Murder Without Pity by Steve Haberman

government has warned…. An anonymous source has revealed…. Rumors in Austria persist. And in the center column of one Parisian daily, the result of a weekend poll. A majority of those questioned, the article reported, said they thought the government wasn’t doing enough to combat domestic terrorism. When asked what frightened them the most, fifty-eight percent cited the Palace of Justice bombing. Strikes at the heart of our democracy, a baker offered. If the courts with all their gendarmes aren’t safe, a saleslady from a department store asked, are we?
    Sensationalist reporting, he thought. Heated up to sell papers. Forty-two percent believed things weren’t as grave, Monsieur Editor. He stuffed the papers back into his case. He might read them later if he had time. He had his piles of Little Miseries to worry about.
    The metro jerked to a stop. The doors to his left hissed open. Three gendarmes and an elderly couple stepped on board. But no accordionists, puppeteers, or chanteuses. Since the bombings, passengers, he could tell, had become surly and tightfisted with those performers. The doors slid shut. The metro lurched away from the quay. The heavy boots of the police clumped on the floor as they shuffled aside for the couple, who took seats in front of him.
    The eyes of a curious few flicked toward the gendarmes and dropped away. A pretty brunette across from him, he noticed, pulled her coat over an exposed slice of thigh and gazed out.
    One of the police nosed a German shepherd down the aisle, while his two colleagues lagged behind. Hard eyes under kepis probed packages, pockets, shopping bags, anything that could conceal, anything that bulged. A woman a row ahead slipped a hand into her knapsack. The mouths of the gendarmes pinched into alertness. She withdrew a comb and began brushing her hair in short, angry bursts. They slowed their way down toward the other end, darting their heads at the merest sound. Everyone looked suspect.
    The metro rattled into Cité Station. “Report unattended baggage immediately,” he heard a woman’s metallic voice warn over the station’s speakers as he hobbled up the steps into the cold fog.
    He paused at the red traffic light at the boulevard and stared across. What had happened to his Law Courts? They had become a fortress within an island. From an army truck across the street, soldiers heaved sandbags to others who were finishing a bomb barrier as high as the gilded lilies atop the gateway. At the drive into the courtyard near the edge of the gate, cars backed up into the boulevard, slowing the little traffic that struggled past. A gendarme poked his club inside the trunk of the first car at the entrance. His partner slowly worked a bomb detector around the underside. A pedestrian, stepping into the crosswalk, bumped Stanislas into awareness the light had flicked green.
    Once inside the Palace of Justice, he wandered. The increased security stunned him. His Law Courts turned into a fortress overnight! The Forces of Order had prepared the building for a revolution, not another attack. Packs of dogs twitched for explosives in satchels and purses. Gendarmes in twos and threes, all with hands gripped on machine-guns, roved through almost deserted corridors.
    Next the Sainte-Chapelle Courtyard, shadowed in medieval gloom, its stone walls oozing dampness. Gendarmes everywhere eyed the visitors who squeezed through the security checkpoint.
    Then Stairway G, leading up to his original office on the fifth floor, now roped off. A soldier straddled the entrance. No one, not even an examining magistrate, was allowed upstairs any longer. The floors had become unstable, he explained, while Stanislas peeked into the foyer. The soldier was now explaining something about disaster specialists tiptoeing around, about more salvageable dossiers and mail forwarded to him, and none of it mattered. Stanislas stared at a line of dried blood that remained splattered on the wall. In the debris below