Haberman Murder Without Pity

1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4835-9866-6
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

Paris, France: dark with fog, riots over police killings, and Far Right demagogues. Here state criminal investigator Stanislas Cassel, grandson of a French propagandist for the Nazis during WWII, works at the Palace of Justice. Ashamed of his family's notoriety, he avoids anything political. Instead he absorbs himself, solving small crimes, which he calls his Little Miseries. Little does he suspect the shock awaiting him when he investigates the bizarre murder of a pensioner, who seemed to have lived an uneventful life. A story for today's turbulent times. More frightening than when first published.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Haberman, Steve

Leseproben

CHAPTER 4

BENEFIT AT THE HOTEL EDEN

“No rest this Friday evening, Monsieur Judge?”

“The Hotel Eden tonight.” Stanislas pulled the Peugeot’s rear passenger door shut.

“Ah, the glamorous Eden. A social obligation?”

With his rotund chest, the chauffeur looked to Cassel more like a bon vivant than a policeman assigned to drive and protect him. “It’s a charitable affair. Another magistrate got the flu and asked me to stand in.” He watched the grimy outpost of the Justice Annex vanish into the fog. His driver switched on the wipers. An ice wind from the Seine behind them fluttered leaves like ashes through a streetlamp’s glow as they passed through the white night onto Rue de Rivoli.

A charitable affair indeed, he thought. With Occupation survivors included, something he didn’t need after that ten-hour work day. He, grandson of a collabo, as an unintended guest. How many of their relatives had that scoundrel sent to their deaths? He had no desire to be reminded of that treachery. He should have asked the nature of the benefit before accepting. He’d leave after staying a respectable hour or two.

“I start overtime tomorrow, protecting another judge too.” The driver glanced in his rear view mirror at Stanislas. “The rest of the time I’ll help patrol some hot quarters. Good-bye plum desk job; hello stress.”

“You’ll be back to your usual work in no time.”

“That’s what my wife thinks. The riots protesting that police shooting will blow over. The demonstrators and demagogues will go home. Lots can happen before that occurs.” He glanced in the mirror again, this time beyond Stanislas. “There he is, on schedule. Our escort. We’ll get you there in one piece,” and he returned his attention to driving.

He himself had gotten careless, Stanislas realized. He hadn’t checked to see if someone were following, so tired was he. Exhausted, he closed his eyes.

A lurch frightened him awake. Talking skulls in death camps didn’t surround him, as he had dreamed, he realized. He sat in the car’s warmth, and his driver had slowed. “We’re there already?” He squinted out his window for some landmark through the drift and then understood why his chauffeur hadn’t responded. He heard ahead of them a roaring murderous chant of some kind that seemed to arch his driver’s back in fear when he braked two blocks short of the hotel.

A riot controller, uniformed in black, rapped his truncheon against the chauffeur’s window and dipped eye level. “Security zone!” he shouted. “No unauthorized vehicles permitted. Your papers!”

He grabbed the driver’s ID, aimed his flashlight on the page, and tossed it back after a moment, fixing his suspicion and light next on Stanislas’s face. “Yours.”

His nostrils blew vaporous puffs into the chill from his command, Cassel saw. An ALPHA 1 armband, a red lightning bolt slashed through the P, brandished his importance. ALPHA 1? The policeman shoved the ID back through the window’s slit, breaking his thought.

“Very well,” the riot controller said and pulled open the rear door. “Be careful, Monsieur Judge,” and he gestured up the street with his club.

A convoy of police vans had massed, Stanislas noticed, as a barricade nearly bumper-to-bumper in front of the Hotel Eden’s entrance further up on the left side of the avenue. On the sidewalk across from the Eden, two huge mobs, raging to kill, surged toward each other with police in the middle heaving them apart.

“Vi-va Fuchs! Vi-va Dray!” the crowd closer to him chanted.

“Down with Fuchs! Down with Dray!” the crowd further back on the sidewalk jeered.

“One nation! One blood!” the Fuchs and Dray supporters flung at them. “Europe for Europeans!”

“Liberty! Equality! Fraternity!” the masses confronting them yelled back.

The melee inflamed many into frenzy. They jumped over the crowd control barriers and into the boulevard, stirring the mist. Some police in the avenue pushed their hands against the fog, demanding they retreat onto the sidewalk. Others menaced clubs, whipping the mist into whirls. A riot could explode any second trampling him, Stanislas realized. He swung his bad leg forward as fast as he could toward the hotel, waving his invitation to a policeman ahead like a safe-conduct pass through a war zone. “Officer Frenay, you’re working this?” he shouted over some hecklers.

The officer shook hands. He began to respond, then stopped, and Stanislas followed his gaze to a limousine, whose driver bumped the Mercedes against the curb next to the Eden. A tuxedoed gentleman leaped from the rear seat. Ducking a rock, he rushed two gowned ladies under the striped awning as a tall, bald man in dark T-shirt in the Fuchs-Dray crowd jumped from the shadows. He lunged against three police to break across the avenue. As they shoved him back, the guests flung themselves through the hotel’s revolving doors into the lobby’s safety.

“Yes,” Officer Frenay answered at last. “Me and lots of other cops, thanks to Messieurs Dray and Fuchs. Word leaked out their thugs would protest this benefit, and unionists, teachers, and writers showed to demonstrate support.” The officer, a trim man with a mustache, stepped closer while he studied the crowds. “They’re vicious rowdies,” he shouted out of the side of his mouth. “Three weeks ago, seven hundred or so brawlers protested at a Tunisian fête. Last week at a reception for the Senegalese ambassador, about nine hundred toughs. Tonight, over one thousand, and we’re still counting. For this chic gala, we’re under orders from Monsieur Prime Minister himself: a demonstration of intent only on both sides so we going to clamp down at two.” He glanced at Stanislas, his forehead furrowed in concern. “Many soccer hooligans from Liverpool this time.”

More jeers erupted. He pressed his binoculars to his eyes and scanned the protestors across the street as he motioned to the mob closer to them. “The Brown Shirts there,” he explained. “Behind them, those guys with the Mohawks, the Eight-Eights”—he lowered his field glasses to look at Stanislas—“the eighth letter of the alphabet, H as in Heil Hitler. Fuchs’s scrappers. Nine busloads from lovely Vienna.”

Another policeman, peaked cap slouched forward from running, gripped a metal detector as he jogged up, sweating.

“Sorry,” Frenay said, “but everyone’s searched tonight. More orders from the highest level. The event’s too important for our country’s prestige to risk any incident.” He pressed his binoculars against his eyes. “That’s one of the few things the prime minister and president have agreed on lately.”

The other policeman roughed the detector front and back over Stanislas’s raincoat. “What’s this ALPHA 1?” he asked, raising his hands above his head.

The commotion grew louder. Distracted, Frenay didn’t respond, and Stanislas, noticing two suited men in front of them, didn’t pursue his curiosity. Wearing earpieces with wires protruding from collars, they marshaled field glasses toward the front of the Brown Shirts. With both hands the tall, bald man propped a pole on his left shoulder. Another Brown Shirt in shadows on the other side of him braced a second pole on his right shoulder. A huge banner of some kind, attached to the poles, roiled the mist from their zeal to launch.

The tall man screamed in rage, “One, two, three.” With one muscular heave, they launched the banner through the mist until it towered above the throngs. A woman sobbed joy into a reporter’s microphone. Another shrieked in ecstasy into a bullhorn, “Vi-va Dray!” A man grabbed it and ranted, “Vi-va Fuchs!” The Brown Shirts jerked the poles tautly. Two faces snapped flat above their admirers. A cannonade of cheers exploded. “Europe for Europeans!” A mass of dark fists spiked outwards in choreographed hate. Then more cheers and whistles of admiration. Fuchs and Dray grinned down in benediction.

“There’s a rumor they had planned to speak at Bercy Stadium next month in support of the police,” Frenay said. “And to celebrate Fuchs’s court victory. Next I heard it was cancelled due to scheduling conflicts. Now the rumor is they’ve moved their joint appearance to next year.”

“Who’s this Monsieur Fuchs?”

“Founder of Austria’s One People Party. A Viennese jury acquitted him days ago of a rape charge. There’s also a rumor he and Franz Streible—he started Germany’s National Unity Party—have slipped in and out of Paris several times this month. Who knows what those three are planning? We can pick up little that’s substantial about them.”

As he listened, Stanislas caught a bottle crinkle Fuchs’s canvas nose. Red dripped down onto the lips. Protestors from the other side whooped delight. “Fuchs’s assassinated!” a man roared through his bullhorn.

Frenay turned back to Stanislas, shaking his head. “Those unemployed skinheads mixed with high immigration, a demagogue’s favorite cocktail. And our nightmare. You’ll have to excuse me.” He shook Stanislas’s hand and trotted across the boulevard to investigate who had tossed the bottle.

Stanislas limped up the steps toward the Eden’s entrance. Halfway there, he heard the joyous roar of “Vi-va Fuchs!” again. For a second he recalled a war newsreel of his grandfather’s profile on a banner at a pro-German rally. Shame heated his face. This isn’t my fight, he thought. Without further reflection, he smacked hard on the revolving door’s glass panel and entered the lobby’s sanctuary.

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