French National Highway A20.
They stopped for lunch in Orleans, then drove on, this time with Mickey at the wheel. At seven-thirty, by which time it was already too dark to take pictures, they pulled into the cobble-stoned forecourt of Le Relais in the village of Cognac-Boeuf.
“It looks,” Matt said, “as if it’s been here for centuries.”
“It looks like a dump,” Mickey said. “Is this the best we can do?”
“This is it, unless you want to go back to Bordeaux.”
Mickey wordlessly turned the engine off and got out of the car.
The only accommodation available was one room. It had two single beds and a washbasin. The bath and water closet were in separate rooms down a narrow corridor.
“And I’ll bet you snore, too, don’t you?” Mr. O’Hara inquired.
Their dinner-roast lamb — was very good, and so was the wine. At nine o’clock, they retired to their room.
“I want to get up early, find their house, and take a couple of shots,” Mickey announced, “then hang around for a while to see if I can get a couple of shots of Festung, and then get the hell out of here.”
They called their respective maternal parents, turned off the worldwide telephone because the battery was running low, and then got into bed.
“You know what else-besides forgetting to charge the phone in the car-you made me do when you decided to drink everything in Paris last night?” Mr. O’Hara inquired across the dark room.
“I can hardly wait to hear.”
“I didn’t call that jackass in the embassy.”
“You can call the jackass in the embassy in the morning,” Matt said.
They were both asleep by half past nine.
When it is half past nine in Cognac-Boeuf, France, it is half past three in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
At 3:33 P.M., Dianna Kerr-Gally, Executive Assistant to the Honorable Alvin W. Martin, stepped to the mayor’s door and coughed.
“What’s up?” he inquired.
“I’ve got Eileen Solomon on the line,” Dianna said.
“Put her through,” he said.
“She wants to know if there is any reason you can’t see her right now.”
“See me? As opposed to talk to me?”
Dianna nodded.
“Did she say what she wants?”
Dianna shook her head, “no.”
He shrugged.
“You think I should talk to her?”
“I think you should tell me if there’s some reason you can’t see her right now.”
“Tell our distinguished district attorney that my door is always open to her,” the mayor ordered. “And stall whatever’s on the schedule until she shows up.”
The Honoable Eileen McNamara Solomon, trailed by Detective Al Unger, appeared ten minutes later in the mayor’s outer office, and was immediately shown into the inner office by Dianna Kerr-Gally, who stood just inside the door.
“This is between the mayor and me,” Eileen Solomon said. “Do you mind?”
Mrs. Kerr-Gally smiled somewhat thinly and left the office.
Our D.A. is really pissed off about something. I wonder what? And what does it have to do with me?
“You seem a little upset, Eileen,” the mayor said.
“ ‘Little’ is an understatement, and ‘upset’ a euphemism,” she said.
“Well, let’s see what we can do to make things right,” the mayor said. “What’s happened?”
“I had a call just now from Walter Davis,” Eileen began. “He told me he was really delighted to be able to tell me that Isaac Festung would soon be returned to Philadelphia.”
“Well, that’s certainly good news after all this time.”
“Specifically, that he was reliably informed by the legal attache of our embassy in Paris… You do know, don’t you, Alvin, that for reasons I never really understood, they call FBI agents assigned to embassies ‘legal attaches’?”
“No, I can’t say that I did,” Martin confessed.
“Rephrasing, the FBI agent at our embassy has told Davis that the French court is about to extradite Isaac Festung.”
“And for some reason I don’t understand, you’re annoyed about that?”
“Davis said that as soon as the French court orders his extradition, the legal attache-read FBI agents-there will take custody of his person, and then they and U.S. marshals will escort him home.”
“You’re going to have to explain to me, I’m afraid, what’s wrong with that.”
“When I was on the bench, Alvin, after Festung jumped bail, I spent a lot of effort-and a lot of taxpayers’ money- trying to find him. After he was convicted in my court of murder in the second, and-surprising me not at all- the FBI had not been able to find him, much less bring him back here and lock him up, I spent even more effort and taxpayer money trying to find him and bring him back here.”
“And the FBI was not very useful in this, I gather?”
“What they did, Alvin, was notify Interpol. ‘Hey, fellas, the local cops here are looking for this guy. If you stumble over him, give us a call, huh?’ ”
Mayor Martin was tempted to smile, but wise enough to know that this was not the time to do so.
“And since I became D.A.,” the D.A. went on, “my people- my fugitive guy and others-have spent a fortune running this sonofabitch down all over Europe. We found out from the French cops that he was-wherever the hell he is, in some village in the South of France-and when Interpol and the FBI did nothing to get him back, I sent two assistant D.A. s over there-at the taxpayers’ expense-to light a fire under them.”
“I see,” Alvin W. Martin said, although he really didn’t.
The only thing he knew for sure was that he had never seen the Honorable Eileen McNamara Solomon so angry before, and from which he drew the conclusion that one could anger Mrs. Solomon only at great peril.
“I have no intention of standing there, smiling in gratitude, when the FBI or the marshals take him off the plane,” Eileen McNamara Solomon declared.
“I understand how you feel, Eileen,” he said.
“I want a Philadelphia cop’s handcuffs on him,” she said. “I want a Philadelphia cop to bring him back.”
“I can understand that,” the mayor said.
“Those bastards try this sort of thing all the time. They even showed up in Alabama, trying to steal Jason Washington’s pinch of Homer C. Daniels.”
“I didn’t know that,” the mayor said, truthfully. “Is that what it’s called, ‘stealing a pinch’? That sounds like something that would happen at a high school junior prom.”
It was evident on District Attorney Solomon’s face that she did not share Mayor Martin’s sense of humor.
“Well, what can we do about this, you and I, Eileen, to make things right?”
“What you can do, Alvin, is call Ralph Mariani and tell him to get a cop-preferably one from Homicide-over to France before the FBI gets away with this.”
“Is there going to be time to do that?”
“There will have to be,” Eileen McNamara Solomon declared.
“Homicide, Lieutenant Washington.”
“Mariani, Washington. Is Quaire there?”
“No, sir. He is not.”
“Come up here, please, Jason. Right now.”
After he had explained the situation to Lieutenant Washington, Commissioner Mariani was surprised, and a little annoyed, at the amused look on Washington’s face.
“This is not funny, Lieutenant. We better be able to do something, and do it right now.”
