Lovers and Liars Trilogy

by Sally Beauman

  Pascal met his eyes and smiled at him as if they were old acquaintances. Shouldering his camera bag, he said, “You want me to get the elevator? Which floor?”

  The simplicity of the question seemed to help the man.

  “Just get the gates,” he said.

  Pascal did so, moving slowly, without threat. The man backed inside, still clutching Gini, still jabbing the gun at her throat. Pascal made to close the doors on them, then, at the last moment, held them and inserted his foot in the space.

  He was trying to read Gini’s expression, trying to pick up some tiny hint. He could make no violent move, and no threat. Gini’s eyes, wide with fear, had been fixed on him. As he held the door, he saw her face become tight with meaning. He saw her look very deliberately at his camera case.

  “Can I help?” Pascal said, trying to read this message. “I work with Gini, you see, and”—he frowned, then understood—“I’m a photographer…”

  “You are?” The man was staring at him, his eyes glazed, then alert. He made a small twitchy movement.

  “That’s cameras?” He jerked his head at Pascal’s case. “You have cameras in there?”

  There was, just perceptibly, something that might have been excitement, even awe, in his voice.

  “Sure. Cameras. Lenses. Film. Color. Monochrome…”

  “Well, what d’you know? Now, how about that?”

  The man gave a small shiver. He kept the gun under Gini’s chin, and his eyes on Pascal.

  “This is Pascal Lamartine,” Gini said in a low voice. “He and I—we work together…”

  “Look, why don’t I come up with you?” Pascal stepped into the elevator. He stood well back, by the gate. “Which floor?”

  He watched the man’s face carefully. He had expected some reaction when he moved through the gates, but there was none. The man seemed to be reacting to his name; as soon as Gini used it, he registered racing disbelief, then glazed incomprehension, then—as they traveled upward, and he seemed to get a fix on the name, a curious elation and relief.

  Not in the elevator, Pascal was thinking, and not in the tenth-floor lobby either. These spaces were too confined, and the man was still holding Gini too tight. In the apartment, he thought as the man tossed him some keys and told him to open the door; yes, here, Pascal thought as they entered a large, overfurnished room: here—when he finally moves away, if he relaxes, loses concentration…

  “I know you, Pascal…” The man’s face now wore an expression of almost messianic triumph. He had had the sense to position himself with his back to the fireplace wall, with Gini still in front of him, the gun still at her neck.

  “I know you. I’ve followed your work. I have pictures of yours. Those ones of Caroline of Monaco you took? Remember those? I clipped those. And that American movie star—Sonia Swan? Those were great. I clipped those too. You work for all my favorite magazines—Paris Match, People…” He frowned. “I haven’t seen your stuff so much recently…”

  “No. I’ve been doing other things recently. You know how it is.”

  “Sure. Sure. I do. I mean, it must have been tough, getting in so close to all those celebrities, getting past the security, the dogs. Taking the pictures the world wasn’t meant to see… I loved that. I mean, that bitch Sonia Swan, no better than a hooker. You showed us what she really was.” He was quivering with excitement. Pascal thought: how ironic. The three years of his own life he most despised, the three years of his life that shamed him still—and yet they were the three years that were useful now. He looked at this man, and thought: a specific kind of insanity; a fan; a fanatic.

  “I still have pictures of yours I clipped.” He gave a high-pitched laugh. “I’ve got them here. I keep some of my things here, in my mother’s room across the hall. We could look at them later, maybe? They’re in this suitcase, under the bed…” He paused again, then regained control. He gave another small, twitchy movement.

  “So, listen, Pascal—you’re smart, right? This is what I want you to do. I want you to go through this apartment, every room, and close the shades and the drapes. Put the lights on and leave them on. Then go in the kitchen and get me some water. Bottled water, okay, out of the fridge. Mathilde keeps it there for me. Bring the sealed bottle and a glass. And don’t stop being smart, Pascal, because—”

  “No. No. Sure. I understand.”

  Pascal moved to the windows of this room. He was calculating time. Five minutes? Ten? Would they use sirens, or opt for the silent approach?

  He moved fast around the apartment, learning its geography. One long central corridor, windowless; on either side of it, two large rooms; on the right, two bedrooms, each with its own bathroom; on the left, the sitting room they had first entered, then a dining room beyond that; finally, at the end of the corridor, a large, old-fashioned kitchen. It had almost exactly the same layout, though smaller, as Helen’s apartment—and as he realized this, his hopes rose.

  He entered the kitchen, and they were dashed. Like Helen’s apartment, this, too, had a service door that led out to the fire escape stairs. Pascal stared at this door angrily: he had been counting on it. It was blocked by a huge, immovable refrigerator. He unlatched each window, as he had done in all the rooms, though he doubted it would be helpful. The windows looked long unused; they had been painted in. He leaned hard against the one above the sink; it did not budge an inch.

  He looked around the room, then quietly began opening drawers. He finally found the kind of implement he was looking for: a long, thin, very sharp boning knife. He slipped it inside his jacket pocket without great optimism. A knife was a close-range weapon; a gun was not.

  He was returning with the water—why water?—when he heard from the room beyond a sound that made his heart stop. A low moan, then a muffled cry from Gini. “No, please…” he heard. “Star, no—listen, please, not yet. We have to talk. You want me to do the interview. I have a tape recorder in my bag, and tapes, and—”

  Pascal reached the door five seconds too late. There might have been an opportunity, but it had gone. Whatever Star had been doing, he had heard Pascal’s footsteps and had stopped. Pascal halted in the doorway, white-faced.

  He could read the scenario, and it made him deeply afraid. Gini had been forced to her knees in front of Star. She was trembling violently. Star’s belt was undone. He held the gun nuzzling against her temple with his right hand. His left hand was grasping Gini by the back of the neck. On his face was an expression of arousal and urgency that was naked. As Pascal entered, he jerked Gini back up to her feet.

  “Put the water down. Get back over there. Now.” He waited until Pascal had done this. “Okay. We do the interview. Pascal can take some pictures. Yeah. That could be good. I have to tell you the whole story, and…” His eyes glazed slightly, then focused again.

  “I did have a whole lot of things I wanted to say. But I don’t know. I might keep it brief. I—there’s other things I might want to do. You know, before…”

  He stopped. His head jerked around like an animal’s. He became instantly alert. He listened, and Gini listened, and Pascal listened—to the whoops of many sirens.

  They came closer, became deafeningly loud, then stopped.

  Star gave a long, slow sigh. He drew Gini back against his body, and Pascal, watching Gini’s face with horror, knew why he had done that. He watched the blood drain from her face. She closed her eyes; her fists clenched. Star’s right hand held the gun to her throat; he moved his left hand so it rested on her breast.

  He had listened to the sirens. Now he seemed to listen to the silence.

  “I guess the audience just arrived,” he said.

  At eleven-thirty, as fuchsia-dressed Quest swung out along the runway, Rowland moved up the aisle of the salon to its exit doors. He looked at the rows of pale faces, at the line of operatives circling the rear tier, and every instinct in his body said wrong. This scenario was too neat, too convenient, whatever Mina had been told. He left the building at once. This
was a piece of theater, he thought—and wherever its director was, he was not, had never intended to be, out front.

  As he left the building, his sense of being an extra in someone else’s production increased. The arrival of the GIGN had, inevitably, intensified the interest of the press. Outside the courtyard of the Cazarès building, a huge mob of reporters and photographers and TV crews were engaged in a series of running battles with the police. They would spill across the barricades at one point, then be forced back, then advance again. Rowland cut around behind them and turned into a series of side streets. He passed a mews with locked gates, where the fleet of Cazarès Mercedes were presumably garaged, then found his way to the rear staff entrance.

  It could not be long, he thought, before this gate came under press siege as well, but for the moment it was quiet. The surly guard on the gate did not take his appearance well; he informed Rowland that only authorized personnel were admitted here, and only authorized personnel had been admitted. Reaching for a telephone, he told Rowland to leave, and leave now, before he called his security backup. Rowland left: he could think of only two other places where Star might have gone—Mathilde Duval’s, or Chantal’s. But Mathilde Duval would be at Cazarès’s now, watching the collection from the rear room Juliette de Nerval had described to him. Chantal’s, then, he thought. Less than ten minutes later he was getting out of a cab in the rue St. Séverin. He paused by the church, then crossed the street. The entrance door was open. He paused in the doorway, looking up the flight of stairs that led to Chantal’s apartment. The door above was also open. He tensed.

  He knew what had happened, what must have happened, before he pushed the door back. He could see the blood smeared on the wall opposite; he could hear frantic scratchings and the yowling of the cat.

  The cat had been shut up in one of the cupboards under the sink. The cat, for some reason, had been spared; Chantal and Jeanne and their small, thin gray dog had not. Jeanne had tried to put up a fight. She was sprawled at the base of the blood-spattered wall; Chantal, who might never have known what was happening, had been shot while in bed. The bed was soaked in blood; there was blood on the floor, the net curtains, the walls. It could only have been Star who had done this, and he had signed his handiwork in blood: there was a crude blood star on one wall, above Jeanne’s body; there was a second blood sign by Chantal, a daubed crucifix of blood, just above the bed. Next to the dog’s body was a pile of clothes—black jeans, a red scarf, the student uniform Star had told Mina he would wear to Cazarès’s. Rowland averted his eyes from the bodies. The sink, the surrounding worktops, and floor were all stained with watery blood; he thought—this was planned; he came here and he did this, and then he changed and washed.

  A sense of incomprehension and outrage fought with shock. Wrapping a handkerchief around his hand, Rowland called Luc Martigny, then—the noise was unbearable—opened the cabinet door and released the cat. It streaked past him, down the stairs. Rowland backed out of the room; these silent sprawled bodies were sending out signals to him, they were telling him a story, and it was not simply a murder story, the atrocities here were more complex. He fumbled his way back down the stairs and waited in the doorway below for the police. He tried to steady his own breathing; he tried to listen to the memories in his head, Chantal the day before, Mina that morning, both women in very different languages explaining to him that although Star had these angers, he posed no sexual threat. “Please,” Mina had said, “please, he’s not really bad. He didn’t hurt me. He didn’t do anything to hurt me—please understand.”

  Rowland stared hard at the black outline of the St. Séverin church. A light rain had begun to fall; he heard the approaching sirens, was dimly aware that Martigny and fellow officers were entering the building. He listened to their footsteps on the stairs, the muffled exclamations that escaped even these professionals. He could feel a deepening premonition and fear, a growing alarm. Where was Gini? He watched the church gargoyles arch above his head.

  Martigny remained only a few minutes in Chantal’s apartment—Rowland registered that. When he returned, he took Rowland by the arm and led him across to a police car.

  “I’ll explain in the car,” he said. Rowland listened in silence as they raced through the crowded streets. The air flashed blue and white with alarm; the sirens were at once outside him and inside his head.

  “It isn’t just those two women back there,” Martigny began in a terse voice. “It’s five dead. Lazare himself; that maid Madame Duval, and a security guard on the rear gates—”

  “And?” Rowland said.

  “And now we know where this Star is. The call came in about five minutes ago. He’s at Mathilde Duval’s apartment. And I’m afraid he’s not alone. Your colleague—Genevieve Hunter—is with him. No, wait, listen. At gunpoint, as a hostage. But she isn’t alone. There’s a photographer with her, a man you may know—Pascal Lamartine.” Martigny hesitated. Rowland did not speak.

  “The presence of another man… that improves the situation, perhaps.” Martigny glanced at him. “Of course—it is serious. Obviously so. Five people dead. Those women back there…” He hesitated again; Rowland met his gaze.

  “He’d raped them, hadn’t he?”

  “Yes. I’m afraid he had. Maybe before death, maybe after…” Martigny’s expression became closed. “Meanwhile—we need your help.”

  When they reached the rue de Rennes, a grim-faced Martigny disappeared. He returned to Rowland to revise his roll call of the dead.

  “Not five, six,” he said. “They’ve just towed the Mercedes. Believe me, you don’t want to see what’s in its trunk.”

  He lit a cigarette, drew on it deeply. He and Rowland stood side by side in the rain, looking along the boulevard. They were still evacuating buildings, still bringing in the matériel for a siege. Crime-scene tapes fluttered; police cars, black vans, clustered; the street rang to the sound of booted feet.

  Rowland raised his eyes slowly up the façade of Madame Duval’s building. On its roof, and the roof opposite, he saw black shapes as police snipers moved into place.

  “It’s that apartment up there,” Martigny said. “The one with the closed blinds.”

  “I know which it is,” Rowland said.

  “We’ll make a telephone connection in about ten minutes. He hasn’t ripped out the lines apparently, which helps. We don’t want to start talking too soon, and when we do talk to him, we have to do it the right way. We need your help—English, French? Possible approaches we could use? You know more about him than anyone else does…”

  “Sure. Of course.”

  “Look.” Martigny took his arm. “I told you. She’s not alone with him. That helps.”

  “You think so? Since around eight o’clock this morning, he’s killed six people.”

  “Even so. In this situation, you can never predict. She’ll probably be all right. They’ll both be all right. He needs them alive—they’re his ticket out. Listen—have a cigarette…”

  Rowland shook his head. He kept his eyes on the building opposite.

  Martigny was not a fool. “All right. Okay,” he said, “he probably doesn’t need both of them—I admit that.”

  “You know damn well he doesn’t.” Rowland turned on him angrily. “Two makes it worse, not better. He loves an audience. He’ll kill one of them and keep the other alive—for a while.”

  “He’ll keep the woman alive,” Martigny said. “We both know that. That’s obvious enough—the woman is physically weaker, easier to intimidate.”

  He paused. He met this Englishman’s cold green gaze, and he knew exactly what was passing through his mind, since it was also passing through his own.

  “Don’t,” he said quietly. “It doesn’t help to imagine the worst—not in this situation. Wait. Within the next half hour we’ll be talking to them, we’ll have the listening devices in place, we’ll have the plans to the apartment, we’ll know exactly where he’s standing—if he blinks, we’ll know.” He shrugged
. “Near enough anyway… Come on through here. This van. They’re setting up the tapes and the telephone link.”

  Rowland followed him slowly. As they had spoken, another three vans and five cars had turned up. The first TV crews were arriving, the first clutch of cameramen. He stepped over cables and wires; he watched another posse of GIGN don helmets and flak jackets. He had seen it in a hundred movies, a hundred news reports—and at that he felt the same sense of foreboding he had experienced earlier. It was like a movie, he thought, because Star intended it that way, and because Star was still, in every sense, calling the shots.

  “Don’t you see?” he said to the quiet, dark-suited psychologist who would make the first telephone contact and who was sitting opposite him now. “Don’t you see? This is what he wants. Maximum coverage—prime-time reports. He’s scripting this. This is his movie. This is when he finally gets to be a star, when he’s been a nothing, a nobody, for most of his life.”

  “Flattery?” the psychologist asked.

  “Perhaps. Certainly no overt criticism. And he doesn’t like questions, the Dutch girl said that. But the mood swings are very rapid—and he’s almost certainly on drugs. Possibly cocaine, possibly something else…” Rowland stopped. He was desperate, and angry, and out of those emotions an idea came to him. He thought of dead Cassandra, dead Maria Cazarès.