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turning point in my career. I’m at a turning point in my marriage. Théophile is just a big fat lump who’s more interested in his wine tastings and his cave than anything going on with me. And so I’ve found a friend. We do things that drain out my tension and leave me fit and productive. It’s my way of forging on. Surely you can understand that.”
    Capucine stared at her, mute.
    â€œLook,” Cécile said. “This is nothing. It’s like smoking a cigarette or having a drink, nothing more. Don’t try to turn it into a big deal. I have to get back to the office. We’ll talk soon and I’ll fill you in on all the fun details.”
    Cécile stood up, making the classic writing in the air sign of requesting the check, except that this time it meant that it was to be added to her running tab, and dashed out of the restaurant.
    Capucine didn’t see it at all. She wasn’t revolted. She was just thunderstruck. When her own life became impossible, she automatically turned to Alexandre. And sleeping with a woman! She saw herself as a feminist. Of course she did. Hadn’t she studied all the greats: Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray? Hadn’t she put herself to sleep the night before reading Elisabeth Badinter’s Le Con-flit? But there was a vast difference between an intellectual exercise and the necessity of having a man as the mainstay to your life. Anything other than that was as incomprehensible as viewing tripe as a great delicacy. Wasn’t it?
    Capucine sat, staring, mesmerized by the woman untiringly slicing smoked salmon, until with a jerk she realized she was far more than her usual fifteen minutes late for her appointment with the juge d’instruction. It wasn’t really important, she told herself, but still, she hated being rude to anyone.

CHAPTER 5
    A s her brand-new Renault Twingo purred its way across Paris, Capucine thought of the president’s portrait defaced by poisoned blowgun darts. She herself was far from a fan of the man. She despised his philistinism—he had publicly announced that reading Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves was a waste of time—his indifference to gastronomy—an endomorphic, fanatic runner, he took no pleasure at all in restaurants—and, most of all, his trophy wife—a former model whose naked breasts had adorned the popular press for months after their wedding until everyone got tired of the little things.
    But one thing about the president pleased her enormously: his recent decision to phase out the function of juge d’instruction as part of his overhaul of the French judicial system, which he had labeled archaic and no longer viable in modern society.
    From the police’s point of view, the juges d’instruction were a bane. Not only were they nominally in charge of most investigations, they had a monopoly of control over surveillances, wiretapping, and arrests. It was true that most of the juges had the good sense to recognize their real utility was to ensure that the police assembled all the legal niceties that would guarantee the public prosecutor a conviction, but a small handful seemed to genuinely believe they were running the show.
    For Capucine, the most egregious of the latter group was Juge d’Instruction August-Marie Parmentier de La Martinière, whose ambition was as boundless as his inhumanity. The police truism was that the only good juges were the ones who thought like flics; the bad ones thought like judges. Martinière thought only of himself.
    Capucine trotted a little breathlessly into Martinière’s office and apologized profusely for her lateness. His face black with rage, he scowled at his watch and pointed a long bony index finger at a chair, indicating she should sit. Junior in the juges’ hierarchy, Martinière had been allocated only a closet-sized office. From her last visit Capucine remembered