Murder Without Pity by Steve Haberman Page A

rested a tiny shoe, exploded into shreds. The soldier explained another baby had died.
    Gendarmes had stockpiled cots, blankets, and first aid kits against the wall in the Justice Annex’s main corridor. Siege provisions, Stanislas thought. Undue panic in the quantities dropped off. Stacked on a wooden table beside them were thick dossiers they had also delivered. A box beside the files contained a bundle of mail. He hefted the load onto a trolley and pushed it with effort across his office’s threshold.
    He remained standing at his desk, while he sifted through the mail. The first piece, a thick correspondence with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam as the return address, was directed to Christophe Minh. A high official in Hanoi must have finally responded to the family’s request, he thought. They might get compensation yet for that confiscated tea plantation. He tossed the envelope onto his clerk’s desk and turned to Pincus’s mail the gendarmes had collected from his concierge.
    He fanned through the sad little pile, then pitched them back one-by-one into the box each with a dismissive thought. A catalogue promoting a stationery sale…useless information. A flyer announcing the move of a Cambodian restaurant to a larger building in the tenth district…a waste of time. There was a leaflet from a rat exterminator. Another from a repairman that touted expertise, fixing broken windows and locks. Stanislas tossed these also into the box. The packet yielded no postcards, letters, invitations, nothing to reveal deep human contact. A teacher had retired early from his profession, crawled into a hole and one morning tripped to his death…with a look of terror in his eyes. Again he recalled the arriving crime scene officer’s description.
    He withdrew his appointment book from his satchel and thumbed through the pages. Coroner visits. Trips to a forensic lab. Meetings with a deputy public prosecutor. One trip to London to conference with Scotland Yard detectives. Three trips to Rome to consult with an Italian examining magistrate. So much work, he thought. So little rest.
    He crossed from busy September to frenetic October, and nearly two weeks past that divide reached his destination. On the top line of the right-hand page he had scrawled “Christophe to call Madame de Silvy for questioning.” So he had in fact, he saw with relief, noted that reminder to himself. Hopefully, she could aid his investigation.
    And what was the cryptic meaning of that H he had encircled so forcefully at the bottom of the left-hand page the red ink had bled through the paper? H for… Henri , that’s what he had meant, he recalled after reflecting. Henri had accidentally bumped into him late yesterday evening at the Café Levant. Only the officer hadn’t by chance met him, he discovered when the policeman followed him downstairs into the men’s room. And Henri didn’t continue chatting about that game show scandal when the lavatory had cleared. Taking precautions, the policeman had whispered they must meet away from the Annex and had finished with two pleas. “ Tell no one ,” he had warned. “ I beg you, no one. And Monsieur Examining Magistrate ,” he had added, “ be aware of your surroundings. Light can kill .”
    A wind swept across the Seine. The bridge’s gray wall loomed overhead through the jumble of leaves that quivered in the chill. Stanislas backed deeper into the shadows. If he could gaze up through that foliage to the Pont Royal, he thought, someone up there could spot him hiding below. His right leg ached from standing too long. He wondered how much longer he must remain pressed against the trunk. A lamp, bracketed to the quay’s wall, shown a faint light through the leaves. He raised his arm and caught the numbers’ glow. It was a little after nine, and he still had twenty-five minutes before he rendezvoused with Henri.
    He noticed a crowd of sufficient thickness gather against the bridge’s low wall. Cameras hung