Madonna and Corpse
Jefferson Bass
Chapter 1
Descartes
The Petit Palais Museum
Avignon, France
“Turn off that damned alarm!” René Descartes—Inspector René Descartes, of the French National Police—waved his arm in a sweeping arc of annoyance that encompassed not just the bored police officers and the nervous museum staffers, but also the museum itself, its collection of ancient paintings, and possibly even their long-dead creators, as if the artists themselves might bear some of the blame for rousting him from sleep at one in the morning.
“We’re working on it,” croaked the museum’s director, a withered crone named Madame Clergue. Christ, how old is she? wondered Descartes, jotting her name in a pocket-sized notepad that he’d fished from inside his jacket. She probably bought these pictures from the guys who painted them. Beneath her hastily donned raincoat, Mme. Clergue appeared to be wearing only a thin cotton nightgown. Its embroidered collar was unraveling, sending tendrils of thread curling upward toward her wispy white hair.
Unlike Mme. Clergue, Descartes was fully decked out in his de facto professional uniform—dress pants, dress shirt, jacket and tie—not because he’d swiftly suited up when the dispatcher awoke him, but because he’d fallen asleep on the couch at eleven, still wearing the rumpled outfit he’d donned fifteen hours before. Somehow this had become his nightly ritual of late: nursing a few beers or a bottle of wine in front of the television until the news or soccer highlights lulled him to sleep. As a result, his dreams often hitched themselves to the sirens and shrieks emanating from the television, creating the odd sensation that he’d not actually fallen asleep, but had simply switched to a channel specializing in French surrealism. As the museum’s alarm continued to jangle mercilessly, Descartes wondered if this, too, might simply be another of those dreams, conjured up to explain a particularly clamorous sound track.
Just as he could bear no more, the alarm ceased. Its clang echoed for several seconds in the stone corridors and stairwells of the vast structure. In the acoustic void left behind, the silence seemed as close and dense as fog until Descartes spoke, dispersing it. “And you’re quite sure it’s not a false alarm, Madame?”
Mme. Clergue nodded vigorously for a woman of her years. “Quite sure. Pascal”—she stretched a clawlike finger toward a uniformed guard hovering in a nearby doorway—“found the door propped open at the service entrance.” At the mention of his name, Pascal, who managed to look as self-important as a key witness yet also as sheepish as a guard who’s been robbed, approached the director and murmured in her ear. She blanched, then said to Descartes, “If you wish to see the security-camera footage of the thief, Pascal has it on the monitor.”
“Sure, let’s take a look.” The inspector followed Pascal and Mme. Clergue through a doorway into a small, windowless room located just off the entry hall. Arrayed above a low, desklike counter that lined one wall, an appliance-store-worth of small televisions showed video feeds from a fleet of cameras. Three of the cameras monitored exterior doorways—the museum’s main entrance, a large loading-dock door, and an emergency exit—and the others offered wide-angle views of the museum’s galleries. At the center of the cluster, a larger monitor featured a zoomed-in view of the loading-dock door, propped open with a stone block. A man, frozen in midstep, was emerging from the building. Pascal stooped and snaked an arm between Descartes and Mme. Clergue to press a button on the console; on the screen, the door opened wide and the man exited the building.
Descartes leaned in for a closer look. As he did, he inadvertently collided with Mme. Clergue, who was likewise angling for a better view. “Excuse me,” she squawked. It was an accusation, not an apology, and Descartes ignored it.