“So what can we two rejects of society as we know it do for the next thirty days?” Matt asked.
“That’s what I came to talk to you about,” Mickey said.
“Whiskey and wild, wild women? You want to go to Atlantic City? What about Vegas?”
“Casimir has this nutty idea-has had it for years-that I should write a book.”
“You told me about that, Mick. And I told you it doesn’t sound nutty to me at all.”
“The original idea was a collection of stuff that I’ve done, Matt, and I even started putting stuff together for that.”
“I know.”
“But what Casimir did now was call some publisher and tell him that what they really needed was a book about Fort Festung, and I was just the guy to write it.”
“Why him?”
“Casimir said the Frogs can’t stall much longer-he looked into it, I suppose-and they’re going to extradite the slimy sonofabitch.”
“I agree with the Bull,” Matt said. “If they send Festung back, it’d be national news. That’d sell a lot of books. And you are just the guy to write it.”
“Yeah, well, anyway they threw a lot of money at me- which I don’t have to give back, by the way, even if I don’t write the book, or they don’t like it-and I’m going to France to have a look at him.”
“Hence the worldwide telephone?”
“Yeah. My mother goes bananas in the nursing home unless I call her once a day. I think it’s nine dollars a minute or something when you use it, but what the hell.”
“The more I think about this, it’s a great idea,” Matt said.
“Come with me,” O’Hara said.
“What?”
“Come with me. What else have you got to do?”
“Wow!” Matt said. “That came out of left field.”
“You’ve been there, right? You even speak a little Frog?”
“Very little,” Matt said. “Ouvrez la porte de mon oncle. That means ‘open the door of my uncle,’ if you’re taking notes.”
“That’s more than I speak. Come on, Matt. Everything on me, of course.”
Matt didn’t reply.
“I already know all I have to know about the sonofabitch, so all I have to do is take a quick look at this farmhouse, maybe get a couple of pictures of it, him and his wife, then we can go to Paris, or wherever, drink a lot of wine, and cherchez la femme.”
“Mick, if I didn’t think this was be nice to poor, loony Matt time, I actually think I’d go with you.”
“I want you to go because I don’t want to go by myself, okay?” O’Hara said.
Jesus, he means that. Mr. Front Page himself, the battling brawler of the city room, is afraid to leave Philadelphia by himself.
What the hell, why not? What else have I got to do?
“What the hell, Mick, why not?” Matt said.
Mickey took out the cellular, pushed one button, and then put the instrument to his ear.
“What happened to the Zero Zero One routine?” Matt asked.
“The Bull’s got one of these, too. They store a hundred numbers of other people with one of them,” Mickey explained, then held up his hand to cut Matt off.
“Antoinette, this is Michael. Would it be possible for me to speak with Casimir, please?”
It took several minutes for Mr. Bolinski to get on the line. He explained he was floating around the pool.
“Matt says he’ll go, Casimir,” O’Hara said. “Set it up.”
Bolinski said something Matt couldn’t hear.
“You got a passport? Is tomorrow night too soon for you?” Mickey asked.
“Yes and no,” Matt said.
“That’s fine with Matt, Casimir. Set it up.”
Bolinski said something else Matt couldn’t hear.
“He’s fine. He was exhausted, is all.”
Mickey broke the connection after Bolinski said something else.
“The Bull says he’s glad to hear you’re okay.”
“That’s nice of him.”
Mickey pushed another button on his worldwide telephone and put it to his ear.
“Hi, Mom!” he began. “How you doing?”
He spoke with his mother for five minutes, then handed the cellular to Matt.
“You want to call your mom?”
“Not particularly.”
“She’s your mother, for Christ’s sake. Call her.”
Matt called his mother and told her that he was fine, thank you, and that he was going to Paris tomorrow night with Mickey O’Hara.
When Air France Flight 2110 deposited them at Charles de Gaulle International Airport in Paris the second morning later, French customs showed great interest in Mr. O’Hara’s brand-new luggage-a last-minute purchase after Matt suggested that if they were going to be gone a couple of weeks Mickey would need more space than his zipper bag with the Philadelphia 76ers logotype would provide-and went through it suspiciously before gesturing they could pass.
Outside Customs, a man in a chauffeur’s cap was waiting for them, holding a sign lettered “M. O’Hara.”
He drove them, in a new Mercedes, to the George V Hotel, where they were installed in a two-bedroom, two-bath, sitting room suite on a corner of the building. From two windows in the sitting room, if they looked carefully, they could see the Champs Elysees, a block away.
They unpacked their luggage and then walked over to the Champs Elysees, took a quick look at the Arc de Triomphe at the other end, and went in search of breakfast.
Then they went to the U.S. Embassy at the foot of the hill, where-after Mickey threatened him with calling Pennsylvania’s junior senator right then and on his worldwide telephone-the press officer somewhat reluctantly promised to be prepared to give him the latest developments vis-a-vis the extradition of Isaac Festung once a day when Mickey called.
As they left the embassy, Matt said they were within walking distance of two famous Paris landmarks, the Louvre Museum and Harry’s New York Bar.
“Let’s take a quick look at the museum,” Mickey said. “Just so we can say we saw it. And then we’ll go to the bar and hoist a few.”
They went into the museum a few minutes before eleven and left a few minutes more than eight hours later, when at closing time three museum guards-immune to Mickey’s argument that he was the press, for Christ’s sake, and entitled to a little consideration-escorted them out.
He immediately announced to Matt that they were going to have to come back tomorrow.
“I could spend all goddamn day in there just looking at Venus de Milo,” Mickey said.
They called their respective maternal parents while sitting at the bar in Harry’s. When Matt told his mother they had spent most of the day in the Louvre, and had only minutes before arrived at Harry’s Bar, she chuckled knowingly.
“Have a good time, sweetheart,” she said. “But get some rest.”
When they left Harry’s four beers and an hour later, and were walking toward the Opera, where Matt remembered a restaurant his father particularly liked, Mickey offered a philosophical/historical/literary observation:
“Did you know that’s the joint where Hemingway used to hang out?” he asked.
“I heard.”
“Did you know that before he became a writer, he was a newspaperman?”
“I heard that too.”
“I don’t mean some schmuck on a small-town rag, he worked for the Herald-Tribune, here,” Mickey said. “He gave a speech one time where he said he thought working on a newspaper was the best training he ever had to become a writer.”
“I didn’t know that, but I’m sure he was right,” Matt said.
“Yeah,” Mickey said, thoughtfully. “He probably was.”
Am I in the company of the next Tom Clancy? The next Whatshisname, the guy who made millions writing about dinosaurs?
“When do you want to go to Cognac-Boeuf, Mick?”
“What’s that?”
“That’s where Festung is.”
>
“Soon, but not right away. I told you, I want to go back to the Louvre. You can’t see half what they have in that place in one day, for Christ’s sake.”
Over the next five days, they developed a routine. On waking, while Matt ordered their room-service breakfast, and while waiting for it to be delivered, Mickey first got on the phone to the embassy’s press officer, then would get on the Internet with Matt’s laptop, go to the Bulletin’s Web site, and catch up on what was happening in Philadelphia.
After breakfast, they took a cab to the Louvre. Matt thus got to see more of the museum than he’d seen in his previous- more than a dozen-visits to the City of Lights. Once they went out of the museum to lunch, but that took too much time for Mickey, so the other days they had eaten lunch standing up at a museum concession.
He did manage to get Mickey briefly to the top of the Eiffel Tower-to which Mickey’s reaction was “What’s the big deal?” and “Are you sure it’s safe? It’s rusty all over”- and to Napoleon’s Tomb, but that was about all.
They called their respective maternal parents daily, usually from Harry’s New York Bar after the Louvre closed. And then they went to dinner, and after that, twice, to jazz places on the East Bank.
Matt realized that he was having a good time, largely because Mickey was what his father described as “a good traveling companion.”
On the morning of the sixth day, Mickey called, “Hey, you better take a look at this!”
Matt, munching a croissant, walked to where Mickey was at his laptop. The screen showed the front page of the Bulletin, and for a moment Matt didn’t understand what he was being shown. And then, in the “Inside Today’s Bulletin” box, he saw: “Police Arrest Two in Fast-Food Restaurant Murder. Page 3, Section 2.”
There wasn’t much of a story there, even though it had a double byline on it.
TWO ARRESTED IN FAST-FOOD DOUBLE MURDER BY RICHARD HIGBEE AND BETTY-JO WOLFF BULLETIN STAFF WRITERS
Philadelphia-Police Commissioner Ralph J. Mariani announced the arrest early this morning “without incident” of Lawrence John Porter, 20, and Ralph David Williams, 19, at their homes in the Paschall Homes Project. The two, who are cousins, have been charged with the double murder of Ms. Maria M. Fernandez and Police Officer Kenneth J. Charlton during a robbery of the Roy Rogers restaurant at South Broad and Snyder Streets earlier this month.
“We’ve had the two under round-the-clock surveillance for some time,” Commissioner Mariani said, “but delayed arresting them while assembling irrefutable evidence against them.”
Mariani said that evidence included the murder weapon, a. 38-caliber handgun, which police divers, assisted by the Philadelphia Treasure Hunters Club, recovered later yesterday from the silt banks of the Schuylkill River, where it had been thrown.
Mariani cited the involvement of the Treasure Hunters, who joined the police in searching the murky waters of the Schuylkill, as another example “for which I am grateful and proud” of civilian cooperation with the police.
Philadelphia mayor Alvin W. Martin, in a separate statement, said that all Philadelphians “can and should take pride in the professionalism and dedication of the officers of the Special Operations Division Task Force, which I ordered formed, in apprehending these individuals under extremely difficult circumstances.”
“Jesus, what a shitty story,” O’Hara said. “And it took two of them to write it.”
“There’s not much, is there?” Matt said. “For all the effort that went into that job.”
“On the other hand,” O’Hara said, more charitably, “it might have been my pal Kennedy’s editing. I know the broad. She’s got talent.”
O’Hara looked thoughtful for a minute, and judging by the look on his face, Matt was not very surprised at what came next.
“Matty, unless you really want to go back to the Louvre… You’ve been there before a lot, right?”
“Yeah, I have.”
“How would you feel about making arrangements to getting us to where… I forget where you said…”
“Cognac-Boeuf,” Matt furnished.
“Right. Where this sleazeball Fort Festung is.”
“Sure, Mick. Good idea. We better rent a car. I don’t know if we can find one to rent down there.”
“See if you can get us a Lincoln, or a Cadillac. These Frog cars look tiny to me. What I’d really like to have is my Rendezvous.”
The concierge in the lobby of the George V said it would be impossible to provide either a Cadillac or a Lincoln-much less a Porsche or a Buick Rendezvous-and he would therefore recommend a Mercedes.
“Unless M’sieu would like a Jaguar?”
“Tell me about a Jaguar,” Matt said.
He put the Jaguar rental on his American Express card, because every time he’d tried to pick up a bill, O’Hara had been adamant that the whole trip was on him. “Put your goddamn money away,” he’d say.
Signing the receipt triggered the memory of what Detective Olivia Lassiter had said to him in Alabama about his not even looking at the bill there before he signed it, and his first reaction was, “Screw her!”
But she stayed in his mind all day, and about six-thirty, as he sat in the hotel bar in the vain hope that Mickey would leave the Louvre before they threw him out, he remembered that Mickey had left his worldwide telephone in the suite. And after one more drink, he went to the suite, dialed Zero Zero One, and after some difficulty was connected with the Northwest Detectives Division of the Philadelphia police department.
“Detective Lassiter, please.”
“Who’s calling?”
“Sergeant Payne.”
“Hello, Matt. How are you?”
“I’m fine.”
“I heard-”
“I’m fine, Olivia. Thank you for asking. I was about to send you one of those ‘having lovely time in Gay Paree wish you were here’ postcards, but I figured what the hell, I’d call you.”
“Matt, I’m working.”
“Can I call you later?”
"I don’t think that would be a very good idea,” Olivia said. And hung up.
The next morning at ten, Matthew M. Payne and Michael J. O’Hara, both more than a little hungover, watched their luggage being loaded into a powder blue Jaguar XK8 Cabriolet. Then they got in and, with Matt at the wheel, drove across Avenue George V onto Rue Pierre Charron, then turned right onto the Champs Elysees and headed for French National Highway A20.
They stopped for lunch in Orleans, then drove on, this time with Mickey at the wheel. At seven-thirty, by which time it was already too dark to take pictures, they pulled into the cobble-stoned forecourt of Le Relais in the village of Cognac-Boeuf.
“It looks,” Matt said, “as if it’s been here for centuries.”
“It looks like a dump,” Mickey said. “Is this the best we can do?”
“This is it, unless you want to go back to Bordeaux.”
Mickey wordlessly turned the engine off and got out of the car.
The only accommodation available was one room. It had two single beds and a washbasin. The bath and water closet were in separate rooms down a narrow corridor.
“And I’ll bet you snore, too, don’t you?” Mr. O’Hara inquired.
Their dinner-roast lamb — was very good, and so was the wine. At nine o’clock, they retired to their room.
“I want to get up early, find their house, and take a couple of shots,” Mickey announced, “then hang around for a while to see if I can get a couple of shots of Festung, and then get the hell out of here.”
They called their respective maternal parents, turned off the worldwide telephone because the battery was running low, and then got into bed.
“You know what else-besides forgetting to charge the phone in the car-you made me do when you decided to drink everything in Paris last night?” Mr. O’Hara inquired across the dark room.
“I can hardly wait to hear.”
“I didn’t call that jackass in the embassy.”
> “You can call the jackass in the embassy in the morning,” Matt said.
They were both asleep by half past nine.
When it is half past nine in Cognac-Boeuf, France, it is half past three in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
At 3:33 P.M., Dianna Kerr-Gally, Executive Assistant to the Honorable Alvin W. Martin, stepped to the mayor’s door and coughed.
“What’s up?” he inquired.
“I’ve got Eileen Solomon on the line,” Dianna said.
“Put her through,” he said.
“She wants to know if there is any reason you can’t see her right now.”
“See me? As opposed to talk to me?”
Dianna nodded.
“Did she say what she wants?”
Dianna shook her head, “no.”
He shrugged.
“You think I should talk to her?”
“I think you should tell me if there’s some reason you can’t see her right now.”
“Tell our distinguished district attorney that my door is always open to her,” the mayor ordered. “And stall whatever’s on the schedule until she shows up.”
The Honoable Eileen McNamara Solomon, trailed by Detective Al Unger, appeared ten minutes later in the mayor’s outer office, and was immediately shown into the inner office by Dianna Kerr-Gally, who stood just inside the door.
“This is between the mayor and me,” Eileen Solomon said. “Do you mind?”
Mrs. Kerr-Gally smiled somewhat thinly and left the office.
Our D.A. is really pissed off about something. I wonder what? And what does it have to do with me?
“You seem a little upset, Eileen,” the mayor said.
“ ‘Little’ is an understatement, and ‘upset’ a euphemism,” she said.
“Well, let’s see what we can do to make things right,” the mayor said. “What’s happened?”
“I had a call just now from Walter Davis,” Eileen began. “He told me he was really delighted to be able to tell me that Isaac Festung would soon be returned to Philadelphia.”
“Well, that’s certainly good news after all this time.”
“Specifically, that he was reliably informed by the legal attache of our embassy in Paris… You do know, don’t you, Alvin, that for reasons I never really understood, they call FBI agents assigned to embassies ‘legal attaches’?”
Final Justice boh-8 Page 54
