AL01 - Murder in the Marais

Martine's chair and stuffed his mouth with pink Post-Its.

Garbled noises came from his mouth.

She eased out the Beretta from where it was taped to the small of her back and pointed it between his eyes.

'Shut up. Subtlety isn't my strong point.' She straddled his leg, pulling open drawers in Martine's desk. She found postal tape in the drawer, then taped his ankles to the swivel-base chair.

'Copy completed' came up on the screen. She leaned over and hit 'Eject.'

The disk popped out. She yanked the mouse wire and looped it several more times around his wrists.

He struggled, his eyes bulging, and tried to spit out the Post-Its. His patent-leather shoes beat a rhythm against the desk.

'He's very proud of those shoes, Mademoiselle Leduc,' a familiar voice said from the open office on the left.

Cazaux winked at her. He stood flanked by a pistol-toting bodyguard. The guard snatched the disk from her, handed it to Cazaux, and body-searched her.

The guard shimmied his hands over her body, then shook his head. 'Nothing,' he said after he had set her gun on Martine's desk.

'Have you grown more hair, Mademoiselle Leduc?' Cazaux said. 'I remember it shorter.'

Fear jolted up her spine.

The guard felt her hair, then ripped her hairpiece off. The small microphone clattered onto the floor. Cazaux nodded to the guard, who threw her laptop at the wall. He stomped it with his boots until little fiber-optic cables spurted out, like so much techno blood.

'You won't win, Cazaux,' she said.

'Why not?' He held up the disk.

'Rene sent copies to every newspaper in Paris,' she said.

'Go downstairs,' he told the bodyguard.

He gestured towards the other office. 'Let's discuss this privately.'

Once inside, he locked the door and sat down, indicating for her to do so. 'You're bluffing.' He smiled. 'But I would, too, if I was in your situation.'

'Laurent de Saux is your real name,' Aimee said.

'Well, young lady,' he said. He smiled indulgently, as if humoring a child. 'How could you prove that assumption?'

She glanced at her watch. 'You better read the Sunday edition of Le Figaro to find out, which starts printing in thirty minutes.'

'That's impossible.' He chuckled. 'Gilles is in my pocket. And your girlfriend Martine is sleeping off a tranquilizer.' He leaned forward, resting his elbows in his lap, and stared at her. 'Please sit down.'

She kept standing.

'You've been a good sparring partner,' he said. 'This game doesn't exactly match my wits, but so far it's been mentally stimulating.' Cazaux smiled expansively.

'This is only a game to you, isn't it?' she said. 'Not real live people. Just objects you manipulate or remove to advance your position. Soli Hecht understood your thinking pattern. It's like a giant series of moves in megalomania chess.'

'And you think you've engineered a checkmate. . .but how well I know,' he sighed wearily. 'How the corridors of power are lined with minor annoyances.'

'You informed on your parents after you killed Arlette Mazenc,' she said. 'You probably watched them executed below your window on rue du Platre.'

'What do you want?' he said. His eyebrows lifted in curiosity. 'I've been watching you. I'm impressed. You're good, you know. How about a nice, fat EU contract designing software frameworks for participating countries? I'll make it happen. Or would you like to head the French government's on-line security division?'

He dangled impressive carrots.

'You should step down,' she said, hesitating a fraction of a second.

He sensed weakness like a shark going in for the kill. 'I know how you feel. You think I did wrong.' His tone became soothing. 'Sometimes we have to do things for the greater good.' He shrugged. His eyes burned as he went on. 'But now I'm almost at the peak. I'll scale it. The culmination of my life.'

'Fifty years of lying and killing and you get to be prime minister?' she said.

His eyes narrowed. The moment had gone and he knew he'd lost any chance of recruiting her.

Loud reverberations came through the floor, the rhythmic pounding of the press. Aimee realized the Sunday edition had gone to print without Cazaux's identity. She had to make him confess, then somehow get out, get help.

'What about Arlette Mazenc, the concierge?' she said.

'You keep bringing up that harelipped harpy. What an ugly mug she had!' His tone had changed. He whined like a petulant schoolboy. 'That crippled cobbler liked it, though. He would. The bitch almost conned me out of some tinned salmon. My stepmother found it, tried to make me return it. And my stupid papa, bewitched by that slut who thought she could replace my mother, backed her up. Can you imagine? I had to teach them a lesson.' He looked at Aimee with a wide smile. 'Seems ridiculous now, doesn't it?'

He talked as if he'd spanked a naughty child, not brutally bludgeoned a fellow collaborator and informed on his parents, causing them to be shot below his apartment window. Truly evil incarnate, just as Odile Redonnet had said.

'And Lili Stein saw you, she'd hidden in the courtyard. She escaped, only to recognize you fifty years later, so soon before the election,' she said. 'You carved the swastika in her forehead.'

'She was a self-righteous busybody who took Nazi food,' he said. 'Like the rest of us. When you're that hungry you don't care. But I was smart. I made money out of them. Every one of them except Lili.'

'One hundred francs for anonymous denunciations. You figured the swastika would point to skinheads,' she said. 'But skin-heads make them differently. You drew it slanted, like Hitler and everyone else of your era did. A signature of that time.'

'Signature?' he said.

'The 1943 Nazi flag flying over the Kommandantur on rue des Francs Bourgeois had exactly the same one. You passed that every day on your way to school from rue du Platre.'

He smiled and his eyes were evil. 'Lili was the smartest in class but she stopped helping me.'

'Helping you?' she said. 'You mean, because she didn't let you cheat on math homework, you informed on her parents.'

'We all deserve what we get.'

'Arlette Mazenc cheated you on black-market tinned salmon. Furious, you bludgeoned her down in the light well, where she kept her cache. But Lili was hiding in the courtyard, afraid of the Nazi officer who'd been asking Arlette questions. She saw everything. You chased her up the stairs but she ran and escaped over the rooftop. You figured she had died. The last link to your identity erased, especially since you knew of the punishment inflicted upon Sarah, the blue-eyed Jew, Odile's deportation to Berlin and your classmates shipped to the countryside. But fifty years later Lili recognizes you in a Hebrew newspaper and tells Soli Hecht. Hecht tells her to do nothing until he has more proof, then makes overtures to the Simon Wiesenthal Center. But Lili couldn't wait, she knew how you silenced opposition. She tracked you herself—that was her mistake. You found out via your government connections that Hecht obtained a piece of an encrypted photograph with you in it. Hecht hired me to figure out the encryption. He tried to tell me your name. I don't know how you found Lili. . .'

He interrupted Aimee with a wave of his hand. 'But Lili was the only one who could put it all together. Of course, she was where I'd expect her to be.' He gave a little smile. 'Alors, still on rue de Rosiers.'

'You saw Lili talking with Sarah and killed her before she could spread her allegations. Killed her like you killed Arlette Mazenc.'

'She deserved it,' he said.

Yellow slanted light came from the half-opened door into the next room. Aimee edged towards it.

'The deal is you withdraw tonight,' she said.