confess to the murder. They know that you were Johnny-on-the-spot when he had his first attack.”
I shrugged.
“You want some food?”
“Yeah. And a bath and a plane ticket home.”
“Admiral Grafton will be here this afternoon. All I can do is grub and a bath.”
I was bathed and shaved, had had a nap and was accoutered in trousers, a white shirt, a tie and a sports coat when I was admitted that afternoon to the secure spaces in the basement of the U.S. embassy in Paris.
The place looked like an old-fashioned bank vault but was called a “skiff”—a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF. Elaborate physical and electronic safeguards had been installed to prevent electronic eavesdropping. The air was conditioned, of course, and bore the unmistakable faint aroma of light machine oil. The window-less cubicles lit 24/7 with fluorescent lights overhead, the odor and the constant low-grade whir of fans moving air made the SCIF feel like a world within a world, a place detached from the places where normal people live. In short, the dump looked and felt like a prison. And believe me, if the people outside ever locked the door, we weren’t leaving until the resurrection of the dead.
Grafton was tucked into a little office in the SCIF about the size of a bedroom closet. He had a desk, the chair he sat in and two more little folding chairs. The furniture almost filled the space.
“I hear you had a long evening,” he said as he inspected my welts and bruises.
I dropped my fanny into the folding chair on the left and sighed. “You want to hear it again?” I knew he would have been briefed, probably by George Goldberg. Two newspapers lay on his desk. Marisa was on the front of one and Isolde the other. I tilted my head so I got a better look. Isolde looked distraught, haggard, and Marisa looked overwhelmed. Lovely. Vulnerable. How did she manage that, anyway?
“All of it,” Grafton said, nodding.
When you report to Jake Grafton, it’s like talking to a voice recorder. He merely sat and listened, didn’t ask any questions while I spoke, nor did he do facial expressions or gestures to keep me talking. He listened. Listened so well that I always got the impression he could repeat everything I said pretty much word for word.
When I ran dry he scratched his nose a few times and sat digesting it all. At last he said, “This Henri Stehle … he worked for the Paris World Hotel for about a month. The police say his references and his address are fake. The prior employers he gave as references never heard of him, and he doesn’t live at the apartment house he said he did. The concierge doesn’t recognize the photo the hotel took for his building pass.”
“Guess World Hotels Inc. really checked him out.”
“The police inspector told me Stehle was the right age, had good references and knew how to cook French cuisine. The hotel manager let it go at that. Stehle didn’t handle money. He did an excellent job until last night.”
“So he poisoned Jean Petrou?”
“No proof of that. You didn’t serve the head table, did you?”
“No.”
“Turns out Jean and his mother both ordered vegetarian plates. Isolde has been a vegetarian since her university days, and Jean has had some kind of stomach trouble the last few months. The food that remained on Jean’s plate contained a powerful heart medication, digitalis; the other didn’t.”
“The plates were identical?”
“Apparently. The waiter was told in the kitchen who they were for. He served Isolde first, and she got the plate in his right hand because he’s right-handed. The plate in his left hand he put in front of Jean.”
I wasn’t liking what I was hearing. “If the people in the kitchen didn’t know which person the plates were going in front of, they couldn’t have poisoned them. Have I got that right?”
“That’s a working theory, anyway.”
“So the implication is that either the waiter, Isolde or Marisa poisoned him. The waiter could have poisoned the food as he brought it to the table—“
“Difficult but not impossible,” Grafton said.
“—Or more likely, Isolde or Marisa put something in his grub when his head was turned.”
“Oh, I didn’t tell you. The police have heard that Isolde was a heart patient several years ago. They are checking with her physicians to see what medication she was on then and is on now.”
“I don’t think Marisa did it.”
Grafton chuckled. He had a dry chuckle, sort of like a rooster might make when looking at his favorite chicken. “Umm,” he said.
“Why would his mother want to pop him off?”
“Darned if I know,” the admiral muttered. “The French police are investigating. A very wealthy family, large stock positions in banks in four countries, board positions, family trusts — one suspects that with Jean’s death large sums of money will change hands.”
“So what are the women saying at the chateau?”
“Nothing at all. They got home, packed their bags and left in the limo for an unknown destination. Right now they are somewhere in Germany.”
I said a nasty word. I was thinking of all the effort I put into bugging the joint. Okay, okay, the job took less than an hour, but I had to set it up and think about it for a week. That was the time and effort that was wasted.
If Grafton had any sympathy for me, he didn’t let it show. He appeared to be thinking about something else.
There was a photo on Grafton’s desk of Henri Stehle. This was the photo the Paris World had taken for his employee pass. I picked it up and scrutinized it carefully. Stehle didn’t look much like the old man I had seen here in Paris last fall. Yet the more I stared, the more doubts I had. Perhaps he and the old man were indeed one and the same.
“Abu Qasim?” I asked Grafton, waggling the photo.
Grafton shrugged. “Possibly,” he muttered.
“Come with me,” he said. He picked up a file from his desk and led me to a conference room, where the real work is done in a SCIF. Speedo Harris and Nguyen Diem were there going over police reports and slurping coffee. Unfortunately the American embassy was the only place in France that served American-style coffee. British though he might be, Harris was swilling his like a Yank. He and Diem inspected my war wounds and made appropriate comments.
Admiral Grafton summarized my adventures of the previous evening. “Gentlemen,” he continued, “we have a hell of a mess on our hands. The Russian government says it had nothing to do with the murder of Alexander Surkov, a murder that is being investigated by the British police and Interpol — and the nuclear angle is being investigated by half the police forces in Europe. Last night’s murder of Jean Petrou is being investigated by the Paris police. The only link between them is the presence at both poisonings of Marisa Petrou, who is possibly the daughter of the most wanted terrorist in America and Europe, Abu Qasim.”
He paused, and Speedo Harris asked, “Is she his daughter?”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“That comment could be made about bloody near every young woman on earth,” Harris observed trenchantly. The Brits were like that, trenchant, yet I don’t think Harris had a very high regard for the admiral.
Grafton wasn’t normally one to take much crap from subordinates, but he didn’t bother to squash Speedo this time. “Very perceptive,” he said agreeably.
“So what is your theory?”
“I want to know if there is a link between these killings. What, if anything, did Alexander Surkov and Jean Petrou have in common?”
“Marisa Petrou killed them both,” Speedo suggested.
“Or Abu Qasim,” Per Diem mused.
From a pocket Grafton produced a photo and handed it to Diem. I recognized the face from the newspapers — Alexander Surkov. He also produced envelopes, one of which he handed to each man. “You both are now liaison officers officially attached to the U.S. State Department, which means you work for me. Those letters will get you cooperation almost anyplace if you say please and thank you. Visit the various agencies investigating these killings. I want to know what they know. Got it?”
