Chapter 38
KARL HAD ALREADY identified the Italians' rooms at their hotel, but their windows stayed in darkness all evening.
Around the wide Paris boulevards the silver Alfa had been too fast to follow on the old man's moped. Not that it mattered: if the Italians struck lucky with the relic they would return here with their trophy. Let them do all the hard work, then he could capture it from them. He was not the only one waiting. He could see a French gendarme in the lobby of the hotel reading a newspaper to pass the time.
As he stood in the shadow across the street he kept wondering how to get inside the hotel. The gendarme could only watch the main entrance, and there must be a rear door to slip through. Breaking into a hotel room was child's play. But the man and woman weren't there, so what could he do if he got in? The leaders of Achtzehn Deutschland Reinigung, men like Phönix, would almost certainly know what to do.
He phoned Erich in Düsseldorf again, to find out when he would be arriving in Paris. Then he thought of something stimulating he could do, although Herr Kessel would not have approved of spending more of the ADR's money on a woman. The old Narr had been fussy enough in Rome. A picture of the Italian woman in the silver Alfa kept coming to his mind. Late twenties and far more attractive than older women. He should have found her apartment in Rome a few days ago. What would it be like to run his big hands over her soft flesh while she tried to fight him off? An inner urging needed to be satisfied. Killing the Italian had given him an enormous sexual appetite.
He had the pink card from the phone booth with the address of Zeta the masseuse, and the dead Italian's map to show the way into the city. This could jeopardize the whole mission, but the craving for sex had become too great to resist. He would visit Zeta and dump the Makarov automatic on the way there. The two Italians weren't likely to come back yet.
The ride on the old man's moped took only fifteen minutes. Once there, the whole activity took even less time.
Back outside the hotel in La Porte de la Chapelle he felt inside his jacket pocket. The brief moment of sex, paid for in advance, must have coincided with the few seconds the pimp needed to remove his money and replace it with strips of paper. But he still had Herr Kessel's credit card, and the list of names and phone numbers was safe in the pocket of his black jeans. With the map he could easily find Zeta's brightly lit doorway in the red light district again. Taking his feelings out on the noisy moped he headed back to the city, the engine screaming at high revs. When the whore and her keeper saw the knife they would quickly return his money!
Stopping to check the way in the wide boulevard Magenta, he opened the map he had taken from the Italian and rested it on the handlebars to check the way. An area on the map had been circled in black pen: a patch of green labeled Cimetière de Montmartre. The map looked brand new, so whatever the Cimetière was, the Italians had marked it recently. Maybe they were there now.
There were far more important things in life than threatening some stupid French pimp -- though it would have been fun to hear the tart squeal. Surely the dead Italian's map held the key to the mystery. He found Montmartre easily. Then he noticed the silver Alfa on Roma plates parked in the main street called the rue Caulaincourt, within the circle drawn on the map.
He could feel a light drizzle in the air, so he would shelter in a doorway and wait for the Italians to come back to their car. It felt unbelievably cold for mid summer, especially after the intense heat of that mad Italian city. He regretted not bringing warmer clothes from the stolen Opel. Even if he had time to get it from the car now, the gendarmes might be there watching. He'd seen films where that sort of thing happened.
Sartini and that woman had to be nearby, probably scared out of their minds. Well, wherever they were, they would have to come back for their Alfa. He slid the Göring dagger into a gap between the stones on the doorstep and slowly bent the blade at the narrow section until it looked straight. It bent back surprisingly easily, so the damage couldn't be too serious. The drizzle was getting heavier and the dark streets felt depressing.
He spent the night in a state of restless sleep. At eight-thirty the next morning he was sitting like some homeless drunk in a shop doorway when he heard the Alfa doors slam. As the engine started he leapt to his feet, jumped onto the moped and pedaled furiously.
The Alfa only went a couple of hundred yards. He followed it across the wide bridge and down into a narrow street. The Cimetière was a creepy graveyard with rows of stone buildings no larger than garden sheds. What a place to be coming to at this time of the morning. He parked the bike under a tree and followed the Italians through the high gates into the weird burial ground. He had never seen anything like this world of the dead. What the hell did Sartini and the woman want with this place?
The main street ran overhead on a wide, noisy bridge of iron girders. The graves directly beneath the bridge, almost lost in the darkness, seemed even more eerie. The Italians stopped at a notice board just inside the large green gates.
He stood and watched the young priest point past the bridge to where the graves ran away out of sight. A large cat stalked past, black, with the appearance of Satan himself. It stopped, turning slowly, staring with unblinking eyes.
For a moment he felt his heartbeat quicken, excitement rising in his throat. This must be an omen. There was to be death, violent death in this garden of the dead. He felt for the Göring dagger. His favorite weapon would be the instrument, the sacrificial knife.
The cat was joined by its mate, an even larger beast with a bent and torn ear. The cats were studying his every move. He stared back, sensing an attempt at communication, some message he was unable to interpret. This was a beautiful place. A thrill ran through his body. He would dispose of the woman first.
MARCO TURNED again and listened. The cemetery had been open for over half-an-hour, but so far they had seen no other visitors. With luck the zoticone would still be outside the hotel in La Porte de la Chapelle. Laura had complained all the way here about the noise in the hotel during the night. Guests kept banging doors until the garbage collectors took over the task of keeping everyone awake at five-thirty. But because they had got so little sleep in the hotel on the noisy autostrada the previous night, he and Laura had stupidly dropped off to sleep again and not woken until well after eight.
As they made their way through the maze of tombs, Marco caught hold of Laura's hand. Touching Laura, his amica, gave him comfort. He could see that the graves ran in avenues, with a grid reference to each one listed on the board by the entrance. It took them nearly five minutes to find the name Georges, the French name of the Giorgio family.
Very few families appeared to visit these ornamental sepulchers.
Caring relatives had once filled the insides with vases and religious artifacts, but it seemed many of them had now left everything to become overgrown and encrusted with dirt. An object could be concealed in one of these places for years without attracting attention.
Laura began to count the rows. "It must be that one."
The builders had tried to distinguish the Georges' tomb from its immediate neighbors by decorating the outside with blue tiles and polished stone panels. Through the iron grill that served as a doorway Marco stared into the gloomy interior. There was just enough room for a person to sit, should they be brave enough to do so. The family vault would be deep below.
As his eyes adjusted he could make out a shelf with a corroded metal cross and two stone vases, all thick with dirt. Wind-blown paper and sweet wrappers littered the floor.
Then, half hidden in the darkness, out of reach on a low shelf, he could make out the outline of a human head.
The heavy iron grill to the small chamber was firmly locked.
KARL TURNED FROM his communion with the cats, suddenly knowing for certain that the bronze head was here, and it had to be purchased with a sacrifice of blood.
From their excited voices the couple must have found the relic already. Their blood, spilt in this dwel
ling place of the dead would open the door to a future of absolute power: a perfection of power. He drew the Göring dagger from his pocket. The spilling of blood was essential to complete the consecration.
The crazy priest was pulling noisily at the grill and would soon attract attention. Karl moved closer, watched only by the large black cats on the stone steps, their tails waving rapidly from side to side in anticipation.
As he reached the grave he rushed forward and smashed the edge of his hand across the back of the priest's neck. The woman screamed and started to run. He reached out, grabbed her coat and slammed the dagger into her back. The blade went in effortlessly, the handle twisting in his hand as it did so.
The woman fell forwards against a high stone cross, both hands scrabbling for a hold. Her head hit the stone with a sharp smack. Without a sound, she slipped to the ground. He raised the precious dagger to administer the sacrificial blow to the young priest as he lay against the tomb. But his hand held an empty handle. The blade must be stuck in the woman who lay motionless beneath the cross. The final use of the knife had been beautiful.
He moved forward and pulled her up. Through her clothing, he could feel the softness of her breasts. It was an attractive body, and yesterday he would have had her. But last night he had seen enough of women for a few days, and unresponsive female flesh held no attraction to a real man. He draped the body over the arms of the cross and stood back, laughing at the sight.
Near the floor, in the darkness behind the grill, he could see the object that had caused the raised voices. It might be metal or marble for all he knew, but it was a head, white like the one in Herr Kessel's old photograph -- and it was what the Italians had come to get. He wrenched at the grill but it was immovable.
He started to panic, desperate not to leave here without the key to his future. Without the relic he was in deep trouble with the leadership. Fighting to control his anxiety he guessed there would be a wheel brace in the woman's Alfa. He could easily prize the grill from the wall.
Breathing deeply and deliberately, fighting back his panic, he ran towards the high green gates.
An attendant stood just inside, talking to two French gendarmes, while pointing over the crowded graves. They must know something. Perhaps they'd come to search the cemetery. If so, they would soon find the Italians.
Standing close to the wall he tried to stay cool. His training, he must remember his training. The woman was dead, but the Priester could still be alive. There had been no chance to use the knife on him. Hell. The man would be a witness. One of the gendarmes called him over.
Shout in the Dark Page 56