by Pirate Irwin
Both he and Levau strode down the street on opposite sides of it before clarifying that the plain clothes detective, a nice decent sort called Amédie Noel, was still in place.
He told Lafarge, after asking him what the heck had happened to which the Chief Inspector had smiled and said he should see the other guy, that Courneuve had switched on the lights about 30 minutes beforehand as it had got darker and was about the most eventful thing that had taken place.
Lafarge handed him a few francs and said he should go back down the street to the café and have a couple.
“Thanks, Lafarge. Oh, by the way, I’m grateful for you relieving me but you are a bit behind the gendarmes, as a couple of new ones turned up about 10 minutes ago,” said Noel.
Lafarge froze and looked first at Levau and then at Noel.
“Did you see the other two come out?”
Noel scratched his chin and thought.
“Come to think of it, no I didn’t see them. They must be chatting to each other upstairs,” said Noel.
Lafarge thought that was a possibility but he wasn’t prepared to waste a moment in case it was something more sinister. He removed his revolver, which he had recovered from Monnet’s corpse, and told Levau to do the same while asking him if he had replaced the two bullets he had used in Butte Chaumont.
He ordered Noel to run to the café and order back-up and then return and wait outside the building.
“If they have done anything I would have heard it,” said Noel rather desperately before he scampered down the street to the café.
Lafarge covered Levau as he pushed open the large green door to the entrance, and as it swung open the Chief Inspector rushed ahead of his younger partner.
He gestured to Levau to look into the concierge Grosbière’s little apartment. Levau turned to him ashen faced and ran a finger along his throat. Lafarge glanced through the open door and saw Grosbière lying on his back, his head nearest the door and his throat a gaping wound.
Lafarge put his finger to his mouth and then contemplated whether to take the lift and go a floor above to de Boinville’s level or risk taking the stairs. He opted for the lift option while he told Levau to take the stairs, thus both ways out were covered. He just hoped that the gendarmes didn’t come down the stairs while he was still in the lift for then Levau would be exposed.
He whispered in Levau’s ear to keep pace with the lift or as best he could, although lifts when they worked in Paris generally moved at a pace snails would find even too slow for them.
Sweating ever so slightly, so that some of Monnet’s blood dripped into his mouth making him gag, he pushed the button and the lift swung into action.
He was unable to see if Levau was matching him, and he hoped he was holding back a little as it would take him time to get out of the lift and walk down the flight of stairs. He kept his gaze looking towards where the iron grille gates would open just in case there was a nasty surprise when he pulled them apart to exit.
He exhaled slightly as he passed the floor where the Courneuves apartment was and listened for any sounds but didn’t hear any, at least from outside the flat. However, he feared what might be taking place inside the apartment. He crept out and looked from side to side once he reached de Boinville’s floor, and saw nothing.
He heard Levau’s footsteps reaching the floor below, so he descended the flight of stairs and saw immediately that there was no sign of the four gendarmes. He swung to the left of one of the double doors of the entrance to the apartment and told Levau to do the same and then he tried the handle.
Fortunately it gave and the door opened although it left Levau in the line of fire. Lafarge tried to cover him as he pivoted round through the opening, but not before a shot was loosed off and hit the paintwork just behind his right ear. He dived for whatever cover he could find in the hallway, while he hoped Levau would do the same.
Lafarge managed to hide partially behind an expensive-looking umbrella stand, which looked to have been made out of an elephant’s foot. He didn’t spend too long admiring it as there were rather more pressing matters to deal with. Levau, he was relieved to see, had succeeded in entering the hall and was crouched down behind a marble-topped table opposite him.
“We’re police!” yelled out Lafarge in a vain attempt to persuade the gendarmes to put down their weapons or, in the least likely scenario, ensure they identified themselves in case the uniforms thought they had come to harm Courneuve.
“We know who you are,” muttered a voice down the corridor.
Lafarge noticed there was a doorway just beyond the umbrella stand which was reachable if Levau covered him. He shot a glance at Levau and pointed towards the door and flexed his trigger finger three times so as to give him the message what he was to do. Levau nodded and Lafarge, keeping low, ran round the stand and shoulder-barged the closed door, gaining access as it all but came off its hinges.
Levau must have hit a target because he could hear cries of agony from further down the corridor. He glanced back at Levau who was well covered by the table, and gestured for him to stay there. He, in the meantime, was able to stand up once he ascertained there was nobody in the drawing room. It was completely unrecognisable from the neat and tidy room when they first met the Courneuves. The beautiful china figurines of some long forgotten Empress and her eunuchs or bodyguards, lay smashed to smithereens on the floor, all the chairs were overturned and while the paintings still hung from the walls they were at such an angle that it seemed like someone had been vainly hanging on to them as they resisted being dragged into another room.
Courneuve had clearly put up quite a lot of resistance, more it appeared than his victim the Count had done. For a simple reason he surmised it had been Courneuve who had hung on for dear life to his prized paintings as he fought with his assailants: the gendarmes, who he had placed outside the front door to the apartment, both lay behind the sofa, their throats like that of Grosbière slit.
Lafarge edged back to the first doorway into the drawing room and saw Levau was still in the same position. He could hear someone wailing down the corridor, whether it was Courneuve or the assassins he couldn’t make out, but whoever it was was in a great deal of pain.
He indicated to Levau to stay where he was, while he tossed him the pistols of the two dead gendarmes, and that he was going to go out the far door of the drawing room and to give him cover.
Once he heard Levau start firing he swung the door open and entered into a small study which had also been torn asunder, but again there was nobody there. He started to sweat and breathe deeper as he realised that sooner or later he was going to come face to face with one or two armed men as he didn’t know whether it was one of them Levau had hit or inadvertently Courneuve, who could have been used as a shield.
He pressed his ear to the doorway that led he thought to the kitchen, though having only visited the place once his memory was a bit sketchy. He could hear people talking and it made him feel a bit better as they sounded as hyped up and nervous as he did.
“Where the fuck is the other guy?” asked one.
“How the hell should I know? Just cover the door to the study for if he isn’t in the hall he must be making his way down the side of the apartment. I’ll try and get closer to the other shooter,” replied the other one.
The exchange also confirmed to Lafarge that neither of the two were the man wailing, that must be Courneuve, which made his task all the more urgent because he had to save the man’s life much as it galled him to have to do so.
Preventing murderers from being executed was not in the almanac for detectives, at least it wasn’t in his, but without the weasel there was little chance of pinning anything on de Cambedessus. He didn’t know whether Marianne Courneuve had ever met de Cambedessus. Even if she had, once she discovered her husband had been murdered on his orders, there was little chance she would be willing to identify him.
Lafarge reproached himself for being such a pessimist but having spent most of hi
s working life in the police force that negative feeling was part and parcel of the job. Thus here he was risking his and his young partner’s life to rescue a cheap pederast, blackmailer and murderer. “Your life has come to a pretty turn hasn’t it, Lafarge?” he grinned grimly.
He wasn’t prepared to launch himself through the door as that would be plain suicide. Instead he knocked over three or four of the few things that remained upright in the study and then ran to the far side of the room by the curtains. He cast a quick glance out the window to see whether the back-up had turned up yet, but all he could see was Noel looking despairingly up at the apartment.
His move, though, had worked for after a matter of seconds someone burst through the kitchen door shooting wildly towards the other door that led back to the drawing room. Lafarge didn’t hesitate, and pulled the trigger twice hitting his target in the midriff and the shoulder of his shooting hand. The man fell back writhing in agony, clutching his stomach with his hand as he tried to stem the blood that was flowing liberally from the wound.
Lafarge went over and kicked his gun away and added a kick to the man’s ribs and the wounded shoulder for good measure. He then handcuffed him to the Louis XV desk.
“Where’s your partner?” he whispered.
The man, who looked around the mid 40s, though as he was all but completely bald he may have been younger, screwed up his eyes into slits and spat at Lafarge, plastering him with bloody spittle.
Terrific! A mix of Monnet and now another gendarme’s blood – he had had his fill of the uniforms for the day.
He yanked his head back and banged it twice against the leg of the desk and asked him again. It was no use as the force of the blows had all but knocked him unconscious.
Fortunately he got his answer as a burst of gunfire rang out from the hallway which was followed by someone returning fire.
He strode quickly to the door that he now knew for sure led into the kitchen and looked in. However, there was no sign of either the other assassin or Courneuve. He swung to his left and peered through the exit into the passageway of the hall and saw the other gendarme was hiding behind another table, this one made of thick wood, but his back was exposed to Lafarge.
Lafarge took aim and fired, hitting the gendarme in the shoulder which provoked him into spinning round, and without batting an eyelid the Chief Inspector emptied what remained of his magazine into his body. He lay motionless and Lafarge wandered carefully over to him, nevertheless, to confirm he was dead.
Levau joined him and they moved quickly to the bedroom and found Courneuve, though it quickly became clear why he had been wailing in such agony. He was naked, with his arms and legs strapped to the four poster bed, and while unlike de Boinville his manhood was intact, there were slash marks on his abdomen and his limbs.
However, they were mild wounds by comparison to what they had done to his face. Hubert Courneuve would not be gracing any high society homosexual parties anymore in search of his next blackmail target. Indeed his chances of even procuring cheap thrills in the pissoirs looked to be at an end: one of his ears had been sliced off and placed on his chest; his nose had been cut open, but even stitched back together it would leave a deep scar. While Lafarge couldn’t care less about his loss of prospects in the blackmail market what was deeply damaging to any chance of getting him to talk was that his tongue was hanging by a thin sliver to the inside of his mouth.
His face was contorted like one of the gargoyles that stared out from the top of Notre Dame, but Lafarge felt a slight pulse and instructed Levau to get some towels from the bathroom to try and stem the flow of blood.
There was little they could do with regard to the tongue; if they slid it back into his mouth he could well choke on it by swallowing it involuntarily. Lafarge cursed and swore in frustration at where the back-up was. He rang the Quai from the phone in the drawing room, which he found thrown under a chest of drawers that was unlike its owner luckily still intact and attached to its socket.
He was told there were riots in the east of the city but that a couple of cars would be with him soon while an ambulance would also be sent.
He swore loudly as he returned to the bedroom and saw that Levau, being rather more humane than he was, had covered Courneuve’s body in a sheet. Lafarge felt his pulse again and taking a leaf out of his partner’s book mopped his brow which was becoming feverish – no wonder at the torture he had endured.
He raised his eyebrows at Levau, who had remained impressively calm throughout the shoot-out and then the appalling sight of Courneuve’s body, although Lafarge thought one might as well call it a corpse, and motioned for him to follow him and see if the gendarme he had shot in the study had come round.
However, as soon as they entered the room Lafarge knew it was no use as there was the smell of bitter almonds in the air.
The gendarme, whether through fear of what he might say, expert training or the pain of his wound had proved to be unbearable, had bitten down on a cyanide capsule. This devotion to duty, if it had been to avoid interrogation, deeply troubled Lafarge, although he hid his feelings from Levau.
Going to such lengths as taking their own lives to prevent any information seeping out and by trying to get rid of him and Courneuve, it wasn’t just to save de Cambedessus but it also implied the plot was back in play.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Well gentlemen, that is a fine night’s work. Four gendarmes dead along with a concierge and our main suspect in a murder enquiry unlikely to ever talk again,” said Pinault sternly.
Whilst they were seated in the café down the street from the apartment building, there was no sense of conviviality about the occasion.
It was just Pinault having been roused from his bed was not in the mood for holding the post mortem – there were enough of those in the physical sense being held at that very moment in the mortuary – back at the Quai, and seeing the café was open had pushed Lafarge and Levau in there.
Lafarge, who was on his second cognac which he could safely vouch would not be paid for by Pinault, cleared his throat and his superior shot him a sharp look.
“Erm, sir, I’m afraid you will have to add one more body to the tally. There is another gendarme, though I use that term loosely and with bile swimming around in my stomach, lying dead in Butte Chaumont,” he said.
“What the hell, Lafarge! What do you mean there is another gendarme lying dead in Butte Chaumont? You say that there is a large amount of bile in your stomach. Well all I can say is that is nothing compared to the taste I have in my mouth after seeing the carnage in there, ” said Pinault glaring at Lafarge.
Lafarge was about to reply but was cut short by Levau, who for the most part had remained silent while Pinault had berated the two of them, but for the most part his target had been the Chief Inspector.
“I shot Captain Monnet, sir. He was about to shoot the Chief Inspector and so I had no alternative but to do as I did. I was after all following your orders,” said Levau silkily.
Lafarge smirked as he saw Pinault’s features cloud over.
“Yes well, be that as it may, Levau, why did this Captain Monnet wish to kill you Chief Inspector?” asked Pinault sulkily.
Lafarge for once didn’t hide anything from his superior; he felt his job was once again on the line and he was damned if he was going to join the lengthening list of former policemen who had been thrown off the force.
Pinault to his credit listened without interrupting him and took some notes, occasionally staring at Lafarge quizzically and at others, the Chief Inspector hoped, with new-found respect.
Pinault ordered another round of drinks once Lafarge had finished his lengthy account of the events of the evening, and having dipped his finger into the cognac he ran his index finger round the crystal glass.
“You know, Chief Inspector and Levau, that to test the quality of a glass, to see if it really is genuine crystal by running your finger round the rim, if it makes a humming noise it proves that it is indeed
what it is claimed to be,” said Pinault.
Both Levau and Lafarge exchanged glances and allowed their superior to proceed, wherever he was going with this analogy.
“Thus, Chief Inspector, it is the same question I ask about your claims with regard to this case. If we were to say run our finger round the rim would we find that it hummed.
“You claim that this intelligence officer, Colonel de Cambedessus, is perhaps not the band leader but he is under orders and was handling the Courneuves and using them to blackmail de Boinville in some monarchist plot to destroy General de Gaulle.
“By chance he is married to a lady, who you met when you were temporarily incarcerated and then pleaded for her to be released whereupon she is swiftly raped after you have left her off at her home.
“This rape, and also you say of your sister at Rue Lauriston, was perpetrated by Captain Monnet because of the visceral hatred he held for you since you arrested him during the dreadful events of 1943.
“You claim that de Cambedessus then set you up with Monnet while he organised for two assassins to go and take care of Courneuve,with whom you had overheard a conversation between them in the latter’s house in Fontainebleau the day before.
“According to you, this ‘Arthur’ is none other than de Cambedessus, who you have the immense good fortune to come across the next morning when you meet with Gaston Palewski. You claim also that despite your insistence you wanted to arrest Monnet you were yourself the victim of emotional blackmail by the colonel and were ordered to … what is the politest term one can use? …yes, execute him.
“Am I correct in everything I have said so far, Chief Inspector?” asked Pinault, his tone grave.
Lafarge nodded and felt that the tone of Pinault’s voice, and the manner in which he had outlined these coincidences, did not augur well for what was to come.
“On the surface it hums but I just find that it is too neat, and I have rarely found a case is as simple, or rather tidy, as this one seems to be. Everything in this intricate tale, like the story of Theseus and Ariadne and the Minotaur, seems to me you have had the piece of thread to get yourself round the Maze from the start.
