The Grave Gourmet (18 page)

“F
ucking tie! What's the point of being plain clothes if you have to dress like a goddamn clown? Might as well be directing traffic.”

“Momo, calm down,” Capucine said.

“Lieutenant, he nearly killed the whole operation,” Isabelle said. “He went into this burlesque Arab routine that he thinks is funny. If that poor woman hadn't been stressed out of her gourd she would have smelled a rat.”

“All right, all right, start from the beginning,” Capucine said, acutely conscious that setting up a conference call to listen to the two brigadiers report at the same time on their cell phones had been a big mistake.

“There we were dressed up like the Gestapo…”

“Momo,” Isabelle interrupted, “that's the Renault security uniform. There's nothing we could have done about it.” She added for Capucine's edification, “Monsieur Momo took offense at the Sam Browne belt.”

“All right, guys, enough of this. There you are manning the security checkpoint at the Renault headquarters in Renault security staff uniforms and what exactly happened?”

Isabelle picked up the thread of the narrative. “Okay, Lieutenant, around seven thirty along comes Miss Princess, the Naval Anchor. She tries to walk around the metal detector and Momo starts doing his thing, you know, the sycophantic illiterate North African. ‘So sorry, Madame, you must go through the detector or de boss man, he fire me.' It almost didn't work.”

“But it did, didn't it, dipshit?” Momo pointed out.

“Yes, it did asshole. Lieutenant, she tried to pull rank. She tried to say she was exempted from the security check. She tried to turn around and go back. But in the end we made her open her briefcase.”

“And what was in it?” Capucine asked.

“A folded copy of the
Monde
, a Fred Vargas paperback thriller, a pack of Marlboro Lights, and a sealed manila envelope about an inch thick.” Isabelle answered self-righteously. “We pretended it was nothing. That we were just looking for stolen laptops. But we hit pay dirt. That's why we're calling you.”

 

As Clotilde walked up the steps of the Marcadet-Poissonniers metro stop into the cool evening Capucine was a few steps behind her. Two brigadiers waited at the top of the stairs while David and two other brigadiers were placed at strategic locations on the path to her door. In her desire to take no chances at all Capucine had planned her surveillance with such textbook precision that the exercise could have been videotaped for training sessions.

One brigadier remained on post at the metro. Capucine followed Clotilde for two short blocks and was smoothly replaced by two other members of the team. Another brigadier was loitering across the street from Clotilde's door. Anticlimactically she went straight into her building; the lights in her apartment were seen to go on, and after a short pause the blue glow of her television appeared. To all indications she intended to spend a quiet evening in.

Capucine admired the forbearance of her team as they settled into what was likely to be an all-night vigil the way a ship's crew anesthetizes itself as it sinks into a night watch. They paced quietly, smoking, lost in reverie but still keenly observant, becoming almost invisible in the shadows. Capucine walked to the corner susurrating into her radio, raising the team one by one and positioning them in a broad arc spanning the three blocks in front of the building door.

For Capucine the time passed with agonizing slowness. She stared at the faint blue flicker in the center window and calculated her next moves. She would wait a full two hours after all the lights had gone out before sending the team home and would leave a brigadier in front of the door all night long just in case.

Without warning the front door opened and Clotilde stepped out briskly, still in her work clothes, a copy of the
Monde
folded under her arm.

Capucine pressed a button on the radio. “Subject moving.”

Clotilde turned left, walking up the steep hill in the direction of the Sacré-Coeur, purposefully, rapidly, as if she were late for an appointment. Capucine followed, fifty feet behind. It was the least expected route. The point officer, lounging a hundred feet up the hill, was Momo. He and Isabelle, who would be easily recognized, had been assigned the positions farthest away from her front door to allow them plenty of time to get out of sight. Capucine pressed the button on her radio again.

“Momo, she's coming your way.”

Momo stepped through a rickety glass door into a minuscule café. The façade was of dirty glass down to the shin level allowing a full view of the room inside, no bigger than ten feet by fifteen, packed with men, many in flowing djellabas with kufis perched on the backs of their heads, sitting on benches drinking mint tea in ornate gilt glasses or espressos from thimble-sized cups. The crowded room was completely free of the odor of bodies or cigarette smoke. Momo positioned himself at the end of the bar farthest from the door and asked for a mint tea. He could still see the narrow street from his vantage point but was confident he would be imperceptible among the other North Africans. Without thinking he had almost asked for a beer, which he would have relished, but realized in the nick of time that he was in a deeply religious part of the quartier and a request for alcohol would have earned him a stern reprimand from the barman and probably cries of “shame” from some of the patrons. There was even a chance of an uproar and his being thrown out of the café.

Directly opposite, Clotilde walked up to a short Asian man in a suit and accosted him angrily. The man seemed evasive and attempted to walk by her, making a pantomime show of embarrassment. As if in exasperation she thrust her
Monde
at him, turned on her heel, and stalked irately back down the hill. The man wheeled and walked in the opposite direction slowly, as if he were continuing a leisurely stroll. A few seconds later Capucine arrived, walking up the sidewalk following the Asian while whispering animatedly into her radio. Momo threw some coins on the bar and walked out after her. In his rush he took no notice of the number of men who shuffled out after him. At the corner the Asian man paused as if uncertain which way to go.

In the next street a loudspeaker suddenly blared out a wailing melismatic chant, the recorded voice of the muezzin rising hauntingly. “
Allahu
kbar, allahu
kbar, ash'hadu
n l
ilaha ill
-allah
,” it began and continued on.

The street filled with men. All silent. Most carrying rolled-up rugs. The urgency in the air was palpable.

The Asian man turned to the left and walked into a narrow street, a tight fit for even one car, now as thronged as the metro at rush hour. The loudspeaker, which was in the middle of the block, blared again, much more loudly. “
Al-
lahu
kbar, allahu
kbar, ash'hadu
n l
ilaha ill
-allah
,” with the muezzin sounding more stern and commanding. Quickly the men slipped off their shoes and pointed babouches, jockeyed them with their toes into neat rows against the building walls, formed into a tight phalanx, shoulder pressed against shoulder, began the prayer, and then dropped as a single man to their knees on rugs that had been spread out on the cobblestones. The Asian was halfway down the block on the sidewalk, inching down the street crabwise, back to the wall, squeezing past the kneeling men, clearly unnerved by the spectacle. At the next chant from the loudspeaker the men in the street pitched forward, foreheads hard down on the rugs, posteriors high in the air, palms flat on the ground beside their faces. The distances between the rows had been so well learned by endless repetition that heads were less than an inch away from feet in the row in front. The street was a tightly woven carpet of humanity. The recorded muezzin chanted on through his hidden loudspeaker. The prostrate men in the street chanted in response.