The Marble Mask Read online

  His voice sounded tired. “We’re not on the inside. We’re hired guns—worked for Marcel for years, and now Michel. Marcel didn’t trust his own people no more, so he used us behind the scenes.”

  I thought about that for a moment. Marcel’s having private operatives didn’t surprise me, but given Michel’s reputation, I hadn’t expected him in the same context. Then again, little of anything we’d guessed about this bunch had turned out to be true. “You kill Guidry?”

  That brought a defensive reaction. “No way. We get things done, find things out. But we’re not triggermen. That was Michel all by his lonesome.”

  “The way we heard it, Michel can barely wipe his own ass.”

  “Old news. He’s a snot nose, and Picard and Guidry helped keep him in the dark so they could make the grab after his father croaked. But Marcel tumbled and faked being sicker than he was. He’s the one who put Michel and us together and then trained Michel so their power play would blow up in their face.” He paused and then added, “Of course, that was Plan A, before Michel turned into a magic act and came out of the top hat as full-fledged wacko.”

  My headache had faded over time. It now caught its second wind. “Did he kill Sawyer?”

  “Guidry did that and put a contract on you before. He was paranoid you’d pin Jean’s death on him.”

  “We already had.”

  Didier smiled and shook his head, by now totally free of any inhibitions about talking. “In your dreams. You’ve been wrong from the start. Guidry didn’t kill Jean Deschamps. He was just in the right place at the right time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  But this time he didn’t play along. “Enough. We got to get back to Marcel. The motor’s off—he’ll start getting cold. You want to take me to him and leave the other two with the gimp, fine, but I’m done talking till I make sure Marcel’s okay.”

  “Willy?” I shouted over my shoulder. “Bring the other guy back.”

  He did so, still dragging his prize like a sack along the floor. The man’s mouth had been taped shut, and there wasn’t a mark on him. Willy was looking satisfied with his playacting as a torturer. “You get what you wanted?” he asked.

  I pointed at Didier. “He nailed you from the start, not that it matters. He’s spilling his guts anyhow. Marcel Deschamps is in a car near here, waiting for these three. I’m going to have a talk with him, if you don’t mind babysitting the other two.”

  “I don’t mind,” he said, “but I’d like to scope the scene before you stick your head into another trap.”

  I conceded the point. We bundled Didier’s companions together, back-to-back, left them temporarily in the boxcar, and escorted Didier, still bound and now gagged, out of the rail yard, across a service road, and to a row of trees lining a parking lot behind a dark, empty-looking warehouse. Alone in the lot was a white delivery van. Didier pointed his chin toward it.

  “He in there?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  Willy left our side and disappeared into the shadows hemming us in, as quietly as the gentle breeze that occasionally wafted in off the ice-solid water beyond the tracks.

  Fifteen minutes later, Willy reappeared. “It’s clear. I’ll keep watch for a while after you get in, then go back to the others. How long’s the train staying put?”

  I removed the duct tape from Didier’s mouth. He gasped with the pain, compressed his lips several times, and finally said, “Seven tomorrow morning.”

  He and I crossed the parking lot. I walked up to the sliding side door of the van, placed Didier before me as a shield, and pulled it open. Before us in the feeble light from the overhead dome lay Marcel Deschamps, propped up on a camp cot, swathed like a baby in layers of blankets. He didn’t look startled at the sudden intrusion. I even half wondered if he was still alive.

  Until his eyes moved.

  “Deschamps?” I asked. “You okay?”

  He said something in French to Didier.

  “English,” I ordered.

  Didier answered first in French and then turned to me. “I only told him we’d screwed up, and that I’d been shooting straight with you. Can I start the engine and get the heater going?”

  I unwrapped the wire from around his hands and let him climb up between the front seats to get behind the steering wheel. “You touch the gear lever and I’ll blow your head off,” I cautioned him, as I quickly patted down Marcel’s blankets for weapons.

  I needn’t have been so cautious. Didier kept his word, clambering back to Deschamps to tuck him in more comfortably. Throughout, Marcel’s gloved hands lay still on his lap and his eyes remained at half mast.

  “You feel well enough to speak?” I asked him, at last climbing in myself and slamming the door shut behind me.

  “A little,” was the whispered reply.

  I decided not to waste time. “I need to know about your father’s death.”

  If possible, the face before me paled even further, and Marcel moved the fingers of one hand in Didier’s direction. “Tell him.”

  “Jean Deschamps was sort of nutty about finding Antoine’s killer,” Didier began. “He tracked down Roger Scott because he thought Scott and his son had been tight during the war. According to what Jean had been told, Scott was a schoolteacher before the war, and maybe a good judge of human character. Jean wanted to pick his brains about Antoine. Turns out Scott was actually Charlie Webber, and that him and Antoine had found a treasure just outside Rome—a buried trunk in a fancy villa, jammed with jewelry, rare art, and gold. But one of ’em got greedy, Webber killed Antoine, making it look like a combat death, and then changed his name after he got shot and paralyzed later. I have no clue how Jean knew Antoine had been whacked in the first place, but he sure didn’t know Scott and Webber were the same. What happened when Jean and Webber met is a mystery—Guidry was the only other one there and being the swift bodyguard he was, he was outside the room. But for some reason Webber ended up sticking Jean with an ice pick. Didn’t do him much good, ’course. He might’ve been strong enough to knock somebody off, but he still couldn’t get out of that wheelchair. Guidry came running in, put two and two together, and saw the chance of a lifetime.”

  “He’s not that clever,” I said flatly.

  Marcel gave a pale imitation of a laugh.

  “Picard sure is,” Didier answered for him. “Guidry called him that night in a panic. Picard drove down and they set it up together.”

  It was like hearing a tune that had lingered too long just outside memory’s grasp. In that single moment, all the disconnected bits and pieces of this case began falling together.

  “How did Sawyer fit in?”

  “He was a money launderer Jean had authorized the year before. Stowe was nothin’ then, but it was a coming thing and it was nearby. The U.S. dollar was lookin’ good. Picard being the legal eagle sent Sawyer down from Canada to open a restaurant, which is a great way to wash money. Picard came up with the angle of keeping Jean’s body on ice—typical lawyer move—but he needed a freezer. Enter Sawyer.”

  “And they had to move fast,” I suggested. “Before the snow melted and Jean’s body thawed.”

  “Right on. After that, all they had to do was con Marcel with fake loyalty, be rewarded with top jobs, and cruise through the years on what Jean had created by busting his ass—knowing all the time they had a big-time secret tucked away for future use.”

  “But Marcel’s fingerprints were on the ice pick,” I protested.

  Marcel looked disgusted.

  “Piece of cake,” Didier explained. “Ice picks were used all the time back then. All Guidry had to do was hand Marcel this one a couple of times to chop ice. The only joke was that DNA came out of nowhere to help ’em out even more. That was pure dumb luck. Anyhow, once the ice pick was squared away, they planted the other clues you found and made sure they had a small gang in their pocket to back them if things got tough, which of course they were hoping would be never.”

  “Like Mar
ie Chenin and Lucien Pelletier,” I guessed.

  “And their inside man, Jacques Chauvin,” Didier agreed. “Not counting some hired muscle. All of ’em either pointed you where they wanted you to go, or told Picard and Guidry what you were telling the Sûreté. Like when they leaked Jean’s name to the U.S. papers as the frozen stiff, just so Chenin could pretend the publicity reminded her that she had that old hotel bill.”

  “And the trigger for all this was Marcel getting sick and Michel being tapped to replace him?” I asked.

  “Right.”

  “Hadn’t they anticipated that possibility? No offense, but none of them is any spring chicken.”

  Marcel’s whole body quivered slightly, and he raised a hand to point at me. “I knew. I knew.”

  Didier leaned forward and adjusted the sick man’s blankets again after he fell back against the pillows, exhausted.

  “Marcel had been smelling a rat for years,” he said over his shoulder, “at the same time that the other two were getting suspicious about how much Marcel knew, which really wasn’t that much. So each side was making plans and building up private manpower while they were all pretending to be a big happy family. Picard and Guidry found out they weren’t going to be able to use Michel like they’d used Marcel after Jean’s death, so they sprang their trap.”

  “By pulling their fifty-year-old frozen rabbit out of the closet,” I concluded.

  Didier smiled. “Yeah—too much, huh? Dumping him out of a plane? You gotta give ’em points for style.”

  “Who flew the plane?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Beats me. Lot of guys might do that for the right amount. But that was just the beginning, anyway. They also had to fake a war with the Angels. They knocked off Tessier, since they knew he was in Marcel’s pocket—not knowing Tessier had the three of us as backup—and then they killed the guy who supposedly called you that night at the old jail. You were a big help. And then they sliced one of their own and put an Angel’s button in his hand. Very Hollywood.”

  “And very useless after Marcel passed the polygraph,” I said.

  “Yeah. That’s when the shit hit the fan,” Didier agreed.

  I looked directly at Marcel. “But you still didn’t know who’d killed your father.”

  Marcel merely tapped the side of his head.

  “He had a pretty good idea. It just happened to be wrong. We only figured it out after Guidry lost his nerve, tried to knock you off, and did kill Sawyer.”

  That still didn’t make sense to me. “How? Those dots don’t connect to Roger Scott.”

  There was an awkward silence. Marcel’s glance fell to his idle hands.

  “Michel did that,” Didier said. “He got tired of screwing around, grabbed Guidry, and got it out of him.”

  I shook my head. “He tortured him. I knew he was shy of a full load. You guys are too much.”

  Again Marcel jerked to life, waving a hand at me and croaking, “They are the killers. We were just businessmen.”

  I didn’t argue with him. “I’m guessing Picard suffered the same fate. Where’s he stored?”

  There was no comment from either one of them.

  “Why grab me, then?” I persisted. “What was that going to do for you? You told me you were buying time for Michel. Am I the diversion while he heads out of the country?”

  Again, there was only silence. I looked from one of them to the other, wondering at this sudden reticence, reviewing all I’d learned. As far as the Deschamps lineage was concerned, the three relevant intertwining threads were ego, pride, and revenge. Jean had set out to redress his son’s murder in Italy. Marcel had conspired with his son to right the wrong of Jean’s death. So what of Michel in this parody of a Greek tragedy? He’d killed in turn, ignorant of ever having known either Jean or Antoine, but inflamed by passions he’d inherited in psychopathic proportions from a father only reputed to be as cold as a calculator—but who’d proved to have been willing to sacrifice his final legacy for the sake of family honor.

  Michel had to be the remaining loose missile in all this, and the silence I was getting now implied that his destiny was as yet unfulfilled.

  A coldness crept into me as I finally understood.

  I swung around, opened the door, and stepped outside, looking back at Marcel one last time. “I may have been behind the ball on most of this, but I am goddamned if I’m going to let this play out the way you want it to. You can go to your death knowing your vanity destroyed your own son.”

  Marcel’s eyes widened and he opened his mouth to speak, but I slammed the door to cut him off. I’d already heard more than I wanted to.

  Chapter 25

  I RAN BACK TO THE RAILROAD YARD AS FAST AS I COULD, slipping on the snow, calling Willy’s name before I even reached our boxcar.

  He stuck his head out the door, his gun in hand. “What the hell’s goin’ on?”

  “We gotta find a phone. Fast,” I said, already heading back out toward the street.

  “What about these two?” He shouted after me.

  “Take their wallets for the IDs and cut them loose. We can round them up later.”

  Willy caught up to me as I was slowing down before a public phone booth mounted to the side of a darkened building.

  “What happened?”

  I picked up the receiver and began dialing the Stowe police department. “If we’re lucky, nothing yet. The reason I was grabbed was to stall us.”

  The dispatcher picked up on the other end.

  “This is Joe Gunther. Is the chief there? It’s an emergency.”

  “Nobody’s here. The patrol’s out and everyone else is in bed.”

  “Roust them out, then. Send a unit to the Roger Scott residence. Somebody’s on the way to kill him, if he hasn’t already. You know the address?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Okay, move on it. I’m in Sherbrooke with Kunkle and heading your way as fast as I can.”

  “Who’s trying to knock him off?” Willy asked as I stepped from the booth to the curbside, having just noticed a patrol car in the far distance beginning to turn down a side street.

  “Fire your gun a couple of times at that pile of pallets,” I told him.

  He did so immediately, filling the night air with noise and two blinding flashes. The car stopped, straightened out, and its strobe lights came to life.

  “I think we just got a ride,” I said.

  · · ·

  Thirty minutes later we were in a helicopter heading for the American border like a darkened rocket in the night—Willy, Gilles Lacombe, myself, and the flight crew.

  Lacombe was on a cell phone, as he had been virtually from the moment we’d left the ground, exchanging information with his people back at headquarters.

  Willy and I were wearing headsets, connected to the onboard communications.

  “Why in Christ’s name is Michel going after Scott?” Willy asked over the engine’s din.

  “To satisfy family honor,” I told him. “The real Scott was killed in battle—something I was told days ago but didn’t follow up on. Another man named Webber—a certified weasel—stole his dog tags, probably for a rainy day, and then later relieved some Italian villa of a zillion dollars’ worth of jewels, art, and gold, killing Antoine Deschamps at the same time.”

  “You’re kidding me. A heist?”

  “Not surprising, given the people involved. Anyway, my guess is Webber shipped it home somehow—easy if you knew the right people—but then got shot and crippled in southern France. He also was reported killed—probably by himself—which is when I think he put those stolen dog tags to good use. Roger Scott was reborn as a wounded vet, shipped home to meet up with his loot and a future as a rich Stowe eccentric.”

  “Did Jean Deschamps know that?”

  “No, which is why he was so relaxed when he came to Stowe to interview Scott—eating out on the town and staying at a fancy inn.”

  “So Scott killed father and son both,” Willy said.


  “Right. The way Marcel’s been polluting his brain, Michel doesn’t think he has anything left to lose. His own father’s all but dead of cancer, he’s killed both Picard and Guidry, the organization’s about to be eaten by jackals, so all that remains is family pride. The final debt must be paid, regardless of the cost.”

  Lacombe shut his phone down and put on a headset. “They have just located Marcel Deschamps in a van in his own driveway. The preliminary evidence is telling us he is dead of an overdose.”

  “Suicide?” I asked.

  “That I do not know. Was he strong enough to do it?”

  I considered that, along with the dexterity it would have taken. It was clear to me Didier had followed orders one last time. But I wasn’t sure—had I been in his shoes—that I wouldn’t have done the same thing.

  “He might have been—yes,” I told Lacombe. “Did they find the others? Didier and his two pals?”

  “Not yet, but they did find Gaston Picard in the basement of the Deschamps home.”

  “Tortured to death?”

  Lacombe merely nodded as the pilot broke in, speaking English out of courtesy. “You might want to take a look out the port window,” he said. “I’m also switching you over to the police frequency below, by their request.”

  We all three craned toward a flickering glow in the left window. I clearly recognized the outline of Roger Scott’s castle-like mansion below us, engulfed in flames like a vision of Hell.

  “Joe, you there?”

  I recognized Frank Auerbach’s voice.

  “We’re right overhead, Frank. Is Scott still alive?”

  “We got complications there. We set up an LZ for you upwind to the northwest. I’ll see you after you land.”

  · · ·

  From the ground, the fire looked like it was spewing from a volcano, spiraling upward as if propelled from deep below the surface. It roared and crackled with cyclonic energy, pulling oxygen toward it with enough force to make our clothes flap.

  Frank Auerbach came running toward the helicopter with Paul Spraiger in tow.

  “What complications?” I yelled at him over the rotor noise and fire combined.