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at Massip as a leather cutter, and he stayed there until his retirement. Initially, however, he didn’t intend to go into this line of work. We found out that he spent almost two years in a seminary. Then, during the war, he didn’t seem to have a regular job.”
    “How did he get by?”
    “At that point in time, he seemed to live by his wits. Who knows how? One thing is sure: he was still living with his parents. He seems to have been politically active with two collaborationist groups, Fire and the French Popular Party.”
    “What was his involvement?”
    “It appears that he was a kind of grass-roots organizer. He didn’t have anything to do with the leaders of the Vichy government or any other higher-ups. At any rate, I’m not an expert in that area. All I know is that he was some kind of small-time collaborator, fairly unknown. He didn’t suffer much at the end of the war. He spent two months in detention. Then he went to work as an oyster grower for a cousin who had a few oyster farms in the Arcachon Basin. In 1949 he found his job as a leather worker in Bordeaux.”
    “And do you have as much on Émile Chaussagne?” Benjamin asked.
    “More or less. He got around more. He came from a middle-class family in Périgueux. He studied the humanities, Latin and Greek, and then went to law school in Bordeaux. When the war broke out, he was still a student, but he dropped everything to concentrate on journalism at some really trashy fascist-leaning newspapers. After the Liberation, it appears that a group of former Resistance fighters wanted him for something or other. They trailed him. According to our intelligence, he lived here and there: Marrakech, Douala, Pondicherry, and Spain, near Alicante. He didn’t return to France until 1974, just after Georges Pompidou died, and the old stories were being forgotten. Let’s say things worked out for him. He survived on what was left of the family fortune. If I were a novelist, I would say he squandered his inheritance by living parsimoniously. In short, he was starving but was still living like a discreet old gentleman in the Saint Pierre neighborhood.”
    “And both of them lived just a few blocks apart,” Benjamin said. “It would be interesting to know where Armand Jouvenaze lived. He’s buried in Libourne, but he might have spent his whole life in Bordeaux. It’s strange, all the same—this geographical coincidence, the Saint Pierre neighborhood, and the Pétrus. I can’t help but think it’s all connected.”
    “Maybe. Who knows?” Barbaroux said, shrugging.
    “You don’t seem convinced.”
    “I think we should focus on their parallel paths during the occupation.”
    “Indeed, it is rather troubling. You will probably have more clues once you look into the past of this Armand Jouvenaze, who is lying beneath our feet. The Nazi accusation seems especially telling. But why did they break the cross?”
    “How the hell should I know?” the inspector growled. He tossed his wadded-up tissue on the grass.
    “It was just a simple question, Inspector.”
    “I’m sorry, Mr. Cooker. But try putting yourself in my shoes! I spent the entire morning dealing with these guys who were rushed over by the prosecutor’s office. Almost two hours of ranting and arguing with an old criminologist in a three-piece suit, a long-haired dude in charge of profiling serial killers, and a four-eyed psychiatrist who specializes in dangerousness!”
    “Dangerousness. Is that a word?” Benjamin asked, surprised.
    “Yes, so it seems. I checked in the dictionary. Another damned word invented by intellectuals who sit at their desks and never go near a corpse. They call Mommy whenever someone gives them the finger. Words: they never run out of them! Those assholes dish them out while they look down at you because they spent ten years at the Sorbonne. And they blurt them out bombastically: ‘lack of impulse control,’ ‘pathogenesis of aggressive behavior,’ ‘overcompensation