Paris Ransom

by Charles Rosenberg

“So in your country do you, as a lawyer, owe an obligation of truthfulness to a court?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Do you think that just because you are in a foreign country and are not a member of our bar, that you do not owe this court the same duty?”

  “I don’t know, that’s a tricky question.”

  “I did not mean it to be tricky.”

  “I know.”

  “Why did you really go into the room, Professor?”

  “I thought there might be a clue there as to why Oscar had been kidnapped.”

  “Kidnapped?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maître Bertrand, are you aware of this?”

  “Yes, your honor, but I thought it was not really related to the matter before the court.”

  “Really. I think it might well be very related. Professor, are the police looking into this matter?”

  “They are looking into whether money laundering was involved. I don’t think they’re really looking for Oscar, unless they just happen to stumble on him while doing the rest of the investigation.”

  “When was he kidnapped?”

  “New Year’s Eve. Near the Odéon Theater.”

  “If you know, what is the name of the policeman who is in charge of the investigation?”

  “Well, there is Captain Bonpere, who began the investigation. But then it was taken over by General Follet. But I don’t think he’s in the police.”

  “Maître Bertrand, you have appeared in my court many times. Did you not think it appropriate to let me know what this case was really about?”

  “I apologize, Monsieur le juge. I did not think you would want to know about these, uh, complications to a rather simple case of breaking and entering.”

  “I see. Well, when this is over, we will have to discuss your candor. Or lack of it. For now, I will take a brief recess so that I can call the general.”

  “You know him?”

  “Oh yes. Over many years.”

  “Okay. How long will the recess be?”

  “I think if you and the professor and the translator just wait on the bench outside, that should be fine.”

  They left the room and I called General Follet, who had once upon a time been my regular tennis partner, until a broken elbow had sidelined me. How long had it been since I’d seen him? Five years, maybe? Surely he would welcome coming to my office for a cup of coffee and a renewal of our acquaintance.

  CHAPTER 32

  When I reached the general I was surprised to learn that he had emerged from retirement and was doing something—he avoided saying exactly what—with the police at 36 quai des Orfèvres. Which was unusual. The military does not usually play well with the police.

  He was at first reluctant to accept my offer of coffee, despite the fact that my office at the Palais de Justice was, with shortcuts, at most a two-minute walk from where he was. I threw in an offer of almond croissants, which I recalled he loved. He relented and said he’d be at my office in thirty minutes. I did not tell him what I wanted to discuss.

  I asked my greffier if she would go out and buy four of them, including one for herself. She had overheard the call and readily assented to go. “Anything else?” she asked.

  “No. I think our espresso machine is working well, is it not?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then that should suffice.” I had long ago put in a coffee machine so that my guests would feel at home while they spoke to me, even if they might later find themselves on the way to jail due to my professional ministrations.

  “What about Maître Bertrand, the witness and the translator, whom you have left sitting out on that narrow and uncomfortable bench?”

  “Please send them home, but ask them to be prepared to come back tomorrow. I will let them know what time.”

  “Okay.”

  The general arrived on time and we exchanged the various greetings expected of old friends who have not seen each other in a long time, including the fatuous promise not to let so long go by until the next time. Then we sipped coffee and munched on croissants and finally, when we had each eaten about half a croissant, we got down to business.

  “Mon général, old friend,” I said, “I have today taken jurisdiction over a strange case.”

  “What case is that, my friend?—A friend who ought, by the way, to be retiring. You are too old for this game, as am I.”

  “Eh, retirement is coming soon. The case is one in which an American professor, a tourist, is accused of picking the lock of a hotel room door and stealing an antique pen.”

  “What idiot assigned such a petty case to you?”

  “The presiding judge of our panel.”

  “You are much too senior for this. You deal with terrorism and important matters.”

  “That is just the thing. The professor, whom I began questioning this morning, has mentioned that she broke into the hotel room in order to find clues that might lead to the recovery of a friend of hers who has been kidnapped.”

  He took a sip of his coffee and another bite of the croissant and chewed for a few seconds, as if gaining time for a response.

  “That is quite extraordinary.”

  “Yes, and what is most extraordinary is that she mentioned that she had spoken with you about it.”

  “In what regard?”

  “She asserted, mon général, that you are running the investigation into the kidnapping.”

  “I see.”

  “Eh, see or do not see, or whether you are or you are not, I am going to look into this kidnapping and I thought as a courtesy between old friends I should let you know.”

  “You do not have the jurisdiction to look into it.”

  I was truly shocked at his statement. I had genuinely thought that he would welcome my help, but since he did not, I took another tack. “General, has another magistrate been asked to take jurisdiction of this matter?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Well, I know. I have looked at the list of pending matters. There is no other judicial inquiry at the moment concerning the kidnapping. So I am seizing jurisdiction.”

  “You can only do that if the public prosecutor asks you to.”

  “In normal circumstances, you are right. But here—and perhaps you do not know this—the public prosecutor dismissed the case, and the partie civile resuscitated it.” I handed him the dossier. “Look for yourself.” He took it, looked at it briefly, and handed it back to me.

  “So,” I said, “you can see that for the moment the public prosecutor has no role. The case is mine, and I will investigate what I must to achieve the goal I always try to achieve to the best of my limited abilities.”

  “Which is what, to satisfy your personal curiosity?”

  “No, to do justice.”

  He sighed deeply. “Monsieur le juge—and I use your formal title intentionally—justice is a slippery thing. If you interfere here, I fear you may do a small justice and sacrifice a much larger one.”

  “Will you answer a few questions about your knowledge of this thing? Perhaps you can persuade me to back off.”

  “Is this a formal hearing?”

  “No, it is a conversation between friends.”

  “I will respectfully decline to answer then.”

  “I can always send you a summons and make you come here to answer under oath.”

  “You will find I have immunity from a civilian court proceeding.”

  “Since you are retired, I don’t think you do. But we can test that very soon.” I grabbed a blank summons form from my desk drawer, filled it in and handed it to him. “Your hearing is tomorrow at fifteen hundred hours. You can contend that it’s not timely, if you want, I suppose, or that you are immune from service. In either case you can appeal the order, and this matter will become more public, which will
be fine with me.”

  He glanced at it and smiled. “Tomorrow is my birthday. Surely you would not . . .”

  “Give it back, then.”

  He handed it to me. I modified it and returned it to him. “Now it is the day after tomorrow, same time.”

  “If I choose to come, I assume I can bring a lawyer with me.”

  “Oh, by all means. Try to bring someone who plays tennis. Maybe we can find a fourth for the late afternoon and put together a couple sets of doubles when we are done. My elbow seems healed now.”

  He didn’t commit to tennis, but he did leave.

  I turned to my greffier. “Did you take all of that down, even though it was not official?”

  “Of course, Monsieur le juge.”

  “You are the best.”

  Before I left for the day, I put in a call to Captain Bonpere, whom I had met a few times, but didn’t know well. She was out. I left a message to please call me.

  I also called my caretaker in Provence and told him I would not be coming after all. At least not for a while.

  The next morning there was a message on my phone from Captain Bonpere. I called her back and she agreed, without hesitation, to come to my office.

  I offered her a croissant, and apologized that they were yesterday’s and perhaps a bit stale. She seemed not to care, but declined coffee. Which was good, because my greffier had not yet come in and I was terrible at making coffee.

  “So,” I said, “we have met a few times at conferences, I believe.”

  “Yes, we have. What can I do for you, Monsieur le juge?”

  “I now have jurisdiction over a case involving a professor from America who is accused of breaking into a hotel room and stealing a pen.”

  “Ah, yes. I know the case. My unit started to investigate it, but it was taken away from us by General Follet. He says he is working on it with the Brigade Criminelle.”

  “Do you doubt he is?”

  “I have not seen anyone from there, but on the other hand, they have no reason to pay attention to me. I am a mere police captain in charge of a squad.”

  “But you have met and interviewed the professor?”

  “Yes. I believe she is honest in saying she broke into the room because she was trying to solve the kidnapping of her friend Oscar Quesana.”

  “Are the kidnappers demanding a ransom?”

  “Yes, but in the form of a rare antiquarian book that they believe the kidnapped man has hidden somewhere.”

  “That is a new one.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Is anyone else involved?”

  “The man the professor was with the night of the kidnapping is also trying to find Monsieur Quesana.”

  This was new. “Who is he?”

  “Ah, his name is Robert Tarza. He is also an American, and a former colleague in a large law practice with the professor. He is older and now retired.”

  “A romance?”

  “No, no. He has lived here in Paris for many years now with Madame Tess Devrais.”

  “I have heard that name somewhere. Who is she?”

  She looked around the room, as if checking to see if anyone was listening. “Um, do you have a security clearance, Monsieur le juge?”

  “Yes, of course, or I could not have worked on certain terrorism cases.”

  “Is it still current?”

  “Yes.”

  “May I see it?”

  I actually have a certificate. I got it out of my desk drawer and handed it to her. She looked at it with great care and then handed it back.

  “Madame Devrais,” she said, “is a consultant to the highest levels of the government on national security–related electronic infrastructure.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “I worked with her several years ago on an investigation involving an electronic penetration of an ultra-secure facility.”

  “What was that about?”

  “Despite your security clearance, Monsieur le juge, I do not think you have a need to know, so, with all due respect, I would prefer not to discuss it.”

  “May I ask how Madame Devrais came to be in this position? It is unusual for a woman.”

  “Yes, I think I can tell you that, to the extent I know it.”

  “Go on then.”

  “Madame Devrais founded her own software company when she was only twenty-five. She sold it several years later for several hundred million euros.”

  “I do not recall that. You’d think I would. It is the kind of thing that would have been in the newspapers.”

  “She sold it to the government in a closed and secret sale. Kept very quiet somehow. And much of the information about the company was wiped off the Internet, which was very young then. It was much easier to do that at the time.”

  “And then?”

  “She gave up operational control of the company but continued to consult on special projects.”

  “I see.”

  “She also did something very clever.”

  “Which was?”

  “When she became a consultant, apparently certain figures in the military and police treated her badly.”

  “In other words, they treated her like a young woman who did not matter.”

  “Yes, but she did something about it.”

  “What?”

  “She insisted that if she were to continue consulting, she must be given a civilian rank equivalent to a divisional general—which is a rank with three stars.”

  “Ah, so then she outranked most of the assholes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she trying to help find the kidnapped man?”

  “She was trying to help us before the matter was taken away from us. She has to be careful because she has no operational role in the security services. She is only a consultant. But I suspect she is trying hard to find out what is going on.”

  “Thank you for your candor, Capitaine. Let us stay in touch. And please call me right away if you learn anything new in this strange tale.”

  “I will do that, Monsieur le juge.”

  She had not been gone long when my phone rang. It was Maître Bertrand. “The professor has received a new text from the kidnappers,” he said.

  “I wasn’t aware that she had ever received any texts from the kidnappers.”

  “Ah, yes, I apologize. I forgot that we had not gotten into the details of all of this before, Monsieur le juge. You left us to sit on the bench for a while.”

  “What are those details?”

  He then summarized—quickly—the story as he knew it, including the text messages that had been exchanged and the bizarre goings-on in Digne-les-Bains. When he had finished, I said, “Well, that is quite an histoire. What did this newest text from the kidnappers say?”

  “It said that the victim had relented and told them where the book is hidden. They have given instructions for its delivery to them once the professor retrieves it from its hiding place.”

  “By ‘the book,’ you mean the one the kidnappers are demanding as ransom?”

  “Yes, that one.”

  “And where is this book supposed to be now?”

  “In a secret compartment in the hotel room that my client broke into. It’s apparently well hidden.”

  “And you are telling me this why?”

  “My client believes that the general reads the texts she sends and receives. She also thinks that he has tapped her cell phone. Therefore, she has no doubt that the general has already read this new text and will try to get there first and retrieve the book himself.”

  “What is the basis of her belief?”

  “There is a phrase in English she uses. I am almost embarrassed to tell it to you. She says her ‘suspicion-o-meter’ tells her this.”

  I raised
my eyebrows. “What does that mean?”

  “It is difficult to translate into French, Monsieur le juge. Perhaps ‘pifometre’—it is as if something does not smell correct. But I think it means that she trusts her intuition about people, and her intuition about the general is not good.”

  “The professor was a trial lawyer for many years in Los Angeles?”

  “Yes, and apparently a very good one.”

  “Eh bien, trial lawyers often have superior intuitions. But even if she is right, won’t the general just use the book to free the kidnapped victim?”

  “She fears not. She thinks he might do something else with it, because she thinks he doesn’t care about the victim.”

  Before my strange meeting with the general, I would have found the idea that he would use the book for anything other than a legitimate purpose preposterous. Now I was not so sure.

  “What exactly do you want from me, Maître Bertrand?”

  “I respectfully request that you issue a search warrant for the book at the hotel and have the police carry it out. As soon as possible.”

  “You believe I have the authority to do that?”

  “Monsieur le juge, you have opened a judicial inquiry into the allegation that my client broke into the hotel, and so . . .”

  “And so you think exploring this kidnapping that led to that break-in is within my jurisdiction.”

  “Yes.”

  “I have concluded the very same thing. So I will do it.”

  “How long will it take to carry out a search?”

  “If the police will treat it as an urgent matter, we should be at the hotel in an hour.”

  “You’re coming, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “May I bring my client?”

  “Yes, as long as she doesn’t interfere.”

  “I will ensure that she will be on good behavior.”

  CHAPTER 33

  The judicial police usually carried out the searches I ordered. But the Paris Police would do it, too, if I so requested. So I called Captain Bonpere, told her of the situation and requested assistance. She enthusiastically agreed to help and mentioned that she had an officer who spoke good English, and that she would send him to pick me up and take me to the hotel.