Louis Shalako: A Stranger In Paris, An Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery #9, Pt. 33. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

“Suivez l’argent, Gilles.” Roger had a point, and one or two others had questions...many, many questions.

There was Tailler, representing Criminal Intelligence and a certain gentleman, Bouchard again, from the Deuxième Bureau, as well as a certain deputy cabinet minister, who so far, had not said a word, made a note, or even really engaged. There were questions written all over him.

He appeared to be mostly listening…

Finally, he spoke. A Monsieur Étienne.

Grey, quiet, and one who radiated something.

Gilles wasn’t quite sure what, but it was something to do with power.

“So, who done it then, Inspector.”

“Ah, yes, well, sir.” Somebody somewhere had a real sick sense of humor, according to Roger.

“That, would appear to be self-evident, Monsieur Langeron.”

Roger’s eyes turned to Maintenon.

“All of these femmes fatales, Gilles.”

“Hmn.” Gilles’ brow was furrowed. “…argh…by a careful analysis of language, some semblance of the truth may be revealed…”

Fuck. If only he could express it.

“Sherlock Holmes, Gilles?” Roger studied him.

“Er, no…at least I don’t think so.” It had just sort of popped out of him. “…some positively brilliant actors here…”

He sought the words.

“Gilles. Why did Saulnier return at all?” Perhaps with a bit of prompting, Gilles could come to the point…

“To convince us of his existence, mon ami.”

“I see. Ah. Like the lady, what’s her name, whipping out the passport first thing. All of them with a rather lavish back-story, homes and bills and bank accounts and food in the refrigerator. So, what is our theory of the crime?” And could you put that in some kind of report—

Which might have to remain classified, for the time being.

“Hmn. Merde.” Gilles pursed his lips, sinking perhaps a little lower into the deep, plush, velour chairs in Langeron’s office. “Madame Daniau.”

“What? Oh, yes.”

Gilles was off to one side of the desk so they could all look at each other.

“Well. The whole object of the exercise was, and probably still is, to fuck with our heads.”

Roger sat, listening—

They all did.

Rapt.

“This is a psychological operation.” Such things tended to morph over time, as new ploys, new tactics, new messages and new responses came along.

“Huh.”

“Yes. The message, as I interpret it, is a fairly simple one.”

Gilles took a moment, as pigeons fluttered past the windows, barely heard, but out there nevertheless.

“Fiction, well. It has to make sense or else the editor sends it back to you—”

Then there were the bodies, as it were.

“What about that, then?” Tailler.

“Canned goods. Trucked in, like so many tinned sardines, drugged, dressed, perhaps having been made certain promises…two, three, four people in a car, happy, cheerful, conscious, well-dressed, money written all over them.” A quick check of the squeaky-clean passports, and they would be through the border. “The victims would have had an escort. Just to keep them honest, each one brought in, one at a time.”

Just to make sure they didn’t get lost in transit.

And, once in the country, once unconscious, a body could be dressed just like any storefront mannequin.

“Hmn. Oh, yes.” Gilles referred to his notes, the case was so fucking complicated, so damned detailed. “Saulnier’s shoes. Sure enough, purchased where the lady said. Said shoes were on the victim’s feet—the one she looked at, ah, at the morgue, right? Thank God the shoes did not show up on the wrong body, who knows where that would have led us except nowhere. And yet, the whole damned ball of wax proves nothing. There’s a mark, a logo, but it’s not like a junior sales clerk would ever be able to identify a customer, after months or years…”

Any asshole, any other asshole, could have bought those shoes. All they had to do was fit some dead guy.

There were rueful nods all around…

“There’s more, plenty more. Cariveau. We have not located his mother, nor his sisters, nor the alleged brother, and yes, it’s a fairly common name. This individual did have machinist skills. The ladies, seem to have had some serious acting skills, which implies a certain kind of training, even special recruitment. If you’re bringing in an agent, the fact they had some skills is rather handy. More professionals, when you think about it. A foreign power could provide any number of passports. Madame Bernier’s alleged tenants are a bit mystified at our inquiries. They’ve been paying the rent to a management company for, as the lady told us, twenty-four years, and we never even checked, not until it was too late. The company owns the building. She simply lied to us, and we bought it, hook, line and sinker. To establish credibility, one presumes. Well, that’s the sort of information she would have found it easy to obtain—all you have to do is to buy some carrots, fifty centimes worth of onions, and fall into conversation. Fondle the tomatoes. Argh. Our next-door neighbours have all kinds of camps, penal institutions, mental hospitals. People disappear off the street all the time, don’t they. Their own media are pure propaganda, but there are foreign correspondents, and they can’t all be controlled, some of them bought, maybe. But not controlled. It makes our papers when one of our own goes missing in their country, right. But. Once you have the bodies in the country, simply tear up the old passports, flush them down the toilet. Whip out some new ones, and our victims suddenly become somebody else. Keep them drugged up, intravenously or otherwise. Treat them well. Give them good suits, if only for one night.” Give them one last hot meal…

Millie had said that about editors, Millie from Birmingham. He grinned slightly, recalling her breath on his ear.

“The message, is that they can do anything they want to us—evil stuff, violent stuff. They can fuck us over endlessly. And we can’t do a damned thing about it. Okay, the banking information, it only goes back so far. It’s like the young men got a job, a very good job, and opened an account. The ladies, roughly the same time period, maybe a year and a half, the oldest account going back maybe two and a half. They have been in place for that long, it seems.”

He explained all of that.

Roger sat there heavily; no one else spoke.

Do we have evidence, Gilles...

“Do we have any evidence for all of this?”

“Nope, none at all. Only about ten tonnes of meaningless facts. Only the fact that they had a huge budget, and plenty of help, for the most part, professionals. Only the bodies themselves. All of them of a certain description. All of them, fattened up, perhaps, all of them pliable. A shave, a haircut and a good pair of shoes. Bullshit clues in the pockets, bullshit relationships, even the jobs if you think of it. I mean, we checked out the places of employment, after all. Some of them had, at least on the face of it, been there for two or three years. We really haven’t gone into any history prior to that. It all takes time and manpower. It didn’t seem relevant in the early part of the investigation. Ah. For the other side. It takes time to create a credible history. Once you accept, at least some of that, the list of potential answers gets shorter and shorter. All of them, disposable—everything else, every other thing, every other bit of evidence, also provided to us. Everything we have seen, is a form of disinformation, made all the more real by virtue of having a few dead bodies laying around—spectacular dead bodies, as we are all too well aware from news coverage and the pressure of public opinion…”

All of them, already condemned to death for whatever reason. What difference did it make, in how they died.

And of course, poor old Roger had his superiors, one of them sitting right there beside him. Poor old Roger had his own report to write, his own job, his own ass to justify.

“But…but, who, Gilles.” He stared. “So, four fake guys, or maybe only two or three, fake guys who have been in the country for months, for years even. They pick up a new passport from their, ah, embassy, and then leave the country. And four other fake guys, end up dead, mutilated in an alley.”

Hmn.

That, now that was one real good question.

“It requires the simplest of sleight of hand. Also, a busy and distracted police force, and a ferment in the political environment. It is information overload to some extent.” There was too much distrust in public institutions.

“No one would believe it anyways.” The man from the Bureau gave a slight grin…

“Ah, yes.”

The plan took such things into account.

Funny thing was, (as someone had once said), that, should have been obvious all along.

“Ah. Cutting off all of those fingers—that was meant to force us, to, ah, you know, to focus on the identity. An identity which did not exist, at least in the conventional sense.” Monsieur Étienne, connected to the Minister’s office. “How can you cut the fingers off of someone who doesn’t exist? You can’t. Hmn. Interesting—and all of this would have to come to a court somewhere. That goes for the car as well.”

The gentleman pursed his lips, and bit on the lower corner as he contemplated it.

“Hmn. In the event, they could pull out the real guys—the real guys, and blow any case we put forward, ah, out of the water. It’s not like anyone could ever prove otherwise, not at this point.” He reached into a pocket, perhaps for a pipe or something.

Not finding it, he pulled his hand out again.

Maintenon nodded.

“Yes. That’s about the size of it, and it demonstrates the sophisticated nature of their thinking…” So the gentleman had a few brains of his own.

Big deal.

***

"Germany, Gilles?" Tailler.

“Germany?”

They sat there with stunned looks on their faces.

“Germany. The Nazis. They plan on going to war. The only question is when and with whom. Look at the modus. They’ve built the world’s biggest bullshit machine, they’re re-arming, and they’re not exactly shy about it. This entire case is nothing but bullshit. It has their fingerprints all over it, and the odds are, we will never prove a thing.” Gilles went on. “They marched into the Rhineland, and our army, our government, our allies did nothing. They’re building up their tank force, their air force. They’re calling up their army. They’re building ships and moving battalions around. Everything. Hitler’s making rumblings about bringing all Germans under one big umbrella. Mein Kampf is full of talk about lebensraum, presumably in the east. Herr Hitler hates the Jews, but he also hates the Slavs. He hates homosexuals, and Gypsys, and the Poles, and the Czechs and the disabled, and the mentally retarded. They do not fit into his plan, who do not contribute sufficiently to his dream of the National Socialist state. Then there is one big other score to settle. With us, gentlemen. With us. This is the master race talking to us.”

There was a long silence over the room.

“What am I supposed to tell the Cabinet?”

“Tell them—tell them. Exactly that. Yes, I should think. Very, very soon now.”

“So. That’s it then—this is what you’re going to put in your report?” Roger sighed, deeply. “And so, is this case solved, or is it not solved, or is it just dead?”

“We never close such a case.”

Gilles shrugged, not for the first time.

“We’re sort of wondering if one of the embassies, will turn up here at some point—and report that one of their own is missing. This would tend to give information to the enemy—their enemy. Schleischer didn’t have a passport on him at the time of his demise. One wonders where he had been living. Perhaps a carefully-worded announcement in the papers would elicit some response from a landlord, a friend, an acquaintance. A costume shop. Sorry, I guess that was a joke. This might also give important information to our enemies. That one’s a tough call. He had to eat, after all. One wonders just how often he would put on the getup and show himself around town. It all comes down to a neighbourhood, and we don’t even know where to begin. There are still characters unaccounted-for, like Baille, possibly, and it is also possible his lunch companions will, eventually, somehow or other, get picked off. As for the actual car, it might be in the river, or cut up with torches, or driven out of the country, through a checkpoint or on some faint track leading through the forest.”

All that would take would be local knowledge, the dark of night, and a bit of fog maybe. Pasture country—cut a hole in the fence and drive on through, and the farm on the other side might be some other country. It didn’t necessarily have to be Germany—almost anywhere else would do.

“Gilles, what about that piece of paper? The one with the list of names?”

“More bullshit. But, more than anything, it speaks to the mind…the mind, of Schleischer.”

Roger stared at him…

“Honestly, we can go through this point by point…it’s only five or six pages.” His voice was flat and professional, and yet there was this tone

Roger shook his head.

Monsieur Étienne nodded and sighed, looking up at the clock.

“There is just one thing I don’t know.” He turned to Emile.

“What’s that, Gilles?” Emile sat there, thoughtful but unruffled.

“Which one of you guys sicced Sophie onto me?”

The lady in question, after brief questioning after the shooting, had signed a statement and gone home. She’d literally been driven by an officer, who, after she stepped out, thought nothing more of it and off he had gone. She had also not shown up for work the next morning, and now Alphonse was telling him that it was just another dead end—there were people at that address, some sort of west Africans, and in spite of some language difficulties, it seemed they had never even heard of the lady.

Startled by the question, Roger had looked around, Emile had shrugged and shook his head. Monsieur would never stoop that low, and finally, the gentleman from the Bureau had raised a hand from his lap.

"You don't owe us any favours..."

“Sorry about all that, Gilles. Just for the record, you don’t owe us any favours or anything. Quite frankly, we owe you a few—all of those open-ended warrants, some of them still blank, and wiretaps in a lot of the right places, too. We’re getting reams and reams of material, and piecing together more than one picture, shall we say. She will be reassigned, and some of us reckon she’s overdue for promotion as well. You have to admit, we were right. One of our more intuitive moments. She’s also rather attractive, as you may have noticed.” He stood, a faint gleam in his eye. “Anyways, if we run into any of those more dubious characters, Baille, perhaps, or Saulnier, or Cariveau—well, we will be sure to let you know. There must have been a driver as well, as the car pulled up out front, right. When Hector was killed. We have some very good pictures of the other two creeps, and maybe we’ll get something.”

Putting on his hat, he headed for the door, and now Monsieur Étienne was rising, and Roger, and the two had a quick handshake.

“Thank you, Inspector.” And with a sketchy salute in Maintenon’s direction, he was gone too.

Roger stood there. Tailler was rising…

“Well, Gilles?”

Maintenon had done his best, and sometimes that just wasn’t good enough.

“I thought you guys cleared Sophie.” Gilles wasn’t angry, just curious.

“Sorry, Gilles. Orders from above.” With a nod, Tailler grabbed his hat and his coat and then he was gone too.

Roger shrugged. What else could he do?

“Sorry, Gilles.” He looked at his watch. “Anyways, I have another meeting…”

So. That was it, then.

END

Chapter One.