Werewolf Murders Page 7

  “They did think you were nuts,” Janet said.

  “‘Nuts,’” Ron said. “That’s why we keep you around, for these keen scientific psychological insights.”

  “‘Nuts,’” Janet replied, “is the word that says it best. All of a sudden they go too polite to ask any questions.”

  Benedetti showed them a palm. “I rather hope the town does begin to buzz, as you put it, with talk of a werewolf. The word, by the way, young friend, is ‘loup-garou’ in French—listen for that among the mumblings you hear.”

  “Why, Maestro? Why set off a bombshell like that so early?”

  Benedetti grinned knowingly. “Because we have been handed the fuse and the match. The full moon, the nature of the attacks. It is all too tempting to resist. Romanescu has seen it and reacted with panic. You have seen it, and reacted with skepticism. As the canvas shows, I, too, had already seen it.”

  “And reacted with what?” Janet asked.

  “Humility,” Benedetti said. “Always with true humility—a respect for the variety of the universe and a knowledge of my own limitations.”

  The old man took out one of his crooked cigars and lit it. “It will be instructive,” he said, “to view the reactions of the others around us. One way to catch a pyromaniac is to study the crowd around the blaze for the smiling face.”

  “You have to let him set his fire before you do that,” Ron said.

  Benedetti took a puff, then took the cigar from his mouth. Smoke ran out through a frown. “This one is already lit,” he said. “I am taking the admittedly risky step of fanning the flames to make more light to see by. I count on you both to help assure Niccolo Benedetti doesn’t make a fool of himself.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “I am not joking, amico,” the old man said. He rose and walked to the window. He pulled the curtain aside. The moon was round and white over the Alps. “I no more believe in werewolves than you do,” he said. “Nevertheless, I see the sky and am uneasy.”

  Karen Tebner tried to read. Couldn’t. Tried to write a letter to her sister back in the States. Couldn’t. Tried to watch Knot’s Landing dubbed in French on TV. Impossible. She didn’t even like it in English.

  She threw herself down on the bed, then got up and paced the room. She went to her window and looked out. She couldn’t see the moon from where her room was in the building, but she could see the reflected glow of it from the snowcaps on the mountains in the distance. It was just too goddam picturesque for words.

  What she wanted was to be back in the States, away from France, away from Mont-St.-Denis and all the sights and sounds that reminded her of early-morning horror and burning corpses of nice old men.

  Of course, she didn’t dare leave. She was their second most important witness. And since, if rumor could be believed (and it was Karin’s experience that within the scientific community almost any rumor could be believed—all that training in accuracy paid off), the first most important witness had been hospitalized with a bad case of what Karin’s Aunt Mim would call the heebie-jeebies.

  Poor Dr. Romanescu. Karin supposed she was the only one at OSI who could even come close to imagining what was going through his brain. She felt shaky enough herself, and she had only seen the bloody aftermath of the first attack. Romanescu had actually felt his flesh being clawed. Karin shuddered.

  She had managed to convince herself, during the month that followed the first murder, that she’d shaken it off, that it was a horrible experience that wouldn’t affect her.

  She’d stopped running early in the morning, though. Since that first attack she either ran at midday, dodging incredulous and irritated Frenchmen, or she worked out at the gym at le Coq d’Argent, one of the fancier resorts in town. As an OSI scientist, she had guest privileges, but she still felt out of place working the rowing machine in her baggy flannels. There had never, Karin was sure, been a more elegant place for people to sweat. It just wasn’t right to exercise yourself to a frazzle, and wash it off by turning a solid silver handle in the shower.

  But she’d done it. If she thought about it at all, she considered it a reasonable precaution.

  The second murder had come, the Sûreté man. That was like killing an FBI agent.

  During the past month, Captain de Blois had questioned Karin probably nine or ten times. She’d grown to like him. He hadn’t come on hard and skeptical, like the cops of fiction. He just kept trying to get to the truth. He showed her a picture of his family, a plump and pretty dark-haired wife and two robust little boys. He said he showed that photo to everyone he questioned, just to remind them that cops were human, too.

  But since his murder yesterday she hadn’t been thinking of de Blois as a husband or a father or even as a human being. She’d thought of him as the personified might and authority of the country she found herself living in.

  And if this authority and might could get its throat torn out in the supposed sanctuary of police headquarters, then who was safe?

  Especially the only currently functioning witness to the case.

  Karin realized she had gotten worked up into a case of the shivers. She willed herself to stop. She had just about succeeded when there was a knock on her door.

  Karin jumped so hard she was breathless. The knock came again.

  “Mademoiselle Doctor Tebner?” A man’s voice, low and slightly rough.

  “Who’s there?” Karin demanded.

  “My name is Samuel Marx, Mademoiselle Doctor. I am a captain of the Sûreté. I have replaced Captain de Blois.”

  “I don’t know you,” she said. “Why didn’t the desk clerk ring me on the house phone and announce you?”

  The voice sounded amused. “Policemen discourage that practice. We are usually visiting less savory characters. The clerk is old, sly, and experienced. I did not request he refrain from ringing you, but I suppose he assumed that was what I wanted.”

  “What do you want?”

  “To ask you some questions. I have only arrived today. Not, perhaps, with the fanfare of the great Professor Benedetti, but here to do my job just the same. It is time now for me to speak to you.”

  “Okay,” Karin said. “But we’re going to do this the New York way.”

  “The New York way?”

  “I lived there for awhile. I take it you have credentials.”

  “Excellent ones.”

  “Good. Put them on the floor near the door, right near the crack.” She waited a second. “Have you done it?”

  “I am exercising great patience, Mademoiselle Doctor.”

  “Okay. Walk down the hall. The door is on a chain bolt. I’m going to examine the credentials. If you’re anywhere near, I’ll just slam the door until you come back with someone I do know.”

  “I had heard life in New York had deteriorated, but this is truly sad.”

  “Just do it,” she said.

  Karin listened for footsteps walking away. In the meantime, she grabbed the champagne bottle she’d been saving as a souvenir of the opening ceremonies. She held it like a club. It was thick, heavy glass. You could probably hammer a nail with it.

  She opened the door a crack, saw a leather card case, snatched it, and pulled her hand inside. She relocked the door and had a look. Photo ID, papers, it all looked pretty official to her. Still, what did she know about French credentials?

  “Is everything in order?” the voice asked from outside.

  “Just wait a minute,” Karin told him. She picked up the phone and called police headquarters. After a month of scheduling appointments for questioning there, she had the number memorized.

  She was lucky enough to reach the prefect, Diderot, who had apparently stopped in at the station on his way home from the hospital.

  The prefect wished her a pleasant evening and inquired after her health. She said she was fine, although she wouldn’t have sworn to that under oath. She said that someone claiming to be a Captain Samuel Marx of the Sûreté was outside her door. He had credentials. She read him
the identification number. Should she let him in?

  “By all means,” the prefect told her. “How long have you kept him waiting?”

  “About ten minutes so far,” Karin said.

  She could have sworn Diderot chuckled at the other end. “Please, don’t ring off until after you let him in. Just to make sure the man is as genuine as the credentials, I will speak to him myself to see if I recognize his voice.”

  “You’re making fun of me,” Karin said.

  “I assure you, Dr. Tebner, I am not. There is nothing about this situation that is fun. If he does anything suspicious when you open the door, scream. I will hear and get you help.”

  Karin was less than reassured, but she went and opened the door.

  The man who stood there was short and dark, ugly-handsome in a French movie-star kind of way. His suit was suitably rumpled and a cigarette dangled from his lip.

  He showed her a crooked smile. “I would show you my credentials, but I no longer have them,” he said.

  “On the bed,” Karin said. “Next to the phone. The prefect wants to talk to you.”

  “To me?” He shrugged, then walked over and picked up the phone. “No, no. I understand her, Diderot. It is your amusement I do not understand. Perhaps they will understand in Paris, when I make my report. Yes, I will confer with you in the morning.”

  Marx handed the phone back to Karin. Diderot vouched for her visitor, and that was that. It wasn’t until she hung up the phone that she realized Marx had been talking English for her benefit.

  “I’m sorry—” she began.

  “Do not mention it, Mademoiselle Doctor. I am glad to see someone in this town taking this situation as seriously as it deserves to be taken.”

  “You don’t think people are taking this seriously?”

  Again, the shrug and half-smile. “I have been here only briefly, so perhaps I am wrong. Still, I get the idea that the locals believe it is something you scientists brought with you, and the scientists treat it as something designed to add spice to their stay.”

  Karin shuddered. “You can’t be right.”

  Marx crushed out his cigarette in his fingers and looked around for an ashtray. Karin found him one, and asked him to sit down. He took a chair; Karin sat on the edge of the bed.

  “Time will tell, mademoiselle. You may judge for yourself, of course. Just keep what I have said in mind as you mingle with your colleagues.”

  Marx lit a new cigarette. “And that, Mademoiselle Doctor, is why I am here.”

  “Try calling me Karin,” she suggested. “Mademoiselle Doctor is too much of a mouthful.”

  That earned her a whole smile. “Très bien. Karin it shall be. I have come, Karin, to ask you to accompany me to the observatory. I wish to talk to your colleagues, to see the place where Dr. Goetz has done his work. To get, how is it said, a feel for the situation. I have much catching up to do.”

  “No one is there tonight,” Karin pointed out. “Not in our section.”

  “I understand. But had Goetz no interaction with those in other sections?”

  “Oh, of course. Just to drink coffee together, if nothing else.”

  “Then I wish to speak to them. Your presence will help me.”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “I have been given to understand that with Dr. Goetz dead and Dr. Romanescu hospitalized and incoherent—and believe me, as one who has just come from several hours of trying to talk to him, he is incoherent—then you are senior member of your section, and will direct the study of this special star of yours.”

  “My God,” Karin said.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “No,” Karin said. Yes, she thought. Plenty was wrong. She was amazed at herself for not having realized that she’d be in charge now. Not that there was much of a section left to run—just her, a promising young Zimbabwean named Boza, and a couple of technicians. She was also appalled at herself for the unkillable tickle of delight that ran through her at the knowledge that the OSI study of the supernova would be directed by her. And she was afraid of what Marx and his colleagues might be implying from the fact. Had anyone ever committed murder over something that happened millions of years ago in another galaxy?

  “Of course,” Marx was saying when she tuned back in, “if you already have plans for the evening...”

  “No, no. I was just...hanging out.”

  Again the crooked smile. “I am a poor excuse for a Frenchman, no? I find a lovely woman alone on a beautiful moonlit evening, and what do I do? I take her to work. My apologies.”

  Karin smiled in spite of herself. She knew she was being manipulated, that he was trying to put her at ease, but she didn’t mind. She was glad he was making the effort.

  “Just let me get my jacket,” she said.

  Marx drove a small Citroën, a totally middle-class car. It surprised her. She had expected a movie-starrish sports car with a canvas snap-up roof. He drove her across town to the base of the cable car that would take them up the mountain to the observatory.

  Marx knocked on the door of the attendant’s shed. They waited a long minute before a blowsy middle-aged woman came out grumbling something about why couldn’t people wait until the end of Knot’s Landing. That’s what Marx told Karin she said, anyway.

  Karin and the Sûreté man climbed aboard a red-and-white cable car about half the size of a school bus. They had the place to themselves.

  “Better sit down,” Karin said.

  Marx shrugged and sat. There was a scraping, then a jolt, and the front of the cable car swung upward. Marx started, grabbing his seat.

  “Does that every time,” Karin explained. “Scares me to death. I should have warned you. I wonder why someone who hates these things as much as I do picked a job that always takes me to the tops of mountains.”

  “When you face your fear, you defeat it,” Marx said.

  “Defeat it, maybe, but it keeps coming back for more.”

  “Tell me about Herr Professor Doctor Hans Goetz,” Marx said.

  It took about twenty minutes for the cable car to reach the observatory. Karin spent the first half of it talking about Goetz and the rest of her colleagues.

  “There was no jealousy? No animosity?”

  Karin shook her head. “In our section, we all loved him. The three of us. He was a legend, but he was so kind. He helped me a lot; he went out of his way to ease Dr. Romanescu back into harness—the poor man had been away so long. He told Dr. Boza he’d wind up being the first great African astronomer since the ancient days.”

  “Yet he was the one whose name will be permanently written in the sky. No jealousy there?”

  “Oh,” Karin said. “Well, maybe. Of course, I’d like to have my name written in the sky. I like that phrase, by the way.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But it’s already there. Once Dr. Goetz reported his sighting, it was his, you see. Nobody could do anything to change it. And anyway, what about the attack on Dr. Romanescu? Or the murder of Captain de Blois?”

  “I do not know what about them. I can only proceed as I have been taught to proceed. There is no need to be defensive. Now what about the other sections, practicing other forms of astronomy?”

  “No jealousy. They think we eyeball astronomers are rather quaint. Ted Llewellyn—he’s a Welsh radioastronomer—calls us ‘Thomases.’”

  “Thomases?”

  “We won’t believe unless we see.”

  Suddenly, the car cleared the shadow of the next mountain, and there was the moon, looming over the valleys of the French Alps. It looked enormous, like a silver balloon Karin could catch, if she’d just lower the window.

  Just looking at it, she went cold. Captain Marx, too, seemed to be looking at her coldly, and he too had fallen silent.

  Images flashed across Karin’s mind. Hands on her throat. The door of the cable car slid open, her unconscious body thrown to the rocks below. A trip back for the man with the cigarette in his mouth, and an attac
k on the fat woman who ran the cable car. And she could be gone and no one would know, not even the desk clerk at the hotel, because they’d left down the back stairs to have a shorter walk to Marx’s car.

  A policeman, Karin thought. A policeman had the best chance to be the killer and get away with it. And she’d be dead and broken on the rocks below—

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Marx said gently, and Karin nearly jumped out of her skin.

  “What is?”

  “The moon. So lovely. How typical of people, to think such a beautiful thing could have evil power.”

  “I—I’ve never thought about it.”

  Again, the shrug. “Ah, well, it is not good for a policeman to be too philosophical, eh? But here we are. Does this thing behave as obnoxiously arriving as it does departing?” He suddenly looked concerned. “Mademois—I mean Karin. Is everything all right? You look ill.”

  As the cable car ground to a stop, Karin cursed herself for a hyperimaginative idiot. “No, I’m fine,” she said. She gave Marx a mental apology.

  The visit to the observatory was anticlimactic, after her vaporings on the way up. She introduced Marx around, then sat in Dr. Goetz’s office—soon to be hers, she supposed—and worked up a schedule for herself and Boza, and the others.

  On the way back down the mountain, Marx asked her if she would care to join him in a glass of wine. Karin was tired, but she figured she owed it to him to accept. He took her to a dark little bistro, where a piano player sang sad songs in that quavery way French singers have. They talked about things that had nothing to do with crime. Karin looked in Marx’s sad, dark eyes, always behind their curtain of cigarette smoke, and wondered about the power of the moon.

  11

  LEVESQUE ROSE EARLY AND went to the office wing of the château. He walked into the fax room, to the machine with the extra wide carriage, and took a look at the headlines from around the world.

  Since de Blois’s body had been discovered, Levesque had had the public relations staffs at each office of the baron’s enterprises around the world on twenty-four-hour duty, with the most pressure, of course, falling on the people in Paris. That was where the media was. That was where the baron’s major competition was.