A Twist of Orchids (18 page)

“More like where our skip went,” grumbled one of the men. In its absence, the renovators were dumping rotten planks and torn linoleum in a messy heap on the ground.

The other man, a big blond fellow, his cheeks bulging with food, shrugged. He swallowed and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The hairs on his forearm stood out, white and fuzzy with sawdust.

“They’re gone? Good riddance, if you ask me. Owner probably told them to shift it. They’d have had to get out by next week anyway.”

“Do you know how I can contact the owner?”

Blondie could only give them the name of the firm of architects who had hired them: Chauvin et Fils.

Mara and Julian left.

“How about lunch?” suggested Julian gloomily.

•

At about the same time that Julian and Mara were having lunch, a worker at a dump site outside town spotted a blue and white trainer poking out from a pile of rubble. The shoe looked in good condition, and the worker wondered if it came with a mate. He clambered up the hill of debris. The shoe was an Adidas, almost new. He shook his head. People threw away anything nowadays. It wasn’t like that when he was a kid growing up after the war. You counted every
centime
, hung on to things until they were of no possible further use. Steadying himself with one hand on the shifting scree, the man reached out with the other to push aside a broken plank to grab the shoe. It resisted his pull. He tugged harder. It came away, revealing a human foot.

•

The story on the eight o’clock news hit Julian like a blow: the body of a young man, identified as Kazim Ismet, nineteen years old, of Brames, had been found at a dump site outside Périgueux.
It had lain in a skip, covered by building debris, until the skip had been taken on Monday morning to be emptied. The body, tumbled out with the contents of the skip, might not have been noticed even then, except that an alert worker, spotting a shoe, had become suspicious. Upon investigating the matter, he had made his grisly discovery.

A preliminary report gave the cause of death as a drug overdose, making this the second drug-related death in Périgueux in three weeks. A hypodermic needle had been found with the body. Documentation in a wallet had led to a positive identification by the youth’s father, Osman Ismet. A shaken Osman appeared briefly on the screen. He denied that Kazim had ever taken drugs and blamed bad influences and poor policing for his son’s death. Osman appeared to have shrunk substantially. His words carried the conviction of a deflated balloon. At one point only did he give a glimpse of his old spirit. “Who is protect our children?” he raged. “When they are young, stupid, who protects?” Arms outstretched to the television audience, he communicated his anger and pain to every viewing parent like a knife to the heart.

Mutely, Julian stared at the television screen. He imagined Betul’s grief. Osman’s anguish was plain to see. Julian was furious with himself that he had delayed searching for the Ismets’ boy, then overwhelmed by an awful sense of guilt. He had promised. A day might have made all the difference.

Mara reached for his hand. “Don’t blame yourself, Julian. You did all you could.”

He shook his head and pulled away. He should have done more. And a hell of a lot sooner. He felt a stress headache coming on. Thumpers, he called them. They started with a pressure behind the eyes that quickly became the assault of a manic percussionist beating a bass drum inside his skull.

She tried to hold him. Her voice reached him distantly. “Listen to me. This is not your fault.”

He stood up. “Leave it, will you?”

“For God’s sake, don’t shut down like this. Talk to me!” She had risen, too, and was following him out of the room.

“Talk?” he turned and almost shouted at her. “That’s my problem, isn’t it? I’m going to have to go to the shop, look Betul and Osman in the face, and say what? How terribly sorry I am that I absolutely fucked up? Frankly, I don’t have the sodding bottle to do it.”

However, Laurent Naudet was another matter. Ignoring his pounding head, Julian did not wait for the gendarme to call him back.

•

Two hours later, Julian and Mara sat in the office of Commissaire Boutot of the
Police judiciaire
in Périgueux. They had met the Commissaire a few years earlier when Mara was trying to find her missing sister. He was a melancholy man with baggy eyes, a drooping mustache, and a habit of rolling a pencil between his hands. Julian told his story. He repeated Kazim’s exact words. Yes, the boy had mentioned a man named Serge. The recorded message was saved on his
répondeur.
Yes, he and Mara had gone to Périgueux to find Kazim. Betul Ismet thought her son had been staying with a former classmate, a young woman named Nadia Beaubois. However, the flat had been vacated by the time they arrived. Of the other occupants—an English kid named Peter and a French girl named Brigitte—Julian knew nothing. Mara corroborated what she could of Julian’s statements.

Julian listened to the soft rasping of the pencil rubbing against the dry skin of Commissaire Boutot’s palms and admitted that it was a bit odd that the Ismets had asked someone who was not of their faith, who didn’t even know their son, to find
him, to persuade him to come home. He tried to explain the deal he had struck with respect to the importation of Turkish salep, the marketing of Elan, but his words sounded so meaningless in the face of Kazim’s tragic finish that he trailed off and never mentioned orchids again.

The next day, Adjudant Compagnon requested to see them. The brigade commander, a tall, carrot-haired man with pockmarked skin, shook their hands warily but at the same time with an air of suppressed excitement, and invited them to sit down.

“We meet again,” he said, and if his eyes held a memory of a past, harrowing experience involving a mummified baby and other corpses, he made no mention of it. “This case is out of my hands jurisdictionally. However, I’ve asked you here because the Lokum trashing is still unresolved, and there are a few minor details you may be able to help us with since you have some knowledge of the Ismet family.”

Laurent sat nearby, ready to take notes on a laptop.

Oddly enough, Compagnon spent more time talking about Kazim’s death than about the Ismets’ shop. Unusually expansive, the brigade head offered them coffee and was even willing to give out information. The conclusion drawn by the Périgueux police was that Kazim had died in the early hours of Sunday morning of a self-administered overdose of heroin. He was obviously an intravenous user. His arms were covered in needle marks, and the hypodermic found with him was covered with his prints. The speculation was either that he had shot up in the skip and died there, or that Nadia and company had found him dead in the garret, panicked, and dumped the body and needle there themselves.

“Frankly, I don’t like it.” The adjudant looked like a man scenting a bad odor. “It’s easy to knock off a junkie with a fatal injection and make it appear like an overdose.”

“Are you saying someone killed him?” Mara asked.

Julian stirred uncomfortably beside her. “I think the Ismets have been through enough without having to deal with the proposition that their son was murdered.”

“Ah,” Compagnon rose to the challenge like a leaping trout. “But let’s look at it logically. Kazim’s pals find him dead. If their intention was simply to distance themselves, wouldn’t they have been better off leaving the body in the garret and simply taking off? It might have been days before the renovators worked their way up to the top level of the building. By putting Kazim in the skip, which was emptied on Monday morning, they ensured his body would be discovered quickly.”

He went on to point out that tracing the body back to the address on Rue Porte-de-Graule had been simple. Only two skips had been emptied that day, and the renovators had been easily able to identify the surrounding debris. Anonymity could not have been the objective. A health card had been found with the body. Plus thirty euros and change. Scum like Nadia would have taken the cash. Whoever was responsible for putting Kazim in the skip hadn’t panicked and wasn’t interested in money. That person wanted Kazim’s death to be discovered and had been making a statement.

“Well, is anyone trying to find Nadia?” Julian asked. “Or Peter or Brigitte? What do they have to say? And what about Kazim’s bike? He had a red Honda Bol d’Or.”

Compagnon shook his head. “The owner of the building has been questioned. He admits giving Nadia free accommodation in return for her acting as a kind of caretaker. He was probably taking unreported rent off her. But apart from that, he claims to know nothing about her and doesn’t know where she’s gone. I think we can rely on the police in Périgueux to round up her and her pals. We will also let them look for the missing
moto.
I and my men have more important work to do.”

By this, Compagnon gave them to understand that Julian had provided him with the first promising link leading back to Rocco Luca: Kazim had been running from a man named Serge before he died. Serge Taussat was a known associate of Luca. Kazim was a user and probably a small-time pusher who had worked for Luca. Maybe he had tried to hold out on the Ton.
Et voilà.
It was a typical drug scenario. It also explained the trashing of Kazim’s parents’ shop, which could now be interpreted as a warning. Everything was falling into place, and the Brames Gendarmerie was bang in the epicenter of the action. Luca lived in the jurisdiction of Brames. Kazim’s body may have been discovered on the outskirts of Périgueux, but the roots of the case were right here, beginning with the vandalism of Lokum. Jacques Compagnon virtually hugged himself. The cheeky rhyming housebreaker was almost forgotten, if not forgiven.

The
femme de ménage
from hell, as Julian had taken to calling her, was now leaving notes. She put them on the dining table where they could be plainly seen the moment one entered the front room. Previous missives had read: “There is a stain on small table from something wet left on it.” And, “Ask
him
to buy more Destop! Downstairs drain is plugged
again!
”

Madame Audebert’s direction that
he
should buy the French equivalent of Liquid Plumber clearly stated whom she held responsible for the frequent slow evacuation of the bathroom basin.

That day Julian was the first back, tired from an afternoon’s hard labor planting a hedge with only the aid of Bernard, the Chez Nous weekend waiter, as his digger. The sight of yet another of those odious slips of paper irritated him beyond belief. He wanted to tear it up, burn it, stamp on it, and yet he felt compelled to read it: “Vacuum not working because of sock (man’s) under bed.”

The vacuum had been left, also prominently in view, in the middle of the room.

He gathered that the vacuum had sucked up a sock (his) that had jammed the works. He was cursing and struggling to extricate the sock from the power head when Mara came in.

“What’s wrong with the vacuum?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said. In the next breath, he burst out resentfully, “Can’t you tell her to stop leaving those bloody notes?”

“How else is she to communicate with us if we’re not here?”

“It’s
how
she does it that’s offensive.”

“Well, if you’d only make some effort to be a bit less messy, maybe all this unpleasantness could be avoided.”

“Look here, don’t you think all this behavior modification for the cleaning woman is a bit over the top?” He had hold of the sock now and ripped it violently from the roller. “Frankly, it smacks of middle-class angst to me.”

Mara stalked out of the room. Julian, ashamed of his outburst, stood up, threw the sock on the floor, and went after her.

“I’m sorry.” He took her in his arms. She pressed into him.

“No, I’m sorry. I know you’re still getting over Kazim.”

They held on to each other as if they were both treading water in a deep and treacherous sea.

•

It was a slow night at Chez Nous, and Mado and Paul, with the aid of Bernard, had a relatively easy time of it for a change. Julian, Mara, and Loulou arrived together, greeted the room with the customary
“messieurs,”
“
dames”
as they came in, and took their usual table. The dogs settled down, hopeful of handouts.

Paul came out to greet them. “The usual
apéros?
What do you want for starters?”

Mara and Loulou chose the baked oysters, Julian the lamb’s sweetbreads.

“So, I hear that kid Kazim died of an overdose,” Paul said to Julian, waiting pen in hand for their main course orders.

“I don’t really want to talk about it,” said Julian. “I’ll have the rabbit pie.”

“That’s how the lads in Périgueux are treating it,” said Loulou. “But our good friend Jacques Compagnon thinks Kazim was pushing for Ton-and-a-Half, and he called in the kid’s account. It would explain why Kazim was running away. And why his
parents’ store was trashed.” He broke off to inquire, “The
blanquette
of veal
.
Is the meat local?”

“Old Michaud down the road.”

“
Ça va.
”

Paul wrote: 1 rabbit, 1
blanquette.
He grinned. “Speaking of
blanquettes
, see that
anglais
over there?” He thumbed over his shoulder at a hefty Brit wearing a Newcastle United sweatshirt. “He told me he went to a store to buy what he calls a ‘blanket.’ They told him to try a restaurant. So he went to a restaurant, and when he asked for a blanket there, they told him they didn’t do veal. You get it?”

Julian closed his eyes.

Mara said, “I’ll have the roast pheasant with chestnuts.”

“Trouble is,” Loulou went on, sniffing the air appreciatively as Bernard hurried by with a platter of potato croquettes, “a death like that leaves no trademark. A lethal dose of
l’héro
, then
paf!
Lights out, and no one’s the wiser.”

“Bastards.” Julian was moved to speak up. “He was just a kid. And what about Betul and Osman? If Luca really is behind it, their lives could be in danger, too.”