The Day After Tomorrow

6

AT FIVE in the morning Paris streets were deserted. Métro service began at five thirty, so Henri Kanarack relied on Agnes Demblon, head bookkeeper at the bakery where he worked, for a ride to the shop. And dutifully, every day at four forty-five, she would arrive outside his apartment house in her white, five-year-old Citroën. And every day Michele Kanarack would watch out the bedroom window for her husband to come out onto the street, get into the Citroën and drive away with Agnes. Then she would pull her robe tight about her and go back to bed and lie awake thinking about Henri and Agnes. Agnes was a forty-nine-year-old spinster, an eyeglass-wearing bookkeeper, and by no one’s imagination attractive. What could Henri see in her that he didn’t in Michele? Michele was much younger, a dozen times better-looking, with a figure to match, and she made sure Henri got all the sex he needed, which of course was why she was finally pregnant.

What Michele had no way of knowing, and would never be told, was that it was Agnes who had gotten Henri the job at the bakery. Persuaded the owner to hire him even when he had no experience as a baker. The owner, a small, impatient man named Lebec, had had no interest in taking on a new man, especially when he would have to undergo the expense of training him, but changed his mind immediately when Agnes threatened to quit if he didn’t. Bookkeepers like Agnes were hard to find, especially ones who knew their way around the tax laws as she did. So, Henri Kanarack had been hired, had quickly learned his trade, was dependable and did not constantly press for raises like some of the others. In other words, he was an ideal employee and, as such, Lebec could have no quarrel with Agnes for bringing him on board. The only question Lebec had posed was why Agnes had been so willing to quit her job over so nondeseript and everyday a man as Henri Kanarack, and Agnes had answered that with a curt “Yes or no, Monsieur Lebec?” The rest was history.

Agnes slowed for a blinking light and glanced at Kanarack. She’d seen the bruises on his face when he’d climbed in, now in the dash lights they glowed even uglier.

“Drinking again,” Agnes’ voice was cold, bordering on cruel.

“Michele is pregnant,” he said, staring straight ahead, watching the yellow headlights cut the darkness.

“Did you get drunk out of joy or misery?”

“I didn’t get drunk. A man attacked me.”

“What man?” She looked at him.

“I never saw him before.”

“What did you do to him?”

“I ran away.” Kanarack’s eyes were fixed on the road ahead.

“Finally getting smart in your old age.”

“This was different—” Kanarack turned to look at her. “I was in the Brasserie Stella. The one on rue St.-Antoine. Reading the paper and having an espresso on the way home. For no reason at all a man flew at me, knocked me to the floor and started beating me. The waiters pulled him off and I ran away.”

“Why did he pick you?”

“Don’t know.” Kanarack looked back to the road again. Night was fading to day. Automatic timers were turning the streetlights off. “He followed me afterward. Across the Seine, down into the Métro. I managed to beat him out, get on a train before he could catch up. I—”

Agnes downshifted, slowing for a man walking his dog. Passing, she accelerated again. “You what?”

“I went to the train window. I saw the Métro police grab him.”

“So, he was a crazy. And the police are good for something.”

“Maybe not.”

Agnes looked over. There was something he was not telling her. “What is it?”

“He was an American.”

Paul Osborn got back to his hotel on avenue Kléber at ten minutes to one in the morning. Fifteen minutes later he was in his room and on the phone to L.A. His attorney put him in touch with another attorney, who said he’d make a call and get back to him. At one twenty the phone rang. The caller was in Paris. His name was Jean Packard.

A little more than five and a half hours later, Jean Packard sat down opposite Paul Osborn in the hotel dining room. At forty-two, he was exceedingly fit. His hair was cut short and his suit hung loosely over a wiry frame. He wore no tie, and his shirt was open at the collar, perhaps to purposely reveal a ragged, three-inch scar that ran diagonally across his throat. Packard had been a Foreign Legionnaire, then a soldier of fortune in Angola, Thailand, and El Salvador. He was now an employee of Kolb International, billed as the world’s largest private investigation firm.

“We guarantee nothing, but we do our best, and for most clients that is usually sufficient,” Packard said with a smile that was surprising. A waiter brought steaming coffee and a small tray of croissants, then left. Jean Packard touched neither. Instead he looked at Osborn directly.

“Let me explain,” he continued. His English was heavily accented but understandable. “All investigators for Kolb International are thoroughly screened and have impeccable credentials. We operate, however, not as employees but as independent contractors. We take our assignments from the regional offices and share the billing with them. Other than that, they ask nothing. In effect, we are on our own unless we request otherwise. Client confidentiality is very nearly religion with us. Keeping matters one on one, investigator to client, assures that. Something I’m certain you can appreciate at a time in history when even the most privileged information is readily available to almost anyone willing to pay for it.”

Jean Packard put out a hand and stopped a passing waiter, asking in French for a glass of water. Then he turned back to Osborn and explained the rest of Kolb’s procedure.

When an investigation was completed, he said, all files containing written, copied or photographed work, negatives included, were returned to the client. The investigator then turned in a time and expense report to the Kolb regional office, which, in turn, billed the customer.

The water came. “Merci,” Packard said. Then, taking a drink, he set the glass on the table and looked to Osborn.

“So you understand how clean, private, and simple our operation is.”

Osborn smiled. He not only liked the procedure, he liked the private detective’s style and manner. He needed someone he could trust, and Jean Packard seemed to be that person. Still, the wrong person with the wrong approach could send his man running and, as a result, spoil everything. And then there was the other problem, and even to this moment Osborn hadn’t quite known how to broach it. And then Jean Packard said the next and Osborn’s difficulty was erased.

“I would ask you why you want this person located, but I sense you would prefer not to tell me.”

“It’s personal,” Osborn said quietly. Jean Packard nodded, accepting it.

For the next forty minutes Osborn went over the details of what little he knew of the man he was after. The brasserie on the rue St.-Antoine. The time of day he had seen him there. Which table he had been sitting at. What he had been drinking. The fact that he had been smoking. The route the man had taken afterward, when he thought no one was following him. The Métro on boulevard St.-Germain he had suddenly dashed into when he realized he was.

Closing his eyes, picturing him, Osborn carefully went over Henri Kanarack’s physical description, as he had seen him here, just hours ago, in Paris, and as he remembered him from that moment, years before, in Boston. Through it all Jean Packard said little, a question here, to repeat a detail there. Nor did he take notes, he simply listened. The session ended with Osborn giving Packard a drawing of Henri Kanarack he’d made from memory on hotel stationery. The deep-set eyes, the square jaw, the jagged scar under the left eye that worked its way sharply down across the cheekbone toward the upper lip, the ears that stuck out almost at right angles. The sketch was crude, as if drawn by a ten-year-old boy.

Jean Packard folded it in half and put it in his jacket pocket. “In two days you will hear from me,” he said. Then, finishing his water, he stood and walked out.

For a long moment Paul Osborn stared after him. He didn’t know how to feel or what to think. By a single circumstance of serendipity, the random choosing of a place to have a cup of coffee in a city he knew nothing of, everything had changed and a day he was certain would never come, had. Suddenly there was hope. Not just for retribution but for redemption from the long and terrible bondage to which this murderer had sentenced him. For nearly three decades, from adolescence to adulthood, his life had been a lonely torment of horror and nightmares. The incident unwillingly played over and over in his mind. Propelled mercilessly by the gnawing guilt that somehow his father’s death had been his fault, that somehow it could have been prevented had he been a better son, been more vigilant, seen the knife in time to shout a warning, even stepped in front of it himself. But that was only part of it. The rest was darker and even more debilitating. From boyhood to manhood, through any number of counselors, therapists and into the apparently safe hiding place of professional accomplishment, he had unsuccessfully fought another, even more tragic demon: the numbing, emasculating, terror of abandonment, begun by the killer’s definitive demonstration of how quickly love could be ended.

It had proven true at that moment and held true ever since. At first by circumstance, with his mother and his aunt, and later, as he got older, with lovers and close friends. The fault in his adult life was his. Though he understood the cause of it, the emotion was still impossible for him to control. The moment real love or real friendship was near, the sheer terror that it might again be so brutally taken from him rose from nowhere to engulf him like a raging tide. And with it came a mistrust and jealousy he was powerless to do anything about. Out of nothing more than sheer self protection, whatever joy and love and trust there had been, he would erase in no time at all.

But now, after nearly thirty years, the cause of his sickness had been isolated. It was here, in Paris. And once found there would be no notifying of police, no attempt at extradition, no seeking of civil justice. Once found, this man would be confronted and then, like a disease itself, swiftly eradicated. The only difference was that this time the victim would know his killer.