“An old story. To the victor goes revenge.”
“Paris’s Court of Justice unanimously found you aided Germany in violation of our penal code.”
“The logic of hate cloaked as justice.”
Stanislas fanned out the circulars on his desk. “Here are four ministerial announcements that covered your period of service from 1940 to 1945. Each advertised openings with higher salaries. Interior Ministry records show you stayed at your lower echelon post. Why?”
“I stayed out of principal.”
“Out of principal?”
“To permit me and not a pro-German Frenchman to control the collection of information. I could fiddle with the figures and give false readings of smuggling.”
“My, my, how self-sacrificing. During a time of unprecedented hardship, you turned down more pay to aid our country.”
There was a soft knock at the door. Stanislas demanded to know who was there. Couldn’t that person read the sign? He was conducting a hearing. A woman lawyer uttered her name so timidly her voice barely penetrated. Stanislas asked her to speak up. She repeated her name louder and said he had given her permission yesterday to examine her client’s dossier. Stanislas nodded at Christophe, and he pushed a trolley, thick with massive files, out into the corridor for her.
Boucher held himself erect, as if he refused to show any fatigue. Christophe returned and flexed his fingers to limber them. Stanislas suppressed a yawn. He wouldn’t reveal his own tiredness. “Your police testimony, ‘I heard this man shout, “Hey you, monsieur,”’ you stand by that?”
“I do.”
“He really shouted your name, didn’t he?”
“He did not.”
“You two knew each other.”
“That is simply not true.”
“Or his parents during the German Occupation of Paris.”
“Nonsense.”
“Or some other family member during the war.”
“I repeat: I never met him or anyone in his family. That should be clear.”
Stanislas dictated. Christophe typed.
“Another witness has sworn she thinks she might have heard Monsieur Pincus call out a name.”
“I repeat under oath she’s mistaken.”
“She’s testified twice she might have heard a name.”
“She’s mistaken twice.”
“Do you agree to confront her in my office?”
Boucher drew one leg in, then the other in a posture of withdrawal.
“Yes or no to a Confrontation?” Stanislas demanded.
“Monsieur Criminal Investigator, it will be my pleasure.”
Christophe finished typing the testimony and stretched across with it to Boucher, who began to read and sign each page.
Stanislas glanced over to the wall clock above the dossier shelf next to the door. He studied the man’s face for worry, doubt, or fear the ordeal might have inflicted. He found only blandness, as if he were reading a Sunday newspaper, and not a document that might condemn him to prison. Stanislas realized how foolish he was to think he could rattle him. He knew no more now than at the first hearing. He might uncover nothing new at any future Confrontation.
Boucher finished signing the last of the pages with an angry flourish and pitched the deposition onto Stanislas’s desk. He signed and handed it across to Christophe.
As his clerk began signing each page, Stanislas told Boucher he might contact him for a third hearing before any Confrontation and that he must remain in Paris until released.
“That purge, that trial,” Boucher said, “what the Resistance did to me was nothing but revenge. My family and I still suffer from their roughshod tactics.”
“However minor your role,” Stanislas said, “you were a careerist in an apparatus that did hateful things. Arrests based on anonymous letters. Detention without notifying family. Brutal interrogations. The firing squad. Gestapo methods. And some have never forgotten.”
“We were at war,” Boucher cried out.
“And that war may still continue. Good day.” Stanislas said.
Boucher rose before they did and departed without any handshakes and with the door flung open.
Stanislas pitched the file into a wire basket on his desk. Hopefully, after any Confrontation he could finish with this sordid man and the Occupation. If not and he must question him again, he’d interrogate him first thing in the morning and get it over with.
A red light on his phone console blinked. He took the call. The last of the security services was reporting. Like the other agencies, it had cross-referenced Léon Pincus under several possibilities. And like the others, it had found nothing. That result didn’t surprise him as he hung up. The man’s life appeared as opaque as the fog.
He stepped to the doorway and noticed the woman attorney, seated behind a desk in an alcove to his left, was busy studying the requested dossier. A commotion broke out to his right further down the hall. Several women in colorful skirts and blouses had swarmed around Boucher near the exit. One pounded his chest. Another beat his arm. A third clawed at his face. Gendarmes leaped from their benches. Three shoved them into an office. Two escorted Boucher to the door where he thanked them with a wave. The corridor quieted as quickly as it had erupted.
Leclair paused beside Stanislas. “They’re Romanian Gypsies. The mother was caught using her eight-year-old son to beg.”
Had Boucher pushed them in his haste to leave? Or caught them picking his pocket? Stanislas couldn’t tell, and neither could the officer when asked; he’d just come from the men’s room, and the fight had happened too quickly to catch the opening scene.
Stanislas did glimpse the closing, though. Alerted by the scuffle, a photographer had shouted recognition of Boucher and snapped him onto film. And several reporters gleefully scribbled the man’s plight for next morning’s dailies.
“He deserves those parasite journalists.” Avoiding Stanislas’s eyes, Leclair shuffled past him into the office. “I thought I should tell you about a slight problem I had.”
CHAPTER 16
PLOYS
Leclair dropped into the chair as though he had just witnessed his favorite soccer team humiliated. “What’s the latest from the capital of the people’s paradise, Monsieur Minh?”
Christophe squeezed out from behind his desk. “An undersecretary in Hanoi wrote they might set up a commission to study further the matter of compensation for our plantation.”
“You’ll get payment when Judge Cassel finds time to sail his boat.”
“I’m afraid you’re right.”
“Your grandfather should have stuck to smuggling opium,” Stanislas said, easing into his swivel chair, “and forgotten about buying land and becoming respectable.”
“He’d certainly have saved us heartache and legal bills,” Christophe said, moving toward the doorway. “I’ll call Madame de Silvy to verify your appointment for tomorrow when I return from lunch.” He pulled shut the door behind him.
Stanislas scribbled A Tale of Two Cities on a notepad and began to underline “buy Penguin Edition?” when the pencil lead broke. “Why the glumness, officer?” He rattled open his middle drawer and grabbed a pen. “You still can’t find any family for the Pincus case?”
“I found the next best thing. The name of a non-relative that concierge had jotted down and temporarily misplaced. A Monsieur Dautry. First name, Edgar. Judging by his birth date, he’s quite old. He lives near a farming village in the Masssif Central. Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. He doesn’t have a phone, but Officer Henner has volunteered to go down there. Maybe that elderly man can help us.”
“This fog giving you fits with the Boucher apartment stakeout?”
“We’re doing the best we can with the manpower available.”
“No luck tracking down any German friends of his?”
“No luck so far, but we’re still asking around. That Monsieur Altmann off-the-book job you gave me, that’s the problem. I lost him.”
“What?” Sta
nislas lay his pen down and looked across, stunned. “You lost him?”
“He was very sly.”
“Deliberately throwing you off?”
“In Cadenabbia. He knew the Italian Lake District well. Certainly better than me. It was my first time there.” Officer Leclair straightened in his chair, trying to rally some dignity back. “Following him was easy at first. From Paris to Milan and from there to Como, no problem. From Como to Cadenabbia, no problem either.”
“But you had a problem in Cadenabbia?” This should have been, Stanislas thought, a simple shadowing job. “He take the train to Milan?”
“Some four-year old commuter start-up. Air Swissthanza from Paris to Milan under ‘Myron Kahn.’ From there, the train to Como. After that, a taxi to Cadenabbia.” He leaned across and placed some receipts on Stanislas’s desk. “He really did look like an ordinary tourist for awhile.”
Stanislas glanced at the receipts. He’d have to account for the expenses somehow.
“In fact,” Leclair continued, “he didn’t use any tactic I could detect at the time. He looked so easy to follow. So ill, I mean. Always coughing and tossing Kleenex away. And your assignment was easy.”
“Until Cadenabbia?”
The mention of that infamous town deflated Leclair. He slumped back into his chair with a nod. “Until Cadenabbia.”
“He probably thought you’d be extra vigilant in crowded Milan and less alert where there were fewer people.” He shook open a side drawer and tossed the receipts inside. “Well, what did he do in that bustling village?”
Leclair leaned forward and with renewed vigor snapped four color photographs onto the desk. “Here, a lovely side shot of him checking into the Hotel Italia under the name of Albert Mandel. Very expensive taste, incidentally. Notice that stunning chandelier in the dining room. Here, a front shot of him sipping a drink at the hotel’s Bar Verdi. Here, emerging from Banco Medici. Here, admiring a lakeside view. You see how he looked like a tourist?” His voice had risen for a plea of understanding.
Stanislas held each photo near the desk lamplight and examined them. The slight figure of Jules, back to the camera, admiring a plant with the outline of an island and ferry landing in fog in the background. Jules, licking his thumb before counting his notes, after emerging from the bank. In neither these or in the remaining photos could he detect the man knew Leclair shadowed him. The officer was right. The man did fit the image of a sightseer, not someone who had somewhere somehow in his past learned evasion expertise. This was more than he had expected. “No shot of him on the ferry?” He rubbed banded the pile and pitched it into the drawer beside the receipts.
“None getting on, no. That’s where I must have lost him. A Polish tour group was waiting to board, and I assumed he was among them.”
“You boarded, and by the time you realized your mistake, the ferry was docking on the island?”
“Something like that.”
“Before you boarded, did you notice by any chance a taxi near the ferry landing?”
Officer Leclair shook his head and glanced away. The questioning had apparently become too painful. “I was too busy searching for him in that crowd.”
He had dragged out enough embarrassed history. “Well, even if you had followed him all the way to his mystery destination, what could you have done in the two days I gave you?” Maybe, he wondered, the job’s unofficial status had lulled the policeman into complacency. Still, an old man throwing off a veteran like Leclair? And using at least one cooked passport? He might look into this himself, he decided. For Anna’s sake.
“Can I try again?” With his earnest expression, Leclair looked like a champion upstaged, who wanted a rematch.
Stanislas pushed himself to his feet, and Leclair did the same. “You’d lose him even earlier next time and suffer a heart attack from the humiliation. Once is enough. I thought I’d do a friend a favor, see if some spa had duped this man into a miracle cure. I can’t risk another off-the-books trip. If the president of the tribunal found out….” He drew a finger across his neck and winked.
Officer Leclair shook his head in wonder as he paused by the door. “That old man looked so innocuous.”
“It takes an expert to lose an expert. After all these years, Officer Leclair, you’ve met your match.”
Stanislas closed the door and dropped his smile. If Jules had traveled to a spa, why his trickery? Only that man knew where he went in the taxi after dumping Leclair. The less Anna knew about what he might uncover, he decided, the better.
A gendarme was checking the identity papers of a one-legged man on crutches queued before the Annex’s massive front doors. Boucher glanced at the cripple, who at that moment looked at him. His eyes bulged with recognition, and he yelled an insult. Boucher ignored the charge and stepped further away from the line to await his ride. As he shoved his cell phone into his overcoat pocket, he worried how he had sounded during the hearing. Bitter with something to hide? Or cooperative, with what anger displayed blamed on the interrogation’s length?
The heckler taunted him now furiously. “Collabo, coward! Collabo, coward!” The gendarme tried to shush him, but that only incited the man to shout a new invective. “There he is! Louis Boucher! A bullet to his head! That’s the only trial that traitor deserved! Collabo, coward! Collabo, coward!” and he clapped his hands to each word’s beat.
A murmur passed through the line behind him. A dark-skinned man in an overcoat joined in the clapping and shouted, “Sieg heil!”
Boucher knew he didn’t need more attention, so he stepped away from them to the curb when he heard coarse talk behind. He feared part of the interrogation’s aftermath continued and craned left for his driver. The quicker he departed, the better.
“Monsieur Boucher, a word, please.”
Boucher looked straight ahead.
A reporter approached from the side, a spiral notebook in one hand, a pen gripped like a dagger in the other. “Your reason for slumming with the unwashed here?”
Boucher shifted away from his inquisitor. “You members of the press understand a pretrial investigation’s secrecy.” He tugged up a glove in a show of intent to leave. “It’s a sacred concept of our legal system.”
His No Comment aroused other journalists’ aggressiveness, and they swarmed around him. “Pretrial secrecy?” A petite woman reporter with bangs scoffed at his answer. “Article 11 of the Code of Criminal Procedure applies to investigating magistrates, their clerks, and officers of the judicial police, not to witnesses.”
“Nevertheless, I won’t comment out of respect for the hearing.”
A man armed with a micro-recorder elbowed past four colleagues and thrust it into his face. “What do you mean by ‘out of respect for the hearing’?”
A third didn’t want for his answer. “Examining Magistrate Cassel questioned you for over an hour. You’re involved in something serious?”
Boucher repeated he wouldn’t say anything and indicated his chauffeur had arrived.
Several reporters scurried out of the Mercedes’s way. The driver braked in front of Boucher, hopped out, and yanked the rear door open.
They jammed around Boucher in one last vicious assault. Would the examining magistrate interrogate him again? If the hearing wasn’t serious, why did he look shaken? Did he think the children and grandchildren of his Occupation victims could ever forgive him?
He waved a good-bye and pushed through. They, in turn, shoved each other for a final question as Boucher disappeared into cushy safety.
With a slam of the car’s door, the chauffeur threw up a barrier. Boucher pressed two buttons. The first tripped a lock, securing him against the hordes. The second zipped up his window with a comforting hum.
Undeterred, one journalist stooped and hollered a question that misted the glass with his anger. Boucher cupped a hand behind an ear to indicate a penalty of age prevented his understanding as the Mercedes lurched away.
“A rough pack, those jackals,” the drive
r said, eyeing Boucher in his rear view mirror, and asked where he wanted to go.
The shutters pressed closed for days against the occasional protestor’s rocks had turned his apartment into a cave, Boucher reflected. He had suffered enough confinement. “Just drive around, Mario,” he said.
He settled back and through half-closed eyes saw him zigzag his way eventually onto Quai de Montebello. Notre Dame’s flying buttresses off to his right didn’t thrill him this time. A sense of menace came over him. He sat up abruptly and glanced back through the blurry window. A car of indeterminate make swung behind with two dark silhouettes sitting in front. Had that judge ordered him followed? There was one way to see if they were. He’d move around. “The Ritz,” he said to Mario as he again looked back. The other car was still there.
Only two Ferraris and a Bentley, none of them occupied, sat parked outside the hotel as his driver braked at the entrance.
As Boucher wandered through the lobby, he noticed few guests. The weather and the bombings must have chased the rich elsewhere, he thought. At the threshold to his favorite bar, he gazed around. His anxiety that undercovers were somewhere made him long for the comfort of friends. He saw no one he knew, meandered into a restaurant, realized he hadn’t any appetite, and drifted outside. He detected no car of similar outline that had earlier followed. Place Vendôme appeared deserted. He must have imagined that threat. Or had he? This damn fog! It had thrown up a wall that obscured, that made judging difficult. One never quite knew what lay beyond.
The plaza’s misty splendor reminded him of St. Mark’s Square, of his family vacationing in Venice. Should he disobey that investigator’s injunction and leave Paris to visit them? Or flee without seeing them?
No, absolutely not, he decided. Flight would imply guilt. He would wait out his fate like he had since the Occupation. Like an innocent. He’d brazen through any Confrontation. No one was alive from the old days for that magistrate to question except poor Friedrich, and he had become senile.
Boucher jammed his hands into his coat pockets, confident he could survive any questions, and made his way south toward Rue de Rivoli when he suddenly stopped. Frau Kleist, he had overlooked her. Didn’t she still visit his old friend at that sanitarium despite her estrangement? He saw he remained in danger. He must telephone at once from a pay phone to avoid any tapped line. Warn her to destroy any personal correspondence. He must destroy any too. That Judge Cassel could order a search of his home as well as wiretaps.
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