The Unknown Masterpiece Read online

  The Unknown Masterpiece

  An Aliette Nouvelle Mystery

  John Brooke

  © 2012, John Brooke

  Print Edition ISBN 978-1-897109-98-4

  Epub Edition, 2012

  ISBN 978-1-927426-08-1

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, for any reason, by any means, without the permission of the publisher.

  Cover design by Terry Gallagher/Doowah Design.

  Photograph of John Brooke by Anne Laudouar.

  Shoemaker painting on front cover by Willem van Nieuwenhoven (1879-1973). The author has unsuccessly sought the family/estate of W. van Nieuwenhoven. In good faith, jb

  We acknowledge the support of The Canada Council for the Arts and the Manitoba Arts Council for our publishing program.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Brooke, John, 1951 Aug. 27-

  The unknown masterpiece / John Brooke.

  (An Aliette Nouvelle mystery)

  I. Title. II. Series: Brooke, John, 1951 Aug. 27- .

  Aliette Nouvelle mystery.

  PS8553.R6542U65 2012 C813’.54 C2012-906322-3

  Signature Editions, P.O. Box 206, RPO Corydon

  Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3M 3S7

  www.signature-editions.com

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part 1

  This Side, That Side

  1. Piaf as Marker

  2. Crime Scene

  3. Crime of Passion?

  4. Heading for the Border

  5. Zup

  6. Angel on a Rock

  7. Not Just Another Morning at FedPol

  8. Our Murder, Their Painting

  9. Josephina’s role

  10. More Role-playing at Zup

  11. Game Changer

  12. A Different Kind of Man

  13. Info on an Angel

  14. Friday at FedPol

  15. View from VigiTec

  Part 2

  Fantasy Weekend for One in Basel

  16. A Bit of Pleasure

  17. Rudi’s Day in the Twilight Zone

  18. Trapped in This Life

  19. Parsing a Mother’s Message

  20. Deeper into It with Hans

  21. Like Goldilocks on Sunday Morning

  Part 3

  Search for R

  22. Rather Blakean

  23. Preparing to Re-enter Switzerland

  24. Klaus Nomi Night at Zup

  25. SNAFU

  26. Effects of Bad Judgment

  27. Time at the Centre of the Universe

  28. Spotted!

  Part 4

  En novembre

  29. Invitation

  30. Misgivings on Service & Discretion

  31. Hans Down

  32. Managing It

  33. Ready for the World

  34. Riverside Bench

  35. An Angel’s Protector

  36. Pieces in the River

  Part 5

  Effects of Angels

  37. Robert’s Things

  38. New Life for Rudi

  39. Finer Shades of Motivation

  40. If Della Hadn’t Been So Nervous

  41. What Robert Knew

  42. If Franki Hadn’t Been So Sad

  43. Greta and the Angel

  44. Too Late for Franki

  45. The Charigot Wall

  46. The Shoemaker’s Stand-in

  47. Blue Pantoufles

  48. How to Kill with Kindness

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Other Books in this Series

  “We’re both of us beneath our love, we’re both of us above.”

  — Leonard Cohen, “Dance Me to the End of Love”

  Prologue

  Top Basel Art Restorer Slain in Garden… Inspector Aliette Nouvelle may have noticed the item in yesterday’s paper as she spread it open on the lawn. But lurid headlines screaming bloody murder had ceased to engage her. She wasn’t jaded — she was a cop. A French cop. A murder in Basel, the Swiss city an hour down the road, was not her business. And she had other things on her mind that morning. Piaf was dead. Her closest friend, her staunchest ally. Almost nineteen years of partnership were over. Of course she had known it was coming. For the past three years the kindly vet had been suggesting that a quick and painless needle would put a dignified end to the limpy, hearing-impaired, perpetually shitty-bummed ignominy of Piaf’s golden age. Aliette had always agreed wholeheartedly. Then resisted.

  Claude Néon had had no choice in consenting to Piaf’s presence when Aliette consented to move into the large house in the north end. Love me, love my cat. The old white warrior had explored every shadow in the garden. In the end, it seemed Piaf had dozed off in the dying autumn flowers and hadn’t woken up. Aliette had arrived home the previous evening to find him lying there, dead stiff, spirit gone — no more Piaf to be seen in that grizzled old face. Sad proof that the body’s just an envelope for the soul.

  She called the vet. He gently advised her to put Piaf in a garbage bag and out with the trash. The inspector gathered that a garbage bag was the dreary fate of those cats left to die at the clinic where she had spent a small fortune on her friend. Or, said the vet, she could bury him where he lay. He added that pet cemeteries were available in the area but they were expensive and, in his opinion, slightly ridiculous. When, unasked, the vet pressed on, eager to assure her that a garden interment was not against the law, it suddenly occurred to Aliette that after all these years this good man had no idea she was a senior inspector with the local bureau of the Police Judiciaire and would probably already know the ins and outs of such regulations. Aliette did not resent this. Au contraire, she was touched. Piaf was the vet’s focus, not her. She was merely Madame Nouvelle and her payments were always prompt. She thanked him for his advice. In leaving her to grieve, the vet told her pet psychology was central to his role and the death of a pet was always a family milestone. She did not tell him that now it was just herself and Claude.

  The bereaved inspector had thought about her options for Piaf’s final resting place overnight. The tragedy was compounded by the fact that Claude had no idea how to comfort her. This lack of empathy was at the heart of the larger thing weighing on the inspector’s mind. Somehow the mournful night had produced an erotic dream about the kindly vet. The vet and Aliette. And a lot of animals who were sort of human, each of them damaged to the quick and needing to be cared for by someone who knew how, i.e., not Claude Néon.

  She had awoken to the realization that their relationship was over.

  Now she stood in the morning sun, weeping in her discreet way.

  Piaf would be buried in the garden, exactly where she’d found him.

  After shrugging his permission, because it was his house and property, Claude had turned his attention back to his tennis club newsletter and finished his breakfast before going out to dig a cat-sized hole with his spade. Then he left for work, leaving her alone to say her final farewell.

  Kneeling, she wrapped Piaf in newspaper and tied the bundle with a green velvet ribbon, an old one she’d had for years, that he’d always loved to kick at, and put the bundle in the bag. Yes, a garbage bag. ‘Adieu,’ Aliette whispered.

  Then she slowly lifted gentle shovelfuls of garden earth and covered her old friend.

  Part 1

  This side, that side

  1

  Piaf as Marker

  French side

  For a while Aliette and Claude had walked to work together. Why bother trying to conceal what was never officially mentioned but universally known? A pleasant twenty-five-minute march along affluent streets with school children and professionals, then down throu
gh the park and past her old apartment, and on through the labyrinthine old quarter to the musty police building in rue des Bon Enfants. Different schedules had eroded this comfy ritual. The morning of Piaf’s burial, Aliette headed out alone and was glad not to have Claude beside her. She paused in the park to gaze at the third-floor balcony where she and Piaf had shared beer and dreams… Arriving at the Commissariat, the inspector felt the weight of too much time as she climbed three flights of stairs. In no mood for morning chitchat, she went straight to her office, where she sat at her desk, morose, staring through her north-facing window. The sky was pale blue amid vague grey swathes of cloud where it met the rising Vosges. Summer was still making desultory gasps, but it was dying, mirroring back this futile sense of another year, not enough to show. She felt as if her life were collapsing behind her. It was not Piaf the cat. It was Piaf the marker, the mute evidence of an entire part of her life. Her best years? The notion was devastating. She stood, took her coat from the hook on the door and pulled it back on.

  It was testimony to the ever-tenuous core of her heart that the inspector still paid rent to Madame Camus for the third-floor apartment beside the park. ‘My pied-à-terre,’ she joked whenever the subject of this ‘needless expense’ came up — because Claude was wanting her to contribute to the payments on the house. Needless? She had tried to see the future but it would not come clear, and so she always put another envelope in Madame Camus’ mailbox at the start of each new month. Indeed, she often climbed the stairs to sit there for a spell. Because love matters and you had to care about it. You had to work at it. Wasn’t work the crux? Claude Néon was proud of his tulips, but guess who’d soon taken over responsibility for the garden in the north end? Aliette watered and dug, planted, pruned and picked. And she tried to help him learn to tend it, but Claude had been happy to watch her do it. He said it stirred something deep and central to see her kneeling with her clippers and her trowel. That was nice to hear but did nothing to ease the encroaching ache in her lower back (like her mother was prone to), nor this evolving worry in her heart. Central, Claude? You can learn a lot about a man from observing him in his garden. Or with your cat. Perhaps she should dig Piaf up and put him in Madame Camus’ tulip bed instead. Madame Camus had never expressed much love for Piaf, but she was at least a studious gardener. She’d won a prize for her nasturtium patch…

  Monique, secretary-to-everyone-but-mainly-Claude, buzzed. ‘You joining us for coffee?’

  ‘Yes. No… I don’t know.’ The inspector sat back down. In her coat. In a muddle. It doesn’t really matter where you put a body. A garden in the north end was just as good as a garden by the park. And the flat on the third floor was a stop-gap, not a final destination. In her heart Aliette knew she could not go back there in any permanent way.

  Toward mid-morning, Monique buzzed again. Claude had something. Please come.

  She headed down the hall. Monique asked, ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Piaf died.’

  Monique raced around her desk and hugged the inspector before the tears could start again.

  Just in time. ‘Merci, Monique… I’m fine. I’m good…’ She breathed. She smiled.

  Collecting herself, stepping into Claude’s domain, she mused that if Piaf were to be cremated his ashes would fit into a cigar box, maybe a hand-thrown clay jar. ‘I could keep him on my desk.’

  Claude nodded but refrained from comment. Piaf was a private matter. They had to stick to the rule about leaving private stuff at home. And he knew that whatever he might say, it would surely be wrong and only add to the larger problem. Not easy trying to manage two separate relationships with the same person. Instead, he passed her the information just sent up from the municipal police detachment at Village-Neuf, a bedroom community thirty minutes away on the banks of the Rhine. ‘You should check the situation. It’s up your alley, or appears so.’ A body discovered on the shore. Found by two kids that morning. ‘If you don’t want it, give it to Patrice or Bernadette, depending.’ Inspector Patrice Lebeau was their Anti-gangs specialist. Inspector Bernadette Milhau, still a rookie, was focusing on Vice. A senior inspector knew whose skills fit with what crime. She also had tacit rights of first refusal on whatever case struck her fancy. ‘But if he floated across from one of our neighbours, it’ll be for you. Mm?’ Her own unlabelled specialty being the borderland defining the murky legal edge of France. ‘IJ’s already gone down,’ he added. IJ was Identité Judiciaire, their two-man forensics team. And now Claude smiled, trying to be encouraging — at least in his role as boss. At home, all he could do was dig in and hold his ground. ‘Go. It’ll help you get this off your mind.’ Whether he meant Piaf or them was left professionally unclear, hanging in the space between.

  She rose, robotic, file in hand.

  He smiled again. ‘I’m sure the right solution will come.’

  Inspector Nouvelle descended to the garage and requisitioned a car from mechanics Joël and Paul. Sorry, the barf-green Opal with the fritzy clutch was the only vehicle not out or up on a hoist. Shedding her coat because it was a now sunny and rather humid early autumn day in Alsace, and in no big hurry — she was in mourning and mourners don’t rush — she headed out of town, took the slower D201 down to D105, then went east. The sickly coloured Opal brought her thinking back to Piaf, his poor tummy, always full of fur balls and bugs and only God knew what…

  2

  Crime Scene

  French side

  The longest river in Europe has its source in the Swiss Alps. Flowing west, the Rhine forms the Swiss-German boundary until making an abrupt jag north at Basel, where the Swiss briefly share the river with both Germany and France. The Rhine then forms the French-German line before entering Germany, where it flows on to the Netherlands and into the North Sea. The thirty-kilometre man-made canal separating the Rhine from ports serving the French shoreline dates from 1925; for most of those thirty kilometres the view of Germany is blocked by a finger-like faux-isle which is home to park and beach areas, government-owned farming sites, several hydro stations. The inspector’s destination was a park-like stretch of shoreline at the mouth of the canal where it joins the actual river. A uniformed cop on the side of the road across from an industrial pump parts factory directed her down a well-worn track through the trees. Emerging from the forested area separating road from water, she could see beyond the tip of the finger-island to Germany on the far side. Aliette left the car and headed across fifty metres of scrubby grass and shrub-strewn terrain to the boulder-lined shore.

  After almost ten years with the PJ force in this corner of the Republic, Inspector Nouvelle had dealt with lots of cases arising from the Rhine. Illegal immigrants. Illegal traffic. Drugs. And bodies. Floating, snagged in the rocks, dredged up from the mucky bottom, a body in the river usually meant a murder without a home as jurisdictions bickered to lay claim or, more usually, took steps to deny any. While the victim languished in a legal nowhere-land, the perpetrator gained the benefit of wasted time.

  There were pockets of sand along the bank, large enough for a beach towel, maybe two. The place was probably fine for swimming, partying, lovemaking, quiet thinking — but you could never call it a bona fide beach. Jean-Marc Pouliot and Charles Léger of Identité Judiciaire were hard at it. Jean-Marc was marshalling the movements of half a dozen gendarmes trained to assist. The group, always strangely absurd in their snowy ‘bee keeper’ suits and bag-like boots to match, trooped softly, methodically picking through the rocky edges and shrubby growth. Charles waded in the shallows, looking like a bizarre long-billed rubbery-skinned amphibian thanks to the diving mask with the extended beak which plowed a course below the surface (his own rather clever invention, affording him a clear view while saving his back a good amount of agony). The inspector noted a snorkel moving parallel to Charles Léger slightly further out. Yet another diver surfaced near mid-stream. Then sank.

  The usual yellow and blue tapes had been spooled out and widely stretched because of course the public
had found its way past the road-side barriers. Indeed, there was a good crowd, mothers mostly, with dogs and prams, some senior citizens. Plus media. Husbands were at work. Kids were at school. Or most. The gendarmes had detained two adolescent boys.

  It was hard for a cop fending off depression to be thrilled by these examples of emerging masculinity. Around fourteen or fifteen, both conformed to the large, hulking mode that mothers were producing these days: boys with bad skin and dirty hair, slouched, hands stuffed in low-slung baggy pockets while languidly shuffling to a self-conscious kind of choreography as they waited by a patrol car. Aliette’s eyes registered wires extending from ears hidden under the unkempt hair to palm-sized devices clipped in belt loops. Drawing near, she could hear it, the way you hear it in the train — an undertone, a discordant din, the boring thump of bass.

  Before she could present herself to the cop minding the two boys, Serge Phaneuf of the Cri du Matin rudely left an earnest local mother in mid-description of how it felt to have a murder in her neighbourhood and, notebook in hand, touched her arm. ‘Got a name for me, Inspector?’

  She waved him off, peevish. I just got here! And ducked under the barrier tape.

  The gendarme got out of his car. ‘Inspector…’

  He handed her his notes and a plastic bag containing two expertly rolled joints.

  ‘Alors?’ Drugs and a body. She hoped these two boys hadn’t swallowed something powerful enough to inspire them to go after a stranger on the shore and leave him dead. It was happening everywhere. She was in no frame of mind for the likes of that. The smaller of the two large teens was nervous enough to turn his music off and nod hello. His gigantic friend smirked in her direction through glittery eyes and continued to move to the beat. Aliette had nothing against children, but neither was she one who automatically loves them just because they are. This child entered into his relationship with the Police Judiciaire on a seriously bad foot. Stupid boy.