 
Architect of His Own Destruction

Louis Shalako

Copyright 2014 Louis Shalako and Long Cool One Books

Design: J. Thornton

ISBN 978-1-927957-38-7

The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person living or deceased, or to any places or events, is purely coincidental. Names, places, settings, characters and incidents are the product of the author's imagination.

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Architect of His Own Destruction

Louis Shalako

Chapter One

Maintenon was thinking that a vacation was a rare and precious thing. It was also a lucky thing, coming just when it did. Paris had gone mad for the Olympics.

Why then, did he dread it so? The worst moment came when he locked the front door at street level and picked up their suitcases, as the taxi-man bustled about, putting things in the boot. He was grinding his jaws already, but the mood somehow lightened. Just the act of getting into the car and finally moving made things better. He didn't want to make it any worse for Ann. That was part of it. Just getting away was the big psychological hurdle. It was a little like going over the top, thought Gilles. He must be artificially cheerful, a feeling he had known from before, and dreaded.

Fix bayonets. Off you go, lads.

It's one thing to go—it's quite another to send the wife.

And then would come a single pistol shot, cutting through the rumble and crash of heavy guns all around and then everything turned into a haze of mud and blood and fire and hell.

Ann's face was always in the periphery of his vision. All he had to do was to look over and feel the guilt.

Her illness was no respecter of persons. It didn't care who you were, or where you came from.

You were dead, sooner rather than later, and that was it for you.

It didn't care if you had been good, or bad, or indifferent.

It was completely arbitrary, and mean, and it could take anybody.

Anyone at all, and in that sense it was an allegory for all of life—and all of death. It was a metaphor for all of human existence, past, present and future.

The other thing was his stomach, something he had been paying more attention to lately. A good cup of railroad coffee—anything but a contradiction in terms, for it was one of the few things they did well, and a heavy slab of dense, sweet chocolate cake were a big help.

The train ride was almost interesting. It was the most time they had spent together in years. All of those hours with nothing to do but stare out the window, and yet there was a new intimacy here too.

Difficult under the present circumstances to appreciate, France was a lovely place, with a rich landscape and a varied history going back through the millennia. Ann seemed to enjoy it and that was the main thing. Gilles held her close and tried very hard not to see it through her eyes.

Any words exchanged were a bonus and a torment. He knew they would not be her last, or their last, and yet each one was precious, never to be repeated. Such intensity. He didn't know how he could stand it sometimes. There was that patient look on her face, and the times when he wondered what kind of a look might be on his face.

***

Waking up in a strange bed was refreshing, in that it was new and unfamiliar. The water in the bathroom was quite hot. That, at least, was different. For many years, Maman had heated water on the top of a massive old range, and given the kids a tub-bath once a week on Saturday nights.

What awful fights they'd had, when the time rolled around for the boys to get a hair-cut.

The memories were there, almost a relief from the present. All he needed was a gentle prodding to get the thoughts flowing. A fraction of the tension had left his shoulders and upper neck. It happened overnight. There was that much relief.

It was their first full day in what had once been his village. They hadn't even left the house yet. On some level, Gilles was looking forward to showing Ann around, perhaps meeting some old friend. They would be reliving a bit of history, boyhood memories, in that bittersweet manner that sensible folks had once they hit old age. It would be a kind of pleasure, he supposed.

Maybe it wouldn't be as bad as he was making out. Or, it could be worse. There were plenty of things that could be worse than what they had right now.

He didn't even hear it. He was so absorbed, what with his own thoughts and trying to focus on the board.

Raymond moved a piece.

"Gilles. Gilles." His sister Henrietta appeared in the archway of her small salon.

The smell of food, and dogs and cats and Pierre's pipe tobacco never left the room. He remembered it from last time, and some things never would change. The smells from the kitchen were already making their presence felt, with bread baking in the oven.

She had her sleeves rolled up and there were traces of flour on her apron. He was struck by the redness of her hands. No one in this family had ever been afraid of a little work. They always said he had the brains in the family, mostly because he had escaped. The break from established routine was the worst, unwelcome and yet probably very necessary—once in a while.

Theoretically, Gilles was fully immersed in a game of backgammon with his fourteen year-old nephew, Raymond.

He and Ann were staying with Henrietta and Pierre's family for a week, and then they were going on to the seaside and a week with Louise, another sister; and her family. On the way back to Paris, they would have a chance to visit with Ann's folks. He was almost looking forward to that, but then he didn't know them quite so well and they were much less demanding in terms of entertaining their guests. It was also only for one day. There was only so much of an itinerary that they could squeeze in. Her folks had always treated him very well. Perhaps they had seen something that he himself had missed. It was only later, as a mature man, when he had wondered why. Here was some brave young man, and he was interested in their daughter. Let's give the fellow plenty of rope. Perhaps he will hang himself.

He blinked at Henrietta, struck by how old she had gotten.

The baby of the family, Gilles was always welcome in the homes of his siblings. When the inevitable vacation rolled around, he and the wife were at a loose end moneywise and unable to refuse the offers of hospitality that poured in. With Ann's condition, there were only so many options. Staying home didn't seem right, somehow.

"Yes?"

"It's the telephone."

Gilles bit back a smile at her tone of wonder. Quite isolated, Bagneres de Luchon, the village of his birth, was near the border with Spain in the high Pyrenees. Change came slowly this far from the real world, but come it inevitably must.

They weren't all that well off, although his brother in-law made a good living as the local postmaster. They would never be rich, and they would never be poor.

Perhaps that would suffice.

"The telephone?" Raymond looked up from the board.

His bug-like antennae began quivering, instincts aroused. Gilles was his favorite. Raymond saved newspaper clippings about his uncle, anything that he could get his hands on, although the local papers only reported the most sensational national cases.

Gilles put his hands on the arms of the chair and heaved himself up.

He hadn't been in town in years and he wondered who in the hell would be calling him here? His wife Ann, thin, pale and consumptive, looked up. She was just as beautiful as ever, perhaps more so now that he had seen her courage, her resolve. She smiled reassuringly. She had been looking through a picture book with nine year-old Denise, dark and a little too pugnacious, in Gilles's estimation. The kid couldn't help herself. Ha! It was the family tree. Those roots went very deep.

Ann's knitting bag was on the couch beside her, a habitual pass-time and an escape from boredom and ennui. At least she had something, thought Gilles. I have nothing when it comes to hobbies. Did he really love his work that much?

Not exactly. He saw it as a necessary evil. That really says something about me, he thought.

"Very well, then." Like many an old-fashioned home, the phone was on the back wall of the kitchen, being not quite fit for polite society.

The house was just as he remembered it. It was quite spooky how Henrietta had redecorated, and everything was all new, except her taste was so very strongly influenced by their dear departed Maman. All pink, floral and stripes and swirls.

Why couldn't women leave well enough alone.

Had no one ever heard of painting a wall white and then just leaving it?

***

"Gilles."

"Yes?" His mind raced.

The voice was the wrong age for anyone he knew around here. Four years ago, or at the time of his last real vacation, it had been Jacqueline Roux. That one had been a little hard to explain to Ann.

You probably don't remember me, but...

The voice, male, was too strong, too definite. This was not some tentative inquiry from thirty years in the past.

It didn't ring any bells. Reality snapped back with a bang.

"Gilles. We need you back here."

"What? Who?"

Who in the hell are you?

"I'm sorry, Gilles. We need you back here. On the double. We have a case."

"What? A case?" Damn this bad line.

The crackle on there was something else, and Gilles had the impression from a quick intake of breath, that there were others on the line. Ah, yes. The old party line.

"A case?"

"Yes, Gilles. A case."

His mind hit on that voice.

"Inspector Mathieu...?" Nicholas Mathieu, his immediate superior.

Merde.

"Yes. Inspector Mathieu. Who in the hell did you think it was?" Mathieu had his orders and getting through to the man had been a bit of a chore with the antique phone system in that part of the world.

Think quick.

"I'm sorry, sir. Bad line. I can hardly hear you."

There was a quick pause.

"Ah...if you don't mind me asking, sir. I am on vacation."

"Yes, and we're dreadfully sorry about all that."

"Ah..." There was no saying no.

Gilles bit back his rising irritation.

Ann was ill. She hadn't been out of Paris in years. She hadn't seen her parents in a year and a half. She had tuberculosis. His wife was dying, and dying very slowly. They both knew it and so should the damned department.

"Sir."

"Look Gilles, you're being asked-for in all the right places."

A detective sergeant in the Sureté, Gilles had written his exam. It took time to assess the results from all of those candidates. No one would know the results for quite some time, and they didn't always accept all of the qualified people. There were only so many Inspector jobs going around.

"Okay, ah. What's this all about, Inspector Mathieu?"

The line was very clear all of a sudden, or had it just gone completely? But Gilles, staring out through the back door into a bright sunny day, with the mountainside a hundred and fifty metres away and the dark boughs of conifers hanging low between here and there, caught a long sigh from the other end.

The Inspector said a bad word.

Maintenon's eyebrows rose, and he waited.

"Go on, sir."

"It's complicated, Gilles. You might even say that you are going to hate it. It's a cold case, Gilles—and a man's life is at stake. Maybe even a very important man. I don't really know myself. This one's out of my hands. They're not telling me anything very much. It's hard to say."

"Um, yes. Sir. So. What exactly do you want me to do about it?" It came out in a rush, perhaps not the best sort of diplomacy with a senior officer. "Ann is ill. She deserves better than this."

He ground his jaws, eyes going hard and his breath very tight in his throat. The big lump in there might have something to do with it. He swallowed, hard, panting through the nostrils like a bull in the arena after a couple of good pricks with the bandarillas.

My sympathies lie with the bull.

"I'm sorry, Gilles. But we can certainly make it up to you, ah, later." Mathieu was apologetic, knowing full well what he was asking.

Gilles could turn him down, and probably should. Mathieu understood the career implications, and everything there was to know about pressure tactics, but otherwise he was pulling for Gilles' promotion.

"Very well." Gilles's jaw moved back and forth and he fought any urge to express resentment or reluctance. "Sir."

It had better be bloody well important.

"Have you ever heard of the novelist Aldrich Tobias?"

Oh, merde.

"Ah, yes, sir. I have."

Aldrich Tobias had won numerous awards, but never the big one, le Concordat de Littéraire, according to press accounts. He was also awaiting the guillotine. His date of execution, as Gilles remembered, couldn't be all that far off. He'd killed a bunch of women and girls, and had been duly caught, convicted in a court of law, vilified on the front pages of the newspapers, and ultimately sentenced to death. A real crazy one, with lots of psycho-sexual and ritual aspects to the case. Not directly involved, he'd followed it as best he could with his usual interest in all things homicide.

"You've got to be kidding me." That one was like a punch in the guts.

"I'm sorry, Gilles. But we really do need you to look into this. Just so we can sign off on the man with a clear conscience, non?"

"Oh, God. But why, ah...Nicholas?"

"Ours is not to reason why, Gilles. Ours is but to do."

Or die.

Sullen stubbornness came over Gilles. He was looking at the sublime blaze of hot sun on that incomparable mountainside, after all.

I was looking forward to this...or so he told himself.

This was my home, once upon a time...

"At least let me have one damned day with my family. Sir."

His raised voice could be heard in the salon, and Henrietta was right there in the kitchen door, wringing her tea-towel and trying to interpret what was happening from his side of the conversation.

"Very well, Gilles. The odds are there's not much in it, and he's a guilty man. The trouble is that the President himself is interested in his case. Who knows, Gilles. Maybe we can find some extenuating circumstances. Maybe he really was mad, you know? Maybe you can help the man out, Gilles. He gets life on Devil's Island, or locked up in the crazy-house somewhere. The president's conscience is satisfied. His fans have cause to mourn, and agitate, and demonstrate, riot in the streets, and he can write more books. Right? Or whatever. But it sure would be a big favor if you could do it."

Detective Sergeant Maintenon.

Inspector Maintenon.

"...there are no more appeals, Gilles. He's a dead man. And that's where you come in."

The choice is all mine, and it really ought to be harder than this.

"Very well, sir." Gilles' heart sank as soon as the words came out of his mouth. "Ah, yes. Of course."

"Thank you, Gilles."

Argh.

He had to break the news to Ann, and his sister.

Pierre was off at work. Raymond and the girls would be bitterly disappointed, or was he merely kidding himself?

Merde.

The Inspector was still talking.

Somebody had been doing their research. The Inspector had it all mapped out.

Inspector Mathieu told him exactly when they would expect him home. If he and Ann hustled, they might be back by tomorrow, at midnight.

Maintenon really didn't think they could do it, but the morning after that was barely possible.

Hanging up, he glanced at his watch.

Damn them.

God damn them all to hell.

Merde.

Chapter Two

It was a hasty departure and a sad goodbye.

After two hours in the ramshackle taxi-cab of Guillaume Lemieux, one of the few willing to tackle the trip, they arrived in Toulouse. There was an interminable wait at the station with a score of other bleary-eyed passengers. These were mostly male. One or two even looked Ann's way in a speculative fashion, unabashed by Maintenon hovering at her side. When Ann coughed blood into her handkerchief, Gilles seethed. He clung to her and what once was, after they had their compartment and their seats. Maybe the other males didn't see that part, or maybe they just didn't care. Maybe they were just predators. Perhaps all men were predators. Some men had better manners. That was the only difference between a predator and a gentleman.

To say his thoughts were bleak would have been an understatement.

The train rattled along, up one saddle-back and down the next.

"Don't worry my love, it will be all right." Her patience, her exhaustion tore at him.

The pale skin, the agonized breathing, the big dark circles under her eyes, ate at him.

He couldn't argue with her. He no longer had the heart. Why burden her with his anger.

But.

The word gnawed at him.

It was like he was killing her with all of this. The idea that he could abandon Ann to his relatives had crossed their minds. His sister had even offered. The big problem was that Gilles didn't know how long any given case might take. Ann might have had an easier time of it if she simply stayed for a while. For all they knew, he'd be back in two days.

Unfortunately, this one had the sound of a real doozie.

They had nine or ten hours on the overnight train to Paris. He would just have time to take her home and then he could be at the Quai for nine o'clock. For them, it would be just another effing morning on the job. He had to keep that in mind. To the professional officer, family could come in second place sometimes. It was the same for everyone, of course, but it got worse the closer one got to the top. It was something to consider. The trouble was the money—the jump in pay would be considerable, assuming he made the grade.

The night train was an institution, and hailed as a miracle of modern technology. It was somewhat better than not having one. That was about all Gilles could say for it. He tried to be objective, in spite of his irritation. The lights rumbled past as the train traversed another nameless village, asleep now with only its sparse street lighting, pallid, yellow and cold.

They were both suffering, and had been for some time.

The reflection of her emaciated face haunted him in the window of the carriage. She slept, huddled against his warm shoulder, so that he dare not move. They had talked of putting her into a sanatorium. The trip south was supposed to be a refreshing break for Ann. The hot, dry air of the south was said to be good for those with her ailment. She had been diagnosed long ago with tuberculosis and they both knew they were putting off the inevitable.

Thanks to Aldrich Tobias, they were heading straight back to the soot, the grime and the stress of the big city and the moist, hot and polluted air of northern France.

***

While some could sleep in the heaving, pitching berths aboard the train, Maintenon had found it a fitful night. All of his dreams were just in the corners of his vision. Whenever he turned to look, they vanished, leaving an impression of his father, whom he'd once thought cruel. The old man had been gone for over twenty years now. It was his subconscious talking to him. His father wasn't so much cruel as poverty-stricken, thought Gilles.

The poor man couldn't afford to give an inch.

The blue rings around Ann's eyes, and flecks of dried blood in the corners of her mouth were a real kick in the solar plexus first thing in the morning.

It all added up so nicely.

Gilles wondered if a career was really worth it sometimes. The bitter truth was that it was just a job, admittedly a rather high-paying one for one whose roots were humble. They needed it to eat—to have a home, and to live in the glittering big city in the first place. He needed the money to look after Ann or he might have quit before now. A strange admission, but a sign of the deep and profound depression he had been living with for quite some time. Maintenon had learned to live with it without being overly demonstrative.

If one thought of it only in terms of employment, it was a very good job.

He soldiered on, for all of their sakes.

Even so, his anger was just under the surface as the cab pulled up in front of the Quai. It was pissing down rain. His eyes felt like freshly-sandpapered radishes in their sockets and hadn't looked much better in the bathroom mirror this morning.

After a quick check at the front desk, he went straight up to the Director's office. The place was an oasis of quiet and sanity compared to the more functional working spaces.

This was not a criticism. It was more of an observation.

He shook hands with Inspector Rene Lavoie, and a Captain Leduc, described as an emissary from the President of the Republic, and Le Directeur, Jean Chiappe. Chiappe was at the top of the food chain. One or two others rated a quick nod. They were all busy men.

"Ahem."

Gilles listened.

"...our new president, Gaston Doumergue—" Chiappe paused. "Well. He's very interested in the Tobias case. In fact, he honestly believes that Tobias is innocent. And I have to admit, Gilles, the president's logic, is...er, compelling."

He coughed into his hand, holding Gilles' eye as Capitaine Leduc looked studiously uninterested in such obvious cues.

"Listen well, Gilles. We really don't have much time." He mentioned the date of Tobias' execution, June 27.

"Good lord!"

Chiappe's eyes bored into Gilles' and then wavered slightly.

"Yes, it's very tight."

Chiappe could hardly call their new president a radical in front of Leduc. Anti-clerical, Doumergue was the first Protestant President in the nation's history.

At one time the fellow would have been burned at the stake just for his thoughts.

Doumergue was a single man, which was suspicious in and of itself. It was whispered that he might be an atheist. Devil-worship or transvestitism would be less shocking. Yet he had swept to power on a wave of popularity. It was a sign that things were changing in spite of persistent and long-standing conservative efforts to hold it together, and the equally long-standing efforts of communists and socialists to usurp it. Doumergue was nothing if not a compromise.

According to the press, Doumergue possessed charisma.

This explained much that was otherwise unfathomable, at least in their own humble opinions.

Jean Chiappe reached for his pipe.

Capitaine Leduc spoke up.

"Reaching out on this matter. It was one of Monsieur le President's first acts in office."

Gilles sat comfortably at ease, but attentive in his deep leather armchair. Chiappe was known to pull out the cognac decanter, but perhaps because of Leduc's presence, there was no sign of it today. Just as well, really. The day was still way too young.

"Just the facts, please." That was me, wasn't it?

That tiredness would make him careless, sooner or later.

Leduc began.

"The fact is, that the President likes Tobias' books. He's often said that if he hadn't entered politics, he might have made a pretty good detective. He loves the mystery, you see. And he likes to think he might have solved one or two himself. It's the sort of thing...ah, remember what Renoir said—if God hadn't created breasts, I would never have become a painter—that sort of throwaway line that political types use without any really deep meaning. Tobias is very well regarded among the readers, although a bit of a cranky character to deal with. The President feels that may, at least partly, be at the root cause of his present predicament." There was probably more to it, but Leduc was preaching to the choir, having been thoroughly reassured by Chiappe.

Now that Gilles was on the scene, everything would be taken care of. It was unwritten, but legible upon the stale air of this room, all masculine efficiency and pretensions of self-indulgence.

"So they have a personal relationship?"

"Oh, yes. They have political leanings and move in the same crowd—or at least they used to. Now, not so much." He grinned in mawkish humor. "It may be that simple. The President simply likes Tobias, no easy feat according to some sources."

Other than that, he wasn't saying much.

Chiappe smiled dutifully. Leduc stood looking down at Maintenon in his leather chair.

He was gathering an impression of Maintenon, one he would take back to Monsieur le President.

He could almost see the thought go through the Detective-Sergeant's mind.

Politics.

And Maintenon had made the papers once or twice, fairly recently too. Big, splashy cases.

The best cops hated politics while sort of acknowledging their necessity.

"I'm not sure I follow." Gilles nostrils twitched as their new commissioner, Jean Baptiste Chiappe, tried to get the old clay pipe going.

The sound of the second match came.

Sulfur swirled about in the upper stratosphere of the high-ceilinged room, eddying behind the slow-moving fan blades. Chiappe puffed in a kind of enthusiasm, waving the match around and encouraging them to go on without him if necessary. That pipe was said to be a fixture—whatever the hell that meant that was supposed to mean.

There were a lot of things said about Chiappe, not all of them complimentary. Gilles had no real impressions. One did not just recklessly repeat any and all such wanton remarks. Gilles was a man who made up his own mind. There was more to it, of course. Maintenon was a junior officer, undistinguished, certainly so at the time. They'd only met briefly, at official functions. Gilles had been working plainclothes, high-security detail, and Chiappe had been schmoozing with the bigwigs as he called it. Jean Baptiste was also said to be a relatively competent officer, having come from the penal system. He knew his way around the system. So it was said. There was a sharp distinction between working cops and the more political animals haunting the upper castes of the department. Maintenon knew his place, and would have resented being asked to take sides. Some of these fellows did pretty well for themselves, and some of them weren't above stirring the honey-pot from time to time. They had just acquired a new government...

That's just the way it is, sometimes.

Maintenon was dying for a smoke, but preferred not to display any weakness in front of the stiff and formal Leduc. He was clearly an ascetic man judging by the thin black mustache, white gloves and polished black swagger-stick. Leduc's cheeks shone with physical fitness and a very close shave, rather than brutish strength. His hat looked as hard as a rock, although Gilles for one never set a hat down on any chair, not in any house or place of human intercourse. There would be no sweat stains inside of that hat, thought Gilles. Leduc would have it replaced immediately.

Leduc would do calisthenics beside his army cot upon awakening in the morning.

Leduc's almost colorless blue eyes pierced Maintenon in assessment, giving the impression that he liked what he saw. The captain turned and paced the room, a little stiffly as befitted his high status and military background, stick tucked under his left arm, his hands behind his back and thinking aloud. He turned around. He ran a free hand over his slicked-back blonde hair.

"Just the facts. Very well then. The right man for the job—" This in an aside to Jean Chiappe.

Chiappe shrugged. That piercing glance impaled Archambault, who shifted in his seat.

Gilles colored slightly, eyes falling to examine his fingernails.

Leduc turned. He spoke, rather loudly, in the general direction of the big windows.

"Thirteen women and girls, all slashed up. Dead, some of them in classic posed positions..."

The blades were very sharp—the killer spent time with his tools.

In some incidents, the tools had been brought with him, and taken away again. In other incidents, the killer used what was handy. The killer must have worn gloves in virtually all circumstances. There was some disparity in the modus operandi. This had been conveniently explained or excused away by the imaginative occupation and the published works of the accused. Apparently, the fictional crimes written by Monsieur Tobias ran the gamut from A to Z.

The prosecution hinted darkly, 'he did his research...'

The jury seemed to like it.

Hmn.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: he did his research.

There was a list of similarities or correspondences, in each and every case, with chapters from Tobias' books. Their killer had taken pride in his work—just like Tobias.

He was a self-professed artisan. Messages had been scrawled in blood, Gilles recalled that well enough.

"And the modus operandi fits with scenes and chapters from a number of Tobias' books. Yes, I know all of that." Gilles hadn't worked the case, but was familiar enough from newspaper accounts and talk among members of the force. "Damned by his own words, as it would appear."

Nothing is ever as it appears.

The Architect of His Own Destruction—that was the title of one of Tobias' more popular books. It had come out quite recently.

That damned little internal monologue again, but Maintenon had learned to listen. The Capitaine was certainly well briefed. He was breezy, and confident. He appeared to be well-fed, and not overworked or anything. There was a mind in there, that much was certain.

"Here's the thing, Gilles. The defense didn't even bother pointing out the differences from killing to killing—the prosecutor, a young fellow, very ambitious, and who was very competent, would have simply said the fellow was trying to muddy the waters, or drag a red herring across the trail. He was reenacting scenes from his books, having lost the ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality. He panicked, and didn't have time. And yet, they also say he wanted to be caught. This was the major contradiction. The defense knew it. Tobias, who should have knocked them dead, Gilles, must have been a very bad witness in his legal team's opinion, or they should have put him on. And. Everyone was so convinced that he did it. All the man did was to plead not guilty. Even if he took the stand, I doubt if it would have made much difference. Then there were the psychological ramifications."

They hardly had to sell Gilles on the investigation. All it really took was orders—

"Was Tobias insane?"

Chiappe spoke up.

"By the time our shrinks get to them, they're all insane, Gilles." He was referring to the prison doctors, who would make periodic health and welfare assessments of the condemned. "That sort of crime does tend to speak for itself. If we charge an individual, especially with that sort of offence, the jury is already halfway there. We all know that."

No one had ever claimed the system was perfect. The fact that it worked as well as it did was some kind of modern miracle. This was a line from one of Chiappe's little speeches.

Maintenon asked again.

"Was Tobias insane?"

Leduc shrugged. He exhaled, reluctantly as it would seem. He pieced words together.

"Not as far as we can determine. He still insists that he is innocent, and after a time, the shrinks say, ah...it becomes so convincing, and the subject is so convinced, that they really can't tell anymore. Not with any degree of certainty. Don't forget, there was some physical evidence."

Maintenon's pulse hardened in his veins. We have a case. We have something to go on.

That's all that matters sometimes.

"So what's the big deal? What makes anyone think he's innocent?"

"It's tortuous logic, Gilles." Chiappe grinned. "The moment I heard it, I thought of you."

He took in the Capitaine.

"Gilles is one of our most promising young officers."

Leduc raised his eyebrows and smiled.

"That, is exactly what we need. A promising young officer, and one with an impeccable service record and a reputation for getting at the truth..." He left further words hanging.

Chiappe nodded.

"Okay. The fingerprint. One fingerprint." The Director regarded Gilles. "And even, oddly enough, the chapters of the book aspect of it. Anyone could have read those books, Gilles."

"Ah." Gilles used his own big brown eyes to good effect, and Leduc grinned briefly.

"Yes—but. There was one of his fingerprints on a figurine. It was a bronze vase in one of the girls' residences..." The Capitaine studied his notes for a moment. "Sorry, a statuette."

Maintenon bit his lip. One fingerprint—on a portable object. Yes, it could be so. And without the books, there was virtually nothing else to implicate Aldrich Tobias.

He glanced at Chiappe. When in doubt, improvise, adapt, and overcome.

"The hair." The hair, says Chiappe.

A single hair, found at one crime scene, and no one could say whose it was—only that it wasn't the victim, and neither did it belong to Tobias. It did not belong to any of Tobias' family members, no one in the victim's apartment building, nor to any of the victim's family. A hair found in a compromising position, as Gilles recalled hazily. There was that whole sexual aspect of the case. If nothing else, it would be interesting to look into.

"How did the prosecution account for that?"

"They didn't bother bringing it up at the trial." They had merely disclosed it in pre-trial briefs, hoping to get an offer from Tobias' attorney.

Life for a confession.

Consequently, there was nothing much for the defense to shoot down. They were gambling all the way. Since Tobias didn't take the stand, the defense had no case at all. It really didn't take much to tip the balance in a high-stakes game.

"I know that look." Chiappe winked at Leduc, who nodded stiffly.

"Someone has been doing some thinking." Gilles doubted very strongly it was the President.

More politics...merde.

"Better late than never, Gilles. The thing is that we have only a couple of weeks until the execution."

It was first-name basis now.

They must want it pretty bad.

"Yes, that's cutting it fine." Gilles shrugged. "Okay. I'll do it."

It was no skin off of his nose. His curiosity had definitely been piqued. Someone had some doubts. Gilles had read a few of Tobias' books. He might have one or two still on the shelf, although he had found them so-so from the police procedural standpoint. Gilles collected a certain kind of book, and re-read them from time to time. It was part of his personal ritual life. It was one of the little things that cleansed the mind and the soul. Gilles was a collector of mystery novels, a few at least. His collection consisted more of non-fiction books from world experts on criminal science. Those books had kept him going at times, all the years of study and hard work just to get a foot in the door. The books were highly-symbolic. Maybe that was why they needed him. He'd actually read the things, where others might just display them in fine leather-bound covers and never crack one open.

This was a special case.

It's not that the man Tobias wasn't a good writer, but he had this dark, pessimistic outlook, rife with a certain anti-social commentary. And, their new president was a radical, possibly even an out-and-out fascist.

The best thing that could be said about the new government was that it was weak, and not necessarily evil in intention. Like their predecessors, the new regime was slightly corrupt and vaguely incompetent. They seemed quite muddled at times. It said a lot about the times they lived in, with political and moral stupidity a kind of saving grace these days, and if so, Maintenon for one would take it rather than leave it.

He really didn't know what else to suggest.

It had always been the weakness of democracy, hadn't it? And the alternatives were there for all to see. It was all over the news. Mussolini was talking tough again. But then, Mussolini was always talking. It was something that could not be ignored. The Tour got ten times the air-time.

Times had indeed changed, and not for the better. Maintenon was more a supporter of a kind of social democracy, a liberation of all social classes, perhaps an uplifting of society in general. He couldn't deny that certain Catholic values came into play, even though under the façade, the Church was as corrupt as anything else in this country these days. It always had been, as any thinking man knew. He couldn't escape his upbringing, and a kind of faith had been a big influence in his life. It was the sort of viewpoint one didn't express too stridently these days, not in any kind of public, professional position. Politics had become defeatist and even Nihilist, bordering on anarchist in some quarters. He didn't have a lot of patience with that sort of thinking.

"Yeah, what the hell. I've always wanted to meet him."

Before it's too late.

Chiappe stared coldly at Gilles. Gilles stared right back.

Leduc nodded sharply, the glint of humor barely visible but there nevertheless. He must know exactly what they were asking. When the President mentioned Gilles, someone very much like Leduc would have made quiet inquiries before moving ahead.

The phone rang, and Chiappe's personal assistant Benjamin, seated at a desk behind and to Gilles' right, spoke softly into it, tapping his typewriter keys in an oddly muffled manner. Chiappe looked over. Apparently reassured by what he saw, he brought his attention back.

The room was very warm.

"The problem with the legal process, is that there is no real legal way, no fool-proof way to intervene once it gets going. They're going to execute him, come hell or high water. There's just no way the President can step in, not without sufficient grounds. It's the egregious nature of the crimes, the sensation. The new government must be spotless morally, beyond question. If it is to have any positive effect. As I'm sure you would agree. Gilles. The whole thing is just too easy. It's like he laid it all out for us, beginning years in advance. Then he goes out and kills all these people over the course of about a year and a half? That is if we accept, the, ah...the Nelson girl, who was killed during the same time frame."

Leduc had obviously read the file. He was one up on Gilles.

The Nelson girl. He made a mental note of it.

"That one was one of the few instances where we could at least find some other reasonable suspect, Gilles." Baptiste Archambault had been silent so far.

A thickset man with long, mousy hair combed over the right side, he wore his habitual brown suit and heavy-soled shoes which had kicked more than one dangerous suspect into submission. He took his glasses off and cleaned them thoroughly. He had worked the original case under Chief Inspector Eugene Allard.

Archambault cleared his throat.

"I always thought her no-good boyfriend hacked her up in a fit of rage one night. He got creative in disposing of the body, thinking to throw suspicion onto some kind of sensational serial slasher. There's always something going on to that effect in the news. I said so at the time." Nelson was an artist or student living abroad, a rich single girl with all of their idiosyncratic lifestyles. "She'd had sexual intercourse before her death, and of course once they fixated on Tobias..."

Somebody was always getting cut up somewhere.

"Tobias has the the most common blood-type." Unfortunately, so had fifteen or twenty million other Frenchmen, according to Chiappe. "The trouble lies in separating the different types out and proving whether he was, or was not there."

It wasn't an exact science.

At the time of his arrest, Tobias had no recent cuts or scars, but that was months later, in terms of the bulk of the killings.

The rest was left unsaid.

Gilles thought it over as the Capitaine continued.

Normal French girls really didn't live like that unless they were orphans, whores, or rich and divorced. As he recalled, Nelson didn't quite fit that profile. The trouble with the other girls was the posing of the bodies and crime scenes, the sometimes ritual nature of the killings—and the mirror-like correspondence to killings written by Aldrich Tobias into his many novels. When some anonymous critic had brought it up to some journalist, whose eyes must have lit up when he heard that one, the cat was very much out of the bag.

It was only one quick phone call to one of the investigating officers and all of a sudden the whole thing made a sick kind of sense. Archambault explained that somehow many of the original investigating officers knew about the call, and yet none of them could quite say who they heard about it from, or who had actually taken the call.

Wasn't that suspicious in itself?

Not really, once you knew how things really worked around here.

"And all of that, that's what the jury saw?"

"Yes."

Gilles nodded.

"Very well."

Chiappe nodded and Leduc looked pleased. Gilles stood and they shook hands.

The captain gave him a quick salute, almost unconscious of what he was doing, and popped a quick little bow to Chiappe. With a nod at Archambault, he picked up his briefcase, lighter by one small letter in its soft white envelope with Maintenon's name on it, and left without further ado.

Chiappe handed Gilles the envelope and the others watched in fascination as Gilles quickly skimmed through it.

"So. What's that, then? Your commission, your letters of marque?" Archambault chuckled. "I have to admit. I'm impressed."

Gilles nodded and bit his lip.

"Oh, nothing much." He carefully refolded it.

Archambault looked suitably disappointed at his not sharing the missive with all concerned.

Tucking the tab in properly, Gilles thoughtfully put it in his inner breast pocket, ignoring their scrutiny. He was under no orders to share it and so he didn't. Call it a kind of revenge.

Just a little personal note from the President. His thoughts of Ann were dark and deep, but she would probably like to see it. She might even be thrilled. His own feelings were mixed.

Chiappe, standing right there, clapped him on the upper arm.

"All resources are at your disposal. You can have anyone you need."

He was dismissed.

He and Archambault left le Directeur's office as Gilles mind swarmed with the necessary details.

One had to start somewhere.

Chapter Three

Arriving back at their cramped little squad room, Gilles headed for his small corner desk and Archambault went straight to the coffee pot. A fly buzzed, trapped by the screen and attracted by the light. It had no other options, unable to think its way out of the puzzle.

"Lord." In the few days he'd been gone, someone, pressed for space and with a heavy case-load, had lined his desk with rows of files in thick stacks.

"Oh. Damn. That one's Firmin's." Jean took his time, poured out a cup of the precious black fluid and put a heaping tea-spoon of sugar in it.

He had learned to drink it any way it came. There was rarely cream this high up in the building.

Some said the place ran on coffee and persistence.

The flics never gave up—and that took a lot of coffee, a hell of a lot some days. Archambault stood there with this look on his face, as if seeing it all for the first time.

He sipped thoughtfully as Gilles cursed under his breath. Firmin's desk was the usual jumble and it was clear he couldn't just dump it all there.

He opted for stacking Firmin's desk chair, the tall pile sloping up the back but secured to some extent by the curve of its back. He had a few more files. With a spreading motion, using the back of his left forearm, he made a rectangular swipe across the front and centre of Firmin's desk. He piled them there.

Chiappe's assistant had taken charge of several dozen banker's-boxes of files from the Tobias case and would be bringing them up on a cart. He'd be here any minute. That was the theory.

Stranger things had happened.

"So. Gilles." Archambault's humorous look was upon him. "Aren't we the lucky ones."

Baptiste Archambault, with that hang-dog face, sagging jowls, broken knob of a nose, and bushy black eyebrows, shrugged beefy shoulders in philosophic contemplation.

"Huh. All resources are at your disposal, he says." Gilles didn't look happy. "The trouble with all of this, is that it takes one mind, and a hell of a lot of time, to read all of those reports."

There was only so much time. His brain would have to hold all of this.

Killing after killing and girl after girl. The more information there was, the more there was to digest, and the more that could be missed. The only way to know was to dig in, and the stuff wasn't even there yet.

"What about you, Baptiste?" Gilles moved to the coffeepot even as voices and wheels were heard in the outer corridor. "Why is the Director rubbing your nose in it?"

It was a stab in the dark, but a good one.

Archambault grinned crookedly, sitting behind his desk now and placing the cup carefully down. He reached for one of his interminable cigarillos, a habit Gilles had picked up by a kind of osmosis.

Archambault snapped a match. He sucked smoke into his lungs and let some of it back out through his nostrils. Uncharacteristically for him, he gagged and choked on the first puff, his face reddening as he struggled for air.

At last, he was done with his little coughing fit.

"I'm the highest-ranking surviving officer, and someone has to take responsibility." It seemed that his former boss, the senior investigating officer, had been struck and killed in a hit-and run several weeks or months after Tobias' arrest. "As to what I can actually remember, all of two years later...hmn. That's a very good question."

At least he had read all the material. Archambault had been in on it right from the start, beginning with his own investigation of a murdered prostitute.

Gilles' head swiveled on his neck as he turned to regard Archambault with mouth slightly open.

"Pardonnez moi? What did you just say?"

"It's just that Inspector Allard was killed by a car. But, by that time we had Tobias in the bucket."

Allard, Allard. Gilles hadn't known the fellow. At the time, it was all very sad and made all the papers. There were pictures of Allard's wife and young son standing graveside at the funeral. He recalled that much. Allard was a decorated officer, and barely forty years old.

At that exact instant the door thumped open, slamming against the wall. Fouad, an Algerian, their pet Tuareg as they called him, came in pushing a heavily-loaded cart. With him was Chiappe's pet assistant Benjamin, his long white hands flapping around in the background. The pair began loading boxes up onto Gilles' freshly-cleared desk.

"Hello!"

"Hello, Fouad."

Gilles indicated a half a square metre of empty floor space beside his desk. Fouad nodded, and put the rest down there.

"I'm saying that Inspector Allard was killed by a hit and run driver..."

"That seems like a bit of a coincidence, doesn't it?"

"Goodbye!"

"Yes, thank, Fouad. Thank you, Benjamin." The door slammed shut and the cart rumbled back down the hallway.

Archamault sat up a little straighter, eyebrows climbing.

"Yeah, now that you mention it. It does, doesn't it?"

Baptiste Archambault sat there with the cup in his hand, chewing on his lip and staring out of the window, way up under the roof of the Quai D'Orfevres.

***

His friend, a reporter and photographer for le Temps, was at his desk when Gilles called.

"Hector."

"Gilles. What can I do for you?"

Gilles explained, very briefly, what he was looking for. Vachon would be scribbling merrily away, mind racing with the implications.

"Hmn." The line went quiet. "Interesting."

"Yes." Why not start a rumor? "There are second thoughts about the Tobias verdict."

"Hmn!"

Hector was always glad to help an old friend, especially when the favor would be returned sooner or later. Vachon scattered a lot of such seeds. The men had been cultivating each other professionally, and on a more personal level for some years. To say that they actually liked each other would be pointless. It would never be expressed in such a way.

They were both useful men with some degree of mutual respect. Nothing more.

It was all they had time for.

Hector's voice was tired but good-humored on the telephone.

"You've got yourself a real tiger by the tail this time, Gilles."

His chuckle was deep, rich and brown, the voice of a long-time smoker and burgundy-lover.

"I'll have a dig through the morgue and send some stuff over as soon as I can. Baise! When that might be is anybody's guess. However, I can tell you that Tobias is divorced. He has a daughter, who still lives with the mother. He has a rather dissolute son, kicking about town somewheres. That one thinks he's going to be a great writer someday, just like his dad, but apparently they aren't that close."

Vachon would include a few pictures in case Maintenon needed to observe them without them being aware of police interest.

"Other than that, Gilles. You're on your own."

"Tell me something I don't know. Thank you, Hector. We'll get together for a drink, ah, soon, okay?"

"Of course, Gilles. And you can tell me all about your case." He was only half kidding. "So how is Ann?"

Maintenon winced. Sooner or later, they would always ask.

"That, is still a rather touchy subject." Gilles was at work, calls went through the switchboard and there was always someone coming or going. "We'll talk later."

"So why you, Gilles?"

Maintenon had been doing some thinking about that. Never mind that he was on vacation—more than anything else, his docket had been completely cleared up (rather unusual for the industry) and he was simply available without pulling men from more pressing cases. It was the simplest explanation and sometimes that was best.

Gilles was junior officer, had the lowest seniority and presumably the least to lose. And yet he had made the papers, to the extent the President had asked for him. He wondered how much of that was pure conneries—bullshit, and whether the President had indeed ever heard of Detective-Sergeant Gilles Maintenon.

He rang off abruptly, but Vachon was a busy man and probably appreciated it as much as anything.

***

Sergeant Andre Levain was in his sixth year on the force. He had only been with the unit a few months. His desk was squeezed in beside Maintenon's. Inspector Mathieu had sent him along, which was a bit of a break because of Gilles's own low seniority. A leg man might be useful. It was terribly hard to say at this point.

Andre sat sideways on the hard maple seat. Archambault had unaccountably drifted off somewhere and hadn't come back. They could hardly blame him for that. He must have pressing work of a more rewarding nature. He would have plenty of files of his own.

The rest of the team members were out on various cases.

"So where in the hell do we start?"

Gilles sighed, having finally, after a good twenty minutes of searching, found the file for the first killing.

"At least one of us has to read the whole thing, or at least the highlights, from beginning to end." The crime scene reports were the must-reads there, and anything from the coroner. Names, addresses and phone numbers of any person or persons mentioned in any file...

Andre nodded sourly.

"And it would be better if we all did. All two of us."

Andre sighed, running his hand through hair still thick around the sides and over the ears, although that might not be for much longer. Reading was, after all, part of the job. He was getting paid for it.

He stood.

"Let me think. What you need is chronological order. And someone to weed out the chaff, before you get there."

"And?"

"Why don't you read the first file, and by that time I should have a few more lined up. Then I can start from the beginning and follow along...non?"

Gilles nodded. It made sense enough.

"What if we grab one of the interview rooms, and a couple of those portable tables?" They could lay the files and papers out, and stack them up when they found ones that corresponded to dates and cases.

This was going to take up a lot of table top. What was in the boxes had turned out to be a fearful jumble, with nothing orderly about it.

Gilles nodded. He looked up. He already had mounds of files, cast aside for the most part while looking for anything with the name Lis Deniau on the cover. She was the first, according to Leduc, and that was a logical starting point.

"Chiappe did say all resources." Gilles wondered what that might mean in actual practice, once Capitaine Leduc had gone away.

"Merde."

Levain looked up.

"Find out everything you can about that Capitaine Leduc character." Gilles might have asked Hector when he had him on the line.

The only good thing was that ideas were beginning to flow.

Levain nodded happily. This would keep him going for a while at least, but at some point he would have to pick up on page one and have a look for himself.

He reached for the phone. Someone in housekeeping would know who to call about the tables, if nothing else.

***

Things were already marginally better. Andre had rustled up a seldom-used conference room and had gotten permission from Inspector Mathieu to place it off-limits to all but invited personnel. They had gotten lucky. It was just down the hall, and on the same floor and everything. High summer, the building seemed curiously empty at times, what with the vacation roster and many of the men off. Andre had gotten the phones hooked up. As a sergeant, Andre would get a week's vacation in March. As a mere patrolman, with five years seniority, he'd been getting a week in June. It was the price of ambition, and in his case, the reward of some personal valor.

He had the scars to prove it. They would be there for life.

Gilles sat at one clean desk, reading under a bright lamp. His jacket was off and he wore a green editor's eye-shade. He was trying to put some thoughts into words, glad that he had some help with the case. His notes were still sparse. Nothing in particular struck him as he read through the Deniau file.

He and Andre had worked together before, although neither one had a dedicated partner as yet. Gilles was putting his thoughts in order.

"The key to solving the serial homicide is communication. The sharing of information, because there are so many cases, all initially investigated by different groups of people. Here we have the opposite problem." He sighed at the stacks and stacks of files, very little of which had actually been used in the prosecution of Aldrich Tobias. "We have to wade through this and look for anomalies. And one would think, interview as many of them as we can...fuck."

"Where do you want to start?" Andre had his own desk, right by the door.

He sat poised with his pencil and pad.

"Get us a God-damned calendar in here."

Andre's pencil struck like a heron grabbing a frog from the turbid green waters of the Seine.

Calendar.

"I'm thinking the wife, for one thing. Also his kids. His agent, or somebody like that. They might be able to give us a pretty good glimpse into his mind. But going at it the other way—we need to reinvestigate all, or at least some of these cases."

From the point of view that Tobias didn't do them.

In which case, who did?

Gilles went on.

"We need to talk to friends and family of some of the victims. Pick three or four promising cases and just go at it hammer-and-tongs. Assuming Tobias was involved with any of the victims, someone must have known something." And yet none of that had come out at the trial.

One would think that if anyone knew anything, surely they would have come forward.

Surely they must have mentioned it.

Their job was to check the facts. If Tobias was guilty, then there was nothing much more to be done.

The first method would be to attempt to shoot down the state's prosecution—on almost any grounds.

What if they could just do that?

At that point the investigation must invariably become much wider, much more thorough. And they had only limited time. It wasn't necessary to catch the actual killer or killers before Tobias' execution, only to find reasonable grounds for a stay of execution. Finding viable suspects in some of these cases would turn out to be impossible, after all of this time.

Cops hated to take a case once marked solved, and re-tag it unsolved.

Normally it was their job to fry them, and now the state was asking them to pull Tobias out of the frying pan. Everything about the thing was completely outside of their normal set of working assumptions.

Levain nodded.

"We don't have a phone book. Incidentally."

Gilles grimaced, then grinned.

"Thank you." Gilles put his head down and began to read all about murder victim number four.

Levain tipped his head in acknowledgement. Well, it wasn't his ass on the line and Maintenon had surprised the whole bunch of them more than once.

He wouldn't put it past this guy.

Andre's hand was on the knob. Maintenon's head came up again.

"And another thing, Andre."

"What's that, Boss?"

Gilles threw the file he was reading down in disgust.

"We really are deep in the shit." He glanced up at the clock.

Three-thirty p.m. His eyes found Andre's.

"Why do you say that, Boss?"

"Because in the first four cases, one is for lust, one is for the thrill, one is clearly about control and punishment of women, and one is for good old-fashioned...ah, necrophilia."

Maintenon had been proclaimed an expert in psychological crimes, based on one or two small comments made while being interviewed by the press. Andre knew all that. Now he was seeing the fellow in action. It would be well to listen.

Gilles pursed up his lips.

"I don't doubt Tobias wrote such a thing—or many such things. But it would be an unusual killer who exhibited all of these tendencies in such a short period of time."

He bit his lip, lost in thought.

Andre's eyes glinted. He straightened, standing casually, the phone book forgotten.

"What in the hell are you saying?" Andre knew very well what Gilles was saying.

"That Monsieur Tobias is almost undoubtedly innocent." Gilles lifted a hand. "Yeah, somebody has been doing some thinking. But who, and why, and when?"

Someone upstairs. Somebody really, really big.

Levain watched the eyes, always a fascination. Gilles was off somewhere.

Maintenon's hand hovered over the telephone.

His eyes were vacant and far away.

The hand fell to the desk again.

No. Let them stew a while. But it would be handy to have some more manpower. At least now he had a little leverage.

"Andre."

"Yes?"

"The phone book."

Gilles rose as Andre left the room in some confusion, the thin-paneled door thumping against the frame but not latching properly. Gilles ignored it as it swung back into the half-open position.

"Yeah, the only question..." Gilles placed his hands behind his back. "...is who done it?"

At one time, that would have brought the ghost of a smile. Not anymore...

He began to pace back and forth, back and forth. His face was tight with concentration, but he wasn't getting much. The blank walls held no inspiration. The inner tiers of rooms had no windows, which was handy in that it prevented desperate suspects from jumping out of them. Hopefully some thoughts would leap out at him. It was also desperately quiet.

He looked at the clock again.

They were making progress. Surely he had earned a cup of coffee and a smoke. In a little more than an hour he would be back at home with Ann and all of this could go straight to hell.

Now it was Maintenon's hand on the door-knob. He needed to get out of their claustrophobic little space for a few minutes.

He sighed, deeply.

With a case like this, it was better to just dive right in.

There was still that small streak of rebellion in him.

Chapter Four

"My former husband was a wonderful man and a very good provider." The former Madame Tobias sat across from Gilles, with Andre seated off to one side with his note-book at the ready. "I loved him very much. I still do, I suppose."

Her lips flattened and she looked away, out of the curving bay window, set up high, and off into the depths of the hazy blue air in the treetops lining the boulevard below. It was a beautifully warm day, and Gilles had the suggestion of sweat under the armpits. The breeze was warming the room rather than cooling it, and Maintenon had the impression she had opened the curtains just for them. Solange Tobias sat, hands in her lap and back straight on the left side of a couch that was colorful red flowers with swirling, very dark green foliage on a white fabric background. The place was full of plants, flowers and great swaths of small pictures adorned an otherwise blank end wall opposite the archway. Her thick red hair, cut relatively short in response to modern conditions—no Rapunzel-like locks hanging down to her knees for this one. Hers was professionally styled in something asymmetrical and very short at the back.

She lived in an upscale pension-style flat in the rather Bohemian 14th Arrondissement of the city. Traditionally home to many artists and other performers, as Levain would say, her flat was modern, tasteful and very open with the Scandinavian furnishings and a distinct Bauhaus feel. East and west sides of the room had windows, facing a very small garden out the rear window.

Out front, it was a quiet cul-de-sac lined with a few small trees.

On the other side of the hall was a small kitchen and bathroom. She had the floor above as well, with three bedrooms. According to her, one was quite good but the others were small. She seemed comfortable with this aspect of the conversation. It had once been the family home and so that was why Gilles was asking. There was a small bathroom on the upper level and she had sufficient income. There was a little money of her own and a settlement from Tobias. Solange enjoyed decorating, entertaining and going out, but nothing excessive as she put it.

So far she hadn't offered the tour and they hadn't asked. It might come to that, thought Gilles.

Gilles knew some of this from a glossy home and garden magazine Vachon had been thoughtful enough to provide.

Know your ground, know your quarry, as someone smart once said. Know thyself, as someone even smarter had once said.

He wasn't scribbling anything just yet, more intent on taking a good look at her.

Solange was in her early forties and still attractive, wearing a grey knit dress just below the knee and soft brown leather pumps. A string of pearls, matching earrings and the scent of Jasmine completed a picture of affluence and effortless style. Her feet were nicely tanned through the open-toed sandals and they weren't lumpy or deformed from the abominable shoes women forced themselves to wear in the hopes of attracting the right male counterpart.

"I hope you will forgive us, Madame." Gilles was apologetic.

He had no idea of where to start or what he might be hunting for.

"Can you tell us why you, er...divorced?"

"Yes, Sergeant. Aldrich fell in love with another woman."

There was silence, as Gilles took a moment to appreciate the cultural contrast of the black and red lacquer Chinoiserie bureau, dynasty vases, and the walnut paneling on the walls. Chintz curtains billowed in and out with the warm breezes of June. The house was an oasis of cool and calm. She had a fluted crystal vase of irises on a sideboard and their scent filled the room with their sweetness.

"Did you confront him?"

"Yes." Her eyes were down, demure, defiant, and yet also defeated or something indefinable.

They came up and flashed with strong emotion.

Solange had never quite gotten used to the idea.

She was a very confident, even accomplished woman, and yet she had never known real work, or privation, or trial, or sacrifice. Any simple injustices she had suffered must have been quite trivial up until now. This interview had to be quite threatening.

"You're doing very well, Madame." Andre scratched away at his notes.

"What was her name?" Gilles held her eyes until they fell away.

"I have no idea, Detective-Sergeant Maintenon."

The mask of formality had gone up. Until then, she had been cooperative, even friendly. Gilles took her back to safer ground.

"And how do you feel about the possibility that he may be innocent—wrongfully convicted and that we are taking an interest again?" He cleared his throat. "We may be able to save your husband yet, with a little help. And maybe a little luck."

She shrugged, giving Levain a quick glance as he wrote something on his pad.

Turning back, she made a quirky move with her mouth, which was mobile and expressive.

"I'm happy for him. Honestly—I've always found it so hard to imagine him like that." She engaged fully with Maintenon again. "It really was completely out of character, that is...if he really did all that."

"What do you mean?"

She hesitated.

"Well."

Gilles glanced at Andre. Andre closed the notebook, and gave her a nod.

"It's all right, Madame. I can assure you of complete discretion. But what was your husband like, ah, sexually?"

There was the hint of a blush high up on her wide cheekbones and her eyes came up in a kind of level look.

"Very good, Sergeant." Her eyes slid to Andre and back again.

She blushed fiercely. Perhaps it helped that Gilles blushed as well. It was a tough question to ask. It would be even harder to answer it honestly.

"He seemed perfectly normal in all respects."

"And there was no sign of any kind of deviant behavior, not in all the time..." Gilles consulted his notes. "The twenty-three, twenty-four years you were married?"

She shook her head.

"I always thought we were pretty happy...in that regard."

Andre cleared his throat with a small, dry cough.

"Please excuse us, Madame. I know this is terribly personal. But what sort of things, you know, er...did Tobias enjoy?" By some process of osmosis, he was hoping she knew what he meant—he was asking about the really weird stuff with ropes and whips, chains and sharp implements.

He stared at her earnestly, and she blushed furiously, eyes darting back and forth between them.

"I am so sorry, Madame, of course you don't need to answer that question if it's too, ah, uncomfortable..." Gilles hovered over the last word.

"No...I don't mind. Tobias liked...well, all sorts of things...all the usual things, gentlemen. But there was nothing violent, or even deviant, about him. Honestly, he seemed quite normal. The whole notion that he had found another woman was quite absurd. It was the worst shock I had ever received." She bit down, hard. "We played a few games...innocent games."

"I see."

She came back to Maintenon.

"You have another question...?"

He nodded, soberly.

"Many, Madame."

That one smartened the both of them up. He cleared his throat, disengaging for a moment.

"Did you ever have cause to suspect infidelity, at any point earlier in the marriage?" Levain again, soft-voiced and sympathetic.

"No."

She looked again at Gilles, the obvious leader.

"So, in other words, this was the first time?"

"Yes."

"Very good, Madame. Were you and he active, right up until the very end?"

She heaved a sigh and slumped a little on the couch.

"Yes. Possibly even afterwards."

One of the items the over-enthusiastic prosecution had made out of nothing at Tobias' trial was the separation from his wife. The implication was that he had gone mad for lack of a sexual outlet. Psychology was all sexual, of course. Yet, no one had asked the simplest, most obvious questions, at least not as far as he could make out from the small pile of case notes he'd managed to read so far. It occurred to Gilles that he was getting quite a little list of items himself.

So.

The couple had gotten back together once or twice, a polite euphemism, after the breakup.

Sometimes good sex helped to rekindle a romance. She said she'd gotten some advice from a friend. She and Aldrich had given it an honest try, in her view.

Once the flames of suspicion and resentment had been lit, (on both sides) there was no way of putting them out. She had a way with her words that left little doubt as to her meaning.

"In a way, that was mostly my fault."

"I see."

She looked at Andre with pain in her eyes.

"Yes. He and I tried to make up, to get back together."

"This was when?"

"A month, maybe three weeks, before he was arrested."

Andre kept poking.

"How did that work? Did he come here?"

She blushed at that one. What was she going to say?

Not with Fleur in the house?

Ludicrous, and yet, so understandable.

"We went out to dinner. We talked...we went to his place afterwards."

Solange asserted something with her eyes when she spoke next, seeking out Levain in a kind of defiance.

"It was wonderful—really great sex, and...and...I guess we had been neglecting that part of our life for, ah...perhaps a little too long." Solange was blinking back tears. "...and yet it didn't really work, in the end."

Gilles did not press the matter further, but it fit a pattern.

It was a good term.

A pattern.

"In the past, did you and he ever, er...feud? You know, like make up and break up? Was your marriage prone to the stormy dramas that sometimes don't really mean all that much? Any kind of pattern like that?"

"No." She seemed pretty firm.

She flushed a bit and then grinned unexpectedly.

"No." She said it much more firmly. "No, we were never like that—although I know what you mean."

She took hold of herself.

"That's why it came as such a shock, I suppose."

Gilles gave the lady a small smile of reassurance.

Yes, we all know someone like that.

Maintenon moved on while she was in a receptive mood. This really was tough ground, and not just for her either. All of this resonated inside, for many reasons. It was a very human story. Gilles wondered if there were any parallels in Tobias' books for their relationship. He stopped himself there. Of course there would be, there must be. All the more reason to read them, he supposed. But a writer would change things and make it unrecognizable out of compassion and sheer self-preservation. They had to live with themselves. It was also very easy to make enemies. That was a thought which he must hold for later. That was an entirely different line of inquiry, one that could not be ignored for too much longer.

"Another question. You were together, living in the same abode, at the time of the earliest of our murders. Did your husband ever leave the house, unexpectedly..." Most of the crimes had been committed at night or in the evening. "Did he ever go out in the middle of the night?"

She had been asked all of this before. After she kicked him out, Tobias got a hotel room, as he was trying to finish a book and he was unable to deal with moving and setting up a new place.

A few months later, he got arrested. His personal effects had eventually been turned over to his next of kin, but the inventory provided in their notes was not extensive.

"No. Not at all, at least not so that anyone ever noticed."

"Do you use any sort of sleep aids, Madame?" Andre stepped in again, right out of the book of course.

"Ah, no, Sergeant." She was soberly answering all of their questions without a lot of hesitation.

"Okay, Madame. As you know, we would like to speak to Fleur and Marc."

She nodded, quite businesslike now that the unpleasantness was over. Gilles caught her in another appraising look at Andre, who seemed oblivious to her attention. It might even have been cathartic for her, a thought which eased the conscience not at all.

"I understand, although I doubt if they can help you very much." Fleur was out, but expected back before tea time.

It was a little tradition they had. They had dinner quite late, and then Fleur would often go out. The son, Marc, had his own place in (or on) Montmartre. She hadn't communicated with them, and they didn't know the police were coming to question them. She looked a bit scared when she acknowledged this question, but that was pretty normal for mothers of almost any social class. She always looked very sad when Tobias was mentioned.

So. Aldrich Tobias fell in love with another woman.

"How do you know he fell in love with someone else?" Andre's quick question came. "Did you ever confront him?"

She blinked back tears.

"Yes. I never met her, but I knew...I knew of her existence."

Gilles listened very carefully.

"A woman knows these things. The little signs, the wrong scent, a smudge of lipstick of the wrong shade. It really couldn't be anything else."

She had a conclusion with little or no evidence, and the prosecution took the ball and booted it into the net. Poor old Tobias, eh? Just his bad luck.

"And you confronted him."

"Yes."

"And yet you say he never let on. He never made excuses to leave the house? He was never missing from his work? Like if you turned up unexpectedly at the study door, something like that?"

"N-n-no." She sobbed into her hands.

The trouble was that air of uncertainty, something in the tone. That hesitation. Could they really trust her? She felt guilty, somehow responsible for what had happened. If she had never confronted Aldrich, they might still be together—it might have been a quick fling and he might have come to his senses. She might have waited it out. Many women would have taken that tack. But then, there were the women, rare enough, but they would have aided and abetted their lover, and taken him in again, even if they had known of a long list of crimes. Wives had helped husbands to cut up their victims. It happened often enough.

The number of women writing letters to inmates that they had never actually met in real life was said to be quite something. Perhaps the head-shrinkers could account for it, but Gilles Maintenon sure couldn't.

There was no accounting for love, was there?

The lady broke up in a rush of teary emotion. Andre got up and offered the lady his handkerchief. He gave Gilles a side-long look when she noisily blew her nose into it.

Gilles hit her with another question, before she could answer Andre's last question, the dates of their assignations. She shook her head angrily, not liking him nearly so much now.

"Surely you must have talked about why he was leaving?"

She hung her head. The emotional upheaval must be profound. Solange shuddered, fighting for air. They had her on the ropes. She had no more defense.

"Did he give any excuses, or any explanation?"

"No, he simply denied it. And then he turned around and said he had done it after all."

"How did that conversation go, actually, what was said? Can you possibly recall?"

She shook her head, looking wrung out. She put her hands on her knees as if to get up, but sat there hunched, not looking at them.

"That all happened very suddenly, gentlemen. It was like he was here today and gone tomorrow." She wrung her hands in her lap. "I was so very deeply hurt."

And consequently, she must have been extremely angry. It was the pattern. It was only later that she had time to think.

"We were yelling at each other, and not listening to each other. Perhaps. Perhaps not even my own heart, or his heart for that matter. We never really talked, after a certain point."

She blamed herself. A certain class of woman invariably would.

She had somehow failed in her duty as a woman.

Gilles grunted softly. The psychology was clear.

In the previous investigation, the police hadn't gotten a whiff of the other woman, and some said she didn't exist. At the time Tobias simply wasn't talking, on advice of legal counsel.

When would Tobias have ever found the time? He was a prolific author. He worked from a room in the back of their upper flat in this fine old town-house, at least before the divorce, and by all accounts he was a creature of his creative habits.

Our habits define us, in Maintenon's opinion. They limit us in so many ways, in order to liberate us in some other ways. Habits could be useful things, in other words.

It would be extremely helpful to know if the other woman actually existed or not. Tobias' denial meant nothing. He had clawed his way up from obscurity to a comfortable bourgeois existence, no matter how he reviled the bourgeoisie in his works. But he would have bought fully into the mythology of the gentleman long before that—even as a boy. And a gentleman never tells.

What if the other party was married? That might be it, and so simple. Tobias would protect her.

"But you must have discussed the reasons for your separation, your divorce."

"Oh, yes, Sergeant Maintenon. She's real, all right—" It was like she knew what they were thinking. "He didn't deny anything, but of course he refused to give a name. Probably afraid of what I might do. There was a lot of screaming and shouting back and forth."

Her face reddened at the mental picture she was presenting.

"Did you still love your husband at that time?"

Tears spurted into her beautiful dark eyes and Maintenon regretted causing such pain. One thing for certain, this person was a difficult suspect in framing up Tobias—he didn't think her capable of anything but the most emotionally impulsive crime. She was a very expressive person, perhaps not entirely logical at the best of times. This crime had taken too much thought, if one accepted that theory.

"Yes, Sergeant."

Andre looked up from his notes.

"Do you still love him now?"

"Yes. And if he is innocent, I hope that you can help him."

Gilles was out of his seat, wandering over for a look out the window while she collected herself. He gave her a little time.

"Thank you." She sniffled and wiped at her eyes and her nose.

"I understand that your husband could be a difficult man at times." She nodded, looking into Gilles's eyes for an extended moment. "Would you take him back?"

She half-sobbed, and then half-laughed, eyes darting around at the remark.

"Oh, God, yes. Not that he couldn't be infuriating. But Michele can tell you so much more about that." Her lips were twisted in bitterness. "We understood each other well enough, and I knew enough not to disturb him when he was working. It was a happy enough marriage, happy enough. For many years, Sergeant."

"Michele?"

"His agent. Michele Duret. I have his card here for you."

Andre accepted it with thanks.

"I have just one more question, Madame. What one character trait distinguishes your husband, above all others?"

Her upper body straightened, her eyes dropped, and her mouth opened. They waited.

She lifted her chin and looked him straight in the eye.

"Aldrich Tobias is the most stubborn person you are ever going to meet. Gentlemen."

Maintenon nodded thoughtfully.

She must be very lonely at times. Money and status, a comfortable life. Ease and plenty so rarely brought happiness and fulfillment in Gilles' observation. He wondered why that was sometimes, but there was a big hole in her life that nothing could fix. She probably saw Aldrich in her dreams at night, with his head in the block and the blade coming down, and she still didn't hate him for what he had done to her. Arguably, she didn't hate him for what he did (or had done) to his alleged victims.

She simply didn't have it in her.

A woman like that might very well take a lover. If he was discreet, and handsome, and clean, and not too demanding. One had to wonder what they would find to talk about. She would never marry out of her class. The lady would likely remain alone for the rest of her life—if she still loved her husband. Nothing could replace that.

It was very often like that.

You don't know what you've got until it's gone. Gilles found that very compelling.

Chapter Five

Fleur Tobias had not turned up the previous afternoon. Coming home very late, she had slept till noon. At that time, after a long bath and a light breakfast, she had deigned to call the police. They had a deadline, and yet never had patience been so called-for. The investigation was just getting started and perhaps her statement wasn't entirely essential.

It wasn't like they had anything better to do, thought Gilles.

"I hate my father. For what he's done to me, and to Marc. I especially hate him for what he's done to Mother."

Fleur Tobias was seventeen years old, and going on thirty, at least in her own mind. It was written all over her.

"And what is that, Mademoiselle?"

"Well! All of this, for one thing. All those girls, all tied up on the bed, molested and killed, all cut up with sharp knives, strangled, raped even after they were dead. It's horrible, I tell you."

"One was strangled." Andre watched her closely, a study in human perceptions. "One was beheaded..."

Her posture was all closed in, and yet it wasn't them she found distasteful.

Andre had the impression she wasn't taking it seriously enough. This was her father they were discussing. Surely the young woman ought to know better.

Fleur Tobias, flaxen-haired, with flashing blue eyes and white teeth standing out from a fine and athletic tan, didn't miss a beat.

"That's exactly the thing he would do—to muddy the waters." She looked at Maintenon knowingly. "He was a crime writer, after all. He knew all about fingerprints, and footprints in the garden under an unlatched window, and skeleton keys, and determining the time of death, and all about stomach contents. He had all kinds of books on poisons, for crying out loud."

She looked away, and positively growled, gnashing her jaws and with muscles twitching at the base of her fine jaw line.

"Argh."

Gilles nodded.

He wondered if she took herself so seriously, but the anger, mostly pure narcissism, was real enough. It probably felt real enough.

She felt hard done by. First there was the separation of her parents, and the social embarrassment of their divorce, with all of the attendant and riotous publicity. Her father was infamous without being a reliable best-seller, one of the better quotes Gilles had seen. Vachon had included some clippings on the subject. Then came the arrest and trial of her father on the most egregious charges one could imagine. The journalists would have approached her and all of her friends. They would have gone after her mother and her brother. They would have talked to her classmates, former teachers, neighbors, and relatives. They would be trying to get a story or even just a simple comment. The phone would be ringing off the hook. They would have waited outside of her home and outside of her school. They would have tried to get a photograph when the family came out of Sunday morning church service. Some of them would have asked about her personal life, and there were one or two who might have made a pass at her.

He understood without her having to say it.

A girl like Fleur would have wanted to crawl under a rock and pull the earth in over her head from sheer embarrassment. She might have even learned a little bit about hate. She would have been mortified, a good word Gilles had always thought. Fleur was so young and still vibrantly superficial. She should have been achingly beautiful, and yet there was this air of hardness, even bitterness about her. She was just a little bit spoiled. Something had been taken away from her. Her eyes were startlingly blue, like her father. In all other physical respects she seemed to take after her mother. As a fully-grown woman, she had the potential to be quite striking.

"And to your own knowledge, there were no great absences from the home, at or about the times of these incidents?"

She had the grace to look troubled by the question. Her eyes latched onto Maintenon's.

What was that? Was that hope?

"No. Not really." In a quick move she took another look at Andre and Maintenon repressed a smile. "Seriously. The place is not that big, and he and mother slept together. The cook sleeps in the back bedroom, but she's an insomniac, too. She's up and puttering about at all hours of the night." Fleur was opening up. "...she might have a nap during the day. I sleep till noon most days."

She had the grace to look a bit startled, as if recognizing the significance of these words for the first time, ever.

The girl was being a little more helpful now.

Her eyes fell and so did her voice.

"I suppose I come and go at all hours too." She wrung her hands, still looking down.

"If your father is innocent, then I very much would like to save his life. They are going to guillotine him in ten days. Is that right? You know; I never know what day it is any more." He nodded at Andre. "All we need are sensible answers to sensible questions. Non?"

She looked very shocked. She blinked at Gilles Maintenon, her berry-red lips and and wide open eyes making a very charming picture. She swallowed convulsively.

"Yes, sir. Of course." She gulped. "Please help him."

The girl began to cry. Good. He had her full attention now. She didn't hate him for all the nameless crimes of the Establishment, and that was a good sign.

Andre cleared his throat. Her eyes clutched at Andre like a drowning girl reaching for straws. Levain had run out of clean handkerchiefs, so Gilles handed his over.

"How come no one seems to know the name of this other woman?"

Not entirely unexpectedly, Fleur had one or two theories on that score too.

***

They had interviewed Marc Tobias that morning.

The gentlemen took visitors only by appointment. Marc Tobias, twenty-two years old and apparently well enough off that he would never have to work, (nor would he ever consider it important that he do so), lived in a spacious loft. Montmartre was on the right bank, and the young fellow had a sweeping panorama over a great swath of the city from a row of squeaky-clean bay windows.

Gilles tried to visualize the fellow cleaning those windows and failed, miserably.

Marc had mentioned that the place had once been home to an obscure member of Les Incoherents, an even more obscure movement in painting of the previous century. Neither Gilles nor Andre recognized the name, but did their best to look suitably impressed.

"Yes, that is pretty obscure." Andre nailed it and Gilles desperately tried not to laugh.

He merely smiled in an appreciative manner and sipped at his tea-cup.

Even young Monsieur Tobias grinned, giving Andre another look.

The young man, rakishly slim in his morning suit. The papers were scattered all over the dining table. Coffee was very much in evidence, as well as two or three overflowing ashtrays. Marc was luxuriously slumped on the end of the overstuffed couch. Gilles wondered if he was going somewhere, but then at home he was a stocking-foot sort of a man, and Marc was wearing shiny black patent-leather boots of a bygone age. He might even have a top-hat in a closet around there somewhere. He had that kind of look, a young man with a little too much money and a little too much privilege and little too much time on his hands. No real merit to call his own. His hair, an affectation that he would have said defined him, was stylishly long.

Gilles took a matching armchair, but Andre preferred to remain standing. He moved idly about the room, closely examining what were clearly artifacts of some significance. If nothing else, Marc had taste, and apparently the money to indulge it. There were small fertility figurines, headless, handless and footless. There was a native African drum, a collection of blow-guns hanging on the wall, and also hanging on the wall, a couple of ceremonial masks carved in hideous distortion of human form in some highly-polished dark wood. Andre put an item down and moved on in his examination.

"Very nice."

"That's allegedly druidic." Marc snorted. "But it's a good conversation starter."

He mentioned what he had paid for it.

Andre put it down carefully.

Marc looked at an attentive Maintenon.

He smiled.

"So. You're here about my father? Well, good riddance to him. The dirty old bugger's guilty, all right."

Now that the parents were divorced, and Tobias was in for it, Marc stood to inherit quite a pile. Gilles wondered how much that played into his thinking, and hence his attitude. He would finally have his freedom, his independence, something he would no doubt cherish.

Marc reached over and picked up a sherry glass, holding it up to the light and then sipping appreciatively. Gilles noted the aristocratically-long fingers, the bearing of the head and neck. This child of his father had some acting ability, and he wondered what Fleur's talent might be. Everyone had some kind of talent. The facial lines were unmistakable, long, lean, and with the bridge of the nose curiously in line with the forehead. It was a classically Greek profile and the kid probably knew it, too.

Andre pulled out his notebook.

"So. What would you gentlemen like to know?"

Gilles heaved a deep sigh.

"Strictly routine, young man. Strictly routine. So. How long have you lived here?"

Chapter Six

With Marc and Fleur properly disposed of, on the way back to the office they stopped in at Le Temps. It was on the way downtown. Gilles had been there once or thrice, and he led an impressed Andre Levain in through a labyrinth of open offices, small corridors, and cubbyhole offices. The rooms were stuffed with wire services, and typewriters, walls and ceilings yellowed and dulled by decades of tobacco smoke settling as there was nowhere else for it to go. The sound of all those typewriters, rising and falling in unison and then breaking off into individual, staccato bursts, reminded Gilles of the crickets of late summer...no. The rifle fire of the early part of the war, before it was completely drowned out by heavy guns. It was a kind of apoplectic harmony, he thought.

Music to a publisher's ears, no doubt, whether in war or in peace.

It was all the same to them.

Vachon closed the door and things got a lot quieter.

"Gilles. Young fellow. Please excuse the mess."

Hector Vachon occupied one small portion of a larger space, with heaps of old files and stacks of photographs, still smelling of chemicals. Gilles wondered how the man ever found anything.

His mind, razor sharp, was a repository of useful and useless information. Vachon was fond of saying things like that. It was part of his charm, as he would say.

"How are you, my old friend?"

They shook hands gladly, and Hector took a second, slightly longer look after experiencing Andre's gentle but potentially-crushing grip. The man had a set of real shoulders on there, Vachon noted.

"Hmn. Got a name for this one?"

"Sergeant Andre Levain, and like many of us, an aspiring candidate."

Hector nodded.

"My door is always open to you, sir."

Andre grinned crookedly.

"You scratch my back..."

Vachon nodded vigorously.

"I'm sorry, Gilles." He indicated a chair, hurriedly moving two stacks of files, each a third of a metre tall, out of the way.

He went to a neighboring desk where there was a vacant chair sitting idle beside it. With a polite nod, the owner indicated that he could take it, phone cradled between shoulder and ear, pencil scrabbling away and a cigar burning up in the ashtray as he listened intently and made monosyllabic comments.

"Merci, Eduard." Vachon wheeled the thing over for Andre. "A very good man, although his wife misunderstands him to some degree."

Eduard extended a casual finger, up and over the shoulder, without even looking up as Gilles and Andre dutifully chuckled. Andre settled in.

"Okay. Here." Hector had more clippings.

Vachon sat heavily in his own seat.

"I think I can put my hands on one or two more items. You mentioned photographs."

He had a sheaf of them, not all of them Tobias, in a file folder. Opening it, he showed Gilles that each had been clearly identified and labeled.

"Ah, excellent." At some point Gilles might have to brief officers who hadn't been involved in the case.

Having good pictures of all the parties was a luxury.

He passed off a couple to Levain, Madame Tobias prominent among them.

"She's not exactly hard to look at." As Andre nodded, Vachon's eyes slid around to Gilles. "One would think the other woman would have to be something quite spectacular—and yet no one seems to know one damned thing about her."

"The daughter's something else. Gooey, as they say." Gilles held his eyes for a moment and Vachon grinned. "The other woman is probably married."

Vachon nodded.

"Gooey. Yes, that is the word these days."

Andre looked over at Gilles, content just to listen. Vachon had twenty years of high-echelon reporting, his dual skill with the pen and the camera making him an invaluable addition to Le Temps, one of the city's more pretentious, perhaps even genuinely prestigious rags.

"You'll like Tobias."

Andre grinned sourly, giving Vachon a look.

"Really?"

"Nope. They say he's one big pain in the ass. I've never really spoken to him, but if you look up arrogant in the dictionary, you'll see they've got his picture right there."

Gilles nodded and Andre gave a genuine chuckle.

"I've read a couple of his books at least. His politics are pretty far out there." Gilles would have to find the time to read some of them again.

Tobias' social theories were that poverty bred crime, and yet there were no social solutions. The man had no proposals—only harsher penalties and more repression. Like fools who thought honor and nobility were carried in the blood, Tobias seemed to think that criminality was hereditary.

It seemed quite counter-intuitive, although some of it was a purely conservative reaction to changing conditions and the enfranchisement, economic as well as political, of an ever-increasing number of people. Guys like Tobias weren't all that fond of sharing power.

Tobias, or at least some of his aristocratic protagonists, seemed to believe in a kind of laissez-faire, unregulated capitalism of the marketplace. They were rich men with hearts of gold, always with the good of society foremost in mind. What that meant in practice was impunity for the cartels, the suppression of the workers, and a return to the good old days. When they said that, one had to wonder just what the hell they meant. Tobias' antagonists were people who always seemed to be cardboard-cutout caricatures of those who were not merely unfortunate, or even just mistaken, but motivated by a desire for pure evil. Gilles had always found that simplistic, perhaps even distasteful.

Besides. The good old days of what? The Church, the parish Curé and the Maire de Cité? The Masons and the Temple? When people like Tobias talked, one had the impression that they envisaged themselves as the ones sitting on the throne. Somehow they saw it as oh-so-natural, pre-ordained by God all of that, all of that ilk, and why couldn't the rest of the world see its sublime and inevitable logic?

France's immediate history was turbulent, and in Maintenon's mind, so was everything before that, going back to the 1850s or possibly the sixties. Some of their political theorists must be quite mad, thought Gilles. The Napoleons—all of them, were no mere cultural aberration. In that sense, they really were France. Their consequences were still alive and kicking. Their shadows haunted the minds of the elite or the merely ambitious.

A man could go far, if he was ruthless enough.

"They say he threatened his former agent." None of this had come out at the trial.

Andre laughed.

"Did he really spill coffee on that one publisher?"

Vachon gave him a look.

"There are conflicting accounts." He smiled, looking down and riffling through the stuff on his desk.

Coming up with nothing, he thought that he had given the officers pretty much everything he had. Issues of privacy didn't come into play with Vachon, not where his cop buddies were concerned. It was common gossip after all, but Vachon had heard the story from a number of different sources.

"He threw a cup of coffee, very hot, on a publisher whom he said had cheated him. Not that that doesn't happen." Vachon's eyes went through some kind of a routine as he went through it. "He was plenty pissed off in that interview the Revue Blanche did with him. That was the one just after...ah, just after he didn't win the Prix. Which happens every year, but this was back in nineteen-twenty-two."

His eyes rolled up, left and back, and over the top to the right as he checked his recollection, but he was confident enough on the date. Vachon was mentally back again, just as suddenly as he had left. He must have a real storehouse in there, thought Andre.

"Yeah—twenty-two."

"Okay." Gilles thought about what he had heard of the man. "Was there ever anything sexual?"

Vachon bit his lip.

"Not much. One or two rumors, and that's what made it so spicy—at first. But every famous person draws their share of, shall we say, ah...unwelcome attention." What he meant was cranks and crackpots, anonymous letters and back-biting gossip fed into the world out of pure spite. "They had a happy marriage, gentlemen. We just have to accept that."

Vachon's face was ever so innocent. He moved on.

"This industry is unregulated, and yet self-policing. This is not a contradiction in terms. It's just that success breeds fame, and fame comes at a very high price. We all have our, ah, fliqueurs."

Flics, cops. Bobbies, as the Tommies called them. The self-appointed ones were the worst. After one particularly lurid case, well-reported in Vachon's own paper, Gilles had come in for some share of attention. There were all too many letters sent to the cop-shop, one or two to his home. A few letters had been held for him at various Paris newspapers. A great many of them must have been disposed-of, by editors big and small who had seen it all before.

Most of it was complimentary, although some of it was not. Praise was one thing, but pure vitriol had been outside of Maintenon's personal experience.

Until then!

Someone had taken Gilles aside and explained that it was an assertion of their impotence, to write stuff like that, and that he shouldn't worry too much about it. On that day, Gilles had resolved to look after his men (and his feet) and not worry too much about what the dinks of this world thought, or what they had to say about him in poison-pill letters to the editor.

Some of those editors could be crackpots as well, as Vachon hastened to point out.

People were so certain, whereas it was Gilles's job to get the right guy, not just the one everyone wanted it to be, or thought it was, or had already condemned within the privacy of their own minds.

Very little of such negative commentary was ever true, although in Vachon's opinion calumny was more prone to exaggerate than to invent.

"I see."

Gilles looked at his watch.

"You guys got time for coffee?" He had this hopeful look

"I'm sorry, not today, Hector."

On cue, Andre stood up and took charge of the bulging file that was the fruit of this particular enterprise.

"Gentlemen."

"Thank you—and rest assured, we will be in touch."

Again, they exchanged handshakes, Hector kneading his lower back in sheer habit as they did so.

Vachon winked, turned without another word and with a little grunt plopped his ample backside into his chair, which squawked in protest. One hand was already reaching for the phone and the other for the pen behind his ear.

***

Gilles was at home in his study. While it seemed mere formality, with nothing much to go on but an impression, he was bringing home one small briefcase per night.

It was all he could reasonably handle. They were lucky that Ann had been fairly up the last couple of days. They had someone in the house on a daily basis to handle the household chores. Ann had a hot lunch, and a cold supper was prepared for them. Someone else did the shopping now.

Otherwise they might not have had any food in the house. Gilles barely had time to eat, sleep and shower the way things had been at work over the last few months. This was just another source of guilt. Then he had to find the time to study for the exams. Most officers in his age bracket were still patrolling the streets, or had found nice, tedious little desk jobs. Some of those jobs, day jobs, were fiercely-contested. He wondered if there would come a time when he wanted one of those sinecures. Gilles had found a certain inevitability about his relatively-rapid rise in the force, when all he was doing was his job. Was that really so special?

The tendency to blame the victim was strong, but Gilles had seen it enough times in other people. His resentment was directed more towards superior officers and some of Ann's own family members. As a husband, he had taken full responsibility with the vows of marriage.

That didn't stop a person from wishing for things. Ann had brothers and sisters. They lived either in, or not that far from Paris. They had all been rather conspicuous by their absence, although their professed love was strong and unreserved. Perhaps it was that they were all busy and successful people in their own right. They had families of their own. It didn't pay to be too hard on them. That was a thought process that might rapidly spiral out of control. One must be charitable, or if nothing else, respectful. They deserved the benefit of some doubt. One had to convince oneself that they were just doing the best they could with what they had.

Bad thoughts, every one! He had to fight himself every inch of the way, some days.

It worked, after all.

At least at home he had the cognac decanter, and a fine thin cheroot. It was a habit picked up in the big city. Gilles was just twenty years old and trying to look a proper man, what with the leather jacket and the seventeen-hair mustache. The smoke, wine-dipped tobacco, eddied up around the overhead light, roiling there for a time and then slowly ebbing in the vague direction of the double sash window. Thrown back, this led to an impossibly small balcony, more decorative than anything although Ann had a few straggling plants on it.

A tiny black fruit fly hovered in front of his face, and he waved it away irritably. Little black bugs, looking like small flying ants could come out of the baking cupboard, he knew that much and little else.

He really should have listened more over the years.

The phone rang and he dropped the papers in his hand almost in gratitude. He glanced at the clock. It was nine-thirty.

He became aware of certain things.

Ann was in the doorway, blinking. The rest of the house was dark. He had all the room lights turned up full in order to avoid eyestrain and to help pick up his spirits if that were possible.

Gilles turned fully. His eyes lit up. She stood there in a fuzzy red housecoat and the slippers with the rabbit fur around the edges. Her hair was up in curlers and her face freshly-scrubbed. She smelled clean and still moist from the bath, a poignant reminder of better, younger days.

His hand hovered over the phone.

"My love. It's probably work—"

She nodded, with a small, knowing smile and a shake of her head.

"Aw, go on, Maintenon."

His heart ached at that exact moment in time, but there was nothing else for it, so he picked up.

"Hello?"

"Gilles. It's Rene."

"Ah, yes, Inspector Lavoie. What can I do for you?" He gave her a look.

Ann tilted her head, tightened up the belt on her housecoat and still hugging herself as if in cold, turned and shuffled off to the kitchen.

"It's nothing much. I really hate to bother you, but. When is your appointment with Tobias?"

"Tomorrow. Eleven a.m., Inspector." It was the earliest it could be arranged with prison authorities, in spite of the fact that they were all working under the aegis of the Ministry of Justice.

The fact that Tobias might want to consult his attorney, and some time for notice was required, was a more practical consideration. Time was burning along its inexorable line, like a fuse that once lit could not be extinguished. They were trying to save the man's life, if you accepted that theory. Every little thing took its own sweet time.

Tobias had what? Eight or nine days to live.

"Ah. Very good." The line buzzed and Gilles wondered what it was about.

"Would you like me to call you, sir? Afterwards?" The bugger didn't much like all the attention Gilles was getting.

You want Maintenon, a junior man, and one trained by me, so why don't you want me? Perhaps that was it, or at least some of it. Lavoie wasn't a bad guy, not by a long shot.

"Honestly, sir. I haven't a God-damned clue, except one or two minor points. Is that going to be enough?"

"Probably not, Gilles, or it would have been done before now. You need something new—if you can get it."

"Well, sir..."

"Call me Rene. You've been around here long enough."

There was a gush of something in the guts. Call it gratitude—call it something.

"Very well. Totally off the record, sir. I could use all the help I can get on this one."

"I agree. Gilles. And yet I have this feeling that there might be something to it. Is that what you feel?"

"Yes. I have no idea why. Perhaps it just tickles me. Tobias has been well served, if he really is an innocent man. So far, no one has a good thing to say about him. Not even his own children. His wife is the exception. Yet they have nothing concrete to point to—just dislike and resentment, sheer narcissism, as far as I can see."

Wasn't all that hereditary, carried in the blood? How much of it was due to their upbringing in the Tobias household? If you knew a man's children, you knew a little something about him.

"That's exactly right, Gilles, and in point of fact, my sources—I never witnessed this, but his defense was all wrong, a simple not guilty when everyone wanted him convicted. Oh. And damn your eyes, to boot. It's just the way the man is, Gilles. He made no effort to appear humble, or even halfway human for that matter. He was conceited, arrogant, combative, and defiant. There's no way he could deny writing those book passages. I'll grant them that. But there is something petulant about the man, something...ah."

Gilles couldn't think of the word either or he would have supplied it.

Childish.

While other people's impressions could be valuable, more than anything he wanted to see Aldrich Tobias for himself. Someone had said something about actors: they were all children.

That might apply to the arts in general.

"And how is Ann, now that you are back, Gilles?"

There was another surge in the midriff, this one not as warm and fuzzy as the last one.

"Well, she's a bit better, sir....Rene. Anyways, ah, Rene, I have one or two lines of inquiry, and who knows? Something might turn up."

"Let's hope so." The inspector rang off on that optimistic note.

Yes, Ann was a bit better. He looked at the clock. He looked at the papers. He was his own boss in a sense. She deserved better than this, and she was going to get something better than this.

He snapped off the desk light.

Otherwise his attitude might be a whole lot different.

Chapter Seven

"Ah, yes. Detective Sergeant Maintenon...ah. Huh. Hmn. Maintenon."

The fellow looked up from his register, where people signed in and out of La Prison Santé, literally the Prison of Health. Irony at its worst, thought Maintenon.

He doubted if notorious author and convicted serial killer Aldrich Tobias appreciated it very much.

"Yes, that's right. Maintenon." He'd been here before, once or twice.

It was part of the job description to witness an execution or two, once you'd been tapped for certain specialties. High crime, treason, habitual violent offender, kid-fuckers, those involved in policing gang activities. There was rape, murder, and one or two other little categories.

"The Minister of Justice himself called about you."

The man took off his spectacles and wiped them in speculative fashion.

"Wow. What are we going to do about you, eh?" Faded grey eyes impaled Gilles with a look.

He cracked a grin, hit the loudspeaker button and called a name.

An officer arrived from somewhere up ahead to lead him through the labyrinthine passages of justice and punishment, swift, sure, and certain.

***

Three of them sat in a cold and barren interview room. Its peeling and bilious green paint was adorned with one black stripe at eye level, on all four walls, a reminder of the ever-present power of the institution.

Aldrich's lawyer, a man named Emile Lambert, broke the ice. But first, he ran a hand through tired blonde hair, straight and fine.

"I have instructed my client to tell you anything and everything, insofar as he is comfortable in doing so." His expression was carefully unreadable, the quick glance at his client enigmatic.

After this didactic pronouncement, the slender and waxy-faced young gentleman interlocked his fingers and then placed his hands across his midriff. His eyes fell away. His thumbs began to twirl lazily. Thankfully, he was not a knuckle-cracker. Maintenon took a moment to assess the suit, but Tobias' problem wasn't money, was it? Tobias looked wan and thin. His long wrists and bony hands dangled from the sleeves of his striped prison suit, which appeared to be a couple of sizes too small for him. Authorities treated the more political prisoners shamelessly sometimes. Gilles hadn't expected such a big man. Like his lawyer, Tobias had put his hands together. Unlike the other he was wringing them extensively, knuckles white. He leaned forwards, propping his elbows on his knees.

The one big question, the question Maintenon would most like to ask, would have to wait until last.

The other woman.

They couldn't afford to have Monsieur Tobias lock up on them. The idea hung in the air between them, as Gilles caught the attorney studying him from under half-closed lids. Tobias' dark blue eyes stared into Maintenon's, who was trying to decide where to begin.

"I shit myself, Sergeant."

Gilles recalled that Tobias had done his military service, had seen as much action as anyone, and had all the usual campaign ribbons and a couple of genuine service medals for gallantry.

"Er...what?"

Aldrich Tobias' gaze burned into his across the battered and scarred deal table of the interview room.

The walls were clammy with condensation and the air was thick under the single overhead lamp, hanging in a flurry of blue smoke clouds, eddying and twirling away into nothingness. Cops were bad that way, in that they smoked everywhere and anywhere.

"You mean, when you were convicted."

"No, Sergeant. Before then. Way before that. It was my first or second night in the cells. When those first cops grabbed me. They were asking all these questions. God! All the wrong sort of questions. I finally got to speak to my mouthpiece, my lawyer, you know? He explained it in sufficient detail...fuck. What I was up against."

Tobias' body heaved as the man sucked in air, eyes unwavering.

"I shit myself that night, just thinking about it. The terror is the same, my friend. I learned that in here. It's the same for me, it's the same for any other man. It's just like the war. It doesn't care who you are, or what you have done, either. No, not the terror. It doesn't matter if one is innocent or guilty. Once they have you, they aren't letting go for anything or anyone." He stared. "They can do anything, literally anything they want with you. It is the awesome majesty of the state, Maintenon. And you are alone. Terribly alone. It's too late for me, you see."

Gilles looked into those eyes.

"Fuck. Seriously. I thought being a writer was bad—it's always so solitary, you know?"

Aldrich Tobias was an extremely intelligent man. The fact was that he could have done a series of crimes, any number of them, over the course of time, and gotten away with it quite nicely. The trouble was that he had been caught—when someone thought to have another look into all of those noir crime novels, which the critics loved and hated but which sold in such moderate numbers.

"Don't do this to me."

"Pardon?" Gilles was stumped.

"I've had time to get used to the idea, my dear fellow. I almost welcome death, I relish it even. It will be a blessed release from the trials of life. My life has been very disappointing, as you can see, my fully-fledged new friend. And yet, here you are—bringing me that most unwelcome and over-rated of commodities. Hope, Sergeant. Hope."

Tobias finally looked away, face working.

His eyes lifted and it was like a stab to the heart.

"If you are innocent, then it is my duty to find the real killer." Gilles had to tread carefully.

The man would be close to the ragged edge, this close to his execution date. Gilles tried to ignore that literal deadline. Panic wouldn't do anyone any good.

"I'm going to need all of your help, Aldrich."

Aldrich Tobias sat up, suddenly remembering that he had an unlit smoke hanging out of the corner of his mouth. It was a real character face, thought Gilles as he held a match. Tobias clamped onto Maintenon's wrist, and steadied his hand as the fire snagged the tip of his Gauloise. There were two angled scars, on the left side of his lip, parallel. It was a face no one could mistake or forget. If only they had some witnesses, either for, or against.

Gilles shoved the matches across the table along with the cigarettes.

"You can keep those."

Aldrich's eyebrows rose as he took another look at his visitor.

"Pulling some strings, are we?"

"I've spoken to your warden. They might even bring you an ashtray."

"Let's hope you die of cancer, eh, Aldrich?"

Tobias stared at his lawyer, and then his face turned back.

Maintenon, eh?

He seemed to recall seeing the name in the papers or something.

"Do you have any enemies, Monsieur Tobias?"

There was something in the way he said it.

Tobias threw his head back and laughed like a maniac. A staccato burst of mirth went through him and then just as quickly died.

He shook his head in disbelief. He hadn't laughed at anything in a good long while.

"Yes." Tobias seemed relatively unembarrassed by the notion. "Yes, I do, er...Gilles."

It was public knowledge anyways, depending on which journals a person read.

"Also, they're going to chop my head off." So Aldrich was willing to give it a try, then.

Maintenon repressed a snort. He flipped open his notebook and began on his prepared questions.

***

Gilles spent a good hour and forty minutes with Tobias, finding him as difficult in his present circumstances as he was said to be in regular life. Getting out of the place took a certain amount of time. Tobias was sort of aggressive one minute and then suddenly passive, like all life had been sucked out of him.

Maintenon's driver had unaccountably taken off and abandoned him, probably an emergency of one sort or another somewhere, and Gilles had gone back in and called for a taxi. That would teach them, if he remembered to file it on the expense account. There were times when they queried the necessity of every little thing, and it just wasn't worth arguing with the bean-counters sometimes.

It was a long ride back to the office.

Why couldn't you call in? We might have had a car in the area.

Why didn't you take the bus?

For the same reason you guys don't go and fuck yourselves—it just doesn't seem too practical.

What with the need to return to the Quai to write up his report, and having fallen into the trap of reading more files, at some point Gilles looked up, saw what time it was, and abruptly packed up and left for home. Traffic was bad, pedestrian and otherwise. The Metro was cramped and he couldn't get a seat, and it was late in the day when he arrived at his own front door.

Nurse Beauchene had been waiting for him to arrive so she could go home. A stern, matronly woman, her glance pierced him in a kind of disapproval. She was the sort of person who would stand with her arms crossed, and tapping her foot quite a lot. Other than that, she was mousy, grey, stout and very competent. An uncomplicated woman. She apparently disapproved of anything with a penis.

"How is she?" Ann had been sound asleep when he left that morning. "I'm sorry, I didn't get a chance to call. I was so busy at work today. All of this running to and fro, you know."

He was surprisingly cheerful in spite of his utter tiredness.

Her lips pursed and her face reddened. Yet it clearly wasn't anger. She was clasping her hands and leaning forwards, slightly into him as if to impress him with the urgency of her mission.

"Monsieur Maintenon. We have to talk." She took a good breath, exhaled it, and then straightened up. "It's about Ann."

***

Her head was heavy on his shoulder and her thigh warm against his. She was all skin and bones these days and her eyes no longer glowed and sparked with life and humor. Every day was agony for Ann, just trying to get enough breath into her lungs. He clung to his wife's hand, desperately, wondering how she could be so strong when he was so weak.

Gilles was the needy one in this relationship, and that had never been more apparent. One moment, he saw everything, and with the next moment, he was lying to himself.

But no more.

Her smile was tragic and beautiful, and filled with love as she gazed into his eyes.

"This is all anyone has ever really needed." She stroked his hair as he cried like a baby. "Gilles. My poor, darling Gilles. It is time and we knew this day would come."

"What. What do you mean?" She lowered her head onto his chest, as he rocked her back and forth.

"I've never had any doubts about you, Gilles. You have always been a wonderful husband." She took a deep breath, the clarity of her mind, her purpose, overriding all other considerations. "Gilles. If I don't come out—if I never get out again..."

"No! No." The hot water sprung fresh from within his tormented soul. "Please don't say it."

A couple of weeks, a month or two maybe, and Ann would feel as right as rain. At least for a little while. She would be home, feeling much better and they could maybe go somewhere. Just the two of them. She had never been strong, and yet she had been young at least. They had fallen hopelessly in love, him in Paris, far from home and her working as a typist in a legal office. They kept seeing each other at the lunch counter in the neighborhood where he was a beat cop. That pale and languid beauty was what had attracted him in the first place. She seemed cool and mature where the other girls were pretty, vivacious and just plain silly much of the time. Ann had a brain in her head. It had spurred his interest, to discover that it was possible for a woman to be intelligent, and strong, and to have her own mind—her own opinions, based upon her own observations. If they had been able to see the future, would Gilles, or Ann for that matter, have chosen any differently?

That was the worst question a person could ever ask, or one of them.

I'm sorry, my dear, you're all very well—but that bit about taking each other in sickness and in health, well, that's a bit much to ask—of course not. Of course not. Love is blind to such things, especially in the young. It is the peculiar blessing of the young that they just don't see it coming. It was the worst moment of his life, so far, and yet the decision couldn't have been put off much longer anyways. He knew that.

When they figured out they weren't ever going to have children...nothing the doctor's could put a finger on, but Ann had never conceived. That was a heavy blow, but one softened by time and acceptance. It was a kind of tragedy, but he was almost grateful now. Her children would not have to witness this.

His feelings ate at him, and at the same time it was one of the best talks they'd had in a long time.

Fucking narcissism, pure narcissism...

We have to think of her.

They'd been putting it off. They'd been avoiding the unavoidable and they had just run out of time.

It must be confronted and dealt with, a terribly guilty knowledge. They had put it off too long and that was just the truth, Gilles perhaps more in denial than Ann herself.

"Of course, my dear."

Gilles was to make the call to St. Maurice Among the Oaks, a former abbey, first thing in the morning. She insisted that he had his own life, his career to consider.

"You need your respite, too, Gilles. Otherwise there will be two of us in the hospital."

His eyes gradually dried and the heaviness of sleep finally overcame Ann.

Picking her up, he carried her to the bedroom.

Damn them.

Damn them all to hell.

This was sheer hell, and there was no one he could turn to.

He'd never felt so alone in all his life.

***

His weekend ordeal was over. The weekly ordeal was just beginning. When Gilles arrived at their makeshift office, Andre was nowhere about as he unlocked the door and snapped on the light.

He winced, as all three of their temporary phone lines were ringing.

Argh.

He took a moment to remove his dripping hat and overcoat, and kicked off the low rubber galoshes he was wearing. The city had received forty millimetres of warm, fat raindrops over the preceding night. The sky had darkened on the last portion of his commute, the part where he walked over the bridge, the clouds opened up and he had gotten soaked in about a minute.

He shook his head. The day was already beginning badly.

He must choose. Pick one thing, and then do it...just do it.

He picked the phone on his desk, its number, thirteen-oh-nine, allocated to one Detective-Sergeant Maintenon.

"Yes? Hello?"

The other phones stopped ringing.

Of course. Half the switchboard must be trying to get at him.

"Maintenon?" It was Rene Lavoie.

"Ah, yes, sir." In his pressing need to move forward with the case, he'd forgotten to call him yesterday afternoon. "I'm sorry, sir, but I finished up quite late yesterday."

"Ah. Yes. Well. Never mind that. I've got someone I want you to see."

"Pardonnez moi?"

"It's Raymond Morin, the literary critic. Apparently he's read every Aldrich Tobias novel ever written and given him some pretty scathing reviews—although he's done one or two rather nicer ones more recently. The most important thing is that he knows him personally."

Gilles listened in a kind of awe. A literary critic—and this was a serious suggestion from an interfering superior officer.

Nom de Dieu, but this was getting a bit much to take.

"Sir."

"No, seriously, Gilles. What do we have to lose? What other leads do you have?"

That was the crux of the matter.

"I showed him a photo of the brass vase. Tobias said it didn't look like anything they had at home. Although he couldn't be too sure anymore." Tobias hadn't seen his home in almost two years now, by Gilles' reckoning. "As to whether or not it was an honest answer..."

He gave his head a quick shake.

"He admitted to knowing the Nelson girl, even admitting to some attraction, which he believed mutual." She had attended various literary conventions as a writer-hopeful, and this had been brought out to some extent at his trial. "No one ever saw them together, and no one ever saw him around there, and no one even saw him coming and going from his own home. And no one missed or remarked upon his presence or the lack thereof."

He recalled something integral.

"...he absolutely refused to discuss the possibility of a lady friend, one who might conceivably save his backside by providing an alibi..." A most infuriating man, in other words.

"Well." There was a light buzz on the line, presumably from the Inspector's end.

Since you put it that way.

"All right, Inspector. I'll see the gentleman. Can you give me the details, please?"

Gilles flipped open a pad and found a pen lying on the table. Andre came in just then and Gilles motioned for quiet as he took down the details.

"Ah, Inspector Lavoie. I hate to bring this up, and it's never a good time."

"Yes, Gilles?"

"I'm going to have to take most of Friday off." Gilles quickly explained the situation with Ann.

He was taking her to the sanatorium in the afternoon and would be staying the weekend to get her settled in. His heart hung heavy on the words and his throat was tight. Gilles got through it, professionally enough, as Andre listened from his side of the room with sympathetic ears.

"Very well, Gilles. I know this is important to you. But we have so little time."

"Yes, sir." That was it.

That was all it took, one of the benefits of being invaluable.

He rang off quickly, before Lavoie had any other bright ideas.

"So. What's up?" Andre was all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning, as the saying went.

"We have an appointment for ten o'clock with someone who is alleged to be one of France's premier literary and social critics. Allegedly."

Andre's eyelids rose and then he grinned.

"There's method here, is what I'm thinking."

When all else fails, an artist has technique. Andre had forgotten who said it, but somebody had.

"If nothing else, Andre, Tobias gets his chance. For what it's worth." That's why they pay us the big bucks, Gilles was thinking.

Merde.

He looked at his coat and hat, hanging on a hook on the back of the door. His eyes moved back to a cheerful Andre, away from the regular routine for a while and wondering how long he could milk it. Gilles was a good guy and an excellent officer to work with. Levain had some ambitions of his own, but learning the ropes took time and it was wise to pay attention.

"Is it still raining out there?"

Chapter Eight

"One critic wrote that he despised Aldrich Tobias' book—I forget which one it was, with a fine-tooth comb. Another said 'whoever wrote this book is a total, complete and utter waste of skin.'"

Gilles repressed a grin and Andre out and out laughed.

"It takes a certain kind of personality to succeed in this field, or perhaps endure is a better word."

The cops exchanged a quick glance as Morin went on.

"When I say that, I mean people who really ought to know what they're talking about. Guys like me, always going around saying that you're killing western literature. It gnaws at them. It really does."

He smiled in a deprecating fashion.

"You mean, like stubborn?" Andre fed him the next line.

"Yes. Guys like Aldrich Tobias, that is to say those who could, conceivably, write similar material, are a dime a dozen. Successful writers, now that is something else. Say what you want about his work—and it is lacking in so many ways, Aldrich had that most precious gift. The gift of persistence, gentlemen. The patience to endure, in the face of appalling odds and not very much joy."

Levain looked up from his copious notes.

"In that sense, to write, and to write well, ah. It's a little bit like making love to a tigress."

There was the hint of a dramatic pause.

"Aldrich had a way of bending like the reed rather than snapping like a twig. At least as far as criticism is concerned! I've often wondered if he even cared what the critics actually thought of his work. That's an important point. If the critics, and of course I am one of them, think the writer is arrogant or not paying sufficient attention to his, er, craft—and its true potential, which they themselves can't always see, why, we can be quite hard on them."

"I see." Said the blind man, thought Maintenon.

"Not I, said the cat," a line from one of Aldrich Tobias' impenetrable works. Funny how it was all coming back to him.

"It's all for the good of literature, of course." Morin stopped there with a serious look.

His eyes went far away.

"It was another Monday morning, and all of the world was still, and the invisible audience was still out there...Aldrich Tobias, gentlemen."

Maintenon nodded soberly.

"Do you think he did it? I mean, killed all of those girls?"

Levain twitched but didn't look up from note-taking.

The critic snorted.

"Not my area of expertise. But in my opinion, no. He's nowhere as near as tough as he thinks he is. Much of the persona is an act. The brashness, the insecurity of it all. The defiance of established norms and social order is nothing new. I have said so in more than one article. But there is a reaction, in these times of ferment and sweeping social changes, with the rise of the power of the working classes. Writers are artists, and artists like Tobias specialize in being abrasive, controversial. If the common man was right-wing, rather than left-wing as so many have become these days, Tobias would have simply adopted an opposite stance. He could justify it very well. He has a quick mind, quick to see the paradoxes inherent in all of our assumptions. And surely you would agree that society is built on a set of assumptions."

Was it nothing more than a way of calling attention to the man and his works? But surely he had some beliefs of his own.

"More than anything, he just wanted to be read."

Gilles could see how Raymond Morin had earned his reputation for suave erudition and a place in the literary journals. According to Vachon, over a quick phone call, his reviews appeared in Paris Match, and from time to time some of them were picked up by major papers overseas. This would be true in the case of Morin's reviews of Nobel winners or the big, international bestsellers. Morin had made a point of mentioning a paper in Berlin and the New York Times.

Morin lacked nothing in the confidence department. He seemed unfazed by their interest in Tobias, but then journalists of all kinds had their sources of information. That information ran in some surprising channels. Morin was nothing if not a journalist. Lavoie had made some contact somewhere along the line, just to be assured of their welcome. Gilles wondered how politically-adept Lavoie actually was.

Gilles wondered what made a man want to become a critic, anyways.

For surely, life was all about becoming—Tobias again. Maintenon was going to have to read a few of the damned things. One more log piled on his wagon. It was an old peasant saying, but then the winter nights got very cold.

Morin sat on one end of a sofa with a sea-shell motif, taken to the extent of swooping carved wooden arms, curling legs and rounded tops for each of its three sections. It was upholstered in a deep plum color. The rest of the room, with white lacquered glass-fronted cabinets, heavy brocade curtains flung wide to admit a little light, good chairs and reading lamps, fitted the personality of an educated, possibly even an important man. Gilles and Andre were comfortable enough in their high-backed wing chairs. Ice water had been thoughtfully poured by a silent manservant in black trousers, white shirt and a red vest. He was the sort of man who retreated as silently and as swiftly as he had arrived.

Raymond Morin beamed at Gilles as he took a better look at the place.

It was a room built and conceived for living and working in. This was a man who lived his work going by the number of bookshelves. The chocolate brown carpet under their feet showed a bit of thread here, a bit of cigarette ash there, but the overall effect was of comfortable utility rather than pure showpiece. There was a heavy book open on Morin's desk, and it appeared that he took the work seriously judging by the sheaf of notes he was taking. Paper-clips along the edges of the pages presumably marked certain passages in the book under scrutiny.

"Did you like him?"

Morin stared at Gilles.

"Well, Sergeant. That's hardly a consideration—"

Gilles repressed a sigh.

"No. I mean seriously, as a person. You might have met him once or twice, at a conference or an awards banquet—that sort of thing."

"Oh. Yes. Of course."

That wasn't exactly an answer. According to the notes provided by Vachon, they went back quite a ways. For some reason Morin wasn't very forthcoming on the subject. Maybe he just didn't want to bad-mouth an old friend. The trouble was they needed information.

"Did he have a friend? Another writer, perhaps, one that we might talk to? If Aldrich is innocent, and you certainly think that might be the case—" Gilles stopped at the thunderstruck look on Morin's face.

"A friend—" His eyes glazed over and he stopped dead.

His face came around.

"A friend—Tobias? That's a good one." He pursed his lips in thought as Gilles wondered what was meant by that exactly.

He was about to get a clue.

"Aldrich Tobias is...the most self-reliant, most internally composed person I have ever met. Honestly, he should have commanded troops in battle." He grinned. "As it was, we were mere poilus."

Morin's face clouded. And lucky to survive, no doubt, for they all had their stories.

Levain stuck an oar in the water. Maintenon rarely floundered, but he seemed to have something else on his mind, and most likely Andre could nail it in one guess.

Ann.

"What do you think about all these girls? One girl, nothing but a torso turns up. Then in one killing, there is the burning of the body. Then in what people called the Kitty Killing, there was the dead cat. The girl and her cat were kidnapped. She was tortured, drugged, raped. Then she was decapitated." The cat was then decapitated as well, in what was a unique touch for serial killers in general and Paris in particular.

Morin nodded vigorously.

"Yes—yes! I always thought that was a bit overdone, but such things do happen. And authors have to compete, in a marketplace powered by the popular tastes of the time. You see now, don't you, how difficult it is to distinguish between fact and fancy. I understand you are referring to the actual crime and not the fictional one. But my own personal taste runs to the British, dare I even say English style, a more genteel style of presenting the age-old moral dilemma of crime and murder to the reader, who is only seeking to be entertained and not battered over the head with a weighty sermon. Oh! Don't forget the blood and guts. The British have a less splashy way of handling a dead body. Tobias went on, and on, and on, sometimes."

"But of course." Andre looked helplessly at Gilles as if to shrug in defeat.

"This looks like a terrible line of coincidences to us."

Morin looked interested, almost bored by it up until now.

"Go on, Detective-Sergeant." Morin had that critical mind.

Why not try him out?

"Well. Tobias plans a murder, not exactly the perfect crime, especially not if you keep on killing. Why would he just incorporate it into his books? Allegedly, this latest book comes out...and then he goes off, kills a girl, then goes home and writes more books. And then one day, right out of the blue, for no reason at all, he decides to act out a few more chosen scenes from his novels?"

According to the time-line, the first crime was three years previously. There was a long break of eighteen months, and then a whole rash of them.

"That doesn't sound very logical, Sergeant."

"I'm sorry, I've put it rather badly." Andre had the grace to blush.

That was exactly what Gilles was thinking. And yet in order to construct a book, especially an intricately-plotted murder mystery, Tobias would have, must have, a supremely logical mind.

It took time, obviously, but even if Tobias had spent years on each book, that didn't account for the crimes. Did he want to be caught? Some true psychopaths taunted the authorities with their prowess, their ability to defy detection and punishment. It wasn't always so easy to get at them, either.

Some of that was detailed in Tobias' books.

"I have a question, Sergeant."

"Yes?"

"If there really was some kind of ritualistic aspect to these killings, why no totems?"

Gilles stared into those intelligent brown eyes. The man was biting back a smile.

All quarters available to Tobias had been thoroughly searched and no trace of totemic items had ever been found. Even his knife drawer had turned out to be completely uninteresting. The prosecution said he 'must have' had them hidden 'somewhere special.' Then they left it at that, and then the defense did nothing with it.

"You know something."

"No, I don't, Sergeant. But either Aldrich Tobias is the dumbest killer to come along in quite some time, or someone put an awful lot of time and effort into setting him up." Morin leaned back, put his arms behind his head.

An elegant set of boots clumped onto the nearest corner of his desk.

"And the poor devil, the man everyone loves to hate, poor old Aldrich Tobias, has a date with the guillotine..."

His eyes found the desk calendar.

"Oh, my God...and you are running out of time, gentlemen."

"In your assessment, then?" This wasn't as snarky as it might sound.

The rush of adrenalin on mention of the deadline was surprisingly strong for Gilles.

Morin knew Tobias intimately from his works and his ability to analyze psychological motifs. They had at least served in the same unit, however briefly, together. They had eaten together, drank together and no doubt ran across the same muddy ground together.

"Your killer is someone who read those books from back to front. They knew something about Tobias as well—his routine, his household...something. And they hate his guts, for some reason." Morin looked older, sadder, wiser somehow. "And the really shocking part is that he went out and killed all or most of your girls. Your victims. That's quite a lot of hate, gentlemen."

It sounded positively mad when put in those terms, causing Gilles not his first moment of doubt.

If Tobias was really guilty, they needed to know that too.

"Hmn. That's an interesting point—our possible, ah, alternate suspect would have to be capable of all of that."

It was nothing Gilles hadn't thought of, but they had Morin talking and that was supposedly not the easiest thing. The sort of man who got paid, and paid well, simply to talk, didn't open up to just anybody without a hot and sweaty centime in their hand.

It was a feeling that Gilles had been unable to put into the proper words. Morin also thought Tobias was innocent. Gilles thought Morin's instincts might be pretty good. They agreed with his own, after all. But it was something to hear it from another person, and one who knew the subject better than he ever would. The impression gained from seeing Tobias in the hoosegow or simply reading the notes, was inevitably going to be a distorted one.

"Much of Tobias' work is, or was, an attempt to disrupt staid, bourgeois value systems. He wanted to get people asking questions. He was desperately provocative. Imagine the disappointment! For such things are very rare. No one ever asks a question they don't have to, gentlemen. The choices that he made say much about him, for as a young man, he was unformed—and uninformed. He might just as easily have become an ardent trade-unionist, an out-and-out communist, or for all we know a nudist, a fucking Red Indian, gentlemen—or converted to some obscure Russian church or something." All such men had their influences.

They got their ideas from somewhere.

All of this seemed a bit obscure to Gilles and he bit his lip. Hopefully, the man had some kind of a point—as someone once said, a story was so much the better for the listener if it had a point.

"You know who you might talk to. Corbin, the anarchist. The people's writer. That's what they call him, although I've never used the term myself. Another one, another Tobias, only this one is diametrically-opposed in his social philosophy. They were like peas in a pod; those two, when they were just starting out. Some of the arguments they had." He looked humble, something Gilles didn't think him capable of. "All of us, really. We were a group of very headstrong young men. I didn't know Corbin or some of them very well. Not on that sort of circuit. It's just that we frequent the same sorts of places, and, obviously, we run in a similar crowd, gentlemen. I have no idea of where he's living now, a flop house for all I know. Ernest Corbin. His last book came out, at least anything under his own name, about three...maybe four years ago."

There was more, a lot more. Morin was off on his favorite subject, and had studied the artistic mind over the years. Finally he ran down.

"Oh. This one sort of struck me the other day." He hesitated, then plunged on. "When Tobias denies having an affair with another woman, maybe that's entirely true—because he likes little boys."

He threw his head back and laughed and laughed and laughed.

"Monsieur Morin..."

Morin looked across, face still high with color.

"I was joking, gentlemen. But perhaps you need to start asking some different questions. Perhaps you need to look at things in a different way."

He gave Gilles and then Andre a pleading look, even as Gilles blushed. That last phrase seemed awfully familiar. As a junior officer of the force, it was terribly hard to be interviewed by the press without either being dull and repetitive, a parrot, or a fool. Morin's eyes came back and he gave Gilles a disarming smile.

"So. You do read the newspapers, then."

Morin laughed, a genuine laugh, one with no trace of cynicism or guile.

"And now, gentlemen. You know as much about it as I do." He sighed, deeply. "Good luck to you, and especially to my old friend Tobias. Yes, gentlemen. I can see the questions in your eyes. We were friends once. For I think you are all going to need it."

They had been dismissed, which was at least a familiar feeling. The fellow had admitted to friendship with Tobias—and introduced it with a sense that it wasn't important, or even just interesting.

In the latter case, Gilles would have gladly settled for that much. Gilles was a man looking at, figuratively and literally speaking, a very large stack of files when they got back to the office.

A short time later Gilles and Andre stood on the pavement, with the car baking in the sun.

"Did you get all that?"

Andre gave him a look.

"What. You mean all that stuff about Tobias' work being rife with populist realism and the bizarre juxtaposition of psycho-sexual elements? And the indictment of the bourgeoisie's oppressive control of reason? Not to mention the images of complete unreality rendered with such precision? In an ordered society where the forces of irrationality and violence endure?"

Gilles gave Andre a good, old-fashioned look.

"Hmn." He shook his head. "So you were listening."

"Yeah—sure I was." Andre opened up the passenger door. "I take good notes, too. Where to now, Boss?"

The doors slammed and Andre fired up the ignition. They sat there in their own stink.

Vehicles from the motor pool were not the best sometimes, but so far neither officer rated a personal vehicle.

"You know what I was thinking?"

"No. what were you thinking?" Andre put it in gear and pulled gingerly out into traffic.

"I was thinking that figurine didn't necessarily have to come from Tobias' own house in order for him to touch it." He gave Andre a significant look.

The significance was not lost on Andre.

"Monsieur Morin had some rather interesting items of décor. Is that what you were getting at?"

The artist is mad, always mad.

Morin might be mad. It was just really hard to tell, sometimes.

"Something like that. But it could have been anyone's house, anyone at all. How much did Tobias get out and about? He might have touched it at a party. Someone saw him do it. Maybe even Solange. Right? If he's really innocent, then we need to narrow down the field of suspects, not spread our net wider. But there's more."

Andre was focused on changing lanes and getting around a bus, squatting in the curb lane and making all the stops based on its performance so far.

"Tobias could have touched the thing in a shop and then the next customer came along and bought it. And then they were murdered..." Which would mean it was completely unconnected.

"That is one huge coincidence, Boss."

Levain was right, of course. The actual case was so flimsy, and yet it hung like an albatross around their necks.

"Merde."

Andre glanced over but said nothing as Maintenon's mind drifted.

"Then there is the whole question of the victims. There are just too many of them."

Any investigation was hampered by its initial assumptions—especially if they didn't pay off straight away. When Tobias came along, they were happily discarded. Those assumptions were not well documented, only the alleged, discernable 'facts,' and all of those alleged facts focused on Tobias.

Morin had it right, more or less—someone had done a real number on Tobias, and the police had helped out considerably.

"It's hard to see how anyone benefits from all of those killings, Gilles. And if it was a frame-up of Tobias, all they really needed was one. Right?"

Gilles bit his lip, looking out the window, the busy foot traffic barely registering in his mind. It really was pretty, he thought inconsequentially. This was Paris at its best, and one of many reasons to live there.

All they really needed was one...

But he wasn't so sure of that. All of those killings, all of the sensationalism, meant that the investigation carried its own urgency. It carried its own blindness. Things were proceeding normally, and then, out of nowhere, came the tip from someone, somebody somewhere. He would very much like to speak with that person.

So far, Gilles hadn't found that name in the case notes and he wondered if he ever would. It was most likely an anonymous call.

Inspector Allard's notes were neat and legible, but Gilles still wasn't sure he'd actually found all of them.

If only they had a little more time.

Pulling a rabbit out of a hat was going to be very difficult.

Chapter Nine

Originally, all of their cases had been investigated separately. It was only when new information came in that they were all lumped together. It was an entirely different kettle of fish.

Gilles, back in their temporary headquarters at the Quai, lacking any other inspiration or even instruction, was patiently reading each and every case. He had started, logically enough, with the earliest one and was working on about the ninth one so far.

Gabrielle Langlois had been murdered in her own bed. She was found there, an estimated anything-up-to-two-weeks after her demise, with a dead cat lying on the bed beside her, and faint scratches on her bloodless upper arm which could only have come from the animal's claws. The animal must have gotten hungry, and wondered why his mistress wouldn't wake up. This was the second case with a cat in it. Gilles wondered why the investigating officers hadn't latched onto that one. That one must have been beyond even their no-doubt inconsiderable abilities. There were times when the incompetence of some of his fellow officers was breathtaking. It was the price of political patronage and a hyper-conservative institution, and a holdover from a time when jobs were handed down from father to son.

She'd had her eyes gouged out with a spoon, after death by drowning in the tub. There were some special features in this crime scene. There was no sign of forced entry, or abduction, and the victim had no known associations. She was a nice girl, who came from a good home and had full-time, steady employment.

According to accounts from friends and neighbors, she had no male friends, although she went out to parties and dancing like other girls her age. She was twenty-six according to the file. It was odd that there were no messages scrawled in blood on the wall or the floor. Nothing appeared to be missing from the apartment. Even the eyes were left at the scene, simply tossed aside. It wasn't unheard-of, exactly, and yet the reason for removing eyes and things was a kind of totemism. Killers of a certain type liked to collect souvenirs from their victims. It was slightly unusual for such girls to live alone, but her wages were high enough and she had some money of her own. Removal of the eyes was a symbolic act, perhaps to prevent her ghost from following her killer. There was a special level of madness associated with such acts, and yes, the sort of acts that Tobias wrote about in his fictional worlds. The girl had seen something she shouldn't. It was an obvious conclusion—if one was mad enough.

Yet this crime lacked certain hallmarks. By all rights, Gabrielle should have been a blowsy old whore, or an alkie, or something—

A certain class of woman would have bristled at the suggestion of impropriety, and yet some of them did pretty well by having plenty of male company. Some lived, or attempted to live, by a shabby and genteel little lie. The only evidence of their profession would be a long list of men who had been thrown out because they were no good.

Living a certain kind of lifestyle, the girl would have made a certain kind of name for herself. She'd lived at that address for over four years. This painted a certain picture. The neighbors would have certain things to say about her. There were only so many choices available to them.

No one had mentioned anything in particular. Their silence spoke volumes. She was a nice girl and no one had seen anything—really.

If someone had preyed on Gabrielle with a view to her killing, they must have met the girl somewhere. She worked at an exclusive department store only a few blocks from her top-floor garret. The job paid enough to live on, so it didn't really look like the typical working girl. Not in the most cynical sense. Reading the statements from neighbors, no one had anything bad to say about her. It was unusual for a girl of almost any age to live on her own in Paris. That alone would have made her vulnerable. Working in a big store, serving in the public eye, might have made her accessible in certain ways. Her single status might have made her open to at least some types of suggestion—if the man were charming, and handsome, about the right age, and paid her the proper and very polite attentions.

No one had known a damned thing about any such male figure in her life. There were a few males that had been seen, unfortunately no one could cough up a name. She hadn't confided in anyone at work or among her family. That was the trouble with all of the cases, as far as he could make out. Something, a suspect named Aldrich Tobias, had come along and interrupted the investigation before it could really get anywhere.

And now, it might be too late. Going back there and conducting all of the interviews again, after the well-known fact of Tobias' conviction, was not a promising prospect.

How could he ever trust one damned word of it, no matter what anyone might say? Her death, at least, had been verified innocent, with no suggestion of impropriety—what the papers said was, often enough, 'the police say that the victim may have contributed to their own demise...'

This implied much but spared embarrassment to the survivors.

He took one last, sad look at the photograph of a cheerful and healthy young woman, her life snuffed out before it had even really gotten going. It seemed unreasonable to believe that she was entirely sexless or had no male interests, nor any hot prospects in her life.

He set the file aside for further study. He had one or two more like that. He turned to the next file.

Andre, returning from another errand, stuck his head in the door.

"Do you need anything, Gilles?"

Gilles looked at his watch.

"No." He sighed, and rubbed his eyes. "Thank you, Andre."

"Boss."

"Yes, Andre?"

"When the baby comes, ah. I'm going to be unavailable for at least twenty-four hours."

Gilles nodded.

He looked up, blinking.

"I know." He grinned at Andre and gave him a wave. "Can't come any too soon, eh?"

With a nod and a quick look at his ashtray to see if anything was burning in there, Andre closed the door softly and left Maintenon to his work.

There was no sense in hanging about when he didn't have to.

***

Friday, predictably enough, dawned wet and dark, with low, black clouds looming over the hilltops on the horizon.

Gilles had initially planned on going to work for a couple of hours, but there was just no possible way he could have done it. Hindsight was twenty-twenty on that score. Even with the help of the nurse, Mademoiselle Palomier, Ann was so weak. Distraught as much as anything else, she needed assistance with virtually every operation. Gilles fussed and bothered about her quite as much as the Mademoiselle, a weather-beaten woman of fifty-five. Finally, at ten-thirty or so, they had all of her bags, hatboxes, the bags of shoes, all of which would be useless in the event, in the boot of the taxi-cab. He couldn't begrudge Ann her shoes, nor could he entirely control the irritation. But where in the hell did she think she was going?

He knew a psychological crutch when he saw one.

The Abbey, St. Maurice among the Oaks, was fifteen kilometres away, out in the southwestern part of the greater Paris area. A prestigious location, it was big, airy and clean, with open fields and hills, pastures and cows to look at from the window of your room. It looked all right in the brochures, and one or two people had told him a little bit about the place. One day Gilles had taken a half-day off at work. He'd borrowed a car off the books so to speak, and driven out and taken a look at the place. The architecture was said to be ideal for a sanatorium. It had lots of big, bright rooms, large windows, numerous paths and walkways, balconies and porticoes where the patients could live in the open air in a way that the denizens of the crowded, dirty city could never do.

It was all part of a process, as someone had once told Gilles. There were times when he thought he would go mad from frustration—and the fear. The sheer dread of being able to see the future and knowing there was nothing one could do to avert it.

The day had come, and the process of losing Ann had accelerated. There would be no holding it back now, and both of their lives were spinning out of control. And yet there were still things they could do. They might stave it off a little longer, snatch some joy here and there. It wasn't over until the fat lady sings at your funeral.

It would almost be easier if it was his funeral and not hers.

There was no choice but to give the destination to their driver.

As they moved through busy Friday traffic, Ann's eyes were alight in something akin to excitement. She had been house-bound for so long, anything was a change, and any change must be for the good.

As for Gilles, his heart was breaking. Too much of it was about himself, for whatever would he do without her? What would it be like for her? She would be surrounded by sickness and death, not seeing each other except on weekends and the odd week-night. He had his work, although he dreaded the nights, the evenings and the weekends off. She would have nothing to think about except death and uncertainty—and him.

"Oh, look, honey." Ann stared at a dress in a window as the car sped by, Gilles noting her pale face reflected back from the storefront.

Her face radiated humor in that moment. She had always been the right one for him. She'd always had that wry wit that he so admired.

"Just my luck. It's marked fifty percent off." Ann had always dressed well, her one, solitary haute frock something to be savored, cared-for.

There had been so few occasions to wear and display it, the trophy of having a good husband and a good provider, something very welcome in what was otherwise a pretty ordinary life. Ann loved a bargain and had a very discerning eye for quality, cut and fit. She knew what she could wear and what she couldn't, in her own phrase.

She reached over and clutched his arm, flashing her old smile.

Ann was trying desperately hard to be light and gay about everything and it was impossible to watch and to know without blinking back tears.

Fuck you, Jesus. She deserves so much better than this.

Just then she convulsed in a fit of coughing, holding the handkerchief up to her mouth and nose, and Gilles tore his eyes away rather than check one more time for the tell-tale blossom of bright, red arterial blood.

The driver, becoming cognizant of the address and no doubt realizing that tuberculosis was a communicable disease, caught Gilles' eye in the mirror but said nothing. He turned his head away, perhaps studying the rearview mirror for upcoming threats.

Sighing deeply, Gilles looked away, muscles tense with aggression.

Gilles noted the pressure of acceleration on the back of his seat, and the needle on the dashboard increasing accordingly.

One could hardly blame the man.

***

It seemed to take hours to get Ann registered, even though she was expected. It was a bureaucracy, Gilles appreciated that much. No one seemed to know what room was slated for Ann or even if they had one. After much consultation, the three, and then four, and then five staff members decided amongst themselves that they had a bed after all for Ann Maintenon.

How many times were they going to ask the name of her doctor. Gilles fumed, but inwardly, not letting a hint of his feelings escape out into the open.

He had a mental picture of himself, red-faced, shouting, spittle flying from his lips.

"It's Doctor Ribaud, you miserable bastards..." And on, and on, and on...

There would be plenty bottled up in there.

There was that sense of guilt, and of shame. That sense of abandonment, like throwing someone you loved to the wolves in order to save oneself, or maybe you were just saving your sanity.

Finally they had a bed.

"It's just that it's a Friday, Monsieur Maintenon. It's all these doctors, don't you know."

"No doubt they are all off golfing." It was a joke, or so Gilles thought when he said it.

He barely got it out.

She looked away briefly.

The lady was a plainclothes nurse if there was such a thing, a hospital administrator of the most junior level.

Ann and he stood in the door. He told himself it wasn't a bad room.

"Oh, this is lovely." Ann was lying.

"These rooms are fairly comfortable, if a bit dull sometimes. Especially when there's no sun. It's a bit better after dark. There are extra outlets for the electricity and you can bring in a good lamp or two from home if you like."

Gilles made a mental note: a lamp. Ann squeezed his arm in a claw-like grip, her strength surprising. He patted the hand, a hand that had once belonged to his wife but belonged to a stranger now, and made reassuring noises as best he could.

They took two tentative steps forward as the lady went about checking things.

The bathroom was private, and each room had one. It seemed all right, in fact this one was better than the one they had at home. Their flat had always been a bit cramped, six or seven rooms, scattered all up and down. It was on three floors of an old house in a relatively-affordable middle-class enclave in the 14th arrondissement. The place was barely seventeen feet wide. It was a neighborhood either taking its time about going down, or it might be its way back up, according to some. Many of their neighbors had been there for years and it was at least a stable area. The couple had stopped dreaming of moving into something better a decade before. Paris, the belly-button of the world, was, put into its simplest terms, a very expensive place to live. There was nothing out there, and they would never move now. It was just a feeling they, or at least he, had had at the time. Ann had wanted to move rather badly at one point, while for him it wasn't a pressing matter.

One got used to it.

The lady fluffed up the pillows and turned down the covers. Ann stood there looking scared, and Gilles held her at his side as the nurse bustled about on her useless and nonsensical business. Surely all of this had been done before. They were capable of opening a window if the call for that sort of thing should arise, for crying out loud.

"It's okay, Gilles. Really."

His heart was a stone in his body, and it was all he could do to stand upright.

"Of course, dear."

It wasn't even two o'clock in the afternoon. Long hours loomed ahead and his stomach sank deeper into his pelvis. The urge to drag Ann out of there and run screaming was strong as he had a bit of a moment.

The lady turned from her duty, perhaps having stalled long enough.

They always had this bright look on their faces when they spoke to you. Cops had their special faces too.

"You must be famished." Ann had seated herself calmly, hands in her lap, with Gilles fussing about and trying to decide what to do with the bags.

The chairs around here certainly looked very nice, and yet they were all hard and awkward as all hell. All institutions were like that, when a society was crumbling. Perhaps that was unnecessarily harsh. It hadn't quite crumbled yet.

Merde.

Ann would tire quickly and needed help unpacking. He must remain true to her, to be there for her.

"Perhaps I could show you the dining room?" The lady managed to catch Gilles' eye.

He found it within himself to forgive, for whatever crime the nice lady had on her conscience.

"But of course." He managed a sickly grin, noting Ann's eyes fall, and the knowing look on that calm and professional visage. "Madame..."

She stepped back and away and Gilles busied himself in helping to dispose of hats and gloves and coats, and finally in getting Ann up out of her chair.

A cup of coffee and a croissant or something. For the love of God, that wasn't asking so much.

***

After a light tea, which did somewhat mollify a miserable, wounded tiger of a man, Gilles at his worst, they put Ann to bed. Gilles would be staying the night, and he had a briefcase full of files to be read if he got the chance. Ann's afternoon nap had become a familiar thing, and yet this wasn't their home.

Baise. Would the pain never subside, and yet it had to be so much worse for Ann.

It looked like he would be able to work, as a matronly figure clad in grey-blue striped cotton garb led him to another wing of the sanatorium.

She opened up door number nine.

"This is where you will be staying."

Gilles, unlike Ann, had only one small overnight bag and his briefcase. The porter, an elderly but very tall man with good shoulders in spite of a pronounced stoop, put Gilles' bag on a low velvet covered bench at the foot of the narrow bed. He stood aside, not quite sticking his hand out for a tip but managing to convey the idea fairly well.

The lady made a polite turn and went to turn down the blanket as they were so wont to do and Gilles slipped the old fellow fifty centimes.

The man saluted and Gilles's hand was halfway up before he caught the mischievous grin and the wink. He'd been in the Army and still had a keen eye for rank.

"Knew it!"

The porter stood with a droll look on his face.

"Do you mind if I call you Sergeant?"

Gilles smiled tiredly.

"Please don't—Private."

"Ah, buddy—we're not in the army any more, are we?"

The man laughed and sauntered out of the room with one last glance, eyebrows lifted and teeth white in a big smile, closing the door with a sharp click behind him.

"Dinner is at six, and our patients may have visitors from seven until nine p.m. Immediate family members only. No children or pets." She stood steadily regarding him. "Do you have any questions?"

Of course he had a million of them, but in the light of that compassionate gaze, he couldn't think of any one thing in particular.

"Ah—no. Madame."

"Monsieur Maintenon. Gilles."

"Uh...yes?"

She seemed very sympathetic.

"There's a little talk we have with all of our adult, ah, spouses, former care-givers, loved ones who come and go..."

His mouth came open, and his eyebrows rose. She was about to lecture him on tuberculosis and certain prophylactic measures.

"Yes? Madame, ah, Dubrueil?" He was pretty sure that was correct.

They really ought to wear the name tags at all times, but they did what they could to ease the institutional air of the place. It really was more of a home, a community, segregated, not by skin color or economic status but because they shared a common affliction—and a common fate, in the end.

"Tomorrow morning, just after breakfast, one of our staff will notify you. She will tell you that there is a cab, out from town as they just dropped off another patient. The driver is asking if anyone is going back that way...do you understand?"

"No. Not really." It was a powerful blow to the solar plexus. "No."

Merde.

What now?

She nodded.

"Honestly, it's just better if she knows you're off, and that you're going to be all right. There's no sense in these terribly dramatic scenes. You know, Gilles, one of the most common worries of people who are ill, is their loved ones."

"Ah—ah—yes?"

"It's just that she'll be just as worried about how you'll be making out, non? She'll worry about you endlessly, you know that." The sympathy was professional, but no doubt sincere. "You'll be alone now, Gilles. She knows that."

It was better for Ann if she didn't fret too much. Better for both of them.

Gilles nodded in comprehension. Somehow it had to be done and somehow, they must get through it. He would deal with his feelings later.

Privately.

One must not cry in front of the help.

Her head moved in some kind of universal communication of an unspoken nature. She was relieved when he didn't argue.

She patted him on the bicep.

"We'll see you and Madame Maintenon in the dining room at six, ne'est pas?"

"Oui, Madame."

Mercifully, she was gone with a swishing of skirts and a light fog of scent and soap. Gilles could be alone with his thoughts and a crushing burden of loneliness. The despair didn't help much either.

Chapter Ten

It was done, for better and for worse. Ann was in the sanatorium, and Gilles did what he could, the only thing he could do under the circumstances, to take his mind off of his troubles.

The British Tommies had a song for it, or was it the Yanks?

Pack up your troubles in the old kit bag.

The big psychological hurdle was past, and now they must live with the consequences. Life itself had consequences, one of which is that we all have to die someday.

On that thought, Gilles pulled the next file off of the thick wad in his briefcase as the taxi, coming home through the pastoral peace of the countryside, took him back downtown and his work. Sunday at the office held its comforts right about then.

They bumped along and it forced him somehow to really focus. At first, he struggled to comprehend, it was like a kind of temporary amnesia. The funny thing was to be aware of it.

What in the fuck is wrong with my head...?

He was a bit young for proper dementia...he tried again. The words finally began to sink in. The world outside went away after a while.

This case was typical for the bunch he'd read so far.

Abrial Martin, and her boyfriend Geffrey Simon. The young man was found dead in an orchard, a place on the eastern outskirts of the city, where horses were turned out after a day's work to loaf about and be ready for the next day. There were all sorts of horses still in Paris these days, although it must soon become a thing of the past. Open land was scarce enough, and there were only so many places, especially away from rivers, streams and ravines, to dump a body.

The young man had been presumably grabbed from behind and then his throat quickly cut.

He died in his tracks.

Passers-by heard screams in the darkness. By the time anyone got there with a lantern to help, or to look about, the girl and her abductor were gone.

She would have been absolutely hysterical after witnessing that, thought Gilles. Even if she didn't actually see much in the darkness. The young couple were an item, and were likely involved in sexual activity or merely some heavy petting. They were of an age.

The girl had been found days later, in an abandoned storefront building, one long-vacant and since condemned as the absentee landlord wasn't paying the taxes. The place, falling into disrepair, had been boarded up to prevent tramps from camping out and ultimately burning down the entire neighborhood. This was not uncommon in certain areas of the city. The back door had been kicked in, and probably held shut by soft iron wire found at the scene and rigged for just such an eventuality.

Question: how in the hell would Tobias know about such a place? Did he research it?

And if so, when?

The girl, nineteen years old, tied to the ramshackle old iron bed, had been raped, tortured and then killed by numerous downward slashing cuts to the body. She was awake and conscious at the time of the final attack, as the bruises and tears to the skin where the ropes had been attested.

There was a message scrawled in blood on the wall by the door.

It was three simple words.

Whore of Babylon. The girl's panties were missing—fulfilling at least one of the hallmarks or requirements of the typical, truly psychopathic, 'motivated' killer,' the need for trophies and the communication with a wider audience.

There were the usual undertones, overtones might be a better word, of some overwhelming moral outrage.

Other than the fact that they had no real suspects and no good witnesses or descriptions, the case was unremarkable for all of that.

He closed the folder and reached for the next one. The trouble was that they were all like that—superficially, on some level, there was a resemblance. Once you had all of them in your hand at once, you began to see the important differences.

That should have been a clue for the original team.

***

It was six-thirty in the evening.

The figure in the hallway paused at the door, hearing muffled curses from within. This warranted a brief pause in the interest of diplomacy. Then he rapped. Receiving no response, he rapped again.

Inspector Lavoie cautiously opened the door, sticking his head in with a blank look on his face as he had always found it the least threatening to subordinates.

"Knock-knock." The opening to a bad joke, he thought.

The response, when it came, was unusual but not unheard-of.

"If you're not here to kill me, then what the fuck good are you."

Gilles Maintenon heaved a deep sigh. He put the file down with an air of resignation and turned to see who was there. His face kind of froze there for a minute.

"That bad, is it?" Lavoie inclined his head and bit back a guffaw. "Sorry to sneak up on you like that."

Gilles hastily got to his feet.

"Sir! Ah, Rene. I am ever so sorry..."

"Merde. I'll bring a bottle next time, okay?"

Lavoie opened the door fully and eased into the room, bearing yet another buff file folder, secured with metal tabs and a grommet to keep the contents snug and secure. It wouldn't do to have them falling out in the hallway, or in an elevator somewhere. It was the secret dossier on yet another great literary figure.

Lavoie was beginning to find it remarkable, just how extensive the previous several governments had been in keeping tabs on the sort of dissident minds that any artistic community seemed to attract. Perhaps spawn was a better word, thought Lavoie.

Gilles' face was a bit pale, but he extended a hand and took the file. The file was easily five centimetres thick, dragging his arm down with the weight. His eyebrows rose at the name neatly inscribed in black ink on the upper left hand corner.

Ernest Corbin.

Anarchist writer.

"I thought this might help. Some of it's not so easy to get. We have the man's tax records and everything, military service, including a psychiatric discharge...everything. What they call combat fatigue. You know—lack of moral fibre. Not enough moral muesli, is what I always think. Looks like someone did him a real favor on that last one, eh? War is tiring, isn't it, Gilles. Anyway, you might as well go and see the man. Where's Andre? And is there anything else I could do? Ah...anything you want to get off your chest?"

Gilles's eyes met his for the first time since he'd entered the room.

"Hmn."

"Go on. Spit it out." Lavoie snagged a wheeled swiveling armchair and brought it over.

He sat back, crossing an ankle over his knee and giving Gilles a helpful look.

"Something on our good Capitaine Leduc might be helpful."

Lavoie studiously said nothing and made it stick.

"Well, shit, Inspector. If Tobias is innocent, then we're stepping on a lot of toes. There will be a lot of egg on people's faces, you know?" Maintenon paused. "But even worse. We're going at the whole thing ass-backwards."

"What do you mean, Gilles?" Lavoie pursed his lips and waited.

This one was pretty bright and they all had their high hopes for him.

"Let's say that we're trying to prove him innocent—and we don't have any evidence. It's extremely difficult to prove a negative. There is simply too much leeway in his day, in that household, in that particular class and occupation. Tobias never punched the clock in his life. He could come and go at will. I will give the prosecutor that much."

He left out the part about Morin suggesting Tobias might like boys. He intended to ask the question on his next visit though. One more item on the list. Tobias would laugh in his face and then they could cross it off.

Maybe.

"Okay. Very well. What do you propose?"

"Throw all of it away—all of it. And then reinvestigate all of those cases again."

"Ooh." Rene Lavoie's face screwed up in dismay. "That one, is going to be a real hard sell, Gilles."

Detective Sergeant Maintenon, very conscious of his junior status, aware of the opportunity and also the consequences of failure, sighed.

He was deeply unhappy, but there was not much more to be said either.

"Unfortunately, that is all I've got for you."

Lavoie pursed his lips, nodding sagely.

Time for some kind of pep talk.

***

Outside the door, with a bag of sandwiches in one hand, and a bag with four cold bottles of highly-unauthorized beer almost falling out from under his other arm, Andre Levain paused at the rumble of voices. One was Gilles, the other ominously familiar. At this time of the evening the upper corridors were fairly quiet. There was no one there to remark on his behavior, and he'd better get while the going was good.

He turned and crept silently down the corridor, where hopefully their regular squad-room would be empty—if he was damned lucky.

Sergeant Levain with his guilty packages was just at the yellow rectangle of the open door. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunate indeed, but the bulky figure of Archambault was hunched over his desk, still awake by the looks of it but ready for an illicit nap. Open files and copious notes attested to another thankless overtime shift.

The latch on the door behind him, up the hall, snapped open and Inspector Lavoie strode out, coming up fast from behind as Levain kept his head down and continued into the squad-room.

He could not help but turn and look.

He caught a polite nod from the Inspector as he went past, and then turned his head towards their pet refrigerator, something not every unit had.

With his keen hearing and overly-sensitive conscience, the sound of the door down the hall came again. He barely had time to thrust the bags into the fridge and slam the door. The Inspector was still going and that was good...

"Andre. Andre."

There were footsteps, right there.

"Yes, Boss?"

Archambault's eyes were definitely open now, as his head came up and he blinked at Andre.

"Come on. We're going somewhere."

Andre nodded.

"Okay. Any idea where, Boss?"

"Yeah. Another interview. What's in the bag?"

"Ah—lunch." Or dinner, rather, or merely personal survival.

The organism that is man must eat.

One ate when one could, for surely the calm could not last.

Gilles nodded in approval.

"Bring it with us. We'll eat it in a park or something." Gilles patted his pockets in some subconscious ritual, perhaps not totally superstitious in origin.

He went over and marked Maintenon and Levain 'out' on the chalkboard by the door.

"At this time of night?"

Gilles grinned.

"The Monsieur is an anarchist, Andre."

Archambault snorted, and eyed his cold coffee with disdain. He rubbed his eyes and looked at the clock. He was already a man of few words, but it was like he was running out of steam.

Andre opened the fridge and pulled the bags out again.

Chapter Eleven

Evening sunlight slanted in from a row of tall windows and tall shafts of blue haze angled up from brilliant rectangles on the rug as lazy curlicues of smoke drifted through them.

"Illegalists usually do not seek moral basis for their actions. They recognize only the reality of might rather than that of right for the most part. Illegal acts are done simply to satisfy personal desires, not for some greater ideal, gentlemen. This is a subversion of established norms, no doubt. Revolutionists of the left and right are supremely convinced that theirs is the only sane course. They are of course insane themselves." It sounded like a speech or manifesto.

The gentleman had been expecting them.

"It is an age of political abstraction, with all of the hold on men's hearts that abstractions so often have. Their beliefs are formalized, even formulaic in their abstraction. He's a great artist and I hope you get him out, although I strongly disagree with some of his techniques. But when all else is lost, an artist must fall back on technique. Aldrich, a dear friend of mine, once gave me some writing advice. He told me to always paint with the largest possible brush."

Corbin studied them closely for a moment, and then delivered the punch line.

"He's a great artist—if only anyone knew what he was talking about a lot of the time."

Andre's pencil snapped, and he put the bits into his jacket pocket and pulled out another.

"Well." Gilles was strongly tempted to add, 'thank you for clearing that up for us...'

"Well, okay then." Andre's snort, almost a twitch, really, was almost completely silent, but it was there.

Gilles wondered how much of this Lavoie had known or how seriously one might take it. Academic theory was all very well, but what did it amount to? Some crackpot making bombs in a basement. It left fools like Corbin, and plenty of others just like him, writing their extreme left and right-wing newspaper columns, egging them on and providing a kind of justification with their inflammatory rhetoric. As a policeman, just meeting Corbin was educational.

"More than anything, it was his stance on religion."

"I believe it was Marx who said that religion was the opiate of the people." Andre barely looked up from his note-taking.

"Ah. Actually, opium is the opiate of the people—Aldrich Tobias, in Leader of Men." Corbin grinned affably. "But in his opinion, organized religion is virtually always abused as a source of money, power, and social control. According to Aldrich, it rots the mind because of the lack of need for objective evidence. This renders all morality a matter of blind self-interest on the part of the privileged classes, who obviously have much to lose if social control is lost."

He took a deep breath.

"But this, more than anything, is what attracts the critics, who as you know are legless men who want to be paid—and paid very well indeed, to give lessons in running, walking, leaping, cavorting, and dancing. They are also staunchly conservative. The Church and the state are inseparably interconnected these days."

"As an anarchist, don't you feel the same way?"

"Oh, absolutely. We differ in other areas. More than anything, we differ by degrees. Guys like Tobias wanted power, where I just want to abolish it. Where I might see the necessity of violence, in order to shift the social paradigm, Aldrich suggested that we simply ignore them both. But this is of course impossible to do when they are all-pervasive and such a terrible power disparity exists between the governed and governing classes."

"So you would use violence to overthrow the state?"

"I might advocate violence as an agent of social change, Sergeant. As to overthrowing it, no—that generally implies somebody else taking power. I merely want to do away with it entirely, and let the marketplace decide." This last remark came with its own special grin, by which the two officers understood he was being facetious. "Call it a kind of social Darwinism if you will. But these guys tend to forget what that actually means."

"And what does it mean?" Andre again, challenging.

"It means that my sword might be bigger than yours. It means that I might be even more evil, more violent, and even more rapacious than the very same bourgeoisie who always seem to visualize themselves at the pinnacle of a new social order—where the eebie-jeebies and the rubby-dubs, the unwashed and the undesirable, are firmly cemented in place. At the bottom of the heap, where they can be seen, not heard, and provide cheap labor and a steady market for beer and tobacco, and lottery tickets. They tend to forget that we outnumber them, by a thousand or ten thousand to one, and that our agreement is necessary to govern us."

"I see."

Ernest Corbin was not just an anarchist. He was a poet, a writer, and a painter of the surrealist school. However, he had been thrown out of that school according to a quick character precis, all that Gilles had found time to read during the car ride over. The government's files on Corbin were extensive. The entries went back to the late 1890s. The gentleman was barely forty years old, but the first entries were strictly small-time, more criminal than political: smashing windows and writing (or painting) socialist graffiti.

How in the hell did you get caught for graffiti? That didn't speak well for his competence, even as a young man of sixteen or whatever.

Monsieur Corbin had a blowsy wife, whom they had met, with her thinning strawberry red hair, and there were pictures of his numerous progeny lining the mantel. The place smelled like fish, probably laying out fresh on the kitchen countertop. The flat was not particularly large or well laid-out. It was said he was still a staunch Catholic. How that reconciled with anarchism had always been a mystery to Gilles, not that he wanted to know the answer. He just didn't have time for it.

Corbin lived in the northwestern part of city, having a small third floor flat, looking out over a busy thoroughfare. The sounds of life and laughter came in through open windows, curtains billowing in the breeze and with a single fly buzzing around, coming and going from the dark to the light and back again. He and the wife were the only ones living there these days and they had plenty of room.

The gentleman wore blue dungarees, no doubt to establish his solidarity with the democratic working peoples of the world. His thin, dark grey knit turtleneck did little to dispel the air of the long-haired intellectual. The diplomas on the walls of his study reinforced the impression of a suave, urbane and sophisticated man. Yet the beard was unkempt, the sweater had crumbs and stains on it and Corbin's shoulders showed a fine powdering of dandruff. Gilles wondered how the fellow might smell up close. It was possible to take curiosity too far.

Tendrils of fine smoke curled up from Corbin's pipe as it rested in the ashtray.

"Tell me something, Mister Corbin."

"Please call me Ernest, Sergeant Levain."

Levain snorted, audibly this time.

"Thank you, Ernest. Please call me Sergeant Levain—"

Monsieur Corbin slapped his palms on the desk in front of him and gave Gilles a bright grin.

"Heh."

"...but if I may be so bold, does your friend Aldrich Tobias actually believe, that in a stateless, er, state...a stateless society, order would happen spontaneously? That, sir, is a ludicrous assertion."

Ernest Corbin spread his hands palm down in a deprecating manner.

"In a manner of speaking, that may be true. I have no idea of what Tobias actually believes, deep down inside, gentlemen. And I hate to contradict you, but he never said any such thing, although there is a school of thought that goes somewhat along those lines. My own personal belief is that a kind of feudal oligarchy must ensue, as the weak rallied around the strong, and the unarmed clustered about the mightier, the better-armed, or simply the most vicious of society. So, in that sense, some level of municipal self-government is inevitable." In his opinion this would be highly-localized, an idealized middle-ages village mentality.

There would also be moral contradictions.

Gilles nodded. He tended to agree. A stateless society would be a barbaric society, where nomadic hordes would pillage at will their weaker, less mobile, unorganized brethren. In the state, these primeval social urges were more properly expressed as crime—clearly reprehensible, clearly unacceptable on a large scale in societal terms, and hence the need for police and investigation.

The state was a deterrent, as Ernest described it.

"You once wrote that there are no universal truths, and that all morality is relative to its time and place."

"Yes, that's entirely correct, Detective-Sergeant." On some feral impulse, Corbin leapt up from his seat and began to pace back and forth, seemingly unable to stop himself.

Corbin stopped dead. He looked at Gilles anew.

"But it's best not to take such things out of context. I have also written, that the War killed all of our best, our brightest, and our bravest. In some odd sense, it also took our most moral, because it took away our youth. We are left to be governed by women and boys. Fools, cowards, bigots and eunuchs. Is it any wonder then, that France is in trouble, deep trouble, gentlemen? And you wonder why I am such an anarchist. But you see, my friends, I have witnessed the benefits of organization, of unchecked authority, the so-called leadership which is nothing of the kind, nothing but a gathering of a clique, merely the misrepresentation of interest—oh, yes, gentlemen. I have seen the benefits of regimentation—"

He stopped and clamped his mouth shut, glaring at them now.

Gilles dropped it there. He took a new tack.

"There was talk that Tobias was in love with another woman. Would you have any idea of who that might have been?"

Corbin exhaled in a blast of pressure. He looked down, surprised to find himself where he had begun. He fell back into his chair. It rolled backwards and rocked alarmingly from side to side, which he must have been used to, as he took no apparent notice of his danger. He ran a hand through his hair.

Corbin appeared to consider the question.

"As far as I, or anyone else knows, he and Solange had a very successful marriage."

Apparently the two couples got together once or so each year, going back over old times and having a good gossip.

Gilles took that as a cue, and engaged in some humble gossip of his own. Prison authorities were monitoring all letters to Aldrich Tobias. There were plenty of crackpot and more threatening letters, which were held back as undeliverable, Tobias hadn't received a whole lot of mail from any suspicious or interesting females.

He wasn't getting too many compliments, either. Corbin nodded in interest at all of this. He might even pass it on, out of a sense of helping Tobias in some way.

The idea of checking them out had been quickly discarded on examining the addresses, which were all over the country. There simply wouldn't be enough time for it to do any good. Tobias' own family members had studiously ignored him, with only one incoherent letter from his daughter. That one had been sent shortly after his arrest and she was clearly in emotional turmoil at the time of writing.

She said she hated him. Gilles cautiously laid all this out for Corbin's consideration as the gentleman studied him and Levain unabashedly.

"Nah. It really doesn't seem like him. He was never that way, you know—predatory. Anyway, I've never heard any names mentioned. Why, isn't he saying? But that's preposterous. Surely she might be able to give him an alibi, shit! At least for one or two of the incidents."

It was so easy to accept, the suggestion once made. Even Corbin sort of bought into it.

"Yes, that's what we were thinking, too. She's probably married or something, eh? But unfortunately, he has clammed up on the subject and I don't think we're going to get anything out of him." Sharing information with a subject, a witness or a possible suspect was chancy, unusual at best.

It might be best to think of Corbin as potential expert witness material for a later date. He was an expert on anarchist writings.

Corbin had attended school with Tobias and it was worth a shot, to take him into their confidence like that. It was mostly bullshit anyways, just gossiping really. It was all in the presentation, but Corbin might think of something on his own hook and give them a call. It was the best they could hope for.

***

The pair sat in a park, angled towards each other, sitting on one cheek so to speak. The darkness covered a multitude of sins, possibly even some anarchist graffiti.

Gilles chewed on a mouthful of bread, butter, meat, mustard and pickles.

"Oh, Lordy."

Andre snorted.

"You've got to start looking after yourself a little better, mon ami."

Gilles nodded shortly. It was true. For months, years even, the knot of tension, fear of the unknown, had held his guts hostage to his emotions. Well, the unknown had finally happened. Ann was in good hands, better than he had been able to provide at home, and somehow the knot in his stomach seemed looser today.

The denial, the bargaining, the begging, was over. There was only acceptance, and defeat, and it was a curiously humbling thing—to discover that one wanted to live on, even now. He wasn't as nice as he thought he was, apparently.

What terrible thoughts were in his head sometimes.

He knew he hadn't been eating properly, and that sleep was hard to come by. Things that had once given him pleasure now held no meaning at all. Gilles had fallen, and he was having a hard time getting back up.

Even now.

"There's something bothering you, and I'm not talking about Ann." Levain tipped back his lukewarm lager and took a good swig.

Andre wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The man on the bench beside him sighed.

Gilles took another breath, and sat up straighter.

"Yes. One or two things. The file on Allard himself." So far he hadn't stumbled across it, and the pair of them had gone through the whole lot, admittedly in a quick search, trying to see if it might be there. The problem was that they had to sift through piles of it, and one could never really be sure it hadn't been tucked inside one of a hundred other bulky folders.

There was just too much disparate material, and a surprising amount of chaff. This would be envelopes, indecipherable notations on unsigned note-ads and individual sheets of paper with no identifying names or numbers. They couldn't just throw them away, so all they did was to set them aside for last. There were telephone numbers with no names, and illegible names with no notations, and even a few lunch receipts stuffed in as if to justify the time on the job. For surely the whole thing had been a useless endeavor.

Gilles let out a silent burp, the alcohol causing a pleasant stinging sensation where the nostrils met the esophagus.

The crickets were really something this evening, and a low moon loomed at the end of an uncharacteristically long block for this part of town.

At one time, it would have seemed romantic.

In a few minutes the moon would rise, and cross the street so to speak, going again out of sight behind buildings, the trees and the scattered cumulus of a balmy evening. Gilles waited for a bus to pass before attempting to put his thoughts in order.

"Once someone made the suggestion that the cases were related, each and every individual case was suddenly rendered unsolvable. Let's face it. They were never going to be solved that way. Besides, the whole idea that the killings were related revolves around Monsieur Tobias." Gilles became aware that he was holding his sandwich on an angle well-calculated to lose all of the stuffings out onto the pavement.

He hastily brought it up and took another bite.

He chewed on it for while. His eyes came back to Andre.

"It might not be as hard to solve some of those cases as people make out."

Andre nodded.

"Sure. They all have a reputation on the line. They have to say it's impossible. And like you say—they were all happy enough with Tobias at the time." Group dynamics at its worst, thought Andre.

Passing the buck until it stopped at the guillotine for Tobias.

The real problem was deciding which cases to look at. This might involve stepping on a few toes. They had all the notes. They had all the names, addresses and phone numbers, constables' note-pads, everything from the original calls. The big problem was that sooner or later, news of their interest would get back to someone who had an interest, someone on the force. Pretty much everyone outranked them. Rumors that the Tobias case was being re-opened were probably already going the rounds. If nothing else, flics were notorious gossips amongst themselves. This they might have called a professional exchange of information, but gossip was not entirely useless in police work. Not at all.

Then there was the other end—the President would tell a friend, and no doubt they would tell a friend. It was always the way.

They would have to work fast.

As for the death of Inspector Allard, he seemed to recall some sort of eye-witness description in the news stories at the time.

Gilles cleared his throat.

"Our problem is three-fold, Andre. To prove Tobias innocent is almost impossible. It simply can't be done with the materials at hand."

"Two?"

"We need to find some suspects in at least some of these cases. That would be a big help."

"And then, Gilles?"

"I would love to know who set Tobias up." His head came around and he met Andre's eyes as if suddenly realizing that he had an audience.

"Hmn. Yes."

"That...that is the one really interesting aspect of this case."

Gilles saw that all he was doing was muddying the waters and confusing himself.

Andre grinned at what came next.

"Whoever that was, well. That one had a very devious mind."

"Whoever the hell that was, must have hated poor old Tobias with a fine passion, Gilles."

There was a faraway look on Gilles' face, and then he slowly crumpled up the paper bag, and looked around for his half-empty beer bottle. He looked at his watch.

"Yes...hmn. A fine passion indeed."

Then there was that whole political aspect to the case. That part stank to high heaven.

"Well." Andre sat up straighter. "I have three suggestions."

Gilles grinned.

"One. We get that Allard file. Two, we find a suspect. That Clifford girl, for example. We might try that one."

"And three, mon ami?"

"Find a urinal. I've got to piss like a race-horse."

Gilles nodded seriously, although this was the most enjoyment he'd had in quite some time. He had forgotten what it was to live. Life should not be a grueling chore, each and every day. It should not be something to be borne, to be gotten through rather than enjoyed.

Not that a little rain wouldn't fall into every life. His was no exception, but then life was all in how you lived it—what a person did with it, and how they felt about it. He'd never had any doubt that it was precious. Initially, we all kid ourselves we're doing it for the love, a service to the public and the nation. There was some self-regard in there too. One must believe that you are worthy of the honor, and capable of fulfilling its call. He had gone into homicide for a reason after all. Back then he thought he had a kind of objectivity towards death, and killing, and murder, but back then he was also young and stupid.

It was always somebody else's death, wasn't it? And perhaps, soon enough, it would be his beloved's turn at the grave and oblivion. The trouble was that he would live on. If so, then it had better be on some kind of terms. Otherwise he would be staving off hell by substituting another kind of perdition.

"And another thing, Andre—if the new government wants Tobias to be innocent, why did the previous one so badly want him to be guilty...?"

But the other fellow was on his feet and all set to go, face turned to the brighter glare further up the street.

***

"Jesus Christ, what fucking day is this?"

Gilles had slept badly. Awakening at four a.m., he had a raging thirst and a fuzzy head. Draining the last of the orange juice, he drank two curiously insipid glasses of tap water, which seemed to help. Somehow he knew he wouldn't be getting back to sleep. The thoughts, repetitive and perverse, not all of them about the case and Ann, spun around and around in his head. Colors swam in front of his eyes when he rubbed his eyelids.

Then he tossed and turned until dawn. Predictably enough, he ended up falling asleep ten minutes before his normal rising time, and then sleeping in twenty minutes late.

The disruption of his normal, unhurried routine was a bad beginning, and when he stepped out the door, it was cold, wet and dark. Another one of those days.

Gilles was just settling in, shoving files off to one side in the rather forlorn hope of finding his new but rather small desk calendar when the door opened and Andre came in whistling some nameless, formless little tune that sounded vaguely familiar.

With an air of triumph, he pulled his right hand out from behind his back.

"Voila. Leduc."

"Ah." Gilles extended an eager hand for the clean red file folder, perhaps five millimetres in thickness.

Andre whipped out the other hand from behind his back.

This was substantially thinner.

Gilles mouth opened.

"I give you Inspector Allard."

"Oh."

"I went and asked around in his unit." He mentioned a name. "Dumb-ass Dubois had it all along."

Gilles took the files and Andre spun on a heel. This being temporary quarters, the coffeepot was down the hall.

He paused with a hand on the doorknob, even as Gilles opened the Leduc file.

"I've been meaning to get us a couple more good lights in here."

"Um-hmn."

So. It was like that, then.

Andre left the room as Gilles read on, immersed as they say.

Chapter Twelve

Read on, Macduff.

A misquote, (a double misquote in fact), but a good one. Gilles had the impression he'd read the thing fifteen times and it was still boring, or possibly heavily sanitized was a better expression.

Leduc came from a good family. His home was a small village in Normandy. Going by the name of the house, it sounded quite grand. It might even be a genuine chateau, rather than a big, new house with even bigger pretensions. The fellow went to good schools, rather expensive private ones, and then on to military college. He either earned or otherwise received good marks, including top honors in athletics. Somehow there were no surprises there. Commissioned a subaltern, he'd risen through the ranks. When war came, he saw service, and then transferred out of the cavalry, serving in Intelligence in the war.

Gilles grimaced when he read that. They were all eggheads and intellectuals, virtually every one of them connected, a fucking meritocracy if a man had ever seen one. And yet; they had done the best they could. They only had so much to work with, whether it was by aerial observation, balloons, interrogating prisoners or their own spy network. It was terribly objective work, Gilles thought. It would always be imprecise. For just that reason, good men would die needlessly. It was all about security—no socialists or anarchists on that team.

That's not to say that the poilus didn't eventually come to hate Intelligence, with their clean hands and clean bed-sheets, their little wine-and-cheese parties, always held well back from the Front.

The whole thing was curiously thin. He wondered if someone somewhere had a more political dossier on Leduc. He might ask Vachon, but it wasn't wise to go back to the same well too many times. It was not wise to drop everything in Levain's lap either. A man of action, he might just go ahead in some ham-fisted and clumsy way when finesse would serve rather better.

But. Leduc was connected with the President. That alone spoke volumes.

Andre came back in, sipping coffee, just as Gilles tossed it to one side, where he kept stuff for further study.

Gilles opened up the Allard report.

This was barren indeed. An autopsy report, death certificate, some personal details as to next of kin. There had been one eyewitness, and there was the name of the senior investigating officer. Not much to go on, but the case had been ruled a hit-and-run accident. Speculation was that drunk driving may have been responsible.

He quickly skimmed through the notes.

"Andre." He jotted down a name, address and phone number.

He looked up.

"Yes, boss?"

"I was wondering if somewhere there is a political dossier on Tobias." Gilles sat there, eyes drifting until he appeared to be gazing up into the top corner of the room. "Maybe even Leduc. Or for that matter—you and I."

Or possibly even Inspector Allard, he was thinking.

He shoved his chair in close and reached for the phone.

"For want of inspiration, let's find this girl and ask her again, about the night the unfortunate Inspector..."

"...bought a small farm in the Beauce." Levain was tongue-in-cheek, but he was young and had never met the fellow.

"Ah—oui, my young and impetuous friend."

Andre nodded, reaching for his own phone.

Might as well try and look busy. Besides, they really did need more light in there. Maybe even a chalkboard, and some chalk, even.

It was either that or read up on some more whacky murders.

***

They were making a pretty good start to a brand-new day. Maribel Vathy was just as one would have pictured her.

Sleek rather than plump, with her hair cut short rather than a pair of braids, she waited breathlessly while Andre assured her mother, who would please remain in the room at all times, that there really was nothing to worry about and that it was just good old routine, plain and simple.

"Really, Madame, we just wanted to follow up on a couple of little things."

While the girl would probably talk about their visit, there was the whole question of who she might tell. Maintenon's eye swept the mantelpiece and the photos lined up in silver frames. All good, working-class folks. Not a gendarme among them, he was pleased to see. Yet the grapevine was also very long. It had tendrils everywhere.

"Really, in a case like the poor Inspector, we just thought we'd stop in while we were in the neighborhood. Anyhow, we're glad to hear Maribel is none the worse for her experience."

Maribel sat on one end of the couch, hands clasped in her lap, eyes as big as saucers. Her legs weren't quite long enough to reach the floor and her feet, predictably enough, swung slightly back and forth with the irrepressible energy of the very young.

"Maribel."

"Yes, Maman."

The feet stopped, momentarily. As Andre extended a courteous but unmistakable gesture, the woman finally sat. Gilles turned back to the girl as Andre casually took out the note book. He gave the end of his pencil a lick and the girl a quick smile.

"That always helps."

She smiled at Andre, now seemingly more at ease. Another minute and she'd be giggling.

"There's no need for embarrassment or anything like that. Such a thing could happen to anybody, and in some weird sense, you're lucky. You saw something very exciting, non?"

The girl nodded, sneaking a quick glance at Maman.

"Yes, you were cutting curfew or something. But that's none of my business, and you and your mother must have settled that a long time ago..."

Another sneaking glance at Maman, who suppressed a sound, and Gilles sensed another reassuring nod from Andre's direction.

"Okay, you're an extremely intelligent young woman. I won't waste your time. Can you tell us, in twenty-five words or less—just exactly what you saw that night? Leaving nothing out, and yet not overly-dramatizing it, comprene-vous?"

The girl reddened slightly, and her eyes widened at the implications. Gilles held up a palm, gave her a nod, and then looked up at Andre and that hovering pencil.

She had her story all ready to go.

Out of the corner of his eye, the girl seemed pretty intent on the side of his face...a hint of anger there.

When she spoke, it was quite stiff, almost formal.

"Why, yes, of course, Sergeant." She took a breath. "Why, on the evening in question..."

"Please, young lady—twenty-five words or less."

She flushed and looked away, mentally kicking herself. Gilles actually smiled at Maman.

"I was walking down the street. I was on the right-side sidewalk, and there was a man ahead of me, on the other side of the street." They were going in the same direction. "A car that had been parked in an alley, facing out—although I don't recall seeing anybody in it, came out, from in behind me, and turned in the direction we were walking—it came out after I walked by that alley."

Gilles nodded, staring into her eyes now. But she was sure of it, and not lying if he was any judge.

"Were the lights on or off?"

"Off. But then they turned them on."

"One or two people in the car?"

"I—I'm not sure."

"And then."

"Yes, Sergeant. And then, it swung across the other lane, mounted the curb, and hit the gentleman from behind."

It was the dull sort of thud it made. She still remembered that thud. Then a kind of sickening scraping noise, and then the man came out from under the back end. Her face dropped and she was crying.

"Oh, God."

Her mother bustled over and took her in her arms.

"I am so very sorry, young lady—and Madame." The woman nodded as the girl sobbed and shook.

Baise.

Both Gilles and Andre made soothing talk, some of it just noise and the kid settled down again, sniffling and pulling back wet dark hair from her smooth, rounded forehead.

"It went right over him. He must have been dead in a minute." The car bounded, as she put it, down the curb again and zoomed off up the street.

The vehicle was weaving a little bit, as she said.

Dead in a minute. If it was deliberate, someone had made sure.

"Now. There doesn't seem to be anything in our notes about the vehicle. If the Mademoiselle could just refresh our memories, we would be very grateful." It was bullshit, but he wanted to hear it from her.

Gilles looked at Madame, who pulled back, but stayed on the couch for all of that.

She held her daughter's hand, and watched her face intently.

"It was a long, low black car. That's all I can remember." Maribel looked up.

She sniffled and yet gave a wan smile.

"I'm sorry. It's just that it was a long time ago—and it's like I had almost forgotten all about it."

Gilles agreed, speaking softly.

"Yes, thank you."

With polite words they made their way out of the neat but faded working class flat in the eastern part of the city and made their way down to their hack.

With a little luck, the vehicle might even start and then what?

It seemed to Gilles that they were just treading water.

When you start grabbing at straws, then you are in real trouble.

The driver's door thudded closed as Gilles searched for the seatbelt.

"We've got pull, now." Andre was referring to the vehicle.

No matter how beaten the car was, it was unusual to say the least.

"Yes. Power has its uses."

"Boss."

"Yes, Andre?"

"What in the hell are we going to do now?"

"Ha!" Gilles blew a lot of stale air out in a hurry with that one.

He turned to Andre.

A strange grin cracked his more usually reserved face.

"Let us not forget, my dear Andre...that the killer is an artist, and so must be the cop." His voice took on sepulchral tones, sardonic and wicked. "One schema must fall, in order for the correction to occur. This leads to the next phase, one of creative and political freedom."

"Yeah-yeah-of course. But—"

"Oh, Nom de Dieu. How in the hell would I know?" He sighed deeply, gesturing for Andre to start the motor, if he could.

Andre slowly turned the key, eyes searching his friend's anxious mien.

"All right. Okay."

"The older I get, and the more I learn, the more I am convinced..."

With a whine and a snap, the engine caught.

"...that ninety-eight percent of the human race has no idea of what the fuck they are doing, at any given time, in any given place, and for the most part, they're just winging it." Gilles' tone was flat, the words clipped.

He was angry, deep inside. Andre found that a revelation, but of course there was the personal life, always lurking in the background. Levain had found it all a bit of a lark so far. Perhaps that was all the wrong attitude. His guts sank on the revelation; but what more could he do to help? Clearly all, or at least most of the pressure was on Gilles. And yet he had been assigned to the case as well.

Hmn. Perhaps there was danger here after all.

Andre pulled it into gear with a crunch, and glanced at his watch.

"And what about the other two percent?'

"Fucking idiots. Let's go, for Christ sakes."

"Well. Okay then." All he needed was a destination.

With a little luck, one would shortly be forthcoming.

***

"How seriously are we taking the political angle, if at all?" Andre drove relatively serenely through busy noonday traffic, hardly cussing at all.

They were heading back downtown for lack of will or direction.

"Huh. I'll put it to you this way. They'll take a live Aldrich Tobias over a dead one any day—assuming we can do it for them. If nothing else, it tends to discredit the previous government, and these coalition governments are shaky at best."

It was a prop—he recognized a crutch when he saw one.

"There is always that, of course."

"He might be an effective propagandist for them, Andre." Gilles had other thoughts, too.

He was completely oblivious to the fact that Andre was, for all intents and purposes, going around in circles.

They still had plenty of fuel, and the state was the source of all that was good.

The radio crackled on the dashboard. As a precaution, in order to avoid being picked on by Dispatch, Andre had the frequency dial cranked all the way to the far right.

"Car, one-eighty-nine."

Andre's jaw dropped.

"Merde."

Gilles, eyelids fuzzy with the need for sleep, and the heat of the sun, and the tiredness in his bones, sat up a little straighter, giving his face a rub and blinking in the glare.

"Car, one-eighty-niner, come in, please."

"Shit. What do I do?"

Gilles exhaled in a long, quavering sort of sigh.

"Ah, what the hell. We might as well answer the man."

He picked up the microphone and spoke.

"Car, one-eighty-nine. Over. Detective Sergeant Maintenon. Over."

There was a crackle and then it came.

"Telephone message from Detective-Inspector Ardouin. Call him immediately, please. His number is—" Gilles scrabbled madly for his pen and notes as Andre negotiated through ever-thickening traffic.

"Gilles! Close the damned window." The exhaust of a bus was right there, the stench of hot diesel fumes sandblasting the side of his face.

Gilles shifted hands with the microphone and hastily cranked it up.

"Repeat, Ardouin, extension number thirteen-fourteen."

"Car, one-eighty-nine, Maintenon, acknowledged." He read back the number. "Ardouin, thirteen-fourteen. Over. And out."

"Over. Out."

The thing went quiet again.

"Huh. What do you think, Gilles?"

"It's either a break, or we're neck-deep in shit, or he's tapping us for some kind of charity subscription."

Andre grinned.

"That's the spirit."

At least now they had a destination. They needed a phone, and that could only mean one thing in a strange neighborhood: a bar. Or a shop or a store or a call-box. But a bar would work just fine, in Andre's estimation.

Right up ahead was just such a place, and for now, it would have to do.

***

Someone in Ardouin's squad had picked up on the first ring, and told them exactly where to find the fellow. They had a new killing, and. This one was still warm. It was eleven kilometres away through midday traffic and worth every bit of suffering that might have entailed, which it did.

"Call me Claude."

They shook hands and the Detective-Inspector made a motion for them to enter. Next it was Ardouin's partner, and Gilles made a mental note of the name, D'Arras.

"So, gentlemen. What's up?"

Gilles ran an eye over the crime scene. This was the living room, where a man in a smock was dusting surfaces for fingerprints and there was still the smell of fear and death and blood.

"Well. We heard someone was looking into the Tobias killings again." Detective-Sergeant D'Arras spoke first, the junior partner, but perhaps it had been his idea to begin with. "We have some similarities with one of your victims. Ah, the Peltier girl, as I recall."

Gilles nodded. It was, unfortunately, one of the files he hadn't read yet. It really didn't ring too many bells. D'Arras didn't need to know that, so he let the man speak.

"I see."

The Inspector spoke up.

"We're almost done here. In fact the morgue people are raising a stink. I think they want their lunch or something." He grinned, but probably also meant it to some degree. "You can have a look, if you're quick about it."

D'Arras gave an evil smile.

"Step right this way, gentlemen."

They followed him down a short hall, with a bathroom visible through an open door at the end. He took the door on the right just before.

They entered and stopped.

"Oh, dear. Goodness, gracious, me." Andre had been sort of saving that one for a while, and was rewarded with a chuckle from two out of the three.

Maintenon, more serious now that he had something real to examine, raised a palm in Levain's direction.

"That means shut up." Andre's whisper cracked up D'Arras, and the Inspector shook his head in semi-admiration. "He's gaining an intuitive impression of the killer's aura and its ambience..."

"Andre."

"Ah, yes, Boss."

The room was equipped with what looked like a cross between exercise equipment and meat-handling gear in a slaughterhouse, an unfortunate allusion, going by the crusty brown ochre smeared all over walls, floor, and spattered extensively on the ceiling.

"Bondage?"

"Yes, Gilles." The Inspector's mouth was a flat line now. "A little bit of sexual magic, and then our little friend—almost undoubtedly male, sort of got things backwards.'

"Oh, really? In what way?"

"He sawed her in half, Gilles. And then he put her in the box!"

Gilles and Andre looked around.

"And where is...?"

"The victim?" D'Arras beckoned to the open door again, where he led them back up the hall, and turning into a door on the right, they entered the kitchen.

"Seek and you shall find."

"Oh, shit." With heavy feet, suddenly recalling something about one of the Tobias cases from the rather lurid book cover...Gilles opened the door of the refrigerator.

They looked on, eager, hungry...like three big black vultures, as yellow light spilled over his face and he caught sight of the contents.

"Oh, my, God."

"She'll keep quite a while like that, eh, Gilles?"

D'Arras bit his lip, giving an inquiring glance at Levain, whom he'd met over another case, a month or two previously.

Andre shook his head in artistic appreciation.

Wow.

"What's her name?" Andre's pen hung poised to take down details.

"Marthe Cousineau." Age, about twenty-two. "She may have been a pro, or just a dedicated hobbyist."

"Jesus."

Gilles' face, stark and pale, shining a bit, almost as if he was sweating, swung around to Andre and then he took in the others. The room, the whole building seemed chill inside, after days of rain, cloud, and cool, up-one-minute-and-down-the-next weather.

He straightened.

"Yes. The killer as artist. A familiar hand indeed, gentleman." With an unconscious motion, Gilles closed the door on the two halves of what had once been a very attractive young woman, torso upright and legs neatly lined upside down, one on each side. Gilles made his way back to the living room, where there was better air and maybe a chair to sit upon for a moment.

Andre came in, as the others muttered outside in the hallway, consulting. Levain nodded at the stretcher-bearers that they could take her away now.

"Thank you, Sergeant." They clumped past, intent on their business and Andre went and looked out the front window.

"So what do you think?"

Instead of answering Andre, Gilles raised his tired voice, calling out to those in the other room.

"Do you gentlemen have any suspects?"

There were footsteps and then D'Arras was with them again. He had a bright look on his smooth, ingenuous face.

"Sorry. I almost forgot. Yes, there is a fellow. He's known to some of the other tenants, and we'll be looking him up, ah, very, very shortly."

Gilles nodded. It all seemed rather positive, but he had his doubts. It was never that easy.

Shit, it could never be that easy.

"When—or if, you catch up with him, I wouldn't mind having a word with the boy. Let me know if you get any hairs that you can't account for, or any fingerprints, of course."

Andre chewed a lip.

"Try and get a hair off your suspect." He nodded, pleased with his work.

"What? Here?" D'Arras indicated the crime scene.

"Yes, he means here." Detective-Inspector Ardouin sighed, but their big suspect might turn out to be nothing and they were always going to be thorough—that was the rule. "And him."

"Sure. No problem."

D'Arras was young, like Levain, and even Maintenon to a lesser extent.

"Thank you, gentlemen." Gilles resisted the urge to rub his stubbly old chin-whiskers.

It was an easy psychological read, though. Such a killer, once caught, would very often want to brag, to set the record straight about all of their exploits, past, present, known and unknown. Over the years, one or two had been quite indignant about someone else getting credit for one of their kills. That whole Whore of Babylon thing painted in blood on the wall was an excellent point of similarity.

When they got back to the shop, their own photos would confirm it. Gilles sat in the chair as Andre looked out the window, giving him time and waiting for more information.

It was best to be quiet and just let him go.

He was getting to be pretty familiar with that look. Maintenon was somewhere far, far away.

Chapter Thirteen

The fuse that was Aldrich Tobias' lifeline was still smoldering, and it getting shorter by the minute. Gilles had a fuse as well, and he sometimes marveled at just how much of an unexploded bomb he had become. It was taking all of his self-discipline at times. This interview had a little more meat on it, and thank Christ for that.

Michele Duret, Aldrich Tobias' agent, was clearly a busy man judging by his busy-looking desk. As to how successful he might be was anyone's guess. Appearances could be deceptive.

The cramped quarters he shared with a thin, slope-shouldered woman of about forty-five years were lined with sagging bookshelves. Table after table was heaped with what looked like old magazines and newspapers. There were one too many cats—Gilles had counted four rather fat ones between this room and the door.

Duret had a lot of tables. What a clever observation that was. Gilles was lucky to have even a sour humor these days. The gentleman lived on the second floor of a rather shabby house and the smell of cooking confirmed that he lived on the premises. There was something about the way they murmured to each other that spoke of a long-term association. She would be indispensible, paid pennies on the dollar and fired on a whim. Or they could be married, but Maintenon didn't ask.

"Wow. I sure don't envy you your job. Trying to save Aldrich's ass? I'm all for it, of course. He's earned us a lot of money, relatively speaking, over the years. I mean, I have less successful authors. But seriously. What do you have to go on? Nothing. Nothing, I tell you." The sort of fellow that insisted on first names 'right off the bat,' as he put it, Michele was a tall, thin, bespectacled balding man in his mid-thirties.

Gilles shared something with the man.

"That's not strictly true. For one thing we're not adopting anyone else's logic on this one."

The fellow stared at him owlishly.

Andre thought he'd better get things rolling.

"So, what sort of a fellow was Aldrich to work with? What was it like to sort of do business with him?"

"Oh, God." He sat up straight, mouth twitching irrepressibly. "What, you mean, like totally off the record?"

Gilles' mouth twisted in a grin.

"Sure. Why, was the man that bad?"

Duret exhaled, slowly, carefully, taking time to think it over.

"Okay, so he was an asshole. He still is, at least for a while. But then, so many of the best ones are—and he really is the best. I've always been firmly convinced of that. Unfortunately, so was Aldrich. You will notice something very strange about Aldrich. No one ever calls him Al. You know what I mean?"

"Not exactly, er. No." Andre's pen was busy as always.

Levain labored to copy out the exact words and the full sentences, which no doubt put more than a little pressure on a certain type of subject.

Gilles tended more to quick, two and three-word aides-memoire. All he really needed were salient facts. Anything that stuck out was interesting. It was like picking at scabs to see if there was some grey, smelly pus underneath.

The girl in the fridge had affected him badly, and yet here they were, in the neighborhood.

They couldn't just go somewhere, park under a bridge and hope that no one caught on! Thereby condemning Tobias to an untimely death. Not until Gilles was firmly convinced, would he let that sort of defeatism reign.

"Yes, but what do you mean?"

"He could be a bear, sometimes. When he got his teeth into a project, and then someone came along and asked a simple question. Call him on the telephone once too many times, and he would growl at you. I knew he was angry when I called and he couldn't, or wouldn't speak. He got so wound up. All he could do was simple, guttural monosyllables. There have been times when those little interpersonal skills might have meant a lot to the man's career, you know? Yet I've always put it down to insecurity—"

He thought about it.

"I sort of understand the guy, you know? And I do push my people, especially near the deadlines. It's a give and take relationship. He put up with me, and I put up with him."

"Ah."

Even Andre paused.

"Ah." Did Levain actually write that down?

The case had its surreal elements, not the least of which was that they were drowning in useless information already.

"Did he kill those women?"

"Hah! Fuck, no. Gentlemen. If you need me to answer that question, then I guess we really are in trouble." Michele relaxed somewhat. "So why are you here? I can give you a list of friends, I can tell you what cafés and what restaurants he favored."

"That would be good for a start. Did Tobias have any enemies?"

Duret bobbed his head at what was a pretty good question.

"Yes. We all do." His eyes had a fine glint. "Aldrich was pretty darned good at making them. Ah, it was mostly sturm und drang, the usual angst, and the usual suspects. Writers are a bunch of highly-strung people, with all of the stress, all of the risk, all of the rewards, that go along with that sort of life. It's no wonder people rub each other the wrong way sometimes. They're all after the same thing."

"And what's that?" Andre was all over it like a dirty shirt.

"Fame. Riches, respect. Validation, mostly. The industry is fueled by vanity, and the promise of great reward. And yet so few actually get those rewards. It can lead to some jealousy. You know what Aldrich told me once?"

"Er, no."

"He told me he wrote because otherwise, he was good for nothing and hard on food. It's something his grandfather probably said, and it stuck with the man. There was some grain of truth in that statement, gentlemen, and I think a lot of them are like that."

Gilles mouth opened, but the can of worms had been opened.

"Go on."

"People hate each other for all kinds of reasons."

Levain gasped, a simple, guttural monosyllable, at the futility of this line. This one could take all day.

But Michele was going on.

"Now, people hate guys like Tobias for many reasons. It's a slightly-shorter list. We all feel that we have at least one book in us. And yet most of us never write that book, not even one book. One person in a thousand writes one book, gentlemen." There would be that superficial type of jealousy. "And only about one in one thousand of them, gets the thing published, and only about one in one thousand of them make any money at it...comprene vous?"

Gilles and Andre nodded soberly.

It was an old story.

Many are called, few are chosen.

"Does anyone in particular come to mind?"

"Merde. Not really. Like I said—all of them, and none of them, and I mean that literally."

There was peculiar emphasis on that last word.

There would be all sorts of people who disapproved of Aldrich Tobias. That disapproval was the key to understanding their attitudes, and their actions. There would be the negative things they read, or heard. They might associate Tobias closely with another figure or group of figures they already didn't like, and the list went on. They might not like his politics, or his characters, or the themes in this book or that book. And on. And on.

Duret knew all about it, and he wasn't afraid to share. He didn't have too many unexpressed thoughts on the subject, not today anyway. Gilles sagged a little. This wasn't going anywhere, and yet it all went to the psychological picture of the man and his world. While his alleged victims lived in the real world—Tobias himself lived in a kind of stratosphere, the heady realm of the true artists.

His head would be in the clouds most of the time, was the impression Gilles had, and Duret was not exactly dispelling it.

"So you're saying they think differently?"

"Yes. Exactly." Duret nodded in approval at Gilles' intuitive leap.

In other words, they were all nuts.

Fine, but Gilles had to interpret that world on his own terms. A certain type of victim, a certain type of crime, required certain other elements, to be in place.

Oh, yeah.

Apparently Duret had a few theories on the subject. His authors wrote crime, after all. They all did. The poor fellow had to read it all in its early stages. He told them all about it, and how. He had a stable of authors, but only in certain genres. Duret's people tended to be the brooding, introspective type, and they wrote the sort of literature he was interested in representing.

It was a matter of personal taste.

"Tobias' views were a little different. He was a provocative writer, and he knew when and how to take a chance. Critics hated his books, and for all the right reasons—if you know what the rules are and if you were trying to follow those rules, then maybe they were right. But guys like Tobias make their own rules. The average person who buys a book is going on word of mouth. But whose word is it? Whose mouth is it? They plop down good money, they take a book home and maybe they don't like the philosophy—Tobias had good plots, good dialogue. Some of his characters were more like bizarre caricatures of ugly modern stereotypes. He also liked making statements, although he would put them in the mouths of his characters. I'm not saying he subscribed to any and all beliefs expressed in the stories. But there are those who would never have given those sentiments to those particular characters. You see, they saw a little bit of themselves portrayed, or in his work, and they were being parodied—and there is nothing more hurtful than to see ourselves revealed, gentlemen. Nothing. And of course they hated him for it, for he revealed all of human frailty, all of human weakness, and all of our very human sins."

His jaw worked back and forth. He had a little angst of his own, apparently.

"What they sort of missed, was the fact that they endured." That seemed to be some sort of final word.

"Hmn." Gilles reached for his cigarette case, it was like he just couldn't help himself these days. "I see."

Off to his right, Levain and his scuttling stub of a pencil was the only sound in the room.

After a statement like that, hopefully Andre would have a question.

It had already been a long day, and it wasn't getting any shorter. Andre looked up at the silence.

"Oh, Lord, what's next?" Andre flipped through his notepad, reading back through it, hoping inspiration would strike.

It didn't, or at least, he didn't think it did.

***

It was a relief to be clear of the place.

"Did you really mean all that?'

"All what?" Gilles pulled his vision back into the interior of the car and the present, away from Ann, and the future.

"You know—that bit about how we actually have more than we're letting on."

"Yes. I'm sorry, Andre. It's just that we've been behind the eight ball right from the start." It had also occurred to Gilles that Andre hadn't been at the original briefing, and Archambault, good man though he was, probably hadn't seen fit to brief him, either.

Archambault would have told him to ask Gilles...it's his baby, now.

He went on to explain about the fingerprint, and the one lone human hair that seemed out of place, in an otherwise self-explanatory crime scene. Also, Andre was still behind Gilles in reading all of the various case notes.

"So here is our problem, or at least one of them. We dare not toss all of that aside. We may, or in my opinion, probably, have at least one serial killer, and most likely one or more. None of whom are in fact Monsieur Tobias. But even more interesting—and everything about our little problem has some interest, but, ah...for that figurine to have had Aldrich's fingerprint on it—"

In one of Tobias' novels, a killer had lifted a print with tape, and deposited it, admittedly a murky print, tainted with glue, on another surface. Had some inspired person taken a page from Tobias' book?

Gilles thought that particular gambit to be pure bullshit, (the writer in question had handled it fairly well, which wasn't really the point) but one never knew.

Andre nodded sharply, signaling a turn and taking time out of his busy day to roundly curse a string of pedestrians who seemed to have no idea that their light had long since gone red.

"Mange la merde!"

The response was predictable enough, Gilles supposed. They were taking time out of their busy day as well.

"Ah, yes, Gilles. If Tobias wasn't there—and if he didn't put it there, then it had to have been, or might have been, brought along to frame him. You're right. That is interesting."

"I can't for the life of me remember the name of the girl."

Gilles explained how a suspect might simply have observed Tobias from afar, and if he had picked it up in a shop or a flea market, he might not even recall the act or the object. Yet Tobias had also admitted that he might have had something very much like it at home—in the back of a closet, in a box in the attic, or perhaps thrown out long ago. Police had of course searched his residence.

The notion that Tobias had handled it, and then the girl bought it, also came into play.

They had found no physical evidence in his home, nothing linking him to any of the crimes. They had not found the statuette he had mentioned, nor anything of interest. Certainly the police had nothing exculpatory, which they would have hardly been looking for anyway. What that might have been, Gilles couldn't really say.

"Here's the thing, Andre." They were still a few blocks away from the Quai. "Follow me if you will. But let's assume another killer. He would have to have access to the victim. He would have had to know quite a lot about Tobias—enough to hate him. He could very well have access to the Tobias household. This is too structured, it's too precise for it to have been merely an attempt to avoid suspicion. Where would any killer have gotten such a brainstorm?"

There was that whole hate-Tobias thing. Otherwise anyone's fingerprint would have done. Andre nodded sagely at this.

"One stinking fingerprint—it's mad, I tell you." Gilles gritted his teeth. "No, this was definitely directed at Tobias. And yet we have all of those killings—with some superficial resemblances, but only after having read Tobias' books. Our killer has literally studied Tobias, Andre."

Whoever it was had known Tobias very well, on some more personal level.

"Yeah, I'm sort of with you on that."

"We have a house of cards, built on a whole series of assumptions." It was difficult to conceive of someone killing him merely for something he had written.

Hate was usually so much more personal than that. So far, no one had any suggestions, and they were those closest to Tobias.

"Are you sure the...whoever framed him up, wasn't just completely mad?"

"Oh, yes, Andre—whoever did this is completely mad. Never have any doubts about that."

Andre pulled up to the curb to let Gilles out. He could walk the rest of the way and Andre could drop the vehicle somewhere. Now that they had their car, where to park the thing was another question. Space was at a definite premium downtown, or anywhere along the river. To leave it back at the motor pool was to lose it in short order. Motor pool staff couldn't be expected to reserve it for them, or fight for it on their behalf.

"Did the killer have access to the Tobias residence?"

"Hmn."

Gilles opened the door, taking a quick look for his briefcase, recalling that he hadn't brought a raincoat or anything.

"That's no answer."

But Gilles was already gone. It was a bright and sunny day, and Maintenon was right.

It was bloody well time he finished reading all of those files.

"And yet if Tobias didn't do any of them, what's the bloody point?"

Conscious that he was talking to himself, aware that the steering wheel throbbed slightly whenever he used the brakes, Levain cruised the streets looking for a likely spot.

Chapter Fourteen

While waiting for further information on the latest killing, there was nothing much else to be done, except to read on.

"Shit." Gilles fumbled through the pile, looking for the name.

Then he had it.

Addie Peltier.

Opening the folder, he began to read.

And it was spooky, just how similar it was. There was the scrawl in blood. He went down the hall to his regular desk and found his magnifying glass. The short transit of the hallway, the brief nod at one or two of his colleagues was merely stalling. Whoever put the file together had been very thorough. He wondered if they had already drawn their own conclusions—of course they had.

It was with rising excitement that he pulled out the most interesting photo and studied the bloody words on the wall behind the bed.

He picked up his pen and made a side-note: handwriting analyst. He sat up, biting his lip. There were one or two consultants, but perhaps Lavoie or even Inspector Mathieu should make that call. They would ask questions. He would need a bloody good reason, and the cat would then be out of the bag.

It sure looked like the same hand. Someone had literally used a couple of fingers, dipped in the victim's blood, to write the thing. He had a hard time imagining Tobias doing that. Tobias might be misguided in the social, economic and political sense, perhaps even the moral sense, and yet his motives, as Gilles recalled, were pretty conventional. He wanted to save the world.

His blood was all spilled on the printed page.

Maintenon nodded, as it all went to describe a certain personality.

Tobias had gotten those decorations for his actions, which involved the spilling of blood. But that was in war, with the social sanction that went with it. His writings seemed to be more a sublimation of that past horror than anything else. Most writers were positive milquetoasts, when you got right down to it.

No Rest for the Wicked, maybe Maintenon should reread that one as soon as possible.

That was getting down to the nitty-gritty. Some men were capable of cold-blooded murder, multiple murders. People always denied it in themselves.

Gilles had seen too much of it to know better. But there was more.

What if someone had read Tobias's books, and what if someone was acting out something, for surely the term Whore of Babylon was in one of those books. He recalled from the notes that it had come up in expert psychological testimony at his trial. That might account for a genuine three or four of their killings, and yet still not be Aldrich Tobias.

He made a mental note to read some of the damned things as soon as possible. That seemed to be the hamstring of this investigation. Too much information, and all of it sort of inessential and inappropriate. It was totally clogging the toilets of the issue, or something like that.

He skimmed the file, noting further similarities. Both girls had been about the same age, both were the blonde, blue-eyed archetype. There was an autopsy file on the Peltier girl. He opened it and read the first part, called the initial presentation of the body by some practitioners. She was a healthy young girl, no bad habits, no illness or disease. What struck him was that the girl was described as well-tanned, with the normal white bits in the usual places. The body in the refrigerator had impressed him the same way. He wondered about the Peltier girl's social life, and whether she rode, played tennis, or enjoyed other outdoor sports such as shooting. Both girls were from working-class roots. So where were they getting the tan? Sun-dresses? Sunday afternoons in the park? Their killer had to find them somewhere. He had to gain their confidence and therefore access to their person in a more private place. The tall sky-scrapers of other cities had been held at bay in Paris, and girls were known to sunbathe—in the nude—on the rooftops.

There were no other tall buildings to overlook them, going by the addresses and what he knew of those locations, so that seemed a non-starter.

Most of the victims had been discovered in their own beds—their killer was either personable, or had gained trust and access for other reasons. They might be some kind of authority figure. That happened often enough, but those cases were almost exclusively sexual abuse, over the course of time. This lust for blood was a distinct criminal signature in its own right.

Peltier was employed, so was the other girl. One was in domestic service, and one waited tables in an uncle's restaurant. Police had checked out the uncle and he didn't seem like much of a bet in the opinion of the pair of investigating officers. He recognized one of the names and what he knew of them.

It could be so, he thought, in any case they were only going to get so much time. They had to telescope the most investigation they could into the least possible time.

And then, they must make something of it.

"Andre."

"Yes, boss?" His big shoulders hulked at his own desk, casting big shadows at Gilles' feet.

"I keep thinking that we need to hand all of these cases back to the units in question. That, is a terribly unpopular move, one would suspect." But they, at least, had the time and manpower to deal with them.

Gilles and Andre didn't, although Chiappe did say all resources.

"Holy, Jesus. I suspect you're right." Andre didn't need much excuse to drop the paper for a moment.

He was still three or four files behind Maintenon. His eyes ached and his neck was stiff and he wondered how much longer he could stand sitting in this shitty old chair.

He considered the thought.

"Wow. Then what?"

"I don't know. But I desperately wish there was another way to go about this." Gilles slumped back in his seat, and then tiredly lifted his feet onto the end of the desk.

He took a quick look at the clock, which read four thirty-seven p.m.

It wasn't quite time to go home yet, so he picked up his next file and began reading. This time, he was looking for fuck-ups, anything that looked cheap, or slipshod, missing bits and pieces in the logical pie that had led to a charge against Aldrich Tobias.

Maybe that was the way to go about it—to discredit all of these original investigations.

Oh, joy.

Sooner or later, Andre would figure that out too.

"I got a question, Boss."

"Yes?"

"I wonder how many other bodies have turned up since this investigation was closed..."

Gilles sighed deeply, nodding and grimacing.

"So far, I don't want to touch that one with a ten-foot pole."

"Yeah, I hear you. But Boss. Tobias hasn't got much time—and neither have we."

Gilles looked at the clock again. He looked at Andre.

"In twenty-five words or less, what are you suggesting?"

"We need a case conference. And we need to ask for a hell of a lot more manpower. We need to spread the word. Assuming you believe it's justified. Right now, I think it is. That's just my opinion, for what it's worth."

Merde.

Maintenon's eye strayed to the clock on the wall again.

Merde.

If he called Chiappe now, the bugger might still be in his office.

Merde.

"Spread the word?"

"The number of people involved here is relatively small. There are thousands of peons, who have no stake in the matter."

There was more than one way to skin a cat, his manner seemed to imply.

***

It was a terrible gamble, and it looked like a tough audience this morning. They were gathered in Chiappe's office.

The Director looked harried and irritable. Capitaine Leduc was there, hardly necessary in Maintenon's opinion, and Lavoie, and Archambault, who had been making himself very scarce these days. It was the usual mob. Obviously Chiappe had his own priorities, and was responsible for the thousands of cases ongoing, but Gilles would have preferred a little less coming-and-going when important discussions took place.

While Andre was probably feeling a little intimidation, he concealed it well. He looked cool and comfortable in his black jacket, pale blue shirt, yellow tie, grey slacks and loafers with darker grey socks. Unlike some of the attire worn by the others, it was not a suit amenable to a flower in the buttonhole.

Chiappe, sitting hunched there like a toad ready to strike, spoke first. His tone said it all.

"All right, gentlemen. We all understand the seriousness of the matter, and hopefully we're all more or less up to speed. You have the floor, Detective-Sergeant Maintenon."

Gilles cleared his throat.

"Yes, hopefully, you have something for us." Leduc, of course, was casually sardonic.

Gilles' chest was tight, and he could hardly think straight.

When shaving this morning, he'd caught sight of his face in the bathroom mirror, just at the moment when he'd been thinking forward towards his day—and right about then was also when he thought of Ann. The stab of remorse, guilt, fear, call it whatever one would, had been all but unbearable. His chin stung where he'd nicked himself with a razor that badly needed replacing and he hadn't slept well at all. He'd spent the night tossing and turning endlessly, second-guessing and worrying about Ann whenever he could tear his mindless thoughts away from the Tobias case.

It didn't pay to get too obsessed.

Argh.

"What the hell. You can only fire me once."

No one laughed, although Leduc twitched in his seat, never taking his eyes from Maintenon's face.

"The problem with the Tobias case is too many hands, too many cooks. My suggestion would be to take all of those cases back, and put them into the hands of those involved in the original investigation. Quite frankly, no one else is going to want to take it on."

Archambault sat up and groaned on hearing that one.

"It is only by separating the wheat from the chaff, that we can hope to make any sense at all of this case. But, simply put, if Tobias did not kill those girls, then somebody went to a lot of trouble to make it look like he did."

That was their major working theory, and they had one or two minor ones.

Leduc crossed his arms and looked tolerant.

Gilles looked helplessly at Andre, who murmured a couple of key words.

"Ah. The Cousineau case, perhaps you've already heard."

Gilles briefly outlined the facts of the Marthe Cousineau killing.

Chiappe seemed slightly reassured that they had something, and of course the Capitaine was still unimpressed.

"What I am suggesting here, is that we go back and look at all recent cases that fit a certain profile. By that I mean all of those that are unsolved, and maybe even take a quick look at our killers in some of the ones that were solved. We might be able to clean up a few of those files."

"Oh, Jesus." Even Capitaine Leduc seemed shaken. "Won't that take a lot of manpower?"

Wasn't the Army a specialist in squandering men? Gilles didn't say it, but it was unfortunately true.

"None of this helps Tobias, Gilles." At least, not quickly enough.

Most likely.

The Director had a point.

"No, but Andre and I can't handle all of it. You did say all resources. And I think we might better apply ourselves elsewhere. If we can find enough killings that correspond, and God willing, maybe find ourselves a viable suspect or two before the deadline, then we may have enough for ask for a stay of execution."

He took a deep breath.

"That's about all we can expect under the circumstances and the time allotted anyways." For some reason Chiappe felt compelled to explain this to Archambault, who nodded sagely, fist up to his mouth, as if to stifle a yawn. "Anything else is just a bonus."

Archambault yawned.

While Gilles was sure Archambault had plenty of problems of his own, he really wasn't being of much help.

Archambault's eyes came around.

"Please, continue, young man."

Gilles nodded.

"The basic premise is that Tobias had access to the women and girls who became his victims. Yet in the case of working class girls, that seems rather unlikely—he was not a painter, always looking for models. He was not a notorious bar-hound or a known lecher. He was a married man, who kept to his home for much of the time."

The figurine came from somewhere, and it had Tobias' fingerprint on it. Once again Andre supplied the name, and then Gilles went on to outline that particular crime scene. He showed them the photos of the words 'Whore of Babylon,' written in blood on the walls of two different crime scenes—one happening after Tobias had been put away.

Yesterday, in fact. Marthe Cousineau, in fact. Maybe that immediacy was the trigger.

Now, the Capitaine looked impressed.

It was his turn to speak.

"Very well. I have, and I will continue to stress, that the President is prepared to do the right thing. We just have to give him what he needs to do his job, non?"

Those clear, liquid eyes, stared deep into Maintenon's and it looked like they might even pull it off.

***

It could never be that easy, and there was not to be any getting out from under the load.

That much was made abundantly clear to Maintenon and Levain, and to a lesser extent, Archambault and even Inspector Lavoie. Their immediate superior, who had turned the knob silently and crept into their meeting late, with a resigned Chiappe waving him on with an impatient gesture.

With that anticlimax, the meeting ended as abruptly as it began. Lavoie and Archambault stayed behind to discuss this and that and a few other matters. It was the price of rank.

"Well." Andre reckoned things had gone well enough.

So far.

"Yes."

The two men strode down the corridor, rubbing shoulders as they went past various people going in the opposite direction, and holding up in eddies as groups formed and reformed in front of doorways, and chatting and then moseying along in the same direction. For some reason everyone in the building had conspired to create a traffic jam, for no real reason as lunch was still some ways off.

"Oh, boy."

"Huh."

Gilles ground his jaws, kept following along, and just tried to hang in there.

They were at their little temporary workspace soon enough.

"Huh."

"Andre."

"Yes?"

"Let's go to lunch." Gilles didn't care to admit it, but he really hadn't been looking after himself very well for a few days now and it wouldn't hurt to have a hot meal once in a while.

Levain's eyebrows rose in appreciation.

"You're a cool customer, aren't you? All right, buster. You're on."

Gilles smiled tiredly, but it was better than trying to investigate all thirteen, plus more now, of those other cases.

"Andre?"

"Yes, Boss?" Andre took his hat off the rack, but left his raincoat dangling from its hook.

"How many days do we have left?"

"You don't want to know, Gilles."

Gilles nodded and followed Andre out the door.

He knew just the place, and for at least the next hour or so, they would be difficult to find.

Sometimes that was a very good thing, as it made it harder for the exalted ones to change their minds.

"Where's the car?"

Andre shrugged, as there were people in the corridor and discretion was the better part of valour.

"You'll see. Congratulations, by the way."

The pair clattered down the stairs, Gilles with his hat pulled low over his eyes and his hand up to his face, puffing furiously on a freshly-lit cheroot.

"On what?"

"On what looks like a brilliant maneuver."

Gilles grinned in spite of himself. There were bigwigs, Chiappe among them, milling about behind the big reception desk on the ground floor. Le Directeur had his head down, a phone up to one ear, and three big uniformed gendarmes huddled around him.

"Yes, it's good to be out of there." Andre paused on the top step, sucking in fresh, clean oxygen.

"The air is good. Come on, I'm hungry. And, we finally have some actual work to do."

Chapter Fifteen

"Whoa." Andre belched silently, wondering if the others would smell the sharp tang catching at the back of his nostrils. "Excuse me."

After a tasty lunch of toasted bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches, washed down with a bottle of cold lager, Gilles had used his scruffy-looking notebook and dialed up Madame Tobias. She was in for the afternoon and not too cheerful on the phone. They would be welcome if they arrived before two p.m. and would be even more so if they promised to be gone by three.

She answered on their first knock, dressed rather more casually than he would have expected. Gilles supposed women wore slacks these days. The lady hadn't done her hair or her makeup, and there were dark smudges under her eyes. While still a fine looking woman, she was distinctly showing, and no doubt feeling, her age. Her over-large white blouse was hanging down at the waist, and her cuffs were not done up.

The skin, where visible at the neck, looked very well for someone in their forties, creamy but opaque, with no hint of the blue veins underneath.

"I am so sorry, Madame Tobias." She grimaced at the name, but let them into her home with a kind of inbred good grace.

"Of course, anything I can do to help, gentlemen."

He wondered if she had been crying.

She probably had.

"Thank you for seeing us on such short notice. First thing I want you to know. I feel there is much hope for Aldrich."

She swallowed convulsively, unable to look directly at him. He wasn't sure if that helped, much.

"Other than that, I really can't say anything. However, it might be very helpful if we could look through Monsieur Tobias' personal effects, unless perhaps you disposed of them?"

"Oh. No." Her hand came up to her sternum. "Yes, of course."

The lady turned and led them to a narrow set of dark-varnished steps going to an upper floor.

They followed along, Andre taking a moment to assess what he could see of her bare ankles as she wasn't wearing stockings, and at the top, the passageway led off to their right.

His study was the very last room on the left.

"You—this is hard to explain, but I haven't touched a thing."

"No, no, Madame—we understand perfectly." This was not the time to tell her about Ann, and how his heart lurched unexpectedly, like a drunk suddenly losing his footing but then catching it again whenever he saw her picture on the bureau, or opened up the bathroom cabinet for a toothbrush only to see one of her old nail files, or a hairbrush with a few of her long, silver-blonde hairs in it.

She opened the door, and sunlight flooded into the hallway.

Madame Tobias stepped back, face down, her hands came together and she made an altogether tragic figure.

"It's all right, Solange." Andre spoke in a low tone. "We promise not to touch a thing. Please stay right here—just inside the door, non?"

The two cops moved into the centre of the room, a good, well-lit little space with the obligatory floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, two or three sturdy but plain old desks, one newer typewriter and another, smaller, older one on what was clearly a secondary desk. The curtains at the end of the room were open, but the windows were closed and securely latched.

"Andre."

"Ah, right, Boss."

Levain went and opened the window. He stuck his head out, taking a good look around, left, right, up and even up in behind, to where the roof-line would be.

Pulling his head back in, he caught Gilles' eye. Hopefully Solange was oblivious, totally caught up in her own misery.

He shook his head.

"And what's in these?" Andre indicated a small stack of boxes, and a suitcase or two.

"That was returned to me by the court." She hadn't known what to do with it, and had never unpacked it.

Since they already had an official inventory, they took a quick glance in the top two boxes just to confirm the contents. Andre thoughtfully folded the tops in properly when they were done.

Gilles gave a quick nod, and continued with his visual survey of the room. What struck him, first and foremost, was that Tobias really didn't have a lot of bric-a-brac, or memorabilia, or little bronze statues at all. The grand total of three pictures on the walls, were old, cheap and faded prints. Tobias had a degree prominently displayed, one from a prominent university. There were some old photos from his younger days. There were a number of pictures of laughing young men and pretty young women, all in what had been suave and sophisticated fashions back then but looking pretty old-fashioned these days.

Tobias' family was relatively well-off, cheerfully paying him an allowance when he left school to write. He had eventually gone back to school part-time, on evenings and weekends, working for years to get that coveted degree. It said something about the man's determination, to get ahead, and to make something of his obscure upper working-class roots.

Obsession. The price of ambition. Dangerous enough in its own right.

It could be so—but not murder, not in Maintenon's opinion. Tobias was simply too intelligent for that. He wasn't quite desperate enough.

Gilles pulled a photo of the bronze figurine out of his pocket. It was a lady, nonsensical in that it purported to be Greek but it didn't really correspond to any known classical statue. It was merely a cheap and generic rendition. It was a bad copy of something that didn't exist.

"To your knowledge, did you or your husband ever own such an object?"

She took the picture, her face screwed up in emotion and concentration.

A look of extreme distaste went over her features.

She had testified in court, but this was different and of course he hadn't been there to see it.

"No." Her gaze came up, hard and angry. "I don't mean to sound like a snob, gentlemen, but this is hardly the sort of thing I would have in my house."

"You mean, the, er...breasts, Madame?'

Andre managed to convey a certain diffident expression.

"Yes, there's that. But it's just so cheap—" Her voice held all the venom that came from her own social pretensions.

"Have you ever been to Greece?"

"No!"

"Ah, um." Gilles took up the line of questioning here. "Please forgive us, and trust me, all of this might be of great value to your husband—"

"My former husband!"

"Yes, yes, I'm sorry. I understand all of that, really we do. Let's go at this another way. Do you have things in storage? Do you have a storage space?"

"No." She relented somewhat, wringing her hands now. "We have some old things. We have a few boxes in the attic, would you like to see them?"

Gilles nodded, and a silent Levain followed them up an even narrower set of stairs, this one concealed in the back of a closet in a child's bedroom, the son's by the look of it. It was Maintenon's turn to check out ankles and things, reasoned Andre. Honestly, he didn't have much to contribute so far.

The attic space was small, very hot and musty-smelling. One had to watch, so as not to smash your head on a beam, and there were places when they literally had to step through the structural beams of the roof trusses. The smell of dust and dryness was very strong, hot and enveloping.

At one end of the space, which was the full width of the building, there was a surprisingly small stack of sagging corrugated boxes, and one or two open-topped wooden orange crates.

I'm just here to observe, thought Andre.

Gilles pulled the first one over to the better light beside the western windows, which were very small dormers, set into the gentle slope of the roof.

Opening it, it was mostly papers, old tax records, insurance. The next box was kid's clothes. The next one held toys, mostly old, broken or clearly out of date, the children being relatively full-grown at this point in their lives.

A raggedy old teddy bear, one leg partly torn off, with stuffing and sawdust coming out of it, seemed oddly poignant in view of present family circumstances.

All of the boxes were like that. There weren't even any broken old lamps, and not a lot of items of home décor.

At one time Aldrich Tobias would have been young. At one time he and his young wife and very small children might have led a more Bohemian existence. Not now. Not at their age and in their present station in life. Unlike the truly poor, people of a certain class really didn't keep a lot of junk around the house. They had no need repair and keep using tired old things. For another thing, they didn't acquire it in the first place. They bought quality stuff that would last, and when they got tired of it, they just threw it out or donated it to charity. They distributed it among their own extended family, based on some nebulous and arbitrary ranking based on merit, and no doubt some personal liking and favoritism.

"Very well, Madame Tobias. We do not need to trouble you any further." With a small nod at Andre, Gilles went to her and gave her an impulsive pat on the shoulder.

"I wish I could promise you something, Solange."

It might be very unprofessional, but there were times when you really needed to say something nice. Gilles wasn't too good at that sort of thing, but his own problems had showed him that just trying might do some good once in a while.

With an odd sheen of moisture in his own eyes, he stumbled his way out of the cramped and airless space, with Andre's soft and reassuring tones following him down as his partner consoled Aldrich Tobias' very beautiful, and rather distraught soon-to-be widow.

They were divorced in fact, but not in Solange's heart, apparently.

***

"In many homicide cases, when a married man is murdered, the first suspect is the wife." Andre scowled into his beer. "But honestly, I don't think it's her."

"No. It's not her, Andre."

The pair were still avoiding the office, at least in Andre's opinion. There was nothing really wrong with his marriage, but lately one or two irritations had manifested themselves. It was just a question of not making it worse, riding it out, and then maybe talking to the little woman when she was more receptive, and when he himself, might possibly be a little more sensitive. In order to do that, one had to calm down first.

"That's pretty good logic, Andre. Solange would have access to any knick-knacks and bric-a-brac, give the dog a bone, lying around the house—"

Andre scowled even harder, as he hadn't meant it seriously, at least not relating to the case. It was just that Gilles was in a really odd mood. They'd worked cases before, and Maintenon was as tough and hard-working as he needed to be. But they had always been doing legwork for more senior officers. They were always following someone else's logic.

Another thought struck Gilles.

"She could easily have read his books, even before they were printed. The only real question, is how she might have gotten access to the girl. Only the one, that's all she needed."

"There's that stray hair in the other case, what's her name."

Gilles looked up. A waitress brought them a fresh ashtray and took away the old one.

"I don't think it's a stray hair at all—I think it's a hair from the killer. The thing there is to find a viable suspect or two and ask them if they wouldn't mind us borrowing a hair or two off of their heads. It might be interesting to see how they reacted." The hair was a mousy brown with faint suggestions of pomade or hair oil on it, something that Tobias had allegedly never used.

Neither did the hair's physical characteristics match with his.

"So Gilles. Let's say they open some of these other investigations. Let's say they find the real killers."

"That would throw some doubt on the overall case against Tobias. No question of that. Yet there will be those who argue, so what? Maybe the flics fucked up, got the wrong guy. Maybe it's just that one little case. So, maybe Tobias didn't do that one—but even so, maybe he still did all the others." There were all those damned chapters, all those damned killings in his books.

It wasn't exactly gore, but it wasn't done in the staid, British fashion either. It was a little too dark, and as often as not involved working-class characters. Tobias wrote psychological studies phrased in terms of his genre...perhaps that was it. Gilles had read them for a reason, and kept them on the shelf for a reason.

Murder was so much more fascinating when your social superiors did it, he supposed. It was a much more moral tale when a rich man killed in greed, or a hypocrite killed a blackmailer to save their reputation...

Which, of course, such people prized above all else: that image of how they were living the perfect life, largely due to their inherent moral qualities, and how everyone else really ought to try and be more like them.

Generally, they would pay and pay until they ran out of money or couldn't take it any more. Only then did murder become an option.

"Yeah, but what are we trying to do here? Prove he's innocent? Or just get him a new trial, or give the president a reason to stay the execution? Some kind of clemency?"

Gilles shrugged, becoming more aware of the comfortable hum of conversation and the blue haze of tobacco in the air. And yet, if you had seen one, you had seen them all—

"Whatever we can get." He was still thinking of Solange. "She had a motive, after all."

Andre's eyebrows rose.

She really didn't look the type, and yet there was no question in his mind that Solange Tobias had been devastated by her husband's possible infidelity. Gilles had also gathered the impression of a pretty good brain inside of that head.

"So, what's our plan for the rest of the afternoon, Boss?'

"Stop calling me that, for one thing. But, uh...we'll go back to the office about four-thirty, five o'clock, and hopefully the big-wigs will be gone by then. We'll be safe enough. They'll never think of looking for us at work. But then you can go home."

"And what about you, Gilles?"

"I have to take off at least one day on the weekend. I badly need to at least skim through the last few cases. There are still many questions to be answered."

Or even asked, he was thinking.

"Let's take them one at a time." Andre stared deep into the bottom of his beer glass. "What's our plan for tomorrow?"

"Huh. That's the easy part. Andre, I just want to sit and think. Sit here and breathe heavily for the next little while, okay?"

Andre straightened up in his seat.

"You want me to get lost for a while?"

"Yes, but first get us a couple more beers, please?"

Andre was already eyeing the half-dozen billiard tables visible through the arch into the back room of the establishment.

"All righty." He got up, and moved towards the bar, where the black-vested gentleman plied the fourth oldest occupation in the world.

The first was of course the king, the second was the priest, and the third was the prostitute.

He figured the fifth was either doctor or lawyer.

On that thought, pulled out his wallet and peeled off a couple of small notes. Glancing back, it was clear that Gilles was deep in thought and lost in a world of his own.

As for Solange, it was always a possibility—and she didn't actually have to kill anyone. All she had to do was to come up with idea and then organize some kind of gag.

Then there were the children, and a few other people might have hated Tobias. A difficult man, as it was said.

It was Maintenon who coined that term, as he recalled. The bartender pushed foaming glasses over the bar. The fellow gave a quick nod at the coins he had left for the tip.

That pale and tired looking face in the mirror belongs to me, Andre realized.

Holy, shit.

I really am going bald.

Chapter Sixteen

As things presently stood, with the time-frame involved, Aldrich Tobias was a dead man.

Gilles was, for some reason, reminded of something Dali had said.

"By simulating paranoia one can systematically undermine one's rational view of the world, which becomes continually subjected to associative transformations, for instance, one can see, or persuade others to see, all sorts of shapes in a cloud: a horse, a human body, a dragon, a face, a palace, and so on. Any prospect or object of the Physical world can be treated in this manner, from which the proposed conclusion is that it is impossible to concede any value whatsoever to immediate reality, since it may represent or mean anything at all."

He couldn't really see how that would apply here. What the hell, try anything once.

Someone, with one, single phone call, had caused an industry pundit to have another look at Aldrich Tobias' books. How paranoid where they? How imaginative? Again, a single phone call from a jaded columnist—they still had no idea of whom, and then the police began simulating paranoia. And, then, once reality had well and truly walked the plank, all things were possible.

This much he had deduced, but it only went to explain the process by which Tobias had been fingered and convicted.

Take all of that away, and there really wasn't too much left.

It was like he had done all he could, for the moment.

Gilles pulled out his notebook and made a few squiggly marks. He grunted in a kind of disgust. The fact was that his life was shit, and it had been for some time. Maintenon had gone through a period when he considered giving up the job and trying something else. That was years before, and he had thought himself beyond such thoughts. The funny thing was, that he expected better than this. He demanded better from himself...usually.

He honestly believed that most crimes could be solved. But how does one un-solve a crime? That was a new wrinkle on an old face.

One more doodle appeared.

Allard.

That one word was at least fairly legible. But it might do to have another look at anything with his name on it.

They might also ask about his personal effects, as more than one cop's widow had received a big box of stuff and there were some interesting stories as to what had ultimately turned up in them.

Coming out of nowhere, he remembered the letter from the President, still neatly folded in his inner jacket pocket. It hadn't been much good so far. He had even forgotten to mention it to Ann, whom he talked to almost every evening on the telephone.

Also out of nowhere, Maintenon came up with another idea. If they were going at it bass-ackwards, and it sure looked like they all had, which was the right end of the stick? Where would you even begin to unravel the plot, a very real plot he was certain by this time, to nail Tobias, but good. While the wife couldn't be ruled out, this one called for a certain type of mind.

As Gilles always said, a certain type of victim required a certain type of killer, and this type of crime was the same way—only so many people in the world could have ever come up with such an idea. And what a beauty of an idea it was, too.

More than anything, they needed a plan for tomorrow.

Gilles Maintenon pulled back his cuff and checked his watch. He took the first small sip of the second big glass of beer. He was almost hungry again. Lately he'd been neglecting the most basic necessities of life.

Pulling out a long black cheroot, his lit up and then moved one of the unused chairs out of the way. He idly noted Andre knocking balls around the table a hundred feet back into the building, as a couple of the typical lounge lizards hovered interestedly. As if Andre had no brain and a pocketful of cash. Best of luck to you, boys.

Gilles swung his chair to the left, put his feet up on the other chair and settled down for a long wait.

***

"Holy."

"Yes."

The pair had taken the rest of the day off, assuming that this was the correct day. It was terrible to be under such time restraints and to have such a fuzzy mind.

Gilles was quite distracted lately.

They rendezvoused shortly after dinnertime, which was always arbitrary and usually a matter of discussion. It depended on one's social class, of course. A working man might get off work, ride the bus home and expect dinner on the table when he walked in the door. But then, he needed dinner on the table when he walked in the door. He'd just spent eight, or ten, or twelve hours of pounding rivets or winding cables on armatures.

The rich, they had their afternoon tea, they had their entertainments. While they needed sustenance just like anyone else, filling their bellies wasn't such a priority. It was the mind that must be sated—and it could only be sated by luxury and a conspicuous display of fortune. Simply put, they might keep different hours. Solange Tobias would have her own little routine, one both complex and comforting. For her to break character would be difficult at best.

While Gilles accepted that a man might have made a few decisions in life and that he very much could affect his own fate, the truth was that sometimes a baby was born and after that you couldn't expect much from it. Sometimes a child was born in the back of a police car and didn't get too much further in life. Solange was the opposite extreme—born into relative good fortune, and married to an up-and-coming literary figure. Until things went bad.

Every so often, a child was born into poverty. It was born into a family that had habitually been, for whatever reason, sometimes even racial reasons, on the wrong side of the law or even just prosperity for a very long time. This went back generations, even.

In the initial investigations, including that of Tobias, the most basic premises of homicide investigation had been forgotten or ignored.

They were watching for the lady to come out.

They wanted to know if Solange had a lover.

"This is the shits." Levain had a good point.

The odds were that they were spying on an innocent person, perhaps even someone they liked.

"If anyone ever needed a lover, I mean...someone really nice, it's her, Boss. That's sort of why I'm convinced she doesn't..." Andre sighed.

The heart of a true romantic had been stirred. He wondered what his wife would do without him around at the end of a day. It didn't bear contemplation, he supposed.

"I know."

The lights on the upper two floors of the building were mostly lit, one or two rather dimly, as if a mere night-light burned in the bathroom or a hallway. This was more especially true on the top floor.

The salon, on the front, left side, was lit well enough by table lamps. More light flooded in from somewhere behind. A shadow moved across the ceiling, for they were thirty feet below. Like many buildings in the city, on the ground it was the usual rental space, with a couple of shops on the street level, professional offices on the second floor, and only then came the private residential floors.

It was a nice neighborhood, with strolling couples holding hands and music flooding out of several small cafes lining the street.

Gilles looked at his watch.

This type of surveillance could go on for days, and they only had so much time. Yet Gilles wanted to get some kind of impression of the lady without her being aware of it. Thinking of Sherlock Holmes and his reading, those childish fantasies of disguising himself as a Lascar and haunting opium dens in search of so-called clues almost made him cringe. The reality was so much different. It was more gritty even than that.

Now we are talking real people, real life and real death. Real tragedy, real blood and guts and shit and piss all over the place. The trouble was that some of them were terribly nice people, relentlessly nice in some cases.

There was even a kind of justice there—the lady had ended up with Tobias, who had appreciated her, at least at first, for the social status such a marriage conferred. And yet, by all accounts, they had also loved each other very much.

"It doesn't get much more real than this."

Andre's guts clenched as the street-level hall light varied in intensity through the frosted glass.

The door opened.

Solange came out of the front door with a fox wrap around her shoulders.

"Oh, wow."

"You've been saying that a lot lately."

I have? When was that?

She closed the door and locked it.

She tapped off down the street to the north-west, or in the direction of brighter lights and more noise, more life and more people. Her skirt was above the knee, and her heels were high and her pale pink toenails exposed.

"Hmn."

Andre's hand hovered over the ignition.

"Relax."

"Sure, Boss."

Gilles opened the door and got out.

This might be a good test of Andre's intuitiveness.

If he could conceivably beat this case into the dirt, Gilles would be able to name his own price. What an odd moment of hubris.

Wing it.

No one ever truly knows what they are doing.

Get over it and get on with it.

"Andre."

"Boss."

Gilles closed the door as gently as he could and yet making sure the latch snapped in securely. In the slanting light of evening, he put his head down and tugged at the brim of the old charcoal-grey fedora. She looked all right, dressed to the nines and clearly going somewhere.

With his luck, she had run out of asparagus or something.

***

Solange walked three blocks. Gilles was impressed. With the sedentary life he had been leading lately, or perhaps the shoes were just worn, but it didn't take very long to recognize that walking was no longer his strong suit. This was a strange admission from a boy who had grown up, not particularly tall, or even muscular, but wiry, and with the constitution to go on and on and on.

He had grown up climbing mountains all day long and thinking nothing of it at the time. What extraordinary people we once were, as children.

No more. That was one thing for sure.

She seemed cool and assured as she turned slightly to her right, held the rail and descended into the Metro.

Well, this was beginning badly enough. Tailing people underground left such limited options. In the stations, there weren't very many bolt-holes and on the train itself, there were two directions of approach and retreat—forwards or backwards.

In the event, she was oblivious of Gilles, and pretty much everything else. Sitting six or seven rows behind Solange, directly behind the lady, her head turned once or twice, and it seemed that she was either curious or at least becoming aware of her surroundings. A dashing fellow, this one with broad shoulders and a very good suit, caught her attention for a second. The chin lifted and she turned away, looking prim and proper as she watched the featureless walls of the tunnel flash by. The talk all around him, what he could catch of it, was all Olympics and the Tour.

Solange liked the young ones, but then the same could be said for many a man—and woman. Inside of your head, you are always twenty years old, as someone fairly smart had once said. And when that's gone, you are well on your way, as someone else, someone very wise, had once retorted.

He kept track of the stops. They were going downtown. Considering the sort of casual yet clingy dress she wore, along with the hat, the fur, the shoes, what some called the fuck-me pumps, it seemed odd that she might not take a cab. And yet she must feel so unlike the people around her, well away from her own social group.

She might not get out much. She might just like the people, and the movement through an alien environment, which was how Gilles had always seen it. There was so much, and so little an investigator could learn in a half-hour interview.

There was nothing natural about the Metro, or modern life, for that matter. Perhaps something very valuable had been lost along the way, and maybe Solange was looking for it.

There was always that mental processing of information, even in the absence of provable facts. Legal defense cost money. Nice flats cost money, dresses and furs cost money. Writers didn't make that much. Her own income might be very regular, but insufficient to sustain a lavish lifestyle. Those moral shoes might pinch a woman like that very much, thought Gilles.

Take out hubby and off you go—you inherit cleanly and everyone commiserates with you on your damned bad luck!

The train pulled into the next siding and something about her alertness told him this was it.

He'd have to find a phone or a radio-car and flash a badge if he needed Andre. Instructed to hold up, report his location to dispatch and wait for a call, Andre would do just that. He was eminently trustworthy in that regard. So far, he had shown sparks of personality without much initiative other than in the servile sense.

The man had a ways to go yet, before he could really call himself a detective.

As for himself, Maintenon had run out of doubts quite some time ago.

***

Solange sat in a piano bar, engaged in conversation with a fellow clearly much too young for her.

Her laugh tinkled out, audible even over the saxophone and piano, admittedly played softly and in a romantic little air that Gilles had probably never heard before. He read about the new music in the papers, without ever hearing it played.

The young fellow leaned in and whispered in her ear.

"Psst."

Andre slid into his seat. They were in the darkest corner they could get, set well away from the bar, or the restrooms, the main foyer or the fire exits. The place, elegant enough, was dimly-lit. The desolate pools of illumination hit the microscopic tabletops but not much else. There was a dance-floor with its colored spots roving around, and half a dozen couples. They moved, shuffling along, all looking so much the same to a jaded Gilles that they may as well have been painted metal cut-outs rotating around on top of a wind-up musical box. This was a child's toy for an adult world.

He examined her reaction.

Solange seemed a bit red in the face, pulling back, with her neck erect and stiff. Her face fell and her mouth went straight.

"Uh, oh. More than she bargained for." Andre had pitched it very low, and yet it seemed she turned and looked around as if she caught the tone, or something of the meaning.

Of course, she was wondering if anyone had caught the by-play. Her eyes swept past and thankfully kept going.

They were a hundred feet away, with a good fifty people in the place, or Gilles wouldn't have attempted this type of surveillance. Over the years, undercover officers popped under such circumstances, might have claimed, feigning good cheer and happenstance, simply to be out having an innocent drink. Over the years, one or two subjects might have bought it as a coincidence. He didn't think Solange would. Solange was the suspicious type.

"Well, she likes boys, anyway." He watched as the young man gathered up his dignity, although he might not have much to begin with, and then made some kind of excuse.

Solange smiled sweetly, although they only had a side-view. She said something, softening the blow, and the young man stood up, eyes already brightening at the sight of another attractive prospect. This one was a solitary brunette of indeterminate age sitting alone at a table right beside the dance floor.

"Don't look at me." Andre grunted. "I'm a happily-married man."

Gilles kicked him lightly on the ankle under the table.

"Let's hope she doesn't look this way." All of Maintenon's movements, lighting a smoke, taking a sip of his cognac, were calm and unhurried.

Prey animals were often spooked by sudden movements, not necessarily having good, long-range vision. The trouble was that changing your suit, not shaving, showing up in an unfamiliar environment, wasn't enough. Only the fact that Solange was strictly amateur had motivated their present course.

With her hand on her chin, Solange appeared to be buried in the music, which was very good. Her hand twirled the glass by the stem, a good red by the look of it, and yet she wasn't really drinking. Finally her face turned away, and down, and it seemed as if she had made up her mind. The hand came up and she beckoned at a passing waiter.

"What do you think, Boss?" Andre was wearing a brown leather jacket cut like an ultra-modern suit coat, and a kind of punkish looking English chirper hat, and like Gilles, he was also unshaven.

"If she goes to the bathroom, which I think she will, nip on out and then find an alley a little further on. I'll wait until she leaves."

Normally women went to the bathroom in pairs. He wondered what would happen next, but she could hardly deny the physicality of her body. No matter how alone she was.

He explained as much in a low, guttural monotone. Andre nodded. One man would be harder to spot, and it would be easier to act unobtrusive. If she looked at some obscure males at a table, and the two men under scrutiny suddenly began hiding their faces and coughing into their handkerchiefs at the same time, it would be a dead giveaway.

The lady paid her bill, and left a small tip by the expression on the waiter's face. Perhaps body language would be a better way of putting it, as the face was guardedly neutral.

"Ah. There she goes." Sure enough, Solange headed first for the powder room.

She wasn't leaving anything behind, taking the wrap and putting the hat on for the walk.

As soon as she turned the corner, Andre got up and headed for the exit. Gilles drank up and beckoned for a waiter, pulling out bills and coins in a quick bid for mobility.

"Merde."

It simply hadn't occurred to him before, but she might conceivably be heading for the backstage door.

Merde.

It was all he could do to stick with the plan.

Luckily for them, she wasn't.

Instead, she was home by ten-thirty. This time she took a cab, from the ranks waiting along the curb. The night was still young by big-city standards. Judging by the lights coming on, and then going off again, Solange Tobias, her daughter presumably out for the evening somewhere else, was in bed by eleven-thirty.

"One must assume that she does not have a lover." Gilles bit his lip. "Otherwise, why go out alone?"

The car was cold and clammy now, with their breath fogging the corners of the windows. It had been very damp lately, although the moon was coming along nicely, hanging amidst low, scattered clouds.

"I suppose that's true." The other thing, in Andre's opinion was the time frame.

They could only put so much time into a project like this. If they weren't careful, they'd end up following the cook around. This might not be the best time to say it, though.

One thing he was learning about Maintenon: the bastard was thorough.

He was a thorough-going bastard, when you thought about it.

Hopefully, they would get what they wanted.

Chapter Seventeen

Friday afternoon had rolled around, as it inevitably must.

Gilles had to confront the inevitable. He was looking forward to seeing Ann, and yet the workday, the working week, offered relief by providing distraction.

There was a cold, dull ache in his guts, and then there were the times he thought of Monsieur Tobias—and his family.

That one was more like a douche of ice water to the spleen.

Andre tipped his chair back. There was no need to look at the clock. Levain had been keeping an eye on it all day. He knew Gilles was leaving early and he thought he'd better get it out there.

"I've been thinking about all of this bass-ackwards stuff."

"Okay." Gilles looked up, trying to sort through the most relevant documents.

The odds were that he wouldn't get much done, but shooting down the Tobias case was still important. He had to justify it, to explain it, and of course write a coherent report—so that others could justify it, and explain it, and hopefully they would make the right things happen.

It wasn't just about saving Tobias. It was also about opening up all those old cases, which threw egg on certain faces. It would also take a lot of man-hours, and that's where the real justification came in.

"So." It was almost prescient, the way Andre focused on man-hours.

He threw a file down in disgust.

"The boys spent an awful lot of time on that damned figurine."

"Yes." But then, it was an important piece of evidence.

"Well, I've got an idea, Gilles—one that properly disposes of that initial assumption."

"Yes?"

Andre cleared his throat. He hoped to get better at this someday.

"Okay. What's your impression? Was Tobias telling the truth?'

"What do you mean?"

"Well, he said he wasn't sure it they had one at home. He wasn't sure, Gilles. It's hard to deny, when your print was on it. Yet at times, in the interrogation, he was almost helpful."

He meant the original interviews, before his lawyer got involved. Andre wondered at the possibilities, a real screw-ball of an accusation, and then you get an incompetent lawyer.

"That must have been before he realized what was up, Andre."

"Okay. So off they go, trying to figure out where it came from." His eyes wavered, but Gilles was asking for ideas. "Why don't we assume the girl bought it."

"It's a distinct possibility."

"Okay, Gilles. You're a good judge of character."

"Let's hope so."

"You can tell when someone's lying."

"Sometimes—but rarely."

"People say you have a feel for this sort of thing."

"That's their problem." Gilles patted his pockets, a rising note, not so much of impatience, as patience, evident in his voice. "What's your point?"

"Well, I want to go looking and find where the girl bought the thing. One, it's cheap. Two, she had a limited radius, or let's say she only went so many places." He riffled through notes, but the young woman had come to Paris from a small village about thirty miles north of the city.

She probably didn't get back there very often, and it was a very small place when she did.

"She was a beautiful girl. The stock had to come from a distributor."

"Okay."

"So. What do we do."

Gilles straightened.

"Do you feel like working the weekend?"

Andre's eyebrows lifted and he shrugged.

"Ah...sure."

Gilles sat down again.

Spinning the dial, Gilles waited for a moment, and Andre watched as he telephoned.

"Hello. I need to speak to Inspector Mathieu."

A small shot of adrenalin went through Levain's guts.

He bit his lip.

What the hell. I asked for it.

"...Yes, Inspector Mathieu. I think it's a really good idea, and if you would be so good as to allow Sergeant Levain some people."

Andre held his breath, almost hoping the answer would be no. What did he care if Tobias lived or died?

"Andre's logic seems sound.'

It does? I didn't know I had logic...

"Yes, Inspector Mathieu. I think what Andre is saying is that if Tobias really was there, he didn't necessarily have to have brought the thing with him. Why do it, right? And no one has ever suggested that she came and took it from his home, and no one has ever suggested that Solange Tobias went over there and killed her, somehow accidentally leaving a cheap, shit figurine that she had just picked up for no reason...sorry, sir, but it is kind of obscure."

"We could have the men take photos of Solange around for the ride."

Gilles nodded in Andre's direction.

There was more talk.

Scratchy little sounds came from the telephone earpiece as Levain tried to catch the sense of it.

And poor old Tobias was still sitting there in his jail cell. He would be wondering too. Levain had some natural empathy for the man, anyone, really, who found themselves in that situation. There was only so much they were going to be able to do about it. He stared out the window at the clearest blue sky they'd seen in days as the monologue on the other end continued.

It was just another day, on some level. However, if Andre put in the hours now, he could take personal leave later, and maybe use that time for family.

"Yes, sir."

Gilles rang off, and got to his feet, blinking a little as the reception by Mathieu was rather surprising.

"What? What?"

"Hmn."

Inspector Mathieu didn't ask one single damned question. That, to say the least, was unusual for him. Gilles had endured a gentle lecture on not squandering resources, and being told that the entire department was relying on him to save their honor and somehow pull this nasty old cat out of the bag. The man was a walking, talking compendium of shopworn cliches, and that was really saying something around there. The average age of the top brass in the place was mid-sixties. One day there must be a housecleaning! Either that, or the old boy's league would just start dropping in their tracks, one by one. He'd heard a few whines about promotions and the distinct lack of prospects over the years.

"Ah. He says you can have six men, and if you want to do this tomorrow, or over the weekend, whatever, you'd better figure out what you want. They'll need to start asking people if they want the overtime, or call in people off duty." It was a warm, sunny weekend in mid-summer, and they would have to do some phoning around.

Andre would have to do this work himself, working from the roster in terms of seniority, top down. Overtime at time and a half, plum job and everything. It might not be so easy, with the weather finally turning good.

"So think this out, okay?"

What?

"Just like that?"

Overtime hours at time and a half.

Gilles grinned, which was a surprise even to him. It faded quickly enough. God, life was going to get worse before it got better, though.

"You can handle it."

Reaching for his hat, he put that on and then slung his jacket over his arm as the day was stinking hot.

"He would like some news from you first thing Monday morning, incidentally." Gilles gave him a look. "Just call the guy, basically. He likes to know what's going on."

"Ah. Oh." Levain nodded. "Okay."

With a wink, Gilles picked up his briefcase, made sure his desk drawer was locked, and left a slightly-stunned Andre Levain to work out what had just happened and figure out how to deal with such success.

But honestly, it really wasn't such a bad idea. Gilles had no doubt that Levain could direct a few young bucks on what would be a big, scary assignment to them. He paused at the door.

"All right, we'll see you tomorrow. In the meantime, better work up something on paper." With that, Maintenon was gone.

***

"Nom de Dieu." Sucking the hot, thick air into his lungs wasn't much help.

"Welcome to the rat race." The driver nodded sagely in the rearview mirror. "Yes, mon ami. It just seems to get worse, with every passing day."

Gilles took off his tie, and unbuttoned his collar. The tie went into his pocket. If only he could get these shoes off. Life would be so much better—

"What do you think of that Flying Finn, that Paavo Nurmi?"

"Pardon?"

"Paavo Nurmi, the Flying Finn? That guy, he's unbeatable."

"Ah." Of course.

"Yeah, man. I just love that guy. What heart! What an indomitable spirit."

The Olympics were in town, and Gilles was probably the only one who knew nothing about it. He hadn't turned on the radio at home in days. Hell, maybe even weeks. He was too tired to care, much of the time. He was too lazy to go looking for another channel. They could only get six or eight stations on the radio at the best of times, and some of them were very poor in terms of reception. One or two, he just didn't like the music.

The back end of the lorry ahead of them lurched forwards. His driver, Etienne by the placard on the seat-back, hastily let out the parking brake and shoved the gear lever in place.

"That Mussolini's a right bastard, eh?"

"Who? Ah, yes."

"We're going to have problems with him, mark my words."

"Ah, yes." Gilles had a sinking feeling the fellow was right. "Yes. We probably will."

Sooner or later, a man like Mussolini must throw his weight and muscle around. The stories coming out of Rome were not good, and yet it was all so much rumor. Without any proper moral sanction of time and history, he must inevitably rule by a strong arm and a secret police.

The traffic problems would only get worse, the driver explained.

"There are too many amateur drivers on the roads these days." That was how he put it. "All these private cars, and half the time they have no idea of where they are going or what in the hell they are doing."

He hooted the horn derisively, receiving a universal gesture in return from the vehicle edging up beside them.

The next intersection, with a gendarme hooting his whistle and waving his white-gloved hands theatrically, was just up ahead.

"Thank God. At last." The driver pulled right and accelerated. "We're close now."

Gilles settled back into the seat as the country opened up and sped by.

Hot as it was, the air was still a lot better out here, where the smokestacks were thinner and a hot breeze from the south brought up the big, puffy clouds, the grasshoppers and the smell of farms and stables. This could almost be restful, if only he didn't hate everything so much. God, let it take forever.

Gilles would try and be cheerful for Ann, and she would try to be cheerful for him, and that's how it would be.

All so artificial, and yet not without its meaning.

Every act could be made to appear symbolic. Especially if it was ritually imbued with sufficient meaning.

He had forgotten who said that. Some cynic probably.

Pulling up in front of the building, impressive in the bright sunshine and surrounded by tall, gnarled oaks, Gilles sweated on the steps as the fellow got his bags out of the trunk. The sunlight dappled the ground, and theoretically it was a fine afternoon. The place was already becoming a second home, as he made his way down bright corridors and exchanging greetings with bright, cheerful people. There were two kinds of people here, he thought. Those who are going to die, and those who are already dead. He forgot where he'd heard that one.

The day was too long sometimes. He was already exhausted.

He'd packed the night before, which hadn't saved as much time as one would have thought.

"Ann?"

Finding the door unlocked, he turned the knob. Gilles was stabbed with a kind of guilt, conscious that he and she were now leading separate lives, and that she might be startled if she was in the bathroom. She might not know who it was.

"My love? Ann? Are you here?"

Getting no response, heart-rate slightly elevated, he lugged the big suitcase in. The bulging briefcase went down on the corner of the bed, and then Gilles turned to pay off the driver, no doubt expecting a healthy tip after coming all this way.

Sweat poured from under the gentleman's hat and Gilles didn't feel much better.

"Thank you, sir." That fifty-centime tip did it every time, although it got expensive after a while.

The cabbie departed, and Gilles was just heading for the bathroom, fairly certain that Ann wasn't in. It was the long ride and all those cups of coffee. He was just opening up his fly when a strong rap came at the door. The flow had already begun, and he was hastily attempting to stem it via sheer willpower when the sound of someone who was not Ann came from the outer room.

"Madame Maintenon? Is everything all right?"

Gilles stuck his head out the door.

"She's not in right now. I'm her husband. May I help you?"

The young woman, clearly a member of the housekeeping staff going by the apron and the black dress, a sop to tradition in this most modern of environments, shook her head.

"It's just that I saw a strange man coming out..."

"Oh. Yes. That was my driver. I'll be staying the weekend."

"I'm very sorry, sir." She bowed her head, turning to go.

"That's quite all right...er. You're right to ask questions, of course."

Her face came around as she pulled the door all the way open.

She smiled, one which appeared genuine. That might be an unusual thing for a worker in a place like this, although Gilles was sure it couldn't be as bad as all of that.

"Thank you, sir."

"Oh, boy." Gilles heard the latch click into place and her key being removed. "Oh, Mary, Mother of Jesus..."

Now he could relax...

He washed his hands, changed into a lighter pair of slacks and a white shirt.

"No tie for me. Not tonight, not today." He ran his hand through his hair, once wild and rebellious but now unfortunately all too tame and inclined to just lie there, lifeless and uninterested. It was like he had the mind of a fourteen year-old boy, trapped in the body of a seventy year-old, sometimes. Gilles Maintenon turned the knob, took a big breath, and plastered a cheerful look on his face, mostly for Ann's sake but also for his own.

Life was too fucking short, and one might as well try and make something of it.

Lord, love a duck.

***

Andre was still a few files behind Gilles. He sighed, feeling like he was back in school, and longing to escape into a clear summer's day. He'd been born in what were the outskirts of the big city, way back then. The fields, the forests and the streams, private mostly, were only a quick walk, and the best place to be when skipping school. Those really were the days, eh?

Before one grew up, became an adult, and everything sort of went sour.

There was the familiar hum of voices and telephones and footsteps on the other side of that thin wooden door. It was like the buzz of insects on a hot afternoon just before harvest. Someone right next door was speaking in a high, whiny kind of monotone and he wondered how people could stand it sometimes.

For the love of God, put some expression into it...

He was already pushing his luck, with coffee and smoke breaks. Andre had even taken a quick stroll through the building earlier. The recognition that sooner or later, he must run into someone he knew, and that they would invariably ask what case you were working on, had nipped that in the bud. He could make it through the day, and they could take it up again tomorrow.

Sometimes that was best.

It was best to keep one's head down and not draw too much attention sometimes. His assessment was that if they failed, and Tobias was guillotined, he and Gilles would survive. In that sense, they were the perfect sacrificial lambs. They were being asked to do a job that was impossible in the first place. That might help to account for his own complacency, which he could sort of admit to himself in a quiet moment. There were all too many of those with this particular case.

The trouble with Gilles was that sense of honor.

In attempting to evade their own responsibility, the system had unexpectedly hit upon the one man that took it seriously, and for some reason Maintenon's subconscious was eating at him.

Yes.

So that was it.

He took another look at his partner.

Sure enough. The little bastard's got something.

And he did say Tobias didn't do it...

Andre sat up a little straighter. Sure, Ann was serious. It was traumatic for Gilles. But there was more to it than that.

He was sure of something—he just didn't know how to justify it yet, and for that he would need evidence. Real evidence, the kind that didn't come cheap. That evidence didn't just have to convince the Boss. It had to convince some real heavy hitters, ones who could not afford too many mistakes or they would go down hard for they had further to fall. That part made a lot of sense.

He did some small stretching exercises, and put some thought into his seating position. There was still time yet, and Gilles was obviously in it for the long haul. He eyed the two or three small hard-backed volumes of Aldrich Tobias novels, sitting on the back of Maintenon's desk.

Fuck, if things get bad enough, I might even read one of them things myself.

He grinned at the mangled punch-line.

Aldrich, the man himself, was the key to everything. Nothing else made sense otherwise.

Someone wanted him dead.

The hard maple chair under him had no forgiveness, and his elbows were sore from the hard table top. Head propped on his hands, he read all about a thirty-two year-old young man. This case stuck out like a sore thumb, he thought.

He shook his head in disgust at the originating officer. Not the best, thought Andre. Not that I'm one to talk—

Daniel Perrault. A drag queen. Hmn. While it was possible that he had been taken for a young woman in some innocent mistake on the part of the killer, the homosexual angle hadn't entered into any of the previous cases that he had read. No inscriptions at the scene, either.

Taking a leaf out of Maintenon's book, Andre put all other considerations out of his mind. These other cases were about control...and a perp who hated himself for something deep down inside. He thought about that for a minute.

Comme ci, comme ça.

Andre was having a terrible time with it. No wonder Gilles had tried to ditch it.

Just focus on this one young man, this one case.

What should have happened? And why didn't it, or why wouldn't it? Maintenon had this weird way of putting things sometimes. Yet he always had a point, too. How many scenarios could he really come up with? He quickly leafed through the rest of the file. Andre already had a kind of gut instinct about it.

Huh. We're learning already.

Regarding the larger case: this was one more kink in a profile already too crowded with such kinks. Serial killer, young archetypes, beheading, bodies in the ice-box. People sawed in half, a dead cat or two...and now a male victim in a crowd of females.

While poor Daniel's family knew or claimed to know nothing of his propensities, (and yet how could they not have known?) the police had also had interviewed his neighbors in the slum tenement where he lived alone in a bed-sitting room. It would have a shared bath and kitchen facilities, if Andre recalled the area properly. He'd kicked in a door or two in that very building. Not that many moons ago, either. Definitely not the nicest of neighborhoods, but then Daniel didn't seem to have any employment. In that case, how did he survive? And where did the killer, i.e. Tobias, poor, crazy old Tobias, latch onto him, and why a boy in a case full of girls?

Hmn.

The neighbors had provided a few names, or at least nicknames, and more than a couple of physical descriptions.

It seemed much more likely to be a lover's quarrel. Daniel had been struck in the temple with an empty magnum champagne bottle. he must have dropped like a stone, judging by the injuries noted in the coroner's report.

"Fuck. I have to kill myself." Gilles threw a sheaf of papers down in disgust, standing over his desk and straightening up, hands kneading his lower back.

Something about Gilles' tone struck Andre.

"Ha. I like that one."

He laughed dutifully, giving Gilles an appreciative look. All he got was that stubborn profile as Gilles scowled down at his scattered notes. It had been so quiet in there since their arrival at what seemed like the crack of dawn but was really only ten to nine. He'd sort of gathered that Gilles wasn't having the best of days and that it might be better not to prod too hard. So far Gilles hadn't said one word about his weekend. Prepared with one or two shuffleboard and crocket jokes, Andre hadn't had the heart to bring it up. Gilles was all wound up, the sheer animal tension of the man made that clear. The twitching of the muscles in the corners of the jaw was obvious enough.

"Oh, God. You're right—this one doesn't really belong in here either." Andre closed the file. "Daniel what's-his-fucking-name."

Some miserable son of a bitch had just dumped the case into the heap and effectively washed his hands of it. Hey, who knows—maybe some other lucky schmuck gets to solve it. The originating officer might have hated fags. It was that simple sometimes. Sometimes it was nothing more than that—the investigating officer either had too much on his plate or thought it unsolvable.

There's more than one way to skin a cat, thought Andre.

Gilles' chair scraped back with a kind of flick of the foot, and he left the room, snagging his hat from the rack as he went.

It took two minutes to go to the salle de bain and relieve oneself, perhaps five or ten under certain circumstances. But you really didn't need a hat for that.

It was only after a full twenty minutes had passed, when Andre began to wonder where exactly Gilles had gone.

With the river right there outside the window, twenty minutes was an awfully long time.

It gnawed at him.

Andre couldn't overlook the fact that Gilles had just walked off without any explanation.

"Fuck, I'm am a detective, after all." That's what people said, anyways.

Leaping up, he grabbed his own hat. Turning the key in the door on his way out, on impulse, he went back in. Opening up the bottom drawer on his desk, he pulled out a pint of brandy kept there for medicinal purposes and went off to look for Gilles, who most likely had just gone for a stroll around the building or around the block.

It wasn't exactly unheard-of to take a dive into the Seine, though.

Chapter Eighteen

Gilles stepped out the front door, and feeling curiously care-free, dropped down the steps two at a time. He should have done this a long time ago. For some reason, walking always made the mental juices flow, keeping the grey matter well-oiled. Following some homing instinct that only the totally oblivious can appreciate, he turned to his right, put his chin down and kept going.

He didn't care where he was or where he might end up. He was going nowhere, as fast as he possibly could. His only real thought was to escape the mental cloister of sitting in that room and staring at page after page of badly-investigated killings.

It was taking too much self-repression to make it through a typical day.

He could never really say what he wanted to say, he had to hold it in. He couldn't speak his thoughts, or someone might be offended.

He needed to go out in the forest and scream profanity out into the wilderness, a sublimely negative impulse but it was there.

I have to kill myself.

That wasn't a proper thought, and yet the words just seemed to flash through his mind sometimes. It had been happening more and more often.

It hadn't always been that way. He'd always been a pretty cheerful fellow. If only there was some little blue pill one could take, to insulate oneself from the pain and suffering of life. He would take that pill, if only because he had a job to do and he needed to do it well.

If he didn't think he was doing it well, he would have no choice but to quit. Anything else was madness. The pavement pounded all the way up into his lower abdomen and his hips already had a slight ache. He slowed down to avoid getting a stitch in his side.

He tried to get his breath into proper shape.

It was all in the posture. It was all in how you stood up to the world. Now, at this exact moment in time. Gilles spent too much time thinking about the future.

Sometimes the future doesn't matter, for if you don't get through the moment, you're not going to see it anyways.

He had to bear that in mind...

What he was supposed to do about it was another question.

More than anything, his thoughts were all jumbled up and tortuous—what a fucking word that was. If only a man could relax and just sit and think for a moment, perhaps not the answer, but the next step in the path might become so much clearer.

As it was, they were spinning their wheels, mired in a muck of their own creation.

He had to find some outlet for all of that energy, all of that angst as the philosophers called it.

After a while, his heart began to pound and sweat ran down inside of his shirt. He turned left, and right, and left again, zigzagging down boulevard streets, narrower thoroughfares, and across intimate, cobbled little squares where dripping laundry hung overhead and the old men still sat in their doorways, smoking their pipes and drinking the rough red so many favored. The longer the street the better it was sometimes, for when he had to pause at a red light, it was awkward, almost painful to wait. He loved the life of the city, but just standing there was no good.

One had to move forward.

He'd already decided that all of the files, all of the witnesses, all of the points raised in prosecution were false and misleading. Why then, were they still looking at them? That one required some sort of executive decision—which was exactly what they were paying him for. All it took was a little guts.

Then there was Ann.

Then there was him.

Lately, surely, Gilles had been a part of the problem, rather than being a part of the solution. He knew that very well. His gut was in one big knot and had been for what felt like years—and then the department comes along and dumps this fucking shit on me.

Someone said hello and Gilles just stared blankly. It wasn't his world. The man was in his own time and space. They were intersecting, for one brief moment. The fellow was just coming the other way down the street, and yet Gilles was tempted to curse the fellow.

How had life come to such a pass.

He nodded so as not to offend, and they passed like ships in the night. The odds were that they would never meet, never lay eyes on each other again, and Gilles knew that other man had a story to tell too. Everyone did, and it was best to remember that, and to count one's blessings.

I still have my mental health, he thought bitterly.

There was a bigger, brighter street, and he turned right again. Looming ahead was one of the city's famous outdoor urinals, and just beyond that, the entrance to the Metro.

I have to kill myself. If it hadn't been for Ann, he might have done it long ago, and yet if it were not for Ann, he wouldn't have to feel this way. There was guilt either way. The head-shrinkers always said that suicide was redirected aggression.

We know that we're not supposed to hurt people, and so we turn it inwards, on ourselves.

Knowing that wasn't much help. His crumbling world wasn't affected one whit.

What difference does it make?

He had a pocketful of change, and he had no idea of what he was doing anymore. He needed some time to focus—to think.

He needed to put his own problems on hold and fixate on Tobias and his immediate circle for the next few days. If he couldn't take the weekend off, so be it. No matter how hard it would be.

Gilles Maintenon had to buckle down and take the pain, for as long as life kept dishing it out.

Other than that, he had to save Monsieur Tobias' life, with absolutely nothing to go on and not a whole hell of a lot of time left. It was a matter of priorities.

One thing at a time and first things first.

It was as simple as that.

***

The door to their cubby-hole crashed open and Maintenon walked in and stopped. Absently, he took off his hat and extended his arm. He stood there, the hat hovering in mid-air over the tines of the hat-rack.

"Come on in and sit a spell." Andre had a coffee and a cigarette going, and he'd had his lunch some time ago.

Gilles had been gone all of that time.

"What?"

"I said, come on in and sit for a while." Andre shoved his chair back. "Hey, why don't I get you a cup of coffee."

Gilles finally let the hat down and shuffled slowly forward, heading in the general direction of his desk. Not angry, and not particularly happy by the sort of lost look on Maintenon's face, Andre brushed past and went to the squad-room.

On the bright side, Gilles didn't smell like booze or anything.

Firmin was in their regular squad-room, typing away in desultory fashion as he listened to someone on the telephone, an awkward thing but necessary sometimes.

"He's back." Andre went to the coffeepot and found a relatively clean cup for Maintenon as Firmin nodded and gave him a quick thumbs-up.

"Yes, sir." Firmin hung up abruptly, giving Andre a shoulder-slump and a sigh. "I'll try to remember that."

He grinned sourly and then took in an expectant and slightly-relieved Andre Levain.

"Well. I told you so."

Andre nodded, stirring well and picking up the cups carefully by the handle as it was devilishly hot, unusually so for this place. Firmin was settling in for a long session judging by the clean ashtray, today's newspaper folded and set to one side, and various other indicators that Andre had learned to read over the last few months.

They were all special, each member of the team very good in their own way. And yet, Andre would have set Maintenon apart from all of them.

"I know." He grinned. "Well. I can't wait to see if he's come up with something."

Anything, really.

"Huh!" Firmin was eyeing his newspaper but seemed to think better of it.

His fingers were again poised over the machine as his eye sought out the notes regarding the as-yet unidentified body found in a park last Tuesday.

Andre opened the door, trying not to spill, and with a nod at Firmin, went back down the corridor, where hopefully Gilles would not have wandered away again.

***

Having left their door unlatched, Andre backed into the room, so for a minute there, he didn't catch on. He put the cups down, one on the corner of his desk, and one on the corner of Gilles's desk, and then he turned to look.

Fouad was there, with his little cart, and he and Maintenon were bent over the long row of folding-leg deal tables on the opposite side of the room, in fact used more than their actual desks.

"What's going on?"

"We're sending it all back." Gilles' eyes met his. "Right back to where it came from."

Gilles sat at the typewriter and began addressing a brief memorandum to Inspector Mathieu on this extraordinary action.

"Ah...boss. Promise me you're not going to stick a note in there somewhere..." He took a breath, aware of a grinning pet Tuareg, big brown ears flapping.

The man from housekeeping beat him to the punch line as first Andre gaped, and then Gilles guffawed.

"...yeah, you got to promise not to put a note in there telling 'em to shove it up their asses..."

It was the first time Andre had seen Gilles smile or laugh in a few days.

His sensitive fingers began clapping out a familiar tempo.

So that was all right, then.

"He's right, Andre. We can't do that." A relieved Gilles stopped typing for a moment. "We'll be starting off from square one—and this is the really fun part, Andre."

A decision had been made, and that was all to the good. He became more serious all of a sudden.

"You know what? I don't care what they think. We have eleven days yet—eleven more shopping days, so to speak. As you know, there's not much open around here on a Sunday." He bit his lip, eying up weekdays and weekends on the calendar. "We'd better not take it too close to the wire."

The date of the Tobias execution was circled in red.

June 27.

His eyes slid over the calendar, a big one with big squares, all white and open spaces and you could put things in there and figure things out.

Andre shrugged.

"Hey, I'm still young—I can find another job."

Levain was pleased nevertheless.

In the absence of any relevant information, they were better off with nothing anyways.

"So what do you want me to say?" Fouad was only half-kidding.

He was going to take some heat for this, and most likely on a Friday afternoon or something.

He supposed it could be a Monday, which wouldn't be any better.

Fouad hated Mondays.

"Nothing. Just read the Investigating Officer's name on the file. This one whole box goes to D'Arcy." Gilles patted the top box on the one end of the car, and looked at Andre. "Other than that, maybe you can think of something."

Andre raised his eyebrows and shrugged elaborately.

"Nope."

So, it's like that, eh.

Andre stood staring at the room, transformed. His hand crept up to the bald patch on top. The only stuff Maintenon had kept was their notes, their pens and pencils. A few lonely scraps of paper were scattered in an otherwise empty room, one or two of them even on the floor.

"Jesus, Christ, Gilles. I hope you know what you're doing." This was breathtaking.

Gilles patted the man on the back and shoved the cart towards the door. Good old Fouad had always been able to take a hint.

He even said so.

"I can take a hint."

"Thank you, Fouad."

"What now, Gilles?"

"Grab our hats and go."

He wasn't kidding either, Andre discovered, much to whatever was the opposite of dismay.

It was a kind of glee, almost.

It was a good enough word.

***

Andre grabbed an elbow and led Gilles to where he was stashing the car these days, which wasn't too much of a walk. Gilles kept his head down and his hat pulled low. Both of them were looking pretty anonymous with jackets across their arms and hands up in front their faces, smoking furiously, whenever they came across anyone looking like they came from the department.

"Who are we avoiding?"

"Everyone." Gilles scowled. "The question is now, how to proceed."

He chewed his lip and kept on chewing until they had cleared the immediate area.

"More than anything..." Gilles began in a low tone.

Andre turned the radio down.

"...more than anything, I would like to know who made that phone call."

"What phone call?" Then Andre remembered that conversation. "Oh, yeah. That phone call...?"

"Yes. Someone fingered Tobias. That was mentioned in the papers, or at least that's how I recall it. Yet there's nothing in the files that I saw."

"The problem is, that tip might have gone to Inspector Allard himself." And he's no longer available, thought Andre.

He looked at Gilles.

"That is rather a neat touch, isn't it?"

"Yes, Andre. And yet, incredible as it may seem, the death of Allard might be a coincidence. A terribly inconvenient one, but a coincidence nevertheless." Gilles hadn't really decided on that one yet.

"Where are we going, Boss?"

"Anywhere, for the moment. Just drive." Gilles looked out the window, where storm clouds loomed on the horizon although the sky directly overhead defined azure itself. "I'm sick and tired of distractions, disruptions, and having heaps of useless information dumped upon us."

Andre tried to think of someplace to go.

When in doubt, the Bois de Boulogne.

"Gilles."

"Yes."

"We don't know a damned thing, do we?"

Gilles didn't answer, simply staring out the window, lost in his own little world.

Going by the body language, he seemed a lot more relaxed, and Andre wondered what had happened during his little disappearance earlier in the day.

"Feel like a beer, Boss?"

"Sure. Why not." It couldn't do any harm, and it might do some good.

"How about someplace with girls?"

Gilles grunted.

"I don't know Andre—that would be like waving a steak around in front of a drowning man."

***

With a promise of manpower, he put his best face on and dealt with it. It was only a matter of time before one or two ambitious and slightly more senior officers began wondering why such a junior officer was conducting such an important and complex investigation. And kicking up a fuss about it as well—that sort of thing just wouldn't do.

He would very much like to show them why that was.

"All right, ladies and gentlemen. Here's what we're going to do."

With the morning shift of uniformed gendarmes off to their respective duties, Gilles was addressing his troops on their own ground. This was a much larger space than the detectives' little enclaves. This briefing room had rows of desks, a blackboard, chalk, pointer, and a couple of small rows of relatively eager faces in their chairs.

"Team One." Maintenon had a dozen officers, three of them female, requisitioned for special duties.

They weren't exactly hand-picked, merely available.

"You will follow your lists. Senior officer drives or authorizes expenses such as bus, taxi or train fares. Start at the top and work your way down. We need to find alternate suspects, and for that we need names, addresses, workplace, alias, descriptions. Any detail may be important, so take good notes."

"Team Two." This was a small section of two female officers, who might pass in a pinch.

Their job was to follow Solange Tobias everywhere she went.

He stepped forward and gave them two identical dossiers on Solange Tobias, along with an envelope of cash money and written orders.

"Off you go." Clad in their rather clingy plainclothes dresses, looking very well in their expensive shoes and holding on to their fine handbags as if they had owned them all of their lives, the pair rose, and excused themselves.

"Team One." Andre stepped forwards, and handed out envelopes. "A hundred francs for expenses. Make sure you count it. Sign the chit and hand it back to me before you leave this room."

There was eager muttering as the officers collected their envelopes.

"You will be unsupervised. Make sure you have a proper receipt or you will be docked for any discrepancies." Andre grinned. "Off you go, and keep in touch at the number provided. Don't screw up, this is an important assignment."

Team One's task was to talk to every literary critic, every editor at a major cultural magazine, every columnist, book reviewer or keeper of any salon, if such a thing still existed, and ask them one very specific question.

"Team Three." There weren't very many of them.

There were three uniformed gendarmes, listed by name on the blackboard, and Archambault, Firmin, and LeBref, a bit of a fixture in the department.

LeBref was not exactly a dwarf, but he was the next best thing to being one, The man was very handy in certain situations because no one would ever suspect he was a flic.

The room was quiet and all the others were gone.

"Hmn." Gilles wanted to choose his words carefully.

He stood there looking at them, Firmin, dragged into it at the last moment, sitting there looking glum, with his arms across his chest and knee crossed on the other. He looked the most closed-in of the bunch. The others were relatively open to suggestion by their expressions.

"I want you guys all over Inspector Allard. His military career, his education, where he grew up, what social circles he moved in. I want to know who his friends were, what he ate for breakfast, where he walked his dog, and where he was likely to go on his day off when his wife was off at her mother's. Bad habits, good habits, whether he went to church or not..."

Archambault's eyes gleamed with some unspoken humor.

He, at least, knew it was all bullshit and that they were just going through the motions.

And yet there might be something in it.

They might catch a drunk driver—or they might find that elusive political connection which Gilles was half-convinced existed—or must exist, or should exist.

Gilles nodded.

"I sense a fine Italian hand in all of this." The gendarmes and LeBref laughed dutifully. "Be thorough. I know this is a shitty and thankless job. But Inspector Allard was one of our own, and he deserves an honest investigation. Non?"

There were nods and murmurs to back this up.

"All right. Off you go, lads."

Over the top, in other words.

He and Andre, briefing concluded, left the room as the others, having their orders, sorted themselves out.

They stumped up flights of stairs as the briefing had been held in the plebian territory of the ground floor.

"And where are we going, Gilles?"

"We're going to see Vachon."

"We'll need our hats."

By the sound of thunder outside of the stone walls of the building, they would need their raincoats as well.

"My thinking exactly, Andre."

***

"So, what is your problem, exactly?" Brow wrinkling, mouth opening and eyes sort of flaring, Vachon digested what Gilles had just told him.

"We're not getting anywhere and we're running out of time. I want to put an ad in the paper. All of them, actually. And magazines, any kind of periodical."

"And what do you want it to say?"

Andre spoke up now.

"That's why we came to you. We need someone to write it for us."

Vachon bit his lip.

"Well." He went through his little eye-rolling routine as he sought the proper form.

"Hmn."

Vachon was dead silent, and yet they hadn't lost him or anything, he was still there. Andre watched that right hand, tapping the butt end of the pen on his knee.

"Okay." Vachon bit his lip again. "Hmn."

His eyes stabbed at Andre, then Gilles. His chair spun and he pulled a blank pad over in front of him. He scribbled away, stopping suddenly and scratching it all out again. Crumpling that one up, he tossed it in the general direction of the overflowing wastebasket.

Andre's chair scraped and Vachon gave him a quick and ugly look. Andre froze, and then Hector had it.

Taking a deep breath, he set to from the top left and worked his way down, line by line and bit by bit.

Satisfied with his work, he held it up to where the light fell over his shoulder. Looking down his nose and through his half-glasses, he read it off.

"To the person who made the phone call that changed the course of literary history—please contact Detective-Sergeant Gilles Maintenon at the number listed below. Information required, reward offered. No come-backs."

Andre gaped.

"That's it?" His tone implied that they could have done that much themselves, but Gilles saw the artistry.

His only concern was the amount of information that they had to disgorge in order to get Hector's cooperation—and it most likely wasn't going to stop there.

"No charge for that, incidentally." It was like Hector could read Maintenon's mind, and that was explicit in his semi-feral smile. "Glad to help out. Vive la Republique!"

He chuckled, his mind already moving on, to his story, the deadline, and of course then he got to do it all again. Like Gilles, it was like being married to the job—heartbreaking at times, but what else was a man supposed to do? It got in your blood and then you were screwed. More than anything, he sensed an exclusive here.

Gilles slapped his thigh, in the best humor he had been in for days.

"Thank you, my friend." And it was true, too.

If you trusted a man enough, then he was a friend.

A friend in need was a friend indeed.

Now all they had to do was to disseminate the thing to as wide an audience as humanly possible.

"You guys need a list of all the publications in the city?"

"Ah, yes. We would like that very much."

Hector didn't have the time, but he had someone who would do it. He pressed a button on his desk. All that it took was time, money, and legwork.

"Can we make the afternoon editions?"

"Hopefully. Some of them, anway."

The hook would be baited and set.

"So what are you boys going to do if this doesn't work?"

Gilles shrugged.

"We will burn that bridge when we come to it."

As to whether it would work or not, one never knew until they tried.

***

"Oh, boy. Boy, oh, boy." Andre sat at his desk, wondering how long it could continue.

Back in their regular quarters, and sitting at their regular desks, the phones, normally ringing every few minutes or so with this or that piece of information, this or that officer, or witness, or mouthpiece, trying to speak with this or that officer, had gone curiously silent.

Gilles had his chair tipped back, his feet on one end of the desk, and his hands up behind his head.

LeBref came in, and Andre eyed him curiously for signs of excitement or disappointment. His manner was as usual, sardonic and his face displaying that cruel, dark wit often shown by those who were truly different. So far they hadn't achieved much except put together an unremarkable list of friends and acquaintances of Allard, whose life appeared blameless so far.

The department's height requirements had been waived for LeBref, and that said something about him. Kilogram for kilogram, he was said to be the most useful man in the department.

LeBref had the gift for talking to people and gaining either their confidence or their contempt in the first few syllables. This had helped him immensely in the tricky and patient maneuverings that played out in the endless pursuit of criminals at the higher levels of the game.

And a game it was, to one such as LeBref.

"You guys got any coffee?" He eyed Andre in speculative fashion, his morose Charlie Chaplin mustache bristling with eagerness just this once.

"Yep."

LeBref moved over to the sideboard and refrigerator where the makings were kept.

He rubbed his hands together, looking positively scruffy in baggy black trousers, beaten shoes with curiously fat, rounded toes, shoes from either a bygone age or looking a bit too far into the future. LeBref was affecting a stained Homburg hat today, and his plain black coat of thin fabric looked about three sizes too small for him.

Some kind of idiot-savant of the underworld class, they said he was a ghost when shadowing some of the most dangerous people in the world.

Gilles' eyes opened.

"So."

LeBref sipped coffee.

"So."

Andre grunted.

"So, what?"

"So. Not much joy, although some of our whiz kids are going all-out."

LeBref sauntered over to the window, standing on tiptoe to have a look out and down into the street just below, the river flowing silently past, characteristically green, outside of their open windows.

He took the empty chair at Inspector Firmin's desk and spun around on its swivel.

"No, not much joy there." He cast his eye over the two rows of desks facing each other, the cork and chalkboards, the beaten-down channels in the carpet. "You boys are doing pretty well up here. So. What about the others?"

Andre had gone through all of their reports from the previous day.

"What's our basic premise here? I'm not sure I'm explaining to the kids properly?" LeBref sipped his coffee and grimaced. "Jesus Christ."

"It's simple, really. The girl bought the figurine after our boy somehow handled it."

"Merde."

He shrugged, eyes sliding over to Gilles, who looked up.

"Here's the other thing." Maintenon took a puff of his cigarette. "Think about our other so-called evidence. Solange for example. Did Aldrich's affair even happen? She says so. It is, after all, the reason for their divorce, and hence so utterly convincing. She herself is convinced, and that's all it takes to be believed."

LeBref ran it through his head. Her actions said it all. Tobias had no real defense, and it was all tied in with everything else.

"Hmn."

Maintenon didn't seem to be paying a whole lot of attention. This worried Andre, for the department hated to see men sitting around doing nothing. Crime was rampant and so were letters to the editor. He'd already gone over the place once, cleaning, putting stuff away in its proper drawers, loading up the fresh typing paper in its repository. Andre had cleaned the coffee area, and even brought in housekeeping so he could borrow a vacuum cleaner. Bored stiff, Andre had made the woman watch while he did the work. The truth was, he was just busting out with repressed energy. The waiting would surely drive him mad. How Gilles could remain relatively calm, even cheerful at odd moments, was something that eluded him.

"Argh." Andre looked at Gilles, shoulders hunching and his face set and hard. "So, now what?"

Gilles nodded at LeBref, giving him a quick twitch of the left eyelid to catch his attention.

"Ah, yes, my young and impetuous friend. I was wondering when you were going to ask that question." His voice dropped an octave and he said the words in sepulchral tones. "And now, we wait."

"Argh."

LeBref just snickered quietly, appreciating the momentary lull in the storm that was modern police work.

Chapter Nineteen

It was the end of a long day. The others had all gone home in blessed relief. It was another summer weekend, and although rain was predicted, the sun was still out and they'd had a long week of hard slogging and disappointment.

Gilles himself was just clearing up stray papers, meaningless in the extreme, although he always took a quick look to see if he had jotted a telephone number, a name, a talking point on there.

Then it was straight into the waist-basket.

The briefcase was stuffed so full it was hard to close. For the first time, he had put an Aldrich Tobias novel in there. Andre had nipped out and grabbed them at a bookseller's a few blocks away. Gilles badly needed to break the obsession with the chain of logic and maybe have another look into the mind of the man.

It might even be entertaining, but at least it wasn't reading about endless rounds of questioning by junior officers and long lists of names being gathered, all of which would be pointless if only he could figure out what happened and why—the why of the whole thing was what eluded him.

The political angle, maybe, but even that seemed far-fetched, and there were plenty of drunk drivers on the road these days in the Allard case.

On the plus side, their one black hair had been linked to a suspect in one of the other cases, and it was at least something.

To his irritation, just as he was placing his raincoat over his arm and placing his hat on his head, briefcase dangling, the phone on his desk rang.

There was that strong temptation to ignore it, but he was alone in the squad-room and there was no one else there to deal with it. It might be an emergency, or it might just be another message for Archambault or Lavoie, both of whom had been in and out all day long, intent on their numerous case-loads and most pressing cases.

It rang again. There was something about it.

His heart was thudding too badly.

Sometimes we just know.

He put the coat and briefcase down, finding a pen as he lifted the receiver. His hand trembled slightly.

"Hello? Special Homicide Detachment."

"Hello." There was a short pause. "I'm looking for a Detective-Sergeant Maintenon."

"Yes, that's me. How may I help you?"

Gilles' impatient eye slid to the wall clock, but it wasn't like he had anywhere to go anyway.

"It's just that I saw your message in the paper—in the personal columns."

His guts froze as something cold and liquid shot through him.

"...you know...you know the one. You must be talking about Aldrich Tobias..." There was a sound, not quite a cough or a sneeze. "I might be able to help you. You said something about a reward?"

"Absolutely."

Racing through Maintenon's mind was the likelihood that it was probably nothing, just a crank or someone desperate enough for money to try and run a game on him. It occurred to him that the male voice on the phone was waiting for him to say something else.

"Yes, if it is credible information, and if it checks out and all of that."

There was another long silence.

"Very well..."

"No come-backs, I promise, okay? We're just trying to do the right thing here."

"Okay."

Maintenon's hand hovered over the paper.

"All right. It's up to you. Where can we meet?"

With some hesitation, and not a little hemming and hawing, the fellow mentioned a bar, a street and a time.

"And how will I know you?"

"I've seen you in the paper. Just go in, sit down and order a beer. Leave that famous hat on. If things look all right, I'll be along...right?"

It was the best he was going to get.

"All right." Gilles wrote the information down, hanging up without fanfare.

Straightening, he looked at the clock.

He wondered just how much thought had gone into that phone call—and its timing.

With all of his people dispersed, halfway home or certainly between here and there in most cases, it looked like he was completely on his own.

Thoughtfully, he took his hat off, and sat down again.

Taking out his pistol, he checked the load and looked at the coffeepot, not quite empty but down to its final dregs.

There was still a little time yet.

***

With their deadline looming, and Tobias' execution set for Friday, to be adrift on a weekend was positively infuriating.

Gilles slammed the phone down.

Mathieu, weekend in the country. Chiappe, a conference in London. Lavoie, off duty and no word left at the desk. Gilles thought Inspector Lavoie's wife was from elsewhere, but couldn't for the life of him remember exactly where. According to the desk sergeant, Rene had trotted confidently out the door and down the steps at about two-thirty in the afternoon. According to the schedule, up on the board by the door, he had off-hours coming and would be back Monday—nothing more.

A short period of unavailability would appear to be in order for the Inspector.

Gilles had tried to reach Capitaine Leduc, only to be told by some anonymous but highly-official sounding switchboard operator that Leduc was unavailable. Messages would be held for him, but there was no telling when the good Capitaine might check in. The lady said he did it 'quite regularly,' but that meant nothing to Gilles.

Tobias's lawyer was helping on his end, but the Minister of Justice hadn't returned his call.

***

Gilles still had the letter from the President in his pocket, and that ultimately was how he bluffed Andre Levain and himself into le Prison Santé.

It was Monday morning. Tobias had four days to live.

He was seated behind the desk in the interview room, still bilious green with that dull black racing stripe on the walls. Aldrich Tobias was brought in by a bored guard who clearly understood that, one, the prisoner hadn't been violent in the whole time he had been incarcerated, and two, that he was somehow important, what with all of this attention, special treatment, and calls from here and there. A subdued Andre had a chair in the corner away from the door. He'd never actually met their subject.

"Maintenon. Hello." Tobias gulped, clearly scared and wondering what he was about to hear.

"Thank you for agreeing to see us on such short notice." It really was a ludicrous thing to say, but one had to say something.

Tobias' attorney shook hands with his client and ushered him into his seat.

The lawyer sat down, Gilles noting the dignity of the young man and his air of restrained excitement.

He looked his client in the eye.

"I want you to cooperate with Detective-Sergeant Maintenon. I want you to tell him the truth, Aldrich."

His mouth went into a hard line and he glanced over at an attentive Gilles Maintenon.

"I promise you that I didn't know anything about this. Sir."

He leaned back and placed his folded and intertwined hands across his belly. Andre was stillness personified.

The place was very quiet. The sound of a heavy iron gate slamming into place shattered the stillness. The murmur in the hallway faded.

Tobias twitched, never taking his eye off Maintenon.

"So. What have you got for me?" The tic up beside the lower lid of his left eye betrayed him, but Maintenon could overlook that.

"You. Aldrich Tobias. The Architect of His Own Destruction."

The soon-to-be beheaded novelist flushed.

"What...what do you mean?"

"You. You made that phone call—you dropped those hints."

Tobias' face went white.

"What...what in the hell are you talking about?"

Gilles lifted the notebook.

"Have you ever heard of Quentin Hardy?" Tobias, previously slumped in real and apparent misery, sat up and shot a look at the lawyer. "Go on."

That long, pale face stared across the table.

"You telephoned the gentleman. You cultivated a certain sort of young man—usually. After all, there are not that many women literary columnists. And you were just chatting on the phone, taking him into your confidence so to speak, and hoping for some little mention of your upcoming book."

It was all very well and good. The lawyer cleared his throat but remained silent.

Gilles went on.

"...and just in passing, you happened to mention that you took your crimes, your scenes from real life. It's the sort of thing you should say, am I not correct? Striving for accuracy, oh, what is the word. Verisimilitude. But then, ah, then. You mentioned that some of the recent killings in Paris were uncannily like some of the crimes described in your own works. You speculated with the young fellow, all in good fun of course, that a serial killer, a real madman, might be reading your books. They might strongly identify with either your characters, or perhaps with you, sir. They might be trying to impress you, or have some psycho-sexual fixation on you."

Tobias was visibly shaking, and his face fell forwards into his hands.

"I wonder what that young columnist made of that, eh? And who he told, and who they told, and one wonders where it went from there, eh?"

A shudder wracked that lean body, all skin and bones now, pallid on the neck where even the most effete of men would have a bit of dark.

"It's terribly thin. It's going to be very difficult to convince the President, let alone a jury. Monsieur Tobias. According to Hardy, this all happened about a year and half ago—or about the time, ah...The Girl In the Icebox came out. Do you remember that?"

Aldrich Tobias lifted his head, eyes swimming with tears.

He nodded, sniffling, as the lawyer handed over a clean, white handkerchief.

"Yes."

***

Aldrich Tobias, face shining with moisture, an emotional train-wreck of a man, with only a few more days in this hell, a few more days to live and then die, tried to explain. He tried to explain, if only to his own satisfaction, how it had all came about.

"You don't know what it's like." He put the sopping rag up to his eyes and tried again to staunch the tears.

"What? We don't know what its like to be you, Monsieur Tobias? Trust me, the pain is the same for everyone. You said it yourself: the terror is the same for everyone. What do you think happened? How would you set about writing it up if it was a chapter in one of your books, Monsieur Tobias?" Gilles sat, arms folded, relentless in pursuit of the truth. "I need to hear this from you and no other, Monsieur Tobias. I must have it in your own words, and hopefully, of your own free will and volition. Otherwise I don't see how I can be of further assistance..."

Maintenon's chair scraped back.

"No! Please. Don't go." With a massive wrench of the will, Tobias managed to take a couple of relatively proper breaths.

He licked his lips, staring at his attorney.

The young man was not pleased.

"To withhold things from your attorney is the mark of a fool, Aldrich." The young fellow also sat back, arms across his chest.

"Imagine how it felt."

Gilles leaned forward, speaking in a gentler tone.

"What? How what felt?"

Aldrich had somehow escaped his present surroundings.

"The artist is mad—always mad."

"Go on, Aldrich."

Gilles gave the man a look, and he subsided. It looked like they had finally gotten through to him.

"She was the only person I had ever truly loved. That's not to say that I don't love my children, because I do. I love them very much. But Solange...Solange was special."

Gilles exhaled, slowly, every so slowly, so as not to throw him off.

"She was the only thing I ever cared about. Other than my work, of course."

"Of course."

He would tell it in his own way, and in his own God-damned good time, too.

But it looked like he was going to tell it, and that was the main thing.

"What was that like for you, Monsieur Tobias?"

"She held me when I cried—many times, and yet she didn't think any less of me for it. She accepted that part of me. She knew when I was sad, she knew when I was happy, and she knew when I needed to talk. She knew everything about me, Gilles...and you too, Emile."

His body twitched, wracked by one great sob.

"And then one day, right out of nowhere...she accused me." Tobias looked away, and there were fresh rivulets going down his cheeks and neck. "And I got angry—very angry."

He stared at Maintenon.

"Such hate! Solange truly hated me in that moment, so much so...that she reminded me of a few things."

"What did she remind you of, Aldrich."

Gilles waved a hand impatiently.

Shut up, you fool. Shut up.

Tobias looked at Emile, almost smiling in some inexplicable fashion.

"She reminded me that we had lived on her money, and with a lot of help from her parents at first. Mine too, but not so much because they didn't have any to begin with. She reminded me of how she had talked me down off of more than one window ledge...more than once, somewhere along the way...gentlemen."

Gentlemen.

There was a long silence, and yet Gilles did not dare reach for the notebook. With Andre's ears practically screaming, he had a high degree of confidence in their eventual notes. He had no way of knowing just how well Levain could actually remember it.

"All right Monsieur Tobias. Just tell it in your own words. We're going to help you, okay? Just as much as we can, okay?"

Aldrich stared wildly at his attorney, and Gilles could have punched the man in the mouth.

Fuck!

"Please let me handle this, sir."

The attorney froze at the tone.

Gilles quickly ripped a page from Freud's book.

"And...how did that make you feel?" Instinct told him to drop the first name thing for the moment.

Don't jog the man's elbow.

"And it just occurred to me what a miserable, selfish bastard I can really be, you know? Always putting my art first, always putting the work, and the time, and the effort first." Something glittered, perhaps self-disgust, in behind those dark pools, the windows of the soul.

Assuming Aldrich had one of course, or anyone else for that matter...

"So she wasn't happy, and that sort of shocked you, because, being so immersed in your work, you were happy."

"Yes. I was as happy as a pig in shit, Maintenon. Such a clever little man you are!" Tobias gave Lambert a quick look. "Yes, this one is really something special."

He swallowed convulsively.

"If you wouldn't mind telling me a little more about that night—when first you and Solange fought." Gilles had considered that last word carefully, and yet he had an instinct.

A marriage, going along very well by all accounts, and then there comes the spark. It would bring up all kinds of little resentments.

Gilles went on as Tobias clenched his lips.

"For one thing, what did she say? What did she see or know that set her off?"

Tobias' face hardened, and his mouth turned down, hard.

He glowered at Maintenon.

"I had spaghetti sauce or something on my collar. I went through the Maximum Department store, I was just looking for some new shoes. I like to have good shoes, gentlemen—for there was a time when I lived in bedroom slippers, or went out wearing hob-nailed boots."

Tobias sat up straight.

"Yeah, it seemed like a good idea at the time. And some girl, admittedly a rather attractive one, spritzed some goop on me as I was passing the cosmetics counter on the third floor."

"Enlightenment dawns...go on, please."

Now.

Pull out the notebook, now.

Tobias nodded soberly.

"Yes, my friend. Get this all down, the final confession of the condemned. The final confession of a fairly smart man's greatest stupidity, his arrogance, and his selfishness. The confession of a man all wrapped up with himself, going through life with a grudge at the world, thinking that his story is more important than anyone else's. Yes, take it all down, please, young man." He looked over to Emile. "No fucking priests, remember that."

Lambert nodded. It was his wish.

Tobias growled at whatever was in his heart.

"And do the world a favor, young man. Let the world know, as best you can, that Aldrich Tobias had it all—and he threw it away in anger and in spite and in pure, simple funk...for the only woman that had ever loved me suddenly hated me and thought that I was even capable..."

The fellow broke up again.

"...thought I was capable..." He sobbed. "Capable of betraying the only one...the only one...aww."

That looked to be about it.

That magnificent head came up and he glared at them through the tears.

"So I just said fuck it, gentlemen!" He howled in an agony of despair and self-loathing.

Poor old Aldrich Tobias.

It wasn't very nice to have to sit there and watch a man crack up, to finally let go and let it all hang out. All emotional restraint had just vaporized.

They were finally getting down to the real Aldrich Tobias, and it wasn't all that pretty to begin with.

Gilles sat tapping his pen on the notepad as Emile Lambert got up, went over and stood with a hand on Tobias' shoulder. The novelist bawled his eyes out and Gilles needed to think.

He looked at his watch.

"Monsieur Tobias. Your wife still loves you very much." This only had the effect of making the spasms going through the man so much worse. "She hasn't found another man or anything like that. You need to get a grip on yourself. And we need to know just who you talked to—about that whole the-crime-scenes-resemble-chapters-in-my-books thing."

Going by the way the man slid sideways off of his chair, with his lawyer grappling and trying to keep him from pounding his fists into his own face in his anger and his grief, this was looking to be a bit of a long session.

Needing air, grunting at the futility of it all, Gilles nipped on over.

"Merde."

Suicide by cop. It wasn't exactly unheard-of.

Lambert sat on Aldrich's chest, immobilizing him, while Gilles locked a good grip onto his wrists and talked to him as best he could.

Aldrich Tobias was nothing, absolutely nothing, if not a danger to himself.

Good for nothing and hard on food...

Yet there was still a chance to save his ass.

"I'm not going to let you get away with it, Aldrich. I'm not going to let you kill yourself."

It was certainly possible. A man could love a woman that much. And men go mad from time to time.

The way Aldrich Tobias kept dry-heaving, retching away at something deep in his guts was rather compelling. Tobias understood very well what he had done—to himself, and to his family, and to the woman he loved, and just exactly how stupid it was possible for a fairly smart man to be sometimes. Why he hadn't been able to stop himself was another question, possibly an irrelevant one. It was sheer childishness on some level, but there was more to it than that. There were times when a man hated himself, for no good reason sometimes. The trouble with Tobias' near-vomiting status was that it was pretty contagious. A lot of thoughts must be going through Aldrich's mind right about now.

Gilles knew a little something about it himself.

***

With some help from Emile Lambert as to wording, Gilles put the facts as he saw them down on paper. For some odd reason Lambert said that he liked his client, or he wouldn't have taken him on.

"It takes all kinds to make a world." That was his only explanation, and then he was off for the office.

It was with trembling hands that Gilles put the thick buff envelope into the hands of an official courier, with instructions to see that it got into the President's hands and no other. It was all they could do to wait, and pray that the courier followed their instructions to the letter. It could be disaster if the courier handed it off to the wrong person—even the first person they saw, which had been known to happen.

Day one, Gilles and Andre sat on their hands all day long. But Gilles didn't expect anything to happen so quickly, and he managed to sneak off by cab and see Ann for a couple of hours. His weekend had been a kind of hell, consulting with Andre, Lambert, and still trying to locate Capitaine Leduc on the phone. Chiappe and the others were incommunicado, and high-ranking officers not briefed on this matter were to be avoided at all costs...

Day two, they sat in the squad-room, staring at the phone and practically jumping out of their skin when it rang, which it did often enough.

And Maintenon kept trying, Leduc, Chiappe, Mathieu, anyone he could think of.

He tried Leduc for the second time that day.

Gilles listened patiently on the telephone, grinding his jaws by this time.

"...I am ever so sorry, Capitaine Leduc will check in, in due course, and of course I will relay your message..."

Gilles put the receiver down as carefully as he could manage. The urge to slam it, leap up and kick the desk almost overwhelming.

"Ah."

Andre shook his head.

"It's early days yet."

Merde.

***

It was all too close. Tobias, now that his hopes had been suitably raised, was to go under the blade at midnight or shortly thereafter, Thursday night or Friday morning, however one cared to refer to it.

Gilles and Andre rotated bathroom breaks, and took turns going out to get a sandwich or coffee, but the day wore on and their nerves were rubbed raw. There was nothing worse than doing nothing and trying to look too busy to be disturbed.

What Andre found worrying was the ugly probability that someone higher up, someone really big, would finally call them, and the bastards would ask him a question and maybe Gilles had just stepped out of the room.

What do I do then, eh?

Sooner or later, Chiappe would call down and ask why they wanted him. Sooner or later, Mathieu, or Lavoie, or any one of a dozen senior officers would wonder if anyone could spare a few men for an important case—and there was no way they could hide out somewhere else.

It was nerve-wracking in the extreme.

That night, Gilles took a cab out to the Abbey to see Ann, as sitting at home beside the phone and thinking too much was more than he could handle.

Let Andre take the overtime shift, he said he didn't mind and had some notes to type up properly. Maybe he needed the sleep or something, thought Gilles.

Wednesday dragged on, until shortly after one p.m.

Gilles appeared to be asleep, and Levain was slow on the draw. In the event, it was Firmin, just stopping in for some fresh bullets as he always liked to say, who picked up the call.

"Hey! Hey!"

Gilles eyes popped open and Levain started halfway up out of his seat.

His hand snaked up the receiver.

Firmin put his set crashing down.

"Hello?" Levain listened intently.

His eyes locked on Gilles'.

His mouth formed silent words: Capitaine Leduc.

Gilles picked it up with alacrity, one could even say with relish. There was that sense of dread, of course, for he had no idea of what the President might be saying.

"Hello? Capitaine Leduc?" His heart thudded in his chest.

"Ah, Gilles. How are you?"

Argh. Social niceties.

"Ah, fine, Capitaine. And yourself?" Gilles could have screamed.

"Fine, fine. So."

"Yes. Can you tell me—"

"Oh, yes. Ah, Gilles, the President is very impressed with your submission. He is taking it under due consideration. He just wanted to tell you what good work you have done and we will get back to you on the matter."

"Pardon?"

"Ah, yeah, Gilles. As you may have gathered from the newspapers, there is a bit of a Cabinet kerfuffle going on right now. Ah, that's the trouble with all of these coalition governments these days, and, ah...honestly, he's been in meetings all day."

"Ah. Oh. Right. When do you think—"

"Well. He has the documents now, and I did get the chance to prod his memory—I can assure you that he is still keenly interested." There was a pause while Leduc snapped a lighter on his end.

The line was good and the sound clearly identifiable. Judging by low-pitched voices in the background, with light piano music clearly audible, he was either at home or at a club.

"I see."

"Not to worry, Gilles. Our President is a workaholic as they say. I must say, what a strange tale. And yet it has the ring of truth about it."

"There's not much time left." Gilles wanted to throttle the man, to strangle him, to pound his head off of the pavement and make him understand the urgency.

"You've done your part, Maintenon, and now it's all up to him. At an opportune moment, I am sure that he will make the announcement." The calm urbanity of that voice was infuriating. "It's all up to him, now."

Gilles couldn't afford to lose it now.

"Yes. Of course."

"Anyways, Gilles, you can always call on me. Simply leave a message and I will get back to you."

Gilles nodded in bitterness.

"But of course."

The line went dead.

"What? What?"

Gilles stood up and went to the coat-rack. Andre pitied anyone who crossed him up now; the man was like a caged tiger standing in a door that had been left open accidentally.

He looked very much like a man with a score to settle.

"The President has the folder. That's all we know." Gilles barely got the words out.

With a nod at a slightly-bemused Firmin, rummaging through a bottom drawer as if just this once he was actually after ammunition, he opened the door and left the room. Andre Levain struggled into his long and soggy raincoat, grabbed his hat and his holster, and went after him.

"Merde, Maintenon. Wait for me, for crying out loud." He was shouting at the back of the man's head, twenty metres down the hallway already.

Who knows, maybe they could finally get some real food.

Chapter Twenty

Detective-Sergeant Gilles Maintenon, hands clasped firmly behind his back, paced back and forth in an anonymous waiting room as an equally tired-looking Andre Levain sat on a yellow leather couch.

Maintenon hadn't slept in at least two days. The evening before, he'd found himself screaming, foaming at the mouth, standing in front of the kitchen sink. Not realizing the significance of the curdled lumps of white goo in his coffee, he'd taken a big slug of the vile stuff and promptly spat it all over the counter and back kitchen wall.

He hadn't seen Tobias since their session of Monday morning. What the man must be going through was unimaginable—the only good word was horror. And Maintenon, for all of his efforts, had only made it worse.

Baise.

What have we done?

And yet Tobias could not possibly be the only, the first and the last innocent man sent to the guillotine.

Gilles stopped and straightened. He had been all hunched over, staring at the floor, wringing his hands and snapping his knuckles from time to time. Andre looked up, mouth open.

The door opened and a guard in the uniform of the prison authority stuck his head in.

"The prisoner is all ready to go. It won't be long now."

Maintenon's bowels were crawling around inside. It was all one could do to clench up on the sphincter and stay the present course...

Shoving the door all the way open, the man leaned backwards and took a long look down the corridor to his right where muffled voices could be made out.

"Okay, gentlemen. Step this way, please."

"Oh, Jesus." Andre lurched to his feet, giving his head a shake and then instantly regretting it as the world swam.

Little swirling black and white curlicues appeared in the periphery of his vision and sharp, stabbing pains went through his head. He really was that tired. It could be so much worse. It really wasn't Andre's responsibility.

Gilles, as senior officer, went first and Andre waited half a second and then followed. Not having quite the same psychological connection with Aldrich Tobias, Andre told himself he was mostly there to drive Gilles back to the shop afterwards. He prayed it would be over quickly. It probably wouldn't be much in terms of ceremony, he decided.

Hopefully, it wouldn't be too graphic, and yet his own emotions were high enough.

Ahead, a small party stood patiently waiting outside the open cell door.

Uncharacteristically, or so Andre thought, light spilled out from within. Shadows moved around in there, shapes falling black and sharp onto those in the corridor.

Everyone spoke in hushed tones, and it was like they were all talking at once.

There was one low response, in answer to some higher-pitched instruction or query and Andre thought that must be Monsieur Tobias. He could feel himself distancing himself already.

A curious thought.

At the back of the group, luckily taller than Gilles or any of them for that matter, Levain found himself up on tiptoes, catching a glimpse of Aldrich Tobias' face as they came out of the cell.

Aldrich made one anguished glance to his left before the entourage began shuffling along to the right, or straight ahead from Levain's point of view.

He would never forget that look.

***

"Deus, Pater misericordiarum, qui per mortem et resurrectionem Fílii sui mundum sibi reconciliavit et Spiritum Sanctum effudit in remissionem peccatorum, per ministerium Ecclesiae indulgentiam tibi tribuat et pacem...Et ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti."

The words of the priest were unnaturally loud, echoing and re-echoing in the hard stone corridors, which were a mercilessly short distance from the cells of the condemned.

Hard words and loud voices called out all up and down the long side corridors as other men, waiting for their inevitable turn, said their goodbyes to a neighbor they had never seen or spoken to face-to-face.

***

The messenger pounded on the bell, calling for someone to come to the desk.

Finally a figure shuffled out from around the corner, coming from the back room.

"Yes."

The messenger, terribly aware of the lateness of the hour, and the grave import of the letter he was carrying, signed it was said by the President himself, forced himself to be patient, polite.

"I have an urgent message for the Governor." He handed over the cover letter, a separate document, stating his authorization and the urgency of his missive. "It is from the President of the Republic."

The guard, looking decidedly bored, and still smelling faintly of a recent bowel movement, turned aside, holding the letter up to the light and piecing his way through it.

He was a maddeningly slow reader. The courier repressed a scowl and a comment.

Those wish-washy eyes latched onto him in a kind of assessment.

The messenger gazed patiently back. This would go just as fast as it would.

To push was to cause his own delay. You could read it in the faces in this place.

"Very well." The man's hand found the button and the dial.

He lifted the phone and spoke into it.

The courier had the presence of mind to reach over and casually retrieve his letter. The phone was hung up.

He folded it up and stuck it back in the envelope as footsteps sounded and electric bolt was withdrawn from the door.

"Thank you."

The guard nodded. His duty was done.

"Step right this way, please." Another bored-looking individual.

"It's extremely urgent."

"Yes. I know."

It was all the messenger could do just to follow along and not speak until spoken to.

After several corridors, long and short, and a couple of flights of stairs, mostly down, down, down, they stood at a door.

The guard's hand was just reaching for the button to announce their presence. He had in fact just pressed it, and at first the messenger didn't quite catch the significance of the faint snap sound, the rumble of the blade in its tracks and the resonant thud as it hit home, at the bottom of Monsieur le Guillotine.

Oh, sweet Jesus...

For a moment, he thought his guts would let loose.

Someone inside let them in.

Suddenly feeling very sick to his stomach, knees suddenly gone weak, it registered on the messenger that his escort was stepping aside, and that men with bleak and worried faces were all talking at once and beckoning him into the room.

"Get the hell in here! Damn you!"

Gilles Maintenon, face red with anger, snatched the letter from the messenger's hand, as Prison Governor Aloysius DeSouci stepped over and retrieved one splattered half of a melon from the bucket at the base of the guillotine. The executioner's apprentice nipped in behind, removing the other half from the head-block and wiping up the juice with a clean white cotton rag.

The Governor had a mischievous glint in his eye.

"Well. So. That's all right then."

Aldrich Tobias slumped, almost dragging down his two burly guards. They had him by the upper arms, already supporting him for the most part, but it was like the man didn't have a bone in his body all of a sudden.

Maintenon ripped the official envelope open. He would have sworn to God the fucking thing was scented. He would deal with that anger later.

His eyes raced over the sheet.

His eyes locked on the form of Tobias, looking up, almost on his knees between his guards, his mouth open beseechingly, opening and closing soundlessly, like a wounded carp.

"You, sir, are the luckiest son of a bitch it has ever been my pleasure to meet."

Aldrich Tobias wept.

Gilles nodded. His head swiveled. He extended an arm.

"Read it."

The lawyer, Emile Lambert almost tore a corner off in his haste.

The Governor's eye went to the clock on the wall.

It read eleven fifty-nine—on the sixteenth.

His eyes came back.

One minute to live, Tobias, that look seemed to imply.

"Talk to me, please."

One minute, one minute to live or to die.

"The President has stayed the execution of Aldrich Tobias, pending the results of further investigation, with a view to a probable re-trial and eventual exoneration of Monsieur Tobias."

Andre's powerful slap on the back almost sent Gilles into the executioner, who was unaccountably grinning from ear to ear.

"That, is one hell of a statement." The lawyer, Lambert, with less to lose, seemed so much happier than Tobias or even Maintenon at that exact moment in time. "Well, well, well."

His eyes took in their savior and benefactor.

But Gilles' relief was nothing as compared to the executioner's quick comment.

"Congratulations, Tobias."

Aldrich Tobias, helped to his feet by Lambert and Andre Levain, nodded soberly, unable to believe his good luck. He turned to the executioner.

He managed a ragged grin through his tears.

"Thank you—thank you very much!"

"Not at all—After all, Aldrich. You're the big one that got away."

"Yes, you can get together someday, have a drink and laugh about it." Andre wilted under the assault of looks from distinctly superior officers.

"Sorry." Andre didn't look very sorry at all. "Such is life."

Tobias couldn't quite bring himself to laugh or smile at that one, but the look on his face said it all.

Holy, shit.

His head hung and he slumped again.

"That's enough of this nonsense." The Governor, taking charge of the room, took Emile Lambert by the elbow. "Pending further investigation—and further instruction from the exalted ones wouldn't exactly hurt my feelings either."

Gilles peeled himself out of their embraces, the prisoner and his lawyer both.

With a bit of luck, if only they could get out of there soon enough, he might finally be able to get a good night's sleep.

"Baiser le monde, l'homme."

That's just how things were sometimes.

***

The house was quiet. On the left side, it was an old lady, very much so, in every sense of the word. Gilles had, upon occasion, wondered if she had died or something and no one might know for days, at least. There was rarely a sound from over there at any time. On the right side of the Maintenon residence, the couple had children, and they tended to fly down the stairs and one could even hear their cheerful calls through the walls sometimes. Gilles had never been offended by the sound of a baby crying at two a.m. The walls were thin, and you couldn't do much about that.

His sympathies lay with the parents, who had embarked upon nine or ten years of constant sleep deprivation in order to bring new life into the world.

That was a very good thing, in his opinion, for nothing lasts forever and sooner or later we all have to get old—those of us who are lucky enough to make it.

Gilles Maintenon felt very old at that particular moment in time.

It wasn't just Ann, and it wasn't just him.

It wasn't just the job, and it wasn't even the loneliness of his present circumstances. He'd gotten home late tonight, and there simply wasn't time for a visit. All they'd managed was a brief phone call.

On his desk lay the remains of a package, one composed of a soft and fuzzy brown wrapping paper, string and a hasty note scrawled in the artist's own hand.

"My dear Gilles;

I thank you for my life. I will never be able to repay you. Please accept this small token of my gratitude.

Oh, and I hope you enjoy the story—it's a pretty good one.

My next book is even better, (of course). There's this funny little detective. He's a bit taller than you, and he has a mustache. He gets things done! And he always gets the right guy, Maintenon. In that sense, he was inspired by you in some small way. At least that's what I think. The critics will have their own thoughts, I am sure. Anyways, I think you're going to like him.

Your friend;

Aldrich Tobias.

P.S. Solange sends her regards. My children are well, and perhaps they will grow up someday."

Gilles picked up the book.

Architect of his Own Destruction, by Aldrich Tobias. Leather-bound and lettered in gold paint. It wasn't exactly Ann's cup of tea, but she might want to read it...he would definitely bring it along next visit.

He nodded.

"Sure. Why not, eh?"

Moving over to a chair by the lamp, he settled in.

Oh, Lord. The man didn't miss a trick. It was signed by the author and everything.

"Hmn. Nice." It's not that he didn't have more questions—plenty of them.

He almost dreaded what he was about to find—but Tobias had insisted that his predicament was in no way, shape or form a publicity stunt, not even a publicity stunt gone bad.

And Gilles had no evidence to contradict him. Also, in that sort of circumstance, surely they would have said something....

No. It was just a man suffering from a temporary delusion, sick of life and wanting to die. Maintenon was satisfied with the explanation, insofar as he didn't know any different.

Suicide, and yet knowing it was the coward's way out.

A dangerous state of mind in anyone's book. One couldn't deny that.

Gilles finally opened the fucking thing and began to read.

***

He was working in his study when the phone rang.

Solange was out with friends, and when the phone kept ringing Aldrich deduced that Fleur must be out as well.

At her age, one could expect no less.

He picked up the phone. He wasn't really all that busy, as it took a few moments to construct key sentences and paragraphs in his head. Once he had a start on chapter one, he could usually keep it going for a while.

"Hello?"

"Hello, Aldrich."

He recognized the voice immediately.

"Well. It's been a lot of years, Monsieur le—"

"Never mind all that. You were very helpful to our family, once. I've never forgotten that."

Aldrich, as was his habit, listened carefully and considered his next few words.

"I'd sort of forgotten all about it."

It was war. A man falls, and against orders, you pick him up and drag him the last few yards.

A man lives, when he might have died. And politicians have sons, and nephews, and cousins. What goes around comes around, or so they say. Doumergue, not having been in the trenches, probably didn't understand how things really were back then. It had no real significance to Aldrich. He probably would have done it no matter who it was—more than one man had saved his ass, more than once. There hadn't been any time to ask questions.

They were all lucky to be alive.

"So."

"We're even now, Aldrich."

For some reason, Aldrich's heart was racing.

What? That's it?

"About Inspector Allard..."

"Yes, Aldrich. We know."

It had to have been someone in the previous government, not so much to set him up, as to keep the thing going once the absurdities in the case became apparent.

"We've had all the same thoughts on this end, my old friend." For the time being, it would remain a mystery.

But Tobias, and even that Maintenon character to some extent, had their suspicions.

"Some of them guys are in your coalition government now....ah, Gaston."

"Hmn. Yes. We know, Aldrich." There was a pause. "I mean, uh...what can I say?"

Of course. He, and they, would be reluctant to rock any political boats, always fragile and tippy things to begin with.

"Hmn."

There were faint noises in the background of the telephone, more than just a hum or a crackle. There were so many questions.

"You're a lucky man, Aldrich."

"Ah, yes, sir, I know—"

"Because there was one man—one fucking man in the world who actually cared. Think about that, the next time you want to write some nihilistic political bullshit, okay?" There was some real anger there. "Guys like me, all we care about is getting the country governed, non? Like we don't have any values, like we don't have any moral scruples at all..."

And maybe sometimes that was true—

A man didn't necessarily have to like it.

"That's where you are wrong, sir."

"What? Wrong, did you say?"

His words were soft. Perhaps even humble.

"There were two men..." He snapped the rest out. "Monsieur le President."

"Yes, you've made a real friend there. Fuck, everyone knows that power corrupts, Aldrich."

"Ah—ah...yes, sir."

Merde.

So many questions.

Why bother, anyway?

We will never have all the answers.

And maybe that's a good thing sometimes.

"Goodbye, Aldrich. Maybe we'll see each other around."

"Wait!"

"Yes?"

"Good luck to you, sir."

For surely we are all going to need it...in the uncertain times that lie ahead.

We used to say that in the trenches—remember

But of course you weren't there.

Your kind never is.

"Thank you—for that I thank you, Aldrich. No one ever doubted your sincerity, Monsieur Tobias."

There was a quick snort and then the line went dead.

Novelist Aldrich Tobias sighed and hung up the receiver.

Critics say writing can be a humbling experience. But then, they had never dashed through shot and shell, or looked at the world of death and destruction through the tempered glass of a gas-mask.

Nor had they ever looked the guillotine in the eye, to know that you are going to die.

Then there was Gaston Doumergue, his old friend from way back when.

Somebody somewhere actually cares...

It was all the explanation he was ever going to get.

Hopefully he could still write after all of this.

His eyes sought out the small bronze figurine prominently displayed on the shelf above his desk.

A thoughtful and newly-promoted Inspector Gilles Maintenon had sent it over as a memento.

Tobias still marveled at the sight of it.

Well. He must have touched the thing somewhere. They were still said to be investigating that particular case. He had one or two thoughts on the matter, but it wasn't like they really needed his help. Shaking his head to clear it of any and all extraneous thoughts, he inserted a clean sheet of crisp white paper into the typewriter and began pecking out the first few lines of his next story.

Baise.

If nothing else, it paid the bills.

End

About Louis Shalako

Louis Shalako began writing for community newspapers and industrial magazines. His stories appear in publications including Perihelion Science Fiction, Bewildering Stories, Aurora Wolf, Ennea, Wonderwaan, Algernon, Nova Fantasia, and Danse Macabre. He lives in southern Ontario and writes full time.

Louis Shalako

