34
Pierre Papin’s taxi pulled up outside the honey-colored stone facade of Lausanne’s main railway station a little after nine o’clock. The manager and his staff were properly Swiss, which is to say as efficient as Germans, as welcoming as Italians, and as knowing as Frenchmen.
Within an hour he’d found out everything he needed to know. He followed Carver’s trail, taking the train to Geneva, where he walked out of the station into the Place Cornavin, the bustling square whose taxi stands and bus stops were the heart of the city’s transportation system. Once he was there it was just a matter of basic old-fashioned police work, canvassing the drivers to find anyone who’d been around late morning the previous day and showing them the CCTV pictures of Carver and Petrova.
Fifteen minutes in, he struck lucky. One of the taxi drivers, a Turk, remembered the girl. “How could I forget that one?” he said with a knowing wink, from one red-blooded man to another. “I watched her all the way from the station, thinking this was my lucky day. I was next in line. The man with her looked like he could afford a taxi, and if I had a woman like that I wouldn’t want to share her with the trash who take the bus. But no, he walked right past me, the son of a whore, and stood in line like a peasant.”
“Did you see which bus they took?”
“Yeah, the Number Five. It goes over the Pont de l’Ile, past the Old Town to the hospital and back. So, what have they done, these two, huh?”
Papin smiled. “They’re killers. Count yourself lucky they didn’t get in your cab.”
He left the cabbie muttering thanks to Allah and then, still posing as Michel Picard from the federal interior ministry, called the control room at Transports Publics Genevois, the organization that ran the city’s bus system. Naturally, they were only too happy to supply the names and contact numbers of those drivers who’d worked the Number 5 route leaving the station around eleven o’clock the previous day. There were three of them, and once his memory had been jogged by Papin’s photos, one recalled the couple who’d got on at the station. He also remembered looking in his mirror as the girl got off at a stop on Rue de la Croix-Rouge, crossed the road behind the bus, and started walking up the hill toward the Old Town.
“Some guys have all the luck, right?” he said with a rueful chuckle.
“Don’t worry,” Papin assured him. “That one’s luck is about to change.”
Twenty minutes later, he was walking the streets of the Old Town. It seemed an unlikely place for an assassin to hide out. In Papin’s experience, most killers were little more than crude gangsters, spending their money on tasteless vulgarity and excess. But the beauty of the Old Town was restrained, even austere. The tall buildings seemed to look down like disapproving elders on the people walking the streets. There were few hotels in the area, and it took little time to establish that neither Carver nor Petrova had checked in anywhere within the past twenty-four hours, under those names or any other aliases.
Petrova came from Moscow, so this must be where Carver lived. And that meant there would be people in the neighborhood who knew him and his exact address. Papin got out his photographs and started canvassing again.
35
“Well now, there’s a surprise.” Carver leaned back, tilting his office chair and putting his hands behind his head. Then he looked back at the computer screen, which showed the recent transfers in and out of his Banque Wertmuller-Maier account, and sighed. “Of course those buggers weren’t going to pay. They assumed I’d be dead.” Even so, he had received faxed notification of a $1.5 million deposit from his account manager. He had a loose end. If he could find a way to give it a good pull, the whole conspiracy might just unravel.
He thought for a moment, then got up and wandered into the kitchen, where Alix was making herself a late breakfast. The TV was on, still showing news about the crash. He wondered whether anyone in the world was watching anything else.
“Any developments we need to know about?” he asked.
Alix pressed the remote control, lowering the volume, then turned to look at him. “People are blaming the paparazzi for chasing the car. There are rumors it was going at almost two hundred kilometers an hour when it crashed.”
“Well, that’s bullshit, for a start. It was one twenty, max.”
“Also, they say that blood tests prove the driver was drunk, more than three times over the limit. And there’s a survivor, the princess’s bodyguard.”
Carver frowned. “The guy didn’t drive like a drunk. And there’s a bodyguard? Well, no way would any self-respecting bodyguard let a driver get in a car if he was three times over. The guy would have been completely legless, reeling all over the place, stinking of booze. Christ, you wouldn’t let anyone get behind the wheel if he was that far gone.” He slammed his hand against the kitchen counter. “This is bloody amateur hour. They did a rush job and they’ve bungled the cover-up. Now every investigative journalist in the world is going to be crawling all over the place, trying to prove it was murder.”
“Well, it was murder.” Alix’s voice was quiet, but it cut straight through Carver’s bluster. “We did it. Every time I hear about photographers hounding her to her death, all I can think is, no, that was me. I was flashing the camera, forcing them to go faster.”
“Maybe, but if you hadn’t been, someone else would. The real photographers weren’t far behind you. And as soon as they got to the crash, did they try to help? No, they started taking photographs.”
A coldness had descended on Carver, the passion of his lovemaking replaced by impersonal calculation. Alix’s voice rose in intensity as she tried to break through his armor.
“How can you just stand there and talk about this as if we weren’t involved? Don’t you think at all about what you’ve done?”
“Not if I can help it, no.”
For a moment they fell silent; the only noises in the room were the bubbling of the coffeemaker and the muted jabber of an ad from the TV set. Then Carver’s body relaxed slightly. He held out a hand and laid it on Alix’s shoulder.
“Look, I know how callous, how cynical that sounds. I’m not a total bastard. But one thing I’ve learned over the years is not to waste time over people who are already dead. It’s the only way to stop yourself from going crazy. Am I sorry she died? Of course I am. Do I feel bad that it was me at the end of that tunnel? Just a bit. But where does feeling guilty about that get me, or anyone else? Screw feeling guilty. We were tricked into doing something terrible, and I aim to find the people who did that.”
Carver told Alix what he had in mind. It meant her going undercover, playing a role.
“You’ve got a lot of experience using fake identities, right? You can fool a man into thinking you’re someone you’re not?”
“Isn’t that what you’ve been worrying about, that I’m deceiving you?”
“It has crossed my mind, yeah. But forget that for now. I’ve got another part that might interest you.”
He dialed a local number. When he spoke it was with the guttural bark of an Afrikaner accent. “Could I speak to Mr. Leclerc, please? Thank you… Howzit, Mr. Leclerc? The name’s Dirk Vandervart. I’m what you might call a private security consultant, and you’ve been recommended to me by contacts at the very highest levels. I have a little over two hundred million U.S. dollars, looking for a home. I’m hoping you can help me find one… Excellent. Well now, I’ll be in meetings with clients all day. Why don’t we meet at my hotel, the Beau-Rivage, at six this evening, ja? We will have a drink and discuss my banking requirements. I will give you all the references you need at that time. In the meantime, my personal holding company is called Topograficas, SA, registered in Panama. You’re welcome to look it up, though I must say you won’t find a great deal if you do… Ja, absolutely, that is indeed the blessing of Panama! So, are we set, then? Six o’clock, the Beau-Rivage, ask for Vandervart. Thank you. And good day to you too.”