“Let us not forget,” Valincourt said coldly, “you are hardly in a position to judge people for behaving aggressively.”
Capestan took the hit without wincing. It was true: she was not without sin, and she knew it. A ray of sunshine spilled across the room and she could hear the distant reverberation of a pneumatic drill. New squad. New team. All she needed now was her mission.
“Will we have any cases?”
“Plenty.”
Anne Capestan had the feeling that Buron was starting to enjoy himself. It was his little welcome-back joke, a knickknack to mark her brand-new position. After a decade and a half of service, she was back in first year, and this was her initiation ceremony.
“Following an agreement between police headquarters, the local branch of the police judiciaire and the brigades centrales, you will take on all the unsolved cases from every single squad and commissariat in the region. We have also relieved the archives of any closed cases that still have question marks. They have all been sent to your office.”
Buron gave a satisfied nod to his colleagues, then continued:
“The headline is that the Île-de-France police force’s record for solving cases stands at one hundred percent, and yours will be zero percent. One incompetent squad letting down the whole region. It’s all about containment, you see.”
“I see.”
“Archives will send the boxes over when you start moving in,” Fomenko said, scratching his dragon. “In September, when you’ve been assigned your premises. We’re fuller than a Roman Catholic school at number 36, so we’ll find you a little spot elsewhere.”
“If you think you’ve gotten off lightly, then you’re wrong,” Valincourt said, still not moving an inch. “You should know that we’re not expecting any results.”
Buron made an expansive gesture toward the door: Capestan’s cue to leave. Despite these less than encouraging final words, she had a smile on her face. At least now she had an objective, and she had a start date.
Sitting at the Café Les Deux Palais, Valincourt and Fomenko were drinking a beer. Fomenko helped himself to a handful of peanuts from the small dish on the table and munched them down purposefully, crunching them between his teeth.
“What did you make of her, Buron’s protégée—Capestan?”
Valincourt nudged a single peanut all the way across his beer coaster.
“I don’t know. Pretty, I suppose.”
Fomenko burst out laughing, then straightened his mustache:
“Yeah, you can’t miss that! No, I meant in professional terms. Be honest, what do you make of this squad?”
“It’s a farce,” Valincourt said, without a moment’s hesitation.
3
Paris, September 3, 2012
Jeans, flat shoes, lightweight sweater, and trench coat: Anne Capestan was back in her police officer’s outfit, and she was clutching the keys to her new commissariat. She was imagining that twenty of the forty might show up. If one in two could see the point in this squad, then it would be worth the effort.
Capestan, feeling eager and full of hope, strode past the gushing Fontaine des Innocents at a lively pace. The owner of a sports shop was winding up the graffiti-covered metal shutter, and the smell of fried fast-food was lingering in the cool morning air. Capestan turned to face number 3, rue des Innocents. It was not a commissariat—in fact there was nothing to suggest any link to the police at all. It was just an apartment building. And she did not have the door code. She sighed and went into the café on the corner to ask the owner. B8498. The commissaire converted it into a mnemonic to memorize it: Boat, Orwell (for 1984), World Cup (for 1998, the only year France had won).
A barely legible “5” on a crumpled label on the bunch of keys indicated the floor number. Capestan summoned the elevator and went to the top. No chance of an official-looking ground-floor space with windows, neon lights, and passersby. They had been hidden away in the attic, with no sign or intercom on the street outside. The door on the landing opened up onto a vast, dilapidated, but well-lit apartment. The premises might have been short on prestige, but they had at least some charm.
The previous day, after the electricians and telephone people had finished, the movers had come to set the whole place up. Buron had told her not to worry: HQ would take care of everything.
As she entered, Capestan spotted an iron desk that was pockmarked with rust. Opposite it, a green Formica table was leaning crookedly despite the beer coasters shoved under the shortest leg, while the last two desks consisted of black melamine shelves perched on rickety trestles. They were not merely clearing out the police officers: they were clearing out the furniture, too. You could not accuse the scheme of inconsistency.
The parquet floor was dotted with holes of various sizes, and the walls were browner than a smoker’s lungs, but the room was spacious and had large windows that looked over the square and offered an uninterrupted view beyond the old garden at Les Halles toward the towering Église Saint-Eustache, which jostled for space with the cranes that dominated the perpetual construction sites.
Navigating around a knackered old armchair, Capestan noticed a fireplace that had not been bricked over and seemed to be in working order. Could come in handy. The commissaire was about to continue her tour when she heard the elevator. She glanced at her watch: 8:00 a.m. on the dot.
A man wiped his hiking boots on the doormat and knocked at the half-open door. His thick black hair seemed to follow its own peculiar logic and, despite its still being early, his cheeks were already flecked with salt-and-pepper stubble. He stepped into the room and introduced himself, his hands in the pockets of his sheepskin coat.
“Morning. Lieutenant Torrez.”
Torrez. So the bringer of bad luck was the first
