The Accident Man

34

Pierre Papin’s taxi pulled up outside the honey-colored stone facade of Lausanne’s main railway station a little after nine o’clock. The manager and his staff were properly Swiss, which is to say as efficient as Germans, as welcoming as Italians, and as knowing as Frenchmen.

Within an hour he’d found out everything he needed to know. He followed Carver’s trail, taking the train to Geneva, where he walked out of the station into the Place Cornavin, the bustling square whose taxi stands and bus stops were the heart of the city’s transportation system. Once he was there it was just a matter of basic old-fashioned police work, canvassing the drivers to find anyone who’d been around late morning the previous day and showing them the CCTV pictures of Carver and Petrova.

Fifteen minutes in, he struck lucky. One of the taxi drivers, a Turk, remembered the girl. “How could I forget that one?” he said with a knowing wink, from one red-blooded man to another. “I watched her all the way from the station, thinking this was my lucky day. I was next in line. The man with her looked like he could afford a taxi, and if I had a woman like that I wouldn’t want to share her with the trash who take the bus. But no, he walked right past me, the son of a whore, and stood in line like a peasant.”

“Did you see which bus they took?”

“Yeah, the Number Five. It goes over the Pont de l’Ile, past the Old Town to the hospital and back. So, what have they done, these two, huh?”

Papin smiled. “They’re killers. Count yourself lucky they didn’t get in your cab.”

He left the cabbie muttering thanks to Allah and then, still posing as Michel Picard from the federal interior ministry, called the control room at Transports Publics Genevois, the organization that ran the city’s bus system. Naturally, they were only too happy to supply the names and contact numbers of those drivers who’d worked the Number 5 route leaving the station around eleven o’clock the previous day. There were three of them, and once his memory had been jogged by Papin’s photos, one recalled the couple who’d got on at the station. He also remembered looking in his mirror as the girl got off at a stop on Rue de la Croix-Rouge, crossed the road behind the bus, and started walking up the hill toward the Old Town.

“Some guys have all the luck, right?” he said with a rueful chuckle.

“Don’t worry,” Papin assured him. “That one’s luck is about to change.”

Twenty minutes later, he was walking the streets of the Old Town. It seemed an unlikely place for an assassin to hide out. In Papin’s experience, most killers were little more than crude gangsters, spending their money on tasteless vulgarity and excess. But the beauty of the Old Town was restrained, even austere. The tall buildings seemed to look down like disapproving elders on the people walking the streets. There were few hotels in the area, and it took little time to establish that neither Carver nor Petrova had checked in anywhere within the past twenty-four hours, under those names or any other aliases.

Petrova came from Moscow, so this must be where Carver lived. And that meant there would be people in the neighborhood who knew him and his exact address. Papin got out his photographs and started canvassing again.