Murder Without Pity (9 page)

In no hurry to meet this Occupation survivor, Stanislas reached the first floor landing and paused to rest his right leg, which had started to ache. The climb felt steeper this time. Too much work had caught up with too little sleep and too few meals. Behind him, the front door banged shut. Christophe, having retrieved his glasses from the Peugeot, moved to join him. “You both lived in this apartment building,” Stanislas said and hoped that simple fact would quiet the crusty old man.

“We both liked the young Marlene Dietrich. That means I knew him? You’re also checking up on me, I bet. I’m seeking counseling for my drinking.”

“I’m here to question you about Monsieur Pincus, nothing else.” He felt like a policeman asking a hardened criminal to surrender; arguing further was pointless, so he gazed around while waiting for Christophe. Framed in the wall ahead, a window at the curve of the stairs let in a smudge of light. The bulbs illuminated each floor once more since the electrician had repaired the wiring. The two sources, though, did little to brighten the drabness of grime and dust and brooding air. Christophe skipped up behind him with the agility of a teenager. After hearing his clerk report their driver hadn’t spotted any suspicious cars or pedestrians, Stanislas began again his trek up towards Monsieur Lenoir.

The third floor and just in time. The minuterie had flicked off. “Odette, you still owe for that couscous,” one woman cried to another in the dark as Stanislas pressed on the lights. A little over five weeks after Monsieur Lenoir had claimed to have found Pincus at the bottom of the second floor landing, life had returned to normal, he saw. The same bickering as before. The same scratching out a miserly life of survival. And a teacher had retired here? Why? he asked himself and once more had no answer.

His cell phone beeped. “Monsieur Cassel,” he said in a low voice. “Yes, I have a moment.” He paused. “Nothing at all; I see. And that studio? Just one?” He paused again. “At least it’s a start. You’ll have test results when? The beginning of November then.” He slipped the phone into his overcoat pocket. “A lab tech,” he explained to Christophe as they continued up. “That abandoned tenement, contaminated beyond belief with bacteria, mold, animal droppings, you name it. Impossible to get any DNA trace from those assailants, who held me captive. They had some luck with Pincus’s studio. They’re going to do tests on a single hair found there. It doesn’t match his.”

At the top of the fifth floor stairs, Monsieur Lenoir stood feet apart blocking their path, defying him, Stanislas felt, to put him under oath. The man’s heavy cardigan made him look huskier. From his menacing stance he seemed quick with his temper, which he had in fact lost recently in a bar fight, according to a police report in the Pincus dossier. A bandage across his left brow and a bruised cheek proved the brawl’s brutality. Or had Pincus, he wondered, somehow caused the wounds, fighting for his life?

“What do you want to know about that imposter?” Monsieur Lenoir demanded.

Stanislas glanced at the magnifying glass the man brandished. “Why do you call him that?”

Monsieur Lenoir realized his agitation had made him unwittingly hold the tool like a weapon. He slipped the evidence of his anger into his back pocket. “Because he was one, that’s why. I collect stamps,” he added as though compelled to explain himself. “I was an engraver before I retired. I kept up my skill during the war, forging for the Resistance. I guess that’s why I collect what I do, being fascinated with print, I mean.” He glanced down at Stanislas’s right leg, bent slightly outward.

“I was injured in a terrorist attack here in Paris in my youth,” Stanislas said. “I apologize again for our missed meeting.”

Monsieur Lenoir’s grouchy features softened. He extended his hand to each in obligatory greeting.

A front door next to his studio grated open, wood scraping on wood. Through the crack, a swarthy man peered at them above three security chains.

“This doesn’t concern you, Shamir,” Monsieur Lenoir said in a bullying tone. “Get more sleep. Your nightshift starts in a few hours.”

Shamir obliged with a drowsy nod and pushed the door shut with his shoulder.

“We’ve almost no privacy here,” Monsieur Lenoir explained to them.

But enough privacy, Stanislas thought, to commit murder and flee. Either out of the building or back to his own studio here.

“I suppose you must do your duty,” Monsieur Lenoir said to him and led them into his studio.

A partition of glass panels parallel to him ahead divided the cooking and sleeping areas from the rest of the studio, Stanislas noticed as he entered. To his right, on top of a radiator beside a window, rested a yellow wicker basket, filled with rolls. The arrangement resembled a still life, he thought.

Yet a box of revolver cartridges on the desk beside the radiator jarred counterpoint to this touch of domesticity. And paintings arrayed around the walls depicted the storming of fortresses, epic sieges, and epic Napoleonic plunders. Monsieur Lenoir seemed to enjoy blood and battle.

“I bought some furnishings and bric-a-brac at the flea market near Porte de Clignancourt. Not that though,” Monsieur Lenoir explained when Stanislas glanced to his left, to three cards on felt under glass, hanging from the wall.

He turned away from the exhibit. How would that former Resister react, he wondered, if he were shameless enough to announce he was a traitor’s grandson? Hit and kick him like he had those bar patrons?

“I gave what forged ration cards and safe conduct passes I had saved to a museum,” Monsieur Lenoir continued. “Not those identity papers though. Ginette Lévy there in those photos. The kiss of death with that last name. She became ‘Leroy,’ ‘Lefèvre,’ and ‘Leca.’ Three different names and places of birth. One life saved from that butcher, Klaus Barbie and his Gestapoist henchmen. Your Monsieur Pincus was like that too in a way, I discovered.”

Stanislas faced him, puzzled. Monsieur Lenoir had pulled his chair away from his desk and had sat down. “Like what way?”

“Secretive, with two sides.”

Monsieur Lenoir squared himself as though ready to tell his story, but Stanislas told him to stop. The man still didn’t make sense. Léon Pincus, secretive? Had Monsieur Lenoir said that in his police testimony? The tenor of their meeting wasn’t going as expected. The man seemed to have changed his version of events.

Stanislas flung back the flap to his satchel, then jerked back the sides in irritation. “You testified you knew this man for many years,” he said, flipping with unease through his papers for Lenoir’s police statement.

“Let me put it this way. I knew a man who lived on the fourth floor here. He went with me sometimes on Sundays to a stamp mart. He shared a whiskey with me at times and gossiped which stalls offered the best bargains on market day. He was the man who died several weeks ago. That man I knew and can talk about. Beyond that…,”

Stanislas glanced over and caught his shrug.

“…a mystery,” Lenoir said. “Maybe a plotter of coups. Maybe a madman or book thief. Maybe a spy. Who knows who he really was?”

Or maybe simply a product of your imagination, Stanislas thought as he tugged out the deposition. “You were saying?”

“I knew he was a little secretive. Never inviting me into his studio. Always inventing reasons why. I accepted them. If he was hiding something, it was none of my business. But one day I make a joke, thinking I know this man called Léon Pincus and can tease him. A joke and nothing more about him and his precious secrets inside his studio. He takes my joke the wrong way, and after that we are enemies.”

Stanislas traced a finger slowly down the first page, searching for “plotter” and “spy” and “thief” that Monsieur Lenoir must have used in his police testimony. “How did this quarrel start?” he asked, still scrutinizing the print.

“One day I go to visit him. At that time I can truly say we are friends. I see his front door open a little, like Shamir’s that you saw. Naturally I peek inside, thinking I’m doing nothing serious. He could do the same with me, looking in like that, and I tell you I have no problem. I have nothing to hide. With him I see everywhere books and what looks like from where I stand old clippings of some kind in plastic bags. And I see this Léon bent over his desk with a tiny camera taking photos like this.”

Stanislas shifted his eyes across, fearing his suspicion.

Lenoir focused an imaginary camera at his knees. “Click, turn page. Click, turn page. Like that. You understand?”

My God, Stanislas thought. He turned back to the deposition and scanned the second page for “old clippings” and “plastic bags.” This can’t be happening. Why didn’t those police bring this out in their questioning?

“I make a harmless joke,” Monsieur Lenoir continued. “‘What are you, Léon, a spy? A simple joke between friends, I think. I tell you the truth, he jumps like this.” He clapped his hands loudly. “Like a gun’s just gone off behind him, and he’s had the scare of his life. ‘What are you doing in my studio?’ he wants to know. Not yelling. But demanding quietly.”

Stanislas flipped to the third page. First paragraph. Nothing there either.

“I feel at that instant a quiet rage in him,” Lenoir said. “The way he asks, ‘What are you doing in my studio?’ I see a side to him I never see before, this rage. I think he really is an enemy agent, and I discover him with a cache of state secrets that upset him, and now my life is in danger.”

The remaining pages and still nothing. Stanislas could hear through the thin walls Shamir snoring. For awhile they had privacy. But for this stunning revelation? He ignored the pain in his bad leg and his mouth that had turned dry. He needed several more moments to recover from what he had heard, though Monsieur Lenoir seemed unaware of the enormity of his omission. “Monsieur, nowhere in your police testimony can I find this incident.”

“Why should I have mentioned it? He was a book thief, who harms no one, and it’s not my affair. Or a dangerous man with dangerous weapons and dangerous friends and knows where I live. I should tell the police? And afterwards for my protection, find another place as cheap as this? Or stay here and face consequences from a spy, who knows deadly tricks and has deadly friends? No, I tell no one not one minute before it’s safe. Not while my life might be endangered. Since his death, I have watched day and night. No conspirator friends have come. I no longer live in fear. Now is safe. Now is the right moment. Now I tell.”

The man’s belligerent self had resurfaced, the self that had beaten bar drinkers, that had momentarily threatened him, that might have murdered Léon Pincus and afterwards made up a far-fetched story. And if he told the truth, who was this Pincus really? Stanislas closed his eyes in frustration. The police hadn’t bungled as feared. Lenoir might have withheld vital information until now. Everything was going to pieces, his suspicions about Boucher, his belief this was a simple investigation, everything…if Monsieur Lenoir had told the truth. “Could you see any book titles?” he asked, still numb from the discovery.

“From where I stood in the doorway, no. I only see him click and turn the page.”

“Did you see any boxes?”

“Not that morning. Much later, yes, I see him moving large ones out. That morning I only see him take those photos.”

“What about a Monsieur Boucher? Did he ever mention a Monsieur Louis Boucher?”

“Monsieur Criminal Investigator, you must understand. I could tell Monsieur Pincus might have had a secret life. He might have gone places and done terrible things I didn’t want to know about. After that morning, I felt in danger. I said, ‘Good day,’ and nothing more to him. I detected a hardness I hadn’t seen before. He kept a grudge, and I decided he and I were finished, and that was fine with me. I wouldn’t even help him carry out his heavy boxes one morning. He made five, six trips up and down, and I looked away, pretending I didn’t see—”

The apartment building rocked. The wicker basket on the radiator bounced sharply. Rolls spilled onto the floor. The desk beside the heater rattled as did the windowpanes. Monsieur Lenoir peeked out and shook his head as he looked both ways. “What was that?”

Christophe jumped toward the window and pushed him away. “The blast sounded like it came from the south. That’s where those kids are pointing. That warehouse we passed earlier, terrorists might have booby trapped it.”

Monsieur Lenoir grabbed his little portable radio from his desk and flicked a knob. “My TV’s in the shop for repairs.” When no sound came on, he pitched it aside with a grunt of disgust. “The batteries are dead.”

Stanislas jabbed in numbers on his cell phone and reached the tenth district police station. A retiree had just reported an explosion near Rue de la Fontaine au Roi, a policeman cried into his phone and added he had to answer other calls and hung up.

Christophe was into the corridor before Stanislas could say anything, banging on Shamir’s door, shouting if he owned a television.

In the lull as he waited for Shamir to rouse himself, Stanislas massaged his tired eyes.

Monsieur Lenoir asked if he were okay.

Stanislas tried a reassuring smile, too dispirited to nod. Was Léon Pincus a secret agent? He realized he’d have to check with the security services to see if they had anything on the murdered victim. He’d also have to put Lenoir under oath and take his testimony. The man had either lied over what he had stumbled upon to protect himself or told the truth. In the several minutes that witness had spoken though, he had destroyed every assumption. No more was Pincus just another Little Misery, Stanislas realized. He could have done anything. He could have been anyone. A simple beggar. A thief. Or even a spy.

SO MANY YEARS, SO MANY LIES

That evening Jules Altmann placed a telephone call to verify a 7 A. M. flight to Milan, Italy on the thirtieth of the month. Since Anna was holding a board meeting at his apartment, he made it from the Gare Montparnasse train station, after dining alone at a near by café.

He reached an anonymous little commuter airline, Air Swissthanza. When the reservation clerk replied that calling that early to confirm seemed unusual, Jules became testy and insisted she check, since his trip was important. For his peace of mind, she said she would. He used the name of Monsieur Myron R. Kahn, accenting the middle initial for authenticity and stressing the spelling of the surname. It began with a
K
, he explained, not a
C
, as some people assumed.