Three to Kill (11 page)

21

It was getting late by the time he reached Auxerre and registered in a hotel as Georges Gaillard. He ate badly and slept little. The radio news made no mention of him or of any killing in the Alps. Gerfaut hoped he would be able to use the Capri for a few more hours, and he was not to be disappointed, for the next morning the car got him without incident to Paris. Arriving at lunchtime, he abandoned the vehicle in Pantin, leaving the doors unlocked and the key in the ignition, trusting that, with a bit of luck, the thing would be stolen and any pursuers thereby thrown off the scent. And stolen it was, by what must have been well-organized felons, for no one ever heard of the car again.

Gerfaut took the metro, changed at Gare de l'Est, and got out at Opéra. It gave him great pleasure to be back in the city, though he was not completely aware of it. He was carrying Carlo's canvas bag with the Beretta and a few clothes in it. For a few minutes, he enjoyed strolling through the maze of side streets that lies to the east of Avenue de l'Opéra. Scurrying office workers, exhausted secretaries—a little world of grumbling and irascible yet contented people flooded the snack bars and cafés, rubbing shoulders with anxious currency dealers and American students. Gerfaut bought
France-Soir
and leafed through it abstractedly as he sat at the end of a counter eating a frankfurter and fries. The usual things were going on in the world, yet Gerfaut detected an evolution of some kind that was hard to pin down. He finished his beer, left the copy of
France-Soir
on the counter, and made his way to the headquarters of the daily newspaper
Le Monde.
Across the boulevard, a staring match was in progress between a large squad of uniformed police and a picket line barring the entrance to a bank. Gerfaut asked if he might consult back issues of the newspaper dating from almost a year earlier. He was told yes, certainly, and given directions; he set himself up, searched, and found what he was looking for. A male who had died at Troyes hospital the year before without regaining consciousness, after having been dropped off by an unidentified man, had turned out be a Monsieur Mouzon, a legal adviser by profession, from Paris, age forty-six. The cause of death was four bullet wounds inflicted by a 9mm weapon—no mention of any road accident. Gerfaut was not surprised.

Nine Mouzons were listed as residential subscribers in the Paris phone book, including someone described as a manufacturer of electric fans. In the listings by profession, however, Gerfaut found a consulting firm called Mouzon & Hodeng. He wrote down the number and as an afterthought noted the nine residential numbers, too. He walked across the post office and stood in line for a telephone cubicle. The business number elicited a recorded message informing him that the number was not currently in service. He began dialing the residential numbers one by one, leaving out the fan maker.

“Hello?”

A woman's voice.

Gerfaut pressed the button to make the connection.

“Monsieur Mouzon, please.”

“Hold on, please. Who's calling?”

Gerfaut hung up. Tried another number. Same result. Tried a third. Busy signal. The fourth try was different.

“Hello?”

“Monsieur Mouzon, please.”

“Monsieur Mouzon has died. Who is this?”

Gerfaut hung up, then remained motionless for a moment in the cubicle, thinking about death and about the horrible damage that bullets can do. Someone began tapping on the glass door with a set of keys in an obnoxious way. A fat man. Gerfaut came out.

“Fat idiot!” he said as he passed the man.

“What? What was that you said?”

But Gerfaut was already on his way out of the post office. He walked to Place de l'Opéra, studied a map of the metro, caught a train, changed at Invalides, and reemerged into the daylight at Pernety. It was only just four o'clock. Things were moving quickly. Having got his bearings, Gerfaut took Rue Raymond-Losserand, which was clogged with cars, delivery vans, road work, street vendors, and a good-humored and noisy throng. He found the house number he was looking for and went into the building where Mouzon had lived. There was no list of tenants. Gerfaut had no wish to ask the concierge. On the fifth floor he came upon an apartment door with a scrap of card pinned beneath the bell: MOUZON—GASSOWITZ, it said. Gerfaut rang. A man opened the door.

“Yes?”

The man wore beige cotton pants and a plaid lumberjack's shirt. He had greasy hair, thick lips, and a blue chin. With his Robert Mitchum build and beer belly to match, he didn't look particularly Polish—more like an ex–North African colonial type.

“I'm looking for Madame Mouzon.”

“Yes?”

“That's it.”

The man weighed the pros and cons, then seemed to reject the idea of throwing Gerfaut down a flight of stairs to the next floor. He turned his head sideways, without taking his eyes off the visitor, and bellowed over his shoulder.

“Éliane!”

“What?”

“It's for you!”

Bustling could be heard within. The man redirected his chin toward Gerfaut and sighed softly, filling the four cubic meters of air on the landing with Ricard fumes. Éliane Mouzon arrived at the apartment door, but Gerfaut had to crane his neck to see her because the guy still blocked the way.

“What is it?”

She seemed tired, poor, and ordinary: not colorful at all, about forty-five, medium build, quite pretty despite very bad skin, lightly tinted hair, frankly lackluster black-and-white chiné suit, tan rayon blouse, torque of fake gold, bracelet ditto. She was artfully, almost beautifully made up. She was a slave to good taste, but she did not let herself go, and Gerfaut felt sympathy for her.

“I would like to speak to you in private,” he told her. “About Monsieur Mouzon.”

The skin around the woman's mouth blanched dramatically. She placed a palm against the hallway wall, and her eyelashes fluttered. The heavy-set guy glanced at her, then turned back to Gerfaut, lowering his head like a bull about to charge. His lips, too, were now ringed with white.

“Listen here, buddy,” he growled, “I'm holding back because that's what she wants. But I don't know how long I can keep it up. So you'd better piss off, get it?”

“Stop it—he's not the one,” said Mouzon's widow from behind his back.

“Oh, okay,” said the heavyset guy—an irate Mr. Magoo struggling to focus and calm down at the same time. “I, er....”

“Come to think of it,” broke in Gerfaut, “it's you I'd like to talk to. You—Monsieur Gassowitz, I take it? I have to talk to you. You have to let me in. Otherwise, I'll talk to the police, instead. I'm sure you wouldn't care for that, am I right?”

Gassowitz did not reply. He was thinking, and he appeared to be bothered by noise. But there was no noise. The landing was deathly quiet.

“I don't know who you are and I don't want to know,” said the widow. “Leave me alone. Him, too.”

Quite without warning, she burst into tears. Her cheap mascara ran into her eyes, and she wiped them with tiny fists, mumbling “Oh, my God” in an emotionless and exhausted voice.

“We can't just stand here on the landing,” ruled Gerfaut.

Gassowitz retreated into the hallway, took the woman in his arms, and nestled her head to his shoulder. He stroked her hair. At the same time, he continued to stare at Gerfaut in a treacherous and angry way. Gerfaut proceeded gingerly into the apartment. Gassowitz used his foot to slam the door shut behind them.

“Baby,” he murmured to the widow, “you go on into the bedroom.”

Mouzon's widow disappeared into the bedroom. Gassowitz showed the visitor into a kitchen with a formica-topped table. His dark blue eyes were still shooting daggers at Gerfaut, who sat down without being invited. He noticed that he was sweating profusely and put it down solely to the emotional heat being generated on all sides in the small room.

“Shit!” he said. “I had absolutely no idea—I didn't anticipate anything like this. Listen, she's told you about it, hasn't she? What I mean to say is, who was it that came the first time—that other time? A young man, dark, wasn't it? A young guy with wavy black hair and blue eyes? And a big toothy fellow, older?”

“It was the young one,” said Gassowitz. “They both came together. But it was the young one who....”

“I killed him yesterday. I smashed his fucking skull; I busted his head in.”

Words failing him, Gerfaut burst into tears. Folding his arms before him on the formica table, he laid his head on his forearms and sobbed strenuously. His tears stopped suddenly, but for several minutes he went on quaking and hyperventilating. He sounded like a Brazilian musical instrument.

Unsentimentally, Gassowitz tapped him on the shoulder.

“Here, you need a drink.”

Gerfaut sat up, grasped the proffered mustard glass and tossed down the six centiliters of undiluted Ricard it contained. The pastis burned his throat. He felt it trickle ever so slowly, like a small raspy hot egg, down his tight gullet. Gassowitz sat down gently on a kitchen chair, his left leg extended and his right bent. Gerfaut glanced at the man's shoes—cheap tasseled things—and got the feeling that if at that moment he were to make a dash for the door, Gassowitz would plant his foot right in his face without bothering to get up from his chair.

“They killed Mouzon, obviously,” said Gerfaut. “Then they came here to make sure that his widow knew nothing. If she had known anything, they would have finished her off, too. And they made doubly sure.” He glanced at the white-lipped Gassowitz. “You are—what? Her lover, naturally. You met her after the fact. Listen, I don't want to know what they did to her.”

“No, right,” replied Gassowitz in an ordinary conversational tone.

“Listen,” repeated Gerfaut, “I'm the guy that picked Mouzon up from the side of the road. It was me that dropped him off at the hospital. Then they caught up with me. It wasn't easy for them, but they caught up with me several times, and they did worse stuff to me than—well, I'm not sure that it was worse. I can try and give you the details if you like. I have to know if they were taking orders from someone. They saw me coming to Mouzon's rescue. They took my plate number. I suppose they figured I'd heard his last words. It's all so banal, it's pathetic. I can't....”

“I want the details.”

“Okay, I'll try.” And Gerfaut told his whole story to the heavyset guy. It took more than half an hour, because Gassowitz kept asking questions, to some of which Gerfaut had no answer. Gassowitz wanted to know why Gerfaut had not gone to the police, and Gerfaut said that that would have been a pain in the ass.

“But still, I mean, going right ahead like that!”

“Yes, yes, I know. But I can't explain. I can't really understand it myself.”

“Maybe you were just sick of everything?”

“But could it be that simple?”

“It could.”

Gassowitz also wanted to know how come the two thugs had found Gerfaut at the gas station, the time the toothy man had gone up in flames, but Gerfaut couldn't explain that, either.

Éliane Mouzon came in to see what was going on, her pretty face collapsed and ravaged. Gassowitz sent her back into the bedroom, promising to explain everything later, but he did so with great tenderness.

“That's it,” said Gerfaut at last. “Is that what you wanted to know?”

“I suppose so,” grumbled Gassowitz.

Gerfaut drank a little Ricard diluted with water.

“I don't know why I told you all this. The only thing I'm interested in is finding whoever gave those two bastards their orders. And you know nothing. Your—Madame Mouzon knows nothing, either; otherwise, they wouldn't have let her off that easily, and....”

“I'm interested in that, too,” Gassowitz broke in.

“Okay, but you don't know anything, you don't know why....”

“Hodeng.”

“Huh?”

“Philippe Hodeng. Mouzon and he were partners. They were legal advisers. You know, they got pathetic people to pay their debts by throwing a scare into them. With letterheads and legal-sounding threats, that sort of thing.”

“Debt recovery?”

“Something like that. But sleazy. And they came across all kinds of stuff. They would get information on people, then offer their so-called services. Mouzon was an ex-cop—I expect you knew that?”

“No, I didn't.”

“Well, he was. He was canned or whatever you call it. Something about theft—while he was still in the police, I mean. But he was amnestied later—which is how he was able to set up his consulting business. Hodeng, I don't know exactly, but I think he was a sort of stool pigeon of Mouzon's when he was still a cop. Then, later, they went into partnership, get it?”

“I get it, all right.”

“And just after Mouzon died, the next day, Hodeng met with a serious accident.”

“Is he dead?”

“No.”

“Can he be found?”

“Monsieur Gerfaut, I am going to take you to him. I want to go with you. Give me a moment—I need a word with Éliane, so she doesn't worry. But I want to go with you. I can because I've been out of work recently. And I have to, you see—I simply must go with you.”

“Fine,” said Gerfaut. “Fine, yes. Good.”

22

They found Philippe Hodeng where he was at that point in his life: in a filthy retirement home in Chelles; and in the shape that he was in at that point in his life: helpless and almost mute. He occupied a dingy dark room on the second floor of one of the four or five buildings that made up the institution. In the courtyard, sycamores laden with young leaves of garish green hung over an admixture of gravel and dog turds. Philippe Hodeng was fifty-two, but he might have been seventy or a hundred, for that matter. He sat in a wheelchair with a tartan blanket over his paralyzed legs. In falling out of the window at Mouzon & Hodeng's offices, he had fractured his spine. At some point, he had suffered brutal trauma to the throat. His larynx had been crushed. He had undergone a tracheotomy and various other operations. He was now a cripple, and his vocal cords were destroyed. Although voice-retraining techniques existed that could have helped him, Hodeng could not afford such treatment. But, by following the instructions given in an American book, he was beginning to produce organized sounds once more by subtly contracting his diaphragm and trachea. The result, a raucous, piping, and pneumatic register, was somehow simultaneously reminiscent of François Mauriac and Roland Kirk.

Hodeng was dressed in a shiny, slim-fitting suit, a ratty nylon shirt with a gaping collar, and a Basque beret. His toothless mouth was surrounded by a multitude of white wrinkles and crevices. His glasses were green, and his hair was a yellowish white. To put it in a nutshell, his condition was desperate.

Gerfaut and Gassowitz had no difficulty finding him. They presented themselves at the reception desk, where a fat girl with unkempt hair, flabby cheeks, and rolls of flesh under her arms gave them directions without hesitation and without curiosity. The fact was that the old people in the place were left much to their own devices: the rooms were cleaned now and then, the bedding changed every couple of weeks, meals served in a refectory for those who were mobile and brought up to those who were not, and anyone who wet their bed got a chewing out. That was it.

The problems began after Gerfaut and Gassowitz entered Hodeng's room, when the patient, reaching beneath the bedclothes, produced a small 7.65mm automatic, with the word VENUS inscribed in large letters on the grip, and pointed it at the visitors.

“Hey!” said Gassowitz. “Take it easy. We're from Social Security.”

As he spoke, the massive Gassowitz seized an empty umbrella stand and whirled it in an arc; it caught the little automatic and wrenched it from Hodeng's fingers and sent it skittering across the dirty carpet. Gassowitz took a step forward and nudged the weapon under the bed with the tip of his shoe. Hodeng put his wheelchair violently into reverse, whining, whistling, and grunting, and ended up backed against the wall. That was when Gerfaut and Gassowitz explained the nature of their business with him—or at least the parts Hodeng needed to know. And Hodeng supplied the information requested.

It went pretty quickly and simply.

“No! Afraid,” the invalid wheezed at one stage in the conversation. It sounded more like “Oo! Ray,” but by this time Gerfaut and Gassowitz could fairly easily understand the sounds he produced.

“They can't do anything else to you,” said Gerfaut.

“One ... ah ... ivv.”

Gassowitz interpreted: “He says he wants to go on living.”

“Listen, Hodeng,” said Gerfaut, “I can understand that. That's why I've told you some of what they did to me. It's also why you can take it from me that either you talk or I'll kill you. Tell me who's behind those two bastards or I'll kill you. Here and now. Get it? You don't believe I'll do it?”

After a very short moment's reflection Hodeng nodded vigorously and asked for paper and pencil. He then covered four pages of a datebook with tiny handwriting. From time to time Gerfaut or Gassowitz interrupted him with requests for clarification. At last he had finished, and there were no further questions. Gerfaut stuffed the datebook pages in his pocket.

“We'll try and make sure this doesn't drop you back in the shit.”

“Ssss ... too ... wid, huh?” said Hodeng with great difficulty. “Unning to live!” He indicated his useless legs, his useless throat, then the shitty room, and the shitty landscape outside; as his gestures tailed off, he smiled self-deprecatingly. “Kill him,” he whirred. “Kill at bastard, kay?”

Gerfaut and his out-of-work companion headed toward Paris in Gassowitz's clapped-out Peugeot 203, then bypassed the city via the ring road. It took them a long time, for it was rush hour and the ring road was backed up. They weren't talking; they were barely thinking. About six-forty-five, they took the superhighway to the west. Once past the Chartres turnoff they were able to drive fast. Gerfaut opened the canvas bag lying at his feet on the car floor. He took out the Beretta and silencer. He handled the weapon for a few moments to make sure he understood its operation. The 203 left the highway at Meulan. Gassowitz stopped in front of a pharmacy that was still open, got out of the car, and went in. He emerged with two pairs of rubber gloves of the kind used by housewives for washing dishes. He gave one pair to Gerfaut. Each man thrust his pair of gloves into a jacket pocket. The 203 set off again and took the road to Magny-en-Vexin.

“It's one thing for you,” said Gerfaut. “I imagine you love Éliane Mouzon. As for me, though, the woman who was killed up there in the mountains, I didn't love her, you know. She was really very beautiful, but….” He broke off and fell silent for a good minute. “Perhaps I shouldn't be as angry as I am.”

“Do you want to stop for dinner and think things over?”

“No.”

“How about I drop you at a train station and you leave me your gun?”

“No, absolutely not,” was Gerfaut's reply.

They passed through Magny-en-Vexin and followed the sign for the hamlet of Vilneuil. Still ten kilometers away, Gassowitz pulled over and parked on the roadside. Without speaking, the two men sat in the car and waited for night.