Murder Without Pity

by Steve Haberman

  Stanislas lifted the micro-cassette recorder’s plastic hood and peeked inside. There was no writing on the tiny cassette. “Only half of Paris,” he said.

  “I know.” Henri steered left. “It’d be safer if you got in back. The police are thick tonight because of those metro bombings.”

  Stanislas parted a curtain of heavy beads that hung behind the front seats and squatted on a spare tire, facing Leclair, the recorder on a knee. He began to slip on the earphones when Henri downshifted abruptly, and he pitched against the back of the driver’s seat. Through the slit in the curtain, he made out cars ahead and to both sides bunched up like rush hour. The taillights of a Citroën in front blinked red dots and dashes as it poked ahead. Henri braked. He studied his rear view mirror and smacked the steering wheel. Stanislas understood. They had stumbled into a random checkpoint.

  Leclair kneaded the steering wheel tensely, while he let the engine run. “The police must have blocked off the side streets and pinched everyone into the boulevard,” he muttered over his shoulder.

  After awhile he switched the ignition off. A driver jammed further up the line honked his outrage. Others followed with beeps. After several more minutes the Citroën bumped ahead, and Stanislas could glimpse a trail of flares along the avenue’s left side. A breeze whipped dense red smoke about in the fog, nearly blinding their view.

  “Company’s coming.” Henri lowered the radio’s volume.

  Stanislas moved further back. He heard a man from a distance yell a command, next the crush of boots closing in, finally a name called. “Henri.” The greeting was a statement of recognition. It carried no warmth.

  “Joxe.” Henri stared straight ahead.

  From the sound of his breathing, Joxe must have stopped at the driver’s window, Stanislas thought.

  “It’s still ‘Joxe,’ Henri?” the policeman asked. “Not ‘Victor’? Not even after three years? You do keep a grudge and over a little disagreement. I never realized you were that fond of Arabs.” He revolved his flashlight in circles over the curtain. The beams hit the right side paneling. “Who’s in back? Some Bulgarian cow? Or does your taste run to North African meat? You naughty boy. You should be home snuggling up to pretty Yvette.”

  “Bored?” Henri said, still looking ahead. “Haven’t clubbed anyone lately?”

  “Carrying out orders: Inspect every suspicious vehicle. Such as this one.” He fixed the beam on the dashboard like an accusation. “You listen to rap? Who’s the group?” He broke out into a singsong voice. “‘Putrid race, la-la. You sons of bitches, la-la. You SS-cops. Kill. Kill. Kill. La-la-la.’ Or something like that.” He struck Leclair’s face with the light. “Henri, we’ve lost our way. From Voltaire and Hugo to, let me guess, Public Assassins? Or is it Cop Killer? What’s happened to our once great motherland?”

  “Go back to Toulon,” Henri said, staring now at Joxe. “You’ll have lots of company there.”

  “It’s no longer just in the south of France. The Politics of Order are gaining everywhere in Europe.”

  “You must be drunk, Joxe.”

  “Henri, wake up. See what’s happening. Graffiti everywhere. Arabs everywhere. Our Seine’s become a toilette. The Marais’s turned into a huge gay bathhouse. Those Israelites multiplying like rats. Gypsy gang shootouts in churches. My advice: Get on board while you can.”

  Stanislas strained forward to risk a peek, to see if Joxe wore the ALPHA 1 armband, to match a face with the voice that made him sweat. But Joxe had stepped back. Stanislas struggled against his pounding heart and the horns to detect the direction of the policeman’s walk…around back to fling open the rear doors?

  A light lanced through a tinted side window. The beam died. Joxe continued around to the rear.

  The inside door handle rattled suddenly in violent fits, left, right, left. “Yoo-hoo,” Stanislas heard Joxe call out. “Mademoiselle-of-the-night.” The cop had somehow picked up his presence in the van, he feared. “Or is it Mademoiselles-of-the-night? Yoo-hoo.” How would he explain his presence? How explain the tape? They could risk punishment and destroy it, he realized. Or blow his investigation’s secrecy. Left, right….

  “We can go?” Henri shouted.

  The handle jerked left.

  “There aren’t any cars ahead of us.” Henri pounded the horn with his fist, and Stanislas saw him try to wave the policemen aside with several frantic sweeps of his hand. “Joxe, you’ve had your fun,” the officer shouted.

  Joxe slammed his riot club against the rear door. Then he returned to the driver’s side. “For the time being we’ll lift the barriers, Henri. Old friend, think about what I said. Believe me, you and Yvette don’t want a son-in-law named Ahmed.” He moved back, and Stanislas could see him through the blurry windshield, laughing amid the reddish smoke, motion his men to step aside.

  Henri jammed on the gas. The engine roared above the honks. The Renault lurched ahead through the reddish pall.

  Stanislas warned him to slow down. Though they had passed that checkpoint, other police roved, and he couldn’t let Henri’s bitterness put them at risk. He told him to dodge around the side streets for awhile.

  “He was best man at my wedding,” Henri said, preoccupied.

  There was no irony in the officer’s voice. Only sadness from his own personal war. Stanislas patted his shoulder in sympathy and left him with his thoughts. He eased on the headphones and with a press of a recorder’s button heard the tape again.

  “…want about our food. At least our police are more civilized.”

  “I didn’t signal from a phone booth that night to chat about your problems, Lenny. I called because I must know if you rang me at my apartment Friday evening, the sixth. About 8:30?”

  “Sir, you warned me not to call there anymore. Remember? I only saw your Mercedes parked on the street this morning, and here I am. You sound more agitated than the last time we talked. Hello? Hello? Mr. Boucher?”

  “I was just thinking.”

  “A friend of yours? Or a wrong number? Anyway while you’re on the line, sir, you’ll be pleased to learn we’ve bidders for the Steuben crystal.”

  “Whatever they pay won’t go far. Anyone interested in the Madonna and Child?”

  “For the right price, sir, there are always bidders.”

  “I asked you a question. Any other buyers as we speak? I’ll need the money before long.”

  “None except that Mr. Gaaf. The market for Old Masters is rather soft these days. I still think a blind intermediary as the seller through Christie’s or Sotheby’s might work wonders.”

  “And risk exposure? It’d humiliate my family if word got out. Your network’s worked wonders so far. Go with this Mr. Gaaf then. And quickly.”

  “Very well. The lads will arrange everything. And fear not, sir. Discretion is our byword. Oh, almost forgot. About our added ten percent contingency fee. Your changed circumstance, telephoning from a call box. Why is your affair. But I assume the lads and I are as much at risk as you from whatever the threat is.”

  “I don’t need you to remind me. Upon the sale’s consummation to Mr.Gaaf, of course. The added premium.”

  “Payment in American dollars would be lovely, the lads think.”

  “Yes, yes, yes, Lenny. U. S. dollars. Good-bye.” The line went dead. The phone booth’s door swung open. A melee of children’s screams filled the cabin.

  Stanislas frowned as he pressed a button. The tape rewound. This wasn’t the Boucher, whose suffocating arrogance he had endured during the hearing. The man on the tape sounded somewhat panicky. And despite being wealthy, he was desperate for cash, using someone with a British accent to auction valuables for a vague deadline. Was it next week? Next month? And did any of the tape relate to the Pincus dossier?

  “Boucher speaks good English,” Henri said over his shoulder.

  “After his interrogation,” Cassel said, “I did a quick history on him; he acted too sure of himself for my taste. I discovered he lived for a time in
London before the war as an exchange student.”

  “Their code was certainly simple.”

  “They must have prearranged everything. How Boucher would signal this Lenny for a contact. What time to call. What phone booth to dial.”

  “What could be the motive for slipping the gift to us?” Henri asked.

  “Boucher served on something called the Economic Inspection Board in Paris during the German Occupation.”

  Henri eased up on the gas. Again he half-turned toward Stanislas.

  He seemed no longer interested in small talk, Stanislas thought. This bit of history had triggered something in him. “The EIB wrote up volumes of black market regulations and punished hundreds of smugglers. Many by firing squad. He must have collected a number of enemies over the years.”

  “Settling a score at this late date?” The van swerved. Henri steered back onto the street as another wave of mist rolled over them.

  “It’s a remote possibility. Revenge,” Stanislas said.

  “French revenge,” Henri added. “With no mercy or personal statute of limitations. More power to whoever hates that bastard.”

  Stanislas rocked from Henri stomping on the gas pedal.

  “You ask me,” the officer continued, “functionaries of the president sent the tape. They could have given us chaff from some illegal tap.”

  “It could have come from a ministry, say Interior,” Stanislas said. “That could explain why you got the tape and not me.”

  Henri slowed the van. “I thought you might want to see where he lives.”

  Stanislas peeked through a slit in the curtain to a row of darkened luxury off to his right. “Who?”

  Henri flexed his right hand outward, thumb up, forefinger stiff. “Collabo Boucher. We’re nearing his apartment in the sixteenth district. The Bois de Boulogne’s further west.” He idled the Renault, while he gave several slight upward kicks to his imaginary gun as he aimed toward a lighted window. “That’s his place. And that might be his silhouette.”

  Stanislas let the curtain go limp. He had enough contact with this dirty man for the evening. The Léon Pincus dossier may have dragged up a vendetta from a long ago war that continued, a viciousness fought in the dark without mercy and without end from generation to generation. He feared an anxiety he couldn’t explain that before any resolution these enemies could turn his case deadly with him in the middle.

  CHAPTER 10

  PROJECT JANUS

  “Thirty cans with gasoline and fifty-eight empty wine bottles, the anti-terrorist squad unearthed in that garden. I saw the headline myself yesterday, waiting for my Mikhail at de Gaulle airport. Our Dray’s absolutely right. Streible and Fuchs too. Ayatollah shock troops are what those hooligan foreigners are with their hidden Molotov cocktail factories. The continent will go up in flames, if people like us don’t act soon. Did I tell you, Louis, Iranian tourists wanted to stay at my hotel in Moscow? I told my directors, ‘Let them make the Radisson their headquarters. Destroy it, if they want. But not my Palace Rustova.’” He gestured with his left hand to a restaurant on the right side of the street. A group of police had paused to study the menu displayed in the window. “Next time I slip into Paris, I take you there. They serve an excellent stuffed sturgeon.”

  Boucher studied the police, fearing they’d approach. “You spent the first half of your life in the KGB, scheming to destroy us decadent Westerners, Gennadi. You’ll spend the second half making up for lost time with your Pierre Cardin buying sprees and your stuffed sturgeon.” He glanced over his shoulder. The car was still there, following at a discreet pace on Rue Daru. It had materialized from out of the darkness as soon as they had left that restaurant. Only its beams through the mist revealed its presence. He felt as if he were in a cross hairs as they walked on, while the police at last continued their patrol in the opposite direction.

  Gennadi admired the shadowy outline of the domes of Saint-Alexandre-Nevsky Cathedral off to their left. “Its foggy like I’ve never seen. We are practically invisible. Still you are jumpy, Louis. You insisted on your chauffeur driving you to the restaurant, thereby denying me the pleasure of picking you up. You worried throughout our dinner—a feast at my considerable expense, let me add—and you continue to worry. Show some courtesy. Pay attention to your host, please.”

  “Keep your voice down. I’m not used to conspiracies like you are.”

  “I’m the one who should be frightened. I’m half your age and therefore by my calculation risk twice as long in prison. I’ve lived this long because I stuff a rabbit’s foot in my pocket whenever I go out? Believe me, I know when someone’s following. Your Gennadi’s had years of experience. Relax. We’re out for an after-dinner Saturday stroll. A Frenchman and a Russian, each strengthening a centuries-old friendship between two great powers.”

  Boucher eyed him sideways. Their rendezvous had unexpectedly turned into a Stolichnaya evening. Gennadi had gotten too boisterous at dinner for him to reveal the summons without provoking a scene. Was now any safer? “You’ve too much confidence. We aren’t in your Moscow where you know your way around.”

  Gennadi slapped him on the back. “Show some respect, Louis. Remember, I’m putting my money on the line for this project.”

  “That’s beside the point.”

  Gennadi swayed as he brushed away crumbs from his droopy mustache. “And what is the point? You will kindly inform me.”

  Boucher clutched Gennadi’s shoulder. “Where do you think we are? Club Med because we don’t have your Wild West shootouts, at least not yet? Gennadi Primakov, listen to me. Paris has become dangerous. That examining magistrate’s summoned me for a second hearing.”

  Gennadi stopped and lolled his head toward Boucher. “Oh?”

  “I got his order in this morning’s mail.”

  “He is suspicious?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Think hard, Louis. I can’t afford your ‘not sure.’ None of us can at this point. We’ve gone too far.”

  “You think I’ve thought about stuffed sturgeon since I got the summons? Of course, I’ve thought about it. I told the truth at that interrogation. As far as I’m concerned, the man who approached me that morning was a bum. I know nothing about what happened afterwards to him. But suppose that Monsieur Cassel still suspects me and has undercover police out? Understand now why I don’t like being in the open? That’s my point.”

  Gennadi frowned, as though finally sensing danger through his stupor. He slipped his left hand inside his overcoat pocket, pulled out his cell phone, which he gripped awkwardly, and muttered something in Russian. Then: “If things heat up, and you must disappear—”

  “No, no, my family. You understand?”

  “You think I have no heart because I’m Russian businessman? I have family too. But consider my suggestion as an option. Why not my hotel outside Rome?”

  Boucher turned to Gennadi; the suggestion appalled him. “We Bouchers have rooted ourselves in French soil for centuries. You may not have any love for your country. Don’t think that attitude extends to anyone in my family. We aren’t the problem. We aren’t the ones who must leave. Isn’t that what this is all about?”

  The car that had followed ballooned out of the mist and glided to the curb a step behind them. It was a black Citroën, Boucher noticed, and Gestapo agents nodded at him as they swaggered out of it. His heart pounded. He felt panic build

  “You….”

  The image vanished. He glanced across to Gennadi. He had unconsciously revealed his flashback to that former spy, who had caught on to him? But no, he was wrong, he saw. Gennadi simply yanked the rear door open with two fingers of his left hand as a hook, while his right coat sleeve fluttered in the breeze.

  “…go first,” the Russian said to him.

  Boucher slowed his breathing to relax as he ducked inside.

  Seated beside Boucher, Gennadi fumbled with the gold latch that secured a panel against the back of the passenger seat. A small fold-out table
dropped down. Still using his left hand, Gennadi gripped a gold pen from a pocket woven into the rear paneling. It slipped from his grasp and disappeared between their legs.

  Gennadi leaned down and ranged his left hand around in the darkness. “I’ve given one of my men—also ex-KGB—another title: Vice President in Charge of Opening Presents From Lovely Natashas. Ah, there it is.” He straightened, gripping his pen between two mangled fingers. “That way I increase my chances of keeping attached my remaining hand and also my head. You think competition in the West is rough? Try running a business in the East. Now then, under what name should I have the corporation registered, please?”

  “I’m to hear you out first.”

  “Whatever our good friend wishes. The money is as much his as mine. My idea: I know an attorney, who has marvelous ability with numbers. He has helped me better live with what taxes I must pay in Russia, so he is expert in these matters. Don’t worry. I don’t use the name Janus when we talk. Simply that I have some project in mind. The rough outline is he proposes a corporate shell already on the shelf. Bylaws, etc. one hundred percent ready to go. He opens an account in the corporation’s name, TransEuropa-something, this lawyer suggests, but whatever name our good friend wishes. Something that sounds respectable, and he makes a deposit.”

  “That large an amount will alert the authorities?”

  “Not if we find a no-questions bank. After that, it’s simply a bank-to-bank transfer. Say look, I ask as someone who’s known you many years, what is this? You sound suspicious.”

  “I also understand something about this kind of operation. The Americans prefer the Caribbean. The British, Gibraltar. But these tidbits don’t make me an expert in money laundering.”

  “Tidbits is what you call my work?”