Chapter 5
That night Capucine was unable to sleep. Woken repeatedly by her squirming and noisy plumping up of pillows, Alexandre finally ironically growled an old French proverb, “Sleep is even more perfect when it’s shared with a loved one.” Capucine jumped out of bed and stalked off to the living room sofa dragging a needlepoint coverlet, pillow under her arm.
The next morning she was still despondent as she arrived at the headquarters building of the fiscal branch; she didn’t have the slightest clue what to do next. The approach to white-collar cases always seemed to flow like water from a spring, but now she was utterly stymied.
Even the unintentional cynicism of the fiscal division’s address—122, rue Château des Rentiers, the coupon clippers’ castle—failed to cheer her up, as it invariably did even in the worst of her moods.
For lack of anything better, her plan for the day was rudimentary, a quick run-through of her office at Rentiers to deal with any departmental effluvia that might have emerged during the night and then down to the Quai des Orfèvres to sic the three brigadiers on the restaurant staff. If in doubt, keep everyone busy.
She was stunned to see a man installed at her desk, a rather attractive man—a very attractive man, actually—his feet on its top carelessly strewing her meticulously ordered stacks of files, poking amateurishly at the keyboard on his lap—her keyboard, actually—lost in childlike concentration. For a brief, wild flash she thought that the room had been reassigned and this was the new tenant waiting impatiently for her to remove her possessions. But that was impossible. This man just couldn’t be in the financial brigade. He didn’t look at all like an accountant. He looked more like a rock star, or at least a wannabe rock star: designer jeans, Western belt with a large silver buckle, pistol in an American-looking basket weave quick-draw holster, artful stubble, brown eyes smoldering with brooding eroticism.
As Capucine approached the desk, the liquid mahogany pools of those eyes languidly detached themselves from the monitor and lapped over her body. She felt beyond naked; the pools seemed to coalesce in her intimate crevasses.
“Now it makes perfect sense that Tallon put you on my case,” the man leered. “I didn’t get it before, but I sure get it now.” Capucine blushed, simultaneously outraged and seduced.
Unceremoniously, he dumped the keyboard on the desk. It fell upside down. He uncoiled with serpentine grace. He put out his hand. “Jeanloup Rivière, at your service. I fervently hope.” His ogle transformed the phatic into a leaden double entendre.
“B . . . But I thought you weren’t due back until Monday.”
“Little sister, it turned out to be a goddamn computer course. I spent as much of the day on the beach as I could but that got old fast. So I told them I had been called back for a crisis and here I am. Did you miss me?”
“I’ve never met you.”
“You should have. If I’d been here you wouldn’t be scratching around in the dust with nothing to show for your time.”
“How do you know what I’ve been up to?”
“Little sister, little sister. I’ve been with Tallon since the ass crack of dawn this morning. The hot news is that he’s decided to keep you on the case full-time. And he’s put me on another case. A real honey. Some citizen did a woman in and left pieces of her body in twenty different metro stops. More my style, Tallon must think. And the best part is that he’s asked me to be your guardian angel. You know, show you the ropes, keep an eye on you and all,” Rivière said with a leer so exaggerated it looked like farce.
Despite herself Capucine broke into a smile.
“And the good news just keeps on coming. He’s even given you my three musketeers for the duration. They seemed happy enough about that. Momo told me you were way more decorative than I am. Anyhow, let’s get our delicious asses out of here and get some work done. We’ve got to jump-start this puppy.”
As they arrived at the Quai des Orfèvres Rivière suddenly dropped his cartoon Lothario routine and switched to caricaturing an aloof superior officer.
He peremptorily ordered Capucine to obtain the names and stations of all the police guards of the official buildings and embassies in the vicinity of Diapason for the night of the incident. Capucine looked blank.
“You know, Lieutenant, the vigies, those poor sods who are too dumb to make gendarme rank and spend their days stuck out in front of public buildings like sacks of cabbages. Beats the hell out of me why they get automatic weapons. They can hardly hold them, much less shoot them. I’ll bet they’re not loaded.” Capucine had no idea why he wanted the list. But he wanted it within the hour.
Fifty minutes later Capucine was in Rivière’s office being undressed by his eyes once again, this time even more thoroughly. He now seemed to know where all the clips and snaps were. Once his inspection was over he ran his eye down the list, circled two names with a fat marker, and shoved it back at her. “Here. Find out where these two guys are right now. They have stuff to tell us. Get back to me in fifteen minutes.”
As she rushed off she lashed out at herself. Here was exactly the sort of man she despised most in life: vulgarly macho and arrogantly stupid. And here she was all a-twiddle, rushing around trying to please him. He was attractive, yes, but her reaction was still despicable.
Within the allotted time frame Capucine returned with the addresses the two vigies were currently guarding. Rivière now seemed to be concentrating on her legs. He was clearly a man of eclectic tastes. “That took long enough. Let’s get going.”
Their first stop was six hundred yards down the rue de Varenne from Diapason at the entrance to a huge eighteenth-century hôtel particulier. Rivière clapped the blue dome light on the roof of his car and bounced it up on the sidewalk at speed, screeching to a halt in front of a doltish policeman in an ill-fitting uniform. As if in a blind rage Rivière jumped out and roughly grabbed the man’s body armor.
“You Durand?” he sneered.
“Y . . . Y . . . Yessir!”
“You deserted your post on Friday night. I’m going to take you down to the Quai and write you up right now. This isn’t going to be some little review board slap on the wrist. Your ass is going to get fired and you’re not going to get a centime of pension when I get through with you. Count on it, my friend!” As he spoke he shook the vigie hard enough to rattle his teeth.
“Sir, please, please, I only stepped to the corner to have one cigarette.”
“One! You little shits think you’ve joined a smoking club. You think we pay you to stand around on street corners chatting with your buddies without giving a good goddamn about the buildings you’re supposed to be guarding. Is that it?”
“Sir, please, I only had two or three cigarettes that night.”
“Durand, you’re truly pathetic. Two or three, my ass. Did anything unusual happen? Your only hope is to tell me something I might want to know, otherwise I’m going to pull you off duty and put you on write-up right now. Better make it good.”
“Sir, please, I didn’t really see anything. Nothing. Just this one delivery being made.”
“Out with it, Durand.”
“I was having a smoke on the corner and having a natter with Vigie Clement, who was guarding the Austrian Embassy just across the street.”
“You mean the Austrian embassy that’s two hundred yards down the street.”
“That’s the place. So Clement says to me, ‘Check this out. Here are a couple of guys actually making a delivery to that fancy restaurant at 2:30 in the morning. These rich dudes don’t know the difference between night and day.’ He said two guys were carrying a big bag into the restaurant. That’s all, sir. Then I went back to my post. But I didn’t see it. Clement did.”
“And why didn’t you report it when the bulletin went out?”
“Well, it didn’t seem all that important, it was just a routine delivery, right, and I couldn’t very well have said I was off station, now could I have, sir?”
Back in the car Rivière breathed hard through his nose like a bull in an arena, in the grip of his endorphin rush. Capucine felt she should be humiliated at participating in the shameful bullying of a pitiful human being worthy of her every compassion. But she was almost as exhilarated as Rivière. It was like being on a roller coaster. She wanted to shoot her arms up in the air to intensify her giddiness.
Vigie Clement turned out to be considerably lighter than his colleague and was easily lifted off the pavement. He delivered the entirety of his brief testimony with his heels a good two inches clear of the street. He had walked down from his station to the corner opposite Durand’s post. From that vantage point he had had a full view of the side entrance to Diapason. At around 2:30 he had seen two men drive up in a car—manufacturer not noted, much less license plate number—and remove a six-foot-long duffel bag from the trunk. With a man holding each end of the bag they carried it into the restaurant straining under the weight. He had not seen them get back into the car since he had had to return to his post quickly. He was keenly sensitive to the responsibility of his duties and couldn’t in all conscience stay away from his post for too long no matter how interesting things were. He was sure the lieutenant would be sympathetic to that.
As he got back into the car Rivière put his hand on Capucine’s thigh. “Voilà, little sister. That’s how it’s done. Now we know how the body got back into the restaurant. I did the hard part. All you have to do is find those two guys. Think you can handle that?”