AFILM SET IS A SEEMINGLY CHAOTIC PLACE, if you don’t know what’s going on. If you do, you see that everyone is going about his business quickly and in such a way as to avoid disturbing anyone else’s. First-time visitors rarely perceive this, however, and can usually be recognized by their timorous resemblance to small children crossing a busy intersection.
During our second week of production, Inspector Bonnot made, as I had invited him to, such a visit. We were on location near Paris, shooting a scene in a warehouse full of supposedly stolen artworks (Esmée had put Fred in touch with one of her late husband’s contacts, a high-end art fence, who had supplied him with a wealth of useful information). I introduced Bonnot to the production assistants, to the director and cinematographer, to some of the actors he hadn’t already met. He greeted Esmée solicitously and Ginny warmly (yes, I’d forgiven her for her willingness to see me killed on camera—one night with her and you’d understand why) and sat with us for lunch, after which he asked for a moment of my time, alone.
As luck would have it the scene being shot after lunch was one of the few I wasn’t in. We walked along the banks of the Seine in silence for a while, and then he cleared his throat to speak.
“You know, you could have been more careful.”
“How’s that?” I asked.
“You left the rubber ball in his mouth, for one thing. Your prints were on the strap. So were Mme. Guiteau’s. So were those of M. LaForge. And those of an unidentified fourth person, as well as those of M. Guiteau himself. His prints are explained by a second dental imprint on the ball itself—those of Mme. Guiteau.”
“How did you come to get our prints?”
“There are various means of getting those, if you’re not worried about it holding up in court. In your case, I swiped a drinking glass from the Guiteaus’ apartment.”
“I see.”
“In addition, you bought a gun for five hundred euros from a certain Gégé, who likes to stay on good terms with the police. When he heard that you were involved in the Krysmopompas case he came to me.”
“I did no such thing.”
“You should have had your friend LaForge buy the gun. Your attempt at discretion left a good deal to be desired, my friend. Because Gégé identified the gun’s previous owner, we have its ballistics, and they match those of the bullet that killed Guiteau.”
We both slowed down at the sight of something in the water. I saw a thin ribcage floating in the weeds, and for a horrifying moment I thought it was a child.
“Look at that,” Bonnot said. “A dead swan.”
And then I saw the white feathers and the remains of the webbed feet. “So it is,” I said, and we continued on our way.
“Finally, there’s that name. Krysmopompas. There’s the film, Kamikaze 1989, of course, and I found a rock group that had taken its name from the film. But you know what my first hit was when I plugged the word into Google? The New York Times crossword puzzle.”
“Is that so?”
“Which runs every day in the International Herald Tribune. The word appeared as an answer therein the very day you were attacked. If, indeed, you were attacked. On several occasions I’ve noticed you working on the puzzle in your spare time.”
The funny thing at that moment was, I’d always wondered why he hadn’t picked up on those things. All of them had occurred to me as possible keys to my downfall, and I honestly never underestimated the man. I was almost relieved to find that he was as sharp as I’d thought.
“So why bring this up now, now that there’s a film in production and people counting on me to make a living? Surely you knew all these things months ago.”
“That’s true. I suppose I wanted to come up and see a film being made. I’ve never been on a movie set.”
“Are you going to arrest me now?”
He laughed. “If I were going to arrest you, I’d have done it before Guiteau was in the ground. He was a pig. Shall we start back?”
We turned around and walked in silence until we reached the carcass of the swan. “Seeing it like that, you realize what a large animal a swan really is,” he said.
“That’s true. Whereas the skeleton of a lion or a bear, stripped of flesh and fur, seems quite small by comparison to its living form.”
“You’re a philosopher,” he said.
“So won’t you be in trouble, failing to solve the murder?”
“Not every murder is solved. And speaking of trouble, I believe I mentioned that the divisionnaire’s wife . . .”
“Right.”
We walked along, and the already beautiful day seemed to have taken on a new glow. I was a lucky man and I knew it, but this was beyond luck.
And then he cleared his throat.
“Ah, there’s just one more thing. I almost forgot.”
I wondered if he did this in all his interviews, or if he’d been saving the Columbo routine for just such an occasion as mine. “What’s that?”
“My daughter Jeannine, she’s twenty-three years old, went to drama school, hasn’t had much luck getting cast since. I was just thinking, maybe . . .”
“You know, that’s funny,” I said as we approached the set. “There’s a role we haven’t cast yet, that of a young girl.” Actually it hadn’t been written yet, but Fred was quick and he would understand the urgency of the matter. “Have her come by with a head shot.”
“It so happens I brought one with me,” Bonnot said, and from his jacket pocket he produced an eight-by-ten glossy of a young woman of considerable beauty, the kind who would be just fine onscreen even if she couldn’t act her way out of a paper bag, the kind whose performance in the sack would redeem any kind of hamming on-screen.
We shook hands as though we were the best of friends, and he took off to watch the scene being shot. I climbed into my trailer for a brief nap, a massage, and a quick blowjob from Ginny before my next scene.
• • •
It’s good to be the star.
Fin