The Golem of Paris

Chapter twelve

BOIS DE BOULOGNE

16EME ARRONDISSEMENT, PARIS, FRANCE

The police scientifique had begun to pack up, affording Capitaine Théo Breton his first opportunity to think without distraction. He crouched at the center of the clearing, unwarmed by his anorak and scarf, covering the cough that kept insisting up his throat, reading the trees and tasting the emotional nature of the scene, the hole in the canopy like the roof of a pagan temple.

From his left, from his right, the obscene stare of woman and child fell relentlessly upon him.

They were markedly underdressed, she in a ruffled white shirt and a black miniskirt, the opaque tops of her pantyhose peeking out. Oily black hair draped the left half of her face. A gunshot wound marred the center of her forehead. The boy wore jeans and a Hugo Lloris jersey, and he had the same wound, as though it was an inherited trait, a black cavity standing out against the rest of his skin, which had gone a violent, chemical blue.

It disturbed Breton to realize that he had already begun to conceive of them as mother and son.

A whistle: Dédé Vallot, waving to warn him: the prosecutor had arrived.

Breton stood, knees popping. He had a backache, an auger boring into his kidney. He coughed into his elbow, smiling at the dapper man waddling over to offer a soft hand.

The prosecutor said, “Bonjour, Théo.”

“Bonjour, monsieur le procureur.”

Breton did his duty, walking him around the crime scene. Animals had mucked the area up, and the ground had since refrozen, leaving a veneer of ice and no footprints. The man who had discovered the bodies, a pensioner hunting winter mushrooms, was hospitalized with a panic attack, unable to remember if he had touched anything.

The prosecutor’s name was Lambert. He was bundled up in a cashmere coat, like a spoiled child, his cheeks bright red. He said, “I must tell you, Théo, I’ve had complaints that your boys are not helping the situation. ‘Tramping around like a Mongol horde’ was how the criminalist put it.”

Breton said nothing. He had gotten adept at concealing displeasure. Smart procureurs knew their rightful place: behind a desk. They knew what they were and more importantly what they were not. Not cops, not psychologists, not television stars.

Lambert said, “You ought to keep them on a tighter leash.”

“I’ll bear it in mind.”

The procureur breathed on his hands. “Press been by?”

“Not yet.”

“This sort of thing, they can be helpful for identifying the victim.”

And for getting your fat face in the paper. “Of course.”

“You’ve begun your canvass.”

“Martinez and Berline are out as we speak.”

“I suggest that they focus their efforts on the Allée de Longchamp.”

“Most of the prostitutes scattered before we could talk to them.”

“Then come back tonight, when they’ve returned,” Lambert said. “Someone will recognize her.”

“No one has so far,” Breton said.

“You said yourself: they ran off. Keep at it.”

“I’ve never known a prostitute to bring her son to work,” Breton said.

“Maybe she couldn’t find a babysitter. Ballistics?”

“Nothing yet.”

“The bullet might be embedded in the ground. Or in a tree.”

“Mm.”

“He must have picked up the casings.”

“Or it was a revolver,” Breton said.

“Yes, as I was going to say. You know, Théo, you might consider the possibility that they were killed elsewhere.”

Breton was getting tired of this guy. He was getting tired of everything. His insides churned, his mouth felt cottony, his skin raged with itches and areas of needlepoint sensitivity.

“They were definitely shot elsewhere,” he said. “There’s no spatter.”

“And,” Lambert said, warming to his theme, “there was more than one killer. You can’t move two bodies a great distance on your own.”

You couldn’t, you slob.

Then again, Breton had to admit that neither could he, these days.

Lambert squinted through the trees in the direction of the road. “They drove up, dragged them here, drove off. Twenty minutes, maximum.”

“Longer than that,” Breton said.

The prosecutor frowned at being contradicted. “What makes you say that.”

“It’s a hundred twenty meters over rough ground. The bodies were staged carefully.”

Lambert spiked a lawyer’s finger. “Which proves my earlier point. That amount of commotion, the whores must have noticed something. It’s inevitable.”

He bent, putting his face level with the woman’s. “Any sense of how long they’ve been here?”

Breton shook his head.

“They’re very well preserved.”

“It’s been cold.”

“No nibbling, I mean,” Lambert said, straightening. “Well. You may continue to investigate it en flagrance, for the moment, anyway. We’ll revisit the question once we’ve heard what the pathologist has to say.”

Breton nodded. That, at least, was decent news. Once the case became an official inquiry, he would lose control.

Lambert had turned to stare at the boy. “What is he? Five?”

Breton shook his head. He lacked a point of reference, but Pierrot Martinez, who had two boys of his own, had guessed six or seven. Registering the anxiety in his voice, Breton had taken pity and sent him out to canvass.

Lambert sighed. “Monstrous,” he said.

Inwardly, Breton agreed, but he found the proc’s stage-bound tone distasteful.

“Don’t you find it uncomfortable? Why doesn’t someone shut their eyes?”

Breton said, “You’re welcome to try.”

Lambert glanced at him uncertainly.

“He sliced their eyelids off,” Breton said.

With grim satisfaction, he observed the Prosecutor’s jowls twitch.

“Is that — really...” Lambert fumbled for a cigarette, fired up, sucked in a breath, offering the pack to Breton as an afterthought.

“No, thanks.”

“You quit? Since when?”

Breton did not answer.

Lambert took another deep drag. His fingers still shook a bit. “Anyway. It’s... But — you’re well, otherwise?”

“Superb,” Breton said.

“Busy.”

“Always.”

“I understand. There’s no need to be a hero.”

Breton looked at him.

Lambert said, “We can agree that the Crim is better equipped to handle this.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, monsieur le procureur.”

“Don’t be so sensitive, Théo.”

Breton said, “They’re busy at the Crim, too.”

“Yes, of course. Big cases. Media. I wouldn’t want you to feel overwhelmed.”

“That’s nice of you.”

“Of course. I only want to help.” The procureur checked his watch. “My appointment book is full. Au revoir.”

When he’d gone, Dédé Vallot ambled over, scratching his goatee. “That guy’s a twat.”

Breton clapped him on the arm. “Go back. Start checking missing persons.”

Vallot nodded and departed.

The attendants were getting ready to remove the bodies. Breton watched them cover the woman and place her on a stretcher. He did not watch them deal with the boy.

An hour later, as Breton was about to leave the scene, Lambert had his revenge.

“Bonjour, Capitaine.”

She offered her ID card, presumably to show him that she, too, was a captain. Her name was Odette Pelletier, and she was young, trim, nice looking, with dyed blond hair and slanted dark eyes that parsed him like a supermarket scanner.

“The proc sends his regards,” she said. “He’s asked me to assist you.”

As a rule, Breton adored women. He had known a fair number of them in his day. He fancied himself something of an expert. His own mother was a woman! But he didn’t want them on his team. They complicated the dynamic he’d worked so hard to cultivate: the coffee and smoke breaks, evenings at the cinema watching American and Japanese action movies, Saturdays at his cottage outside Auxerre, kicking around a flappy football.

Your boys Lambert had called them. And so they were. Around the division they were known as les Bretons, as though he had personally sired every one of them.

As far as family went, that would have to do.

Odette Pelletier tossed back a shelf of hair. She was wearing a leather motorcycle jacket and black jeans, a bright green scarf tucked in at her throat, a crescent of paper-white skin visible at her neckline. Around her wrist was an odd, chunky bracelet made of matching green rubber. Breton wondered at it before grasping that it was one of those fitness trackers, the kind that buzzed at you when you’d completed your daily death march of ten thousand steps. He felt a mild pulse of contempt.

“So,” she said. “What do I need to know?”

“We should meet later,” he said. “You’re not dressed for the cold.”

He even disliked her teeth when she smiled. Too white, like a print ad.

“I’ll survive,” she said.

As he had done for the procureur, Breton led her in orbit around the scene, pointing out the location of the bodies, now gone, and describing their positioning.

She asked to see his camera. He watched her thumb through, her face placid and emotionless. It was worse than he’d realized, far worse: she was one of those women who thought she was a man.

“Lambert feels we should be looking for a missing prostitute,” he said.

“And you feel differently.”

“The women don’t recognize her as one of their own.”

Pelletier peered at the camera. “She’s not dressed like a hooker.”

Now that she was agreeing with him, Breton felt compelled to adopt the opposite stance. “That depends on what you want in a hooker,” he said.

“Looks like a uniform to me. A maid, or something.”

“Some men like that,” he said.

“Do they.”

“It’s a type of fantasy.”

“If only I had you with me all the time,” she said. “To help me navigate the tangled jungle of the male mind.”

He smiled thinly.

“If you’d like,” she said, “I could have a word with the girls along the Allée de Longchamp. They might be more forthcoming with a woman.”

“They’re not shy,” he said.

“Not while doing business. They might be in this situation.”

“My men know how to seduce a witness.”

She raised an eyebrow, returned to the camera.

“It’s personal,” she said. “Don’t you think?”

He shifted to see what she was looking at: the boy.

“The proc called them mother and son,” she said. “Do we know that for a fact?”

“DNA will tell us.”

She handed him the camera. “I’m not any happier about this arrangement than you are, Capitaine.”

“I doubt that.”

“Think whatever you want. It’s not a promotion for me.”

Wind blasted through the trees, shattering branches. Breton hunched into his anorak — a reflex he regretted when Pelletier did not flinch.

“Here,” she said.

She was offering him a tissue.

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not,” she said. “You’ve got a nosebleed.”

His face had gone numb; he didn’t feel it running down his lip, but then it reached his mouth and he tasted the liverish tang. He grabbed the tissue and pressed it to his nose.

“Tilt your head back,” she said. “Pinch.”

“I know,” he said irritably.

“Maybe you want to step aside,” she said. “To avoid contaminating the scene.”

He gave a grunt but moved to the edge of the clearing. Thinking that it was an accurate, if unsubtle, symbol. How long before he was completely marginalized?

Odette Pelletier said, “It’s the dryness. I get them, too.”

The blood was slowing to a trickle. Breton waved off a second tissue.

“Anyway, I’m here,” she said. “You may as well make the most of the opportunity. Or whatever it is to you.”

He gestured haphazardly at the acres of snow and dead wood. “Why don’t you take a walk? See what you can find. It’s a big park.”

“Very well.” Giving him a mock salute, she tramped off, a bright green anomaly in the monochrome. Then she vanished altogether, and Breton felt minimally better.

He pressed the pad of his thumb to his nose, checked for blood. Negative.

He cupped his hands and yelled to Sibony that he was heading out.

He hiked back through the trees and up the road to his unmarked. It would have been just as easy to walk from the commissariat, but he was exhausted.

He drove a kilometer south from the scene, pulling over near a barren copse. From the glove compartment he took a beige vinyl case with a zippered top. He opened it and shook out a disposable lighter and a plastic bag containing seven marijuana cigarettes.

He selected the fattest one and lit up. He adjusted the seat back, shut off the police radio, and switched on France Musique. They were broadcasting live from the Umbria Winter Jazz Festival. Abdullah Ibrahim was playing “Damara Blue.”