If music be the food of crime

By Marie Hélène Visconti

Isolde, 16, is intern in a symphonic orchestra to improve her culture. On her second work day, the big mess begins ..
A fun crime novel. An inquiry which rambles from Maigret, to Facebook, via the adventurous four, Zola, Rouletabille and Einstein with many twists and turns. Romances not always romantic.
Cultural clashes: Gen Y versus Mozart, gift of the gab versus erudition, Paris versus Province.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marie Hélène Visconti
• Release date: Nov 28, 2012
• ISBN: 9791090392113

Marie Hélène Visconti

I'm very active on Google+, where I post at least daily https://plus.google.com/u/0/106002545837976723927/posts Painter, writer. l love to cook, garden, read, entertain, arts & culture. I live in Paris.

Book preview

If music be the food of crime

Marie Helene Visconti

Copyright Marie-Hélène Visconti

Published at Smashwords

@ Montsouris Communication

ISBN #: 979-10-90392-11-3

To the small man who loved words so much and to the dead princess

If music be the food of love, play on,

Give me excess of it; that surfeiting,

The appetite may sicken, and so die.

(William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night)

Chapter One

A yell. High, powerful. A demented note. A silence. The yell resumes and escalates. Higher and higher... A yell beyond the possible. Beyond the bearable too.

The racket had stopped Isolde in her tracks. She resumed serving an apple juice to Marcel Maurice. They were alone at the bar. Marcel Maurice had left the rehearsal twenty minutes before the pause. The conductor had freed the trumpet players. Marcel had climbed to the musicians' foyer. The second trumpet player was in the accountant's office, challenging a deduction on his pay.

The cry stops, resumes, rises up again.

- Fuck, don't tell me this crap is artistic!

Marcel Maurice was too busy eyeing up the teenager's surprising look and questioning genetics' rules to pay attention to the din coming out of Brigitte Brodin's dressing room. How on earth this moron of a local political potentate and his posh blonde had succeeded in manufacturing such a funny kid. All of a sudden, he noticed something was amiss.

- Shit! It's not normal. She's not singing. She's bawling.

- I don't see much of a difference.

The noise was now no more human. Marcel Maurice remarked:

- Oh Shit, something must be done, she can't be left like that!

They looked at each other, speechless. None of them was keen to go and check what was going on in the dressing room.

This big sow of an opera singer pissed Marcel Maurice right off.

Isolde Leprince put boldness in opposing her parents, had blue hair and a frog tattoo on her left wrist (a gift from her anti-posh grandmother which nearly provoked a heart attack in her father and sent her mother in a fit of hysterics), but she was no more than a sixteen year old girl working for the first time in her life, since the day before.

The cavalry came to their rescue, in the person of the head stage manager, Regis Dubreuil. He was definitely no fan of the drinks served at the foyer's bar, all strictly alcohol free, but, nevertheless, a bar was a bar. You had the wrapping if not the gift! As soon as he could, he was there.

Regis reacted promptly. Continuous yelling had sent Brigitte Brodin's voice off the rail. The opera singer was now emitting sounds of a stunning dissonance. He questioned Marcel and Isolde.

- What's with the Brodin?

- We dunno, answered Isolde.

Regis Dubreuil was known to rush first and think afterwards. He acted accordingly. He raced to the dressing room, where, no doubt, he got more than an earful! He came out as quickly as he had gone in, but far redder.

- What happened to her?

- Her necklace's been stolen. I run an tell the boss.

Isolde and Marcel looked at each other and burst out laughing. Isolde summed up the situation:

- Fucking great, Castafiore's jewels have been stolen, that's ace!

The show that followed was also ace.

The diva kept on shouting: "call the poliiiiiice, call the poliiiiiice!"

As the pause had begun, the full orchestra had invaded the foyer. It was rustling like an effervescing birdhouse.

The head stage manager, back from the boss' office, was jumping about.

Isabelle Millet, aka the boss, had arrived, after having called the police. She was trying to placate the singer who did not listen and went on bawling.

The show could have lingered, dragged on, and, in the end, wear the spectators out. A sudden twist turned the story from farce into drama.

Regis Dubreuil had skipped away to go to the stage's workshop to down a comforting beer. He had opened the door, thrown a glance in the room and had rushed back immediately.

He burst into the foyer and muttered before fainting:

- The sky fell on Will's head, the sky fell...

Christian Leprince chose that precise moment to call his daughter and ask her if things were going on well at the orchestra.

- Groovy! It rocks deadly.

- And Isabelle Millet, you get along with her?

Isabelle Millet, managing director of the orchestra, had just cleared the place around Regis Dubreuil, ordered someone to call for help and given him First aid. She was speaking with a policeman who had just arrived.

- She's fucking good, fucking good!

Christian Leprince was about to voice his opinion about this range of vocabulary in the mouth of a girl, and, moreover, in the mouth of his daughter. But she had hung up and switched off her phone.

Marcel Maurice inquired:

- It was your father?

- Yep.

- Well, he won't be disappointed by the mess in his country orchestra!

Isolde's father, Christian Leprince was president of the orchestra. He had taken advantage of that position to get an internship for his daughter during Easter holidays. Isolde had screamed with disgust at that perspective:

- I'd one hundred thousand times prefer to collect garbage.

He had screamed back. These privileged brat's reactions infuriated him. And this bitch of a high school head… Her superior stance and prim tone… He was still furious and aggrieved. She had summoned him to complain about his daughter's lack of culture. She had looked so perfidious when saying:

- And to think that you manage so many cultural institutions!

She might have overheard that he had been given the responsibility of Culture with a big C because culture with a little c had been given to his eternal rival in the Region.

Christian Leprince was a fighter. He had been denied the fields. He had decided to conquer them. He, thus, had undertaken to bring closer Culture and cultures. It meant transferring as many cultural facilities as possible to villages as small as possible and raised problems virtually insurmountable.

Consequently, only two institutions had made the big jump to the Big Green. The Horticultural Library was now located at the entrance of an arboretum and the Orchestre Symphonique de Medianie at the outskirts of a village, in a former factory. "A mini Tate Modern", had said Christian Leprince with pride, in his inaugural speech, a month ago. Tate Modern, whose existence he had discovered the day before, while perusing the speech his cabinet director had written.

Isabelle Millet asked the administrative manager to go down and see what had happened. The policeman decided to follow him.

A few seconds later, he was calling the police station and saying:

- Just like in books, faint smell of bitter almond, pink skin and veins well marked! Just like in books...

One hour later, the police was working. The stage manager had been taken to the hospital. The dressing room and the stage’s workshop had been taped off. The orchestra and the administrative staff had been confined in the foyer.

For once, under the effect of amazement and sadness, musicians were calm and controlled.

Brigitte Brodin alone was fussing, vociferating that she was the first victim and that it was a shame not to look for her necklace. No one reacted to her restlessness. On the contrary, each of her cries deepened the ambient abasement. The two gendarmes watching the foyer had soon gave up calming her.

- Yuck! Come on, Marcel, someone has to do something! She must return in her cage.

- Yeah, but I'm no trainer of circus animals!

Someone else took charge of the tour de force. Norbert d'Apremont, artistic advisor of the orchestra, got up and went to whisper in the beast's ear. He almost had to stand on tiptoe to do it. The cubic capacity of Norbert d'Apremont was reversely proportional to his musical and literary culture. He weighed barely half the singer's weight but he had succeeded in taming her. Brigitte Brodin was now silent. She just sported the dignity mask of the offended. Nobody cared. Nobody even noticed.

Norbert d'Apremont came to the bar, asked for lemonade and added much sugar in it. Marcel Maurice inquired:

- Shit, Norbert, what did you tell her?

Norbert d'Apremont gazed at Marcel Maurice with spite. This lout, this vulgar, this bittern! This noxious individual who had ruined his efforts and mined his work without respite under pretense of union representation! Distasteful and ultimate irony, this brute played the trumpet sumptuously, and was, only God knows how, one of the best musicians of the orchestra. Norbert would have liked to turn his back on him and go away with his glass without answering his stupid question. But he was well-educated.

- I just told her she would damage her voice.

Meanwhile, superintendant Bernard Berthier was getting acquainted with Isabelle Millet, managing director of the Orchestre Symphonique de Médianie.

Bernard Berthier was a big Hitchcock fan and Isabelle Millet possessed the cold beauty of the filmmaker's heroines. But she lacked the essential: their fragility. She was just blonde, thin, elegant and icy. She acted with much efficiency. He found that inhuman under the present circumstances. Had she been wearing ballet flats, she would have been, like him, five feet nine. But she wore stilettos and stood a few centimeters taller than him. Aggravating!

She had taken him to her office. White walls, a minimum of minimal pieces of furniture. Pristine and clinically tidy, no personal object. A fridge!

She had summed up the situation in a few clear sentences and, to illustrate her discourse, had produced maps of the place, work schedules, personal files and production documents, that she had, one after the other, stacked in a very neat pile.

- I've asked the administrative manager, to free his office so you can use it.

- No need to disturb your administrative manager. I will stay in your office. But don't worry. I won't use your desk. I will set myself here, so I'll be able to spread my mess.

He had just indicated the spotless meeting table. To mark his determination, he dropped his laptop bag on it.

She threw him a murderous glance. Just as she thought she had reached the bottom, he was proving her that things could still get worse.

Six months ago she had accepted, at last minute notice, to replace the managing director of Orchestre Symphonique de Médianie. The social unrest triggered by the transfer of the orchestra from the center of a big town to the border of a little village had thrown him in a profound depression. Many months of cure had said the psychiatrists.

By doing this favor, Isabelle had hoped to boost her career. She had worked as a model to finance her studies and she was the single mother of multicolored siblings. These two facts were serious handicaps in the small uptight world of senior civil service.

She had also hoped that leaving Paris for a quiet region would do some good to Mehdi, her eldest son, fifteen, whose teenage years had begun boisterously.

Yet now, no more boost. The shame of having failed even if she had not been faulty, the sadness of a young man's death and, on top of it, some sort of an alpha male, aggravating and attractive, settled in her office to remind her that she added professional failure to personal dissatisfaction.

Once the opera singer silenced, nothing more was making diversion in the foyer. The musicians began to behave as usual, like a big unruly school class.

First, they asked Isolde to serve them free drinks.

- I can't! I'm not allowed to.

Then they turned to Marcel Maurice who replied acidly :

- It's not my problem. Go and see your representative.

Marcel Maurice was a collateral victim of the orchestra's transfer to the fields.

For twenty four years, he had waved, loud and clear, the flame of union struggle. The musicians of Orchestre Symphonique de Médianie had a favorable status as members of a national orchestra. Nevertheless, he had fought with unlimited energy to improve it, to make of them privileged amongst the privileged. And he had done it.

The musicians - and consequently the rest of the staff - had been granted generous pay rises and seniority bonuses.

The musicians' working time had shrunk and the orchestra's repertoire too.

Ousted the musical works considered exhausting or tedious. Ousted those they had already played too many times for their liking. Ousted those the musicians just did not appreciate.

The fame of the orchestra was a collateral victim of Marcel Maurice's fighting talent. The orchestra's fixed costs were now so high that there was no money left to hire the extras required by most symphonic works. This had furthermore restricted the repertoire. And the orchestra was unable to afford renowned soloists or conductors.

As a consequence, the turnover of musical directors had increased fast and their capacity to artistically manage the orchestra had declined as fast. The function was now reduced to getting on the nerves of the artistic advisor and conducting one third of the concerts.

With fortitude, Norbert d'Apremont, the artistic advisor, had fought adversity. He kept on striving to build interesting programs. He dipped into the works the orchestra still accepted to play. He found unknown soloists or conductor: beginners, foreigners from lost countries or second choice artists, like Brigitte Brodin, granted with a look unfit for her repertoire. And this was how Arianne, the Blue Beard's young and seductive wife was to be impersonated by a XXXL quinquagenarian directed by a Chinese teenager!

This way, Norbert d'Apremont achieved an artistically satisfying result, unfortunately commercially unpalatable. Politicians wondered louder and louder about the usefulness of an orchestra more and more expensive and playing less and less, in front of a shrinking audience.

It had been an easy game for Christian Leprince to have approved the moving of the orchestra from a private mansion rented at a high price to a vacant building belonging to the region.

As soon as the information leaked out, trouble began.

Marcel Maurice had convoked the musicians full of joy at the perspective of a good brawl. He had not imagined he would first have to wrestle with some of his colleagues about his choice of vocabulary. Yes, the word exile was appropriate and the word deportation was definitively bad taste. In the end, he refused to discuss the matter any longer and exposed his plan. It won unanimous approval, but some yes rung badly.

He had begun with a harassment campaign of the orchestra management: the administrative manager, the artistic director and,