That was possible. But it was also his preferred explanation. It would justify his previous hesitations about the man’s information.
“That’s possible,” I said. “But if he is, why did he give this much away about Staub? He led me to the man’s door.”
Fortier shrugged a Gallic shrug, probably of the don’t-look-to-me-for-an-explanation variety.
I would otherwise have questioned Staub’s knowing Lang’s street but not his address, but Fortier’s shrug rendered that redundant. So I asked, “Do you grab Staub now?”
He shook his head no. “You felt it wise to follow him. I agree. Bernhard Lang aside, we don’t know how many are involved. It may have been an accomplice this morning. Now that you’ve found Herr Staub, along with the window I will give you one of my men to relieve you. But I wish to keep it simple and expert. Which is why your Mr. Trask gave me you. Our procedures in this sort of work can be clumsy with larger numbers. I’m afraid of our wolf smelling us and vanishing into the woods.”
Staub wasn’t the only wolf in the forest: “I can handle it with minimal help,” I said. “I won’t misjudge him again.”
Fortier waved this away. “Please. I have not doubted you.”
I said, “I’ve heard both explosions. They sound like dynamite. If that’s so, Staub couldn’t bring in as much as he needs as a refugee. Where is he getting it in Paris?”
“He can’t,” Fortier said at once, emphatically. Then, less emphatically: “He shouldn’t.” Then: “I don’t know.”
“There are surely others involved.”
“One thing we are good at is spying on ourselves. My people will return to every Parisian who dealt in commercial explosives in peacetime. They are now under strict controls. The building trade. We know them well.”
“And I’ll return to Staub.”
We stood.
Fortier wagged his head sharply, and he circled back to how we began this morning, with the bomb just across the bridge. He waved a hand at the wall of his office. “Close to home, but not so close,” he said. “He preys on the children on the village path, the livestock in the field. We can guard our own. I am safe. General Joffre is safe. President Poincaré is safe. But we cannot protect every bistro, every Metro platform.”
12
I returned to my room at the hotel.
Louise was gone.
For the sake of what I had to do, I was glad for that.
But I did step to the bed. She’d made it. Crisp-cornered as a Boston hospital bed.
There was not a trace of either of us there.
As if she knew I was someone else now.
I packed my own satchel so that I could follow Franz Staub. I would not wait for Fortier’s window.
I approached Le Rouge et le Noir on its side of the street. As I neared, I scanned the building fronts on the opposite side. The six-story building directly across from the bar was all French windows fronted by outer louvered shutters and waist-high iron balustrades. I noted, on this cloudy mid-morning, the floors and apartment positions where adjacent sets of both shutters and louvers remained closed. There were three of them. In this German Quarter these might have held tenants who fled or were evicted or arrested.
I went one floor up and knocked at the door of such an apartment. No one answered. The whole building had simple ward locks. Easy. I found the right skeleton key among my tools. I opened the door to a bare wooden floor stretching into darkness. Nothing was on the walls. I closed the door behind me. Softly, nevertheless. I lit my flashlight.
At the end of the hallway the front room was empty but for a couple of pieces of unsalvaged furniture.
I went to the windows, opened them, opened their shutters, closed the windows. From where I stood I could see the sidewalk in front of the bar. Whoever could have afforded this second-floor front could afford to escape Paris to a more remote place, away from the mob fervor against them in the capital.
I stepped back into the room and put my bag down. A few minutes later I was the image of a wounded vet with a cane and a limp and a bandage round my head and ready to go outside in a corduroy teamster’s coat and a flat, wool cap.
Sitting randomly across the room was a dresser with a cracked mirror and a couple of drawers missing. I pulled it near the window and arranged its angle to let me sit upon it and watch the opposite sidewalk. I leaned forward and the Mauser tightened against the small of my back. I wondered if I’d have to use it today.
Then I waited.
And I told my mind—which wanted to dwell on the Pont Neuf Metro—to shut the hell up.
Not even an hour later, Staub emerged. I grabbed coat and cap and cane and dashed down the steps and into the street. I saw him heading in the same direction as yesterday, west toward Lang’s street. He was walking briskly, seemingly unwary.
For a moment I hesitated, as I finished putting on my workman’s coat. The bar was likely empty at this hour. A bomb had already gone off today, and this might be my best chance to search Staub’s room and his belongings.
But I had to stay with him.
I lifted my stage prop of a cane and jogged after him to establish a comfortable following distance, and when that was accomplished, I slowed to match his pace, ready to touch down my cane and slow further to a limp at the first twitch of his shoulder or sideways movement of his head.
He gave a quick glance in Lang’s direction, as he passed Cité de Trévise, but did not so much as break his stride.
He scudded by the Folies Bergère in full sail with no glance at all.
Less than fifteen minutes later we crossed Boulevard Haussmann, strode along the east side of the Paris Opera House, and emerged on the Place de l’Opéra.
On the west side of the place was a large Haussmann building built for a triangular plot with its flatiron-end clipped to make a fifty-yard facade. Along it ran the green-awninged terrasse of the Café de la Paix.
Staub skirted the front of the Opera in the direction of the café and stopped at the corner of Rue Auber to wait for a dray of beer barrels to enter the traffic of the square.
He waited patiently, his hands clasped behind his back. Then he crossed in the wagon’s wake, stepping casually over fresh dray-horse apples, and he strolled before the café’s terrasse. The morning was chill but the marble-topped tables and wicker-backed chairs had been set up for any hearty boulevardiers, of which there were a dozen or so. Staub passed them by and went inside.
I gave him a little time to get situated, and then I limped into the café on my cane.
The main room was all mirrors and gilt, with a high stucco ceiling. The lunch rush had not quite begun. A young woman was seating Staub at a table along the left-hand wall, which looked out onto the Boulevard des Capucines.
She approached me next, moving her eyes from the bandage around my head to the scar on my cheek to the cane in my hand, and she put her hand on my forearm to lead me to a table. I asked for one to my right, looking out on the place.
Seated, I held the menu before me and kept one eye on Staub across the way.
He too had raised the menu, though his eyes did not shift in my direction.
A waiter arrived at Staub’s table in an evening coat and a white wraparound apron that extended from waist to shoe tops.
Staub put down the menu and lifted his face to the man, who bent slightly to him. They exchanged words for a time. It struck me from watching them that Staub was taking pains to get his order just right.
The waiter went away and Staub leaned back, took out a cigarette, lit it, pulled a drag, and blew it toward the window beside him. His gaze followed. He took off his hat and laid it on the chair next to him.
He seemed to be relaxing into a leisurely meal.
I put down my menu and rose and limped from the Café de la Paix.
I hurried across the place as fast as a plausible disabled poilu could. When I’d slipped out of eyeshot, heading toward Boulevard Haussmann, I lifted the cane and strode quickly east.
Ten minutes la
ter I was standing at the cellar door of Le Rouge et le Noir.
It yielded to a skeleton key.
I entered, relocked the door.
I waited.
The place was very dim. No sounds.
I switched on my flashlight.
I crossed to the back hallway, entered its toilet-tainted air, stopped at Staub’s door.
I picked the right skeleton key from my pouch and slipped it into the keyhole. I thought how appropriate it was: the simple thing getting past the complex defense. The protective wards inside the lock defended it only from an equally complex key. This stripped-down metal stem and bit slid through unimpeded, unnoticed, and turned the locking bolt.
Staub’s door opened.
I stepped in and closed the door behind me.
My tungsten beam flashed first in the mirror over the dresser, fell to the dresser top, and then found the bed and the nightstand, which supported a small, electric table lamp. I went to the lamp and switched it on.
I looked around once more. Dresser first. The shaving mug and travel case were still sitting out. Beside them were a hairbrush and, stuck upright in its bristles, a comb.
Inside the case was a fine Solingen straight razor with an ivory handle. A badger-hair shaving brush. A pair of tweezers.
I began to go through the drawers.
In two side-by-side half drawers, I found merely toiletries. Toothbrush and paste. Toilet soap wrapped in a handkerchief. Witch hazel and talcum and a tin of brilliantine.
As commonplace as they were, these objects made me pause. I picked up the tin. Painted gold and green with embossed flowers. Vinolia Brilliantine. To slick Franz Staub’s hair.
I put the tin back precisely where I’d found it.
I went through the full-width drawer one level down.
A union suit, separate sets of undershorts and undervests. Neatly rolled socks. A cotton nightshirt and a flannel bathrobe.
I lifted each item carefully. Felt through it.
In the bottom drawer were three carefully folded dress shirts, linen collars, two silk ties, one red, one blue.
I looked around the room again. On the floor at the foot of the narrow bed was a leather suitcase. I laid it on the bed and opened it. Folded inside was a three-piece sack suit of gray wool. I carefully lifted the suit out and placed it aside, and I went over the suitcase carefully, looking for hidden compartments.
There was nothing.
I refolded the suit and replaced the suitcase on the floor.
Staub was a cool customer.
Not that I had any doubts, but the man was no refugee. He’d packed like a gent on a business trip.
He had to have another base in Paris. The bombs had to be put together somewhere.
But I needed to search this room for every cleft and crevice where he might have put something that could yield a lead.
The obvious places first.
I lowered myself to my knee and shined the light beneath the bed.
Nothing.
For ten minutes more I searched beneath and behind bed frame and nightstand and dresser. Behind and beneath each dresser drawer. Around and within a washstand in a corner. Along the walls.
Nothing.
I stood in the center of the room and focused my thoughts.
This place allowed Staub simply to sleep and dress. Not more than fifteen minutes had passed. I still could get back to the Café de la Paix before he had finished his leisurely lunch.
So be it.
I turned and stepped to extinguish the electric light on the nightstand. And I was struck by a thought: This is a tiny room, under the ground, down a back hallway of a bar where German nationalists have gathered unmolested each night for sixteen months. If a German spy could feel safe anywhere in Paris, it would be here.
As that thought blossomed in my head, my hand remained on the light switch without snapping it. I’d hesitated. I withdrew the hand.
I looked at the bed.
I’d searched behind it and beneath it.
I had not searched in a place where a German spy would never put something important. Unless, perhaps, he felt safe.
The bed was neatly made. Staub was as precise in this as a nurse. His blanket and sheet were folded back together in an even, layered flap. Centered on the exposed bottom sheet was his flat rock of a horsehair pillow.
I lifted the pillow.
Lying there was a five-by-seven manila envelope.
I put the pillow aside and I sat down on the bed.
I picked up the envelope.
It was well-handled and not sealed.
I looked inside.
There were two items.
I took out a sheet of pale blue bond. I unfolded it carefully, recognizing at once that it had been unfolded many times over many years. Its message was written in German in a florid hand rendered through a fine-point, flexible-nib fountain pen that narrowed and flared often. It was dated October 12, 1890. It read:
My darling Franz,
We parted only an hour ago. I still feel the touch of your hand on mine. I still see the brightness of your eyes under the linden trees. We must never part again, my treasure.
Forever your Greta
I slipped the other item out of the envelope. A cabinet card. I knew who would be pictured there.
A young Franz Staub, hair brilliantined, mustache twirled, sat in a chair in a Berlin photographer’s studio. And behind him stood a young woman with her hand firmly on his shoulder, her hair rolled up, her collar high-standing. She was big-boned and wide-shouldered. A young Valkyrie. The Greta of the love note was the Greta who had seemed so freshly in love with Bernhard Lang.
That affair was fresh.
Franz Staub was no bomber. Probably no German agent. He was a wronged husband. He’d come to Paris to take back his wife from the man who had recently stolen her. And perhaps have his revenge.
And thinking of Lang, I heard him again warning me that this man was so dangerous that I needed to kill him without hesitation.
I was this wife-stealing German maître d’s hired assassin.
To resist my rising rage, I folded Staub’s love letter. Folded it carefully, for it was fragile after a quarter of a century and a hundred weepy readings in the past few months. I forced my hands to stay focused on a nonviolent task, though they were not happy about it. I put the letter upon the cabinet photograph, whose heavy card stock would protect it. I slid them both, together, into the envelope. I laid the envelope in the center of the upper end of the bed and placed the pillow over it.
I still was furious. But at least not actionably.
And then I thought of the matter of my password. The coached lie of how I obtained it. Dieter the waiter at the Café de la Paix.
I’d seen Dieter half an hour ago.
Staub had been lying or wangling or threatening or paying Dieter for Lang’s exact address.
I rose from the bed.
Perhaps Staub would eat a thoughtful meal before doing what he had to do.
But perhaps he’d ordered only coffee.
Or nothing at all.
Perhaps he was heading straight for his wife and her lover.
When I stepped into the street before the bar, I was considering two courses of action. The easy one, the one that would satisfy my fury with Lang, though indirectly, would be to return to my hotel. Let Staub do what he felt he had to do. Let the three of them suffer whatever were the consequences.
But I’d still be responsible for whoever got killed, even if I wasn’t calling the shots.
The second course of action would have me wade into the middle of a nasty love triangle. Which seemed like a very bad idea.
Nevertheless, I struck off west, heading for Lang’s place. If I was lucky, I’d get there before Staub and all I’d need to do would be to warn the maître d’, punch the son of a bitch in the face, and leave.
But climbing the stairs at number seven, Cité de Trévise, I knew something was wrong. The apartment do
or at the landing was halfway open and a woman was standing there staring up the staircase. As I appeared from the steps below, she looked me in the eyes as if I were a madman, stepped back, and shut the door quickly but quietly.
I paused at the foot of the steps to the third floor. Lang’s floor.
I heard nothing.
I pulled the Mauser from the small of my back, released the safety, and climbed the stairs as softly as possible.
When my head was about to become visible on the floor above, I stopped. I listened again.
Nothing.
Lang’s apartment was at the rear. My aural focus was in that direction.
But now from the other way, from the front of the building, an apartment door clicked open, then abruptly clicked shut again.
Silence once more.
If I was going to do this, I just had to do it.
I lifted my pistol and went up the rest of the steps, quickly, bringing the Mauser to bear down the hallway to the back.
Halfway along, Bernhard Lang’s body lay facedown.
Beyond, the door to his apartment was shut.
I approached Lang.
His arms were sprawled outward. One leg was bent oddly akimbo. The bullet had gone into his spine between his shoulder blades.
I stepped around him and approached the door.
The door that seemed closed from a distance, wasn’t. It had snugged up against the jamb just before the latch bolt caught.
I put my ear against the door to listen.
Nothing.
No.
Not nothing. Not quite. Heavy breathing. Gasping, for its sound to make it through the wood.
I stepped back, centered the Mauser waist-high over the threshold, lifted my foot, and kicked the door open.
Half a dozen paces down the hallway Greta stood facing me, absolutely still, wearing her flowered bathrobe with the tasseled cinch, her hair loosened and tumbled wildly over her shoulders, her arms dropped to her sides. She was gazing at the floor before her.
At her feet were Staub’s feet. He was lying on his back. At my end was his brilliantined hair. Halfway in between, a kitchen carving knife was buried deep in the center of his chest.
Greta lifted her eyes to me.
Paris in the Dark Page 10