“Pa?”
Yes.
“Is Mom with you?”
I’m with him, Paul.
He hadn’t heard her voice in twenty years. His tears burned as much as the Luger.
“I’ve got to ease his pain, Mom…”
It’s wrong.
He felt a strange pressure in his brain. He was confused. He had eased her pain. Why was it wrong to ease Lafitte’s pain? Why must everything have a reason? He had to know.
“Why is it wrong?”
Think.
He didn’t hear their voices anymore. He thought hard. He thought harder. The reason it was wrong was the reason. It was that clear now. It was wrong to murder in cold blood. Lafitte was good but what he did against Bourgois to save his own life was bad. Killing him likewise would be bad, even if he wanted it.
He knew now what to do. He stood up and paced away from the baby and felt relieved. He’d throw the Luger in the river. He felt the strange pressure in his brain go away.
He turned and saw Eddie holding up the baby by one foot.
No flute.
No rumble in his brain.
No tremor.
The brainquake came without warning. The flute shrieked. In brighter reddish-pink Eddie was smashing the baby against the wall. Paul whipped the Luger out and pulled the trigger. It was frozen. Safety on. The baby was shrieking louder than the flute. Paul clicked the safety off and fired point blank and the room shook and spun and pictures fell from the walls and his brain cells were pulling the baby into the crevice and Eddie vanished but Michelle lunged at him, raking his face with her fingernails and tearing the Luger out of his hand and the flute stopped, the brighter reddish-pink gone, the brainquake over.
But the baby was crying.
“You shot at my baby!”
“Eddie…smashing baby…against…wall.”
She pulled him to the baby crying in the crib.
“Do you see a smashed baby? Do you?”
The room spun. The floor moved. Part of this was brainquake. Part was not. No blood on the wall. No blood on the floor. She pointed at the bullet hole in the crib.
“You missed my baby by a hair!”
He started toward the door. She spun him around. “You’re not running anywhere, you bastard! Out there alone you’ll shoot at another baby and you’ll kill it!”
Holding the gun in one hand, she beat his face with the back of her fists, the barrel just missing his eye. He stood there, took the beating, knew she had the right to do it, the right to shoot him if she wanted. But she was no killer. Blood covered his face.
* * *
Michelle stopped suddenly, the hand holding the gun raised, poised for another brutal swipe. Her manufactured hysteria boomeranged. He had a gun. He’d been waiting for Eddie. Who’d prepared him? She stared at the gun, recognized it. Her plan collapsed.
“Where did you get his Luger?”
“Lafitte.”
“Why did you steal it?”
“Gave it to me.”
“Why?”
“To shoot him.”
“Why?”
“Stop his pain.”
“What pain?”
“…Cancer.”
“Oh, my God!” She broke into tears. “Oh, no! Did he tell you that? He’s sick?”
Paul said nothing.
She put the Luger on the table, lifted the crying baby, comforted it, put it back in the crib.
They both stared at the gun. Paul reached for it, but she got it first. “No, Paul. He’s my responsibility, not yours. I’ll stop his pain.”
He followed her out into the galley, but she stopped him at the sink. “Here.” She ran water over two towels, wiped blood from his face, stuffed the blood-splotched towels in the cardboard cake box on the counter. “You stay here. Please, Paul.”
She went into Lafitte’s room, closed the door.
In the soft blue light, Eddie and his gun were shaking.
“The bastard’s armed!”
“Shh! Keep it down, Eddie. Pocket your gun.”
He did. She thrust out the Luger.
“Use this one.”
Eddie took it. A snore from Lafitte made Eddie jump.
“Dead drunk,” Michelle said.
“Where’d he get this Luger?”
“From him. It’s a godsend. What’re you waiting for?”
Eddie pointed the Luger at Lafitte. Eddie couldn’t fire.
“Shoot him!”
“You shoot him.”
Through dizzying fog of pain, Lafitte heard:
“He’s like my father. Goddam it! Haven’t you got any feelings? Shoot him!”
Eddie shot him.
The bullet impact in his chest shook Lafitte. Blood covered his brass buttons. His hand spasmed. Eddie stared at Lafitte’s open eyes.
“He’s looking at us!”
She felt for a pulse under Lafitte’s ear.
“No. He’s dead.”
“What makes his eyes stay open?”
Lafitte saw the fuzzy Michelle staring at him.
“Reflex,” Michelle whispered.
“They give me the willies.”
She opened the door calling out “Paul!” She picked up the big stone ashtray from the small table, positioned herself behind the door, raised the ashtray high.
How hard should she hit him? He still had the wig on, which would soften the blow. He might come out of it too soon. But too hard a blow could kill him. Jesus Christ, how hard should I hit him to keep him alive?
Lafitte saw the white turtleneck sweater opening the door. Paul hesitantly walked in. Smashed on the back of his head with the ashtray, he fell, hitting the edge of the chest, and crashed to the floor. She dropped the ashtray next to him and ran out.
With handkerchief around the barrel of the Luger, Eddie wiped off his prints from the butt, fitted it into Paul’s hand, pressed hard on the fingers, made sure one was on the trigger. He wiped the barrel clean.
Where he lay, his vision fading, Lafitte saw the shadow that was Michelle reappear, carrying the baby, a cardboard box and the leather bag. Eddie scooped up the baby doll from the floor, took the bag from her. They vanished.
A thousand miles away, Lafitte heard a car starting up and roaring off.
* * *
In the car driving down the waterfront road, Eddie was still sweating. She felt good.
“I still can’t forget his open eyes,” Eddie said.
“Maybe a muscle snapped. I heard about a man shot in a steam room…fell naked on his back and his cock stood up and saluted after he was dead.”
The car roared up the cement ramp, braked at the phone booth. She got out. The car waited. She called Police HQ and asked for Inspector Sainte-Beuve in Homicide.
“Your name, please?”
“Michelle Valour.”
“He’s on the phone. Can I help?”
“It’s urgent. A man’s been shot!”
After ten seconds Sainte-Beuve was on the line.
“Michelle! Last week Lafitte told me you were in New York!”
“Lafitte’s been shot. Just minutes ago, on his barge. A man broke in. He’s unconscious. I hit him. Please come. You must come!”
“We will, stay there,” he said, and she heard him shout something to someone in the room with him. “The man? Do you know who he is?”
“Yes. It’s Paul Page, the taxi driver wanted for murder in New York. They want me for the same murder, but it’s not true, he did it. My baby is with me! I need help!”
She hung up to sell panic, jumped in the car. Eddie backed down the ramp and returned her to the barge.
“Dump that cake box in a sewer, Eddie. Stay glued to the phone in your hotel. After I get a clean slate from the New York cops, I’ll phone you in Paris.”
She got out with the baby, slammed the door, ran aboard the barge. Eddie drove away. She found Paul still unconscious, put her baby in the crib, pushed the backpack under the bed, flopped on the mattress, still
tasting the miracle that Inspector Sainte-Beuve had been there, not out on another case. From the start she had planned to use him, and only him, as her unwitting ally. He was an old friend. He’d question her gently. How did she get mixed up in murder? She would never mention Paul’s brainquake. She’d give him the facts she wanted to and no more. Lafitte was dead, and Paul couldn’t talk, especially under the stress of a police interrogation. Nobody would be able to untwist the facts she presented. Sainte-Beuve had dealt with homicidal maniacs. He’d grill Paul, hoping to drag out a coherent phrase to bring before a judge. With the blow on his head and under pressure of questioning, Paul would have a brainquake, convict himself. Sainte-Beuve would buy her story. She had delivered the first blow.
That was half the battle won.
44
After Michelle hung up abruptly, Inspector Sainte-Beuve searched for Interpol’s “Wanted List.” Nine fugitives, including the baby.
My baby is with me! Whose baby was it? Her husband’s? Paul Page’s…?
Staring at Paul’s photo, he saw a cipher face, eyes opaque gray, unmemorable.
He looked at Michelle’s blurred face in the photo taken through the ambulance doors in Central Park. Would he have recognized her if he hadn’t known her years before? He doubted it. Michelle Troy. He certainly hadn’t recognized the name when Lieutenant Zara had told him about the case she’d come across the ocean to work on.
Alerting his team to get to their cars immediately, the Inspector swiftly went over the report as he rose, slipped one arm into his jacket, then the other, shifting the report from hand to hand as he did so. Poker-cheating husband shot by gun concealed in baby carriage…bomb…$10,000 involvement with some black psycho…the gunshot murder in her apartment, the flight with the taxi driver…
He’s unconscious! I hit him!
A week after Lafitte delivered baby Michelle, Sainte-Beuve had toasted him as the absinthe-drinking midwife on the Seine. Help me! How? The New York police said she had murdered a man and run. The child he had picked up after school whenever Lafitte was working had grown up to be a wanted murderess…
In his car, followed by horns clashing with sirens, the Inspector was speeding along the Seine toward the Jean Bourgois. He was behind the wheel himself. He hated being driven. It made him nervous, he felt he wasn’t in control. Of course, how could you feel in control when you were driving into a nightmare involving dear friends? He idolized Lafitte. He loved Michelle as a daughter.
He checked his rear-view mirror. Tailgating him with blinding headlights through traffic were the ambulance, mobile lab, lab crew van, and minibus with eight cops. A year ago at the Anchorage Bar he’d told Lafitte about his idea to speed up investigations and cut down red tape. He requested a fully equipped mobile crime lab with him in the field. He got it.
Now it was racing to help Lafitte.
The Inspector had bought Zara’s story that Page was connected with organized crime, probably as a bagman. He had to have some shady connections to raise $200,000 in cash for the charter pilot to fly them to France. The pilot’s partner had been tortured and killed in the manner of a known organization hit man. And now Zara’s brutal murder in Paris before the police could find the fugitives…
What the Inspector couldn’t buy was Michelle fleeing the country with her baby and a homicidal maniac. Unless Paul only became one tonight. He thought back to the photo of Paul and to Zara’s description of him. The Inspector hated stone walls. He knew how tough it was going to be to pull anything coherent out of Paul.
The Inspector was not a desk psychiatrist. He was a cop. Paul was just another fugitive, wanted for questioning about murder. If he was insane, that wasn’t the Inspector’s problem.
But of course it was. And it was Michelle’s, too. Her husband dies and she runs away with this man…had he somehow convinced, mesmerized, romanced Michelle? How, if he was the man Zara had described?
And why, if he had been the one to pull the trigger, did the murder gun also have her prints on it?
And how could this Paul have gotten the drop on Lafitte tonight? If Lafitte had suspected Paul was dangerous, he would have shot him himself, or held him at gunpoint while Michelle ran to phone the police. Lafitte had no shortage of guns on his barge.
The Inspector hoped that through the cracks of the stone wall a few words would slip out from Paul…a few lucid words…but rarely, in the Inspector’s experience, had those words, when pieced together, been worth anything.
Lafitte was the Inspector’s only hook. Lafitte would fit the pieces together. If he was still breathing.
“How long have you known him, Inspector?”
The Inspector glanced at the man sitting beside him: the police surgeon who had already saved several lives in emergencies in the mobile lab’s operating room over the past year.
“Known whom?”
“Captain Lafitte?”
“Thirty years.”
The Inspector was back with them again, grateful to the surgeon for having broken into his thoughts. Behind them sat a young forensics man, Gautier, the whip of the mobile lab crew. With him was the surgeon’s top assistant, an ex-paratrooper medic named Rensonnet.
“My son,” Rensonnet said, “has a picture of Bourgois and Lafitte on his bedroom wall.”
“You think that’s something,” Gautier said, “my niece wrote a school play about the Resistance. Her little friend was Bourgois.”
“Does Lafitte still live alone on his barge?” Rensonnet said.
“Yes,” said the Inspector.
“Is it true he has no phone, no TV, no radio?”
“Yes.”
“How can he live in Paris without them?”
“He doesn’t understand how we can live with them.”
They exchanged wry smiles at the old man’s eccentricity.
“Was he wounded in the head, Inspector?”
“Why the head?”
“To live like that, like a hermit…”
“He was wounded three times but not in the head. He was hit in the balls. Lost one. He told the Resistance doctor it was all right. He could live with one ball. That was why they gave us two of them.”
They laughed.
“I saw that in an American film,” Rensonnet said.
“American—French—balls are the same all over the world,” the Inspector said. “All men could live with only one ball. Lafitte’s all iron inside. No bullet’s tough enough to kill him.”
“How long’s he been living like that?”
“Since the war. But it’s wrong to call him a hermit. Hermits don’t go drinking and brawling in waterfront bars.” The inspector weaved between two slow-moving cars in front of him, saw the convoy in his rear-view do the same. “He likes to brawl and he likes to drink and that’s got nothing to do with liking to live alone after a day’s work on his tug. His barge is his castle. I’m one of the rare ones who’s been on it. There’s nothing strange about living in privacy.”
“Don’t you think the war made him a little crazy?”
“Hell, no. Just suffering from battle fatigue.”
“After forty-five years?”
“Time has nothing to do with it.”
Rensonnet snorted. “My father fought with the Free French in North Africa. Infantry. Close combat. Saw men’s faces shot off. Enough to drive him insane. Wounded twice. Lost a leg. But not a single sign of battle fatigue forty-five years later.”
“He wore a uniform,” the Inspector said.
“Of course he did! He was a sergeant!”
The Inspector glanced at Rensonnet in the rear-view mirror. “A captured soldier knows he’ll live. A captured Resistance fighter knows he’ll be shot. The man who fights with a gun has got to know he has a chance to survive. Without that chance, he is dead every day he fights. Lafitte is suffering from that kind of battle fatigue.”
There was silence in the car. Only the horns battling the sirens as they rocketed toward the waterfront. They weren’t far now.
“I never thought about it that way, Inspector,” Rensonnet said. “It makes sense. He must be a sad and frightened man.”
“Sad? No. I’ve never known someone with a bigger joy for life, or a better sense of humor. Mischievous. We’d go out drinking and he’d toast everyone with a quote, he’d say it was from Balzac, and everyone would say, ‘Yes, yes, Balzac!’ But it was just something he’d made up himself. ‘You know that line?’ he’d ask. And some snob would say, ‘Oh, yes, yes! My favorite line!’ And he’d say, ‘From such a wonderful play, no?’ And the poor sap would crawl further onto his own sword: ‘Oh yes, one of his best!’ ‘The one about the duchess and the gardener?’ ‘Yes, yes, I think that’s right…’ He could keep it up for an hour. Then finally he’d drop the blade: ‘Balzac never said it, I did.’ And as often as not the sap, trying to salvage his dignity, would insist: ‘No, no, I’m quite sure I remember reading it…’ ”
“Sounds like a scene Balzac would have loved,” the surgeon said.
“Now don’t you start,” the Inspector said.
“Why’d he do it?” Rensonnet asked. “Just to have a laugh at their expense?”
“That,” the Inspector said, “and because it was a line he was proud of. If they thought Balzac said it, they’d take it seriously. Who’d believe a tug captain hauling coal and Cokes should have his words listened to respectfully?”
“What was the line?” Rensonnet asked.
“Later,” the Inspector said, stepping on the gas as he swung onto the quay. “Pray he can tell you himself.”
45
Two-way speeding traffic in the isolated tree-lined Seine area came to a sudden, head-jerking, angry, jarring halt amid sirens, horns, and blinking police lights, punctuated by sounds of bumpers striking bumpers.
Careening off the road, the Inspector’s car lunged past the phone booth, charged down the cement ramp, whipped along the dirt waterfront road, led his noisy team to the barge.
All its lights were on.
The Inspector jumped out of his car, saw the wild-eyed blackhaired woman in funky clothes and huge gaudy earrings streaking toward him like an arrow, kissing him, hugging him, clinging to him, her body shaking with panic.
He did nothing. He hadn’t kissed her, hadn’t hugged her. He stood as stiff as a telephone pole. Horns and sirens died, to the relief of awakened birds in their nests. The distant, haunting, lonely whistle of a tug horn could be heard.
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