The Day After Tomorrow

14

BY THE time his Fokker jetliner touched down at Charles de Gaulle Airport three hours later, McVey knew where Paul Osborn lived, where he worked, what professional licenses he carried, what his driving record was, and that he’d been divorced twice in the State of California. He also knew that he’d been “detained” and later released by Beverly Hills Police for attacking a parking attendant who had demolished the right front fender of Osborn’s new BMW in a restaurant lot. It was clear Paul Osborn had a temper. It was equally true to McVey that the man or woman he was looking for was not severing heads out of passion. Still, a hot head was not passionate twenty-four hours a day. There was adequate time between rages to kill a man, remove his head from his body, and leave the remains in an alley, beside a road, floating in an ocean or tucked up neatly on a couch in a cold, one-room apartment. And Paul Osborn was a trained surgeon, wholly capable of removing a head from a body.

The downside of the situation was that, according to the entry stamps in his passport, Paul Osborn had been neither in Great Britain nor on the Continent when the other murders were committed That could mean any number of things: that he was innocent; that he was not who he said he was, and could have more than one passport; even that he could have done the head in the alley but not the others, which, if that were the case, meant McVey was wrong with his lone killer theory.

So, at this point, he was little more than a stick figure suspect connected to the latest crime only by the coincidences of time, place and profession.

Still, it was more than they had before. Because, so far, they had nothing.

For a moment Paul Osborn stared off, then his eyes flashed back to Jean Packard. They were sitting in the front terrace room of La Coupole, a chatteringly alive gathering place on boulevard du Montparnasse on the Left Bank. Hemingway used to drink here, so did a host of literary others. A waiter passed, and Osborn ordered two glasses of White Bordeaux. Jean Packard shook his head and called the waiter back. Jean Packard did not touch alcohol. He ordered tomato juice instead.

Osborn watched the man walk off, then looked again at the cocktail napkin Jean Packard had scribbled on and put in his hand. On it was a name and an address—M. Henri Kanarack, 175 avenue Verdier, apartment 6, Montrouge.

The waiter brought their drinks, and left. Again Osborn glanced at the napkin, then, folding it carefully, put it in his jacket pocket.

“You’re sure,” he said, looking up at the Frenchman.

“Yes,” Jean Packard replied. Sitting back, he crossed one leg over the other and stared at Paul Osborn. Packard was tough, very thorough and very experienced and Osborn wondered what he’d say if he queried him about it. He was only a doctor and his first attempt to kill Kanarack, albeit on the spur of the moment and in the heat of rage, had failed. But Jean Packard was a professional. He’d said as much when they first met. Was a killer by trade, as a soldier of fortune against a political or military enemy in a Third World country, any different from a killer for hire in a major cosmopolitan city? The glamour of it might be different, but other than that he doubted it. The act was the same, wasn’t it? The payoff, too. You killed; you collected for it. So how could there be any real difference?

“I wonder,” Osborn said carefully, “if you sometimes work on your own.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, do you sometimes freelance? Accept assignments outside your company?”

“It would depend on the assignment.”

“But you would consider it.”

“Why are you asking me?”

“Then you know what it is . . .” Osborn could feel the sweat on his palms. Delicately he set his glass down, picked up the napkin it had been sitting on and ran it between his hands.

“I think, Doctor Osborn, that what was promised has been delivered. Billing will be completed through the company. It was a pleasure to meet you and I wish you every good luck.”

Putting down a twenty-franc note for the drinks, Jean Packard stood. “Au revoir,” he said, then, stepping around a young man at the next table, he left.

Paul Osborn watched him go out, saw him pass in front of the large windows overlooking the sidewalk and disappear in the early evening crowd. Absently he ran a hand through his hair. He’d just asked one man to murder another and had been turned down. What was he doing, what had he done? For an instant he wished he’d never come to Paris, never seen the man he now knew as Henri Kanarack.

Closing his eyes he tried to think of something else, to blot it all out. Instead he saw his father’s grave alongside that of his mother. In the same vision he saw himself standing in the window of the headmaster’s office at Hartwick, watching as his aunt Dorothy, an old raccoon coat pulled around her, got into a taxi and drove away in a blinding snowstorm. The awful aloneness was unbearable. Was still unbearable. The jagged pain as brutal now as it had been then.

Pulling himself out of it, he looked up. All around him people were laughing and drinking, relaxing after work or before dinner. Across from him a handsome woman in a maroon business suit had her hand on a gentleman’s knee and was looking into his eyes as she talked. A clamor of laughter from another table caused him to turn his head. Immediately there was knocking at the window in front of him. He looked and saw a young woman standing on the sidewalk, peering in, smiling. For a moment Osborn thought she was looking at him, then a young man at the next table jumped up, waved and ran outside to meet her.

When he was ten a man had cut out his heart. Now he knew who that man was and where he lived. There would be no turning back. Not now, not ever.

It was for his father, for his mother, for himself.