“You think she set the fire?”
“I won’t rule it out until we question her. But if she was only a housewife, which it seems she was, I doubt she would have access to those kinds of incendiary materials.”
Detectives Barras and Maitrot had been through Henri Kanarack’s apartment on the avenue Verdier in Mont-rouge and had found nothing. The flat had been all but empty. A few of Michele Kanarack’s clothes, a handful of catalogues advertising baby clothes, half-a-dozen unpaid bills, some food in the cupboards and refrigerator and that was it. The Kanaracks had evidently packed up and left in a hurry.
At this stage the only thing they knew for certain was that Henri Kanarack/Albert Merriman was in the morgue. Where Michele Kanarack was was totally up in the air. A check of hotels, hospitals, halfway houses, morgues and jails had come up blank. A trace of her maiden name, Chalfour, had done the same. She had no driver’s license, no passport, not even a library card— under either name. Nor had there been a photograph of her in the apartment, or in Merriman/Kanarack’s wallet. As a result, all they were left with was a name. Nonetheless, Lebrun had put out a wanted bulletin for her across France. Maybe local police would turn up something they couldn’t.
“What killed Merriman?” McVey made a mental note of the landscape as they turned off the highway and onto the muddy road that encircled the park.
“Heckler & Koch MP-5K. Fully automatic. Probably with a muffler.”
McVey winced. A Heckler & Koch MP-5K was a people-killer. A nine-millimeter light machine gun with a thirty round magazine, it was a terrorist favorite and weapon of choice among serious drug merchants.
“You found it?”
Putting out his cigarette, Lebrun slowed to a crawl, navigating the Ford through and around a series of large rain puddles.
“No, that’s from forensics and ballistics. We had a dive team working the river for most of the afternoon without success. There’s a strong current that runs a long way here. It’s what took Merriman’s body so far, so quickly.”
Lebrun slowed the car and stopped at the edge of the trees: “We walk from here,” he said, pulling a heavy-duty flashlight from a clip just under the seat.
The rain had stopped and a moon was peeking out from behind passing clouds as the two detectives got out and started toward the cinder and dirt ramp that led down to the water. As they went, McVey looked back over his shoulder. In the distance he could just make out the lights of Saturday-night traffic moving along the road that hugged the Seine.
“Watch your footing, it’s slippery here,” Lebrun said as they reached the landing at the bottom of the ramp. Swinging the flashlight, he showed McVey what was left of the washed-out tracks Agnes Demblon’s car had made when it was towed away.
“There was too much rain,” Lebrun said. “Any footprints there might have been were washed away before we got here.”
“May I?” McVey put out his hand, and Lebrun handed him the light. Swinging it out toward the water, he judged the. speed of the current as it moved past just off the shore-line. Bringing the light back, he knelt down and studied the ground.
“What are you looking for?” Lebrun asked.
“This.” McVey dug in a hand, came up with a scoop of it, shining the light on it just to make sure.
“Mud?”
McVey looked up. “No, mon ami. Rouge terrain. Red mud.”
45
* * *
COMPARED TO the boisterous reception at Kloten Airport, the dinner for Elton Lybarger was genteel and intimate, with guests taking up four large tables around a dance floor. More than an entry into an entirely new world, it was the setting Joanna found extraordinary, “ even incredible. In the private ballroom of a lake steamer leisurely exploring the shoreline of the Zurich-see, which the deep Alpine Lake Zurich overlooked, she felt as if she had become a character in some dazzlingly elegant, turn-of-the-century play.
Seated next to Pascal Von Holden, dashing and resplendent in a deep blue tuxedo and starched white, wing-tip shirt, Joanna was at a table for six. And although she smiled and made polite conversation with the other guests, paying attention as best she could, it was all but impossible for her to keep her eyes from the country-side they passed. It was the time just before sunset, and to the east, above a picturesque village with rambling villas built down to the water’s edge, high wooded hills rose . straight up to vanish into the magnificence of the Alps, the setting sun striking the snow on the uppermost peaks and turning them a golden rose.
“Sentimental, yes?” Von Holden smiled, looking at her.
“Sentimental? Yes, I suppose that’s a good word. I would have said beautiful.” Joanna’s eyes held Von Holden’s for the slightest moment, then she looked back to the others.
Next to her was a very attractive and obviously very successful young couple from Berlin, Konrad and Margarete Peiper. Konrad Peiper, from what she could gather, was president of a large German trading company and Margarete, his wife, had something to do with show business. Just what, Joanna wasn’t exactly sure, and it was difficult to ask her because most of her time was spent sitting back from the table talking on a cellular phone.
Seated across from her were Helmuth and Bertha Salettl, brother and sister. Both, Joanna guessed, were in their seventies, and had flown in that afternoon from their home in Austria.
Dr. Helmuth Salettl was Elton Lybarger’s personal physician, and Joanna had met with him four of the six times he had visited Lybarger at Rancho de Piñon in New Mexico. The doctor, like his sister now, had been somber and austere, saying little and asking only a few pointed questions regarding Lybarger’s general health and regimen. The fact was that although she dealt daily with the rich and famous who came to Rancho de Piñon to recuperate secretly from anything from drug or alcohol addiction to face-lifts, she had never encountered anyone like Salettl. His presence and entrenched arrogance frightened her. But she’d found as long as she answered his questions and acted professionally, everything would be all right because he would never be there for more than twenty-four hours.
Two tables away, Elton Lybarger sat talking with the plumpish woman who’d smothered him with kisses and called him “Uncle” at the airport. His .earlier fears about his family seemed to have faded, and he looked relaxed and comfortable, smiling and acknowledging the well-wishes of the others, who, during the course of the evening, stopped by to take his hand and say a few personal words of encouragement.
Next to Lybarger was a heavy-set and plain-looking woman in her late thirties, who Joanna learned was Gertrude Biermann, an activist for the Greens, a radical environmental peace movement, who seemed to take great pleasure in interrupting Lybarger’s conversations with others to engage him in talk herself. As the evening progressed, Joanna wished she wouldn’t be so insistent, and even considered going to her and mentioning it, because she could see Mr. Lybarger was beginning to tire. Why he would have a dowdy political activist as a friend was something that plucked Joanna’s interest. The idea seemed so incongruous with Lybarger and the rest there who seemed to represent some form or other of big business.
Holding court at the third table was Uta Baur, touted as “the most German of all German fashion designers,” who, after first being feted at trade fairs in Munich and Düsseldorf in the early seventies, was now an international institution in Paris, Milan and New York. Pencil thin, and dressed all in black, she wore little if any makeup, and her hair, cut almost to the scalp, was white blond to the roots. Were it not for her animated gestures and the sparkle in her eyes as she talked to those at the table with her, Joanna might have taken her for a female version of the grim reaper. She was, as everyone there knew and Joanna later found out, seventy-four years old.
Standing back, near the entry door, were two men in tuxedos who had earlier been in the dress of chauffeurs at the airport. They were lean, short haired, and seemed to be constantly watching the room. Joanna was certain they were bodyguards of some kind and was about to ask Von Holden about
them when a waiter in lederhosen asked if he might take away the remains of her supper.
Joanna nodded gratefully. The main course had been Berner Platte—sauerkraut garnished liberally with pork chops, boiled bacon, and beef, sausages, tongue and ham; at five foot, four and twenty pounds overweight, Joanna had been carefully watching her diet. Especially of late, since she’d begun noticing most of her bicycle racing friends were just this side of emaciated and fitted nicely into spandex. Middle, top and bottom.
Privately, and discussed with her only true friend, her Saint Bernard, Henry, Joanna had begun watching crotches. Male crotches of the bike racers.
Joanna had grown up the only child of pious and simple parents in a small west Texas town. Her mother had been a librarian and almost forty-two when Joanna was born. Her father, a letter carrier, had been fifty. Both had assumed, the way only such parents can assume, that their only child would grow up to be like them— hardworking, grateful for what they had, average. And for a time Joanna had done just that, as a Girl Scout and member of the church choir, as an ordinary student getting by in school, and, following the lead of her best friend, applying to nursing school after twelfth-grade graduation. Yet plain and dutiful as she seemed and even viewed herself, inside Joanna was rebellious, even quirky.
She’d had her first sex when she was eighteen with the assistant pastor of the church. Horrified afterward, and certain she was pregnant, she fled to Colorado, telling everyone, friends, parents and assistant pastor included, that she’d been accepted to a nursing school affiliated with the University of Denver. Both were inaccurate—she had not been accepted to nursing school, nor was she pregnant. Still she’d stayed in Colorado, worked hard and become a licensed physical therapist. When her father became ill she moved back to Texas to help her mother care for him. And when both parents died, literally within weeks of each other, she’d immediately packed everything and gone to New Mexico.
On Saturday, October 1, one week before the homecoming dinner for Elton Lybarger, Joanna had turned thirty-two. She had not made love, nor been made love to since that night with the west Texas assistant pastor.
A sudden round of applause followed two waiters across the room as they brought in a large cake over-flowing with candles and set it in front of Elton Lybarger. As they did, Pascal Von Holden put his hand on Joanna’s arm.
“Can you stay?” he asked.
Turning from the festivities at Lybarger’s table, she looked at him. “What do you mean?”
Von Holden smiled, and the creases in his sunburned face turned white.
“I mean can you stay here, in Switzerland, to continue your work with Mr. Lybarger?”
Joanna ran a nervous hand through her freshly washed hair.
“Me, stay here?”
Von Holden nodded.
“For how long?”
“A week, perhaps two. Until Mr. Lybarger is physically comfortable at his home.”
Joanna was completely taken aback. All evening she’d been looking at her watch, wondering when she would get back to her room to pack all the gifts and trinkets for her friends, which Von Holden had helped her purchase in their tour of Zurich that afternoon. When she would get to bed. What time she would have to get up to get to the airport for her flight home the following day.
“My d-dog,” she stammered. The idea of staying in Switzerland had never occurred to her. The concept of spending any time outside her own self-made nest was all but overwhelming.
Von Holden smiled. “Your dog will be cared for while you are away, of course. And while you are here, you will have your own apartment on the grounds of Mr. Lybarger’s estate.”
Joanna didn’t know what to think, how to respond or even react. There was a round of applause from Lybarger‘s table as he blew out the candles and again, seemingly from nowhere, the oompah band appeared and played “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”
Coffee and after-dinner drinks were served along with squares of Swiss chocolate. The plump lady helped Lybarger cut his cake, and waiters brought pieces of it to each table.
Joanna drank the coffee and took a sip from what was very good cognac. The liquor warmed her and felt good.
“He will be uncomfortable and unsure without you, Joanna. You will stay, won’t you?” Von Holden’s smile was kindhearted and genuine. Moreover, the way he asked her to stay made it seem it was he, not Lybarger, who was encouraging her. She took another sip of the cognac and felt flushed.
“Yes, all right,” she heard herself say. “If it’s that important to Mr. Lybarger, I’ll stay, of course.”
In the background the oompah band struck up a Viennese waltz and the young German couple got up from their table to dance. Looking around, Joanna saw other people get up as well.
“Joanna?”
She turned and saw Von Holden standing behind her chair.
“May I?” he askèd.
A broad smile unintentionally crossed her face. “Sure. Why not?” she said. She stood up and Von Holden drew back her chair. A moment later he led her past Elton Lybarger and out onto the floor among the others. And, to the outlandish strains of the oompah band, he took her in his arms and they danced.
46
* * *
“I ALWAYS tell the kids it won’t hurt. Just a little jab under the skin,” Osborn said, watching Vera draw 5ml of tetanus toxoid out of a vial and into a syringe. “They know I’m lying and I know I’m lying. I don’t know why I tell them.”
Vera smiled. “You tell them because it’s your job.” Withdrawing the needle, she broke it off, wrapped the syringe in tissue paper, did the same with the vial, then put them both in her jacket pocket. “The wound is clean and healing well. Tomorrow we’ll start you on exercises.”
“Then what? I can’t stay here for the rest of my life,” Osborn said, sullenly.
“You might want to.” Vera plopped a folded newspaper down in front of him. It was the late edition of Le Figaro. “Page two,” she said.
Opening the paper, Osborn saw two grainy photographs. One was of himself, a mug shot taken by the Paris police, the other was of uniformed police carrying a blanket-covered body up a steep river embankment. Linking both was a caption in French: “American doctor suspect in Albert Merriman murder.”
All right, so they’d dusted the Citroën and found his prints on it. He knew it would happen. No need to be surprised or shocked. But—“Albert Merriman? Where did they get that?”
“It was Henri Kanarack’s real name. He was an American. Did you know that?”
“I could have guessed. From the way he talked.”
“He was a professional killer.”
“That part he told me—” Suddenly Osborn saw Kanarack’s face staring up at him from the rushing water, terrified that Osborn would give him another shot of the succinylcholine. At the same time he heard Kanarack’s horror-stricken voice, as distinctly as if he were in the room with him now.
“I was paid—”
Again, Osborn felt the shock of disbelief—that his father’s murder had been cold, detached business.
“Erwin Scholl—” he heard Kanarack say.
“No!” he shouted out loud.
Vera looked up sharply. Osborn’s jaw was set and he was staring straight ahead, focused on nothing.
“Paul—”
Osborn rolled over and slid his legs over the side of the bed. Unsteadily, he pulled himself to his feet. Wavering, he stood there, his face white as stone, his eyes utterly vacant. Sweat stood out on his forehead and his chest heaved thunderously with every breath. Everything was catching up. He was on the edge of a breakdown and knew it, but there was nothing he could do about it.
“Paul.” Vera came toward him. “It’s all right. It’s all right—”
His head snapped around to look at her and his eyes narrowed. She was crazy. Her reasoning came from the outside world where no one understood. “The hell it’s all right!” His voice was thick with rage. But it was the tortured rage of a child. “Y
ou think I can do it, don’t you? Well, I can’t.”
“Can’t what—” Vera was very gentle.
“You know what I mean!”
“I don’t . . . .”
“The hell you don’t!”
“No—”
“You want me to say it?”
“Say what?”
“That. That . . .” He stammered. “That I can find Erwin Scholl! Well, I can’t. That’s all! I can’t! Not start all over again! So don’t ask again. Is that clear?” Osborn was leaning over her, yelling at her. “Is that clear, Vera? Don’t ask, because I won’t! I won’t, because I can’t!”
Suddenly he glimpsed his pants hanging over the back of the chair by the window table and lunged for them. As he did, his bad leg gave way and he cried out. For a mordent he glimpsed the ceiling. Then the floor hit him in the back. For a moment he just lay there. Then he heard someone sob and his vision blurred and he couldn’t see. “I just want to go home. Please,” he heard someone say. There was confusion because the voice was his own, only it was much younger, and it was choked with tears. Desperately he rolled his head, looking for Vera, but he saw nothing but unfocused gray light.
“Vera—Vera—” He cried out, suddenly terrified something had happened to his eyes. “Vera!”
Somewhere, somewhere near, he heard a thumping. It was a sound he didn’t recognize. Then he felt a hand slide through his hair and he realized he was leaning against her breast and what he was hearing was the beat of her heart In time he became aware of the rhythm of his own breathing. And he had the sense that she was on the floor with him, and had been for some time. That she was holding him and rocking him gently in her arms. Still his vision hadn’t cleared and he didn’t know why. It was then he realized he was crying.