Besides, he said, he truly believed then, as now, in the importance of order to society, Occupation or no Occupation. His job, as he saw it, was no different than it had been before: the maintenance of civil order, the protection of ordinary citizens, and the apprehension of the criminals who preyed on them.

  “But—” I hesitated, afraid of getting out of my depth again, then went ahead anyway. “But you were taking orders from the German military. Didn’t they ever—”

  There was a gush of smoke from his nostrils. “I was not taking orders from the German military,” he said, the first time I’d heard anything like harshness in his voice. “The police here were not like the police in Vichy or in Paris, out-Nazi-ing the damned Nazis themselves. What went on at the higher levels I don’t know, but it wasn’t us they got to help them with their dirty work.” His mouth had set. “I took no orders from those bastards. I made things difficult for them every way I could.”

  “I see,” I said, surprised (I suppose I shouldn’t have been) and a little intimidated by his intensity. “I’m sorry, all I—”

  “Let me get to my point, damn it.”

  Yes, sir, I thought.

  He took a breath to restore his calm. “Before the war, you see, I might see my friend the optician on the street and say, ‘Good morning, Henri, how are you today? Have you heard from your nephew Bernard lately?’ and we’d have a pleasant chat and go our ways, and that was that.”

  Road barriers swung down at the edge of the square, bells clanged, and an express roared through town, drowning out conversation for a few seconds, and then was gone in a swirl of dust almost as soon as it came. The barriers swung up, the bells stopped clanging.

  “But in the Occupation it was no longer that way,” Juneaux went on, looking straight ahead as we walked. “‘Have you heard from your nephew Bernard lately?’ I would say—the same casual question, no different from before—but for my friend Henri everything was changed. Was I just being friendly, or was there something more to it? Was Bernard perhaps suspected of being a resister and was I, as a policeman, trying to worm information out of him? Was I perhaps after all in the service of the Nazis? Was this a prelude to an interrogation? Or possibly I was giving him a veiled, friendly warning of an arrest to come and suggesting that Bernard disappear for a while? What did my inquiry mean? There was no such thing as a casual question between neighbors any more. You could never be sure of what might result from your answer, of who might be tortured, or sent away, or killed.”

  “I’m beginning to understand,” I said.

  “Are you?” He flung the stub of his cigarette angrily onto the cobblestones and ground it out with his heel. His nostrils were flaring. This was a Juneaux I hadn’t seen before. “I was brought before Donnadieu’s tribunal too, I suppose you didn’t know that.”

  “You?” I said, stunned.

  “On September 8, three days before Vercier’s trial.” His head was down so that he was speaking into his chest. We had gradually been slowing down and now he brought us to a halt altogether. Not knowing what to say, I just shut up.

  “Things had gotten more complicated for me too, you see. In 1942 I had arrested a man in a drunken brawl who, as it turned out, happened also to be a maquis leader. After he was jailed and sent to Paris, the Germans came for him. He died in their hands. At the end of the war I was accused of collusion and arrested by the FTP.”

  Jesus Christ, did this stuff just go on and on, tendrils within tendrils? “What … what happened?”

  “Oh, Donnadieu threw the case out,” he said as we began walking again. “Several Resistance officers came forward to testify to the things I’d done for them. It was over in an hour, but not everybody accepted the result. There are still people in Veaudry who feel about me the way they do about Marcel Vercier or Armand Chastenet.”

  “Look, I’m sorry I—”

  His hand rested briefly on my shoulder. “No, it’s for me to apologize. I have no reason to angry with you. Enough of ancient history.” His face lightened. “Here we are. Let’s go in and get that coffee.”

  “Boy, am I ready,” I said, and then stopped when I saw where we were. “The Brasserie Metropole?” I exclaimed. “That’s where you want to have coffee?”

  “Oh,” he said, looking at me with round, innocent eyes. “You’ve heard of it?” And then he couldn’t quite choke back a nasal, jolly whicker of laughter.

  I told you he had an offbeat sense of humor.

  Chapter 15

  He wasn’t being morbid (he said); it was only that he thought that coming there might jog my memory. And it did. It took about two minutes.

  We had just been served. Juneaux had ordered café complet—coffee, rolls, croissants; the same thing he’d had at the hospital. I had asked for café au lait, nothing else. The waiter wasn’t the one who’d been there yesterday. We were seated at a table along the wall, about ten feet from where I’d sat before, from where Chastenet had bled and died and I had bled but not died. There was no sign of any of that now. The entire place was sleek and gleaming, and the smell of floor wax was doing battle with the aroma of coffee and cinnamon. The linoleum shone, the walls had no ugly spatters or bullet holes that I could see (and I was looking hard), and a fresh, thick table cloth covered the table that he and I had sat at. (Juneaux had blithely suggested that we sit there, but that was a little more than I was ready for.) No one else was sitting at it either. For the time being, at least, it seemed to be a shrine.

  I tried not to notice the people at other tables who were staring at me, although I couldn’t help overhearing one whispered exchange between two women as we sat down.

  “But you said he was killed!” The speaker was aggrieved.

  “He was,” said the other defensively. “At least I thought he was. He should have been. He bled like a stabbed pig. I’m amazed he has any blood left at all.”

  The eyes of most of the customers however—and there were significantly more customers than there’d been yesterday—kept drifting hungrily to the empty table. So did mine. And when they did for the third time or so, I sat up with a jerk.

  “I saw his face,” I murmured.

  Juneaux looked up from the croissant he was tearing apart. “What?”

  “I saw his face! I completely forgot! Damn!”

  “But … Are you sure? Everyone agrees he kept his face hidden. A hat, a woolen muffler—everyone says it was imp—”

  “Yes, but when I was rolling around on the table and he was trying to brain me with his gun—did I tell you about that?—I got hold of the muffler without meaning to and pulled it away for a second. I was looking right into his face.”

  “Can you describe him? Would you recognize him?” The croissant, half in each hand, was forgotten.

  “Well, I was seeing him upside down, and I was scrambling around trying to get out of reach, but … yes, I might.” In fact, in my mind was a surprisingly clear picture of his face: squat features, squashed nose, mean little eyes. How could I have forgotten so completely about it?

  “He was ugly,” I said.

  Juneaux threw back his head and laughed. For a cop on a murder investigation it seemed to me he did a lot of laughing and chuckling, not that it didn’t have a certain charm. “Ah, well, that narrows it down enormously,” he said. “After all, how many ugly people are there in France?”

  “All right, he looked like a toad.”

  “A toad.”

  “Wide mouth, wide-set nostrils, low forehead, not too tall. Sort of a flat face … I don’t know. Like a toad.

  He went back to his croissant, tearing it thoughtfully into quarters. Flakes fell onto the white tablecloth. “We’ll get some photos for you to look at. It may take a day or two. You’ll be here a while?”

  “Uh, actually, I wanted to talk to you about that. I’d really like to go back to Barcelona; today if I can, but if you really need me—”

  “No, don’t concern yourself, just make sure I know where I can get hold of you there. And afterward as well. Are you sure you’re up to traveling today?”

  “Oh, I think so,” I said. “If I take it easy. Boy, I’m glad I remembered about him. It’s really a relief.”

  His eyebrows went up. “Ah?”

  “Well, sure. Now I understand why he was trying to kill me. I saw his face, that’s all.”

  “And that’s a relief?”

  “Of course it is. You almost had me thinking there might something deeper to it. But it was just an accident. He was just upset that I’d seen what he looked like, nothing more.”

  “I suppose that’s one way of looking at it,” Juneaux said.

  I looked up from my oversized cup; I’d been bathing my face in the aromatic steam. “And what’s the other way? Or don’t I want to know?”

  “The other way of looking at it is that, if what you say is correct, he is no doubt still upset. And we know he’s still at large. That doesn’t sound like much of a relief to me.”

  “Thank you for pointing that out,” I said crossly.

  “On the other hand, I could be wrong. I’m often wrong.”

  I laughed. “That’s reassuring, I think.” I got out my vial of codeine pills, shook one out and downed it, and followed with a slug of coffee. “Inspector, do you have any suggestions about what I ought to do?”

  “For the moment I think that being somewhere else might be a good idea. Barcelona sounds like a fine choice. And Mr. Simon? Perhaps it would be best not to mention it to anyone else.”

  * * *

  The next morning, for the second time in four days, I climbed the stairway of the Galeria Metropolitana. The steps were as dim and dusty as before, but big changes had been made in the showroom: no more half-opened packing crates or litter. The slate floor was clean and inviting, with beautifully lit coins, silver ornaments, and old jewelry displayed in head-high, glass-fronted cabinets that covered three walls. The place looked downright classy. Maybe Holiday magazine had had it right after all.

  Mrs. Aguilar, however, was busy and distracted. “If you’re here to see Mr. Lebrun, I’m afraid he has a client in with him at the moment.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  “As you like.”

  She returned her attention to the sheet of paper in her typewriter.

  “Mrs. Aguilar?”

  She glanced up, eyebrows arched, fingers poised on the keys.

  I kept my voice down. “I’d like to thank you for your help.”

  “You’re completely welcome, Mr. Simon. It’s been my pleasure.”

  “I mean the note—you know? The note in my pocket. It was very helpful. I’ve just come from Veaudry.”

  She frowned at me and threw a cautious glance at her boss’s closed door. I was only making her nervous. After all, if she had wanted me to know who the note was from she would have signed it. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to say anything about it to Mr. Lebrun,” I said. “I just wanted you to know how much I appreciate it.”

  “I … that’s quite all right, Mr. Simon.” She resumed her typing.

  Behind me I heard the door to Lebrun’s office open, and then a flood of animated conversation in German. When I turned I saw Lebrun standing in the doorway, all smiles and proprietorial good cheer, nattering glibly away with a distinguished-looking, well-turned-out older man with a perfectly blocked homburg in one hand and a beautiful, camel’s-hair-collared topcoat over his forearm. A diplomat, I thought.

  Lebrun saw me and actually looked happy about it. “Mr. Simon,” he chirped in French as I stood up, “how nice to see you again.” Then something in German to the older man. I heard my name and “Amerikanischer.” Then back to French for my benefit: “Allow me to introduce Herr von Feuerbach,” he said with great formality and a certain pride. I gathered I was seeing Charles Lebrun in action, “buttering up” a client. “Herr von Feuerbach has a most important post with the German embassy in Madrid.”

  How about that, I’d actually figured out what the guy did for a living—working from mere surface appearances. Amazing. Louis would have been thrilled.

  “Wie geht es Ihnen, Herr von Feuerbach?” I said, pretty much exhausting my German.

  “How do you do?” he replied in silky-smooth English as we shook hands. “Perhaps I should point out that Mr. Lebrun is referring to the East German embassy, the GDR.”

  I didn’t know what he was expecting me to say to that, so I said “Ah” and looked wise.

  Lebrun cut in, addressing me. “If you’d care to take a chair in my office, Mr. Simon, I’ll be in shortly. There are just a few more details to take care of with Herr Von Feuerbach.”

  “A pleasure to have met you,” Von Feuerbach said to me. I thought he might click his heels, but no.

  “My pleasure,” I said.

  Lebrun’s office too was quite orderly. Sitting upright on an easel beside his desk was a green velvet mat to which was pinned what appeared to be a necklace, a beautiful, gleaming thing full of pearls and rubies, with its centerpiece a dog, or sheep, or some such thing standing in profile on its hind legs.

  I was standing there studying it when Lebrun came in, as jumpy as ever, but in a happy way this time, and stood beside me to gaze fondly at it, his hands clasped over his belly. “Wonderful workmanship, don’t you think? Look at the floral settings for the rubies. Herr von Feuerbach is very pleased. He’s purchasing it for his home, you know—that is to say, his family castle—near Leipzig.”

  “The Rearing Lamb,” I murmured tentatively, taking what was little more than a shot in the dark.

  I heard a sharp intake of breath. “You know this piece?”

  “Merovingian … seventh century,” I said, scrabbling around in my memory for whatever crumbs I could retrieve about the necklace that, to all appearances, was the golden pendant I’d read about at the Forty-Second Street library the previous Saturday. Except that, according to Holiday, it was supposed to be occupying pride of place in the Tegucigalpa art museum.

  “That’s right,” a clearly impressed Lebrun said.

  Clearly flustered too, I thought. I pressed on. “Don’t I remember hearing somewhere that this went to the Honduran Museum of Ancient Art?” I asked, as if I was very much up to snuff on such things.

  “Why … yes, that’s correct, but we, ah, got it back. It was … returned, you see. Too bad.” He managed to summon up an uneasy little smile. “Won’t you—won’t you sit down, Mr. Simon?

  “We have a strict policy in this gallery,” he said more evenly when we were both seated. Being behind his familiar desk seemed to have replenished his self-confidence. “If for any reason the purchaser is unhappy—perhaps they do not have the funds they anticipated, or perhaps there are insurance problems, or conservation issues at the location—we take back the work for the price paid and ask no questions.”

  Baloney, I thought. I didn’t know much about the fine-arts world, but I knew, or thought I knew, that legitimate deals weren’t closed and art objects didn’t change hands until the funding, insurance, and conservation details had been worked out. So when a major piece was returned to the dealer by an institution, it almost certainly meant that there was something wrong with it, that its attribution had turned out to be faulty or uncertain, or that the—what do they call it—the provenance was suspect. The one truthful thing Lebrun had said was probably that the Galeria was willing to take back works they had sold, no questions asked. As in any business, it wasn’t good to have clients fighting you in court over a product that wasn’t quite what you said it was. The sooner things were hushed up and forgotten the better. Especially if you could just sell it to the next sucker anyway.

  Herr von Feuerbach, for example.

  So Lebrun was a shyster. Had Vercier been one too? Probably; having been a collaborator, how much of a leap was it to being an all-around crook? Besides, Vercier had still been alive at the time the pendant had been sold to the Hondurans, so he would have been in on it.

  Interesting, but I didn’t see that it did me any good.

  The intercom on the desk buzzed. Lebrun, eager to change the subject, jumped to punch a button. “Yes?” he barked.

  Mrs. Aguilar’s voice came on. “It’s Herr Eichendorf. He wants to know if the Transylvanian ten-ducat set can be shipped this afternoon.”

  “Impossible!” Lebrun shouted into the machine. “Is he crazy? Does he think we don’t have other customers? Who does he think he is? Tell him not before Wednesday.” He punched the button again and looked at me. “Some of these people! You wouldn’t believe them.” Slowly, his feathers unruffled. “So, Mr. Simon, I didn’t expect to see you again so soon.”

  “Herr von Feuerbach,” I said. “Herr Eichendorf. Do you have a lot of German clients?” I didn’t know what I was probing for, but it was obvious that something here was making Lebrun edgy, and, considering the delicate nature of what I was there to ask him about—the sixteen-year-old Lily Vercier and her relationship to him— I thought that it wouldn’t hurt for me to seize the moral advantage early.

  “Well, yes, I suppose we do,” he said, as if he’d never thought of it before. “We have, right from the start.”

  He was uncomfortable, picking once or twice at his chewed-up fingernails. I held my tongue, waiting him out.

  “You see,” he said at length, “when Marcel first came to Spain after the war, he found that his reputation was known to many collectors in the, er, German community. They thought … that is to say, they assumed that, coming as he did from occupied France, and having dealt with a number of high-ranking members of the German military … well, they assumed that he was on good terms with them.”

  “And wasn’t he?”

  “Only out of necessity,” Lebrun snapped, coloring. The man had a short fuse, and I had hit another sore spot. “Marcel had a family. He did what he had to do.”

  I looked down at my own fingernails. “Our very amiable association and mutual esteem”—had that been required by necessity? What about looking forward to contacting Polizeimajor vom Steeg “concerning the location of certain other art objects in which I am sure you will be interested”? Well, what the hell, Lebrun probably didn’t know about that letter. He’d left without knowing about the tribunal. Or so he said.