Murder Without Pity (24 page)

He shoved Cassel into the room, then swung his gun down into the dark. “Guys, I got a Beretta on your Monsieur Justice,” he shouted. “A Beretta. Fifteen rounds in the clip, okay? More than enough for him and me, okay?”

Stanislas gazed over his shoulder. “I’ve come alone, Danny. Like I promised.” He spoke softly and didn’t move. Danny was jumpy to fire at the slightest provocation.

“Like you arrived that other night. Alone. Remember that other night?” He jabbed him hard in the back with his Beretta to step further inside. “Shit, I bet you do. You must have had one hell of a fright. Those guys scare me too. You weren’t wired that night either.”

“And I’m not tonight.” Ahead shadows from candles in wine bottles on a crate between two chairs whipped around on the walls.

“Raise your hands higher,” Danny said, “and nothing tricky with your cane. I got this Beretta, ten years on you at least, and two good legs.” Gun in his right hand, he yanked open Stanislas’s raincoat with his left, ripping off two plastic buttons in his haste, and roughed a hand over his chest. “I’ve never taken a risk like this. Never.” Drops of sweat had beaded a mustache above his lip, and he tried to wipe away his fear with the back of his hand.

“I see we have something in common,” Stanislas said.

Danny darted his eyes at him.

Stanislas caught the wildness in the youth’s expression as if he felt mocked.

Danny motioned with his gun for Stanislas to turn around. “If you hadn’t shown up at the Le Brune mansion,” he said, patting down his back, “I’d have kept quiet. What does the death of one Jew mean to me? One less internationalist plotter to worry about. When I saw you there, I figured I’d better act quickly or end up in prison. You have a reputation, Monsieur Cassel. You’re an iron-willed bastard. The Mauriac dossier. Remember the accomplices arrested? The headlines? You nearly caused an international incident because of that case. Seven years. Four continents. Over the objections of an Italian prime minister and two French presidents later, you cracked it. So long kidnappers.” He crouched low and slapped his fingers up and down Stanislas’s pant legs.

The search was amateurish, Stanislas noticed. A professional never would have moved in close enough for him to knock away the gun. A professional would have stripped him down to his underwear for a wire.

“Okay, you’re clean.” Danny stood and indicated with his gun toward the chairs. “Drop your flashlight on the crate.”

Stanislas nudged aside some filthy jeans a homeless must have discarded. On the wall ahead in black swipes, the same political obscenities he had noticed when he had ripped off his blindfold that long-ago night. In the air hung that same stench of life spiraling to an end. Nothing’s changed, he thought, and everything’s changed. He carefully lowered his arms, and as he sat down made sure to rest his cane on the floor away from his right hand.

A crumpled packet with a black eagle clawing a rat as a logo lay near the candles, and wax had pooled on the cellophane wrapping. Four barely smoked cigarettes lay smashed out. “Have you been waiting long, Danny?”

“Too long.” Danny relaxed his gun hand on his knee with the barrel pointed at Stanislas’s groin. “We’re clear about everything? Don’t play games. Too much is at stake.”

“As I promised, we never met, Danny. Or should I call you…you know, you haven’t told me your last name.”

“And I won’t. Here.” Danny stretched across with a slip of paper. “Your word, remember.”

“My word, as I said.” Stanislas slipped Danny’s cell phone number into his pocket.

“We ever need to meet again, my choice of place. Clear?” Danny raised his gun hand to his own forehead and wiped away more sweat. “I want to continue working for the Movement. I believe in non-violent revolution. Understand?”

Non-violent revolution? Stanislas let the contradiction pass and nodded.

“My girlfriend’ll swear for me if you ever say I met you. Britta’s very tough. You have to be if you’re a revolutionary. She’s bright too. A philosophy degree with honors when she was nineteen. She read
Mein Kamph
when she was fourteen. Imagine that, at that age!” He bounced in his chair from the wonder of her precocity. “Brit knows how the world works. We share a passion for revolution. Peaceful revolution. You must understand our dialectics. That’s the only way to purify society. From the bottom up peacefully. The masses must simply be educated. Through marches. Through debates. Are we tracking?”

“Peaceful revolution’s the way to root out the evil that afflicts mankind.”

Danny momentarily closed his eyes and nodded as if he had heard a priest bless him. The words seemed to calm him, to give him some reassurance with Stanislas as an accomplice in his dangerous adventure into the unknown. His taunt features relaxed. “That’s right. We don’t need rough stuff cause the tide’s slowly turning. ‘We’re five ticks from the hour,’ Franz likes to say. ‘Stay the course. Have patience and work. If not this election, the next one.’ I’ll say this much for him, he’s got that right. Victory to the side that endures.”

He shucked off his overcoat, switching his gun to his other hand to make his task easier. His shirt stuck to his chest from the humidity. “Okay, you already know about the four others who were involved in that escapade here. I was the fifth man that night. I drove three of them here. Hans Rauter, a heavy set German. Luc Bressard. Some guy I’d never met or seen since and picked them up afterwards.”

“You mean, after their ultimatum?”

“If you’d leave the esteemed Louis Boucher alone, they’d leave you alone. If not…. It wasn’t an idle threat either. They can play rough, despite their talk to the contrary.”

“Why’d they want me to go easy?”

“Because of you know who. I never thought much about paranoia till I started dealing with him. That guy really goes way over the top sometimes. More than the others. Anyway, Monsieur Paranoid was terrified you might uncover Boucher’s role. A guy with his Occupation past surfacing again in the public eye? The less publicity, the better for everyone. He was useful as long as he was invisible. Shit, I almost forgot.”

He thrust his hand into his overcoat, snatched out his cell phone, dipped into the candlelight to see better, and tapped in numbers. “Brit, it’s me. I’m at the squatter’s hole. What’s the word? Any calls from the mansion? Good. Call me if you get any. I’ll love you always.”

He pitched the cell onto the crate and wiped away more sweat from his brows and lip. “Got a smoke?”

“I had to quit. Doctor’s orders.” Stanislas tried to smile. “He said it’d aggravate my ulcer, and I’d have to deal with stress some other way.”

“It’s no big deal. I can’t stay long anyway. I told the guys at the mansion Brit fears she’s got cervical cancer and needs me. You wouldn’t believe how possessive that crowd gets. Danny, do this. Danny, do that. Most of my French and German buddies are devoted to themselves and things. They’ve become so American. I couldn’t do it. The emptiness and waste of it. How many cars and TVs do you need? So I joined the Movement, and all of a sudden I’m a slave to their Pan-European Council and that Franz’s favorite word, work. Work. Work. Work. Twenty-four hours a day on call. The plans they have. Here. Berlin. London. Rome. Everywhere. Tiny groups, impossible to infiltrate.”

“What plans, Danny?”

Danny’s eyes widened in awareness. He waved his Beretta back and forth as he grinned. He must have realized nervousness had made him talk too much. “No, you don’t, Monsieur Justice. I don’t give out indiscriminately. I’ll take you just so far. That was our deal, right?” He leaped across and jammed the Beretta between Stanislas’s eyes. “Are we tracking?”

“Just so far, Danny.” He’s scared and maybe pumped with drugs so don’t go beyond the agreement, Stanislas warned himself, glancing away from the gun.

“Who had you held captive? Who let Boucher take the fall? Who had him murdered? Who tried to scare you that night, using that motorcyclist? Who’s frustrated and humiliated you all these months? That’s the deal. Right? That’s the focus. Right? Nothing beyond. Right? You and your infidelity. You got me wrong if you think I’m switching. I believe in the struggle. I belong to the faithful. Pedigree, how often do you hear that word used today? My grandparents, my parents, some aunts and uncles, my family’s pan-European bona fides go back decades. On my father’s side, the Fatherland Committee in Germany in the ’50s and ’60s. On my mother’s side in the same period, the Democratic Action Forum in Austria. Europe was going down the toilette then. It’s going down the toilette again, this time with hordes of African and Asian mongrels invading our soil and those internationalists buying up everything. People are confused. They require direction, and that’s our purpose, to give them back their sense of destiny, and change is coming. Last week in Weimar—Christ, Weimar of all places, home to Bach and Strauss and Let-man-be-noble Goethe—last week a few thousand protested, Brit said. She was there. She saw it happen and phoned me. The middle class this time. You know you’re in trouble when those apathetic march, and they did it with little violence. Despite what those press infidels reported. So you must understand I don’t approve of thuggery. Neither does Brit. And two murders, who would have thought of that happening? I’ll go to prison for no one. I can barely take confinement in that Le Brune mansion as it is.”

Two and not three? That skinhead must have acted on his own, Stanislas realized, when he murdered Anna. “Luc from the mansion killed Monsieur Boucher, didn’t he?”

The youth seemed to understand the enormity of the risk the question posed. He began pacing, as if he needed to think over his decision. He glanced out a window, as though fearing Luc lay hidden in the deserted street beyond the tenement’s wall. After a further moment of reflection, he turned toward Stanislas and simply nodded.

“You also told me you were upstairs at the mansion, when you overheard Luc had killed Monsieur Pincus. How did you happen to be there?”

“Happen to be there?” Danny laughed. “I practically live at that mansion. Like I said, work, work, work. Next to no time off in the last month. Why I still rent an apartment is beyond me. I mean, I even keep a change of clothes at the Le Brune’s. That Franz even gave me a set of keys. He made such a big deal when he handed them over. Throwing his arm around me like he was entrusting me with entrée to a kingdom. He’s such a pompous, heavy-handed fool sometimes.

“Anyway, I was working there, analyzing voting patterns in Bavaria. The mansion was nosier than the Gare du Nord train station during summer vacation. Visitors going in and out. Phones ringing. Small groups everywhere, chatting away. I needed quiet so I retreated to Madame Le Brune’s little dressing room on the second floor. Just me, my laptop, and those racks of Givenchy gowns. It was too peaceful, evidently, because I dozed of. When I woke up, it was past midnight. I started downstairs. That’s when I caught Luc and the others, jabbering away in the dining room. They must have assumed they were alone.”

“Why’d Luc kill?”

“From what I could pick up, Monsieur Paranoid thought Boucher had become an albatross by attracting too much media attention. The guy must have been whacked with panic when he caught the evening news of Boucher leaving your interrogation. I mean, five channels on five TVs going in that hideaway of his. Plunked in front of them, I imagine. Watching that coverage over and over. Cursing Boucher surrounded with reporters. Going out of his mind or what’s left of it. Scared journalists or, God forbid, you, would start digging deeper and find a money trail.”

“A money trail?”

“Yeah, a money trail. Apparently, Boucher acted as a finance finder for Monsieur Paranoid’s campaign. Those funds, his lifeline, my guess, in case he got fed up with everything.”

So that’s how it was, Stanislas thought. He should have seen it all along. Factions.

“In any case,” Danny continued, “Monsieur Paranoid knew Boucher had betrayed twice. Didn’t he go hard on black marketeers to win German hugs? And at his post-Liberation trial, didn’t Boucher betray collabos to try to get leniency? Any pressure from you might make him cave again. Reveal everything about a shady Russian pumping money into the war chest. Monsieur Paranoid knew he must do something. The robbery idea was stupid, they realized, but worth the risk. End of Boucher, end of any trail.”

“And Monsieur Pincus’s murder, how did you find out about that one?”

“I was a witness there, too.” He sighted his Beretta at Stanislas and grinned his importance. “That’s how I know, Monsieur Justice. Because I was at the mansion again when hell broke loose.”

He let his gun hand fall to his side as he wandered back to his chair. “Brit and I had had it out earlier one evening. You know how some young things are. They think nice tits and ass give them the right to sleep around. Her Highness denied it. Did she ever. Like I was the only guy who’d ever banged her. Like she’d never fancied that Franz. Like that Franz had never eyed her. I didn’t believe her and cut out.

“I didn’t want to go back to my place. I feared she’d follow, and we’d start in again, and I needed sleep. So I decided to spend the night at the mansion. She wouldn’t go there; I knew that. Some of the operatives there are goons, she thinks, and give her the creeps. I was still in a bad mood, just wanting to smash anything when I arrived, and didn’t feel like chatting with anyone, and I went in a rear entrance. Guess who was there? Monsieur Paranoid, at the desk in the Grand Salon, writing away. Probably working on a draft of his Bercy magnum opus he was going to deliver along with the others.

“Next thing I knew Hans and Luc blew in, breathless, in panic, forgetting caution. They blurted out the news, and Monsieur Paranoid got panicky. Suppose others on the Council found out about that death? That was their number one worry. There’d be a power play, they knew, to put distance between themselves and what had happened. Guess who’d be out before his time, despite his devotion and hard work? Guess who’d lose followers? Guess whose star would dim?”

Danny jerked his wrist around and glanced at the time. “Hans and Luc knew this Monsieur Pincus suffered from angina. They practically admitted it, talking about his collection of pills on his dresser.”