Murder Without Pity (12 page)

The warmth of her touch stayed with him as he watched her leave. Near the entrance she straightened, as if preparing for the coming burdens. After greeting her, the curly-haired security man glared back at him like the elderly man who had shouted at him earlier that afternoon. Then Eli handed her two thick batches of documents that she cradled. Stanislas watched him pull back the heavy front door for her, watched her stop to chat with the receptionist who placed several books on top of the documents, watched her proceed down the corridor where three men with briefcases waited for her.

Her workload must have indeed tired her, he thought. Maybe he’d invite her onto his boat, if he could find the time. She certainly needed some rest. Fatigue could play terrifying tricks with the imagination. It could make them exaggerate or even see things that weren’t really there.

THE DEVIL’S TRAP

“Monsieur Boucher, good day.” Stanislas clutched several circulars in one hand; with the other he greeted his witness. “I’ve been searching through old records and forgot the time. Please excuse my tardiness.”

While Christophe adjusted his monitor’s brightness, he hung the HEARING IN PROGRESS sign on the doorknob and shoved the door shut with his cane. Then he crossed to the lone window and cranked it open. A stench of decay drifted in from the nearby Seine. October had passed to November with thick mist still present. Signs of human life seemed to have vanished. For an instant he felt abandoned on an island in a cell with two mates, only one of whom he liked. The sooner he finished his questioning, the faster he could move to other cases. He shifted around and slapped the documents onto his desk, upset at digging up the past. He had never thought it would happen in his work.

He skimmed the announcements as he lowered himself into his chair. Boucher had years of experience withstanding questions from reporters, attorneys, and public prosecutors, he warned himself. He must proceed carefully, keep the man off balance from stock replies. No time-wasting polite phrasing this time. Bluntness this time to get the job finished. “Monsieur Boucher,” he began when Christophe had finished administering the oath, “after France fell to the Germans in 1940, you remained in Paris. Why didn’t you escape like others?”

“I was a functionary with responsibilities here.”

“You could have carried on the fight abroad.”

“Like de Gaulle in London? The Germans had pretty much sealed off our country.”

“Are you aware of the expression, the Devil’s Trap?” he asked after dictating Boucher’s answers to Christophe.

“I am.”

“Its meaning in your opinion, please.”

“Paris was a lure. One had to watch one’s step.”

“One had to be careful of what?”

“Of corruption. Especially the chance to be part of Hitler’s New Europe.”

“And after the Liberation, what happened to those who had collaborated?”

“Some were shot. Others were tried, acquitted, and served de Gaulle in his first government.”

“What was your attitude toward the occupier? Did you see France as a protectorate with Germany saving us from the Communists? Would Germany allow France autonomy in the New Order? Or did you see Germany as our traditional enemy?”

“I had no grand view. I was merely a civil servant, waiting out the war like others. I supported Pétain and not de Gaulle because he had handled the Boche in the First World War. Was I blind to Pétain working with, not against the Germans? Of course. Like most other countrymen, let me add.”

Stanislas dictated rapidly, unwilling to give Boucher time to think. “Who was Monsieur Friedrich Kleist?”

“Another question from the past.”

“Monsieur Friedrich Albrecht Kleist,” Stanislas repeated. “A Second Lieutenant in the
Wehrmacht.
Transferred to Paris during the first days of the Occupation. How did you come to know him?”

“
Leutnant
Friedrich Kleist.” Boucher pronounced the grade in German as though he spoke the language. “Not to be confused, I hope, with the rank of
Untersturmführer
in the SS. Very well, I’ll tell you about the so-called infamous Monsieur Kleist. I met him in the interwar years at a youth hostel. We became friends and promised to keep in touch, which we did. During the Occupation, as you noted, the army transferred infamous Kleist, in truth a lowly soldier, to Paris. We met a few times at a cultural society or for a coffee at a café. There was nothing sinister discussing Beethoven and
All Quiet on the Western Front
. Unless, that is, one was a former Resister on the Interior Ministry’s post-war Purge Commission, who’d call this fraternization with the enemy.”

“For which that commission found you guilty of collaboration,” Stanislas said. “Where was Kleist now?” he asked.

Boucher shrugged. A few years ago, he explained, he had written several times to the man’s Dresden address. To his shock, the postal authorities each time returned the letters, stamping in black that Herr Kleist had closed out his postal box and left no forwarding address. Then last November, he received a note from Frau Kleist, who wrote her husband lay bedridden in a private sanitarium in the Slovak Republic. He hadn’t saved her correspondence because he assumed she’d write again, though she hadn’t.

Stanislas pushed on, hoping any fatigue might make Boucher utter something incriminating. After a time he returned to the war years. “Besides the whereabouts of this Kleist,” he said, “what interests me is the Interior Ministry’s Purge Commission’s second finding that warranted sending your file to the Court of Justice. In the public prosecutor’s words, ‘excessive zeal in helping track down black marketeers.’ Your response?”

“That was decades ago. I recall little of that period.”

“A refresher then. Pétain’s government in Vichy set up the Economic Inspection Board in Paris with the German’s permission. His Interior Ministry appointed you the Board’s statistical section chief.”

“That’s a matter of record, yes.”

“The Board’s purpose: Help enforce black market regulations. Mainly, stop smuggled goods from the countryside into the cities. Smugglers caught were prosecuted. Many were imprisoned. Others shot.”

“Within legal guidelines set in Vichy and Berlin, yes.”

“Cases included: a farmer, convicted for smuggling several potatoes. A student, convicted for smuggling a carton of eggs. A postal clerk, convicted for smuggling a kilo of sugar.”

“Despite some errors, the Board served France well.”

“After the Liberation, the purged Interior Ministry purged you and sent your dossier to the Court of Justice for criminal prosecution.”

“An old story. To the victor goes revenge.”

“Paris’s Court of Justice unanimously found you aided Germany in violation of our penal code.”

“The logic of hate cloaked as justice.”

Stanislas fanned out the circulars on his desk. “Here are four ministerial announcements that covered your period of service from 1940 to 1945. Each advertised openings with higher salaries. Interior Ministry records show you stayed at your lower echelon post. Why?”

“I stayed out of principal.”

“Out of principal?”

“To permit me and not a pro-German Frenchman to control the collection of information. I could fiddle with the figures and give false readings of smuggling.”

“My, my, how self-sacrificing. During a time of unprecedented hardship, you turned down more pay to aid our country.”

There was a soft knock at the door. Stanislas demanded to know who was there. Couldn’t that person read the sign? He was conducting a hearing. A woman lawyer uttered her name so timidly her voice barely penetrated. Stanislas asked her to speak up. She repeated her name louder and said he had given her permission yesterday to examine her client’s dossier. Stanislas nodded at Christophe, and he pushed a trolley, thick with massive files, out into the corridor for her.

Boucher held himself erect, as if he refused to show any fatigue. Christophe returned and flexed his fingers to limber them. Stanislas suppressed a yawn. He wouldn’t reveal his own tiredness. “Your police testimony, ‘I heard this man shout, “Hey you, monsieur,”’ you stand by that?”

“I do.”

“He really shouted your name, didn’t he?”

“He did not.”

“You two knew each other.”

“That is simply not true.”

“Or his parents during the German Occupation of Paris.”

“Nonsense.”

“Or some other family member during the war.”

“I repeat: I never met him or anyone in his family. That should be clear.”

Stanislas dictated. Christophe typed.

“Another witness has sworn she thinks she might have heard Monsieur Pincus call out a name.”

“I repeat under oath she’s mistaken.”

“She’s testified twice she might have heard a name.”

“She’s mistaken twice.”

“Do you agree to confront her in my office?”

Boucher drew one leg in, then the other in a posture of withdrawal.

“Yes or no to a Confrontation?” Stanislas demanded.

“Monsieur Criminal Investigator, it will be my pleasure.”

Christophe finished typing the testimony and stretched across with it to Boucher, who began to read and sign each page.

Stanislas glanced over to the wall clock above the dossier shelf next to the door. He studied the man’s face for worry, doubt, or fear the ordeal might have inflicted. He found only blandness, as if he were reading a Sunday newspaper, and not a document that might condemn him to prison. Stanislas realized how foolish he was to think he could rattle him. He knew no more now than at the first hearing. He might uncover nothing new at any future Confrontation.

Boucher finished signing the last of the pages with an angry flourish and pitched the deposition onto Stanislas’s desk. He signed and handed it across to Christophe.

As his clerk began signing each page, Stanislas told Boucher he might contact him for a third hearing before any Confrontation and that he must remain in Paris until released.

“That purge, that trial,” Boucher said, “what the Resistance did to me was nothing but revenge. My family and I still suffer from their roughshod tactics.”

“However minor your role,” Stanislas said, “you were a careerist in an apparatus that did hateful things. Arrests based on anonymous letters. Detention without notifying family. Brutal interrogations. The firing squad. Gestapo methods. And some have never forgotten.”

“We were at war,” Boucher cried out.

“And that war may still continue. Good day.” Stanislas said.

Boucher rose before they did and departed without any handshakes and with the door flung open.

Stanislas pitched the file into a wire basket on his desk. Hopefully, after any Confrontation he could finish with this sordid man and the Occupation. If not and he must question him again, he’d interrogate him first thing in the morning and get it over with.

A red light on his phone console blinked. He took the call. The last of the security services was reporting. Like the other agencies, it had cross-referenced Léon Pincus under several possibilities. And like the others, it had found nothing. That result didn’t surprise him as he hung up. The man’s life appeared as opaque as the fog.

He stepped to the doorway and noticed the woman attorney, seated behind a desk in an alcove to his left, was busy studying the requested dossier. A commotion broke out to his right further down the hall. Several women in colorful skirts and blouses had swarmed around Boucher near the exit. One pounded his chest. Another beat his arm. A third clawed at his face. Gendarmes leaped from their benches. Three shoved them into an office. Two escorted Boucher to the door where he thanked them with a wave. The corridor quieted as quickly as it had erupted.

Leclair paused beside Stanislas. “They’re Romanian Gypsies. The mother was caught using her eight-year-old son to beg.”

Had Boucher pushed them in his haste to leave? Or caught them picking his pocket? Stanislas couldn’t tell, and neither could the officer when asked; he’d just come from the men’s room, and the fight had happened too quickly to catch the opening scene.

Stanislas did glimpse the closing, though. Alerted by the scuffle, a photographer had shouted recognition of Boucher and snapped him onto film. And several reporters gleefully scribbled the man’s plight for next morning’s dailies.

“He deserves those parasite journalists.” Avoiding Stanislas’s eyes, Leclair shuffled past him into the office. “I thought I should tell you about a slight problem I had.”

PLOYS

Leclair dropped into the chair as though he had just witnessed his favorite soccer team humiliated. “What’s the latest from the capital of the people’s paradise, Monsieur Minh?”

Christophe squeezed out from behind his desk. “An undersecretary in Hanoi wrote they might set up a commission to study further the matter of compensation for our plantation.”

“You’ll get payment when Judge Cassel finds time to sail his boat.”

“I’m afraid you’re right.”

“Your grandfather should have stuck to smuggling opium,” Stanislas said, easing into his swivel chair, “and forgotten about buying land and becoming respectable.”

“He’d certainly have saved us heartache and legal bills,” Christophe said, moving toward the doorway. “I’ll call Madame de Silvy to verify your appointment for tomorrow when I return from lunch.” He pulled shut the door behind him.

Stanislas scribbled
A Tale of Two Cities
on a notepad and began to underline “buy Penguin Edition?” when the pencil lead broke. “Why the glumness, officer?” He rattled open his middle drawer and grabbed a pen. “You still can’t find any family for the Pincus case?”

“I found the next best thing. The name of a non-relative that concierge had jotted down and temporarily misplaced. A Monsieur Dautry. First name, Edgar. Judging by his birth date, he’s quite old. He lives near a farming village in the Masssif Central. Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. He doesn’t have a phone, but Officer Henner has volunteered to go down there. Maybe that elderly man can help us.”

“This fog giving you fits with the Boucher apartment stakeout?”