will. Iâm going to Germany on Thursday. Iâll report back when Iâve got something. Iâd like a credit account opened in the Deutsche Bank in Bonn, with facilities in West Berlin and Hamburg. Twenty-five thousand marks as a start.â
âIâll make the arrangements,â Jarre said. âIt would help if I knew what you were looking for.â
âItâd help if I knew myself,â Max Steiner said, as he went out.
The men who had killed Sigmund Walther boarded the Swissair flight to Geneva less than two hours after the murder. They carried Swiss passports, made out in the names of Kesler and Franconi; the elder of the two was grey-haired, wore glasses and carried a briefcase, the younger was blond, soberly dressed, and carried a small handcase and an armful of the financial papers. They were described respectively as a civil engineer and an accountant. The dark wigs they had worn for the killing had been pushed into a rubbish bin en route for the airport. The two handguns, all serial numbers erased and never used before, had been dropped in a paper bag into the Seine. They abandoned the stolen car, picked up the self-drive which had been left parked in the car park behind Les Invalides, and driven to Orly airport to catch their flight.
They didnât sit together on the journey. Kesler took papers out of his briefcase and studied them, making notes, and Franconi read the London Financial Times . Kesler ordered a vodka and tonic: Franconi asked for coffee. The flight was uneventful; after a time Kesler put his papers away and stared out of the window at the piercing blue sky. He had been killing professionally since the late fifties; five years in the Foreign Legion had provided him with a hiding place. It was full of people like him, with false names and war crimes behind them, men too unimportant to merit the help of the SS escape organization, Odessa; Poles and Ukrainians and Germans, members of the terrible Einsatzkommandos who had exterminated Jews in the East, concentration camp guards, rankers in the Waffen SS who had thrown away their uniforms and papers and crossed the Italian frontier with the refugees and the army of displaced persons that roamed Europe.
Kesler was a Pole by birth; the Legion accepted him and thousands like him, and sent them to fight for France in Indochina. He had survived the siege of Dien Bien Phu, and returned to civilian life with skills in every kind of modern weapon, and a reputation for ruthlessness that filtered through to people interested in recruiting such men. He went to Marseilles, because he had contacts there through the Legion, and worked for a narcotics ring. That was where he met Maurice Franconi and fell in love. Franconi was an Italian Swiss who had been in petty crime since he was a boy, graduating from male prostitution to theft and extortion from his victims.
Kesler set up an apartment with him, and began to teach him to better himself. He had proved quick and skilful; after a few months he was as good as Kesler with a knife or a handgun. Employment was found for him too, and between them they murdered seventeen people, five of them women, in the next two years. This had been their biggest assignment; the payment was in proportion to the importance of the victim and to the risk involved. After this, Kesler thought peacefully, he and Maurice could retire, buy a little place in Tangier, where they had friends.⦠The sexual aspect of their lives was less important than when they had first met; their relationship was tender, at times almost as of father and son. They liked music and the theatre; Maurice had become a keen reader of the classics, under Keslerâs tutelage. Keslerâs own background had been middle-class in his native Poland; he was a cultivated man and he enjoyed improving his loverâs mind and introducing him to the arts. They had a perfectly balanced relationship and, unlike some of their homosexual
âIâll make the arrangements,â Jarre said. âIt would help if I knew what you were looking for.â
âItâd help if I knew myself,â Max Steiner said, as he went out.
The men who had killed Sigmund Walther boarded the Swissair flight to Geneva less than two hours after the murder. They carried Swiss passports, made out in the names of Kesler and Franconi; the elder of the two was grey-haired, wore glasses and carried a briefcase, the younger was blond, soberly dressed, and carried a small handcase and an armful of the financial papers. They were described respectively as a civil engineer and an accountant. The dark wigs they had worn for the killing had been pushed into a rubbish bin en route for the airport. The two handguns, all serial numbers erased and never used before, had been dropped in a paper bag into the Seine. They abandoned the stolen car, picked up the self-drive which had been left parked in the car park behind Les Invalides, and driven to Orly airport to catch their flight.
They didnât sit together on the journey. Kesler took papers out of his briefcase and studied them, making notes, and Franconi read the London Financial Times . Kesler ordered a vodka and tonic: Franconi asked for coffee. The flight was uneventful; after a time Kesler put his papers away and stared out of the window at the piercing blue sky. He had been killing professionally since the late fifties; five years in the Foreign Legion had provided him with a hiding place. It was full of people like him, with false names and war crimes behind them, men too unimportant to merit the help of the SS escape organization, Odessa; Poles and Ukrainians and Germans, members of the terrible Einsatzkommandos who had exterminated Jews in the East, concentration camp guards, rankers in the Waffen SS who had thrown away their uniforms and papers and crossed the Italian frontier with the refugees and the army of displaced persons that roamed Europe.
Kesler was a Pole by birth; the Legion accepted him and thousands like him, and sent them to fight for France in Indochina. He had survived the siege of Dien Bien Phu, and returned to civilian life with skills in every kind of modern weapon, and a reputation for ruthlessness that filtered through to people interested in recruiting such men. He went to Marseilles, because he had contacts there through the Legion, and worked for a narcotics ring. That was where he met Maurice Franconi and fell in love. Franconi was an Italian Swiss who had been in petty crime since he was a boy, graduating from male prostitution to theft and extortion from his victims.
Kesler set up an apartment with him, and began to teach him to better himself. He had proved quick and skilful; after a few months he was as good as Kesler with a knife or a handgun. Employment was found for him too, and between them they murdered seventeen people, five of them women, in the next two years. This had been their biggest assignment; the payment was in proportion to the importance of the victim and to the risk involved. After this, Kesler thought peacefully, he and Maurice could retire, buy a little place in Tangier, where they had friends.⦠The sexual aspect of their lives was less important than when they had first met; their relationship was tender, at times almost as of father and son. They liked music and the theatre; Maurice had become a keen reader of the classics, under Keslerâs tutelage. Keslerâs own background had been middle-class in his native Poland; he was a cultivated man and he enjoyed improving his loverâs mind and introducing him to the arts. They had a perfectly balanced relationship and, unlike some of their homosexual
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