A Vintage End

by D'arcy Kavanagh

  His cellphone buzzed in the back pocket of his yellow cycling shirt.

  Reluctantly, he pulled it out, thinking the small device had control over a significant part of his life. Then he thought about what he would do without the phone – and he didn’t like the thought.

  Burke saw he had a text from François Lemaire.

  “Plea bargains announced in case of 3 students,” Lemaire had written.

  Burke knew exactly which three students the newsman was talking about.

  He hoped he would have decent reception to go online for more information about the plea bargains.

  He did.

  And then he read how all three students had pled guilty to assault and arson. The other charges they had faced had been dropped. Their lawyers and the prosecution had agreed to a prison sentence of 10 months per person.

  Burke was surprised they hadn’t been hit with longer sentences.

  Then he read a quote from one of the defence lawyers that said the three students “know what they did was wrong even thought their intent was to highlight some of the country’s troubled times during the Second World War.”

  There was also a comment from a prosecutor who said the three “have learned a harsh lesson without much cost to the public.”

  Burke wasn’t entirely sure if the people who had been rushed to the hospital after getting sick at the VIP tent in Vaison would agree.

  He continued with the story.

  It went on about the related charges facing Bosco Yablonski’s security people and his special advisor Josette Martel who apparently held a considerable number of shares in some of Yablonski’s companies.

  Those cases were not expected to go to court anytime soon, the story concluded.

  Burke got a new text from Lemaire: “Contact me soon. One student wants to talk to you.”

  Puzzled as to which student it would be and why he wanted to talk, Burke phoned Lemaire.

  “Christophe Talbot, through his lawyer, wants to meet with you,” the editor said.

  “Do you know why?”

  “Not a clue. The lawyer wouldn’t say,” Lemaire told Burke. “You should go and see what he has to say. There might be a blog in there for you. The story is definitely hot again.”

  Lemaire was always thinking about news and how he could keep his newspaper chain relevant, Burke thought.

  Burke said he’d call the lawyer if Lemaire provided the number.

  “Do it as soon as you can, Paul,” Lemaire said.

  “I’m in Grasse on my bike.”

  “So what? Call him now and meet Talbot,” Lemaire urged. “Then get back to me as soon as you’re done. There’s a story there.”

  Burke agreed and Lemaire ended the call.

  Still sitting on the bench in the park, Burke reluctantly put aside all thoughts about lunch in the Old Town and phoned the lawyer’s number.

  It took a minute of waiting, but then the receptionist put Burke through to the lawyer whose name was Étienne Jordan.

  “Monsieur Burke, I’m glad you’ve contacted me,” the lawyer said in a silky smooth baritone.

  Then he explained that his client, Christophe Talbot, had requested a meeting.

  “What does he want to discuss, Monsieur Jordan?” Burke asked.

  “I don’t know, but do you agree to do it?”

  Burke said he would. Then the lawyer said it would be possible to have the meeting that afternoon.

  Burke asked where.

  “At the police station in Nice,” the lawyer said.

  Burke had a powerful sense of déjà vu. A year earlier, he had met with his elderly neighbour, Madame Marois, in jail after her guilty plea on an assassination charge.

  “I can make it,” Burke said.

  The lawyer suggested 4 p.m. and Burke again agreed.

  “I’ll meet you at the front of the police station at 4,” said the lawyer who then ended the call.

  Burke wondered what Talbot wanted to say to him.

  Chapter 85

  Burke looked at all the people entering and leaving the Nice police station. Which one was Étienne Jordan? There were several who looked like lawyers.

  “I think you’re looking for me, Monsieur Burke,” came a smooth voice to the side of Burke.

  It belonged to a short, heavyset man with enormous bags under his eyes and a suit that looked like it hadn’t been pressed for at least a decade.

  They shook hands and then they entered the police station.

  Ten minutes later, Burke was sitting at a table in a small room, waiting for Christophe Talbot. Beside Burke was Étienne Jordan. Outside was a guard.

  Talbot came in and Burke was surprised at how the young man looked.

  His skin was no longer tanned, just ashen, his eyes lacked all spark and his cheeks had caved in from sudden weight loss. He had aged a decade in weeks.

  Talbot stuck out his hand. Burke shook it, feeling nothing but bones in the younger man’s grip.

  “Thank you for coming, Monsieur Burke,” Talbot said in a tired, thin voice.

  “I’m surprised you wanted to see me,” Burke said.

  “Besides seeing you at the races, I’ve read your blogs for some time,” Talbot said. “I enjoy what you have to say.”

  Burke didn’t know what to say other than “thank you.”

  “I want you to hear a little bit of my story and, hopefully, you‘ll write about it,” Talbot said.

  “Why me? I don’t understand.”

  “We have much in common. We are both cyclists, we are both from Québec and we were at the vintage races. And I think we also dislike injustice.”

  Burke thought Talbot’s arguments for their meeting were still weak.

  But Burke knew François Lemaire wouldn’t care. In fact, Lemaire would be overjoyed if Burke could produce a special blog resulting from this interview.

  “Tell me your story,” Burke said.

  “Well, I have limited time and so I will condense it, but hopefully it will be enough,” Talbot said.

  Burke took out his recorder and his notebook. He noticed the lawyer beside him was equally poised to take notes.

  And then Talbot began.

  “It wasn’t long after the French president, Francois Hollande, and the German president, Joachim Gauck, got together to commemorate the massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane. There was a lot of discussion about mending fences and dealing with the past in a constructive way. I was looking at wartime massacres as part of my research and Professor Bertrand suggested I work collaboratively with three other grad students.”

  Burke expected he knew the identities of the other students, but he didn’t interrupt.

  “We were all researching the aftermath of Oradour-sur-Glane although from slightly different angles and to different degrees,” Talbot said. “My focus was really on the murder of Canadian soldiers because, Monsieur Burke, I had a great grandfather who was killed by the Germans in the aftermath of the D-Day invasion.”

  “On the beaches or somewhere else?” Burke asked.

  “He was in a small group that was captured and then executed.”

  Talbot discussed how he and the other three students – Gabriel Belcourt, Luc Houle and Grégoire Holz – compared their research.

  “Then Gabriel said we should expand our joint work to look at individuals who profited from such massacres or such events. We all agreed although, to be honest, I wasn’t sure we’d find much since many records had been destroyed during the war. But then we bumped across one individual more than once whose story held some interest – Sébastien Hahn.”

  “And you started to chase down his story,” Burke said.

  “We did. I’ll admit there were gaps in the information, but, in the end, we thought we had a decent profile of him. And then we discovered how he had changed his name and how his grandnephew was Bosco Yablonski.”

  “But why go from an academic research project to going after Yablonski personally?” Burke said.

  “As I look back o
n it now, we were foolish and more than a little arrogant,” Talbot said. “We studied Yablonski and saw no indication that he acknowledged his uncle’s past or, for that matter, his family’s. If anything, he seemed as ruthless as his father or even his uncle. And then we heard how he was going to sponsor these vintage bicycle races.”

  “And you changed your plans,” Burke said.

  “We did, Monsieur,” Talbot replied. “We decided we would continue our research, but what we really wanted was to shame Bosco Yablonski.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell the world about what you had discovered?”

  “We were arrogant, but we were also afraid. We didn’t think we had quite enough proof to ridicule him in public, at least with our names attached. We had no money for lawyers if we got sued and we knew he would have the best attorneys. So we came up with a scheme to embarrass him.”

  “And the vintage bicycle races were the way?”

  “We thought so,” Talbot. “We are all enthusiastic cyclists – excuse me, we were – and it seemed the perfect way to go after him.”

  “And you thought that, as a group, you had the necessary skills to make it work,” Burke suggested.

  “Indeed,” Talbot said. “Gabriel is a wizard with computers and technology, and he can do just about anything he wants. If he hadn’t wanted to get a masters degree, he might have become a computer programmer or maybe a special effects person in the movies. Grégoire studied public relations as part of his undergraduate degree and so he had some basic understanding about how the media works. Luc is, or was, our best researcher. As for me, I was the logistics expert. I love to plan things out, identify tasks, set goals, create schedules.”

  “And so you began your campaign against Bosco Yablonski.”

  “We didn’t do anything quickly, though,” Talbot said. “We had a few months before the races started and we all managed to get extensions on our graduate degree work. We started planning. We went over every step again and again. We definitely didn’t want to get caught, especially by Yablonski. He scared us.”

  “Did you ever think that what you were doing was not smart – or was dangerous?”

  “Not at the start. When we found the perfect place to steal those skeletons, I had a moment of doubt, but it disappeared. We were so damned enthusiastic. And then when no one caught us after the Saint-Raphaël race, we were even more arrogant. After Nice, we thought we had him on the run.”

  Burke asked what happened in Arles with Luc Houle.

  Talbot lowered his head and didn’t speak for a half minute. Then he looked at Burke, his face threatening to burst into tears.

  “Arles was to be the place where we would increase the pressure on Yablonski,” Talbot said. “We put together a way to burn him in effigy and, to be honest, it was a good plan. Then we thought about blowing up Yablonski’s limo. We knew it was a step beyond what we had organized for the first two races, but we wanted to do it if we could. It would all depend on establishing if Yablonski had a pattern of behaviour during the races.”

  “You discovered one, didn’t you?”

  “We did and decided, after Nice, to go ahead. We had all the elements assembled to blow up the vehicle without damaging anything else. That was Gabriel’s thing. He had done the homework and had enough science background to build an incendiary device that would destroy Yablonski’s car without doing anything more. As I said, Gabriel is clever.”

  At that moment, Burke wondered if Belcourt and Holz would be pleased to know what Talbot was telling him.

  “But as we got closer to the Arles race, Luc started to object. He didn’t like the direction we were going in. I think for him it had all been some kind of intellectual exercise to that point, but what we were now proposing was a lot rougher and more dangerous. We had a huge fight and Luc left, saying he was done with the entire project. He said he was going home. But he promised he wouldn’t tell anyone about us.”

  That made sense, thought Burke. If Houle had talked, he, as well as his friends, might have ended up in jail since he would have implicated himself.

  “When did you find out he was dead?” Burke asked.

  “Not till Vaison,” Talbot said. “We thought he had caught the train and gone back home.”

  There was a knock on the window and the guard held up five fingers.

  “You know, when I was riding Mont Ventoux a few days later, I saw you on the climb, Monsieur Burke,” Talbot said.

  “I saw you, too. You were almost hit by that red sports car.”

  “Tabernac, what a bastard!”

  Talbot paused. “I just said ‘tabernac.’ Did you hear me say that on the Ventoux?”

  “I did.”

  “So you knew where I was from?” Talbot said.

  “I did,” Burke replied.

  “And when you talked to me during the race in Vaison, you had some sense that I was involved, right?”

  “I did. My friends and I were putting together the pieces,” Burke said.

  “Smart.”

  “They are, not me,” Burke said, thinking of Madame Benoit in particular.

  “You know, we were reading your blogs throughout all the vintage races.”

  “And so you threatened me because those blogs suggested I might be getting close to knowing who you were.”

  “What threat?”

  Burke told Talbot about the email.

  “That had to be Gabriel. I had no clue about it. I don’t think Grégoire did either.”

  Another knock. Three minutes.

  “Why poison all those people in the VIP tent in Vaison?” Burke said.

  “We didn’t want to poison them. We just wanted to make a few of them ill. It would reflect on the catering company and then onto Yablonski who owned it. By that time, Monsieur Burke, we knew the best way to hurt Yablonski was to damage the worth of his companies and that was happening with the value of the shares. We never planned that to happen, but when it did, we didn’t object.”

  “What did Holz put into the food?”

  “Some kind of chemical that Gabriel told us would make some people sick, but wouldn’t be dangerous.”

  “It seems he was wrong.”

  Talbot grimaced and looked down at his hands.

  “Now we’re going to prison,” Talbot said. He paused and shook his head. “I just want to finish by saying there needs to be greater attention paid to war profiteering, to historic events that continue to have an effect on people today.”

  Burke thought Talbot’s conclusion was a little idealistic, but he didn’t doubt the young man’s sincerity.

  Another knock. One minute.

  “My time is almost gone,” Talbot said. “I hope you can do something with the information. Maybe I’ll be able to read whatever you write although it’ll be from behind bars.”

  Talbot stood up. Jordan and Burke got to their feet as well.

  Talbot shook hands with Burke.

  “Maybe we can meet when I get out,” Talbot said.

  “Maybe,” said Burke thinking he wouldn’t mind talking to the young man again.

  Talbot shook hands with Étienne Jordan who said they would be talking again within a day or two.

  The door opened and the guard motioned for Talbot to leave the room by the back entrance.

  Burke had a final question. It wouldn’t be a kind one, but he was curious.

  “Which prison are you going to?” he asked.

  “They tell me Corbas Prison, on the outskirts of Lyon. Very modern with individual cells, thank goodness.”

  Then he was gone.

  Burke looked at Étienne Jordan who returned his gaze.

  Neither said a word.

  Chapter 86

  After leaving the police station and saying goodbye to Christophe Talbot’s lawyer, Burke phoned François Lemaire, giving him the basics of the conversation he had just had.

  “Get me a blog as quickly as you can – no later than 8 tonight,” Lemaire said. “That way, I can get it onto t
he website tonight and then reshape it for the print papers tomorrow morning. You can double the usual length if you want.”

  Burke agreed and rang off.

  A half hour later, he was at home, typing as fast as he could, the words spilling out as he tried to reproduce Talbot’s story. Hélène was at the café, but Burke wasn’t alone; Plato was wrapped around his feet, snoring gently as his master worked.

  Burke finished the story by 7 p.m. and sent it to Lemaire.

  “Got it,” Lemaire replied immediately in an email.

  Fifteen minutes later, Burke’s phone rang.

  “Good job, Paul,” Lemaire said and Burke could tell the newsman meant it. “Very sad in a way.”

  “It is.”

  “You can check the website in 10 minutes to see how we’re playing your blog. Antoine is doing something special now to make the site pop. We’ll be using social media to promote it. It’ll be on the front page of the newspapers tomorrow morning. We’ll talk tomorrow about a follow-up piece. After that, you can move onto other matters.”

  Lemaire ended the call.

  Move onto other matters?

  Burke leaned back in his chair and felt Plato re-position himself around Burke’s feet. He would sit there for a little while longer and then he’d take the little dog for an evening stroll.

  But he knew he would not be moving onto other matters.

  Not for a long time.

  Epilogue

  The prosecution case against Bosco Yablonski’s staff was a strong one, driven by some of the best lawyers in the government office, and the cases went quickly, at least for France. The lawyers for the security men didn’t have the same firepower and were clearly overwhelmed in court. It was obvious that Bosco Yablonski, wherever he was, didn’t help the men defend themselves.

  Four of the men received sentences of 12 years. One individual, Burke’s favourite muscleman who seemed to be the driving force behind the Arles’ deaths, received 20 years.

  They were all sentenced to prisons far from Lyon. Burke, thinking about Christophe Talbot and his friends, was grateful.