Murder Without Pity (19 page)

He held the can outward like a gun and sprayed a black swath of obscenities across the wall. The benefit, she realized. He had yelled at her as she had made her way to the hotel’s entrance, and she remembered glancing at him and moving closer to her bodyguard. She jerked her wrist around, glanced at her watch, then eyed them.

His companion whispered something to him. He stopped spraying, turned in her direction, and aimed the can at her.

Anna turned her head sharply to the stairs behind her. She thought of the long corridors to the exit; the walk was too far. The metro should arrive any minute.

The taller youth shouted at her.

The bird knocked its wings against its cage.

They have no right to frighten me, she thought. She prepared to gouge and slash, to fight for her life. She thrust her hand into her bag past the clipped pages. Lipstick, notebook, eyebrow pencil, compact mirror, shit, where were her keys, her pen, anything sharp and deadly.

There was a distant rumble deep inside the tunnel to her left. She inched closer to the platform’s edge, saw the metro’s lights jittering far back in the darkness, and braced to jump inside the first carriage. Thank God, she thought, fixing on the lights, hearing the metro clatter closer. Someone gripped her arm from behind. She swung around. “No, please don’t,” she pleaded as she kicked him hard. Metal grinding on metal, the metro lurched out of the tunnel into the open.

With a grimace, the taller youth shoved.

With a scream, Anna tumbled.

AFTER ANNA

Stanislas Cassel heard the screams on the final step onto the metro’s quay and gnashed his teeth. Not again, he feared. Has someone else died? He dabbed away more tears from his eyes and saw a girl in pigtails at the far end of the platform. She had broken away from her parents and was hopping with joy over her freedom until her mother shook her into quieting.

A reporter bumped past him, cell phone to his ear. “We are where with this story?” he demanded. The journalist hurried down the stairs without any apology and disappeared through one of the many corridors that branched through the station.

Further to his right near the middle of the platform, Stanislas noticed a man in jeans and bombardier jacket squat while he pecked at the floor with his pen.

He had made it this far, Cassel reassured himself, still trying to understand what had happened and why he had come. Yesterday, Anna was teary with hope. She might have climbed those steps, he guessed and thought through his numbness to move further ahead. Just a few more steps, he kept telling himself, and finally he eased down into a seat for waiting passengers. She might have even sat here while waiting for the metro.

A man with a white beard stepped onto the platform from the stairs to his left and twiddled his fingers in greeting to the squatting man. “Ran-dy Ran-dolph. Hel-lo, hel-lo,” he said in English.

Randolph waved greetings. “Well, I’ll be. Cheers, Bunny.”

“Rumors had you in Africa,” Bunny said.

“Africa can’t pay the mortgage and mistress anymore, old boy. I wrote finito to wars and famines.”

A burly man with portable camera and tripod staggered with clumsy eagerness past Bunny toward Stanislas. He collapsed with a grunt into one of the nearby seats.

“Too much spaghetti and vino last night, Horst?” Bunny asked.

“Too much Monique, if that was her real name.” Randolph returned to picking away cigarette butts and used metro tickets.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Bunny said. “That beggar the police found sleeping here, his poor bird must have suffered a hell of a fright. Look at these feathers scattered everywhere.”

“Enough for three pillows, at least.” Randolph swept a hand around. “We’re orphans late to the family banquet, old boy. The networks got the best photos hours ago, I heard. One of them got a great splatter shot of the tracks, in fact.”

“Lucky bastards,” Bunny said.

“Which isn’t us, that’s for sure. Except for those feathers, the platform’s clean of anything connected to the murder, thanks to the police.” He staggered to his feet and brushed his hands on his jeans. “You’d think they’d show consideration for us freelancers. But we can always dream we’ll discover something.”

Bunny pointed to some surveillance cameras overhead. “They pick up anything?”

“I overheard a metro policeman say they picked up some toughs.”

Bunny unslung his pack from his shoulder onto the ground. “You should have stayed in Africa for your hunting. Blood flows like the Zambezi River there.”

Randolph shook hands with him. “I risked my backside covering their little wars. And after that, NATO in the Balkans. I was lucky to get expenses and half my stories run. People tut tut this stuff, Bunny, but eat it up: Beautiful society lady electrocuted to death under onrushing metro.” He reached into a pocket and felt around.

Bunny unzipped his bag and withdrew a camera. “I thought she helped direct some sort of humanitarian thing.”

She didn’t direct some sort of humanitarian thing, you bastard, Stanislas wanted to yell. She helped direct the Center for Displaced Persons. He couldn’t find the strength though to shout across his anger.

Randolph laughed. “Not any longer. She knew a few society types. We’re playing up that angle. White teeth, a tan, and lots of hair sell, I’ve learned, old boy.”

A few notes from “A Hard Day’s Night” went off. Bunny reached down to his pack and withdrew his phone. “Right-o. Sixish then. Ciao, ciao.” He stuffed his cell back into his bag. “My agent. She’s booked me on an evening flight to Nice. A rock star’s getting married. Or is it divorced? Or buried? Anyway, it’s frightfully important.” He snapped a lens into the front of his camera.

“R. R., when you’re ready to honor the world.” Horst, behind his camera on its tripod, motioned to a chalk mark near the platform’s edge.

Stanislas watched Randolph saunter over and position himself behind the line. He used the camera’s lens as a mirror as he adjusted his tie.

“We’re small time drug dealers, Bunny,” Randolph said. “Sellers of fluff and nothing but.” He looked over the camera to Horst, who handed him a portable microphone. “A shot of those lilies. They make for a marvelous prop next to me.”

Was this why he had come? Stanislas asked himself. To listen to this profanity? With his hands on his thighs, he pushed himself up and wandered past a workman on a ladder, repairing the alarm call box sign. He lowered himself into one of the rows of seats further away from the reporters. He felt used up, too tired to feel any rage at their shabby comments. Would visiting here help him accept her death?

“Who leaked that information? The police?” A reporter spoke into her cell as she stomped past. “Check your sources, Patrice. And interview her lovers. A woman with her looks must have had lots of them.”

She must have entered the platform from his right, he thought. He hadn’t noticed her until that moment. To make real the unreal, he thought after he’d dried his eyes again. Maybe that’s why he had come. To start to accept finality.

“Monsieur Judge?”

He looked up. A man with a crew cut and dressed in a blazer with an orange armband emblazoning METRO SECURITY stood to his left.

“We’ve a surveillance tape when you’re ready,” the man said. “One of the cameras got a clear shot of two skinheads. One of them pushed her off. You can study the action frame-by-frame.”

“What?”

“A skinhead pushed the lady off. We got it on tape.”

“A skinhead?”

“He certainly looks like one. They both do. Knee-high boots. Brown shirts. The instigator with a swastika tattooed on his ugly shaved skull.” The security man jerked his thumb back toward the middle of the quay. “The bastard grabbed her there while she waited for the Line Number 1. Considering the times and her prominence, she shouldn’t have been out that late alone. Nearly one o’clock in the morning, according to the camera that timed what happened. She showed poor judgment.”

Sweat broke on his forehead. “A skinhead,” Stanislas mumbled, this time as he began to understand the enormity of the murder. He gestured the man away. “Leave her alone. And leave me alone.”

Her murder was random; it could have happened to anyone at that dangerous hour. No, her murder was planned because he had involved her in a deadly case. Someone, who had followed him, had executed her as a warning like that from that motorcyclist, who had almost run him over. He didn’t know what to believe except that a skinhead had killed her. He closed his eyes to block out the metro security man, to block out his own blindness, his self-absorption, to block out everything, and he sat there a long time, legs slack, strength gone, caring about nothing.

After awhile he found himself staring across the tracks to posters along the opposite wall that demanded EUROPE FOR EUROPEANS. He shook away his stupor. A few more passengers had reclaimed their right of territory on both sides of the platform.

The girl in pigtails now stood off to his side, while she gawked at him. Her parents paused near the lilies, and her mother pointed to the flowers. “Was that where that poor dear bought it, Irwin?”

Her husband shrugged and with one hand lifted his camcorder to his eyes.

“Dorthea,” the mother said, scolding her daughter. “Leave that man alone. He looks dangerous,” and she told her to join them.

With the other hand, the father waved his family in front of the lilies.

“Hey, the camera! We’re about to film.” Horst pointed to Randolph, who held the microphone to his lips.

Stanislas sighed. A revulsion came over him that his presence made him an accomplice in a crime to soil, and he berated himself for coming. He should have foreseen this tawdry spectacle. He should have foreseen the growing turmoil, too. Anna had been right, after all. A larger evil he hadn’t wanted to see loomed in the world. Maybe he could have done something to save her. Offered to walk her here after work. Suggested a police escort. Something. Anything. He hadn’t, and she was dead.

He drew his legs in and willed himself to stand and move to the stairs to his right that seemed so far away he wondered if he could reach them.

“This is where it happened last night,” he overheard the man named Randolph begin, “the tragic death of glamorous Madame Anna Attali”—he reached the stairs—“who was pushed to her death”—he started to climb—“one of Parisian society’s”—he pushed through the doors into the street, into the cold and fog. He vowed never to use that station again.

At the request of Jules and the Center’s directors, her coffin remained closed at her funeral. In a first row chair, he sat hunched forward, head bowed, eyes closed. In a pose of grief? Guilt over something? Sitting behind him, Stanislas couldn’t tell.

Afterwards, the mourners drifted away in the hundreds. Stanislas helped Jules, arms linked, steady himself as they walked down the path. To their left, Buffi moved with a drooping head that pushed out middle-aged fat beneath her chin. Gustave, Stanislas noticed, with his thick glasses looked more like her grandfather than fiancé as he guided her. An elderly woman ahead fainted. A gendarme rushed to her side. The rabbi, who had led the service, pushed past, knelt and lifted the woman’s head, while the policeman waved a tube under her nose. She revived, then fainted again. He rushed her to a waiting limousine.

Jules paused and lit a cigarette with a shaky hand. He inhaled, his cheeks collapsed from the effort, and he looked more skeletal than ever. And dazed too, Stanislas thought, alarmed. Without his Anna beside him, he appeared terribly alone and lost. After another puff he said, “Let’s go.”

They were the first words he had uttered since he had arrived hours ago. They were the few words Stanislas had heard that afternoon. Anna’s death had stunned most into the silence of disbelief.

A EuropaNews film crew finished packing their equipment into their van. A Mercedes idled next to it, and its chauffeur had hopped out and pulled open the rear door. Jules crouched, gripped Stanislas’s hand for support, bobbed his little head down, then pulled in one leg, finally the other. The limousine drove away behind a cortege of others with Jules showing a queer expression on his face Stanislas found unsettling. The man smiled at his cigarette as though he delighted in the misery his habit inflicted.

Cassel paused inside a hut and asked for a schedule of visiting hours. As the caretaker turned to a shelf behind him, Stanislas began sobbing uncontrollably. He stumbled away without the timetable.

Christophe thought Stanislas’s sense of duty saved him. His Little Miseries gave him balance, his judge confided to him a week later. These ordinary lives were his charges the president of the tribunal had entrusted to him. They kept him in a regimen of work and forced his mind off Anna. The president agreed during a private meeting, though over Stanislas’s protests he shunted some dossiers off to another criminal investigator to relieve the burden. The bulk, including the Pincus file, stayed in Cassel’s office at his insistence.

He put the Pincus dossier aside, Christophe saw. His judge could do nothing more for the time. The laboratory reports from the Scientific Police in Lyon hadn’t yet yielded anything, so the techs had decided to submit the samples collected to more rigorous tests. The one major suspect in Pincus’s murder was himself murdered. A trusted guide for Stanislas, or was she more than that? Christophe wondered, through the maze of the victim’s past, also killed, electrocuted and ground up beneath a metro’s wheels.

As the days passed, Christophe noticed a disturbing change. Stanislas arrived earlier and stayed longer, as though requiring company to keep despair away. He undertook tasks he himself usually did, Christophe noted, as if motion were cure for torment.

These acts were futile. Despair soon broke through, he saw, for his judge aged. One January morning Stanislas showed up with gray that overnight had raked through his once-black hair. And like many an old person, he soon turned inward. Christophe extended dinner invitations. Stanislas politely refused. What lunch he ate, he took alone on a bench away from the Palace of Justice and its Annex. He returned to work afterwards, sometimes late, which had never happened before, and every time dragging himself through the hallway to his office. A dead man awaiting burial, Fabrice snickered one afternoon when he entered the Annex ahead of Christophe. A dead man already buried, Lucien, a fellow examining magistrate, replied, and they both laughed.