Deadly Camargue: Provence Mystery #02 Page 14

  “Well done for rescuing it from the flea market.”

  She lit a cigarette and succeeded in making this routine act into a gesture of scorn. “Nobody wants to know anymore,” she said. “I was the only one interested. In 1945 the farmers kicked the Vietnamese out and sent them back home, as if they were coolies. And then continued to harvest the Camargue rice with the clearest conscience in the world.”

  “I assume your rice fields, too, were fertilized by the sweat of the Vietnamese, Madame,” Blanc answered calmly.

  “Of course. That’s precisely why my husband and I bought our place here. I heard about this forgotten chapter of imperialism when I was a student. We were big opponents of imperialism back in those days. We went out onto the streets in protest.”

  “My older colleagues in Paris still tell stories about the demonstrations,” Blanc confided in her.

  She gave him a derogatory look for a second or two, then shrugged. “Eh bien, I was on the left. I was an idealist, I was horrified. I never forgot the story of those Vietnamese, even though in those days I had no more to do with rice than I had with bananas or yams. My family was from Lorraine, not exactly farming country. It was a lot later when I learned that this piece of farmland was for sale. I heard about it accidentally and my husband and I restored the land before it could turn back into a swamp. Ever since, we’ve been growing rice, the way we ought to, and I collect everything I can about the Vietnamese forced laborers. It’s a sort of way of paying tribute to them in hindsight. Keeping the memory alive is the least we can do.”

  “Speaking of memory,” Blanc mumbled. “There wasn’t any sort of memento among Monsieur Cohen’s bits and pieces, even if not something that goes back as far as the story of the Vietnamese rice farmers. A story from 1990.”

  Marie-Claude looked at him with mild curiosity. She didn’t appear to be in the slightest concerned—until Blanc continued and told her about Cohen’s research into the art theft from the Musée Maly.

  “Oh,” said Marie-Claude Leroux, suddenly nervous, “that old story. That must be why Albert gave me such strange looks in those last few days.”

  “His last few days. You knew nothing about it, Madame?”

  She just shook her head.

  “But you were the one, more or less, who put Monsieur Cohen onto the Van Gogh story! Were you not aware that Monsieur Boré was organizing an exhibition? Van Gogh, Boré. Did it not occur to you that a reporter like Cohen might make the connection?”

  “I’m an art historian, not a journalist! That old story was forgotten long ago. I have admired Van Gogh ever since I had the opportunity back then in the Musée Maly to study one of his masterpieces whenever I wanted to, undisturbed. The artist has had a grip on me ever since. That was why I would have been pleased if L’Événement had brought out an issue with a Van Gogh cover story. Whether it was Boré or someone else organizing the exhibition was completely irrelevant.” She lit up another cigarette.

  The scent of menthol mingled with the sweet aroma of the iced tea. Blanc suddenly felt the need for fresh air and a glass of cool rosé. He pulled himself together. “Monsieur Cohen had dug up witnesses from back then, did you know that? Not just Boré but Guillaume as well.”

  “If you know that name, then you know everything to do with the case.”

  “I don’t know who the culprit is,” Blanc said with a friendly smile.

  “Nor do I,” Marie-Claude answered, shaking her head. “Did Albert find out?”

  “Possibly. On his computer hard drive there are certain…”—Blanc searched for the right word—“… clues,” he decided. “I’m amazed he never talked to you about the theft, Madame. Especially as you were his host and friend.”

  “It’s certainly odd,” she concurred. “I can’t remember ever having mentioned the theft to Albert. It was all so long ago, I didn’t exactly think about it on a daily basis. And back then when it happened I didn’t know Albert. I didn’t even know my husband back then, and it was only through Ernest that I got to know Albert and all the major players on the stage of Paris politics.”

  “But back then,” Blanc tried to use the most neutral form of words he could find, “you were a close friend of Monsieur Boré’s.”

  Marie-Claude Leroux gave an ironic laugh that left Blanc uncertain if it was at his awkward way of putting it or at the memory of Boré. “Daniel’s world was art, Ernest’s is politics. Daniel and I left for Paris together after the police investigation had more or less run into the sand and nobody had any more questions for us. In those days it was easy to find a job. Although I have to admit that I never thought Daniel would go so far. The shy, rather eccentric curator from Saint-Tropez has become Europe’s most successful exhibition organizer. He and I have lost touch since then.”

  “You never met again?”

  “Not for years. I’d have to work out how long it’s been.”

  “You didn’t even call Monsieur Boré? Never sent him an email? Not even when you knew your magazine was going to do a big piece about his next exhibition?”

  “If it had been necessary, then Albert would have done that. He was the one writing it. I really didn’t see any reason for me to get in touch with Daniel. We remember some people kindly, but there are others we’d rather not be reminded of, if you understand what I mean, mon Capitaine.”

  “In which case I regret all the more that I must test your memory a bit more. On the night of the theft you were with Monsieur Boré at the Voiles de Saint-Tropez, were you not?”

  She nodded with a suddenly nostalgic smile. “Daniel always had a weakness for the chic world. He was as overwhelmed as a little child by the yachts, the elegant people, their riches. So overwhelmed in fact that he forgot to take his insulin injections. When he suddenly took a bad turn, he had to lean on a giant anchor that had been erected on one of the quays as a sort of monument while he fished out his utensils from his pockets with shaking hands. Then he was nearly beaten up by two sailors who took him for a junkie taking a fix right outside their glittering palace. They came running down a gangplank, cursing and waving their fists and…” Marie-Claude shrugged her shoulders. “We cleared it all up. The pair of them were embarrassed at nearly having beaten up a sick man. They invited us on board their yacht—the owner wasn’t there—and gave us a drink, the only drink I’ve ever had on the deck of a ship like that. Very romantic.”

  And very easy to check, Blanc thought. If you had told our colleagues back then what had happened in Saint-Tropez, they would have easily found out where the anchor on the quay was and which yacht had been moored there. If it had been a lie, they would have found out inside half an hour. The fact that there was no mention of it in the file meant that Boré and Marie-Claude Leroux had an alibi for the night of the crime. Or at least for several hours that night.

  “Cohen wanted to talk to Monsieur Guillaume,” Blanc let her know. “He lives nearby here.”

  She gave him a surprised and rather nervous look. “I didn’t know that. Olivier isn’t exactly the sort of man you want for a neighbor.”

  “Is he aggressive?”

  “More of a loose cannon. At least he used to be. I haven’t heard from him since 1990.”

  “He was the chief suspect back then.”

  “He only got the job in the Musée Maly because his father was such a famous art collector and had contacts all over the south. Olivier Guillaume was a weird character. He should never have been given a job in any public institution, not even as a janitor. He couldn’t even get along with people he knew. And certainly not with visitors to the museum who thought their entrance ticket also entitled them to expect the staff to be friendly.”

  “Guillaume would have been fired at some stage even if the theft hadn’t happened?” Blanc asked.

  “Absolutely. He was just too unfriendly toward people.”

  “Did Guillaume have any idea he might be about to lose his job?”

  “I couldn’t say. Nobody had a clue what was going on in his head.
”

  “Was he fanatical about religion?” Blanc asked, remembering the cross around his neck and Cohen’s cryptic note. “Did the church in Saint-Gilles have any particular importance for him?”

  Marie-Claude Leroux blew a cloud of menthol smoke toward the window. “You’d have to ask him that yourself. I’m not exactly a churchgoer.” She paused. “Strange,” she murmured. “There was only one time I had anything like a sensible conversation with Guillaume. And now that you mention it, I have to say yes, it was about a church. Although not exactly to do with religion.”

  “About what then?”

  “Art theft.”

  Blanc leaned back as far as he could on the hard futon sofa. “Tell me more.”

  “I don’t know exactly how we got onto the topic. It was at the end of a long working day. Anyway, to my surprise one summer evening I got into a conversation with Guillaume at the entrance to Musée Maly. He told me in detail about the theft of the Ghent altar.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Blanc said.

  “Because you’re not an art historian. The Ghent altarpiece is a masterpiece of Jan van Eyck assembled from several paintings on wood, fifteenth century, absolutely unique. It stood in Ghent cathedral—until one day in 1934 two of the pictures disappeared. Stolen. One of them was soon returned by the thief. It had been placed in a safe deposit box and the thief revealed the number in an anonymous letter. The other, however, has never been seen again, as if it vanished from the face of the earth.”

  “And the thief was never found?”

  “That’s the crux of the story. A man on his deathbed confessed to the theft—and claimed that he had hidden the picture in a place visited by lots of people. But he never said exactly where. Ever since, dozens of experts have suspected that the picture is still hidden somewhere in Ghent cathedral. They’ve turned the ‘House of God’ upside down time and again but never found a trace of it. So, were we just dealing with some old fraudster who with his last breath decided to play the world for a fool by telling a crazy story? Or was it really the thief on his deathbed and he told the truth? If the latter is the case, then all the experts have failed to solve the riddle he left us with. Guillaume was fascinated by the story of the thief who’d flipped the bird to all the acknowledged authorities, who was cleverer than all the art historians, police, and priests. He went on and on about it.”

  “Do you think it’s possible that Guillaume knew that he was going to be fired soon and stole the Van Gogh in revenge? And that he hid it somewhere in the Musée Maly in the same way as the thief who hid the Van Eyck back in the place he had stolen it from?”

  “Hiding the picture in a museum that hardly anyone visits isn’t exactly a masterstroke,” Marie-Claude replied.

  “So could he have hidden it in a church that’s as well known as a cathedral?”

  “You’re the gendarme,” Marie-Claude Leroux replied thoughtfully. “I suspected Guillaume, as did all my colleagues and the cops. But I never connected the theft with the conversation about the Ghent altarpiece. It would have been absurd. But now that you’ve done it, it doesn’t seem absurd at all.”

  The church of Saint-Gilles, thought Blanc.

  “Merci beaucoup, Madame,” he said, getting to his feet.

  “Now that sounds like a really interesting story for L’Événement,” she whispered thoughtfully, pulling another cigarette out of the pack.

  * * *

  Blanc walked alone over to his 2CV. He had left the top rolled down and the windows folded up. Now he noticed that someone had been at the car. There was a yellow Post-it note on the steering wheel. Blanc got behind the wheel but didn’t touch the sticky in case Marie-Claude Leroux was watching from the window, the way she had been when he had driven up. He didn’t want her to notice anything unusual. He drove down the driveway until he turned onto the route départementale. A mile or so along the road there was a spot by the side of the road firm enough for him to pull off the tarmac and stop.

  He took the sticky from the steering wheel and read it. I was eavesdropping. Mama and that tub of lard Boré are still in a relationship.

  * * *

  Blanc drove back to Gadet with his head full of thoughts. The air above the pools of water shimmered. He could make out the shapes of flamingos, pink blotches in a distorted mirror. Two Camargue horses were tied up by the side of the road, staring miserably at the tarmac. Later he arrived in the town, where all the guests at all the shady seats under the plane trees by the bars looked as jaded as the horses.

  The station was deserted, as if the state had withdrawn from this corner of France. The air-conditioning was no longer functioning. Blanc sat down at his computer and began searching for whatever the police, gendarmerie, or just rumor had about the publisher’s wife. It didn’t take long.

  Marie-Claude Leroux brought up not a single hit.

  Marie-Claude Elbaz: just one. Back in 1983 she had been arrested in Paris at a demonstration against “capitalist exploitation,” though she had been released after only a few hours. Her father had picked her up from the police station.

  Perfectly normal, Blanc thought to himself. Young people were allowed to be left wing and get picked up by the police once or twice. At least that was the way it used to be. Astrid and Eric would see things differently in their Facebook world. Shame. But thinking about his own kids inevitably turned his mind to Nora Leroux. What was the relevance of the information she had given him to his investigation? And, merde, what was a daughter doing denouncing her mother to a cop she hardly knew?

  Missing Years

  Blanc was on his feet at daybreak. He pulled on just a pair of sneakers and shorts and ran out bare-chested into the woods behind the oil mill. The temperature before 6:00 A.M. was still tolerable and he wanted to be back before Fuligni and his men arrived to remove the second half of the roof. He took a deep breath of the spicy scent of thyme and rosemary. The dew had collected on the spiderwebs that spread like gauze curtains between the bushes. A dead snake no longer than his index finger lay on the path. The tracks on the ground suggested some fat, tired cyclist on a mountain bike had broken its back. The animal doesn’t always win, Blanc reflected. The ocher-colored sand absorbed the sound of his footsteps and with the birds still asleep and the cicadas silent it was as still as on the third day of creation.

  Until he got over a mile deep into the woods.

  Even before he could see it, he heard the rattling clanking of a diesel motor in idle mode. There was a buzz of voices above the engine noise. He made out Douchy’s rough bass. He couldn’t make out a word he was saying but he didn’t sound friendly.

  Blanc walked across a path where slabs of gray stone shimmered in the morning light between the sand. Douchy was sitting on a dented green tractor.

  One of its rear tires had dragged one of the stones a way out of the ground. In front of the tractor stood the Michelettis—Blanc’s neighbors and the owners of the Domaine du Bernard winery. Bruno and Sylvie were wearing lightweight walking shoes, T-shirts, and Bermuda shorts that looked as if they’d been patched together from old cloth bags. They each had a pair of modern aluminum walking poles in their hands. Bruno was swinging his back and forth like samurai swords while Sylvie had pushed the points of hers into the ground and was leaning on them. She was the first of the quarreling threesome to notice Blanc and greeted him with an apologetic smile. Blanc felt like some half-naked anthropologist who’d stumbled on a native quarrel.

  “This guy and his tractor are destroying an ancient Roman road,” Bruno Micheletti called out when he, too, finally noticed Blanc.

  “To hell with the Romans! The woods belong to the commune, not you!” Douchy grumbled.

  “There’s a Roman road that runs over the top of the hill,” Bruno explained, looking to Blanc for support. “That stone has been lying here for two thousand years. And now look at it!” The weight of the tractor had either pushed some stones out of position or broken them.

  Blanc w
ished he could disappear into thin air and to hell with both ancient roads and tractors. But as a captain in the gendarmerie he was here and now more or less the personification of state authority, even if his naked belly was on display. Douchy, who hated everything and anything that stank of authority, was staring at him viciously. Merde, Blanc thought to himself, let’s get this over with. “I’ll phone the town hall,” he said, trying to sound as neutral as possible. “If tractors are allowed here, then Monsieur Douchy has every right to drive along this path. If not, then he will have to pay for the repairs.”

  Douchy’s bright red face went white, when he realized money might be involved. “I’m not paying a penny for a few ancient stones.” But at the same time he put the tractor into a rattling first gear and turned it around, breaking yet another old stone as he did so. He put his foot down and roared off down the path he had just come along without a single look behind him.

  “Serge is a coarse peasant. He’ll make you suffer for that, Roger,” Sylvie Micheletti said when the noise of the diesel had faded away.

  “He’s forever making all his neighbors suffer,” her husband added offhandedly. “We’ve got nothing to worry about until the fall.”

  “What happens in the fall?” Blanc asked, somewhat disquieted.

  “That’s when the hunting season starts. Serge doesn’t even have a permis de chasser, but who checks on things like that? He’ll be out there in the woods with his shotgun every day. Not someone you want to run across by accident.”