Murder Without Pity (16 page)

Secondly, by leaving without giving notice, Monsieur Pincus had incurred a two-month’s salary forfeiture as stipulated in his contract.

Thirdly, Pascale, who taught French cinema, alarmed over her colleague’s abrupt departure, dropped by his studio after class one afternoon. Not finding him, she slipped a note of concern under his door. When he didn’t respond, others from the faculty had taken turns on following days, calling and visiting. As with Pascale, so with them. Nothing except a mystery, the director explained. What had happened to Léon?

Lastly, just before they planned to report him missing to the police, he called. He had found the note under his door, he said, and wanted to assure everyone he was fine. However, he sounded tired and distracted, the director noted, like he was thinking about a journey from which he’d just returned. He promised to keep in touch, though that was the last any of them heard from him.

Such were the contributions to the dossier during the first week after Boucher’s murder. A search of his apartment had turned up for Stanislas only a haunted past. Some tech had misplaced a critical lab report. And testimony from the school’s director provided no answers to questions Stanislas kept asking himself: What could make a man forfeit two month’s salary and resign, and where did he go?

During the second week, a co-director of the lab phoned him at the Annex. A lowly staffer, he explained, had mistakenly mailed the report to an examining magistrate with a similar name in Marseille. Not to worry, he assured Stanislas. He promised to get it to him even if he personally had to deliver it. He guaranteed no later than the twenty-fourth.

Stanislas couldn’t close the dossier as unsolvable because the lab findings might reveal another suspect. He couldn’t proceed because his major suspect to date was murdered. He had reached a standstill. He put the file aside with relief because the case had cut him with bad memories. Assuring himself he had done everything he could, he reached for another Little Misery that promised quicker resolution and some peace.

The report and crime scene debris did arrive on the twenty-fourth. The co-director’s attached apologetic letter did nothing to change Stanislas’s mind. He no longer had confidence in that police lab. The following Monday he had the package mailed to one in Lyon with a letter that demanded thoroughness and accuracy in examining the evidence.

On the third Friday in December at a little past 13:00, while he munched on a sandwich, the judicial police delivered Pincus’s dribble of mail as usual, rubber banded as usual, and on top an odd letter.

He laid his lunch aside as he stared at this threat to his peace for it marked itself out as unusual. The correspondence, addressed in handwriting, showed itself to be in some way personal in nature and different from others that were typed.

Was proof of the letter’s importance further marked by the black letters engraved in the addresser’s corner, Papandreou’s Self-Storage? Maybe Pincus had stored away old clothes or furniture. And the envelope’s thinness—from the feel of it just one page—boosted his hope of inconsequence. But even a one-page letter could carry bad news, he realized as he fingered it. Hadn’t that concierge mentioned something about her tenant lugging away mysterious boxes? And hadn’t Monsieur Lenoir suspected something about a cache of state secrets? His heart beat rose as he slit open the envelope. He dreaded where duty carried him.

He pinched out the correspondence. It was one page indeed, he noticed, and written in an angry scrawl. “Monsieur Léon Pincus,” the writer began, “former friend!! As of this date, Account 3657 is nine days overdue. You must mail payment, postmarked no later than the fifteenth of the month, to forestall legal action.”

Stanislas swiveled to his right, to his wall calendar. Today was the fifteenth. “Christophe,” he shouted into the corridor, hating the obligation imposed, as he reached toward his phone console. “We’ve an emergency. Grab your laptop. Call Officer Leclair.” The case had come alive. They must get to Papandreou’s Self-Storage at once. No telling what an irate creditor might do.

Monsieur Spiros Papandreou jumped up from his chair as soon as he spotted them through his plate-glass office window. Though mid-afternoon, he bounced with morning brightness, grabbing Stanislas’s hand and pumping out his honor at meeting a prominent functionary. He waved away the ID. It wasn’t necessary, he assured Stanislas. His call earlier had provided enough proof. “One can’t go through life distrusting everyone, which my friend, Monsieur Pincus, never seemed to understand. This way, please,” he said, leading him and Christophe into his office, while the judicial police waited outside. “In twenty years running my business never a problem like this. A friend and customer murdered. How can I help?”

Stanislas said he needed to ask some questions and afterwards inspect Pincus’s storage. Would Monsieur Papandreou raise his hand for the oath?

“…and first business day of the month if not earlier, eight o’clock, he was here with his check,” the self-storage owner explained. “‘What’s wrong with the mail?’ I ask him. ‘Don’t you trust it?’ ‘I leave trust to others,’ was his reply, Monsieur Examining Magistrate. Always the same joke when I see him. Always the same answer, ‘I leave trust to others.’”

“Was he ever late with his payment?” Stanislas asked.

“No, never. Sometimes a week early. On time. Always. Until this last time. Several months ago, I thought, a good customer. I should always be lucky with my accounts. I liked him and made an offer. ‘Monsieur Pincus, what’s with this month-to-month business? For you, a special. Rent me six months, nine, whatever your pleasure, and I give you a bigger than normal discount.’ He wanted four months only. Till the end of November. After that, back to paying every thirty days or so. Fine, four months and a discount. For my favor, he gave me late with his December payment. I gave him one grace period and another and hear nothing. Naturally, I was angry. He had no phone, so I wrote. I was going to pay him a visit until you called.”

Stanislas dictated the answer to Christophe. “Did he say why he refused to pay for a period longer than a month, after November?”

“He said he was storing for maybe a little longer while he looked for another place to live. He told me where he lived wasn’t safe. A burglary or something around May.”

Stanislas finished his questions and asked to inspect the cubicle.

Monsieur Papandreou clapped his hands and pushed himself up. “My pleasure, messieurs. Follow me.”

They walked down a long corridor, walled both sides with private storage rooms. All the time, Papandreou chatted in a loud voice that made several customers turn and stare. They continued down another passage of the cavernous warehouse until they came to Number 458. “We take such a long walk we’re almost in Spain.” He laughed, and his thick brows bobbed at his joke as he searched inside his baggy pants for the combination.

He hadn’t paid full taxes in years. He employed illegal immigrants from Algeria or had broken the law in some other way, Stanislas decided, and was trying to charm away any suspicion. He didn’t care what the owner might have done. Just the contents inside mattered.

“There you are.” Monsieur Papandreou pushed open the door.

Stanislas asked everyone to stand back. He wanted his first impression untainted by their opinions. Standing at the threshold in the half-light, he had the queer sensation for a moment he had invaded a mausoleum. The passageway’s weak light paled the few steps before him ashen and cold like marble. Odors, built up since Pincus had last entered, smelled stale and dust made him sneeze. His eyes adjusted. The ill-defined lumps became books, stacks of newspapers and magazines, and boxes that bulged from three sides toward an island of space in the middle. He could see through the semidarkness ahead a desk Pincus had fashioned from a board and supported on crates. In the lower one he had stockpiled what looked like boxes of crackers, canned goods, and cartons of mineral water. A lamp, clamped to the top of a six-tiered shelf, poked out over the desk.

The cubicle looked like an office. His curiosity growing, he stepped inside and hobbled over to the desk. After a moment’s study, he gripped the board and shook it. Nailed into the crates, it didn’t budge. The desk was sturdily constructed, built to last like the man himself, he thought. Until one evening, someone had terrified him to death.

A picture of some kind hung from string tied to a nail hammered into the wall. He reached toward the lamp and noticed at its base it was battery-operated as he clicked a button. It snapped on in the dusty quiet. A stark bulb lit the darkness. A family emerged, four daughters and three sons posed stiffly either side of their parents. He leaned over and peered, wondering which one was Léon. The youth preening maturity with his scraggly mustache? The one who wore his cap cocked back? He guessed the one whose lower lip pushed against the upper in a show of defiance that might have decades later caused his murder.

His elbow nudged a thermos. He twisted off the top, sniffed, rubbed around the moist inside with his finger, and touched it to his tongue. It was coffee that tasted grainy and bitter. Not American or French. Maybe some Middle Eastern brand, strong enough to stimulate someone, driven to work for hours.

He noticed a book that Pincus had left open. He shone the lamp directly on it. The words looked German with many underlined in some colored code the man must have devised. On the opposite page faced an organizational chart, Heinrich Himmler at the top, Reinhard Heyrich below him, and someone, whose name he didn’t recognize, a Théodor Dannecker, at the bottom.

For a feverish instant he feared he might stumble upon a document that showed his grandfather’s complicity with these Nazi war criminals. He felt warmer than the air the central heater pumped through the building. He jerked loose his tie and reached for a button on a fan, screwed into the board next to the thermos. The battery still worked. A breeze stirred. He remained warm.

He remembered the overhead lights and absently flipped a switch to his left. As he pulled back the chair, he noticed on the cushioned seat a magazine. It was a past issue of a news weekly, he saw when he reached for it, and featured on its cover an army truck heaped with mutilated bodies of blacks and the title, “Never Again?”

His legs weakened. He gripped the chair’s posts for support, yet couldn’t sit, couldn’t relax, couldn’t leave, and after a moment when his strength returned, decided to remain standing. As he put the magazine aside, his attention wandered to the shelves before him.
A Comprehensive
Guide to Departmental Archives in France
guarded the right flank of the top shelf. A thick French-German dictionary propped up the other. Books, deadly with the past, occupied the middle ground. Two had short titles on cloth spines that punched:
World War II Documents of
Destruction
and
The Crime of State
. Another carried a cumbersome title, whose length didn’t lessen its power:
The Persecution of the Jews in France and in Other Countries of the West
. A five-volume set on the Nuremberg war trials burdened the shelf below.

His cell phone went off. He ignored it. Sweat oozed from his armpits and down his back. He shucked off his jacket, flung it aside not caring where it fell, rolled up his sleeves. Then from his back pocket, he jerked out a kerchief and patted his forehead and back of his neck with it.

Colored slips of paper in that code only Pincus understood flagged from tops of another book’s pages. He tugged the book out, flipped through, saw it was a guide to documentation centers in Paris. Each archive listed its address, phone number, nearest metro, and most intriguing, he thought, floor plans with the exists circled in red.

A bundle of some kind lay next to the guide. They were fold-out maps of Berlin, Los Angeles, Moscow, New York, and Tel Aviv, he saw when he fanned them out, alphabetized, primed like everything else there. But for what?

You’ll pay with nightmares for months, he warned himself, smelling his sweat. It’s not worth it. Get out. Let Officer Leclair inside for the inventory.

Against his instincts, he unfolded the Berlin map. It was far more detailed than that tourist giveaway he had discovered in Pincus’s studio. He scanned slowly each sector for markings that might reveal the man’s thoughts. He discovered nothing until he reached the coordinate D8 where he found a section of a metro line circled in red near a vast patch of green.

Did Pincus board the line there or get off? If he did leave, where did he go? To meet someone in the Grunewald Forest? The man hadn’t left any trace or hint of his mission except that red circle, encrypted, off limits, private like everything else in his retreat, his freedom room where he had for some reason placed someone within his cross hairs?

In the shelf below, a stack of pre-paid phone calling cards. No wonder the police couldn’t trace the man’s calls, he realized. Pincus had given up the expense of the telephone to save money.

Beside that stack, a camera, a Minox IIIs, he discovered when he squinted at it. It looked as small as a candy bar, as deadly as a revolver, the camera no doubt Monsieur Lenoir had discovered Pincus clicking.

He broke off his thoughts of that morning when he noticed two red files marked “L. Boucher” and “T. Dannecker” in shadow. He pulled out the Dannecker file first. Telegrams from the 1940s from something murky in Berlin called IV-B-4 to 31A Avenue Foch, Paris, as well as minutes of meetings and memorandums, the bureaucrat’s weapons of war, all coded in German, filled the folder. Across the tops of many documents, someone had inked in capitals what looked like a warning.

He flipped through Boucher’s file next. Newspaper clippings from dailies long since folded and magazine articles, including a September
Paris Today
devoted to still-living World War II collaborators, filled it. Across the tops of many write-ups ran a similar warning.

He tumbled books from some of the shelves, stacked them into piles, flipped through the pages. It was there in French, pounded in with such force the black ink had splattered to the edges, the archivist’s stamp… LIMITED CIRCULATION…. PROPERTY OF…. NOT TO BE REMOVED…. THEFT IS PUNISHABLE BY.