A French Country Murder

by Peter Steiner

  “No, I’m fine,” he said then. “I’m sorry if I alarmed you.” Then, in a gesture so uncharacteristic that it surprised even him, he began a conversation with her. “You are American, aren’t you?” She was perhaps forty, and pretty. She wore blue jeans, boots, and a black sweater. She had a parka around her shoulders.

  “I am an American,” she said. “From California. But I have lived in Paris for the past three years.” Then she added with enthusiasm, “I adore your country. It is a spectacularly beautiful country. It is so varied.”

  “Have you seen much of the rest of France?” Louis asked.

  “I visit different parts whenever I can,” she said. “I am just returning from a few days in Normandy, the coast, near Honfleur. I rented a car. Do you live in Paris?”

  “Saint Leon sur Dême,” he said. “A village between Le Mans and Tours.”

  “I have been to Tours. In fact, I spent two months there as a student learning French. And I was there again last summer.”

  “But north of Tours,” said Louis, “where the Touraine ends and the Sarthe begins, the river Dême, an insignificant stream, empties into le Loir—not la Loire, which has an e. The Dême and the Loir are fishing streams with plenty of trout and other fish. Saint Leon is a farm town right on the Dême. I live in an old house made of tufeau, the soft chalky stone.” He talked on and on. He relished the sound of the words in his mouth, as if each word were a new breath. He savored the feeling as they left his lips. He watched his hands moving through the air in front of him as he described the hill on which his house sat, where Saint Leon was situated, the Dême winding through the valley, Vauboin across the valley, the rows of poplars he had watched grow tall. He looked at her sitting next to him, smiling, her legs crossed, her hands in her lap. “I’m sorry for talking on and on, like an old man,” he said.

  “No, not at all. You make it sound absolutely lovely,” she said. “Are you a poet?”

  “I am a painter,” he said. “But, don’t worry, it’s nothing serious.” They both laughed. “I am going to give you my name and address,” he said and took a pen and scrap of paper from inside his suit coat. “I would like you to come visit some time, to see for yourself.” Louis had never done such a thing before. “You can stay with me.”

  She took the paper. “Louis Morgon,” she read. “I’m Janet Dryer,” she said and held out her hand. It was small and strong. “Thank you for the invitation. It is very generous. I would like to take you up on it sometime.” She tilted her head in such a way that it made him think of Solesme.

  Renard had left for Paris earlier. He had decided to drive. Isabelle had packed a sandwich and a thermos of coffee. “Keep an eye on Jean Marie and Louis,” she said.

  “And who is going to keep an eye on me?” he said.

  “Would you like me to come?” She laughed.

  “No, thank you. That is all I need,” he said. He kissed her on the mouth, and they held each other tightly for a moment. He promised to call her as soon as . . .

  “I’ll wait for your call,” she said.

  By the time Renard arrived at the airport, Louis and Jean Marie were already going over what was to be done. Jean Marie was in uniform. He is handsome, thought Renard, as he did whenever he saw him. I keep forgetting he is a grown man. Jean Marie explained that he had arranged everything so that it was quite simple. There was very little that could go wrong with the plan. Louis would wait where he had been instructed to wait. There was a telephone nearby with an OUT OF ORDER sign which Jean Marie had placed there this morning. That was the phone Louis was to answer if he was called to the phone. “There is little doubt,” said Louis. He seemed so certain.

  Jean Marie would be inside a nearby electronics closet—Louis would be able to see the closet across the vast hall—where he would make the switches manually, and from where he could watch Louis. As soon as the announcement paging Louis was made, Jean Marie would remove the old card and insert the new card—he held up the manilla envelope containing the electronic circuit card he had constructed—so that any conversation from that phone could be broadcast throughout the terminal. Louis could start the broadcast himself by depressing and quickly releasing the receiver mechanism. When the conversation was over and Jean Marie had replaced the new card with the original card, which would return the circuitry to normal, he would leave the closet. Did Louis understand? Louis nodded. There were eight such closets throughout the terminal, so that even if the men on duty responded immediately to the malfunction, it would most likely take them a while to arrive at this closet, by which time Jean Marie would have left with the new card and without leaving a trace. Everything would have returned to normal.

  “And what am I to do while all this is happening?” said Renard. Of course he knew the answer. “I don’t like just watching and waiting.”

  “It is the most important part. If things go awry, I am depending on you to save my life. You have your pistol?” Renard patted his side.

  It was nearly six o’clock. Louis got on the shuttle bus alone. The bus made several stops before it reached terminal two. Confused travelers leaned in the door to ask in broken French if the bus stopped here or there. With each stop, Louis’s heart beat faster. He tried not to look at his watch. But when he finally did look, barely a minute had passed since the last time he had looked.

  Louis walked through the terminal’s great hall. His steps echoed against the marble floor. This part of the terminal was nearly empty of passengers. A woman in a yellow smock pushed a cart with a trash can and brooms. Louis had not taken into account the fact that most international flights arrived and departed early in the day. There were a few passengers seated here and there, and airline agents were busy behind some of the counters. But he would not be surrounded by crowds as he had hoped. And, as the evening passed, there would be less and less people. He was certain that Hugh meant to keep him waiting. He sat down in the middle of an empty row of white plastic chairs not far from the out-of-order telephone. He looked at his watch so often that he finally took it off and put it in his pocket.

  After a while he saw Jean Marie walk across the great hall and enter the closet. He closed the door behind him. Louis looked around the terminal. The windows were black. It was night. The ceiling lights reflected on the wet floor where the woman in the yellow smock was mopping. Louis followed her progress as she worked her way past him. He did not see Renard but he knew Renard could see him.

  Louis waited. He sat beside his folded overcoat, his hands resting on his thighs, his eyes closed. He listened to his own breathing. He tried to empty his mind of everything, but of course he couldn’t. He thought of the pretty American, Janet Dryer. He was pleased that he had been attracted to her. “Not dead yet,” he thought and was startled by his own frivolity. He wondered whether Janet Dryer would come to Saint Leon and whether he would be dead.

  Announcements for flights came less frequently. The airline desks closed and their attendants disappeared. The customs desks were empty. There would be no more flights tonight. A few travelers dozed in chairs across the way. Perhaps they had early morning departures. Two men were engaged in animated conversation and their voices echoed through the terminal. The sound of their voices became a roar, like a great airplane passing low above their heads.

  Louis dozed and dreamed he was sitting alone on a canvas seat in the great empty plane. The only light came from a dim green bulb across from where he sat, so that the area around him was bathed in eerie twilight and the back of the plane disappeared into darkness. It was cold, and the roar of the engines came through the thin metal skin of the aircraft and filled the emptiness with sound. The plane’s frame creaked and groaned as it plowed through the air. He was alone in the plane. There was no one in the cockpit.

  Then he was on a bicycle riding across a vast field of milk. The sky above the milk was a smooth dark gray as though it were made of a sheet of steel. Louis was riding on the tender skin which had formed on the surface of the milk. He had to
pedal with exquisite care and absolute concentration so as not break through.

  Louis awoke to the announcement calling him to the phone. The lights inside the terminal had been lowered. The lights outside were surrounded by haloes. Fog had settled in over the airport. The closed door across the hall was still closed. A few passengers dozed in a twilit corner. They had managed to lie down around the armrests of adjoining seats, their suitcases on the floor in front of them. Instead of pointing at numbers, the hands of the large clock on the wall opposite where he had been sitting pointed at dots to indicate the time. This made Louis uneasy, as though time were no longer specific, as though any time could be any other time. He looked down half expecting to see that he was standing in milk. He looked up at the clock again. It was ten thirty.

  “Were you asleep?” said Hugh Bowes. “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting. I assure you it was unavoidable. I’ve just come from Élysées. I think I can put your mind to rest about the matter we discussed in our last conversation.”

  “The murdered man,” said Louis.

  “Not on the phone, Louis. I’m certain you understand.” Hugh’s voice was calm, not scolding. “Just walk toward the doors right behind you, do you see them? One of my people will meet you inside and escort you to a room where we can talk openly. As you can imagine, this is a matter of the utmost delicacy.” Louis saw the doors Hugh was talking about. They were windowless double doors with a sign forbidding entry to anyone but authorized personnel. “Go ahead, Louis. They are unlocked.” It was as though Hugh were watching him from somewhere and could read his thoughts.

  Louis looked to the left and the right of the doors for mirrors or openings from where he might have been observed. He did not see any. He looked up for security cameras, but they were hidden in the dark ceiling. “I can’t go through the doors, Hugh,” said Louis.

  “You can’t?” Hugh sounded genuinely puzzled.

  “I am alone, Hugh. And I don’t trust you.” There was silence at the other end of the line. Louis waited. There was no response. “Hugh?”

  “I’m still here. It seems to me, Louis, you are the one not to be trusted, given your history of instability, your well-documented efforts to make unauthorized visits to me at the State Department, your association with Milton Hamsher, a man who is also known to be unstable. That is not to mention the preposterous and reckless suggestions recently made by you to me and to Hamsher. I would be foolish to have a serious conversation with you over an insecure telephone line, wouldn’t I?” Hugh’s voice was calm, as though he were a patient father dealing with a recalcitrant child.

  “I see your point, Hugh. What do you suggest?”

  “What do I suggest. I suggest, Louis, that I was wrong to even imagine you could be trusted with the information I was about to offer you. I suggest I was blinded by our earlier association and by my lingering feelings of friendship for you. I suggest that we each go our separate ways. I have had a long day with the foreign ministers of France and Germany, and I now have a long flight home. As for you, Louis, your suspicions about me are as unfounded as your life is pathetic.” Hugh’s voice had begun to rise, his patience had given way to indignation. Louis quickly pushed and released the receiver cradle. “You have returned my generosity and affection with disloyalty and malice.”

  The sound of Hugh’s voice echoed through the great hall. The amplification emphasized his impatience. His voice had a hard metallic ring to it as he unwittingly announced his indignation to the entire passenger terminal. The two passengers opposite Louis, who had been jolted awake by the unexpected sound of the loudspeakers, sat up slowly, smoothing their clothes as they did. They leaned forward trying to tell whether the announcement concerned them or not. Louis noticed that the closet door where Jean Marie waited had opened a crack. Two men, airline mechanics judging from their blue overalls, paused by an exit far across the hall, listened, then looked at one another, then left.

  “I am still willing to help you, Louis.” Hugh had regained his composure. Louis stood with the telephone receiver in his hand, but he listened to Hugh’s voice coming over the loudspeakers. “Please appreciate my position, Louis. You will be perfectly safe. My people will escort you.”

  Two men wearing dark suits stepped through the doors which Hugh had invited Louis to enter. They moved quickly but then stopped. They looked up as they recognized Hugh Bowes’s voice coming through the loudspeaker. The awakened travelers stood by their suitcases now. They strained to understand what was being said, thinking it might be information about their flight. Except this announcement was not in French. And it sounded more like a conversation than an announcement. The voice that boomed across the terminal was obviously talking about something important. He was not simply giving flight information. And Jean Marie had turned up the volume. Hugh’s impatience, then his solicitousness were being amplified, were ringing through the terminal. Louis could see the airline mechanics outside the window across the hall. Were they listening to the outside speakers? A shuttle bus driver stood nearby.

  One of the two men who had just come through the door spoke urgently into a small telephone as they began again to move quickly toward Louis. Louis dropped the telephone receiver and turned to run toward Renard, who was running toward him from across the terminal. But Renard was too far across the terminal to reach Louis before the two men did.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?!” Hugh Bowes’s voice roared from the loudspeakers and echoed through the terminal, his anger crashing about them like a storm. The passengers gaped in astonishment and listened. The mechanics and the bus driver had come into the terminal. After a brief pause during which the man coming toward Louis spoke excitedly into his telephone, Hugh shouted, “Well, stop the son of a bitch. Stop him!” He realized too late that he still had the telephone from his call with Louis in his other hand. Louis turned to see the two men twenty feet from him, the larger of the two with a small automatic weapon pointed at Louis’s chest.

  Then Solesme stepped between Louis and the killers. She stood and faced the two men. Where had she come from? No one had noticed her approach. The two men skidded as they tried to stop on the slick granite floor. The large man recognized her first, then the other one did. Seeing that they knew who she was, Solesme slowly, one could almost say ceremoniously, turned and faced Louis. She was wearing a long black coat and a hat, as though she had known what Louis was wearing and had dressed to accompany him. She smiled at his astonished face. Louis raised his arms toward her.

  Solesme took several steps toward him. She walked slowly and deliberately, her shoulders twisting with each step, walking in her unmistakable way, her body pitching in a way that was both painful to watch and arresting. She was taunting the two killers just as she had taunted the wedding procession in Dissay. The big man aimed his gun at Solesme’s back.

  When Solesme had almost reached Louis, she turned to face the men again. No one spoke. No one moved. There was silence from the loudspeakers, as though the great voice were now watching and listening too. The men did not shoot. Instead, they turned and fled back through the unmarked door. Louis and Solesme stood watching the door. Renard and then Jean Marie came running up. Renard ran to the doors and stepped through, but the men were gone.

  “Let’s go quickly. Before they come back,” said Renard. But they had to walk slowly because of Solesme. Renard had his car outside the terminal. The two passengers, and the mechanics and bus driver stood and watched as the strange little procession passed between them. Louis held Solesme by one arm while Renard supported the other. Louis stared at her in astonishment as they walked. Renard muttered under his breath. “That was a foolish thing to do, madame, for love or for any other reason. You placed us all in danger. You placed yourself in danger.”

  Solesme looked straight ahead as she walked. Then she turned to Louis. “Is it over?” she asked.

  “I think it is,” he said. Then: “But we will have to wait and see.” Then: “I do not know.”


  “The card!” said Jean Marie and ran back to replace the new card with the old one and to lock the closet door. Nobody had come to investigate. Had anyone even understood? A few people had arrived from other parts of the terminal in search of what the announcements might have meant. A cleaning lady stopped to watch them pass. The receiver of the phone still dangled from its cord. The OUT OF ORDER sign lay on the floor.

  XXV

  HUGH BOWES REMAINED ALONE IN THE STATEROOM OF HIS PLANE for the rest of the flight home. The lights were out, but he did not sleep. The meal the steward had served him sat untouched on the table beside the bed. Hugh sat in the large leather chair by the window and looked out at the night sky. The moon above and behind them shone on the solid field of clouds below.

  They were flying from London, where earlier in the day Hugh had met with the British and German foreign ministers. The airplane had been somewhere over Greenland when he had spoken by telephone with Louis in the Charles DeGaulle Airport. Hugh had been certain that he had arranged everything to afford himself complete protection. He could effectively deny that he had been anywhere near Paris at the time of the incident. Or that he knew anything about Louis’s abduction and assassination, if it had come about. How had he underestimated Louis Morgon?

  Hugh fought to restore his sense of equilibrium. What exactly had he said to Louis on the telephone? How much had been broadcast? It didn’t matter what he had said. Simply the sound of his voice placed him in a compromising position. He had jeopardized everything to which he had devoted his life because of one ruinous lapse in his self discipline.