The Day After Tomorrow

29

MICHELE KANARACK looked up at the clock as the train pulled out of the Gare de Lyon for Marseilles. It was 6:54 in the morning. She’d brought no luggage, only a handbag. She’d taken a cab from their apartment fifteen minutes after she’d first seen Agnes Demblon’s Citroën waiting outside. At the station she bought a second-class ticket to Marseilles, then found a bench and sat down. The wait would be almost nine hours, but she didn’t care.

She wanted nothing from Henri, not even their child who’d been conceived in love less than eight weeks earlier. The suddenness of what had happened was overwhelming. All the more so since it seemed to have sprung from nowhere.

Once outside the station, the train picked up speed and Paris became a blur. Twenty-four hours earlier her world had been warm and alive. Each day her pregnancy filled pier with more joy than the day before, and that had been no different, and then Henri called to say he was going to Rouen with Monsieur Lebec to see about opening a new bakery there, perhaps, she even thought, with the promise of a managerial job. Then, with the wave of a hand, it was gone. All Of it. She’d been deceived and lied to. Not only that, but she was a fool. She should have known the power that bitch Agnes Demblon carried over her husband. Maybe she had known it all along and refused to accept it. For that she had only herself to blame. What wife would let her husband be picked up and driven to work day after day by an unmarried woman, no matter how unattractive she might be? But how many times had ; Henri reassured her—”Agnes is just an old friend, my love, a spinster. What interest could I possibly have in her?”

“My love.” She could still hear him say it, and it made her ill. The way she felt now she could kill them both without the slightest thought. Out the window the city faded to countryside. Another train roared past going to ward Paris. Michele Kanarack would never go to Paris again. Henri and everything about him was done. Finished, f Her sister would have to understand that and not try to talk her into going back.

What had he said? “Take back your family name.”

That she would do. Just as soon as she could get a job and afford a lawyer. Sitting back, she closed her eyes and listened to the sound of the train as it quickened down the track toward the south of France. Today was October 7. In exactly one month and two days she and Henri would ; have been married for eight years.

* * *

In Paris, Henri Kanarack was curled up fetally, asleep in an overstuffed chair in Agnes Demblon’s living room. At 4:45 he had driven Agnes to work and then returned to her apartment with the Citroën. His apartment at 175 avenue Verdier was empty. Anyone going there would find no one home, nor would they find any clue to where they had gone. The green plastic garbage bag containing his work clothes, underwear, shoes and socks had been tossed’ into the basement furnace and was vaporized in seconds Every last thing he’d been wearing during the murder of Jean Packard had, by now, filtered down through the night air and lay scattered microscopically across the landscape of Montrouge.

Ten miles away, across the Seine, Agnes Demblon sat at her desk on the second floor of the bakery billing the accounts receivable that always went out on the seventh of the month. Already she had alerted Monsieur Lebec and his employees that Henri Kanarack had been called out of town on a family matter and probably would not return to work for at least a week. By 6:30 she had posted handwritten notes over the telephone at the small switchboard and at the front counter directing any inquiries about M. Kanarack promptly to her.

At almost the same time, McVey was carefully walking the Pare Champ de Mars in front of the Eiffel Tower. A drizzly morning light revealed the same overturned rectangular garden he’d left the night before. Farther down, he could see more pathways turned over for landscaping. Beyond them were more pathways, not yet; turned over, that ran parallel to each other and crossed other pathways at about fifty-yard intervals. Walking the full length of the park on one side, he crossed over and came back down the other, studying the ground as he went. Nowhere did he see anything but the gray-black earth that again caked his shoes.

Stopping, he turned back to see if maybe he’d missed something. In doing so, he saw a groundskeeper coming toward him. The man spoke no English and McVey’s French was unpardonable. Still, he tried.

“Red dirt. You understand? Red dirt. Any around here?” McVey said, pointing at the ground.

“Reddert?” the man replied.

“No. Red! The color red. R-E-D.” McVey spelled it out.

“R-E-D,” the man repeated, then looked at him as if he were crazy.

It was too early in the morning for this. He’d get Lebrun, bring him here to ask the questions. “Pardon,” he said with the best accent he could and was about to leave when he saw a red handkerchief sticking out of the man’s back pocket. Pointing to it, he said, “Red.”

Realizing, the man jerked it out and offered it to McVey.

“No. No.” McVey waved him off. “The color.”

“Ah!” The man brightened. “La couleur!’

“La couleur!” McVey repeated, triumphantly.

“Rouge,” the man said.

“Rouge,” McVey repeated, trying to roll the sound off his tongue like the Parisian. Then, bending over, he scooped a handful of the gray mud into his hand. “Rouge?” he asked.

“La terrain?”

McVey nodded. “Rouge terrain? he said, sweeping his hand at the surrounding gardens.

The man stared at him, then swept his hand as McVey had. “Rouge terrain.”

“Oui!” McVey beamed.

“Non,” the man replied.

“No?”

“No!”

* * *

Back at his hotel, McVey called Lebrun and told him he was packing to go back to London and that he had the increasingly uncomfortable feeling Osborn might not be as kosher as he first thought, that it might pay to keep an eye on him until the next day when he was due to collect his passport and fly back to Los Angeles. “Oh yeah,” he added. “He’s got keys to a Peugeot.”

Thirty minutes later, at 8:05, an unmarked police car pulled up to the curb across from Paul Osborn’s hotel on avenue Kléber and parked. Inside, a plainclothes detective unhooked his seat belt and sat back to watch. If Osborn came out—leaving either by foot or waiting for his car to be brought around—the detective would see him. A phone call with an apology for ringing the wrong number had confirmed Osborn was still in his room. A check of rental-car companies had provided the year, color and license-plate number of Osborn’s rented Peugeot.

At 8:10, another unmarked police car picked McVey up at his hotel to take him to the airport, courtesy of Inspector Lebrun and the First Paris Préfecture of Police.

Fifteen minutes later they were still in traffic. By now McVey knew enough of Paris to realize his driver wasn’t taking the express route to the airport. He was right. In five minutes, they pulled into the garage at police headquarters.

At 8:45, still wearing the same rumpled gray suit that was unfortunately becoming his trademark, McVey sat across from Lebrun’s desk studying an eight-by-ten photograph of a fingerprint. The print was a full finger, clear image enhancement, made from a smudge on the piece of broken glass the homicide tech crew had found in Jean Packard’s apartment. The glass had been sent to the fingerprint lab at Interpol, Lyon, where a computer expert refined the smudge until it became a fully identifiable print. The print had then been scanned, enlarged, photographed and returned to Lebrun in Paris.

“You know Doctor Hugo Klass?” Lebrun said, lighting a cigarette and looking back at his empty computer screen.

“German fingerprint expert,” McVey said, putting the photo back into a file folder and closing it. “Why?”

“You were going to ask about the accuracy of the enhancement, correct?”

McVey nodded.

“Klass now operates out of Interpol headquarters. He worked with the computer artist on the original smudge until they had a legible ridge pattern. After that Rudolf Halder at Interpol, Vienna, did a confirmation test with a new kind of forensic optical comparator he and Klass had developed together. A smart bomb couldn’t be more precise.”

Lebrun looked back to his computer screen. He was waiting for a reply to an identification request made to Central File/Criminal Records data center Interpol, Lyon. His initial request had come back “not on file,” Europe. His second came back “not on file,” North America. A third request was for “automatic retrieval” and sent the computer scanning “previous data.”

McVey leaned over and picked up a cup of black coffee. No matter how hard he tried to be a contemporary cop and use the wide range of high-speed high-technologies available to him, he just couldn’t get the old school out of his system. To him you did your legwork until you had your man and the evidence to back it up. Then you went after him mano a mano until he cracked. Still, he knew that sooner or later he’d better come around and make life a little easier on himself. Getting up, he walked around behind Lebrun and glanced at the screen.

As he did, a “retrieve” file came up from Interpol, Washington. Seven seconds later, the screen scrolled up the name MERRIMAN, ALBERT JOHN: wanted for murder, attempted murder, armed robbery, extortion—Florida, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts.

“Nice guy,” McVey said. Then the screen went blank, followed by a single scroll, DECEASED, NEW YORK CITY— DECEMBER22, 1967.

“Deceased?” Lebrun said.

“Your hotshot computer’s got a dead man murdering people in Paris. How you going to explain that to the media?” McVey deadpanned.

Lebrun took it as an affront. “Obviously Merriman faked his death and came up with a new identity.”

McVey smiled again. “Either that or Klass and Halder aren’t what they’re cracked up to be.”

“Do you dislike Europeans, McVey?” Lebrun was serious.

“Only when they talk in a language I don’t understand.” McVey walked off, looking up at the ceiling, then turned around and came back. “Suppose you, Klass and Halder are right and it is Merriman. Why would he come out of hiding after all these years to take out a private investigator?”

“Because something forced him out. Probably something this Jean Packard was working on.”

The command—PHYSICAL DESCRIP-MUG SHOT-FINGER-PRINTS-Y/N?—came up on Lebrun’s screen.

Lebrun punched Y on his keyboard.

The screen went blank, then came back with a second command, FAX ONLY-Y/N-?

Again Lebrun punched the Y. Two minutes later a mug shot, physical description and fingerprints of Albert Merriman printed out. The mug shot was of Henri Kanarack almost thirty years younger.

Lebrun studied it, then handed it to McVey.

“Nobody I know,” McVey said.

Flicking a cigarette ash off his sleeve, Lebrun picked up the phone and told whoever was on the other end to go back over Jean Packard’s apartment and his office at Kolb International with a finer comb than they did the first time.

“I’d also suggest you have a police artist see if they can come up with a sketch of how Albert Merriman might look today.” Picking up a battered brown leather bag that served as suitcase and portable homicide kit, McVey thanked Lebrun for the coffee then added, “You know where to reach me in London if our boy Osborn does anything he shouldn’t before he leaves for L.A.” With that he started for the door.

“McVey,” Lebrun said as he reached it. “Albert Merriman was deceased in—New York.”

McVey stopped, did a slow burn and turned back in time to see a grin creep over Lebrun’s face.

“For the brotherhood, McVey. Make the call, s’il vous plaît?

“For the brotherhood.”

“Oui.”