The Paris Directive (15 page)

The cemetery, a bleak patch of earth even on a bright, sky blue day like this one, was surrounded by a dreary six-foot cinder block wall, gray and dirt streaked. Parking next to the pickup truck in front, Mazarelle opened the squeaking rusty metal gate and headed toward the cypress tree in the center, his lame foot dragging through the gravel. Down the row to the right of the mournful solitary cypress, Martine’s mother and father were buried near the far wall beneath a stone sandbox filled with gravel. Close beside them was the grave of her sister, a dutiful wife and daughter even in death. The grave of Mazarelle’s wife, the black sheep of the family, was at the far end of the line.

Martine had never told him—or anyone for that matter—that she had a daughter who lived in Taziac with her elderly friend Louise. That was why she’d chosen to come back here to die. But Mazarelle wasn’t a detective for nothing. Besides, the reason didn’t make any difference. He loved Martine and that was enough. If she didn’t want to say anything about Gabrielle, that was her affair. The past was the past and the hell with it. Another dysfunctional family just like his own.

One day Mazarelle’s father, Guy, a serious boozer and womanizer, had walked out of their house to go to work and never came back. An actor—a large, handsome man before all his drinking and whoring caught up with him—Guy was a peacock who fancied himself a star but was really only a bit player. A good voice though, a big resonant stage voice that reminded one critic of the American performer Paul Robeson. He made a career out of that review, dining out on his part as the Fire Chief in Ionesco’s
Bald
Soprano
.

An impossible snob, Guy regarded his son Paul’s choice of career as a flic an embarrassment. And his choice of a bride—a young woman from the provinces who worked in Paris as an
esthéticienne
at some
institut
de
beauté
—seemed so shameful to the old boy that though he swore to be at their wedding, he never showed. No surprise Mazarelle had little love of families.

Glancing down at his wife’s grave, Mazarelle didn’t know why he even bothered to come. This stark, gray, dreary place represented
everything that Martine hated in life and, except perhaps for a few scraps of her genetic code, had nothing to do with her. He wished he’d brought some flowers. Maybe he’d come by in a few months on Toussaint and bring her some carnations. Martine loved carnations. When they first met, she also loved to hear him talk about his work, but that was a long time ago. After their marriage, his shoptalk seemed to bore her.

Nevertheless, he thought that if she were alive, she’d be glad to see him. Might even think he was looking well. Much better than the last few times he’d been there. Would probably have asked if that meant he’d found himself a new girlfriend, her teasing, adorable laughter the wind rustling through the giant cypress. He tamped down his tobacco and lit up, the smoke billowing over his head. Though he’d no flowers for Martine, Mazarelle did have some news. I’ve got a new case that I’m working on, he told her. A multiple murder case. She’d have guessed that was it. There was hardly anything that cheered him up as much as murder.

And why not? Mazarelle thought. Normal human relationships—even without violence—tended to be emotionally complicated, vexed, and painful, whereas homicide, while not always easy to solve, was relatively simple to diagram. There was a murderer and a murderee. He loved the moral clarity of it. But most of all the satisfaction of tidying up the mess at the end and making the world a little better for the survivors. Even Martine might have been interested in this new case. Mazarelle drew on his pipe and the smoke streamed from his lips and sailed away. The best he could say was that though he didn’t have any idea who did it, he thought he knew who didn’t do it. But he wasn’t even sure of that. Hell, it was only the beginning. He smiled to himself at the idea and it cheered him up. A real ballbuster, he thought.

20

DISTRICT ATTORNEY’S OFFICE,
NEW YORK CITY

M
olly Reece sat at her desk, crossing and uncrossing her long shapely legs as she went over the list of questions she planned to ask at the deposition. It was a case that raised her temperature even higher than most she handled. A fourteen-year-old kid in a junior high school’s bilingual education program had been raped by her math teacher. Afraid to tell her parents, she nearly died after an illegal abortion. Fortunately she had told her best friend when it happened or there’d be no case. The defendant was now asking to have a translator at the trial because his English was weak. Molly had no objections. Who says every rapist has to speak English like Orson Welles? Besides, in court a translator would probably work to her advantage with the jury. What really ticked her off, though, was that his lousy English had been good enough to get him a job teaching in the New York City public school system. Surreal, she thought. Like
Alice
in
Wonderland
.

When the telephone rang, Molly assumed that it was the math teacher’s lawyer from the public defender’s office, calling her back. The voice was low, edgy, and identified the caller as Dwight Bennett. Though busy, Molly figured thirty seconds and guardedly heard him out. He asked if this was Molly Reece.

“How can I help you?”

“The daughter of Benjamin and Judith Reece of Manhattan?”

“Yes …”

“Are they currently vacationing in France?”

“All right, what’s this all about?”

Dwight explained that he was calling from the American embassy
in Paris. He was sorry, but he had some bad news. There had been an accident in Taziac.

Molly, who was about to hang up, hesitated. He knew where they were. This wasn’t some nut caught up in the New York County Court system getting an ADA on the phone and trying to push her buttons.

“What are you talking about? What sort of accident?”

“A very bad one, I’m afraid. I’m truly sorry to have to be the one to tell you, Ms. Reece …” He paused. “Your parents are dead.”

“Dead? My parents
dead
. What? What?” She tried to catch her breath. “Oh no … You can’t …” Her voice cracked, her eyes tearing up. “Both of them?”

“I’m sorry. Yes, both of them.”

Her mom and dad dead. Molly couldn’t wrap her mind around the idea. She had just seen them off at JFK. They were so excited. All they could talk about was their French vacation. Putting the phone down on her desk, she closed her eyes. Then taking a deep breath, she picked up the receiver again.

“Ms. Reece,” he said. “Are you still there, Ms. Reece?”

“I’m here.”

“I know how awful this must be for you. If I can be of help in any way—”

“Tell me, how did it happen? Were they driving?”

“No, they weren’t driving. They were murdered.”

It was a whipsaw, first their deaths and then this. Murdered! It was beyond belief. How? Who? Though she’d had some experience with murder and the grieving families left in its wake, it certainly hadn’t prepared her for these deaths. Molly—a crushing weight on her chest—felt herself growing angrier and angrier.

And even much later, sitting in a 747 at thirty-five thousand feet and watching the eye-popping dawn come up, warming the clouds from gray to rust to salmon pink above the Normandy cliffs, Molly still felt that oppressive weight. She wanted answers and intended to demand that her caller, Dwight Bennett, provide them. It was as if she thought he was the French investigating magistrate rather than some lowly U.S. State Department official based in Paris. But Bennett had offered to help and that’s where Molly planned to start.

Kevin had known at once something was wrong by the sound of her voice. She’d caught him on the way out of their apartment in the Village going uptown to rehearsal. The news shocked him. He was fond of Ben and Judy, laughingly called them the “odd couple.” Molly knew what he meant. As far as her bohemian boyfriend was concerned, she was so different from either of them that she might have been deposited on their Upper East Side doorstep in a basket.

Though Kevin thought of himself as being good in an emergency, he was less good at recognizing when he was confronting one. Molly, on the other hand, was focused and well organized even in the worst of times. She told Kevin that her boss would be arranging for postponements of her cases. She’d already bought her plane ticket from Air France. She was leaving for Paris that evening. Molly knew
the city well, having spent her junior year at Barnard studying at the Sorbonne. Besides, she was only planning to stay overnight at the Hotel Lenox Saint-Germain and then fly down to the Dordogne the next morning. As soon as she knew where she’d be staying there, she promised to call.

Kevin volunteered to go with her. The independent Molly made it easy for him. Calling his offer sweet, she said she preferred to do this alone. There was, however, one thing that she did want him to do.

Never having met Sean Campbell, Kevin knew that he’d have to tell Ben’s partner the news of his murder face-to-face. He would have much rather done it on the phone. Kevin had been up to the Reece-Campbell Gallery with Molly only once or twice, their last visit for a show he really enjoyed. Any actor would. The work of the young Austrian artist Egon Schiele was full of self-conscious poses, expressive gestures, brutal sex, torment, lyricism, loneliness, and death. All that and only twenty-eight when he himself died. Despite the amusing Klee drawings that Kevin passed as he walked through the uptown Madison Avenue gallery, death was very much on his mind.

The young woman behind the desk finally glanced up. Good-looking, he thought, surprised to see how duded up she was. Not the careless, plain-Jane look of the women who worked in the downtown
SoHo and Chelsea art galleries. Kevin explained that he was a friend of Molly Reece’s. He’d a message from her for Mr. Campbell. Mona, the gallery assistant, said she was sorry but both Mr. Campbell and Mr. Reece were away on vacation.

Kevin, who knew how to lower his voice without losing his best lines, leaned across the desk and said, “This is important.”

“He’s out of the country. But he’ll be back in a few weeks. Can’t it wait?”

“No, it can’t wait. I wouldn’t be here if it could wait.”

Maybe it
was
important, Mona decided, recalling that perhaps she had seen him in the gallery with Molly. “Mr. Campbell is in France. He’s traveling at the moment. I have no idea where, but I do expect him to call. I’d be glad to relay a message for you.”

Kevin supposed that would be okay with Molly and told her what it was, watching her black-rimmed eyes dilate in disbelief, her face pale. Mona promised to make sure her boss got it. Kevin thought it a little odd that Campbell was in France too and that Molly didn’t know anything about it. He’d probably heard the news of Ben’s murder already.

Taking a slip of paper from her desk drawer as soon as he’d left, Mona went into the office, closed the door behind her, and sat down at Ben’s desk. She dialed 011, then 33 for France, 1 for Paris, and then the rest of the number Sean had written. She could hardly wait to tell him the awful news, fairly bursting with tragedy. “Hello, Sean, Sean …”

21

THE AMERICAN EMBASSY, PARIS

T
he Lenox was a small, quaint hotel that Molly had stayed at on her first trip to Paris. It was just a few blocks from the Seine and, across the river, a short walk to the Place de la Concorde and the American embassy.

Molly, aware that it was harder traveling east than west because of the loss of time, had read somewhere that drinking lots of water helped to prevent jet lag. It seemed to have done the trick. She was so wired, so adrenalized that she wasn’t even tired. But if she stopped for a minute, she was afraid that bad things might happen. Things she didn’t want to think about. After washing up and putting on her black linen suit, which was chic, short, tailored, and which, according to the mirror in her room, had come out of her suitcase better than she had any reason to expect, Molly left for the embassy. It was still early morning in Paris, the streets washed clean of dog shit, the river jeweled and sparkling in the sun. It almost made her feel guilty just for being there.

In the park along the avenue Gabriel, Molly paused by a giant sequoia to read the placard that said it was the embassy’s gift to Paris. She gazed across at the gleaming, four-story, white stone structure with its American flag flying from the balcony above the main entrance. It was surrounded by a high metal spear-tipped fence, and the French police had set up portable steel barriers in front. The embassy looked as if it were under siege. Molly wondered if it had anything to do with the political fallout from the recent NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.

She went up to the gendarme with the machine gun slung over
his shoulder standing by the barrier and inquired how to get in. He smiled when he saw who had asked. Her French was excellent. It was her easy, open, confident American manner that gave her away. Tipping his kepi, he indicated the small temporary wooden gatehouse to his right. Inside, they asked what she wanted and weren’t satisfied until one of them had called Dwight Bennett’s office for authorization. The other examined the contents of her shoulder bag.