Murder Without Pity

by Steve Haberman

  Stanislas jumped. It was only harmless Gustave, he realized. The lawyer pulled behind him a youngish woman in diaphanous red as he heaved through a thicket of guests.

  Gustave, looking expansive from gluttonous living, crowded him against the bar. “Monsieur Cassel, remember Mademoiselle Buffi Olivier?”

  Stanislas put on his party smile as he shook hands. “Of course. Last June at that art exhibit. And you, Monsieur Bricard, fit as ever?”

  Gustave squeezed Buffi closer as he eyed her. “Fitter.”

  Stanislas chanced a glance around the room for the woman in pinstripes. Where was she? Over there, still by the main entrance, now flinging open her arms to embrace an elderly man, head sunk on meager shoulders, who had just arrived. Grandfather? Father? “Los Angeles for our honeymoon, my dear,” he heard Gustave gush as he kept his eyes on the woman in pinstripes. A tuxedoed celebrant snapped her picture, and her smile gave her a luminous presence. A word for each, laughter from everyone, more embraces, an Italian vitality in her spirit, and she pressed through toward his direction where she stopped at a group next to them to chat.

  “…but Gustave, honey, Americans love guns,” Buffi protested.

  “Hush, Buffi.” The woman in pinstripes playfully reproached over her shoulder. She excused herself from the group and joined them beside Stanislas. “Poor Buffi spent three days in Boston several years ago,” she explained to him, “and has yet to recover.”

  Gustave waved to a man several tables away. “Michel, we’re getting married,” and he tugged Buffi off to spread his cheer.

  “I’m Madame Anna Attali, one of the evening’s chairwomen.” She offered her hand in a firm greeting. “I think we met briefly at an art exhibit last summer.”

  Up close, with wrinkles tweaking the corners of her eyes as she smiled, she looked older than he had first noticed, though age hadn’t faded her beauty much. “Monsieur Stanislas Cassel. I thought you looked familiar.”

  ‘Oh yes, the stand-in for our friend, who got the flu.” Her cell phone went off. “You’ll excuse me a moment?” She moved away to take the call.

  “She gets more calls in one day than many receive in a week. I marvel at how she withstands the pressure.”

  Stanislas turned sideways into smoke. The elderly man whom she had earlier greeted, now greeted him.

  “She’s an amazing woman. A friend of yours?” The old man waved his cigaretted hand in her direction.

  “No. Another criminal investigator got sick and asked me to attend. You know her well?”

  “For many years. She’s most capable. An idealist without illusions. Tenacious as well as charming. I think of her as Anna of a Thousand Smiles.” He doubled over into a coughing spasm and had to grip the bar with a shaky hand to steady himself. The attack passed, and he straightened to a stoop. “You must pardon me. I’ve smoked most of my life. At my age it’s too late to quit. Permit me to introduce myself. Monsieur Jules Altmann.”

  “Monsieur Stanislas Cassel. A pleasure.”

  A wail of rage seeped from outside the hotel into the ballroom. “Europe for Europeans. Europeans alone for Europe.”

  Jules let out a moan. The cry faded, but its prophecy lingered on his strained face. He seemed gripped by some thought he couldn’t or wouldn’t express. Only a sad shake of his head hinted at a deep anxiety. “Well,” he said, forcing his attention back to the gaiety, “judging by our name cards we’re table mates. Shall we?” Cigarette still in hand, he motioned to some rococo chairs off to their right.

  Anna approached their table that backed against the stage and seated herself next to him. “I see you met Uncle Jules.”

  Stanislas peered around him to her. “You’re his niece?”

  “He’s everyone’s uncle. He’s one of our dear Angels. ‘Benefactor’ sounded cold when the Center decided—in the ’50s, wasn’t it, Jules?—to honor large donors.”

  “In April of 1953, my dear. At the groundbreaking of the Center’s new office.”

  “Our Jules has the most extraordinary memory.”

  “She’s given to exaggeration sometimes, Monsieur Cassel.”

  “Not all the time, Jules. Anyway, Monsieur Cassel, we chose ‘Angels’ because it’s, well, angelic.”

  “See how she exaggerates? An angel doesn’t look like a battered old man.” He turned to her, momentarily closing Stanislas out. “My dear, I wish you’d reconsider and go lightly over that collaboration business in your remarks.”

  Anna clutched her napkin, while she stared ahead with cold fixity.

  “After all,” he continued in a whisper, “this is an evening to rejoice. Annie, think of it, the Center, from nothing to what we are today. Let’s not rehash ugly times like that. We should—”

  “You don’t quit, do you?” she said, turning to him. “Please stop, Jules. Just stop. We’ve talked this matter to death.”

  Jules stared at her a moment longer. “I was simply trying to help. Very well,” he said, crushing out his cigarette in angry jabs, “have it your way.”

  She didn’t seem to care who had overheard her words that stunned Stanislas, and he glanced out to the hundreds of attendees to hide his unease.

  As if Anna had taken the same suggestion, she also turned to the audience. “My, we do have lots of brave souls tonight. Wouldn’t you agree, Monsieur Cassel?”

  In the wake of his answer the ballroom quieted, and she glanced over her shoulder to the podium as if sensing trouble. “Oh dear,” she said.

  “…and everyone’s favorite. A driving force behind the Center, Madame Anna Attali.” The master of ceremonies gestured in her direction.

  Jules sent her off with a peck on her cheek. She flinched as though in distaste from the touch of his lips, but just momentarily, Stanislas noticed. For the spotlight swept down on her. Camera flashes exploded like starbursts. She smiled out to the celebrants, an actress cued, as she rose. Jules rose too and flared his hands high in showy applause to join the rest of the audience. “She absolutely hates public speaking, but she’ll do fine. We have fusses every so often,” he added, winking at him. “Who doesn’t? It’s really nothing.”

  To wild applause, to cheers and whistles from men and women jumping up, Anna Attali moved up the steps to the stage.

  CHAPTER 5

  HATRED HAS NO HOME HERE

  Several minutes passed before the applause died away. And afterwards from far in the rear, somewhere out in the main corridor, Stanislas guessed, came another sound, a panicky cry, “Stop him!” followed by howls of pain, the racket of plates crashing, and rage against the charitable affair. A security man posted near one of the double doors rushed out into the hallway.

  The intruder’s screams thinned as security subdued and hauled him away. A guard with a stevedore’s heft and blond hair shoved the ballroom’s main doors shut with a loud push to express his protest against the intruding fanatic.

  “Thank you, Serge.” Anna gripped the lectern’s sides. “Hatred has no home here or anywhere. On behalf of the Center, welcome to our fifty-first benefit. I’ll keep my remarks brief for your welfare as well as mine.”

  “We love you, my darling.” A white-haired matron from a nearby table blew her a kiss with both hands.

  “And I’m fond of all of you,” Anna replied, “which is why I won’t speak long.”

  Laughter erupted, and she had to motion for quiet several times before the audience finally stilled. She relaxed her hands on the lectern, more at ease, Stanislas thought.

  “Those of you new to our organization,” she continued, “may not know its humble origin. At our Center when you enter the Hall of Memories, you’ll see a portrait that faces you. It’s the largest one in that somber gallery. Madame Gertrude Steiner, Gerti, to those who had the honor to know and love her. A grandmotherly woman of forty-eight who had seen too much, one of her biographers wrote. Gerti survived the night train from Drancy to Auschwitz. And there, the daily starvations and beatings and rapes and murders of Auschwitz itself.”<
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  She hesitated. Her eyes fluttered shut. From where he sat Stanislas thought she appeared to sway, and for an awful moment he feared she might faint until he understood she was fighting back some painful memory of that woman.

  After a further moment composing herself, she continued. “When the Russians liberated that death camp and she felt strong enough to return to Paris, she had a simple idea: to handle the overflow of camp survivors who gathered daily at the Hotel Lutétia, that grand hotel on Boulevard Raspail turned into a reception point for those returnees. To clothe, feed, and in every other possible way, nurture them back to life. A single room near that hotel, a table, two chairs, a phone that rarely worked, some volunteers, and a board on which those volunteers tacked the names and any photos of camp survivors for any next of kin, the Center’s beginning, ladies and gentlemen.

  “Yet the Center grew, and I’ve heard from several former ministers under Charles de Gaulle that when that woman—that’s how they referred to her, ‘that woman,’—that when she wanted something, she was quite capable of terrorizing the most fearless bureaucrat into submission.”

  The ballroom exploded into whistles, shouts, and cheers, forcing her to pause. Jules’s face blushed so red from laughing he heaved forward into one of his coughing spasms. A teenager seated in the row across from him pounded the table with her palm in delight. The waiters dropped their trays against their legs and clapped as they whistled appreciation. Anna had to bat the air several times for quiet, seemingly unaware how much they adored her, Stanislas noticed. At the edges of the ballroom, a few last laughs went off, and she continued.

  “In Gerti’s last interview, she was asked what sustained her at Auschwitz and afterwards. ‘Was it God?’ the interviewer asked. Gerti brushed aside his question with her legendary brusqueness and refused to say. But she did quote an Old Testament prophet. ‘If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? But if I am for myself only, then what am I?’”

  A lone cell phone went off somewhere in the audience. A flutter of movement blurred at the corner of Stanislas’s vision.

  “The world once looked only to its own selfish interests,” she continued, “and we had war. Gerti….”

  Now more cell phones rang like alarms going off. Something wasn’t right, Stanislas sensed. He stirred away from Anna and noticed a man in the right aisle just steps from the stage.

  “…that no matter what her tragedy, she would never tire helping….”

  The man pounded up the steps.

  “…to the end an unrepentant humanitarian….”

  The man reached the stage.

  “…and that’s what this Center is too, unrepentant in its humanitaria….”

  Now past the white carnation stand in front of the blue curtains, rushing toward Anna with his left hand in his coat pocket, right hand swinging in rhythm with his aggressive stride.

  “…and today, tragically, we hear once more extremist voices,” Stanislas heard Anna say, while he also was aware now of whispers around him from puzzled guests and of Jules’s sharp intake of breath, and a cry of “To your right, that man!” coming from someone in the audience, and Anna seemed to understand something was wrong for she twisted her head in the man’s direction, brushing back her hair behind an ear, as if for a clearer view. “Guards!” Stanislas shouted.

  “Stop him!” Jules yelled, waving frantically at the man.

  The man hurled himself against the podium. Anna stopped in midsentence, her eyes wide with shock. He knocked the microphone away from her with his palm and cupped a hand to her ear.

  He appeared to talk forever, and Stanislas heard the whispers rise to murmurs around the ballroom, delivering no doubt the same message about some disaster the cell phone callers had given. Maybe someone had assassinated the president. Maybe terrorists had bombed another metro.

  The tall, double doors at each entrance were jerked open. Anna, looking pale, gripped the microphone with both hands. “Ladies and gentlemen, the police have asked us to leave the hotel at once. File out by the closest exit. Calmly, please.” The man hurried her down the steps and over to her table. Together, she and Stanislas helped Jules to his feet. Others had already moved into the corridors.

  Most guests huddled under umbrellas in the drizzle a few blocks from the hotel. A few couples descended to the shelter of a nearby metro. The night was quiet. Stanislas overheard several celebrants state with certainty the riot police must have dispersed the Fuchs and Dray militants once the benefit had begun.

  Jules stabbed another cigarette into his mouth. Anna Attali begged him not to smoke. He lit up anyway, the odd tension between them returning, Stanislas noticed.

  She wandered over to Stanislas and apologized. The head of the Paris police had warned the Center about a possible terrorist bomb threat, she explained. But the directors refused to let extremists intimidate and had voted to hold the benefit anyway.

  Something faint and menacing drifted out of the mist to their right further down the avenue. Its sound was leaden, and as it punched louder with mounting fury, it remained Stanislas of soldiers tramping out drumbeats from their boots. It wasn’t a chant he heard this time. The louder it pounded toward them, the more it sounded like a marching song he had heard somewhere long ago.

  A musician stared off into the distance. Jules also turned in that direction. His mouth cracked open. His cigarette fell from his lips onto the wet pavement. Next to him a woman draped in a shawl began to wail. One by one, pulled by curiosity, then seemingly gripped by communal fear, Anna, Gustave, Buffi, and others stared off into the darkness. Anna clutched Stanislas’s arm as though frightened. Jules cursed and shook his little fist. The old woman with the shawl continued wailing. Anna grabbed his arm tighter, and Stanislas began to say something till the song blasted out of the dark in a rowdy beer hall rage—“March! March! March! Close up ranks! March! March! March! Raise high our honored banner for our fatherland!”—and he had to cup a hand to her ear and shout above the fury of the radicals, who hadn’t disbanded, after all. “It’ll be okay. The police will arrive any minute. It’ll be over shortly.”

  She continued staring at the threatening darkness. “Over shortly, this?” She at last brought herself to glance at him. “No, I don’t think so, Monsieur Cassel. These extremists may be fewer in numbers these days. But they remain deadly. Europe’s far right past has come back once again to terrorize.”

  CHAPTER 6

  A DEATH IN THE FAMILY

  “The arriving officer swore the deceased had terror in his eyes,” Stanislas explained in the back seat of the Peugeot the following Monday. “That’s what he remembers most about that night, that look of terror. Imagine that hardened Corsican spooked. Not from how broken the victim looked splayed out on the stairs. But from the trauma captured in those eyes bulging with that look of horror.”

  “The dead I’ve seen had their eyes closed,” his driver said over his shoulder. “As if peace had descended in their final moment.”

  “No peace at the end for this poor soul, if he ever enjoyed any,” Stanislas replied. “It was like fear of whatever he saw had struggled to escape through his eyes and failed, the officer kept saying.”

  The young police photographer in front of him stiffened. She remained as quiet as she had since they had started talking about Léon Pincus. If she insists on working for me, Cassel thought, she must get used to living with finality.

  “You ever have a Little Misery like that, Monsieur Judge?” the driver asked.

  “Considering that twisted expression on his face, no. Nothing as bizarre. And my men haven’t located any next of kin yet either. And no eyewitness so far for that matter. The concierge was out doing chores. The other tenants, except a retiree, a Monsieur Lenoir, who found the body, were at work. They’re checking on his alibi.”

  “The attack was that vicious?” Christophe, sitting beside Stanislas, entered into the conversation at last.

  “The better word’s ‘sadistic,’ Monsieur Minh.
The coroner thinks he was tortured.” Stanislas tapped on a page of the autopsy’s report. “‘Cardiac arrest arrhythmia due to stress.’ Whatever he saw caused his heart to beat way out of its normal range. In a word, he died of fright.”

  His clerk acknowledged understanding of the tragedy with a drowsy nod. The attempt to engage him was failing, Stanislas noticed. The poor boy must have endured another colicky night with his son.

  Stanislas shoved the report back into the dossier as a sharp pain ripped through his stomach. He had again forgotten to take his ulcer medication and was paying the price. He gazed out to take his mind off his discomfort. The policeman strained forward for sight of any path through the fog and blinked the headlights as he inched across Place de la République.

  Somewhere east of them lay Belleville, Stanislas thought. Enclave of the outcast, the striver, the pious, Léon Pincus’s world. Had he begged or confronted Boucher for some reason the day of his murder? And why had those men, he wondered, held him captive, and who were they? No answers came to him; the previous Friday night’s protestors’ death chant had kept him awake, and he too had slept poorly and felt tired.

  Shortly a neon sign, hazing pink a Tunisian restaurateur’s window, came into view. Two Jews in wide-brimmed hats and frock coats hurried into a kosher deli. A black woman, hair swathed in bandanna, paused under a fruit stand’s canopy. The exotic signaled they had arrived in Belleville. The driver slowed at another intersection. Stanislas saw they had turned onto Boulevard de la Villette, Léon Pincus’s last stop.

  The tenement’s lobby was dark except for light at the end of the foyer from a window arching over the concierge’s door. Inside her quarters, a baritone’s voice from an opera boomed. Stanislas punched the minuterie to his right once, then twice. No lights flickered on. The switch hadn’t worked when the police had arrived at the crime scene, he recalled from their report. The darkness on Pincus’s floor might have also contributed somehow to his death. The four of them moved ahead, fixing a mop and bucket against the wall next to her lodge as their rendezvous.