Murder on the Mediterranean (Capucine Culinary Mystery) (20 page)

Rather than ask the question directly, Capucine queried with raised eyebrows.

“Nothing so complicated it will give you headaches,
ma belle.
If you suspect whom I think you suspect, you’re right. But don’t ignore the fact that there are any number of eddies and whirlpools in this case. If you’re going to get your boat into port, you’re going to have to steer carefully around them, or you just might get sucked under. Don’t you just love nautical metaphors? They take me back to those delightful days on the briny.”

Capucine could think of absolutely nothing to say.

“And if my mentor will permit me the indulgence of giving her a spot of advice, don’t spend too much time skulking around this place. It’s lovely and all, but like everyone in our family except my father, you need to feel the pulse of urban living to get your cerebral juices flowing. If Paris is too intimidating, go walk around Bandol. You might see things in a different light. Yes, Bandol would do it. Definitely.” He smiled his all-knowing Cheshire cat grin.

“And don’t waste too much time with me. I know it’s almost a lost cause, but you could have a crack at squeezing some juices, cerebral or whatever you can make work, out of Tubby Hubby. Off to bed with you. I have a little errand to accomplish.”

Jacques produced a long, thin panatela, the sort of cigar an evil Latin villain smokes in a thriller, and wandered down the hill to his car. In the darkness of the night the pulsing red glow of the cigar looked like a malevolent red firefly as he talked endlessly into his telephone.

I
n the morning Jacques was gone. His bed had been slept in, he had left a wry thank-you note for David on the kitchen table, but when Capucine rose at seven, his bed was already cold to the touch. Capucine had an intuition, she had no idea why, that he had been out the evening before, returning only early in the morning.

Capucine accepted a bowl of café au lait from Magali and drank it on the steps of the terrace, watching the colors of the hills lighten as the sun rose.

David dashed out of the house wearing a necktie and a well-pressed tan linen suit.

“Town council. You’d think we’d knock off for August, but we don’t. I’ll be back for lunch.”

Before the rattle of his car had faded, the rasping violins of the cicadas had taken over again. Capucine’s thoughts wandered. Jacques had been right. He always was. She had grown away from Paris and the Police Judiciaire. She wasn’t altogether sure it was such a bad thing.

This was the kind of woolgathering she loathed. The only way forward was to keep working. And she desperately needed to go forward.

Still, what was the point of Jacques’s insistence about the urban experience? Had he been telling her to leave the mas and go back to Paris, or did he want her to go to Bandol? Could it have anything to do with where he had gone last night? If, indeed, he had gone anywhere.

Irritated, Capucine stood up. She needed action, motion, anything but sitting, staring at the hills. She went to the bedroom, dressed in white harem pants, a long-sleeved white linen blouse, which she left unbuttoned to just below the level of her breasts, and white espadrilles with long satin ribbons for laces. It was a look she loved. A look she wouldn’t be wearing if she were back in Paris.

Within twenty minutes Capucine was striding down the quai des Baux in Bandol, buoyant with the intention of buying the morning papers, sitting on a terrace overlooking the boats, letting a
bain de foule
—a “people bath”—wash over her.

By the time she was halfway down the quai, she had acquired a large plastic bag filled with four newspapers, three newsmagazines, and a softcover edition of the latest Fred Vargas, but she had yet to find a satisfactory café.

She reached the Bar de la Marine, a broad café with a terrace consisting of four rows of tables surrounded by navy blue canvas director’s chairs under a broad white-and blue-striped awning.
Perfect.
As she was about to sit down at a table front and center, she noticed Aude sitting one row back at the opposite end. Aude seemed to be looking at her, at least the infinite depth of her butterfly-wing powdery blue eyes were aimed in Capucine’s direction. Capucine smiled and thought—or was it her imagination?—that she received a smile in return.

Capucine crossed the distance between them. When she reached the table, Aude’s eyes softened in a complicit look. Capucine pulled out one of the director’s chairs and unfolded herself into it. A waiter rushed up with zeal uncharacteristic of cafés on touristy quais. Capucine gave her order for an express. Aude shook her head at the invitation to more Perrier.

“Régis told me you’d already left for the States.”

“No. I had to finish an assignment for my boss. I’m going tomorrow.”

“Your boss at Lévêque, Fourcade, and Levy?”

Aude nodded fractionally. “I work for Maître Lévêque.”

Capucine kicked herself internally. How could Isabelle have missed that? It was exasperating to have to conduct a case at a distance.

“I didn’t know you worked for him personally.”

“There are six lawyers on his team who do the legwork for him.” Aude smiled thinly. This time Capucine was almost sure it really was a smile.

“It’s a very fulfilling job. And very gratifying, too. My office is two doors down from my mother’s.”

“Your mother?” Capucine was aware that the repetition made her sound like a half-wit.

“Yes. My mother is Maître Lévêque’s personal assistant. Now that the firm has become so big, it’s a very grand job. She even has two secretaries of her own.” Aude smiled thinly again.

There was an awkward silence. Or, at least, awkward for Capucine. Aude seemed to be serenely biding her time.

“I’ll be on leave while I’m at Harvard. Actually, going there was Maître Lévêque’s idea. He made sure I got in. My job will be waiting for me when I get back.” She paused, her unblinking eyes fixed on Capucine’s for several long beats. “But I’m thinking of leaving private practice and becoming a juge d’instruction when I return. I think that’s something that suits my talents far better.” Her eyes seemed to demand Capucine’s opinion.

“Wouldn’t it be a different world without having your mother so close at hand?”

“Oh, I’m sure she’ll always be close at hand, as will Maître Lévêque. They’ve both always been the central elements in my life.”

“Does that mean you knew Maître Lévêque as a child?”

“Oh, yes. My mother has always worked for him, as far back as I can remember. And he’s always been my mentor.” There was an odd emphasis on the word
mentor.

“How do you mean?”

“You see, my mother was a single mother. She never told me who my father was. I sometimes wonder if she even knows. She has always been completely devoted to Maître Lévêque. He was the cornerstone of our lives even when I was a child. Every summer he’d take two months off to go to his house in Brittany and take us with him. He still does. That was where I just completed my recent assignment for him. He never stops working.... Those summers were wonderful.” For once, Aude’s face reflected an emotion, a deep wistfulness.

“He would dictate letters and memos to my mother and make telephone calls from dawn to lunch. Then he would take me sailing all afternoon. He had—he still does—a wonderful old Brittany sloop with brick-red sails. From when I turned ten, he let me skipper it all by myself while he napped in the cabin.”

Aude smiled a hint of a smile, parting her lips slightly, revealing a line of flawless teeth. She leaned back in her director’s chair, crossed one slim leg over the other, wagged her perfect foot. Capucine’s eye was drawn by the motion. The foot was as shapely as a magazine advertisement, with long, fingerlike toes, the nails made lustrous with clear matt lacquer. She wore stylish Gucci leather flip-flops with a black enamel
G
at the intersection of the toe and instep straps. She flapped the sandal on the raised foot, making a barely audible slap against her heel. After a few taps the sandal fell off. For a few seconds Aude languidly caressed the alabaster sole of her foot with the strap of the sandal and then picked it up with her prehensile toes and slipped it on. Capucine was mesmerized by the gesture.

“I think that was the best part of my life. Between the ages of twelve—no, thirteen—and seventeen. Yes, I was happiest then.”

Capucine understood the allusion as clearly as if it had been expressed in full.

“Did he abuse you?”

“What a term.” She placed two long fingers on the back of Capucine’s wrist so delicately that Capucine felt only a tingle in the fuzz on her skin. “Police terminology is an open door to a world of vulgarity. There was no abuse of any sort.”

Capucine invited the rest with raised eyebrows.

“It began as slowly as the shore grasses swaying in first breaths of the morning sea breeze. We would sail every afternoon and drop anchor in a secluded bay to have what Maître Lévêque called ‘our afternoon tea,’ a glass of rosé for him and a Coca-Cola and some cookies for me. Of course, when I was older, I was allowed a glass of rosé diluted with water and there were no more cookies. Usually, we were very tired. Those ancient Brittany boats are hard work to sail. Everything is so heavy.

“That particular afternoon . . . the first afternoon . . .” Aude looked deeply into Capucine’s eyes to make sure she was understanding. “Is etched in my brain forever.”

Her sandal had slipped off again. She stroked it with her long toes. Slipped it on. “The light came off the ripple of the bay like shards of glass. I had a small splinter in my foot from the rough wood of the boat. He wanted to take it out. It was too small to remove with his finger, so he put my foot in his mouth and drew out the splinter with his teeth. He kept my foot in his mouth and very gently sucked my toes. I couldn’t help but notice what was happening to him. I was profoundly affected. Remember, I was thirteen and had, quite by accident, enslaved my and my mother’s god.

“Without really knowing what I was doing, I responded by touching him with my toes. It was electric. I could feel his soul flow into me.” She fell silent and dropped her sandal again, this time with a loud clack.

“And then?”

“Then? Why, nothing. We sailed home, and I helped
Maman
make dinner. We made
sole à la Bretonne,
as I recall. What happened after was what happened after.”

Capucine was mystified. She had no idea why Aude had told her the story. Her only conviction was that her session with Aude was anything but an accident. She wondered how much of a hand Jacques had had in it. Could it possibly have been the reason for his trip to the mas?

“I think I would make a very good juge d’instruction, don’t you?”

Aude expected an answer, but Capucine could think of nothing to say. The awkward silence lasted for several beats.

“What if I told you, Commissaire, the instructions I would give you if you were investigating this case for me?” The dreamy tone had vanished, replaced by an authoritarian one that did sound very juge-like. There was another long pause. Aude pierced Capucine with her eyes.

“I would tell you to impound the boat we were on and have a first-rate forensics team give it a very thorough going-over. Not just the usual quick look, Commissaire, that forensics teams consider adequate, but the kind of search that involves dismantling decks and looking deep. Very deep. Do you understand, Commissaire?”

“I do.” Capucine was tempted to complete her response with a respectful “madame,” but bit it back in the nick of time.

A young man, as golden haired and copper skinned as one of Helios’s acolytes, appeared at the side of the table, smiled, and moved off to wait courteously for the women to finish their conversation.

“I’m afraid I must leave you.” Aude uncoiled from her seat as gracefully as a sea nymph rising from the foam and bent down to kiss Capucine on the cheek. Capucine sensed rather than felt the alabaster flesh against hers, and she heard the merest murmur in her ear.

“Don’t get the wrong impression. I am, and intend to remain, intact until the night of my wedding day.”

Aude and the golden young man vaporized into the shimmering heat of the quai.

C
apucine leaned back in the director’s chair and pia-noed the black-painted wooden tabletop for nearly a full minute. The waiter appeared and asked what he could bring her.

“A glass of rosé, if you have it by the glass.”

“Bien sûr, madame.”

Capucine took a sip of the wine and willed the merry-go-round of unanswerable questions to a stop. She drummed the table for a few more seconds, then extracted her iPhone, checked Inès’s number, keyed it into one of the confiscated phones. Inès’s secretary put her right through.

“I had an insight into the Nathalie case.”

“I can only hope it’s an insight that will put you back on the active roster of the PJ. I need you right away. I’ve had a setback. I was thinking you could come to Paris incogn—”

“Inès, listen. This could be important. Can you to get through to the juge d’instruction in charge of the Nathalie case, Liouville—isn’t that his name?—and get him to impound the boat and have a first-rate forensics team give it a very thorough shakedown? It might be useful to have Commissaire Garbe, if he’s still assigned to the case, present. I have a hunch that might produce enough evidence for a court case.”

“I’ll have my secretary send an e-mail. But, frankly, Capucine, it’s a complete waste of time. The silly girl went overboard. What’s to find on the boat? Anyway, it’s bound to have been chartered out again and won’t be back for weeks. We can’t afford to go on a wild-goose chase. No more distractions. I want you back here right away.”

Quietly, calmly, Capucine pressed the red END button. Inès had always been obsessive. Now she had escalated to monomaniacal.

As Capucine drove back to the mas, one of her phones rang. She fished it out of her bag and looked at the screen. Inès. She let the phone fall back into her bag.

At the mas she found that David was still in the village and Alexandre and Magali were side by side, engrossed in the making of an
aïoli garni,
a dish of cod and boiled vegetables served with aïoli. Capucine chafed at being ignored.

Capucine sat at the kitchen table and served herself another glass of rosé. While she diced garlic, Magali regaled Alexandre with a long shaggy-dog tale about the wayward daughter of one of her neighbors. The girl was notorious in the village as a
Marie-couche-toi-là
—a strumpet—but her parents refused to admit the fact. The daughter’s favorite tactic was to retire after lunch for a nap, close her bedroom door, and slip out the ground-floor window to an assignation with her lover of the week. Even though her escape was in full view of the neighbors, the parents were so solicitous that if anyone stopped by, they were shushed into whispers, lest they wake the poor girl.

Magali delivered the tagline to the story in Provençal. Alexandre laughed uproariously. Capucine didn’t understand a word. Her pique rose another notch. She went to the refrigerator for another glass of rosé, vexed that Alexandre hadn’t divined her intent and served her before she had risen. She heard one of her cell phones ringing in her bag in the living room and delighted in ignoring it.

Lunch passed uneventfully. David shared village gossip. The aïoli garni was much praised, proclaimed by David to be the only truly authentic version. The dishes cleared, David returned to the village. Alexandre announced his intention of a short nap and looked hopefully at Capucine, who, still irritated at the imagined slight over the glass of rosé, returned a glassy-eyed stare. Crestfallen, Alexandre retreated to their room.

Thoroughly vexed, Capucine walked into the hills, kicking every sizable stone she came across, ruining a brand-new pair of Zanotti flats in the process. She charged up the steep slope of one of the tallest hills in the area. At the top she bent over, clutching her knees, fighting for breath. The effort broke her pique. She sat down in the grass, grabbed a bunch of wild thyme, crushed the spiny leaves, brought her fist to her nose, and told herself how foolish she was being.

Inès was Inès, the eternal aggressor-victim whose life had always existed, and always would, exclusively between the two poles of her beleaguered self and whomever she was currently hunting. But even if Capucine couldn’t afford the risk of going to Paris, she could provide Inès with counsel. Behaving like a hormonal teenager wasn’t going to help anyone.

She loped down the hillside, bounded back to the mas, snatched up one of her phones, and dialed Inès’s number. The secretary stated crisply that Madame le Juge could not be deranged.

Capucine forbade herself to pout. She went to her room, smiled at Alexandre, who was snoring on the bed, then replaced her clothes with a bikini bottom and T-shirt. At the pool, she pulled off the shirt in a cross-armed feminine gesture, then slid into the sun-heated water. After performing a flip, she crossed the pool underwater. As she broke through to the surface, she could hear one of her phones ringing in her bag. She swam back with a strong breaststroke, retrieved the phone with dripping fingers.

“Capucine, you’re more difficult to reach than the president of the republic,” Inès said. “I spoke to Commissaire Garbe. It took him only a few minutes to find out that the boat has been chartered to someone who is on a cruise to Majorca and will be back in Port Grimaud in two days. He’ll have officers at the dock, waiting to impound it.

“Garbe had important news. It seems a body was found on Isola Piana, a deserted, rocky island off the northeast coast of Sardinia, wedged in between the rocks. There are grounds to think it might be Nathalie. The body’s been flown to Cagliari for examination. It’s in an advanced state of decomposition, but there were no bullet wounds and the preliminary investigation suggests death by drowning.”

Inès paused for a reaction. Capucine said nothing, hanging on to the side of the pool with her elbows, forming a small puddle.

“Commissaire Garbe is being sent down to view the body tomorrow, and I want you to go with him. I’ve already cleared this with the DGPJ, who have agreed to your participation on the Tottinguer case. The DGPJ took it for granted that this discovery exonerates you from the slightest suspicion of wrongdoing, which, they hastened to underscore, they had never suspected you of in the first place.” Inès snorted a laugh.

“Capucine, this is excellent news for us. I want you to fly back from Cagliari as soon as you can and get right to work on Tottinguer. We’ve wasted far too much time.”

At the mention of Tottinguer, Capucine bridled. The news had not registered. It was one of those statements that could not be assimilated immediately, like “It turns out it’s not cancer, after all.” So much so that she did not fully accept that her world had been restored until she was sitting next to Garbe on an Alitalia flight to Rome, which would connect to a Cagliari flight.

Garbe was one of those old-style flics with a salt-and-pepper crew cut and crow’s-feet from squinting and looking tough. He was furious he had not been allowed to bring his Manurhin revolver on the plane, and scowled, touching his empty left armpit every few minutes. His face softened slightly when the meal arrived. He tore off the plastic wrapper and prodded the slice of pâté with his plastic knife. He put a small bit in his mouth.

“
Buerk.
This tastes like cat food. Or at least what I imagine cat food tastes like.”

Still, he made quick work of the pâté and attacked the main course, a miniscule plastic bowl of what could well have been
bœuf bourguignon
in an airline caterer’s imagination.

“And now the dog food,” grumbled Garbe. “You know, Le Tellier, it’s a goddamn good thing I only have four months, one week, and two days left before they put me out to pasture. The bullshit is getting too much for me.” He finished his meal and eyed Capucine’s untouched tray.

“Le Tellier, you’re really not going to eat that?” he asked, already switching trays.

In Cagliari they were picked up by two uniformed carabinieri. They squeezed into the backseat of a sit-up-and-beg Fiat police car and rocketed through palm-lined streets, the blaring siren importantly proclaiming that two exalted French police officers had come all the way from Paris on an extremely urgent mission.

The Cagliari morgue resembled every other morgue Capucine had seen: air-conditioning blasting lip-blueing cold, floor-to-ceiling rows of three-by-three-foot stainless-steel doors, toxic miasma of disinfectant. A morgue attendant in a white lab coat checked the names on their IDs against a list on a clipboard, then saluted smartly. Capucine felt herself settle a little deeper back into her skin.

After double-checking his clipboard, the technician stepped up to a door at waist level and pulled out a cantilevered rack supporting a corpse. The body, which had spent two weeks alternately washed by waves and baking in the sun, was in such an advanced stage of decomposition, it was unrecognizable. The eye sockets were empty—no doubt plucked clean by birds—and the flesh was so desiccated, the face looked like an African tribal mask.

The body had been slit open with the standard autopsy Y-shaped incision, and the organs removed. The top of the cranium had been sawed off, presumably to remove the brain, and then replaced. A loose flap of scalp dangled over the partially visible cranium. The hair color seemed to be more or less the russet brown of Nathalie’s hair, and although it was difficult to gauge, the length also seemed to be the same.

A second technician, exuding the authority of someone in charge, came in, looked mournfully at the cadaver, consulted a file.

In fluent but heavily accented French he said, “The autopsy revealed death by drowning. All the signs were there. There was even still a good quantity of water in the lungs. We were asked to make sure she had not been shot, and I can say there is absolutely no question of that. There’s not much else of interest. She had eaten a full dinner about six or seven hours before death. There was only a minimal quantity of alcohol in the blood. There was a trace of semen in the vagina, indicating she had had sexual intercourse earlier in the day. There were also unhealed minute tears in the external sphincter of the rectum, indicating she had had sex there recently, most probably the same day.”

He looked at the body with basset hound eyes.

“I doubt a reliable physical identification is possible given the state of decomposition. I have prepared a tissue sample for you to take back and give your forensics unit. I understand that the woman’s clothes and soiled laundry were sent to France, along with all the evidence the Italian police had obtained. Your forensics people should have no trouble making a DNA link if this person is in fact the victim. I also had our dental expert write a description of the teeth, which could be decisive if you are able to find a dentist who treated her.”

As he spoke, Capucine flexed her knees and lowered herself until her eyes were at the level of the corpse’s hands.

“I’m virtually sure this is the ring she wore.”

On the wedding ring finger of the left hand the corpse wore a ring comprised of three interwoven bands. Capucine had noticed it on the boat. The ring was in the style of the popular Cartier wedding band, except that instead of being made of three different colors of gold, this one was made with three different steel alloys. Of course, now the ring looked very different. Two of the bands were oxidized, one bright orange and the other tarnish black. Only the third band, which seemed to be made of stainless steel, had remained unchanged, even though it was duller than Capucine remembered.

“It might be helpful if we could take the ring back to Paris with us,” Garbe said. “With your tissue sample we should be able to make a positive identification in a few days. The forensics people already have a DNA profile, which they were able to establish from vaginal discharge in some of her underwear that hadn’t been laundered.”

The entire session had taken twenty minutes. In the squad car back to the airport, Garbe stared straight ahead, indifferent to the sights.

“You think it’s her?” he asked Capucine.

“Virtually certain. The ring, the hair color, the body morphology. Yes, I’m almost positive.”

Garbe nodded and said nothing.

That was the last comment he made until the meal arrived on the Alitalia flight to Milan, a soggy-looking veal scaloppine and an unappetizing mass of spaghetti in a chemically crimson marinara sauce.

“These Italians understand airline food. Now, this is what I call cooking.”

Capucine could not help thinking that Nathalie would undoubtedly have liked it, too.