The Day After Tomorrow

31

THE 1961 movie West Side Story starring Natalie Wood was playing in its original English-language version at a small theater on the boulevard des Italiens. The film ran 151 minutes and its second show, starting at four, was the one that Paul Osborn would attend. When he was in college he’d taken two successive film history courses and had written a lengthy paper on translating stage musicals to the screen. West Side Story had been the centerpiece of his discussion and he still remembered it well enough to convince anyone he’d just seen it.

The theater on the boulevard des Italiens was halfway between his hotel and the bakery where Kanarack worked and had Métro stations within a five-minute walk in any of three directions.

Circling the name of the theater with his pen, Osborn closed his newspaper and got up from the small table where he’d been sitting. Crossing the hotel dining room to pay his breakfast bill, he glanced outside. It was still raining.

Entering the lobby, lie looked around. Three hotel employees were behind the desk, and outside, two people huddled under the doorway overhang while a doorman summoned a cab. That was it, there was no one else.

Going to the elevator, he pressed the button and the door opened immediately. Getting in, he rode up alone. As he did, he weighed the situation with McVey carefully. He was sure it was Kanarack who had killed Jean Packard. The question was: Did the police know? Or, more pointedly, did they know it was Kanarack he had hired the private detective to find? As he had seen, what the police knew and how they knew it were beyond the reach of everyday people, himself included.

Playing a worst-case scenario—that the police knew nothing of Kanarack but suspected Osborn knew more about the private investigator’s death than he’d let on— McVey or someone else would be watching the hotel and would follow him the moment he left. The problem was troublesome and he needed to find some way around it.

The elevator stopped and Osborn stepped into the hallway. A few moments later he let himself into his room and closed the door. It was 11:25 in the morning. Four hours before he would leave for the theater.

Tossing the newspaper on the bed, he went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth, then took a shower. It was while he was shaving he decided that the best way to solve his problem was to play the part he wanted the police to expect of him, the saddened lover spending his last day in Paris alone. And the sooner he started, the better the chance to shake anyone following him. And what more advantageous place to begin his lonely journey than the Louvre, with its multitudes of tourists and numerous exits?

Pulling on his raincoat, Osborn snapped off the light and turned for the door. As he did, he saw the darkened image of himself in the mirror and for the briefest instant everything turned inward. That the police might be watching only made what he was doing more difficult. Had Kanarack been caught and tried within a reasonable time, things would have been different. But he hadn’t. Nearly thirty years later and a continent away, Kanarack’s crime stood as a crime apart, with no law that either could, or would, administer punishment or justice. In the absence of law, all that was left was to make equity as one could. And Osborn hoped that whatever God there was would understand.

Deciding that being on foot gave him more options, Osborn left the rental Peugeot in the hotel garage and asked the doorman to call him a taxi. Five minutes later he was traveling down the Champs Elysees toward the Louvre. He thought he might have seen a dark car pull out from the curb and follow them as the cab had turned out of the hotel drive, but looking back he couldn’t be sure.

Moments later the taxi pulled up in front of the Louvre. Paying the driver, Osborn stepped out into a light mist. As the cab pulled away, his immediate sense was to look around for the dark car. But if the police were watching, he dared not clue them in that he knew. Absently putting his hands in his pockets, he waited for traffic to pass, then crossed the rue de Rivoli and went into the museum.

Once inside, he took a solid twenty minutes studying the works of Giotto, Raphael, Titian and Fra Angelico before leaving the gallery to find a men’s room. Five minutes later, he joined a crowd of American tourists about to board a bus for Versailles and went with them out the main entrance. At the curb he left them, walked half a block and entered the Metro.

Within the hour he was back at his hotel, waiting for the Peugeot to be brought up from the garage. If the police had been following him, how could they imagine he was still not in the museum? Nevertheless he watched his mirror carefully as he drove off. To make sure, he turned down one street and, two blocks later, down another. As far as he could tell he was on his own.

Twenty minutes later he parked the Peugeot on a side street a block and a half from the movie theater locked it and walked off. Taking the Metro back to the hotel, he waited until the attendant who had brought his car up from the garage left the front door to retrieve another car, then slipped inside and went up to his room.

As he came in, he looked at the clock on the bedside table. It was exactly 1:15 in the afternoon. Taking off his raincoat, he looked over at the phone. Earlier that morning he’d picked it up and started to dial the bakery to make certain nothing had gone awry and that Kanarack was at work as he should be. Then he had the thought that if something happened and things went wrong, the call could be traced back to his room. Immediately he’d hung up. Looking at the phone now, he felt the same urgency of wanting to know but decided ; against it.

Better to trust to the fates that had brought him this far and assume Kanarack would be spending his Friday as he had spent his Thursday and probably every other workday of the past years, quietly, doing his job and keeping the lowest profile possible.

And now, Osborn took off the tan chinos and dark Polo cardigan he had worn to the Louvre and changed; into a nondescript pair of faded jeans, with an old sweater pulled over a plaid L.L. Bean flannel shirt, Even as he carefully tied his running shoes and put the dark blue watch cap bought at a surplus store that morning into the side pocket of his jacket, and turned, finally to prepare the tools of the day, filling three hypodermic syringes with the succinylcholine—even as he did all that, with the clock ticking down to the moment he would leave for the movie theater on boulevard des Italiens, Henri Kanarack was already parking Agnes Demblon’s white Citroën less than a half block from his hotel.