Tourquai Page 2

  Bloodhound had never been inside Bourg Villette before, and the sight of the lobby took him by surprise. It was as big as a bathhouse, with floors and walls clad in glistening black marble. The only piece of furniture was a reception counter, also of black marble, behind which sat an old frog dressed in some type of uniform. The frog looked up with surprise when the two police officers came in, as if he had been napping. Bloodhound identified himself.

  “Nova Park?” he growled.

  “The elevators in the last row,” replied the frog, nodding toward the corridors with elevators. “Sixty-second floor.”

  There was a bowl of throat lozenges on the frog’s counter, and Bloodhound took a moment to fill one of his jacket pockets before he signaled to Falcon to follow him to the elevators.

  “This is rather impressive,” Ècu whispered as they walked across the glassy floor. “All of it.”

  Even though they were alone, it felt natural to whisper.

  “It’s so pretentious it makes your mother look like a fine lady,” Bloodhound growled.

  Falcon decided not to start any more conversations with the superintendent for the time being.

  Signs embossed with gilded numerals indicated that the elevators in the last row took visitors to floors forty through sixty-two.

  “Hope no one’s afraid of heights,” Bloodhound muttered, pushing the button.

  Personally he always had been.

  Nova Park’s reception was directly opposite the elevators on the sixty-second-floor landing. Neither Falcon nor Bloodhound had heard of the company before, and despite an attempt to get information during the brief car ride, they had not become much wiser. All they knew was that it was a financial company, but that was true for most of the operations in this part of the city.

  The reception was soberly elegant: leather armchairs and dark red wall-to-wall carpeting, round cherrywood tables where there were financial magazines to read while you were waiting. But it was the view that took the visitors’ breath away. Far below the floor-to-ceiling tinted windows lay south Tourquai, and you could see still farther than that, all the way down to Amberville.

  “Amazing, isn’t it?” said the receptionist, a young goat.

  It was not meant as a courtesy; it was blatantly condescending. Bloodhound made an unfathomable grimace and again took out his police badge.

  “Oswald Vulture,” he growled, and his voice was harsher than usual.

  “Have you made an appointment?” asked the goat, studiously avoiding looking at Bloodhound’s extended badge.

  “How fucking stupid do we look?” said Bloodhound.

  The goat nodded, indicating the long corridor that started where the reception counter ended.

  “Miss Cobra is in the office at the end of the corridor,” he said.

  The corridor must have been fifty feet long and was flanked by closed black doors with discreet name plates. There was a faint odor of lemon. The lighting was subdued, and the wall-to-wall carpet absorbed the sound of the police officers’ steps. It was like walking through a dream. The door that formed the end of the corridor said “Emanuelle Cobra.”

  Without knocking, Bloodhound went in.

  “Oswald Vulture?” he said.

  The cobra sitting behind the desk gave them a wry smile.

  “Do I look like an Oswald?” she asked with a hiss.

  The office was yet another waiting room, a kind of drawing room, and the cobra was the most beautiful reptile Larry Bloodhound could recall ever seeing. Her eyes were large as a deer’s, and instead of cloth she was made of black latex. The blouse she was wearing was white and almost transparent, and all of her glistened enticingly in the glow of the inset spotlights in the ceiling.

  Bloodhound was distracted and did not answer, so Falcon felt obliged to say something.

  “No,” he said, “no, you absolutely do not look like an Oswald.”

  The cobra had an enchanting effect on Inspector Ècu; he was bewitched.

  “Unfortunately, Vulture does not receive unannounced visitors,” Emanuelle Cobra informed them, moistening the tip of her tail between her lips in a studied manner. “But I will happily schedule a time for you.”

  Falcon stood motionless, staring at this secretary as though she were one of Magnus’s marvels. Larry Bloodhound sighed deeply—unclear really about what—and went over to the doors to Vulture’s office with determined steps.

  “Stop,” said Cobra. “You can’t—”

  But Bloodhound’s paw was already on the handle. Cobra crawled away from the desk, Ècu followed the superintendent, and thus all three of them were standing at the door to Vulture’s office when Bloodhound opened it.

  The sight was macabre.

  Behind an oversized desk, in a chair high enough to resemble a throne, sat Oswald Vulture, straight-backed. He was wearing a dark jacket with narrow white stripes, white shirt, and a wide, red silk tie. His wings were resting against the desk pad as if he were waiting for someone to set out food for him.

  But where Oswald Vulture’s head had been, only a few tufts of cotton were sticking up.

  1.2

  Emanuelle Cobra screamed.

  A scream of terror and surprise. Then she turned around on the tip of her tail and fell into Falcon Ècu’s wings. Impulsively he closed them around her.

  “Shit your pants,” Bloodhound growled to himself. “Shit your pants.”

  This was an expression of surprise.

  The superintendent suddenly forgot the seductive cobra and the imposing office. His professional role absorbed him, experience took over, and he stepped heavily onto the dark blue wall-to-wall carpet. First impressions were important. He sniffed the room. He held his breath and observed the calm surrounding him. The lack of movement in the oversized office. The old-fashioned solemnity of the furnishings. Heavy curtain arrangements from floor to ceiling, two suits of armor between the windows, the crystal chandelier that seemed to sway freely from the double-high ceiling. The aroma of flowers and cleanser that concealed the hint of cigar smoke. The faint murmur of the air-conditioning.

  Slowly Bloodhound approached the desk where the headless vulture was sitting.

  “Are you calling?” he said to Falcon without turning around. “We need to cordon off the lobby down there and take all the witness statements up here. Tech Department, call directly to Derek. And forensics from place St.-Fargeau . . . but let’s wait to inform Buck.”

  Jan Buck was the newly appointed captain at the police station on rue de Cadix, a career bureaucrat without experience in police work. He was not the first chief for whom Bloodhound felt deep contempt, and he would not be the last.

  As he continued to survey the scene, it was the neatness that struck him, the overwhelming orderliness of the office.

  “Pedantry, huh?” said the superintendent.

  But Falcon was already on the phone, busy ordering up the personnel that Bloodhound had just asked for.

  “Not even a shitty little booger on the carpet,” Bloodhound mumbled to himself. “Not a speck of dust. If it were possible, you’d think the vulture himself had nicely and neatly cut his own head off . . .”

  From the corner of his eye he saw the falcon move to the other side of the room.

  “Don’t touch a thing,” the superintendent growled. “Not a thing.”

  “Absolutely not, Superintendent,” Falcon replied. “I mean, that is . . . absolutely. I won’t touch anything.”

  But Larry Bloodhound was in deep concentration and ignored the nervous inspector. The cobra had recovered and was back at her desk, sitting, in shock. Now Bloodhound had a few minutes to himself to see the entirety of the crime, try to sense the context. By this afternoon most everything in this elegant office would have been inspected and moved around. Connections and theories, times and motives would soon be established, an endless series of possibilities. It was then that Bloodhound must be able to return to these minutes, to this initial scene, undisturbed by knowledge, to avoid getting lost a
mong the details.

  “Shut your beak now, Falcon,” the superintendent said calmly. “Now we’re just going to look and remember.”

  The office was about three hundred square feet. The desk stood to the left of the window. The headless vulture sat with his back to the view. On the opposite wall was a sofa and a built-in bookcase.

  Nothing suggested that any violence had occurred. Nothing even suggested that there had been a visitor here. A faint scent of cologne, true, but Bloodhound sensed that it was Vulture’s own.

  There was a door on the opposite side. Bloodhound went up to it, placed a handkerchief over the handle, and opened. The door led into a large bathroom with a hand basin and drying cabinet. The toilet was located next to a panorama window with almost the same view as from the reception desk. Bloodhound looked more closely at the window and determined that it could not be opened. Those were the building standards—all windows above the fortieth floor were permanently closed.

  Larry Bloodhound stepped back into the office. In other words, there was only one way in to Vulture. The murderer must have come in through the door from the secretary’s office, and he must have gone out through the same door.

  Inspector Ècu was standing less than a yard from the desk, staring at the dead stuffed animal on the chair. It was the first time he had seen a headless animal, and he could not tear his gaze away from it. Not at all the loose-limbed piece of cloth he had expected. On the contrary, it was easy to imagine this vulture alive. Perhaps that was due to the headless vulture’s sitting position, so upright and resolute.

  “Don’t touch a thing,” Bloodhound reminded.

  The superintendent went over to Vulture. The scent of cologne got stronger here; Bloodhound had been right when he assumed the aroma came from the victim.

  “Forgive me for saying this,” said Falcon, “but doesn’t he look alive?”

  It was as if Vulture were still sitting there, working, but without a head. Bloodhound grunted in agreement. The superintendent tried to imagine himself in the chair, sitting and working as Vulture must have been. Where would the center of gravity be, how would the shoulders be placed in relation to the trunk?

  Had the murder been committed somewhere else? With some effort Bloodhound got his large body down on all fours and inspected the victim’s expensive black shoes. There were no signs of dragging, neither on the carpet nor on the shoes. And if someone had carried the body and tried to re-create a natural sitting position, how would that look? Not like this, the superintendent felt sure.

  There were shaky letters written on the paper lying in front of Oswald Vulture on the desk pad. Bloodhound leaned over and read. A “C,” an “M,” and the word “ROD.” The only way this could be interpreted was that the victim himself had written it. The pen that had presumably been used was still lying on the paper.

  Was this a message, an attempt to expose the murderer? Or was it only chance, something Vulture was working on when he unexpectedly had his head removed?

  Other than this piece of paper the desk was unnaturally tidy, Bloodhound thought. Pictures of the wife and son stood in two beautiful silver frames; there was something about the arrangement that bothered the superintendent, but he could not decide what it was. The computer sat to the left, a large screen on a futuristically designed stand, and alongside, to the right of the keyboard, a small laptop computer. Penholder and desk pad, but no plastic sleeves or folders with papers. Bloodhound did not open the drawers; better to let the animals from tech take care of that.

  The cut itself, the decapitation, Bloodhound hardly gave a glance to. There were experts at forensics that could write a book based on this cut.

  Voices were heard out in reception, and both Falcon and Bloodhound gave a start.

  “Go out and meet them,” the superintendent ordered.

  Without a word Inspector Ècu took off, and the superintendent went slowly back toward the sofa. The bookcase was filled with books. On a wider shelf in line with the back of the couch were decorative objects. Glass sculptures that Bloodhound recognized, a few small goblets, a globe that seemed to be upside down: Mollisan Town below and the forest on the globe’s northern half.

  The lowest part of the bookcase consisted of closed cabinets. With some experience in similar offices, Bloodhound doubted whether there was anything in those cabinets. That, too, the Tech Department could find out. The superintendent could see for himself that the cushions on the couch and armchair indicated that someone had actually sat there today.

  Then the room was full of animals.

  The head of the Forensics Department at place St.-Fargeau, Theodore Tapir, came sauntering in along with his team.

  “Larry!” he called happily. “None of yours are here? Where’s Derek?”

  Falcon appeared in the doorway.

  “Derek and tech will be here in a few minutes,” he reported. “And the building’s cordoned off down by the elevators.”

  Derek Hare always arrived last at the crime scene. He was responsible for the Technical Department at rue de Cadix, and a test of wills had been going on between him and Tapir for many years. Sometimes it felt playful, other times the opposite.

  “Shut up now, you long-nosed moth nest,” Bloodhound growled amiably at the forensic doctor, “and be a little helpful instead.”

  “I know what you intend to say,” said Tapir. “Because you always say the same thing.”

  “Animal of science and mind reader at the same time,” the superintendent called out. “Theodore, you never cease to amaze me.”

  “You want an approximate point in time to work with, don’t you, Larry?” said Tapir. “You want me to say when this vulture lost his head before I’ve had time to find that out. And I’m going to say that you’ll have to wait, that I have to do my job. And you’re going to nag. And finally I’ll give you an approximate time because I’ll be tired of your nagging. I’ve gotten too old to argue with you.”

  “You’ve gotten old,” Bloodhound growled, “exactly like me. But we do get a little wiser with the years, don’t we? Ècu, let’s turn this crime scene over to the pros.”

  And with that the superintendent left the room. Falcon followed closely behind him.

  1.3

  Superintendent Larry Bloodhound stopped at a Springergaast convenience store on the way out to Le Vezinot and bought a chocolate bar. It was a new kind, called Mammoth, because it was so large; dark chocolate around honey-rolled almonds and small bits of marshmallow. The fog was on its way into Mollisan Town. Bloodhound saw white veils forming over the clear blue horizon, and he leaned against the car and unwrapped the colorful paper. The aroma of chocolate filled his nose. The week before, he had finished a diet based on avoiding carbohydrates. For ten days he had followed—to the extent that it was reasonable at least—a carefully designed diet program that guaranteed weight loss of more than twenty pounds. Bloodhound didn’t own a scale—he wasn’t a masochist—but nonetheless he felt satisfied with the results. There was reason to celebrate a little today. With a Mammoth, to start with.

  The superintendent had left Falcon Ècu on Boulevard de la Villette and was on his way out to Oswald Vulture’s newly made widow. Talking with family members was something he had never learned to handle. He was not a savage. His manner was perhaps on the coarse side and he drooled a good deal when he was eating, but deep down he was a sensitive soul. The growling surface was only a façade, you might say. Meeting families crushed by sorrow, unexpectedly met by brutal violence, was an ordeal. And then, in their private moment of anxiety and emptiness, to get them to talk, to contribute something to the police investigation, was a balancing act that Bloodhound seldom managed very well.

  Saliva mixed with chocolate was about to run down the corner of his mouth, and he dried it off with the sleeve of his jacket. The sleeve, he discovered, reeked of sausage, and he suddenly longed for a bratwurst. He ate up the last piece of chocolate and jumped into the car.

  It was hardly surprising that the
Vulture family lived in Le Vezinot. The prosperous western suburb, right at the edge of Tourquai, was the obvious choice for stuffed animals who wanted to show off their recently acquired fortunes. With every new generation of merchants and entrepreneurs, the houses grew larger and more elaborate. They were torn down and rebuilt, torn down and rebuilt, and nowadays nothing but short driveways remained of the yards behind the dense hedges that prevented animals from peeking in from the street.

  Vulture and his wife lived in a villa that imitated a Tourquaian temple from the fifteenth century. Towers and pinnacles, narrow windows that resembled arrow slits in a fortress, and a kind of symbolic moat over which the superintendent passed on an arched stone bridge. It was not just tasteless, it was incomprehensible as well.

  Bloodhound rang the doorbell, and the sound of a massive church bell was heard from inside the house. It took a minute or two before a reindeer dressed in livery opened and asked what he wanted.

  “I’m here to see . . . uh . . . the widow,” Bloodhound growled. “I believe that an Emanuelle Cobra called to let you know?”

  For a moment the reindeer appeared to faint, but then he opened the door. He led the superintendent through a bare hallway that smelled of stone and dampness. At the end of the hall they turned off to the right, entering a library where a fire was crackling in an open fireplace, even though it was the middle of the day. The superintendent sat down at a respectful distance from the dangerous sparks of the fire.

  “Mrs. Flamingo will join you shortly,” the reindeer said and left.

  It took almost half an hour before the newly widowed bird condescended to appear.

  During that time, Bloodhound was able to determine that none of the thousands of books on the lovely oak shelves had ever been opened, only the finest sorts of alcohol were in the bar cabinet (and all were nearly empty), and one of the five bridge trays he found in the drawer in the coffee table was set up so that the home pair would almost certainly make five diamonds or three no trumps. He didn’t know which made him most depressed.