By the time I’d driven less than half the distance, I felt my eyes begin to close on two different occasions. I didn’t relish the thought of having my obituary on the front page of a local paper beneath the headline, “Paris Judge Hits Tree and Dies.” I stopped for the night in Montpellier, got up very early the next morning and was in Digne by nine.
I checked into the hotel, apologized for having missed my reservation the night before—I’d be charged for it anyway, of course—and walked to the courthouse. Caroline’s description of the courthouse was not far off, and I found both the tissue box building and her chambers easily. We greeted each other as long-lost friends, she offered me a chair and some coffee—which I declined—and I plunged right in.
“Did you manage to see Monsieur Condelet?” I asked.
“You didn’t get my message?”
It was then I realized that I had muted my phone when I boarded the train in Paris, because I had been in the quiet car. I had forgotten to reset it when I got off.
“My God, I forgot to turn the ringer on my phone back on. Has something happened?”
“I texted you about it. Monsieur Condelet tried to kill himself.”
“How?”
“Hanging. Last night. He put a stack of books on top of his bed, climbed on top of them and tied a sheet to a pipe on the ceiling.”
I got up and began to pace about the room. “Is he dead?”
“No. Unconscious. It is not clear if he will make it.”
“Did you get to talk to him before he tried to kill himself?”
“Just after he tried. They let me know as soon as he was discovered, and I rushed to the jail. They were just putting him in the ambulance as I got there. I leaned over the gurney and asked him again your key question—who told him to put the foreigners in the basement.”
“Did he answer?”
“He just said ‘Russian,’ and even that was kind of slurred. Then they slid the gurney into the ambulance. I actually got in with him, but on the way there they had an oxygen mask over his mouth and I couldn’t get anything more out of him.”
I thought about it for a moment. “It could mean almost anything. I mean, Olga’s father is Russian, but why would he put his own daughter in the basement?”
“You’re right. It could even mean that he was confused and was just trying to tell me who was in the basement, referring to Olga.”
“Right. So as evidence it’s useless, and it’s not much help as a clue either. Can we go see him?”
“I think so.”
We got in her car and drove to the hospital. On the way, I said, “I thought he was on suicide watch.”
“So did I.”
“Who gave him the books?”
“According to the police chief, he asked one of the jailers for some books to read. He told the man he was a book dealer and that he liked the classics. The jail only had mysteries, romance and sci-fi. So they went to the local library and got him The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers and things like that.”
“All big books.”
“Right, the better to stand on.”
“Only in France would jailers think that a request to read the classics wasn’t odd.”
We got to the hospital and went up to Condelet’s room. A police guard was posted outside. As soon as I saw Condelet, I knew that we weren’t going to get anything useful out of him. He was intubated, with tubes in both his nose and his mouth, and he was breathing with the aid of a machine on his chest.
We introduced ourselves to the doctor standing next to the bed, and I asked, “Is he likely to make it, doctor?”
“Monsieur le juge, I doubt it. He was apparently hanging up there for quite a long time. While it is possible—miracles do happen—it is very unlikely.”
Caroline asked, “If he does make it, will he be brain damaged?”
He shrugged. “Hard to say, Madame la juge. As I said, we don’t know exactly how long he was deprived of oxygen before someone cut him down.”
Bottom line, I thought to myself, we weren’t going to be able to talk to him very soon, if ever. We left instructions that if he were to awaken, we should be contacted immediately, although the doctor reminded us that Condelet would be unable to talk because he’d still be intubated. Caroline pointed out that he might be able to write.
On the way back to Caroline’s office, I asked her, “Is the police chief corrupt?”
“How do you mean?”
“If someone offered him money to help a prisoner kill himself, would he take it?”
She pursed her lips. “Eh, there has never been any allegation against him of anything even approaching that. I talked with a couple of the jailers. I think this was a case where they thought that he wasn’t that serious about killing himself, and that if they just took his belt and shoelaces and kept him away from knives and sharp objects, it would be enough.”
“This isn’t Paris, I guess.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Why are you even here, Caroline, so far from, well, anything?”
“I like to ski?”
“Is that the only reason?”
“Probably not, but I have given up being introspective.”
We left it at that.
I caught the next train back to Aix, and this time I made the connection and was in Paris by late afternoon.
On the train, I had time to think, to try to put the pieces together in various ways. But try as I might, they just did not come together into a sensible whole. The general had been my prime suspect, but the chief of the Brigade Criminelle had told Madame Devrais his activity was genuine. And even if Tess Devrais was correct that the chief was an idiot, that didn’t change the legitimacy of what the general was doing. Although I still had my suspicions. Just nothing to base them on.
What about Madame Devrais herself? That made no sense, either. She was as rich as Croesus, so she’d have no need to make money from the sale of the book. Besides that, the victim was a friend of her fiancé. She was not, so far as I knew, a book collector herself.
Then there was the hotel owner, but he seemed like too much of a lightweight to have put together a kidnapping. He did have a motive in that he owned a part of the antiquarian bookstore next door. But they’d have trouble marketing such a potentially famous book. Or would they? Maybe it could be sold in a careful private sale.
Finally, there were the mysterious Russians, Igor Bukov the father and Olga Bukova the daughter. I had not interviewed either as yet, but it seemed the time had come to do so. I texted my greffier and asked her to prepare a subpoena for Olga to testify under oath. I also reminded her of the need for a Russian translator. As for the father, since he was still in Russia, I’d have to see if I could find him and try to persuade him to talk with me on the phone. Either way, neither one of them seemed much of a suspect unless I believed that a father would order his own daughter held in a basement. Which I didn’t.
Somewhere, there was a key piece of information I did not have, or there was something I thought I understood that I in fact did not. If I could find what it was that I was getting wrong, the pieces of the puzzle would fall into place.
I decided to drop by the courthouse, even though it was past six. I had no plans for the evening and perhaps in the judicial ambience I could generate some additional helpful thoughts. My greffier was surprised to see me, although I was equally surprised to see her there so late.
“Bonsoir, Monsieur le juge. I had not expected you back until tomorrow. And I don’t ever recall your coming back to the courthouse so late.”
“Eh, late or early, it is good you are here. I want to issue more subpoenas and set up more meetings.”
She handed me a set of papers. “I have already prepared the subpoena for the first new one on the griddle, Olga Bukova, as you requested. But I do not know where to fi
nd her.”
“I will ask the professor. I have a feeling she will know where to locate her. In the meantime, I have some other things I want.”
“Which are?”
“I want to issue a subpoena to the French army for the personnel records of the general. And to the civil service for the personnel records of Madame Devrais.”
She raised her eyebrows, and I could tell that she was struggling with whether to make a comment about my request—something she almost never did.
“Monsieur le juge, if I may, this seems to me dangerous. The general is a powerful man, and he is far removed from this affair of the hotel room.”
“In my imagination, he is at the heart of it. And if it is dangerous, well, it is dangerous.”
“Do you recall what you told me when I came to work with you, many years ago?”
“That one of your most important duties was to bring in pastries in the mornings, but that I would reimburse you?”
“No, not that.” She smiled. “You told me that you endeavored always to remember that you were investigating only the case in front of you and not the entire French Republic, which would be the job of several lifetimes.”
“I did say that. But this is different. A man’s life is at stake. This is above and beyond a hotel break-in.”
She seemed to accept that we were going forward with the request. “Okay. But we’ve never served a subpoena for military records before. I will have to research where to start.”
I wrote out a name on a piece of paper and handed it to her. “I think you should start with this man. I am sure his phone number will not be hard to find.”
“Who is he?”
“Many years ago, before you came to work with me, I was a judge in the juvenile court. This man, who is now high in the administrative function of the military, had a sixteen-year-old daughter who did something stupid.”
“Something serious?”
“Yes. She could even have been tried as an adult, and the public prosecutor for juveniles wanted to do that. I talked her out of it, and it was arranged that the girl’s sentence would instead involve education and community service.”
She looked at the name on the paper I had handed her again. “His name is familiar, but I cannot quite place it.”
“He is one of those men who has quietly occupied many positions of importance in the military while avoiding serious public attention.”
“And he is grateful to you for what you did for his daughter.”
“Very.”
“And you are about to—”
“Cash in the gratefulness chit. I think it is still good. Call him and arrange for me to see the general’s records, even if it needs to be informal while they consider the formal demand.”
“And Madame Devrais?”
“For her, we should limit our request to her civil service records before she reached the age of twenty-five. That is, I think, when she went to work for the security services in some capacity. There is something about her relationship with the general, based on her body language when I asked her how long they’d known each other, that I don’t quite understand. Sometimes the very old histoire can explain the newer histoire.”
“When do you want these records for the general and Madame Devrais?”
“By two o’clock on the day after tomorrow, which is when the general is coming back to be questioned.”
“This will take time to arrange. You will have to get your own pastries tomorrow morning and the morning after that as well.”
“I will survive.”
CHAPTER 39
Robert Tarza
It had been five days since Jenna and I had returned from Digne-les-Bains. So far, we had accomplished nothing. Each day we’d had a report from the general telling us that they were making progress in finding Oscar and developing plans to rescue him. But he refused to supply any details. Captain Bonpere had called, too. She was sympathetic to our plight, but had nothing much to add because the general had cut her out of the loop.
The lack of information was agonizing. For all I knew, Oscar was being tortured, and we were sitting on our butts in Paris, doing nothing. I spent much of the day stewing about it. Finally, in late afternoon, I asked Jenna to walk down to the Casimodo with me. It’s a restaurant on the quai, right across the river from Notre Dame and only a couple of blocks from Tess’s apartment.
The weather was, if not exactly warm, at least not bitter cold, and we sat at an outdoor table, where we could take in the view. Jenna had just polished off an apple tart, and I was nursing the last of my café Americano.
“You know,” Jenna said, “the punny name of this place is too much.”
“Really? I think it’s great. The name is so bad it’s good. It’s one of my favorites near Tess’s apartment, and it has a great view of the cathedral.”
“Maybe so. Anyway, we should go soon. In not too long it will be dark, and when the sun goes down, it’s going to start getting cold.”
“Before we go, Jenna, I want to talk about trying harder to find Oscar, because we are exactly nowhere in that effort. The general is doing whatever he’s doing, and I guess that the judge is investigating something, but we are doing zero. But I’m at a loss for next steps. Do you have any ideas?”
“I do.”
“What are they?”
“Do you remember that on the day we went to Digne, I told you I had some errands to run in the morning before we could leave?”
“I vaguely recall that.”
“Well, one of my errands was some research in an Internet café.”
“Into what?”
“Into Oscar’s parents, the Brioches.”
“And what did you find?”
“I think they are buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery.”
“I have a feeling this is going to be a long story, Jenna. So why don’t we walk back to the apartment, and you can tell me why this even possibly matters.”
As we walked along, Jenna picked up the topic again, as if there’d been no interruption.
“The reason it matters is this.” She held up a tiny, very rusty key.
“What is that?”
“When the judge let me go back into the closet in Oscar’s hotel room, when he was looking for the book under the trapdoor, I searched again through the pockets of Oscar’s suit that was hanging in the closet. One of the pockets had a small hole in the bottom, and this key had fallen into the lining. I fished it out.”
I shrugged my shoulders and raised my eyebrows in what I hoped was a very French manner. “Alors? So?”
“So I’m betting this is a key to the tomb where Oscar’s parents are buried and that he left something important in there.”
“How on earth did you put that unlikely story together?”
“You found that torn-up map to the Père Lachaise cemetery in his wastebasket, plus a bus ticket that had ‘69’ written on the back. That’s the bus route that goes from near where he was staying to the cemetery.”
“It’s a big stretch. I mean even if he did go there, it was probably just to memorialize his parents.”
“Maybe, but I’m betting the key fits the gate on the Brioche tomb.”
“How do you know that?”
“Two days ago I went to the cemetery and took one of the tours that are led by private guides. When the tour was over, I located the grave.”
“How did you find it? There are thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of graves there, and miles of internal streets.”
“With my iPhone. The cemetery has an interactive website where you can look up the location of gravesites by name. It shows you the section the grave is in, and after that, it doesn’t take all that long to find it if you’re willing to walk up and down the lanes for a while.”
“And?”
“I’m sure
this key fits the lock on the gate to the Brioche family tomb. It looks like it will fit.”
“What do you mean it looks like it will fit? That makes no sense.”
“When you’ve spent time around keys and locks you can sometimes look at a key and just visually see if it’s likely to fit into a particular lock. This one looks like a fit.”
“Did you try it?”
“I was about to when a guard came by. He kept staring at me and wouldn’t go away, so eventually I left.”
We had by then reached the apartment building. Jenna waited politely as Monsieur Martin—my newfound buddy—and I exchanged oh-so-polite greetings just this edge of enthusiasm. In the elevator, I said, “So you failed to open the gate to the tomb. What are you going to do now? Register as a fake relative or something to gain legitimate access?”
“No, I’m going to go back there tonight and try the key.”
“All Paris cemeteries close when it gets dark. In the winter, closing is five thirty, I think. How are you going to get in?”
“I haven’t solved that problem yet.”
“Well, when I took a tour of Père Lachaise a few years ago, the guide pointed out that the whole thing is surrounded by high walls topped with barbed wire and mean-looking, downward-facing curved spikes.”
“Yeah, I saw those. Serious protection. But the guide claimed that all kinds of odd things go on inside at night. Drugs, devil worship, sex. If that’s true, those people are getting into the cemetery somehow.”
“Maybe they boil up from hell.”
“Very funny, Robert.”
“So your crazy plan is to take the 69 bus there and figure out how to get in when you get there?”
“No. I’m going to have our favorite cab driver take me. I already talked to him about it. And he said he’d ask around with cab driver friends and find out how you get in. I’m sure he’ll come up with something.”
“Uh-huh. Sounds like a plan to get arrested again.”
“Not if you help me.”
Paris Ransom Page 25
