Moracchini nearly spun off the road to avoid hitting a tourist. The Xsara swerved to the left and collided with the pavement. Romero laid his hands on the dashboard.
“Jesus, Anne, watch out. I’ve got kids, you know.”
“Put the lamp and siren on the roof. We’ll be more visible.”
In front of the castle of Tarascon, she took the wrong turning, going toward the church instead of the ring road. She reversed back, then shot off the wrong way along the outside lane.
Just after the castle, a traffic cop appeared in the middle of the road and pointed left, toward the car park by the banks of the Rhône.
She parked the Xsara just in front of the security cordon.
“Ah, there you are, Moracchini. Jesus, what a mess. And you knew him, I think?”
Larousse’s face was creased, his eyes almost hanging from their sockets.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know the identity of the …”
“It’s Marceau.”
“What?”
“He’s down there, on the rocks. He’s like the others. It’s … it’s hideous.”
She climbed down to the edge of the river, walked among the clumps of grass that grew just beside the water, then halted. Larousse pointed in the direction of the castle.
“He’s there, can you see him?”
“Yes, quite clearly. Now get rid of those idiots who’re trampling around all over the place. The forensics team will be here in a minute.”
Larousse turned on his heels without replying. He made do with yelling at some onlookers.
“Daniel, call de Palma again. Tell him to get out here. We need him. Too bad if that prick Delpiano kicks up shit, we’ll find an excuse. He and Marceau were friends, I think.”
“O.K., I’ll deal with it.”
“Then we’ll have to go and search his place. At once. In two minutes’ time, I want there to be three officers turning over his house.”
Marceau had been laid at the foot of the ramparts, on the rock often used by the kids of Tarascon as a diving board. It was a fisherman who had discovered him. His first thought was that it was someone who had fallen from the ramparts.
“Anne? Michel here. I’m not going out there. It’s too late, anyway …”
“Up to you.”
“I’m sorry, Anne, but it’ll take me an hour to drive there. Do you see?”
She hung up and took a good look at the people who were watching what was going on. Way up in the ramparts, over 80 meters from the ground, there were several faces framed in the crenellations.
She noticed a brigadier from the local police section and asked him for some binoculars. He disappeared among the horde of police cars, then came back with a pair of 8×30s. She aimed them at the castle and made out some tourist heads, all of them fair, probably English or Dutch, out on a family excursion. Then she panned left and saw three little boys leaning over the wall and gesturing at the corpse.
“And their parents leave them to it,” she said to herself.
She scanned along the walls of King René’s Castle. There was no trace of blood or anything out of the ordinary. At last she reached Marceau’s body, which shone in the sunshine like a pool of nail varnish.
“The first time, it was in front of the Tarasque,” she muttered to herself. “The second in the crypt of Saint Martha, and now on this rock.”
She was about to lower the binoculars, when a taller figure appeared behind the boys. She peered upward and saw a man with a cap on his head. The outline remained for some time in her field of vision. Then she had the feeling that their eyes met. The figure disappeared, all at once.
She immediately grabbed Romero by the arm and whispered to him:
“There’s a man up there acting suspiciously. I don’t know if I’m imagining things or what, but I think we should take a look. And be quick about it.”
“O.K., but no running otherwise he’ll spot us.”
In less than two minutes, they were both standing in front of the castle’s postern. As they went through the door, Moracchini flashed her card at the janitor.
“Close the entrance and let nobody out, except for children.”
The local official, who was bulky and half asleep, struck a pose of importance and carried out the order without a word.
“How many stairways lead up to the roof?”
“Today just one. The other one’s closed.”
She drew her Manurhin and entered the castle courtyard.
A few tourists stared at her and backed off whispering when they saw a revolver’s black steel in the policewoman’s hand. She stared at them one after the other. Mentally she compared each face and form with the capped silhouette on the ramparts. None of the men in the castle courtyard matched the image she had engraved on her memory a few minutes before.
Romero took up position on the far side of the courtyard and scrutinized the arrow slits and windows around him.
Some tourists in shorts and sandals emerged from the Gothic staircase, clearly surprised to see an armed man and woman looking at them. It was the family that Moracchini had spotted earlier, with the three little boys who had been leaning over the battlements.
Romero asked them if there was anybody left at the top, but no one understood what he was saying. He moved them out of the courtyard and told the doorkeeper to hold on to them while they searched the castle.
“Shit, Anne, we don’t have a radio.”
“Too bad. We can’t waste any time. Let’s go up.”
She dived into the half-lit stairwell, climbing fast and trying not to let her Converse shoes clack against the cold stone.
After two L turns to the right, the steps came out in a vast room hung with tapestries. Romero entered behind Moracchini, then ran across to the far side, before entering a second room and emerging again at once. To her right, Moracchini noticed a wooden arrow against the wall, indicating the route for the visitors in three different languages.
A staircase as broad as the first led to another room as vast as the previous one, but better lit. A tourist was reading an information display inside it. She aimed her gun at him, and he turned pale. He put his hands up and stammered something in German. She motioned to him to leave by the stairs. He did not need telling twice, but walked crabwise as far as the door without taking his eyes off the threatening gun.
A second arrow pointed to the upper floors of the castle. Moracchini saw that the staircase was a spiral one, narrower than the others. A real rat trap. She gestured to Romero to cover her, before starting upward as quietly as possible, two steps at a time. He followed a meter behind.
The roof was deserted. She headed for the place where she had spotted the man in the cap and leaned out over the void. It certainly was the best vantage point for observing what was going on below. She could see the two forensic scientists who were busying themselves around Marceau’s body and, beside them on the riverbank, Larousse gesticulating wildly as he talked into his telephone.
Meanwhile, Romero was pacing around the roof.
“We’ve missed him, Anne. He must have gone down at top speed and we missed him.”
“Shit, shit and shit!”
“Can you describe him?”
“He was quite tall, with a white cap over his eyes. Like half the population of this fucking town.”
She leaned on the ramparts, trying to think out a strategy. Beneath her feet, the Rhône flowed peacefully on toward the delta of the Camargue. Its huge green curve seemed almost motionless in its bed.
“Let’s go down and take a longer look. Then we’ll see.”
The room on the second floor told them nothing, nor did the next one down. King René’s Castle was completely deserted. As they went down the second staircase, Romero stopped dead. He had heard something.
“Did you hear that?”
Moracchini shook her head.
A second rattle reached them. It came either from below them or from behind one of the walls. The two officers dashed down the stairs and stopped at the place where the stairs gave on to the courtyard, through a doorway carved with stone flowers.
More banging echoed through the silence of the castle.
“It’s that way,” Moracchini said. “On the river side.”
They emerged from the stairwell and headed toward the possible source of the noise. At first, all was silent, then after twenty seconds that seemed like an eternity, a song rang out:
“Lagadigadeu, la tarasco, lagadigadeu …”
The voice was imprisoned inside a room of the castle. But it was impossible to say exactly where it might be coming from. Its owner must be somewhere behind the walls, in a place that communicated with the outside world by some such means as an arrow slit or narrow door.
“Laïssa passa la vieio masco … Laïssa passa que vaï dansa …”
There was a long silence. And then, plainly from further away:
“La tarasco dou casteu, la tarasco dou casteu …”
Moracchini searched in all directions. She almost glued her ear against the walls. On his side, Romero went back up to the large room on the first floor and leaned out of one of the windows. He saw nothing but the Rhône and, over to his right, Marceau’s body drying in the sun. The voice had gone for good.
After twenty hours’ work, the technicians came back with over two hundred samples. From some of these, the scientists sometimes removed a good twenty different specimens. In all, over eight hundred items were sent to the biology laboratory at Nantes.
The next day’s Provence was headlined: “Police Officer Brutally Murdered.” The national papers picked up the A.F.P. reports and added their own not always welcome comments. The Provence of Mistral was shown in a variety of unflattering lights. Not a single article refrained from mentioning Tartarin and the Tarasque. It was the headline story early in August. It lasted ten days, and no longer.
In mid-August, the first forensic results arrived on the desks of the police and of Marie-Paule Garcia, the investigating magistrate. The scientists had found dozens of unknown D.N.A. traces, but the only one that made any sense was the sample taken from Marceau’s wounds, which matched those taken from Rey and Morini.
Moracchini, Romero and the other officers who had searched Marceau’s house found photocopies of documents, letters, and plans from archaeological digs, some of them in German. Moracchini at once made the connection with the papers de Palma had seen in Steinert’s office. She decided to place them under seal while waiting to see what else would turn up.
On Marceau’s bedside table, next to the telephone, the police found an address book with the contact details of regional politicians and businessmen. In the wardrobe they collected another, thicker notebook with names and numbers. Once all of this information had been put together, what emerged was a huge network of illegal gambling machines organized by Marceau and Christian Rey on behalf of Morini. The policeman covered up the racket and got twenty percent of the profits. Rey took thirty and Morini fifty, protection included. This told potential competitors: “Lay off Le Grand’s slot machines.” Now that the notice was out of date, the one-arm bandit war was going to start all over again. The B.R.B. and illegal gambling boys were going to have their hands full.
But the most interesting discovery was made during the subsequent search of Marceau’s private parking lot. Several handguns turned up: two CZs, two Colt .45s and a 9 mm Beretta. Hidden above the control box for the opening mechanism of the garage door, they also found a box of 9 mm shells wrapped up in a checkered towel and a full SIG 29 clip. The gun itself was nowhere to be found.
The Timone forensics unit released Marceau’s body after two weeks, like a beast letting go of its prey after feeding on it.
The Baron and Maistre attended the funeral alongside Marceau’s elderly aunt. No one else came. Their former teammate was incinerated at the Tarascon crematorium at 9 o’clock on a Thursday morning.
As he watched the coffin disappear into the mouth of the furnace, Maistre crossed himself.
“I can still see him as he was the first time we met in Paris. He was looking for Boyer’s office. He wasn’t a bad guy.”
“He could have killed me but didn’t,” the Baron said as he turned away.
Isabelle Mercier’s name was not spoken.
Twenty days after the discovery at Tarascon Castle, things still stood as they were. The links between Rey, Morini and Marceau were known at last.
Moracchini had examined the police officer’s career in great detail, and certain gray areas appeared, particularly in financial terms. Marceau had been fixing up a ruined family house in Baux-de-Provence, a property inherited from his mother. The work had cost around a million francs, a sum that was far beyond his means.
She noticed once again that their investigations were centered inside a perimeter that stretched between Baux and Mouries and between Eygalières and Maussane.
For a few days, the Baron distanced himself from their inquiries and from everybody else. He spent his days fishing, either on the burning pebbles of the Baie des Singes, just opposite Maïre, or at the far end of the snaking tarmac of Les Goudes, or else around the creeks of Morgiou and En Vau, snug in a hired Zodiac inflatable dinghy, alone and tiny on the waves that washed over the limestone’s fantastic shapes.
The Baron had chosen this retreat so as to withdraw into himself, to delve inside his soul; his only companions in sadness were the great opera singers in the headphones of his Walkman: Renata Tebaldi, Carlo Bergonzi, Mario del Monaco, Montserrat Caballé … in well-worn versions of Aïda, Turandot and I Pagliacci. Real Italian opera full of heavy emotions and flawless melodies. His personal favorites, as a child of the sun.
He had not caught much, either on the languid sea or in the music of his fathers.
He only understood when he changed to Wagner and Strauss, to Melchior, Varnay, Rysanek and Flagstad. When he folded away his rods and returned the Zodiac. His other half was far away. For weeks now, Isabelle Mercier had not called on him from the far side of the known world.
Ingrid Steinert had gone back to Germany for an indefinite stay. Settling her inheritance from her husband was causing her endless problems. She was now the owner of a large stake in Klug-Steinert Metal, which raised the hackles of many of her in-laws. She telephoned the Baron several times. Late in the evening, after spending endless hours in the offices of lawyers and notaries in the four corners of Germany.
When de Palma emerged from his torpor, he immersed himself in books about the German occupation of Provence. He spent whole days at the Méjanes library in Aix-en-Provence, amid students about to retake failed exams in September, soaking up dissertations, theses and symposium papers.
Not once did he see the name of Steinert appear. On the other hand he learned how many of the region’s powerful families had consorted themselves with the occupiers after 1942, the year of William Steinert’s birth. But most of the studies remained extremely discreet about the names of those involved and the fortunes amassed during that period.
It was when he opened a dissertation about the region of Tarascon entitled L’épuration en Provence: 1944–1946 that the Baron came across the names of Steinert and Maurel. The account had been written in 1966 by a Gilbert Sicard, and in his preface the author warned the reader that he would cite no names of witnesses or victims without the express permission of those concerned or of their families.
… In the months that followed the liberation of Provence, between August 1944 and January 1945, old scores were settled in the region of Les Baux, and in particular in Maussane and Eygalières.
According to the witnesses we have questioned, the most sordid event took place at a farmhouse called La Balme, where Emile, the eldest son of the Maurel family, was shot dead and his sister Simone had her head shaved … Yet from various statements it would appear that the Maurel family had never collaborated with the occupiers and that this was in fact a settling of differences between powerful inhabitants of the region, fed by old rivalries and jealousy … Etienne, Emile’s younger brother, had even been part of the Vincent Group, a particularly active resistance network commanded by a farmer in Eygalières named Eugène Bérard.
Henri Bayle, the head of the F.F.I. in Tarascon, claimed that none of his men was mixed up in this affair. At least, this is what emerges from the statement he made to the gendarmerie of Tarascon during the investigations into the case that were carried out in 1952, after a complaint had been lodged by Simone Maurel’s brother, Etienne … As often happened, the case was quickly closed and no charges were made. Cited in the statements and Maurel’s accusation are the names of the region’s most powerful landowners. Henri Bayle declared that he had never heard it said that resistance fighters had shot Emile Maurel. This is confirmed by the records of the F.F.I …
According to oral testimony, Simone Maurel’s head was shaved in the village square of Eygalières, where she was then exposed to public condemnation. It is easy to imagine the degree of humiliation experienced by a young woman whom people spat upon (statement of a man who witnessed the scene) …
She was accused of having had a liaison with a German, a certain Karl Steinert, who was neither an army officer nor in the police … According to the same oral sources, nothing was proved, but it seems that Simone Maurel was judged by a kangaroo court made up of the same people who had had her brother shot …
De Palma made a few notes on his pad. At the foot of the page, he wrote in capital letters: REVENGE.
France Telecom came up with three Gilbert Sicards, one in Fontvieille, one in Arles and one in Tarascon. De Palma tried them all. The first two were dead ends. When he dialed the Tarascon number, he got an answering machine which informed him that Gilbert Sicard would be away until the beginning of September. He left a message.
He picked up Bérard’s photo and examined it closely. Once again, he had the impression that a door was slowly closing. That hope was forbidden.
It was now late August.
The first of a new wave of gangland killings occurred in the center of Aix: nine 11.43 bullets took the life of François Lomini, one of Morini’s lieutenants. Three days later, it was the turn of Jérôme Lornec, shot down in front of the 421, the nightclub Morini had put him in charge of.
Jean-Luc Casetti was taken out by three bursts from an Uzi in a bar on avenue de la République, over a glass of pastis.
Gangland abhors a vacuum.