“That’s what I’m here to find out,” the Inspector says, losing enough control so that he peeks into the coffee can and, seeing the bubbling green solution within, catching the aroma of sour wash water, immediately regrets it.
“You can call me Armand,” the doctor says, friendly now, his version of a bedside manner. “How’dyou find out about me?”
The Inspector can’t help but smile.
“Your reputation is widespread,” he says as the tester wipes his nose absentmindedly on his sleeve and pokes at his makeshift sterilizer with a snapped-off car antenna.
Armand nods as if he couldn’t care less about the response and picks up a package of store-bought cupcakes from the floor of the van. He tears open the package with his teeth and extracts a pastry, takes an enormous bite, smearing his face with chocolate and a dab of marshmallow.
After a moment, and as if realizing for the first time that there’s someone sitting opposite him, Mr. Clairvaux holds the half-eaten cupcake in the air and says, “Want some?”
The Inspector shakes his head no, looks down at his aching and trembling hands and can’t keep himself from inquiring, one more time, where it was he went so utterly wrong.
The smart money has always said that, had he wanted it, Emil Lacazze could have taken the chief’s commission. The smart money may well be right. But that doesn’t mean it knows anything more than anyone else about what is true and what is false within the many legends regarding the man whom everyone, whether fellow officer, politician, gangster, or Jesuit, has come to know simply as the Inspector, as if there were no others.
You would think that Gilrein would know more of the rumors than anyone else and that he might even be able to confirm or deny some percentage. After all, he was Ceil’s husband and from the time Lacazze was given the Dunot precinct house, Ceil was the only detective to meet the unknown qualifications for serving on the Inspector’s fully autonomous squad.
In this regard, however, Ceil kept Gilrein as much in the dark as the rest of the force. Most of the old bastards, who’d seen everything and then an encore, said that even Chief Bendix himself wasn’t aware of half the operations Lacazze was running out of Dunot. But, like everything else, that was before the Rome Avenue Raid. Before Ceil’s death and the Inspector’s tremendous fall from grace.
Ironically, Gilrein had heard Lacazze’s name years before he actually met the man, long before the Inspector even was the Inspector, before Emil the Proud, as the Trinity secretly called him, had been stripped of his soutane and his beads and marched out the front gates of St. Ignatius, a traitor to the black robe, a turncoat shaken from the folds of the Society of Jesus itself.
Lacking spousal affirmation, the version of the legend Gilrein chose to believe went something like this: Emil Lacazze was born in the rear of Hotel Dieu Nunnery, or “the night convent,” as it was more commonly known, a specialty brothel on the west side of Paris. His mother was a profoundly beautiful call girl who was murdered while Lacazze was still an infant. Though it was never confirmed, his father was said to be a lecturer at the Sorbonne, a famed French cryptographer who was rumored, when the mood and the price moved him, to consult with assorted ministries around the planet during various political tumults. The child never met the father, however, and was raised by Maria LaMonk, his mother’s madame, with assistance from the ladies of the house. It was said he was so adored by the women of Hotel Dieu that he caused more than a few vicious rivalries that lasted to the grave.
When the boy’s extraordinary intellectual capabilities became apparent in his youth, Madame LaMonk made the heartbreaking decision, for the good of her charge and over the vehement protests of her minions, to place the boy in L’Abbaye de Hanxleden, whose seminarians in those days were among the nunnery’s best customers.
Though Lacazze sorely missed his home among the sisters of mercy, he adapted well to the abbey and was soon recognized as a prodigy of varying media. By his teen years he mastered Thomistic theology alongside quantum physics, and the black robes of Hanxleden split into a multitude of factions, each of whom thought they had divine knowledge as to the appropriate life course for the boy. This bickering, it is said, often incidentally, may have been what triggered Lacazze’s first experiments with laudanum, and, subsequently, his periodic and tumultuous struggles with a variety of opium-based addictions. It has also been noted that this was likely the start of his passion for those seven-inch, purple-banded Magdalena cigars that the Society had shipped in straight from the El Laguito rolling house of Havana.
Eventually, sometime during a stormy adolescence that saw him flee the abbey more than once and take refuge among the branchés of Rue de Lombards, Lacazze fell into his natural passion — linguistics, tempered and guided by deep and broad readings in cultural anthropology. When he published a highly controversial treatise on a linguistic theory of criminality in the notorious journal Conspirateur, the word came down, possibly from as high as the Father General, to move the young man safely to the confines of research and mediation in the murky cellars of a Rome the general public would never see. Here he spent innumerable hours in the bowels of the Registra Vaticana, possibly even in these early years already beginning to formulate what came to be known, across a broad spectrum of not always sympathetic disciplines, as Lacazze’s Methodology.
Mr. Clairvaux finishes his cupcake and methodically sucks the last traces of goo from his fingers. Then he looks the Inspector up and down and says, “We all set here?”
The Inspector says, “You tell me.”
Getting down on hands and knees, Mr. Clairvaux begins searching the van until he comes up with a single work mitt, a worn and filthy canvas gardening glove decorated with a floral design. He makes a show out of fitting the glove onto his right hand, then fishes inside the bubbling soup of the coffee can and withdraws a needle. It looks more like a knitting tool than a surgical instrument. It’s at least five inches long and its width increases up the barrel. Steam is coming off the steel and boiling liquid is dripping onto the floor.
“We’ll give it a second to cool,” Mr. Clairvaux explains.
“How thoughtful of you,” the Inspector says, and the words come out more sarcastic than he’d intended.
“You do know this is a fairly painful procedure?”
“I’ll survive.”
“You’ve never been tested before, have you?” with the smile of a man who truly enjoys his work.
“I’ve never had the pleasure.”
“The pleasure,” Mr. Clairvaux repeats, holding the needle up near his head and snapping a finger at it to flick away some of the cleansing solution. “Well, I’m probably the best street tester in the city, but I’ve had people jump out of the van with the first prick.”
“I’m sure I’ll control myself,” the Inspector says, wishing they could begin in silence.
“It’s just that the tongue is a very sensitive organ. Lot of nerves in there, you know. You ever burn it really badly? The pain lasts awhile.”
“How quickly will you have the results?”
Mr. Clairvaux shrugs and slips a precautionary mask over his mouth which gives his face the appearance of a starving albino Pig.
“Give me three to five days and—” He breaks off and says, “Christ, I almost forgot,” then crawls to a corner of the van and rummages through a pile of trash, repositioning cotton swabs and pornographic magazines and mismatched tennis shoes until he discovers and pulls free what he’s looking for. He shuffles back to position holding a pair of handcuffs and says, “If you’d just slide these on, we can get started.”