by Jack Barnao
“What’s the problem?” Wainwright asked. “You didn’t have any reservations earlier on, when we were picking this chap up.”
“Labrosse blackmailed me,” I argued. “When he said what he wanted, I was too concerned about what I’d already done to argue with him. Now I’ve had time to think.”
“There’s nothing to worry about.” Wainwright shook his head firmly. “You’ve got me—and Amy, for that matter—as witnesses. We’ll testify that you were coerced into doing this.”
The gates of the Armand château were looming ahead of us. I flicked on the turn signals and pulled into the driveway. “Let’s just hope you’re right,” I said.
“Count on it, old boy,” Wainwright said, but he seemed tense.
I crunched the car slowly up the driveway, wondering what was different about the place. And then I realized there were no children playing around the front of the house. Armand must have shipped the family out so they wouldn’t witness Orsini’s arrival.
Labrosse was standing on the patio. He stooped to see into the car, then signaled to me to keep on going, around to the stables. I nodded and drove on. I didn’t speak. Orsini did not need to know where he was. If I made any comments, he might realize where he had been taken, and that could mean reprisals later.
I drove into the stable yard and saw Armand standing at the mouth of one of the double garages. It was empty, and he beckoned me over, indicating that I should pull in to the right. I did as he wanted, and he pressed a button that rolled the garage door down behind us.
I turned off the ignition and got out of the car warily. My personal alarm system was on red alert. It seemed that Labrosse and Armand were planning for Orsini to make a lot of noise. That was something for me to size up as it happened. Interrogations aren’t usually social occasions, but I wouldn’t sit still for torture no matter what Orsini was supposed to have done.
I looked at Armand closely. He was standing beside the door, arms folded, face set. He was wearing a gray suit, a city suit, not like the more countrified clothes he had worn the day before. He looked formal, as if he had business to attend to. And in the lapel he sported a tiny insignia. I glanced at it, as I do at anybody’s self-advertisement. This one startled me. It was the double-bladed cross of Lorraine, the symbol of the French Resistance. From what he’d said, I had thought he was a prisoner throughout the war. Apparently not.
Wainwright got out of the car more slowly and spoke to Armand. I didn’t understand what he said, but I recognized that he used the familiar pronoun tu. That’s a privilege you don’t get from doing business with another man’s company. It’s either a sign of contempt, as it had been when I used it on the man I’d captured earlier, or it’s a privilege, denoting familiarity, either family or the kind of association you earn by serving together in the same military unit.
“What happens now?” I asked Wainwright.
“We wait for Captain Labrosse,” he said. “Would you be so kind as to get Mr. Orsini out of the car, please.”
I nodded and opened the back door of the car. Orsini turned his head toward me behind its blind black mask. I was reminded of a falcon under its hood, all the hunting and killing skills on hold, until the eyes were uncovered.
Wainwright and Armand were talking, standing close together, clattering at one another in rapid, angry-sounding French. And suddenly I understood what was happening. This was not a criminal investigation of Orsini. This was to be an inquiry, a trial even, for crimes committed forty- five years ago, when Armand and Wainwright and Labrosse’s father had been young men, young Resistance fighters. The three of them, and their victim, the man I had risked my life to bring into this place, were caught up in a time lock that had snapped shut in 1944. I wondered if they would include me in the events, having me execute Orsini so that I would never dare to mention what happened here this day.
I pretended to have trouble hauling Orsini out. As I worked, I pulled my clasp knife and flipped it open. “Faisez rieri maintenant. Attendez!” I whispered to Orsini. Do nothing now, wait! I slit the tape on the top side, where it was pressed against his back and would not be apparent to a casual glance.
He did not reply, but his head moved in a microscopic nod, his chin firm. I coughed to cover the click of my knife’s closing and shoved it into my sleeve as I drew Orsini out of the car, keeping one hand on his wrists so they would not tear free and waste the advantage I’d given him.
“Where do you want him?” I asked.
“Here,” Armand said. He gestured to a planked-in area in the floor. I recognized it as the pit from which a mechanic could work on the engine or underside of a car. I moved Orsini out onto the boards, and then Wainwright proved my theory. He stooped and removed some of the boards over the pit. There was a chain hanging from the ceiling, the block and tackle used for hoisting out engines. Armand stepped forward and looped it around Orsini’s neck.
It was time to get involved. “Okay, what’s going on?”
“Justice.” Armand said. “A traitor to France is about to die.”
CHAPTER 14
I laughed as if I didn’t believe him. “What are you smoking? You can’t go around hanging guys.”
Wainwright answered. He had the Colt in his hand now, his right hand, which he was resting on his left forearm, ready to swing his gun up and at me before I could go for my own weapon. It wouldn’t have worked, not for the money. I could have put three shots into him and covered Armand before he could have raised the weapon. But this wasn’t the time. The stakes weren’t high enough to kill for. Not yet.
There was a normal-sized door in the wall beside the big door of the garage. It opened now, and Labrosse came in. He looked at Orsini and nodded grimly. “Good. This friend of yours did well, Mr. Locke.”
“Cut the games. Armand here is talking executions. I can’t stand still for that, and neither can you. You’re a cop.
He drew his own pistol. Again, I could have beaten him to the draw, but only in a terminal situation. “Your gun, please.”
I looked him straight in the eye. “No way.” I was on the brink, and I knew it. He was a cop. He could probably concoct a story to clear himself if he shot me. I’d already established that I was a dangerous man. I’d left two hoods dead that morning. But I had a feeling about him—and about Wainwright. They could be righteous about killing as long as they stayed in their 1944 time lock, but I didn’t think either one of them would kill me, not now, not in cold blood, I hoped.
For long seconds the silence in the garage seemed to echo like the aftermath of gunfire. Then Labrosse grinned and lowered his pistol. “Tough guy,” he said, burlesquing an American accent. “All right, M’sieur Tough Guy. I will not take your weapon now. There will be time later, after you are an accomplice to what happens here.”
“If you’re going to accuse this bastard of a war crime, then you’re talking a court-martial. And a soldier always has an officer working for him as prisoner’s friend. I’ll do the job, but I want to know what he’s charged with, in English.”
Armand spoke first. “He betrayed his comrades to the Germans. Men died because of him.”
“And this is the first time in forty-five years that you’ve been able to make a case against him? Or the first time you’ve had someone with enough gumption to bring him in.”
Wainwright spoke next. “We could live with the memory of what happened as long as it was only a memory. Captain Labrosse could live with the memory of his dead father. M’sieur Armand could live with his memories of running and fighting and hiding. I could even live with my memories of Buchenwald. But when he came back into our lives, killing Pierre and then Constance, we knew it was time to put an end to him.”
“So have the captain arrest him for those two murders and send him to the guillotine.” It was worth a try. All I wanted was to get out of that garage with clean hands. I had no great affection for Orsini or for traitors anywhere, but I couldn’t see him murdered.
“There is no case,”
Labrosse said. “So we shall try him for a case in which we know the truth, and we shall find him guilty and hang him, the way the Germans hanged so many Frenchmen.”
It was getting close to the time to act. “And you’re planning to do all this trying and condemning and hanging with him blindfolded. What kind of cowards are you?”
Armand took a step forward, raising his arm to strike me. “Coward? How dare you?”
“Well, if you’re so brave, take his blindfold off so he can see who’s calling him names.” I kept a sneer in my voice, trying to make them see the childishness of what they were planning, the unfeeling cruelty of children tearing the wings off a fly.
“Very well. Remove the tapes,” Labrosse said.
“Glad to.” I stepped forward and hooked a finger under the tape on Orsini’s face. I’d put it on carefully, making sure it didn’t run into his hair. Now I patted his shoulder with my left hand and eased the tape up with my right. He stood very still while I did it, then blinked rapidly a few times and looked around at the three men. He made no sign of recognition of either Armand or Labrosse; both of them were familiar to him. But when his eyes focused on Wainwright, his head flicked in an automatic double take.
“Oui,” Wainwright said softly. “C’est moi. Poirier.” Yes, it’s me. Pear Tree—his code name from the war, I guessed.
Orsini spoke rapidly in his harsh voice. I couldn’t follow it, but I had less trouble with Wainwright’s response. He said he had been captured and tortured and taken to Buchenwald, where he had been liberated by British troops a few weeks before the end of the war. I also understood his closing comment, that he and Orsini were the sole survivors of the attack, the only men who knew the truth.
An important part of my SAS training had been interrogation, mostly passive, how to resist so you could hold out longer, give your mates more time to do what they’d been sent for. But I’d also been interested in the body language of the man being questioned. We’d been trained to stay cool as long as humanly possible. Orsini had not. I could read his honest surprise at Wainwright’s words. He wasn’t blusteringly angry; he was astonished.
He may have wanted to talk, but he didn’t get a chance. Armand took over from Wainwright, cutting in angrily, delivering a long, snarling monologue that ended with a question.
In the silence after Armand’s words, Orsini shrugged, then shook his head without speaking. Armand took a couple of steps forward to where he could reach the other end of the chain that ran around Orsini’s neck. It looked like the trial was over and it was execution time. Time to act.
I covered my eyes with my hand as if I were overcome with the tension and half-reeled toward the car. I had left the rear door open, and I made as if to sit down on the edge of the seat that was exposed. I didn’t think Labrosse would buy my collapse, but I wanted to keep Wainwright bamboozled before he remembered my ace in the hole, the booby-trapped crate of booze.
Armand paused, his hands on the chain. “The soldier cannot look at justice?” he asked, a sneer in his voice.
“This isn’t justice, it’s a lynching,” I said, and sat on the edge of the seat, head bowed.
Wainwright suddenly got the picture. I heard him say, “Watch him!” as I turned with the case of liquor and flung it like a medicine ball straight from my chest into the garage pit, aiming the joint of the top against the lip of the hole.
It seemed to be happening in slow motion. As I threw the box, Orsini tore his hands apart and whipped the chain from around his neck. Armand was pulling down on his end of the chain so hard that when Orsini escaped he almost fell over. Labrosse and Wainwright were staring at the box, and then all of them flew backward as the case exploded in a flash of flame and a roar as loud as a fragmentation grenade.
Fortunately for all of us, it happened as the crate was tumbling into the pit, so that most of the force and the glass shards from the shattered bottles flew upward. I was the safest. I’d covered my ears and hung my mouth open as I flung the case, and I was hunched in the car so that only my side was exposed to danger. Orsini was flung the farthest, back off his planks onto the edge of the pit on my side, staggering back against the car. Armand did not get up but clutched his hand to his chest. Wainwright had dropped his gun and was too shocked to go for it again. Only Labrosse was functioning, but I had my gun out and on him before he could face me.
The scene was like a medieval nightmare of hell. The butane and cognac from my booby trap was burning like a torch, throwing a pillar of flame out of the pit. Wainwright was ignoring me, kneeling beside Armand, loosening his tie, laying him flat, feeling for a pulse in the throat. He was like some elderly saint working on a stricken sinner. Only Labrosse was still acting normally, turning toward me, gun in hand.
“Drop it, Captain, and this all ends here,” I shouted. He couldn’t hear me. None of them could. I had saved my own hearing by covering my ears. The rest of them had taken the full shock of the blast on their open eardrums. They would be deaf, possibly for hours, but Labrosse didn’t need the words, just the motion.
We stood facing one another, my gun aimed at his heart, his still pointing away in the direction his arm had been flung by the blast. Our eyes were locked, and I was cold inside at the thought that I would have to cross the line into permanent trouble by shooting him before he shot me.
Then his face changed. He almost smiled, and I caught the ghost of a backward flick in his head, over his shoulder to the great outdoors.
I grabbed Orsini by the arm and backed to the small door, covering Labrosse as I moved, although I knew it was no longer necessary. He wanted me out of there. Why and for how long, I didn’t know. I shoved Orsini out and scrambled after him, pulling the door closed behind me. I was startled to see the Armands’ Mercedes standing not thirty feet from the garage, with Hélène at the open driver’s door. I let go of Orsini and covered the distance in two leaps, grabbing the door before she could sit back down and back away.
She raked at my hand with her nails. “You swine. You saved him.”
I grabbed her hand, twisting it enough to make her buckle in the seat and forget about trying to scratch. “We’re getting out. You’re driving.”
Orsini was right behind me, and I opened the back door and shoved him in, then scrambled in after him and stuck the muzzle of my pistol into Hélène’s neck. “Let’s go.”
“What was that explosion? I heard a bang.”
“Careless smoking,” I said. “Everybody’s okay. Your father’s having a chat with the other guys. Just drive.”
“Where?” She almost screamed it, but she was already driving, pulling her door shut.
“Just out, and don’t speed. Drive at the limit. My buddy here will tell you where to go.”
“That pig. They told me you would kill him. They told me to wait and drive you direct to the airport at Marseilles when you came out.” She was almost screaming in her anger. “Why did you let him go?”
“Who told you to take me to the airport?” I was realizing that I’d been set up. But had they really been planning an escape for me? Or was Hélène meant to put a bullet in me? I didn’t doubt she was capable of it.
“Eric.” She was regaining control now, her voice at a normal pitch, weighing her words.
“Eric told you I would kill Orsini in that garage?”
Now she was in charge of herself again, talking with such confidence that there was no way of knowing whether or not she was lying. “Of course he did. This was his idea. He told us you had killed men before, that you would kill Orsini.” She craned up, tossing her hair back as she angled her head to glare at Orsini in her mirror.
It didn’t surprise me to find that Wainwright had set me up. I hadn’t really trusted him since he let that other man get the drop on me at the farm that morning. But I was surprised about being driven to the airport. “You have an airline ticket somewhere for me?”
“To Paris. Eric says you have contacts throughout Europe, you could vanish from there.”
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br /> “I’m not vanishing,” I said, and glanced at Orsini. He was trying to clear his deafness, working his fingertips in his ears, swallowing. “Où allons-nous?” I asked him, mouthing it large so he would be able to lip-read.
He looked at me, frowning, trying to comprehend, but before I had to repeat it, he spoke to Hélène. I wasn’t sure what he said except for the word cave. That meant wine cellar, I knew that much.
“Pourquoi?” Hélène almost shouted the question, hammering the steering wheel with both hands. The car swerved, and she grabbed the wheel but shouted the question again. “Pourquoi?” Why?
He didn’t answer, but he came to life now, moving forward in his seat to reach over and pick up Hélène’s purse. She said something that sounded like a curse and snatched at it, but he had it high, hefting its weight. It was a nifty little Louis Vuitton number, the kind a lady would use to tote her gold card and a slim wad of thousand-franc notes. From his heft I could tell there was more than that in there.
Hélène made another grab for it, but he pulled it over the seat back and sat looking into it. He didn’t search it, just removed the neat little .22 pistol from it and turned to aim it at me.
I was too quick for him, grabbing the gun and shoving him backward in the seat. He lay there, eyes blazing, as I took the magazine out. There was another round up the spout, and I cranked it out to be sure the gun was empty before reloading and slipping the pistol into my own pocket. A little extra firepower might pay off in the circle I was moving in this day.
Orsini looked at me, narrowing his eyes but saying nothing, then went back to working at clearing his deafness, distorting his face as he tried to get some reception going in his numbed ears. I just sat back and checked the road signs to try to make out where we were going.
We must have gone thirty kilometers before Hélène turned off, up a side road and then into the gateway of an unpretentious house surrounded by fields of grapes and with a steep cliff rising behind it, looming over the place so that you wondered how anybody could bear to live there for fear of rockfalls. I saw that there was a big double doorway cut into the face of the cliff beside the house.