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Guillaume CapitanPortrait of a Killing
A true story of power, art and crime in France
Chapter 6: I'm Going to Be Rich!
At the end of October 1985, Madame Frédérique Noyer d'Orcinas, a round-faced, stocky retired lawyer in her late sixties with a quietly ironic manner, was worried about her friend Suzanne de Canson. But that was normal -- she had been worried about Madame de Canson for one reason or another almost from the day they met.
That was in 1969, when Madame de Canson -- the two women, though close friends, always addressed each other the proper way -- came to her office in Nice, the resort city on the Côte d'Azur, looking for a lawyer to file a claim against a storage company that had allowed some of her pictures to be damaged in a flood. D'Orcinas liked her right away. Nearly 60 years old, despite her famous name and wealthy upbringing, de Canson lived and dressed simply. Every day she walked ten miles, up the coast toward Monaco and back--a real adventure, in d'Orcinas's opinion. Often she hung out with the homeless clochards in the plazas of Nice, listening to their stories, giving them what little change she had, and defending them from the cops in her best high-born manner.
She was a little bit of a bum herself. She owned fabulous pictures -- and could talk about painters and pictures in precise, assured, fascinating detail--yet was always broke. Besides d'Orcinas, her best friend on the Côte d'Azur was her pawnbroker, Madeleine Guerrier, who regularly rolled over loans on her antique furniture to give her a sort of income. For d'Orcinas, a conventional, self-described "little noble," Madame de Canson was an original.
Like most people who knew them both, d'Orcinas disliked Madame de Canson's companion, Laurence Paul -- an arrogant and unpleasant woman, much older than de Canson, garishly made up and coiffed. D'Orcinas was struck by Laurence Paul's avarice, and by her power over de Canson; there were times when she seemed almost to hypnotize the heiress. They had been together for decades.
When the biggest picture dealer in Nice -- at Paul's urging--came to look at de Canson's paintings, and offered $20,000 for her Murillo, she was outraged. "They're all crooks!" she said. But the real reason she refused, thought d'Orcinas, was that her pictures were the last relics of her father.
The late Baronet Jacques Barou de la Lombardière de Canson plainly obsessed his daughter; she constantly talked about the paintings he traded and collected, his many friends, his hatred of Reds and love of monarchs, his powerful, gregarious personality. She even talked to him, through her pendulum--a psychic device that dates back to the Middle Ages. She would swing a gold watch he'd given her on its chain, and ask it questions, and wait to see which way it swung. De Canson said the talisman always told her no whenever she wanted to sell a picture.
D'Orcinas was one of the few people Madame de Canson let in on the humiliating secret, when Laurence Paul ran away to Switzerland in 1973, taking some of her pictures along. De Canson never called her remaining family, an older sister -- whom, she told d'Orcinas, had married a fool, an act beyond pardon. Nor did she ask d'Orcinas to handle the case.
Instead she sought out the lawyer who had negotiated Laurence Paul's divorce, decades ago -- a man named Robert Boissonnet, in Toulon. Probably, thought d'Orcinas, de Canson hoped he could bring her lover back to her.
Soon de Canson seemed infatuated with him--as if he were a substitute father, thought d'Orcinas. Her father had always liked lawyers, and moreover, de Canson confided, Boissonnet was linked to her by blood. His great-great-grandfather had married a close relation of the Montgolfier papermaking dynasty, which the de Cansons had married into and absorbed in the 19th century.
D'Orcinas knew the Boissonnets as a regional dynasty, dominating the legal profession of the Var county, which included Toulon. She considered them typical provincial notables, arrogant and status-hungry. And they seemed grotesquely proud of the Baroness de Canson, whom they paraded at their yacht parties.
But D'Orcinas had to admit that Boissonnet brilliantly fought her friend's case. He filed injunctions that denied Paul the power to sell the pictures she'd smuggled into Switzerland, and seized the ones still on French territory, including the best of them all, the Murillo. Destitute, Paul died in the city hospital of Sion, Switzerland in 1980. Madame de Canson, who'd never stopped loving her, darkly hinted that she'd been murdered. She borrowed money from her friends to keep her dead lover's body on ice for a year.
Even in death, Laurence Paul betrayed her, by leaving a will in which two of de Canson's pictures went to the town of Sion. The Swiss immediately filed suit, asserting their right to keep the paintings. Unlike Laurence Paul, Sion had ample means to press its claims, and the suit turned into a trench war.
One day in 1983, de Canson asked if she could use d'Orcinas's house in Nice as her address. "My passport has expired," explained de Canson, "and I need a legal domicile to get another one." But d'Orcinas refused. She knew that de Canson and Boissonnet were trying to sell some of her pictures abroad, and she was afraid that if they were caught breaking the law, she might find herself in trouble too.
Madame de Canson was furious. But one day she boasted that Boissonnet had solved her problem. One of his other clients, Madame Pesnel, had lent her an apartment.
"But who is this Pesnel?" d'Orcinas asked. "What's her profession--who are her people?"
Madame de Canson liked her secrets, and she revealed little. "She says she's a painter," said de Canson. "But it's minor stuff, nothing at all."
Maybe, thought d'Orcinas, Pesnel was Boissonnet's mistress. By putting de Canson into Pesnel's apartment, Boissonnet could tell his wife he was calling on his aged client whenever he saw his lover.
But she didn't broach the idea to Madame de Canson. You couldn't mention Boissonnet to her, unless it was to compliment him.
D'Orcinas, who in retirement kept her lawyerly precision, never forgot the day she began to distrust Boissonnet. On June 6, 1985, de Canson telephoned her from Pesnel's apartment in Toulon. "I'm very unhappy," she said. "I have no money. I can't stay here! Please, come and get me."
"Of course," said d'Orcinas immediately, "just give me the address." She wrote it down, phoned a friend who had a car, and they set out on the long, hot drive to Toulon -- an hour on the freeway, and another hour on a narrow two-lane road, where trucks loaded with produce threatened to crowd you into steep ditches. Finally they cruised into the Old City of Toulon, toward the address de Canson had provided.
D'Orcinas had no way of knowing it was the wrong one. But she knew the Old City: It was famous up and down the Côte d'Azur under the name "Little Chicago," a tribute to its murderous gangs. The only sector of the port that survived an Allied bombing in November 1943, it clung beside the treeless, broiling concrete desert of the rebuilt port like a wart -- tiny streets covered in thick dust, where old whores and animally alert young white and Arab men shared the narrow, shadowed sidewalks, beside sailor bars carrying names like Le Saigon -- a last, obscene vestige of France's prewar colonial empire.
"It isn't possible," thought d'Orcinas, staring out the window, "no one could live here." She arrived at the address de Canson had given her, and found a filthy, scarred building, the letterboxes rusted past legibility. A butcher shop occupied the ground floor. Frightened by the omen of bloody meat, d'Orcinas hurried back to the car. "Let's go to Boissonnet's office," she said.
Miraculously, she saw Madame de Canson, standing on a corner of a chestnut-shaded avenue near Boissonnet's address. But as de Canson approached the car, d'Orcinas withstood another dreadful shock. Her friend was practically walking dead -- dressed like a bag lady in the last stages of decline, with one of her eye sockets an enormous blue pouch, swollen shut with pus. "I must see Boissonnet," de Canson insisted, "I must."
D'Orcinas persuaded her to sit in a café for a moment and eat something, and then come to Nice. There, over de Canson's objection, d'Orcinas called a doctor. "She's got to see a specialist," he said, after examining the infected eye. "Forget it," said d'Orcinas, "she'll never go." De Canson had trusted only in homeopathy since a childhood illness. The doctor settled for cleaning her eye, and left a prescription for antibiotics.
D'Orcinas's phone rang: it was Pesnel. De Canson refused to take the call, leaving d'Orcinas to speak seriously with someone she had never been properly introduced to. Pesnel made an obvious effort to seem well-bred, d'Orcinas noticed, but she overdid it; too many nice expressions, laid on like rancid butter. It could not be easy for Madame de Canson, whose manners were very fine, to live with this woman, thought d'Orcinas. And look at the state Pesnel left her in, neglected to the point of going blind.
D'Orcinas felt a positive rage toward Boissonnet. It was his duty, as a lawyer and a man, to watch out for de Canson, his client and friend. Pesnel had the excuse of her class, or lack of it. (Just what in God's name was Boissonnet doing with her? d'Orcinas wondered. For a man of his class, a woman like this wasn't even mistress material.) But not Boissonnet.
The next day Boissonnet himself phoned d'Orcinas's house, and talked with de Canson. There was a client who wanted to look at one of her pictures, he said. She must return to Toulon immediately.
D'Orcinas stood by, watching her friend. It seemed to her that as Boissonnet spoke, in a relentless, quiet monotone, de Canson took on a stupid, sheeplike expression, and her spine curved into a servile posture. D'Orcinas had seen that expression before, when Laurence Paul launched one of her diatribes.
De Canson hung up the phone and said, "I've got to go back to Toulon, right away."
There is simply no limit to her trust in that man, thought d'Orcinas.
Worse yet, before she left, de Canson insisted on writing out a strange letter: I charge Madame d'Orcinas... to take care of me, and to look for me if she doesn't hear from me.
"What's this for?" demanded d'Orcinas. "What's going to happen?"
But Madame de Canson refused to say, and then she was gone.
On October 23, 1985, when d'Orcinas opened her morning newspaper, the Nice-Matin, her professional interest was caught by a headline: Did a Tenor of the Bar give a 'Scissor Cut' to the Document that Worried His Client?
Her intrigue gave way to startlement as she read:
The atmosphere was heavy and grim yesterday inthe [courtroom] of Toulon, where for six hours
a case of attempted fraud was judged. A tense
and sad mood, for the principal defendant was
none other than one of the members of that
great judicial family of the county seat...
Robert Boissonnet.
The headline I was shocked! cut the story midway down its first column, where it recounted a complicated tale. In 1976, a Toulon woman, Madame Nicolai, had lent $5000 to her neighbor, who gave her an IOU. Over the next three years, part of the loan was repaid, and the payments were recorded at the bottom of the IOU. Then, in 1979, according to Nicolai, her neighbor took the IOU on a pretext, and wrote a phony receipt for the balance of the debt on it." So Madame Nicolai went to a lawyer, Boissonnet, reported Nice-Matin. How, she asked him, could she prove the repaid IOU was a fake? No one agreed on what happened next:
Boissonnet vehemently denies the accusations ofMme. Nicolai, who declares: "He took out his
scissors in my presence, and in front of his
secretary he cut the paper in two. Me, I was
shocked, but he said: 'Don't worry about it.'"
Then, she claimed, he took the top piece of the sheet, and photocopied it onto another, clean sheet of paper -- to make a facsimile of the IOU, minus the notations that undercut his client's case.
When Nicolai's lawsuit came to trial -- by then, Boissonnet had dropped the case -- the presiding judge noticed signs of tampering in the photocopied IOU, and asked the Toulon prosecutor's office to investigate. By some magic, Madame Nicolai subsequently produced the missing half of the original IOU. Boissonnet protested that he'd never seen it before; his former client was simply blaming him for her own acts. Madame Nicolai countered that Boissonnet gave it back to her after he abandoned her case, and she felt no further obligation to protect him at her own expense.
"Why would my client do this?" Boissonnet's lawyer asked the court. "He didn't know Madame Nicolai, he owed her nothing, and he had nothing to gain from this case." Who could believe he'd risk "his honor and his future," said the lawyer, on a perverse whim?
The prosecutor replied that for Boissonnet, it hadn't seemed like a risk: "He thought no one could suspect him, and that he was absolutely invulnerable."
The prosecution demanded a suspended prison sentence of a year for Boissonnet, plus a heavy fine, read d'Orcinas. But the real punishment, she knew, was that a conviction would end Boissonnet's career.
She suddenly desired desperately to know what had become of de Canson. She hurried to the telephone, and dialed Boissonnet's office. A secretary said he was out. D'Orcinas found his home number, and called it.
His wife answered, and d'Orcinas suddenly felt abashed. She couldn't just tell this woman that she suspected her husband of -- well, of what? That if he could falsify evidence, he could cheat Madame de Canson? That would be impardonably brutal.
It was quickly apparent that Madame Boissonnet didn't like de Canson, who at one point had been her house guest. "Of course, Madame de Canson couldn't stay with us," she said, hinting at awful incidents.
"Very well," d'Orcinas replied, "do you know this Madame Pesnel?"
"Oh, she's a very fine person," said Madame Boissonnet immediately.
How on earth does she know? wondered d'Orcinas. Women who lived on the heights of Toulon didn't usually shower compliments on women from Little Chicago.
Madame Boissonnet changed the subject: Was d'Orcinas related to the family of the same name in the Drome country? "How interesting!" exclaimed the lawyer’s wife. "I have family in the Drome, too! My daughter lives there!"
Truly, how interesting, thought d'Orcinas.
"You know, we're also relatives of Madame de Canson," Madame Boissonnet boasted.
"You're related to Madame de Canson? That surprises me," said d'Orcinas, though de Canson had mentioned the fact to her. "Or rather, that doesn't surprise me at all, because she has three thousandcousins."She'd had it with this silly woman. "Listen, Madame," she said, "I absolutely need to get news of Madame de Canson. It's vital that I hear about her, from you or your husband. If not, I'll take the necessary steps."
She hung up the phone, exhausted. She had no idea what those steps might be. And as the days went by, she began to suspect her bluff had been called. Where, she wondered over and over, was Madame de Canson?
Finally, on December 9 -- nearly a month after the newspapers reported that Robert Boissonnet had been found guilty, and given a suspended sentence, and was appealing -- Suzanne de Canson telephoned her friend d'Orcinas. "I'm at Boissonnet's," she said. “The Murillo has been sold. I'm going to be rich! I'll have the money in a week, and then I'll come to see you."
D'Orcinas was speechless. The Murillo had been sold. She'd never thought it possible. Maybe now de Canson would realize her favorite fantasy -- to move to America, and buy herself a little ranch somewhere, and surround herself with animals and an organic garden. Perhaps, thought d'Orcinas, she'd been wrong about Boissonnet.
"I was sick," de Canson explained, "but I'm cured now."
It sounded to d'Orcinas as though her friend were having a heart attack. She seemed jammed, blocked, unable to find her words.
Perhaps de Canson sensed her concern. "Oh, I was so sick, so sick," she said. "But I'm going to visit you soon."
"Madame de Canson, I'm happy that you called," said d'Orcinas. "Would you like me to come get you?"
"No, no," said de Canson quickly. "It's not worth your trouble."
Still hiding herself away, dividing her life into an infinity of closed, secret compartments.
They said goodbye, and d'Orcinas again wrote down the date of the call. She felt sadly and weirdly like a doctor, recording the progress of an illness on a patient's chart.At Christmas, d'Orcinas phoned the Boissonnet home again, and left a message for de Canson with the understandably curt lady of the house. De Canson never replied. After the holidays, d'Orcinas called Robert Boissonnet at his office. The conversation was cold but polite, as was normal between two well-bred people who detested each other.
"Madame de Canson was sick," said Boissonnet, "but I understand that her health has since improved."
"What happened to her lawsuit in Switzerland?" asked d'Orcinas.
"The procedure has ended," said Boissonnet in his calm monotone. "Madame de Canson won."
"I would like to hear from her," said d'Orcinas.
"I will inform her of your call, of course," said Boissonnet.But he did not offer de Canson's phone number or whereabouts to her. It could be argued that he had no business giving them out. It might also be argued -- and d'Orcinas certainly felt so--that to deny an old friend of de Canson's such information was in bad taste.
Madame de Canson's other close friend, Madeleine Guerrier, likewise called Boissonnet and asked about her. Boissonnet cut her off: "She's crazy!" he shouted.
De Canson's friends reluctantly agreed that they could only wait for her to call again, as she always did.
Brigitte Tonelli was 26 years old, a little blonde with a sweet and most oddly childish voice, especially considering the sorrows she saw and heard every day. In the fall of 1986 she was two years into her career, armed with a college diploma and a certificate of three years' study with the Red Cross, as a social worker for the town of La Garde -- a suburb of Toulon, on a plain looking north toward a ring of purple-gray mountains. It was a highly-trained job paying about $1000 monthly, but she'd wanted to help people, and there were an awful lot to help.
The old people said they hadn't seen so much sheer misery since the Great Depression. In the past five years, unemployment in France had grown by nearly half, and the region around Toulon was especially hard hit, despite a construction boom that was making speculators rich. Often there were 30 new clients waiting for Tonelli and her one colleague in their office at the City Hall during their twice-weekly walk-in hours, not counting the people who telephoned or wrote letters begging for visits. The stories were terribly alike: alcoholism, intimate violence, despair. But Tonelli still treated every case like it was distinct and important, still felt pain for her clients. She was either very strong, or very naive.
On September 16, 1986, she was ordered to investigate a complaint listed in the bureau's Permanent Register -- a record of incoming and outgoing phone calls, visits, and follow-ups by the staff. An anonymous caller had left the tip sometime over the summer vacations. It might have been sitting there for weeks, waiting for someone to deal with it.
Tonelli read: "A lady, Madame Chappuis, is sequestered in the home of Madame Pesnel, [on the] Boulevard Saint-Genevieve."
If this tip were true, she was looking at an abomination. Sequestration means forcibly depriving someone of liberty -- say, by chaining him to a wall, as happened to the Baron Empain during a notorious kidnapping in the 1970s. His torture had led to a change in the Penal Code: Henceforth, sequestration, like voluntary homicide, was punishable by life in prison.
Tonelli immediately left the bureau and drove out to the Boulevard Sainte-Genevieve, a secluded, twisting little road, cutting through pine groves and over lavender-fringed gullies, a few hundred yards inland from the sea. Brand new two-story houses lined both sides of the street, each of them worth at least a few hundred thousand dollars. She went up and down the road, but the names Pesnel and Chappuis appeared nowhere. Finally she parked her car and knocked on a couple of doors, but the people she found at home hadn't heard those names, either.
Tonelli thought: This is a homeowners' neighborhood, there might be a property record. She returned to her office and phoned the cadaster's office. They had no trace of a Pesnel or a Chappuis on the street. Neither did the tax service, nor the voter registration office, nor the local schools.
The calls ate up time -- even not counting busy signals, and wrong numbers, and times no one answered, and the times in between when someone called her, or walked into the office needing help. Days began to go by. Finally she tried the closest name she could find in the phone book, though the listing was in another town -- Andrée Pesnel.
"Good day, Madame," said Tonelli to the woman who picked up the phone, "I'm with the Bureau of Social Aid, can you tell me if by chance you're related to a Madame Pesnel on the Boulevard Saint-Genevieve?"
"No, I am not," firmly said Andrée Pesnel.
Tonelli persisted: "And you have no relatives in the region?"
"I have a daughter and two grandchildren."
Careful, thought Tonelli. "Do the children go to school?" she asked in her most helpful tone. "Because we have a program of aid to schoolchildren, we give kids pocket money for the snack bar, maybe they're eligible."
No way was she going to say what she was really calling about. If a sequestration was taking place, and this woman was privy to it, any trace of the crime might be cleaned up before Tonelli could do anything about it, and an old lady would stay sequestered. Tonelli hadn't yet seen anything like that herself, but she'd heard of it. She wasn't as naive as she might seem.
"Certainly they do," said Andrée Pesnel, and named the schools they attended in Toulon.
"Where might I contact your daughter?"
"I don't know," said Andrée Pesnel.
Tonelli had barely hung up the phone before it rang, and she found herself talking to the woman she was looking for.
"Are you the one who called my mother?" said Joelle Pesnel.
"Yes, I am," said Tonelli.
"What's it about?" She sounded very angry.
"I'll be glad to discuss it with you," said Tonelli. "Can we arrange a meeting at your house?"
"I don't have anything to discuss," said Pesnel.
"Perhaps we do. Where do you live?"
"That's none of your business," said Pesnel.
"Is there an old lady living in your house?"
"Who told you that?"
"I heard it, that's all," said Tonelli.
"People tell lies about each other, it's disgusting! It's slanderous!" shouted Pesnel.
It went on for a moment, ugly and hot, before Pesnel hung up. This, thought Tonelli, far surpassed even the considerable hostility and suspicion the French typically show toward emissaries of the State. Something seemed wrong.
She called one of the schools Andrée Pesnel had mentioned, where a social assistant like herself worked full-time. "Can you find me a boy named Pesnel?" Tonelli asked her colleague.
"Sure," said the colleague.
But she never called back.
Tonelli telephoned the other school, and asked for the principal. "I'm looking for a boy named Pesnel," she said. She didn't say why, because she didn't have the right to say his mother was suspected of a crime.
"Yes, we have a boy here of that name," the principal replied.
"What does his mother do?" she asked.
"I'm not sure," said the principal. "She could be a professional of some kind, maybe an artist."
"Do you know where they live?" asked Tonelli.
"I can't give you that information."
"Do you know where she works?" she insisted.
"I can't tell you that, either."
Then who could? she wondered.
She dialled the post office in La Garde.
"There's no Pesnel or Chappuis on that street," the mail carrier told her.
"Well, do any of the houses have an old lady in them?" she asked desperately.
"I've never seen one," said the carrier.
She'd finally run out of leads; there was no solid information to show a magistrate, no grounds for action, not even an address. She wrote no report, but she told her colleague to be alert for any information about an old lady named Chappuis, who might be sequestered by a certain Madame Pesnel. Tonelli would never forgive herself if what she'd been looking for were really there to be found, and nothing were done about it.
On the same morning Tonelli began her investigation, Doctor Robert Colzi of Toulon, a short, middle-aged, pear-shaped general practitioner whose pencil mustache gave him a look out of the 1950's, was awakened by a phone call from his longtime client, Joelle Pesnel. Her aunt, whom he had attended several times in the past year, had died that night. "The undertakers are already here," said Pesnel. "Can you please come out, and give them a death certificate?"
He wasn't surprised by the news. Since January, the old woman had been rapidly declining, mentally and physically. She had lost weight, grown incontinent, and acted aggressive, almost violent, when he tried to examine her. Once he'd practically had to hold her down to check her vital signs. He'd prescribed some medication to help her circulation -- Pesnel asked for a prescription for herself, too, saying that if her aunt had bad circulation, she'd get it too -- and finally, that she be hospitalized. He'd seen her for the last time on July 30, just before he went on vacation, and it was clear then that age and fatigue were overcoming her.
He drove to the villa on the Boulevard Saint-Genevieve, where he found the body of Pesnel's aunt in a ground-floor chamber, about three paces square, that seemed freshly cleaned and aired. The undertaker's men were waiting for him to finish, but he insisted that everyone leave him alone with the dead woman.
He discovered ugly blue patches on both the cadaver's legs. When he studied them closely, however, he was certain that they weren't bruises, but cyanosis, discoloration caused by inadequate circulation. That was consistent with the symptoms he'd seen in her previously. The heels bore open sores, but there was no trace of a serious, neglected infection. The death had been natural.
He signed the certificate. Until then, he had never known the name of Pesnel's aunt: Suzanne Barou de la Lombardière de Canson.
The funeral was held two days later. The body was displayed in its coffin. A young priest spoke warmly of Suzanne de Canson, a noble and generous woman, an artist in her soul, who had known the joys of travelling, and whose final voyage had led her to the home of Joelle Pesnel, her niece, who welcomed and cared for her as relatives should.
Among those who attended was Robert Boissonnet. One of the other guests, a cousin and sometime business partner of Pesnel's named Pierre Santini, was impressed to see such an important man there -- once he learned who he was. At first, seeing Boissonnet all dressed in black, with his thick, severe-looking dark eyebrows, stern wide mouth and cold eyes, Santini mistook him for the undertaker.
You have just finished Part One of Portrait of Killing -- a book that French reviewers compared to Balzac, and that Jerome Charyn calls "a model of the nonfiction novel". If you want to know more, get in touch.
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