The Day After Tomorrow

Without doubt, Philippe had been an angel. But he was tired and Osborn had the sense he was one surprise away from coming unglued. Too much had happened in the last twenty-four hours to test not only his loyalty but his mental balance. Generous as Philippe was, he was, after all, and by his own choice, simply a doorman. And nobody, least of all himself, expected him to be daring forever. If Osborn went back up to his hiding place under the eaves there was no knowing how long he’d be safe. Especially if the tall man found a way to elude the police and came back looking for him.

Finally, he had realized there was only one choice. Picking up the phone, he rang Philippe at the front desk and asked if the police were still outside.

“Oui, monsieur. Two in front, two at the rear.”

“Philippe—is there another way out of the building besides the front door or the service entrance?”

“Oui, monsieur. Right where you are. The kitchen door opens into a small hallway; at the end of it is a stairway up to the sidewalk. But why? Here you are safe and—”

“Merci, Philippe. Merci beaucoup,” Osborn said, thanking him for everything. Hanging up, he made one more call. The Hotel Vieux. If McVey was picking up his messages, this would be one he. would want. Osborn would give him a time and a place to meet.

7:00 P.M. The front terrace room of La Coupole, on the boulevard du Montparnasse. It was where he had last seen the private detective, Jean Packard, alive, and the one place in Paris he was familiar enough with to know it would be crowded at that hour. Thereby making it difficult for the tall man to risk taking a shot at him.

Five minutes later, he opened an outside door and climbed the short flights of stairs to the sidewalk. The afternoon was crisp and clear and barge traffic was passing on the Seine. Down the block he could see the police standing guard in front of the building. Turning, he walked off in the opposite direction.

At 5:20, Paul Osborn came out of Aux Trois Quartiers, a stylish department store on the boulevard de la Madeleine, and walked toward the Metro station a half block away. His hair was cut short and he was wearing a new, dark blue pin-stripe suit, with a white shirt and tie. Hardly the picture of a fugitive.

On the way there, he had stopped in the private office of Dr. Alain Cheysson on the rue de Bassano, near the Arc de Triomphe. Cheysson was a urologist two or three years younger than he with whom he’d shared a luncheon table in Geneva. They’d exchanged cards and promised to call one another when Osborn was in Paris or Cheysson in L.A. Osborn had forgotten about it entirely until he decided he’d better have someone look at his hand and tried to think how best to approach it.

“What happened?” Cheysson asked, once the assistant had taken X rays and Cheysson had come into the examining room to see Osborn.

“I’d rather not say,” he said, trying to effect a smile.

“All right,” Cheysson had replied with understanding, wrapping the hand with a fresh dressing. “It was a knife. Painful, perhaps, but as a surgeon you were very lucky.”

“Yes, I know . . . .”

It was ten minutes to six when Osborn came up out of the Metro and started down boulevard du Montparnasse. La Coupole was less than three blocks away. That gave him more than an hour to play with. Time to observe, or try to observe, if the police were setting a trap. Stopping at a phone booth, he called McVey’s hotel and was told that yes, Monsieur McVey had been given his message.

“Merci.”

Hanging up, he pushed open the door and went back outside. It was nearing dark and the sidewalks were filled with the restless flow of people after work. Across the street and down a little way was La Coupole. Directly to his left was a small cafe with a window large enough for him to observe the comings and goings across the street.

Going inside, he picked a small table near the window that gave him a clear view, ordered a glass of white wine and sat back.

He had been lucky. The X rays on his hand had, as he’d thought, shown no serious damage and Cheysson, though a urologist and hardly an expert on hands, had assured him that he felt no permanent damage had been done. Grateful for Cheysson’s help and understanding, he’d tried to pay for the visit, but Cheysson wouldn’t hear of it.

“Mon ami,” he’d said, tongue in cheek, “when I am wanted by the police in L.A. I know I will have a friend to treat me who will say nothing to anyone. Who will not even make a record of my visit. Eh?”

Cheysson had seen him immediately and treated him without question, all the while knowing Osborn was wanted by the police and jeopardizing himself by helping. Yet he had said nothing. In the end they’d hugged and the Frenchman had kissed him in the French way and wished him well. It was little enough he could do, he said, for a fellow doctor who had shared his lunch table in Geneva.

Suddenly Osborn put down his glass and sat forward. A police car had pulled up across the street. Immediately two uniformed gendarmes got out and went into La Coupole. A moment later they came back out, a well-dressed man in handcuffs between them. He was animated, belligerent and apparently drunk. Passersby watched as he was hustled into the backseat of the police car. One gendarme got in beside him, the other got behind the wheel. Then the car drove off in a singsong of sirens and flashing blue emergency lights.

That was how fast it could happen.

Lifting his glass, Osborn looked at his watch. It was 6:15.

68

AT 6:50 McVey’s taxi crawled through traffic. Still, it was better than being in the Opel and trying to fight his way across Paris on his own.

Pulling out a tattered date book, he looked at the notes for that day, Monday, October 10. Most notably the last, Osborn—La Coupole, boulv. Montparnasse, 7 P.M. Scribbled above it was a memo regarding a message from Barras. The Pirelli tire representative had examined the tire casting made at the park by the river. The pattern of that tire was found on tires specially manufactured for a large auto dealer who had an ongoing contract with Pirelli to put their tires on his new cars. That tire was now standard equipment on two hundred new Ford Sierras, eighty-seven of which had been sold in the last six weeks. A list of the purchasers was being compiled and would be ready by Tuesday morning. Further, the glass shard of the auto mirror McVey had picked up in the street after the shooting at Vera Monneray’s had been put through the police lab. It too had come from a Ford vehicle; though it was impossible to tell which make or model. Parking Control had been alerted and its officers directed to report any Ford or Ford Siena with a broken exterior mirror.

The last notation on McVey’s October 10 page was the lab report on the broken toothpick he had uncovered among the pine needles just before he’d found the tire track. The person who had held the toothpick in his/her mouth had been a “secretor”—a group-specific substance sixty percent of the population carry in the bloodstream that makes it possible to determine the blood group from other body fluids such as urine, semen and saliva. The blood group of the secretor in the woods was the same as the blood group found in the bloodstains on the floor in Vera Monneray’s kitchen. Type O.

The taxi stopped in front of La Coupole at precisely seven minutes past seven. McVey paid the driver, got out and walked into the restaurant.

The large back room was being set up for the dinner crowd that had yet to arrive, and only a few tables were occupied. But the glassed-in terrace room facing the sidewalk in front was packed and noisy.

McVey stood in the doorway and looked around. A moment later, he squeezed past a group of businessmen, found a vacant table near the back and sat down. He was exactly as he wished to appear, one man, alone.

The Organization had tentacles reaching far beyond those who were members of it. Like most professional groups it subcontracted labor, often employing people who had no idea for whom they actually worked.

Colette and Sami were high-school girls from wealthy families who were into drugs, and consequently did whatever was necessary to feed their habit and at the same time keep their addiction hidden from their families.