The Paris Directive

by Gerald Jay

  The cathedral interior was enormous. The space majestic with huge columns thicker than elephant legs and chandeliers falling from the ceiling and floating in air. As Reiner expected, the church on Sunday morning was filled with vacationing tourists. A few dozen of them standing around a large cabinet displaying a clockface and dial beneath it decorated with rams, scorpions, goats, and other zodiacal signs. Suddenly it began to chime—noisily delighting the children. Reiner’s wristwatch said 11:23. He was more impressed with the one in Strasbourg that had a cock that crowed on the hour.

  Their guide led them down the side aisle past the chapels named after some of the notable families of Bourges who had donated money to the church. He stopped in front of the Jacques Coeur chapel. Its stained glass windows, rich blues and deep ruby reds, cast a wavering light on the faces of the people who were there. None of them looked familiar to Reiner. It was still early. That he didn’t spot any undercover cops in the crowd was especially gratifying. Their guide was describing Coeur as a financier, diplomat, and one of the greatest merchants of the Middle Ages. He failed to mention that Jacques Coeur was also a major arms dealer and that Bourges today was a center of the French armaments industry. Though hardly averse to change, Reiner had a soft spot in his heart for tradition.

  Only about half their group wanted to climb to the top of the tower. The heavy breathing of the couple ahead of Reiner on the way up sounded as if they might have to be carried down on stretchers. As promised, the view of the city was impressive. Caesar had called Bourges “the finest city in Gaul.” To Reiner it looked more like a sleepy provincial town. Reaching into his shoulder bag, he took out his lightweight Zeiss eight by forty binoculars and as he peered through their dustproof, fogproof lenses the view was spectacular indeed. It was only a matter of time before all the others had gone back down, leaving him alone.

  Twelve minutes before noon he spotted the two of them walking toward the cathedral. Though still at a distance, they were unmistakable. Thin and fat like Laurel and Hardy. Reiner wondered if they were lovers. In any event, there was nothing funny about these two. He’d never make the mistake of underestimating them. After all, they’d known enough to track him down in Berlin and hire him. It looked as if they’d come alone. Putting away his binoculars at the bottom of his bag, Reiner unwrapped the chamois cloth from his black Ruger P89 and placed the fully loaded fifteen-shot pistol on top where it was easily accessible.

  In the almost empty chapel, they recognized him at once. “Ah, it’s you. As punctual as ever.” Pellerin extended his hand and Reiner took it. But he didn’t care for the way Blond held back, his hands out of sight in the pockets of his baggy seersucker jacket. Both of them had mahogany tans.

  Pellerin cast a vexed glance about the chapel and said, “I hate to work on Sundays. Let’s make this as painless as possible. Then on to lunch. First of all, there’s Ali Sedak. Wednesday he’ll be formally charged by the investigating magistrate with the four murders in Taziac.”

  Good news, of course, and rather intriguing. No indictment had been publicly announced anywhere yet. He guessed they had an informer in the procureur’s office. Reiner wondered what other connections they had higher up.

  “Second, with the murderer formally charged, our problems are simplified. Your money will be deposited in Zurich Wednesday morning.”

  “Don’t disappoint me. I’ll be expecting it. And the unfinished business you mentioned?”

  “That, monsieur, is where you come in. I said our problems were simplified, not eliminated. Ordinarily this story would now disappear for perhaps a year or so until the trial is held. But the daughter is stirring people up. Every time the Reece woman gives an interview to France Inter or Sud Ouest or La Dépêche, telling them she doesn’t think Sedak is guilty, the story comes back like a bad meal.”

  Hubert Blond, making loud preludial noises, cleared his throat. “And not just in the Arab banlieues either. People are saying that if the daughter thinks a snake like Sedak is innocent maybe he is. Even in Le Figaro—”

  Pellerin broke in, tapping him on the arm, and they waited until two snoopers in front of the chapel had moved on. “So,” Pellerin continued, “we need her to go away. Either she goes home voluntarily or, if not, in a box. We’ll leave that to you, of course. Frankly, I don’t care which, but it has to be done at once.”

  “No, I’m afraid not. I’m finished with Taziac. I never go back. It’s bad luck.”

  “You created this mess. You should clean it up. Let me assure you that you’ll be very well paid for your time.”

  Reiner couldn’t resist. “How well?”

  “Name a price.”

  His was ridiculously high and Reiner knew it, but he’d no desire to take this job. No desire to become the black-haired Barmeyer again. The only way he’d even consider it was for enough money—in addition to what he’d already salted away—to set himself up in the one other business he’d ever been interested in. He watched the two of them exchange glances. Blond, looking dark and worried, kept his hands jammed into his pockets, his mouth shut.

  “All right,” Pellerin said.

  “Half Wednesday along with the other money. The rest within twenty-four hours of my call to tell you that I’ve taken care of the matter. Agreed?”

  “Done. Now let’s get out of here before I lose my appetite. Places like this depress me. Besides I’m starved.”

  All the way to the parking lot Pellerin sang the praises of the Abbaye Saint-Ambroix and its kitchen. On a warm summer day like this, he suggested the cold salmon with fennel confit à l’orange. Simple but succulent, he raved. There was something about the nonstop way he went on that irritated Reiner. And the silence of Pellerin’s fat boyfriend made him edgy.

  “But when it comes to salmon,” Pellerin couldn’t resist pointing out, as he unlocked the long black Citroën and climbed in, “how can you touch arctic char freshly plucked out of a chill Quebec lake and brushed with a little honey mustard and a dry white wine simmering over an open fire?” He kissed his fingertips and turned to Hubert, “Right, mon ami?”

  “Have you two been camping?”

  Pellerin smiled and turned on the engine, but Reiner didn’t get in. Pellerin rolled down his window.

  “You’re not coming with us, monsieur?” he asked, astonished.

  “I’ll be in touch. Toodle-oo!” he called, without looking back.

  31

  THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR

  Mazarelle’s men had returned from the neighbors with nothing new to report. As instructed, Lambert had left a list of the locations of the empty houses in the area on his boss’s desk. Two of them were old farmhouses for sale—drags on the market—with no takers for years. The third, a large château in the Taziac hills, was rented for the summer to a family coming from Brussels. As for the fourth, it was a vacation house owned by an English family that usually arrived at the beginning of next month.

  “Where is it?” Mazarelle asked.

  “Now that’s what makes it interesting. It’s next door to L’Ermitage. But we looked all over the property, and there’s no one there yet. Everything’s locked up.”

  Mazarelle agreed with Lambert. The location of the fourth house made it more than a little interesting. Later that day, he went himself to check the place out. Not a bad-looking country house, on the whole, though it didn’t seem as if anyone was taking care of the grounds. Downstairs the shutters were closed. As for the car tracks—other than those made by his own men—he’d no definite idea how old they were, but all of them appeared to be tire marks made by the same car. Mazarelle tried the front door, and it was locked. He went in through the back door with the aid of one of the passkeys on his key ring, riffling through them until he found a winner. He switched on the lights. He didn’t like doing this kind of thing without a mandat when dealing with foreign owners, but under the circumstances …

  The place was deserted. It didn’t look as if anyone had been in there recently. The damp, musty smell in th
e air was typical of houses that haven’t been lived in. Nothing in the sink, nothing on the table, everything spick-and-span. Then his eyes fell on the gun case on the wall as if it were some flea-market treasure. Without the slightest hesitation or difficulty, he selected another of his keys—a small, toothless one this time—and clicked it open. There were two guns inside. Though both were of interest to him as he looked them over—without touching either—it was the shotgun he was especially eager to get a report on. Only PTS could tell him whether or not it was the weapon that had killed Schuyler Phillips. But he’d need the permission of the owner for that. Mazarelle had a feeling that he was definitely on to something here.

  A sharp squeaking sound caused the inspector to whirl around. It took him a few seconds to locate exactly where the noise was coming from. Somebody standing outside the house had forced open a shutter and was peering in. He assumed it wasn’t one of his own men or he’d have called out his name. By the time Mazarelle got out the back door, hoping to come up from behind whoever it was, he’d fled. Annoyed with himself for letting the intruder get away, the inspector returned to his survey of the interior.

  Upstairs, he went quickly through the rest of the house. That too showed no signs of any trespasser. He walked down to the far end of the hall and found the stairs to the attic. There was a door at the top of the landing and, tramping noisily up the narrow staircase, he turned the knob. It was a small gloomy storeroom with a table, some chairs, a stool, a folded cot, and assorted dust-covered cartons of books, bottles, wires, and plugs that made his nose itch. Pale ghostly cobwebs dangled from the ceiling beams. In short … nothing.

  Not until he was back downstairs did the significance of what he’d just seen dawn on him. Unlike the attic storeroom, the rest of the house was much too clean after having been closed up for months. Someone had been inside, someone he wanted to talk to. Unless whoever it was had been hired to clean up by the owners, get the rooms in order for them before they returned, which of course was possible. Mazarelle would have to find out who this English family was and how to get in touch with them.

  On the way to his car, the inspector heard a tractor working in the field behind the house. It wasn’t until he got closer that he recognized Chambouvard. The last time he’d seen him was when he was questioning Georgette at their farmhouse across the road and her father suddenly appeared bitching about flics being nosy. Yet he was the one who knew all about the time Ali Sedak left L’Ermitage the night of the murders. A real busybody, Monsieur Chambouvard. What the hell was he doing over here? Could he have been the one snooping at the window just now?

  Recalling his previous meeting with the farmer, the inspector was inclined to skimp on the charm even more than he usually did with men. He snapped out his hand like a matador’s red flag—confident in himself rather than any uniform—and Chambouvard hit the brakes.

  “What is it now?” he asked, exasperated. “More questions?”

  “What are you doing on this side of the road?”

  “Trying to work, if you’d let me.”

  “This isn’t part of your farm too, is it?”

  “A servitude,” Chambouvard explained. “The land belongs to the house, but the hay back here belongs to me. I have the right to cut it early every summer for my animals. And that’s the way it’s going to stay no matter what foreigner owns the property.”

  Mazarelle asked the owner’s name.

  “McAllister.” It was obvious that he didn’t like the man. “English.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  The farmer glanced sourly down at the inspector from his tractor seat and shrugged.

  “Have you seen anyone going in or out of the house recently?”

  “That house is none of my business.”

  Mazarelle suspected Chambouvard knew what was going on in every acre in the neighborhood.

  “Where does McAllister live in England?”

  “Ask my wife. Maybe she knows. I have no time for nonsense. I’m busy. And now let me get back to my work.”

  A real pain in the ass. His wife, on the other hand, was glad to see the inspector when he knocked on her door, and she promptly expressed relief that he had the Arab in jail. Madame Chambouvard didn’t like that he’d been working so close to her daughter at L’Ermitage. She never trusted the fellow.

  “Only a suspect, madame,” Mazarelle reminded her, and asked if she knew how he might get in touch with McAllister.

  The farmer’s wife was happy to oblige. She didn’t share her husband’s attitude about the Englishman at all. After hunting among her important papers in the bureau drawer, she found what she was looking for. A page torn from a telephone notepad that said Hôtel Gambetta, Bergerac. The name written on it was Neil McAllister with an address and phone number in London.

  Mazarelle quickly took the information down. “One thing more,” he said, standing at the front door. “Did Georgette ever do any house cleaning for the McAllisters?”

  “Oh no! Jamais de la vie! Chambouvard wouldn’t hear of it.”

  Returning to his office, Mazarelle placed his call to London. The key question he had for McAllister was whether anyone had been using his house in Taziac. He was sure the Englishman must know all about the murders next door. Who didn’t know? The story had been in newspapers all over Europe. Perhaps that was why the family was delaying their return, preferring to wait until the police had their man. They weren’t the only ones.

  The phone rang a few times and a man’s voice answered, but before Mazarelle could tell McAllister what he wanted he was instructed to leave his message after the beep. The message was simple. It was urgent that he call Inspector Paul Mazarelle at the Commissariat de Police in Bergerac, France, as soon as he got home.

  32

  SEDAK INDICTED

  The Hôtel Fleuri was so empty, so peaceful, so quiet that Molly had her first decent night’s sleep since arriving in France. She didn’t even hear the clanging of the church bell across the square. Her shoulders ached where she’d hit the car when the tattooed son of a bitch pushed her. Otherwise she felt fine. Hungry enough for waffles, bacon, and eggs but glad to settle for the petit déjeuner downstairs.

  “Bonjour, mademoiselle.” The frail teenage girl who’d helped with their bags when they arrived brought her a pitcher of coffee and a small basket of croissants. They were hot, flaky, and delicious with butter and apricot jam. Molly was finishing her breakfast when Monsieur Favier came over, looking smug as a lottery winner. He was actually smiling. As he placed a copy of that morning’s Sud Ouest in front of her, his stubby index finger tapped the headline that read “Sedak Indicted in Taziac Murders.”

  “You see, mademoiselle! Le surineur. It was the Arab after all.”

  The lead article on the front page was by Jacques Gaudin, the reporter who had interviewed Molly. In addition to several lesser crimes, the investigating magistrate was charging Ali Sedak with acts of barbarism and all four killings. Gaudin sketched in the details of the crimes and noted that the handyman admitted being the last to see one of the victims alive. Sedak was soon to be moved to the Maison d’Arrêt in Périgueux to await trial.

  “I knew it!” trumpeted Favier. “I knew he did it.”

  All he knew, she thought, was that once they had their murderer, the tourists would be back and his business would return to normal. Getting up, Molly pointed out, “He hasn’t been tried yet.”

  Favier didn’t like that.

  After breakfast, Molly drove up to Bergerac, eager to speak to Ali Sedak before they put him in prison. She had to park a few blocks away from the commissariat because the entrance was cordoned off. Opposite the building, noisy Front National demonstrators were gathering for a protest rally as reporters and cameramen covered the scene. There were bloodthirsty shouts of “Kill the Arab bastard!” and “Send him home in a box!” One of the signs read “Bring back the guillotine—the only tree that always bears fruit.”

  It was the nearest thi
ng to a lynch mob Molly had ever seen. The way she felt, they might have been after her. Though she was wearing dark glasses, Molly realized that her picture had been in the papers. She was far from invisible. Without waiting for the heavy truck traffic to stop, Molly raced across the boulevard Chanzy to the Hôtel de Police.

  “What’s going on?” she asked Mazarelle.

  He explained that they were expecting René Arnaud any minute, the local darling of the extreme right. Arnaud couldn’t resist an opportunity like this. The FN had planned a big demonstration against the indicted murderer.

  Molly said, “I’d like to hear Ali Sedak’s side of the story. May I see him?”

  Why not? Mazarelle thought. It was worth one last try before their prisoner was taken to Périgueux. Let her talk to him—the daughter of two of the victims, a beautiful, young, sympathetic American woman, eager to hear anything he had to say. It might be just what it would take to make him want to clear his conscience, unburden his heart. Who knows? Perhaps if the stick doesn’t work, the carrot will. He gave her half an hour.

  Molly was waiting in the interrogation room when Bandu brought in Ali Sedak. They’d removed his handcuffs the night before, and for the first time he’d been able to snatch a few hours sleep. The inspector had told Bandu to leave a couple of cigs and wait outside. Molly eyed his hands, the nails bitten to the quick, the match shaking as he lit up. He sucked in the smoke as if he couldn’t get enough, then began to cough violently. She found it almost impossible to believe that this cowardly wife beater, this small, wretched man—his face, after a few days in a windowless cell, as pinched and pale as city snow—had by himself killed her father and mother, let alone all four of them.