Authors: Alexander Campion

Crime Fraiche (24 page)

BOOK: Crime Fraiche

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CHAPTER 44

T
he Belle meekly allowed herself to be seated in the back of the car and reclined limply. It was as if she was still persisting in her charade. Isabelle, sitting next to her in the backseat, was tense and keyed up, jiggling her leg violently enough for Capucine to feel it through the floor of the car. It was no secret what she was worried about.

Capucine puttered down the boulevard Saint-Germain at the Clio’s relaxed pace. When they reached the quai de la Tournelle and she took the bridge toward the Twentieth and not the quai in the direction of the Ile de la Cité, Isabelle exhaled sharply in relief.

“Hey, we’re going back to the commissariat. I figured we’d be going straight to the courthouse.”

Isabelle clearly thought that since the Belle had been caught red-handed, it would count as a
flagrant délit
and she would go directly to court for a summary trial and begin her sentence immediately. In that case Isabelle would have received almost no brownie points for the arrest.

“Lying down on the sidewalk doesn’t break any law I know of,” Capucine said.

They drove on in complete silence.

At the commissariat, Capucine went immediately to her office to see if she could learn any news of Momo, leaving Isabelle and David to take the Belle to one of the brand-new interrogation rooms. Capucine was well known in the commissariat as a fervent adept of modern interrogation techniques. When she had assumed command, she replaced the classic PJ technique of a Grand Guignol good-cop, bad-cop routine, followed by a sound hammering on the head with a telephone book, with Reid’s infinitely more subtle nine steps. She had also redecorated the gulag-style interrogation rooms with the breezy décor of an autoroute motel.

While she waited to be put through to the ER, she realized she was ravenous. The foie gras had been delicious but not even close to substantial enough. She guessed that David and Isabelle hadn’t eaten, either, and that the Belle was probably just as hungry. She buzzed the duty brigadier and asked him to get someone to the corner café for an assortment of sandwiches and sodas.

Just as she hung up, the phone buzzed and the ER receptionist came on the line to say that the SAMU had delivered Brigadier Benarouche, but he was still being examined by a doctor, who would call her as soon as he was done.

In the interrogation room Capucine found Isabelle behind the desk and the Belle sitting in the suspect’s uncomfortable metal folding chair. The Belle looked as serene as Isabelle was tense. Both were completely silent. David was absent, and Capucine was sure he was in the squad room, propped up in front of the TV monitor that was used for observation. The mirror on the wall was a dummy, its only use to increase the anxiety level of suspects. She looked up at the miniature video camera barely visible in the ceiling tiles.

“David! Come in here. Bring a chair,” she yelled, forgetting the efficiency of the very expensive set of microphones she had had installed. “We’re going to have some lunch before we get down to our chat.” She could feel Isabelle’s disapproving frown boring into her back.

David and the sandwiches arrived simultaneously. Everyone stood up. Capucine arranged the chairs around the desk, and the four tucked into their lunch. Somehow Isabelle wound up in the suspect’s uncomfortable chair. Despite the potential for awkwardness, it was almost a convivial moment. Capucine pulled rank and grabbed the single duck-rillettes sandwich. Rillettes were one of her favorites, and they were absolutely at their best on a doughy baguette. The effort of chewing the bread partially cleared the nagging thorns of her worry. Momo was in good hands and undoubtedly had enough morphine in his system not to be feeling any pain. Marie-Christine was just a foolish schoolgirl who was always going to find enough support among her boyfriends to be happy, and she could be counted on to do only minimal damage to Loïc. It was the Belle who was the tricky one.

The Belle nibbled at the corner of her sandwich, leaving tiny marks, as if a mouse had been at it. She had a dreamy, reposed look that made Capucine wonder if she really knew where she was.

“Mademoiselle,” Capucine said, “before we get started, I have to ask you for your identity papers.”

“They’re at home. But my name is Miriam Mizrahi, and I live at eleven, rue de la Folie-Regnault in the Eleventh Arrondissement.”

“You know in France you’re required by law to have your identity papers with you at all times,” Isabelle said sharply. Capucine quieted her with a look.

“Mademoiselle Mizrahi,” Capucine said and paused. “Is it mademoiselle?”

The Belle nodded.

Capucine went on, “Mademoiselle, you’re going to be charged with six separate counts of theft.” She looked up at Isabelle for her to read off the names of the victims. Hierarchically, Isabelle prompted David with a jerk of her head. With his ballet dancer’s grace, David twisted elegantly, produced a folded piece of square ruled paper from the back pocket of the pants of his linen suit, and read:

“Monsieur et Madame John Admonson, a
langue d’oïl
manuscript page. Monsieur Georges Lafarge, a Daumier caricature. Mademoiselle Thérèse Thibodeau and Mademoiselle Noemie Chesnier, a Marie Laurencin watercolor, small. Monsieur Claude Josse, a Mene animalier bronze statuette of a deer, small. Monsieur Hubert Lafontaine, a collection of manuscript letters by Hector Berlioz. And Monsieur Jean-Marie Lavallé, a Boulle-style
marqueterie
chest, small, possibly containing an important sum in bank-notes.”

“There were two others,” the Belle said, looking down at the table with the guilty expression of a small child caught snatching cookies to give to her friends.

“So you freely and openly admit to your guilt,” Isabelle said.

“Calm down, Isabelle,” David said.

“Listen, asshole, I’m in charge here.” Isabelle caught herself, looked at Capucine out of the corner of her eye, pursed her lips to form the word
pardon,
thought better of it, and remained silent.

“Maybe we should start from the beginning. Are you French, mademoiselle?” Capucine said.

The Belle tore a corner of the bread from her sandwich and shredded it into little pieces. After a while she said, “I’m Syrian. I came here with my mother a year and a half ago. I have a student visa and my mother has a tourist visa. I am a student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.”

There was a long silence. Little by little the Belle shredded the entire top of her sandwich.

“It would be easier if I could tell you the whole story. Would that be all right?” she asked Capucine.

“Of course. Take your time. There’s no rush.”

“We are from Halab, what you call Aleppo, in Syria—”

“That’s part of the French territory, isn’t it?” Isabelle asked of no one in particular.

“It was given its independence in nineteen forty-four,” David said quietly. Isabelle shot him a stream of deftly aimed daggers with her eyes.

“We are Jews. My father is a dealer in rare books. I studied art history at the University of Halab and painted under the tutelage of Muhammad Tulaimat, the great Syrian painter, until . . .” She trailed off.

“Well?” said Isabelle. “Come on. Let’s hear it.”

“Until I fell in love with a wonderful and beautiful young man. An Arab. I was blissfully happy. In heaven. Then one day the rabbi condemned me publicly and forbade me and my parents to go to the synagogue. Our world came to an end. The whole community rose against us. My father could no longer sell his books. They would whistle at us in the streets. We had no money. I had to leave the university. In the end I decided to come to France. My mother came with me.”

“And why did you think France would be better?” David asked.

“There is a large community of Syrian Jews in Paris. My mother and I thought we would be welcomed by them.”

“And were you?” Isabelle asked, more curious than aggressive.

“No. Not at all. Somehow, they knew of my infidelity to the faith and would have nothing to do with us. We had also hoped that with me gone the rabbi would reintegrate my father, but he didn’t, and now my poor papa is obliged to work as a janitor. He can’t eat to relieve his hunger, much less send us money.”

“So how did you live?” Capucine asked.

“How did we live? We lived in a way that got me here.” She looked at Capucine unblinkingly.

Isabelle inhaled, preparing to speak. Capucine raised her fingers two inches off the desk in admonition. Isabelle released the breath in a sigh.

“At first my mother worked as a cleaning woman. It is easy to find that kind of work in Paris, even if you have no papers, as long as you are prepared to work for very little. I helped her when I could and did babysitting and whatever jobs I could find when I wasn’t going to classes at the Beaux-Arts. We lived in a small studio apartment. I can’t say we were happy, but it was a life.

“Then my mother became ill. We went to many doctors. It is a form of bone cancer. There is a treatment. But it is very expensive and, of course, we have no social coverage for medicine.”

“I begin to understand,” Capucine said.

“The first time was an accident. I had gone to the market on the boulevard Raspail, and I wanted to wait until it was time for the market to close. Sometimes you can get food for next to nothing then. The merchants are happy to sell things cheaply instead of throwing them away. We had had nothing for dinner the night before and naturally no breakfast or lunch. I think I fainted. The next thing I knew, I was talking to two Americans. They were extremely kind. I told them I was a student of art. They were professors of philology. They had just purchased a page of a langue d’oïl illuminated manuscript with a representation of an angel forcing a devil to disgorge by playing musical instruments. They told me all about it.”

The Belle was visibly moved. She opened a plastic bottle of Evian and in her nervousness dropped the blue cap on the floor. She immediately fell to her knees on the floor to retrieve it.

When she was seated again, she resumed her story. “The iconography was obvious. The angel dominates the devil with her music. It is an illustration of Saint Augustine’s dictum that a prayer sung is prayed twice. They did not know that.

“It was an impossible moment. I was fainting from hunger but chatting away about medieval illumination as if I was at a cocktail party back in Halab.”

There was a long pause. The Belle began shredding the other side of her sandwich. This time even Isabelle was reluctant to interrupt.

Finally, she began again. “They took me to their house, fed me, and insisted I spend the night. I had told them some absurd story about an abusive boyfriend. The next morning they went out to the
boulangerie
for croissants. I called my mother. She was distraught. And starving. She had had nothing to eat for a day and a half. I felt terrible, but I knew what I had to do. I took the page and ran. I knew just the dealer who would buy it. I bought two big bags of groceries and went home with what seemed like enough money in my pocket to live forever.”

She paused again and resumed work on the destruction of her sandwich.

“The whole thing seemed preordained. I had never set out to rob anyone. The opportunity was just given. At one point I even thought it was the Higher Being offering me salvation.”

She laughed cynically. “Of course, the money that was going to last forever only lasted a few weeks. The doctors and pharmacies took care of that. After, it became easy. I bought the right clothes for it. I became skilled. I tried to steal only things I knew people didn’t really want. Some of them seemed to like me so much, they would have given me what I took if I had just asked. I suppose that’s why two of them didn’t report my thefts.” She paused once again. There was no more sandwich to shred.

“I am going to go to jail now, am I not?” she asked Capucine.

“That’s for damn sure,” Isabelle said. The Belle ignored her.

“I’m afraid that’s for the magistrate to decide, but there are definitely extenuating circumstances.”

“I don’t care about me. It is my mother I worry about. In a month she will no longer have any money for her medications. Then what will she do?”

The door opened a crack, and the uniformed duty brigadier poked his head in, searched for Capucine with his eyes, found her, and made a gesture with his thumb against his ear and his little finger up to his mouth to signify that she had a telephone call. If he interrupted an interrogation, it was bound to be urgent. And from his expression it looked like it was bad news. Capucine bolted out of the room.

CHAPTER 45

T
he call was from the ER doctor. Actually, the news wasn’t bad at all.

“Commissaire, your man will be back on the job in a few weeks, maybe less. He has three broken ribs and multiple contusions on his torso, some of them severe enough. It looked to me as if he had been repeatedly kicked by someone wearing boots. What worried us most was that he had two blunt traumas on the back of his head—”

“Blunt traumas, Doctor?” Capucine asked.

“From either a blow or from falling. Given their closeness, it seems likely he was hit on the back of the head twice with something heavy. That’s always dangerous because it often results in an epidural hematoma, which is often fatal if not surgically treated immediately. I wasn’t overly concerned, because from the coloration of the contusions, we knew he had received them about fifteen hours prior to reaching us and the symptoms of an epidural hematoma almost invariably peak within six to eight hours. Other than a severe headache, he showed none of the signs. Nevertheless, I had him sent in for a CT scan, which turned out to be perfectly normal.”

“He’ll really be back up and around in a week or two?”

“It’s hard holding him down right now,” the doctor said with a laugh. “He’s a remarkably strong and vigorous individual, but I’m going to keep him here for a night just to be on the safe side. He’s very keen to talk to you, but there are two points I would like to call to your attention first.”

Capucine said nothing, and there was an awkward silence on the line.

“Your officer smelled strongly of beer when he arrived. The initial physical assessment was consistent with alcoholism or very heavy drinking. But there was absolutely no alcohol in his blood. He had not had even one drink the night before. Someone must have poured the beer over his clothes to make it look like he was drunk.”

“That’s useful to know, Doctor. What was the other thing?”

“The SAMU unit that picked him up found him propped up against the wall of a holding cell at the Saint-Nicolas gendarmerie with water pumping across the floor at regular intervals. As you can imagine, we deal with the gendarmes very frequently and they are normally extremely conscientious. I was surprised that your man had not been brought here directly, particularly since one of the traumas in his head had a deep laceration that required four stitches. The fact that he was denied medical attention is an egregious breach that merits a complaint. He could easily have died in the cell.”

Capucine wondered at what point in the evening Capitaine Dallemagne realized Momo was one of her men.

“Anyway, here he is. Remember that the shot of morphine he received when he was admitted is still far from metabolized.”

“Commissaire, I’m sorry. I fucked up,” Momo said in a voice far more quiet and gentle than usual.

“Don’t be stupid. How are you feeling?”

“Not too bad. They gave me a shot that actually makes me feel great. If I could get a drink of something, I’d be feeling perfect.” Momo attempted a laugh but cut it off so sharply, Capucine guessed his head still hurt considerably.

“How did it happen?”

“I took a night off. I’d been back twice to the accounting office and thought it would do my cover some good to be seen out with the buds, sucking up mint tea at the local
rebeu
hangout. On my way out some fucker hit me on the back of the head. Then two of them kicked the shit out of me. It was the last goddamn thing I was expecting.”

“Do you have any idea who did it?”

“Yeah, you kind of take notice when guys are kicking the crap out of you. The master of ceremonies was Martel, the foreman who acts like he’s in charge of the élevage. Remember him? The other two, I don’t know their names, but I could pick them out. Count on that.”

“And you had an ankle gun, it seems, even though I told you not to.”

“Yeah, but did I use it? You try that sometime, lying there doing nothing, letting some assholes use you as a football, when you can blow them away easy as spitting.”

Capucine was abashed. “You did an exemplary job, Momo.”

“I didn’t. I fucked up.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because I did. I went back through the accounting office twice and didn’t find anything worthwhile. The problem is that they just keep too much stuff. They have records of everything. It ’ud take years to comb through all that crap.”

Just then the duty officer came in with a thin file labeled “Mizrahi, Miriam,” containing the order to transfer the Belle to Paris’s central holding cells pending a hearing with the
juge d’instruction
. There was a yellow sticky note stuck on the blue dun cover in Isabelle’s spiky hand, saying that she was typing out the Belle’s confession and would get her to sign it before she was sent off.

“Allô, allô, Commissaire?”

“Sorry, Momo. I was just signing something.”

“So I was saying we’re not going to find nothing in that accounting office. What I want to do is get ahold of my little playmates from last night and have a cozy chat with them. They tried hard to make it look like your basic
blancs
beating up an immigrant for stealing their jobs, but it sure felt like there was something else behind it. I want to find out what.”

“Out of the question. You’re going to spend the night in the hospital, and then you’re going to come back to Paris and take two weeks’ medical leave.”

“But what about the case?”

Momo’s desire to get right back to work astonished Capucine and deepened her feeling of guilt. There had been no need to keep him undercover so long. The one lesson she could never seem to learn was that
le mieux est l’ennemi du bien
—better is the enemy of good.

“Allô, Commissaire. Are you there? What are we going to do about the case?”

“Don’t worry about that. Thanks to you, it’s completely buttoned up.”

BOOK: Crime Fraiche

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