Stone Angel

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 2Two ambulances were pulling away from Fischman’s, sounding their hooters to move people who were milling around in the middle of the street. There were a lot of them: indignant locals, curious passersby, police, reporters, photographers, television crews. Two cops were stationed at the entrance across from the cafe to keep out the news media. I was asking one of them who was in charge when the answer emerged from Fischman’s Cafe and cut across to me.

“I thought you were down at your house in the south.”

“I got back yesterday,” I told him.

Commissaire Jean-Claude Gojon was with the Brigade de Recherches et d’Intervention. That’s the police brigade assigned to very big crimes or ones that might prove politically delicate. He was in his late thirties, small and slim, intellectual and aristocratic, with black-rimmed glasses and soberly expensive tailoring. Very few French cops work their way up to officer rank from the bottom. Most officers start as officers, if they have the qualifications. Gojon had those: top family, law degree, technocrat brain, political agility.

“According to Monsieur Fischman and his wife, you were in their place when it happened. Why?”

“I was hungry.”

Gojon’s thin lips got thinner. “For information as well as food. You showed them a photograph of a girl named Sarah Byrne”—he indicated the building from which the attack had come—“who has been subletting an apartment here for the past six weeks. They told you she sometimes eats in their café but hasn’t been seen for the last couple days.”

“They also told me she’s a nice, quiet girl. A bit shy, not much of a conversationalist. So?”

“Let me see the photograph.”

I took out the picture of Sarah Byrne. Commissaire Gojon studied it. She had a round, wide-eyed face and light brown hair cut short and spiky, semi-punk. The face was pretty but not yet fully formed; some of the baby fat hadn’t dissolved.

Gojon stuck the photo in his pocket. “I understand you still keep your old apartment here in Paris.”

I nodded. I didn’t wonder how he knew. When you function as a private investigator in France, you expect the authorities to keep tabs on you. Especially if you’re a foreigner whose work permit is subject to official review from time to time. As an American, that applied to me.

Actually, I was also as French as Gojon, on my mother’s side. But not legally. First, because I wasn’t born in France. Second, because I’d never applied for French citizenship, though my mother would have made it easy to obtain. I hadn’t for a number of reasons. Some were personal. Others were practical; there were certain advantages, in my line of work, to remaining a foreigner in France. My U.S. passport made some cops hesitate to hassle me too roughly out of fear of getting a black mark for causing international unpleasantness between France and America.

That didn’t apply to Commissaire Gojon, however. He was one of those who knew that my past relationships with certain American authorities were not exactly cordial.

“I’ll have the girl’s picture returned to you,” he said, “after we’ve made copies.”

“Maybe you know something I don’t, Commissaire. Because as far as I’m aware there’s no connection at all between Sarah Byrne and what just happened here.”

“We’ll see. Tell me what you do know about her.” Gojon was nobody to play tricky games with. The Brigade d’Intervention is one of the roughest outfits in the French police system. Most people refer to it as the Anti-Gang Brigade and call its members “The Cowboys.” You don’t get into it unless you’re capable of taking on the most violent criminals, no holds barred. Gojon didn’t look that tough physically. Which meant he had to be harder than most mentally and emotionally.

But I hedged where I could: “Nothing unusual. Just an American nineteen-year-old from a solid, high-income family. Over here to improve her French, absorb some culture, have a little fun before settling down to college and marriage. Her parents haven’t heard from her in a couple months, so I was hired to make sure she’s all right. I didn’t have much trouble locating her here. She’s not trying to hide her trail, just being negligent about keeping in touch with her family. That’s all I know so far.”

“Not quite all,” Gojon said. “You know the place she rented faces this street. On the same floor the terrorists used.”

“The shots didn’t come from her apartment.”

Gojon nodded. “They came from the landing next to it.”

“She wasn’t home when it happened. I rang her bell less than ten minutes before.”

“That doesn’t mean she wasn’t there, only that she did not answer. The terrorists needed someplace where they couldn’t be seen while they observed the cafe, planned the attack, and got their weapons ready.”

“There are other apartments up there.”

“We are checking those.”

“Have you checked Sarah Byrne’s?”

“Not yet. Suppose we do so now.”

The two cops guarding the entrance parted to let us in. As we went through the long, partially enclosed passageway, Gojon said, “You were talking to Yuri Suchar when it happened. What about?”

“The weather on the Cote d’Azur.”

“Any idea where he disappeared to?”

“No.”

“Mmmm…”

We emerged from the passage onto a small cobbled courtyard surrounded by ancient stone walls. There were four open doorways, three to different stairways, one to a back passageway. A dead man was sprawled on his back near the last. One cop was taking pictures while another was having trouble drawing an outline around the body: his chalk kept breaking in the cracks between the cobbles. Gojon led me over to them.

The dead man appeared to be about twenty-three. His jacket lapels and the front of his shirt were soaked with blood from three bullet holes in the middle of his chest.

“Fernand Claudel,” Gojon informed me. “He belonged to FANE for a time.” FANE, the Federation for National and European Action, was one of the most virulent of the French Nazi gangs. Outlawed by the government the previous year, it had simply changed its name. Now it called itself the European Nationalists Group. “But according to rumor,” Gojon went on, “he switched some months ago to one of those little organizations so far to the left that even the Communist Party can’t stand them.”

I was reminded of what Yuri had said.

Gojon’s polished shoe made a small kicking movement in the direction of a Browning automatic lying on the cobbles near Fernand Claudel’s outstretched right hand. “Two shots fired from that.” He pointed a manicured fingertip at the dead man’s chest: “That could be Yuri Suchar’s work, I imagine.”

The three bullet wounds were no more than two inches apart, dead center. Little Yuri had been a member of the Saiyeret commando that Israel had sent into Uganda to free a planeload of passengers Idi Amin was holding hostage at Entebbe airport. A basic requirement for membership in the Saiyeret is the ability to shoot very fast and straight.

We turned from the body and climbed the front stairway. There were spent cartridges all over the steps and the second-floor landing, scattered behind the open window overlooking the bullet-ridden café across the street. Police filled the corridor, taking measurements, lifting fingerprints, collecting the cartridges, interviewing tenants.

“Anybody who was home see the attackers?” I asked Gojon.

“As usual, no. People who hear shooting that close do not open their doors to look out. Sensible, even if it makes more difficulties for us.” He summoned a uniformed cop and told him to open the door to the apartment Sarah Byrne had sublet.

There was a card tacked to the door with the name of the apartment’s owner: Nathalie Ronet. Sarah Byrne hadn’t added a card of her own. Or if she had, she’d since removed it.

The cop had the door unlocked in less than twenty seconds. I followed Gojon inside. The living room and bedroom were overcrowded with heavy furniture from another era. The windows, like the one on the landing outside, looked across at Fischman’s Cafe. None of the rooms contained any evidence that the terrorists had used the place. We also failed to find anything that might belong to Sarah Byrne.

“She appears to have moved out,” Gojon mused.

“Or she packed her things and went off on a trip for a while. Either would fit with the fact that no one has seen her around here for a couple days.”

“She could have given the keys to someone.”

“So could the owner.”

“Madame Ronet is spending several months with a cousin in Lyon. She is eighty-two, an age when one does not normally acquire new and violent friends. But she will be questioned, naturally.”

Gojon stood in the middle of the over-furnished living room, taking a last look around, a thin edge of frustration showing. “How long will you remain in Paris?”

“Until I find the girl. Or find she’s gone someplace else.”

“You will notify me before you go elsewhere. Or if you locate this Sarah Byrne, of course. Or discover anything further about her. Immediately.”

“You’re grasping at straws.”

“What?”

“An American expression. It means there’s absolutely nothing in this apartment to suggest the terrorists were ever in here. So there’s even less reason than before to suspect her of complicity. There are a dozen other apartments the terrorists could have watched the cafe from. And at least six rooftops.”

“I will satisfy myself about that, when and if the girl is found.” Gojon was angry, but more at his own professional impotence than at me. The police had never managed to pin any of the series of neo-Nazi attacks on anybody. Members of extreme-right organizations had been pulled in for questioning but released for lack of evidence. Newspapers kept suggesting that the difficulty in obtaining such evidence might be due to the fact that the membership of those organizations included a number of policemen.

Gojon shrugged off his mood and managed a small smile. “Very well, you may go now. If I need anything further I will contact you.”

It surprised me. He was being too polite. He must have sensed I was holding something back, even if it wasn’t much. In his place I would have squeezed harder before letting go.

Then he said, “I imagine you will be seeing your mother now that you are back in Paris.”

“This Sunday,” I told him, and I was no longer surprised by his diplomatic manner.

“Please give her my warmest regards.”

“I didn’t realize you knew my mother.”

“We met last week at a social affair given by the mayor. She is a fascinating woman. Her escort was General de Montfort.”

Mother and her buddies.

Down in the courtyard, Fernand Claudel was being zipped into a turquoise-blue plastic bag. I went through the front passage and across the street into the cafe. When nobody was looking in my direction, I slipped the .45 into the open drawer under the checkout counter where it was usually kept.

The wounded mother and her dead child had been taken away. But on the floor where they’d been, the tiles were still wet with their blood.

I went out hoping I’d been right about Sarah Byrne having no connection with the shooting. Because if she had, I was going to nail my client’s daughter to the wall, and that is not a recommended method for attracting future clientele.