Nicholas Marten 01 - The Exile

by Folsom, Allan

  Halliday’s initial plan had been to spend two or three days in Paris sifting through whatever evidence the French police had and then, having made the personal connection with Lenard and knowing he would be kept informed, go home. But things had changed unexpectedly soon after Ford joined them in the park when Lenard received a call informing him that Fabien Curtay, one of the world’s wealthiest diamond merchants, had been murdered a few hours earlier in his luxury apartment in Monte Carlo by a hooded intruder who had broken in and shot Curtay and a bodyguard to death.

  There had been no need for Lenard to fill in either Ford or Halliday as to the significance. It had been Fabien Curtay whom Alfred Neuss visited in Monaco and from whom he had purchased the now-missing diamonds.

  Lenard had left immediately for a flight to Monte Carlo, and that was when Halliday asked Ford if there was some place they could go for a drink and where he could make a call to change his flight reservation. The real reason, of course, was that he wanted to talk, so there was little for Ford to do but go with him.

  On the way Halliday had said little, speaking briefly of Neuss and the killing of Curtay, and then making small talk, telling Ford he was glad to see him and envious that his career had sent him to a place like Paris. Not once did he bring up John Barron, where he was, or what had happened to him. Raymond he had mentioned only in passing and in the past tense, giving no hint at all to suggest he might have the same information Ford did.

  It made Ford wonder why Halliday had come to Paris at all, except that he was working as a private investigator on a specific job for an insurance company. Unless—it was all a carefully orchestrated means to renew his past relationship with Ford and through him find John Barron. No matter how he appeared now, he had once been a first-rate detective whose skills at control and manipulation had been honed razor-sharp under Red McClatchy in the 5-2. It was something Ford had to remember so he could make sure he gave nothing away.

  “Thank you,” Halliday said, then clicked off the cell phone and handed it back to Ford. “All set.”

  Halliday picked up his glass and sat back. “I’m divorced, Dan. My wife has the kids. It’s been what—?” he stopped to think. “Almost seven months now.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Halliday looked at his glass and swirled the liquor around inside it, then finished it and signaled the waiter for another.

  “The squad was disbanded.”

  “I know.”

  “A hundred years of it and Barron and I are the only ones left. Just John and me. The last of the Five-Two.”

  There it was, Halliday’s way of bringing up Barron. Ford wasn’t sure how he would take it further, but he didn’t have to wait long because Halliday followed up in the next breath.

  “Where is he?”

  “Barron?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on, Dan.”

  “I don’t, Jimmy.”

  Halliday’s drink came and he took half of it in one pull, then put the glass down and looked at Ford.

  “I know he had a tough time with some of the guys on the LAPD. I wanted to talk to him about it. I couldn’t get a phone number or address. I tried to get him through his sister at St. Francis. She wasn’t there anymore. They wouldn’t tell me what happened to her or where she went.” Halliday’s hand tightened around his glass. “I tried to reach you, too. I don’t remember just when. You’d already been transferred to Washington. I tried you there.”

  “I never got the message.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  Halliday looked across the room and then back. “John and I need to talk, Dan. I want to find him.”

  Ford wasn’t about to be pushed. “I haven’t seen him since L.A. I wish I could help you, I can’t. I’m sorry.”

  Halliday held Ford’s gaze for a long time and then looked off again.

  Ford took a swallow of Bordeaux. There was no doubt Halliday knew he was lying, and before, he would have called him on it, but now he just sat there, glass in hand, blankly watching the bar thin out as Parisians drifted away after the lunch hour.

  Ford didn’t know what to think. Maybe Halliday was simply beaten down—the huge emotional blow of the 5-2 disaster followed by the demeaning assignment to Valley Traffic Division; and then, after everything, his divorce and losing his kids. Maybe all he wanted with Barron was camaraderie. To sit and talk things over with the only other member of the squad still alive. On the other hand, maybe he blamed Barron for everything and that was why he had come. Maybe he’d even manufactured the insurance company business. Neuss’s murder and the fact Dan Ford was in the same city were a perfect excuse.

  “I need to get some sleep, Dan.” Halliday suddenly stood. “What do we owe here?”

  “I’ll take care of it, Jimmy.”

  “Thanks.” Halliday finished what was left of his drink, then set the glass on the table and leaned close to Ford.

  “I want to talk to John. Tonight, tomorrow at the latest. I’m at the Hôtel Eiffel Cambronne. You let him know, huh? Tell him it has to do with Raymond.”

  “Raymond?”

  “Just tell him, huh? Tell him I need his help.” Halliday stared at Dan Ford a moment longer, then abruptly turned and started for the door.

  Ford stood quickly, dropped two twenty-euro notes on the table, and followed Halliday across the room and out into the stark afternoon sunshine.

  25

  Neither Dan Ford nor Jimmy Halliday had noticed the bearded, heavyset man sitting alone at a table by the door as they passed. Nor did they see him come out onto the sidewalk behind them to stand innocently nearby listening as Ford put Halliday into a cab and gave the driver the name of his hotel. Nor had Ford known he was being watched as he walked quickly toward the Place de la Madeleine Metro station afterward, taking his cell phone from his jacket as he went.

  Nor had they been aware of him earlier as he sat on a bench feeding pigeons in the Parc Monceau, observing as they examined the crime scene with Lenard until the Paris detective received a phone call and abruptly left. They had not been aware, either, that he had followed them out of the park and watched as they got into a cab and then followed it in a cab of his own to L’Ecluse Madeleine.

  The bearded man spent another ten seconds on the sidewalk in front of L’Ecluse, looking as if he were trying to make up his mind what to do next and making certain it did not appear as if he had deliberately followed the Americans out. Finally he turned and walked off down the block, vanishing in the throng of pedestrians crowding the Place de la Madeleine.

  His name was Yuri Ryleev Kovalenko. At forty-one, he was a homicide investigator for the Russian Ministry of Justice and in Paris at the request of the French government to assist in the investigation of the murder of Alfred Neuss. Officially he was a member of the French homicide investigation team, but he had no police powers and was answerable to the senior investigating officer, Philippe Lenard, a man who showed him every professional courtesy but kept him at arm’s length, including him when he chose to and at other times feeding him only the information Lenard was willing to share.

  Lenard’s attitude was understandable on two counts. The first was that the crime had happened in his city and his agency was expected to solve it. The second was that the French appeal for a Russian investigator had been initiated by the Russian government through their Foreign Office, with the French invitation coming as a diplomatic courtesy to avoid making the case appear as if it had some kind of international significance; instead, it would be seen as a simple request for input on the murder of a former Russian citizen. In effect Lenard had been handed a political situation in the form of a Russian detective and told to make him full party to his investigation with no more explanation than that. All of this made for somewhat strained relations between them and was one reason why Kovalenko had not yet been introduced to the Los Angeles Times reporter Dan Ford, or been invited when Lenard had taken Halliday to study the m
urder scene in the Parc Monceau.

  Not invited, perhaps, but there was no rule preventing a visitor to the city from putting on dark glasses and sitting on a park bench to feed the pigeons and casually observe what was going on around him.

  Doing so had given him the opportunity to learn something about Halliday on his own. And he had. He knew what he looked like, that he enjoyed or needed to drink, and the name of the hotel where he was staying. Moreover, there had been a bonus to his diligence: When Dan Ford first arrived at the Parc Monceau, a second man had been with him, and upon seeing the police, Ford had immediately spoken to that man and then had turned and walked away. Kovalenko wondered who this second man was, and why the journalist had so quickly turned him back when they’d seen the police. Given that he was accompanying Ford, it was safe to assume he had been interested in the crime, yet clearly Ford had not wanted him to be seen. But by whom—Lenard or Halliday, or both?

  What was interesting was that the entire circumstance—Lenard’s exclusion of him from the meeting with Halliday, a former LAPD detective who had earlier covered the Neuss situation in Los Angeles; the appearance of Ford, a newspaper reporter who had also covered the Neuss story in Los Angeles; and the unusual behavior of the man who had accompanied Ford to the park—gave further credence to Kovalenko’s belief that the killing of Alfred Neuss was more than the murder/robbery it appeared and was an extension of what had taken place in the Americas nearly a year before. Which was the reason he had come to Paris in the first place.

  Known to very few—the Russian Ministry of Justice, and now the Paris Prefecture of Police—was the fact that Alfred Neuss was a former Russian citizen. So were the Azov brothers, the Chicago tailors shot to death by the infamous Raymond Oliver Thorne a short time before he boarded the train for Los Angeles. In addition, two other men of Russian descent had been murdered in the Americas in the days immediately preceding Thorne’s visit to Chicago, one a bank manager in San Francisco, the other a well-known sculptor in Mexico City. San Francisco and Mexico City—cities, verified by entry data on the magnetic strip on Thorne’s passport, that he had visited on the dates the murders there had taken place. Four former Russian citizens killed within days of each other. The fifth, whom Thorne had been trying to get to when he was killed himself, was Alfred Neuss. That the Beverly Hills jeweler had been in London at the time no doubt saved his life. The problem was, the alleged perpetrator of most of these crimes, Raymond Oliver Thorne, was dead, his body cremated, his true identity and the motive for his crimes never known.

  Because of that, Russian investigators had been sent to North America by Moscow to work with local law enforcement agencies to determine if the killings were part of an organized conspiracy against former citizens. With federal approval the LAPD had allowed the Russian investigators access to the contents of Raymond’s bag recovered from the Southwest Chief. After close examination, those contents—the safe deposit keys, Raymond’s handwritten references to London, the house on Uxbridge Street, the Russian Embassy, Penrith’s Bar, and I.M., and the separate entry, April 7/Moscow—were as much a mystery to them as to anyone else. And while the Ruger automatic had proved to be the weapon used to kill the Azov brothers in Chicago, it was not the weapon used in the murders in either San Francisco or Mexico City. So if Raymond Thorne had committed those crimes, there was no direct evidence to tie him to them. His death and cremation and lack of any further information had ended everything, and the case and subsequent paperwork had been filed away in a block-long Moscow storeroom overflowing with the files on other unresolved murder cases. And then Alfred Neuss was viciously slain in Paris by a person or persons unknown and the file was reopened and the investigation handed to Kovalenko.

  If someone asked him directly, he would have said he guessed that the murder and robbery of Neuss and the killings in the Americas earlier were razborka, a violent settling of some kind of accounts. Why, or for what reason, he had no idea. Moreover, there was no hard evidence now, nor had there been before, to suggest he was right.

  Nonetheless Neuss’s murder had brought renewed interest—not only from the Russian Ministry of Justice and the Paris Prefecture of Police, but from a retired LAPD homicide detective and a Los Angeles Times reporter, both of whom had covered the Neuss story earlier.

  In Russia, foreign journalists and their friends and activities were almost always under suspicion because they were presumed to be an element of their country’s intelligence community, and in Kovalenko’s mind there was no reason it should be any different here in Paris. What Ford and Halliday had discussed at L’Ecluse was not possible to know. Equally mysterious was the identity of Ford’s friend in the park and why he had acted as he had.

  There was no reason to believe that the Russian investigators sent to the Americas earlier had been deprived of information. On the other hand, since approval for them to examine evidence and confer with local law enforcement had come through Washington, it was not out of the question to suppose they had not been told everything. Taken as a whole, and considering Russian experience with foreign journalists and Ford’s actions in the park, the combination piqued Kovalenko’s interest, and he told himself Ford might be a key man, one around whom things swirled. And therefore one to be watched, and carefully.

  26

  DAN AND NADINE FORD’S APARTMENT ON THE RUE DAUPHINE.

  STILL TUESDAY, JANUARY 14. 8:40 P.M.

  “Halliday didn’t bring up Raymond for no reason. He didn’t ask for my help for no reason.” Nicholas Marten leaned in across the dinner table in the Fords’ compact dining room.

  Marten had seen Ford and Halliday cross together from the Parc Monceau and wait for the taxi as Ford had hoped, realizing the maneuver was a signal for him to take the Citroën and get out of there. And he had, managing his way across the city and driving in circles until he finally found Ford’s address on the rue Dauphine and surprising Ford’s wife, the pert Nadine, only a little because she had known he was coming. Although she was beginning to feel the effects of her pregnancy, she’d welcomed him right away, making him a sandwich and pouring him a glass of wine and entertaining him until her husband came home, doing it all with warmth and cheer because he was Dan Ford’s best friend in the world.

  And now those two best friends in the world sat arguing at the dinner table in the Fords’ small first-floor apartment. Marten was determined to call Halliday and find out what he knew about Raymond. Ford wanted him to get out of Paris right then and stay out until Halliday left.

  Maybe Marten would have listened if he hadn’t seen Halliday in the Parc Monceau walking the Neuss murder scene with Lenard the way Halliday had walked the Josef Speer murder scene in MacArthur Park in L.A. with Red, himself, and the others. It was an image he couldn’t shake, nor could he get rid of the sea of memories that came with it. Memories that made him realize how enormous the guilt still was—not just for the innocent people who died because of his misjudgment about the kind of man Raymond was, but also, self-defense or not, for his own shooting to death of Roosevelt Lee and Marty Valparaiso in the rail yards. The stark recollection of it was so clear at this moment the acrid stench of gunpowder might as well have hung above the chair where he sat.

  Halliday’s presence had brought it all back and somehow he had to address it, finally and once and for all. Talk it through. And out. Cry. Scream. Rage. Whatever it took, in some way, any way, to put it behind him. It was why he had to talk with Jimmy Halliday. He was the only person on earth who would understand, because he had been right there when it happened.

  “What if the reason he brought up Raymond and asked for help was nothing but bait?” Dan Ford put down his coffee cup and sat back from the table. “Give you a taste of something strong enough to tempt you to tip your hand and call him.”

  “You think he’s got it in for me?”

  “How do you know he wasn’t the one who started the whole LAPD thing against you in the first place? And even if he wasn’t, since then he’s lost h
is friends, his self-respect, his job, and his family. Maybe he knows what we’ve found out about Raymond. Maybe he’s found out even more and wants to tell you about it. Then again, what if he holds you responsible for all of it and wants to even the score? You want to take that chance?”

  Marten studied him, then looked away. Ford was only trying to protect him, he knew, the same as he had earlier on the ride in from the airport and then when they’d seen Halliday in the park. And he might have been right to do it, but there was one thing he was wrong about. No matter how far down Halliday was, he would never have been the one who turned against Marten. Dan Ford might have guessed what had gone on in the rail yards, but he had never pressed Marten to talk about it and Marten never had. So there was no way for him to know what Halliday had done there.

  So, yes, maybe Ford was right by trying to keep him from Halliday, but alongside his own emotions, the weight of his own guilt and remorse and just wanting to talk with him, there was the possibility that what Ford had suggested was true—that Halliday had learned something and wanted to tell him about it. Both those things overrode Ford’s common sense. He turned back.

  “I want to see Halliday. I want to go to his hotel. Now, tonight.”

  “See him?” Ford was incredulous. “As in face-to-face?”

  “Yes.”

  Nadine Ford put her hand on her husband’s. She understood only a little of what had been said, but she knew the argument had suddenly gone in another direction. She saw the way they looked at each other and she felt the emotion of it and it frightened her.

  “C’est bien,” Ford told her gently in French, smiling and patting her belly. “C’est bien.” It’s okay.

  Marten had to smile. Nadine had begun teaching Dan to speak French when they were still in L.A. Obviously she’d been a good tutor, because his ability with the language was a chief reason for his posting to the Paris bureau, and by now it seemed to fit him with the comfort of an old sweater.