Get Off At Babylon

by Marvin H. Albert

  I met several people who recalled having met the boy in the picture I showed them. Like Karine Vidal, however, they knew nothing about him—or Odile.

  But it was too early in the search to get discouraged. I left copies of both snapshots in each place we went to. And hoped they’d get shown to somebody who knew one of the people I was hunting. Sooner rather than later.

  At midnight we took a break for snacks and drinks at the Coupole in Montparnasse, and I phoned Fritz.

  He didn’t have anything either. He’d been calling Odile Garnier’s apartment once every hour, just in case, without getting a response. His man outside Tony Callega’s apartment reported nobody had returned there yet. None of the people among whom the snapshots were being circulated had phoned in so far. Fritz had tried a long-distance call to Eze, but Egon Mulhausser hadn’t heard anything new from or about his daughter.

  I left the Coupole with Karine, and we headed for some other secret burrows popular with undercity buffs.

  At a little before two in the morning we were inside a 1930s bunker underneath the Luxembourg Gardens. It was full of people, noise, and cigarette smoke. They were having a candlelight dancing party: beer, pizzas, and rock music pounding out of a large tape deck. All sorts of people: teenage punks, college kids, well-dressed BCBGs, even several couples in formal evening clothes.

  None of them had anything useful about Odile or her boyfriend. I gave out the last copies of their pictures and asked for them to be shown to other troglos over the weekend. That left me with only the originals. I decided to call it quits for the night.

  We were invited to join the party. Karine Vidal did, promising to go with me again if I wanted to try once more on Saturday night. I left the way we’d come in, making my stooped way through a low, tortuous tunnel under Rue Vaugirard. It ended at a storm drain. I straightened up, shoved its inlet grill aside, and climbed out into the night shadows behind the darkened Odeon Theater.

  There was a young couple in their mid-twenties standing there, smiling at me uncertainly. He was wearing a jacket and pants of soft, expensive leather. She had a fur jacket open over a ballerina’s practice outfit: black leotard, tights, and thick striped stockings.

  “Is the party over?” the ballerina asked me.

  “Going strong,” I assured her, and their smiles brightened. Without much expectation, I moved them over under a street lamp and showed them the photo of Odile’s boyfriend.

  They didn’t know him. I tried Odile’s picture next, with even less hope, but it had become automatic by then.

  The guy in leather squinted at the picture and then looked at his companion. “Isn’t that the girl we met at Monique Orban’s birthday party?”

  The ballerina studied the snapshot a bit longer and nodded. “Odile… She fished for the last name.

  “Garnier,” I said, holding down a sudden rise in tension.

  “That’s right. Odile Garnier.”

  The guy said, “I don’t remember ever hearing her last name.”

  “Monique told me when I called her last weekend.”

  I said quietly, “I’ve been trying to find Odile. Maybe your friend Monique could help.”

  “Monique’s in London this week,” the ballerina told me. “That’s what I called her about. I knew she was going, and I wanted to borrow her place for a friend who was coming to town for a few days. But she told me she’d already promised to lend it to her.” She gestured at Odile’s picture.

  I let myself hope. Just a little. “Where is this Monique Orban’s apartment?”

  “Montmartre, on Rue Fauvet. I don’t remember the exact address offhand.”

  “Is she in the phone book?”

  “Sure.”

  I headed for an all-night brasserie on Boulevard St. Germain while they were climbing down into the storm drain.

  After getting Monique Orban’s address and phone number from the brasserie’s phone book I dialed the number and let it ring ten times. No answer. I walked back to my car and drove to her address.

  * * * *

  It was in a one-block residential street behind the Montmartre Cemetery. The street was empty at that hour, and none of the building’s windows were lighted. A buzzer button clicked open the door to Monique Orban’s building. Inside was a short corridor with mailboxes on one wall. I checked them and got the apartment number.

  The corridor led to a small, high-walled courtyard. The apartment was on the ground floor. It had a window on the courtyard, covered by locked wooden shutters. To the right was an open entry to a stairway. The door of the apartment was inside the entry.

  I decided against knocking. There might be a back way out of the apartment. If Odile was in there, I didn’t want to give her time to run out before I could get inside. I put my ear against the door. No sound at all.

  The door had a mortise lock. There was just enough light from a bare ceiling bulb halfway up the stairway for me to work. I took out the lock pick I’d brought along.

  But I discovered I didn’t need it. The door’s dead bolt wasn’t locked in place. I tried the doorknob and felt the latch bolt slide free.

  I kept a hold on the knob with my left hand, not letting the door open. With my right hand, I put the pick away and drew the Beretta from its holster. Holding it ready, I shoved open the door and went in fast, shifting instantly to one side as I slammed the door shut behind me.

  Nobody shot at me. There was no sound at all. Just a smell in the darkness. Not overpowering, but definite.

  I felt along the wall, found the wall switch, and flicked it on. I was in a neatly furnished living room with a sleeping alcove off to one side.

  Maurice was there, holding the same kind of pistol as the last time I’d met him, complete with silencer.

  But even the gun didn’t make him a threat anymore.

  Maurice was the source of the smell.

  The smell of death.

  Chapter 20

  He lay on his back beside a pinewood coffee table piled with art books and magazines. His legs were bent together at the knees, both shoes pointing to his left, as though he’d swiveled when had fallen. One arm was folded across his chest. The other was bent outward, clutching the pistol.

  His hawk-like face was turned to one side, away from the coffee table. He seemed to be looking in wonder at the heavy bronze candlestick lying on the carpet near his head.

  One side of Maurice’s head had an ugly, indented swelling at the temple, dark from the internal hemorrhage under it. The blow hadn’t broken the skin there. The only external bleeding was a little trickle from his nostrils, and that had dried long before.

  The candlestick on the floor had a twin. It stood on a rough-hewn wooden beam that formed a mantelpiece over the brick fireplace behind Maurice’s corpse.

  He had been dead about twenty-four hours, at a guess. Putting his killing sometime during the previous night. The rigor mortis was as solid as if he’d been carved from a single block of wood. Decomposition wasn’t as advanced as it would have been if the apartment hadn’t been so chilly. The window on the little courtyard wouldn’t let in any direct sunlight at any time, even with the shutters open. And the walls were of big blocks of stone. It was the kind of place that would have to be heated from time to time, even in mild weather. And nobody had turned on the electric radiators in the past day. Otherwise Maurice would have smelled worse.

  Even so, it wasn’t perfume.

  I walked through the rest of the apartment via a narrow corridor. It led past a large kitchen with a dining booth and a good-sized bathroom with the apartment’s only other window: a small casement on an alley. At the end of the corridor there was a back door. I opened its chain lock and looked out. The alley behind the apartment cut through the block. At one end, across a dim street with a “one-way” sign, rose the wall of the cemetery.

  I went back to the liv
ing room and stood beside Maurice, thinking about alternative ways he could have wound up dead on the floor there.

  Boyan Traikov and Tony Callega would have split up their search force, to check as many of Odile’s contacts as possible in a short time. Maurice had come across somebody who knew Odile and Monique Orban were friendly, as I had. He might have learned that Odile had borrowed this apartment to hide in, and he decided to make himself big by capturing her himself. But more likely he’d come alone without knowing, just to check on whether he could find out something from Monique Orban.

  In any case, he had come. After that, the possibilities multiplied. He could have rung the bell, and Odile could have been there and opened the door to him. Or she could have been out, and Maurice might have picked the lock and been waiting inside when she got back. Either way, they’d wound up in here together—and Maurice had gotten careless.

  Maybe he hadn’t felt he needed to be too careful, with a gun in his hand, against a fairly small teenage girl.

  It didn’t feel right. Maurice would have to have been very careless. He would have had to turn his back on her. Long enough for her to grab that candlestick off the mantel and club him with it before he could turn and shoot her. Why would he turn his back on her? I could think of a number of reasons, but they were all what Fritz would call assumptions. I didn’t have anything that changed one of the possibles to a probable.

  I got down on my hands and knees and smelled the gun in Maurice’s fist. It might or might not have been fired. I couldn’t be sure. And I couldn’t get it out of his hand to make sure without breaking all his fingers.

  I stood up and circled the room. There was a small, fresh hole in the wooden frame of the entrance door. Taking out my penknife, I probed inside the hole—prying out a small lead slug. From a 9mm cartridge. The caliber of Maurice’s pistol.

  So he had fired. At the door. With Odile behind him.

  There were a number of different reasons that could have happened. I didn’t dwell on them. It would only be adding more guesswork to a pile of it that was already too unwieldy.

  I crouched beside Maurice again and went through his pockets. His I.D. gave his full name as Maurice Bolec and his profession as “Travel Guide.” Born in Lyons. Current residence: Cannes—the same address as Tony Callega. So it was Tony he’d worked for, probably assigned by Tony’s big brother as watchdog and general thug-of-all-work.

  He was registered as the owner of the car I’d seen him drive out of Tony’s place. His wallet also contained his driver’s license and an assortment of credit cards. He had a gold clip with a fat wad of cash, some keys and loose change, and a spare 9mm ammo magazine for his pistol.

  I also found, in a side pocket of his jacket, two black-and-white snapshots. They were close-ups: one of Odile Garnier, the other of her boyfriend. They were wearing the same jackets and shirts as in my pictures, and they were posing against the same stone wall.

  That answered a question that had been nagging at me: why the opposition hadn’t bothered to take those Polaroid snapshots I’d found in Odile’s studio in Villefranche. These were closer and clearer pictures than mine. They’d taken the best ones they’d found—in Villefranche or her Paris apartment. They’d made fast black-and-white copies of them, like I had, and had distributed them among their search force. One of whom was Maurice.

  I put the snapshots in my own pocket. There was nothing else on Maurice to connect him to Odile or her boyfriend.

  I replaced the other items in his pockets, smearing each to remove my prints.

  Then I searched the apartment. But I didn’t find anything I could identify as belonging to Odile Garnier. The clothes in the closets and drawers belonged to a large woman, not someone small and slim. Odile Garnier didn’t seem to have left anything of hers behind.

  * * * *

  What I decided to do next was worse than dangerous. It was goddamn stupid. But Egon Mulhausser was paying me to protect his daughter, as well as to find her. And as Traikov had pointed out, I did work for money.

  First I opened the living room window, leaving the shutters locked. Cool night air drifted in through the shutter’s louvers. I went to the bathroom and wound the casement window open. The opening wasn’t much; too small for anyone but an infant to climb through. But the cross breeze between it and the living room window would air out the place. Maybe enough, if the apartment’s owner took a few more days before returning from London.

  Back in the living room, I got out my handkerchief and picked up the bronze candlestick from the floor. It was heavy. I wiped it clean and set it on the mantel near its twin. Then I went through the place and wiped everything I had touched, including the outside knob of the entrance door.

  Finally I stripped the top cover off the wide bed and draped it over Maurice’s body. His feet stuck out of the covering, along with the hand frozen around his gun. Nothing I could do about that. It wasn’t total concealment I was after; I was just being squeamish. I wanted as little direct contact between our bodies as I could manage.

  Picking him up, with the blanket between us, was an involved operation. So was getting him through the corridor to the rear door. It was like carrying a tree trunk with some of its roots and branches still attached. I was breathing hard and my clothes were soaked with sweat by the time I neared the end of the alley.

  There I leaned Maurice against the inside wall, standing up, and held him that way with one hand while I peeked out. The street between me and Montmartre Cemetery was empty. No cars, no pedestrians. As it should be at three-thirty in the morning. Respectable neighborhood.

  I carried his body across the street and halfway down the block. There I finally relinquished my heavy and awkward burden, laying it down against the bottom of the cemetery wall. I would have preferred to dump him inside the cemetery. But I hadn’t the strength left to hoist him up and over. I contented myself with tossing his 9mm slug over the wall. Then I hurried back the way I’d come, taking the bed cover with me.

  I used my handkerchief again in opening and shutting the back door. The inside breeze I’d started by opening windows at both ends of the apartment was cool and steady. But it still carried the stink of Maurice.

  Going to the bedroom alcove, I replaced the cover neatly the way I’d found it. Then I used my handkerchief in going out the front door. After that I walked rapidly to my car and got out of the area.

  * * * *

  It was four A.M. when I entered my own apartment. Finding a note from Fritz Donhoff on my living room table didn’t startle me. We had keys to each other’s apartments, in addition to the secret door we’d rigged between our adjacent bedroom closets. Nor was I surprised, at that stage, by his one-word message: “Nothing.”

  Neither of us had gotten any nearer to finding Odile Garnier that night. It was frustrating. But frustration comes with the business. If you can’t stand wading through molasses, get out of other people’s sticky lives.

  I took a very long, hot shower, scrubbing myself with plenty of soap. I shampooed my hair, brushed my teeth, used a file to clean my nails. And still couldn’t entirely rid myself of the feeling of contact with Maurice’s corpse.

  I got in bed, firmly kicked Maurice out of my brain, and was asleep in twenty seconds. But there were dreams. All I could remember later was that in each dream I was dragging something monstrous through endless dark tunnels underneath the city. And in one of them the monstrous burden turned its head and grinned at me.

  * * * *

  It was noon when the delicious odor of perking coffee woke me. Fritz trudged in from my kitchen, carrying a large cup in one hand and a croissant in his other.

  He put them on the chair beside my bed and walked back into the kitchen without a word. Experience had taught him I wasn’t worth talking to before I had some breakfast in me.

  I ate the croissant and was on my last gulp of coffee when he came back with hi
s own cup. He sat down on the end of my bed and took a sip.

  “The name of Odile Garnier’s boyfriend,” he told me, “is Gilbert Lucca.”

  Chapter 21

  The photographs I had put in circulation during that long Friday night had reached someone who knew the boy.

  “The young man who phoned me,” Fritz said, “is named Axel Regis. He’s a student at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. So was Gilbert Lucca, last year. He quit because he couldn’t earn enough money while devoting so much of his time to school. He supports himself by making imitation art deco jewelry, which he sells to boutiques—here in Paris and elsewhere. But he has continued to belong, with Regis, to an informal group of young troglodytes.”

  “Does this Regis know where Gilbert Lucca lives?”

  “An inexpensive apartment near Porte Saint Denis, behind the Passage du Prado.”

  “Has he got a phone there?”

  “I’ve called it twice. No answer.”

  I got off the bed and went to the bathroom. While I took a fast shower Fritz leaned against the side of the open door and told me more.

  “Regis recognized the picture of Odile Garnier, too. I told him her father’s not well and is anxious to locate her. But Regis doesn’t know anything at all about her except her first name—and he has a feeling she and Gilbert Lucca are very much in love. Regis only met her once. Gilbert Lucca brought her along with him the first time their group explored that place you went to last night—near the Babylon Métro. That was back in March.”

  “The postcard Odile got was sent last month,” I said as I toweled myself dry. “The tenth of April.”

  “The group went down there a second time last month. On the third Friday in April. Their group meets once each month for their explorations. Always on the third Friday, at ten at night. But they never send cards like that. They phone each other. And Regis is sure nobody in the group knows her address—here or in Villefranche.”