“Who? What — a policeman? What man?”
“Do we have to send you Kirsi’s right eye to help you remember?”
“No, no, I tell you! I spoke to no one!” His mind raced, who is she talking about? He replayed the tram ride. Then he remembered the man who stood next to him for a time; he had a Bluetooth earpiece and was chatting to someone. “Wait, there was a man next to me talking on his phone, but not to me; it was a small earpiece; you couldn’t see it? I didn’t speak to him at all.”
There was a long pause. The sweat beaded on Raffey’s forehead. These animals on the phone acted swiftly and with no mercy. How could I have been so stupid to take a public tram? “Please believe me, I didn’t speak to anyone; I wouldn’t; he wasn’t talking to me! I wouldn’t do anything to hurt them.” More silence. Then the line went dead. “No! No! I didn’t do anything wrong. Don’t hurt them — please,” Raffey cried out as he strangled the phone in his right hand. He crumpled to the floor and whimpered, imagining the horror he had just brought down on little Kirsi.
Then the cell phone rang again. He fumbled with it to open it. “Please, please…”
“We will allow this one breach. But now the punishment doubles — if you disobey us, both eyes.” She hung up.
Raffey screamed and began to shake uncontrollably.
∞§∞
Being former FBI has its cachet, and still being an active FBI agent had perks, so Brooke, the current, and Joey, the former, stood before Paul Dumond, the chief of Station Interpol, Paris. His office looked as though it had been painted a semi-gloss putty color twenty years ago. It gave the place the same dismal funk as a South Bronx precinct house.
“We think we have found your mystery man. His name is Parnell Sicard, a.k.a. Percival Smyth, Percival Cutney and Percival Wallace. He is dead, 1983 Beirut. He was a Jesuit missionary trying to help the Christian sect in Lebanon when he died in the Hobart Towers blast.”
“Well, now we got a problem because, as I said, “Percy” was very much alive when the Surté snatched him right out from under me at the train station,” Joey said.
“Ah yes, that ‘incident’ officially never happened.”
“Wanna run that by me again?” Joey leaned onto his desk, his palms nearly missing an old spike onto which an inch of phone message slips were shish-kebabbed.
“I mean, there is no record, no radio calls and no judge’s decree on file.”
“Wait a minute; the director of French intelligence was there with Mr. Palumbo. Surely he has corroborated his story,” Brooke said.
“We have spoken with Director Dupré. He maintains the documents were authentic and he had no choice but to comply. Since there was no outstanding warrant to the contrary, he could not detain Sicard, especially with the clarity of the judge’s orders.”
“Can you at least tell me which judge signed the order?”
Even for a French guy, the look on his face said, ‘Oops, I didn’t think of that’ as he reached for the phone and told his secretary to contact Dupré.
Seven minutes had passed. Joey was looking out a nicotine-tinged windowpane at the comings and goings of the Parisians on the street. He realized that few were actually coming or going, as most were sitting at sidewalk tables, on benches or steps. Everyone was smoking and drinking coffee. This whole friggin’ country is one big Starbucks.
The phone rang; it was Dupré. Dumond put him on the speakerphone. “I believe it was Magistrate Vaval.”
“This is Joey Palumbo; what was the cause of the order?”
“The order read ‘person of interest’ in a Grand Inquiry.”
“Agent Brooke Burrell, FBI here. May I ask, inquiry into what?” She looked down at the phone as she talked.
“Ah, bonjour mademoiselle, that only the judge can say.”
“It’s like your Grand Jury, only a lot more secretive. Our liable laws and privacy statutes demand that all inquiries into possible wrongdoing be held in the closest confidence until, and only if, there is an indictment,” Dumond said, shaking his head in apology.
“That explains why there is no record of a file.” Brooke said.
“I work directly for the president of the United States. Do you think the judge will tell me?” Joey said.
Both Dupré on the phone and Dumond in the office said simultaneously, “You can try!”
It took all of two hours, but the American ambassador to France, the French charge d’affair, a handful of French diplomats and Joey were huddled in the judge’s outer chamber. His clerk emerged and announced that the judge would see only the ambassador. Joey thought better of protesting as the ambassador was well briefed and a good negotiator.
Ten minutes ticked by as Joey sat in the judge’s anteroom, which smelled of steam heat and plaster. His eyes kept falling on the visages of past magistrates, frozen on canvas in the somber hues of cracked oils, each one looking fouler than the last. It was as if their game face was scorn — a way of letting the Jean Q. Publis know his place in their legal system.
The ambassador exited and nodded for Joey to follow. As was good practice in foreign government buildings, they both walked in silence.
It wasn’t until they were in the ambassador’s limousine that the man spoke. “Well, that cost me.”
“He charged you for the information?” Joey asked.
“In not so many words. He knows my brother is the dean of admissions at Harvard and, well, the judge has a niece — ”
“Oh, dear God.”
“So he asked me to call my brother right from his office.”
“Okay, can we get to Cutney, eh, Smyth, damn it, Sicard? Who is he and why did the judge pull him from me?”
“He would not say.”
“Whoa, I thought you were good at this? You got the girl into Harvard and walked away with Stu?”
“I’m sorry, Stu?”
“Stu Gatz!”
The Ambassador wasn’t familiar with the slang Italian term meaning ‘nothing,’ whose actual translation was “testicles.” When the old men at the barbershop would say a deal didn’t work or fell through, or they didn’t win the amorous attention of a lady, they would ceremoniously grab their crotch and say, “Stugatz.” It was sometimes shortened to I got or didn’t get ‘Stu.’ Although not in the lexicon of the diplomat, he got the gist of it by its usage. “Now, I did get some information. It seems Sicard was called in for questioning about a long-abandoned case.”
“So in other words, the judge just dug up some reason to get him away from me?”
“This is the case file.” His aide handed him his portfolio. “This is what I got for the phone call.”
Joey perused the files. They were in French, but he was enough of a cop to recognize the universal appearance of a police death investigation report. Joey handed the pages to the ambassador’s aide, “Here, I cut French in high school.”
The aide scanned it quickly and translated. “On or about August 20, 1997, Franciscan Friar Wilhelm Gregory, known local transient address 324 of the Sofitel on 14 rue Beaujon was found deceased in a stairwell at said address. The coroner ruled the cause of death was asphyxiation arising out of a blunt force trauma to the larynx. Probably as a result of a fall down the hotel’s concrete exit stairway. The body found slumped face down with the head hanging over the metal railing of the landing. No suspicious forensic evidence was found.”
“Is there an investigating officer’s signature?”
The aide flipped through the pages, “Yes, here it is; Sergeant Dupré, fourth prefecture, Paris.”
“Wasn’t there a Director Dupré somewhere in all this?” The ambassador recalled.
“Yes, he was my liaison when Sicard gave me the slip.”
“Do you think it’s the same Dupré?”
“If he is, I am going to be really pissed.”
XI. THE GOLDEN GOAT
Brooke had traced a branch of her family tree to the small mountain town of Èze, in Monaco, on the French Riviera. She had also tra
ced the path of the electrolytic fluid to a shipping company in Nice, a few kilometers down along the coast. On the way back from her investigation of the manifests of three ships, one of which she had come to suspect handled the P784 fluid that propelled the “whale,” she would divert to the mountain-top hamlet and look up a cousin she had met only once in America.
The Marnee Line was a small company that operated only three ships, older freighters that regularly traversed the Mediterranean. The vessels carried mostly specialty cargoes, things like Italian leather goods to Libya or Egyptian cloth to Naples or French tires to Tunisia. This was cargo that didn’t travel by or wasn’t containerized freight. The company was definitely a dying remnant of the merchant mariner past. Still, this method of shipping offered direct, three-days or fewer, point-to-point delivery without losing time in the big containerized hubs. In addition, the line offered some degree of anonymity because there weren’t enough EU customs agents to cover the hundreds of thousands of containers, much less three small ships. Then there was the fact that one of the ships, which they barely used now, was a tanker/freighter. It had a cargo hold and a tank hold. It was rumored once to have brought Burgundy wine to the then-dictator of Libya, and returned with thirty thousand gallons of diesel oil in return. Although the market price of the wine per gallon was greater than the fuel, it was during the worldwide shortage in the late 70s, which, to the shipping company, made that ‘vintage’ of fuel worth its weight in champagne!
Brooke’s fairly decent Americanized French served her well enough that she was getting along nicely with the woman who was part bookkeeper and part cargo facilitator. Brooke was keenly interested in a shipment of “automotive fluid” that went to Saint-Eugene, Algeria. “There is a Saint-Eugene in a Muslim country?”
“Before it was Muslim.”
“Right, I see. Where did the cargo come from?”
The woman opened up three filing cabinets and scoured through densely packed manila folders, their tabs bent and folded. Soon she selected one and fought to liberate the folder from the vice-like grip of too many in one drawer. “Here we go,” the woman said with exertion, then she flipped open the file and quickly scanned it. “The origin point of the load was Marseilles.”
That was a relief for Brooke, because in Marseilles they had heard of computers. And the bookkeeper actually had a shipping order number, which the boat crew used to identify the cargo they were to load. She thanked the woman and then planted one more question as innocently as she could. “Wasn’t the wine spoiled by the remnants of oil in the tanker?”
The woman laughed, “No, no, my dear, the wine was in the dry hold in casks but the oil came back in the tanks.”
“Oh, I thought maybe that was the reason for the insurance claim your company filed.”
“Pardon?” Suddenly there was concern on her face.
“Or was it pirates? Oh, yes, that was it. Your boat was attacked by pirates and you settled a claim for damages at sea.”
As she watched for her reaction, Brooke could see the wheels turning in the woman’s head. Brooke knew the chain-smoking, emaciated gal (Monday through) Friday was covering for her boss, who had probably made the whole story up and cashed in on the 1.2 million of insurance money for the P784 liquid that Joey had discovered found its way to the terrorists.
“I know nothing of this. It may have been before my time here,” she said as she snuffed out her third cigarette since Brooke arrived.
Brooke let her off the hook because, after all, she wasn’t there as an insurance investigator. “Perhaps I am mistaken.”. Thank you, you have been most generous with your time. Adieu.”
As Brooke left the offices on the seamier edge of the otherwise beautiful Nice waterfront, she took a deep breath to clear her lungs from the smoky little office. She saw the last light of day in the deepening red sky and looked forward to dinner with her cousin, Mathilde, in Èze.
∞§∞
The French Rivera is legendary as the playground of the rich and famous. Its combination of sun, sea, air and biorhythmic waves ease the compression on the human nervous system. It makes everyone, from a rich Arab sheik to a plumber, breathe easy and see the world as a beautiful place. This night, the air had a warm softness, with the aroma of baker’s ovens and chef’s stoves preparing dinner for the restaurants of the Château de La Chèvre d’Or.
The entire hotel was nestled high atop the highest peak in Èze Village, and the delightful odors wafted up to Brooke’s still-higher room. As she sipped crisp white wine on her terrace, she could see airplanes landing at the airport in Nice on her right, and the lights from the multi-million-dollar yachts steaming into Monte Carlo to her left. Her cousin, Mathilde, who was the manager at the hotel, had saved her the best room and sent along an incredible bottle of ’09 Le Montrachet white burgundy. The little cheese and baguette plate was heavenly, and as she pinched off and popped a perfect grape into her mouth, she thought of the last time she had seen Mathilde. It was Easter and they were both twelve. Brooke’s Uncle Danny brought Mathilde and his family to America on vacation. In that week, Brooke and Mathilde became the best of friends. When it came time for her to go back to France they promised to be pen pals for life. Soon, Brooke began plastering her room with the aero stamped red-and-blue-striped airmail envelopes from each letter she received. They communicated by mail for years, well into their late teens. Then, as they were both distracted by life, letters became less frequent and eventually trickled down to none.
They hadn’t seen one another in almost twenty-five years. Recently, like millions of other people on Earth, they discovered Facebook and now they were “friends.” In a few minutes, a quarter-century of separation would end, as Mathilde was coming to her room for a glass of wine before a dinner being prepared especially for them by the hotel’s executive chef.
“Alo, Brooke?” came from inside the room, and Brooke sprang from her chaise on the terrace. The two cousins squealed and hugged as they had when they were twelve.
“I can see now what you meant when you said that you work “close to God’,” Brooke said as they walked out on the terrace under the deep purple and orange hues of the Mediterranean’s last breath of sunset.
“Sometimes this whole hotel is inside a cloud.”
“You look great,” Brooke said. She did; Mathilde was perpetually thin but curvy. She had always looked good in the pictures they sent each other as kids. Now her hair was relaxed, long and wavy. Her green eyes had always been surprising in how they lit up.
Mathilde did a little prance as she flared out her skirt. “You like? There is a designer who always comes to the hotel. She gave me four of her samples. This is my favorite.”
“Like it was made for you!”
“I think maybe so, because she is a little, you know, into the femmes, and she is always giving me big tips. I think maybe she made it for me.”
“Whatever works,” Brooke said, shaking her head as she poured her alter ego a glass from the four-hundred-dollar bottle. “A toast! To cousins who are like sisters.”
“To my sister who happens to be my cousin!” Mathilde said.
To Brooke, who grew up with four brothers, that notion tickled her heart; she realized she did have a sister.
They sat on the two chaises and spent the next half-hour catching up on family — who had gotten married, had babies, and who had died. When Brooke told her that Harley had been killed in action, Mathilde crossed herself and uttered a little prayer in French for the cousin she only remembered as a boy. Brooke was glad she had held that bit of news off Facebook and until she was face to face with her cousin. They sat for a long minute, then Mathilde took a deep breath, smiled and scanned the horizon that encircled her world. “You like the room? I am sorry I was in town when you checked in, but you were early!”
“No problem; I’m here and that’s all that counts.” Brooke looked over the edge of the patio down at the sea. “I can’t believe there is a spot like this, this high up, with such a br
eathtaking view. I felt so sorry for the bellman, carrying my stuff up the little path. It must be a half-mile from the front desk, uphill.”
“That is why they are all young and very well built. I make sure of that.”
The girls laughed again as the women regressed to a giddier time.
“What is the name of the one who brought me up here, red hair, blue eyes, wide shoulders?”
“Ah, Benji. He is from the farms to the north. Sweet and dumb. Just the way I like them.”
“Mathilde, in America that could be considered sexual harassment by a superior.”
“Brooke, if I have sex with them, it is superior.”
“You don’t really — do you?”
“We are way up on a mountain. Sometimes it gets quiet and sometimes the only thing to do is sip wine and let nature take its course.”
“Yes, but how do you face them the next day? How do you go back to telling them what to do?”
“What go back? I am telling them exactly what to do the night before — sweet and dumb.”
“Whatever works.” Brooke toasted again.
By the time the Mediterranean was snuggly wrapped in a deep blue blanket of stars and a blue-white moon, they had killed off the whole bottle of expensive wine and decided to head down to the restaurant. The chef, who Brooke compared to Gérard Depardieu, didn’t they all look like him?, came out and greeted them. He actually did the French thing and kissed Brooke’s hand. Well, the true French way, more like he blew a kiss onto her hand. He then spun a wonderful tale of what he had prepared, why, and where his ingredients had come from, making special notice of the fact that he went to an out-of-the-way market that morning for the morel mushrooms that were a leading ingredient of his creation for them that evening. He had a twinkle in his eye and a boyish smile that said to Brooke, “Don’t worry about your food; cooking is the way I make love to women, and I do it every day.”
As he returned to the kitchen, Brooke lifted her Cosmo and proposed another toast. “To you, who really knows how to make a girl feel welcome.”
The God Particle Page 12