The Paris Directive

by Gerald Jay

  “What?” Pellerin sounded startled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Don’t strain your mind. Trust me. You’ll see,” Reiner assured him. “I told you a few days.”

  Pellerin found the German’s telephone voice as chilling as the accounts he’d read of the gruesome murders. Hard to reconcile with the handsome young man he’d met in Berlin. Of course he’d known there was a sinister side to Reiner. But this man was all sinister. Pellerin hated to have him in his ear.

  “I hope you’re right, monsieur. Okay, a few days. We’ll expect a call from you then. And,” Pellerin added, “that’s when you’ll get your final installment.” There was a dead silence at the other end of the line that he didn’t care for at all. He wondered if his caller was still there.

  When he spoke again, Reiner’s voice was ice. “If I don’t get my money, I’ll do better than give you a call.” He hoped the Frenchy understood this as a threat, because it was.

  19

  THE OLD MILL, TAZIAC

  On the south edge of Taziac a tiny stream trickled past an old stone water mill surrounded by dust-covered vines. There were few in town who could remember when it was still working. The baby out front slept soundly in the sun despite the large green flies buzzing around its carriage. Even the noise of the police car driving up failed to awaken it. Thérèse, who had been hanging the baby’s wash on the line in back, dried her hands and came hurrying out, eager to see who it was. When she saw the two cops her expression changed.

  Mazarelle announced that they were looking for Ali Sedak. “Is this where he lives?”

  Thérèse nodded and tried to keep calm. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Ali’s face peering from the window.

  “Is he here?”

  “What do you want?”

  Following her glance, the inspector abruptly turned his head and spotted Ali ducking out of sight.

  “There he is,” said Duboit.

  “What do you want with him?” she shouted.

  Mazarelle took her gently by the elbow and led her toward the door. “Let’s go inside.”

  As the policemen entered the stone house, Ali, who was fully dressed and stretched out on top of the unmade bed, propped himself up on a pillow and demanded, “Who are you?”

  “Police,” said Mazarelle.

  “That doesn’t give you the right to barge into my home. Get out!”

  “Are you Ali Sedak?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Shut up and answer the inspector’s question.”

  To the young cop, Ali, who hadn’t shaved in several days, had the look of a religious fanatic, a terrorist. Duboit didn’t like anything about this messy setup—the cocky little Arab stretched out on his backside, his French wife (or more likely poule), their half-breed bastard, and the place reeking of couscous and merguez and pot. It smelled to him like a Maghreban whorehouse.

  Mazarelle held out his hand. “Your papers, s’il vous plaît.” He glanced at the plastic card Ali gave him and, returning it, asked what he did for a living.

  “I’m in the construction business.”

  Duboit snorted derisively. “Handyman.”

  “And where are you working now?” the inspector asked.

  “At the villa L’Ermitage, not far from the gravel quarry.”

  “You mean where the recent murders occurred?”

  “What murders?” Ali looked both confused and indignant. “I know nothing about any murders.”

  “You’re joking,” Duboit sneered. “Do you think we’re idiots?”

  Mazarelle gave him a squelching look and, clamming up, Bernard folded his arms angrily. The inspector turned back to Ali.

  “On the evening of the twenty-fourth, four foreigners who were living at the villa were murdered.”

  “Oh, really. You don’t say?” Ali sounded not especially interested. “I know nothing about it.”

  “Were you working there that night?”

  Outside the house, the baby began to howl. “Will you shut him up?” Ali told Thérèse.

  She ran out the door and returned with the momentarily quieted baby in her arms, though the cute, olive-skinned, dark-eyed child soon began to fuss again, screaming as if in pain.

  “Something wrong with him?” Mazarelle asked her.

  Ali jumped out of bed and in one fluid movement was at Thérèse’s side. “Here,” he held out his hands. “Give him to me.”

  No sooner was the infant cradled in his father’s arms than he stopped crying, started to suck his fingers, and went back to sleep. Mazarelle was struck by how much the two of them resembled each other. He liked sleeping babies. Awake all they did was bawl and shit.

  “Well,” he said, “were you there that night?”

  “I don’t remember. I work when I want to and leave when I want to.”

  “Why didn’t you go to work the next day?”

  “My back—I hurt my back. I could barely move. I’ve been in bed ever since.”

  “You’re better now, I see.”

  Ali avoided the inspector’s eyes. It was plain that his little game was up.

  “Okay. So I knew about the murders,” he admitted. “So what? I didn’t say so because I didn’t want to get involved. Thérèse told me what happened. Didn’t you?” he said to her.

  The look that passed between them was an electric current draining the color from her face. “Yes,” she told the inspector, “a terrible thing.” She had heard about the murders on the radio.

  Mazarelle said to Ali, “Your white VW was seen leaving L’Ermitage very late on the night of the crime. What time was it?”

  “Maybe around ten thirty or eleven. It was late, but there was a job to finish. Phillips liked to help me with the guesthouse I’m building. We were putting down a new floor.”

  “Where were his friends?”

  “They went to eat somewhere. I left before they came back.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “Sure I’m sure. I know nothing about any of these murders. Nothing,” he insisted, his voice rising and the cords popping out in his neck.

  “And where did you go when you left?”

  “I went home. Where do you think I went? I got back here about twenty minutes later and went right to bed. My back was killing me. Didn’t I, Thérèse?”

  “That’s right. He came home and went straight to bed.”

  Mazarelle took out one of the surveillance photos that the bank manager of the BNP in Bergerac had given him and asked if she recognized the face of the man. Ali watched Thérèse anxiously as she studied the picture, her fingers trembling. She shook her head as if she didn’t trust her voice.

  “And you?”

  Ali glanced at the photo and quickly handed it back. No one he knew.

  “All right, thanks.” Mazarelle looked for Bernard and spotted him near the rear door. “Let’s go.”

  “Look what I found.”

  Pulling out a handkerchief, his boss took the rifle from him. Mazarelle thought Bernard had found a shotgun by the excited tone of his voice, but it was a pump-action .22.

  “Is this yours?” he asked Ali.

  Thérèse said, “It belonged to my father.”

  Mazarelle promised to return the gun when he was through with it. “By the way,” he asked Ali, “you don’t own a bayonet, do you?”

  “A bayonet! No, why?”

  “Just wondering. Sorry to bother you. Nice earrings,” the inspector complimented Thérèse, as he walked past her on the way out. Silver teardrops with an intricate engraved design. “New?” he asked.

  Thérèse, her cheeks glowing like burning embers, nodded. “A present,” she said softly.

  “Nice.”

  Duboit could no more hide his emotions than a lion could mute its roar. He was seething. He couldn’t understand why they weren’t bringing in the son of a bitch for questioning. As soon as his boss put the rifle into the trunk and got in the car, Duboit said, “You don’t honestly beli
eve that he wasn’t there when the three of them came back from the restaurant, do you? They probably discovered him with Phillips’s dead body or going through the house searching for loot, and it cost them their lives.”

  Mazarelle started the car and put it in gear. “It’s possible.”

  “Then why the hell aren’t we taking him in?”

  “Jesus, Bernard, take it easy! There’s work to be done first before we can do that. You get so excited, you’ll end up bald as a hubcap before you’re thirty.”

  “That’s not funny.” Sensitive about his hairline, Duboit stared out the car window and sulked.

  Mazarelle barely noticed. He was busy going over in his mind what had just happened with those two. Sedak was lying as fast as he could, and his woman was frightened enough to swear to anything. But why? he wondered. As to the pump-action .22, there was a possibility that, even if it didn’t kill anybody, it was at the scene of the crime, held by an accomplice. As soon as they got back to Bergerac, he wanted it gone over for prints, for whether or not it had recently been fired, and checked for ownership.

  The inspector pulled into the parking lot in front of the small cream-colored stucco building with the mansard roof. The Crédit Agricole was the only bank in Taziac.

  “Why are we stopping here?”

  “I want the tape from the surveillance camera for the ATM over there.” He indicated the machine to the left of the front door. It was the only ATM in town and the closest one to where Sedak lived. Though he’d have to have been a fool, it was possible. “Tell Desforges, the manager, it’s for me. I’ll pick you up later at Madame Charpentier’s for some coffee and cake. I’ve got an errand to run.”

  Duboit made a face and unlocked the door. Before getting out, he asked, “Do you think he stole those earrings?”

  His boss shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe. We’ll see.”

  “What about the gold chain?”

  “What chain?”

  “The gold one he was wearing under his shirt.”

  Though annoyed with himself for missing it, Mazarelle gave no indication as he elbowed his young friend out the door. “Don’t worry, Bernard. We’ll bring him in.”

  On the road out of town—not far from the gendarmerie and a few kilometers beyond it—was the small Taziac cemetery. They’d passed it on their way to the old water mill. Mazarelle had felt a little guilty about not stopping. It was a while since he’d paid Martine a visit.

  The cemetery, a bleak patch of earth even on a bright, sky blue day like this one, was surrounded by a dreary six-foot cinder block wall, gray and dirt streaked. Parking next to the pickup truck in front, Mazarelle opened the squeaking rusty metal gate and headed toward the cypress tree in the center, his lame foot dragging through the gravel. Down the row to the right of the mournful solitary cypress, Martine’s mother and father were buried near the far wall beneath a stone sandbox filled with gravel. Close beside them was the grave of her sister, a dutiful wife and daughter even in death. The grave of Mazarelle’s wife, the black sheep of the family, was at the far end of the line.

  Martine had never told him—or anyone for that matter—that she had a daughter who lived in Taziac with her elderly friend Louise. That was why she’d chosen to come back here to die. But Mazarelle wasn’t a detective for nothing. Besides, the reason didn’t make any difference. He loved Martine and that was enough. If she didn’t want to say anything about Gabrielle, that was her affair. The past was the past and the hell with it. Another dysfunctional family just like his own.

  One day Mazarelle’s father, Guy, a serious boozer and womanizer, had walked out of their house to go to work and never came back. An actor—a large, handsome man before all his drinking and whoring caught up with him—Guy was a peacock who fancied himself a star but was really only a bit player. A good voice though, a big resonant stage voice that reminded one critic of the American performer Paul Robeson. He made a career out of that review, dining out on his part as the Fire Chief in Ionesco’s Bald Soprano.

  An impossible snob, Guy regarded his son Paul’s choice of career as a flic an embarrassment. And his choice of a bride—a young woman from the provinces who worked in Paris as an esthéticienne at some institut de beauté—seemed so shameful to the old boy that though he swore to be at their wedding, he never showed. No surprise Mazarelle had little love of families.

  Glancing down at his wife’s grave, Mazarelle didn’t know why he even bothered to come. This stark, gray, dreary place represented everything that Martine hated in life and, except perhaps for a few scraps of her genetic code, had nothing to do with her. He wished he’d brought some flowers. Maybe he’d come by in a few months on Toussaint and bring her some carnations. Martine loved carnations. When they first met, she also loved to hear him talk about his work, but that was a long time ago. After their marriage, his shoptalk seemed to bore her.

  Nevertheless, he thought that if she were alive, she’d be glad to see him. Might even think he was looking well. Much better than the last few times he’d been there. Would probably have asked if that meant he’d found himself a new girlfriend, her teasing, adorable laughter the wind rustling through the giant cypress. He tamped down his tobacco and lit up, the smoke billowing over his head. Though he’d no flowers for Martine, Mazarelle did have some news. I’ve got a new case that I’m working on, he told her. A multiple murder case. She’d have guessed that was it. There was hardly anything that cheered him up as much as murder.

  And why not? Mazarelle thought. Normal human relationships—even without violence—tended to be emotionally complicated, vexed, and painful, whereas homicide, while not always easy to solve, was relatively simple to diagram. There was a murderer and a murderee. He loved the moral clarity of it. But most of all the satisfaction of tidying up the mess at the end and making the world a little better for the survivors. Even Martine might have been interested in this new case. Mazarelle drew on his pipe and the smoke streamed from his lips and sailed away. The best he could say was that though he didn’t have any idea who did it, he thought he knew who didn’t do it. But he wasn’t even sure of that. Hell, it was only the beginning. He smiled to himself at the idea and it cheered him up. A real ballbuster, he thought.

  20

  DISTRICT ATTORNEY’S OFFICE,

  NEW YORK CITY

  Molly Reece sat at her desk, crossing and uncrossing her long shapely legs as she went over the list of questions she planned to ask at the deposition. It was a case that raised her temperature even higher than most she handled. A fourteen-year-old kid in a junior high school’s bilingual education program had been raped by her math teacher. Afraid to tell her parents, she nearly died after an illegal abortion. Fortunately she had told her best friend when it happened or there’d be no case. The defendant was now asking to have a translator at the trial because his English was weak. Molly had no objections. Who says every rapist has to speak English like Orson Welles? Besides, in court a translator would probably work to her advantage with the jury. What really ticked her off, though, was that his lousy English had been good enough to get him a job teaching in the New York City public school system. Surreal, she thought. Like Alice in Wonderland.

  When the telephone rang, Molly assumed that it was the math teacher’s lawyer from the public defender’s office, calling her back. The voice was low, edgy, and identified the caller as Dwight Bennett. Though busy, Molly figured thirty seconds and guardedly heard him out. He asked if this was Molly Reece.

  “How can I help you?”

  “The daughter of Benjamin and Judith Reece of Manhattan?”

  “Yes …”

  “Are they currently vacationing in France?”

  “All right, what’s this all about?”

  Dwight explained that he was calling from the American embassy in Paris. He was sorry, but he had some bad news. There had been an accident in Taziac.

  Molly, who was about to hang up, hesitated. He knew where they were. This wasn’t some nut caught up in the New
York County Court system getting an ADA on the phone and trying to push her buttons.

  “What are you talking about? What sort of accident?”

  “A very bad one, I’m afraid. I’m truly sorry to have to be the one to tell you, Ms. Reece …” He paused. “Your parents are dead.”

  “Dead? My parents dead. What? What?” She tried to catch her breath. “Oh no … You can’t …” Her voice cracked, her eyes tearing up. “Both of them?”

  “I’m sorry. Yes, both of them.”

  Her mom and dad dead. Molly couldn’t wrap her mind around the idea. She had just seen them off at JFK. They were so excited. All they could talk about was their French vacation. Putting the phone down on her desk, she closed her eyes. Then taking a deep breath, she picked up the receiver again.

  “Ms. Reece,” he said. “Are you still there, Ms. Reece?”

  “I’m here.”

  “I know how awful this must be for you. If I can be of help in any way—”

  “Tell me, how did it happen? Were they driving?”

  “No, they weren’t driving. They were murdered.”

  It was a whipsaw, first their deaths and then this. Murdered! It was beyond belief. How? Who? Though she’d had some experience with murder and the grieving families left in its wake, it certainly hadn’t prepared her for these deaths. Molly—a crushing weight on her chest—felt herself growing angrier and angrier.

  And even much later, sitting in a 747 at thirty-five thousand feet and watching the eye-popping dawn come up, warming the clouds from gray to rust to salmon pink above the Normandy cliffs, Molly still felt that oppressive weight. She wanted answers and intended to demand that her caller, Dwight Bennett, provide them. It was as if she thought he was the French investigating magistrate rather than some lowly U.S. State Department official based in Paris. But Bennett had offered to help and that’s where Molly planned to start.

  Kevin had known at once something was wrong by the sound of her voice. She’d caught him on the way out of their apartment in the Village going uptown to rehearsal. The news shocked him. He was fond of Ben and Judy, laughingly called them the “odd couple.” Molly knew what he meant. As far as her bohemian boyfriend was concerned, she was so different from either of them that she might have been deposited on their Upper East Side doorstep in a basket.