by Lex Lander
‘I don’t rightly know,’ she said at last and threw in an arch smile. ‘Any suggestions?’
Twenty-Nine
* * *
The Citroën XM was parked on the corner, where the Impasse de l’Ecole joined the Rue de l’Agent Bailly. From there it commanded an unrestricted view of the entrance to the school. Inside the car were Lieutenant de Police Enrique Dubois and Brigadier Leveque, his regular sidekick. It was half-past three and the first egress of children was spilling from the open double doors into the playground and the sanctuary of their waiting parents, mostly mothers. A childish chatter arose, amplified by the narrow street.
Marc Fougère came with a friend, a girl of about the same age. They ran up to a youngish woman wearing a stylish black and white dress. She hugged the girl and dealt Marc a kiss on each cheek. As she walked them through the wrought-iron gates, one per hand, Dubois and Leveque closed in.
‘DCPJ,’ Dubois intoned, allowing her a long scrutiny of his ID.
She was a woman of some sophistication, not readily intimidated by authority. She looked him up and down. ‘Vous désirez?’
‘This boy must come with us,’ Dubois informed her in his most officious voice.
‘Are you mad? As you can see he is a child and in my care. He is not mine to hand over to you.’
‘Qu’est qu’il y a, Juliette?’ Marc asked, looking up at the woman, his handsome little face screwed up in puzzlement.
‘We are policemen,’ Dubois explained to him pompously. ‘How would you like to visit a police station?’
He had no children of his own and none of the appropriate skills. He had been given this job only because the top brass were trying to confine the officers involved to those who were already ‘in the know’.
The woman called Juliette was not prepared to back down so easily, but her protests were as pebbles hurled at a tank. Dubois was implacable. Yet she drew the line at letting Marc leave with the DCPJ officers unaccompanied.
‘For all I know you could be pédés,’ she snapped. ‘You have the look.’
Dubois allowed the insult as the price of getting the woman to co-operate.
She and her daughter rode in the Citroën with Marc, Dubois and Leveque to the Bois de Boulogne, there to meet Acting Commissaire de Police Philippe Mazé.
* * *
In a soundproof basement room below that where Commissaire Barail had talked his heart out, Mazé faced Gary Rosenbrand across a metal table whose legs were screwed to the bare concrete floor. Whereas Rosenbrand was alone, Mazé was flanked by Lieutenant Gruyon, a CRS colleague, and Capitaine Krynicki, of the DCPJ.
Above them a powerful strip light glared. It emphasised the room’s absence of colour and made the four men look anaemic. Krynicki’s pale blue suit was faded to a nondescript grey, and even Mazé’s scarlet tie appeared as a pallid pink.
It was also as cold as the interior of an igloo, chilled by air conditioning to an uncomfortable 12ºC. Rosenbrand, still clad in the shorts and short-sleeved shirt he had been wearing in balmy London, hugged himself to keep warm. Somewhat to his own surprise, he found he was not afraid of these stony-visaged policemen and to hell with the reputation of the French security forces for brutality in their treatment of enemies of the State.
‘Allons-y,’ Mazé said.
Gruyon switched on the recorder and muttered briefly into the microphone. He and Mazé then lit cigarettes and puffed away for a while in total silence; Krynicki waved smoke from his air space, looking none too pleased.
Understanding that this was all part of the preliminary softening up process, Rosenbrand kept his gaze fixed on a point midway across the table where a zigzag scratch was apparent (years ago an interrogee had somehow smuggled in a knife which he duly plunged into the hand of the interrogator, passing through flesh and bone to scar the painted surface of the table itself).
Mazé spoke little English, hence his questions and Rosenbrand’s answers, if any, would be passed via Gruyon [Author’s note: for the purpose of this narrative the dialogue will be presented as if it were all in English, spoken directly between Rosenbrand and Mazé.]
At last Mazé stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Alors, petit bonhomme …’
‘Now then, little man …’ Gruyon translated faithfully.
Mazé glared at him. ‘You do not have to interpret every single utterance, Lieutenant.’ He turned back to Rosenbrand. ‘We know who you are and who you work for. We know you plotted to kill President Chirac, using a professional assassin. We know that through him you caused the presidential helicopter to be destroyed yesterday on 2nd June resulting in the deaths of all on board. All that is now required is for you to confess and provide the names of all persons involved in the financing, the planning, the organisation and the execution. Not a lot to ask, hein? Your co-operation will make the difference between twenty-five years in a top security prison with no privileges and ten in an open prison.’
‘You’re bluffing,’ Rosenbrand said, not very convincingly. ‘You’ve got nothing on me.’
When Gruyon relayed this, Mazé remained poker-faced while inwardly seething. The New Zealander was correct in his assessment: the only link between him and the crime was his association with the Glister piece. For all the hard evidence they had on him, he might be no more than her boyfriend.
‘Let us dispense with the verbal jousting,’ he said with a glibness that belied his frustration. ‘You are cold and I am tired and would like to go home. It has been a long day and my temper is a little frayed, you understand.’
‘Stuff your temper,’ Rosenbrand grated. ‘You can’t hold me. You’ve already broken the law by kidnapping me in London. I’m a foreign national, mate. Do you think Sheryl Glister is going to just forget me? If I know her, she’ll be talking to the press by this time tomorrow. How do you think the story will look on the front page of every newspaper?’
Rosenbrand had exposed the flaw in Mazé’s tactics and privately he did not dispute it. Those morons from the Sécurité Extérieure had let the woman slip through their hands. She had gone underground and nobody had a clue where she was now. On the other hand, Mazé reasoned, Rosenbrand could not be entirely certain of this.
‘I am sorry to disappoint you, my friend, but Mademoiselle Glister is in an identical room to this one, answering more or less identical questions.’
‘Come off it,’ Rosenbrand sneered, chafing his bare arms to keep the circulation going. ‘If you ask me, your goons - the ones who chased her - came back empty-handed. Go on, admit it. She got away, didn’t she?’
‘We had other goons, as you call them, out looking for her. Take my word for it, she is right here in this building.’
‘Fuck you, mate. I don’t believe it.’ Rosenbrand pushed his face close to Mazé’s. ‘Best thing you can do is open that door and give me the plane fare back to London, or better still Auckland. If you’re really nice and make it first class, I’ll even sign a statement promising not to tell.’
Krynicki, thus far a non-participant, jabbed a finger at Rosenbrand.
‘We have uzzer ways of keeping people like you from opening zair mouths,’ he said and his tone was vicious.
‘Shut it!’ Mazé commanded. His brief from Le Renard had been unequivocal. Stay within the written rules. No violence, no threats of violence. An effective emasculation of standard police interrogation techniques, but there it was.
He lit a cigarette, took a couple of deep pulls, appreciating the soothing balm of nicotine.
‘Very well,’ he said, letting the cigarette droop from his lip the way he had seen it done by Hollywood-style cops. ‘Let us approach the problem from a different angle …’
Three hours and thirty-seven minutes later the interview was terminated with six pages of prize-winning fiction and a pyramid of cigarette stubs to show for it. A dog-tired Gary Rosenbrand was escorted to a stark but clean holding cell one floor down. He was given a cooked meal, a glass of red wine, and for entertainment a French magazine of which
he understood barely one word in a hundred.
* * *
They came for Barail after dark. Six of them, not speaking, not meeting his eyes. They handcuffed him and escorted him from his cell, oblivious of his protests and demands to know where he was being taken. Down a passageway lit as bright as day, its walls painted a brilliant gloss so white that it hurt his eyes. Out through a steel door with electronic bolts, activated by a key card. A second door, then a third, opening onto a street devoid of traffic. Tree-lined pavements, eighteenth-century architecture. The air was muggy after the air-conditioned cell block.
A black car was waiting, driver at the wheel, engine running. They bundled him in the back and hemmed him in on either side. Another slid in beside the driver. As the car took off he asked again, ‘Dites - où allons-nous?’
Predictably no one enlightened him as to their destination.
On through the streets of Paris. To begin with, Parisian though he was, he was utterly lost. Not until they crossed the Seine with the floodlit Notre Dame on their left was he able to get a fix on their whereabouts. Instead of entering the Latin Quarter they turned left immediately on reaching the rive gauche to follow the river. Once, they were stopped by a red traffic light opposite a bistro; people were sitting at tables on the pavement. The car’s window on the front passenger side was open a fraction and through it trickled the murmur of conversation, the rattle of plates, and even - or was he imagining it - the smell of food cooked to perfection and garlic. Two girls, sitting opposite each other a few metres from the road, glanced incuriously at the car. He fancied one of them smiled at him. Such was his yearning for contact with the world from which he was now exiled that he found himself smiling back.
Then the lights went to green. The car shot forward and the impression was gone if not forgotten.
At Ivry they switched to the Boulevard Périphérique, still bustling with traffic long after the rush hour. They crossed over the marshalling yards. Again, he asked, plaintively now, where they were bound. Again the response was nil.
On their right the Olympic Stadium at Porte d’Ivry slid by, dark and silent. Here he was blindfolded. The man beside the driver opened the dashboard locker and extracted a slender plastic box about the size of a toothbrush container. He snapped it open and passed a hypodermic needle to the man directly behind him. Barail’s head turned towards the source of the sounds, as he tried to identify them and their purport. At that moment the car left the Périphérique via the unnamed exit before the Porte d’Italie. At the end of the ramp they made several changes of direction in succession before entering a private driveway bordered by flowers and beyond them lawns where sprinklers were at work. A discreet sign loomed in the headlights: CREMATORIUM in tasteful fancy gold lettering on a black background.
The man with the syringe ejected a miniature geyser into the air.
‘Now, Commissaire Barail, we are about to send you on a long holiday. Somewhere hot. Do you like it hot, Commissaire?’
* * *
The sun was hardly up when the call came on Ghislaine’s cellphone. She came awake, groaned groggily.
‘Somebody’s gotten a sense of humour,’ Lux mumbled into his pillow.
Ghislaine dragged the phone off the bedside cabinet to note with a tingle of concern the identity of the caller.
‘It’s my mother,’ she said, and into the handset, ‘Maman? Qu’est qu’il y a?’
Lux, half-awake, half listened. The sudden gasp, the exclamation, the terse monosyllabic responses, the final, ‘D’accord. Au revoir, Maman.’
‘The bastard!’ she said in a choking voice and the bed undulated as she bounced off it. ‘If he hurts Marc I’ll kill him!’
All drowsiness fled from Lux. He sat upright. A naked Ghislaine was rummaging through a drawerful of underclothes, alternately cursing and sobbing.
‘What is it?’ Lux asked, slithering across the bed towards her.
She stepped into a pair of black panties and spun round. With her hair still mussed and no make-up, she looked like a waif.
‘That swine Mazé has taken Marc,’ she sniffled, heeling tears from her cheeks. ‘I have to go to Paris - right away.’
Lux was beside her at once, cradling her in his arms, her shuddering body melding with his.
‘We go together,’ he said.
‘Don’t be a fool,’ she said, her mouth against his collar-bone. ‘You can’t enter France. It would be a pointless sacrifice.’
‘Not if you want Mazé killed, it wouldn’t.’ Lux was joking, but she took him in earnest.
‘No. That is not the answer.’
She delayed another precious moment to kiss him full and hard on the lips, a reaffirmation of her love for him. It disturbed him. There was something final about it. More final than could be attributed to just a few hundred miles travel and a day’s absence. But if she shared his presentiment, she was not letting it show. She was back sifting among her undergarments.
‘I must hurry. You will drive me to the airport?’
‘Don’t you think we should check flight times first?’
‘Ah, I am so stupid.’ She hooked up her brassiere, pushing out her chest as she did so, a pose that Lux found intensely erotic. ‘Will you make enquiries for me, darling?’
He nodded and went in search of a telephone directory.
* * *
The drizzle that started around ten depressed Simonelli, creature of the sun that he was. This was only his second visit to Switzerland and it had rained the other time too. Why would anyone choose here as a bolthole? he wondered, when sun, sand, and warm seas were so near in the opposite direction.
The best part of two days spent casing the apartment block on Avenue du Lac and waiting for Lux or his woman to appear had finally borne fruit that morning when Lux drove into the parking lot alone.
From a bench by the lake, Simonelli, his face shaded by a newly-purchased umbrella, had watched the American lock his car and make for the entrance to the building. He made no move to intercept him. This was not some flabby businessman he was taking on. Like all hits it would require painstaking planning. Before all else, he needed to get inside the building, check the layout, and identify two alternative escape routes. Out of practice he might be, tired of living he was not.
* * *
At Ghislaine’s insistence the venue was her mother’s apartment, off the Square de Montholon. She wanted friendly witnesses, just in case. Mazé was already there when she arrived, sitting on a hard chair at the great oval dining table that had been in the family for three generations. By his elbow an empty cup, coffee stains around the rim. Her parents sat at the table too, as far from Mazé as it was possible to be, as if they feared contamination. When Ghislaine whirled in, her face drawn, her clothes crumpled from the flight, they rushed to greet her. Tears were shed by all three. Mazé looked on. If he was impressed by the display of emotion it was not reflected in his expression.
‘What is this all about, my dear?’ her mother quavered, dabbing her eyes.
‘Have you done something wrong?’ Her father, a near-cripple with arthritis but a bit of a martinet, was always ready to suspect his only daughter of misbehaviour, despite having no cause to do so.
‘Later,’ Ghislaine said, a shade brusquely. ‘First I must deal with this … gentleman.’
Suffering from travel fatigue and her early rise, she flopped into the nearest armchair. This spacious yet cosy apartment with its unfashionable address had been her home from her early teens until her marriage. All at once the familiar surroundings - the gloomy furniture built to last forever, the brass fittings, the rococo ornaments, the perpetually faded wallpaper - were hostile, sullied by Mazé’s presence, the outlook over the square no longer pleasant to behold. Even as the thought struck her she revised it: it was not the policeman’s presence that was so repellent, more her own culpability. He was here because she had placed herself outside the law.
‘Where is my son?’ she demanded of him.
&nbs
p; ‘Hello, Ghislaine,’ he returned, not insensible of her feelings, yet not remotely swayed by them.
‘Where is he?’ she repeated, tearful, close to breakdown.
‘Safe and well and not far from here.’
Ghislaine did not doubt it. They had no reason to harm the boy. Not yet.
‘So what do you want from me, you … you …’ An adequate pejorative failed her.
‘Can’t you guess?’
* * *
Here she was, millions of dollars at her disposal, fretting in a sleazy bed-sit in the East End of London. On the run, in a manner of speaking. In England, yet a fugitive from the French Government. Not only that but she felt bad about Gary, about not having stuck around to lend a hand. No matter that if she had she would most likely have joined him on a ride across the Channel to face the thumbscrews and hot irons of a French torture chamber.
She felt bad physically too. She had woken with a migraine and with Duane on top of her, bonking away. He was insatiable. His sex drive licked Rafael’s into oblivion. The pounding in her head hadn’t been helped by the pounding in her snatch, though she didn’t say him nay.
After the quickest shag in her living memory he was off to work, a slice of Vegemite-smeared toast in hand, a cheery ‘So long, girl,’ on his lips. Leaving her to while away the day as best she could in this dump of a bed-sit. Bed-shit would be more appropriate.
She stood before the cracked window and stared down without appreciation at the tiny yard, cluttered with used tyres, engine parts, and sundry junk. Even in the sunlight it was a pretty crappy set-up; on a grey day it must have been dispiriting beyond measure. How did people live in such squalor and still stay upbeat?
Just as worrying as her predicament, not to mention Gary’s, was the absence of news about Chirac’s death. Three days gone by and still the media were mute on the subject. No mention even of an attempt. Chirac was still alive, that much she now had to accept. It looked as if Lux had either fouled up or cried off. Either way or some other way it amounted to the same thing. Pity. She had read him as a man of his word. The financial loss was not to be airily dismissed either, though the prospects of recovering it were slim to zero. God, what a shambles. Her first major project and she had made a balls of it. If Eddie had still been around he would have booted her out, no mistake.
