The Beast of the Camargue (18 page)

On the horizon, the tarmac shimmered in the light laden with benzene and carbon monoxide. The huge storage tanks of the oil terminal were barely visible.

Paul Brissonne was sitting on a cube of limestone facing the wall of Crinas, in the only scrap of shade in old Marseille: the Centre Bourse, at the feet of the huge commercial exchange designed by some Vauban of the age of money. It vaguely resembled an enormous concrete hand with some fingers missing, laid on the four remaining walls of the Greek Phocea, Lacydon's old port. Now, the harbor lay between lawns browned by the sun and dog piss, not to mention turds and litter.

Beside Brissonne, an old Algerian was reading the latest edition of
Al Watan
, a sandal dangling off the tip of his foot.

The gangster was starting to feel that he wouldn't mind taking advantage of the air-conditioning in the Centre Bourse, if he had not been armed to the teeth.

The Baron's hand slapped his shoulder.

“Good day, Paulo. So you're contemplating the marvels of Greek Massalia?”

“This was a wasteland when I was a kid. But now, Jesus, it stinks of dog's piss …”

“Who knows, maybe it stank like that in Greek cities!”

“Let's go for a stroll.”

They took a few steps across the huge paving stones of the Phocean roadway then came to a halt beside the harbor.

“Le Grand doesn't take kindly to you sticking your nose into Mme.
Steinert's business, but he says that it wasn't him who sent round the boy with the silencer. It's not one of his guys. That's for sure.”

“Can you arrange a meeting between me and ‘Piss-pants'?”

“Who?”

“Piss-pants. That's what we used to call him at headquarters. Because, one fine morning, a friend of ours from the brigade found him in some woods near Aix with his pants wet.”

Brissonne glanced round him.

“Don't fuck with him, Baron, because he could really take you for a ride, one of these days. Cop or not, Le Grand couldn't give a toss.”

“All I want is a meeting.”

“Every day, he goes to the Café des Deux Mondes, on place de l'Hôtel de Ville …”

“Thanks, Paulo.”

“You're welcome.”

“You're the big man, Paulo, not him.”

When Brissonne looked up, de Palma had already vanished behind the Crinas wall.

As he parked his Alfa Romeo alongside a mud-spattered Range Rover, de Palma glanced at the clock on the dashboard: 10 a.m. exactly. The time of his appointment with Texeira.

La Capelière was deserted, an odor of dried mud and dead weeds rising as the sun heated the air. Mosquitoes were dancing crazily over the reed beds. De Palma wiped his hand over his forehead, which was beaded with sweat, and headed straight for the museum.

Texeira was talking with the student who was in charge of welcoming the visitors; he turned round quickly as soon as the police officer came in.

“Step this way, M. de Palma,” he said, over a vigorous hand shake. “Let's go into my office.”

On entering the lab where Texeira worked, de Palma noticed the prevailing smell of alcohol. Several test-tubes full of water and containing the shoots of various plants had been placed on a draining board. Beside the microscope, tiny insects were soaking in flasks full of preserving fluid.

A number of species had been pinned onto a polystyrene strip, each with its label:

Scarabeus laticollis
Le Sambuc (dep13), 3/05/2003 CT rec

Texeira warmed to the Baron's interest in his work.

“They're the results of samples we took a few months ago … Scarabaeid beetles are very important animals for us, because they eat cattle dung. It's a good job they do, otherwise …”

“Your job is really fascinating!”

“My main subject is birds. But these days, it's the dung-beetles that are in the limelight. There are nearly 700 species of coprophages like them! There we are. We can't always do what we want.”

De Palma simply shrugged to show his agreement. For the moment, he was trying to soak up the atmosphere, the smells and sounds of a universe totally alien to him, certain that he would uncover scraps of the truth in such a place.

“M. Texeira, did you know, in any way whatsoever, William Steinert, the man you found in the marsh?”

“I spoke to your colleague about that—I can't recall his name … Anyway, yes, I used to know Steinert during the time when he often used to come here.”

De Palma bent over the microscope.

“And how did you get on?”

“Very well. Really. He often stayed for lunch.”

“And you say that he hadn't been back for a while?”

“Not for about two years. He preferred birdwatching either round Méjanes way, or by the Fangassier and Grand Rascaillon lagoons. He said there were fewer tourists. And it's true that there's quite a crowd here in the summer.”

“And what did he do when he used to come here?”

“Well, he arrived early in the morning, before sunrise, and he waited for nature to awaken. A bit like everyone who's a real enthusiast.”

“And did you ever go with him?”

“No, I think the two of us preferred making our observations alone.”

“When did you see him last?”

“Last winter, quite by chance at the market of Tarascon. We bumped into each other and exchanged a few words. He promised to come back and see me in the spring.”

“Nothing else?”

Texeira looked at de Palma for some time, while jangling some keys in the pocket of his lab coat. He seemed suddenly to be on his guard, suspicious even. De Palma realized that he was not going
to get everything he wanted to know out of the scientist that morning.

“I don't quite understand the reason for your visit, M. de Palma. I've already told all this to your colleague. What was his name …?”

“Marceau.”

“That's right.”

“Don't worry, this is just a routine check,” the Baron said, handing him his card. “If anything else comes to mind, call me on my mobile. Sometimes, days later, witnesses remember details … I'll just go and take a look at the scene, so as to wrap up the investigation.”

Texeira examined his police card.

“I'll come with you, there are places that are better avoided. You could come back covered in mud from head to toe. Or even fall into quicksand.”

“That's all I need!” the Baron said, opening the lab door.

They walked for some time between the ash trees and alders, which made the scene look like a mangrove swamp, as did the dead trees rotting slowly in creeks covered with pondweed and duckweed.

The muggy heat stilled everything, drawing a stench of decay from the canals and creeping brambles.

This path, christened “Nature and Observation,” was a complex circuit, winding between pools and crossing some streams before reaching a vast expense of dried mud. Texeira stopped and pointed at a hut some fifty meters away.

“I was in that hut you can see over there, at the end of the scrub.”

The hut was shaped roughly like a teepee, with low walls which must once have been white and a thatched conical roof that took up almost two-thirds of its height.

“The body was on the other side of the reeds, in the marsh.”

“That morning, did you come exactly the same way to get here?”

“That's right …”

“And you didn't notice anything?”

“No, nothing. It was still dark.”

The scrubland, partitioned into thousands of diamonds, was running a temperature and the samphires were curling themselves up as small as possible in their beds of parched mud. When they
went inside the hut, de Palma felt as though he had burst into a lost paradise.

“The body was over there, by that clump of rushes. As I explained to your colleague, the first thing I saw were some rooks circling around in that direction. I thought at first that they'd found some carrion … Boars sometimes drown there. But I would never have imagined that it was a man.”

De Palma gazed round the hut. He saw nothing that could tell him a thing about Steinert's death. He went back out into the heat and headed slowly for the place where the body had been found.

Dozens of footprints were set hard in the dried mud, presumably left by gendarmes and various onlookers.

“Great job,” he murmured. “Now we can't make sense of it.”

He walked several times around the grove, but found nothing. He hunkered down for a moment, as though to make contact with the past and reconstitute the scene as it must have happened. He searched for images, but none came.

“The body was lying in the water, is that right?”

“Just in front of where you are. It was face down.”

De Palma stood up. Something did not fit.

Ingrid Steinert was right. Her husband could not have died with his nose in the slime of this stinking marsh by accident. Either he had been thrown into the water, or else he had thrown himself in. Texeira had drifted away, so he took the opportunity to call Marceau on his mobile. He got the answering machine. Then he tried Mattei, the forensic surgeon.

“Good day, Doctor Death, it's Michel.”

“What's up, Baron? Are you asking me out to lunch?”

“No, I just wanted to know if you found any diatoms on Steinert.”

“I did indeed, super-sleuth. And you aren't the first person to ask.”

“Shit.”

“What's the problem? You too would like him to have been murdered? Well he wasn't. He drowned.”

“And that's all you found?”

“Yes, that's all. And it's already quite a lot.”

“Nothing else.”

Mattei sighed into the telephone.

“No, except for his adrenalin level … which had gone crazy … He'd pumped a ton of it into his heart before dying. I'll leave the conclusions up to you.”

“O.K., doc, never mind. I'll drop by and see you some time.”

“It'll be a pleasure, as always.”

De Palma was still in the dark, but he was sure of two things: Steinert had drowned, hence the presence of diatoms, and he had been utterly terrified before he died, hence the high level of adrenalin.

And that was absolutely normal. The billionaire had been scared before his death.

He looked again at the stagnant waters. A few bubbles rose from the slime before popping on the surface. Further off, a fish leaped out of the water to plunge back down into the murky depths.

“M. Texeira, is there only a single path that leads to this hut?”

“No, there's at least one more, if you go round the other side of the reed bed. In fact, this track is circular, you can go all around it if you want. On the other hand, you can also get here over the grassland you can see over there … so long as you're not afraid of bulls.”

De Palma turned around and behind a fence saw some dark forms that stood out against what was left of the greenery.

“Are those bulls really dangerous?”

“It's better to be careful …”

Texeira went back to his office. De Palma decided to go all the way round the circuit.

He crossed the rest of the scrubland, then walked beside the barbed wire along the meadows before reaching the edge of a drying marsh. A gray heron on the waters headed straight into the rushes as soon as it spotted him.

Right in the middle of the marsh, a turtle as big as a calabash was sunning itself on a log rotten with damp. He realized that it was the first time he had seen one in the wild and stopped for a moment to savor the spectacle.

The path continued into a sodden reed bed, and the heat enveloped
him. The plants grew so close together that no one could push their way through.

“If somebody carried Steinert here to drown him,” he said to himself, “then he certainly didn't come this way. Given his size and weight, even the footpath wouldn't be wide enough. No, he came over what Texeira calls the grasslands.”

When he got back to La Capelière, Texeira was talking with a group of tourists dressed in camouflage gear, with boots on their feet, and binoculars and zoom lenses hung around their necks. They had just come back from a morning's observation.

Texeira left them for a moment to speak to him.

“What else can I do for you, M. de Palma?”

“You've already done a great deal. Just a reminder: if you remember the slightest detail, anything at all, even if it seems of no interest to you, then please inform me.”

“No, I don't think there's anything.”

Texeira gave the impression of hiding something.

He might be lying, the Baron thought. If Steinert pumped up that much adrenalin, then he must have cried out before dying … or at least, that is a real possibility. And Texeira would have heard him from here…

“Really,” he insisted, staring into his eyes. “Don't hesitate to call me.”

Texeira came up to him, scratching the back of his neck.

“Well, there is one thing I didn't tell your colleagues.”

“What's that?”

“One evening, I heard voices. People singing on the far side of the marsh.”

“Is that unusual?”

“Extremely. It's the first time I've ever heard such a thing.”

“And what were they saying, these voices?”

“Something in Provençal, or else Italian …”

“Do you remember any of the words?”

“Sorry, no…”

“It doesn't matter. When was that?”

“The night before Steinert died.”

“And could you pinpoint where these voices were coming from?”

Texeira looked very embarrassed.

“From the far side of this reed bed.”

“And what time was it?”

“About midnight.”

“And was it far from the place where Steinert was found?”

Texeira shook his head and pursed his lips.

“No, not very far.”

De Palma decided not to pursue his questions, and simply trust Texeira. He had hidden a few things to spare himself trouble. The Baron had seen it thousands of times. He just shrugged his shoulders.