Death at the Clos du Lac

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

By the time Rocco arrived at the address Santer had given him for Pascal Rotenbourg, it was late afternoon. Traffic on the main streets was building into the frantic hustle that Parisians seemed to hate and enjoy with equal measure, and he wanted to get clear of the city before it got too bad. But he needed to check Rotenbourg’s address on the off chance that he was in.

The six-storey building occupied a corner site midway down a tree-lined street, with shops at ground level and apartments above. Metal balconies ran the length of the second and fifth floors, and windows promised almost floor-to-ceiling views out across the park on the other side. The area seemed prosperous and was just enough off the beaten track to have a sense of calm to the atmosphere, in spite of the traffic not far away.

Rocco parked his Citroën and walked into the building, nodding at a concierge cleaning a large brass handle on the open front door. Inside, against the rear wall, stood a bank of mail boxes. He checked for Rotenbourg’s name and found it located on the fourth floor, accessible by a clanky lift with concertina gates, a relic from earlier in the century.

‘Can I help you?’ The concierge had followed him inside. He was in his sixties and light on his feet, with the springy stance and bent nose of one who might have done a few years in the ring in his youth. His eyes flicked rapidly over Rocco and he nodded, making a quick assessment. ‘You’re police?’

Rocco nodded and showed him his card. ‘I’m off my patch here,’ he told the man, ‘but I’m trying to verify some information about a case I’m working on. It could be a wrong lead, but these things have to be checked out. Just ticking boxes, that’s all.’

The man shrugged. ‘Fair enough, Inspector. We’ve all got a job to do, right? What name are you after?’

Rocco told him, and the man nodded. ‘I know Pascal. He’s not in, though. Went out this morning, early. You want to leave a message?’

‘Sure. Can you ask him to call me?’ Rocco felt the beginnings of an easy lead slipping away. Whoever the non-swimmer had been, it clearly wasn’t Pascal. He took out another card and handed it over. ‘What does he do, this Pascal?’

‘Do? I’m not sure. He’s retired from business, lived here about ten years, quiet, minds his own, comes and goes — you know how it is.’

Rocco sensed that he’d got as much information out of this man as he was going to volunteer, but asked, ‘Does he have a brother?’

‘I don’t know. You’d have to ask him. He never says much about his background and I don’t ask. Why, is there a body?’

Rocco smiled and thanked him, and headed back towards Amiens.

At ten to seven, Rocco walked through the door of the café in Poissons, and nodded at Maillard, who was drying glasses behind the bar. A pungent fog of cigarette smoke hung over the bar, and the voice of an excited talk show host was fighting a losing battle with a volley of shouts from the far end of the room and a fan clattering noisily in one corner.

‘Drink?’ Maillard jerked his head at the row of bottles behind him.

‘Make it coffee,’ said Rocco. He preferred a clear head when dealing with unknowns, and a cop who was seen to drink didn’t instil confidence in the general public. In this case they were six men, all with the spare, weathered look of farm workers. Two were playing a noisy game of Babyfoot watched by four others slouched on chairs against the wall.

They nodded at Rocco, but said nothing.

‘They’re not here yet,’ Maillard murmured softly. He poured a cup of coffee, black as treacle, and placed a slim glass of cognac alongside it, and a box of sugar cubes. ‘On the house. Cognac, too.’ For good measure, he opened a jar of gherkins and placed a fork on the counter, and tapped the lid of a large jar of pickled eggs.

Rocco nodded his thanks but passed on the eats. ‘Will these men be any trouble?’ He didn’t know any of them, but his cop’s instinct wondered if they were known to the drink sellers and might pitch in to help them.

‘Not this lot. They know who you are, so they’ll behave.’ He smiled grimly. ‘If they don’t, they’ve got a long way to walk to find another place to drink.’

‘Good. Just act naturally and don’t look at me when they come in.’

As Rocco leant on the bar sipping his coffee, the outside door opened and three men walked in. They had the rough look of country men, but there was something about them that set off his internal alarms. The first man was short and stocky, strutting in as if he owned the place. Confident. The leader. He was wearing a pair of very shiny shoes with pointed toes. Definitely not country-style. The second man was tall and whipcord thin, in need of a shave and carrying a long shopping bag which might have contained a baguette. He looked edgy.

The third was the gunman. Rocco recognised the signs immediately. He was wearing a coat, and had one arm clamped across his middle. He was heavily built and watchful, and his eyes flicked around the room, taking in the other customers before arriving on Rocco, who was leaning heavily on the bar with a coffee cup in his fist. The glance didn’t linger, but moved on to settle on Maillard.

‘Gents.’ The bar owner spoke automatically, but his nerves showed in the lick of his lips and the flick of the cloth across the counter.

‘Set them up,’ said the short man, carefully lighting up a Stuyvesant from a new packet as if it were a sacred ritual. The lighter looked like gold, expensive. ‘Your best whisky all round. Big ones. We’ve got business to discuss, right?’

Whisky, thought Rocco. The drink of choice for criminals like this. As if they’d know a good whisky from a jar of paraffin.

Maillard went through the motions and slid three full glasses across the bar. The first two men took theirs and sipped as if they had all the time in the world. The third man reached past them and picked up his glass, throwing it back in one go.

A bad sign, Rocco reflected. A gunman who drinks like that is an amateur. Dangerous.

‘Hey. You.’ It was the stocky man. He was looking at Rocco, standing square on, crowding him. ‘You mind giving my friends and me some space? Go drink somewhere else. We want to talk in private.’

‘He’s OK,’ Maillard said quickly. ‘He won’t say anything.’ He was clearly worried that Rocco might be too far away to stop anything blowing up in his face.

‘I don’t care if he goes and plays the “Marseillaise”, I don’t want him here.’ The man pushed at Rocco’s shoulder. ‘Go on, get lost.’

The bar had gone quiet. The men at the far end of the room were standing still, the click of a final ball rumbling into a pocket chute the only sound.

Rocco straightened up and looked down at the man, who seemed to realise belatedly how tall he was, and moved back a step. In the following silence, he heard a rasp of material, then an ominous metallic click. The hairs on his neck prickled, and a glance at Maillard’s shocked expression told him all he needed to know.

He turned his head. The gunman had produced a short, double-barrelled shotgun from under his coat. It was a lupara. Easy to hide and popular for use on bank jobs, to intimidate. It had no range to speak of, but in a crowded place like this, it would be horribly indiscriminate and deadly.

‘He said move, big fella,’ the man murmured, his words sliding together. Clearly the whisky hadn’t been his first drink of the day. As he spoke, the barrels lifted, catching the overhead lights and revealing a faint layer of oxidisation on the metal and a network of scratches.

An old weapon held by an amateur, Rocco thought. But still dangerous. He guessed that the drinks deal had been a bluff; they were here to take whatever they could get. It made him wonder how many other places they had hit today. The Bonnie and Clyde tactic: select an area, go for the easiest targets, hit them one after the other, then get out. Quantity before quality, the sign of limited aspirations.

His attention veered to the man with the shopping bag. He’d been silent throughout, not moving, just watching the play develop. Another danger. Yet his hands were empty of weapons.

Time to end it.

Rocco nodded and muttered thickly, ‘OK, OK, no need to get rough. I’m leaving.’ He pushed himself away from the bar like a man exhausted, and stepped towards the door. Past the stocky man who was now grinning, stepping alongside the man with the shopping bag. As he went to move past the gunman with the lupara, he turned and ground the barrel of his service pistol hard into his neck, just below the earlobe. Up close the man reeked of drink and cigarettes and an overlaying aroma of stale sweat.

‘This is a MAB with seven rounds in the magazine,’ Rocco said softly. ‘Move a muscle and I’ll use the first one to decorate this room with your brains.’ He flicked a glance at the shopping bag man and said, ‘You’ll get the next.’ Finally he looked at their leader, whose mouth had dropped open in shock, the Stuyvesant dropping to the floor at his feet. ‘Then you.’

It was overdramatic, the language of cheap gangster films and barroom bravado. But it was something the three men understood.

Yet still the man with the shopping bag made a move. His hand slid down inside the bag. Before he could touch what he was reaching for, however, Claude Lamotte stepped through the doorway and rested the tip of his Darne shotgun against the man’s shoulder.

‘I wouldn’t do that, my friend. You’d never even hear the noise this thing makes before your head bounces round the room like a dead chicken.’

Moments later, all three were sitting in chairs, hands and feet tied together by two of the farm workers with rope from Maillard’s back room, while another stood over them with a raised billiard cue.

Rocco called the office in Amiens and arranged for a team to come out and collect the men, while Claude searched them for weapons and identification. It didn’t amount to much: a couple of cheap knives and a set of brass knuckledusters, and some documents showing the men to be from Cambrai in the north. The shopping bag contained an ancient revolver pitted with rust. And a baguette with a chewed end.

Amateurs.

‘Hey, Inspector,’ one of the farm workers called out. ‘Is it true you stuffed a live grenade down Didier Marthe’s pants and made him run into the marais?’

‘No,’ Rocco replied. He knew the man wouldn’t believe him. There were already some lurid stories circulating about how he’d dealt with the former Resistance worker who’d tried to blow him up. After this evening, the rumours would only get stronger and more colourful.

‘Seriously?’ one of his friends urged. ‘I’d have paid to see that, the little shit.’

‘Seriously. I made him walk, in case he tripped and hurt himself.’

‘Mother of God,’ Maillard breathed later, as the three robbers were untied and led out to a police van. ‘You had me fooled back there, for a moment. I thought … Never mind what I thought.’ He looked a little tight around the eyes, and reached for the whisky bottle. He poured shots for everyone in the bar and sank the first one himself, then pushed one each across to Claude and Rocco. ‘Glad you were here, Inspector. Anytime you want anything … well, let me know. I owe you.’

Rocco drank his in three sips, then said, ‘You don’t, but thank you. You did well, Georges. Stay safe.’ He bid goodnight to Claude, who looked as if he’d suddenly had hero status conferred upon him, and waved to the other patrons, then went home to bed.