White breath escaped his mouth as he balanced his cappuccino and croissant in his left hand, working the lock with his right. He heard the bell as he entered, frowning when he realized the alarm was not on.
“C’est le bordel.” Michel had no doubt come back, as he often did, probably drunk. Gerard would have to check the cash drawer; it was usually the reason for the proprietor’s late night visits. Probably found a young one, spoiling him with expensive fruity drinks from money he didn’t have to spend.
“One day that man is going to get us robbed or killed,” Gerard muttered as he placed his items on the counter, unknowingly correct on both assertions. If Michel had taken the cash he would have to rush over to the bank and get the remainder of their money, which wasn’t much, just so he could make change if someone actually purchased something. He smelled ammonia and pine-scented cleaner, absently wondering if the cleaning crew had arranged to come on a different night. But their night was normally Wednesday. At the thermostat, Gerard warmed the room and stepped into the back so he could retrieve the rarest books from the safe.
When Gerard flipped the fluorescent lights on, he screamed. There was no dead body on the floor, no traces of blood of violence. But what made Gerard cry out were the three men standing around the room, one of whom he recognized. The one in the middle, the short one with the pug nose and bleary eyes, held a cup of coffee in his right hand. In his left hand was a small gold revolver; it was pointed directly at Gerard’s gut as the man spoke in working-class, Parisian French.
“Good morning, Gerard, you’re early. But that’s good because we have a few questions for you before we’re on our way.” He smiled wickedly. “And we are in quite a hurry.”
A half hour had passed. The rare book store had been due to open ten minutes earlier; there had been no customers as of yet. France is not a country that puts great value on punctuality. Had a customer pulled on the locked door, they would have glanced at their watch, shrugged, moved on. And in the event that happened, Bruno kept watch from behind the curtain so he could tell Nicky to silence their torture victim.
In the back room, bathed in clean fluorescent light, was the bleeding body of Gerard Micheaux. He was a tall, thin man, his feet hanging off the backlit work table displaying long, curled toes. Thick white rope had been wrapped around his neck, his torso, and his knees. He was held tightly in place, able to move only in millimeters each time he was sliced with the out-of-the-package razor.
Nicky was using one of his favorite interrogation methods and was narcissistic enough to think he had invented it. He walked around the fifty-five-year-old man’s naked body, dragging the box cutter’s dull, cold backside across Gerard’s skin, satisfied as he saw each segment of the body act independently, cringing, as if it just wanted the cutter to spare it and move onto the next limb or organ.
“Tell me the rest, Gerard. Leave nothing out or I’m going to go carving on your man-piercing cock next.”
Gerard’s body shuddered with silent sobs. His eyes were clenched shut, unable to see the forty-two cuts, independently struggling to coagulate enough to keep his body from slipping farther into shock than it already had. He swallowed thickly. “Sir, I have told you everything I know. Absolutely everything. Anything else I tell you I will have to make up, and I have no reason whatsoever to lie. Please!”
Marcel stood at the rear of the back room, smoking a cigarette, exhausted and thoroughly disgusted. The cuts were completely unnecessary. This man would have told them everything simply by being threatened. Having seen enough, he dropped the cigarette in his empty coffee cup and stepped to Nicky, his voice a whisper in the boss’s ear.
“Is this necessary? You’re leaving too much of a trail.”
Nicky cut his eyes to Marcel. “There will be no trail.”
“Okay, fine. But this didn’t have to happen. He would’ve told us what we wanted.”
“Perhaps, Marcel. Perhaps.” Nicky studied him for a moment, finally leaning close again and whispering only for him to hear. “Watch me finish him.”
He walked back to the table and leaned over Gerard, telling him to open his eyes. “So you say Michel’s cousin brought an American man here? But my men say the man with her spoke German. So which is he?”
Gerard’s answer was lightning quick. “He is American. I’m sure of it. He just lives in Germany.” Gerard squeezed his eyes shut again. Nicky patted him again, stifling his laughter as the gay Frenchman flinched each time he was touched or heard any sort of sound.
“Stay with me, Gerard. We’re almost done.” He leaned closer. “The man, his name is Gregory, and the girl’s name is Monika? And she is from Saarbrücken? You are certain of this?”
“Yes.”
“One hundred percent?”
“Oui,” Gerard answered, shuddering violently.
“Again, who were they?”
“She is Michel’s cousin—that’s all. They were just trying to sell a book…some rare diary…and Michel saw it as an opportunity to repay you.” Gerard began to quiver.
Nicky stepped backward, expecting vomit at any moment. “And what was this book, this rare diary?”
Gerard coughed as phlegm was beginning to clog his throat. “Michel wouldn’t tell me. All I know is he thought it was worth a great deal and that there were more. And then he made me leave.”
“When you say ‘a great deal’?” Nicky asked, using a tone one might for their best friend.
“I don’t really know,” Gerard answered, stifling his sobs. “But the way he was acting, running around, calling people, doing research, it could have been incredibly valuable, at least to him.”
“How much?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“Millions?” Nicky asked in high tenor.
“Very doubtful, sir,” Gerard managed. “Books are rarely worth more than thousands. If it was very rare, perhaps a hundred thousand euro.”
Nicky looked up at Marcel.
“C’mon, that’s enough, Nicky. Let’s leave him. He won’t ever speak of this, will you Gerard?”
Gerard, full of hope, insisted he would take it to the grave. Marcel believed him.
Nicky stared at Marcel with sheer contempt. “Mercy? For a faggot?” He flipped the blade over and gritted his teeth, touching Gerard’s upper chest. “Do you know how much I hate homos?” He pulled the blade back, preparing to gash Gerard’s throat.
“Nicky, wait!” Marcel yelled.
Nicky stopped with the blade in mid-air. Gerard was on the verge of screaming, but he choked it back, hoping for some sort of eleventh-hour reprieve.
Marcel held both palms up to Nicky. “Don’t do it, Nicky. The blood from these small cuts can be wiped from the table, but if you go to his neck we’ll have to start all over. We don’t have to kill this guy.”
Nicky hesitated a moment before nodding. He lowered the blade and nicked Gerard on his nipple. Then he leaned to his ear and whispered, “Your lucky day.”
Thinking he was about to be spared, Gerard exhaled loudly, unaware that it would be his last breath. As his body began to relax, Bruno stepped in and covered Gerard’s mouth and nose with strip after strip of thick, industrial tape.
Nicky grinned at Marcel, gesturing to the dying man like a hostess shows a new car on a game show. “See…no mess.”
Marcel dropped his hands to his side and shook his head resignedly. Another death. Another missing person. The trail grows wider and bloodier every day. Where will he stop? Marcel couldn’t save Gerard now, watching as the man’s body began to buck against the heavy rope. Tiny wisps of breath escaped from a crease in the tape—not enough to add five more seconds to the doomed man’s life. Marcel turned away and stepped from the rear of the store, dry-swallowing three Tylenol in the cold morning air.
Bruno and Nicky were clearly impressed with the skinny man’s surprising strength as his body began a death spasm in its quest for air. Three minutes later, just when they thought Gerard’s eyes would bug from his head, the conv
ulsing ceased. Four minutes after that, the trickling blood, pushed by his pulse, stopped. Gerard Micheaux was clinically dead.
Nicky washed his hands and placed his coffee cup in the trash bag they would take with them. “I’ll be in the car,” he said as he left by the back door.
Bruno, wearing gloves, made a sign for the door announcing that the shop would be closed for the next week. All of the bodies would be disposed of, far away, in an incinerator which had never yet failed the Glaives. Later in the morning, a specialized crew from Paris would come in and truly sanitize the shop. Concurrently, two former cops, now Glaives, would break into both Michel and Gerard’s homes, searching for anything—a phone message, a note, an email—that might make someone suspicious about either man’s whereabouts. By the time the local police came looking, all evidence would be gone and the trail would be as cold as the unseasonable November weather outside.
With Michel’s growing debt and drug problems, the investigators would write him off as someone who had simply run away. Since both men were openly gay, the short-sighted police would assume they had left together.
Even with Marcel’s objections, all the trouble had been more than worth the effort. Gerard had given Nicky plenty to begin his search on.
***
An afternoon of vibrant sunshine warmed Metz to a temperature that was nearly bearable. The outdoor cafés were still empty, the patrons sipping their wine or coffee indoors, but more people wandered the narrow streets of the city than the day before. Damien Ellis took advantage of the favorable weather to do some shopping on his last day in Metz, before he was scheduled to move on the next morning. He carried his novel and two bags, one containing several bottles of pinot blanc wine and the other a wheel of cheese.
As he made his way back toward his hotel, where a hot bath and a glass of red awaited him, Ellis spied a simple, two-story brick building with a sign marked Police de Metz. He hesitated, watching a uniformed cop stroll out, getting into a vehicle similar to an enclosed golf cart. Ellis’s brown eyes went back to the front doors of the police station, lingering. He shook his head and kept walking.
Then he stopped.
He looked back at the station.
Grumbling at himself, Ellis walked in and approached the front desk where an attractive policewoman, probably in her early fifties, looked up without smiling. He placed his bags on the floor. “Excuse me, parlez-vous English?”
“Yes.”
Ellis nodded politely, explaining who he was and seemingly irritating her with his slow manner of speech. He asked to see the two detectives he had spoken with the night before. The woman nodded, cutting him off and making a series of phone calls. Finally she turned back to Ellis.
“Officer Lloren is on duty and will be back here shortly. He’ll see you. You can wait right over there.” Her English was good but her tone icy.
“Rough day?” he asked.
She was motionless for a moment, her chest eventually deflating as she let out a breath. “My daughter, she is fifteen and we have been arguing for what must be weeks.” She lifted a mobile phone. “Even by text message.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You hang in there and, no matter what, just be there for her. Those teen years are tough…she’ll come around when she gets a little older.”
The woman cocked her head, returning his smile. “I needed to hear those words. Thank you for saying that.”
“No problem, and good luck to you and your daughter.”
Her tone much brighter, she asked if he would like some coffee.
“Love some,” Ellis answered. He followed her instructions and retrieved a mug from down the hall. The Metz Police police coffee was surprisingly good; a point he intended to share with his commandant upon his return. The first indication of a civilized group of people, in Damien Ellis’s opinion, was the quality of the food and drink they put in their stomachs.
As he waited patiently, enjoying the steaming brew in the lobby, a heavyset woman of perhaps thirty entered with a distressed look on her face. She spoke in rapid-fire French to the desk officer, gesturing with her hands until finally, she too was told to sit and wait. The desk officer walked away.
Ellis understood enough to have made out a few words of what the woman had said. Whether or not he comprehended anything, he’d been a cop long enough that he would have known the woman was distraught and frustrated. She sat adjacent to him, her cheeks flushed, her heavy bosom heaving from her fast breathing. Whatever makeup she had applied that morning was now working against her, smeared like clown paint from the tears and face-rubbing.
“Everything okay?” he asked in English.
She turned to him, frowning, but answering him in broken English. “No. My brother, he is not here.”
“Not here?”
She opened her hands, unable to find the English word. Her large green eyes welled with tears, childlike, displaying a ray of hope that perhaps this strange American with the deep lines in his face might be able to help in some way.
“Missing?” Ellis offered.
“Oui. I call the police two times today and they no help.” Her voice was deeper than most, but marked by high notes as she strained to get the words out. She mopped her face with a tissue, pointing behind the counter. “They no help, so I come here to get help myself. But I do not know what to do.” A fresh bout of sobbing began.
Ellis placed his mug on the table between them, patting her hand. He was a public servant at heart, no matter where he was or what he was doing. “First, try to calm down. Take deep breaths…there you go. Your being upset won’t help your brother, okay? More deep breaths. Ah-ha, that’s good.” When she seemed to regain her composure, he took his hand off of hers. “How long has he been missing?”
“This is what the police ask. I tell them he is just today gone and they say no worry. But this is not Michel. He speaks everything to me.” Talking about it appeared to exasperate her. She tugged on the ends of her brown hair, agonizing on every word.
“Why do you think something is wrong?”
“He is gone, his shop not open! His shop, it is his life. He needs money, oui? He not close shop on day of work. Never.”
“Does he have any employees?”
“Oui, one man, and he no here either.”
Ellis nodded, understanding why she might be upset. “What kind of shop?”
“La librairie,” she said after stammering for the English word. She pointed to his Stephen King novel.
“A book store,” Ellis said to himself, staring at the novel as his mind went elsewhere. Slowly, like when he had been a boy and seen the garage door being reeled up on the Meridian Fire Department, an old-fashioned siren started low and quiet, building, building, until it blared full force in his head.
A book store…
As an officer entered the room, Ellis patted the girl’s arm again and told her everything would be okay. The officer gave her a brief nod and ushered her into the back, leaving Ellis with his thoughts as he waited.
His mind went back to what the American man had said, whispering forcefully in the hotel lobby: Hide the diaries under the back seat!
Diaries.
A bound and gagged desk clerk. A missing security tape. A man telling his accomplice to hide the diaries in the back seat. And now a book dealer has gone missing. Fluke? Perhaps. Enough to at least take a look-see? Definitely. Metz wasn’t large enough to write off those kinds of coincidences, especially when they occurred on the same night.
From the same door the distraught lady had exited, Officer Lloren appeared. He didn’t invite Ellis into the offices, staring at him with an indifferent gaze and speaking to him with the same warmth that he might welcome a panhandler. “Monsieur Ellis.”
Ellis wished he had just gone on back to the hotel and drawn the hot bath. “Yessir, just wanted to drop by and see if you learned anything else about last night?”
A long blink as he sucked on his teeth. Clearly patronizing. “The hotel’s propri
etor, Monsieur Ellis, and the clerk, chose not to seek charges against anyone since nothing was stolen. A cursory look into the clerk’s past revealed that he has had some regrettable situations involving narcotics. So…” Lloren folded his arms in front of him and arched his eyebrows.
“Ah,” Ellis hummed. “So you guys think he might have had some little deal going and would rather just let the chips fall where they may?”
“Monsieur Ellis, we really don’t have time or resources to chase after some mystery man, who might be German or English, who is alleged to have performed a simple assault resulting in no injury, and who didn’t steal anything other than a three euro DAT tape.” He stepped closer. “On the registry, the alleged couple gave an address in Wieseck, Germany that does not exist, nor do the names they provided. So from here, we simply advise our force of their description and move on. We have more pressing issues.”
Ellis was about to speak when Lloren cut him off.
“You leave tomorrow, oui?”
“Yessir.”
“Then I would advise you to go and enjoy our city. The food and wine are excellent; certainly better than the merde they serve in your unfortunate home of Frankfurt. And as far as this matter, we have your information and will call you if we need you. Otherwise, I must ask you to drop it,” Lloren said, his voice hardening at the end.
Ellis nodded. Rather than shake the man’s hand, he offered a pinched smile, swilled the last of his full-bodied coffee, told the desk sergeant to hang in there with her daughter, and exited the door of the station. The sun was nearly down, casting the busy street in dingy gray light as the resident cold swept back in for the night. He walked to a nearby bench, sitting with his bags and bunching his coat around him as he prepared to wait. He smoked his pipe, humming an old jazz tune as he liked to do when he had time to sit and think.
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