Brainquake (27 page)

What the Inspector couldn’t buy was Michelle fleeing the country with her baby and a homicidal maniac. Unless Paul only became one tonight. He thought back to the photo of Paul and to Zara’s description of him. The Inspector hated stone walls. He knew how tough it was going to be to pull anything coherent out of Paul.

The Inspector was not a desk psychiatrist. He was a cop. Paul was just another fugitive, wanted for questioning about murder. If he was insane, that wasn’t the Inspector’s problem.

But of course it was. And it was Michelle’s, too. Her husband dies and she runs away with this man…had he somehow convinced, mesmerized, romanced Michelle? How, if he was the man Zara had described?

And why, if he had been the one to pull the trigger, did the murder gun also have her prints on it?

And how could this Paul have gotten the drop on Lafitte tonight? If Lafitte had suspected Paul was dangerous, he would have shot him himself, or held him at gunpoint while Michelle ran to phone the police. Lafitte had no shortage of guns on his barge.

The Inspector hoped that through the cracks of the stone wall a few words would slip out from Paul…a few lucid words…but rarely, in the Inspector’s experience, had those words, when pieced together, been worth anything.

Lafitte was the Inspector’s only hook. Lafitte would fit the pieces together. If he was still breathing.

“How long have you known him, Inspector?”

The Inspector glanced at the man sitting beside him: the police surgeon who had already saved several lives in emergencies in the mobile lab’s operating room over the past year.

“Known whom?”

“Captain Lafitte?”

“Thirty years.”

The Inspector was back with them again, grateful to the surgeon for having broken into his thoughts. Behind them sat a young forensics man, Gautier, the whip of the mobile lab crew. With him was the surgeon’s top assistant, an ex-paratrooper medic named Rensonnet.

“My son,” Rensonnet said, “has a picture of Bourgois and Lafitte on his bedroom wall.”

“You think that’s something,” Gautier said, “my niece wrote a school play about the Resistance. Her little friend was Bourgois.”

“Does Lafitte still live alone on his barge?” Rensonnet said.

“Yes,” said the Inspector.

“Is it true he has no phone, no TV, no radio?”

“Yes.”

“How can he live in Paris without them?”

“He doesn’t understand how we can live
with
them.”

They exchanged wry smiles at the old man’s eccentricity.

“Was he wounded in the head, Inspector?”

“Why the head?”

“To live like that, like a hermit…”

“He was wounded three times but not in the head. He was hit in the balls. Lost one. He told the Resistance doctor it was all right. He could live with one ball. That was why they gave us two of them.”

They laughed.

“I saw that in an American film,” Rensonnet said.

“American—French—balls are the same all over the world,” the Inspector said. “All men could live with only one ball. Lafitte’s all iron inside. No bullet’s tough enough to kill him.”

“How long’s he been living like that?”

“Since the war. But it’s wrong to call him a hermit. Hermits don’t go drinking and brawling in waterfront bars.” The inspector weaved between two slow-moving cars in front of him, saw the convoy in his rear-view do the same. “He likes to brawl and he likes to drink and that’s got nothing to do with liking to live alone after a day’s work on his tug. His barge is his castle. I’m one of the rare ones who’s been on it. There’s nothing strange about living in privacy.”

“Don’t you think the war made him a little crazy?”

“Hell, no. Just suffering from battle fatigue.”

“After forty-five years?”

“Time has nothing to do with it.”

Rensonnet snorted. “My father fought with the Free French in North Africa. Infantry. Close combat. Saw men’s faces shot off. Enough to drive him insane. Wounded twice. Lost a leg. But not a single sign of battle fatigue forty-five years later.”

“He wore a uniform,” the Inspector said.

“Of course he did! He was a sergeant!”

The Inspector glanced at Rensonnet in the rear-view mirror. “A captured soldier knows he’ll live. A captured Resistance fighter knows he’ll be shot. The man who fights with a gun has got to know he has a chance to survive. Without that chance, he is dead every day he fights. Lafitte is suffering from that kind of battle fatigue.”

There was silence in the car. Only the horns battling the sirens as they rocketed toward the waterfront. They weren’t far now.

“I never thought about it that way, Inspector,” Rensonnet said. “It makes sense. He must be a sad and frightened man.”

“Sad? No. I’ve never known someone with a bigger joy for life, or a better sense of humor. Mischievous. We’d go out drinking and he’d toast everyone with a quote, he’d say it was from Balzac, and everyone would say, ‘Yes, yes, Balzac!
’
But it was just something he’d made up himself. ‘You know that line?’ he’d ask. And some snob would say, ‘Oh, yes, yes! My favorite line!’ And he’d say, ‘From such a wonderful play, no?’ And the poor sap would crawl further onto his own sword: ‘Oh yes, one of his best!’ ‘The one about the duchess and the gardener?’ ‘Yes, yes, I think that’s right…’ He could keep it up for an hour. Then finally he’d drop the blade: ‘
Balzac never said it, I did.’
And as often as not the sap, trying to salvage his dignity, would insist: ‘No, no, I’m quite sure I remember reading it…’ ”

“Sounds like a scene Balzac would have loved,” the surgeon said.

“Now don’t you start,” the Inspector said.

“Why’d he do it?” Rensonnet asked. “Just to have a laugh at their expense?”

“That,” the Inspector said, “and because it was a line he was proud of. If they thought Balzac said it, they’d take it seriously. Who’d believe a tug captain hauling coal and Cokes should have his words listened to respectfully?”

“What was the line?” Rensonnet asked.

“Later,” the Inspector said, stepping on the gas as he swung onto the quay. “Pray he can tell you himself.”

Two-way speeding traffic in the isolated tree-lined Seine area came to a sudden, head-jerking, angry, jarring halt amid sirens, horns, and blinking police lights, punctuated by sounds of bumpers striking bumpers.

Careening off the road, the Inspector’s car lunged past the phone booth, charged down the cement ramp, whipped along the dirt waterfront road, led his noisy team to the barge.

All its lights were on.

The Inspector jumped out of his car, saw the wild-eyed blackhaired woman in funky clothes and huge gaudy earrings streaking toward him like an arrow, kissing him, hugging him, clinging to him, her body shaking with panic.

He did nothing. He hadn’t kissed her, hadn’t hugged her. He stood as stiff as a telephone pole. Horns and sirens died, to the relief of awakened birds in their nests. The distant, haunting, lonely whistle of a tug horn could be heard.

Crew and cops erupted from their vehicles. Their lights kept blinking.

The Inspector could almost hear her heart, feel it hammering against his chest. Slowly, he stepped back and stared at her madeup face and her jet black hair. The only recognizable thing he saw was the unforgettable blue of her eyes, gleaming in the blinking lights.

He was aware he hadn’t greeted her as she’d expected, hadn’t flung his arms around her to comfort her. She needed to see he was not going to be on her side in murder. He saw the fear now filling her eyes, and made the smallest gesture he could: he took her arms in his, held them gently.

She burst into tears. They were the same tears she’d shed when she was nine and he had removed a painful splinter from her toe.

“Let’s go.”

They crossed the plank. She led him to the room. She stayed in the doorway while he went in.

Reacting more to Lafitte’s staring eyes than to the abundance of blood glistening all over his jacket, he didn’t—he couldn’t—examine him. The surgeon would do it any moment. With four citations for bravery as a street cop, the Inspector lacked the courage to see if Lafitte was dead. He had seen many victims of sudden death staring up at him with popped eyes, and none had been revived to life.

Michelle watched his glances swiftly take in the baby sketch on the wall…the raked, bruised face of Paul, still prone on the floor…the blood-matted thick hair on the back of his head… blood-smeared ashtray on floor…red gash on his temple… Luger in his hand…blood on the bed, on the blanket, on the lid of the chest.

The Inspector knew the tale behind every memento in that memory chest, including the Luger that Jean Bourgois took from a Nazi he had killed and gave to Lafitte for courage on the youth’s seventeenth birthday. Unlocking Paul’s grip on the gun, he recognized the trench-knife-scratched initials on the Luger’s butt.

CL
for Christian Lafitte.

He looked up at Michelle framed in the doorway, her blue eyes riveted on his, her dark makeup smeared with tears on her cheeks.

“You know how this bastard got Lafitte’s Luger?”

She nodded.

“We’ll have a talk, Michelle. Go clean your face.”

She nodded but before she could move a cyclone slammed her aside. The surgeon blasted in, trailed by Rensonnet carrying a stand and two medical boxes, the ambulance doctor, Dr. Sully, with his intern carrying medical kits, and Gautier, the forensics man.

The surgeon stared at Lafitte’s chest blanketed with blood.

“X-ray!”

Gautier bolted for the quay.

Michelle didn’t allow herself to feel anxious. She knew the Bomb Squad had used an X-ray machine to save her baby’s life, but she didn’t believe any machine would save someone dead, and Lafitte was stone dead.

Watching the surgeon feel for Lafitte’s pulse with his hand on Lafitte’s neck, under his ear, she felt a strange but exciting spasm shoot through her. She was in control of all this. The surgeon would never feel a beat.

The powder-blue shoulder of a lab technician in a smock shoved her aside and jarred her thoughts.

The technician stood by Rensonnet, who was taking a specimen of Lafitte’s blood in a small vial. The vial was handed to the technician, who carried it out to the mobile lab parked twenty feet from the water.

Michelle watched as the surgeon pulled up the lid of Lafitte’s left eye. Rensonnet adjusted the stand next to him, checking the long tube attached to it, checking the syringe.

The surgeon struck a match, held the flame against Lafitte’s hand. Michelle felt the pain. There was no reaction from Lafitte.

Rensonnet opened both medical boxes, placed two metal cartons on the bed. One filled with balls of cotton absorbents, the other empty. Also on the bed he placed a plastic bag containing surgical gloves, and a headband with a lamp attached, like coal miners’ helmets.

Her gaze shifted to Dr. Sully listening to Paul’s heart on his stethoscope.

She was shoved aside again, this time by two females.

One was a cop in uniform. On her right hip hung her holstered gun. On her left hip hung a batch of pressed cellophane bags with attached cards. On the top bag, stamped in blue:
POLICE/NATIONALE
. She went over to the Inspector, who was watching the surgeon examining Lafitte’s eye.

The other female, not in uniform, was a police photographer with a dead panatela in her mouth who began to take flashbulb photos of Lafitte and of Paul. She turned to the Inspector, who indicated other articles to photograph. She took pictures of the Luger, the blood on the back of Paul’s head, the blood on his temple, the blood on the chest, the blood on the ashtray on the floor.

Then she left for the crime lab’s developing room.

Michelle watched the surgeon slipping out of his jacket, rolling up his sleeves, slinging stethoscope round his neck, adjusting the headband.

The lab technician in powder-blue smock returned with a bottle of blood and left. Rensonnet hooked it on the stand, jammed the needle into Lafitte’s arm, switched the flow open.

Michelle watched blood moving down the tube into Lafitte.

The surgeon, the Inspector and Rensonnet watched.

The blood clogged.

She knew it would. There was no heart to pump blood anymore.

She watched Rensonnet tear open the plastic bag, blow into the two gloves, hold them out. The surgeon thrust his fingers into them.

Rensonnet turned on the bulb on the headband.

The surgeon pulled apart the top of Lafitte’s jacket, ripped off his tie, ripped open the shirt. Rensonnet repeatedly sponged blood, tossing red balls into the empty box.

The surgeon moved his stethoscope in the blood as he hunted for a single faint beat.

Michelle knew he was wasting his time, so she watched Dr. Sully examining the blood-soaked hair on the back of Paul’s head. His intern held out scissors. Dr. Sully began cutting away the hair and stopped. Exploring the matted hair, he pulled off Paul’s thick wig, handed it to the Inspector, then began cutting Paul’s real hair away.

The female cop ripped off a bag, opened it, wrote on the tag as the Inspector said:

“Wig. Paul Page.”

He gave her the wig, initialed the tag. She placed the wig in the bag, clamped it, ripped off another bag, opened it.

Dr. Sully examined the gash.

“The wig softened the blow.”

The Inspector ripped off Paul’s beard.

“Beard. Paul Page.”

The female cop wrote it on the tag. He initialed it. She placed beard in bag, ripped off another bag as Dr. Sully dabbed antiseptic on the head gash, then moved to check the temple gash being dabbed with antiseptic by the intern.

Dr. Sully examined the second gash, then glanced at the smear of blood on the edge of the war chest, then back at the gash.

“An inch higher, he’d be dead.”

The Inspector picked up the Luger. The female cop wrote as he said:

“Murder weapon. Luger. Paul Page.”

He gave it to her barrel-out, initialed the tag. She placed the Luger in a bag, clamped it, dug another, larger bag out of her pocket as he picked up the stone ashtray. She wrote as he said:

“Assault weapon. Stone ashtray. Michelle Troy.”