Werewolf Murders Page 3

  The customs man smiled graciously. “Merci beaucoup, Monsieur Gentry.” He pronounced it “zhahn-TREE.” “Here is your passport. It remains now only for you to hand me your gun.”

  “My what?” Ron asked.

  “Your gun. Your pistol. Automatique.” Still smiling, the customs man made a gun with thumb and forefinger, raised it to his eye and said, “Bang bang bang, no?”

  “No,” Ron said.

  The customs man shrugged. “Pow pow, if you insist. But I am afraid I must insist on confiscating your weapon. The firearms laws of la République du France are strict in the extreme, monsieur. You shall be given a receipt, and may retrieve the gun when you leave the country.”

  “I don’t have a gun,” Ron said.

  “Monsieur Gentry, I know you are here at the request of a man of high importance, but my duty remains, and I will do it. Please do not play with me the games.”

  Ron turned to the Professor for help—maybe this guy would make more sense in his native language with the old man translating—but Benedetti was busy charming the pants (maybe literally) off a dark-haired female customs guard. She was forty-six or forty-seven years old, the Professor’s favorite target group, and she was blushing and smiling shyly as a teenager. Ron had to admit that the woman’s face was lovely, and the uniform didn’t hide a shape that was interesting, if a little too generous by current fashion.

  Benedetti once told Ron, “It is one of the madnesses of the modern age that just at the age when a woman is truly a woman and no longer in any way a girl, she is often cast aside because of flaws that are merely cosmetic. This is as foolish as refusing to drink a vintage wine because there is some dust on the bottle.”

  Ron knew it was useless to try to distract the Professor when he was sniffing the cork, as it were, so he turned to his wife for help. Janet’s eyes were squinched up behind her glasses. Ron recognized that sign. His beloved was finding his current difficulties absolutely hysterical. If she opened her mouth at all, it would be to laugh.

  So he was on his own. He turned back to the customs guard.

  “I’m not playing any games. I don’t have a gun. I’ve never had a gun. I’ve never even fired a gun.”

  The customs guard made a sound something like “psssssssh.” “Mon dieu,” he said. “You are an American private investigateur, are you not?”

  “Yes. It says so right on my passport.”

  “And you expect me to believe you do not carry a gun? Sam Spade? Phillipe Marlowe? Spen-sair? Whom do you think to kid, eh?”

  Ron was just beginning to wish he did have a gun, so he could put a bullet between this guy’s eyes and shut him up, when he saw an angry-looking Paul Levesque making his way through the crowd.

  “Madame Gentry,” he said. “Mr. Gentry. Professor Benedetti. What seems to be the trouble?”

  The Professor smiled. “No trouble at all,” he said. “I have been learning anew why Frenchmen are the envy of the world.” The woman’s blush deepened to crimson. Ron thought, why couldn’t I have gotten in her line, instead of this addict of American mysteries? Not that Ron blamed him for that. Ron Gentry had been hooked on mysteries and detective stories since he’d first come across Dick Tracy in the Sunday comics. All he’d ever wanted to be was a policeman, but his genes let him down by giving him a pair of eyes so myopic he needed glasses to figure out which wall the eye chart was hung on.

  He had decided on law as the next best thing. At least, that’s what he’d told his parents. His real idea had been to get a job with a detective agency to help pay his way through school, then, by the time he was done, he’d have enough experience to qualify for a PI license of his own.

  The plan lasted until senior year, when Professor Niccolo Benedetti had spent a semester teaching at Sparta University. Ron was walking down the hall, minding his own business, when a strong hand grabbed him by the arm, and a loud voice proclaimed, “You!”

  “Me?” Ron said.

  “You,” the old man said. “You have the look.”

  Ron probably would have alerted campus security to a nut running around loose, if he hadn’t recognized Benedetti as the man who consulted with governments and caught supposedly uncatchable criminals around the world. He was tall, almost as tall as Ron, and might have looked taller if his posture had been better. His body was massive, yet still angular, as though some modern sculptor had welded a few I-beams together at more or less random angles, then draped the whole thing with gray tweed. The head, above a spotted blue bow tie, looked small on top of that body. His gray-black hair was slicked back from a high, sloping forehead. He grinned like a cat. And his greenish eyes were eager to see anything the universe had to show.

  Benedetti had been looking for a new “disciple.” That was the precise word he used. From time to time, he would take a young man to assist him, and teach the young man what he’d learned over the years. Ron was the sixth and, Benedetti frequently said, the most remarkable.

  “The sort of knowledge with which I deal is powerful, as are its temptations. Two of my previous students are millionaires, two are in jail, one is virtual dictator of a Caribbean island. You alone have taken my teaching and made it your servant instead of your master.”

  Ron wondered about that. If not for Benedetti’s teaching, he would undoubtedly be back in Sparta, New York, serving subpoenas and looking for bail jumpers, instead of arguing with French customs agents about nonexistent guns.

  “I’m the one with the problem,” Ron said.

  Levesque turned to the man in uniform. “What is the trouble?”

  “I do not wish to offend you, Monsieur Levesque, or the baron, but the gentleman will not surrender his gun.”

  “I don’t have a gun!”

  Levesque showed Ron a palm and nodded reassuringly. “Have you not seen his papers?”

  “His passport is in his hand. I have just returned it to him.”

  “What of the other papers?”

  “Other papers?”

  Ron reached into his pocket and produced an envelope. “I was just going to show him when he started asking for the gun. Which I don’t have.” He handed them over.

  The customs agent read them, moving his lips.

  Levesque didn’t wait for him to finish. “All right, then? This man is ambassador extraordinary from the government of the United States. He could have a cannon concealed about him, and it would be out of your jurisdiction.”

  Diplomatic credentials. Something else the Professor had insisted on before taking the case. “If we do this at the government’s behest,” he’d told Pecson, “we must have government standing.” At the time, Ron had thought the old man was simply giving the diplomat a hard time. Now he wondered if he’d seen this situation coming.

  The customs man swallowed, folded up the credentials, and returned them to the envelope, which he passed back to Ron.

  “My apologies, monsieur. Welcome to France. You may, of course, keep your gun.”

  Ron opened his mouth, then decided it wasn’t worth it. He passed through the barrier. Levesque snapped his fingers, and two men stepped forward to collect luggage. They made their way through the airport to where transportation to Mont-St.-Denis awaited them.

  5

  THE TRANSPORTATION TURNED OUT to be a helicopter. Janet Higgins Gentry didn’t care for flying under the best of circumstances, and there was no way she could fit the idea of a helicopter into her conception of “the best of circumstances.”

  “I was expecting a limousine or something,” Janet said.

  “We’re traveling three quarters the length of France,” her husband told her.

  “And driving is so slow in the mountains,” Levesque added. “The baron is happy to find a use for his machine.”

  “Don’t want to disappoint the baron,” Ron said blandly. Janet looked at him, saw the twinkle in his eye, and realized he was paying her back for laughing at his difficulties in customs. She supposed she deserved it.

  She squared up her sh
oulders, took a deep breath, and climbed aboard. It could have been worse. It could have been one of those bubble things with a little piece of oil-well stuck to the back. If she had to ride in a helicopter, it was just as well it turned out to be something like this. This thing, painted a pale blue with the word BENAC in gold below a gold fleur-de-lis on the door, was as big as four limousines. Inside, the blue and gold continued with a deep-pile light blue carpet on the floor, and a royal blue fabric on the wall. Shiny gold curtains shaded the windows. The chairs were blue leather with gold-finish metallic trim. Even the seat belts were blue with gold buckles.

  Janet sat down and strapped herself in. She closed her eyes for a second, bracing herself.

  “Would you care for a refreshment?” a voice said.

  Janet opened her eyes to see young woman in a blue-and-gold uniform. She looked like somebody’s executive secretary, and here she was taking drink orders. Janet declined with thanks, then watched as the attendant asked the men what they would have.

  Ron asked where the helicopter had come from. Levesque explained that the baron had bought it from the French army, slightly damaged from the unpleasantness France had had with Libya in 1984.

  “Fixed it up a little, I suppose,” Ron said.

  “Of course,” Levesque said.

  Ron nodded. “I hope so,” he said, “because if this had been the way the French army rides into combat, I was going to join up.”

  Janet smiled. The thing she loved the most about her husband was that he could always make her smile.

  She looked around at the helicopter again—she couldn’t stop thinking of it as a mink-lined death trap—and reflected that she’d come a long way from Little Rock.

  Janet frequently found herself analyzing herself. She couldn’t decide whether it was a sign of vanity (was she so endlessly fascinating she could fill the hours in serene self-contemplation?) or a sign of insecurity (she’d better be interested in herself, because nobody else would be). The latter alternative was pre-Ron, of course. He had come along—handsome, blond, exciting—and shown instantly (to Janet, miraculously) that he was interested in her. He still showed it, every day, and Janet felt lucky for it. She supposed that was a good way for a married woman to feel, as long as she didn’t feel she didn’t deserve the luck—

  And there she went again. Janet smiled. It was a habit, that was all, an occupational hazard. She doubted anybody would want to study the workings of other people’s minds if they found their own uninteresting.

  The only thing Janet didn’t allow herself to wonder about was introspection itself. She had a vague fear that it would be like wandering into an M.C. Escher engraving, going down a never-ending staircase thinking about thinking about thinking about thinking....

  The stewardess came back to fill drink orders. Her arrival startled Janet.

  This is good, she thought. This is working. She’d almost forgotten she was dangling from an eggbeater God knew how many miles over France.

  More introspection seemed to be in order. Something with a little body to it.

  Like why it was she enjoyed crime work so much more than anything else she’d ever done. She liked it more than teaching, more than private practice, more even than making beautiful music on the piano or flute or guitar.

  Well, she knew why she liked it better than performing. She’d been forced to perform. She was a shy little girl, always tall for her age, and gawky, with thick glasses and braces on her teeth, and she hated the idea of being seen in public. Her parents had assured her that she was a perfectly fine-looking child, and besides, nobody cared about that—they just wanted to hear the music. All of which was probably true. Still, as much as she loved music, Janet stopped performing as soon as she could make it stick. She even made it a point to go to college in the north. She’d figured that since most of her concerts had been in the South and Southwest, she’d be much less likely to run into anyone who’d heard her play.

  But what was the fascination that crime held for her? It was true that she liked to work with her husband, but that was only part of it. Janet had already become a consultant to the police back in Sparta before she’d ever met Ron.

  There had been a time when she had tried to sell herself on the notion of being Useful to Society, but that wouldn’t wash, either. The more Janet studied people, the more firmly she was convinced that there was no such thing as Society. There were just individuals making choices.

  She decided it had to be an ego thing. Criminals, no matter how small-time, no matter how frequently they went to jail, were invincible egotists. There was the occasional Jean Valjean in real life, who stole because there was no other way to feed his family, but they were damned rare. Mostly, people stole and beat and killed out of an overweening sense that they had the right to whatever they wanted, to the gratification of every whim.

  In idle moments, she thought of saying that to Benedetti, and ending his study into human evil right there. It probably wouldn’t—the Professor probably had a dozen reasons why things were far more subtle.

  That didn’t matter. What it came down to was that these swine, too lazy or stupid or just plain mean to support themselves without victimizing others, were simply swimming in self-confidence, something Janet knew she lacked. Every time she helped the police or the Professor put one of them away, it seemed to even the balance a little. It helped her feel that the meek really might inherit the earth. The earth, by now, had broken out in a bad case of Alps. Janet felt her shoulders pushed deep into the blue upholstery as the helicopter climbed higher and higher.

  Something was niggling at her consciousness.

  “Ron,” she said. “The engine.”

  “What about it?”

  “It sounds different. Faster. Higher-pitched.”

  “Uh-huh,” her husband said. “Want me to tell you why?” Ever since the day he had spoiled her lunch for her by reading her a piece from Discover magazine that described microscopic insects that live in the eyelashes of apparently everyone on earth (“including us, I suppose”) and survive by eating dead skin, “Want me to tell you?” had been a running joke between them.

  “If it’s because of insects, I want a divorce,” she said.

  “Thinner air in the mountains,” Ron said. “The engine has to work that much harder to keep us the same distance above the ground.”

  “Wonderful,” she said. “I’m so glad I asked.”

  Fortunately, she didn’t have too much time to worry. In a couple of minutes, Levesque said, “We are here,” and the helicopter dropped gently through the air, thin as it was, and put them down safely outside the baron’s château. It. had already been decided that they would dine with the baron later, but that now the Professor preferred to get immediately to work. Janet would have liked a nap and a little bit of bourbon, now that the helicopter had stopped moving, but the old man was the boss.

  The doors of the machine swung open, and there, at last, was the limousine Janet had been expecting back in Paris. She didn’t even get a chance to look over the baron’s place—that was just a brick blur in the distance.

  Now, like a good little elf, off to work she went.

  6

  DIDEROT LOOKED AT THE faces of his audience to see if they still followed him. He had no complaints on that score. Gentry, the young American, was interested, but bland, like a man hearing a mildly diverting tale over a glass of wine at a bistro. The woman, Dr. Higgins, who Diderot estimated was one and three-quarters meters tall, most of which was shapely leg, and had to be one of the most spectacular women ever to pass through this place, wore a kind and encouraging expression, and nodded agreeably whenever Diderot made a point. Diderot understood she was the wife of this Gentry, but had not taken his name; who could understand Americans? He hoped Gentry knew he was a lucky man. Diderot himself recognized that his own good fortune in a wife had kept him out of many troubles over the years.

  Captain Samuel Marx of the Sûreté, who had arrived just a few minutes before t
he Americans, was listening as though he were a worried student, and the final examination in this material would follow immediately. As in a sense, it would. Marx was the replacement for the late Captain de Blois. He was short and dark and thin. He needed a shave, and puffed away continuously on English Oval “A’s.” He was not only an Alsatian, but a Jew. Diderot had nothing against Jews; there were people in the town who were not so enlightened. He would have to make sure his temporary colleague suffered no embarrassment. Diderot suppressed a sigh. It wasn’t the fact that the man was a Jew that bothered him, it was that he was an Alsatian. They had agreed to speak English, in deference to Benedetti’s assistant, who was not sure of his French. Diderot was just as glad. It meant he wouldn’t have to listen to Marx’s accent, which had always struck the prefect as absolutely comical, even when saying things sour and sarcastic, as Marx so frequently did. The only thing worse would have been if he’d had to listen to a Belgian trying to speak French.

  “...So much then,” Diderot said, “for the background. Now for the crimes themselves.”

  Diderot cleared his throat and opened the folder of notes he’d prepared. “Three weeks and six days ago, early in the morning of the second of June, Constable Ratelle, with whom you may talk if you wish...?” He looked at Benedetti.

  There had never been any doubt about Professor Niccolo Benedetti’s listening as Diderot spoke. The old man watched with the air of a schoolmaster listening to a none-too-bright student reciting a familiar poem, expecting that the only surprises in store would be mistakes. It was unnerving.

  “Later, perhaps,” Benedetti said.

  If Diderot had had any hopes of being able to step out of the spotlight, that ended them. So be it. If they thought him insane when he had said all he had to say, it couldn’t be helped.

  “As you wish, Professor,” Diderot said. “Ratelle was on duty here at the prefecture when a man staggered through the doors.”