Murderous Mistral Read online

  Blanc, who had for the past few years subsisted mainly on croissants and soggy baguettes, had no idea what thyme tasted like or looked like, just nodded so as not to appear a complete idiot.

  “I’ll come by and give your wife a few recipes,” Paulette said, realizing he hadn’t a clue what she was talking about.

  “You’ll have to mail them to her. My wife is in Paris.”

  Paulette Aybalen didn’t reply, just swung herself back into the saddle. The other three horses had meanwhile trotted back into the meadow. Blanc had no idea what secret sign their mistress had given them. “Then I’ll bring the recipes round and give them to you. We’ll run into one another quite often.”

  “I promise never to mention horsemeat sausage again.” Blanc got back behind the wheel and put his foot down gently on the gas so as not to frighten the animals. In the rearview mirror he saw the horsewoman watching him.

  * * *

  The air above the narrow asphalt roads shimmered. On the radio an announcer was warning of the risk of forest fires and reminding listeners not to drop cigarette butts or glass in the countryside. It sounded like a threat. On either side of the road the land was as brown and crusty as dry bread. He passed by a little drystone wall, with the gray-green leaves of young olive trees on the other side, along with the ruin of a building that might once have been a stable or even a little homestead. Beyond that was a slope with pine trees and oaks growing on it, and then a little dip in the land with rows of vines.

  A dented white van was coming toward him, much too fast. The road was so narrow that he had to swerve the Renault onto the sandy shoulder in order to avoid being rammed. Blanc cursed and the Espace bounced up and down as he crunched over the stones. The glove compartment fell open and an old toy car fell out, a green Opel Rekord. Blanc had never been able to throw out the Majorette and Matchbox cars he had collected as a child. He didn’t display them in glass cases like nostalgic collectors did; they just lay around here, there, and everywhere, coming to light in the most surprising places, then vanishing again for a bit. Like this old Opel. A present from his father.

  He had been a cop too, but was long dead: out in the patrol car one evening when he hit an oil slick on a bend and the old Renault 4 that the gendarmerie used in those days had hit a tree and collapsed in on itself like a tin can. His mother had always been a heavy smoker, and just after her fortieth birthday the doctor had found a shadow on her lungs in an X-ray and had calmly given her the bad news. Two pathetic deaths in one year had left Blanc an orphan in his teens.

  He had gone on to study law in Paris because he wanted to join the police after taking his master’s at the École des Officiers de la Gendarmerie Nationale in Melun. In his second week at the university he had gotten to know Geneviève. She was a first-term history of art student. She was small and dark-haired. He was big and blond. She came from the Languedoc, he came from the north; she talked constantly, he was strong and silent; she thought Éric Rohmer’s movies were the best in the world, they had the same effect on him as valium. She smoked Marlboros, he hated cigarettes; she liked painting late into the evening, he got up early to study. They had absolutely nothing in common. They were the perfect couple.

  The children came along quickly, a long time before they got married, something they only did later, for form’s sake. Then all of a sudden Eric was twenty-one years old and studying biochemistry in Montreal because the job opportunities in France were so poor. And Astrid was twenty and working as an event manager in Paris, though Blanc hadn’t the faintest idea what sort of a job that might be. It obviously wasn’t much of one, because his daughter’s bank account was a black hole. He had taken living with Geneviève as much for granted as breathing, with the result that the bloodhound famed for his sensitive nose hadn’t had a clue she’d been seeing someone else for a year. Minister of State Vialaron-Allègre must have known though on Friday morning when he transferred him to the ends of the earth. Maybe he had even known how Geneviève would react? Gendarmes were soldiers who behaved by military rules: An order was an order! Even if it was an order to be gone from Paris within two days. When Blanc had come back from Issy, still in shock, his wife had listened to what he had to say and then announced that she would be staying in Paris, that she had been meaning to have a serious talk with him for some time and now the moment had arrived. Then she had packed her bag. Blanc had slept no more than four hours since then, and felt like a boxer in the twelfth round.

  He noticed red and yellow shapes in the forest to his left. There were big fire engines parked in the shadow of the pine trees, firemen in full kit who’d just taken their helmets off. A few of them were sitting at a wooden picnic table having breakfast, others were dozing on top of the engines. It appeared that in the Midi the fire service didn’t keep watch from their fire stations but out in the middle of the threatened forests. Clever. He would pay a few euros himself if he could take a snooze in the pine woods right now.

  A bit farther on he parked the Espace between two pine trees and got changed. T-shirt, jeans, and shoes were all thrown carelessly onto the backseat as he donned a uniform for the first time in ages and strapped on his gun belt. Gendarmes could usually choose whether to turn up for work in uniform or plain clothes. In recent years he had usually worn all-black clothing so that his plain clothes still looked somewhat like a uniform. For his first day at a new post, however, he thought it was better to turn up in full kit: The uniform reflected the authority of the state and added just that little bit of magic. Then finally he put on the narrow blue gendarme’s cap. A lot of his colleagues had protested when the old képi had been abolished in 2011 but Blanc had always felt like an extra in one of those old Louis de Funès comedy movies. He put his foot down on the gas.

  At the next crossroads he saw a tall plastered wall to his right with a graveyard and little chapel behind it. It was the road leading in to Gadet. Little brightly colored houses on either side, a modest church in the center, shady plane trees, four bars, tables on the sidewalk, the scent of café and croissants in the air. The morning customers—farmers, older men in rustic clothing, young guys with motorbikes parked between the chairs, stared after him as he drove by. Two boulangeries, a butcher’s shop, a tiny Casino supermarket, a bar-tabac. At least he wouldn’t go hungry here. He wondered what newspapers there were. There was a modern athletic field next to the river—a sign said it was the Touloubre. Post office on his left, opposite the mairie, the town hall, which looked like a little castle hibernating in the summer sunshine. He would have to wait until August 15 to register his new address and change the plates on his car.

  Then finally, the gendarmerie. A two-story flat-roofed concrete building with rows of dark, shuttered windows and a steel door. It was one of those UFOs from the seventies that didn’t age gracefully like the traditional buildings but just decayed. There were marks of dog piss at the corners. He noticed a movement behind a curtain near the entrance. Blanc parked the Espace next to a patrol car and took a deep breath.

  At the desk a young, overweight gendarme with dark sweat marks on his light blue uniform shirt looked him up and down. Blanc introduced himself and showed him his police ID card.

  “Ah,” the gendarme grunted, evidently not feeling the need to give his own name. The badge on his uniform shirt read CORPORAL BARESSI. “The boss is upstairs,” he said, waving one fleshy hand toward a staircase at the back of the room. “He knows you’re coming. He was told you’d been posted here,” Baressi added as Blanc was just about to climb the stairs.

  “When did he hear?”

  “Thursday evening.”

  That means they knew down here I was coming even before I did, Blanc thought angrily. The staircase reeked of strong detergent that was giving him a headache. On the floor above was a corridor with orange-painted metal doors on either side, some of them open, others closed, along with a pin board with torn duty rosters on it, faded wanted posters, circulars from the ministry in Paris, a few police photos and random
notices. The coffee machine was out of order, probably had been for a long time, judging by the layer of dust. Cigarette smoke wafted from one of the open doors. At the end of the corridor was one door bigger than the others, closed, with a bronze name plate: COMMANDANT NICOLAS NKOULOU. “Merde alors,” Blanc whispered, and knocked on the door.

  He opened the door into the most well-organized office he had ever seen: The light-colored desk with a leather blotter and a black computer monitor looked like something out of a furniture catalog. Against the wall stood a bookcase with fastidiously labeled files, the window facing the door covered with an immaculately pleated off-white blind. There was a gold-framed certificate on the desk, but no private photos, no souvenirs, no knickknacks, not even a coffee cup.

  Enthroned on the leather office chair was the youngest commandant Blanc had ever come across. Nicolas Nkoulou was in his midthirties at most, with an unlined face that made him look even younger. His skin was as black as ebony, his crinkled hair cut so short that it looked like his head was encased in a thin helmet. He wore elegant gold-rimmed glasses. His blue uniform shirt was so bright it almost hurt Blanc’s eyes. He wore dark blue summer pants, immaculately pressed. Polished leather shoes.

  “So, Paris sent you down here,” Nkoulou said, getting to his feet with what seemed to be immense effort.

  Blanc looked at his new boss and thought he could hardly have done worse. Brilliant. Ambitious. This one wants to get to Issy, he thought, all the way to the top. He’s afraid I’m going to stick like bird shit to his impeccable reputation.

  “Reporting for duty, mon Commandant,” he said, wondering whether he ought to give him a military salute, reach out to shake his hand, or do neither. In the end he left his arms hanging where they were.

  “I believe you’re an expert on corruption?”

  Blanc nodded.

  “Down here in Provence, everybody’s corrupt.”

  Blanc nodded.

  “But they don’t get caught.”

  Blanc stopped nodding.

  Nkoulou cleared his throat. “I’ll introduce you to your colleagues,” he said without enthusiasm.

  Blanc followed the commandant from office to office; a row of names and faces, a little guy with a broken nose and massive shoulders, a character with wire-rimmed glasses that might have been modern when he was at school. An overweight brunette, with lips that were way too red and a Gauloise between them, pushed the crumpled pack over toward him. Blanc, whose mother had been consumed by cancer, declined. She made such a face that it wouldn’t have taken an expert psychiatrist to guess what she was thinking. Two dark-haired men who might have been brothers and gave each other an ironic look when he came in. A young female officer with long brown hair who barely looked up from her mouse mat when he was introduced. At the end of the corridor, the office farthest away from Nkoulou’s, were two oak-veneered desks, with two computers, the oldest Blanc had ever seen in a gendarmerie station, gray boxes, the only ones that still had flickering bulky monitors on them, rather than flat screens.

  “Welcome to your new home,” the commandant said wearily. “Your partner is Lieutenant Marius Tonon.” He gave a look of disgust at the croissant crumbs on the desk before adding, “No idea where he might be.”

  “Has he been without a partner for long?”

  Nkoulou shrugged. “Don’t let yourself be misled by the office gossip.”

  “I haven’t heard any office gossip.”

  “You’ll hear whispers in your ear soon enough, believe me: ‘Tonon is a bad-luck charm.’ Provincial superstition. I’ve been in charge of this station for a year and nothing bad has happened. But I can’t persuade anybody to go out on a job with Tonon. So I’m glad to have somebody from Paris. A free spirit.”

  Blanc wasn’t sure if it was meant to be an insult or a compliment. “We’ll get on fine,” he replied.

  Just at that moment entered a man of about fifty who must have had to wear insoles to meet the five-foot, ten-inch minimum height requirement for the gendarmerie. He had strong hands with a coat of black hair on the back like huge paws, a body that stretched his crumpled suit, a blob of a reddish violet nose, and thinning, tousled black hair. He trailed behind him an aroma that Blanc at first thought reminded him of cheap aftershave until a memory from his childhood hit him like a hammer: rosé wine. “Lieutenant” was normally a rank people reached in their midtwenties. If it was still your rank thirty years later, then something had gone wrong. Blanc was certain there must be something after all to the office gossip. He shook the man’s hairy paw and introduced himself.

  “A colleague from up north will be good for us,” Tonon said. His voice was pleasantly deep. The sort of voice that could calm a hysterical witness or get a confession out of a suspect, Blanc found himself thinking.

  He smiled. “Parisians don’t normally think of themselves as from ‘up north.’”

  “As far as we’re concerned anything north of Lyon is Scandinavia.” He nodded at the empty desk. “In the afternoons the sun coming through the window means you can’t see anything on the screen. It’s better to go and think things through down at the café.” He laughed.

  Nkoulou gave a wry grin. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to give the café a miss, mon Lieutenant. I’m giving you and Blanc here a routine case. So that you can get to know one another a bit. It’s in the ZGN.”

  “ZGN?”

  “Zone de responsabilité propre de la gendarmerie nationale. The ninety-five percent of French soil that we are responsible for rather than the Police nationale. You really have been in the capital too long, mon Capitaine.” It was true that in Paris the old, traditional, ridiculous separation between the gendarmerie and Police nationale had become meaningless: Down here the gendarmerie were responsible for rural areas while the police were in charge of the cities. Blanc was going to have to get used to working in the sticks.

  “What do you call a routine case?”

  “A corpse, found on a garbage heap.”

  “You call that routine?”

  “You’re a provincial gendarme now. When we first get a report like that, I assume all we’re supposed to do is to cordon off the scene. There are a few things that our colleagues from Marseille will then take over. ZPN. Zone de responsabilité propre de la Police nationale.” He once again gave a humorless smile. “But judge for yourself. Corporal Baressi has put the details together. You can’t go wrong.”

  Blanc nodded.

  “He likes using acronyms,” Blanc whispered as his boss left the office.

  “He can use more than that on his underlings, just you wait,” Tonon warned.

  * * *

  Back downstairs Baressi handed over a sheet of paper. “Dead body found on garbage heap near Coudoux,” he mumbled. “Right on the A7. A sanitation worker found him and called the emergency line, seventeen. He was still glowing.” The corporal coughed.

  “The sanitation worker?” Tonon asked.

  “The corpse, it had been burnt. But that’s probably not what killed him. The colleagues from traffic police were the first to get to the scene; they were already on the autoroute when the report came in. They said there were bullets everywhere. From a Kalashnikov.”

  “Bon,” Tonon said matter-of-factly, and took the report.

  “Good?” Blanc stared at him. “What’s good about it?”

  “We’ll be back here in time for lunch. The little restaurant in Gadet isn’t bad.”

  “Somebody’s just been executed with an automatic weapon. We’re going to be there for hours, at this garbage dump.”

  The lieutenant raised his hands. “In Marseille a Kalashnikov is as common as an Opinel penknife. You can get one for a thousand euros, and even for half that price, though most of them are pretty useless. The dealers spend half their time shooting each other with them. No need to worry. The garbage dump is on the A7 leading directly to Marseille. Commandant Nkoulou was right. We secure the crime scene and wait for our city colleagues. It’ll be one o
f their usual customers. They’ll take over the case. And we can go and have lunch.”

  Baressi threw Blanc a set of car keys. “Great,” he muttered to himself, throwing open the steel door. “I always wanted to see a Provence garbage dump.”

  Tonon pointed to the patrol car. “That’s our Mégane,” the lieutenant said, squeezing himself into the passenger seat of the blue station wagon. Blanc didn’t like the big blue lettering of GENDARMERIE on the doors, the white stripes, the red and white reflectors, the blue light. In Paris they had only ever used unmarked cars. He found the position of the seat and rearview mirror awkward for his height, but eventually turned the key in the ignition. “I assume you know the way, Lieutenant Tonon?” he said, using the polite form, “vous,” for “you.”

  “I may only be a lieutenant, but I am the elder and I suggest it might be easier if we address each other by first name. I’m Marius, by the way. After all, we’re going to be seeing more of each other than our wives.”

  “That’s for sure,” Blanc mumbled.

  “Head to the rotary, then follow the signs to Lançon. After that I’ll navigate. It’ll take us fifteen minutes.”

  Blanc was a lone wolf by instinct. It was true that police always worked in teams, sometimes just three or four on a case, sometimes up to a hundred. He knew that and accepted it. Nonetheless he had a habit of going for cases he could work on alone: He would follow a suspect for hours, days if need be. He would retreat to his office, go through his crammed notebook, and think it all through. Right now, sitting next to this blubbery colleague reeking of rosé wine on the way to visit a burnt corpse, he didn’t exactly feel in his element.

  “The commandant is very young,” he said vaguely, to break the silence. He drove carefully, but unlike in Paris nobody cut him off or honked at him: They recognized the police car.