Back in the Real World

by Marvin Albert

  I had been out to Orly Airport that morning only to discover that there were no flights between Paris and the Riviera until three P.M. Employees of the Côte d’Azur Airport had pulled a surprise half-day strike to publicize their demands for higher pay. I phoned the courier service that was supposed to bring the package from Gilles; it would arrive on a four P.M. flight. So I had a leisurely second coffee at Orly, returned to Paris, and went to see Captain Thierry Gallion.

  The noon heat was sweltering when I reached the Boulevard Mortier. It’s an extra-wide street lined with big maple trees, just inside the eastern limits of Paris. Two military forts loom across the boulevard from each other: the Caserne des Tourelles on one side, the Caserne Mortier on the other. They bear signs warning that this is a military zone where it is forbidden to take photographs.

  There’s little visible to tempt a photographer. High stone walls topped by crisscrossed steel spikes. Tan-uniformed troopers in black berets and shoes, standing guard with compact automatic rifles before blank steel gates. The top of a radio antenna poking above one fort like a miniature Eiffel Tower.

  The headquarters of the DGSE are in the fort on the left, with supplementary facilities in the other across the street.

  I drove up Boulevard Mortier between the two forts—and then between the back of the Piscine des Tourelles and the front of the Defense Ministry offices. At the next left turn I went around the tiny Square de Dr. Variot and found a tight parking spot on Avenue Gambetta.

  Before climbing out of the Renault I buttoned and adjusted my jacket to make sure the pistol holstered on my shoulder harness didn’t show. It was my own Beretta—heavier and bulkier then the Mauser, but Reju had made the smaller gun disappear forever.

  I walked back half a block to the little square and entered a café across from the Métro station of the Porte des Lilas. The café was called the Clairon—the Bugler. With a name like that it was a favorite hangout for military types in civilian clothes from the ministry and DGSE. No uniforms, however. The French consider the wearing of military uniforms when off duty in public to be in very poor taste.

  I took one of the mica-topped tables near the entrance of the Clarion, between its curve of front windows and the curved bar. For lunch I ordered choucroute garnie and a half bottle of Saint-Amour Beaujolais. Then I took a short walk inside the Clarion down a corridor behind one end of the bar.

  The corridor led toward a locked rear emergency exit. Halfway along it there was an open doorway on my right and a small table against the wall on my left. Seated at the table, facing toward the front of the café, was a handsome, inoffensive-looking boy of about twenty or twenty-one. He had longish, bright-yellow hair, clear blue eyes, and an athletic build. He wore neatly pressed jeans and a white sport shirt opened at his muscular neck. On the table before him were a pack of cigarettes, a large brown ashtray, a glass of beer, and a black jacket of thin, supple leather that was folded there with apparent carelessness so you wouldn’t notice that there was something under it.

  He was smoking, and the ashtray was half-filled with the butts of cigarettes he’d consumed. But the beer glass was full, without a trace of head or bubbles; it had been sitting in front of him a long time, untouched. The jacket rested on the left side of his table. That made him a lefty.

  I walked past him. Three steps further, close to the emergency exit, there was another open doorway on my right. You couldn’t see it until you got there. It opened into an alcove that held a round table with a semicircle of padded banquette. The five men taking their lunch in the alcove were having a quiet, serious discussion until I appeared. They shut up and stared at me without expression.

  They ranged in age from late thirties to early fifties. Otherwise they were much alike. Tough, intelligent faces accustomed to exercising authority and assuming the weight of the world. Strong bodies that had known violent exercise but were going soft from too many years behind desks. They were even dressed alike: plain sport shirts and expensive thin leather jackets.

  One of them, thirty-nine years old, was going bald and had a hearing aid in his left ear.

  “Excuse me,” I said, “I’m looking for the toilet.”

  The one on Thierry Gallion’s left pointed and told me, “You passed it. Clearly marked. Next doorway back along the corridor.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and I turned away.

  The blond boy was standing now, facing me, blank-faced. The leather jacket that had been carelessly piled on his table was now carelessly draped over his left forearm, concealing his hand and whatever it held. I smiled and walked up to him and turned into the doorway to the toilet.

  I stayed in there for about a minute, looking at myself in a mirror hanging askew over the sink. Then I went out. The blond boy was seated at his table again, lighting a new cigarette. His jacket was back on the table, and his beer remained untasted.

  My lunch was waiting for me when I got back to the table. The wine was superb. The food wasn’t the best, but it wasn’t bad. I took my time with it and compensated with the wine.

  The blond boy strolled out of the corridor wearing his jacket. His left hand was inside the deep pocket, his other hand dangling, fingers curled. He gave me a bland glance, went outside, and stood there looking up and down the street. I didn’t get the impression he missed much. He was pretty enough to make newlywed brides desert their husbands. But I would have been willing to match him against Jean-Marie Reju, even odds. They were different in every way except quiet competence at their shared craft.

  The five men from the alcove came out of the corridor. The one with the hearing aid went to the bar and ordered a Perrier. His fellow DGSE executives left the café and turned down Boulevard Mortier toward the forts. The blond boy strolled after them, staying a respectful three paces behind so they could talk without his hearing what they said.

  I went to the bar beside Thierry and asked for my bill.

  Thierry said, “I have an appointment near the Luxembourg. Half an hour?”

  It was a good place for a private talk.

  “By the pond,” I said. Then I paid my bill, tipped, and went out to my car.

  Chapter 29

  Kids were using long poles to guide toy boats across the pond behind Luxembourg Palace. Adults who’d brought them there sat on rented chairs, tilting their faces to the sun with closed eyes. Thierry and I walked away from the pond, strolling through the Luxembourg Gardens toward the open marionette theater under the trees.

  We walked slowly. His tricky heart forced him to be careful about any form of physical activity. The last time he and his family had crowded my house for a long weekend holiday, back in May, we’d gone swimming. He was all right in the sea as long as he took it easy and got frequent rests floating on his back. The return climb to the house had been hard for him, though. It was a short slope, but steep. He’d had to stop twice before we reached the patio. Then he’d sat there gazing at the horizon and saying nothing. I could see the fast beating of his heart inside his bare chest. Finally he’d gone inside and taken a short nap, and after that he’d been okay.

  “Neither of those two names belongs to us,” Thierry told me. “So whatever they’re up to is no longer any concern of ours.”

  “No longer,” I repeated. I was walking on his left side, to be near his hearing aid. “That means they were yours, sometime in the past.”

  Thierry was silent for a bit, considering what he could tell me without seriously violating official secrecy. “You’ll have to tell me why you’re interested before I’ll say anything further.”

  I told him about the setup in the renovated Hotel Dhalsten. “An illegal surveillance arrangement of that scope, requiring the cooperation of the hotel chain and the construction company that did the renovation, has to be an operation of one of the secret services.”

  “It’s not ours,” Thierry said.

  We both felt easier after that. If you want potentially damaging information about any government department, the best place
to get help is from a rival department.

  “Do you know which service has it?”

  “No,” Thierry said. But he hesitated. I let that rest for awhile.

  “Tell me what you can about Jacques Morel.”

  “He served for many years as a member of the former S.A. In Sector Two.”

  The S.A. had been the SDECE’s Service Action. It had stopped existing the same way the SDECE had. Under the DGSE it was called Division Action: D.A. The S.A.’s purpose, like that of the D.A., had been to handle dirty work for the service.

  Sector Two did the jobs that required stealthy violence. Jobs that have been known to include kidnapping, bombing, and killing.

  “His name wasn’t Morel in those days,” Thierry said. Before I could ask, he added, “I’m not going to tell you his former name. He got in trouble under that name. And he was one of ours then.”

  We had reached the marionette theater. A large audience of children was shrieking with joy: Punch was beating up a black-jowled policeman. Thierry and I turned away along a path leading in the direction of the ornate palace Marie de Medici had built for herself early in the seventeenth century.

  “He was highly regarded in the service,” Thierry continued. “Entirely a self-made man. Came from a poor background somewhere in the south. With little education and no connections. Joined the army at seventeen and worked his way up to sergeant during the fighting in Algeria. It was there he was recruited into the SDECE.”

  The struggle between French forces and Algerian rebels had become a particularly vicious one—carried out more in the shadows than in open battle. There was only one job the secret service was likely to have recruited a new man for in that war.

  “As a déménageur?” Literally the word means a removal man, usually a furniture remover. The underworld has long used it to denote a killer used to remove difficult adversaries. The French secret services have adopted it as a useful euphemism.

  Thierry avoided the question. “That was long before my time, of course.”

  “But you’ve had a look at his dossier.” When he still didn’t respond to the question I tried another: “Why was his name changed?”

  Thierry considered for a moment. “A man supplying arms and explosives to Corsican insurgents was killed. In another country. I’m not going to give you any more details than that. It caused a gros pepin.”

  Pepin is the pit of an orange or other fruit. It’s also slang for “trouble.”

  “This other country put pressure on France, demanding extradition of the killer. There were repercussions in high places. It was decided that it was best to relieve the pressure by action at a lower level. Against the one who carried out the removal, rather than someone more important who ordered it done. The man you call Jacques Morel was dismissed from the service. Preparations were made to arrest him and turn him over to the other country.”

  “Enough to make a man bitter,” I said. “And cynical.”

  “We didn’t abandon him,” Thierry said defensively. “We enabled him to escape arrest and disappear. The change of name was arranged for him, with everything that might connect him to his former identity erased. In that way, though no longer one of us, he didn’t have to worry about the police finding him.”

  I said, “And you saw to it the French police didn’t really try to find him.”

  “Naturally. But his disappearance had to appear genuine to…the other country.” There was a slight hesitation. Then he added cautiously, “There was a rumor that shortly thereafter Morel was taken up by the DST. In what capacity, I don’t know. It may not be true, of course.”

  We both understood. He was giving me the answer to one of my first questions. If Morel worked for the DST, the Hotel Dhalsten operation was DST.

  It wouldn’t be the first time one of the French services had set up such an operation—and on the Riviera. One had surfaced at the Hotel Majestic in Cannes, when it was revealed that the rooms used by George Ball, U.S. Under Secretary of State, were bugged. It had developed into a pepin so gros that even French President Giscard d’Estaing had been damaged by it. That operation had been under SDECE control. Its discovery had contributed to the service’s fall from grace.

  Thierry was probably delighted with the thought that it would be a rival service that would take the heat this time, if the Dhalsten setup surfaced.

  I told him, “I need to know Jacques Morel’s real name.”

  He shook his head. “I told you…

  “I need to know,” I repeated. And I told him the real reason. I hadn’t wanted to. There was the danger Thierry would get so delighted about the opportunity to needle his agency’s chief power rival that he wouldn’t be able to resist spreading the word. If the DST found out one of its men was playing around with its operation—in a way that could threaten its future existence—Morel was dead. I still needed him alive.

  But there was no alternative now. I had to take the risk. Gamble that I’d be able to move faster than Thierry’s rumor-spreading. I told him about Crow being in prison for the double murder I was certain Jacques Morel had committed. In the past I’d told Thierry how Crow had saved my life in combat. That was the sort of obligation that meant something to him. He’d been sailing a desk for a long time, but he was still deeply military-minded. For a military man, the friendships and obligations that develop in combat are sacred, overriding almost anything else.

  Reluctantly, he said, “I suppose it doesn’t matter now. The emergency that made the name change necessary subsided completely a couple years after it arose. No one cares about the incident anymore.” Thierry sighed, and frowned, and finally told me, “His name was Jacques Taurenge.”

  Now I knew. I didn’t know if knowing would help, but it was possible. It didn’t change my thinking of him as Morel. That was who he was now.

  Thierry sat down on a stone bench under a statue of a former queen whose face had weathered beyond recognition. I sat beside him and waited while he drew several slow breaths.

  “About the other name you were interested in,” he said. “Paul Orain. Known in his own unpleasant circles as Butterfly. I know very little about him. Except that he was, over a short period, one of our honorable correspondents.”

  The term is the one given by the secret services of France to occasional employees hired from outside their regular staffs. Honorable correspondents are part-time free-lance volunteers, used when needed but with no official connections to government. They include former military officers and respectable civilians whose specialized skills, knowledge, or contacts make them valuable for certain specific assignments. Honorable correspondents also include patriotic gangsters and petty criminals: mercenaries for especially secretive and dirty “commando” missions involving strong-arm work, burglary, sabotage, or removals.

  “We dropped him rather quickly,” Thierry told me, “when it was learned that he talked too freely when he drank.”

  “Maybe some other service engaged him.”

  “I doubt it very much. His reputation as a loudmouth became too well known.”

  “Did he know Jacques Morel?” I asked.

  “It’s possible.”

  I told him the names of the two men the police had recognized among the three who’d been waiting to kill me last night. Thierry gave them some frowning thought, then shook his head.

  “I don’t recall either of those names. There’ve been so many over the years.”

  “I’d appreciate your having a look in your files to see if they’re there.” I was pretty sure they would be, in the same section of dossiers where he’d turned up the Butterfly. “When do you leave the office this evening?”

  “Around seven.” Thierry glanced at his watch and stood up. “I have to go now, Pierre-Ange.”

  “I’ll be at my apartment at seven,” I told him. “Call me from a public phone somewhere and tell me if you found those two names. I’ll stay by my phone till I hear from you.”

  He nodded. “But please, don’t ask me any
more favors for a long time after this. Discussions like this aren’t good for my nerves.”

  We shook hands, and he walked off slowly, around the Luxembourg Palace toward Rue de Vaugirard. I went back through the gardens to Rue Soufflot, where I had left my Renault in the parking area alongside the Pantheon.

  I was sure it was more than possible that the Butterfly had known Morel as an officer of the SDECE. Morel had used him, along with other thugs, in his official capacity with the Service Action. He’d have no difficulty in making them believe that anything he asked them to do now, for his own private purposes, was a request from the secret service—and that they were still acting as honorable correspondents.

  Chapter 30

  At 4 P.M. I was out at Orly waiting for the flight from the Côte d’Azur. It came in twenty minutes late. The courier came off with the package from Gilles and gave it to me. I drove back into Paris, opened the package in Fritz’s apartment, and spread its contents on the living room table.

  Reju went out for one of his patrols around the neighborhood. Fritz and I divided up Anne-Marie’s financial records, going back over the past year. I took on the photostats of her checks. Fritz screwed his monocle into his eye and went to work on her Visa Card statements.

  I spent considerable time studying the checks and learned nothing I hadn’t already known. She had made a lot of them out to cash. Very little of what had come into her checking account over the period of that year had stayed there longer than a few weeks. I was starting to go over each check again, searching for something whose significance I might have missed the first time, when Fritz spoke.

  “There is an odd pattern here.” He lined up the Visa statements, month by month, in sequence. On each month’s statement he had underlined a single item with his fountain pen.

  “You see?” he said. “The same thing, every month.”

  Each item he’d underlined was a meal Anne-Marie had charged in a restaurant. The amounts differed slightly. But it was always the same restaurant—in Moustiers-Sainte-Marie, a popular village near the Grand Canyon du Verdon, the most spectacular natural wonder of southern France.