lines and watching each of their homes. Though the lovers had not attempted to meet, they spoke often. Which is how, the previous afternoon, Maroc had found himself listening to his very nervous subordinate, the young Christian Pingeot, reading lurid and explicit pornography out loud to him for the better part of an hour. “Then this Alberto fellow says”—the officer had cleared his throat—“ahem, ‘I want, um,’ ahem, ‘I want to thrust my spear deep into you, your’ … sir, I really cannot.”
“Read it to me, officer.”
“All right, sir. ‘I want to thrust my spear deep into your moist petals’—please, sir.”
Maroc had to agree it was pretty bad stuff. But he had made poor Pingeot continue, simply because he enjoyed seeing the officer’s discomfort. Now he gleefully handed the transcripts to Lecan.
Lecan read the report with wide eyes. “My, this fellow Alberto is a terrible poet,” he said.
“Well, he certainly is Italian,” Maroc conceded.
Lecan smiled. “Do the two know we are watching them?”
“Hard to say. But she won’t let him come to her flat. And they cannot go to Alberto’s, his wife is there. So see what he proposes?” Maroc pointed to a section of the transcript.
Lecan read it and smiled. “Ah-ha, the rascal, he wants her to meet him tonight in the Bois.”
Maroc clapped his hands. “Ha ha, such good old-fashioned naughtiness. Makes me feel young again,” he laughed. “Well, why not join in the fun, eh? Are you up for a bit of surveillance tonight? Maybe we can catch them with his pants down and her skirt up and then bring them in for some real questioning.” He grinned lasciviously.
“Well, between those two and that one in the cage downstairs, we should be able to make some progress,” said Lecan.
“I agree, I agree,” said Maroc. “It’s a very exciting day.” And so they made their arrangements.
Later that night, sitting in an unmarked car across the boulevard, they watched as their subject Alberto paced back and forth on a lamp-lit corner of the park. They had followed Alberto from his apartment and now, having waited for almost half an hour, all of them were growing impatient for Madame Vidot’s arrival.
Lecan lit a Gauloise.
“You fool,” said Maroc. “Put it out; she’ll see us if she comes up now.”
“She’s not coming,” said Lecan.
“Impossible,” said Maroc. “You read those dirty transcripts, the woman is like a cat in heat.”
Lecan looked at his watch. “Maybe her conscience got the better of her. Maybe she feels bad about that nice husband she killed. Who knows? What I do know is we have been here for some time and there’s no sign of her. I honestly don’t know why he’s still waiting. The little slut stood him up.”
Maroc stared at the lone silhouette loitering across the street and shook his head in frustration. Where was she? He had felt so tantalizingly close to wrapping up all the strands in one nice, neat package, but now some gnawing sense at the bottom of his stomach was telling him that the simple solutions he wanted were beginning to slip away. “Fine. Let’s at least grab him. He must know what she did with Vidot. He must. Even if he’s innocent, he’ll have a lot to tell us.”
“Well,” said Lecan, reaching for the door handle, “we’ll never know unless we ask.”
They got out and crossed the street. Alberto stopped his pacing as they approached; they could tell he recognized them at once. Then, pretending he had not noticed them, he began to nonchalantly walk down the path into the darkness of the park. It was bad enough that his date had not shown up, but a conversation with the police was clearly not the way he wanted to spend the night.
“The bastard’s trying to slip away,” said Maroc, picking up his pace. He would have run but he hated running, it always made him feel fat, and so by the time they reached the corner, their suspect was gone. “Come, he went that way, we can catch up with him,” Maroc said. Lecan followed him into the park.
They walked in silence, listening for footsteps, but the Bois was quiet. They followed the paved walkway until it divided and then, instead of splitting up, they both stayed to the right, going deeper into the park and crossing near the lake. Every so often they would pause and look around, hoping to hear their quarry’s footsteps, but as they stood in the silence, it was clear that Alberto had escaped them.
They headed back to the car. Halfway down the walk, Maroc tapped his hand on Lecan’s shoulder and pointed into the overgrowth. “Look, is that him?”
“It’s hard to tell,” said Lecan.
“Who’s he with?” Obscured by the brush, they could only dimly make out a group of figures standing in a small clearing about fifty meters away. Maroc and Lecan moved in closer, stepping carefully between the thornbushes and tree branches in an effort not to make any noise. Coming closer, they found a situation of such interest that it made them completely forget their missing suspect.
There were seven people there, all of whom appeared to be frozen as stiff as wax statues. As Maroc and Lecan came to a break in the trees, it became clear why the group of people were immobile, as the majority of them had guns pointed at one another. A small bald man was moving about and talking. Maroc squinted into the darkness, trying to make out what was happening. “What the devil is he—?”
That was when the little man produced a gun and shot one of the men in the head.
Maroc immediately pulled his whistle from his pocket and blew it as loudly as he could, rushing headlong into the middle of the clearing, with Lecan right behind him. “Police! Put down your weapons and stay where you are.”
Maroc had, up until this point, served largely in administrative roles, and in his entire professional history he had very little actual experience working in the streets among the citizens of the city’s neighborhoods. His long, comfortable career had begun with a desk job in a Paris office; then, during the Vichy years, he’d moved on to more bureaucratic work in Bordeaux, then back to a desk in Paris, where he aided Papon in various departmental roles, and where, over time, he had grown quite comfortable thinking of himself as an important figure of authority and power. Therefore, when he yelled “stay where you are!” he was logically convinced that everyone would do just that. He was, therefore, quite bewildered when his imperious command, combined with his piercingly loud police-whistle blast, had entirely the opposite effect. All the characters in that small clearing, who had, in fact, been standing perfectly still before as they stared down the barrels of one another’s guns, all now suddenly flew into a burst of frantic and frenzied motion. Guns were fired, people ran off in all directions, and, to make things worse, the forest itself seemed to spring into life as two broad caped shadows came swooshing down from the trees, blocking his vantage of the fleeing suspects while knocking one of the women to the ground. What the hell was going on? Who were these superheroes swinging out of the sky like some wild characters from the Fantax or Fulguros comics? Then Maroc realized the large swooping creatures were actually owls and the capes he had imagined were their wide wings. Were these the same killer birds that had attacked the man by the Galeries Lafayette? What was this, some mad homicidal falconry? What went on in this damn park? Lecan went dashing off into the forest, pursuing several of the fleeing group, while Maroc chased down one of the men. Grabbing at the man’s legs, he forced him to fall forward. The man’s gun went off as they hit the ground. When the man started shouting out in English, an infuriated Maroc instinctively punched him hard in the face and knocked him cold. After handcuffing the uncousious man, Maroc stood up, dusted off his coat, and looked around the scene. The birds were gone, frightened by the gun, no doubt. Most of the other people had vanished too. Lecan had not returned. The woman the owls had attacked lay close-by. In her gray suit, she looked ordinary, a secretary perhaps. She was spread out on the ground with her eyes open, staring up at the sky with bloody scratches on her face and a leaking bullet hole in her temple. The dead man, whom the little bald fellow had shot before all the commotion, lay by her side, his legs bent wrong and his arm extended so that the two almost looked as though they were holding hands. Maroc shook his head in dismay. Papon would not like this at all.
Hearing a noise, Maroc looked up to see Lecan coming out of the brush, his hair askew, covered in dirt and leaves. He was pulling another handcuffed man along by his elbow. “I managed to trip him up as he was running by,” he said. “He’s an American.”
“I think this one’s American too,” said Maroc, pointing at the unconscious figure in the dirt. “You’d better take yours to the car and radio the station for some assistance. Get an ambulance here too. Tell them we have two bodies and two arrests.”
Lecan led his prisoner off, leaving Maroc standing in the clearing, looking over the three prone figures. Maroc remembered how when he was little, his overprotective mother would never let him play in the small local park after dusk. “Bad things happen in the dark when God cannot see you,” she would say. He wondered what she
