19 Purchase Street (26 page)

Ten minutes to six.

A bell rang. The closing bell, signaling all visitors to leave the cemetery.

Gainer stepped into the entranceway of a nearby mausoleum for cover. He checked his ASP and the two additional full clips he had brought along. He took the automatic off safety, drew it a couple of times for last-minute practice. The holster was so slick the weapon practically jumped out into his grip.

They went into the office of the conservateur.

The clerk was still there.

Becque was on the telephone.

Gainer and Leslie waited outside the building. People were leaving, headed for the main gate.

Gainer told Leslie. “I'll go with Becque. You stay here, right here.”

“No.”

“Goddamn,
yes
.”

“I want to shoot him too.”

The pure and simple way she said it, he almost gave in to her.

The clerk left for the day with a dour
bon soir
.

Becque called them inside. An obligatory smile. His expression asked for the money.

Leslie handed over the sheaf of one hundred brand new hundreds.

Becque riffled through them once, put the money in his jacket pocket.

They went out. Becque and Gainer, with the container of Norma's ashes, walked eastward along the Avenue Perrier, past the Rothschild family sepulcher. Gainer glanced back, saw Leslie was cooperating, sitting on the steps of the crypt next to the office. She threw him a little wave.

Becque and Gainer were going against the flow of stragglers on the way out. They cut across between graves of divisions 14 and 16 and then up a fairly steep grade. Becque took quick, long steps. He had the money, wanted to get the rest of it over with.
Fou Americain
he thought, but said, “A very old section, very desirable,” as they passed division 36 and went up another short rise.

Only a few stragglers now.

Gainer's mental map of the cemetery told him he was on the extreme perimeter just above the jutting lower lip of the figurative face Leslie had called attention to the night before. Division 33.

Becque led the way down a short path of bare ground that was obscured by old ivy. The cemetery wall was on the right. A row of dense bushes seven feet high on the left.

At the end of the path was the mausoleum. Small, made up of smooth-cut stone, slender columns left and right and a gently sloped roof with a winged baby angel on its front peak. A
botonée
cross was carved above the entrance, and above that an elongated stone panel for the family name. It was blank, recently sandblasted. The pair of narrow iron doors of the mausoleum were rusty but interestingly detailed. They were wide open, swung inward. Inside was just room enough for two in separate repose.

Gainer asked if the vaults had anyone in them now.

Becque lied, saying that they didn't.

Gainer stepped inside. He placed the container of Norma's ashes on the surface of one of the vaults, then took off Rodger's homburg and placed it over the container. He stood there with his back to Becque, who was waiting outside. Gainer, head bowed, appeared to be saying a prayer while he took out the ASP, screwed the silencer onto it and shoved it down inside his belt, concealed.

On the way out, Gainer slammed the doors shut, their rusted bolt mechanism locking into place.

“There is no key,” Becque said. “No way of getting in.”

“It doesn't matter.”

Evidently it did to Becque. It would inconvenience his selling that mausoleum again. “You left your hat inside,” he said, stepped forward and tried the doors, shook them, shoved his weight against them.

Gainer, behind Becque, took out the ASP. Also, from his inside jacket pocket he removed a leather-framed photograph, the one that had been among Norma's belongings, the snapshot of her and him. He pressed the ASP against Becque's spine, simultaneously brought the photograph around before Becque's eyes.

Becque froze.

Gainer wanted the moment to get to Becque as much as possible, for fear to work its special chemistry. No words were necessary. The hard little muzzle of death pressing Becque's back and the photograph said it all.

Becque was no amateur. He had been in the worst of the French war in Indochina for five years, right up to the end in Dien Bien Phu, as near to death as this a number of times. He knew about infighting. What to do and what was best to do when at a disadvantage, even one so point-blank. This man who had somehow gotten on to him meant to kill him, no doubting that. However, this man was not a professional. A professional would not have stood so close behind.

Instead of moving away, making a run for it, as Gainer expected, in one sudden swift motion Becque backed into the muzzle of the ASP, brought a heel down hard on Gainer's instep. The backward thrust of his weight forced Gainer off balance. At the same time Becque turned to the left so that when Gainer pulled the trigger the bullet went by, though so close it burned the fabric of Becque's jacket.

Still continuing the same motion, Becque lunged for the bushes nearby. They seemed to swallow him up, their branches whipping back into place.

Gainer tried to follow but the bushes would not give, were too thick and woven, sprang him back. He must have misjudged the spot Becque had gone through, it had happened so quickly. He ran down the path to where the bushes ended, caught a glimpse of Becque across the cobbled
circulaire
, hurrying down the grade of division 36. He went after him.

Becque, on an in-and-out course, making the most of the cemetery structures, did not stop until he was two divisions away. He crouched beside the tomb of the Comtesse de Noialles. Took stock. He had immediately recognized the woman in the photograph as the recent order he had filled in Zurich. This man was her husband or lover or something enough to want blood. Probably, Becque thought, that fat little bastard who had done the order with him had somehow fucked it up. Should he make his way out of the cemetery, handle this somewhere else later? He did not like the idea of having it biting his mind and not being able to move around town as loose as he liked. No, he'd deal with it here and now in Père-Lachaise, where he knew every inch, and where, if there was a mess, he had the spare tombs to clean it up.

He took out the pistol he always carried in a belt holster on his right side. A 9mm Astra automatic 600. Normally it was his back-up weapon but it would do. He checked its full clip and the spare attached to his belt. Cocked a cartridge into the chamber.

The compressed spitting sound of a silenced automatic being fired.

A slug clanked the corner edge of the Comtesse's tomb just above Becque's head.

He judged the direction from which the shot had come. Moved away, kept low, using the crypts and grave markers for cover. He wanted his adversary to follow, come straight on. To encourage that, he cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted back: “
Leche moi le cul
,” which could only be translated as “lick my ass.”

He altered his direction then, darted off to his right through division 50 and cut back around.

There was Gainer.

About a hundred feet away nearing the top of a long flight of stone steps that led up to division 24. Gainer was faced away, stalking, moving cautiously, his attention on where Becque had last been.

Becque raised his pistol, sighted.

It would not be an easy shot at that range.

He decided not to risk wasting the advantage.

In another moment Gainer reached the top of the steps, disappeared from view.

Becque pressed on, he would close ground.

Gainer kept off the main walkways, only crossing over them when he had to. He was no longer sure Becque was somewhere up ahead. He had not entirely understood Becque's shout but obviously it was a curse. Signs of the man's desperation, Gainer thought.

He paused where he was, at the grave of the artist Dominique Ingres, and because it was one that he remembered Leslie pointing out, he knew his location in relationship to the rest of the cemetery. He was in the center of it. He sat with his back against the stone marker of Ingres, remained still, quieted his breath. Slowly he scanned his view, searched for any movement or irregularity of color among the maze of grave markers, monuments, oversize crosses and statues.

The late-day sun was imposing an amber cast—the green of the bushes and trees was going gray, and the gray of the cemetery stonework was turning jaundice. There were no more stragglers that Gainer could see. Probably all gone by now. Birds were singing their final notes, over and over. And here he was, he thought—in Paris in a graveyard sitting over the bones of a fine artist with a gun in his hand and about to use it. He'd sure as hell botched the chance when he'd had it, wouldn't get another so easy. Becque was smart, say that for him.

Footsteps.

Off to the right about thirty feet away beyond the tall bordering row of azaleas.

Gainer kneeled up, slowly, extended the ASP. Aimed at the motion he saw through the intervals in the bushes, followed it with his aim. Took up the slack of the trigger.

Now, in the clear.

A man. In his seventies at least, dressed nattily in a dove-colored summer suit bought forty years ago but fastidiously cared for. Hat to match, and spats. He was carrying a long white box from Frisard, the most prestigious florist on Faubourg Saint Honoré. The box was opened, lined with green tissue for the gladiolas inside it.

The old gent stopped at a grave site, placed the box on the top surface of an adjacent sarcophagus and helped himself to some gladiolas that had been placed there that day. He chose the most fresh, removed any blossoms that had turned or showed any brown from turning. He added those flowers to those in the box, arranged them in layers, professional-like, overlapped the green tissue to cover them and slipped the lid on. He wiped off any grit that might have been picked up by its underside and, box under arm, continued on to be appreciated for his thoughtfulness by a forty-five-year-old divorcee from Copenhagen who was enjoying the last of him. The old gent did not notice Gainer, would never know he had come within a squeeze of having that natty suit ruined forever.

Gainer resumed his lookout for Becque. He again thought he saw him but it turned out to be a cat. He decided to move up the small incline on the left, would have a better view from there.

He crouched, took three steps.

A compressed spitting sound. The slug ricocheted from monument to monument. It had passed so close by Gainer he had felt the heat and the gust of it.

He went down flat, knew now that Becque had a gun.

That turned everything around.

Including Gainer's stomach.

He crawled between two crypts, front down in the dust, through there and beneath a section of cast iron rail and up into the recessed entranceway of a mausoleum that faced onto a main walkway. He believed from the shot that Becque was somewhere off to the right. Directly across the way now was the rise he'd been headed for. It had a good many shrubs and some large monuments for cover. If he made it over there he could circle around, cut back behind Becque as, evidently, Becque had done to him. But wouldn't Becque figure that? This was his turf, every inch of it. If only instead of Père-Lachaise it was Central Park, Gainer thought.

He made a dash for it across the cobbles, dove into the ivy, fought the undertangle of it until he reached the side of a statue's base.

Becque wasn't one to waste shots, Gainer thought, and told himself to keep moving.

He shimmied along the ground over graves, from monument to crypt, using the shrubs and trees for cover. He got up into a crouch when he reached the top of the rise, paused there beside a gaudy sepulcher.

His throat was so dry that breathing hurt.

His shirt was soaked and stuck to him.

He peeked back around the edge of the sepulcher—

A shot from Becque, so close it blasted grit into Gainer's eye and stung his forehead with stone splinter. Which cancelled out any thought of doubling back.

Becque seemed to be driving him, to a wall perhaps, someplace where he'd be cornered. Should he make a stand here? He glanced around for a better place and recognized what he believed was Kardec's tomb a short distance away. Yes, there was the thick rough granite side walls and roof that formed its shelterlike configuration.

At least to some extent it was a familiar spot. Across from it, on the opposite side of a patch of abused grass, was a line of small mausoleums, nearly contiguous, some with less than a foot separating.

Gainer backed in between two of those structures, had to back in because there was not enough room to turn around. He was face down, shoulders wedged in left and right, arms extended, elbows dug into raw dirt, the ASP in both hands.

Kardec's tomb was no more than twenty feet away. From his point of view the lower part of the bust was obscured so that the shiny black head seemed to be emerging from a shroud of flowers.

Wait.

Listen.

Gainer thought he heard someone in the bushes a couple of mausoleums over, but it could have been birds or another cat. Dusk was deepening, only leftover light now. But Kardec was still shining.

At that moment Becque was at the columbarium about two hundred feet away. He had thought Gainer would head for there, for the safety such a large structure would seem to offer. Becque curled around a corner, noiselessly proceeded along the wall of individual enclosed niches, where the urns of ashes were kept. He avoided the little vases of flowers hung there, especially the many at the niche of Isadora Duncan.

Becque was now convinced that he had bypassed his man, but he was still close. He paused, considered the possibilities, settled on the most likely. He moved low, his back nearly horizontal with the ground, darted erratically so not to be a predictable target, in and out between cemetery structures as quiet and sure-footed as he had once been in a Vietnamese village thirty years earlier.

Going for the kill.