Nicholas Marten 01 - The Exile

by Folsom, Allan

  Marten felt his heart skip a beat. He took a deep breath, and then a second, and booted up Armand’s computer. Sliding in the disk, he clicked it on. The lone file on it was titled “Nonsense” and he felt the air go out of him. “Nonsense,” some kind of computer game or a joke file someone had passed on to Halliday that he had stuck inside the cover of his book and forgotten about.

  Disheartened, he clicked on the file anyway. A millisecond later its contents came up on the screen and the disappointment vanished.

  “My God,” he breathed. “Nonsense” was a copy of Raymond’s missing LAPD booking file. On it were clear pictures of his mugshots and his fingerprints. As far as Marten knew, these were the only copies of his fingerprints still in existence.

  5:50 A.M.

  Abruptly Marten popped the file from the computer and shut it down. Then, sliding the disk back between the cards, he closed them with the rubber band and put them back in Halliday’s appointment book, securing it with the big elastics. The question was what to do now. He had to sleep, at least for a while, but he also had to protect the information. Then he remembered the courtyard outside Armand’s ground-floor dining room.

  He stood quickly and gathered Halliday’s appointment book and Ford’s accordion file; then, carefully opening the door, he went out into the darkened hallway.

  48

  Seconds later Marten entered the dining room and looked out through French double doors to the small courtyard separating Armand’s apartment building from the next. It wasn’t much, but it was something, especially if the police—with Kovalenko distrusting him anyway, and having gone over Dan Ford’s apartment inch by inch with a tech squad—had any suspicion at all that something was wrong or missing or not as it should be and came around asking questions, maybe even bringing some French version of a search warrant.

  He was an American living in England, caught up in a series of ugly murders in France, where he had known two of the victims personally. If the police found the Ford and Halliday materials in his possession, Lenard would not only arrest him on the spot for concealing evidence but might be angry enough to send his photograph and fingerprints to Interpol to see if he had outstanding warrants against him in other countries. And who knew if his “friends” on the LAPD hadn’t posted a Code Yellow/Missing Person “wanted” notice with Interpol on the off chance someone might identify him? Then what? Everything would be found out—who he was, where he was, about Rebecca, everything. Even Hiram Ott in Vermont could be exposed and prosecuted for illegally passing the identity of a dead person on to someone else.

  And then it would be as he’d feared earlier. In very short order Gene VerMeer or some other messenger or messengers would be sent to execute the payback by those in the LAPD who still believed he was responsible for the deaths of Polchak and Lee and Valparaiso and for destroying the squad. It was something he couldn’t let happen. On the other hand, it still remained “his war.” What he’d found in Dan Ford’s files and on Halliday’s computer disk brought that war closer than ever.

  Armand’s wife kept her petite kitchen tidy and well organized, and it took Marten almost no time to find what he was looking for, a box of dark vinyl trash bags. He took one, put Halliday’s appointment book and Ford’s accordion file into it, twisted it closed, sealed it with a plastic tie, and went back into the dining room. There, he turned on a small lamp, unlocked the glass doors, and stepped out into the frigid early morning air. In the dim spill of the lamp he could see the courtyard was roughly ten by twenty feet with a six-foot-high wall at the back connecting the apartment buildings on either side. The wall itself was a scramble of winter-dead vines with a few evergreen shrubs in front of it and a large brick fountain, unused in winter, near the top.

  Five steps and Marten was at the wall and pulling himself up. By now his eyes were becoming accustomed to the dark and he could see a narrow alley on the far side of the wall and several refuse cans on the ground immediately below. Twisting around, he peered into the fountain. Save for a collection of fallen leaves at the bottom, it was empty. Quickly he shoved the garbage bag inside and covered it over with the leaves. Then he turned and jumped to the ground.

  The sky was still dark as he went back inside and locked the courtyard door. Three minutes later he was on the couch in Armand’s study, blanket pulled up, his head eased into the pillow. Maybe he had bought himself insurance against the police, maybe not. Maybe they wouldn’t come at all and he had just been overly cautious. At least he had the peace of mind of knowing Dan’s files and Halliday’s book were hidden away in a place not easily found and where he could retrieve them later from the alley side if he had to. He took a breath and rolled over. All he wanted now was sleep.

  49

  HENDAYE, FRANCE, THE RAILWAY STATION ON THE FRENCH/SPANISH BORDER. THURSDAY, JANUARY 16. 6:30 A.M.

  It was still dark when three men and two women stepped from the train in a group of departing passengers and crossed toward a dark gray Alfa Romeo sedan parked in the railway station lot. They were dressed plainly and spoke Spanish and looked very much like middle-class Spaniards entering France. The first two men were older and carried the women’s bags as well as their own. The third was twenty-two, slight, and boyish, and carried his own luggage. The women were his mother and grandmother. The other men were bodyguards.

  As they reached the car, one of the bodyguards stepped back to survey what was going on around them. The other loaded the luggage into the trunk. Two minutes later the Alfa turned out of the parking lot. Five minutes after that, it accelerated onto the A63 motorway heading away from the Spanish border toward the French coastal resort of Biarritz, the bodyguards in the front seats, the women and younger man in the back.

  Octavio, the man driving, dark-haired and with a narrow scar across his lower lip, adjusted the rearview mirror. A quarter mile behind he could see a black four-door Saab following them. He knew the Saab would still be there when they turned east off the A63 and still with them when they turned north and passed through Toulouse on the A20 toward Paris. Two cars, four bodyguards protecting the three who had come in so quietly from Spain—Grand Duchess Catherine Mikhailovna of the Russian imperial family Romanov in exile; her mother, Grand Duchess Maria Kurakina, widow of Grand Duke Vladimir, a cousin of Tsar Nicholas II; and her twenty-two-year-old son, Grand Duke Sergei Petrovich Romanov, the man recognized by royal houses around the world as the legitimate heir to the throne of Russia, who, if the monarchy were to be restored, would become the first Tsar of Russia since Nicholas Alexandrovich Romanov, Tsar Nicholas II, was murdered with his wife and five children at the beginning of the Russian Revolution in 1918.

  Grand Duchess Catherine glanced briefly at her son and turned to look back at the trailing Saab and then out at the dark of the passing countryside. In little more than twelve hours they would be in Paris and at a formal and very secretive gathering of the Romanov family at a private home on the Avenue Georges V. It was a gathering called for by one of the highest envoys of the Russian Orthodox Church, requesting that the family select the legitimate successor to the Russian throne, and was, for all intents, a clear signal that Russia was, in some way, prepared to reestablish the monarchy, most likely in the form of a constitutional monarchy where the Tsar would be little more than a figurehead. Still it was a day for which the Romanov family had held its collective breath—and had fought over, often desperately and angrily, casting aside one pretender to the throne after another—for nearly a century. With the gathering, everyone knew, would come the final battle, the choosing of a successor the entire family would agree on: the one Romanov who was the true heir in accordance with the fundamental laws of the Russian throne, which were that the crown must pass from the last Emperor to his eldest son, and from his eldest son to his eldest grandson, and on down.

  In the long, Byzantine line of split families and family branches, Grand Duchess Catherine was certain there was only one true heir, and that was her son, Grand Duke Sergei Petrovich Romano
v. She had taken great pains to make sure that when the time came, as it seemingly had now, there would be no question about it.

  Since the fall of the Soviet Union, she, her mother, and Grand Duke Sergei had made yearly trips to Russia from their home in Madrid, developing friendships with key political, religious, and military leaders and all the while courting the media at every turn. It had been a shrewd and carefully orchestrated maneuver to create the lasting and very public impression that Sergei and Sergei alone was the legitimate heir to the throne.

  If her ploy had been shameless and audacious, it had also split the family from the outset, because, while many supported Grand Duke Sergei in the complex labyrinth of claimants and pretenders to the throne, there were others who staked equal claim. Most notable was Prince Dimitrii Vladimir Romanov, who at seventy-seven, was the great-great-grandson of Emperor Nicholas I and a distant cousin of Nicholas II and who, as head of the Romanov family, was considered by many as the true heir. That his Parisian home on the Avenue Georges V was the setting for tonight’s gathering made things all the more difficult if Grand Duke Sergei’s supporters suddenly had a change of heart and sided with Prince Dimitrii instead.

  Catherine let her gaze fall on her mother dozing in the seat between them and then looked to her son, who had the passenger lamp on and was absorbed with a game of solitaire on his laptop.

  “When will we arrive in Paris?” she suddenly asked Octavio, the driver, in Spanish.

  “Barring difficulty, about five this afternoon, Grand Duchess.” Octavio glanced at her in the mirror; then she saw his eyes shift off to something in the distance behind them, and she knew he was looking to make certain the black Saab was still behind them.

  Outside, the first streaks of the dawn on the horizon were bleak and gave the promise of a cold winter day. In the distance she could see the lights of the city of Toulouse, in the fifth century the capital of the Visigoths, now a high-tech center and home to giant aircraft makers Airbus and Aerospatiale.

  Toulouse.

  Suddenly a wave of melancholy passed through her. Twenty-three years earlier to the month, and five years before the death of her husband, Hans Friedrich Hohenzollern of Germany, Grand Duke Sergei had been conceived there, in a suite at the Grand Hôtel de l’Opéra.

  Once again she saw Octavio glance in the mirror.

  “Is there a problem?” she asked quickly. This time there was an edge to her voice.

  “No, Grand Duchess.”

  She looked over her shoulder. The Saab was still there with two cars in between. She turned back, clicked on her own passenger light, and took a crossword puzzle from her purse to pass the time and help ease the worry that increased inside her by the mile. It was the reason for the bodyguards and the wearisome means of travel—an overnight train ride from Madrid to San Sebastian, the short commuter train to Hendaye, followed by a ten-hour trip by car to Paris—when a flight from Madrid to Paris took little more than two hours.

  They were traveling in this exhausting and laborious manner because, despite the relative secrecy of the meeting tonight, any number of people knew of it, and the brutal murders of four Russian expatriates in the Americas a year earlier still resonated. Each victim had been a prominent Romanov—a fact known to few outside the family, but learned and carefully protected by the Russian investigators who had come to the scene for fear a political football would be made of it, both at home and abroad—and among Grand Duke Sergei’s most vocal and outspoken supporters. Furthermore, the killings had come at a time when the rumors of a reinstatement of the monarchy were nearly as loud as they were now. A family gathering had even been arranged to discuss it but, in light of the murders, had been abruptly canceled.

  At the time she had protested to the Russian government, suggesting the murders had been committed to silence family voices loyal to the Grand Duke, but no proof had ever been found. Instead the slayings were laid to the madman Raymond Oliver Thorne, who had been in each of the cities at the time of the crimes and who had died at the hands of the Los Angeles police. At about the same time, the talk supporting a reinstated monarchy quieted, and for a long time nothing happened.

  Then, in just the last days, had come the murders of prominent Russian expatriates Fabien Curtay in Monaco and Alfred Neuss in Paris. Although neither had been a member of the royal family—and their political support of either candidate was not known—the killings unnerved all the Romanovs, especially when one considered Neuss had been a known target of Thorne before and the family gathering to which they were going was in the same city where he had been murdered.

  “Your Highness.” Octavio grinned and nodded toward a large overhead highway sign: PARIS. “We are getting closer.”

  “Yes, thank you.” Grand Duchess Catherine Mikhailovna tried not to think about what lay ahead and instead turned to the crossword puzzle in her lap. One question answered easily, and then two. The next nearly took her breath away in its irony.

  It was 24 Across, asking for a nine-letter word for “Tsar-to-be.” She smiled and swiftly, and in pen, wrote the answer.

  T-S-A-R-E-V-I-C-H.

  50

  PARIS. 7:50 A.M.

  Somewhere far off Nicholas Marten heard a doorbell ring. It rang once and then twice. Then rang again with the same impatient one, two. Finally the chimes stopped, and he thought he heard voices but wasn’t sure. A moment later there was a knock on his door and Armand came in wearing a T-shirt and jockey shorts and wiping shaving cream from his face.

  “I think you’d better come.”

  “What is it?”

  “The police.”

  “What?” Marten was suddenly alert.

  “And a woman.”

  “Woman?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who is she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Abruptly Marten threw back the blanket, pulled on his jeans and sweatshirt, and followed Armand out of the room. How long had he slept? An hour, two at most? He’d been right about the police. But who was the woman? Certainly not Rebecca. Armand would have said so. Then they were at the door and he saw her and his jaw dropped.

  “Clem!”

  “Nicholas, what the fuck is going on?”

  Lady Clementine Simpson pushed toward him, half dragging a uniformed policewoman with her. Her navy business suit rumpled, her hair disheveled, she was exasperated, exhausted, and clearly infuriated.

  Then he saw Lenard waiting in the hallway behind her, a large manila envelope tucked under his arm. With him was another Parisian detective Marten knew as Roget, two uniformed officers, and—Kovalenko.

  “This man,” Lady Clem turned to glare at Lenard, “and the one with the beard, he’s Russian, met me at the airport and took me into a back room and started questioning me! They’ve been asking me questions ever since.” She looked back to Marten.

  “How the hell did they know I was coming? Or even who I was? I’ll tell you how. One of them called the university and managed to find out what no one but a very select few have found out in eight months! And you know very well what I am talking about.”

  “Clem, calm down.”

  “I have calmed down. You should have seen me before.”

  Lenard stepped forward. “It would be better if we talked inside.”

  Nadine came out of her bedroom as Armand led them back into the apartment and down a narrow hallway toward the living room. The confines had no effect on Lady Clem. She was all wound up and still roaring mad.

  “They tried to contact me in Amsterdam, but I’d already left to come here because I had seen the story about Dan on the news and couldn’t reach you or Rebecca. Or Nadine—the police were at her apartment. I left word, but”—she glared back at Lenard—“no one seems to have paid much attention until I landed in Paris!” She looked back to Marten. “The hotel in Amsterdam advised them what flight I was on. How is that for good business practice?”

  “They are the police.”

  Again Clem looked over her
shoulder at Lenard. “I don’t care who they are.”

  Again she swung back to Marten. “I was worried. I tried to call you a dozen times at least. Do you never answer your cell phone or at least check your voice mail?”

  “Clem, a lot’s been going on. Somewhere I lost the phone. I never got around to checking my voice mail either.”

  Clem glared at him for the briefest moment, then abruptly dropped her voice. “They wanted to know about you and Dan. And a man named Halliday. Do you know a man named Halliday?”

  “Yes.”

  “They also wanted to know about an Alfred Neuss.”

  “Clem, both Halliday and Alfred Neuss were murdered in Paris.”

  51

  Marten and Lady Clem and Nadine Ford sat on a couch in front of a large antique coffee table. Armand was in an armchair at one end of it, and the detective Roget sat on a straight-back chair at the other. The two uniforms took up positions outside the living room door, while the policewoman stood just inside it.

  Marten could see Lenard holding the manila envelope and talking with Kovalenko in the hallway. They chatted a moment longer and then came in, with Lenard pulling up a chair directly across from Marten and putting the envelope on the coffee table between them. Kovalenko stepped back to cross his arms over his chest and lean against the window casing, watching them.

  “I don’t know what you’re doing, why you involved Lady Clementine, or why you’re here,” Marten said, looking directly at Lenard, “but in the future, if you have a question that has to do with me, I would appreciate it if you came to me first, before you start involving other people.”