Dark Summer in Bordeaux (5 page)

He leaned over and kissed his grandfather on the cheek.

‘I think I resign anyway,’ he said, ‘You would have had me mate in three moves, wouldn’t you? And I have this meeting. So I must go anyway. It’s all right, Grandpa, I won’t forget the curfew and I’ll be back in time for supper.’

He inclined his head to Lannes.

‘Superintendent,’ he said, and hurried, awkwardly, from the room.

‘He’s a good boy,’ the professor said, ‘but he worries me. These political enthusiasms. Ill-judged and therefore dangerous. And he is devoted to the man Sigi, who is, as you told me, a criminal.’

‘But one with friends in high places.’

‘So much the worse, I fear, in the long run.’

The old man took a cigar from the box on the table by his side, saying, ‘You prefer cigarettes, as I remember.’ He rolled it in his fingers, snipped the end off, and put a match to it.

‘I’m grateful to you, superintendent,’ he said. ‘There has been no more trouble regarding my granddaughter. The warning you gave the Comte de Grimaud seems to have been effective. So I assume it’s some other matter that brings you here.’

The maid came in with tea and petits-fours. Lannes waited till she had left the room, and said, ‘I’ve a corpse on my hands. A retired professor. Of history, I believe. I hoped you might have known him and may be able to tell me something about him. At present I’m at a loss. Not many professors get murdered after all. Labiche was his name.’

‘Aristide?’

‘Yes. You did know him then?’

‘Years ago. He gave up his chair. For journalism. To tell the truth I rather think he was happy to do so. Why should anyone kill poor Aristide? An inoffensive person.’

‘A Communist, I’ve been told.’

‘Certainly. But that’s no reason to murder anyone. Or wasn’t, I suppose. How was he killed, if I may ask?’

‘Hit on the head, and the body left in the bushes in the public garden, not two hundred metres from here.’

‘So . . . A robbery with violence perhaps?’

‘Perhaps, it’s an obvious explanation, but there are reasons why it doesn’t satisfy me.’

The old man drew on his cigar and closed his eyes. Then he pulled the Paisley shawl more tightly around his shoulders. Lannes sipped his tea which was scented with bergamot. He felt tired and would have been content for the silence to prolong itself companionably. The rising wind threw rain against the shutters. The black-and-white fox-terrier came and settled on the old man’s slippered feet. Wouldn’t it be simpler, Lannes thought, to accept that explanation – robbery with violence – and be done with the case? Was it only obstinacy that prevented him from doing so?

‘You’ll know his brother, the advocate,’ the professor said.

‘Yes, he has been no help at all. Says he hasn’t been on terms with his brother for a dozen years, even denies knowing the married name of Professor Labiche’s daughter, which I find hard to believe.’

‘There I can help you. He’s lying, of course. She’s quite a distinguished person, famous indeed. You will certainly know of her, superintendent, as the actress Adrienne Jauzion. I don’t believe she has ever married – Jauzion was her mother’s name. She excels in romantic comedy, but fails in tragedy. Hasn’t the voice for Racine. A matter of breath control, perhaps. That’s only my opinion, you understand. Not that this can be of any significance to you.’

VIII

‘The fair Adrienne,’ Moncerre said. ‘That complicates things, doesn’t it?’

‘You think so?’

‘Seeing as the Alsatian has been chasing her tail and may have caught it for all we know, I should say it does. What’ll you tell him?’

‘Nothing. It’s not as if she’s a suspect. That would be ridiculous.’

‘All the same, he won’t be happy. He’ll think you’re hassling his girlfriend, interfering in his private life . . . ’ ‘But that’s precisely what it is, private. You and I know nothing of his relations with La Jauzion. He’s never spoken of them, has he? To either of us? So we know nothing.’

This was true enough, but he guessed when he called to make an appointment for later that afternoon that she would be on the telephone to Schnyder within minutes. As indeed she was, for here was Schnyder coming into his office, cigar in mouth, and perching himself on the corner of Lannes’ desk. He blew out smoke.

‘These German cigars really aren’t up to much,’ he said. ‘But there are no Havanas in the shops now. It hadn’t occurred to me that being condemned to smoking poor quality cigars would be one of the penalties of losing a war.’

‘There are more severe ones,’ Lannes said.

‘True, of course, but it’s the minor ones that irritate. You don’t happen to have a smuggler chum who could run some over from Spain? I’m sure fat-arse Franco isn’t short of them. The pleasures of neutrality.’

‘Might have,’ Lannes said. ‘I’ll ask around.’

‘Kind of you. You know the ropes as I don’t, me being still an outsider here . . . Any movement in your case?’

‘Not much, not much at all.’

‘Robbery with violence gone wrong by one of our usual customers seems the most probable, doesn’t it?’

‘Convenient too.

‘So why not wrap it up then?’

‘Just what Bracal suggested. I hope I can do so. Unfortunately there may be a political angle. Meanwhile,’ he lit a cigarette; it really wasn’t fair to tease Schnyder who was evidently desperate to know why he had made that appointment with La Jauzion, but was reluctant to put the question. ‘Meanwhile,’ he said, ‘I’ve arranged to see the murdered man’s daughter this afternoon.’

‘His daughter?’

‘Yes, the actress Adrienne Jauzion. I think I pointed her out to you in a restaurant once, the first day you were here, was it?’

Schnyder stubbed out his cigar.

‘There’s really no pleasure in these things,’ he said. ‘Do look out for your smuggler, there’s a good chap. Adrienne Jauzion, yes, I remember, good-looking woman. Actually I’ve met her since, at a race-meeting. And you think she can tell you something?’

‘Probably not. Just help tie up loose ends. Then perhaps we can agree on the solution everyone seems to favour.’

The apartment overlooking the Place de l’Ancienne Comédie was itself like a stage set, though the elderly maid who admitted Lannes was long past playing the ‘soubrette’. Heavy dark-blue velvet curtains were drawn in the salon, where La Jauzion reclined on a chaise-longue in the style of a First Empire beauty. Lannes had last seen her in ‘La Dame aux Caméllias’ in which dated weepy she had given a performance at least as moving as Garbo’s in the film version. She wore a silk Japanese jacket and loose white cotton trousers, and there was a little bunch of cattelyas pinned above her left breast. It was at least five years since Lannes had been called to investigate an attempted burglary in the apartment, but he would have sworn that nothing had changed, that the furniture and objets d’art were in the same precise places, and that the actress herself didn’t look a day older.

‘Your call intrigued me,’ she said. ‘I can’t imagine that I have done anything unlawful to attract your interest . . . ’ She spoke slowly with an affected stress on the word ‘imagine’.

He handed her a photograph of the dead man.

‘This is your father, I think.’

‘But certainly it is. Poor Papa.’

‘Why do you say “poor Papa”?’

She fitted a cigarette into an amber holder at least eight inches long and waited for Lannes to rise from his chair and light it for her.

‘Because he has been “poor Papa” to me for thirty years, for as long almost as I remember.’

The air was heavy with the scent of flowers.

‘I’m sorry to say that I have bad news for you.’

‘About poor Papa?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘I see . . . And since you are here?’

‘Since I am here, yes. Not a natural death.’

‘If I was on stage,’ she said, ‘I would know how to weep, but as it is . . . ’

‘As it is?’

‘You see that I have no tears. How was he killed?’

Lannes told her, sparing nothing, and she listened as if unconcerned or perhaps wondering how to play this part that had been so suddenly assigned her, one for which, he supposed, there was no rehearsal time.

‘Did you know he had returned to Bordeaux?’

There was a pause – was it hesitation? – before she said, ‘But certainly. He came to see me two, perhaps three weeks ago.’

‘What did you talk about?’

‘What should a father and daughter talk about when they haven’t met for four years and then only briefly? Does that sound bitter, superintendent?’

She stubbed out her cigarette, removed the remnant from the holder with a pearl-headed pin, inserted another and again waited for Lannes to light it. She rang a little hand-bell which stood on the table beside her, and the maid entered followed by an orange Pekingese which leaped onto its mistress’s lap and stretched up to lick her face.

‘Bring us a bottle of wine and two glasses, Berthe.’

She stroked the dog which now settled itself.

‘He wanted money.’

‘And you gave him some?’

‘Naturally.’

‘Did he say why he needed it?’

‘Because he had none. Poor Papa, he had scarcely thought of money all his life, but now he had none, so of course he had to think about it, and who else should he approach but the daughter he had abandoned and seen perhaps half-a-dozen times since she was a little girl? Again I ask you, do I sound bitter, superintendent?’

‘That’s no concern of mine,’ Lannes said.

The maid returned with the wine and poured two glasses. It was better wine than Lannes could afford: Château St-Hilaire, given Adrienne, doubtless, by the count of that name who had been her acknowledged lover for years. The attachment was convenient; she let it be known that it was on account of St-Hilaire that she had chosen to pursue her career in Bordeaux rather than in Paris.

‘And besides asking for money, what did your father have to say? Had he some other reason for remaining in Bordeaux?’

‘I know nothing of that,’ she said. ‘What he was doing, or hoped to do, here, was no concern of mine, but I can tell you he wasn’t a well man. Indeed I shouldn’t have recognised him from the photograph you showed me if he hadn’t made that visit. He told me he had spent a year in one of Franco’s prisons, but I have no idea whether this was so. You must understand, we had nothing in common.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Apart from the accident of my birth.’

‘And you didn’t see him again after that visit?’

‘No. I made it clear to him he would not be welcome. He was a Communist, you see, and these are not good times to consort with Reds.’

‘And so you have no idea who might have killed him?’

‘None at all. How should I have? I expect it was on account of politics.’

‘Was he at ease when he came here?’

‘He was never at ease. There was always some so-called injustice he was railing against. But I will add this. I think he was afraid.’

‘There’s one other thing,’ Lannes said. ‘Did he mention where he was staying in Bordeaux?’

‘Some hotel, I suppose.’

‘There’s no record of him doing so.’

‘Then I can’t help you.’

‘It didn’t occur to you to ask him?’

‘No. Why should it? You must understand, superintendent, he meant nothing to me. He used to have a mistress, I believe, but perhaps she’s dead too. I knew nothing of her except that my mother said she wasn’t respectable.’

‘And that was all I could get out of her,’ Lannes said to Moncerre. ‘She’s an actress of course, so you can’t tell when she is playing a part and you know that if she chose to lie to you she would do so uncommonly well and convincingly. Still, I can’t believe she knows anything and it’s evident that she doesn’t care either.’

‘Doesn’t take us anywhere. Write it off as robbery with violence?

That’s what they want, don’t they? So everybody can be happy. It’s clear nobody gives a damn who killed the poor sod.’

‘I don’t envy Schnyder,’ Lannes said. ‘She’s a copper-bottomed bitch.’

‘She ought to meet my wife then, they’d get along fine.’

IX

Henri wasn’t drunk, not quite, just a little tipsy as he had been most times Lannes called on him since his twin Gaston’s murder. They embraced. He was one of Lannes’ oldest friends and the only man he greeted in this way.