by Allan Folsom
A hint of a smile crossed Oven’s face. Vera Monneray was in her residency to become a doctor. Pharmaceuticals were available to her and she was qualified to give an injection. A wounded man coming out of a polluted river would very likely require a tetanus shot booster not only to prevent tetanus but diphtheria. And someone giving a shot would not be likely to do it elsewhere and then bring the empty vial back home to hide it in their kitchen soap bottle. No, the injection would have been given here, in Vera’s apartment. And since the American was not in her apartment now, it meant he was somewhere close by, perhaps in another building, perhaps in this building itself.
Five and a half floors up from the basement where Bernhard Oven stood, Paul Osborn hunched over the small table under his window and stared out across the roofline, watching the afternoon shadows slide over Notre Dame’s Gothic towers.
The hours he hadn’t been sleeping, he’d been alternately pacing the tiny room for the exercise he knew he must have, or blankly staring out the window as he was now, trying to collect his thoughts.
There were certain obvious truths, he had concluded, there was no way around.
First: the police were still looking for him in connection with the death of Albert Merriman. Through Vera he knew they had found the remaining succinylcholine and taken it from his hotel room. If—when—they discovered its purpose, there was every chance they would reexamine—he still wanted to call him Kanarack—Merriman’s body. If they did, they would find the puncture wounds, And if they hadn’t already, McVey would make them. It wouldn’t matter that he hadn’t actually killed Merriman. They would still charge him with attempted homicide. And if they proved it, which they would, he’d not only spend God knew how many years in a French jail, he’d lose his medical license in the United States as well.
Second: he hadn’t come out of the river unnoticed, and sooner or later the tall man, whoever he was, would learn he was still alive and come looking to kill him.
Third: even if he could somehow get out of Paris, the police still had his passport. So, for all intents, he was trapped in France because he could go to no other country without it, not even his own.
Fourth—and perhaps the cruelest and most painful of all, the thing he’d played over and over in his mind—was the clear and undeniable realization that the death of Albert Merriman had changed nothing. The demon haunting him had only become more complex and elusive. As if, after all his years of horror, such a thing were possible.
His insides screamed NO! in a hundred languages. Do not begin the pursuit again. Because this next door emblazoned with the name Erwin Scholl can only lead to what? Another door still! And by then, if you live that long, it can only open onto madness. Recognize instead, Paul Osborn, there will never be an answer. That this is your karma, to learn in this life that what you seek answers to, there may not be answers that are acceptable to you. It is only by understanding this that you will have peace and tranquility in the next life. Accept this truth and change.
But he knew that argument was nothing but avoidance and therefore not true. He could not change today any more than he had been able to change since he was ten. Kanarack/Merriman’s death had been a terrible, emotional, blow. But what it had done was clarify and simplify the future. Before, he’d had only a face. Now he had a name. If this Erwin Scholl, if he found him, led to someone else, so be it. No matter the cost, he would go on and on until he knew the truth behind his father’s death. Because if he did not, there would be no Vera, no life worth living. As there had been none since he was a boy. Peace and tranquility would come in this lifetime or not at all. That was his karma and his truth.
Outside, he could see the Notre Dame towers in full shadow. Soon the city lights would come on. It was time to pull the blackout curtain over his window and turn on his lamp. Having done that, he hobbled to his bed, and lay back. As he did, his resolve of the moment before faded and the pain flooded back, as raw as it had ever been.
“Why did this happen to my family—and to me?” he said out loud. He’d said it as a boy, as an adolescent, as a grown man and a successful surgeon. He’d said it a thousand times. Sometimes it came as a quiet thought, or part of a lucid conversation during a therapy session; other times, as emotion suddenly overwhelmed him, it had been thundered out loud wherever he stood, embarrassing ex-wives, friends and strangers.
Lifting the pillow, he brought out Kanarack’s gun and hefted it in his hand. Tipping it toward him, he saw the hole where death came out. It looked easy. Even seductive. The simplest way of all. No more fear of the police, or of the tall man. Best of all, his pain would be instantly gone.
He wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before.
56
* * *
FIFTEEN MINUTES later, at a quarter to six, Bernhard Oven rang the front bell to 18 Quai de Bethune and waited. He’d chosen to begin his search for the American with Vera Monneray’s building, eliminating it first and then going on from there if necessary.
There was a click of the latch and Philippe, buttoning the top button of the tunic to his green uniform under double chin, opened the door.
“Bonsoir, monsieur,” he said, apologizing for keeping the gentleman waiting.
“I have a delivery from the pharmacy at Sainte Anne hospital, sent by Doctor Monneray. She said to relay that it was urgent,” Oven said in French.
“To whom?” Philippe was puzzled.
“To you, I suppose. The doorman at this address. That’s all I know.”
“The pharmacy, are you certain?”
“Do I look like a deliveryman? Monsieur, of course I’m certain. It’s medicine, needed urgently. That’s why I, the assistant manager, was sent all the way across town on a Sunday evening.”
Philippe paused. The day before he had helped Vera bring Paul Osborn up the service stairs to her apartment from a car parked on the back street. Later in the day he’d helped her take him, heavily sedated after an operation, up to the hidden room under the eaves.
Osborn, he knew, had needed medical attention. Undoubtedly he still did, otherwise why would this delivery have come from the hospital pharmacy on a Sunday evening at Vera’s request?
“Merci, monsieur,” he said, and Oven handed him an official receipt book and a pen.
“Sign for it, please.”
“Oui.” Nodding, Philippe signed.
“Bonsoir,” Oven said, then turned and walked away.
Closing the door, Philippe looked at the package, then quickly walked to the desk. Picking up the phone, he dialed Vera’s private number at work.
Five minutes later, Bernhard Oven lifted the steel cover from the telephone panel in the basement of 18 Quai de Bethune, plugged a tiny earphone into a microrecorder connected to the front-desk phone line and hit “play.” He heard the doorman’s explanation of what had happened, followed by an alarmed female voice that had to be Mademoiselle Monneray’s.
“Philippe!” she said. “I sent no package, no prescription. Open it, see what it is.”
There was a rustling of paper followed by a grunt, then the doorman’s voice once more.
“It’s messy.... It—it looks like a medicine vial. Like doctors use when they give you a—”
Vera cut him off. “What does it say on the label?” Oven took note of the concern in her voice and smiled at it.
“It says . . . Excuse me, I have to get my glasses.” There was a clunking sound as Philippe put down the phone. A moment later he came back on the line. “It says—’.5ml tetanus toxoid.’ “
“Jesus Christ!” Vera gasped.
“What is it, mademoiselle?”
“Philippe, did you recognize the man? Was he one of the police?”
“No, mademoiselle.”
“Was he tall?”
“Très”—Very.
“Put the vial in your own kitchen trash and do nothing. I’m leaving the hospital now. I’ll need your help when I get there.”
“Oui, mademoiselle.”
There was a distinctive click as Vera hung up, then the line went dead.
Calmly, Bernhard Oven unplugged the earphone from the microrecorder and unhooked the recorder from the phone line. A moment later he replaced the cover to the telephone console, turned out the light and retraced his steps up the service stairs.
It was 6:15 in the evening. All he had to do was wait.
Less than five miles away, McVey sat alone at a table at an outdoor café on the Place Victor Hugo. To his right, a young woman in jeans leaned on her elbows, staring off at nothing, an untouched glass of wine in front of her, a small dog dozing at her feet.
To his left, two elderly, very well dressed and obviously very rich matrons chattered in French over tea. They were cheery and animated and looked as if they’d been coming here every day at this hour for half a century.
Cradling a glass of Bordeaux, McVey found himself wishing that was the way he would go out. Not rich necessarily, but cheery and animated, and comfortable with the world around him.
Then a police car flew past with its emergency lights flashing, and he realized his last and final exit wasn’t as much on his mind as was Osborn. He’d lied about the mud on his shoes because he’d been caught. He was a man in love, a tourist who had probably walked near the Eiffel Tower recently enough to know the gardens had been dug up and were muddy, and had been quick enough to make up a cover story for himself when asked about it. The trouble was, the mud there was gray-black, not red.
Where Osborn had been that Thursday afternoon— barely four days ago—was at the riverbank by the park. The same place Merriman had been murdered and Osborn shot a day later.
What had Osborn planned that had gone sour? Was he going to kill Merriman himself, or had he set him up for the tall man? If the idea had been to kill him himself, where did the tall man tie in? If he had set him up for the tall man, how did it happen that Osborn became a victim as well? And why a guy like Osborn, a clean-cut, if somewhat fiery, orthopedic surgeon from California?
And then there was the drug the French police had found in Osborn’s room. Succinylcholine.
A call to Dr. Richman at the Royal College of Pathology in London had established succinylcholine as a presurgery anesthetic, a synthetic curare used to relax the muscles. Richman had warned that outside professional hands it could be very dangerous. The drug completely relaxed the skeletal muscles, and could cause suffocation if improperly administered.
“Is it unusual for a surgeon to have that kind of a drug in his possession?” McVey had asked directly.
Richman’s reply had been as forthcoming. “In his hotel room while he was ostensibly on vacation? I’d sure as hell say so!”
McVey had paused, thought a moment, then asked the million-dollar question, “Would you use it if you were going to sever a head?”
“Possibly. In conjunction with other anesthetics.”
“What about the freezing? Would you use it for that?”
“McVey, you have to understand, this is a sport neither I nor the colleagues whom I’ve queried have ever encountered before. We don’t have enough information about what was attempted or actually happened to even begin to suggest a procedure.”
“Doctor, do me a favor,” McVey had asked. “Get with Doctor Michaels and go over the corpses once more.”
“Detective, if you’re looking for succinylcholine, it breaks down in the body minutes after it’s injected. You’d never find a trace of it.”
“But you might find puncture wounds that would tell us they’d been injected with something, right?”
McVey could distinctly hear Richman agree with him and the sound of the phone as he hung up. Then all of a sudden it hit him. “Son of a bitch!” he said out loud. The little dog under the table jerked out of his sleep and started barking, while the two elderly ladies, who obviously understood enough English to be appalled, glared at him.
“Pardon,” McVey said. Getting up, he left a twenty-franc note on the table. “You too,” he said to the dog as he walked off.
Crossing Place Victor Hugo, McVey bought a token and entered the Métro. “Lebrun,” he heard himself say, as if he were still in the inspector’s office. “We never made a three-way association, did we?”
Looking at the Métro routes on a master scheduling board, McVey picked the route he thought would take him where he wanted to go and got on. His mind still focused on his imaginary meeting with Lebrun.
“We found Merriman because he left his print at the Jean Packard murder scene, right?”
“We knew Osborn hired Packard to find somebody. Osborn told me it was Vera Monneray’s boyfriend and, at the time, it seemed reasonable. But what if he was lying about that, like he did about the mud on his shoes? What if it was Merriman he was trying to find? On our mothers’ graves, how the hell could we miss that?”
Crowding onto a Métro car, McVey grabbed an overhead handrail and stood. Incensed as he was for not seeing the obvious sooner, he was still pumped up by the flow of thoughts.
“Osborn sees Merriman in the brasserie, maybe by accident, and recognizes him. He tries to grab him, but the waiters wrestle him off and Merriman gets away. Osborn chases him into the Metro, where he gets picked up by Metro police and then turned over to you. He makes up a phony story that Merriman picked his pocket and your men say okay and let him go. Not unreasonable. Then Osborn contacts Kolb International, who assigns him Packard. Packard and Osborn put their heads together and a couple of days later Packard comes up with Merriman, hiding out as Henri Kanarack.”
The train slowed in the tunnel, then entered a station, slowed more and stopped. McVey glanced at the station sign and stood back as half-a-dozen noisy teenagers got on. As quickly- the doors closed, the train moved off again. The entire time McVey heard nothing but his own inner voice.
“I’d say it’s a safe bet Merriman found out Packard was after him, and went after him instead, wanting to know what the hell was going on. And Packard, a tough-guy soldier of fortune, doesn’t like being pushed around, especially in his own house. There’s a big argument and it comes out in Merriman’s favor. Or seems to have, until he leaves a fingerprint. Then this whole other business starts.
“After that it all begins to get a little fuzzy. But the key, if I’m right, is that it was Merriman who Osborn jumped in the café that first night. Your men determined it was Osborn who was the perpetrator, but nobody ever identified the victim. Unless Packard did, and that’s how he got on Merriman’s trail in the first place. But if it was Merriman Osborn attacked, and if we can find out why, it could very well make the circle back to the tall man.”
The train slowed again. Again McVey looked for the name of the station as they came in. This was it! The place he was to change trains—Charles de Gaulle— Etoile.
Getting off, he pushed through a rush of passengers, went up a flight of stairs, passed a vendor selling sweet corn and rushed back down another flight of stairs. At the bottom, he made a right and followed the crowd into the station, pressing ahead, looking for the train that he wanted.
Twenty minutes later he walked out of the St.-Paul Métro station and onto the rue St.-Antoine. A half block down the street on his right was the Brasserie Stella. It was 7:10, Sunday evening, October 9.
57
* * *
BERNHARD OVEN stood in the darkened bedroom window of Vera Monneray’s apartment and watched the taxi pull up. A moment later, Vera got out and entered the building. Oven was about to step away when he saw a car turn the corner with its headlights out. Pressing back against the curtain, he watched a late-model Peugeot come down the street in darkness, then pull over and stop. Easing a palm-sized monocular from his jacket pocket, he put the glass on the car. Two men were in the front seat.
Police.
So they were doing it too, using Vera to find the American. They’d been watching her; when she left the hospital suddenly, they followed. He should have anticipated that.
Bringing the glass up again, he saw one
of them pick up a radio microphone. Most likely they were calling in for instructions. Oven smiled; the police weren’t the only ones aware of Mademoiselle Monneray’s personal relationship with the prime minister. The Organization had been aware of it since François Christian had been appointed. And because of it, and the awkward political consequences that might follow if something went wrong, the likelihood the surveillance inspectors would be given a free hand to come in after her, no matter what they suspected, were almost nil. They would either remain where they were and continue the surveillance from outside or wait until superiors arrived. That delay was all the window Oven would need.
Quickly he left the bedroom and walked down the hall, stepping into the darkened kitchen just as the apartment door opened. Two people were talking and he saw a light go on in the living room. He couldn’t make out what was being said, but was certain the voices belonged to Vera and the doorman.
Suddenly they were out of the living room and coming down the hall directly toward the kitchen. Moving around the center console, Oven stepped into a walk-in pantry, lifted the Walther automatic from his waistband and waited in the dark.
A moment later Vera came into the kitchen with the doorman at her heels and turned on the light. She was halfway across and heading for the rear service door when she stopped.
“What is it, mademoiselle?” the doorman said.
“I’m being a fool, Philippe,” she said, coldly. “And the police are being clever. They found the vial and delivered it to you presupposing you would notify me and I’d do just what I did. They assume I know where Paul is, so they sent a tall inspector, hoping I would think it was the gunman and be frightened enough to lead them to Paul.”
Philippe wasn’t as certain. “How can you be sure? No one, not even Monsieur Osborn, has seen the tall man closely. If this man was a policeman, he’s one I’ve never seen before.”