The girl waiting on the second floor of headquarters, in the corridor outside the offices of the murder squad, did not even look twenty-five years old. A few rebellious curls of blond hair tumbled over her pretty face and half hid her emerald stare. From time to time she blew aside her locks out of the corner of her mouth, the movement of her lower jaw making her fleshy lips twist like a real Lolita.
She had told the officer in reception that she wanted to see Commandant de Palma in person. She claimed that she had some important revelations for him. So she had been escorted to the offices of the murder squad and left there to wait. The wait could well be a long one.
As she stood in the harsh brightness of the “guaranteed daylight” striplights she watched the comings and goings of members of the squad as they emerged from one office to go into another for no apparent reason.
At about 10:00, de Palma burst into the corridor and saw this platinum doll twisting her feet at every angle to get a better look at her monumental platform heels. She was obviously losing her patience.
“Are you waiting for someone, young lady?”
He sensed that she knew him.
“Yes, I want to speak to Monsieur de Palma.”
“You’re speaking to him. Come with me.”
This unexpected meeting did not suit de Palma at all. He had been planning to use the last morning of the week to go over initial findings in the murder of Christine Autran.
Capitaine Anne Moracchini opened the office door, put her head inside and gestured at him.
“Good morning, Anne. You haven’t seen Maxime, by any chance?”
“He’s at criminal records.”
“Tell him there’s no hurry. I’ve got someone else to deal with.”
Anne Moracchini glared at the blond, who was staring at the floor, then looked quizzically at De Palma.
“It’s nothing.”
“See you later, Michel.”
Anne Moracchini slammed the door, leaving behind a strong scent of musk perfume and apple shampoo.
De Palma gave a huge yawn. No amount of black coffee would ever drive away that biting fatigue which no longer left him. The young blond was getting impatient. De Palma pretended to tidy up the paperwork piled up on his desk and gave her a long blank look.
“And you are Madame …?”
“Bérengère Luccioni.”
The name Luccioni chimed in Michel’s weary memory.
“So you’re Franck’s sister, Jo Luccioni’s daughter?”
“Yes,” she said shyly, pouting her fleshy lips which were faintly colored with brown lipstick.
Jo Luccioni had been a serious hood. He ran a smack factory at the back of a bakery, and used the shop to launder his earnings. De Palma had not known his son Franck; only that he had been found dead in Sugiton creek.
“So what do you do for a living, Bérengère Luccioni?”
“I work for my father, at the bakery on boulevard Piot, in Pointe-Rouge. I sell the bread and the cakes.”
Bérengère was pretty, but vulgar: too made-up, too blond, her skirt was too short and her accent too pronounced. Too everything! She kept fiddling with her caramel fingers, sliding a silver ring up and down the middle finger of her left hand. This kid looked every inch the wife, sister and daughter of a gangland boss; her particular physique was shaped by a life with the mob, which de Palma knew only too well. She was a real doll.
“Do you still make cream buns?”
“Only on Sunday mornings … why?”
“I love cream buns, that’s why. Especially your father’s ones. I’ll come and buy some one of these days. How old are you?”
“I’ll be thirty in ten days.”
“So, you’re twenty-nine …” he said, attempting a gallant smile.
“That’s right.”
De Palma pretended to flick through a bulky file, lingered over some unimportant reports, went back a few pages, then opened another folder. Bérengère watched him, chewing her gum, making small, wet sucking noises and clicking her teeth together. He let the silence drag on. Bérengère slowly uncrossed her legs. The gentle rustle of Lycra woke him from his torpor.
“Why have you come to see me? I thought my colleague, Lieutenant Vidal, had already interviewed you. Do you have anything new?”
“Yes. It’s just that … well, in July, before my brother was killed, I kept seeing this motorbike outside of the shop. Then I went on holiday to my grandparents’ place in Corsica, and that’s where I heard about my brother … When your colleague questioned me, I’d forgotten about it, but then the other day I remembered that a man came into the shop once to buy bread and croissants. He parked his motorbike on the pavement. Then he asked me about my brother … where he was, what he was doing. That’s all.”
“Mademoiselle Luccioni, there are thousands of men around here who could go and buy croissants on their motorbikes.”
“Sure, but this one wasn’t like the others.”
“Why not?”
“Because his motorbike looked like one in this picture in the papers …”
“A Kawasaki Zephyr 1100! Do you know how many Kawasaki Zephyr 1100s there are in Marseille?”
“O.K. … But it was the first time one stopped at the bakery at 6:00 in the morning, just when we were opening. If he was a friend of my brother’s, he’d have known that he was hardly ever at the bakery. Especially not at 6:00 in the morning! And his motorbike was red, just like in the papers. Plus he kept his helmet on, like he didn’t want to be recognized. He just had the visor up. He had little blue eyes and bushy eyebrows.”
What was Bérengère Luccioni doing there, telling him about a red motorbike she’d seen in the papers? Gangland members never came to the police just by chance. It might cost them too much.
A Zephyr 1100. Of the most recent gangland killings—a record eleven in the past year—most had been carried out by hitmen on motorbikes. As usual, the local police had investigated nothing, and so found nothing. Apart from a burned-out motorbike, a photo of which had been published in La Provence. Bérengère was right; it had been a Zephyr, and according to the boys in the lab it had been red.
“Do you remember which day this happened?”
“That’s hard to say. I think it was sometime the week before I went to Corsica, but the exact day … Maybe it will come back to me. I went to buy my tickets on the 24th, and I took the boat on the 26th … And it was before then, maybe July 20 or 21.”
“A week before you left!”
“Yes, around then, I’m sure of it.”
De Palma took a long look at the young woman. She was more relaxed now, and becoming prettier and prettier. There was another rustle of Lycra.
“Mademoiselle Luccioni, thank you for this information. I think it’s of the highest importance. Now, if you don’t mind, we’ll go over the whole thing again from the beginning, O.K.?”
He jotted down her story in his exercise book. When he came to the date of the event, he wrote the 20th because she remembered then that it had been her father’s birthday. He asked her for a detailed description of her mysterious customer.
“He was wearing jeans and a leather jacket. He must have been about one meter eighty tall. With broad shoulders. And blue eyes. He seemed very calm … I dunno! He spoke with a strong accent.”
“I’ll be straight with you, Bérengère. There’s no official investigation into your brother’s death. The state prosecutor refused to take up the case. Franck was no angel—you saw him in prison often enough to know that! And you know too that he drowned in a diving accident. The forensic surgeon was sure of this. I realize that this is very hard for you, but that’s the way it is. You have to trust us on that score.”
Bérengère looked down. She probably knew far more about her brother than she was letting on, but she was not going to give anything away. Not there, in any case. Maybe later. Time would tell …
She was a gangland girl, and hard too, despite her appearances. She was the sort of person whose character has been forged in prison visiting rooms. De Palma knew her father well. He had arrested him twenty years earlier, when he was with the drug squad. It had taken them a very long time to nail him in his laboratory just outside a tiny village in the Alps. It had been a painstaking investigation, with years of effort and plenty of patience following Luccioni in his little white Renault 4 along the twisting roads of the Alpine valleys, against the backdrop of a Bavarian picture postcard.
Jo Luccioni came and went with no apparent purpose. He drove at a pensioner’s speed, half in a dream, but with his eyes darting in all directions, while his two hounds (the only weapons he ever possessed) sat dribbling on the back seat of his old banger. If all was well, he would be off to stock up on chemicals, the carbonate and various acids required for the transformation of morphine. Those who needed the white powder had made a special trip from Marseille to deposit the goods in some hotel on a hill which no-one now remembers.
Little Bérengère had been taking skiing lessons on the day the big man was arrested. When she came back to the chalet, walking awkwardly in her ski boots, she came across a brigade of gendarmes armed to the teeth. The Brigadier had looked at her rather sadly. There stood her father, in his scruffy clothes with his hands behind his back, his acid-marked face turned to the ground. In a grave voice, he had asked the young Inspecteur de Palma to release him for a moment, so that he could embrace his little girl for the last time. De Palma had accepted. The Brigadier had written it up in his report.
Luccioni got off lightly in the end: twelve years behind bars for having concocted the best heroin in the world. Meanwhile, his little girl grew up as best she could, waiting for visiting times, trying to understand the value of secrecy and the burden of a such a marginal life, and inventing a presentable father for the sake of her friends at school.
Her brother Franck had taken a rockier road, full of shady deals. Instead of working as a baker, he wanted to be like his absent father. But he was a pale imitation. A series of burglaries of the middle-class houses on rue de Paradis had earned him enough dosh to set himself up as a small-time drug wholesaler. A few trips to the police station and inevitably to prison had calmed the young hood’s ardor for a while. But when he got out, he started all over again. Now Big Jo’s son had died a miserable death among rainbow wrasses and voracious conger eels, the victim of his one passion: diving. Police frogmen had found him under a rock several meters down, gently rolling in an invisible current, as underwater scavengers feasted on his corpse.
That was on July 30. At the time, they had presumed it was a diving accident, and they hadn’t investigated any further. As far as the police were concerned, that was one less crook. Case closed. Old Luccioni had never got over it, and on bad days the quality of his cream buns suffered.
The old hood must have sent along his daughter to act as an intermediary with the only policeman he had ever respected. The Baron sensed that he should be on his guard. If he did identify Franck’s killer, then Luccioni Snr. would take it upon himself to extract justice.
“Thank you, Bérengère,” said de Palma as amicably as possible. “I’ll come by and see you. We’ll have a chat with your father.”
“Thanks, Monsieur le Divisionnaire.”
“No, not Divisionnaire. We say Commandant now. It’s stupid, but that’s the way it is. I’ll show you out.”
In the headquarters’ courtyard, the mistral was spinning furiously, like a typhoon in the Roaring Forties. An anemometer would no doubt have been able to measure its vertiginous speeds. No-one, not even the building’s architects and certainly not the police, had been able to explain this phenomenon.
Outside the criminal records office, a group of thugs, one of about fifty and two younger men, were waiting to sign in. They loitered there with dripping noses, pretending not to recognize one another as they stoically put up with the fury of the Provençal wind.
Perched on her platforms, Bérengère Luccioni almost fell over under the force of the gusts, just managing to right herself by grabbing hold of the wing mirror of a heap of rust belonging to the city police. She shrieked, and de Palma gripped her by the shoulder to help her.
At that moment, he had a clear memory of the five-year-old girl he had seen in that chalet hidden in the Alps. She had stared at him with eyes as green as mint leaves, without really understanding why this young policeman, this Prince Charming, had put stainless-steel handcuffs on her papa. In her infant mind, those cuffs had looked like silver.
He watched her leave, this woman with her life of baguettes and pastries, her skimpy skirt, her audible Lycra, and make-up which was too excessive to seduce the old commandant he had become.
Tomorrow, or another day, he would go and see her father.