Another thing was the same. I said it: “It’s always the last Saturday of the month.”
Fritz nodded. “We don’t have the statement for July here. But judging by her pattern, she probably ate there again this past Saturday.”
“The day before she was murdered.”
Fritz looked again at the items he’d marked. “A scheduled appointment…for the same time each month. In the restaurant, perhaps. Or elsewhere in or around Moustiers, and she had the meal at the restaurant before or after it.”
“Moustiers is a tough two-hour drive from Nice,” I mused. “Minimum. A lot of it on those mountain roads around the Verdon gorges. Say two to three hours, depending on weather and road conditions. And the same trip back down. Who did she have to see up there, that she’d use up that much of a day to do it?”
“That,” Fritz agreed, “is the question.”
We were both thinking the same answer. But I shook my head.
“Anne-Marie and Jacques Morel both lived in Nice. Why would he arrange to meet her that far away?”
“There is always a reason,” Fritz said. “This one we simply don’t know as yet.”
I used his phone to call Gilles in Nice and told him, “Anne-Marie went up to Moustiers the last Saturday of every month over the last year. Do you know about that?”
“No, I don’t.”
“She’d be gone for most of the day, Gilles. You must have noticed.”
“Anne-Marie often went off without me,” he said, tight-voiced. “Sometimes she would explain she’d made new friends. She seldom told me about them, and after a time I ceased being interested. I long ago stopped paying attention to where she went, or when, or for how long.”
* * * *
At seven that evening I was in my own apartment waiting impatiently for that call from Thierry Gallion.
It didn’t come until half past.
“Those last two names you gave me,” he said, being careful even over a pay phone. “They were very much like that other one we discussed. Used for a period and then dropped. Because they couldn’t be depended on to be discreet.”
“Thierry,” I said, “you told me our friend Jacques came from someplace in the south. Do you remember where in the south?”
“A village called Châteauneuf,” he answered promptly. “I remember being amused when I came across that in his dossier. There are so very many places of that name in France.”
“Where is this one?” I asked him.
“That I didn’t notice. Or at any rate I don’t recall the exact location. Just somewhere in the south.”
I put down the phone. Châteauneuf—“Newcastle,” in English. Thierry had touched on the problem: there must have been a hundred of them sprinkled all over France. All were named that when they were newly built, but they were now invariably very old. I took an atlas of southeastern France from one of my bookcases and got a detailed map of the Alpes Maritimes and a magnifying glass from my desk.
Jean-Marie Reju was in the kitchen heating another dinner left by one of the local ladies when I reentered Fritz Donhoff’s living room. I told Fritz the name and gave him the atlas. Spreading the map on his table, I focused the magnifier on Moustiers and then began slowly circling it and the Verdon gorges. I found it: one of the villages noted in the smallest print.
“Here’s one,” I told Fritz. “About a thirty or forty minute drive from Moustiers. It’s called Châteauneuf-de-Soleils.”
Fritz found it in the atlas: “Population 365. One church, one castle ruin, one small hotel. The hotel is a surprise, in a village so tiny.”
It was an area of France he didn’t know. Though born in Munich, he’d spent most of his life in Paris and seldom ventured far from it. A city man. I told him, “People come from all over France to look at the gorges of the Verdon Canyon. Not many foreigners. But enough French to fill every hotel, trailer park, and camping site in the area. They build hotels in some unlikely places, and never enough. Taking care of all the sightseers is the main industry there.”
“Sounds overcrowded.”
“It’s a big area. Plenty of wild, empty space left. You get into those gorges, or into the hills away from the main road, and you won’t see a house for miles. Moustiers is the only crowded town. It has the most hotels and restaurants. A good place for Morel to watch Anne-Marie without being seen until he made sure nobody else was watching.”
“We are assuming,” Fritz said, “that this Châteauneuf, near to Moustiers, is the one Jacques Morel originally came from. When his name was Jacques Taurenge.”
“It fits the situation.”
“It does,” Fritz acknowledged. “All right, then—he comes from there. And he has a place there. One he goes to stay at from time to time. On weekends, usually.”
“So he picks Moustiers for Anne-Marie to come to with her blackmail payments—because it’s close to his place, but not too close.”
“And we now understand how she contacted Morel after Lotis phoned her about Pilon. The last Saturday of the month was her day to meet him.”
“The timing was right: Lotis called her Wednesday to warn her of Pilon. She didn’t have any way to get in touch with Morel until Saturday. That’s when she went up there to meet him. It was probably the first time she told him what she’d done to get some of the money for him. It scared him—and the next night she and Pilon died to cover his tracks.”
Fritz said, “They probably met at lunchtime. Noon to two P.M. Between then and the following night would be enough time for Morel to make his plans and assemble his helpers: local ones and some from Paris. He almost certainly told them it was a job for the secret service.”
“Morel must have returned to Nice with Anne-Marie,” I said. “To supervise what followed. He had her phone Crow to make that lunch date with him on Sunday—and to use Crow’s house that night. Morel didn’t have anything against Crow. He just wanted a way to point the murder investigation in the wrong direction.”
Fritz nodded. “And once your friend Crow agreed to let her use his house, she phoned Pilon and told him to meet her there. Saying she had information to give him. Morel didn’t have to explain much to her about why he wanted her to do this. Beyond telling her it was part of a plan to get the threat of Pilon off both of them.”
“Maybe not even that,” I said. “Morel had her under his thumb. He might even have been holding a gun on her by the time she made the call to Pilon.”
“That’s quite possible, if he had her in Crowley’s house by then. He, and probably some of his helpers.”
“Before Pilon got to the house, Morel held a gun on her and forced her to strip and pose for those Polaroid pictures.”
“Or it may be,” Fritz suggested, “that he took those pictures of her long ago. Money may not have been the only sort of blackmail payment Morel demanded of her. He sounds to me like one of those who enjoys toying with people.”
The cold hatred I felt for Morel was getting stronger with every word.
Back and forth, Fritz and I worked out the probable sequence from that point on.
I was certain Anne-Marie knew that Crow kept a gun in the house. Everyone in the family knew it. Morel found it and killed her with it. Then he and his “honorable correspondents” waited for Pilon. Whatever explanation Morel gave his helpers for what they were doing, it wouldn’t have to be elaborate. Secret service officers don’t tell their mercenaries much about the reason for a dirty job. It’s sufficient that the service has deemed it necessary for the security of the nation.
Pilon came to the house—and into their trap. He had no reason to be more wary than usual. All he knew of what he was investigating at that point was that it involved a violation of business ethics. Nothing big enough to kill for, ordinarily. Certainly nothing that would pull in professional removers.
They’d forced him to strip at gunpoint, and then they’d killed him. Again, with Crow’s gun. Which was then hidden where it was sure to be found eventually.
Then Mor
el and his men left the house and headed for Nice. On the way one of them phoned the La Turbie gendarmerie and reported hearing gunshots from the house. In Nice they divided up the jobs of planting the photos of Anne-Marie in Crow’s studio and removing evidence of what Pilon had been working on from his office and apartment. With helpers like Butterfly, at least one of them had to be as skilled as Morel at dealing with locks.
* * * *
“All of it feels right to me,” Fritz Donhoff said finally. “Now—how are you going to prove all or any of it?”
“I don’t think I can,” I told him. “I’m going to have to do something else.”
Chapter 31
I couldn’t get space on a plane for that night. A common problem with flights to the Riviera in the summer. The first seat available was at half past ten in the morning. I booked it.
At noon the next day I was leaving the Côte de’Azur Airport wearing sunglasses to counter the ferocity of the sunlight. I hadn’t left my car there this time. The bomb at my house had discouraged me from taking even small risks that could be avoided. The Peugeot was in a Nice garage I’d never used before.
I had the cab that took me into Nice stick to heavy traffic that discouraged attack. I jumped out at Rue Massena, a pedestrian shopping street where any car tailing the cab couldn’t come in after me. Walking through it swiftly, I cut over to the taxi stand at Place Grimaldi. There were two cabs there. I paid the first to take a short cruise empty and used the second to lose anyone who’d followed me through Rue Massena on foot.
At half past noon I was back in my Peugeot, and the gun holstered under my arm was once more Heckler & Koch’s P7.
Ten minutes later I was onto the A8 autoroute heading west. I left the autoroute above Saint Tropez and drove up route N555 toward the Grand Canyon du Verdon. The smell of the sea faded and the aroma of mountain pine forests took over. The sun stayed strong, but the air got cooler.
The Verdon Grand Canyon has no resemblance to Arizona’s. It’s long and twisty and narrow—so narrow in places you can throw a stone across. It took me almost two hours to get there—and then almost another hour, taking the Corniche Sublime with its views of the river battering sheer cliffs a thousand feet below, to reach Moustiers.
I left the Peugeot in the parking area behind the church of Sainte Anne and walked over the short bridge crossing the ravine that divides the village in half. The restaurant where Anne-Marie had charged all those meals was on the main place.
The normal lunch hour was past. The owner was helping a waiter prepare tables for later diners. I showed them Anne-Marie’s picture. They recognized her immediately. Restaurants in Moustiers don’t get many repeat customers. For most of the French, a voyage to the Grand Canyon du Verdon is a once-in-a-lifetime affair.
She always took lunch at a table by the big window looking out on the place, they told me. They even remembered her first name was Anne-Marie because at some time during her lunch a man would phone and ask for that name. She would go to the phone and take the call, listening and saying little. After the call she would return to her table. Sometimes to finish her lunch. But more often she left the meal unfinished and had a large brandy instead. Then she would go out—they didn’t know where.
The routine wasn’t hard to figure. It gave Morel an opportunity to watch her enter the village and then to observe her in the restaurant. He’d mingle with sightseers in the place until certain nobody else had her under surveillance. Then he would phone and tell her where to go. A different collection point each time. Along one of the back roads that got little traffic. He’d get there first and take up a position where he could observe Anne-Marie’s approach.
When he was sure she was alone he’d step out and stop her. She’d pay him off and drive away, back down to Nice.
I asked for directions to Châteauneuf. The owner got out a local map and showed me. The chateau from which the village derived its name was marked as a ruin, on a slope near a waterfall. It and the original village around it, I was told, had been partially destroyed by a landslide in the previous century and abandoned. A newer village had been built a few hundred yards away, lower on the slope.
I went back to my car and drove there.
* * * *
It was a cheerless little village on the bank of a narrow mountain stream at the bottom of a gorge that got little sun. The houses huddled together for protection against the sharp, cold winds that cut through the gorge. Their walls were of dark stone, their steep roofs covered with black slate. The one-lane road that led to the village continued past it for about two hundred yards. It ended at the foot of a waterfall that was the only lovely aspect of the gorge-high and slim, with the water cascading over humps of rock like moving lace.
The small hotel didn’t look bad. It was the newest building in the village, roofed with orange tiles, its walls whitewashed with red trim around the windows. I checked in, taking a room for one night. It was the quickest and most natural way to become accepted as a temporary part of the village.
The reception desk was inside the hotel’s barroom, the only one in the village. The hotel’s manager, a young, stocky red-haired woman with a broad face and lively eyes, also tended the bar. She was pouring a glass of red wine for a farmer when I came in. After I’d signed in and paid she went back to gossip with him while I carried my bag through a door behind the bar and up a short flight of stairs.
The room was like the rest of the hotel: small and sparsely furnished, but clean. I left my bag on the bed and went back down to the bar.
The redhead and the farmer stopped their chat to look at me, she with a friendly smile, he neither friendly nor unfriendly, just curious. He was a tough-looking old man with gnarled hands and a seamed face, wearing a cloth cap, overalls, a turtleneck shirt, and rubber boots caked with mud.
His glass of red was almost empty. I sat on the stool next to him and asked if I could buy him another. He finished his wine and said, with dignity, “That would be kind.”
I ordered the same and began spinning a tale about coming up there to get away from family tensions for a while. My tale included a wife who complained that my job as a bus driver didn’t bring in enough money and a couple of kids who were always watching television and who paid no attention to whatever I told them. The fanner and the redhead listened with interest, nodding sympathetically. The quickest way to relax the French is to tell them so many intimate details about yourself that they can’t regard you as a stranger.
“There’s a man I know down in Nice,” I said when I had them warmed up, “who comes from here. Name’s Jacques Taurenge.”
“Oh, sure,” the red-haired hotel manager said. “He comes to his place most weekends. Only he calls himself Morel now. It used to be Taurenge—but he says he never liked the name, so he changed it.”
“Don’t blame him,” the farmer said. “Wasn’t nothing about that family to be proud of. Mother that ran off with some man passing through and never came back. Father drunk all the time, right up to the day he died.”
“That was before my time,” the redhead said. “He left before I was born. Only came back about four years ago.”
The farmer said, “I never liked Jacques when he was a kid, and I still don’t like him much. But it was a shame. Kid was always dressed in rags. Going down around Moustiers to scrounge stuff out of the trash. To steal a little, too, I guess. Father never gave him anything except beatings.”
The redhead said, “Well, he’s sure done well for himself since then.” She looked at me inquiringly. “Must be worth a fortune now, whatever it is he does for a living. Is he married, do you know?” The question embarrassed her. “I mean, he never talks about that, either.”
“I don’t know,” I told her. “I’ve just met him a few times. Bar in Nice. He does all right for himself, I think.”
The redhead nodded reflectively. “He must. All it’s costing him to fix up the old chateau.”
“One thing I got to hand him,” the farmer said g
rudgingly. “I remember when he was a kid, the way he’d go up there to hang around the old chateau. Then come down and boast about how he’d come back someday with enough to buy it for himself. Fix it up to look like a real castle again. And there he is, back and doing it. Got to give him that—even if he’s a fool, spending that much on it and no end to it.”
The redhead’s mind still seemed preoccupied with Morel’s possible marriage potential. “It must have cost him a fortune just to run those electric and phone lines up there.”
I said, “He told me I ought to have a look at his place, if I ever got up here. How do I find it?”
They told me: to the end of the road by the waterfall, and then up an unpaved route to the ruins of the old village.
A fairly new pickup truck pulled to a stop outside the hotel. The redhead glanced at it and then made a quick warning sign to the farmer, finger to her lips. The farmer gave a low laugh.
A plump man in his late thirties got out of the pickup and came into the bar. He wore dungarees and a good leather jacket. His expensive cowboy boots made him look taller than he was. He also wore a surly expression that looked habitual. Pointedly ignoring the farmer and me, he settled on a stool at the end of the bar, as far from us as he could get, and ordered Armagnac.
The farmer winked at me and turned to him. “Antoine, we were just talking about Jacques. About what a fool he is, spending all that money to fix up that wreck. This here’s a friend of his from Nice.”
Antoine turned his head and looked at me for the first time. “You’re a friend of Jacques?”
“Not really,” I said. “I’ve only met him a few times.”
He eyed me suspiciously. “What’s your name?”
I told him. Having registered under my own, I couldn’t give him another. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
“Never heard of you.”
Back in the Real World Page 18
