Murder Without Pity (6 page)

“A hat’s hiding his face.”

There was a fussiness to the room, a purpose and energy he could sense. A drive not realized here, he guessed. Not in this halfway house of a room. No, Pincus might have focused his life outward. Again the thought of Berlin returned.

“He’s looking up at this building,” Christophe warned. “And he looks like he’s dialing his cell phone. And getting back into his Safrane.”

Too late to stop that driver from phoning in his search, if he did report to those who had held him captive, Stanislas knew. And too late to call his own driver or other police. But not too late for them to leave immediately and hope that his fear was wrong and that the man was only a property speculator.

“Monsieur Judge!” The photographer rushed into the studio, breathless. “I can’t find the guard. He must have wandered off.”

Stanislas thrust his hand into his trouser pocket for the studio key. “We’re getting out,” he said. Limping toward the door, he sensed a sudden kinship with Pincus. Something that man might have glimpsed from his window might have frightened him just as I’m frightened, he thought. And something might have made him flee just as I’m fleeing. As he locked up, he felt a hunch stronger now than before his visit. Léon Pincus appeared more than the beggar that Boucher claimed, and Louis Boucher, less the innocent than he himself professed.

PANIC

Some remains of Monday’s crowd drifted out of the Theater Anjou and into the fog. Louis Boucher glanced to a couple inside the lobby further to his left. He hadn’t focused on them until that moment and vaguely recalled they had seated themselves two rows back before the play had started. What bits of chatter he had overheard sounded harmless. But didn’t you entrap the unwary with the innocuous? he asked himself. Why didn’t they depart like the others?

He caught dangerous nuances in the lift of their hands. The woman flipped up the collar to her Peabody jacket, a gesture that looked like a signal to a police watcher outside. The man thrust his umbrella forward to a storefront’s blackened window across the street that fired lust in red neon. Visiting there could mean they had finished their assignment and were passing him to others. He should have concentrated on them instead of that suspect beautiful blond, who kept eyeing herself in her compact mirror.

He hadn’t enjoyed the play because of her. Come to think of it, he reflected, that museum’s Italian pastorals earlier that afternoon hadn’t relaxed him either.

But at least these activities had provided pretense for anyone who followed, he hoped, while he awaited the hour.

The marquee’s lights darkened. The lobby lights dimmed twice. Suddenly he stared out to a frightening world of mist and shadows. For an instant he thought, I must elude them. But he knew no matter how many twists he took, in the end he must reach that phone booth where they’d probably pursue him. And if they do? They can’t arrest me for what looks like a friendly call, can they? Unless that judge has that booth also tapped. His lips tightened in alarm at that prospect.

The woman palmed open the door. The man shook open his umbrella above their heads. They stepped as lovers into the wetness and headed across to the Erotique Boutique.

The pimply usherette approached him again, this time with arms folded in impatience. Would the monsieur please leave? They were closing in three minutes, and she gestured at her wristwatch for emphasis. He could no longer remain in that refuge, he realized. Other police might lurk outside as the elderly, as prostitutes in darkened doorways, as patrons in cafés. Life was risk, he thought. One had to gamble sometimes. So he pushed out into the mist, happy movement brought release from his tension, and hurried across an intersection.

Now past an Indonesian restaurant, relieved the chairs around the sidewalk tables remained empty. Next, onto Boulevard du Montparnasse. A police van seemed to float past in a sea of fog. Its revolving light threw a bluish hue over deserted cafés and restaurants as it vanished through the mist toward the east.

He rushed across another street, then faster down the sidewalk. That phone booth, where was it? He glanced around, panicky for its sight. He had passed it. He hadn’t walked far enough. It stood on the other side of the boulevard. No, there it was, just beyond the Tea and Chocolate Salon. Thank God.

“
The witness thinks the deceased might have shouted a name
.” Recalling the judge’s voice made him forget caution. He didn’t care if the police followed. He must find out who had called him that evening at his apartment. Lenny? Or that investigator? Fear pushed him recklessly past a youth in a jacket and calf-high boots, hair greased into green spikes, who lunged toward the same cabin.

Boucher stepped inside. He yanked the phone off its hook. Right foot in next, he banged shut the door and shoved his telephone card into the slot as soon as he heard the dial tone.

The youth spit a blob of phlegm onto the glass door. “Bastard,” he screamed.

Boucher jerked away and realized in his haste he had inserted the wrong side of the card. He flipped it over, almost dropped it, then saw he hadn’t removed his gloves.

“You shit!”

Oh shut up, you trash. With one yank Boucher ripped his right glove off, gripped the card by its sides, pushed it in, punched in the numbers. Three rings. Four. Five. He hung up, swept away cigarette butts on the metal counter, and waited. His phone didn’t ring back.

He thrust his hand into his inside overcoat pocket and snatched out a piece of stationery with Lenny’s number on it. He had dialed the ten digits correctly.

He punched in the same numbers. Again he waited. Lenny’s got to be there, he thought. He must have seen my Mercedes on the street as a contact signal. But Lenny didn’t call.

Boucher pounded the numbers in again, this time with such urgency his fingers almost slipped from the “2” to the “4” on the panel. Five, six, eight times he let the phone ring, forgetting the contact code, begging for a connection until finally after the twelfth ring he accepted Lenny wasn’t there. The receiver slipped from his grip. It dropped like a stone and swung back and forth from its cord.

He slumped against the booth’s glass side. Tomorrow was the tenth; he must try again, see if Lenny had called that night, or if that judge had. The youth shot an obscene gesture at him as he slammed open his own booth’s door and kicked it shut. Boucher closed his eyes, praying for peace. Yet even in the darkness of his mind, he couldn’t flee. A witness might have overheard his name shouted, and that examining magistrate might investigate him deeper. For the first time in years Boucher was frightened, and his phone rang on and on and on.

A NIGHT OUT ON THE TOWN

Stanislas collapsed his umbrella into his satchel and squeezed between arguing commuters in the metro’s aisle. He moved past rows of empty seats with a quick swing of his right leg, eager to reach the furthest limit of the carriage. He’d face enough bickering at work.

He took out Tuesday morning’s newspaper from his bag and glanced through the front pages with an occasional grunt of disbelief over the mess of things, of societies imploding, and of nationalists rushing in. The government has warned…. An anonymous source has revealed…. Rumors in Austria persist. And in the center column of one Parisian daily, the result of a weekend poll. A majority of those questioned, the article reported, said they thought the government wasn’t doing enough to combat domestic terrorism. When asked what frightened them the most, fifty-eight percent cited the Palace of Justice bombing. Strikes at the heart of our democracy, a baker offered. If the courts with all their gendarmes aren’t safe, a saleslady from a department store asked, are we?

Sensationalist reporting, he thought. Heated up to sell papers. Forty-two percent believed things weren’t as grave, Monsieur Editor. He stuffed the papers back into his case. He might read them later if he had time. He had his piles of Little Miseries to worry about.

The metro jerked to a stop. The doors to his left hissed open. Three gendarmes and an elderly couple stepped on board. But no accordionists, puppeteers, or chanteuses. Since the bombings, passengers, he could tell, had become surly and tightfisted with those performers. The doors slid shut. The metro lurched away from the quay. The heavy boots of the police clumped on the floor as they shuffled aside for the couple, who took seats in front of him.

The eyes of a curious few flicked toward the gendarmes and dropped away. A pretty brunette across from him, he noticed, pulled her coat over an exposed slice of thigh and gazed out.

One of the police nosed a German shepherd down the aisle, while his two colleagues lagged behind. Hard eyes under kepis probed packages, pockets, shopping bags, anything that could conceal, anything that bulged. A woman a row ahead slipped a hand into her knapsack. The mouths of the gendarmes pinched into alertness. She withdrew a comb and began brushing her hair in short, angry bursts. They slowed their way down toward the other end, darting their heads at the merest sound. Everyone looked suspect.

The metro rattled into Cité Station. “Report unattended baggage immediately,” he heard a woman’s metallic voice warn over the station’s speakers as he hobbled up the steps into the cold fog.

He paused at the red traffic light at the boulevard and stared across. What had happened to his Law Courts? They had become a fortress within an island. From an army truck across the street, soldiers heaved sandbags to others who were finishing a bomb barrier as high as the gilded lilies atop the gateway. At the drive into the courtyard near the edge of the gate, cars backed up into the boulevard, slowing the little traffic that struggled past. A gendarme poked his club inside the trunk of the first car at the entrance. His partner slowly worked a bomb detector around the underside. A pedestrian, stepping into the crosswalk, bumped Stanislas into awareness the light had flicked green.

Once inside the Palace of Justice, he wandered. The increased security stunned him. His Law Courts turned into a fortress overnight! The Forces of Order had prepared the building for a revolution, not another attack. Packs of dogs twitched for explosives in satchels and purses. Gendarmes in twos and threes, all with hands gripped on machine-guns, roved through almost deserted corridors.

Next the Sainte-Chapelle Courtyard, shadowed in medieval gloom, its stone walls oozing dampness. Gendarmes everywhere eyed the visitors who squeezed through the security checkpoint.

Then Stairway G, leading up to his original office on the fifth floor, now roped off. A soldier straddled the entrance. No one, not even an examining magistrate, was allowed upstairs any longer. The floors had become unstable, he explained, while Stanislas peeked into the foyer. The soldier was now explaining something about disaster specialists tiptoeing around, about more salvageable dossiers and mail forwarded to him, and none of it mattered. Stanislas stared at a line of dried blood that remained splattered on the wall. In the debris below rested a tiny shoe, exploded into shreds. The soldier explained another baby had died.

Gendarmes had stockpiled cots, blankets, and first aid kits against the wall in the Justice Annex’s main corridor. Siege provisions, Stanislas thought. Undue panic in the quantities dropped off. Stacked on a wooden table beside them were thick dossiers they had also delivered. A box beside the files contained a bundle of mail. He hefted the load onto a trolley and pushed it with effort across his office’s threshold.

He remained standing at his desk, while he sifted through the mail. The first piece, a thick correspondence with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam as the return address, was directed to Christophe Minh. A high official in Hanoi must have finally responded to the family’s request, he thought. They might get compensation yet for that confiscated tea plantation. He tossed the envelope onto his clerk’s desk and turned to Pincus’s mail the gendarmes had collected from his concierge.

He fanned through the sad little pile, then pitched them back one-by-one into the box each with a dismissive thought. A catalogue promoting a stationery sale…useless information. A flyer announcing the move of a Cambodian restaurant to a larger building in the tenth district…a waste of time. There was a leaflet from a rat exterminator. Another from a repairman that touted expertise, fixing broken windows and locks. Stanislas tossed these also into the box. The packet yielded no postcards, letters, invitations, nothing to reveal deep human contact. A teacher had retired early from his profession, crawled into a hole and one morning tripped to his death…with a look of terror in his eyes. Again he recalled the arriving crime scene officer’s description.

He withdrew his appointment book from his satchel and thumbed through the pages. Coroner visits. Trips to a forensic lab. Meetings with a deputy public prosecutor. One trip to London to conference with Scotland Yard detectives. Three trips to Rome to consult with an Italian examining magistrate. So much work, he thought. So little rest.

He crossed from busy September to frenetic October, and nearly two weeks past that divide reached his destination. On the top line of the right-hand page he had scrawled “Christophe to call Madame de Silvy for questioning.” So he had in fact, he saw with relief, noted that reminder to himself. Hopefully, she could aid his investigation.

And what was the cryptic meaning of that
H
he had encircled so forcefully at the bottom of the left-hand page the red ink had bled through the paper?
H
for…
Henri
, that’s what he had meant, he recalled after reflecting. Henri had accidentally bumped into him late yesterday evening at the Café Levant. Only the officer hadn’t by chance met him, he discovered when the policeman followed him downstairs into the men’s room. And Henri didn’t continue chatting about that game show scandal when the lavatory had cleared. Taking precautions, the policeman had whispered they must meet away from the Annex and had finished with two pleas. “
Tell no
one
,” he had warned. “
I beg you, no one. And Monsieur Examining Magistrate
,” he had added, “
be aware of your surroundings. Light can kill
.”