I had dinner with Fritz and Reju and then went to the garage for my car. I drove it across Paris to see if the fallen Butterfly had left anything of his past behind.
Like a crowbar I could use to pry up the truth in some form that I could work with.
Chapter 26
“Butterfly used to come in almost every night for years,” Monique Barril said. “He’d hang around, talk big with the other milieu hooligans, kid around with the poules that came in to take the weight off their feet for a while.” She gave me a defensive look. “We don’t let the girls dredge for customers in here. For that they’ve got to go back out on the sidewalk.”
“I know that,” I assured her.
The bar was on the Rue des 2 Gares, with the Gare du Nord a block away in one direction and the Gare de l’Est the same short distance in another. With hordes of daily travelers pouring in and out of both stations, the area was a natural for pickpockets, purse snatchers, con men, and hookers.
As I’d expected, the bar wasn’t doing heavy business at that hour. The nighttime regulars wouldn’t start drifting in before eleven. Monique Barril and I were in a back booth, with nobody close to us. I had a cognac, and she was drinking tap beer. She was a fat woman with a face like a pudding. According to Fritz, she’d been a slim and pretty woman when she’d been a prostitute. She’d deliberately let herself go when she quit the trade, to prove she had no further interest in attracting men.
“Well,” she said, “what can I tell you? The Butterfly, he’d hang around here for an hour or so. Drink too much. Boast too much. Then wander out to do…whatever he did for a living.”
“I hear he dealt in the blanche and handled strong-arm jobs.”
Monique Barril nodded. “I heard things like that, too.”
“And he sometimes took contracts to kill people,” I added.
“That I don’t know about,” she said carefully.
There were two men in a booth up front. They looked like workers who’d finished their day but weren’t in a mood to go home. Two more people were on bar stools. One was an alcoholic somewhere in his late twenties, leaning on the bar and taking small, frequent sips from a tall glass of red wine. The other was a street prostitute taking a break.
Eric Barril was behind the bar giving her some business advice. She listened with attentive respect to every word. He was twenty years older than Monique Barril. Skinny bald, with a permanently anxious face. He’d been known as Grandpop even back when he’d been Monique’s pimp, before they got married.
Theirs wasn’t an unusual story in France. His function as a pimp had consisted mainly of saving the money she earned. When they had saved enough they’d married and bought the bar. Other local merchants treated Monique Barril with respect, though they knew her background. Being a prostitute is not a criminal act in France. They treated her husband with less respect. Being a pimp is a criminal act.
Their not being considered criminals is one reason fewer French prostitutes are on drugs than those in other countries. They stay in the business only to get enough cash together to buy a small business. Most of them think they have a future. Some do, if they’ve been intelligent in choosing their men.
“You don’t have to be careful of what you say about the Butterfly,” I reminded Monique Barril. “I told you, he’s dead.”
When she smiled deep dimples appeared in her plump face. “I would tell you about him anyway. Any friend of Fritz…
“Did this Butterfly ever mention a man named Jacques Morel?”
She thought about it and then shook her head. “No. I never heard of anybody with that name.”
“Sure?”
“Sure. I’ve got a good memory.”
I described Morel, but she couldn’t remember ever having seen the Butterfly with a man who looked like that.
“What sorts of things did Butterfly boast about?” I asked her.
“Oh, the usual. How big a man he was. How much money he made. All his big connections.”
“Mob connections?”
“Naturally. To hear him talk, he was close friends with every top gang leader in France. Claimed he knew big shots in the SDECE, too.”
I sat up straighter. “Did he ever claim to work for the SDECE?”
“That’s what he said. But a lot of those petty hoods say they work for the secret services. Saying it doesn’t mean it’s true.”
It’s the same the world over. German thugs claim they do jobs for the BND. Florida thugs boast of connections with the CIA. It’s good for their prestige with other thugs.
But sometimes it’s true. Secret services do have uses for men like that. As informers. And as men of violence, to carry out jobs they don’t want traced back to the government.
Hoodlums who get that kind of work are proud of it. It makes them patriots, and they take that seriously.
Morel had told the Butterfly I was a traitor, and he’d had reason to believe it.
“How long has it been since you’ve seen the Butterfly?” I asked Monique Barril.
“Oh, about two years, I’d say.”
“The SDECE was put out to pasture more than three years ago. Now it’s the DGSE that handles foreign intelligence. Did he ever claim to work for the DGSE?”
“No. Other men that hang out here sometimes say they do. But never Butterfly. He was indignant about what happened to the old secret service. The SDECE. He used to say it was traitors inside the government that pulled it down.”
I drove from the bar to one of the new condominiums springing up near La Defense. Thierry Gallion lived there with his family. He was the next logical source to try after what Monique Barril had just told me.
* * * *
Detective work, private or police, depends more on who you know than on how smart you are. Without a plenitude of sources—official, criminal, and in the straight world—you’re just floundering through a dark swamp without boots or a compass. Sources are your stock in trade; the more you have the better you are at your trade.
Having Fritz Donhoff as my partner had enlarged my circle of sources immensely. But I had brought to the partnership a number of my own. Some held delicate positions—above ground or down inside its rat holes—and were wary of opening up except to me personally.
Captain Thierry Gallion was one of these. He was in a peculiar position: in a rat hole, but above ground. Doubly delicate.
His father was a retired admiral. During World War II his father had been a young lieutenant, second officer of a destroyer stuck in the naval harbor of Toulon with the rest of the French fleet because of a treaty between the Vichy government and Hitler Germany. Then Hitler had broken the agreement without warning and sent an SS Panzer Korps to seize the fleet. The grab failed when most of the fleet scuttled itself at the last moment. Thierry’s father had slipped out of Toulon and joined the Resistance, rejoining the navy only after the Liberation.
Former Resistance members form a tight fraternity in France. Thierry’s father and my mother became friends during Resistance gatherings, and Thierry and I became friends through them.
Thierry’s own career as a ship’s officer had ended when the submarine he’d commanded sank to the bottom of the Pacific because of engine failure. By the time the engine was repaired bad air and depth pressure had done permanent damage to his heart and hearing. After that he’d been made a desk officer—in the SDECE.
The government’s disbanding of the SDECE a few years back had consisted mainly of changing its name. Now it was the DGSE, doing exactly the same kind of intelligence and counterintelligence jobs. Some of the old officers had been dropped, but not many. Thierry commanded the same desk for the DGSE as he had for the SDECE.
He wasn’t home when I reached his apartment. His wife was watching television after having put their three kids to bed. She told me Thierry was working late and asked me in for a drink.
I had one with her. Just one. Thierry’s wife was pleasingly plump, well-bred, and devoted to him. But one of his less att
ractive sides was an unreasonable jealousy about any man she saw alone. Frenchmen are not as sexually secure as advertised.
I tore a page from my small notebook and wrote two names on it: Jacques Morel and Paul Orain, the Butterfly. Giving the paper to her, I said, “Tell Thierry I have to know about these men. I’ll contact him at lunchtime tomorrow. He should be able to get something on them by then, if they’re anywhere in the files.”
I left the apartment with nothing further I could do to pursue that lead until the next day. Dropping into the nearest café, I looked up the phone number of the woman Gilles had been seeing in Paris and called her.
* * * *
“Gilles warned me by phone that you might come to question me,” Jacqueline Crozet said. “He told me if you did I should slam the door in your face.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No. Gilles considers you his oldest and closest friend, Monsieur Sawyer. In spite of your not feeling too friendly toward each other at the moment. Gilles doesn’t have many friends. If he and I ever do marry, you and I would be seeing each other.” She smiled and shrugged. “Slamming a door in your face would not be the best beginning for our future relationship.”
We sat facing each other across the coffee table in her living room. It was a small, pleasant room. Old, comfortable, tasteful furnishings. A lot of books that showed they’d been chosen to be read and handled with pleasure. Jacqueline Crozet was an attractive woman in her mid-thirties, with soft eyes and a warm voice. Small and slim, she bore a certain resemblance to Gilles’s mother, but without Mona’s chic and drive. I found it impossible not to like her.
“You don’t sound sure you and Gilles will get married,” I said. “There’s nothing to stop it now.”
“That is precisely what may make it impossible. The horrible way we’ve been freed to be with each other. That may prove… She frowned and looked down at her hands. “In any case, I don’t think Gilles will be ready to see me again for a long time. I hope not forever. First of all, there’s his son. He’s trying to nerve himself to tell him that his mother is dead.”
“I don’t envy him that.”
“Nor I. It will be especially hard for Gilles. He’s not good at handling personal relationships. I think I’ve helped him there, a little. But perhaps not enough.” Jacqueline Crozet raised her head and looked at me again. “And then he has to make his peace with himself. Right now he doesn’t like himself. Oh, I know you think he took it coolly. He told me.”
“I know he doesn’t show his real feelings much.”
“It hit him hard, seeing the way you looked at him. Judging him.”
“I don’t judge my friends,” I said. But I felt suddenly uncomfortable, not sure that was the truth.
She continued to look at me probingly. “He didn’t like the way he saw himself through your eyes. He’ll need time to get over that. He’s a sensitive man.”
“Too damn sensitive,” I growled. “He’s got to learn to tolerate friends getting fed up with him sometimes.”
“I agree. I hope he learns it soon.” She smiled again suddenly. “He’ll be hell to live with if I can’t lose my temper with him once in a while.”
I stood up and said, “It’s getting late. I’ll go now. Thanks for seeing me.”
She rose to her feet. “You haven’t questioned me.”
“I didn’t come for that.”
“Why, then?”
“As you said, Gilles and I have known each other a long time. Since we were kids. I’m in Paris, I had a little free time tonight. I wanted to meet you.”
“You don’t suspect Gilles anymore, then.”
“I don’t think I ever really did.” I held out my hand. She took it and stepped closer and kissed my cheek.
“I hope we do see each other again.”
I went out feeling better about Gilles than I had been. I just hoped he’d have the sense to take what fate—good and bad—was offering him.
* * * *
It was almost midnight when I put my car back in the garage and walked to Place Contrescarpe. There weren’t many of the evening’s visitors to the neighborhood left around. Most of them were inside the two cafes that were still open on the place. There was nobody else walking the poorly lit street leading down to my apartment.
I was only two doors from the fenced courtyard when my nerves warned me, before my eyes did, that something was wrong there.
Chapter 27
There was a clochard sleeping on the darkly shadowed sidewalk near the door to my courtyard.
I slid my hand under my jacket and closed it around the grip of the Mauser as I came to a stop.
Clochards do sleep on the sidewalks. On very cold nights, over grills that let heat out of the Metro line below. But there was no grill there, and it was a warm night. In summer the clochards of the neighborhood sleep together in the middle of Place Contrescarpe.
This one was curled up in fetal position against the courtyard fence, wrapped in what looked like a raincoat.
I brought the Mauser out.
There was a soft, short whistle from somebody inside a car parked near the clochard.
The clochard uncurled and came up on one knee with something in his hand.
I almost shot him. But suddenly there was somebody closer to shoot.
Just ahead of me a man stepped out of a dark doorway that I would have passed if I hadn’t seen the clochard. He twisted toward me with a long-barreled revolver. I put two bullets in him at a distance of four feet, and he settled into an ungainly heap on the sidewalk.
The one who had whistled was leaning out the window of the parked car and turning an automatic rifle in my direction. The clochard fired three shots so fast that the explosions blended together. All three .45 slugs hit the man in the face. What was left of his head was kicked back inside the car, taking the rest of him with it.
I was sprinting past the clochard to the courtyard door by then, thinking of Fritz alone up there in his apartment. Jean-Marie Reju hissed something at me as I went by him, but I was already punching the buzzer button. The door unlocked and the lamps in the courtyard went on.
The instant the lights went on two shots boomed inside the confines of the courtyard.
I kicked open the door and dodged in, crouched and ready to fire. But there was nobody left to shoot at.
A man sprawled face down across the cobbles with the top of his skull caved in and a little MAC-10 submachine gun lying between his out-flung hands. He’d been standing near the tree in the center of the courtyard, facing the door, waiting for me to come through it when the lamps went on.
Fritz was resting his elbows on his living room windowsill with the Beretta still aimed down into the courtyard. He drew the gun back and nodded when I looked up at him.
Reju came in with his open raincoat flapping and lowered his Colt .45 when he saw the dead machine gunner. “Give me your gun and I’ll get rid of it,” he told me in a no-nonsense whisper. “Get in your apartment fast and go to sleep. It was only me and Donhoff.”
* * * *
Understandably, it was some time before I got to sleep after that. I took off my clothes and put on a bathrobe and bedroom slippers. Then I sat in my living room with the lights out and the windows opened. Over the next couple hours there was a progression of police officers of ever-higher rank converging on the courtyard. I listened to Reju telling them what had happened.
An anonymous phone caller had threatened Fritz Donhoff s life. Fritz had hired Jean-Marie Reju to protect him, and Reju had applied for and obtained a permit to carry a gun while so employed.
Reju had been taking a stroll outside when three men started shooting at him. He had killed the one in the car. The second attacker had been killed when he accidentally stepped into the line of fire and got hit by two bullets that the third man fired at Reju.
The third man had then run away.
Fritz, alarmed by the gunshots, had snatched up his pistol and leaned out his window to see wha
t was happening. The machine gunner in the courtyard had taken aim at him, but luckily Fritz had managed to shoot first. As he had every right to do, defending himself in his own domicile.
And that was all that Reju or Fritz could tell the police about it.
The cops knew more. They had no trouble identifying the two of the dead attackers who still had faces. Both were known voyous—hoods who’d done time for robbery, assault, and carrying weapons. They’d also been suspected of killing, but there’d never been witnesses or evidence to convict them.
I heard their names clearly, repeated a number of times by different cops.
At one point I went to my kitchen and poured myself a glass of wine. I sat and sipped it and listened some more. Cops clumped up and down the stairs between Fritz’s apartment and the courtyard. Other cops began ringing doorbells and asking people who lived around the courtyard and the street outside if they’d witnessed any of it.
When they came to my apartment I told them the same things everybody else seemed to be telling them: I’d been awakened by the gunfire, but it had been some time before I’d ventured to look out my windows, and by then it had all been over. I hadn’t seen or heard anything that could be of help in their inquiry.
Then I went back to my wine. The house and courtyard seemed unlikely to be free of policemen for the rest of that night. So when I finished the wine I did go to bed.
Chapter 28
It was shortly past noon the next day when I got to the headquarters of La Piscine—the Swimming Pool.
That’s what they used to call the SDECE when it still existed as France’s most important foreign intelligence service. The DGSE has taken its place, but it bears the same nickname, and for the same reason. The service has new initials and a different chief. But it handles the same work and operates out of the same facilities in the same location: across the street from a large indoor public swimming pool, the Piscine des Tourelles.
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