by Allan Folsom
The water came. “Merci,” Packard said. Then, taking a drink, he set the glass on the table and looked to Osborn.
“So you understand how clean, private, and simple our operation is.”
Osborn smiled. He not only liked the procedure, he liked the private detective’s style and manner. He needed someone he could trust, and Jean Packard seemed to be that person. Still, the wrong person with the wrong approach could send his man running and, as a result, spoil everything. And then there was the other problem, and even to this moment Osborn hadn’t quite known how to broach it. And then Jean Packard said the next and Osborn’s difficulty was erased.
“I would ask you why you want this person located, but I sense you would prefer not to tell me.”
“It’s personal,” Osborn said quietly. Jean Packard nodded, accepting it.
For the next forty minutes Osborn went over the details of what little he knew of the man he was after. The brasserie on the rue St.-Antoine. The time of day he had seen him there. Which table he had been sitting at. What he had been drinking. The fact that he had been smoking. The route the man had taken afterward, when he thought no one was following him. The Métro on boulevard St.-Germain he had suddenly dashed into when he realized he was.
Closing his eyes, picturing him, Osborn carefully went over Henri Kanarack’s physical description, as he had seen him here, just hours ago, in Paris, and as he remembered him from that moment, years before, in Boston. Through it all Jean Packard said little, a question here, to repeat a detail there. Nor did he take notes, he simply listened. The session ended with Osborn giving Packard a drawing of Henri Kanarack he’d made from memory on hotel stationery. The deep-set eyes, the square jaw, the jagged scar under the left eye that worked its way sharply down across the cheekbone toward the upper lip, the ears that stuck out almost at right angles. The sketch was crude, as if drawn by a ten-year-old boy.
Jean Packard folded it in half and put it in his jacket pocket. “In two days you will hear from me,” he said. Then, finishing his water, he stood and walked out.
For a long moment Paul Osborn stared after him. He didn’t know how to feel or what to think. By a single circumstance of serendipity, the random choosing of a place to have a cup of coffee in a city he knew nothing of, everything had changed and a day he was certain would never come, had. Suddenly there was hope. Not just for retribution but for redemption from the long and terrible bondage to which this murderer had sentenced him. For nearly three decades, from adolescence to adulthood, his life had been a lonely torment of horror and nightmares. The incident unwillingly played over and over in his mind. Propelled mercilessly by the gnawing guilt that somehow his father’s death had been his fault, that somehow it could have been prevented had he been a better son, been more vigilant, seen the knife in time to shout a warning, even stepped in front of it himself. But that was only part of it. The rest was darker and even more debilitating. From boyhood to manhood, through any number of counselors, therapists and into the apparently safe hiding place of professional accomplishment, he had unsuccessfully fought another, even more tragic demon: the numbing, emasculating, terror of abandonment, begun by the killer’s definitive demonstration of how quickly love could be ended.
It had proven true at that moment and held true ever since. At first by circumstance, with his mother and his aunt, and later, as he got older, with lovers and close friends. The fault in his adult life was his. Though he understood the cause of it, the emotion was still impossible for him to control. The moment real love or real friendship was near, the sheer terror that it might again be so brutally taken from him rose from nowhere to engulf him like a raging tide. And with it came a mistrust and jealousy he was powerless to do anything about. Out of nothing more than sheer self protection, whatever joy and love and trust there had been, he would erase in no time at all.
But now, after nearly thirty years, the cause of his sickness had been isolated. It was here, in Paris. And once found there would be no notifying of police, no attempt at extradition, no seeking of civil justice. Once found, this man would be confronted and then, like a disease itself, swiftly eradicated. The only difference was that this time the victim would know his killer.
7
* * *
THE DAY after his father’s funeral, Paul Osborn’s mother moved them out of their house and in with her sister in a small two-story home on Cape Cod.
His mother’s name had been Becky. He assumed it was short for Elizabeth or Rebecca but he’d never asked and never heard her referred to as anything but Becky. She’d married Paul’s father when she was only twenty and still in nursing school.
George David Osborn was handsome, but quiet and introverted. He’d come from Chicago to Boston to attend M.I.T. and immediately following graduation had gone to work for Raytheon and then later for Microtab, a small engineering design firm on the Route 128 high-tech hub. The most Paul knew about what his father did was that he designed surgical instruments. Much more than that, he’d been too young to remember.
What he did remember in the blur that followed the funeral was packing up and moving from their big house in the Boston suburbs to the much smaller house on Cape Cod. And that almost immediately, his mother began drinking.
He remembered nights when she made dinner for them both, then left hers to get cold and instead drank cocktail after cocktail until she could no longer talk, and then fell asleep. He remembered being afraid as the drinks mounted up and he tried to get her to eat but she wouldn’t. Instead she became angry. At little things at first, but then the anger always came around to him. He was to blame for not having done something—anything—that might have helped save his father. And if his father were alive, they would still be living in their fine home near Boston, instead of where they were in that tiny little house on Cape Cod with her sister.
And then always, the rage would turn to the killer and I the life he had left her. And then to the police, who were inept and impotent, and finally to herself, whom she despised most of all, for not being the kind of mother she should have been, for not being prepared or equipped to deal with the aftermath of such a tragedy.
At forty, Paul’s aunt Dorothy was eight years older than her sister. Unmarried and overweight, she was a simple, pleasant woman who went to church every Sunday and was active in community projects. In bringing Paul and Becky into her home, she did everything possible to encourage Becky to pick up her life again. To join the church and go back to nursing school and to one day make nursing a career she could be proud of.
“Dorothy is a clerk who works in the county administration building,” his mother would rail halfway through her third Canadian Club and ginger ale. “What does she know of the horrors of raising a child without a father? How can she possibly understand that the mother of a ten-year-old boy has to be available every single day when he comes home from school?”
Who would help with his homework? Make his supper? Make certain he didn’t fall in with the wrong crowd? Dorothy didn’t understand that. Couldn’t understand it. And kept on about the church, a career and a normal life. Becky swore she was prepared to move out. There was quite enough life insurance for them to live alone, if frugally, until Paul graduated from high school.
What Becky couldn’t understand was that church, a career and a new life weren’t what Dorothy was talking about. It was her drinking. Dorothy wanted her to stop. But Becky had no intention of doing so.
Eight months and three days later Becky Osborn drove her car into Barnstable Harbor and sat there until she drowned. She had just turned thirty-three. The funeral was held at First Presbyterian Church in Yarmouth, December 15, 1966. The day was gray, with a forecast of snow. Twenty-eight people, including Paul and Dorothy, attended the service. Mostly they were Dorothy’s friends.
On January 4, 1967, at age eleven, Aunt Dorothy became Paul Osborn’s legal guardian. On January 12 of that same year, he entered Hartwick, a publicly funded private school for boys in Trenton,
New Jersey. He would live there, ten months out of the year, for the next seven years.
8
* * *
THE POLICE artist’s sketch of the severed head made the London tabloids on Tuesday morning. It was presented as the face of a missing man, and the caption asked anyone with any information to please inform the Metropolitan Police immediately. A phone number was given along with a notation saying all callers could remain anonymous if they so chose. All the police were interested in was information on his whereabouts for a grievously concerned family. No mention was made that the face belonged to a head that had no accompanying body.
By nightfall not a single call had come in.
In Paris, a different sketch had more luck. For a simple hundred-franc bribe, Jean Packard had been able to shake the memory of one of the waiters who had pulled Paul Osborn from the throat of Henri Kanarack while they struggled on the floor of Brasserie Stella.
The waiter, a small man, with slight, effeminate hands and a like manner, had seen Kanarack a month earlier when he had been employed in another brasserie that had closed shortly afterward because of a fire. As he had at Brasserie Stella, Kanarack had come in alone, ordered espresso, then opened a newspaper and smoked a cigarette. The time of day had been about the same, a little after five in the afternoon. The brasserie was called Le Bois on boulevard de Magenta, halfway between the Gare de l’Est and Place de la Republique. A straight line drawn between Le Bois and Brasserie Stella would show a preponderance of Métro stations within the area. And since the stranger did not have the appearance of a man who took taxis, it was reasonably safe to assume he’d either come to each by car or on foot. Parking a car near either café at evening rush hour to linger alone over an espresso was not a likely happenstance either. Simple logic would suggest he’d come by foot.
Both Osborn and the waiter had described the man as having a stubble beard or “five o’clock shadow.” That, coinciding with his working-class manner and appearance, made it reasonably safe to presume that the man had been on his way home from work and, since he had done so at least twice, that he seemed to be in the habit of stopping for a respite along the way.
All Packard had to do now was make the rounds of other cafés within the area between the two brasseries. Failing that, he would triangulate out from each, until he found still another café where someone would recognize the man from Paul Osborn’s sketch. Each time he would show his identification, explain that the man was missing, and that he had been hired by the family to find him.
On only his fourth try, Packard found a woman who recognized the crude drawing. She was a cashier at a bistro on rue Lucien, just off boulevard de Magenta. The man in the sketch had been stopping there, off and on, for the past two or three years.
“Do you know his name, madame?”
At this the woman looked up sharply. “You said you were investigating for the man’s family, but you do not know his name?”
“What he calls himself one day is quite often not the same as the next.”
“He is a criminal?”
“He is ill. . . .”
“I’m sorry. But no, I do not know his name.”
“Do you know where he works?”
“No. Except to say that he usually has some kind of fine dust or perhaps powder on his jacket. I remember that because he was always trying to brush it away. Like a nervous habit.”
“Construction firms have been eliminated because construction workers do not, in general, wear sport jackets to and from work. And certainly not while they are working.” It was just after seven that night when Jean Packard sat down with Paul Osborn in a darkened corner of the hotel bar. Packard had promised to contact him within two days. He was delivering in less.
“Our man seems to work in an area that collects powdery residue where he hangs his jacket during business hours. Scrutinizing the firms within a one-mile radius from the three cafés, more than a normal walking distance from a work day, we have been able to reasonably narrow his profession to cosmetics, dry chemicals, or baking materials.”
Jean Packard spoke quietly. His information was brief and explicit. But Osborn was hearing him as if in a dream. A week earlier he had been in Geneva, nervously preoccupied with the paper he would deliver to the World Congress of Surgery. Seven days later he was in a darkened bar in Paris listening to a stranger confirm that his father’s murderer was alive. That he walked the streets of Paris. Lived there, worked there, breathed there. That the face he had seen was real. The skin he had touched, the life he had felt under his fingers even as he tried to strangle it, was real.
“By this time tomorrow, I will have for you a name and an address,” Packard finished.
“Good,” Osborn heard himself say. “Very good.”
Jean Packard stared at him for a moment before he a got up. It was no business of his what Osborn would do with the information once he had it. But the look in Osborn’s eyes he’d seen in other men. Distant, turbulent and resolute. There was no doubt in his mind whatsoever that the man he would soon deliver to the American seated across from him would, very shortly thereafter, be dead.
Back in his room, Osborn stripped and took his second shower of the day. What he was trying to do was not think about tomorrow. Once he had the man’s name, knew who he was, where he lived, then he could think about the rest. How to question him and then how to kill him. To think about it now was too difficult and too painful. It brought back everything dark and terrible in his life. Loss, anger, guilt, rage, isolation and loneliness. Fear of love because of the dread that it would be taken away.
Shaving cream covered half his face and he was wiping steam from the mirror when the phone rang.
“Yes,” he said directly, expecting Jean Packard with a forgotten detail. It wasn’t Jean Packard. Vera was downstairs in the lobby. Was it permissible for her to come to his room? Or was he with someone else, or had he other plans? She was like that. Polite, considerate, almost innocent. The first time they’d made love she’d even asked permission before touching his penis. She had come, she said, to say goodbye.
He wore only a towel when he opened the door and saw her there in the hallway, trembling, with tears in her eyes. She came in and he closed the door, and then he kissed her and she kissed him back and then they were in each other’s arms. Her clothes were everywhere. His lips were on her breasts, his hand in the darkness between her legs. And then she spread her legs and he came joyously into her and everything was laughter and tears and unthinkable desire.
Nobody said goodbye like this. Ever had, ever would.
Nobody.
9
* * *
HER NAME was Vera Monneray. He’d met her in Geneva when she’d come up to him shortly after he’d presented his paper and introduced herself. She was a graduate of Montpellier medical school and in her first year of residency at the Centre Hospitalier Ste.-Anne in Paris, she’d told him. She was alone and celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday. She hadn’t known why she was being so forward, except that he’d caught her attention the moment his speech began. There was something about him that made her want to meet him. To find out who he was. To be with him for a little while. At the time she’d had no idea if he was married or not. She didn’t care. If he’d said he was married and with his wife, or if he’d simply said he was busy, she would have shaken his hand, told him she admired his paper and left. And that would have been that.
But he hadn’t.
They’d gone outside and crossed the footbridge over the Rhône to the old city. Vera was bright and filled with life. Her long hair was almost jet black, and she swept it to one side and tucked it behind her ear in a way that no matter how animated she became, it stayed where it was without coming loose. Her eyes were nearly as dark as her hair and were young and eager for the long life still ahead of her.
No more than twenty minutes after they’d met, they were holding hands. That night they had dinner together in a quiet Italian restaurant just off the red-lig
ht district. It was curious to think of Geneva as having a row for prostitutes. Its reputation for chocolate and watches and its aura of sobriety as an international finance center somehow didn’t play against the skintight, thigh-slit skirts of street hookers, but there they were anyway, populating the few odd blocks allotted them. Vera watched Osborn carefully as they walked past them. Was he embarrassed or silently shopping or letting life be what it was? All, she thought. All.
And dinner, like most of the afternoon, was more of that same kind of thing, a tender, silent exploration by a man and woman instinctively attracted to one another. A holding of hands, an exchange of glances and, finally, the long, searching stare into the other’s eyes. More than once Paul had felt himself become aroused. The first time it happened they were browsing through baked goods in a large department store. The area was crowded with shoppers and he was certain every eye was on his groin area. Quickly picking up a large bread, he discreetly held it in front of himself while pretending to look around. Vera saw him and laughed. It was as if they’d been lovers for a very long time and shared a secretive thrill playing it out in public.
After dinner they walked down the rue des Alpes and watched the moon rise over Lake Geneva. Behind them was the Beau-Rivage, Paul’s hotel. He’d planned dinner, the walk, the evening, to end there in his room, but suddenly, now that it was at hand, he wasn’t quite as sure of himself as he thought. He’d been divorced less than four months, hardly time enough to get back the confidence of being an attractive bachelor, and a doctor at that. In the old days, he tried to remember, how did he do it? Get a woman to his room? His mind went blank, he couldn’t remember a thing. He didn’t have to; Vera was way ahead of him.