Chapter 32

Taken by surprise Capucine suddenly found herself hard in the grips of a deep depression. She tried telling herself that she had every reason to feel pleased with the way the case was going. The pot was boiling away cheerfully, brimming with enough ingredients to promise a rich and fulfilling denouement. She insisted to herself that La Crim was turning out to be exactly what she had hoped for: cases with countless convoluted threads intertwining through real people, requiring unraveling with infinite care and finesse. So very different from that pointless white-collar work where the suspect was identified from the onset and the challenge was simply to produce a file thick enough to send to court.

But the forced logic had no effect on either the stale brown taste in her mouth or the sinking certainty in her gut that none of the threads in hand would ever lead anywhere, much less to a solution. The whole thing seemed an exercise in futility. She was doomed. The case was unsolvable. She hated the whole business and rued her decision to try and make her way in the Brigade Criminelle. What a childish fool she had been. The more she thought about it the worse it got.

Of course, it was far from the first time she had felt this way about her life. Once, she remembered with painful clarity, at Sciences Po she had quit a class on literary theory in the middle of the semester while in exactly the same mood of despair. It was a decision she still bitterly regretted. At the time, once she had calmed down, she realized that it was nothing more than intellectual overload. It had been a demanding course and she had overinvested herself in it. The solution would have been simplicity itself: cut the class for a few days and wait for her enthusiasm to return, which would have happened quickly enough. Everyone burns out every now and then. It was perfectly normal. Wasn’t it?

The more she tried to reason with herself the more her little homilies rang hollow. She knew she was on dangerous ground, an inch away from storming into Tallon’s office and plunking her badge and gun down on his desk—or was it just in American movies that one did that?

She reached her three brigadiers on the phone—she was so close to tears she didn’t have the courage to face them personally—and assigned them to a further round of computer background checks she knew perfectly well was useless. But at least they wouldn’t pester her for a while. She then decided to devote the day to the most frivolous and futile pursuit she could come up with—keenly aware that the frivolity itself was the essential reagent—and wound up spending the day wandering through the fashionable boutiques of Saint-Germain fingering expensive clothes. She even went so far as to leave her Sig behind, something she had never done since the day she was inducted into the force. She felt even more denuded than if she had forgotten her wedding ring on the side of the bathroom sink.

The afternoon turned out to be a sweet and sour dish of pleasure and angst. The chic Latin Quarter boutiques, with their astronomic prices and rarefied ranges of clothes, turned out to be an effective opiate. She was far away from the police, embraced by a life that would have been hers by default if she had not made it a full-time job to resist it. Ironically her sense of relief brought home how easy it would be to quit. And that realization brought with it the shock of catastrophe and the terror of an empty life. By late afternoon she had only a pair of backless Italian mules to show for her efforts and was exhausted enough to call it quits. She squeezed into a seat on a café terrace facing the church of Saint-Sulpice. As the sun went down releasing the crisp odor of fall she nursed kirs and navigated the labyrinthine editorials of the final edition of the Monde.

By her third kir there was hardly enough daylight to even pretend to read and she was numb enough from the cold and the wine to feel that the whole world was safely at arm’s length. No solutions had presented themselves, but she had the feeling that somehow she had tipped over to the other side of some sort of some unnamed watershed. It was time to go home and let Alexandre tease her about how useful her purchase would be on duty. The thought made her very happy.