The Day After Tomorrow

47

THIRTY MINUTES later, at eleven forty-five, the two detectives sat in Lebrun’s unmarked Ford outside Vera Monneray’s apartment building at 18 Quai de Bethune.

Quai de Bethune, even in traffic, is less than a five-minute drive from the headquarters of the Paris Préfecture of Police. At eleven thirty, they had entered the building and spoken with the doorman in the lobby. He had not seen Mademoiselle Monneray since she’d gone out earlier that evening. McVey asked if there was any way she could get back into the building without passing through the lobby. Yes, if she came in through the back entrance and walked up the service stairs. But that was highly unlikely.

“Mademoiselle Monneray does not use ‘service stairs.’” It was basic as that.

“Ask him if he minds if I call up?” McVey said to Lebrun, as he picked up the house phone.

“I do not mind, monsieur,” the doorman said crisply in English. “The number is two-four-five.”

McVey dialed and waited. He let the phone ring ten times before he hung up and looked at Lebrun. “Not there or not answering. Shall we go up?”

“Give it a little time, eh?” Turning to the doorman, Lebrun gave him his card. “When she comes back, please ask her to call me. Merci.”

McVey looked at his watch. It was nearly five minutes to midnight. Across the street, the windows of Vera’s apartment were dark. Lebrun glanced over at McVey.

“I can feel your American pulse wanting to go in there anyway,” Lebrun said with a grin. “Up the back service stairs. A credit card slipped against the lock and you’re in, like a cat burglar.”

McVey took his eyes off Vera’s window and turned to Lebrun. “What’s your relationship to Interpol, Lyon?” he asked quietly. This was the first opportunity he’d had to bring up what he’d learned from Benny Grossman.

“The same assignment as yours,” Lebrun said, smiling. “I am your man in Paris. Your French liaison to Interpol in the severed-head cases.”

“The Merriman/Kanarack business is separate, right? Nothing to do with that.”

Lebrun wasn’t sure what McVey was getting at. “That’s correct. Their help in that situation, as you know, was in “providing the technical means to convert a smudge into a clear fingerprint.”

“Lebrun, you asked me to call the New York Police Department. Finally I got some information.”

“On Merriman?”

“In a way. Interpol, Lyon, through the National Central Bureau in Washington, requested the NYPD file on him more than fifteen hours before you were even informed they’d made a clear print.”

“What?” Lebrun was shocked.

“That’s what I said.”

Lebrun shook his head. “Lyon would have no use for a file like that. Interpol is basically a transmitter of information between police agencies, not an investigative agency itself.”

“I started kicking that around on the flight from London. Interpol requests, and gets, privileged information hours before the investigating officer is even informed there’s a fingerprint that might eventually lead to the same information. That is, if the investigator knows what he is doing.

“Even if that sits a little raw, you have to say, okay, maybe it’s internal procedure. Maybe they’re checking to see if their communication system works. Maybe they want to know how good the investigator is. Maybe somebody’s tinkering with a new computer program. Who knows? And if that’s all there was, you say, fine, forget about it.

“But the trouble is, a day later you pull this same guy, someone who’s supposed to have been dead for twenty-odd years, out of the Seine and he’s all shot up with a Heckler & Koch automatic. A job which I sincerely doubt was the work of any angry housewife.”

Lebrun was incredulous. “My friend, you are saying that someone at Interpol headquarters discovered Merriman was alive, learned where he was in Paris, and had him killed?”

“I’m saying fifteen hours before you knew about it, somebody at Interpol got hold of that print. It led to a name and then a fast-forward trace. Maybe using the Interpol computer system, maybe something else. But when whatever system retrieved Albert Merriman and matched him with a guy named Henri Kanarack, alive and living in Paris, and gave that information out, what happened next happened awfully damn fast. Because Merriman was hit within hours of the positive I.D.”

“But why kill a man who was already legally dead? And why the rush?”

““It’s your country, Lebrun. You tell me.” Instinctively McVey glanced up at Vera Monneray’s window. It was still dark.

“Probably to keep him from talking when we got to him.”

“That’s what I’d guess.”

“But after twenty years? What were they afraid of? That he had something on people in high places?”

“Lebrun.” McVey paused. “Maybe I’m crazy, but let me throw it out anyway. All this just happened to take place now, in Paris. Maybe it was coincidence that it had something to do with a man we were already following, maybe not. But suppose this wasn’t the first. Suppose whoever’s involved has a master list of old foes gone underground and every time Lyon, as a kind of international clearing house for quirky law-enforcement problems, gets a new fingerprint, or nose hair, or some other kind of connecting reference, it automatically does a search and retrieve. And if a name comes up that’s on that list, the word goes out. And it goes out worldwide, because that’s how far Interpol reaches.”

“You’re suggesting an organization. One with a mole inside Interpol headquarters at Lyon.”

“I said I might be crazy—”

“And you suspect Osborn is part of that organization, or is in the pay of it?”

McVey grinned. “Don’t do that to me, Lebrun. I can theorize till I’m purple, but I don’t make connections without evidence. And so far, there is none.”

“But Osborn would be a good place to start.”

“That’s why we’re here.”

“Another,” Lebrun smiled lightly, “would be to find who it was in Lyon that requested the Merriman file.”

“ McVey’s attention shifted as a car turned onto Quai de Bethune and came down the block toward them, its yellow lights cutting sharply through the rain that had begun to fall again.

The detectives sat back as a taxi slowed and stopped in front of number 18. A moment later the front door opened and the doorman came out carrying an umbrella. Then the passenger door opened and Vera got out. Ducking under the umbrella, she and the doorman went inside.

“Shall we go in?” Lebrun said to McVey, then answered his own question. “I think we shall.” As he reached for the door, McVey put a hand on his arm.

“Mon ami, there’s more than one Heckler & Koch in this world and more than one guy who knows how to use it. I’d be very careful how I went about my inquiry into Lyon.”

“Albert Merriman was a criminal, in the dirt of a dirty business. You think they’d chance killing a policeman?”

“Why don’t you take another peek at what’s left of Albert Merriman. Count the entry and exit wounds and see how they’re arranged. Then ask yourself the same question.”