The silence got wider and deeper.
“A man once loved me,” Sarah said softly. “But I didn’t love him.” She sat immobile, her eyes focused on infinity.
“These things happen,” I said as gently as I could.
When the silence was threatening to strangle us both, she said, “Now I know how it feels.”
She got up and walked out. The waitress bringing the wine stopped and watched her go.
The wind off the Atlantic carried in low clouds that evening, and rain fell across most of northern France. About ten o’clock a man came walking slowly and unsteadily along a street in a working-class district of suburban Paris, a street lined with cars and small trucks, with scooters and motorcycles parked sideways between them. The man wore an ankle-length coat and a hat that shed the rain. Under the coat, he had a muffler wrapped around his neck. Sticking from the pocket of his coat was the neck of a bottle.
He took shelter in the doorway of a closed business. There he extracted the bottle from his pocket, sipped on it and lit a cigarette. Working carefully, keeping one hand on the locked door of the building and the other firmly around the neck of the bottle, he lowered himself to the concrete. Once in position, he took the cigarette from his mouth and exhaled slowly, savoring the smoke. Then he took another nip from the bottle.
Pedestrians, and there weren’t many, ignored the man. The people were going into and out of a bar across the street. Even those men and women who glanced his way couldn’t see him very well, with the hat obscuring his eyes and his coat collar turned up against the invigorating night breeze, which occasionally whipped a small shower of raindrops into the doorway.
An hour passed as the rain made puddles in the street and on the cracked, broken sidewalk. Half of another hour had slipped by when a dark blue motorcycle came down the street at a good rate of speed and stopped in front of the motorcycle parking area near the bar. In the rain the motorcycle looked black, except when a streetlight shone directly on it.
Unfortunately the motorcycle parking area was full. The rider eased his steel horse into motion, rode to the end of the block, then turned around. Coming back toward the bar, he saw a place on the sidewalk near a pole that he could squeeze the motorcycle into. No sooner thought than attempted.
The man in the doorway was standing now. The motorcyclist ignored him and set about securing the vehicle with a chain lock, which he threaded around the drive shaft and and through the spokes in the rear tire.
The light was bad, and the lock on the chain quickly became wet and slippery. The motorcyclist put his helmet on the seat of the bike and bent down, trying to see where he needed to put the chain.
He realized that the man in the doorway had left it and was behind him, and glanced around. As he did so, the man in the coat fired a pistol into the motorcyclist’s head. The bullet entered it above his left ear. The shot was muffled, a wet pop that was lost in the sound of an oncoming truck. The victim slumped to the pavement, his legs splaying out.
The man in the coat quickly bent down and fired another bullet into the motorcyclist’s head, then put his pistol back into his coat pocket.
The shooter walked away along the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets as the truck passed. In the dim light and rain, the driver of the truck didn’t notice the man lying on the sidewalk.
The falling rain diluted the blood that had leaked from the holes in the victim’s head and washed his open, unseeing eyes.
CHAPTER FOUR
Jean-Paul Arnaud saw the flashing lights in the wet street and pulled his BMW as close to the curb as he could, then parked and locked the car.
He walked toward the nearest policeman and flashed his credentials. The policeman pointed. “Inspector Papin.”
The inspector was a man wearing an English raincoat with the collar turned up and a brimmed hat, standing under a bit of awning watching the photographers work. The body still lay in the gutter by the motorcycle, just as it was when it had been discovered an hour ago. The rain was almost a mist now, given weight and substance by a cool breeze that swirled through the streets.
“I’m Arnaud, DGSE.” He offered his credentials for inspection.
The police officer gave them a cursory glance, without touching them, and produced a set of DGSE credentials from his pocket. “He had these on him. One of your men, apparently.”
Arnaud accepted the building pass, looked at the photo, and studied the name. “Claude Bruguiere,” he said softly, and handed the credentials back to the inspector. “What can you tell me about it?”
“We’re just getting started. The body was found about an hour ago, in the position in which it lies now. The doctor who examined it said the man has been dead no more than two hours. He was apparently killed by two bullets to the head. They appear to still be in the skull and will be recovered during the autopsy. I have officers canvassing the neighborhood trying to find someone who saw or heard the shooting, but I expect they will find no one — no one telephoned the police when it happened. Still, we shall see.”
The inspector took the time to light a cigarette and return his lighter to his pocket. “Bruguiere came to this bar,” he nodded toward it, “several times a week to see a woman who works there. She is married to another man. She was in there all evening — no one saw her leave the premises — and was there when the body was discovered. Only when someone said there was a body on the street outside did she come out to see if she recognized who it was. She’s inside now, crying. We have an officer getting her statement.”
“Her husband?”
“He works nights. An officer is interviewing him now.”
“Was Bruguiere robbed?”
“I doubt it. He had his wallet on him, his credentials, a wad of keys on a ring …”
“His family?” Arnaud asked. He was almost embarrassed to ask — he couldn’t remember if Bruguiere was married or not, nor had he asked the duty man at the office to find out when he called to notify him of Bruguiere’s murder. It hadn’t occurred to him.
“Your office says he isn’t married. We got his address from his driver’s license. We have a man on the way over there.”
The photographers finished their work and began packing their gear. Inspector Papin motioned to the crew of the ambulance, who had been standing out of the way. They began preparations to move the body to the morgue.
The inspector conferred with his officers, listening to their reports and sending them off on other errands, but he had nothing more for Arnaud. The DGSE official lingered until the body was in the ambulance, then walked back through the rain to his car.
My mood wasn’t great that morning. Before I went to the train station, I went over to the company for an interview with one of the paper pushers, a man named Rick Odell. While I was waiting Gator walked past pretending he didn’t see me, so I knew the Patriots had lost.
“Hey, Gator, sports dude. What’s the news from the U.S. of A.?”
He looked blank.
“Ten pounds, buddy.”
The blank look disappeared. “You look like a sport, Carmellini. How about double or nothing?”
“How about paying up, Gator-bait? The Patriots ought to pay you to bet on somebody else.”
He counted out pound coins with little grace. He acted as if it were my fault that the Patriots couldn’t cut the mustard. “I’m really sorry your life sucks,” I said.
“Fuck you, Carmellini.”
“I’m sure you’d like to,” I replied, “but you look like the kind of guy that would kiss and tell.”
I knew Rick Odell from previous trips to Europe. He was perhaps forty, prematurely bald, and never smiled. He ran through contact procedures, telephone numbers, whom I should call if I got burned, the address of a safe house, all of the procedures and info that an agent in a foreign country needed to do his job and stay alive. Everything had to be committed to memory, so after we had run through everything twice, he quizzed me.
