“Next week?” That just slipped out.
“The government doesn’t want a breath of scandal now, during the summit.” I see.
“If he refuses to retire, he will be fired,” Grafton added. “He’ll retire, I think. The authorities don’t have enough evidence to prosecute him.”
“Prints on the gun? The magazine? Ammo? Suitcase? Computer?”
“None, they tell me. Wiped clean.”
“You’re joking.” I could see that he wasn’t, so I added, “Hairs on the uniform? DNA?”
Grafton shrugged. “If there is an attempt made on the lives of the G-8 leaders and somehow it can be tied to him, that decision could change, of course.”
“Gotta have evidence,” Willie declared, and slurped more wine.
I was thinking of Marisa. “Very civilized,” I said, and nodded at the inspector.
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
As Willie attacked his second glass of wine, Inspector Papin glanced at his watch and excused himself. Watching Willie slurp it kinda bothered me, too.
Grafton waited until the policeman was out of the room. Then he said, “If you were going to kill eight world leaders, how would you doit?”
“Wait until they were all in one place,” Willie said, “then blow it up. While the television cameras watched.”
“The only place all eight will be together on television is upstairs in the Hall of Mirrors. Oh, Wednesday evening they’ll all go to a state dinner hosted by the French president at his residence in Paris, but that won’t be televised live.”
“It’ll be here,” Willie Varner insisted. “While the world is watching.”
I agreed with Willie. Still… “The bomb squads have had dogs in the building all day.”
“Indeed they have, but dogs are trained to smell certain types of explosives. No dog can be trained to find everything in the chemical cornucopia that can be made to go bang.”
We discussed it and decided to start in the basement and work up. We found a door to the dungeon, all right, a damp, dark place of massive stone walls and iron beams. The beams were at least a century old, installed to replace the original oak beams, yet the iron looked serviceable. It had been painted recently with some kind of red rust inhibitor.
Grafton had a pocket flashlight, and we used that to supplement the poor light from the overhead light fixtures. The fixtures and wires looked as if they dated from the nineteenth century. We found the remnants of ancient cells that probably once held political prisoners, back when the musketeers were dashing and slashing.
“The dungeon,” Willie whispered.
After my recent jail experience, the place gave me the shivers— and an uncomfortable, closed-in feeling.
It seemed to get to Willie, too. “Man could get that clause-tro-phoby in a place like this,” he remarked at one point. “People musta been smaller back in them days.”
“How much explosive would it take to knock out the supports and bring down the building?” I asked Grafton. He was a naval officer; he must know more about explosives than I did.
“A few hundred pounds if it were placed right. A whale of a lot more if it were just packed in here.”
“They don’t have to bring down the building,” Willie pointed out.
“That’s right,” Grafton admitted with a sigh. “But I don’t think there’s anything here. Let’s go upstairs.”
When we got back to the kitchen, the door to the stairwell was locked. As Willie worked on it with the bobby pin, I said, “A man could go far with a thing like that.”
Willie opened the door with a flourish.
“All the way to the penitentiary,” Jake Grafton said as he walked by.
We walked the passageways looking at everything, not that there was a lot to see. The floors were wooden, the walls and ceiling plasterboard, and there were lights and wires and doors. That was it. So we walked along looking for discontinuities, something out of the ordinary, such as a floorboard that had been removed and replaced, a section of the wall that had been repaired, anything. It was time-consuming and tedious, and, of course, we found nothing.
We had been at it an hour and were in the south wing of the building when two paras came along with a bomb-sniffing dog. They looked at our badges, then looked us over while I eyed the dog — it wasn’t interested in us — edged by, and went on.
“We’ll never manage to walk through all these passages,” Grafton remarked. “Let’s go back to the main building where the summit meeting will be held.”
“In the main building on the main floor, in the passageway between the king’s bedroom and the Hall of Mirrors, there are ladders — actually just boards nailed to the wall,” I told him. “A dog couldn’t climb them.”
“We’ll try that,” Grafton said.
The first ladder we came to went up into the ceiling, yet the trapdoor was screwed shut. We walked along, looking. There were three ladders, and all three had secured trapdoors.
“I saw some hand tools in the kitchen, Tommy.” Grafton told me where they were, and away I went. I found them and paused for a drink of water, then headed back.
I took off my coat, got up on the middle ladder, and started screwing. Ten screws, with paint covering the heads. It took a while.
I got the honor of going up first. When I opened the trapdoor in the ceiling, it was dark as a tomb above me. I stuck my head up and felt around, found a switch, and flipped it. Way up high, a naked bulb illuminated among the rafters and braces. The space between the massive uprights of the walls of the Hall of Mirrors and the king’s bedroom was crisscrossed with wooden braces that stabilized everything and tied the whole building together. It was dusty and gloomy up there. There was only that one bulb, and in that huge dark space, it looked like a firefly in the night.
“We’re going to need a flashlight,” I said.
Grafton, who was below me on the ladder, passed up a small pocket flash. “Callie always packs these when we go anyplace, just in case the power goes out.”
I took the flash, put it in my shirt pocket, and climbed into the loft. Grafton, then Willie, followed.
There were spiders and webs. Didn’t look as if anyone had been up here in a while.
Willie cussed as he climbed. “This is my good suit, I’ll have you know. Paid near two hundred dollars for it. It gets ripped, I’m gonna bill the gover’ment. Grafton, just want you to know.”
“He got it at the Salvation Army,” I said.
“That’s a damn lie.”
Near the top of the ladder was a catwalk. I climbed up on it. The lightbulb was in a ceramic fixture screwed to a rafter. Scanning the flash around, I could see that the rounded ceiling of the Hall of Mirrors was suspended from the rafters and joists and braces. The joint work looked superb to me. I could see by the different shades of the wood, and the texture, that the beams were of various ages. Across the space was the outside wall of the chateau; the beams and boards there butted into the masonry.
“Bet some of these boards are as old as the building,” Grafton muttered as he joined me on the catwalk.
I looked down the ladder. Willie was going back down to the passageway below.
“Hey,” I called.
“You don’t need me up there. I’m too old for this shit, anyway.”
Grafton took the flash and went down the catwalk, looking at everything. I followed along. We went all the way to the end of the catwalk and worked back to the other end. It was a nice distance, at least a hundred feet, but the room below was huge.
All we saw was beams and dust and spider webs and sawdust from the construction last winter and spring. Finally Grafton sat down on the catwalk. I did, too. We could hear chairs being set up in the hall below, plus some
