Faces in the Rain

by Roland Perry

  Freddie got out at La Coupole, the last of France’s great brasseries, which happened to have been a favourite haunt of mine for twenty years. I couldn’t think of one visit to Paris where I hadn’t taken a coffee or a meal there.

  The brightly-lit restaurant had been retained in the old style, but the owners had given in to economic pressures and changing times and had constructed six floors of offices above the 1927 building.

  Freddie entered the huge square room which was full of late diners. He sat inside in a section of cubicles set aside for those who wished to just drink, and waited. I wasn’t about to go in or be seen pressing my nose against the window, so I stayed on the opposite side of the Boulevard and strolled east towards Gare Montparnasse.

  The area had become dominated by cost-efficient premises that housed hordes of fast-food restaurants with their yellow, plastic interiors and Franglo-gibberish names: Freetime Longburger Restaurant; Le Cafe Big Mac; Le Chien Hot and others. There were endless garish cinema complexes that proclaimed mainly American films. Many doorways were occupied by prostitutes, usually in tight black leather skirts, and often chewing vigorously. In my time coming here the artists and intellectuals had been replaced by tourists, bourgeois and roughs. La Dome, La Rotonde and Le Select were still there, but the new had seen off the fashionable and the bohemian nightlife, and with them had gone the area’s charm.

  I doubled back after a twenty-minute stroll and could see Freddie speaking with somebody. I crossed the road and was close enough to recognise the twitching shoulders of Cochard.

  I retreated to Le Select across the boulevard from La Coupole and was uncertain whether to stay hidden or quit. A white-coated waiter stopped arranging beer mats and tearing paid bills in half, and offered me a seat on the terrace. I ordered a citron pressé and waited until he had cleared coffee pots and soda siphons from my table before sitting down.

  So dear Freddie was connected to Cochard, who was staying at ninety-eight Boulevard du Montparnasse, which adjoined La Coupole. I took the drink and was about to leave before they did, when Freddie greeted a woman who had just entered. I had to dodge traffic halfway across the road to see who it was. Surprise number two. It was Danielle.

  I retraced my steps and this time stood in the shadows next to Le Select and watched.

  I lit a cheroot.

  A lady of the night approached and offered me her services so nicely that I nearly missed the three of them coming out of La Coupole. They disappeared into the Cochard’s apartment block.

  I hailed a taxi and returned to my firetrap lodgings in St Michel.

  There was too much on my mind. I spent a couple of hours staring at the plain, cross-beamed ceiling, thinking about Danielle.

  If she was in with Cochard and Maniguet, wouldn’t she have told them I was disguised as Morten-Saunders? Presuming she had, wouldn’t Cochard have known who I was on the plane? Was he aware of me all the way? Did he fool me and follow me? But if he had done, surely he would have tried to kill me, especially if he had learned about his companion’s demise in Melbourne? He could well have heard that I was a key suspect.

  This mess of unanswered questions, fears and puzzles allowed me only semi-sleep until four a.m. when I dozed off and didn’t wake until after nine.

  NINETEEN

  THE APPEAL OF Meudon as a business HQ site was clear. It was situated south-west of Paris and just beyond the ring road or Périphérique, but it was just eleven minutes by train from Gare Montparnasse. It had escaped the ravages of the inner city and had a quiet, almost villagey atmosphere, accentuated by its proximity to Meudon Forest a few kilometres from the town centre.

  I had taken the train by myself to Meudon in search of Vital. The fact that it might have a hospital there intrigued me. Vital, Farrar and Freddie had said, made perfume.

  A short walk from the train station in sleepy hollow found me at at a group of shops. I stopped at a cafe to ask directions to Rue Des Gardes. I walked into a dark room dominated by a stained, marble bar. Above rows of bottles was an old clock that had ticked its last at five thirty-three this morning or a decade ago, and to add to the time warp, there were old calendars and posters on the wall. The customers included two men looking like French peasants, complete with dirty laced boots and patchy trousers tucked into socks. They were playing cards and sipping Calvados at a marble-topped table. There was also a group of four younger men and women: judging from their casual dress and long hair, they could have been students.

  I pressed a buzzer on the counter covered by well-used drip mats advertising aperitifs. An old barmaid in a mini-skirt, and with puckered and wrinkled flesh like blow-torched paintwork, sauntered in and gave me a gutteral ‘Oui?’

  I asked directions to Rue Des Gardes and Vital. The two peasant types came to the aid of the perplexed barmaid, who probably had never looked past her bulbous nose, and explained the route. My French seemed to be standing up well, if I allowed for my accent and the bullet replies I would miss every so often.

  I trudged to the top of Rue Des Gardes and a group of twenty villas on the edge of the forest. Vital’s offices were in a two-storey building beyond them. There was no sign of the hospital mentioned in Cochard’s notes.

  A small truck passed on the narrow road next to the villas that led to the Vital building. I hailed the driver. He was a skinny, pop-eyed man of about thirty. I asked him if he was delivering to a hospital.

  ‘Il y a un hôpital?’ I asked.

  ‘Je ne connais pas, Monsieur.’

  ‘No hospital?’ He threw up his hands and shook his head.

  ‘Vous êtes sûr?’ I enquired.

  ‘Oui, monsieur.’

  He drove on and I walked in his trail. Instead of going up to the front entrance I followed the truck round to the rear and watched it disappear through automatic doors in the building’s basement. I headed for a track which began in the set of villas and went into the Forest. The sun had broken through the cloud to create a dappled effect, which completed a quiet, idyllic scene amongst the thin pine and poplar trees.

  I couldn’t resist strolling down the track. Ahead of me a man was pushing a pram, while the woman with him was mustering two young children, who were running in and out of the forest. They made me think of Alistair and Sam. By now they would be considering the idea that their father might be a killer. I hoped they would keep faith in me.

  Apart from the chirp of sparrows, and the muffled growl of a truck nudging through the gears up Rue Des Gardes, I could hear a woodsman somewhere in the forest. It was the tap of an experienced chopper, with the cuts coming in speedy bursts. The sound was emanating from somewhere between me and the Vital building.

  I wandered off the track and it took a few minutes to find a clearing where there was a tiny cemetery next to a bluestone church. There were about forty or so tombstones in one section and a cremation area marked by a rosebush for each plot. A priest – I assumed he was a priest from the huge cross and chain around his neck – looked my way. His dark round face looked apprehensive. He signalled for the chopper – a black woods-woman – to stop. She had arms and almost everything else like a Sumo wrestler. At first the priest seemed like a black from an African colony, but when he came close, I saw I had the right coloniser but was geographically adrift. His rugged features were Polynesian, probably Tahitian.

  ‘Je cherche l’hôpital,’ I said.

  The priest came up close. His eyes scanned me so closely you would swear he was searching for blemishes. He had dark, very curly hair with patches of grey. It could have been a kindly face if he had been carrying a Bible instead of a mallet and a couple of stakes for his grave sites.

  ‘Vital?’ he said.

  ‘Oui.’

  He pointed at the Vital building.

  ‘It has a hospital on the second floor,’ he said in English. So much for my French accent.

  ‘Merci beaucoup,’ I said, anxious to vacate the area in case Madame Sumo wanted leg-twisting practice on a white boy. I made
my way back through the forest to the slope leading down to the garage where the truck had gone and found that the automatic door was up. I sidled inside and took stairs next to a lift to the second level.

  I tried the doors to rooms until one opened.

  A young male nurse was operating a computer which controlled a radiotherapy machine. He was so engrossed he didn’t notice me. A female patient, half-encased in a polystyrene mould, could be seen through the window to an adjoining chamber. She was undergoing treatment. The machine’s moveable head of about half a metre square was cartwheeling automatically. There was method in its gyrations and in a few seconds it was positioned to shoot radiation into the woman’s brain.

  I left more silently than I had entered only to hear the nurse call out ‘Monsieur!’

  I walked at the double down the corridor to a second door and opened it.

  There was a strong antiseptic smell in a long ward air-conditioned by three roof fans. Twenty patients were variously propped or lying in their beds with the forlorn look of the sick. At least half of the patients were Polynesian like the priest. One Tahitian girl of about seventeen was sitting up reading. Her raven hair was dreadlocked and she had large, dark-brown eyes.

  She smiled at me.

  ‘Monsieur?’ she said.

  ‘I must be at the wrong place,’ I said. ‘What sort of hospital is it?’

  ‘Cancer,’ she said softly. Another Tahitian woman of about forty in the next bed turned her head towards me.

  ‘All cancer patients?’ I asked the girl.

  ‘Oui,’ she said. I sat on a chair next to her bed.

  ‘What do you have?’ I said.

  ‘Vous êtes un docteur?’

  ‘No. Un visiteur.’

  ‘English?’

  ‘Australian.’

  She reverted to English.

  ‘I would like to go there,’ she said.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  ‘I have a tumour,’ she said, ‘in my stomach.’

  At the other end of the ward, a glass door to a balcony slid open. Two young female nurses were sitting on deck chairs with their white dresses tucked into their panties for maximum sun on their legs. One of them had pushed the door aside with her foot. She sat up and pointed at me. I wished the young patient luck and opened another door marked ‘Pathologie’. It had air-conditioning for three desktop computers. A short, chubby young man wearing a white coat challenged me. I shoved my way passed him back to the ward of patients and along the corridor. The male nurse waddled after me. He didn’t seem fit or brave enough to do much more.

  ‘Qui êtes vous?!!’ he shrieked in a high-pitched voice, ‘Arrêtez! Arrêtez!!’

  I began to run and the male nurse stopped and scurried the other way, shouting the alarm.

  I charged down the two flights of steps to the corridor leading to the loading bay.

  The door was shut and the truck had gone.

  I pressed a button on the wall. The automatic door began to slide up. I ran for the daylight, but had only gone a few metres when two men appeared from beyond the door. They were the same peasant roughheads who had given me directions from the bar. This time they said nothing, which told me a lot more.

  I turned to see another man coming from behind me. He was silhouetted in the light from the corridor and he held a metre-long pipe. He gripped it like a man used to using it, and that was intimidating.

  I decided to crash through the two heavies in front of me and make for the cover of the forest. I dashed and baulked like a footballer, only to be rugby-tackled so well that it took the wind out of me. It seemed as if my chest and stomach had been ripped out of me, but I fought on the ground with the two attackers and was aware of the third man trying to line me up for a home run with his pipe. My elbows, feet and fists were battling the odds and I might have broken free if it hadn’t been for that pipe. I had just struggled to my feet when it hit me on the base of the skull. I went down on my knees and think I collected another whack. I heard the sound of a chainsaw in the forest and my face hit the dirt.

  I regained consciousness, almost. People in white coats had their backs to me. Every part of my body felt like it was a dead weight and impossible to lift. I tried each limb in turn and my torso, but failed each time. A white-coated woman turned towards me holding a syringe. I shut my eyes.

  ‘Combien?’ the nurse said.

  A deep male voice from another corner replied, ‘Un autre cinq, peut-etre.’

  What had they done to me? I took consolation that I was alive. My head felt like a truck had run over it. Maybe it had.

  Some of my senses were still in play, more or less. Like smell. It confused me. I could pick up chloroform. I was sure there was eucalyptus oil too. But that seemed impossible. Then other odours floated round me. Cloves. Bacon. Cooked chicken.

  Some culinary clown, in the forest perhaps, was wading into something like coq au vin. The thought was exhausting, because I wasn’t hungry. Far from it. I was nauseated.

  Taste. I had taste. Was I eating something? I had had it before. My mind struggled to recall the experience. I would know if I could compare it.

  It was similar to the time you woke up in a daze in a New York hotel room. You thought you had been mugged, but you hadn’t. You woke up with that taste in your mouth and staring unfocused at a dark patch laid against a gaudy pattern. The dark patch was your blood on the carpet. In a freak accident you had slipped getting out of the shower and cut your head open on a door knob. That same flavour was in your mouth and throat now. Iron and salt. Bleeding again.

  ‘He’s breathing,’ a voice I knew but couldn’t place said in English. It had a frightened quiver to it.

  ‘Bien sûr, idiot!,’ a stronger French voice said. I didn’t know that tone at all. Or maybe it was because it was said in French. It was befuddling. Hadn’t I hit my head on a doorknob in New York?

  But that was another time wasn’t it? No. Maybe I was in a Manhattan hospital, and these people were pretending to speak French.

  I wanted to sleep. I wanted to sleep for a long time. I didn’t need any asanas or mundis to float me away either. I was there and I wasn’t.

  I felt a needle going in. Hey! The uncrushed part of my brain protested. But nothing came out my mouth.

  Hope they used a new syringe.

  ‘I think he should be killed,’ a third voice said. That person was familiar too and he spoke with an accent. I didn’t like his tone, not because he wanted some poor individual put to the sword, whoever he or she was, but because it gave me bad vibes.

  It was like an impression you get about a kid you knew when you were a young child. You either liked him or you didn’t and thirty years later when you met him again you remembered the feeling. The impression stuck and never changed. So with this deeper-than-deep voice. It spelt danger.

  The owner of the voice was walking when he spoke because I heard him come closer and the food whiffs were stronger. He carried them. Monsieur Coq au Vin. Le Chef. He repeated his destructive thought in French and with some vigour. But the dominant voice was against killing the poor so-and-so, whoever he might be, just yet.

  ‘You are going to take him to the Bois de Boulogne for a rendezvous with Christine,’ the dominant voice said.

  ‘Christine?’ Coq au Vin said incredulously.

  ‘Oui. That way there is no connection to us.’

  ‘Merde! That’s crazy!’

  So the victim was going to be taken to the Bois de Boulogne where the transsexuals and hookers hang out and he was going to be introduced to Christine. It sounded odd, but far better than Coq au Vin’s suggestion.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Coq au Vin complained.

  ‘You’re not paid to understand,’ the Dominator said.

  ‘But what use is he alive?’

  ‘Plenty. The Australian police think he murdered Martine. They know he killed Maniguet.’

  ‘That’s why I want him dead!’ Coq au Vin complained. I heard a spit and
a splat of saliva hit my cheek. It was warm then cold. I felt something wet – a flannel – brush my face and a nurse growled something inaudible. It then struck me that the one they wanted eliminated was me. Now I was more emotionally involved.

  ‘No, Richard,’ the Dominator insisted, ‘if the murders are pinned on him then we can return to Australia without hindrance. The police must find him, charge him and take him to Melbourne. We have to go back there. We must get the files.’

  ‘Mais . . .’

  ‘Don’t contradict me!!’ the Dominator yelled. ‘You failed me once. Do I have to do everything?!!’

  Coq au Vin seemed defeated.

  ‘What about May?’ Coq au Vin enquired.

  ‘That’s a different matter.’

  ‘Do we need him?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Then let me finish him.’

  ‘He has no idea who I am?’

  ‘How could he?’

  ‘I want to be sure.’

  There was a brief pause.

  ‘He might know who you are, actually,’ Coq au Vin said, without much reflection. He was changing his position quickly. Too quickly. The Dominator was right onto him.

  ‘You’re saying that because you’re frustrated,’ the Dominator remarked, ‘that’s the trouble with psychopaths. They’ve got to kill to relieve frustrations.’

  ‘I’m not a psychopath!’

  ‘OK. You’re not a psychopath. But you give a very good impression of one.’

  There was a brooding silence.

  Knives rattled in metal trays. The chainsaw had stopped in the forest and the drone of insects had taken over.

  The Dominator asked the nurse to put the light on. It was getting dark. That meant it was about nine p.m. I had lost nearly half a day, and I hoped I could get it back crossing the international date line.

  ‘Richard,’ the Dominator said, ‘what makes you think May might know who I am?’