Murder in the Rue Dumas: A Verlaque and Bonnet Provencal Mystery (Verlaque and Bonnet Provencal Mysteries) (21 page)

The noisy avenue de Clichy was far behind them. Birds raced around their heads and cats chased each other from garden to garden. Verlaque stopped halfway up the street and smoked his cigar, reading a marble plaque before a small delicate white house.
Paulik stopped beside him and read—the residents had been killed during World War II for forging passports.

“Notice how they specify that the men were shipped off to their deaths,” Verlaque said, “but that the sole female forger, Colette Heilbronner, was killed here, on the spot.”

They walked on a few meters and Verlaque stopped at what was so far the most beautiful house on the street. Made of a golden stone, the house was three stories with large multipaned windows and a simple front garden that sloped down to the front door.

They looked at the house for a few minutes, Verlaque hoping to see one of its current residents and Paulik pondering the fact that a wealthy Parisian couple—who could have lived in the sixth or seventh arrondissement—would choose to live in an unfashionable neighborhood in northwest Paris, albeit on a street with distinction and cachet. It made him understand the judge a little more.

“Lunch?” Verlaque asked, smiling.

“Starving. Breakfast was a long time ago.”

They walked back down the street and through its green gates, out onto the avenue de Clichy. Crossing where they had crossed before, they entered the Batignolles neighborhood where the shops and cafés became chic at once. After a block Verlaque walked into a small restaurant with freshly painted glossy black trim. Inside a fire was burning in the fireplace, something Paulik had never seen in a city restaurant. The owner, a slim man their age wearing designer eyeglasses, grabbed Verlaque by the shoulders and gave him a
bise
. “Antoine!” he hollered. “It’s about time!”

Verlaque laughed and introduced Paulik, and they were given a table for two beside the fireplace. Both men chose an entrée of a duo of rillettes—one pork and the other duck—served with a mustard sauce and caramelized tomatoes. “I’m tempted by your
vegetable mille-feuille, though,” Verlaque said, stubbing out his cigar.

“It’s cold out,” Paulik reminded him.

Verlaque laughed. “All right, the rillettes followed by the roasted veal with the garam masala crust and lentils…”

“And spinach,” the owner, Didier, answered.

Paulik ordered the steak, which the chef had marinated in Indian spices. He sat back, happy that they had ordered and that a bottle of one of his favorite reds, a Pic Saint-Loup, was on its way. “The lawyer was sad, wasn’t he?” he said. “He seemed to be grieving, and not at all well himself. And he was protecting his old friend. No university professor has bank accounts all over Europe and one in the States.”

Didier came back with the wine and showed the label to Paulik, who nodded, smiling.

“Hey Didier, we just visited Maître Fabre, who works, and I think lives, around the corner. Do you know him?” Verlaque asked.

“Of course,” Didier answered, about to pour a little wine in Verlaque’s glass but halting when the judge quickly motioned that Paulik should be the taster. Without flinching, Didier poured a small amount into Paulik’s glass and continued speaking. “He came at least twice a week for years. He and his wife would sit at this table every Friday night with their little dog. They had no kids.”

Paulik sniffed the wine. “It’s fine.” Didier smiled and poured, impressed to have someone who looked like a rugby player, complete with scars on his bald head, who sniffed a wine, without tasting it, to see if it was corked.

“His wife died recently,
non
?” Verlaque asked.

“Yes, she died early in the year, of breast cancer. And now he has cancer too.”

Verlaque gave Paulik a “you were right” look. “Lung cancer?”

“Ah, no, believe it or not. Cancer of the pancreas. They were as thick as thieves…it was always a pleasure to see them. She was real bubbly, and he was too, back then. Soon they’ll be side by side.” Didier finished pouring the wine and left just as a young waiter brought the first courses.

Verlaque and Paulik began to eat, spreading their rillettes on thinly sliced brown bread, neither talking. Paulik was thinking of Hélène and Léa, neither of whom he could live without. Verlaque was thinking of Didier’s words “soon they’ll be side by side.” He thought of one of Larkin’s most well-known poems, “An Arundel Tomb,” whose opening stanza was,

A faithful dog lies at the countess’s feet, much like Mme Fabre’s dog, whom Verlaque pictured sitting, patiently, under the restaurant’s table. And the poem had one of his favorite last lines, “What will survive of us is love.” He looked over at Paulik, who was quietly eating his rillettes without his usual excitement. Verlaque imagined that the commissioner was thinking of his wife and daughter, but perhaps married men no longer thought of their spouses in that way. He would go home this evening, make a surprise call on Marine, and apologize for his idiotic remarks.

T
hierry Marchive was a good twenty minutes into his presentation and feeling more confident with each passing minute. He had secretly worried that using visuals in a theology lecture might be seen as cheating by some of his peers, but he had been invited to speak on the Cluny order’s contribution to art history and that could hardly be done without slides. Having Yann sitting in the front row, giving him the occasional grin or thumbs-up, helped enormously as well. Yann had beamed, looking to his right and left, when Thierry had referred to the Cluniac order’s eleventh- and twelfth-century building craze as “the boom to end all booms,” and Thierry had backed that declaration up with a quick succession of slides showing only a small sampling of the eighty cathedrals and five hundred churches—from large to small—the order had built. It was a subject that Thierry was comfortable with—he loved ecclesiastical art and Cluny had given Europe some of its greatest treasures. He was particularly excited to have found slides showing
the clever medieval reuse of Roman bricks—long, thin, and red—in the facades of their churches, one church even using Roman columns, now sunk into its thick outer medieval walls.

“Thanks to Burgundy’s excellent river connections—long before the canals were built—materials were easily transported from neighboring countries,” Thierry said, clicking to a map of then-Burgundy. He had added, spontaneously, the bit about the canals, and was feeling very pleased. “This formidable location allowed droves of artisans to come to Burgundy,” he continued. “Bands of masons, glassmakers, and painters came across from Italy to work here.” He then moved on to his best set of slides—the tympanum at Autun. “Such were the frequent and well-paid commissions coming from Cluny, that artisans began to sign their works almost for the first time, save for this sculpted bronze chest from the fourth century BC, which is signed, ‘Made by Novius Plautius in Rome.’ The carved tympanum at Autun’s cathedral is signed, we can clearly see, ‘Gislebertus.’ That one signature alone could be significant enough to warrant us studying, and praising, the Cluniac order for centuries to come. It encouraged a free-flowing exchange of ideas from all neighboring countries, which would be lost during the French Revolution and only found again in the twentieth century. Thank you.”

Polite applause filled the small room as Garrigue Druon quickly jumped up, knocking over an empty chair, and turned on the room’s lights. She had agreed to help Annie Leonetti with the technicalities of this symposium only because her own paper hadn’t been ready for today’s lectures—she still had a few more weeks’ work on it before she would send it off to Perugia in hopes of being published in their quarterly journal and perhaps being invited to present, which she dreaded, at their own upcoming symposium in February.

Thierry collected his notes off of the lectern and Annie Leonetti
came and took the microphone—hardly needed as there were only two dozen people in the room—and announced that there would be a short coffee break before the open discussion would take place.

“That was great,” Yann said as he patted Thierry’s back.

“Was I good? Did you like it?”

“It was great,” Yann repeated. He lowered his voice and said, “Claude and Garrigue aren’t even giving papers today. We were right to submit ours.”

Thierry took off his wool sweater—he had sweated throughout his entire talk. He then said to Yann, “Your talk on Cluny’s contribution to wine making was fantastic.”

Yann smiled. “You really think so? That stuff about the monks giving France the concept of
terroir
wasn’t too much?”

Thierry shook his head back and forth. “No, no! I had no idea that a wine that comes from one section of a vineyard can taste dramatically different from wine made from grapes grown on another parcel of that same vineyard. So it was the monks who taught us that? Cool. Dr. Leonetti and that beautiful law professor were nodding up and down in agreement.”

“Marine Bonnet?”

“Yeah, her. Come on, let’s get some food. I’m starving.”

The students had just helped themselves to the remaining Petit Lu cookies when Claude Ossart strode past them and said, “Ah, who better to extol the frivolities of Cluny than you two.”

Yann rolled his eyes. “Get a life, Ossart.”

They walked back into the lecture hall and Dr. Leonetti was at the microphone, smiling her acre-wide smile. “She’s so at ease up there,” Thierry whispered to Yann.

“I know. I was so nervous, but she doesn’t even flinch. She’d make a great politician.”

Thierry laughed. “Yeah, in Corsica.”

“Before we open up the discussion, I’d like to thank you all for coming today, and thank especially our participants: Dr. Rodier for his fine paper on Saint Bernard’s contribution to the spiritual work of the Templar monks, Dr. Kahn from Toulouse for his study of Cluny’s revitalization of the Norman church, and our graduate students, who bravely delivered their first papers in the presence of kind, but very knowledgeable, peers and colleagues.”

Applause filled the room and Yann poked Thierry in the ribs.

“I’d now like us to pause for a minute’s silence in remembrance of Dr. Georges Moutte, our beloved doyen, and his secretary, Mlle Zacharie,” Leonetti said. Heads were bowed and silence filled the room, but only a few of the conference attendees were thinking of the recently departed. Thierry was concentrating on keeping his stomach from rumbling; Yann was going over, word for word, his interview with the judge and commissioner, worried that he and Thierry still might be expelled from school; Annie Leonetti forced herself to think of Georges and Audrey because she was at the podium, as if the audience could read her thoughts; Claude Ossart was still fuming over the excesses of Cluny and Yann Falquerho’s conceit; Bernard Rodier had begun making a mental list of tonight’s Picard shopping, then, ashamed of himself, he began silently reciting the Hail Mary; and Garrigue Druon was musing on the generous offer that had just come her way.

Questions began, with the elderly Dr. Florence Bonnet asking Dr. Kahn to what degree he thought Cluny had inspired Saint Dunstan in England. Drs. Bonnet and Kahn spoke back and forth and Thierry, try as he might, could not keep his eyes open. He had stayed up most of the previous night reworking his paper and now was feeling the effects. He drifted off for a few minutes to be woken up by loud voices and Yann poking him again in the ribs.

“What is it?” Thierry whispered, sitting up straighter.

“You’re missing the fireworks,” Yann replied. “Everyone is fighting. It’s the drunken, debauched Cluniacs versus the pickle-up-your-butt Cistercians.”

“Forty farms were needed to produce enough food for the monks at Cluny alone,” Claude Ossart said, his voice cracking. “The black-robed monks ate roast chicken and drank fine wines”—here he threw Yann a look across the room—“while monks from other orders ate porridge and drank broth.” Yann looked at Claude and shrugged, smiling.

Thierry’s mouth watered at the thought of roast chicken, but he quickly remembered a fact he had read late the previous night and so he spoke up. “But the serfs who were transferred to monasteries under Cluny’s reign were regarded as fortunate…” He paused, wishing he hadn’t fallen asleep. He was feeling too drowsy to speak.

“Go on, Thierry,” Annie Leonetti said, motioning with her hand to help him finish his sentence.

“These serfs, under the protection of Cluny, were less subject to transfers, or even being sold like slaves.”

Annie Leonetti smiled. “Quite right, Thierry. Thank you.”

“The Cluniac order’s opulence knew no precedent, as Dr. Rodier so aptly proved, and should be condemned!” Claude now shouted. “The order was even too opulent for nunneries to exist, as they were not seen as cost-effective.” With “cost-effective,” Claude had bent his index and middle fingers to make quotation marks. “The monks at Cluny performed no manual labor,” he continued, not drawing a breath, “and when their priests, wealthy themselves, died, they left everything to the order. It was like the Mafia!”