The Exile

by Allan Folsom

The thought of it made him smile. How far she’d come. She was a woman now, and beautiful, who spoke several languages and in many ways was far more sophisticated than he ever would be. Yet, because illness had stolen such a massive piece of her adolescence, she was in many ways still a child, naive and inexperienced in the realities of life and love. There were times, as her healing had progressed and he’d visited her in Neuchâtel, that he’d probed, lightly asking her about her personal life and male friends. Her response had been simply to flash a teasing smile and say something like “I have friends.” And each time he’d left it at that. Inside, wishing her well, wishing her all the happiness that could be, and letting her find her own way.

  God, how he loved her.

  47

  3:20 A.M.

  Creak!

  Marten sat up at a sound just outside the door. He listened.

  Nothing.

  Abruptly he threw back the blankets in the dark and went to the door and listened again.

  Still nothing.

  Maybe he’d fallen asleep and had been dreaming or—Armand’s study was just off the entrance hall, and maybe someone from one of the apartments above had come in and gone upstairs—or maybe he was just on edge.

  3:30 A.M.

  He was wide awake. For the first time he thought of Clem. He should have called her long before this and at least told her what had been going on. But he hadn’t, the sweep of emotion and motion had been too great. Now, wherever she was, still in Amsterdam or back in Manchester—at this stage he could hardly be expected to remember her personal itinerary—it was too late. What he would do was track her down and call her first thing in the morning.

  3:35 A.M.

  Raymond. The idea that he might be, or was, alive and in Paris never left his mind.

  3:40 A.M.

  Click.

  He turned on a small halogen lamp on Armand’s desk, sat down, pulled open Dan Ford’s accordion file, and found the section headlined DECEMBER. It had been the murder of Alfred Neuss that triggered Ford’s probe of Raymond’s “cremation,” but Neuss had been killed only days ago, so what he might find in the December file he had no idea, unless Ford had still wondered about Raymond’s actions in L.A. and had been quietly investigating on his own. Perhaps there was even a reference to the man called Jean-Luc, a person of whom neither Nadine nor Armand had ever heard Ford speak. This confirmed what Marten had earlier believed, that Jean-Luc was some sort of acquaintance, the kind every reporter courted and depended on for leads. And since Ford had gone off willingly in the middle of the night, it seemed obvious that whatever he was meeting Jean-Luc to discuss was relatively harmless. Or so he’d thought.

  4:10 A.M.

  So far nothing except a deeper appreciation for Dan and the exhaustive work that made him the kind of reporter he’d been. There were handwritten notes and clippings from newspapers all over Europe, ideas and working outlines for stories five months into the new year and on subjects from garden exhibits to local and world politics to medicine, sports, business, society, and the entertainment world.

  4:40 A.M.

  Marten turned one page, then another. Then he came across a computer printout article from the London Times. The story was about a knighthood bestowed by the Queen on world media mogul Peter Kitner nearly a year earlier.

  Puzzled, Marten put the sheet aside. This was a long-past event. Why was it in the current December folder? He turned the next page and found out. In front of him was a formal menu for a dinner to be held at a private home. Printed on expensive off-white card stock with raised dark gold lettering, it announced what seemed to be a ceremonial dinner that was to take place in Paris on January 16.

  Carte Commémorative

  En l’honneur de la

  Famille Splendide Romanov

  Paris, France—16 Janvier

  151 Avenue Georges V

  Marten’s French was all but negligible, but it wasn’t hard to understand what he was reading—a commemorative menu in honor of the “splendid” Romanov family for a dinner taking place in Paris at 151 Avenue Georges V on January 16, and almost every item on it was Russian.

  Suddenly he realized today was January 16. The dinner was tonight! Slowly, almost mesmerized, he turned the menu over. Written in Ford’s hand at the top were the words Kitner to attend and then at the bottom, in the same handwriting, Jean-Luc Vabres—Menu #1.

  A commemorative dinner for what he assumed was the fabled Romanov family. The royal imperial family of Russia. Russia! There it was again. And Peter Kitner was to attend.

  Again Marten looked to the Kitner knighthood clipping.

  “Christ,” Marten swore under his breath. Kitner had been knighted in London on Wednesday, March 13, of last year. That was the day after Neuss had left Beverly Hills to go to London, which meant, because of the length of the flight and the time difference, March 13 was the day Neuss would have arrived in London. Was it possible he had gone there to see Kitner? Neuss had told the London Metropolitan Police he had come to London on business. It made Marten wonder what kind of business and if the investigators had asked the details of it. If they had, he hadn’t seen it in their report, and he certainly couldn’t call them now and ask to speak with one of the original investigators. Marten clenched his fist in frustration and looked off, trying to decide what to do. Suddenly he thought of someone he could call. Someone who might very well know.

  Abruptly he looked at the clock. It was nearly quarter to five Thursday morning in Paris, which meant it was about quarter to eight Wednesday evening in Beverly Hills. Marten reached into his jacket for his cell phone. One pocket and then the other, and then the inside pocket. The phone wasn’t there. What had happened to it, where he had lost it or left it, he didn’t know, but it made no difference because it was gone. Immediately his eyes went to the phone on Armand’s desk. He didn’t want to use it for fear his call might later be traced back. But at this time of day, and with the time pressure of the Romanov dinner tonight, he had no other choice.

  Quickly he picked up the receiver, punched zero, and asked for AT&T. Twenty seconds later he was put through to Los Angeles directory information and asked for the home telephone number of Alfred Neuss in Beverly Hills. It was a nonlisted number, he was told. Marten grimaced and hung up. There was a special number police and other emergency services personnel in L.A. used to access the nonlisted directory. He knew because he’d employed it many times himself when he’d been on the LAPD. All he could hope now was that it still worked and that neither the system nor the number had been changed.

  Once again he picked up the receiver, dialed zero, and asked for AT&T. A moment later he had a line and punched in the number. It rang through and then a male voice came on and, to his relief, confirmed he had reached the target he wanted. He took a breath, then identified himself as Detective VerMeer of LAPD Robbery-Homicide, saying he was involved with an important investigation overseas and was calling from Paris. Within seconds he had Alfred Neuss’s home number. Immediately he hung up, then clicked back on and went through the AT&T procedure again. An instant later he punched in the number and waited, concerned that, because of the publicity after Neuss’s murder, all he would get was some kind of voice mail, but to his surprise a woman answered.

  “Mrs. Neuss, please,” he said.

  “Who’s calling?”

  “Detective Gene VerMeer, Los Angeles Police Department, Robbery-Homicide Division.”

  “I am Mrs. Neuss, Detective. Haven’t we spoken before?” Marten heard hesitation in her voice.

  “Yes, of course, Mrs. Neuss,” he covered quickly. “I’m calling from France, the connection’s not so great. I’m in Paris following up on your husband’s murder with the local police.”

  Marten ran the receiver over his shirt to simulate bad-connection static. He didn’t know if it worked and shrugged it off with a self-deprecating, it-was-worth-a-try half grin. “Mrs. Neuss—are you there?”

  “Go ahead, Detective.”

 
“We’re starting from the day your husband landed in Paris and are working backward.” Suddenly Marten remembered what Dan Ford had told him on the way in from the airport. It was something that had seemed inconsequential in light of what else was going on at the time and maybe still was, but here was a chance to ask it before he got on with the rest.

  “Mr. Neuss flew from L.A. to Paris and then took a connecting flight to Marseilles before he went on to Monaco.”

  “I didn’t know about Marseilles until your people told me. It was probably just a convenient connection.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Detective, I said I didn’t know about it. I hardly asked for his itinerary. I was not that kind of wife.”

  Marten hesitated. Maybe she was right. Maybe the stop in Marseilles was only a convenient connection.

  “Let me go a little further backward in time.” Now Marten got to his main point. “I believe you and he were in London last year. March thirteenth to be exact.”

  “Yes.”

  “Your husband told the London Metropolitan Police that he had gone there on business.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know what business it was exactly? Whom he met with?”

  “No, I’m sorry. We were there for only a few days. He went out in the morning and I didn’t see him again until evening. I don’t know what he did during the day. He didn’t discuss that kind of thing with me.”

  “What did you do in the meantime?”

  “I shopped, Detective.”

  “Every day?”

  “Yes.”

  “One more question, Mrs. Neuss. Was your husband a friend of Peter Kitner?”

  Marten heard the smallest expulsion of air, as if she had been caught off guard by the question.

  “Mrs. Neuss,” he pressed her, “I asked if your husband was a friend of—”

  “You are the second person who has asked that.”

  Marten suddenly perked up. “Who was the first?”

  “A Mr. Ford of the Los Angeles Times called my husband sometime before Christmas.”

  “Mrs. Neuss, Mr. Ford was just found murdered, here in France.”

  “Oh—” Marten heard her strong reaction. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Mrs. Neuss,” Marten pressed her again, “did your husband know Peter Kitner?”

  “No, he didn’t,” she answered quickly. “And he told that to Mr. Ford.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “Yes, I’m certain.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Neuss.”

  Marten hung up, his question answered. Mrs. Neuss had been lying when she said her husband did not know Peter Kitner. That Ford had already asked Neuss the same question was hardly unexpected because, for whatever reason, he was interested in Kitner and had thought there might have been some sort of connection between the two. Why he had waited so long to try to find out was hard to judge unless he had only come across the Kitner piece just before Christmas and the coincidence of the March 13 dates had come to him then. It made him wonder if Ford had tried to call Kitner and ask him about Neuss—and if he should do the same. Unfortunately, the likelihood of getting a man like Kitner on the phone and then having him answer personal questions was next to nil, even for a reporter, or a cop unless he had some kind of very substantive suspicion that Kitner had committed a crime. Moreover, if he tried, he risked Kitner’s people trying to find out who he was. So, at least for now, he put that idea aside.

  Still, putting Ford’s call to Neuss in perspective, it had been made long after the hubbub of Raymond Thorne and his interest in the Beverly Hills jeweler had died down. So, if there was a connection between Neuss and Kitner, especially considering the March 13 date, by then both Neusses would have had a pat “no, Alfred Neuss does not know Peter Kitner” as a response, especially if they were trying to hide the fact that the men knew each other and had met in London and were trying to keep it quiet. And Ford, with nothing more concrete than a coincidence of dates, had simply accepted it and gone on about his business.

  Since then, Neuss had been murdered, and police and reporters would have had questions flying at his wife from every direction. And Mrs. Neuss, still distraught over losing her husband and with her nerves still on edge, even if no one else had asked her about her husband and Peter Kitner, had been caught off guard by Marten’s question and inadvertently given herself away. Nick Marten (or rather John Barron) had been a homicide detective too long not to have heard the little gasp of air and recognized it as surprise. So the answer was yes, Alfred Neuss had known Peter Kitner. More to the point, had they been close enough for Neuss to have visited Kitner in London last March? If so, why? And why then? And about what? And why had both Neuss and his wife denied it?

  Now Halliday was dead in Paris and Dan Ford had been killed because he’d gone to meet Jean-Luc Vabres, whoever he was. Suddenly Marten wondered why Ford had made the note about Kitner attending the Romanov dinner and why, after Neuss had been murdered and everything pointed to some kind of Russian connection, he had not so much as mentioned the dinner to him. Maybe the answer was that Ford suspected something but had no proof and wanted to keep Marten out of it. Or maybe, like everything else—from the house on Uxbridge Street to I. M. and Penrith’s bar to April 7/Moscow and even to the chartered jet—there was nothing to grasp, and he simply saw the Romanov family dinner as nothing more than another society affair that the public liked to read about. After all, that was his job, too.

  The trouble was that Marten now knew there had been some kind of relationship between Alfred Neuss and Sir Peter Kitner. What it was and whether it had to do with the Romanov family, at this point there was no way to know.

  Suddenly two thoughts came in rapid succession. The first—what was the dinner commemorating?

  Second—if menu #1 had been given a number, did it mean there was a menu #2? If there was, what was that occasion? Where was it to be held and when? And if there was a menu #2, was that what Ford had gone to see Jean-Luc about? But why in the middle of the night and to such a remote location? On the other hand, it made no sense, because Lenard had asked about a map. He glanced back at the menu.

  Carte Commémorative.

  Carte? What was that?

  Next to the lamp on the far side of Armand’s desk was a small pile of books. All were in French except one—a French-English dictionary. Quickly he picked it up and opened it to the C’s. On the sixth page he found carte—it meant (marine, du ciel) chart; (de fichier, d’abonnement, etc., à jouer) card; (au restaurant) menu; (de géographie) map!

  Map!

  Maybe Kovalenko had misinterpreted the French to mean “map” when the meaning that really applied was “menu.”

  Marten put down the dictionary and went through the rest of the entire Ford file looking for more on a second menu, Kitner, the Romanovs, or Jean-Luc Vabres, but he found nothing until he came to a nine-by-twelve envelope marked KITNER in pencil. He opened it to find a series of reprints of articles about Peter Kitner gleaned from various newspaper databases around the world. Most carried photographs of the tall, distinguished, white-haired Kitner and were in English, though several were in other languages—German, Italian, Japanese, and French. A quick read told him they were mostly gloss-overs about Kitner, his family, his British knighthood, the building of his media empire from his roots as the son of a moderately successful Swiss watchmaker. As far as he could tell there was nothing at all to indicate why he would be attending a Romanov family dinner other than the fact that he was Sir Peter Kitner and probably on the A-list of a thousand social events held around the world at any one time. As for the hoped-for second menu, or even a reference to it, or another reference to Jean-Luc Vabres, there was nothing.

  Finally Marten put the clippings back and closed the file. Weary, discouraged he hadn’t found more, he was getting up, finally ready for bed, when his eyes wandered to Halliday’s appointment book and he suddenly wondered if there was something else in that unruly mass of paper and note
s he had missed. Maybe Halliday had come upon a Romanov or Kitner, too.

  He opened the book and went through it again, this time looking for any reference to Kitner, the Romanovs, Jean-Luc Vabres, or a menu.

  5:20 A.M.

  Wholly exhausted and finding nothing, he reached the book’s last page. The only pieces still untouched on this go-round were the loose pages stuffed into the back, which he’d begun to look through earlier. With a deep sigh and a final effort, he pulled them out again. He saw the same photographs of Halliday’s children and traveler’s checks he’d seen before, then Halliday’s electronic airline tickets and passport. For no particular reason he opened the passport. Halliday’s photograph stared out at him. He looked at it for a moment, started to close it, then didn’t. Something drew him to Halliday’s eyes. It was almost as if the murdered detective were reaching out to him from the other side trying to tell him to look further. But where? He’d seen everything, there was nothing else. Slowly Marten closed the passport, put it with the papers, and then started to put the papers back into the pocket. It was then he again saw the awkward bulge where the cardboard backing of the day/date calendar had been slipped into the cover’s leather sleeve. Thinking the bulge was just a crease in the cardboard, he tried to flatten it so the papers would fit more easily into the pocket. It wouldn’t flatten.

  “Dammit,” he swore, too tired to fight it any longer. Then he realized the bulge was not a crease in the cardboard but something else. He pulled the cardboard sleeve out entirely and eased open the leather pocket. Inside, he saw a small, dog-eared packet of three-by-five cards held together with a rubber band. Quickly, he took the packet out and slid the elastic from it. When he did the cards fell open. Between them was a single computer disk.