Louis Shalako
Garnier put down the phone.
“Alphonse is out front.” Having brought the car around from the far end of the building, his more-or-less usual haunt, and about as far away from brass-hats and authority as it was possible to get without booking off or actual desertion...
He’d radio the desk and tell them to phone up, and with months to retirement and a don’t-give-a-damn attitude, he usually got his way.
It’s not like they didn’t know him down there; and if they didn’t know him, they sure as hell soon would.
The pair of them grabbed their hats and headed down to the street.
A couple of days had passed. Their newspaper story ploy seemed to have paid off, with at least a couple of tips. Only time would tell whether they would pan out. In the meantime, a certain amount of legwork was in order.
There was something different about Martin today, and for a detective, Hubert might have been a bit slow on the uptake, but the fellow really was in a suit and tie this morning.
“Hey. Did you pass the exam?”
“Huh. Not so far as I know.” They clattered down the stairs, with feet pounding and doors slamming and other people talking, all echoing round and round in the hard, narrow space. “It just seems justified in terms of today’s job…er, jobs.”
Hubert nodded.
There were times when the uniform was just a little too conspicuous.
“Well. You look good.” And it was true.
Garnier had worn the fairly standardized shiny black shoes, medium grey trousers, and a darker jacket. The shirt was a pale, creamy yellow and the tie a light tone of electric blue, matching the corner of a handkerchief sticking out of the left breast pocket…the hair was freshly slicked back and there was the faint aroma of aftershave. The slight bulge of a shoulder holster was almost invisible.
“They do say the clothes make the man.” Anyhow, there was the door, and the shiny black car with good old Alphonse at the wheel. “There’s only one way to find out.”
“After you.”
Someone just coming in held the door for them and they plunged out into the broad light of day.
***
It was a long drive across town, and they had a chance to talk outside of the confines of the office.
Hubert was gaining new respect. Garnier had plenty of thoughts. After a minor comedy of manners, Garnier had settled for the front seat and Hubert had taken the back as befitted his status or seniority or something. It was better than the three of them up front, and that was for sure. Let the junior man do all of the neck-craning. Sure enough, Martin was already twisting in his seat and now Hubert found himself leaning hard to the left in a kind of sympathetic reaction.
“I’ve been thinking. That delivery van still had the original license plates. That pretty much confirms that they must have hidden it away until the exact date. To do the actual job, the van is already loaded, with the freezer and the lid. The bodies are in another freezer. So now, we have two freezers. Big ones. Fuck—another potential lead, did someone buy two freezers at once sort of thing. Maybe they drove around somewhere and picked the corpsicles up that very morning. That would require some pretty good knowledge, or an appointment with somebody rather bent in their own right, and the odds are they had them already, right. What if they paid money for them? That leaves another loose end, for them and for us. They have the rugs all lined up on the floor, right. Roll them up like cigares-au-chou, good old cabbage rolls, and toss them in the back. All of this, preferably indoors at some private location. The actual driving, it’s only across town. A half an hour, forty-five minutes to the Inspector’s house, say. Maybe less, maybe even a lot less. It’s a question of exposure and time. It’s very rare for an officer to see a vehicle, to remember even one of a hundred license numbers and go from there. It’s a big town. There are so many auto-theft reports, so many numbers to remember. A driver would pretty much have to make some kind of a real bad mistake to get pulled over. The officer pulls them over, he radios in the license information…that’s really the only way they could ever get caught.” Leaving the vehicle outside, even on private property, seemed much less likely. “They had to stick the new signs on it, after all. The old signs would be in plain view. That might have drawn attention.”
Hubert nodded. The daily bulletins were chock-full of such license numbers, and vehicle descriptions, and while the police did make plenty of arrests based on such information, it was much more useful in identifying abandoned vehicles.
Not all car thieves were pros, there were plenty of youthful joy-riders as well. A vehicle simply abandoned by the side of the street might have a perfectly sensible reason for being there, having run out of gas, a breakdown, or whatever. If it was not on the list, an abandoned vehicle really only mattered to the parking-meter people.
“Well, let’s hope Alphonse doesn’t run out of cigarettes.”
Hubert grunted at that one—
“That’ll be the day.” He had a thought. “He’s been known to piss in here, you know, in an old soda bottle he keeps under the seat…”
And now it was Martin’s turn to grunt, a grunt of appreciation or so Hubert thought.
Alphonse, he was convinced, would never run out of cigarettes, and he’d probably have a pack in his pocket in his coffin, and might even sit bolt upright and light one up at his own funeral. They might as well throw the bottle in there as well, he thought as a quiet little grin stole over him…
Through it all, Alphonse ignored them, perhaps more pointedly than usual. Finally he spoke.
“All right, boys, here we are.” He pulled into the curb.
Turning, he impaled Garnier with a look.
“Corpsicles? Really?” He shook his head in faint disgust. “Cabbage rolls?”
Chuckling, Martin reached for the door handle.
Their first stop was to the corner store of one Khalid Omar, an Algerian, who according to their information, had been in the country for twenty years or more. He had a wife and children, an extensive family circle, and no known criminal associations.
He’d seen the story in the newspaper and had phoned it in, with Firmin taking the call.
The family lived over their store in the east end of the city, in the 20th Arrondissement, Belleville-Père Lachaise, a working-class area with fairly low rents. It was becoming more popular and even showing signs of gentrification as younger and more prosperous folks bought up cheap properties and began fixing them up. On the side of the hill named Mont Louis after the King, was the largest cemetery in Paris, with millions of visitors a year. The cemetery itself had been named after Père Lachaise, a Jesuit priest and confessor to Louis XIV, a point which was largely irrelevant except in setting a certain tone. It was a mixed neighbourhood, one which was neither good nor bad. It simply was.
Slums and ghettos were better off kept small and scattered around, dispersed, rather than all concentrated into one, as Hubert had always thought—
After dropping them off at the door, Alphonse took the car down, or more accurately, up, the narrow street, looking for one of the ever-elusive parking spots, as the streets seemed to become more and more crowded with every passing day according to his own pithy observation.
The lady behind the counter was serving a customer, and, from just inside the door, they had a moment to observe.
They were conversing in a language neither man was familiar with. On the phone, the man had spoken pretty good French, albeit strongly accented according to Firmin.
Dressed in the long white haik, traditional dress of her people, her hair was covered and most of her face, with only the eyes, eyebrows and the bridge of the upper nose visible.
Those soft, dark eyes were all right, thought Hubert, and she didn’t seem fat or anything.
The little bell on the cash register jingled, the drawer closed with a clunk, and her customer lifted their package and turned to go. This was when she became aware of them, even as a pair of young children played on a colourful rug on the floor, at one end of the open space behind the sales counter. They were cute as all hell, in the eyes of one who expected to become a father, very, very soon now. He was finding the prospect had given him new eyes to appreciate, or something like that.
The woman turned her head and spoke sharply in the general direction of a doorway screened by a curtain of gaily-coloured patterns, and the voice of a younger woman came in response. It sounded like Arabic or something very much like it.
“I reckon they’re getting the old man.”
The customer brushed past them with a nod.
“I reckon you’re right.” Hubert kind of liked the smell in the store.
It was combination of herbs and spices, and tobacco, along with something else, something cooking in the back room, or perhaps it was the chili-peppers and other obscure vegetables in open bins. There were all kinds of foreign labels on the grocery shelves, which were sort of front and centre aisle, and there were tall shelves along the exterior walls, anywhere where there wasn’t a window or a door.
He could see cigarettes, bottles, cans, boxes, bolts of fabric, house and kitchen wares, toys, fireworks, colourful signs in French and Arabic. They could buy a lottery ticket, or a packet of potato crisps, a bottle of wine, pretty much anything. Except maybe pork chops…or maybe that was being unfair, they were selling the wine after all.
It was the atmosphere that was somehow different, underscored by the foreign music coming from a small radio set on a shelf behind the counter.
“Bonjour, Messieurs. Vieullez venir, s’il vous plaît…”
END
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