A Death on the Seine, one very Parisian chapter from Finding Pegasus
Introducing Sophie Leroux, Philippe Cabillaud, and Jeremy Bentham, three very important characters from my Eddie Grant series of Paris novels.
Last week I offered a special deal on my third novel, Finding Pegasus. Like all my novels, it's basically a Paris story, so I thought you might like to see its introduction to the super-scenic area bounded by Notre Dame, Place Saint-Michel, and the famous institutions around them. Meet Sophie, a stylish young parisienne who works two jobs to support a young son and can barely afford the old apartment on the river that her father left in his will. But she wouldn't consider living anywhere else.
I'd like this excerpt to be longer but I have to stay within Amazon's limitations on distributing books I sell in KDP Select (Kindle Unlimited). But if you're a KU member you can read the whole thing for free, or buy it at a very reasonable price. Click the link in the next paragraph.
To see the Amazon page for Finding Pegasus, click here.
Excerpt from Finding Pegasus. Chapter 2
Paris
Six time zones to the east, Sophie Leroux stood calmly, smoking a cigarette as she waited for a bus at a shelter across the street from the Café Le Mistral. Even at mid-afternoon, every one of its outdoor tables was filled.
She inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly and watched the smoke float downwind on the gentle breeze that follows the Seine past Notre Dame Cathedral.
It’s a lousy habit, she told herself one more time. Dirty, expensive, bad for her and everyone around her. Then she reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out another one.
Once upon a time chic parisiennes wore black, which turned out to be a habit much easier to break than cigarettes. Black was the fashion statement that separated them from their country cousins, but as summers became warmer and then manifestly hot, their frocks faded.
Not Sophie’s. As her friends went dull, she went bright. Even in black, she stood out from the crowd, but in the tailored red number she wore now on the bustling corner overlooking the Seine, she was a robin among sparrows, and the sparrows noticed.
A dozen of them, all with long dark hair and perfect but almost invisible makeup, strode purposefully down the sidewalk or waited impatiently for the light to change. A few flirted casually with their companions, many of whom stole a glance at Sophie. A stout German guide hoisted her parasol and commanded her charges to stop and admire the sweeping view stretching from Notre Dame on the left to the Eiffel Tower in the distance on the right. The Left Bank stretched away on the far side of the river.
Sophie stepped back from the rough stone wall separating two booksellers’ stalls. The electronic notice board above the bus shelter told her the next one would arrive in three minutes, but it was wrong, as she discovered only after she lit another cigarette. The 72 stopped two minutes early to disgorge its cargo of chattering écoliers. Her eight-year-old son Lucas jumped out as soon as the back door opened. The cigarette, unsmoked, went into the bin attached to the shelter.
“How are you, mon petit? Did you do well in school?” She smiled down at him and ruffled his raven hair, then took his hand and began the walk across two bridges and the Île de la Cité, the island where Paris first became Paris well before the Romans arrived. It was a tradition they had followed for Lucas’s first two years of primary school, but now that the third had started he was already lobbying to make the walk alone. The idea made her nervous, and she suspected he wasn’t all that convinced, either.
The walk across the Île de la Cité is one of the most famous in a city of famous walks. It never bored Sophie and Lucas seemed to enjoy it more every day, as she had at his age. The walks of her childhood were a deep cultural memory, one of the many experiences that had turned her from just another schoolgirl to a true parisienne, with a feel for the city and its monuments that she knew would be hers forever. No one could take it away.
Sophie’s world was bordered by Châtelet and its bus stop, Notre Dame, the Place Saint-Michel, the French Institute and the Louvre. She was convinced her personal stretch of the Seine bordered the most beautiful square mile in the world and saw little reason to wander very far away.
The Seine was Sophie’s home. She had lived on the river for every one of her thirty-two years and, little by little, had become one of those contented Parisians who view their arrondissement as their own small village and live happily in it, venturing out of it only when absolutely necessary.
They turned their backs on the twin theaters bracketing the Châtelet fountain and headed across the Pont au Change, dodging pedestrians and tourists with the aplomb that comes from long practice. On the Île itself they steered to the east side to avoid the lines of tourists hoping to enter Sainte-Chapelle before it closed for the day.
Thronged with visitors, dense with imposing stone buildings, the Île de la Cité has two main populations: police and tourists. Most of the buildings belong to the National Police and the courts, and the sidewalks belong to the tourists.
On the façade of one building, the city had mounted a display of old photos of soldiers returning from World War II, where Lucas always insisted on stopping so he could search out his grandfather once again.
Lucas knew Sophie’s father only from her stories, but the picture of him as a young soldier with a luxuriant walrus mustache was the icon Lucas depended on to connect with the family’s past. They both would be sorry when the traveling exhibit moved somewhere else.
“Up or down?” Sophie asked as they started across the second bridge, the ornate Pont Saint-Michel. Its south end, on the Left Bank, lay across the broad intersection from the tourist restaurant where she worked as a hostess six days a week, first at lunch and again through the dinner hour, stopping only for the afternoon break, when she met Lucas at the bus. On school days she delivered him into the caring hands of Madame Westerhof, her downstairs neighbor, where he would stay until her workday ended at nine thirty. Madame Westerhof was pleased when Lucas stayed overnight, as well.
“Down,” Lucas burbled. He pulled his little hand free and dashed in and out of the pack of commuters headed for the suburban trains that met below the street, one to run alongside the river, the other to cross under it.
Her nose wrinkled at the thought of the secluded staircase that connected the street to the Saint-Michel RER station and, further down, to the riverbank. It was an unofficial haven for a handful of hardcore homeless men, and the smell of urine was ever-present.
She held her breath and dashed down the stairs, then took a deep breath of the fresh air gusting down the Seine. Lucas stood under the massive stone arch of Saint-Michel Bridge staring with intense curiosity at the flotsam whirling in the eddies around its massive pilings. At those moments he reminded Sophie of her own father, whose curiosity about anything and everything had remained sharp until the end of his life seven years before.
They turned away from the bridge to walk downstream. She had measured it one day – from Pont Saint-Michel to Pont Neuf was 500 paces on her long legs, many more for a small boy, although Lucas had more than enough energy to compensate.
He darted ahead, his feet hardly seeming to touch the large cobbles that made her low heels risky. After a hundred yards, he stopped and turned back to her.
“Maman, why are those men fighting?” he asked, pointing ahead to two men sitting with their legs hanging over the heavy granite edge of the quai. The river flowed only a couple of feet below, unlike other stretches where the drop was much longer. As a result, this was a favorite spot for couples to share lunch or doze idly in the sun. Now and then one rolled the wrong way and had to be pulled out by the fire department, whose station and boats were just a hundred yards downstream.
Sophie saw one of the men push the other away from him and try to stand. He’s trying to get away, she thought, but then the other man grabbed hard for his belt and pulled him back, then raised his arm and threw a hard punch to his midsection. It ended the fight.
As she watched, the attacker rummaged in his victim’s trouser pocket and pulled out a wallet, which he put into his own pocket. He walked back toward them, stumbling once on the large cobblestones and almost falling on Lucas. As he passed her, Sophie saw his eyes dart around. He’s just robbed a man and he’s afraid, she thought.
She watched him turn into the odiferous staircase. The homeless man hunched in the corner of the first step put out his hand in fruitless appeal as the man bounded up the stairs and disappeared around the corner. She could not tell if he had gone into the RER station or continued up to the street – in either case, he was gone.
When she turned back, the second man was lying on his side. From her vantage point a dozen yards away he looked like any of the other tired office workers she’d seen dozing in the sun, but the terrified “Maman!” from Lucas told her it was something else.
“Maman!” he cried again as he wrapped his arms tightly around her legs. “That man is bleeding.”
She gently pulled free from his grip and approached cautiously. From the back the man looked normal. But when she got close enough to look at his face she saw a gusher of blood flowing down the granite wall into the Seine. The handle of a large knife protruded from his chest.
She screamed.
* * *
Sophie’s panic lasted only a few seconds. She wasn’t timid, and she’d seen bodies before – just last month a tourist from Indiana had collapsed during his cheese course and fallen out of his chair, sightless eyes staring into the afternoon sky.
She reached for her phone and dialed 112. As calmly as she could, she explained what she’d seen. The operator told her to wait, and by the time he came back on the line she could hear the distinctive two-tone siren of the fire department’s high-speed rescue boat coming upriver toward her.
“The pompiers are on the way, madame,” the operator said formally. “Please wait for them and for the police, who will be only a few minutes behind. And please don’t touch anything. I gave your name and number to Commissaire Cabillaud. He will have questions.”
“Philippe?” she shouted at the operator. “Philippe is nothing but questions.” It calmed her to know that the policeman was one of the regulars who walked across the bridge for their afternoon coffee. She did not normally have much use for policemen, but Philippe was different. He was kind and had gentle eyes. So what if he had a daughter her age?
Its blue light still flashing, the firefighters’ boat nudged the stone wall. The driver revved the engine to hold it in place while two fit young men jumped from the bow onto the granite river bank. Bystanders had gathered in a tight knot around the body but backed away now, leaving only Sophie, Lucas, and a young doctor who had been reading a book next to Pont Neuf when Sophie’s scream interrupted his plan for a quiet lunch. He found no pulse.
Lucas’s fascination with the firemen drove all thoughts of the corpse from his mind. The bleeding had stopped, leaving an ugly brown stain on the quay. It would remain until the city’s ever-present cleaners brought a pressure washer.
The taller of the firemen pressed his gloved fingers to the dead man’s throat.
“Mort,” he said flatly. His partner picked up the man’s legs and stretched him out to his full length. Together, they turned him gently on his back. A sandwich wrapper lodged under the body blew free. One of the firemen followed it for three steps before giving up and watching it float down the river.
The boat’s driver handed up a tightly folded white plastic sheet, which the two spread over the body. A large sheath knife, still stuck between the man’s ribs, held the sheet up like a tent pole.
A small ambulance approached from the Pont Neuf traffic ramp and parked a dozen yards away.
“Now we wait for the police,” one of the firemen told Sophie. “The commissaire and a doctor are on the way from the Quai des Orfèvres.” He indicated with his head toward the police headquarters directly across the Seine. She could see the line of blue vans that carry crowd-control police to the many street demonstrations Paris sees each week.
Sophie spotted Philippe as soon as he left the stairs. “Here he is,” she said to the firefighters.
“Of course they would walk,” the taller one replied. “They should keep a boat over there. If he’d called us we could have picked them up sooner and by now we’d be back at the station.”
She recognized Philippe first by his hat – the one that looked like an Australian outback hat, made of light, butter-soft leather. He’d placed it in the chair next to him many times when she’d shown him to a table. The other man carried a small black bag.
The two firemen shook hands formally with Philippe and the doctor, who pulled back the sheet to look closely at the body. Like the fireman, he tested for a pulse.
“Rien,” he said to Philippe. Nothing.
“This lady found the body and thinks she saw the killing,” the taller fireman said to Philippe, who looked at the witnesses for the first time.
“Sophie!” he said in surprise. “Shouldn’t you be at work?”
“It appears Lucas and I are your witnesses. I was walking him home from the bus like I do every afternoon. We had just come down the stairs when Lucas spotted the two men arguing. The robber walked right by us and up the stairs.”
“You’re sure it was a robbery?”
“I saw him take something brown, like a wallet, out of that man’s pocket.” She pointed toward the still shape lying on the stones.
“So you got a good look at him?”
“I would know him again.”
Philippe crouched so he could look her son in the eye.
“Lucas, my name is Commissaire Cabillaud and I see your mother sometimes at her work. Can you tell me what you saw?”
Lucas repeated the story he’d told his mother. Philippe nodded and thanked him gravely, one grownup to another, and stood up.
“Sophie, the doctor and I have some things to do but I need to talk to you some more. Would you mind waiting on that bench?” He escorted her to a granite bench against the wall and asked a young couple to move. They got up grudgingly and walked away.
By then Philippe’s driver had arrived with another policeman. The doctor had pulled the sheet completely away and was inspecting the body carefully for other wounds, pulling the man’s white t-shirt from side to side.
“Nothing,” he said, standing up. “One knife thrust. It went between his ribs and into his heart, and probably severed his aorta. I’ll know more after the autopsy, but I suspect he was unconscious within seconds and died almost immediately.”
Philippe put on gloves and expertly rifled the man’s pockets, finding a dirty handkerchief, which he dropped into the bag his driver held open.
“No ID, no money, no métro pass. But there should be a wallet or some money.”
“Maybe he was just forgetful and left his wallet at home,” the doctor said.
“Sophie saw the killer take it.”
Philippe leaned over to photograph the man’s face with his iPhone, then took a picture of the gaping wound. He raised an eyebrow and the doctor shrugged as if to say, Whatever you want, and pulled at the knife. It resisted at first but by twisting it he was able to withdraw it, holding it only by the guard so he would not disturb the fingerprints both of them hoped were present. He placed it on the stone so Philippe could photograph it as well, then the driver put it into another evidence bag.
“It stuck between his ribs,” the doctor said. “I suspect the killer tried to get it out but couldn’t, and panicked.”
As the ambulance pulled away, Philippe turned to Sophie. “Now I need to know what you saw. You may be the only witnesses, unless we get really lucky and find a tourist who was taking video at the time.”
“I’m already late for work,” Sophie said, clearly pleading for his help. “I was gone too long once last week and Alex got very angry.”
“This is going to take some time,” he replied. “I’ll call Alex right now so he won’t worry.” He found the number and summarized for the restaurant owner what had happened to Sophie.
In very few words, he told the boss she would be away for several hours. The man on the other end of the line, whom he’d known for several years but didn’t count among his friends, seemed to resist.
“Alex, this is not a request. I did not say please. It’s police business. There has been a murder and Sophie was a witness. I know you’ll do the right thing, especially since her sunny personality is a big part of the reason you seldom have to face a health inspector. And why my colleagues and I visit you instead of your friendly neighbor across the street.”
He ended the call and turned back to Sophie. “You live on the quai, don’t you?”
“Yes, at the corner.”
“Then we’ll go there, to the bistro. It would take too long to go to the préfecture. I can talk first to Lucas, then you can take him to the sitter. Does he stay in the building?”
“With Madame Westerhof, two floors down from me.
Sophie’s building was one of a row of massive stone piles lining the sidewalk not far from the Mint, at the corner where Pont Neuf ends at the Quai des Grands-Augustins. The busy street was named for a long-defunct order of monks whose property had once dominated the neighborhood but whose only surviving relic was the fine arts academy nearby.
“This is the best place,” she said, leading him into the Bistro Augustin. At mid-afternoon it was dark and as quiet as any pub on a major thoroughfare could be.
“I need to talk to Lucas alone for a few minutes. Why don’t I bring him up to you when we’re done? You can take him to Madame Westerhof and then we can talk. After that, you can go to work and make Alex happy. I’ll even take you back there myself.”
She knelt before Lucas. “You need to stay here with the commissaire and tell him what you saw, and then we’ll go see Madame. Can you do that?”
“Bien sûr, Maman,” he said, not entirely convinced. “Where will you be?”
“I’ll be at home. Philippe will bring you there.” She turned to Philippe and said, “Fifth floor on the right.”
Philippe picked a table in the corner. When the waiter came he looked suspiciously at Philippe and said, “I know Lucas well, monsieur. But who are you?”
“Very observant. Good for you,” Philippe said, and showed his ID. He ordered an orange pressé for the boy and a glass of Bordeaux for himself.
They each took a sip of their drink, then he said gently, “Now, Lucas, will you tell me what you saw on the quai? Please don’t leave anything out. You may be our most important witness.”
Slowly, Lucas recounted how he first saw the two men arguing and then, as he drew closer, one appearing to reach for something on his belt.
“I thought he was giving it to the other man, but he pushed it pretty hard.”
“Show me,” Philippe said. He pulled his chair around next to Lucas and asked, “Is this how they were sitting?”
“The man with the knife was on the other side. He used his right hand.” Lucas extended his right hand to show he knew the difference. “Maman taught me.”
They switched sides. “Now show me what the man on the right did.”
“First they argued, then he reached down to his belt…” Lucas put his hand to his waist.
“On that side of his body?” Philippe asked.
“Yes, sir. Then his hand came up with something in it. He said something loud, then that’s when I thought he’d handed something to the other man. Then he got up and left. He walked right past me.”
“Could you hear what he said?”
“It was loud, but I didn’t understand. It was in some other language. I have a friend at school who talks like that and I can’t understand him, either, but he’s learning French.”
“Where is your friend from?”
“Hungary. That’s where Professor Westerhof is from, too. He speaks that way sometimes.”
The questions went on for another ten minutes, until Philippe said, “You’ve done a good job, Lucas. Would you like to be a policeman one day?”
“My grandfather was a soldier.”
“Was he?”
“His picture is on the wall of the préfecture, behind General de Gaulle.”
Philippe thought that unlikely because those pictures had been made seventy years before. All the old soldiers who had served with the sainted general were either dead or very, very old, and it was unlikely that any of them had a daughter Sophie’s age.
“You and your mother must be proud of him. Now let’s go find her and you can visit Madame Westerhof.”
The boy clapped his hands in glee. “She promised to make a gâteau. But don’t tell Maman.”
“I won’t. Boys should have a little cake from time to time, and there’s no need for their mothers to know everything.”
Philippe took the boy’s hand and started toward the front door. The bartender stopped them with a polite, “Monsieur le Commissaire?” and pointed toward a half-hidden door at the end of a hallway, past the stairway that led downstairs to the toilets. Philippe thanked him gravely and they stepped out into the lobby of Sophie’s building.
It was, he thought, a very nice fringe benefit for both the residents and the bistro.
* * *
The building was one of tens of thousands built to Baron Haussmann’s design in the second half of the nineteenth century. Emperor Napoleon III gave him a free hand to raze large sections of the old medieval city and construct grand thoroughfares lined with elegant seven-story apartment buildings, which still housed many of the two million Parisians who live inside the perimeter traced by the old city wall. Haussmann set the design firmly: the façades must be built of cut stone, with iron balconies on certain floors, so that the entire block looked like a continuous building. The design gives Paris a feeling of elegance and formality.
As a side effect, entirely intended, the broad avenues offered uninterrupted fields of fire if the population got too restless. The nineteenth century had been a raucous one. The memory of the brutal Commune soon after the American Civil War was still fresh in peoples’ minds.
Sophie’s lobby, like many Paris buildings of the epoch, showed a faded elegance. It was dominated by a grand central staircase, which narrowed as it approached the next floor. Uncounted feet had hollowed the stone steps to thin crescents.
Lucas pulled Philippe away from the stairs to a tiny elevator whose shaft rose in the center of the spiral. To Philippe, it looked like it had been added between the two world wars and updated since for self-service. He opened the century-old scissor door and Lucas immediately pulled the threadbare operator’s seat from the wall and sat down. Ceremoniously, he pressed the button for the fifth floor.
When the old car rattled to a stop, Lucas dashed toward the door to the right, key in hand. He pushed the door open with a loud, “Maman! I’m home!” Philippe hung back until Sophie appeared and invited him in. She asked Philippe to wait while she took him down to Madame Westerhof.
* * *
As Sophie had said to the police operator, Philippe had nothing but questions. He grilled her closely for a half-hour and, just as she thought he would never quit, he did.
“We should get you back to work,” he said as he stood to leave. “But your sitter – was her husband the professor there when you took Lucas?”
“I didn’t see him today, but he spends most of the day locked in his study, and he travels to Hungary quite a bit for politics. He was at home yesterday. Do you know him?”
“I met him once at a party, but I have an American friend who was his student years ago and knows him very well. I asked because Lucas said the killer spoke Hungarian.”
* * *
“I’ve wanted to ask ever since I walked into this great apartment. How long have you lived here?”
“All my life, quite literally. I was born in the master bedroom over there.” She pointed down the dark-paneled hallway toward the rear.
“So you inherited it?”
“Fortunately. I can barely afford to maintain it, and I certainly couldn’t buy it now. My grandfather bought it right after World War One. My father inherited it when he was a young captain just out of the army and beginning to make a career in the de Gaulle government.”
“So Lucas was right? I had my doubts that someone of that generation could have a daughter your age.”
“His first wife left him in the sixties. He married my mother in the eighties. She died when I was a child.
“When I married, he called in an architect and had the back of the apartment separated into a smaller one-bedroom place with access from the back stairwell. He lived there the rest of his life, which was only a couple of years. That apartment is a lifesaver for me. With the income I get from it and what I earn at the restaurant, I get by.”
“And Lucas’s father?” Philippe asked, hoping he wasn’t intruding too much, but he thought it odd such an attractive and personable woman would live alone.
“He left just about the time Lucas started to walk, right after he found out the apartment was the sum total of my father’s estate. Last I heard he was operating some sort of tourist attraction in Biarritz. He was a bad decision.”
“The marriage decision is usually either good or bad. I did about as well as you, I think.” He closed his notebook and stood. “I’m done. Are you ready to go now?”
“You don’t have to accompany me. I’m a big girl.”
“I also know Alex and I knew his father before him. Their business is very profitable, but they are really tight and not always pleasant. I’ll just be sure he does the right thing by you.”
In twenty minutes they arrived at the restaurant. Alex walked with a scowl to the podium, where Philippe waited with Sophie.
“Alex, the police thank you for allowing Sophie to help us today. A man was murdered down by the river and she gave us very valuable information. I’ll be sure my friends know of your generosity. It’s not every owner who would pay her for the time she missed helping the police.”
Alex stammered and finally was able to force out a few words. “It was my pleasure, Monsieur le Commissaire.” He didn’t notice Philippe’s conspiratorial wink at Sophie.
* * *
Philippe hung the hat on the chair across the small table, ordered an espresso, and sat back under the red awning along the pedestrian street separating the restaurant from the boutique next door. The sound of the city was in his blood; the chattering of the bright young things flitting from shop to shop didn’t break his concentration any more than the bewildered conversation of the tourists trying to figure out how to get to Notre Dame (they were walking the wrong way).
He was tempted to go back and try to see André Westerhof but decided it would be better to use an indirect approach. Westerhof was closely tied to one of the centrist political parties of Hungary, and in fact had received death threats from people who openly identified with the collaborators who had done the Germans’ bidding during the war. Every country had its hidden history, often alluded to but seldom brought into the light for examination. France was no exception.
It amazed him every time he ran across someone whose politics were driven by something their grandfather had said or done three-quarters of a century ago. He occasionally discussed it with his daughter Aurélie, a history professor, who invariably told him to stop worrying.
“You’ll never change the blood-and-soil types,” she told him. “They will always – always – carry their grievances and grudges. We’re lucky our politics aren’t that chaotic, but remember that we’ve been at it a lot longer than the Eastern Europeans, and we’ve had our moments. The Hungarians lived under the Russian boot until just yesterday, as the history of nations is measured. We got rid of our Germans seventy years ago.”
“With a little help,” Philippe interjected.
“With a lot of help. But look at how much better off we are having the Germans as friends. It will be a long time before the Hungarians and the other Soviet satellites get to the same point with the Russians.
“My big concern,” she added, “is that they will go the other way and decide the strong man is the best man to govern the country. Of course, the Russians would welcome them back with open arms, plus a little armed encouragement. Look at what’s happened in Ukraine.”
So, Philippe mused, I’m not the guy to have a discussion with André Westerhof. I just need answers to police questions, like has he ever seen the dead man, just in case Lucas was right that he spoke Hungarian. This is a job I should leave to Aurélie or —
Easy. There was only one man for the job. He picked up his phone to call Jeremy Bentham.
* * *
“C’est Jeremy. Bonjour.” The voice sounded exhausted, and Philippe realized he’d caught Jeremy during the run he did three or four afternoons a week, after his partner Juliette Bertrand had gone to work.
“I forgot about your run. This is Philippe. Should I call you later?”
“Lord, no. I’ve been looking for an excuse to sit down for the last mile. You called just as I spotted an empty bench right on the edge of the canal. Hold on a minute.”
Philippe heard a sigh of contentment and conjured up an image of Jeremy planting himself firmly in a cool spot under the trees along Canal Saint-Martin, near the townhouse he shared with Juliette.
“Much better,” Jeremy said. “What can I do for you, Monsieur le Commissaire?”
“We had a bizarre one this afternoon. A man was stabbed as he sat on the edge of the Seine just across from the Quai des Orfèvres. No ID. There are two witnesses, a woman and her eight-year-old son. It’s a small world. The woman works at a restaurant at Saint-Michel and leaves the boy with a sitter, who happens to be the wife of your old professor, André Westerhof.”
“Sophie and Lucas. Quite a coincidence,” Jeremy replied. “But what could the professor have to do with it?”
“The victim looks like a Slav, and Lucas heard the dying man say something in a language he thinks was Hungarian – he has a schoolmate who speaks the language. It’s a long shot, but I remembered that the professor is into Hungarian politics, and anybody who reads the newspaper knows how nasty things are now. It’s possible he might know something, maybe even know the victim, and I thought you might get a better response than I would.”
“I’ll be glad to try,” Jeremy said. “Dr. Westerhof was a terrific professor at West Point and he helped me considerably with one of my books, but I don’t see him much anymore. I’d like an excuse to get back in touch with him. Did Sophie also see what happened?”
“Mainly Lucas. Sophie was a little farther away. You know them?”
“More. She and I dated a few times just before I met Juliette. It wasn’t going anywhere, but she is interesting; she likes to stay out late, and she likes older men. You should talk to her. She might be just your type.”
She is attractive and smart, Philippe reminded himself. She’s also younger than my daughter.
“Some other time. The thing is, if Lucas is right about the dying man being Hungarian, perhaps Professor Westerhof could help us. Would you mind talking to him?”
“I’m certainly willing to try,” Jeremy replied. “A lot depends on what mood he’s in. At the best of times he can be a little rigid. Email me what you’d like me to ask and I’ll call him tonight. No promises.”
* * *
Philippe hung up, then raised his hand for the waiter but saw him disappear around a corner into the kitchen. Sophie came to take his order instead.
“I didn’t know you and Jeremy Bentham were friends,” Philippe said.
“Friends? You could say that. We had a nice relationship for a month or two until he met the TV star, what’s her name? Juliette. Juliette Bertrand. And I think it was your daughter who introduced them.”
“I’m just a little surprised, that’s all. I know Aurélie would be unhappy if she hurt you.”
“I think I saw my father in him,” Sophie replied. “My father was never a general, but he was a very serious man. Jeremy is like that, and he writes books. I like to read them but I can’t imagine ever writing one.
“Anyway, I like older men. They’re solid and they’re kind. They’ve had all the children they want. And they’re not at you all the time.
“I’ll get your wine. It’s Bordeaux, isn’t it?”
* * *
Philippe texted his picture of the dead man to Jeremy, asking him simply to find out if André Westerhof recognized him. There was nothing suspicious about a man speaking Hungarian in Paris, a polyglot city of immigrants, tourists, and citizens from all over the world. It was, Philippe had to admit, a bit unusual to hear anyone shout in any language as he committed murder in one of the most heavily trafficked tourist areas in the city, one where he knew his daughter would walk alone without concern for her safety.
Violent crime, a one-on-one attack, was almost unheard of in the upscale parts of the city, which added to his suspicion that this was either political or organized crime. In either case, he needed to find the source of the infection and stamp it out, quickly and thoroughly.
* * *
Despite his German-sounding name, the man Jeremy had always known simply as “Dr. Westerhof” was a Hungarian patriot to the core, a sentiment that had grown during his last years teaching in the United States. Years earlier, after he had been Jeremy’s history professor at West Point, he had moved to a large university in the Midwest.
For the same reason, Major General Bentham had retired early from the army – disapproval of the impending American invasion of Iraq and fear it would do nothing positive in the Middle East and might arouse a perfect storm of jihadis and suicide bombers – Dr. Westerhof had retired and returned home to Budapest, dragging his reluctant American wife Emma with him. They had bought a small apartment in the hills on the Buda side of the Danube, overlooking the city, but Emma spent as much time as she could in Paris, at the old apartment they had bought soon after they married.
He knew the professor had a habit of two or three glasses of strong, spicy Villány red wine in the evening, so he allowed time for two and part of a third before he called.
“We haven’t talked much since you were researching your books,” the professor said. “I read them all and I compliment you on them. But tell me what prompts this call.”
“Thank you again for the help you offered.
“I’m calling because a man was stabbed on the quai this afternoon, just a few hundred meters from you. Sophie and Lucas witnessed the killing.”
“That’s terrible! She didn’t mention it to Emma when she brought Lucas.”
“Lucas thought he heard the victim say something in Hungarian just before he died. He has a schoolmate from Hungary and thinks the language he heard was the same one his friend speaks.
“Philippe Cabillaud sent me a picture of the dead man, on the slim chance you might have run across him in the expat community. Could I send it to you?”
“Of course, but I don’t know every Hungarian in Paris. Far from it.”
“I understand, but Philippe thinks this was no ordinary street crime, that it might have been political. After all, it’s not every day that a murderer sits down with his victim on the edge of the Seine and then walks away as though nothing had happened.”
Jeremy went silent as he prepared to send the picture.
Dr. Westerhof said, “What you say about politics could be right. You would not believe how disorganized and miserable the politics of Hungary have become. The Jobbik Party thinks our right-wing government is insufficiently right-wing, and that’s dangerous enough, but most people haven’t heard about the splinter Jobbiks, the little outfits that are fighting with each other to gain seats in parliament. Then there are the neo-Nazis, who come from all over the world, including your country, and think they’ve found a home in Hungary. It’s pitiful.
“Aside from the imported crazies, the Jobbiks and their little brothers have a couple of things in common. They want to leave the EU but they want to keep the subsidies. If Russia would give them the same money they would happily take it, but the Russians are broke and everybody knows it.
“The other is their view on Jews, and as a Jew I’m sensitive to that. Worse, both the governing party and Jobbik get funds from Moscow, some of it in ways that benefit their leaders directly. These are people whose fathers and grandfathers fought the Russians in the Second World War, then lived under the communist boot for forty years. It’s inconceivable!”
They both heard his phone chirp as Jeremy’s message arrived. “Wait just a minute and I’ll look at the picture,” the professor said.
* * *
Dr. Westerhof was silent for a long minute, then Jeremy heard him say, “My God! It’s Vasily.”
“So you do know him?”
“Do I know him? He came to Paris two days ago specifically to see me. We talked all day yesterday and again this morning, until nearly lunchtime. We were supposed to go see a man together this afternoon but Vasily didn’t show up.”
“Who was he?” Jeremy asked.
“He is – was – deputy general secretary of my party. He ran the party in effect, because the general secretary is an old man and has turned very inflexible as he’s aged. The plan was for Vasily to replace him at the end of the year, in plenty of time to organize the next parliamentary elections.” He was silent for a moment, then continued in a faltering voice, “I don’t know what we will do now. This is a blow, and a bad one.”
“I think Philippe would like to talk to you about this. Could I bring him over later, say in an hour?”
“Yes, but even later will be better. Sophie picks up Lucas at nine thirty, so if you can wait until then, it would be good. I’ll tell you everything I can.”
* * *
Philippe wouldn’t consider waiting. “Wait? Wait? This is a murder investigation, not a tea party. Call and tell him I’ll be there in a half-hour. Can you come, too? It might help.”
“Sure,” Jeremy responded. “There’s a café on the ground floor. I will meet you there as soon as I can, but it won’t be in a half-hour. More like twice that.”
Philippe arrived in forty-five minutes and was surprised to find Jeremy sitting at the same corner table where he’d interviewed Lucas. He had a notebook out and was outlining what he knew about modern Hungarian politics, which he’d studied before writing his last book about post-Soviet Eastern Europe. Philippe signaled the waiter for a coffee and pulled out a chair opposite him.
“Hungarian politics is a little like American politics,” Jeremy told Philippe. He had drawn a chart showing a group of overlapping circles and used it to illustrate how the right-wing parties were becoming more influential in both countries, and their anti-democratic branches were gathering strength as well.
He drew a circle in the center of the page. “This is André Westerhof’s party, which they call The Center, a signal that it’s not extremist in either direction. In the United States it would be slightly left of the Democrats. In France it’s somewhere to the right, but not very far.
“It would be unfair to say Hungary is a neo-Nazi state, but in reality there is a hard core of voters who are so upset by the changes in European society that they want a strong man in power.
“A lot of people think the current prime minister is strong enough, but not the hardcore revanchists – they dream about someone like the Turkish leader, Erdogan. Most of them have settled in the Jobbik Party and a bunch of small factions on its right. This murder could be a squabble between parties.”
* * *
They took the elevator to Professor Westerhof’s floor and knocked on his door. Lucas answered.
“Mon Général!” he said briskly to Jeremy. “Maman is not here now.”
“I know, Lucas,” Jeremy answered. “Have you met Commissaire Cabillaud? He is another friend of your mother.”
“He was at the Seine this afternoon.”
“Good. Would you please tell the professor that we are here?”
Dr. Westerhof looked only mildly annoyed that they had come early. He invited them into his bedroom, where a small suitcase lay open on the bed.
“I have to fly back to Budapest tomorrow morning,” he told them. “Vasily’s death is going to cause big problems in the party and I need to be there to help. Do you mind if I continue packing while we talk?” He did not wait for a reply.
Under Philippe’s questioning, he told about the political changes he thought might have led to Vasily’s murder.
“Vasily was a mild man,” he said. “Not everyone in Hungarian politics is. If I had to guess, it will be something personal or it will be politics; probably politics because he led a very quiet life otherwise. There are some people on the right who are afraid Vasily would be a much stronger leader than the man who is retiring, which is not saying much.”
“The current leader is being pushed out?” Philippe asked.
“He knows he isn’t up to the job anymore,” the professor said. “He’s not happy to leave but he knows the time has come. Hell, my time has come, too. Emma and I spend almost the entire year in Paris now, mainly because we think it’s time for a new generation to take over.
“But no, it’s not someone in the Center Party. You will probably find it’s someone in a small right-wing party who sees an opportunity to make progress at our expense. And mainly at the expense of poor Vasily.
“If I were you, I wouldn’t expect much help from the Hungarian police.”
“Did he have a family?” Jeremy posed the question but Philippe nodded in approval.
“There’s an ex-wife and a couple of children, but they moved to Germany, where she works in a hospital. I don’t think he had talked to her in a couple of years, although he did send small gifts to the children. One of the reasons he could afford to work for the tiny salary we can pay is that his former wife is a very successful doctor. She doesn’t support him, but she gave him some money when she left and sends a bit every few months. I think it’s the price of his absence.”
“Where did he stay when he was in Paris?” Philippe asked. Professor Westerhof had closed his suitcase and was clearly ready for them to leave. “Maybe we can get some information there.”
“There are a couple of one-star or no-star hotels down in the fourteenth, near the Catacombs. He liked the area and could always get a room in one of them. I don’t know which one he was in this time, but there are only two or three. We tried to get him to stay with us but he wouldn’t.”
As they left, the professor said, “There’s one more thing. I’ve kept in touch over the years with a man named Viktor Nagy, who was a security agent for the Hungarian government before the Wall fell.
“I saw him a couple of weeks ago because, frankly, I was trying to get him to make a donation. At first he laughed at me. He said we were old and out of date, too far behind the times, and he was thinking of shifting his support to a new party. It is so new it doesn’t even have an official name yet, but for now it is called Arrow Cross.”
“Arrow Cross!” Jeremy was aghast. “That was a Nazi organization, or pretty close to it. Why would anyone choose that name?”
“To send a signal. They will change it well ahead of the elections next year, but it’s code, what you Americans call a dog whistle. It’s to tell their members that their policies will be very nationalist. Marine Le Pen, who borrowed Russian money for her presidential campaign, is a piker next to these Hungarian parties. A lot of them are wholly owned subsidiaries of the Russian government.”
Jeremy, baffled, asked, “Is the Arrow Cross party an old party in a new suit of clothes, or is it something entirely novel?”
“It has been organizing for almost a year, and its personalities don’t seem to want a lot of personal publicity. I have done some checking around, and the money behind it is American, from a Hungarian émigré who made his first fortune in Silicon Valley and his second by buying into the insurance industry in a big way. I know nothing about him, and I think Viktor Nagy was a little concerned because he knew nothing about him, either. Or said he didn’t.”
“Do you have a name?” Jeremy asked. “We can probably find out something.”
“Viktor says the man’s name is Max Molnar. I called some friends in Budapest and they tell me he’s been more and more visible there lately. It makes sense – Viktor was the foreign arm of the Hungarian intelligence services, and they don’t play fair. A tough, authoritarian politician would appeal to him, especially one with money.
“I don’t think this Molnar has fully convinced him. Viktor didn’t close the door to us completely. I asked him if Vasily could come talk to him further, and he consented, although I could tell it would be uphill. That was the appointment for this afternoon.
“Emma made him a sandwich because he enjoyed taking a late lunch and eating it along the Seine, where he could watch the barges and cruise ships go past. He must have been having lunch when the killer found him.”
“Who knew about these lunches?” Philippe asked.
“Anybody and everybody,” Westerhof said. “He loved Paris, and he’d talk about it to anyone who would listen. He made a lot of new friends just sitting on the riverbank talking about the city. My guess is that he thought he was just chatting with a friendly stranger, not the man who would kill him.
“Emma and I thought about going with him today, but she didn’t want to take a chance on missing Sophie and Lucas. I wish we had. Things would be much different now.”
“Maybe,” Philippe said, “but maybe not. You might have been stabbed, too.”
Westerhof nodded gravely. “That’s right,” Jeremy added. “There’s no telling what the killer might have done.”
Philippe continued, “Viktor told you about Max Molnar. Could he have told Max Molnar, or someone else, that you and Vasily had been to see him?”
“Viktor was and probably still is a spy. If he thought it would serve his purpose to tell Max Molnar who his competition was, he would do it. But it wouldn’t be out of friendship. It would be a tactical step in a very complex game of political chess.”
* * *
As they rode down the elevator Philippe said, “I’d like to take the métro and go see what we can find at those hotels. Do you have time to go with me? I can get an officer if not.”
“I have time,” Jeremy replied. “It’s only eight o’clock, and I can’t pick up Juliette for another two hours.”
They walked the quarter-mile to the Saint-Michel station. Jeremy stopped to run has finger down the menu of Lapérouse and pointed out a famous and complicated veal dish.
“Juliette would like that,” he said, then turned to catch up with Philippe.
The walls of the immense Saint-Michel station are the original steel caisson that was dug into the Seine riverbank to keep the work dry. Jeremy and Philippe walked down three flights to the track level and waited to catch the Line 4 train, which they rode for ten minutes to Denfert-Rochereau, the stop serving the Catacombs and the big Montparnasse Cemetery.
“Let’s start with the Idaho. It’s just around the corner,” Philippe said.
The block would be dark in another hour, when the sun finally set, but now it was bathed in the softening pre-sunset light the French call the crépuscule – no longer full daylight but far from night.
* * *
As they walked from the métro stairs past two sidewalk cafés filled to overflowing, Jeremy said, “This is turning into an international affair, or at least it might. I saw Icky Crane a couple of months ago and he asked me – all of us – to send him a signal if we saw or heard anything about Russia and the EU, or Brexit. His people know the Russians are trying their best to stir chaos in European politics. He’d already talked to Eddie.
“While we were on the métro I was thinking that we have a new name – Max Molnar – which may be important. I’ll tell Eddie about it later and he can work it into what he already knows. He and Aurélie are probably at dinner, but this won’t be the first time.”
“Okay,” Philippe said. “But I didn’t hear a word of what you just said.”
* * *
Eddie Grant and Jeremy Bentham’s complicated relationship had begun in the eighties, when Eddie was a freshman ROTC cadet at West Texas State University and Jeremy, then a lieutenant colonel, was the ROTC commander. They had met again in 1991 when Captain Grant was a Special Forces company commander in the first Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm, and then-Colonel Bentham was his commander three levels up.
Jeremy had retired from the army as a two-star general ten years later, concerned that the pending invasion of Iraq would lead to the deaths of thousands of Americans and reduce the Middle East to chaos. As plain Dr. Bentham, he had gone back to West Texas State as chairman of the history department and begun working on the first of several books about the former Soviet satellite countries in Eastern Europe, one of them Hungary.
At the same time, he and his wife Pat had bought and renovated an old townhouse in the Canal Saint-Martin district of Paris, which at the time was far from gentrified. When Pat had fallen ill, she and Jeremy had moved permanently into the townhouse and Jeremy had renewed his relationship with Eddie. After Pat died, he and Eddie had become occasional teammates in intelligence projects for the CIA through their friend Icky Crane, who had been Eddie’s executive officer during Desert Storm.
When both were soldiers, Jeremy’s stars had made him the unquestioned leader, but Eddie had had a closer relationship with Icky. When he left the army, he had moved back to Paris and become both prominent and successful – and had married Philippe’s daughter Aurélie Cabillaud, who was well known in parts of Paris’s intellectual society both for her skill as a professor of history at the Sorbonne, as an author — and for her striking beauty. She turned heads everywhere. As a couple the tall, ash-blonde Aurélie and the dark-haired Eddie were even more noticeable.
* * *
“On second thought,” Jeremy said, “I’ll text him. They’re probably just sitting down to a candlelight dinner somewhere and this isn’t a super-hot issue right now.” He sent a message asking for a call, not urgent.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if they were at dinner a hundred meters from us,” Philippe said. “This is one of their favorite parts of Paris.”
* * *
A waiter in the iconic uniform of white shirt, black trousers, and many-pocketed vest signaled to invite them to a table on the back row, but Jeremy shook his head and they walked on.
The Idaho was no different from hundreds of other Paris buildings that had sprung up in the construction boom just before World War I. Its Art Deco façade set it off from its less distinguished neighbors and the grimy stone was mute evidence that the ten-year cleaning required by the city was long overdue.
A row of well-used bicycles stood in a rack under the windows. Next to them a half-dozen middle-aged men smoked and chatted noisily in Arabic but fell silent as Philippe and Jeremy passed.
The peeling front door refused to budge. Jeremy reached out to press a doorbell button to its right. Through the dirty glass panes they saw the night clerk look up from his small TV set, then reach under the counter. The door buzzed and they pushed their way through.
* * *
“Bonsoir, Monsieur,” Philippe said, taking out his police identity card. The clerk looked at it without interest and after a few seconds said, “Yes?”
“We are trying to find the hotel where a visitor stayed in the last few days,” Philippe said. He took out his iPhone and turned the picture toward the night clerk.
“Do you know this man?”
“Is he dead?” the clerk asked, startled.
“Yes,” Philippe said. “I need to know if he was a guest here last night.”
“He was here for two nights. He checked out this morning but asked me to keep his baggage. Another man came looking for him but he had already left.”
“Was this other man also a Hungarian?”
“No,” the clerk said. “I figured he was Russian.”
“How did this other man know he was here?”
The clerk glanced from side to side, seemingly looking for a way to escape, but finally said, “He came last night and asked me if I knew this dead man, Vasily. I said I did, and he asked me to call him when Vasily came in.”
“How much did he give you?”
“A hundred euros.”
“So one hundred euros was the price of his life,” Philippe said. “Your conscience will have to carry that burden, but right now I need to see the man who paid you. Please show me the pictures from that camera on the wall behind you.”
* * *
The clerk lifted a gate in the counter and led the way through a door marked “Security.” What passed for a security office was cramped and airless, more a closet than a room. A desk on the right side held an old Dell computer whose screen showed the lobby as viewed from the camera above the check-in desk.
“He was here about this time,” the clerk said. He entered the time on a keyboard and the image of the lobby rewound rapidly.
The picture went forward and back as the clerk looked for his visitor, and finally he stopped it.
“There,” he said, pointing to a single figure standing at the check-in desk.
Philippe leaned into the screen and photographed it with his phone, and Jeremy did the same.
“You are to keep that file,” Philippe told the clerk. “Someone will come for it tomorrow, along with the luggage Vasily left with you.”
“I can give you a copy now on a thumb drive,” the clerk said.
“Do that.”
* * *
“You won’t meet Juliette for a while yet, and I have no particular desire to go home and cook,” Philippe said. “Let’s go around the corner for a coffee. Or something.”
“Café Daguerre,” Jeremy said. “A favorite.”