Murder Without Pity Read online

  “According to this witness’s police testimony, Monsieur Pincus ordered a white coffee there at 7:30 on the morning in question. However, he barely drank it after the waiter had served him. The proprietor further stated the deceased appeared restless, that every few minutes he checked his pocket watch, and that he seemed to be waiting for someone. Was he waiting for you?”

  “Waiting for me?”

  “And when you didn’t show, he decided to go to you.”

  Boucher exploded in laughter. “This man appeared to do this. He seemed to do that. Such fruitless speculation. For all we know, he may have been sulking over a lost love. I assure you, I never saw this beggar until that morning, and I thought no more about him until the police called later. It’s a simple story.”

  “My police have located another witness.” Stanislas watched Boucher’s reaction to his blunt statement. “Also out that morning like you. This witness thinks the deceased might have shouted a name.”

  “Name? I heard nothing of the sort.”

  “Very well. Two last questions. Do you have German friends?”

  “No.”

  “German acquaintances?”

  “None that I’ve kept in touch with for years.”

  “You understand you’re under oath?”

  “Monsieur Cassel, I move in my own circle, French.”

  “Then who is Luc?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Luc, who is he?”

  Boucher crinkled his forehead in puzzlement. “If I’ve any friend by that name, he’s kept himself hidden because I’ve never met him.”

  Steady voice, eyes aimed at him, and no pause throughout the hearing to invent. The signs of innocence in a witness who, nevertheless, may have given doubtful testimony now on record. The first interrogation was over, Stanislas decided. The investigation into Monsieur Léon Pincus’s murder had started.

  CHAPTER 3

  A CALL FOR MONSIEUR BOUCHER

  The telephone in the apartment above rang for the sixth time. Its stifled urgency through the front door pressed down on Boucher in the lobby. He paused in fear at the stairs, one foot on the marbled step, eyes on the first floor, praying the ringing would stop. There’s another meeting to discuss the financing, he thought, and immediately changed his mind. It’s that examining magistrate working late, and he’s summoning me for a second hearing. For a moment Boucher imagined himself back in that investigator’s office. “My police have located another witness. This witness thinks the deceased might have shouted a name.” Who was this witness? he wondered. A neighbor in this quarter with a vengeful memory of the war years?

  A door closed on a floor above. He gazed up to locate the sound’s location. From the second floor, he guessed. From that retired cardiologist he had often argued with over politics? He looked old enough to have lived through the Occupation. Had that neighbor slipped up, made the fatal error of an amateur spy, nudged his door shut a little too hard after observing him for that judge? And his phone was once more ringing. An anxiety from alibis falling apart slowed his climb when he began trudging up the stairs.

  To his relief, the ringing ceased as he switched off his security system beside the front door. The magistrate must have given up. It started again though once he stepped inside his foyer. The magistrate was persisting.

  Enough torture, he told himself. With several steps, he was inside his bedroom. He lunged for the phone on his night table and ripped it from its jack with one vicious yank, then flung it toward his bed that was covered with newspapers. It landed on that morning’s edition crinkling the headline, ARMY TO HELP POLICE QUELL GROWING RIOTS. Peace finally, he thought.

  The ringing continued, this time from his library. His cell phone, of course, he realized. He had forgotten about it. He banged open the louvered doors to his bedroom, stalked down the hallway past his dining room into the darkened library. He fumbled to his left, felt the dial, twisted. The room brightened from the chandeliers.

  He focused ahead. There, just as he thought, in the middle of the room lay the locus of his anxiety, in the sofa. His cell must have slipped between the cushions when he had sat down earlier that day. When he was able to relax. Before that interrogation and the fears it had caused.

  He rushed ahead, kicking aside a footstool in his path. He reached the sofa, pitched the cushions onto the rug, clawed through the underside, gripped the cell, smashed down the OFF button. Finally no ringing from either phone and absolute quiet.

  Except that now one fear had loosened another. “Sooner or later you awake to the screams,” he recalled poor old Kleist whimpering. Would he also hear them? Would they make him let slip a word or gesture at any second interrogation?

  He caught his fingers shaking. The trembles, he hadn’t suffered from them since his trial. More than fifty years without them, and now they had returned. He should have stayed home that Wednesday morning instead of going for his walk. He tried to banish evidence of his nerves and clasped his hands behind him. “My police have located another witness.” Would he finally crack and confess after these many years?

  He felt a sudden urge to smoke. He patted his suit pockets and found no cigarettes. He crossed to his writing desk near the sofa, yanked a side drawer out to its full length, pushed around its contents. No Benson & Hedges. He slammed the drawer, yanked back its twin. Nothing.

  He glanced to his right. There on a round table beside family photographs lay a packet. He shakily tapped out the last one. He lit up and sat down on the edge of a chair, when he noticed Paris Today on the carpet where he had flung it that morning. The weekly lay flipped open to its lead story, “Some Collaborators of Yesterday: Where Are They Now?” He, a civil servant during the war, had lived in blissful obscurity, invisible for decades afterwards till that scandal sheet had run that investigative piece. And after that, that Pincus fellow had shown up. Damn it!

  He jammed the cigarette into a tray, stood, and wandered over to one of the tall windows. On the balcony, tendrils of vine in half shadow coiled around a pot’s neck.

  And beyond the railing in the parking island in the street below, something flickered. The movement was fleeting, yet solid, definitely someone.

  He squinted across the field of mist for a glimpse of the threat beneath the foliage. A heckler had returned to hurl rocks? That examining magistrate had put him under surveillance? Yes, he decided, that criminal investigator had ordered him watched. The mist swirled, thickened, and thinned. He bobbed his head left and right for a clearer view, but couldn’t pick out anyone below.

  Maybe that judge had put him under surveillance for days, and he hadn’t realized his jeopardy. He could recall nothing alarming. Yet in the past few days, a police professional, he felt certain, had no doubt slipped behind him under cover of this fog and now stood practically outside his window.

  He crossed to the bar next to the hallway entrance, poured half a glass of brandy, drank several contemplative sips. He wouldn’t flee. That would imply guilt. He would remain in Paris and continue his routine. Rise at six as usual. Take his morning strolls. Visit the Café Flaubert afterwards. And plead ignorance at any second questioning. “Monsieur Examining Magistrate, I fully understand I’m under oath. I don’t care what the witness claims. I repeat under oath the deceased did not, let me repeat, did not shout my name.”

  That’s how he’d act, innocent until the end. Lies and half-truths were the only way out of this danger.

  CHAPTER 4

  BENEFIT AT THE HOTEL

  “No rest this Friday evening, Monsieur Judge?”

  “The Hotel Eden tonight.” Stanislas pulled the Peugeot’s rear passenger door shut.

  “Ah, the glamorous Eden. The hideaway of some rich and famous, I’ve heard. A social obligation?”

  With his rotund chest, the chauffeur looked to Cassel more like a bon vivant than a policeman assigned to drive and protect him. “It’s a charitable affair. Another magistrate got the flu and asked me to stand in.” He watched the grimy outpost
of the Justice Annex vanish into fog that had massed into drizzle. His driver switched on the wipers. An ice wind from the Seine behind them fluttered leaves like ashes through a streetlamp’s glow as they passed through the white night onto Rue de Rivoli.

  A charitable affair indeed, he thought. With Occupation survivors included, something he didn’t need after that ten-hour work day. He, grandson of a collabo, as an unintended guest. How many had that scoundrel sent to their deaths? He had no desire to be reminded of that treachery. He should have asked the nature of the benefit before accepting. He’d leave after staying a respectable hour or two.

  “I start overtime tomorrow, protecting another judge too.” The driver glanced in his rear view mirror at Stanislas. “The rest of the time I’ll help patrol some hot quarters. Good-bye plum desk job; hello stress.”

  “You’ll be back to your usual work in no time.”

  “That’s what my wife thinks. The riots protesting that police shooting will blow over. The demonstrators and demagogues will go home. Lots can happen before that occurs.” He glanced in the mirror again, this time beyond Stanislas. “There he is, on schedule. Our escort. We’ll get you there in one piece,” and he returned his attention to driving.

  He himself had gotten careless, Stanislas realized. He hadn’t checked to see if someone were following, so tired was he. Exhausted, he closed his eyes.

  A lurch frightened him awake. Talking skulls in death camps didn’t surround him, as he had dreamed, he realized. He sat in the car’s warmth, and his driver had slowed. “We’re there already?” He squinted out his window for some landmark through the drift and then understood why his chauffeur hadn’t responded. He heard ahead of them a roaring murderous chant of some kind that seemed to arch his driver’s back in fear when he braked two blocks short of the hotel.

  A riot controller, uniformed in black, rapped his truncheon against the chauffeur’s window and dipped eye level. “Security zone!” he shouted. “No unauthorized vehicles permitted. Your papers!”

  He grabbed the driver’s ID, aimed his flashlight on the page, and tossed it back after a moment, fixing his suspicion and light next on Stanislas’s face. “Yours.”

  His nostrils blew vaporous puffs into the chill from his command, Cassel saw. An ALPHA 1 armband, a red lightning bolt slashed through the P, brandished his importance. ALPHA 1? The policeman shoved the ID back through the window’s slit, breaking his thought.

  “Very well,” the riot controller said and pulled open the rear door. “Be careful, Monsieur Judge,” and he gestured up the street with his club.

  A convoy of police vans had massed, Stanislas noticed, as a barricade nearly bumper-to-bumper in front of the Hotel Eden’s entrance further up on the left side of the avenue. On the sidewalk across from the Eden, two huge mobs, raging to kill, surged toward each other with police in the middle heaving them apart.

  “Vi-va Fuchs! Vi-va Dray!” the crowd closer to him chanted.

  “Down with Fuchs! Down with Dray!” the crowd further back on the sidewalk jeered.

  “One nation! One blood!” the Fuchs and Dray supporters flung at them. “Europe for Europeans!”

  “Liberty! Equality! Fraternity!” the masses confronting them yelled back.

  The melee inflamed many into frenzy. They jumped over the crowd control barriers and into the boulevard, stirring the mist. Some police in the avenue pushed their hands against the fog, demanding they retreat onto the sidewalk. Others menaced clubs, whipping the mist into whirls. A riot could explode any second trampling him, Stanislas realized. He swung his bad leg forward as fast as he could toward the hotel, waving his invitation to a policeman ahead like a safe-conduct pass through a war zone. “Officer Frenay, you’re working this?” he shouted over some hecklers.

  The officer shook hands. He began to respond, then stopped, and Stanislas followed his gaze to a limousine, whose driver bumped the Mercedes against the curb next to the Eden. A tuxedoed gentleman leaped from the rear seat. Ducking a rock, he rushed two gowned ladies under the striped awning as a tall, bald man in dark T-shirt in the Fuchs-Dray crowd jumped from the shadows. He lunged against three police to break across the avenue. As they shoved him back, the guests flung themselves through the hotel’s revolving doors into the lobby’s safety.

  “Yes,” Officer Frenay answered at last. “Me and lots of other cops, thanks to Messieurs Dray and Fuchs. Word leaked out their thugs would protest this benefit, and unionists, teachers, and writers showed to demonstrate support.” The officer, a trim man with a mustache, stepped closer while he studied the crowds. “They’re vicious rowdies,” he shouted out of the side of his mouth. “Three weeks ago, seven hundred or so brawlers protested at a Tunisian fête. Last week at a reception for the Senegalese ambassador, about nine hundred toughs. Tonight, over one thousand, and we’re still counting. For this chic gala, we’re under orders from Monsieur Prime Minister himself: a demonstration of intent only on both sides so we going to clamp down at two.” He glanced at Stanislas, his forehead furrowed in concern. “Many soccer hooligans from Liverpool this time.”

  More jeers erupted. He pressed his binoculars to his eyes and scanned the protestors across the street from him as he motioned to a gap between some vans. “The Brown Shirts there,” he explained. “Behind them, those guys with the Mohawks, the Eight-Eights”—he lowered his field glasses to look at Stanislas—“the eighth letter of the alphabet, H as in Heil Hitler. Fuchs’s scrappers. Nine busloads from lovely Vienna.”

  Another policeman, peaked cap slouched forward from running, gripped a metal detector as he jogged up, sweating.

  “Sorry,” Frenay said, “but everyone’s searched tonight. More orders from the highest level. The event’s too important for our country’s prestige to risk any incident.” He pressed his binoculars against his eyes. “That’s one of the few things the prime minister and president have agreed on lately.”

  The other policeman roughed the detector front and back over Stanislas’s raincoat. “What’s this ALPHA 1?” he asked, raising his hands above his head.

  The commotion grew louder. Distracted, Frenay didn’t respond, and Stanislas, noticing two suited men in front of them, didn’t pursue his curiosity. Wearing earpieces with wires protruding from collars, they marshaled field glasses toward the front of the Brown Shirts. With both hands the tall, bald man propped a pole on his left shoulder. Another Brown Shirt in shadows on the other side of him braced a second pole on his right shoulder. A huge banner of some kind, attached to the poles, roiled the mist from their zeal to launch.

  The tall man screamed in rage, “One, two, three.” With one muscular heave, they launched the banner through the mist until it towered above the throngs. A woman sobbed joy into a reporter’s microphone. Another shrieked in ecstasy into a bullhorn, “Vi-va Dray!” A man grabbed it and ranted, “Vi-va Fuchs!” The Brown Shirts jerked the poles tautly. Two faces snapped flat above their admirers. A cannonade of cheers exploded. “Europe for Europeans!” A mass of dark fists spiked outwards in choreographed hate. Then more cheers and whistles of admiration. Fuchs and Dray grinned down in benediction.

  “There’s a rumor they had planned to speak at Bercy Stadium next month in support of the police,” Frenay said. “And to celebrate Fuchs’s court victory. Next I heard it was cancelled due to scheduling conflicts. Now the rumor is they’ve moved their joint appearance to next year.”

  “Who’s this Monsieur Fuchs?”

  “Founder of Austria’s One People Party. A Viennese jury acquitted him days ago of a rape charge. There’s also a rumor he and Franz Streible—he started Germany’s National Unity Party—have slipped in and out of Paris several times this month. Who knows what those three are planning? We can pick up little that’s substantial about them.”

  As he listened, Stanislas caught a bottle crinkle Fuchs’s canvas nose. Red dripped down onto the lips. Protestors from the other side whooped delight. “Fuchs’s assassinated!” a man roared through his bullhorn. />
  Frenay turned back to Stanislas, shaking his head. “Those unemployed skinheads mixed with high immigration, a demagogue’s favorite cocktail. And our nightmare. You’ll have to excuse me.” He shook Stanislas’s hand and trotted across the boulevard to investigate who had tossed the bottle.

  Stanislas limped up the steps toward the Eden’s entrance. Halfway there, he heard the joyous roar of “Vi-va Fuchs!” again. For a second he recalled a war newsreel of his grandfather’s profile on a banner at a pro-German rally. Shame heated his face.

  This isn’t my fight, he thought. Without further reflection, he smacked hard on the revolving door’s glass panel and entered the lobby’s sanctuary.

  To the left of Reception near him, a placard on an easel announced the Fifty-First Anniversary Benefiting the Center for Displaced Persons met in the Henri IV Ballroom. A nearby bellhop stood ready to serve. Stanislas asked directions.

  At the ballroom’s main entrance he tensed, fearing whispers, an accusing finger, a shout. “Look. Over there. Marcel Cassel’s grandson!” Someone would surely recognize the resemblance. The toss of wild hair. The intense gaze. A clarinetist drifted by, playing some Benny Goodman. An elderly woman pushed past in a wheelchair. But no one with revenge shouted his arrival.

  A pageantry of blue, white, and red bunting decorated the upper reaches of the room. Below fluttered the flags of many countries. The festive atmosphere didn’t relax him as he headed toward a bar to the left of the stage ahead.

  As he ordered a whiskey he caught a blur of movement. It was a darkly attractive woman in pinstripe suit near the main entrance, he noticed upon turning to his right, who approached a man and his entourage. The group parted to let the French president’s peripatetic representative bestow a kiss on each of her cheeks in greeting.

  “Monsieur Cassel.”