TimeLocke

by Jack Barnao

  It was time for a little cold water. “He wants to hurt you,” I said shortly. “You humiliated him; he will humiliate you. To a man who deals in sex the way McDonald’s deals in hamburgers, that means one thing. Do I really need to draw any pictures?”

  Her face went white, and she didn’t speak for a long time. Finally, she said, “I guess you’re right.” She went over to the sink and rinsed her coffee cup under the tap, a mechanical gesture, as if normality could wipe out evil possibilities.

  I changed the subject. “What’s on the agenda today?”

  Slowly, she collected herself. “First I want to talk to Pierre. Then we’re going to call on Madame Boulanger; she’s on the list I gave you. Her husband was killed by the Germans in 1944.”

  “Was he an active partisan or just an innocent hostage?”

  “Let’s find out.” She had put her coffee cup in the sink and was now running hot water. I added mine, and our plates, and wiped up as she washed. She was very quiet, contemplating the reality I’d handed her. It’s not something I do very often to a client, but I’d never had one who had so much trouble understanding why I was there.

  She didn’t speak again until we were out in the car. By then I had looked it over for additions the manufacturer hadn’t included and had done my best to check that no sniper was in the trees, waiting to knock me out and come on down to claim Amy. “We’re going to have to find a new place to live,” I told her as we bounced back down the narrow pathway to the road. “By tomorrow they could have this lane closed off. If they’re that serious, they’ll shoot me and grab you as we come out.”

  I was looking ahead, watching for a face or the glint of a gun muzzle in the bushes on the roadway, but out of the corner of my eye I saw her turn to look at me, openmouthed in horror. “You think they’d go that far?”

  “I’m sure of it. We move today.”

  “I’m on a budget, and I’ve already paid for the summer.” Her voice was petulant.

  “Wainwright will pay. I’ll put it on my expense sheet for him.”

  “But I’ve told my contacts to call me at Constance’s,” she persisted. Her pout was audible.

  “Then you can call in and pick up your messages. One thing’s for sure, Amy. You can’t afford the risk of going back to that farm.”

  We broke out of the lane, and I booted the car up the hill and out onto the roadway, relieved but still alert, checking the rear mirror for strange vehicles.

  “Where to?” I asked her.

  “Pierre’s place first, the old town.”

  “Right.” I put my foot down and concentrated on building up my speed through the winding roadway. If anyone chased us out here, they would be familiar with the roads, I had to be able to outrun them if necessary. It was exhilarating. The road twisted and meandered so that thirty miles an hour would have been pushing it. I hit fifty in a few places.

  I slowed when we came to the traffic lights at Vaison, and we drove down the main street, through town and over the bridge to the old quarter. Amy still had not spoken as we pulled into the little square where Pierre lived.

  “Wait here,” she told me as she got out, but I ignored her.

  She stood on the other side of the car, looking at me across the roof. “Why are you coming with me? I told you to wait here.” She was wearing a light cotton blouse knotted beneath her breasts. She looked to me like a double- dipper ice-cream cone would to a ten-year old, but I kept my voice crisp.

  “I’m doing my job.”

  She twisted her mouth into an angry knot of muscle, then jerked her head impatiently and stamped off toward Pierre’s front door.

  I locked the car, checking all around as I did so. There were no loiterers and no strange faces at any windows. Coming back to Pierre’s house was not the smartest move we could have made, but this was Amy’s research project, not a military operation.

  There was nobody visible through the archway where I had half-hidden the day before, and I joined Amy at the door as she tugged on the old bell pull.

  We heard it jangle deep in the house, but nobody answered. I flashed another look around the square—nobody there. “Is he usually in this time of day?” I asked.

  “Always,” she said. “He gets up at six and writes until noon. It’s his routine. It never varies.”

  “Stand behind me.” I pulled out my handkerchief and held it in my left hand. With my right I drew my pistol, keeping it out of sight from the square, flat in front of my body as I faced the door. Carefully I tried the door handle with my left, making sure not to wipe it as I did so. It opened, and I stepped in.

  “Stay quiet and behind me,” I whispered. She didn’t make a sound, but followed as I took the three steps to the door of Pierre’s study. It was closed, and I pushed it with the knuckles of my left hand. It swung inward, disclosing the cluttered desk, the books, the hard, empty chair, and finally, on the floor, a rusty stain that thickened and reddened as the door swung farther until it revealed Pierre’s body, in the center of that ugly bloodstain that spread out a yard each way from the gash at his throat.

  I didn’t let her look. “Stay there,” I said, not looking around. I held up my left hand to keep her from entering the room, but she had walked into it, allowing it to touch her breast. She gasped indignantly and slapped the hand away. “Watch it,” she snapped. “Who do you think you are?”

  I turned to her. “Pierre is dead. Don’t move. Don’t touch anything. We have to call Labrosse.”

  She gasped again, then craned around me, trying to see the body. “There’s nothing you can do for him. We need the gendarmes. I’m just going to make sure there’s nobody here.”

  I crouched and stepped into the doorway, my head at table height. There was nobody else there, and I could see that the bloodstain had spread out over the rug so wide that walking in the room would destroy evidence. I backed out and turned around, taking one look at Amy’s white face and grabbing her by the elbow before she could collapse.

  She let me grip her arm for about thirty seconds before regaining her composure and gently moving my hand away. At the outer door I stepped in front of her, holding the Walther under the flap of my jacket, glancing around the square. There was nobody out there, even on the rooftops. I hooked my head at Amy, and she followed me out.

  I pulled the door closed, using my handkerchief again. “Okay. We need a phone, pronto.”

  “There’s a hotel in the next square. It’ll be quicker than trying to get some private phone,” she said. Her calmness surprised me. She hadn’t seen Pierre’s body, but she knew what had happened to him. But she didn’t collapse. Nor did she falter over the next ten minutes, through the use of the telephone and the wait while Labrosse and his men came screaming up the road from town, sirens hee-hawing loud enough to bring everyone in the old town into the square.

  Labrosse took a moment to get the details from us, then left us with one of his men while he checked things out for himself. He was back out within five minutes, and he asked me to join him inside.

  A gendarme in white gloves was standing outside Pierre’s office. He pushed the door open for us, and Labrosse stuck his hands in his pockets and stood in the doorway, looking down at the body.

  “What do you think?” he asked me.

  I made the best inspection I could from that distance. The hands were bloody where Pierre had struggled to stop the bleeding, and his hair was ruffled. That looked interesting, and I said, “I’m a soldier, not a cop. But from the look of his hair I’d say someone snuck up behind him, grabbed him by the hair to force his head back, and cut his throat.”

  “One wonders why,” Labrosse said dryly. “And one wonders why there are many little cuts, six, seven.” He extended his finger and counted. “I see eight little cuts, in the neck, under the chin.”

  “You think he was tortured?”

  He nodded. “I think the man with the knife talked to our friend for a while and then killed him.”

  “This has to be about Am
y,” I said. “I was beginning to think that he had told Orsini she was coming to town. This proves I was wrong.”

  “Perhaps. But I do not think he could take much pain, this man. If there was anything they wanted to know this morning, they know it now.” He turned and listened to a new arrival, a man in plain clothes carrying a camera. He nodded, and the man began to photograph the scene. As the photographer crouched and clicked, Labrosse said, “You see his hands? They are not cut.”

  “That means there were two of them,” I thought out loud. “One to use the knife, one to keep his hands out of the way.”

  “From the condition of the blood I would say this was done … per’aps one hour ago,” Labrosse said. “Where were you at eight-thirty?”

  “As you see, I only have one pair of hands, Captain, but Amy and I were out at La Fongeline.”

  “And you are moving out of that trap?” He didn’t need to spell out for me that Pierre would have told them where Amy was staying. I knew they would have found out by this time, anyway.

  “I’ve advised Amy to move. It would take a dozen men to keep her safe up that laneway.” I looked him in the eye, soldier to soldier. “I wouldn’t want to cause you any unnecessary work.”

  “The death of a tourist, perhaps two tourists, causes me much trouble,” he said with a slight grin. “Where do you move to?”

  “I’m not sure. Somewhere I have a better chance of doing my job.”

  “I have a suggestion,” he said. His English had come all the way back, I noticed. His accent was still as strong, but he was getting around in the language better than most English-born speakers.

  “Let me guess. You want her to go home.” It should have been any cop’s first choice.

  “I do not think Ma’amselle Roger will leave,” he said. “No. I was thinking per’aps you could move into my house. It is large; I live alone.”

  “It’s up to Amy. Thank you for the offer, Captain. I’ll tell her.” So the good captain fancied his chances with my charge! Good. It lightened my load enormously. No doubt Amy could take care of herself in the relationships department. A woman as attractive as she had slapped her share of roving hands.

  “Come,” he said abruptly. He led the way back out. Another car had arrived with two more men in it. He went to them first and gave them a crisp set of commands. They nodded respectfully and separated, going to the front doors of the houses on each side of Pierre’s. A canvass. Good. Solid police work that might just give Labrosse a description of Pierre’s last callers.

  I’d left Amy sitting in the police car, and I went over and bent to speak to her through the window.

  She looked up at me as if she had just woken up. “What did you say?”

  “The captain has a place for us to stay. That’s if you still want to stay now.” I figured she wouldn’t. Murder is nature’s way of saying “listen up.” And she had been close to Pierre.

  She surprised me. “I think Pierre would want me to stay, to finish my work. We talked about it so much. He was proud that I was going to do it. His father was in a German prison camp. He hated them. He wanted me to celebrate the courage of the French people.”

  “I don’t advise it. But it’s your call.”

  “I will finish it and dedicate it to his memory.” There. She had a reason, if she had needed one. This was one tough woman.

  “So, okay, the captain says we can stay with him.”

  That thought didn’t please her a lot. But she was practical now, concentrating on her work again. That much was good.

  “If we don’t, what do you suggest?”

  “We’d have to look for a succession of places. We couldn’t stay anywhere longer than it would take to trace us. This way you’ve got double the protection and a permanent address.”

  “It looks as if I’ve won a heart,” she said coolly. “Where is he?”

  “Talking to his men. He’d like to know your answer.” I opened the door, and she got out.

  “This is humiliating,” she said quietly. “I won’t do it.”

  “Your choice, but we have to leave La Fongeline.”

  “You told me that,” she said. “I am not moving in with some cop, that’s all.”

  In the end she fielded the whole thing very well. Speaking in French too fast for me to follow in detail, she thanked him and refused, but there was a warmth in her voice that took any sting out of her words. Labrosse gave her a taut smile in return and a quick response, also in French I couldn’t follow, and turned away.

  We went back to our own car, and I opened the door for her. It was already hot in the square, the glorious high-sunned summer of the wine country, trapped by the old stone walls, and the interior of the car was like an oven. Amy didn’t even notice. She was coming out of her numbness and beginning to understand what had happened to Pierre. Her eyes darted everywhere, and her fingers fidgeted, but she did not weep.

  I started the motor and asked, “Where does Madame Boulanger live?”

  “In the Place de Montfort, opposite Le Siècle,” she said. And then, finally, she broke down and began to sob.

  I glanced at her, unsure what to do. She had proved by her coolness up to that point that she didn’t want me to make “there, there, poor thing” noises. But she was not ready to meet anybody. In the end I compromised. There’s a small lookout point next to an old church on a side street. I drove out on to it and got out of the car, dropping my handkerchief next to her on the seat without a word. Then I walked back to the entrance to the area and stood there, watching the road behind us for a few minutes until I saw Amy get out of the car and walk to the wall that overlooked the river and the new town below.

  She turned as I rejoined her and gave me a watery smile, the first unstudied expression she’d worn since we’d found Pierre’s body. “Thank you,” she said, and tucked my handkerchief back into the breast pocket of my light jacket.

  “You’re welcome,” I said, keeping it light. “Shall we get back where we Boulange?”

  She snorted at my poor pun, and I drove us down to the village square. We found a parking spot under a plane tree, and she led me to a doorway in the solid wall of stores and apartments that made up one side of the square. There were four doorbells on the wall, and she rang the topmost one, then backed out into the street.

  High above us a woman’s voice asked, “Who’s there?” in French. Amy replied, and there was a torrent of French and a tinkle on the sidwalk in front of us. Amy picked up the key and let us in for the four-story climb.

  Madame Boulanger was waiting at her door, a frail- looking seventy-year-old. She and Amy greeted one another, but without kisses. They were new acquaintances. Amy introduced me, and the old woman shook hands. “Enchantée.”

  “Moi aussi “ I said, and the old lady laughed and commented in rapid French. Amy translated, grinning. “The gist of that is, don’t give up your day job, you’ll never make it as a translator.”

  “Je promisse,” I said, and the old lady cackled again.

  We went into her apartment, which was furnished like an early cinema verité movie set, and she put coffee on. Then she and Amy started talking.

  Amy had brought a tape recorder with her, and it turned silently as she chattered away with our hostess. I was lost except for the occasional word, but one word I did understand. Amy referred to Le Loup. And that brought Madame to a standstill. Her right hand fluttered to the brooch at her throat, and her lips pursed in anger. “Il a tué mon mari,” she said.

  I didn’t have any trouble understanding that message. Orsini had killed her husband.

  CHAPTER 7

  The old lady began to weep, and Amy moved beside her on the couch to comfort her. There were tears in her own eyes. She was not just a historian on this one. Perhaps she had thought that she could dull the pain of Pierre’s death by working on her project, looking at her own life from the perspective of the past. Instead, she had stumbled across other sorrows, and they had added to her own.

  I f
elt sorry for both women. I’ve lost a lot of friends over the years, good buddies I’d lived with and fought alongside in the shabby side streets of Ulster or the cold and rain of the Falklands. I know how it feels when death tears a hole in your life. As a soldier you expect it. Your grief is tempered by the thought that it could just as easily have been you going home in a body bag. As a civilian you don’t get even that much icy comfort.

  The only tactful thing to do was leave them for a while, so I moved out into the kitchen and stood at the window, looking down at the activity in the square. A couple in a convertible had driven in, lovers, laughing together while their car radio blared French rock music, but apart from that, the pace of life was what it had been for the last two centuries, slow and calming. Standing there was like watching a pageant.

  After a while the voices next door became audible again, and I went back in. They had composed themselves, and the old lady was speaking slowly, recounting her memories of the night her husband died, speaking with dignity, slowly enough that I could follow.

  Her husband had been a Communist. She said it with some pride in his shrewdness. The French have a tradition of socialism that dates back to the Revolution, and for many of his generation Stalin had seemed like the obvious antidote to Hitler. Anyway, somebody informed the Germans, and they came looking for him. His wife had been able to get word to him in the vineyard, and he dropped his tools and disappeared, joining the Maquis. From time to time he managed to sneak back at night to see her. She had even conceived a child on one occasion, a man in his forties now who had never known his father.

  He had come one night and told her that something special was about to happen. Sloppy security—but understandable in a civilian. Madame had been far along in her pregnancy by that time, something that had made the German gauleiter in town suspicous, she added, until she had made a practice of seeming to flirt with the baffled patron of the butcher’s shop. Her husband had heard about the flirting from some new Maquis recruit and had been jealous, she remembered, until she explained, and it was then he had told her about the action he was going into.