The Paris Directive

by Gerald Jay

  The waiting area outside the emergency room was crowded, people talking in whispers. A nurse called out someone’s name, and a well-dressed woman in her fifties got up, holding a blood-soaked handkerchief to her nose, and followed her. At the front desk the inspector was told he could go inside.

  A tall, bearded doctor with a stethoscope around his neck was talking intently to a heavyset, middle-aged man holding a worn leather briefcase. Mazarelle identified himself and asked about Ali Sedak.

  The doctor pointed to the gendarme filling out forms at the desk.

  “Dead. He never regained consciousness. Maybe if we’d gotten him here a little sooner, perhaps then …” Someone was calling him. Not knowing what else to add, the doctor apologized and walked briskly away.

  “A tragedy,” said the man with the briefcase.

  He introduced himself as François Astruc. Mazarelle had seen a picture in the paper of the militant, high-profile defense lawyer from Toulon. With the financial help of Ali’s sisters, Thérèse had managed to hire him for her husband, but now it was all for nothing.

  Astruc said, “I know that since he was put in prison, his morale had plummeted. But we were preparing for trial and I personally believe, though you may not, that we had a good chance of success. Even that didn’t cheer him up. So sad …” The lawyer shrugged. “If only I hadn’t been late this morning for our appointment, he’d have been found sooner and this wouldn’t have happened.”

  “What time was he expecting you?”

  “Nine. I was held up by a telephone call and didn’t get to the prison until twenty minutes later. When the guard and I found him on the floor of his cell with his wrists slashed, he’d already lost a lot of blood but was still breathing. What a shame! To have been driven to take his own life.”

  “You believed he was innocent?”

  “Of course I believed he was innocent! What kind of question is that? Innocent and despairing of justice. The first time I met him he said, ‘I wouldn’t be in prison if France didn’t have two kinds of citizens—those born here and second-class ones like me.’ Why else would he have killed himself?”

  “In my experience,” the inspector offered, “it’s the guilty ones who kill themselves.”

  “Your experience and mine differ, monsieur,” Astruc replied coldly. “The outrage of Ali Sedak’s death lies entirely with the prison authorities and people like you, Inspector, who had a responsibility to safeguard my client’s life and failed.”

  On Mazarelle’s list of least favorite people, defense lawyers like Astruc ranked right up there just below murderers, pederast priests, and pégriots who stole from blind men’s cups. Why, he asked himself, why do I waste my time?

  There was a public phone near the entrance and, checking his address book, he dialed the procureur’s direct line. When he told d’Aumont who was calling, the procureur seemed pleased. As Mazarelle hoped, he hadn’t heard yet. Mazarelle certainly didn’t want him to learn the news of Sedak’s death from TV reports. He promptly explained where he was and why.

  D’Aumont was furious. It was inconceivable to him that the director hadn’t arranged to have the new prisoner watched around the clock.

  “The man is an imbecile! The only reason he got the job was because his father was once mayor of Périgueux. That plus the fact that he has a good tailor. But thanks to you, Inspector, Sedak would have been found guilty no matter what. The evidence against him was overwhelming.”

  Mazarelle told him of PTS’s discovery of Reece’s blood on the floor mat in Ali’s car.

  “Voilà! An open-and-shut case. Outstanding, Inspector!”

  Mazarelle was annoyed with himself for feeling as pleased as he did about the procureur’s bureaucratic flattery, which he knew was largely hot air. Though he thought they had a case, it was hardly open-and-shut. For example, the shoes Ali was wearing the night of the murders. According to the lab report, they didn’t have any blood on them. Not a trace. How could that be if he was in the kitchen at L’Ermitage, where the white tile floor was awash in Reece’s blood? Unless, of course, those weren’t the shoes he was wearing. As for Ali’s suicide, Mazarelle certainly didn’t see it as a clear message from the land of the dead of either guilt or innocence. Nothing more than a simple miscalculation. A clever manipulator’s desperate attempt to win sympathy as the wrongly accused, while being saved by his lawyer’s timely arrival. Unfortunately for Ali, Astruc’s telephone rang as he was leaving and he answered it.

  37

  LOOSE ENDS

  Bandu, who was talking on the phone, glanced up as the inspector—hangdog and prickly—lumbered into the task force meeting room, looking exhausted. He headed for the coffee machine like an old steam engine climbing a steep grade, the smoke from his pipe streaming behind him. Bandu suspected a migraine. Putting his hand over the receiver, he said, “I hope you don’t mind my saying so, chief, but you look like shit.”

  “Nobody’s perfect.”

  “Anything wrong?”

  “Yeah.” The inspector sipped his black coffee. “Where’s everybody?”

  Bandu told his caller, “I’ll get back to you.”

  Their task force had been cut in half following the indictment of Sedak. Bandu was the only one there now. He reported that Vignon was screening the last of their tapes from the digital face-recognition system he’d set up in the mall and the others hadn’t come in yet.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Ali Sedak is dead.”

  Bandu winced. “How did it happen?”

  “Suicide.” Mazarelle didn’t want to talk about it. “I’ll be upstairs if you need me.”

  The first thing he did when he got into his office was take four aspirins and hope they’d do the trick. Since leaving the hospital, he’d lost his appetite and, despite having had nothing to eat, he felt as if he’d put on a ton. Mostly dead weight. It wasn’t that he saw Ali’s suicide as a tremendous loss to society—one criminal less. The loss was the loose ends left behind. Mazarelle honestly believed that he’d been within a hairbreadth of learning the truth about what had happened. He comforted himself with the thought that if Ali was the murderer, he probably didn’t do it alone, which meant there were eyewitnesses still alive who knew what happened that night.

  Without knocking, Duboit breezed in, smiling like a kid at a carnival. “I just heard the news. Exactly what you were afraid he might do. Sort of like a confession, isn’t it, boss? Well, good riddance. One less to worry about.”

  “You don’t like Arabs very much, do you Bernard?”

  “Me? I love Arabs, but in Algeria, Libya, Morocco. Not here in France. Anyhow”—folding his arms with satisfaction—“I guess that wraps things up for us.”

  “What gives you that idea? Don’t be a blockhead. We’re not finished yet. Besides, what about the two guns I asked you to send to Didier for testing?”

  Duboit groaned.

  “That was important, Bernard!”

  “Sorry, boss. I’ll take care of it right away. I have a lot on my mind lately.”

  “Never mind. I’ll do it myself. All I want you to do is keep an eye on Mademoiselle Reece till she goes home.”

  “Awwrrrr … Do I have to, boss?”

  “Unless you’d prefer filling potholes or stocking supermarket shelves.”

  Duboit whined. “I hate sitting around in a car, twiddling my thumbs.”

  “Try jerking off. Frankly I don’t care what you do, just stay with her.”

  “All right. If I have to, I’ll do it.”

  “That’s better.”

  “I mean she’s not a bad-looking woman. But it’s no fun seeing her screwing around with her new French boyfriend. Those Americans don’t mourn very long, do they?”

  “What new boyfriend?” the inspector asked. “Who?”

  “Never saw him before. He’s from Strasbourg.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I’m a cop.”

  Mazarelle felt his headache gettin
g worse.

  “Okay, okay.” Duboit could see that his boss wasn’t in a playful mood. He told him how he’d followed the two of them from Madame Charpentier’s boulangerie to Les Eyzies and la grotte de la Beune and how he’d alerted the guard, who examined their papers and then kicked them out.

  “That cave,” Duboit reminded him, “isn’t open to the public.”

  “Then what were they doing there?”

  “Fucking around, I suppose. Maybe they were old friends. It sure looked that way to me. By the way, his name is Pierre Barmeyer.”

  “Do what I told you, Bernard. Just get back there and don’t let her out of your sight. Okay?”

  “You mean you really don’t think the case is over yet?”

  “The only one it’s over for is Ali Sedak. Goddamn it, watch her, Bernard!”

  Mazarelle knocked the ashes from his pipe into his wastebasket. Why couldn’t Bernard just do what he was told and stop being a pain in the ass? The last thing he wanted was to have another foreigner butchered in his neighborhood. Especially a young, pretty one who seemed to attract a great deal of attention wherever she went, not all of it welcome. Who was Pierre Barmeyer from Strasbourg and how did they become such good friends so quickly? Mazarelle realized he was behaving more like a jealous husband than a detective. But he’d always been something of a brooder.

  On nothing more than a hunch, he picked up the phone and dialed Daniel Couterau, an inspector he knew at the Commissariat de Police in Strasbourg. He asked him for whatever they had on a Pierre Barmeyer.

  “Tell me, Paul, how come you only call me when you want something?”

  “Because I don’t want to waste your time.”

  “Very funny. You still have that brut sense of humor. That’s nice.”

  “What about my Pierre Barmeyer?”

  “Is he from Strasbourg?”

  “I think so.”

  “Approximate age?”

  “Say somewhere between twenty and fifty.”

  Couterau laughed. “That’s a lifetime.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Anything else you can tell me? An address? Profession? Military service? Disabilities?”

  “Sorry.”

  “You’re not making this easy for me, Paul.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. But don’t hold your breath.”

  “Please, Daniel, as soon as you can. This is important.”

  No sooner had Mazarelle hung up than his phone rang. At first he thought that Couterau was calling him back, but it was a low voice that he didn’t recognize. Dwight Bennett was on the line from Paris. He was worried about Molly Reece. He’d tried to reach her at the Hôtel Fleuri, but the manager told him that she’d checked out and left no forwarding address.

  “I was wondering if you might know where she is. Has she gone back to the United States?”

  “Mademoiselle Reece is fine,” Mazarelle said, and hoped it was true. “She’s staying with a friend of mine who runs the bakery in Taziac.” He gave him Madame Charpentier’s telephone number.

  Bennett thanked him. “That’s a relief. Oh, by the way, I saw you got an indictment against Ali Sedak. When does the trial begin?”

  Mazarelle sighed. “There’ll be no trial. Ali Sedak committed suicide this morning.”

  Bennett was stunned. “I’m sorry to hear that, Inspector. Did you think he was guilty of killing all four of them himself?”

  “That was for a jury to say. It’s too bad that now we’ll never know their decision.”

  As Dwight dialed the number Mazarelle had given him, he thought of Ali Sedak. Poor son of a bitch.

  “Dwight! How did you manage to find me here?”

  Hearing her voice on the phone, Bennett felt better. He asked why she’d left the hotel.

  “I needed a change.”

  Her breezy tone made him suspicious. “Did anything happen?”

  Molly, not wanting to go into detail about her Arnaud episode, said simply, “Someone broke into my room there.”

  “You’re joking!”

  “No big deal. I thought it best to get out, that’s all.”

  “I’m glad you did. Will you be leaving Taziac soon?”

  “Soon. But there’s nothing to worry about. I’m staying with the inspector’s friend Madame Charpentier. She’s great.” Molly glanced at the white lace curtains in her room, the Che Guevara mug on the windowsill. “It’s really quite cozy here. I’m perfectly fine.”

  “Did you hear about Ali Sedak?”

  There was something dark hiding in his voice. “Why? What do you mean?”

  “He’s dead. Mazarelle told me that he committed suicide this morning. Cut his wrists.”

  “How awful! Even a bastard who treated his wife like a punching bag didn’t deserve to die like that.” All Molly could think of was how pale and frightened he seemed when she saw him at the commissariat, and those pathetic fingernails of his bitten to stumps.

  She said, “I hope the police aren’t planning to bury the case with his body. Did Mazarelle say anything to you about that?”

  “He said there was a lot of evidence against him, but now that he’s dead we’ll never know.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.”

  “Leave it to the inspector, Molly. I know him. Trust me, he doesn’t give up easily. Okay?”

  She didn’t say anything at first. Then finally she said, “Okay.”

  He didn’t believe her, but he’d said what he could.

  Bennett opened his office door and told Barney that he wasn’t taking any more calls, didn’t want to be disturbed. The recent, surprising news from Taziac had to be sifted, sorted, and added to the file. Dwight Bennett’s Paris embassy post was a magnet. Sensitive data from all over France and abroad passed across his desk. Business developments, money laundering, political shifts, technological breakthroughs, espionage, terrorism, drugs. A series of dots to be put together. Recognizing relationships and their significance was what he was paid for. Normally Dwight was good at it. In this instance, however, he’d been having trouble finding a clear pattern. Time to rethink. Regardless of Ali Sedak’s suicide, there didn’t seem to be any place for him in the picture.

  Leaning down, he unlocked his bottom drawer and quickly found what he wanted—a large folder with the bland commercial title Franco-German Exports. He ran his eyes over the ELINT transcript that had been forwarded to him a month ago from their station in Berlin. It was stamped Top Secret—one of dozens collected via bugs from rooms at the new Hotel Adlon. Like the old Adlon, the new one was still interesting to the Company. A place where people of importance stayed and international business deals were made, though probably not many like the one recorded here.

  A murder had been commissioned. Someone in France—probably a foreigner—was to meet with an accident, which Dwight took for a dusty old underworld euphemism, before the end of June. But who? Where? The speakers were cautious, but inadvertently they’d dropped a few tiny clues. For instance, the Quai d’Orsay. How was the Foreign Ministry involved? And Simone. Was that Simone Nortier—the minister’s deputy? The man they wanted for the job was an “Ossi.” Curious, yes, though not terribly suggestive. Perhaps the target was German.

  More helpful to him were their references to foods typical of the region where the murder was to take place. On that basis, Bennett had narrowed it down to two or three locations. Since then, the only even remotely relevant crime that had occurred was in Taziac, in the Dordogne. But why four people? And as for the killer, Ali Sedak was no more a professional hit man than he was an Ossi. Besides, Pellerin called him “Herr Reiner.” Bennett found the contradictions frustrating. The intriguing connections, however, were another matter.

  Clipped to the typed transcript was the photograph that McCarty had returned after checking the bugs at the rue de Berri. Bennett had discovered it among the pictures he’d requested from Berlin. They’d all been taken by their surveillance camera acros
s from the main entrance of the Adlon on the day of the meeting between the hit man and his employers. Bennett had assumed that the killer would be in one of them. Another face in the crowd but a face that might be familiar to him. What he hadn’t expected were the two French agents coming out the door of the hotel whom he recognized instantly. Émile Pellerin and Hubert Blond.

  Although Bennett had heard his old friends had retired from the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, he knew—even before he’d received confirmation of it—that their Adlon room number would turn out to be 501, the number stamped on the transcript. One doesn’t completely give up a life in the secret service any more than a career in crime. They were a team, Pellerin and Blond, and a good one too. At the end of the eighties, Bennett had worked with them to crack a drug case they called the Southern Triangle—an international gang transporting heroin from Karachi to Marseilles to Savannah, Georgia, the drugs hidden aboard giant container ships. But in 1990, when relations between the Company and DGSE cooled, he lost track of them.

  Much later Bennett learned that Pellerin, who’d been attached to the French embassy in Washington, had been charged by the State Department with “activities incompatible with his diplomatic status” and booted out of the country. Once again, he’d been teamed up with his pal. This time it was industrial espionage—an operation known by Americans in the trade as a Tinker to Evers to Chance. Blond, working in Silicon Valley, was stealing high-speed computer chips and sending them to Pellerin in Washington, who passed them along to Paris via diplomatic pouch. It wasn’t anything that the Chinese or the Russians or the Israelis or, for that matter, the Americans weren’t doing, but the French had the bad luck to be caught at it. Tant pis. Undoubtedly it sped their retirement. Or semiretirement if this current operation was sanctioned, which he couldn’t be sure of, given its highly unusual nature.

  Dwight wondered if they were merely trying to fatten their retirement pensions by going into business for themselves. As he recalled, the two of them had expensive tastes. Perhaps they’d been hired by some wealthy private party to subcontract a crime. If so, Molly’s father was certainly a possible target. But he knew of no hint of any friction between him and his partner or that the Reece-Campbell Gallery was anything but solid gold.