Jim McGill 05 The Devil on the Doorstep

by Joseph Flynn

  The cops kept their guns pointed at him.

  “Y’all can put your weapon down anyway,” one cop said.

  Welborn did, and that was when the driver of the Mini emerged, hands up.

  A girl, not quite as young as a pre-schooler, but about the size of a Keebler elf.

  She yelled, “Don’t nobody shoot me, I’m a minor.”

  Arlo Carsten didn’t try to get out of the Mini.

  Not until he threw up all over himself.

  Avignon, France

  When Gabbi Casale entered the lobby of the Hôtel Cloitre Saint Louis that morning, intending to ask if the desk clerk might recommend a place to eat breakfast outside the hotel, the clerk had a question for her.

  “Are you a cyclist, madam?”

  “You’re asking about bicycles?”

  “Oui.”

  “Yes, I know how to ride.”

  “There is a gentleman, a priest, waiting for you. His name is Père Georges Louvel. He would like for you to accompany him on a bicycle tour of Avignon.”

  Gabbi ran that idea through her mind. She was acceptably dressed for a ride and in decent shape, but not nearly as fit as when she worked for the State Department as a regional security officer. Avignon was hilly. In January, there were also other concerns for cyclists in Provence. Cold rain and a colder wind known as the Mistral.

  A look out a window showed the soft glow of winter sunlight.

  “Is there wind this morning?” Gabbi asked the clerk.

  “Very little, madam. Becoming quite strong this afternoon.”

  “Bringing rain with it?”

  “Oui. Will you be our guest another night?”

  “Check-out is midday. I’ll let you know before then.”

  The clerk told her where she could find Père Louvel. He would have a bicycle and a helmet for her. She stepped out of the hotel expecting to see a wizened little fellow in clerical garb, perhaps a Gallic knockoff of Barry Fitzgerald. What she found was a fellow who more closely resembled Bob Hoskins, a short thickly muscled man with a dusting of steel gray hair on a great dome of a head. His eyes were a soft blue but his shoulders, arms and knuckles suggested he’d been his seminary’s middleweight boxing champion.

  Gabbi extended her hand to him. “Père Louvel? I’m Gabriella Casale.”

  He smiled, clasped her hand and asked, “Your people are from the Italian Piedmont?”

  “Not for a hundred years, Father. But originally, yes.”

  “You are American, then.”

  Gabbi nodded.

  “Will the hills be too much for you on the bicycle? We can always walk.”

  “I’ll try to keep up, but I am hungry. I could use some breakfast.”

  “I know just the place.”

  Gabbi wasn’t the least bit surprised. She donned the helmet dangling from the handle bars of the bicycle Father Louvel held for her. She swung onto the seat and they were off. The priest set the pace and Gabbi followed behind, thinking she needed to hit the gym more often.

  Châteauneuf-du-Pape — France

  The ride to the village of Châteauneuf-du-Pape — the Pope’s new palace — was a little more than ten miles. More uphill than down. To Gabbi, it felt like a hundred-mile stage of the Tour de France through the Maritime Alps, without the benefit of performance enhancing drugs. The effort was grueling despite Father Louvel’s far from scorching pace.

  He just kept going and going.

  Not herky-jerky like an Energizer bunny.

  Implacably, like a man — a priest — on a mission.

  The saving grace for Gabbi was the weather. The sun, rising in the sky, did a fair imitation of summertime radiance, but the temperature was just fifty degrees. Good for sustained aerobic effort. The breeze came from the Northwest, holding just a hint of greater coolness and the promised change in the weather scheduled to arrive that afternoon.

  Narrating the ride over his shoulder, Father Louvel, told Gabbi that Châteauneuf-du-Pape’s raison d’etre was to sell its famous wine and every second shop in the village did just that. Still, the priest managed to find a storefront in the lower reaches of the village that not only wasn’t a wine shop, it didn’t have any signage at all to announce its purpose.

  When the proprietor and his wife noticed Père Louvel’s arrival, however, they brought a table out to the sidewalk, along with two chairs and menus. They took the bikes inside so they would not clutter the narrow lane, and brought two huge cups off coffee.

  Black. No cream or sugar.

  Gabbi would have preferred a gallon of lemonade but the promise of a caffeine rush was not to be overlooked. She and Father Louvel dined on sweet crepes, fresh strawberries and more coffee, this time avec crème et sucre.

  Apparently, the good father had given his silent consent to such indulgences.

  At the end of the block, the road curved, offering a view of the resting vineyards below.

  Not a soul, either on foot or in mechanized transport, passed them as they ate.

  Between bites, Gabbi said, “You’ve heard from M’sieur le Magistrat.”

  “Oui.”

  “The content of his message being?”

  “That you are a woman of true courage and integrity. You should be treated with the greatest of respect. Nothing should be withheld from you, at least regarding the reason for Yves’ visit to America.”

  “Very flattering, but how do you feel about that?” Gabbi asked.

  Père Louvel wrinkled his brow and thought a moment.

  He said, “I take it your family thinks of itself as American, after such a long time away from the Old World.”

  “We do, but I’ve lived and worked in France for years.”

  “Bon, then you might know how our country folk are.”

  “Country folk are pretty much the same the world over, Father. No one has any secrets, from each other. Where outsiders are concerned, very little is shared, and then grudgingly.”

  “Exactement.”

  “So how would Magistrate Pruet persuade you to do otherwise?”

  “You know of our revolution, of course, occurring as it did so soon after America’s own. We disposed, to put it mildly, of our monarchy. For all our liberté, égalité et fraternité, though, we are still a hierarchical society. Position matters to us. Some people are simply situated to do certain things better than others.”

  Gabbi asked, “Are you saying the magistrate has taken on an obligation that in other circumstances would be yours?”

  The priest’s face clouded. In that moment, he looked ten years older.

  “The Pruet and Louvel families have lived and worked together for a very long time. We don’t share bloodlines, but in all other ways we are one family. Many years ago, one of us, no one quite remembers who, came up with an expression: the devil on the doorstep.”

  Gabbi thought she could guess the meaning, but she wanted to hear the explanation from the priest in his own words.

  “By this, we are saying that one of us is facing an irresistible temptation to commit an irredeemable act.”

  “What’s the solution to such a problem, Father?”

  “It is quite simple. You don’t open the door to the devil.”

  “And if restraint isn’t possible?”

  “Then you kick …” The priest paused to search for the right words.

  Kick his ass, Gabbi wondered. But that wouldn’t be hard to remember.

  “This is an American expression, I believe,” Father Louvel said, “the one I seek.”

  Now, Gabbi knew what he wanted. “You kick him to the curb.”

  The priest smiled and made the gesture of blessing her.

  “Just so. You give the devil a good, hard kick to the curb.”

  In the conviviality of the moment, Gabbi asked, “Father, will you tell me, please, what the nature of the irresistible temptation facing Magistrate Pruet is?”

  Somber again, he said, “When Laurent Fortier stole the painting by Renoir from the Pruets, he
killed the maître d’hôtel of their villa. He was my elder brother, Charles. Whenever Yves had one of his many differences with his own father, Augustin, he turned to Charles, a second father, if you will, for comfort and guidance.”

  Gabbi said, “Je suis si désolée, Père Louvel.” I’m so sorry.

  “As are we all. The only reasons we did not insist a Louvel be the one to find Fortier is because Yves and Charles were so close, and Yves would be far more likely to succeed.”

  With the definition of success being … arrest or vengeance?

  Only one of those choices seemed irredeemable to Gabbi.

  Père Louvel’s silence on the matter was all the answer she needed.

  Solving the problem Magistrate Pruet had taken on would require …

  “Madam,” the priest said, “are you all right?”

  Require beating the devil at his own game, Gabbi thought.

  Tempt him into making a fatal mistake. She thought she knew just how to do it.

  “Father, do the Louvels know other families in Provence, in Paris and around the country, for that matter, who have the same relationship to the bourgeoisie that you have with the Pruets?”

  The priest was reluctant to answer, but he finally nodded.

  Gabbi said, “Good. I have an idea that might save everyone from damnation. Except Laurent Fortier.”

  They discussed it on the ride back to the hotel.

  Père Louvel grew quite excited by the notion.

  He promised Gabbi all the help he could muster.

  He gave her another blessing and kissed her on both cheeks.

  She was on the TGV to Paris by the time the Mistral blew into Avignon.

  FBI Offices — Richmond, Virginia

  The pint-sized hellraiser who tried to drive Arlo Carsten to freedom refused to give her name to any of the feds. Took pride in her defiance. As if she’d laughed off a month of sleep deprivation and listening to nothing but “Dancing Queen” and other ABBA hits. Welborn and Celsus stood in the far corners of the interrogation room while the FBI had at her.

  Washington, DC was only a hundred and seven miles away, but Richmond hosted a much smaller media contingent, and the higher ups decided there would be a lesser chance of a news leak of the arrests of Ms. Don’t Nobody Shoot Me and Arlo Carsten if they were confined in central Virginia.

  After five hours of attempting to get the imp to open up about anything, Welborn stepped forward and said, “You know what I think? We could all use a milk shake. How about it? Can we send someone out for shakes?”

  The FBI agents in the room looked him blankly.

  So did the prisoner.

  The others feds played along when they saw Celsus give a small nod. Welborn was an unknown quantity to most of his federal brothers and sisters in arms, but just about everyone knew that Celsus Crogher had been the SAC of the Presidential Protection Detail for four years. He had obvious connections; his opinion mattered.

  The FBI followed Welborn’s lead. He took the orders of everybody who wasn’t incarcerated and then said, “You want one, kid?”

  “Screw you.”

  “Yeah, sure.” Welborn shook his head. “Like you’d know anything about that.”

  The little punk turned bright red, but she claimed, “I know, all right.”

  “Maybe so. The kind of pinheads you hang with do like their jailbait.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “We’re getting into a loop here. You want a shake or not?”

  “Strawberry,” she said.

  Welborn led the other feds out of the room, leaving the kid to stew on her own for fifteen minutes. When they returned each of them held a large cup with a Dairy Queen milkshake in it, including whipped cream, a maraschino cherry and a straw. Welborn plunked the strawberry shake down in front of the kid and took a step back.

  She looked at the cup and asked, “How do I know you didn’t put something in it?”

  “You don’t, but no one’s forcing you to drink.”

  While the prisoner pondered, the captors drank. Loudly. One finishing his shake and slurping the bottom of the cup. Welborn consumed his more slowly. When he got to the halfway point, he told the punk, “You don’t want yours, I’m going to take it. I’m hungry.”

  She grabbed her cup in both hands, chomped the cherry off the top.

  Got whipped cream on her nose and chin.

  Welborn leaned in and laughed at her.

  She looked at him, her temper rising as she sucked up some of the shake.

  The others joined in with Welborn, laughing at the kid. Wasn’t long at all before she’d had enough of their crap. Her muscles tensed and Welborn started to retreat, but not so fast that she didn’t splatter the front of his shirt with the milkshake she threw at him.

  He did get his left hand up in time to catch the gobbet of saliva and DQ’s finest she spat at his face, caught it neatly like an infielder snagging a line drive. One of the FBI guys stepped up and scraped the globule into a clear plastic bag.

  “That enough?” Welborn asked him.

  “Plenty.” He left the room with the bag.

  Welborn drew close to the kid again.

  “Thank you for the DNA sample,” he said. “Even if you’ve never been arrested before, my guess is someone in your family has. Your daddy maybe. We’ll find the connection, learn who you are and go looking for your kin.”

  “You asshole! You cock—”

  Welborn held up a finger and shook his head.

  The kid was smart enough to know she’d better hear him out and bit her tongue.

  “We could have gotten a court order to force you to provide a DNA sample, taken a swab from inside your cheek. But what you did, throwing your cup at me, spitting at me, that was an assault on a federal law enforcement officer. The straw in your milkshake might’ve put my eye out. You know how much prison time you can get for that?”

  The kid had no idea, but she knew she was in more trouble than ever.

  “Truth is,” Welborn told her, “I don’t really know myself. It might be as little as three months or as much as sixty years.”

  “Sixty years?” The fight went out of Elvie. She slumped in her chair.

  “The judge has a lot of leeway,” Welborn said. “Depends on the kind of crime the people you’re running with have planned. The worse it is, the longer your time. It’ll also depend on how much you piss off the judge, and pissing people off seems to be your specialty.”

  The kid started to cry.

  Small as she was, it looked like they were keeping her from her nap.

  Nobody said, “There, there, it’ll be all right.”

  What Welborn said was, “On the other hand, you work with us, your future will look a lot brighter. Judges like people who help us out.”

  A gleam of hope entered the kid’s eyes.

  Welborn told her, “Let’s start with Arlo.”

  FBI Headquarters — Washington, DC

  After FBI Director Jeremiah Haskins promised the president he would clean up the mess he allowed to happen, he did what any good top executive would do. He delegated the task to his most able assistant. That person was Deputy Director Byron DeWitt.

  DeWitt took on the task of poring over the life of Special Agent Osgood Riddick.

  The matter of weeding out any “cowboy sheriffs looking to clean up Dodge” who might be employed at the FBI, DeWitt passed along to his most trusted assistant, Special Agent Abra Benjamin.

  DeWitt closely read Riddick’s file from the time he applied for his position at the FBI to the day he pulled his duty weapon on the president’s husband. What the hell could he have been thinking, DeWitt wondered. That he’d lock up James J. McGill for interfering with an official investigation? That he’d get McGill alone for a moment and rough him up? Intimidate the president’s henchman? Jesus. The guy had to be nuts.

  Or suffering from an overabundance of testosterone.

  As a matter of policy, special agents of the FBI had to submit to r
andom drug tests throughout their careers. Riddick had always tested clean for recreational hallucinogens, narcotics, cannabis, steroids and human growth hormones, but his testosterone numbers always bumped up against the high end of normal, sometimes nudged over the high end.

  Of course, there were several legal testosterone supplements on the market. But they were generally intended for guys approaching grandpaternity. Sometimes, though, if a younger man suffered from an abnormally low production of the hormone, a supplement might be a legitimate medical prescription. The bureau wouldn’t have had a problem accepting that.

  But Riddick said, no, he didn’t take any testosterone supplements.

  He claimed he made enough of his own and his readings were consistent from the time he came on the job. Thing was, those numbers remained high into his forties, when they should have started to decline. But the polygraph said he was telling the truth.

  Government regulations, especially those of the FBI, tried to take everything under the sun into account, but it had never occurred to anyone to require that certain male employees take prescription drugs to reduce the amount of testosterone in their bloodstream. Had they tried, people might have laughed. On the other hand, the correlation between raised testosterone levels and competitive behavior, including aggression, was widely recognized.

  So maybe a testosterone-lowering drug wouldn’t have been such a bad idea.

  The excessive force complaint against Riddick was filed by an NYPD patrol officer. Both men were off duty, having drinks in a bar. The cop went off on his girlfriend when she criticized him for not leaving his wife, as he’d promised. Riddick was the only person who saw fit to intervene. The cop tried to scare Riddick off by flashing his badge.

  Riddick then showed his ID and told the cop he was under arrest for abuse of authority.

  The cop resisted and got the worse of it, by far. Witnesses said Riddick might have been overly enthusiastic in subduing the cop, but the jerk had earned it. The NYPD made no fuss. Word was quietly passed they were glad the guy, also a wife beater, was no longer their problem. The New York County D.A.’s office didn’t pursue any charges against Riddick.