French Kiss (10 page)

K. Burke sits outdoors
at a small bistro table on rue Vieille du Temple. She is alone. Moncrief had asked if he could be by himself for a while. “I must walk. I must think. Perhaps I must mourn. Do you mind?” Moncrief had said.

“I understand,” she said, and she did understand. “I don't need a chaperone.”

She sips a glass of strong cider and eats a buckwheat crepe stuffed with ham and Gruyère. It is eight o'clock, a fairly early dinner by French standards. At one table sits a family of German tourists—very blond parents with two very beautiful teenage daughters. At another, an older couple (French, Burke suspects) eating and chewing and drinking slowly and carefully. Finally, there are two young Frenchwomen who appear to be…yes, K. Burke is right…very much in love with each other.

Burke's own heart is still breaking for Moncrief, but she must admit that she is enjoying being alone for a few hours.

Back in her hotel room, she takes a warm bath. A healthy dose of lavender bath oils; a natural sea sponge. Afterward, she dries herself off with the thick white bath sheets and douses herself with a nice dose of the accompanying lavender powder.

She slips on her sleep shirt, and she's about to slide under the sheets when her phone buzzes. A text message.

R U Back in yr room? All is well? Mncrf
.

She imagines Moncrief in some mysterious part of Paris, at a zinc bar with a big snifter of brandy. She is thankful for his thoughtfulness.

Yes. K. Burke.

But then, for just a moment she considers her own uneasiness. She simply cannot get used to not having a gun to check. So she does the next best thing: she checks that the door is double-locked. She adjusts the air-conditioning, making the temperature low enough for her to happily snuggle under the thick satin comforter. Within a few minutes she is asleep.

Two hours later, she is wide awake. It is barely past midnight, and Burke is afraid that jet lag is playing games with her sleep schedule. Now she may be up for hours. She takes a few deep breaths. The air makes her feel at least a little better. Maybe she will get back to sleep. Maybe she should use the bathroom. Yes, maybe. Or maybe that will prevent her from falling asleep again. On the other hand…

There is a sound in the room. At first she thinks it's the air conditioner kicking back into gear. Perhaps it is the noise from the busy rue de Rivoli below. She sits up in bed. The noise. Again. Burke realizes now that the sound is coming from the door to her hotel room. Some sort of key? What the hell?

“Who's there?” she shouts.

No answer.

“Who's there?”

Goddamn it. Why doesn't she have a gun?

She should have insisted that Moncrief get them guns. He was right. She feels naked without it.

She rolls quickly—catching herself in the thick covers, afraid in the dark—toward the other side of the bed. She drops to the floor and slides beneath the bed just as a shaft of bright light from the hallway pierces the darkness. Someone else is in the room with her. She moves farther underneath the bed.
Jesus Christ,
she thinks.
This is an awful comedy, a French farce—the woman hiding beneath the bed.

As soon as she hears the door close, the light from the hallway disappears.

“Don't move, Detective!” a muffled, foreign-sounding voice hisses.

Then a gunshot.

The bullet hits the floor about a foot away from her hand. There's a quick loud snapping sound. A spark on the blue carpet. She tries to move farther under the bed. There is no room. It is so unlike her to not know what to do, to not fight back, to not plot an escape. This feeling of fright is foreign to her.

Another bullet. This one spits its way fiercely through the mattress above her. It hits the floor also.

Another bullet. No spark. No connection.

A groan. A quick thud.

Then a voice.

“K. Burke! It is safe. All is well.”

Hotel management and guests
in their pajamas almost immediately begin gathering in the hall.

K. Burke emerges from under the bed. We embrace each other the way friends do, friends who have successfully come through a horrible experience together.

“You saved…” she begins. She is shaking. She folds her arms in front of herself. She is working to compose herself.

“I know,” I say. I pat her on the back. I am like an old soccer coach with an injured player.

Burke pulls away from me. She blinks—on purpose—a few times, and those simple eye gestures seem to clear her head and calm her nerves. She is immediately back to a completely professional state. She has become the efficient K. Burke I am used to. We both look down at the body. She moves to a nearby closet and wraps herself quickly in a Le Meurice terry-cloth bathrobe.

The dead man fell backwards near the foot of the bed. He wears jeans, a white dress shirt, and Adidas sneakers. His bald head lies in a large and ever-growing pool of blood. It forms a kind of scarlet halo around his face.

The crowd in the hallway seems afraid to enter the room. A man wearing a blue blazer with
LE MEURICE
embroidered on the breast pocket appears. He pushes through the crowd. He is immediately followed by two men wearing identical blazers.

I briefly explain what happened, planning to give the police a more detailed story when they arrive.

K. Burke then kneels at the man's head. I watch her touch the man's neck. I can tell by the blood loss, by simply looking at him, that she is merely performing an official act. The guy is gone. Burke stands back up.

“Do you know him, Moncrief?” Burke asks.

“I have never seen him before in my life,” I say. “Have you?”

“Of course not,” she says. She pauses. Then she says, “He was going to kill me.”

“You would have been…the third victim.”

She nods. “How did you know that this was happening here, that someone was actually going to break in…threaten my life…try to kill me?”

“Instinct. When I texted you I asked if all was well. So I drank my whiskey.

“But fifteen minutes later, when I am walking back to the hotel, I found myself walking faster and faster, until I was actually running…I just had a feeling. I can't explain it.”

“You never can,” she says.

The next morning.

Eleven o'clock. I meet K. Burke in the lobby of the hotel.

“So here we are,” she says. “Everything is back to
ab
normal.”

Even I realize that this is a bad play on words. But it does perfectly describe our situation.

“Look,” I say. “A mere apology is unsuitable. I am totally responsible for the near tragedy of last night.”

“There's nothing to apologize for. It goes with the territory,” she says, but I can see from her red eyes that she did not sleep well. I try to say something helpful.

“I suspect what happened a few hours ago is that the enemy saw us together at some point here in Paris and assumed that we were a couple, which of course we are not.”

I realize immediately that my words are insulting, as if it would be impossible to consider us a romantic item. So I speak again, this time more quickly.

“Of course, they might have been correct in the assumption. After all, a lovely-looking woman like you could—”

“Turn it off, Moncrief. I was
not
offended.”

I smile. Then I hold K. Burke by the shoulders, look into her weary eyes, and speak.

“Listen. Out of something awful that almost happened last evening…something good has come. I believe I have an insight. I think I may now know the fingerprint of this case.”

She asks me to share the theory with her.

“I cannot tell you yet. Not for secrecy reasons, but because I must first be sure, in order to keep my own mind clear.
On y va.
”

“Okay,” she says. Then she translates: “Let's go.”

We walk outside. I speak to one of the doormen.

“Ma voiture, s'il vous plaît,”
I say.

“Elle est là, Monsieur Moncrief.
 
”

“Your car is here?” Burke asks, and as she speaks my incredibly beautiful 1960 Porsche 356B pulls up and the valet gets out.

“C'est magnifique,”
Burke says.

The Porsche is painted a brilliantly shiny black. Inside is a custom mahogany instrument panel and a pair of plush black leather seats. I explain to Detective Burke that I had been keeping the car at my father's country house, near Avignon.

“But two days ago I had the car brought up to Paris. And so today we shall use it.”

I turn right on the rue de Rivoli, and the Porsche heads out of the city.

After the usual mess of too many people and triple-parked cars and thousands of careless bicycle riders, we are outside Paris, on our way south.

K. Burke twists in her seat and faces me.

“Okay, Moncrief. I have a question that's been bugging me all night.”

“I hope to have the answer,” I say, trying not to sound anxious.

“The gun that you used last night. Where did you get it?”

I laugh, and with the wind in our hair and the sun in our eyes I fight the urge to throw my head back like an actor in a movie.

“Oh, the gun. Well, when Papa's driver dropped off the car two days ago, I looked in that little compartment, the one in front of your seat, and voilà! Driving gloves, chewing gum, driver's license, and my beautiful antique Nagant revolver. I thought it might come in handy someday.”

In the countryside I pick up speed, a great deal of speed. K. Burke does not seem at all alarmed by fast driving. After a few minutes of silence I tell her that I am taking the country roads instead of the A5
autoroute
so that she might enjoy the summer scenery.

She does not say a word. She is asleep, and she remains so until I make a somewhat sharp right turn at our destination.

K. Burke blinks, rubs her eyes, and speaks.

“Where are we, Moncrief?”

Ahead of us is a long, low, flat gray building. It is big and gloomy. Not like a haunted house or a lost castle. Just a huge grim pile of concrete. She reads the name of the building, carved into the stone.

She does a double take.

“What are we doing here, Moncrief?”

“We are here to meet the killer of Maria Martinez and Dalia Boaz.”

A few years ago,
a detective with the Paris police described the prison at Clairvaux as “hell, but without any of the fun.” I think the detective was being kind.

As K. Burke and I present identification to the entrance guards, I tell her, “Centuries ago this was a Cistercian abbey, a place of monks and prayer and chanting.”

“Well,” she says as she looks around the stained gray walls. “There isn't a trace of God left here.”

Burke and I are scanned with an electronic wand, then we step through an X-ray machine and are finally escorted to a large vacant room—no chairs, no tables, no window. We stand waiting a few minutes. The door opens, and an official-looking man as tall as the six-foot doorway enters. He is thin and old. His left eye is made of glass. His name is Tomas Wren. We shake hands.

“Detective Moncrief, I was delighted to hear your message this morning that you would be paying us a visit.”

“Merci,”
I say. “Thank you for accommodating us on such short notice.”

Wren looks at Detective Burke and speaks.

“And you, of course, must be Madame Moncrief.”

“Non, monsieur, je suis Katherine Burke. Je suis la collègue de Monsieur Moncrief.”

“Ah, mille pardons,”
Wren says. Then Wren turns to me. He is suddenly all business.

“I have told Ballard that you are coming to see him.”

“His reaction?” I ask.

“His face lit up.”

“I'm glad to hear that,” I say.

“You never know with Ballard. He can be a dangerous customer,” says Wren. “But he owes you a great deal.”

With a touch of levity, I say, “And I owe him a great deal. Without his help I would never have made the arrests that made my career take off.”

Wren shrugs, then says, “I have set aside one of the private meeting rooms for you and Mademoiselle Burke,” Wren adds.

We follow him down another stained and gray hallway. The private room is small—perhaps merely a dormitory cell from the days of the Cistercian brothers—but it has four comfortable desk chairs around a small maple table. A bit more uninviting, however, are the
bouton d'urgence
—the emergency button—and two heavy metal clubs.

Wren says that he will be back in a moment. “With Ballard,” he says.

As soon as Wren exits, Burke speaks.

“I remember this case from the other day, Moncrief. On the computer. Ballard is the horse trainer who killed some guy and wounded another at the Longchamp racecourse.”

“Yes, indeed, Detective.”

“But I don't totally get what's going on here now.”

“You will,” I say.

“If you say so,” she answers.

I nod, and as I do I feel myself becoming…quiet…no, the proper word is…frightened. A kind of soft anxiety begins falling over me. No man can ever feel happy being in a prison, even for a visit. It is a citadel of punishment and futility. But this is something way beyond simple unhappiness. Burke senses that something is wrong.

“Are you okay, Moncrief?” she says.

“No, I am not. I am twice a widower of sorts. And now I feel I am in the house where those plans were made. No, Detective. I am not okay. But you know what? I don't ever expect to be okay. Excuse me if that sounds like self-pity.”

“No need to apologize. I understand.”