“So in other words, the judge just dug up some reason to get him away from me?”
“This is the case file.” His aide handed him his portfolio. “This is what I got for the phone call.”
Joey perused the files. They were in French, but he was enough of a cop to recognize the universal appearance of a police death investigation report. Joey handed the pages to the ambassador’s aide, “Here, I cut French in high school.”
The aide scanned it quickly and translated. “On or about August 20, 1997, Franciscan Friar Wilhelm Gregory, known local transient address 324 of the Sofitel on 14 rue Beaujon was found deceased in a stairwell at said address. The coroner ruled the cause of death was asphyxiation arising out of a blunt force trauma to the larynx. Probably as a result of a fall down the hotel’s concrete exit stairway. The body found slumped face down with the head hanging over the metal railing of the landing. No suspicious forensic evidence was found.”
“Is there an investigating officer’s signature?”
The aide flipped through the pages, “Yes, here it is; Sergeant Dupré, fourth prefecture, Paris.”
“Wasn’t there a Director Dupré somewhere in all this?” The ambassador recalled.
“Yes, he was my liaison when Sicard gave me the slip.”
“Do you think it’s the same Dupré?”
“If he is, I am going to be really pissed.”
XI. THE GOLDEN GOAT
Brooke had traced a branch of her family tree to the small mountain town of Èze, in Monaco, on the French Riviera. She had also traced the path of the electrolytic fluid to a shipping company in Nice, a few kilometers down along the coast. On the way back from her investigation of the manifests of three ships, one of which she had come to suspect handled the P784 fluid that propelled the “whale,” she would divert to the mountain-top hamlet and look up a cousin she had met only once in America.
The Marnee Line was a small company that operated only three ships, older freighters that regularly traversed the Mediterranean. The vessels carried mostly specialty cargoes, things like Italian leather goods to Libya or Egyptian cloth to Naples or French tires to Tunisia. This was cargo that didn’t travel by or wasn’t containerized freight. The company was definitely a dying remnant of the merchant mariner past. Still, this method of shipping offered direct, three-days or fewer, point-to-point delivery without losing time in the big containerized hubs. In addition, the line offered some degree of anonymity because there weren’t enough EU customs agents to cover the hundreds of thousands of containers, much less three small ships. Then there was the fact that one of the ships, which they barely used now, was a tanker/freighter. It had a cargo hold and a tank hold. It was rumored once to have brought Burgundy wine to the then-dictator of Libya, and returned with thirty thousand gallons of diesel oil in return. Although the market price of the wine per gallon was greater than the fuel, it was during the worldwide shortage in the late 70s, which, to the shipping company, made that ‘vintage’ of fuel worth its weight in champagne!
Brooke’s fairly decent Americanized French served her well enough that she was getting along nicely with the woman who was part bookkeeper and part cargo facilitator. Brooke was keenly interested in a shipment of “automotive fluid” that went to Saint-Eugene, Algeria. “There is a Saint-Eugene in a Muslim country?”
“Before it was Muslim.”
“Right, I see. Where did the cargo come from?”
The woman opened up three filing cabinets and scoured through densely packed manila folders, their tabs bent and folded. Soon she selected one and fought to liberate the folder from the vice-like grip of too many in one drawer. “Here we go,” the woman said with exertion, then she flipped open the file and quickly scanned it. “The origin point of the load was Marseilles.”
That was a relief for Brooke, because in Marseilles they had heard of computers. And the bookkeeper actually had a shipping order number, which the boat crew used to identify the cargo they were to load. She thanked the woman and then planted one more question as innocently as she could. “Wasn’t the wine spoiled by the remnants of oil in the tanker?”
The woman laughed, “No, no, my dear, the wine was in the dry hold in casks but the oil came back in the tanks.”
“Oh, I thought maybe that was the reason for the insurance claim your company filed.”
“Pardon?” Suddenly there was concern on her face.
“Or was it pirates? Oh, yes, that was it. Your boat was attacked by pirates and you settled a claim for damages at sea.”
As she watched for her reaction, Brooke could see the wheels turning in the woman’s head. Brooke knew the chain-smoking, emaciated gal (Monday through) Friday was covering for her boss, who had probably made the whole story up and cashed in on the 1.2 million of insurance money for the P784 liquid that Joey had discovered found its way to the terrorists.
“I know nothing of this. It may have been before my time here,” she said as she snuffed out her third cigarette since Brooke arrived.
Brooke let her off the hook because, after all, she wasn’t there as an insurance investigator. “Perhaps I am mistaken.”. Thank you, you have been most generous with your time. Adieu.”
As Brooke left the offices on the seamier edge of the otherwise beautiful Nice waterfront, she took a deep breath to clear her lungs from the smoky little office. She saw the last light of day in the deepening red sky and looked forward to dinner with her cousin, Mathilde, in Èze.
The French Rivera is legendary as the playground of the rich and famous. Its combination of sun, sea, air and biorhythmic waves ease the compression on the human nervous system. It makes everyone, from a rich Arab sheik to a plumber, breathe easy and see the world as a beautiful place. This night, the air had a warm softness, with the aroma of baker’s ovens and chef’s stoves preparing dinner for the restaurants of the Château de La Chèvre d’Or.
The entire hotel was nestled high atop the highest peak in Èze Village, and the delightful odors wafted up to Brooke’s still-higher room. As she sipped crisp white wine on her terrace, she could see airplanes landing at the airport in Nice on her right, and the lights from the multi-million-dollar yachts steaming into Monte Carlo to her left. Her cousin, Mathilde, who was the manager at the hotel, had saved her the best room and sent along an incredible bottle of ’09 Le Montrachet white burgundy. The little cheese and baguette plate was heavenly, and as she pinched off and popped a perfect grape into her mouth, she thought of the last time she had seen Mathilde. It was Easter and they were both twelve. Brooke’s Uncle Danny brought Mathilde and his family to America on vacation. In that week, Brooke and Mathilde became the best of friends. When it came time for her to go back to France they promised to be pen pals for life. Soon, Brooke began plastering her room with the aero stamped red-and-blue-striped airmail envelopes from each letter she received. They communicated by mail for years, well into their late teens. Then, as they were both distracted by life, letters became less frequent and eventually trickled down to none.
They hadn’t seen one another in almost twenty-five years. Recently, like millions of other people on Earth, they discovered Facebook and now they were “friends.” In a few minutes, a quarter-century of separation would end, as Mathilde was coming to her room for a glass of wine before a dinner being prepared especially for them by the hotel’s executive chef.