The Twenty-Year Death (21 page)

Letreau looked disconsolately at the list of names in his hand. Then he turned and shouted, “Arnaud!” and headed back to his men.

Phone calls were made. Pairs of police officers left the station. Soon there were men filing in from outside. These would be the search party. Having seen the search party from the other night, Pelleter noted that this was a different sort altogether, only young men, some who were still almost boys, all with mean faces. Several of them carried rifles. At least one of them had a pistol in a shoulder holster. They laughed and smoked, filling the public space of the station. There was none of the worried urgency of the other night. This was the excited anticipation before a football match between rivals.

Pelleter thought of the warden’s description of his youth as a Verargent troublemaker.

Reports came back negative. They were losing time.

Letreau interrogated the warden and Soldaux again to see if there were any places that Passemier visited regularly, but the man led a simple life of work and then home, work and then home...and of course disposing of murdered corpses.

At last Letreau appeared with a large map of Verargent and spread it out over the front desk. “Quiet now,” he yelled over the noise of the crowd.

Pelleter worked his way beside the chief of police.

“Quiet, please.”

The remainder of the police force that was not currently on a roadblock or checking on other prison guards stood in silence behind their chief.

“Gentlemen!”

“Right, now!” Pelleter said, at a stern but normal level.

The men closest to him fell silent, elbowing those behind them. There was a last stray laugh, somebody said, “And she will,” and then, “Shut up, blockhead,” and there was quiet. The smoke from their cigarettes clouded above them.

Letreau cleared his throat.

“Thank you all for coming.” The chief of police glanced at Pelleter for support, but the chief inspector remained impassive. “Right. We are looking for a man by the name of Passemier. He is six foot one, two hundred twenty-five pounds, fifty-one years of age, with dark hair graying at the temples. You are to assume he is armed and dangerous. We know that he was in the Rue Victor Hugo within the last two hours and that he is most likely trying to leave town.”

Letreau held up the map and pointed.

“This is Passemier’s home. We’re going to conduct a house-by-house, block-by-block search from there to the edge of
town, and we’ll search through the night if we have to. If he’s still in town, that will force him to show himself at some point.”

“What, we can just go in people’s houses?” one of the men said near the front.

“There will be officers with you. You have to explain the situation. If somebody refuses, get an officer, and he’ll take care of it.”

There was an uneasy pause. The men shifted on their feet.

“Any other questions?”

No one spoke.

Letreau turned to his officers. “Men, divide up the search party, and get started. I want constant updates here.”

The noise started then, as the door opened, letting in a breeze and a shaft of bright light over the heads of the search party. The crowd filed through the door.

Letreau turned to Pelleter. “Do you think we’ll get him?”

“Maybe not today. But we’ll get him eventually.”

Letreau rolled the map in front of him with both hands. “That’s what I think,” he said, the hint of a pleased smile on his face. “But the warden...and the other one...” He nodded to himself. “Surely you won’t refuse dinner tonight!”

The crowd at the door had shrunk to just police, and then the last of those were out the door.

“Madame Pelleter will expect me back,” the chief inspector said, but even as he said it, he was thinking that there was something that he was missing about Passemier’s whereabouts that was important. He wanted to at least see the search through. He wouldn’t feel settled if he didn’t.

“And what of Madame Letreau?” Letreau said, clapping the chief inspector on the shoulder.

The Verargent chief of police was clearly feeling pleased. He had had perhaps the worst week of his career with six murdered persons showing up and two lost children. But he had suspects in custody for the bodies—even if they were not the murderers, they were responsible—and the children had been found unharmed.

“Let’s see how this afternoon goes,” Pelleter said.

“Right,” Letreau said. “I’ll tell her you’re coming.” And he walked back towards his office.

The police station appeared emptier for the disarray in which it had been left. The desks were scattered with papers, files left opened, fountain pens across their pages. Chairs were pushed back, and a file cabinet drawer had not been shut. The cloud of smoke from the search party’s cigarettes drifted, a diffuse haze over the empty scene.

A lone officer had been left to man the phones. He was busy taking notes, the receiver of a phone cradled between his shoulder and his ear.

Here it was again. The waiting. That was perhaps all that was left with this one. It was best to be moving.

Pelleter turned to go outside. He badly needed a cigar. There was a tobacco shop in a little out-of-the-way street just off of the square. He left the station.

The weather was almost too perfect, but the chief inspector did not notice that as he crossed the square. He pictured Passemier sitting across from him in the interrogation room in the prison, first bluster, then confusion, then arrogance. Was he going through those stages again now? He had followed Pelleter two nights in a row. He had attacked him the second night. Now he was on the run. Was he confused or was he arrogant?

The chief inspector nodded to the old men around the war memorial, touching the brim of his hat. He shook his head as though he had been asked a question, and then passed on.

The warm comforting smell of tobacco enveloped him in the tobacconist’s shop. Distracted, he bought three cheap cigars, just enough to get him through the rest of the day.

“Beautiful day,” the tobacconist said.

“Oh? Yes.” The chief inspector snipped the end of one of the cigars. “If a large man with a suitcase comes in, you let the police know.”

The tobacconist’s brow crumpled into a question, leaving the smile alone on his mouth.

The chief inspector turned to leave the store without answering the unspoken question.

Outside, Pelleter scanned the square almost without thinking, the old habit of a longtime policeman. But nothing registered out of the ordinary. He lit his cigar, and his muscles relaxed with the first inhalation of smoke. He rolled his neck, feeling the now reassuring pain in his shoulders. He wondered if Fournier had heard yet of the warden’s arrest. What about Mahossier, who seemed to know everything?

The chief inspector’s nostrils flared, and he bit down on his cigar. Yes, perhaps it wasn’t quite finished. Maybe Letreau was near satisfied, but what had Mahossier said, that Pelleter was to find who had taken the bodies out of the prison and the madman would supply the names of who had made them bodies in the first place?

Pelleter shook away the thought of having anything more to do with the man. He headed back across the square, forced to nod to the old men at the war monument again as though he had not just seen them minutes before.

Over the course of the afternoon, Pelleter regretted having bought cheap cigars. He regretted having bought only three cigars.

The reports came in from the search party, from the roadblocks, from Lambert at the train station.

Nothing.

“Come then, shall we?” Chief Letreau called across the station, emerging from his office, already arranging his overcoat on his shoulders.

Pelleter looked up without seeing his friend. His gaze shifted to the floor; he shook his head and pulled himself to his feet.

The long uneventful afternoon had unsettled the chief inspector, eradicating any sense of progress from the morning. Pelleter now felt certain that Passemier was within his grasp if only he could remember the correct detail, but he had been through his notebook no less than ten times without stumbling upon the answer.

Letreau gave orders to be followed in his absence. “The warden’s wife will be bringing Soldaux and the warden dinner. She can stay with them while they eat. But then she must go. Don’t let her give you any trouble.”

Letreau clapped his hands on Pelleter’s shoulders and kneaded them like a coach with a prizefighter. Pelleter shrugged away, wincing from the pain of his injury.

But the chief of police didn’t see, already at the door, turning to check whether Pelleter was following him.

Pelleter said to the desk officer, “When my man calls, tell him to hold his position. I’ll be there soon.”

Outside the sun had already fallen out of sight but the sky had not yet started to darken. There was an easiness about Letreau as he guided them towards his home. It was the relaxed confidence of a man of authority in control of his domain, something that had been missing in the chief of police since their initial trip to the baker’s days before. For Pelleter, on his walk home after work, he always felt the crush of responsibility, the city and its inhabitants too large to fathom, his job to keep out the barbarians by building a gate out of toothpicks. But here, the normal order of business was petty theft and vandalism, and Letreau currently had most of the regular perpetrators conducting a search for a suspect on his behalf.

A girl—or was she a young woman—collided with Letreau in the doorway of his house.

“Whoa there,” Letreau said, wrapping his arms around her. “Where do you think you’re going?”

The girl ducked her head, crossed her wrists over her chest, and leaned shoulder-first into Letreau, allowing herself to be embraced. “I’ve just come to borrow some salt, Uncle.”

Letreau waddled in place, rotating them in the doorway so that his back was to the open house and the girl was on the street side. He looked at Pelleter over the girl’s head, his eyes gleaming, and asked her, “You don’t want to stay for dinner? We’ve got an important guest from the city.”

The girl realized that she was being watched by a stranger, and she pulled herself away, straightening her frock with one hand, a teacup held in the other. She slid her hair behind first one ear and then the other with an unconscious turn of her fingers. “We’ve already started cooking at home,” the young woman said, for Pelleter saw that she was a young woman. “But thank you, Uncle.”

Letreau pressed his smile between closed lips, and nodded once. “Yes, of course.”

The young woman smiled at Pelleter, then her uncle, and darted off, grabbing at her skirt with her free hand.

“My wife’s sister’s daughter,” Letreau said, stepping into his house.

Pelleter watched the young woman hurry along the street for a moment. She went to a house several doors down and pushed her way inside. The sight of her made him think of Clotilde Rosenkrantz, and then in turn of Passemier. Why was he so preoccupied? Why couldn’t he feel some of the closure that Letreau clearly felt? If the man was to be found, he would be found.

The chief inspector followed Letreau into the house. The smell of cooking filled the space, chicken and rosemary.

Letreau had gone back to the kitchen, and Pelleter followed.

“Oh, good you’re home,” his wife said, lifting a roasting pan out of a coal stove with two leather potholders. “Everything is ready. You can sit down.”

A gnarled old woman with no teeth blinked and smiled at Pelleter, tasting her lips.

“My mother-in-law,” Letreau said by way of an introduction. “She’s deaf.”

“Would you get her seated?” Madame Letreau said. “She insists on helping, but she’s always just in the way. Alice was just here.”

“I saw her on the way out.”

The name came back to him, and Pelleter realized that he had met the girl on one of his previous visits, only she had been a child then, and Letreau had doted on her. Nothing else had appeared to change.

“Inspector Pelleter, you’ve decided to have a real meal finally.”

“Madame Letreau. Through no fault of your husband, I assure you.”

The table was a small round butcher block in an ill-lit corner of the kitchen. There were four wicker chairs, the wicker in two of them broken through in places—Madame Letreau made sure to arrange them so that she and her husband took those chairs. There was just space for the four of them to have the roast chicken, boiled beets and potatoes that reminded Pelleter once again of how many days this business had kept him from home.

“So you’ve arrested the warden and one of the guards,” Madame Letreau said, still on her feet, making sure her mother was settled with her precut meal.

Letreau looked put out that his wife had already heard his news, but he regathered himself, chewing heartily a purplish mass of beets and potatoes. “Yes. It seems thanks to Inspector Pelleter that things aren’t a complete mess.”

Madame Letreau’s mother stared across the table at the chief inspector with a blank smile.

“That’s certainly good news,” Madame Letreau said without looking up, and then, “Eat!”, gesturing to her mother, who frowned, shifted back and forth on her seat, and shrugged her shoulders. “Eat!” Madame Letreau took her own seat, and in a moment, the old woman leaned forward to take her fork in her hand.