CHAPTER 14

 

 

I laughed as if I didn’t believe him. “What are you smoking? You can’t go around hanging guys.”

Wainwright answered. He had the Colt in his hand now, his right hand, which he was resting on his left forearm, ready to swing his gun up and at me before I could go for my own weapon. It wouldn’t have worked, not for the money. I could have put three shots into him and covered Armand before he could have raised the weapon. But this wasn’t the time. The stakes weren’t high enough to kill for. Not yet.

There was a normal-sized door in the wall beside the big door of the garage. It opened now, and Labrosse came in. He looked at Orsini and nodded grimly. “Good. This friend of yours did well, Mr. Locke.”

“Cut the games. Armand here is talking executions. I can’t stand still for that, and neither can you. You’re a cop.

He drew his own pistol. Again, I could have beaten him to the draw, but only in a terminal situation. “Your gun, please.”

I looked him straight in the eye. “No way.” I was on the brink, and I knew it. He was a cop. He could probably concoct a story to clear himself if he shot me. I’d already established that I was a dangerous man. I’d left two hoods dead that morning. But I had a feeling about him—and about Wainwright. They could be righteous about killing as long as they stayed in their 1944 time lock, but I didn’t think either one of them would kill me, not now, not in cold blood, I hoped.

For long seconds the silence in the garage seemed to echo like the aftermath of gunfire. Then Labrosse grinned and lowered his pistol. “Tough guy,” he said, burlesquing an American accent. “All right, M’sieur Tough Guy. I will not take your weapon now. There will be time later, after you are an accomplice to what happens here.”

“If you’re going to accuse this bastard of a war crime, then you’re talking a court-martial. And a soldier always has an officer working for him as prisoner’s friend. I’ll do the job, but I want to know what he’s charged with, in English.”

Armand spoke first. “He betrayed his comrades to the Germans. Men died because of him.”

“And this is the first time in forty-five years that you’ve been able to make a case against him? Or the first time you’ve had someone with enough gumption to bring him in.”

Wainwright spoke next. “We could live with the memory of what happened as long as it was only a memory. Captain Labrosse could live with the memory of his dead father. M’sieur Armand could live with his memories of running and fighting and hiding. I could even live with my memories of Buchenwald. But when he came back into our lives, killing Pierre and then Constance, we knew it was time to put an end to him.”

“So have the captain arrest him for those two murders and send him to the guillotine.” It was worth a try. All I wanted was to get out of that garage with clean hands. I had no great affection for Orsini or for traitors anywhere, but I couldn’t see him murdered.

“There is no case,” Labrosse said. “So we shall try him for a case in which we know the truth, and we shall find him guilty and hang him, the way the Germans hanged so many Frenchmen.”

It was getting close to the time to act. “And you’re planning to do all this trying and condemning and hanging with him blindfolded. What kind of cowards are you?”

Armand took a step forward, raising his arm to strike me. “Coward? How dare you?”

“Well, if you’re so brave, take his blindfold off so he can see who’s calling him names.” I kept a sneer in my voice, trying to make them see the childishness of what they were planning, the unfeeling cruelty of children tearing the wings off a fly.

“Very well. Remove the tapes,” Labrosse said.

“Glad to.” I stepped forward and hooked a finger under the tape on Orsini’s face. I’d put it on carefully, making sure it didn’t run into his hair. Now I patted his shoulder with my left hand and eased the tape up with my right. He stood very still while I did it, then blinked rapidly a few times and looked around at the three men. He made no sign of recognition of either Armand or Labrosse; both of them were familiar to him. But when his eyes focused on Wainwright, his head flicked in an automatic double take.

“Oui,” Wainwright said softly. “C’est moi. Poirier.” Yes, it’s me. Pear Tree—his code name from the war, I guessed.

Orsini spoke rapidly in his harsh voice. I couldn’t follow it, but I had less trouble with Wainwright’s response. He said he had been captured and tortured and taken to Buchenwald, where he had been liberated by British troops a few weeks before the end of the war. I also understood his closing comment, that he and Orsini were the sole survivors of the attack, the only men who knew the truth.

An important part of my SAS training had been interrogation, mostly passive, how to resist so you could hold out longer, give your mates more time to do what they’d been sent for. But I’d also been interested in the body language of the man being questioned. We’d been trained to stay cool as long as humanly possible. Orsini had not. I could read his honest surprise at Wainwright’s words. He wasn’t blusteringly angry; he was astonished.

He may have wanted to talk, but he didn’t get a chance. Armand took over from Wainwright, cutting in angrily, delivering a long, snarling monologue that ended with a question.

In the silence after Armand’s words, Orsini shrugged, then shook his head without speaking. Armand took a couple of steps forward to where he could reach the other end of the chain that ran around Orsini’s neck. It looked like the trial was over and it was execution time. Time to act.

I covered my eyes with my hand as if I were overcome with the tension and half-reeled toward the car. I had left the rear door open, and I made as if to sit down on the edge of the seat that was exposed. I didn’t think Labrosse would buy my collapse, but I wanted to keep Wainwright bamboozled before he remembered my ace in the hole, the booby-trapped crate of booze.

Armand paused, his hands on the chain. “The soldier cannot look at justice?” he asked, a sneer in his voice.

“This isn’t justice, it’s a lynching,” I said, and sat on the edge of the seat, head bowed.

Wainwright suddenly got the picture. I heard him say, “Watch him!” as I turned with the case of liquor and flung it like a medicine ball straight from my chest into the garage pit, aiming the joint of the top against the lip of the hole.

It seemed to be happening in slow motion. As I threw the box, Orsini tore his hands apart and whipped the chain from around his neck. Armand was pulling down on his end of the chain so hard that when Orsini escaped he almost fell over. Labrosse and Wainwright were staring at the box, and then all of them flew backward as the case exploded in a flash of flame and a roar as loud as a fragmentation grenade.

Fortunately for all of us, it happened as the crate was tumbling into the pit, so that most of the force and the glass shards from the shattered bottles flew upward. I was the safest. I’d covered my ears and hung my mouth open as I flung the case, and I was hunched in the car so that only my side was exposed to danger. Orsini was flung the farthest, back off his planks onto the edge of the pit on my side, staggering back against the car. Armand did not get up but clutched his hand to his chest. Wainwright had dropped his gun and was too shocked to go for it again. Only Labrosse was functioning, but I had my gun out and on him before he could face me.

The scene was like a medieval nightmare of hell. The butane and cognac from my booby trap was burning like a torch, throwing a pillar of flame out of the pit. Wainwright was ignoring me, kneeling beside Armand, loosening his tie, laying him flat, feeling for a pulse in the throat. He was like some elderly saint working on a stricken sinner. Only Labrosse was still acting normally, turning toward me, gun in hand.

“Drop it, Captain, and this all ends here,” I shouted. He couldn’t hear me. None of them could. I had saved my own hearing by covering my ears. The rest of them had taken the full shock of the blast on their open eardrums. They would be deaf, possibly for hours, but Labrosse didn’t need the words, just the motion.

We stood facing one another, my gun aimed at his heart, his still pointing away in the direction his arm had been flung by the blast. Our eyes were locked, and I was cold inside at the thought that I would have to cross the line into permanent trouble by shooting him before he shot me.

Then his face changed. He almost smiled, and I caught the ghost of a backward flick in his head, over his shoulder to the great outdoors.

I grabbed Orsini by the arm and backed to the small door, covering Labrosse as I moved, although I knew it was no longer necessary. He wanted me out of there. Why and for how long, I didn’t know. I shoved Orsini out and scrambled after him, pulling the door closed behind me. I was startled to see the Armands’ Mercedes standing not thirty feet from the garage, with Hélène at the open driver’s door. I let go of Orsini and covered the distance in two leaps, grabbing the door before she could sit back down and back away.

She raked at my hand with her nails. “You swine. You saved him.”

I grabbed her hand, twisting it enough to make her buckle in the seat and forget about trying to scratch. “We’re getting out. You’re driving.”

Orsini was right behind me, and I opened the back door and shoved him in, then scrambled in after him and stuck the muzzle of my pistol into Hélène’s neck. “Let’s go.”

“What was that explosion? I heard a bang.”

“Careless smoking,” I said. “Everybody’s okay. Your father’s having a chat with the other guys. Just drive.”

“Where?” She almost screamed it, but she was already driving, pulling her door shut.

“Just out, and don’t speed. Drive at the limit. My buddy here will tell you where to go.”

“That pig. They told me you would kill him. They told me to wait and drive you direct to the airport at Marseilles when you came out.” She was almost screaming in her anger. “Why did you let him go?”

“Who told you to take me to the airport?” I was realizing that I’d been set up. But had they really been planning an escape for me? Or was Hélène meant to put a bullet in me? I didn’t doubt she was capable of it.

“Eric.” She was regaining control now, her voice at a normal pitch, weighing her words.

“Eric told you I would kill Orsini in that garage?”

Now she was in charge of herself again, talking with such confidence that there was no way of knowing whether or not she was lying. “Of course he did. This was his idea. He told us you had killed men before, that you would kill Orsini.” She craned up, tossing her hair back as she angled her head to glare at Orsini in her mirror.

It didn’t surprise me to find that Wainwright had set me up. I hadn’t really trusted him since he let that other man get the drop on me at the farm that morning. But I was surprised about being driven to the airport. “You have an airline ticket somewhere for me?”

“To Paris. Eric says you have contacts throughout Europe, you could vanish from there.”

“I’m not vanishing,” I said, and glanced at Orsini. He was trying to clear his deafness, working his fingertips in his ears, swallowing. “Où allons-nous?” I asked him, mouthing it large so he would be able to lip-read.

He looked at me, frowning, trying to comprehend, but before I had to repeat it, he spoke to Hélène. I wasn’t sure what he said except for the word cave. That meant wine cellar, I knew that much.

“Pourquoi?” Hélène almost shouted the question, hammering the steering wheel with both hands. The car swerved, and she grabbed the wheel but shouted the question again. “Pourquoi?” Why?

He didn’t answer, but he came to life now, moving forward in his seat to reach over and pick up Hélène’s purse. She said something that sounded like a curse and snatched at it, but he had it high, hefting its weight. It was a nifty little Louis Vuitton number, the kind a lady would use to tote her gold card and a slim wad of thousand-franc notes. From his heft I could tell there was more than that in there.

Hélène made another grab for it, but he pulled it over the seat back and sat looking into it. He didn’t search it, just removed the neat little .22 pistol from it and turned to aim it at me.

I was too quick for him, grabbing the gun and shoving him backward in the seat. He lay there, eyes blazing, as I took the magazine out. There was another round up the spout, and I cranked it out to be sure the gun was empty before reloading and slipping the pistol into my own pocket. A little extra firepower might pay off in the circle I was moving in this day.

Orsini looked at me, narrowing his eyes but saying nothing, then went back to working at clearing his deafness, distorting his face as he tried to get some reception going in his numbed ears. I just sat back and checked the road signs to try to make out where we were going.

We must have gone thirty kilometers before Hélène turned off, up a side road and then into the gateway of an unpretentious house surrounded by fields of grapes and with a steep cliff rising behind it, looming over the place so that you wondered how anybody could bear to live there for fear of rockfalls. I saw that there was a big double doorway cut into the face of the cliff beside the house.

Hélène spoke to me over her shoulder, angrily. “You know who’s here, don’t you?”

“No idea. I’ve never seen the place before.”

“Amy,” she said. “I left her here an hour ago. She’s talking to the patron, some old man from the Resistance.”

I glanced at Orsini, wondering what kind of a scheme he was cooking up. Did he plan to play on Amy’s affection for him? To have her act as a voluntary hostage until he could get to the safety of his own rabbit warren in Marseilles and drop out of sight? His face gave nothing away. He had stopped contorting it, probably realizing that nothing but time would cure his problem.

Hélène drove up to the front door and honked the horn, loud and long, twice.

I saw Orsini’s eyes crinkle in faint surprise and realized that he had heard something at last. The fact pleased him, and he sat back and waited as easily as if this were his own car and Hélène his regular chauffeur. After a little while the door of the house opened, and an old woman came out. She saw Hélène and waved and went back in.

We sat there until Amy appeared, carrying her tape recorder, frowning. She came to the car and spoke to Hélène in rapid French. Hélène cut her off and answered in English.

“Your friend Orsini wanted to see you. He came to the house with John.”

Now Amy leaned down to talk to me through the window. “What happened? Are you and Eric all right?”

That was a change. I’d got equal billing with her old sparring partner. “Couldn’t be better. Only I found that he and Labrosse and Hélène’s dad wanted to execute Orsini for what he did in wartime, so I hauled him out of there. He asked to come here. Why don’t you ask him what’s on his twisted little mind?”

She shifted her gaze to Orsini, putting a smile on her face, payment, I guessed, for the introduction he had made to her latest interviewee. She spoke in French, and when he cupped his hand around his ear, she repeated herself, speaking louder and slower.

He said something to her in a voice louder than his usual growl, another sign of his deafness, and then got out of the car.

I got out on my own side and reached in past Hélène to take the keys from the ignition. She looked at me coolly but said nothing, just getting out of the car and shutting the door with a neat clunk. I noticed again how beautiful she was, even today, dressed in trim blue jeans and a white silk shirt with a couple of gold chains and dangly gold earrings as her only jewelry. She was like a fairy-tale princess, only now she was treating me like any other peasant.

The man Amy was interviewing came to the door of his house. When he saw Orsini, his face brightened like a true believer in the presence of the pope. He ducked his head and smiled and waved Orsini into the house, then, as an afterthought, the rest of us. It was a measure of his awe that he didn’t give Hélène a second glance.

Orsini shook his hand graciously and went in. We followed and found ourselves in a cool room furnished with heavy old wooden items that would have fetched the price of the house itself if they’d been offered for sale in Toronto. Our host waved us to seats, but Orsini shook his head and pointed deeper into the house. The old man looked surprised but opened the far door for us, and I found out why Orsini had said cave. The back room led directly into the living rock. There was a natural cave here, filled with racks of bottled wine, eight feet high and thirty feet long. The cave went back a couple of hundred feet, reaching over our heads twelve to fifteen feet in places. It was sparsely lit by a few electric bulbs hanging from the bare rock ceiling. It was a natural cave that the thrifty old man had turned into his business, renting out space, no doubt, to neighboring vintners who had more wine than they had space to store it.

It was cool here, and Hélène rubbed her shoulders with both hands, hunching against the chill. I broke the silence. “What’s he after? One of you tell me, please?”

“I don’t know,” Amy said anxiously. “I don’t know what’s going on at all. What was all this about the others wanting to kill him?”

“They were set to hang him, but I got him out.” I was speaking quietly, but Hélène heard and made a little gesture of disgust, turning her back to me with a quick shudder that might have been contempt or a reaction to the chilly air of the cave.

“Eric wanted to hang him?” Amy repeated in a mystified voice. “He wouldn’t do a thing like that.”

“Did you know he was a prisoner in Buchenwald?”

“The concentration camp?” Amy gasped. “He never said anything about it to me.”

I didn’t wait for an answer. Orsini was picking up his pace, walking quickly down an aisle between racks of wine. At the end of the aisle he turned sharply, lost to my sight for a moment. I broke away from the others and ran the few steps after him. He had vanished, and I jumped forward to the far side of the wine rack, crouching almost to my knees in the automatic trained movement of a soldier entering hostile space.

It saved my life again. His shot sailed over my head, through the place my heart would have been occupying if I hadn’t reacted.

I dived back, behind the end of the rack, and pulled my gun. I was partially deafened from the first shot. I could make out the alarmed shrieks of the women, nothing more. If Orsini was moving, he was too quiet for me to hear. But, I realized, his hearing was in worse shape than mine. He couldn’t hear me, either.

I ran back to the others, shoving the women. “Get out. He’s got a gun. Get outside the house and scatter.”

The old man didn’t understand. He frowned at me and tried to speak to the women, but I ignored him, pushing them by the arms. “Get outside. He’s dangerous.” I fumbled in my pocket for Hélène’s gun and gave it to her, snapping off the safety as I handed it over. “Take this.”

She took it, but they kept arguing, first in French, then English, but I ignored it, keeping the pressure on until they had gotten the message and were backing out on their own, not moving as fast as I would have liked but heading for the door and safety.

By this time I had come back the full length of one rack; there were two more lengths between them and the door. I spun around the corner of the rack. Orsini was not there, and I clambered onto the top of the second rack. The top was covered with thin planking, but by stepping on the upright supports I could move without bringing down the structure, so I moved over to the far side and glanced along the length of the racks.

Orsini had vanished. That meant he was probably between the racks, waiting where the women would have to pass him. I ran, on tiptoe, along the top of the rack. The women and the old man were almost at the door, with just one more rack to pass. And then I heard them scream.

There was a sudden clatter of angry French and then a shot. I crouched, putting my hand on the top of the rack on the far side from the noise and vaulting down, knowing that Orsini would be deaf to me now after a second shot at close quarters. I ran to the end of the final rack and around it, coming out behind him as he stood with his arm around Hélène’s throat, his gun trained on Amy. The old man was lying crumpled in front of him. Behind him, at chest height, a line of broken wine bottles were pulsing out their contents onto the ground, bleeding in sympathy with their owner.

I curled my fist so the barrel of my gun would not reach Hélène, and I smashed Orsini in the temple with all my strength. He collapsed. Amy screamed. Then Hélène turned and shot him, pumping three rapid rounds into his body before I could bat the gun aside.

She had fired like an expert. Orsini had three bullet holes within a six-inch circle on his chest. One of them was through the corner of his breast pocket, dead center on his heart. “That’s enough,” I said softly. “Pierre is avenged.”

“Good,” she said in a tight, angry hiss. And then she started to weep, clinging to me like a baby to its mother.

I stood, holding her, patting her back, making soothing noises, although she couldn’t hear me very well, I was sure of that. I was facing away from Orsini’s body, facing Amy, who was on her knees, examining the old man. She turned to me and shouted, “Never mind her. Jean is still alive. Help him.”