“Smart, René. Look at this.”
She picked up the third faxed sheet, a prelim ballistics report. “The shooter used a German Luger. Wehrmacht issue. How the hell can anyone trace that? But there’s a name at the bottom. Jacques Baleste, vintage arms expert.”
“Et alors, that Baleste?” said René. “But there can’t be two.” René took a last sip of espresso. His mouth tilted in a small smile as he grabbed his jacket. “We go way back. Baleste owes me a favor. Time I collect, eh?”
Wednesday, 1 P.M.
LITTLE DID THE tourists at Notre-Dame Cathedral know what lay behind the unmarked nineteenth-century wood door they passed. The police armory, nestled on Ile de la Cité, a stone’s throw from the préfecture. From time immemorial every flic had checked out and returned their weapon here across the same worn wood counter. Hadn’t Baleste once commented that any coordinated armed insurrection would succeed, given the time it took for the flics to log out their weapons through this narrow, wire-caged counter?
René stepped into the cloud of familiar odors: oil and stale coffee. He heard the radio tuned to the World Cup quarterfinals. “Jacques Baleste, s’il vous pla?t?”
“Une seconde. He expecting you?” asked a pockmarked young lieutenant. He sniffed, looking down on René, whose chin just reached the counter. Too bad the ma?tre d’armes, old Voudray, had retired.
He rotated his foot to ease his shooting hip pain. “Tell him it’s about the Luger,” he said. “He’ll understand.”
“ID?”
René reached up and shoved his carte d’identité over the grooved wood. His fingers came back greasy.
The lieutenant pulled out the duty log, consulted it and dialed a number on the old, black rotary phone. By the book, this one.
“A René Friant to see you, sir.” Pause. “Room one hundred and thirty-two, down the hallway.”
We go way back, he almost said, former shooting partners … Instead he smiled. “I know.”
René sucked in his breath as he walked. Their last parting loomed in his mind. But his failure so far to find anything leading to the rapist and Aimée’s shooter drove him on.
“Come to gloat, have you, Friant?”
Jacques Baleste, perspiration beading his flushed forehead, sat at a metal desk with his leg in a cast propped on an orange crate.
“What happened?” said René, surprised.
“As if you didn’t know,” said Baleste, vibrating with angry energy. Short and stocky, he filled the chair.
René reached in his pocket. “If it’s about the firing-range club fees I owed you … look, I’m sorry if that got you into trouble.”
“That? Pheuff.” Baleste waved the francs away. He expelled a gust of air. “You don’t know?”
René shook his head, perplexed. “A fight?”
“I plan dinner at Solange’s favorite resto, bring her roses, and she gives me the heave-ho. Literally.” He slammed down his fist. “Down the stairs.”
Last month René had fixed up Baleste with Solange, a coiffeuse with a passion for astrology and rollerblading.
René stifled a laugh. “Solange kicked you down the stairs?”
“Tripping on the damn carpet didn’t help.”
Clumsy as usual.
“She blurts out, ‘René introduced us, but I can’t get over him, Jacques!’ and shuts the door in my face, just like that.”
He hadn’t thought of Solange that way in months. Or ever.
“C’est ironique. You’re moonfaced over someone else. Women go for you, and you go for the unattainable Aimée.”
Was it that obvious? Or too much drinking and talking after the shooting range one night? Unattainable—Baleste got that right.
“Which brings me to the Luger someone shot her with last night,” said René.
“Remember that song, ‘Love the One You’re With’?” Baleste sighed. “When will you ever learn, Friant?”
Learn that to Aimée he would never be more than her best friend? He knew that already. Best friend, business partner and godfather to her child. Uncle René, if she’d let him be.
“Tell me about the Luger, Baleste.”
The office was piled with files, walls plastered with black-and-white photos of weapons: Uzis, semiautomatics, Sig Sauers. Baleste pointed to a shelf. “There.” Damp, blue sweat rings showed under the arms of his blue uniform. “Get that green binder in the bookcase, the least you can do.”
René stood on tiptoe to reach the shelf, pulled the binder and set it on Baleste’s messy desk.
“I’ll show you what I showed the investigating Brigade Criminelle.” Baleste thumbed through the pages. His anger had evaporated now that he had guns to expound on. “But they’re on it already.”
A wasted trip.
Still, René sat down, determined to take a load off his feet and learn something.
After five minutes of viewing photos of German Lugers, he sat back in the chair, his eyes on the shadows of the tourists crossing outside his window like a fretwork.
“So the shooter ditched the Luger in the Seine, non? It’s gone?”
“Did I say that?”
Everyone consulted Jacques “Short-Fuse” Baleste, despite his volatile temper, on military arms. His grandfather had worked on the design of the M1909 Benet–Mercie before the First World War, his father on adapting features of the Lee–Enfield in the Second.
“Then tell me what you didn’t tell the Brigade Criminelle.”
“How can I? It’s all conjecture.”
“You must have a theory. Any of these Lugers registered?”
“You’re kidding, right? No one turned in booty from the occupiers.”
So the perfect murder weapon, untraceable.
“The countryside turns these up every so many years—someone finds them in an old trunk or an attic on a farm.”