Top Basel Art Restorer Slain in Garden… Inspector Aliette Nouvelle may have noticed the item in yesterday’s paper as she spread it open on the lawn. But lurid headlines screaming bloody murder had ceased to engage her. She wasn’t jaded — she was a cop. A French cop. A murder in Basel, the Swiss city an hour down the road, was not her business. And she had other things on her mind that morning. Piaf was dead. Her closest friend, her staunchest ally. Almost nineteen years of partnership were over. Of course she had known it was coming. For the past three years the kindly vet had been suggesting that a quick and painless needle would put a dignified end to the limpy, hearing-impaired, perpetually shitty-bummed ignominy of Piaf’s golden age. Aliette had always agreed wholeheartedly. Then resisted.
Claude Néon had had no choice in consenting to Piaf’s presence when Aliette consented to move into the large house in the north end. Love me, love my cat. The old white warrior had explored every shadow in the garden. In the end, it seemed Piaf had dozed off in the dying autumn flowers and hadn’t woken up. Aliette had arrived home the previous evening to find him lying there, dead stiff, spirit gone — no more Piaf to be seen in that grizzled old face. Sad proof that the body’s just an envelope for the soul.
She called the vet. He gently advised her to put Piaf in a garbage bag and out with the trash. The inspector gathered that a garbage bag was the dreary fate of those cats left to die at the clinic where she had spent a small fortune on her friend. Or, said the vet, she could bury him where he lay. He added that pet cemeteries were available in the area but they were expensive and, in his opinion, slightly ridiculous. When, unasked, the vet pressed on, eager to assure her that a garden interment was not against the law, it suddenly occurred to Aliette that after all these years this good man had no idea she was a senior inspector with the local bureau of the Police Judiciaire and would probably already know the ins and outs of such regulations. Aliette did not resent this. Au contraire, she was touched. Piaf was the vet’s focus, not her. She was merely Madame Nouvelle and her payments were always prompt. She thanked him for his advice. In leaving her to grieve, the vet told her pet psychology was central to his role and the death of a pet was always a family milestone. She did not tell him that now it was just herself and Claude.
The bereaved inspector had thought about her options for Piaf’s final resting place overnight. The tragedy was compounded by the fact that Claude had no idea how to comfort her. This lack of empathy was at the heart of the larger thing weighing on the inspector’s mind. Somehow the mournful night had produced an erotic dream about the kindly vet. The vet and Aliette. And a lot of animals who were sort of human, each of them damaged to the quick and needing to be cared for by someone who knew how, i.e., not Claude Néon.
She had awoken to the realization that their relationship was over.
Now she stood in the morning sun, weeping in her discreet way.
Piaf would be buried in the garden, exactly where she’d found him.
After shrugging his permission, because it was his house and property, Claude had turned his attention back to his tennis club newsletter and finished his breakfast before going out to dig a cat-sized hole with his spade. Then he left for work, leaving her alone to say her final farewell.
Kneeling, she wrapped Piaf in newspaper and tied the bundle with a green velvet ribbon, an old one she’d had for years, that he’d always loved to kick at, and put the bundle in the bag. Yes, a garbage bag. ‘Adieu,’ Aliette whispered.
Then she slowly lifted gentle shovelfuls of garden earth and covered her old friend.