Treasure of Saint-Lazare

by John Pearce

  “Did you call him?”

  “The next day. He called me back in a couple of hours and I told him I couldn’t think of anything else I hadn’t told him, but I would call again.”

  “Who answered the phone?”

  “It may have been a restaurant or a shop. Anyway, it sounded like there were some people there, but they weren’t loud. I’m pretty sure I heard some Arabic in the background, although the man who answered the phone spoke good French.”

  Eddie and Aurélie spent the train ride back to Paris rehashing their conversation with Jacques. Paul, as usual, sat in the car behind.

  “Do you think Jacques told us everything he knows?” Eddie asked.

  “No, but I think he gave us enough to let us figure out the rest. And I think what he told us was the truth. He seems really sad to be at the center of something that’s caused so much unhappiness.

  “That expression ‘rise like Lazarus’ interested me. You don’t hear it a lot these days. The Count’s townhouse was not that far from Gare Saint-Lazare. Maybe that’s the connection.”

  “It certainly could be,” Eddie said. “And Saint-Lazare — St. Lazarus — was supposed to have been the first bishop of Marseille after he was raised from the grave, so there’s a French connection, or maybe it was just hot air. What we really need now is the chance to squeeze Erich.”

  She laid her hand on Eddie’s arm and smiled. “It shouldn’t take much detective work to find him, if that’s what you want.”

  “You know damned well I want him in hell,” he responded sharply. She pulled her hand away quickly. “Sorry. It’s just something I have to do. Erich must have a string-puller somewhere, and it sounds like neither of them will rest until they find what they want. I need to find Erich first, then his puppetmaster.”

  “I know Philippe will be glad to hear what happened today. It will make his job easier.”

  Eddie said, “I’ll see him in the morning. It would be good if you were there too. Can you do it?”

  “Classes in the morning. Instead, let’s have dinner. That way you and I can fill in each other’s gaps. I’ll set it up. We probably should invite Margaux.”

  They parted when the train pulled into Gare Montparnasse. Eddie and Paul went separately to the Luxor to make plans for the next day.

  “Aurélie’s going to set up a dinner so we can brief Philippe together. In the meantime, we need to find out how Erich gets messages at the number Jacques gave us.”

  Paul replied, “That won’t be the last number in the loop. Either it will be forwarded somewhere else, or the person who answers it calls another number. Either way, we have to start with what we have. I’ll find out.”

  The number started with 01, which meant it was a Paris landline. Eddie went down the hall to the bathroom while Paul used the reverse directory on his iPhone to find out where it was installed. When he returned Paul had just finished writing the address in his small pocket Moleskine notebook.

  “Sort of what I thought. It’s an Internet cafe on Rue Montparnasse, just down the street from the gare. I’ve passed it dozens of times, and I know you have, too.”

  “Should we pay them a visit? Like right now?”

  “Why not? If we hurry we might catch the owner, rather than a night clerk.”

  “I’ll have the desk get a cab.”

  The cab dropped them at the corner of Boulevard Montparnasse and Rue Montparnasse. They walked up the one-way street looking for the Internet café on their left. They passed a crêperie, then a second, and Paul said, “If you like crêpes this is the place. Thousands of ironworkers from Brittany lived in this area while they were building the Eiffel Tower and the rest of the 1889 exposition, and they brought their food with them.”

  Paul’s wife was a Breton, and proud of it. She was one of just a few hundred thousand people still able to speak Breton, a celtic language imported from Cornwall and Wales that had little or nothing in common with French. Although she was a long-lapsed Catholic, she still reserved one Sunday every month or two for services at Notre-Dame du Travail, whose exposed armature, it was said, had been constructed with iron left over from the tower. There were differing opinions about whether M. Eiffel knew about his gift.

  “We come over here at least every couple of weeks, mainly for the crêpes. The cider, too.” Breton restaurants were famous for their hard cider. “I’ve seen this Internet café and it seems less seedy than most.”

  “It’s probably offering this message service as a moneymaker and doesn’t ask if all its customers are legal,” Eddie said. “We’ll have to pay for the information we need.”

  They agreed Eddie would do the talking, as Paul’s accent would immediately mark him as American. “I’ll stand in the background and look menacing,” he said.

  Three phone booths stood inside the door on the left and a dozen computers stretched along three counters on the right. A bored-looking man, paunchy and balding, stood behind a counter near the phone booths, looking warily at two strangers better dressed than most of his clients, who tended to be young or foreign or both, but not affluent.

  Eddie pushed open the glass door and stepped inside the store. A middle-aged man with a mustache looked at him from one of the phone booths with interest but not hostility. The three young men at computers did not look up from their video games.

  The man behind the counter shifted from foot to foot as he eyed them warily. He thinks we’re the police, Eddie thought. Let’s let him keep thinking that.

  “Excuse me for disturbing you, sir,” Eddie said, his tone colder than his words. “Your telephone number has come up in a search for a man we must find, and we are here to ask for your help.” He had written the number in his Moleskine notebook, and laid it on the counter. “Is this the telephone number of this establishment?”

  The man was growing more nervous by the minute. He pulled the notebook toward him and adjusted his glasses. “Yes, that is my number.” Two paces behind Eddie, Paul looked directly at the man, his face closed.

  “And may I know your name, please? Write it in the book below the number.” Unwillingly, the man did so. “Now write for me your home address, please.”

  When he had finished Eddie took the book back and looked at the page. “Monsieur” — he looked at the name — “Arobas. This is a confidential investigation and you must not repeat to anyone what we ask you or what you have told us. Do you understand that?” The man gulped and nodded.

  Eddie turned to Paul and held out the notebook. Paul ostentatiously copied the page into his own. Then Eddie turned back to M Arobas.

  “You receive from time to time telephone messages at this number from a man you know as Erich. I must know what you do with those messages.”

  The man immediately relaxed, overjoyed to learn they were only after one of his customers. He’d been afraid they were the dreaded tax police, for whom almost any tax evasion merits time in prison.

  “Oui,” he said, looking first at Eddie and then at Paul. “I receive calls from time to time for Monsieur Erich. His instructions to me are to immediately call another number and pass the message on to the person at that number. He does not receive many calls.”

  Eddie opened his book again and said, “Please write that number in my book.” The man reached under the counter for a small file box and extracted an index card, which he consulted before writing a number in the book. Then he slid it back over the counter to Eddie. He displayed the card, which contained only the name Erich and a Parisian 01 telephone number. Paul again duplicated the information.

  “Thank you for your cooperation,” Eddie told him. “If all you have told us is accurate and you do not tell anyone else of our visit, you will not see us again.”

  Back on Rue Montparnasse they walked toward the Gaîté métro station, where both could catch trains home.

  Paul asked tentatively, “How much do you want to tell Philippe?”

  “Ultimately, everything. The question is, How much do we want to tell Philip
pe before dinner tomorrow? The answer to that is, not much. I’d like to find Erich first, because Philippe is going to lock him away and keep him from the Sarasota prosecutors just the way they’ve kept him from Al Sommers and Sonny Perry.

  “How would you feel about trying to get him tomorrow?”

  “Great, but time is pretty short.”

  Eddie thought a minute, then said, “We could set up a fake meeting with Jacques, but Jacques would have to be in on the planning because Erich’s likely to call him for a confirmation. Let’s take a chance that he checks the message drop every day and go watch it. Can you find out where the number is installed?”

  “Easy.” Paul went to the Pages Jaunes site on his iPhone and typed the number into the reverse directory. In a minute he looked up and said, “A café called Le Stop, in the 18th not too far from Barbès-Rochechouart. It’s probably one of the many workers’ cafés in the neighborhood. Let’s go take a look at it.”

  They stood under the elevated métro track to get their bearings.

  “It’s a few hundred yards north,” Paul said, leading Eddie up the busy Boulevard Barbès. At sunset, its sidewalk cafés were crowded, many with North African men having coffee or a drink before going up to their tight apartments in the buildings looming over them. A satellite dish hung on each balcony next to the laundry.

  Idly, Eddie asked, “Do you think the Muslims would integrate better if they didn’t watch the foreign TV channels?”

  “Probably,” Paul said. “My wife thinks so, and she has some Arab blood from several generations ago. But most of them don’t speak French. Almost none of the women do, so they’d have to work at it, and their husbands want them at home. Look at me — I learned French late, and it was rough.”

  They turned right on Rue de Suez, a narrow one-way street of plain-front apartment buildings with North African hair salons and small groceries specializing in vegetables and fish on their ground floors. Halfway down the block they saw Le Stop, its name emblazoned in fading gold on a blue awning that protected a half-dozen men drinking small cups of black coffee.

  “If he comes by now we’re screwed,” Paul said. “But I suggest we just walk into that hotel across the street from it and rent a room on the front.”

  “OK with me. The desk clerk’ll just think we’re a couple of foreign perverts.”

  Paul paid cash for a double room on the second floor. Its single window was covered by a sagging once-white shade that slapped in the light breeze. Le Stop was directly across the street, but its awning prevented them from seeing most of the coffee drinkers. They would have two chances to spot Erich — once as he went under the awning and once when he emerged from its cover. A weak street light bolted to the hotel wall above their window cast a violet shadow on the curb in front of Le Stop. It darkened as the sun fell steadily toward the horizon, deepening the shadows filling the narrow cavern of Rue de Suez. By eleven o’clock there would be only the street lights and a few lighted shop windows and bars for illumination.

  Paul sat on the edge of the double bed while Eddie took up his position in a folding chair. They raised the window as far as it would go to get more air, then checked to be certain they were in the shadows and couldn’t be seen from the street.

  “At least it was cheap,” Paul said.

  “Hotels get stars based mainly on the size of their rooms, plus amenities,” Eddie responded. “This is a no-star, and always will be.”

  A couple walked arm in arm under the awning from the left and a few seconds later emerged from the other side.

  Every fifteen minutes or so a single man would leave, but replacements came only half as often and most of those stayed less than a half hour. At eleven-thirty a thin man wearing a white taguiya came out from under the awning and began to raise it, using a crank he fitted into a socket in the wall. As it rose, they saw the tables and chairs under it were empty, except for one against the wall next to the entrance. Two bearded men sat talking, one with a wine glass of the distinctive balloon shape used for Bordeaux, the other — also wearing a white lace prayer cap — with a small coffee cup.

  The two stood, then went into the restaurant. Seconds later, a light came on in the window above the awning. Paul and Eddie ducked instinctively until they realized at the same time that their window would be just another dark rectangle viewed from a lighted room across the street. “Jumpy, aren’t we?” Eddie said with a chuckle.

  The men came into view as they walked across the room, then sat down at a table in the center of the room under a bare bulb. The man wearing the taguiya carefully counted ten green 100-Euro notes, then picked up the stack and handed it across the table. The other man counted them again carefully before putting them into a wallet he extracted from the pocket of a brown jacket. He extended his hand across the table for a perfunctory shake, then rose to leave. As he turned away from the window they saw the notch prominently missing from his right ear, starkly silhouetted against the white wall.

  “Now’s the time. We’ll never have a better chance,” Eddie said. His voice was as calm and cold as Paul remembered it in Kuwait. “We’ll watch from the lobby to see which way he goes, then take him at the corner. If he goes to the right all the scaffolding around the building down the street will be the perfect place.” A large apartment building fifty yards away was shrouded in scaffolding and netting for the cleaning and surface repairs the city mandates every ten years.

  They watched Erich leave the café and turn to their right. He moved without haste, seemingly satisfied with his money and the wine. When he was thirty paces away they left. Eddie crossed the street to come up directly behind him while Paul stayed to provide cover from the other side. He walked fast, a man on his way to an important rendezvous, and quickly pulled abreast of Erich, who glanced at him once and then ignored him as he moved away.

  Eddie’s rubber-soled shoes enabled him to catch up with Erich almost silently, so by the time he reached the corner opposite the scaffolding Eddie was only ten yards behind, then five, as Erich headed for the covered sidewalk beneath the scaffolding. He became alarmed when Paul began to cross toward him, and as he put his hand into the right pocket of his trousers Eddie’s hand gripped his wrist like a vise. Paul immediately grabbed his other arm and together they hustled him into the inky shadow of the scaffolding.

  “And now we meet the famous Erich Kraft. Or Erich Wetzmuller. Or is it something else?” Eddie asked in English, tightening his grip on Erich’s right arm.

  “Fuck you.”

  Eddie’s voice dropped an octave to a menacing growl. “Understand this,” he said. “This is not about me. This is about the people you’ve killed and injured. Roy Castor, most recently. My father. My wife and son. The innocent desk clerk at the Hôtel Chopin. God knows who else.”

  “I don’t know anything about any of that.”

  “Think about something before you take that line. Did you know I killed Dmitri? With my hands? I could do the same to you and sleep like a baby.

  “I could turn you over to the Paris police and you’d spend forever in their rat-infested prison system. Or I could take you back to Florida and turn you over to the Sarasota police. That might be the best. Florida still has the electric chair, and I understand they like to use it. Or you can answer my questions and walk away and deal with your own nightmares in your own way. Which will it be?”

  Erich sat silently.

  “What do you want to know?” he finally asked.

  “Everything, from the first time you met Albert Sommers.”

  He thought again. “And you mean you’ll let me go? I can look out for myself.”

  “You can walk down this street, go back to Germany, wherever.”

  Then, without prompting, Erich confirmed most of what Eddie had picked up from Philippe and Carole Westin. He told how a man in Paris, whom he wouldn’t name, had told him that Al Sommers had a lead on some leftover Nazi treasure and was looking for help in finding it. He knew Erich had an American green card and
offered him expenses plus wages and part of the profits for finding out what Sommers wanted and leading the project.

  “I thought Sommers was nuts, but he did seem to have some good information. He knew about this old fellow in Paris who knew about the painting, and he knew how the top Nazis had thought, so he was pretty sure there would be hard goods with it, maybe even gold bullion. Al told me his friends Sonny and Dmitri would help me when the time came.

  “While I was there I got Jennifer to vouch for me and help me get citizenship. She was pissed that I took her name, but I didn’t have much choice. The Krafts were too well known to Interpol. I’d been visited once or twice by German intelligence. They were trying to make sure I hadn’t linked up with any of the guys my father had run in his Stasi days.”

  “Is she part of the gang?” Eddie asked.

  “Her? She’s just a woman. She just wanted the money. Al told her he’d give her $100,000 of the proceeds if she’d help with my citizenship and a few other errands. I never knew exactly what. And she liked what I had to give her, too.”

  He told of returning to Paris and telling his boss he needed a safe house to question the man Sommers wanted targeted. “He was old, so we figured he wouldn’t put up much of a fight. My boss gave us part of a warehouse he rented in Rennes. That’s after I found out this Mr. Grant went out there every month. Was he your father?”

  “He was.”

  “I’m sorry he died. It shouldn’t have happened that way. We took him at the Rennes station, in the car rental parking lot, and tied him up in this warehouse. We’d lined the floor and walls with plastic just in case. He just wouldn’t talk. He wouldn’t tell us anything. We questioned him a couple of hours until he passed out. Then I went outside for a smoke and to figure out the next step. I told Dmitri and Sonny to watch him, but he waked up and that Russian idiot decided he’d scare him by putting a plastic bag over his head. The idea was to threaten to suffocate him. But just after I got back he had a heart attack and died. We ran his car into a tree in a park nearby and burned it.”