Lovers and Liars Trilogy (154 page)

It could not be long, he thought, before this gate came under press siege as well, but for the moment it was quiet. The surly guard on the gate did not take his appearance well; he informed Rowland that only authorized personnel were admitted here, and only authorized personnel
had
been admitted. Reaching for a telephone, he told Rowland to leave, and leave
now,
before he called his security backup. Rowland left: he could think of only two other places where Star might have gone—Mathilde Duval’s, or Chantal’s. But Mathilde Duval would be at Cazarès’s now, watching the collection from the rear room Juliette de Nerval had described to him. Chantal’s, then, he thought. Less than ten minutes later he was getting out of a cab in the rue St. Séverin. He paused by the church, then crossed the street. The entrance door was open. He paused in the doorway, looking up the flight of stairs that led to Chantal’s apartment. The door above was also open. He tensed.

He knew what had happened, what must have happened, before he pushed the door back. He could see the blood smeared on the wall opposite; he could hear frantic scratchings and the yowling of the cat.

The cat had been shut up in one of the cupboards under the sink. The cat, for some reason, had been spared; Chantal and Jeanne and their small, thin gray dog had not. Jeanne had tried to put up a fight. She was sprawled at the base of the blood-spattered wall; Chantal, who might never have known what was happening, had been shot while in bed. The bed was soaked in blood; there was blood on the floor, the net curtains, the walls. It could only have been Star who had done this, and he had signed his handiwork in blood: there was a crude blood star on one wall, above Jeanne’s body; there was a second blood sign by Chantal, a daubed crucifix of blood, just above the bed. Next to the dog’s body was a pile of clothes—black jeans, a red scarf, the student uniform Star had told Mina he would wear to Cazarès’s. Rowland averted his eyes from the bodies. The sink, the surrounding worktops, and floor were all stained with watery blood; he thought—this was
planned;
he came here and he did this, and then he changed and washed.

A sense of incomprehension and outrage fought with shock. Wrapping a handkerchief around his hand, Rowland called Luc Martigny, then—the noise was unbearable—opened the cabinet door and released the cat. It streaked past him, down the stairs. Rowland backed out of the room; these silent sprawled bodies were sending out signals to him, they were telling him a story, and it was not simply a murder story, the atrocities here were more complex. He fumbled his way back down the stairs and waited in the doorway below for the police. He tried to steady his own breathing; he tried to listen to the memories in his head, Chantal the day before, Mina that morning, both women in very different languages explaining to him that although Star had these
angers,
he posed no sexual threat. “Please,” Mina had said, “please, he’s not really bad. He didn’t hurt me. He didn’t do anything to hurt me—please understand.”

Rowland stared hard at the black outline of the St. Séverin church. A light rain had begun to fall; he heard the approaching sirens, was dimly aware that Martigny and fellow officers were entering the building. He listened to their footsteps on the stairs, the muffled exclamations that escaped even these professionals. He could feel a deepening premonition and fear, a growing alarm. Where was Gini? He watched the church gargoyles arch above his head.

Martigny remained only a few minutes in Chantal’s apartment—Rowland registered that. When he returned, he took Rowland by the arm and led him across to a police car.

“I’ll explain in the car,” he said. Rowland listened in silence as they raced through the crowded streets. The air flashed blue and white with alarm; the sirens were at once outside him and inside his head.

“It isn’t just those two women back there,” Martigny began in a terse voice. “It’s
five
dead. Lazare himself; that maid Madame Duval, and a security guard on the rear gates—”

“And?” Rowland said.

“And now we know where this Star is. The call came in about five minutes ago. He’s at Mathilde Duval’s apartment. And I’m afraid he’s not alone. Your colleague—Genevieve Hunter—is with him. No, wait, listen. At gunpoint, as a hostage. But she isn’t alone. There’s a photographer with her, a man you may know—Pascal Lamartine.” Martigny hesitated. Rowland did not speak.

“The presence of another man… that improves the situation, perhaps.” Martigny glanced at him. “Of course—it is serious. Obviously so. Five people dead. Those women back there…” He hesitated again; Rowland met his gaze.

“He’d raped them, hadn’t he?”

“Yes. I’m afraid he had. Maybe before death, maybe after…” Martigny’s expression became closed. “Meanwhile—we need your help.”

When they reached the rue de Rennes, a grim-faced Martigny disappeared. He returned to Rowland to revise his roll call of the dead.

“Not five, six,” he said. “They’ve just towed the Mercedes. Believe me, you don’t want to see what’s in its trunk.”

He lit a cigarette, drew on it deeply. He and Rowland stood side by side in the rain, looking along the boulevard. They were still evacuating buildings, still bringing in the
matériel
for a siege. Crime-scene tapes fluttered; police cars, black vans, clustered; the street rang to the sound of booted feet.

Rowland raised his eyes slowly up the façade of Madame Duval’s building. On its roof, and the roof opposite, he saw black shapes as police snipers moved into place.

“It’s that apartment up there,” Martigny said. “The one with the closed blinds.”

“I know which it is,” Rowland said.

“We’ll make a telephone connection in about ten minutes. He hasn’t ripped out the lines apparently, which helps. We don’t want to start talking too soon, and when we do talk to him, we have to do it the right way. We need your help—English, French? Possible approaches we could use? You know more about him than anyone else does…”

“Sure. Of course.”

“Look.” Martigny took his arm. “I told you. She’s not alone with him. That helps.”

“You think so? Since around eight o’clock this morning, he’s killed six people.”

“Even so. In this situation, you can never predict. She’ll probably be all right. They’ll both be all right. He needs them alive—they’re his ticket out. Listen—have a cigarette…”

Rowland shook his head. He kept his eyes on the building opposite.

Martigny was not a fool. “All right. Okay,” he said, “he probably doesn’t need both of them—I admit that.”

“You know damn well he doesn’t.” Rowland turned on him angrily. “Two makes it
worse,
not better. He loves an audience. He’ll kill one of them and keep the other alive—for a while.”

“He’ll keep the
woman
alive,” Martigny said. “We both know that. That’s obvious enough—the woman is physically weaker, easier to intimidate.”

He paused. He met this Englishman’s cold green gaze, and he knew exactly what was passing through his mind, since it was also passing through his own.

“Don’t,” he said quietly. “It doesn’t help to imagine the worst—not in this situation. Wait. Within the next half hour we’ll be talking to them, we’ll have the listening devices in place, we’ll have the plans to the apartment, we’ll know exactly where he’s standing—if he blinks, we’ll know.” He shrugged. “Near enough anyway… Come on through here. This van. They’re setting up the tapes and the telephone link.”

Rowland followed him slowly. As they had spoken, another three vans and five cars had turned up. The first TV crews were arriving, the first clutch of cameramen. He stepped over cables and wires; he watched another posse of GIGN don helmets and flak jackets. He had seen it in a hundred movies, a hundred news reports—and at that he felt the same sense of foreboding he had experienced earlier. It was like a movie, he thought, because Star intended it that way, and because Star was still, in every sense, calling the shots.

“Don’t you see?” he said to the quiet, dark-suited psychologist who would make the first telephone contact and who was sitting opposite him now. “Don’t you see? This is what he wants. Maximum coverage—prime-time reports. He’s
scripting
this. This is his movie. This is when he finally gets to be a star, when he’s been a nothing, a nobody, for most of his life.”

“Flattery?” the psychologist asked.

“Perhaps. Certainly no overt criticism. And he doesn’t like questions, the Dutch girl said that. But the mood swings are very rapid—and he’s almost certainly on drugs. Possibly cocaine, possibly something else…” Rowland stopped. He was desperate, and angry, and out of those emotions an idea came to him. He thought of dead Cassandra, dead Maria Cazarès.

“There is one possibility…” he said, then shook his head. “No. It’s too dangerous.”

The psychologist and Martigny exchanged glances.

“Monsieur McGuire,” said the psychologist, putting on headphones. “In this situation, everything is dangerous.”

“Open the suitcase, Pascal,” Star said. “Stay back there by the table and open the suitcase. That’s great.”

Pascal opened the suitcase, which had been, as Star said, under the pink bed in the pink room, the room filled with pictures of a woman Pascal recognized as the couturière Maria Cazarès.

He glanced up. Star was still jittery, but also careful. He was positioned fifteen feet away, still with Gini in front of him, still with the gun jabbing her neck. On a small table next to him was Gini’s tape recorder and microphone. A tape had been inserted.

It was recording now. Pascal knew, and Gini knew—he could read the knowledge in her face—that this tape was not helping them. This tape was Star’s route to notoriety, to immortality—not any interview Gini might write. Pascal, piecing these events together, could see that whatever Star might have said to Gini earlier, he had never intended her to write up this scene afterward: transcribe his words now, possibly, better still, record them so the world could later hear his voice—but not survive to give her own account any more than Pascal would survive any photographs he might take.

They were useful to him now, Pascal thought, but when the pictures had been taken and the recording had been made, he would kill them. Pascal knew that with absolute certainty; he also knew which of them he would kill first.

The suitcase was crammed with notebooks and press clippings and photographs. They were in disarray. With extreme care he began taking them out and laying them on the table in front of him.

“Don’t muddle them up, okay?” Star said sharply. “They’re in order—all right? On the top there’s all the stuff about my mother and father—and the notes I wrote, after I realized, when it all started to make sense…”

His mother and father, apparently, were Maria Cazarès and Jean Lazare. Pascal piled the notebooks in one place, the dogeared cuttings next to them.

Beneath them, he saw, were bundles of tattered miscellaneous papers and other press clippings. There was a collection on Monaco’s royal family, including his own stolen pictures of Princess Caroline to which Star had referred; there was a section on the Kennedy family, one on an English duke with a Canadian wife, one on an Australian-American press magnate, and several on various American movie stars. He laid each of these out in neat piles. Beneath them, at the bottom of the case, was a collection of pornographic pictures, much-handled and of extreme violence. Pascal closed the lid of the case on them. Star made a peculiar wiggling movement, gestured toward the secondary piles of press clippings, then smiled.

“Those were my false starts, all right? That duke—the movie star—I always knew there was something different about me, that I wasn’t just anybody, you know? I tried tracing my mother—as soon as I was old enough, and they’d let me, I tried. But, of course, Maria had covered her tracks. You know what they tried to make me believe?” His voice was filled with derision. “They tried to make me believe my mother was this hooker, this two-bit fucking hooker, now deceased. Well, I wasn’t about to buy
that.
In Quebec I saw this fucking social worker bitch, and she brought out all these papers, a birth certificate—there wasn’t even a father’s name on the fucking thing—and she said I couldn’t meet my mother because my mother was dead, got beaten up good by one of her johns, some shit like that… And the way she looked at me, with this kind of fucking pity on her face. I wanted to kill her right then, I just wanted to snap her fucking neck, because she was feeding me all these fucking lies. And then I saw—she was just part of the conspiracy, that’s all. So I let her live. Smug fucking dumb lying bitch…”

He shuddered, and Gini flinched.

“After that—I had to find them, my parents, right? And they’d made it really hard for me—so I followed a few false leads, and then I got lucky; just like that. I met Mathilde. I was in Paris, I’d just come here from Amsterdam and I was down on my luck, the cards weren’t good, I had no money—and this friend of mine, Chantal, we’d had a fight, so I had no place to go—and then I met Mathilde. A few blocks from here. She was in this little park, feeding pigeons—and I got talking to her. I just wanted a meal. A place to sleep. I wasn’t feeling too well—I get these pains in my head. So she brought me back here and she cooked me this food—and Mathilde was all right. I liked Mathilde. She was lonely, and she started talking—about Maria. And I knew who Maria was, of course, because I’d read about her in the magazines, and so—slowly, I began to see. A week later, maybe less, maybe a day later, I don’t remember—but Mathilde told me how Maria had lost her baby son, way back, in New Orleans—and then,
light,
I mean,
I saw.
Everything fit. The dates fit. I’d been in New Orleans one time, for a while. My hair—it’s black, like hers, like that pig Lazare’s. Yeah—my hair, and my eyes… I look like my mother. Don’t I?”

“I can certainly see a resemblance,” Pascal said.

He kept his eyes on Star. His attention seemed intermittent now, his gaze wandering like his words. He’d look at Pascal, then Gini, then the gun, then he’d stare off into space. Pascal had the sensation that this conversation was familiar, that it had been repeated many times, and that mostly it was a conversation Star was having with himself.