Murder Without Pity (20 page)

Christophe wondered if he should urge Stanislas to seek counseling. But Stanislas returned to communal eating the next day in the Palace’s restaurant, he saw and postponed his suggestion. Stanislas ignored the stares and whispers from other diners, paid for a small salad and roll, and sat at a table alone. He repeated this throughout the rest of the week and into the next, as though easing back into the community.

Respecting Stanislas’s privacy, Christophe continued to sit apart, yet watched his judge out of concern. For Stanislas had rallied only so far. The crash of saucers from a countertop the last Wednesday in January didn’t stir him from his stupor. Neither did laughter around him that Thursday or the clatter of trays dropped onto his table that Friday.

Fabrice and Lucien unloaded their lunches and settled in. Fabrice slapped open a brochure that featured Dray and Streible and Fuchs on its front and thumped down the stiff cover with much show to ensure it stayed put. There followed, between mouthfuls of food, an audible murmur of conversation about those three men’s virtues that Christophe could overhear that lasted for some time.

Stanislas stared at his food, oblivious to them. After awhile and more talk about the three men, something overheard stirred him from his lethargy. He shifted his head toward them. The veins working along his temple showed some deep emotion. “What did you say?” he asked Fabrice in a threatening voice as he looked at him. Without warning, Stanislas smashed his fist into Fabrice’s jaw.

Fabrice’s head jerked back. His eyes crushed shut in pain. His mouth twisted, exposing yellowy teeth. Bits of food splattered across Lucien’s stunned face.

“For Anna!” Stanislas shouted in a depth of rage Christophe had never heard before. “For all of them!” He flung down his fork. He tossed his napkin aside. His chair toppled over, as he rose. He limped out before other diners realized what had happened.

That was the extent of the fight, Christophe saw, a few words, whose meaning he didn’t understand, and a blow which he did. Something had happened to his boss in those few minutes, something he’d never seen before. The man had turned violent. He had crossed a line, Christophe felt certain, and from that moment on Stanislas Cassel wouldn’t ask for any mercy or give it.

CHAPTER 23

THE BRIEFING

“Monsieur Minh!”

A gendarme in bulletproof vest parted coils of wire that looped around the Annex’s perimeter.

Preoccupied with the bag’s content in hand, Stanislas hobbled past with a perfunctory nod. “Monsieur Minh!”

Another guard hopped out from his booth beside the entrance and pushed open the massive front door.

Even before it had eased shut, Stanislas yelled out again, “Monsieur Minh. Quickly. We’ve work to do.”

His voice echoed down the corridor. Relatives of prisoners jerked their heads his way and hushed. On a bench a man with orange hair rattled manacled hands at him. “M’sieur,” he screeched. “That stabbing was self-defense. Help me.”

Monsieur, I don’t help. I indict. He tossed his cane onto the table in front of him, startling the gendarme seated behind it. Without any apology, he snatched the pen in front of the guard’s hands and scrawled his initials across the ledger in the tense silence.

“Monsieur Judge,” the policeman said. “Your complete name, if you please.”

Stanislas pitched the pen down and closed him out.

“I’m on the phone,” Christophe finally answered.

Cassel shifted to a half shut office door to his left. “I need you immediately.” His voice was raw with impatience, and he didn’t care. The pen rolled onto the linoleum. He limped past the table and gendarme, past the crowd and down to the washroom where he banged open its door. Whimpers from behind rose again in misery as the door swung shut.

A harsh ammonia smell made him cough. A bulb from a tangle of wires above yellowed the walls. Ahead, an opened window crosshatched with wire let in a chill. He bunched his shoulders from the cold as he dropped his cane on an adjacent basin, tossed the bag onto the glass countertop above the sink, and twisted hard on the tap. Water trickled into the stained bowl.

“I was speaking with Monsieur Vallon. He wants to talk with you about Fabrice and a disciplinary hearing.” Christophe entered and stood just inside the doorway.

The male prisoner on the bench screeched another cry. Christophe kicked the men’s room door shut with his heel and stepped further inside. “We’ve a new security directive too. This one’s filled with six pages of do’s and don’ts.”

“I’ll read it later. Tell Officer Leclair to see me in half an hour.” Stanislas splashed lukewarm water over his face.

“What about these?”

He glanced sideways and caught a pile of message slips Christophe held. The calls must have come in while he was out. Be absent fifteen minutes, he thought, and you fall further behind. “Hold them for the next hour. I’ve got some reading to do.” With one rip, he brought a length of paper towel from the roll on the countertop to his hands and lightly patted them. “And come into my office.” Not waiting for any response, he pitched the towel into the trash, grabbed his cane and bag, smacked open the door to the corridor, and crossed to his office.

The DO NOT DISTURB sign on the outside doorknob and the murmur of a twenty-four hour news station from his portable radio were excessive precautions, he knew as he eased into his swivel chair. He didn’t care. The case had become too important to risk any leaks.

The bag lay discarded in the trash. Centered in the middle of his green desk blotter lay its sole content, a thick folder, whose cover proclaimed the report’s importance in red capitals: SECRET. FOR INVESTIGATING MAGISTRATE STANISLAS CASSEL, PARIS PALACE OF JUSTICE ANNEX, ONLY. NO OTHER SIGNATURE ACCEPTED.

“A special courier from Lyon just met me a few blocks from here,” he explained to Christophe, seated to his right. “We have movement in the Pincus dossier. A profile of sorts from a further analysis on evidence found in that studio. You’ll work late tomorrow night.”

Christophe let out a moan. “I promised Suzanne Thursday evening.”

“Not this one. This is urgent. You’ll type up my notes after an off-premise briefing Officer Leclair and I will hold tomorrow night at eleven. This dossier’s turning at last.”

“What do you think of that Rudolph Fuchs fellow?” Leclair asked.

“That Austrian fringe freak?”

“He’s marginal no more, Jo Jo. Read the latest
Der Spiegel
. They did a twenty-page piece on his rape trial and found his support growing in spite of those charges.”

“I got better things to do with what little time off I get these days, Officer Leclair.”

Who could blame Henri for talking about everything except the briefing? Stanislas thought. He paused in reading the folder’s contents and glanced across to Leclair, who stood a step back from the curtained window the other side of the room. “It’s thirty-seven minutes past by my watch, and Zidi still hasn’t shown. Neither has Marco.”

Jo Jo shuffled toward the first of the four rows of metal folding chairs at the front of the room, abandoning his friend to his explanation. Leclair surrendered his military bearing with an apologetic shrug. “I’m asking myself the same question. Where are they?”

“You talked to them personally?”

“To Marco, yes. Not to Zidi. His chief dropped him into another dark hole earlier this year. No one can get near him on that housing estate. It’s too dangerous in that maze of high-rises. The Zombies control a good part of that project with their drug trade. I did manage to get a signal to him last night, however.” Leclair turned back to gaze down at the pedestrians passing below. “He signaled he’d be here.”

It’s the fog, Stanislas thought, trying to ease his anxiety. It makes driving hazardous, if Zidi and Marco are driving, and you can’t snap your fingers and expect undercovers to rush to your command. Not like the old days. Not with terrorist bombings and riots that might require their services elsewhere at the last minute.

He returned to studying the bios Leclair had prepared, one-page overnight wonders the officer with his two-finger pecking had dashed off, each agent’s specialty on the first line, strengths and weaknesses in two columns underneath, a sullen photo head shot paper-clipped to the upper right corner of the sheet, case name and number left blank. Good for you, Henri, he thought. You can’t be too careful these days even with your own boys.

The nerves in his right leg pinched a dull pain up his back, and he recognized the sign. Unable to shake his tenseness, he clamped both hands on his cane, pushed up, and hobbled over to the window, gripping the folder.

He peeked out though he knew he would see nothing except the night and its pestilential fog. Two moons of light burned funnels through the rolling mist off to his right at the end of the block. He squinted forward for a better view.

“That might be our boy,” Leclair said.

“If it is, he should have parked elsewhere and walked. He’s gotten careless.”

“Battle fatigue probably.”

And on my operation. Stanislas smacked the folder hard against his side in disgust as he started limping back to his seat. Jo Jo had slumped into a chair and dozed with his long blue-jeaned legs stretched out. He didn’t recognize the other agent stooped four seats over from that undercover. The youth stared ahead to the blank wall like a shell-shocked combatant. We’re recruiting them that young these days? he wondered.

The room’s barrenness resembled a canteen for soldiers on leave from a war against terrorism that hadn’t left them, he noticed, whose worsening violence he had seen yet hadn’t seen. And these exhausted would work for him?

The buzzer next to the red wall phone beside the door sounded two times, then stopped. Leclair lunged left to answer. “Paul speaking. I’m sorry. Gwen’s at Club Narcissus for the evening.” There was a pause. “In that case, try Pandora’s Box.” His face brightened, and he cupped the receiver. “It’s Zidi,” he said in triumph across to Stanislas. Then back to his agent. “Come up. We’re waiting.”

From a closed-circuit television monitor on the metal table to his left, Stanislas watched Zidi grasp the railing. He saw him pull himself up step by labored step, the first, the second, then the rest of the floors, like an elderly man, till at last he heard the thump thump dirge of the last few steps, then heard the door creak open, and a slight man with a Middle Eastern swarthiness entered. Breathing heavily, he paused to rest. That can’t be him, Stanislas thought.

“Zidi!”

Zidi ignored Leclair’s hand. The undercover had brought with him the ghetto’s squalor on his baggy pants and Nike baseball cap knocked awry. Acknowledging no one, he shuffled over to the last row and slouched down. He also brought the slum’s hopelessness in his slow pace.

Stanislas flipped to Zidi’s page and studied the color photo, dated years ago. It wasn’t the same man slumped in the chair, whose shagginess stunned him. Working without a gun or backup had aged him.

“I think we can do with what we have.” Leclair had returned to standing in front of the table.

His plan was falling apart before the briefing had even started. “One moment.” Stanislas once more struggled up. “What the hell is this?” he demanded as he limped over.

His anger woke up Jo Jo, who stretched.

“Zidi arrives in a car,” Stanislas continued, “maybe alerting half the quarter. The other two agents are half-dead from fatigue. We’re missing Marco.”

“They were what I could dig up, Monsieur Judge. Every unit’s thin because of these riots and bombings. I was lucky to get these few. It’s them or nothing.”

Stanislas thumbed to the last page in the folder where someone had scribbled three names in the margin like an afterthought. “What about these?”

“Vic ‘the Rat’ Debré works the train tunnels for gang hangouts these days. Bruno Sébastian covers the eighteenth where there’s an enclave of Serbian émigrés. I’ll talk to them when their shifts end tonight.”

“And Officer Henner, what about him?”

“He’s now doubtful. He had to rush his wife to the hospital.”

Seven undercovers at best, Stanislas thought. A beggar’s manhunt in fog where you couldn’t see past your hand sometimes. “Okay, get on with it.”

Leclair clasped his hands behind him and began pacing in front of the table. “Rules of procedure as a reminder, tired as you are, to make things run smoothly. We’re running a secret operation since you arrived. No notes. No phone calls out and don’t worry. We’ve opened our hot line in the next room should an informer need to reach you about arms, drugs, etc. uncovered. No discussion about this case with your wife or joyful other, should she ask you your whereabouts this evening. You were working late at the office or whatever. No discussion with any colleague outside this case.”

“His Excellency permits smoking?”

Jo Jo remained slumped in his chair, Stanislas noticed, his legs still stretched out, his Beretta evident in his left ankle holster.

“You can smoke your Camels, Jo Jo. No one will consider it unpatriotic.”

“What dossier is this anyway?”

Leclair stopped abruptly and stared down at him. “That’s irrelevant, point one. Point two, I’ve asked your various chiefs to second you here for the time being because you’ll be hunting a murder suspect, whose traces the techs found at the crime scene. You’ll put in lots of time on this one—”

Zidi swore loudly. Jo Jo groaned. The youth four chairs over from him showed nothing on his haggard face.

“—more pay, naturally,” Leclair continued, raising his voice over their protests.

The buzzer next to the red phone sounded. Everyone ignored its stridency and glared ahead at Leclair.

“You’re men of the shadows,” he continued. “You infiltrate. You lull. You put to sleep. And may God bless your treachery, you betray if necessary. Your milieu’s the street, the alley, the housing project, the filth and depravity most Parisians never see. What’s in order here is something beyond your expertise, a bit of forensic science to help you better understand our problem.

“Every time someone comes in contact with another person or place, something of that individual’s left behind at that place, and something’s taken away with him.”