To his surprise, he discovered that Mario Cassini was still employed as a waiter. Well into his forties now, his hair a salt-and-pepper gray, his face creased with the lines of twenty years of smiles, Mario nodded and said, “Yes, yes. Of course I remember. The police, they come to talk to me three, four times. And each time I tell them the same thing. M. Tavistock, he comes for café au lait, every morning. Sometimes, madame is with him. Ah, beautiful!”
“But she wasn’t with him on that particular day?”
Mario shook his head. “He comes alone. Sits at that table there.” He pointed to an empty table near the sidewalk, red-checked cloth fluttering in the breeze. “He waits a long time for madame.”
“And she didn’t come?”
“No. Then she calls. Tells him to meet her at another place. In Pigalle. I take the message and give it to M. Tavistock.”
“She spoke to you? On the telephone?”
“Oui. I write down address, give to him.”
“That would be the address in Pigalle?”
Mario nodded.
“My father—M. Tavistock—did he seem at all upset that day? Angry?”
“Not angry. He seems—how do you say?—worried. He does not understand why madame goes to Pigalle. He pays for his coffee, then he leaves. Later I read in the newspaper that he is dead. Ah, horrible! The police, they are asking for information. So I call, tell them what I know.” Mario shook his head at the tragedy of it all. At the loss of such a lovely woman as Mme Tavistock and such a generous man as her husband.
No new information here, thought Jordan. He turned to leave, then stopped and turned back.
“Are you certain it was Mme Tavistock who called to leave the message?” he asked.
“She says it is her,” said Mario.
“And you recognized her voice?”
Mario paused. It lasted just the blink of an eye, but it was enough to tell Jordan that the man was not absolutely certain. “Yes,” said Mario. “Who else would it be?”
Deep in thought, Jordan left the café and walked a few paces along Boulevard Saint-Germain, intending to return on foot to the hotel. But half a block away, he spotted the blue Peugeot. His little blond vampiress, he thought, still following him about. They were headed in the same direction; why not ask her for a ride?
He went to the Peugeot and pulled open the passenger door. “Mind dropping me off at the Ritz?” he asked brightly.
An outraged Colette stared at him from the driver’s seat. “What do you think you are doing?” she demanded. “Get out of my car!”
“Oh, come, now. No need for hysterics—”
“Go away!” she cried, loudly enough to make a passerby stop and stare.
Calmly Jordan slid into the front seat. He noted that she was dressed in black again. What was it with these secret agent types? “It’s a long walk to the Ritz. Surely it’s not verboten, is it? To give me a lift back to my hotel?”
“I do not even know who you are,” she insisted.
“I know who you are. Your name’s Colette, you work for Claude Daumier, and you’re supposed to be keeping an eye on me.” Jordan smiled at her, the sort of smile that usually got him exactly what he wanted. He said, quite reasonably, “Rather than sneaking around after me all the way up the boulevard, why not be sensible about it? Save us both the inconvenience of this silly cat-and-mouse game.”
A spark of laughter flickered in her eyes. She gripped the steering wheel and stared straight ahead, but he could see the smile tugging at her lips. “Shut the door,” she snapped. “And use the seat belt. It is regulation.”
As they drove up Boulevard Saint-Germain, he kept glancing at her, wondering if she was really as fierce as she appeared. That black leather skirt and the scowl on her face couldn’t disguise the fact she was actually quite pretty.
“How long have you worked for Daumier?” he asked.
“Three years.”
“And is this your usual sort of assignment? Following strange men about town?”
“I follow instructions. Whatever they are.”
“Ah. The obedient type.” Jordan sat back, grinning. “What did Daumier tell you about this particular assignment?”
“I am to see you and your sister are not harmed. Since today she is with M. Wolf, I decide to follow you.” She paused and added under her breath, “Not as simple as I thought.”
“I’m not all that difficult.”
“But you do the unexpected. You catch me by surprise.” A car was honking at them. Annoyed, Colette glanced up at the rearview mirror. “This traffic, it gets worse every—”
At her sudden silence, Jordan glanced at her. “Is something wrong?”
“No,” she said after a pause, “I am just imagining things.”
Jordan turned and peered through the rear window. All he saw was a line of cars snaking down the boulevard. He looked back at Colette. “Tell me, what’s a nice girl like you doing in French Intelligence?”
She smiled—the first real smile he’d seen. It was like watching the sun come out. “I am earning a living.”
“Meeting interesting people?”
“Quite.”
“Finding romance?”
“Regrettably, no.”
“What a shame. Perhaps you should find a new line of work.”
“Such as?”
“We could discuss it over supper.”
She shook her head. “It is not allowed to fraternize with a subject.”
“So that’s all I am,” he said with a sigh. “A subject.”
She dropped him off on a side street, around the corner from the Ritz. He climbed out, then turned and said, “Why not come in for a drink?”
“I am on duty.”
“It must get boring, sitting in that car all day. Waiting for me to make another unexpected move.”
“Thank you, but no.” She smiled—a charmingly impish grin. It carried just a hint of possibility.
Jordan left the car and walked into the hotel.
Upstairs, he paced for a while, pondering what he’d just learned at Café Hugo. That phone call from Madeline—it just didn’t fit in. Why on earth would she arrange to meet Bernard in Pigalle? It clearly didn’t go along with the theory of a murder-suicide. Could the waiter be lying? Or was he simply mistaken? With all the ambient noise of a busy café, how could he be certain it was really Madeline Tavistock making that phone call?
I have to go back to the café. Ask Mario, specifically, if the voice was an Englishwoman’s.
Once again he left the hotel and stepped into the brightness of midday. A taxi sat idling near the front entrance, but the driver was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps Colette was still parked around the corner; he’d ask her to drive him back to Boulevard Saint-Germain. He turned up the side street and spotted the blue Peugeot still parked there. Colette was sitting inside; through the tinted windshield, he saw her silhouette behind the steering wheel.
He went to the car and tapped on the passenger window. “Colette?” he called. “Could you give me another lift?”
She didn’t answer.
Jordan swung open the door and slid in beside her. “Colette?”
She sat perfectly still, her eyes staring rigidly ahead. For a moment, he didn’t understand. Then he saw the bright trickle of blood that had traced its way down her hairline and vanished into the black fabric of her turtlenecked shirt. In panic, he reached out to her and gave her shoulder a shake. “Colette?”
She slid toward him and toppled into his lap.
He stared at her head, now resting in his arms. In her temple was a single, neat bullet hole.
He scarcely remembered scrambling out of the car. What he did remember were the screams of a woman passerby. Then, moments later, he focused on the shocked faces of people who’d been drawn onto this quiet side street by the screams. They were all pointing at the woman’s arm hanging limply out of the car. And they were staring at him.
Numbly, Jordan looked down at his own hand
s.
They were smeared with blood.
Five
From the crowd of onlookers standing on the corner, Amiel Foch watched the police handcuff the Englishman and lead him away. An unintended development, he thought. Not at all what he’d expected to happen.
Then again, he hadn’t expected to see Colette LaFarge ever again. Or, even worse, to be seen by her. They’d worked together only once, and that was three years ago in Cyprus. He’d hoped, when he walked past her car, with his head down and his shoulders hunched, that she would not notice him. But as he’d headed away, he’d heard her call out his name in astonishment.
He’d had no alternative, he thought as he watched the attendants load her body into the ambulance. French Intelligence thought he was dead. Colette could have told them otherwise.
It hadn’t been an easy thing to do. But as he’d turned to face her, his decision was already made. He had walked slowly back to her car. Through the windshield, he’d seen her look of wonder at a dead colleague come back to life. She’d sat frozen, staring at the apparition. She had not moved as he approached the driver’s side. Nor did she move as he thrust his silenced automatic into her car window and fired.
Such a waste of a pretty girl, he thought as the ambulance drove away. But she should have known better.
The crowd was dispersing. It was time to leave.
He edged toward the curb. Quietly he dropped his pistol in the gutter and kicked it down the storm drain. The weapon was stolen, untraceable; better to have it found near the scene of the crime. It would cement the case against Jordan Tavistock.
Several blocks away, he found a telephone. He dialed his client.
“Jordan Tavistock has been arrested for murder,” said Foch.
“Whose murder?” came the sharp reply.
“One of Daumier’s agents. A woman.”
“Did Tavistock do it?”
“No. I did.”
There was a sudden burst of laughter from his client. “This is priceless! Absolutely priceless! I ask you to follow Jordan, and you have him framed for murder. I can’t wait to see what you do with his sister.”
“What do you wish me to do?” asked Foch.
There was a pause. “I think it’s time to resolve this mess,” he said. “Finish it.”
“The woman is no problem. But her brother will be difficult to reach, unless I can find a way into the prison.”
“You could always get yourself arrested.”
“And when they identify my fingerprints?” Foch shook his head. “I need someone else for that job.”
“Then I’ll find you someone,” came the reply. “For now, let’s work on one thing at a time. Beryl Tavistock.”
A Turkish man now owned the building on Rue Myrha. He’d tried to improve it. He’d painted the exterior walls, shored up the crumbling balconies, replaced the missing roof slates, but the building, and the street on which it stood, seemed beyond rehabilitation. It was the fault of the tenants, explained Mr. Zamir, as he led them up two flights of stairs to the attic flat. What could one do with tenants who let their children run wild? By all appearances, Mr. Zamir was a successful businessman, a man whose tailored suit and excellent English bespoke prosperous roots. There were four families in the building, he said, all of them reliable enough with the rent. But no one lived in the attic flat—he’d always had difficulty renting that one out. People had come to inspect the place, of course, but when they heard of the murder, they quickly backed out. These silly superstitions! Oh, people claim they do not believe in ghosts, but when they visit a room where two people have died…
“How long has the flat been empty?” asked Beryl.
“A year now. Ever since I have owned the building. And before that—” he shrugged “—I do not know. It may have been empty for many years.” He unlocked the door. “You may look around if you wish.”
A puff of stale air greeted them as they pushed open the door—the smell of a room too long shut away from the world. It was not an unpleasant room. Sunshine washed in through a large, dirt-streaked window. The view looked down over Rue Myrha, and Beryl could see children kicking a soccer ball in the street. The flat was completely empty of furniture; there were only bare walls and floor. Through an open door, she glimpsed the bathroom with its chipped sink and tarnished fixtures.
In silence Beryl circled the flat, her gaze moving across the wood floor. Beside the window, she came to a halt. The stain was barely visible, just a faint brown blot in the oak planks. Whose blood? she wondered. Mum’s? Dad’s? Or is it both of theirs, eternally mingled?
“I have tried to sand the stain away,” said Mr. Zamir. “But it goes very deep into the wood. Even when I think I have erased it, in a few weeks the stain seems to reappear.” He sighed. “It frightens them away, you know. The tenants, they do not like to see such reminders on their floor.”
Beryl swallowed hard and turned to look out the window. Why on this street? she wondered. In this room? Of all the places in Paris, why did they die here?
She asked quietly, “Who owned this building, Mr. Zamir? Before you did?”
“There were many owners. Before me, it was a M. Rosenthal. And before him, a M. Dudoit.”
“At the time of the murder,” said Richard, “the landlord was a man named Jacques Rideau. Did you know him?”
“I am sorry, I do not. That would have been many years ago.”
“Twenty.”
“Then I would not have met him.” Mr. Zamir turned to the door. “I will leave you alone. If you have questions, I will be down in number three for a while.”
Beryl heard the man’s footsteps creak down the stairs. She looked at Richard and saw that he was standing off in a corner, frowning at the floor. “What are you thinking?” she asked.
“About Inspector Broussard. How he kept trying to point at that photo. The spot he was pointing to would be somewhere around here. Just to the left of the door.”
“There’s nothing to look at. And there was nothing in the photo, either.”
“That’s what bothers me. He seemed so troubled by it. And there was something about a briefcase….”
“The NATO file,” she said softly.
He looked at her. “How much have you been told about Delphi?”
“I know it wasn’t Mum or Dad. They would never have gone to the other side.”
“People go over for different reasons.”
“But not them. They certainly didn’t need the money.”
“Communist sympathies?”
“Not the Tavistocks!”
He moved toward her. With every step he took, her pulse seemed to leap faster. He came close enough to make her feel threatened. And tempted. Quietly he said, “There’s always blackmail.”
“Meaning they had secrets to hide?”
“Everyone does.”
“Not everyone turns traitor.”
“It depends on the secret, doesn’t it? And how much one stands to lose because of it.”
In silence they gazed at each other, and she found herself wondering how much he really did know about her parents. How much he wasn’t admitting to. She sensed he knew a lot more than he was letting on, and that suspicion loomed like a barrier between them. Those secrets again. Those unspoken truths. She had grown up in a household where certain conversational doors were always kept locked. I refuse to live my life that way. Ever again.
She turned away. “They had no reason to be vulnerable to blackmail.”
“You were just a child, eight years old. Away at boarding school in England. What did you really know about them? About their marriage, their secrets? What if it was your mother who rented this flat? Met her lover here?”
“I don’t believe it. I won’t.”
“Is it so difficult to accept? That she was human, that she might have had a lover?” He took her by the shoulders, willing her to meet his gaze. “She was a beautiful woman, Beryl. If she’d wanted to, she could have had any number of lovers.”<
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“You’re making her out to be a tramp!”
“I’m considering all the possibilities.”
“That she sold out Queen and country? To keep some vile little secret from surfacing?” Angrily she wrenched away from him. “Sorry, Richard, but my faith runs a little deeper than that. And if you’d known them, really known them, you’d never consider such a thing.” She pivoted away and walked to the door.
“I did know them,” he said. “I knew them rather well.”
She stopped, turned to face him. “What do you mean by ‘rather well’?”
“We…moved in the same circles. Not the same team, exactly. But we worked at similar purposes.”
“You never told me.”
“I didn’t know how much I should tell you. How much you should know.” He began to slowly circle the room, carefully considering each word before he spoke. “It was my first assignment. I’d just completed my training at Langley—”
“CIA?”
He nodded. “I was recruited straight out of the university. Not exactly my first career choice. But somehow they’d gotten hold of my master’s thesis, an analysis of Libyan arms capabilities. It turned out to be amazingly close to the mark. They knew I was fluent in a few languages. And that I had taken out quite a large sum in student loans. That was the carrot, you see—the loan payoff. The foreign travel. And, I have to admit, the idea intrigued me, the chance to work as an Intelligence analyst…”
“Is that how you met my parents?”
He nodded. “NATO knew it had a security leak, originating in Paris. Somehow weapons data were slipping through to the East Germans. I’d just arrived in Paris, so there was no question that I was clean. They assigned me to work with Claude Daumier at French Intelligence. I was asked to compose a dummy weapons report, something close to, but not quite, the truth. It was encoded and transmitted to a few select embassy officials in Paris. The idea was to pinpoint the possible source of the leak.”
In Their Footsteps / Thief of Hearts Page 8