A French Country Murder Read online

  A

  FRENCH

  COUNTRY

  MURDER

  A

  FRENCH

  COUNTRY

  MURDER

  Peter Steiner

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS

  ST. MARTIN’S MINOTAUR NEW YORK

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

  A FRENCH COUNTRY MURDER. Copyright © 2003 by Peter Steiner. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  Design by Susan Yang

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Steiner, Peter.

  A French country murder : a novel / Peter Steiner.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-312-30687-3

  1. Americans—France—Fiction. 2. Police—France—Fiction. 3. Country life—Fiction. 4. France—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3619.T4763 F74 2003

  813’.6—dc21

  2002032514

  First Edition: March 2003

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Except for the point, the still point,

  There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

  —T. S. ELIOT

  Charles the great has come at last,

  Come at last to stay.

  He knows not where he’s going, though

  He thinks he knows the way.

  He thinks he knows the way to love,

  Through flowered fields and highways.

  He does not know what love is or

  That I will love him always.

  A pretty girl there waits for Charles,

  To ease his pain and kiss his eyes,

  To circle him with chains of love,

  To show him love and make him wise.

  Charles the great might disappear

  while thinking you can see him.

  But life is short and art is long,

  And she can live without him.

  —HENRI KADUSCO

  A

  FRENCH

  COUNTRY

  MURDER

  I

  EVERY MORNING, AS THE BELLS OF THE CHURCH IN SAINT LEON SUR Dême were clanging eight o’clock, Louis Morgon set the two pitchers, one of hot milk, the other of coffee, along with a cup and a knife, a baguette, the white and blue butter dish, and the little cracked marmalade pot on the battered metal tray and carried them all out to the terrace. If the day was cold, he put on a gray wool overcoat and wrapped an old plaid shawl around his neck. When it rained, he sat contentedly under the faded umbrella as it flapped and rattled in the wind and the rain dripped around him. When it was hot, he wore a T-shirt and a pair of shorts. From the little table between house and barn, he could gaze over the gravel driveway, across the descending garden at the field running up the opposite hill. What he saw changed with the weather and the seasons. But, however it changed, it always pleased him as though he were seeing it for the first time.

  This year, as it happened, the fields were planted in sunflowers, which were in full bloom now, their massive heads sagging under the weight of their seed. And this particular Tuesday morning, the sun was brilliant. Its brilliance was refracted in the thousands of drops of dew that still clung to the grass, the hedge, the roses, the herbs and vegetables, the ivy and trumpet vine which climbed the stone barn. The sky was that particular blue which endures right down to the horizon, a color so intense and deep that you can feel the blackness of outer space behind it.

  As Louis opened the door with his right hand, balancing the tray with his left, something fell lightly against his leg. He looked down to see that it was the arm of a dead man who lay across his doorstep, having been deposited there sometime during the night. Louis pulled his leg back, and the dead arm settled on the floor. Louis did not drop the tray. To an observer it might almost have appeared as though he had expected to find the dead man there.

  Louis carried the tray back to the kitchen. Then, after steadying himself against the table for a moment, he returned to look at the body. It had belonged to a black man although by now the skin had taken on that peculiar gray pallor the dead share, no matter what race they may have been. The dead man wore blue jeans and running shoes without socks, and a polo shirt not tucked in. There was a red, green, and black embroidered skullcap sitting on the front of his head.

  The man’s throat had been slit from ear to ear. But, aside from the blood crusted black along the edges of the wound, there was no blood anywhere else, not on the ground and not on the man’s clothes. The eyes were closed. The mouth was closed. The man seemed perfectly tranquil, but for the gaping smile which had been cut into his neck.

  Louis was not entirely undone by the grim sight of this corpse, even though this was his first face-to-face encounter with violent death. Nor was he worried that the man’s murderer or murderers might still be lurking about, although he perhaps should have been. Louis walked to the top of the driveway and peered down the hill. He came back, crouched down, and studied the man. After some hesitation, he lifted the hands, first one then the other, more to feel the weight of the dead arms than anything else. He looked at the fingernails, although he did not know what he expected to see. The arms were hard and heavy. They no longer had the feeling of human flesh.

  Louis examined the clothes. The dead man’s pants and shirt were clean and looked to be new. There was nothing in his pockets. The cap had the word Liberté embroidered on it.

  Louis stood and looked at the dead man for a long time. Then he went inside, closed the door, and dialed the number of the police. When, a short time later, the police car came up the drive followed by the ambulance, Louis was seated at his outdoor table, his back to the corpse. He rose as though to greet invited visitors. The men shook hands all around. After a quick exchange of friendly words, Louis and Renard, who was the Saint Leon gendarme, went over to look at the dead man. Renard crouched down to look at the man. This was not Renard’s first corpse by any means, but it was his first murder—at least, as he said with a slight smile, as far as he knew. The ambulance men had edged up behind Louis and Renard and were peering at the body.

  “He was killed elsewhere,” said Renard to no one in particular and stood up. He gazed for a few moments at the body from this vantage and then turned his gaze on Louis. At just over forty-five, Renard was probably fifteen years younger than Louis. He stood half a head taller than the older man. Louis’s thin white hair riffled in the breeze. He felt the policeman looking at him. “Coffee?” he offered. Without waiting for an answer, he went inside to make a pot.

  After Renard had finished with the dead man, he nodded to the ambulance men, and they lifted the corpse onto a stretcher. The skullcap fell off. One of the men picked it up and put it on the stretcher. They loaded the body into the ambulance and shut the door. Then they all stood in the bright sun and drank coffee. They drank in silence.

  “A warning from ‘the sordid world’?” asked the gendarme finally. “The sordid world” was one of those phrases which old married couples and old friends have as a sort of code for ancient and familiar arguments. It reminds them why they like and dislike one another. Louis did not answer.

  The ambulance men waited. The gendarme motioned with his head. They took a last sip of coffee and set their cups on the edge of the table. They shook hands with Louis, got in the ambulance, and backed down the driveway. They did not turn on the blue lights. The ambulance disappeared backward over the rim of the hill. Louis an
d the gendarme listened while the driver changed gears at the bottom of the drive and drove off toward town.

  “We are so far from Washington. How did they find you? And why?” Louis did not answer. “He looks North African. There will probably be a big investigation. It will get political.”

  “It already is political,” said Louis and turned his face into the wind. He appeared to regret having said even that.

  Then the two men made small talk. Renard promised to let Louis know if he discovered anything about the dead man. But neither man expected that he would discover very much. They stood in silence for a while, listening to the wind shake the leaves of the linden trees, listening to the birds. Then they shook hands and Renard left.

  Louis returned to the kitchen with the empty coffee cups. He refilled the coffeepot, picked up his breakfast tray, and carried it back outside to the table. He sat down facing the field of sunflowers. The butter had gotten soft. The marmalade was sweet and bitter as good marmalade is. He ate his breakfast with relish and sorrow. When Dominique Brisard came clattering up the drive on her moped, he had just finished eating. She came every Tuesday morning to clean his house.

  “Bonjour, monsieur,” she said. “It is a beautiful day.” She smiled broadly and swept her arms about her. Her gesture took in the garden, the roses climbing the front of the house, the fields, the sky, the whole world.

  “It is a beautiful day, Dominique,” Louis responded, and she thought in that moment that Monsieur Morgon was surely the most contented man she had ever known.

  II

  BACK IN HIS OFFICE IN THE TOWN HALL, RENARD LIT A CIGARETTE. The bright day spilled into his office through tall windows. The Hotel de France across the square was bathed in sunlight. Its flower boxes were overflowing with geraniums. Renard turned his attention to the small stack of forms he had assembled. Though he had been a policeman for nearly twenty years, a murder is a milestone. A murder is a big event. It must be reported in great detail. And not only the murder itself, but what came before and after.

  Renard was certain that this murder in particular would be scrutinized all the way up the line, through the prefecture, through the department, until it landed in Paris. Just the thought of it made him light another cigarette while the first was still burning. Although Renard knew very little about Louis Morgon’s past before he had come to Saint Leon, he knew enough to recognize that the case probably had international and—who knew—maybe even national security ramifications. Yet there was so little he could report. Name of the victim: Unknown. Place of the murder: Unknown. And so on.

  Louis could perhaps be of help, but he wouldn’t be. Renard was sure of that. Years before, Louis Morgon had turned his back finally and completely on his past, whatever it had been, in Washington, D.C., what he now referred to as “the sordid world.” Renard surmised he had been connected somehow with espionage or politics, but he never asked. Washington was, however, the capital of the United States and as such, the center of all kinds of intrigue. Renard also knew that Louis had once been married and that he had two children. But, given that the two men were friends, that was very little.

  In their conversations over afternoon coffee at the Hotel de France, Louis could be eloquent about the new wines, about a recipe for rabbit stew. He would talk on at great length about literature or about his painting. Louis would lay down imaginary fields of color with his hands on the white tablecloth. As far as Renard understood, Louis began his painting with colors that were not even meant to be seen in the finished work. These colors would somehow affect subsequent layers of color so that you would only sense their presence in the finished work. Renard had the tantalizing sense that Louis’s discourses on underpainting were coded clues about his life. If he just heard them the right way, he was sure they would give him insights into his friend’s past. But this understanding always seemed to remain just beyond his reach.

  “Did you paint when you lived in Washington?” Louis would look at Renard as if to say, “Have I overestimated you? How can you be so direct and obvious?” Louis had been experimenting, he explained, with dark reds and umbers he had borrowed from the Italians. “Our light is more delicate than the Italian light, and so the reds come up wrong.” They showed through too fiercely and suggested a more intense, a hotter landscape than he was painting here. “I am trying a lighter, yellower red, but it isn’t quite right either. Not strong enough. You see, Renard . . .”

  Sometimes, Louis dragged the protesting policeman into the barn whose downstairs had become his painting studio. There was the one dusty window in the garage door which even on the brightest days only dimly illuminated the old Peugeot parked there. But, entering the small door that had once been one of three stall doors and switching on the bright lights, one saw an ancient workbench, a jumble of tables and easels, and a bewildering arrangement of jars stuffed with brushes, of boxes and cans, of crushed and twisted tubes of color. There were stacks of partially built wooden stretchers, other stacks of stretched canvases, and a storage rack for paintings that covered one wall and reached to the ceiling. The cement floor was spattered with paint. A tall roll of canvas leaned in the corner. The smells of linseed oil and turpentine filled the room, a sensation which Renard had to admit he found pleasant.

  Renard showered the forms with curses and cigarette ash as he labored over them. He scribbled diagrams of the crime scene and the position of the body. He described the wound as best he remembered it. He tried to make it all sound scientific and routine. When he was finished, he scrawled his signature across the bottom of the page.

  He was supposed to report the murder to the authorities by telephone and to telefax them the reports. Instead he jammed the required copies into envelopes which he addressed to the regional prefect and the national gendarmerie. He walked them across to the post office and handed them to Madeleine Picard, the clerk. “Take your time with them,” he told her.

  Louis was certainly right about the case being political. Just involving foreigners as it did, this case would be passed up the line until it found its way into the hands of someone determined to make political hay. Then there would be loud cries for action, for solutions. Everyone would be nervous about it being an African who had been murdered, what with the bombings that had been going on in Paris and the heat that was coming just now from the smoldering Islamic revolt in Algeria. Before too many days, detectives and forensics experts and journalists would begin arriving from Paris. The journalists would concoct international political implications. The politicians would make pronouncements on television.

  Renard walked to the hospital to have a closer look at the corpse. He pulled aside the sheet that covered the dead man. But the ashen figure, though he was now naked, revealed no more about himself than he had earlier. He lay on a stainless steel table, his arms at his sides, his hands palm up. Under the fluorescent light, he looked even grayer than before. His skin was hard and dry. His lips were opened slightly to reveal large teeth. “He lost a great deal of blood,” said Boudin, the doctor. “The wound is deep. It was made with one cut of a very sharp, long blade, from left to right.”

  “My left or his?” asked Renard, feeling vaguely that he ought to ask something.

  “His. There is very little blood on his clothing, as if whoever killed him changed his clothes. There is some bruising on his arms. His blood had a significant alcohol level. He was intoxicated when he was killed. I have sent samples out to be tested further. He was dead less than twelve hours when I first saw him at about eleven thirty. And there is this: Some back teeth were pulled after he was dead. Probably to make it more difficult to identify him.”

  “Where are his belongings?”

  “There are only his clothes. His pockets were empty.”

  “Let me look at them.” Renard did not want to appear less than thorough in front of the doctor.

  “Did you call the prefecture?” asked Boudin.

  Renard did not answer. The clothes did not tell him anything. He set the c
ap on the dead man’s head. It slid off onto the steel table.

  “What should I do with him?” asked Boudin impatiently, taking the cap and putting it with the other belongings.

  “Keep him,” said Renard.

  “For how long?” asked Boudin.

  “I’ll let you know,” said Renard.

  “Our morgue is small,” said Boudin.

  “Anybody who wasn’t murdered you can bury. You have my permission,” said Renard and left.

  Renard found Louis at the foot of his driveway.

  “They must have carried him up the hill beside the driveway. I would have heard the gravel if they had been driving or walking on the driveway. Like you said, he wasn’t killed here. There isn’t any blood. There aren’t any tire tracks.”

  “An elaborate way to deliver a message. Listen,” said Renard with a great sigh. He knew already what the response would be, but he continued anyway. “In a few days there will be national police, detectives, reporters, and your tranquility will be gone. ‘The sordid world,’ as you call it, will reenter your life with a vengeance. Tell me what this is about or what you think this is about, anything you know, and maybe we can sort it out before they get here. I have delayed reporting it to my superiors. But it is only a matter of time.”

  “Solving the murder will solve nothing,” said Louis, and started walking slowly up the drive. The gendarme walked beside him. The heavy heads of the sunflowers scraped against each other in the breeze. “Solving the murder will uncover things that should not be uncovered. It will raise questions which can never be answered, but which people—once the questions are asked—will not let go of.”

  “I have no choice but to investigate the murder,” said Renard helplessly. He stopped and lit a cigarette.

  “I know,” said Louis. Renard walked back down the driveway. Louis watched as he reached the bottom. Renard walked back and forth, moving the gravel from time to time with his toe, looking at the grass, at the edge of the roadside. At one point, he stooped beside the road and picked up something. It was only a faded scrap of paper with nothing on it, but he stuck it in his pocket. He wanted to worry Louis, and he didn’t know what else to do.