Murder Without Pity (23 page)

They had buried what shock over his intrusion beneath practiced amiability, Stanislas noticed. They had turned actors, who covered up whatever argument he had overheard. Only the security guard off to his left remained natural, eyeing him suspiciously, convinced he was armed.

“The young.” Fuchs shook his head at their folly. “Always too eager to impress. Danny’s seen too many Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. And you, Monsieur Cassel, you’re a spoiler,” he continued, aiming an edgy smile at him. “Shame on you. You’ve stumbled onto our little secret.”

“I had hoped,” Dray said, “for a surprise at my upcoming appearance at Bercy Stadium. One security lapse, thanks to young Danny, and the secret’s out: ‘The Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse,’ as those press infidels have styled us, together in Paris.”

“Those enemy propagandists,” the ruddy-faced man said. “Oh well, what’s done is done. You’re here, Monsieur Cassel.”

Apart from his voice, Fuchs’s and Dray’s were oddly soft for demagogues, Stanislas noticed. Maybe that partly explained their success. Their voices and jocularity had seduced the unwary.

“Our guest’s obviously here for a reason, André. Offer him a drink, and we’ll chat.” The ruddy-faced man eyed him and Fuchs, seeming to gauge how they would react in the presence of the law.

Before Stanislas could respond, Dray strolled past the desk to a cart in front of it. “What is your pleasure? Campari? Some St-Amour Beaujolais? Martell Cognac? Or Vittel? No Coca- Colas.”

“He means nothing American,” the ruddy-faced man said, “and I quite agree. Why feed the Anglo-Saxon rapaciousness by buying anything from them?”

“I’m not thirsty.”

“Oh nonsense,” Dray said. “Vittels for everyone to keep our heads clear.”

Fuchs flung his arms open as he advanced on Stanislas. “It’s an honor meeting Marcel Cassel’s grandson.” He clasped his hand in both of his and pumped out his joy. “I’m Herr Rudolph Fuchs—Rudi, if you prefer. Founder of Austria’s One People Party. Unlike other countrymen, we’re smart enough not to publicly admit admiration for our Hitler. The big gentleman over there with the paunch is Dr. Franz Streible, professor of philosophy at Heidelberg and leader of Germany’s National Unity Party. Franz, if you wish. I assume you already know of Monsieur André Dray? The French First Party? A rising star.”

“We all are, Rudi,” Franz said. “And thank God for that.”

“I prefer to place my faith in the people,” Fuchs said. “Monsieur Cassel, do you know my grandfather met yours once at a rally at Vichy during the war?”

“Your grandfather understood the Manichean struggle in Europe like few did, Monsieur Cassel,” Franz Streible said. “The Forces of Good pitted eternally against the Forces of Evil, and the need for essence. Like a Mercedes that needs the purest gasoline to race to its potential.”

“His assassination deprived us of a great strategist,” Rudi Fuchs said.

“Strategist?” Dray scoffed. “Rudi, you’re parochial. His tragic death deprived us of a great visionary.” He gave a muscular twist around the neck of a Vittel and broke its seal. “Your grandfather was quite a spellbinder.” He glanced over his shoulder at Cassel, sparkling with warmth. “I watched those old Pathé newsreels of him. His arms outstretched. Pounding the lectern. Trying to warn the world about the Judeo-Communist threat. What conviction!”

“Little good it did, André,” Fuchs said.

“Pay attention, Rudi. Never, ever give in to defeatism,” Streible warned. “That’s exactly what those Anglo-Saxon and Zionist plotters want.”

Dray focused on Stanislas. “I tried speaking like him until one of Franz’s charming factotums was kind enough to point out the give-em-hell style wouldn’t work on TV. Could I please be a little more modern, as he put it, and speak conversationally? Alas, I had to adopt.”

“Alas, our acclaimed speaker could serve us,” Streible said.

There was a sharp knock, and a young woman with red-rimmed glasses peeked inside. “Franz, don’t forget your honey-and-water tonic later, if you want to be in your usual good form at Bercy. That is, if André will consent to sharing the podium spotlight.”

“Consent or not, I’m speaking,” Streible said without any humor. He waved her inside and gestured to Stanislas. “My dear, Monsieur Stanislas Cassel, Marcel Cassel’s grandson.”

“His grandson?” She looked closer. “Yes, it is him. Franz, you should have told me he was coming. I’d have brought my copy of
The Phalanx
for his autograph.” She clasped Stanislas’s hand warmly. “I found a copy of that gem, Monsieur Cassel, at one of those secondhand bookstalls along the Seine. I’m Mademoiselle Caroline Le Brune, Madame Isabelle Le Brune’s granddaughter.”

“A part of the Le Brune fortune’s contribution to the Pan-European Council,” Streible said. “Along with this mansion when madam winters on the Côte d’Azur.”

“In other words, their press secretary,” she said. “I’m their concession to modernity. Don’t let their occasional growls put you off, Monsieur Cassel. Despite those media alarmists, none of them have the slightest touch of evil in them. They’re grandparents, even.”

“Do this grandparent a favor,” Streible said, “and go over my final draft.”

“I hope your writing’s improved, Franz.” She shielded her mouth with a playful aside to Stanislas. “None of them have ever heard about the typewriter, let alone the word processing program.”

“Be a good girl and go type,” Streible said.

“I’ll correct your spelling and untangle your metaphors, Franz, but I won’t tolerate your servant girl handling of me. You should know that by now.”

Streible smiled anger at her and shrugged at Stanislas. “The rich, too much money and education. What can I say?”

“I know what I can say. Grandmama’s favorite treatment of you can change awfully quickly.” She snatched the notepad from his hand and scanned the speech as she strode from the room. Danny followed with a quick glare at Stanislas.

A subtle shift in the mood had occurred, Stanislas could tell. He could pick it up in their eyes that averted each other’s in the uneasy silence as Dray served him his Vittel. She had broken some taboo, unwittingly revealed in her prideful outburst a family secret to an outsider, and nothing any of them could say could change that.

Streible cleared his throat and indicated a section of the room to his left set off from the rest of the salon by a quartet of Louis XV armchairs. “Monsieur Cassel, we’re busy men of affairs. You are too. How can we be of assistance?”

Stanislas glanced at his watch. Where was that loping bit of decency to keep him company? And to memorialize the interrogation? Had Christophe gotten caught in a police roadblock search and been delayed? He had never missed him like now. Another minute more alone with these three seemed intolerable.

They seemed to observe a protocol, he noticed when he moved to his chair. Streible seated himself first and in the middle, the Movement’s animating intelligence, no doubt, followed by Fuchs to his left and Dray to his right, the three already having the self-possessed look of men in power.

“I’m looking for a man in a murder investigation,” he explained to Streible. “White. Long dark hair. Well above average in height. We have reason to think he works or at least lives at this address.”

The others glanced at the German, then leaned back, waiting for him to lead. The illusion of comradeship had vanished, Stanislas could see. They realized he had come strictly on business that might threaten them.

“That must be Luc.”

The Luc who had helped keep him captive in that tenement? Stanislas kept his features impassive.

Streible relaxed his forearms on the chair’s padded supports and crossed one leg at the knee. The mansion was his territory, the Movement’s temporary headquarters, and he as much as acknowledged his leadership by his posture.

“A low-level staffer on the Council,” Fuchs explained. “He works the evening shift, analyzing profiles of supporters. What’s he done?”

Stanislas found something predatory about him as though ready to spring and claw, despite his smile. “I need to question him. I can’t say more than that.”

“He left an hour ago,” Dray said.

“By the rear entrance,” Fuchs said.

“For the rest of the evening.” Streible raised his hand for quiet like a king to his subjects, intimidation behind the indolence. “You’re really here because of his police record, are you not, Monsieur Cassel? He beat up an African, who taunted him viciously at a rally last year—there were a host of witnesses, and no, none of them belonged to the so-called far right. The Belgian police threw poor Luc in jail to prove their anti-racist stance, thereby staining his life. Don’t play us for fools because we’ve lost a few local elections, and some call us marginalists. I’m sure he’s innocent of any charges.”

His having to shake their hands, to endure their admiration for his grandfather, to suffer through their fellowship that assumed he belonged, all that was too much. He felt anger tighten his throat. “And if you’re wrong?”

“If I’m wrong, which I doubt, whatever he might have done isn’t connected with us. We’re adamantly opposed to any form of violence.”

“In any form?”

“Of course. Without exception. It’s in all our speeches.”

The other two raised their Vittels in a toast to his proclamation.

“Our council’s on record, as a matter of fact, for refusing to admit the British and Italians,” Dray said.

“They’re simply soccer thugs, as far as we’re concerned,” Fuchs said.

“Violence causes violence, Monsieur Cassel,” Streible added. “It’s a cliché men with good ideas and bad tempers never learn. You see, we battle with our program, not our fists. The Pan-European Council’s platform of Compassionate Realism simply asks everyone conform to certain standards. And why not? Do you know hordes of illiterate Africans, Asians, and East Europeans are overrunning us?”

“If you can’t control your own borders,” Fuchs said, “what’s left of your country?”

“Excellent point,” Streible said. “And let’s not forget immigration brings more crime. It’s a scientific fact.”

“A Paris-Berlin-Vienna axis will change all that,” Fuchs said. “Compassionate Realism, just wait.”

“Time’s our ally, Monsieur Cassel,” Streible continued. “Sooner or later, the people will awake from their misery.”

Stanislas couldn’t remain silent any longer. “My grandfather was like that,” he said, his voice rising as he addressed each. “He merely gave speeches and wrote articles. He only expressed opinions. It was all in a day’s work, what he did with his pen. Like selling shoes or ties. He even claimed on his deathbed he never harmed anyone. In fact, he helped murder innocents with his words that made hatred patriotic.”

Streible gazed across, brows raised, surprised at the vehemence. A further moment of contemplation passed, then his features changed, the last trace of pleasantness gone, replaced by brutal banality. His mouth puckered suppressed anger; his jaw tightened as he seemed to reappraise who sat opposite him. He glanced at Fuchs with a warning look, then stared across again to Stanislas. “Well, so that’s how it is. You, of all people. You sat at the feet of a brilliant theoretician of a New Europe and learned nothing. Aren’t you aware of what’s happening to our countries? I see I misjudged you.”

“We all did, Franz. Here we thought he was in the trenches along with the rest of us.” Their mistake upset Fuchs so much he flexed his fists in a strangling motion on the armrests. “He’s misled to make fools of us.”

Streible eyed Fuchs. “His ploy is quite clear now.”

“He was a fool and a bully,” Stanislas continued. “A mean-spirited little man who used his meager talents to become a mean-spirited big man. That was your Marcel Cassel.”

Streible unwound his legs and leaned forward. He didn’t appear to want any ambiguity in his message. “Enough! No one talks like that here. I don’t care who they are. You’re here without your clerk. I’m not sure this is an official visit. You’ve had your evening’s entertainment at our expense. Now leave.”

Danny burst into the room, this time with a Doberman leashed. The dog lunged toward Stanislas to kill, and Danny strained with both hands to hold it back.

Dray chuckled as he gestured toward the youth. “Danny, always the hero? Franz and our guest were just having a little disagreement.”

“Don’t humor him, André,” Streible warned. “Or me. Rudi, get rid of him at once.”

“I’ll get him out,” Danny said, fighting with the pinscher as he muscled it over to Fuchs. “It’s the least I can do to make up for my security lapse.”

Streible sank back into his armchair as a display of indifference and brushed Danny away. “I don’t care who does it. Just get him out.”

Danny’s demeanor to Stanislas as he pushed him out of the Grand Salon reminded him of a bodyguard, who relished his work. In a loud voice the youth threatened a beating as he jabbed him several times in the back down the corridor and out the front door. Not satisfied with that viciousness, he shouted that Stanislas was a traitor to the family name and a tool of the Jews as he followed him along the gravel drive toward the wrought-iron fence, and he added a final punch in the back that Stanislas thought sadistic. Not until they reached the gate did Danny drop his roughness as he whispered urgently while thrusting the cell phone into Stanislas’s pocket. So that after Danny had thrown him out onto the sidewalk and clanged the gate shut, what stayed with him wasn’t the youth’s meanness, but the wild fear in his eyes over what he had promised to reveal.

THE FIFTH MAN

Stanislas flicked off his flashlight at the doorway, obeying the last of the instructions, and stared ahead into the dimness with its jittery candlelight. This was where they dragged me months ago, he recalled. Before Anna. Into this room in a burned-out carcass of a tenement in a quarter of Paris few tourists dared visit. And here too, the Léon Pincus dossier might begin to end. As he stepped inside, he inhaled a reek of cigarette smoke.

“You wanted proof?” Danny jumped from the darkness to his left. He trembled a gun at Stanislas’s temple. “‘Show me where everything began,’ you demanded. Your exact words, Monsieur Law and Order,” he said, his voice whining with fear. “‘Show where they held me captive, and I’ll believe you.’ Here we are in this cozy chateau. Believe me now?”