The Paris Directive

by Gerald Jay

  “Why don’t you show me from here?” It seemed to Molly a sensible alternative.

  Reiner swept her up in his arms.

  “Hey! Hold on! What the hell are you doing?”

  “Don’t worry. Here we go.”

  She felt she was flying. Effortlessly, he lifted her through the window and stepped out onto the roof, putting her down on the tiles. The sun had set an hour or two earlier, but the tiles still felt warm under her hands. It was such a clear night that far in the distance she could see the moonlit bell tower of the church in Taziac. Standing up, Molly found herself under a theatrical ceiling of lights, a spectacular star-filled sky that seemed close enough to touch. In spite of herself, Molly was awed by the spectacle.

  “Careful,” Pierre cautioned her. “We wouldn’t want any accidents up here.”

  Molly wondered if she was doing him an injustice. Not too far from her, midway on the roof, was the cupola just as he had said—a trifle weather-beaten perhaps with a dented copper roof and some missing and broken panes of glass.

  “I don’t see any owls.”

  “You will. Walk straight ahead. But watch your step. And don’t look down. I’ll be right behind you.”

  “No, please, Pierre—” Molly’s one thought now was somehow to keep him at a distance. “Just stay where you are. You make me nervous. Let me go by myself.”

  “If that’s what you want. Sure, go ahead.”

  The light spilling out from the window helped her see where she was going. Walking carefully, Molly concentrated on the cupola ahead and instinctively did her best to avoid the white stains on the roof tiles the closer she got. She thought she could hear scratching sounds as she approached. With Pierre at a distance, Molly felt steady, more confident.

  Then, in the blink of an eye, he was behind her, his breath on her neck. Without warning, he shoved her violently. Molly shrieked, lunged for the cupola. Grabbing hold of it, she gritted her teeth and held on for dear life.

  “What the hell are you doing?” she screamed. “You nearly pushed me off the roof.”

  “Sorry. I tripped. An accident. Here, let me help you.”

  “Don’t touch me!” Molly knew that it wasn’t an accident. There were no owls up here. Owls hoot and she’d heard nothing but scratching noises. Rather than throwing her into a panic, she was strangely calm. Or both simultaneously. And most of all furious at his betrayal. Molly quickly put the pieces together—the passports, the gun, the proximity to the murder scene. But why? What had she or her family or their friends ever done to him? And who was he?

  “Keep away from me.”

  Pierre drew closer. “Don’t be foolish. I’m only trying—”

  “Stop, monsieur!” ordered the inspector. “One more step and it will be your last.”

  Mazarelle, his powerful chest heaving from his charge up the stairs, stood framed by the open window, his .38 gleaming in the moonlight, its muzzle fixed on his drinking companion from the Café Valon. Without any hesitation, he vaulted through the window and hit the tiles full force, the loose bullets in his pocket clicking like castanets. Until landing on the roof, he’d forgotten about his ankle. The rush of adrenaline quickly eased his pain. He knew full well what sort of bastard he was up against after seeing what he’d done to Bernard. Unlike Ali Sedak, a petty crook who lacked the warped, feverish imagination to operate on such a murderous scale, Koenig was a maniac who lived in a sick dream where there were no limits.

  Mazarelle shouted, “Stay where you are!” Tightening his grip on his gun, he raced toward the cupola.

  “What’s this all about? Put that gun away.”

  “Shut up!” Mazarelle had been looking forward to this confrontation with the L’Ermitage murderer, but not on a rooftop, not in the dark. What the hell was keeping Bandu and the others? “Get your hands up where I can see them.”

  “My hands are up. What’s wrong with your eyes?”

  “Higher,” he ordered fiercely.

  “Who are you?”

  “You know damn well who I am. The only way you’ll get away from me this time, Monsieur Koenig, is if you can fly.”

  “Koenig?” Reiner stared at him incredulously. “My name is Pierre Barmeyer. You’re making a serious mistake. I’ve never seen you before in my life. Are you mad?”

  The inspector was becoming increasingly infuriated. This son of a bitch was laughing at him. Not only was he a multiple killer, but he didn’t feel a pinprick of guilt.

  What could you expect from a madman? Turning toward Molly, he called, “Are you safe there, mademoiselle?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Good. Just don’t let go.”

  “The window,” cried Molly. “He’s trying to escape through the house.”

  “Hold it,” Mazarelle shouted, raising his revolver. “Not another inch!”

  The fleeing German, who already had one foot through the open window and was about to pull himself in, glanced back and sneered at the inspector. “I’ve had it with you, du verdammter Arschficker.” Throwing back his head, Reiner laughed hysterically, a piercing, bone-chilling challenge to Mazarelle.

  Without missing a beat, the inspector squeezed off a single round. A crack shot, he aimed for the back of the German’s thigh. He wanted his man alive.

  “Missed!” whooped Reiner, a full-throated cry of triumph, and laughed again. “Not even a flesh wound!” But losing his hold, he suddenly fell backward onto the roof and began to slide toward the gutter. Followed by a gleaming trail of blood on the red tiles. On the edge of the roof, he teetered like a broken weather vane. Lunging toward him, Mazarelle caught the German by one leg and held him, dangling in space. Reiner’s furious howls blended with the swelling sound of approaching sirens from the police cars racing up the hill. Finally, Mazarelle thought, the cavalry to the rescue.

  “Inspector!” Molly cried. Brushed by the outstretched, beating wings of a large owl returning to its nest, she’d lost her terrified grip on the cupola, slipped on the white droppings and gray pellets left by the birds. Unable to stop herself, Molly began to tumble. Mazarelle saw her coming, her luminous red hair streaking across the night sky like the flaming tail of a comet. He had no choice. Letting go of the German, he caught Molly and held on tight, felt her wildly beating heart. Or was it his own? What he hadn’t expected was the loud, hysterical laughter that fell through the darkness and ended as neatly as a snipped thread.

  When Reiner hit the flagstone walkway three stories below there was no cry, no earsplitting crash. His body struck with a dull thud, the sound a bag of cement makes when it’s thrown from the back of a truck.

  “Ça va, inspecteur?” someone called out from below.

  It was Bandu. Mazarelle could hear the concern in his voice. Could almost see it in his face and that of the other members of his squad looking up at him, the flashing blue lights on top of the two police cars illuminating the eerie nocturnal scene.

  “We’ll be down in a minute,” the inspector called. “Did you find Bernard’s body?”

  “Doobie? Is Doobie dead, chief?” Bandu’s voice disappeared into the night air as quickly as if he could hardly ask, much less bear to hear the answer.

  “It’s behind the woodpile.”

  “Poor guy! Okay, chief. I’ll take care of him.”

  “What about the salaud?”

  “Don’t worry.” Stepping back to show his prize, Bandu revealed the body of the German crumpled at his feet. “Il est foutu, patron. Kaput!”

  PART FIVE

  48

  MAZARELLE MAKES A CALL

  Cemeteries didn’t bring out the best in Mazarelle. Reminding him of Martine’s funeral and how unseasonably hot it had been, the small group of mourners who showed up, and the foul smell of manure from the nearby farms. Never before had he felt so lonely. As for Bernard’s good-bye, there was quite a crowd. Besides Babette, their two boys, the family, and friends, everybody from the commissariat who could be spared was at the graveside. Rivet, of course, c
ame resplendent in his commissaire’s dress-blue uniform, looking stiff and solemn as a headstone. Afterward, as Mazarelle went out the cemetery gate, the raw, rusty screech it made was exactly the way he felt on that gray, lifeless day.

  Back at the commissariat, and even after several shots of Black Label, the inspector remained haunted by the unshakable gloom of the cemetery. He tried his favorite brier pipe, lit up an overflowing bowl of Philosophe. His heavy breathing into his pipe stem sent a fountain of angry sparks shooting crazily through the air. Of course Mazarelle was angry, so mad it smelled as if his mustache was ablaze. Glancing down, he saw that it was the wastebasket burning. He jumped up; emptied the crumpled, smoldering papers on the floor; and in a cool, businesslike way began stomping out the glowing embers.

  Gnawed at by unanswered questions, he was unable to concentrate on anything very well. The thought of the last time he’d seen Bernard turned his stomach. Doobie’s head so badly mangled that the mortuary director had urged Babette to keep the lid closed on his coffin during the service. And coffins reminded Mazarelle of one more piece of unfinished business.

  Picking up the receiver, he dialed Paris. Elizabeth Barnes, Dwight Bennett’s secretary, told the inspector that he was on another line. Could he call the inspector back?

  Mazarelle said he’d hold.

  In less than a minute, Bennett was on the phone.

  “Chapeau, inspecteur!” he congratulated Mazarelle. He’d read in the Paris papers all about his deadly rooftop encounter and how the inspector had saved Molly Reece’s life. “Well done. Speaking for my embassy, I can’t tell you how grateful we are for what you did. You’re quite a hero.”

  Mazarelle hesitated, clearly uncomfortable with his bullshit. “I just do my job.”

  “This Koenig seems to have been as bad as they come.”

  “Bad, yes. A homicidal maniac, according to Interpol. But whoever that was up on the roof,” Mazarelle went on, “he wasn’t Dieter Koenig. It turns out that Koenig was just arrested a few days ago by German police officers at the central train station in Mannheim. In the entire time he’d eluded recapture, Koenig claims never to have left Germany.”

  “Then who—?”

  “I wish I knew. What I’m sure of,” the inspector added, “is that he was the same cutthroat who murdered all four vacationers at L’Ermitage, and the same one who later killed one of my own men by beating him to death. We sent the German authorities everything we had. Prints, photos, DNA, and the four passports he was carrying.”

  “Four!”

  “That’s right. One German, one French, one Polish, one Spanish. All of them with the same face but different names. And they’ve told us that the murderer couldn’t have been any of them.”

  “You’re certain about the German?”

  “Positive. The German passport was stolen. Klaus Reiner was a journeyman football player for the East German Hansa Rostock club in the eighties. He’s still very much alive.”

  Bennett cleared his throat. “The truth is Reiner was the name we knew him by.”

  “You knew about him?”

  “We had information suggesting that these murders might be the work of a paid assassin hired by two former French DGSE agents—Émile Pellerin and Hubert Blond. They called him Klaus Reiner. It seemed as if his assignment was to eliminate an American vacationing in Taziac. Murder was Reiner’s business. I’m not sure, but my guess is that the target was Schuyler Phillips—”

  “How do you know that?” Mazarelle interrupted.

  “The usual way. I get paid to know things like that.”

  “Goddamn it!” Mazarelle exploded. “If you knew all that, why the hell didn’t you tell me?”

  Bennett hesitated. “I’d only have been speculating.”

  The inspector’s patience even on good days was not without limits, and this was not one of his better days. He hated to be stonewalled.

  “Don’t you realize that it might have helped us?”

  “Perhaps … But I wasn’t free then—”

  “And now?”

  Though Bennett bobbed and weaved, Mazarelle finally managed to drag out of him a story that was both strange and disturbing. The inspector wondered where he got his information. Did the CIA have an illegal tap on the retired agents’ home telephone? But when he tried to get more details, Bennett cut him short.

  “I’m busy, Mazarelle. How about telling me why you called?”

  The inspector didn’t care for the snotty tone any more than the far-fetched tale he’d just heard. He realized he’d get no more from Dwight Bennett. “I thought you might be interested in knowing that the bodies of Mademoiselle Reece’s parents are now being released from our custody, and she’s planning to leave tomorrow. I’ve arranged for two hearses and a motorcycle escort to take them from Bergerac to the Bordeaux airport. I’m sure she could use your help in getting back to Paris and then at Charles de Gaulle. Is that possible?”

  “Absolutely,” he cried. “I’ll take care of everything. Tell her not to worry. I’ll be down on the first plane tomorrow morning.”

  Though relieved for Molly’s sake, Mazarelle had to admit to being less than thrilled.

  49

  LEAVING TAZIAC

  Gabrielle was busy with customers when the inspector entered the boulangerie, but not too busy to give him a smile that—along with the wonderful smell of Louise’s fresh-baked bread perfuming the air—brightened his melancholy mood. She said to go right up. Mademoiselle Reece was expecting him.

  Molly was in her room, packing. Bennett had called to tell her he was arriving the next day and would help her through French customs. She thanked the inspector for asking him to come. Said she could use Bennett’s experience with the details and was glad to have it. The black T-shirt she wore made her face appear paler, thinner, tired, her green eyes larger and even more striking than he remembered. Mazarelle, who knew how much she’d been through, was touched by her vulnerability. Her reference to customs reminded Mazarelle of news he had about her father’s partner, Sean Campbell.

  “Sean!” Molly was surprised the inspector remembered.

  Apparently he’d been stopped at Charles de Gaulle Airport while attempting to leave France with a small Cubist painting in his luggage—Braque’s portrait of Gertrude Stein.

  “Your Monsieur Campbell made the unfortunate mistake of trying to take part of France’s cultural patrimony out of the country without an export license, and the airport customs agents discovered it. Probably his worst nightmare.”

  Molly shook her head sadly. Her father had trusted Sean. She had been much less sympathetic. When she’d heard that Sean was in France, she’d even wondered if he wasn’t somehow involved in what happened. There’d been so many twists and turns to the investigation. She’d been startled by the newspaper story of the background of the serial killer named Koenig from whom Mazarelle had saved her. Molly had never heard of Koenig before then. She’d tried to come to terms with that idea, but then she’d spoken to Bennett.

  Turning to Mazarelle, Molly said, “Bennett just told me that the reporters had it all wrong. His real name was neither Pierre Barmeyer nor Koenig. Is that a fact?”

  Mazarelle stroked his mustache. “Yes, that’s true. As you saw from the passports he carried, the man who tried to kill you used several different names, several nationalities. But regardless of his real name, you and your family have nothing more to fear from him.”

  “I hope you’re right, Inspector. The awful truth is there’s not much of my family left to kill.” Though she spoke in anger, it was impossible for him to miss the deep sadness in her voice.

  Like the writing of reports, Mazarelle hated this part of the job. It was always hard for him to come up with the right words to say and the right way to say them. In these situations, he tended either to say too much or nothing at all.

  “I see,” began Mazarelle softly, and stopped. “I’m sorry.”

  She nodded without looking at him. Then suddenly glancing
up, a worried look on her face, Molly asked, “What makes you so certain you’ve seen the last of him? Did you bury the body?”

  Mazarelle seemed almost relieved to answer her question. “German Interpol wanted it in connection with their ongoing investigations. After that, he’ll be cremated.”

  “Did you find out his real name?”

  “No, I didn’t. On the other hand, he looked German, spoke French with a German accent, was a die-hard German football fan who operated out of East Berlin and probably was German. But whatever name he was born with and whatever sort of artist he might have been, I have no doubt he was the Taziac murderer.”

  Lowering the top of her suitcase on the chenille bedspread, Molly sat down on the edge of the bed opposite the inspector, who had claimed the rocking chair.

  “I owe you a great debt, Inspector,” said Molly, her eyes glistening. “I want you to know how grateful I feel that you found my parents’ murderer, and more than grateful to you for saving my life. But whoever the hell he was, why was he trying to kill me? I don’t understand any of it. Was he totally mad, or was there something else involved?”

  “I wish I could explain everything to you, mademoiselle, but some of it is still a mystery to me. If Dwight Bennett is to be believed—and I’m not at all sure about that—the murderer was a paid assassin whose target was Schuyler Phillips. According to Bennett, your parents and Phillips’s wife were, in his words, ‘collateral damage.’ Even Ali Sedak and my man Duboit seemed to fall into that category.”

  “Collateral damage! That’s my parents he’s talking about. What a depressingly grotesque idea …”

  Mazarelle took a deep breath, and his whole body seemed to sigh in resignation at the sadness of things. He too found it overwhelmingly depressing, if true, that all the other Taziac deaths might have been merely gratuitous. An ad valorem death tax added to the cost of doing business. Mazarelle supposed that all CIA agents were trained to think in that cold-blooded way. Such jargon wasn’t called la langue de bois for nothing.