Chapter 18
By Saturday afternoon Capucine was stale, irritable, and moody. She convinced herself a break would improve things. Nothing much had happened after the meeting with the juge d’instruction. She had spent the rest of the day interviewing a series of social acquaintances Delage saw infrequently, all of them dead ends. It seemed like pointless make-work. She decided to take the rest of the day off and keep away from the Quai until Monday.
She was at home by three in the afternoon and spent the rest of the day in an afghan on the sofa reading and then dining with Alexandre at the bistro around the corner. After, they had found their way to bed quite early but had gone to sleep very late.
The next morning Alexandre woke in high spirits, keen on trying out a seafood restaurant that had just opened near the Bastille. “Think red-checked tablecloths; think mountains of oysters: Speciales, Bélons, Fines de Claires; think oursins, langoustines, moules, bulots you prize out of their shells with little pins; think the whole lot washed down with gallons of very dry Sancerre. You’ll love it! Just what you need to get you out of your funk.”
At the word “oyster” Capucine’s face had clouded.
The restaurant proved to be everything Alexandre promised, a caricature of a classic Parisian seafood bistro, but a successful one nonetheless. The oak paneling and white square ceramic floor tiles, at most a few days old, had been skillfully distressed by the decorators and looked almost authentic enough for the diner to feel the place might really have been around while the Bastille was still standing. A green stand outside was staffed by rotund rubicund men in Breton fishing outfits to give the impression that the seafood was actually supplied by independent Breton artisans who journeyed out to Loctudy at the crack of dawn each morning to select the best from their family boats. The waiters, dressed in immemorial black jackets over ankle-length aprons starched and bleached to an unnatural whiteness, bustled with a hospitable arrogance that seemed to have been polished by the centuries.
As always Alexandre had reserved in his own name and the maître d’ had clearly been on the lookout for him. He and Capucine were ushered to a quiet table in a corner with the deference normally reserved for rock stars. Over the inevitable flute of complimentary champagne Alexandre was treated to a detailed recitative of the trials and tribulations of the restaurant’s opening, which he received with ill-disguised impatience. Cutting the tale short, Alexandre ordered the largest of the plateaux de fruits de mer and a bottle of Sancerre that was little known but, in his opinion, particularly excellent. The restaurant was packed with prosperous-looking Parisians happily set on an extended Sunday lunch, creating a din that was somehow pleasing despite the uproar.
Capucine smiled at him. “In my world you have to beat people up to find out anything. In yours the more you scowl the more they chatter away. And they offer you free champagne to boot. Maybe you’re right and I am in the wrong business.”
The seafood arrived rapidly. The waiter first set a steel frame about a foot high on the table, then placed several little dishes with butter, brown bread, lemon sections, and sauce Mignonette—made from red wine vinegar and shallots—in the middle of the frame and finally returned with a huge metal plateau heaped with crushed ice and a profligate display of every possible variety of seafood arrayed with an engineer’s precision in meticulously concentric circles.
For the first fifteen minutes the concentration required to dismember langoustines and suck oysters from their half shells without wasting any of the precious juice precluded anything more than monosyllabic conversation.
Alexander looked over at his wife affectionately. “Makes you feel better about the world, eh?”
“Absolutely, but I’m still dreading going back to work tomorrow. I have absolutely no idea what to do next.”
“Tell me about it.”
“We had a very curious session with the juge d’instruction on Friday. Actually, I worked with her once before and she was very direct and easy to get along with. But yesterday she was entirely cryptic. Her instructions were riddles, worse than the Delphic oracle.”
“Who was it?”
“A rather imposing woman called Marie-Hélène d’Agremont.”
“Ah, la brave Marie-Hélène! I know her quite well. Or at least I used to. We were students together.”
Capucine laughed. “You know everyone! What was she like?”
“Very bright, very zealous, and very political. I wouldn’t say she was exactly consumed with ambition, but she definitely knew what she wanted. And she was very . . .” Alexandre paused. “Well, let’s say she was calculating, Machiavellian, really, in her way of getting it. How’d the session go?”
For the space of a heartbeat Capucine was tempted to press Alexandre about his history with Marie-Hélène d’A-gremont but decided to stick with the case. Anyway, lunch was never a good time to pry into Alexandre’s past.
“Well, for openers she seemed as disconcerted as Commissaire Tallon that Trag might be involved, and—”
“Hold on,” Alexandre interjected, “you never told me that. What’s this about Trag?”
“It’s not all that much, really. I discovered the phony DGSE agent’s cell phone had originally been issued to a subsidiary of this Trag.”
“Well, then they’re in it up to their ears. That can’t be an accident. Tallon must have had conniptions.”
“How did you know?” Capucine asked.
“Well, I’m sure you know all about that CIA hare that the Minister of the Interior started way back when.”
Capucine nodded. “Tallon told us all about it.”
“Well, it was my paper that originally published the list of spies to be deported. I was just a cub reporter in those days. Did he tell you about what happened?” Capucine nodded. “I was assigned to the story and stayed with it until the end. I’ll bet Tallon didn’t tell you that he was one of the flics who was involved in harassing Trag’s French clients, did he? When the wind shifted he was one of those severely reprimanded. He was lucky he didn’t get exiled to the boondocks or worse.”
“No wonder he reacted so strongly when he heard about Trag.”
“Marie-Hélène must have leaped like a gaffed salmon, too,” Alexandre said with a smile.
“Why would it be a problem for her?”
“Simple. She wants you people to complete a beautiful little case, so she can package it up all tied in string and red sealing wax and hand it to the public prosecutor, who will tell her she’s brilliant. That’s what floats her boat. If it becomes a Trag thing, it’ll get lifted out of her hands and given to the DST. In fact, because of the impersonation, the DGSE might be able to grab it. That would mean that you guys and your juge would be kicked out. That would drive Marie-Hélène wild. Coitus interruptus was never her thing,” Alexandre bubbled with an irritatingly secret little chuckle.
“I’m not going to go there,” Capucine said with a pretty moue. “But it was definitely odd. Normally these juges are overly directive. They think they can do better police work than the flics. But she wasn’t. She just told us she wouldn’t sign an authorization for any kind of investigative work on Trag and told us to get on with it. Tallon just sat there saying, ‘Yes, ma’am, three bags full.’ ”
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
“Well, we’re stuck. There are no leads at all except Trag. They’re the gateway to the solution. And we can’t go near them. Tallon will never let us.”
“What did Tallon say after the meeting?”
“He didn’t say anything. He just did his roman noir scowl and said he’d see me on Monday.”
“Well, he’s weighing the risks of Marie-Hélène’s dare.”
“What dare? What are you talking about?” Capucine asked, annoyed.
“Simple. I’m sure she put on a holier-than-thou schoolmarm expression when she told you she wasn’t going to sign any papers of any kind on Trag, right?”
“You really do know her. She was infuriating.”
“My guess is that she was goading you to do something on your own. I’ll also bet that Tallon understood that.”
“But there’s absolutely nothing we can do. Or at least nothing I can think of.” Capucine began making meticulous piles of bivalve shells on her plate, separating them painstakingly by species. “Now’s the perfect time for your little speech on how silly I’m being and all I have to do is quit the force and life will be perfect and wonderful and all.”
“On the contrary,” Alexandre answered carelessly, rooting earnestly through the crushed ice in search of a stray clam. “Not only do you seem to be getting the hang of it, but I’m beginning to find this case quite challenging. Definitely far more interesting than those insider trading sagas where you could never understand who was on the inside and who was on the outside.”
Alexandre squinted and pursed his lips in an attempt at representing fathomless Asian wisdom but only managing to look like he had gas. In a stentorian voice he said, “As great Lao Tzu say, ‘When deprived of own tactics, must use those of enemy.’ ”