The Diaries - 01 (23 page)

Bruno and Nicky
were clearly impressed with the skinny man’s surprising strength as his body
began a death spasm in its quest for air.
 
Three minutes later, just when they thought Gerard’s eyes would bug from
his head, the convulsing ceased.
 
Four
minutes after that, the trickling blood, pushed by his pulse, stopped.
 
Gerard
Micheaux
was
clinically dead.

Nicky washed his
hands and placed his coffee cup in the trash bag they would take with them.
 
“I’ll be in the car,” he said as he left by
the back door.

Bruno, wearing
gloves, made a sign for the door announcing that the shop would be closed for the
next week.
 
All of the bodies would be
disposed of, far away, in an incinerator which had never yet failed the Glaives.
 
Later in the morning, a specialized crew from
Paris would come in and truly sanitize the shop.
 
Concurrently, two former cops, now Glaives,
would break into both Michel and Gerard’s homes, searching for anything—a phone
message, a note, an email—that might make someone suspicious about either man’s
whereabouts.
 
By the time the local
police came looking, all evidence would be gone and the trail would be as cold
as the unseasonable November weather outside.

With Michel’s
growing debt and drug problems, the investigators would write him off as
someone who had simply run away.
 
Since
both men were openly gay, the short-sighted police would assume they had left
together.

Even with Marcel’s
objections, all the trouble had been more than worth the effort.
 
Gerard had given Nicky plenty to begin his
search on.

 
***

An afternoon of vibrant
sunshine warmed Metz to a temperature that was nearly bearable.
 
The outdoor cafés were still empty, the
patrons sipping their wine or coffee indoors, but more people wandered the
narrow streets of the city than the day before.
 
Damien Ellis took advantage of the favorable weather to do some shopping
on his last day in Metz, before he was scheduled to move on the next
morning.
 
He carried his novel and two
bags, one containing several bottles of pinot
blanc
wine
and the other a wheel of cheese.

As he made his way
back toward his hotel, where a hot bath and a glass of red awaited him, Ellis
spied a simple, two-story brick building with a sign marked Police de Metz.
 
He hesitated, watching a uniformed cop stroll
out, getting into a vehicle similar to an enclosed golf cart.
 
Ellis’s brown eyes went back to the front
doors of the police station, lingering.
 
He shook his head and kept walking.

Then he stopped.

He looked back at
the station.

Grumbling at
himself, Ellis walked in and approached the front desk where an attractive
policewoman, probably in her early fifties, looked up without smiling.
 
He placed his bags on the floor.
 
“Excuse me,
parlez-vous
English?”

“Yes.”
 

Ellis nodded
politely, explaining who he was and seemingly irritating her with his slow manner
of speech.
 
He asked to see the two
detectives he had spoken with the night before.
 
The woman nodded, cutting him off and making a series of phone
calls.
 
Finally she turned back to Ellis.

“Officer
Lloren
is on duty and will be back here shortly.
 
He’ll see you.
 
You can wait right over there.”
 
Her English was good but her tone icy.

“Rough day?” he
asked.

She was motionless
for a moment, her chest eventually deflating as she let out a breath.
 
“My daughter, she is fifteen and we have been
arguing for what must be weeks.”
 
She
lifted a mobile phone.
 
“Even by text
message.”

“I’m sorry,” he
said.
 
“You hang in there and, no matter
what, just be there for her.
 
Those teen
years are tough…she’ll come around when she gets a little older.”

The woman cocked
her head, returning his smile.
 
“I needed
to hear those words.
 
Thank you for
saying that.”

“No problem, and
good luck to you and your daughter.”

Her tone much
brighter, she asked if he would like some coffee.

“Love some,” Ellis
answered.
 
He followed her instructions
and retrieved a mug from down the hall.
 
The Metz Police
police
coffee was surprisingly
good; a point he intended to share with his commandant upon his return.
 
The first indication of a civilized group of
people, in Damien Ellis’s opinion, was the quality of the food and drink they
put in their stomachs.
 

As he waited
patiently, enjoying the steaming brew in the lobby, a heavyset woman of perhaps
thirty entered with a distressed look on her face.
 
She spoke in rapid-fire French to the desk
officer, gesturing with her hands until finally, she too was told to sit and
wait.
 
The desk officer walked away.

Ellis understood
enough to have made out a few words of what the woman had said.
 
Whether or not he comprehended anything, he’d
been a cop long enough that he would have known the woman was distraught and
frustrated.
 
She sat adjacent to him, her
cheeks flushed, her heavy bosom heaving from her fast breathing.
 
Whatever makeup she had applied that morning
was now working against her, smeared like clown paint from the tears and
face-rubbing.
 

“Everything okay?”
he asked in English.

She turned to him,
frowning, but answering him in broken English.
 
“No.
 
My brother, he is not here.”

“Not here?”

She opened her
hands, unable to find the English word.
 
Her large green eyes welled with tears, childlike, displaying a ray of
hope that perhaps this strange American with the deep lines in his face might be
able to help in some way.

“Missing?” Ellis
offered.

“
Oui
.
 
I call the police two times today and they no help.”
 
Her voice was deeper than most, but marked by
high notes as she strained to get the words out.
 
She mopped her face with a tissue, pointing
behind the counter.
 
“They no help, so I
come here to get help myself.
 
But I do not
know what to do.”
 
A fresh bout of
sobbing began.

Ellis placed his
mug on the table between them, patting her hand.
 
He was a public servant at heart, no matter
where he was or what he was doing.
 
“First,
try to calm down.
 
Take deep breaths…there
you go.
 
Your being upset won’t help your
brother, okay?
 
More deep breaths.
 
Ah-ha, that’s good.”
 
When she seemed to regain her composure, he
took his hand off of hers.
 
“How long has
he been missing?”

“This is what the
police ask.
 
I tell them he is just today
gone and they say no worry.
 
But this is
not Michel.
 
He speaks everything to me.”
Talking about it appeared to exasperate her.
 
She tugged on the ends of her brown hair, agonizing on every word.
 

“Why do you think
something is wrong?”

“He is gone, his shop
not open! His shop, it is his life.
 
He
needs money,
oui
?
 
He not close shop on day of work.
 
Never.”

“Does he have any
employees?”

“
Oui
, one man, and
he no here either.”

Ellis nodded,
understanding why she might be upset.
 
“What kind of shop?”

“La
librairie
,”
she said after stammering for the English word.
 
She pointed to his Stephen King novel.

“A book store,”
Ellis said to himself, staring at the novel as his mind went elsewhere.
 
Slowly, like when he had been a boy and seen
the garage door being reeled up on the Meridian Fire Department, an
old-fashioned siren started low and quiet, building, building, until it blared
full force in his head.
 

A
book
store…

As an officer
entered the room, Ellis patted the girl’s arm again and told her everything
would be okay.
 
The officer gave her a brief
nod and ushered her into the back, leaving Ellis with his thoughts as he
waited.

His mind went back
to what the American man had said, whispering forcefully in the hotel
lobby:
 
Hide the diaries under the back seat!

Diaries.

A bound and gagged
desk clerk.
 
A missing security
tape.
 
A man telling his accomplice to
hide the diaries in the back seat.
 
And now
a book dealer has gone missing.
 
Fluke?
 
Perhaps.
 
Enough to at least take a look-see?
 
Definitely.
 
Metz wasn’t large
enough to write off those kinds of coincidences, especially when they occurred
on the same night.

From the same door
the distraught lady had exited, Officer
Lloren
appeared.
 
He didn’t invite Ellis into
the offices, staring at him with an indifferent gaze and speaking to him with
the same warmth that he might welcome a panhandler.
 
“Monsieur Ellis.”

Ellis wished he
had just gone on back to the hotel and drawn the hot bath.
 
“
Yessir
, just wanted
to drop by and see if you learned anything else about last night?”

A long blink as he
sucked on his teeth.
 
Clearly patronizing.
 
“The hotel’s proprietor, Monsieur Ellis, and
the clerk, chose not to seek charges against anyone since nothing was stolen.
 
A cursory look into the clerk’s past revealed
that he has had some regrettable situations involving narcotics.
 
So…”
 
Lloren
folded his arms in front of him and arched his
eyebrows.

“Ah,” Ellis
hummed.
 
“So you guys think he might have
had some little deal going and would rather just let the chips fall where they
may?”

“Monsieur Ellis,
we really don’t have time or resources to chase after some mystery man, who
might be
German or English, who is
alleged to have performed a simple assault resulting in no injury, and who
didn’t steal anything other than a three euro DAT tape.”
 
He stepped closer.
 
“On the registry, the alleged couple gave an
address in
Wieseck
, Germany that does not exist, nor
do the names they provided.
 
So from
here, we simply advise our force of their description and move on.
 
We have more pressing issues.”

Ellis was about to
speak when
Lloren
cut him off.

“You leave
tomorrow,
oui
?
”

“
Yessir
.”

“Then I would
advise you to go and enjoy our city.
 
The
food and wine are excellent; certainly better than the
merde
they serve in your unfortunate
home of Frankfurt.
 
And as far as this
matter, we have your information and will call you if we need you.
 
Otherwise, I must ask you to drop it,”
Lloren
said, his voice hardening at the end.

Ellis nodded.
 
Rather than shake the man’s hand, he offered
a pinched smile, swilled the last of his full-bodied coffee, told the desk
sergeant to hang in there with her daughter, and exited the door of the
station.
 
The sun was nearly down,
casting the busy street in dingy gray light as the resident cold swept back in
for the night.
 
He walked to a nearby
bench, sitting with his bags and bunching his coat around him as he prepared to
wait.
 
He smoked his pipe, humming an old
jazz tune as he liked to do when he had time to sit and think.

And had Officer
Lloren
not pissed him off, he would be soaking in the hot
bath instead of waiting out here in the cold.

“Prick,” Ellis
whispered, immediately admonishing himself for using the word.
 
Twenty minutes later, he stood when he saw the
book dealer’s sister exit the station.
 
She dipped her head, beginning to head off down the street.
 

“Drop it, my black
butt,” he said to himself as he walked to her.

***

Frankfurt, Germany

Jean
Jenois
sat on his sofa, a freshly-opened bottle of brandy
in front of him.
 
The house smelled of
scented candles and numerous bouts of spirited sex, bathed in a warm, reddish
light from the setting sun.
 
His
traditional little black book was open on his knee as he dialed the numbers of
the girls with three stars next to their name.
 
The current one he called happened to be an Australian who worked for an
international bank in the center of Frankfurt.