TimeLocke

by Jack Barnao

  Hélène spoke to me over her shoulder, angrily. “You know who’s here, don’t you?”

  “No idea. I’ve never seen the place before.”

  “Amy,” she said. “I left her here an hour ago. She’s talking to the patron, some old man from the Resistance.”

  I glanced at Orsini, wondering what kind of a scheme he was cooking up. Did he plan to play on Amy’s affection for him? To have her act as a voluntary hostage until he could get to the safety of his own rabbit warren in Marseilles and drop out of sight? His face gave nothing away. He had stopped contorting it, probably realizing that nothing but time would cure his problem.

  Hélène drove up to the front door and honked the horn, loud and long, twice.

  I saw Orsini’s eyes crinkle in faint surprise and realized that he had heard something at last. The fact pleased him, and he sat back and waited as easily as if this were his own car and Hélène his regular chauffeur. After a little while the door of the house opened, and an old woman came out. She saw Hélène and waved and went back in.

  We sat there until Amy appeared, carrying her tape recorder, frowning. She came to the car and spoke to Hélène in rapid French. Hélène cut her off and answered in English.

  “Your friend Orsini wanted to see you. He came to the house with John.”

  Now Amy leaned down to talk to me through the window. “What happened? Are you and Eric all right?”

  That was a change. I’d got equal billing with her old sparring partner. “Couldn’t be better. Only I found that he and Labrosse and Hélène’s dad wanted to execute Orsini for what he did in wartime, so I hauled him out of there. He asked to come here. Why don’t you ask him what’s on his twisted little mind?”

  She shifted her gaze to Orsini, putting a smile on her face, payment, I guessed, for the introduction he had made to her latest interviewee. She spoke in French, and when he cupped his hand around his ear, she repeated herself, speaking louder and slower.

  He said something to her in a voice louder than his usual growl, another sign of his deafness, and then got out of the car.

  I got out on my own side and reached in past Hélène to take the keys from the ignition. She looked at me coolly but said nothing, just getting out of the car and shutting the door with a neat clunk. I noticed again how beautiful she was, even today, dressed in trim blue jeans and a white silk shirt with a couple of gold chains and dangly gold earrings as her only jewelry. She was like a fairy-tale princess, only now she was treating me like any other peasant.

  The man Amy was interviewing came to the door of his house. When he saw Orsini, his face brightened like a true believer in the presence of the pope. He ducked his head and smiled and waved Orsini into the house, then, as an afterthought, the rest of us. It was a measure of his awe that he didn’t give Hélène a second glance.

  Orsini shook his hand graciously and went in. We followed and found ourselves in a cool room furnished with heavy old wooden items that would have fetched the price of the house itself if they’d been offered for sale in Toronto. Our host waved us to seats, but Orsini shook his head and pointed deeper into the house. The old man looked surprised but opened the far door for us, and I found out why Orsini had said cave. The back room led directly into the living rock. There was a natural cave here, filled with racks of bottled wine, eight feet high and thirty feet long. The cave went back a couple of hundred feet, reaching over our heads twelve to fifteen feet in places. It was sparsely lit by a few electric bulbs hanging from the bare rock ceiling. It was a natural cave that the thrifty old man had turned into his business, renting out space, no doubt, to neighboring vintners who had more wine than they had space to store it.

  It was cool here, and Hélène rubbed her shoulders with both hands, hunching against the chill. I broke the silence. “What’s he after? One of you tell me, please?”

  “I don’t know,” Amy said anxiously. “I don’t know what’s going on at all. What was all this about the others wanting to kill him?”

  “They were set to hang him, but I got him out.” I was speaking quietly, but Hélène heard and made a little gesture of disgust, turning her back to me with a quick shudder that might have been contempt or a reaction to the chilly air of the cave.

  “Eric wanted to hang him?” Amy repeated in a mystified voice. “He wouldn’t do a thing like that.”

  “Did you know he was a prisoner in Buchenwald?”

  “The concentration camp?” Amy gasped. “He never said anything about it to me.”

  I didn’t wait for an answer. Orsini was picking up his pace, walking quickly down an aisle between racks of wine. At the end of the aisle he turned sharply, lost to my sight for a moment. I broke away from the others and ran the few steps after him. He had vanished, and I jumped forward to the far side of the wine rack, crouching almost to my knees in the automatic trained movement of a soldier entering hostile space.

  It saved my life again. His shot sailed over my head, through the place my heart would have been occupying if I hadn’t reacted.

  I dived back, behind the end of the rack, and pulled my gun. I was partially deafened from the first shot. I could make out the alarmed shrieks of the women, nothing more. If Orsini was moving, he was too quiet for me to hear. But, I realized, his hearing was in worse shape than mine. He couldn’t hear me, either.

  I ran back to the others, shoving the women. “Get out. He’s got a gun. Get outside the house and scatter.”

  The old man didn’t understand. He frowned at me and tried to speak to the women, but I ignored him, pushing them by the arms. “Get outside. He’s dangerous.” I fumbled in my pocket for Hélène’s gun and gave it to her, snapping off the safety as I handed it over. “Take this.”

  She took it, but they kept arguing, first in French, then English, but I ignored it, keeping the pressure on until they had gotten the message and were backing out on their own, not moving as fast as I would have liked but heading for the door and safety.

  By this time I had come back the full length of one rack; there were two more lengths between them and the door. I spun around the corner of the rack. Orsini was not there, and I clambered onto the top of the second rack. The top was covered with thin planking, but by stepping on the upright supports I could move without bringing down the structure, so I moved over to the far side and glanced along the length of the racks.

  Orsini had vanished. That meant he was probably between the racks, waiting where the women would have to pass him. I ran, on tiptoe, along the top of the rack. The women and the old man were almost at the door, with just one more rack to pass. And then I heard them scream.

  There was a sudden clatter of angry French and then a shot. I crouched, putting my hand on the top of the rack on the far side from the noise and vaulting down, knowing that Orsini would be deaf to me now after a second shot at close quarters. I ran to the end of the final rack and around it, coming out behind him as he stood with his arm around Hélène’s throat, his gun trained on Amy. The old man was lying crumpled in front of him. Behind him, at chest height, a line of broken wine bottles were pulsing out their contents onto the ground, bleeding in sympathy with their owner.

  I curled my fist so the barrel of my gun would not reach Hélène, and I smashed Orsini in the temple with all my strength. He collapsed. Amy screamed. Then Hélène turned and shot him, pumping three rapid rounds into his body before I could bat the gun aside.

  She had fired like an expert. Orsini had three bullet holes within a six-inch circle on his chest. One of them was through the corner of his breast pocket, dead center on his heart. “That’s enough,” I said softly. “Pierre is avenged.”

  “Good,” she said in a tight, angry hiss. And then she started to weep, clinging to me like a baby to its mother.

  I stood, holding her, patting her back, making soothing noises, although she couldn’t hear me very well, I was sure of that. I was facing away from Orsini’s body, facing Amy, who was on her knees, examining the old man. She turne
d to me and shouted, “Never mind her. Jean is still alive. Help him.”

  CHAPTER 15

  There wasn’t time to waste in waiting for an ambulance. We all packed into the Mercedes. Jean’s wife crouched with him in the back, where he lay on the seat. Amy knelt next to her, keeping pressure on the wound, which was high, almost in the shoulder, and through and through. It seemed to me that the bullet had missed the lung, but I was hazy about the placement of anything else important that high up. On top of that, Jean was an old man, almost eighty. A mechanism that rickety can’t take the same kind of punishment a young body can. I doubted he could make it.

  Hélène used her car phone as she drove, and the Avignon police sent out an escort to whisk us into the hospital. They also alerted the surgical staff there for an emergency. The cops found us about five kilometers out of town and escorted us in, through that tangle of traffic, in a matter of three minutes instead of the forty it would have taken normally. The doctors were waiting and went to work right away.

  So did the local police. Nothing brings out excitement in cops like a shooting. With Jean under the knife, the real excitement started for all of us. Jean’s wife couldn’t take part. She found the hospital chapel and went in there with her rosary, but Amy, Hélène, and I were the target of some very energetic detectives. They quickly gave up on me, awaiting the arrival of a fluent English speaker, but the women were both questioned at length.

  After half an hour or so Hélène was given a break while the guys concentrated on Amy. I got Hélène a cup of the lousy coffee they had at the nurse’s station and sat down next to her. The media people had arrived, and they were waiting down the hall with their cameras and tape recorders, but a uniformed policeman was keeping them away, so I had a chance to sit and talk to her privately. “Everything’s going to be okay,” I told her. “It was self-defense. No charges will be laid.”

  “They should be,” she said tightly. “I killed him. There was no need. Perhaps he would have died from your hit.”

  “And perhaps not. He was a bad man. He’s been bad since he was a kid. Nobody knows the evil things he’s done over the years. Including killing your brother.”

  She looked at me now out of eyes filled with tears. “John, you try so hard to be kind. You realize that I did not want this man killed because he killed my brother.”

  “One reason’s as good as another. He had it coming.”

  “I wanted him killed for business.” She made the last word sound like some disgusting disease. “He was trying to ruin my father.”

  “He killed your brother. He’s dead. That’s the only thing to think about.” Lord, I was getting to wonder if there was a future for me in the counseling business. Here I was in the midst of chaos, making like Dear Abby.

  She squeezed my hand and then set down her coffee cup and hugged me. Not bad work, this counseling, I decided.

  Someone coughed, and I looked up. Captain Labrosse was standing a couple of paces away. “I must talk to you, M’sieur Locke.”

  “Of course, Captain.”

  I followed him down the hall past the reporters. He waved them off, and we walked to the worker’s canteen, where he took a corner table overlooking the parking lot.

  “You nearly killed M’sieur Armand,” he said. “If he had died, I would have arrested you for murder.”

  “Rubbish.” The English use that word a lot. It’s polite, but it says it all. “I saved your neck, Captain. You wouldn’t have gotten away with hanging Orsini. It would have been found out, and your career would have been over. You might have gone to jail.”

  “It was never intended that he hang.” Now he sounded tired, Santa Claus unmasked, explaining to his son that the pretense had all been in his best interests.

  “Then why did you go through all that? Why send me off after the man? You could have picked him up yourself.”

  A couple of cleaners approached our table with their coffee cups, but Labrosse looked up at them bleakly, and they backed off, muttering. “If I had arrested him, he would still be alive. In jail, perhaps, but soon free.”

  “So you wanted him dead?”

  “Yes.” He let the word hang there as he sat back in his chair, weary. “Yes. He was a bad man. He caused the death of many men.”

  It was another indication that Orsini’s war career was somehow more important than the things he had done since, bad though they might have been. I took it up. “Look. Just once I’d like to get to the bottom of what’s happening. Where does the division come between what’s happened since Amy Roger and I got here and what happened forty-five years ago, when the war was on?” I put both hands on the table and looked at him calmly until he answered.

  “It is complicated, no?”

  “It is complicated, yes. I’ve heard Orsini accused of being a traitor to his country, of causing the deaths of a load of Resistance men, of landing our friend Wainwright in Buchenwald. And I’m personally accusing him of murdering Pierre Armand and the old lady at La Fongeline. Are the two sets of crimes tied together?”

  “They are,” he said, then paused while he dug into his pockets for his inevitable cigarette and lighter. He offered me a smoke, and I shook my head. He lit up, sucking the smoke down deep inside and letting it out in a long, appreciative sigh. I didn’t say anything; he’d read the same medical horror stories as I had.

  “That is why I let you go this morning.”

  “You had no choice. I could have shot you.”

  “You would not shoot a policeman,” he said simply. “No. You are an officer and a gentleman, not a mercenary. You do not fool me, Mr. Locke.”

  “And you recognized all these sterling qualities and decided I should go? Or did you think that I’d end up fighting with Orsini like the rest of the world, only this time I’d kill him?”

  “He was not a generous man.” He brushed a nonexistent shred of tobacco from his tunic and tilted his head slightly. “I knew he would do something foolish, something that would anger you, give you no choice in the matter.”

  “Did you know he had arms planted at Jean’s vineyard?”

  Labrosse shrugged. “If not there, somewhere. From time to time we uncover arms from the war, especially in this region, where so many of our Resistance fighters were killed before they had a chance to use their guns.”

  “Okay, then. So you figured he would get hold of a gun and try something murderous and I would cancel his check. What did you plan to do about it, slam me in prison?”

  “Hélène had a ticket to Paris for you. M’sieur Wainwright said you would slip out of sight once you got that far.”

  “And Interpol would ignore the warrant you issued for my arrest?”

  He scowled and reached for the ashtray, stubbing his half-smoked cigarette angrily. “I would have let you go. I still will let you go. But first I have to know some things. Let me talk.”

  It was the first indication that he had a real agenda of his own, and I just nodded and let him go. As long as he talked, I didn’t have to plan tactics, wondering whether to be on the attack or on the defensive.

  “There are many things happening here,” he said after a pause. “As you say, some of them reach back into the past, into the war. For the first thing, Pierre Armand was not the son of M’sieur Armand.”

  “But he called him his son.”

  “Pride,” Labrosse said. “Also, he is a gentleman, something an English officer should have recognized.”

  If that was meant as a dig, it worked. I used to be a real pain until I served with the British army. Upper-crust Brits have a lot of faults, but their formal manners are excellent, and some of it had rubbed off on me.

  “M’sieur Armand was a soldier. He spent most of the war locked up in a German prison camp. He escaped in 1944 and worked with the Resistance in Paris. When he returned home after the war, his wife was the shape of an aubergine.”

  “That happened a lot.” It had happened to one of my men while we were in the Falklands. I had appeared as
a character witness at his trial for breaking his rival’s arms.

  Labrosse went on. “The story was that during the war she had sheltered a Resistance man. He had forced himself upon her, and she was pregnant.”

  “Orsini?” I remembered the story the old woman had told us in the little flat overlooking the square in Vaison-la-Romaine. Orsini had survived the fatal attack on the hospital. It was he who had fathered Pierre.

  “But that doesn’t add up.” I picked out the obvious flaw in the logic. “How come he would have had his own son murdered?”

  “That is what we will find out,” Labrosse said. “Come.”

  He stood up, turning the heads of a tableful of female orderlies. French women are cool about the impact of men, they expect to draw all the admiration they need, but as much on-the-hoof maleness as Labrosse generated was going to get attention anywhere.

  If he noticed them, he gave no indication. He led us back down the corridor to where the local police were talking to Amy and Hélène. He spoke to them rapidly in French and then nodded to me again and strode off to the elevator.

  He took the police car, dismissing his driver to find his own way back. “We have a call to make,” he told me, and there was enough force in his voice that I didn’t ask questions. I just sat in and let him drive, in silence.

  Once we were out of the tangle of traffic around Avignon, he put his foot down, and within half an hour we were turning into the gateway of Armand’s château. He had slowed as we approached the driveway. A hitchhiker saw us and brightened as we slowed, then relaxed in disgust as we drove past him through the gates. And at last Labrosse spoke. “I want you to do something for me.”

  “Sure. What?”

  “I want you to tell the story of what happened in the cave, only to make one change.” We had reached the front of the house, and he stopped the car and put the hand brake on before continuing. “Instead of saying that Hélène shot Orsini, say that Miss Roger did.”