“Benny.” Angelo waved his cigar at an “Out to Lunch” sign behind the office door. “You don’t cooperate with us, we’re going to close you down. You’re going to be flying that thing for a month.”
Benny sat, despondent but defiant, in his chair.
“We’ll close you down, Benny. And if we do, I hope you got a lot of fire insurance.” Very slowly, very deliberately, Angelo scattered the ashes from his cigar over some of the rubbish strewn on the floor. “Real firetrap you got here. Owner’s away, fires happen, you know what I mean?”
Benny paled. “You son of a bitch. You wouldn’t …
“Who said anything?” Angelo asked, flicking some more ashes on the papers on the fence’s desk. “Hell of a fire this place’d make, though.”
“I’ll get you on a civilian complaint. Tell ‘em you threatened to burn me out.”
Angelo remembered Feldman’s whispered injunction a few hours earlier. “You know what you can do with your civilian complaint, Benny? You can shove it up your ass.”
The fence blinked, perplexed. He bad been arrested six times and walked each time. This time there was an element of menace, of coercion, he hadn’t experienced before. “Okay,” he said, resignation creeping into his voice.
“I don’t keep much cash around here, but we’ll make a deal.”
“Benny.” Angelo’s voice was low but firm. “That’s not the kind of deal I’m talking about. I don’t give a shit what you’re doing in here. I don’t give a shit how many welfare checks you’re making, whatever. I only want to know one thing, Benny: where did that card go?”
“Hey,” Benny said, mustering what defiance remained. “You gotta let me call my lawyer. I got a right to call my lawyer.”
“Sure thing, Benny.” The mirthless smile spread over Angelo’s teeth. “Call your lawyer.” The cigar came out of the detective’s mouth. With a low chuckle, he tapped the ashes on the fence’s desk. “What is he, anyway, your lawyer-some kind of fucking fireman?”
The dark-brown eyes that had been so full of fury a few minutes before were soft and liquid now, brimming with tears. Angelo studied his quarry. There came in every interrogation a critical moment like this when a man hovered on the brink, when one deft thrust could nudge him over. Or when, afraid of the consequences of giving somebody up, he’d step back, go in and take the collar. The detective leaned close to Benny, real warmth on his features this time. His voice was a hoarse seductive whisper. “All I need to know is where that card went, Benny. Then you and I got no problems.”
The lip, the lower lip, thrust out in its permanent pout, quivered slightly. The fence’s chin sank into his chest. It remained there awhile before he looked up at the detective. “Fuck it,” he said, “bust me.”
“Angelo.” It was Rand, his voice as soft and well modulated as that of a bank vice-president extending a new client a line of credit. “Perhaps you could let Mr. Moscowitz and me have a word together before we take him in?”
The detective looked irritably at the younger man, then at the fence. A sense of impotent rage, of humiliation, caused by his failure in front of Rand overwhelmed him. “Sure, kid,” he replied, making no effort to conceal his bitterness. “Talk to the motherfucker if you want.” He got up from Benny’s desk, his joints creaking, and walked wearily to the door to the anteroom. “Try to sell him a little fire insurance while you’re at it.”
“Mr. Moscowitz,” Rand said as the door closed behind his partner, “you are, I presume, of the Jewish faith?” He let his eyes rest on the gold Star of David peeking through the fence’s open shirt.
Benny looked at him, stunned. What the fuck have we got here, he thought scornfully, some kind of professor or something, talking like that, “of the Jewish faith”? His chin thrust defiantly forward. “Yeah. I’m Jewish. So what?”
“And you are, I presume, concerned about the security and well-being of the State of Israel?”
“Hey,” Benny’s poise was returning. “What are you cops doing? Selling bonds for Israel?”
“Mr. Moscowitz.” Rand leaned forward, his arms resting on the fence’s desk.
“What I’m about to tell you, I’m telling you in the strictest confidence, because I think you of all people should know it. It is of far greater concern to the State of Israel than the sale of a few bonds.”
Angelo was watching them through the glass panels. Benny seemed first skeptical, then concerned, then intensely interested. Finally his puckered little face exploded with emotion. He leaped up from his desk, barged through the door into the anteroom, headed past Angelo toward the window without even glancing at the detective. He thrust an angry outstretched arm at the window.
“It was a fucking Arab son of a bitch who wanted it.” He pronounced the word A-rab. “Hangs out there in that bar down the street!”
* * *
Tiens, General Henri Bertrand thought. Our cardinal has metamorphosed into Sacha Guitry going to Maxim’s. Once again he was in the elegant study of PaulHenri de Serre, the nuclear physicist who had supervised the construction and initial operations of Libya’s Frenchbuilt nuclear reactor. This time de Serre was dressed in a burgundy velvet dinner jacket and black tie. On his feet, the director of the SDECE noted, were black velvet pumps, their toes embroidered with gold brocade.
“So sorry to keep you waiting.” De Serre’s greeting was effusive, particularly so in view of the fact that Bertrand’s visit had interrupted a small sit-down dinner he was offering a group of friends. “We were just finishing dessert.” He went to his desk and picked up a mahogany humidor. “Do have a cigar,” he said, opening its heavy lid. “Try one of the Davidoff Chateau-Lafites.
They’re excellent.”
While Bertrand carefully prepared the cigar, the scientist stepped to the bar and poured two balloons of cognac from a crystal decanter. He offered one to Bertrand, then sank into a leather armchair opposite him, savoring as he did his first taste of his own cigar. “Tell me, any progress on the matter we spoke of this morning?”
Bertrand sniffed his cognac. It was superb. His eyes were half closed, a weary, melancholy gaze on his face. “Virtually none at all, I’m afraid.
There was one point I thought I should review with you, however.” The fatigue of his long and difficult day had weakened the General’s voice.
“That early breakdown that forced you to remove the fuel rods.”
“Ah, yes.” De Serre waved his cigar expansively. “Rather embarrassing that, since the fuel in question was French-made. Most of our uranium fuel, as you are perhaps aware, is American-made.”
Bertrand nodded. “I was somewhat surprised you hadn’t mentioned the incident in our chat this morning.”
“Well, cher ami”-there was no indication of concern or discomfiture in de Serre’s reply-“it’s such a technical, complex business I really didn’t think it was the sort of thing you were interested in.”
“I see.”
The conversation between the two men drifted on inconclusively for fifteen more minutes. Finally, with a weary sigh, Bertrand drained his cognac glass and got to his feet.
“Well, cher monsieur, you must excuse me once again for imposing on your time, but these matters …” Bertrand’s voice dwindled away. He started for the door, then paused to stare in rapt wonder at the bust glowing in its cabinet in the center of the room.
“Such a magnificent piece,” he remarked. “I’m sure the Louvre has few like it.”
“Quite true.” De Serre made no attempt to conceal his pride. “I’ve never seen anything there to match it.”
“You must have had an awful time persuading the Libyans to give you an export permit to take it out of the country.”
“Oh!” The scientist’s voice seemed to ring with the memory of recollected frustrations. “You can’t imagine how difficult it was.”
“But you finally managed to persuade them, did you not?” Bertrand said, chuckling softly.
“Yes. After weeks, literally weeks of argui
ng.”
“Well, you are a lucky man, Monsieur de Serre. A lucky man. I really must be on my way.”
The General strolled to the door. His hand was on the knob when he stopped.
For a moment he hesitated. Then he spun around. There was no hint of fatigue on his face now. The eyes that were usually half closed were wide open, glimmering with malice.
“You’re a liarl”
The scientist paled and tottered half a step backward.
“The Libyans didn’t give you an export permit to take that bust out of the country. They haven’t given anybody a permit to take anything out of there for the past five years!”
De Serre staggered backward across the room and collapsed in his leather armchair. His usually florid features glistened with the clammy pallor of the physically ill; the hand that clutched his cognac glass quivered lightly.
“This is preposterous!” he gasped. “Outrageous!”
Bertrand towered above him like Torquemada contemplating a heretic stretched out on his rack. “We spoke to the Libyans. And incidentally had a chance to learn about your misadventures in India. You’ve been lying to me,” he intoned, “since I walked in that door this morning. You’ve been lying about that reactor and how the Libyans cheated on it, and I know damn well you have.” The General was following his instincts, stabbing in the dark for the target the inquisitor in him told him was there. He leaned down and placed his powerful thumbs in the ridges of the scientist’s collarbones. “But you’re not going to lie anymore, my friend. You’re going to tell me everything that happened down there. Not in an hour. Not tomorrow morning. Right now.”
The General squeezed de Serre’s collarbones so hard he squirmed in pain.
“Because if you don’t, I shall personally see to it that you spend the rest of your life in Fresnes Prison. Do you know what prison is like?”
The word “prison” brought a wild, almost hallucinated flicker to de Serre’s eyes. “They don’t serve Davidoffs and Remy Martins after dinner at Fresnes, cher am!. What they do after dinner at Fresnes is sit around and bugger helpless old bastards like you silly.”
Bertrand felt the panic beginning to overwhelm the man. It was now, in these first instants of fear and hysteria, that all the advantages were with the inquisitor. Break him, the General’s instincts told him, break him quickly before he can start to reassemble his shattered psyche. Those long-honed instincts also suggested where the trembling man in the armchair would be most vulnerable.
“You think you’re going to retire in a few months, don’t you?” He almost hissed the words. “And you’re going to need every sou of your pension to go on living like this, aren’t you? I know because I spent the afternoon studying your bank accounts. Including the secret one you’ve been building up illegally in the Cosmos Bank in Geneva.”
De Serre gasped.
“You’re going to cooperate with me, Monsieur de Serre. Because if you don’t, I’m going to ruin you. By the time I’m finished with you, your wife won’t have enough money to bring you oranges out at Fresnes.”
Bertrand relaxed the pressures on de Serre’s collarbones and allowed his voice to take on a more gentle tone. “But if you do cooperate, I’ll promise you this. What brings me here is very important. So important that I shall go personally to the President of the Republic and intercede with him on your behalf. I’ll see that this is written off as completely as your little episode in India was.”
De Serre’s face was gray now. His chest heaved twice and his jaw fell open.
My God, Bertrand thought, the bastard is going to have a heart attack on me. A gagging sound rumbled up from the depths of de Serre’s bowels. The scientist let his cognac glass tumble to the floor and clapped his hand to his mouth to staunch the flow of vomit that spurted through his fingers and cascaded in a vile-smelling yellow-green stream down his burgundy dinner jacket’s lapels and onto the lap of his black trousers. Desperately, he pawed at his pocket for a handkerchief.
Bertrand grabbed his own handkerchief to clean him up, but the scientist had already half collapsed, holding his head in his hands, his chest shaking with sobs.
“Oh God, oh God!” The voice was shrill. “I didn’t want to do it. They made me!”
Bertrand picked up the cognac glass, went to the bar and filled it with Fernet Branca, the dark-brown liqueur the French use to settle queasy stomachs. He had his man. There was no need to continue playing the Spanish Inquisitor. He brought the glass back to the shaking scientists. As de Serre gratefully sipped it, Bertrand dabbed at the worst of the mess on his dinner jacket.
“If you were coerced,” he said, his tone as reassuring as that of an aging family physician at the bedside of a familiar patient, “it will make everything easier. Begin at the beginning and tell me exactly what happened.”
De Serre sobbed. “I didn’t want to,” three more times before he was able to continue.
“Every weekend I used to go down to Leptis Magna. One could find things occasionally in the sands there, particularly after a storm.” He took out a handkerchief and blew his nose, fighting to regain his composure. “There was a Libyan guard I met there. Sometimes, for a few dinars, he’d indicate where I could find things. Then one day he asked me into his but for tea.
He had that bust.” He pointed to the stone head glowing in its cabinet with what seemed now a mocking beauty. For a pathetic instant, de Serre stared at it as an older man might look at a younger woman with whom he is desperately in love at the moment of parting. “He offered it to me for ten thousand dinars.”
“An insignificant sum, 1 suppose, for such a piece?”
“God, yes.” De Serre sniffled. “It’s worth millions. Two weeks later, I was going to Paris for the Pentecost weekend. The Libyans had never, never looked at my bags, so I decided to take it with me.”
“And at the airport, Customs went right for your bags?”
“Yes.” De Serre seemed puzzled by the swiftness of Bertrand’s observation.
“Why wouldn’t they, since they had set you up? And then what happened?”
The wild, terrified look that had swept de Serre’s face earlier at the mention of the word “prison” illuminated his features with a fear akin to that of a trapped animal. He gagged and gulped at the Fernet Branca.
“They put me in prison.” The man, Bertrand saw, was becoming hysterical.
“Their prison was a black hole. A black hole with no light and no windows.
I couldn’t even stand up. There was nothing in it, no bed, no toilet bowl, nothing. I had to live in my own excrement.” De Serre shook. A touch of madness glowed on his face now, a glimpse of how close he must have come to insanity in that hole. Poor son of a bitch, Bertrand thought. He knew something about holes like that. No wonder he almost went over the edge when I mentioned the word “prison.” The scientist’s fingers clutched the flesh of Bertrand’s arms. “There were rats in there. In the dark I could hear them. I could feel them brushing against me. Biting me.” He shrieked involuntarily at his recollection of the rats’ nibbling bites, their jabbing little paws. “They gave me rice once a day. I had to eat it with my fingers before the rats could get it.” De Serre was crying uncontrollably now. “I got dysentery. For three days I sat in a corner in my own shit screaming at the rats.
“Then they came for me. They said I had violated their antiquities law.
They refused to let me call the consul. They said I would either have to spend a year in a jail like that or …”
“Or help them divert plutonium from the reactor?”
“Yes.”
The word was a quick, despairing gasp. Bertrand rose, took de Serre’s empty glass and refilled it with Fernet Branca.
“After what they had put you through, who can blame you?” he said, passing the glass to the trembling scientist. “How did you do it?”
De Serre took a gulp of the drink, then sat still a moment, panting, trying to regain his composure.
“It was relat
ively simple. The most frequent problem in any light-water reactor is faulty fuel rods. Some failure in the cladding that surrounds them. The fission products that build up in there as the fuel burns leak out through the fault into the reactor’s cooling water and contaminate it.
We pretended that had happened in our case.”
“But,” Bertrand said, thinking back to his talk with his scientific adviser, “those reactors are such complex machines. They have such an array of safety devices built into them. How did you manage such a thing?”
De Serre shook his head, still trying to force the ugly images of the last few minutes from his mind. “Cher monsieur, the reactors themselves are perfect. They are equipped with so many marvelous safety systems they are, indeed, inviolable. It’s the little things around them that are always vulnerable. It’s like …” de Serre paused. “Years ago, I had a dear friend who raced Formula One cars. I was with him once at the Grand Prix in Monte Carlo. He was racing with Ferrari then, and they had given him a superb new twelve-cylinder prototype. Worth millions, it was. The car broke down the first time he went past the Hotel de Paris. Not because anything was wrong with Monsieur Ferrari’s beautiful engine. But because a two-franc rubber gasket failed to hold.
“In this case, we started with the instruments that measure the radioactivity in each of the reactor’s three fuel compartments. They’re like all instruments of that sort. They work on rheostats based on a zero setting. By simply altering the setting upward, we arranged to have the instrument tell us there was radioactivity-when, of course, there wasn’t any. We drew off a sample of the cooling water and sent it to the lab for analysis. Since the lab was run by the Libyans, they gave us the answer we wanted.”
“How about the inspectors and safeguards of the United Nations in Vienna?”
“We notified the International Atomic Energy Agency that we were shutting down the reactor to remove a faulty fuel charge. By mail, of course, to win a few days. As we had suspected they would, they sent out a team of inspectors to watch us make the change.”
“How did you convince them that something was really wrong with your fuel?”
The Fifth Horseman Page 37