Murder Without Pity (13 page)

“We’re doing the best we can with the manpower available.”

“No luck tracking down any German friends of his?”

“No luck so far, but we’re still asking around. That Monsieur Altmann off-the-book job you gave me, that’s the problem. I lost him.”

“What?” Stanislas lay his pen down and looked across, stunned. “You lost him?”

“He was very sly.”

“Deliberately throwing you off?”

“In Cadenabbia. He knew the Italian Lake District well. Certainly better than me. It was my first time there.” Officer Leclair straightened in his chair, trying to rally some dignity back. “Following him was easy at first. From Paris to Milan and from there to Como, no problem. From Como to Cadenabbia, no problem either.”

“But you had a problem in Cadenabbia?” This should have been, Stanislas thought, a simple shadowing job. “He take the train to Milan?”

“Some four-year old commuter start-up. Air Swissthanza from Paris to Milan under ‘Myron Kahn.’ From there, the train to Como. After that, a taxi to Cadenabbia.” He leaned across and placed some receipts on Stanislas’s desk. “He really did look like an ordinary tourist for awhile.”

Stanislas glanced at the receipts. He’d have to account for the expenses somehow.

“In fact,” Leclair continued, “he didn’t use any tactic I could detect at the time. He looked so easy to follow. So ill, I mean. Always coughing and tossing Kleenex away. And your assignment was easy.”

“Until Cadenabbia?”

The mention of that infamous town deflated Leclair. He slumped back into his chair with a nod. “Until Cadenabbia.”

“He probably thought you’d be extra vigilant in crowded Milan and less alert where there were fewer people.” He shook open a side drawer and tossed the receipts inside. “Well, what did he do in that bustling village?”

Leclair leaned forward and with renewed vigor snapped four color photographs onto the desk. “Here, a lovely side shot of him checking into the Hotel Italia under the name of Albert Mandel. Very expensive taste, incidentally. Notice that stunning chandelier in the dining room. Here, a front shot of him sipping a drink at the hotel’s Bar Verdi. Here, emerging from Banco Medici. Here, admiring a lakeside view. You see how he looked like a tourist?” His voice had risen for a plea of understanding.

Stanislas held each photo near the desk lamplight and examined them. The slight figure of Jules, back to the camera, admiring a plant with the outline of an island and ferry landing in fog in the background. Jules, licking his thumb before counting his notes, after emerging from the bank. In neither these or in the remaining photos could he detect the man knew Leclair shadowed him. The officer was right. The man did fit the image of a sightseer, not someone who had somewhere somehow in his past learned evasion expertise. This was more than he had expected. “No shot of him on the ferry?” He rubbed banded the pile and pitched it into the drawer beside the receipts.

“None getting on, no. That’s where I must have lost him. A Polish tour group was waiting to board, and I assumed he was among them.”

“You boarded, and by the time you realized your mistake, the ferry was docking on the island?”

“Something like that.”

“Before you boarded, did you notice by any chance a taxi near the ferry landing?”

Officer Leclair shook his head and glanced away. The questioning had apparently become too painful. “I was too busy searching for him in that crowd.”

He had dragged out enough embarrassed history. “Well, even if you had followed him all the way to his mystery destination, what could you have done in the two days I gave you?” Maybe, he wondered, the job’s unofficial status had lulled the policeman into complacency. Still, an old man throwing off a veteran like Leclair? And using at least one cooked passport? He might look into this himself, he decided. For Anna’s sake.

“Can I try again?” With his earnest expression, Leclair looked like a champion upstaged, who wanted a rematch.

Stanislas pushed himself to his feet, and Leclair did the same. “You’d lose him even earlier next time and suffer a heart attack from the humiliation. Once is enough. I thought I’d do a friend a favor, see if some spa had duped this man into a miracle cure. I can’t risk another off-the-books trip. If the president of the tribunal found out….” He drew a finger across his neck and winked.

Officer Leclair shook his head in wonder as he paused by the door. “That old man looked so innocuous.”

“It takes an expert to lose an expert. After all these years, Officer Leclair, you’ve met your match.”

Stanislas closed the door and dropped his smile. If Jules had traveled to a spa, why his trickery? Only that man knew where he went in the taxi after dumping Leclair. The less Anna knew about what he might uncover, he decided, the better.

A gendarme was checking the identity papers of a one-legged man on crutches queued before the Annex’s massive front doors. Boucher glanced at the cripple, who at that moment looked at him. His eyes bulged with recognition, and he yelled an insult. Boucher ignored the charge and stepped further away from the line to await his ride. As he shoved his cell phone into his overcoat pocket, he worried how he had sounded during the hearing. Bitter with something to hide? Or cooperative, with what anger displayed blamed on the interrogation’s length?

The heckler taunted him now furiously. “Collabo, coward! Collabo, coward!” The gendarme tried to shush him, but that only incited the man to shout a new invective. “There he is! Louis Boucher! A bullet to his head! That’s the only trial that traitor deserved! Collabo, coward! Collabo, coward!” and he clapped his hands to each word’s beat.

A murmur passed through the line behind him. A dark-skinned man in an overcoat joined in the clapping and shouted, “
Sieg heil
!”

Boucher knew he didn’t need more attention, so he stepped away from them to the curb when he heard coarse talk behind. He feared part of the interrogation’s aftermath continued and craned left for his driver. The quicker he departed, the better.

“Monsieur Boucher, a word, please.”

Boucher looked straight ahead.

A reporter approached from the side, a spiral notebook in one hand, a pen gripped like a dagger in the other. “Your reason for slumming with the unwashed here?”

Boucher shifted away from his inquisitor. “You members of the press understand a pretrial investigation’s secrecy.” He tugged up a glove in a show of intent to leave. “It’s a sacred concept of our legal system.”

His No Comment aroused other journalists’ aggressiveness, and they swarmed around him. “Pretrial secrecy?” A petite woman reporter with bangs scoffed at his answer. “Article 11 of the Code of Criminal Procedure applies to investigating magistrates, their clerks, and officers of the judicial police, not to witnesses.”

“Nevertheless, I won’t comment out of respect for the hearing.”

A man armed with a micro-recorder elbowed past four colleagues and thrust it into his face. “What do you mean by ‘out of respect for the hearing’?”

A third didn’t want for his answer. “Examining Magistrate Cassel questioned you for over an hour. You’re involved in something serious?”

Boucher repeated he wouldn’t say anything and indicated his chauffeur had arrived.

Several reporters scurried out of the Mercedes’s way. The driver braked in front of Boucher, hopped out, and yanked the rear door open.

They jammed around Boucher in one last vicious assault. Would the examining magistrate interrogate him again? If the hearing wasn’t serious, why did he look shaken? Did he think the children and grandchildren of his Occupation victims could ever forgive him?

He waved a good-bye and pushed through. They, in turn, shoved each other for a final question as Boucher disappeared into cushy safety.

With a slam of the car’s door, the chauffeur threw up a barrier. Boucher pressed two buttons. The first tripped a lock, securing him against the hordes. The second zipped up his window with a comforting hum.

Undeterred, one journalist stooped and hollered a question that misted the glass with his anger. Boucher cupped a hand behind an ear to indicate a penalty of age prevented his understanding as the Mercedes lurched away.

“A rough pack, those jackals,” the driver said, eyeing Boucher in his rear view mirror, and asked where he wanted to go.

The shutters pressed closed for days against the occasional protestor’s rocks had turned his apartment into a cave, Boucher reflected. He had suffered enough confinement. “Just drive around, Mario,” he said.

He settled back and through half-closed eyes saw him zigzag his way eventually onto Quai de Montebello. Notre Dame’s flying buttresses off to his right didn’t thrill him this time. A sense of menace came over him. He sat up abruptly and glanced back through the blurry window. A car of indeterminate make swung behind with two dark silhouettes sitting in front. Had that judge ordered him followed? There was one way to see if they were. He’d move around. “The Ritz,” he said to Mario as he again looked back. The other car was still there.

Only two Ferraris and a Bentley, none of them occupied, sat parked outside the hotel as his driver braked at the entrance.

As Boucher wandered through the lobby, he noticed few guests. The weather and the bombings must have chased the rich elsewhere, he thought. At the threshold to his favorite bar, he gazed around. His anxiety that undercovers were somewhere made him long for the comfort of friends. He saw no one he knew, meandered into a restaurant, realized he hadn’t any appetite, and drifted outside. He detected no car of similar outline that had earlier followed. Place Vendôme appeared deserted. He must have imagined that threat. Or had he? This damn fog! It had thrown up a wall that obscured, that made judging difficult. One never quite knew what lay beyond.

The plaza’s misty splendor reminded him of St. Mark’s Square, of his family vacationing in Venice. Should he disobey that investigator’s injunction and leave Paris to visit them? Or flee without seeing them?

No, absolutely not, he decided. Flight would imply guilt. He would wait out his fate like he had since the Occupation. Like an innocent. He’d brazen through any Confrontation. No one was alive from the old days for that magistrate to question except poor Friedrich, and he had become senile.

Boucher jammed his hands into his coat pockets, confident he could survive any questions, and made his way south toward Rue de Rivoli when he suddenly stopped. Frau Kleist, he had overlooked her. Didn’t she still visit his old friend at that sanitarium despite her estrangement? He saw he remained in danger. He must telephone at once from a pay phone to avoid any tapped line. Warn her to destroy any personal correspondence. He must destroy any too. That Judge Cassel could order a search of his home as well as wiretaps.

He found himself beside the Concorde metro entrance and hurried down the steps to some public phones. No one was using them. He had privacy. He placed the call. She was home. He heard her gasp at what he reported and knew she understood his danger. “Deny” and “burn” were his parting words before he hung up.

He remained nervous. She still might slip up. Or he might. He’d better signal an emergency to Lenny, he decided. When he returned home, park his Mercedes this time on that side street. Then wait. Within the next three days the fog might thicken and offer the most cover for him to make his way to that phone booth. Surely that man with his connections could arrange some means of escape, if he decided to flee, after all.

Boucher wandered down onto the platform, spotted few riders, and felt exposed waiting in the open. He gazed around for undercover police and finally gave up trying to spot them as the metro rattled in. They ran in teams, he guessed, one handing him off to another, risking little exposure as they worked toward the final blow, the criminal investigator’s indictment.

He reached the sixteenth district’s eastern boundary at last, though he felt no ease nearing the sanctuary of his apartment. Fear stayed with him. He couldn’t spot them, so they must be that good. They were out there in the thickening nightfall. They were watching with binoculars and taking notes. They were preparing to close in sooner or later with deadly questions. How he hated this autumn. The dried leaves and chill reminded him more than past seasons of death.

He stopped at a wine shop for a bottle of cognac. He had to steady his nerves. The judge had clamped down on his movement. He’d surely demand a Confrontation soon. Boucher felt trapped. The thought of dying alone in prison terrified him.

THE THIRD DAY

Boucher lifted his cup to his lips when he spotted the lead article in Thursday morning’s newspaper. He slowly read each paragraph until he reached the bottom of the column and saw it continued on the second page. The piece was obviously more than a newsworthy story. It was a manifesto to lynch. He settled his cup down and brusquely flipped to the next page. “‘…seen rushing from…,’” he muttered. “‘…refused to answer….’” “‘An enemy among us….’” “Lies! All lies!” he cried out. “I’m not a traitor, you libelous swine!” He banged his fist down from his bitterness, and the breakfast cutlery rattled, and coffee spilled onto his robe.

A mob’s howl erupted once more through the fog at the end of the block. He ignored them. The police had earlier cordoned off the avenue, and the hecklers had become mere pests to endure. He snatched a second paper from the stack in front of him. Title in accusing caps: FORMER COLLABORATOR QUESTIONED. Article framed in black and bull’s-eyed middle of the first page. The newspaper’s zeal to hang also impossible to miss. Lead paragraph…”’Monsieur Louis Boucher,’” he read out loud, “‘former Interior Ministry functionary in Marshall Philippe Pétain’s government at Vichy, was seen hurrying from the Palace of Justice Annex yesterday after a hearing with Examining Magistrate Stanislas Cassel. Several court observers, who demanded anonymity, said the questioning lasted two grueling hours.’” Two hours? he thought. And hurrying? More damn lies.

He continued reading aloud until he became too upset. “Rigged justice, you fool!” he shouted, unable once more to restrain his bitterness. “You didn’t live through the Occupation. What do you know?” He flung the newspaper aside and grabbed another.