Bertrand sniffed his cognac. It was superb. His eyes were half closed, a weary, melancholy gaze on his face. “Virtually none at all, I’m afraid.
There was one point I thought I should review with you, however.” The fatigue of his long and difficult day had weakened the General’s voice.
“That early breakdown that forced you to remove the fuel rods.”
“Ah, yes.” De Serre waved his cigar expansively. “Rather embarrassing that, since the fuel in question was French-made. Most of our uranium fuel, as you are perhaps aware, is American-made.”
Bertrand nodded. “I was somewhat surprised you hadn’t mentioned the incident in our chat this morning.”
“Well, cher ami”-there was no indication of concern or discomfiture in de Serre’s reply-“it’s such a technical, complex business I really didn’t think it was the sort of thing you were interested in.”
“I see.”
The conversation between the two men drifted on inconclusively for fifteen more minutes. Finally, with a weary sigh, Bertrand drained his cognac glass and got to his feet.
“Well, cher monsieur, you must excuse me once again for imposing on your time, but these matters …” Bertrand’s voice dwindled away. He started for the door, then paused to stare in rapt wonder at the bust glowing in its cabinet in the center of the room.
“Such a magnificent piece,” he remarked. “I’m sure the Louvre has few like it.”
“Quite true.” De Serre made no attempt to conceal his pride. “I’ve never seen anything there to match it.”
“You must have had an awful time persuading the Libyans to give you an export permit to take it out of the country.”
“Oh!” The scientist’s voice seemed to ring with the memory of recollected frustrations. “You can’t imagine how difficult it was.”
“But you finally managed to persuade them, did you not?” Bertrand said, chuckling softly.
“Yes. After weeks, literally weeks of arguing.”
“Well, you are a lucky man, Monsieur de Serre. A lucky man. I really must be on my way.”
The General strolled to the door. His hand was on the knob when he stopped.
For a moment he hesitated. Then he spun around. There was no hint of fatigue on his face now. The eyes that were usually half closed were wide open, glimmering with malice.
“You’re a liarl”
The scientist paled and tottered half a step backward.
“The Libyans didn’t give you an export permit to take that bust out of the country. They haven’t given anybody a permit to take anything out of there for the past five years!”
De Serre staggered backward across the room and collapsed in his leather armchair. His usually florid features glistened with the clammy pallor of the physically ill; the hand that clutched his cognac glass quivered lightly.
“This is preposterous!” he gasped. “Outrageous!”
Bertrand towered above him like Torquemada contemplating a heretic stretched out on his rack. “We spoke to the Libyans. And incidentally had a chance to learn about your misadventures in India. You’ve been lying to me,” he intoned, “since I walked in that door this morning. You’ve been lying about that reactor and how the Libyans cheated on it, and I know damn well you have.” The General was following his instincts, stabbing in the dark for the target the inquisitor in him told him was there. He leaned down and placed his powerful thumbs in the ridges of the scientist’s collarbones. “But you’re not going to lie anymore, my friend. You’re going to tell me everything that happened down there. Not in an hour. Not tomorrow morning. Right now.”
The General squeezed de Serre’s collarbones so hard he squirmed in pain.
“Because if you don’t, I shall personally see to it that you spend the rest of your life in Fresnes Prison. Do you know what prison is like?”
The word “prison” brought a wild, almost hallucinated flicker to de Serre’s eyes. “They don’t serve Davidoffs and Remy Martins after dinner at Fresnes, cher am!. What they do after dinner at Fresnes is sit around and bugger helpless old bastards like you silly.”
Bertrand felt the panic beginning to overwhelm the man. It was now, in these first instants of fear and hysteria, that all the advantages were with the inquisitor. Break him, the General’s instincts told him, break him quickly before he can start to reassemble his shattered psyche. Those long-honed instincts also suggested where the trembling man in the armchair would be most vulnerable.
“You think you’re going to retire in a few months, don’t you?” He almost hissed the words. “And you’re going to need every sou of your pension to go on living like this, aren’t you? I know because I spent the afternoon studying your bank accounts. Including the secret one you’ve been building up illegally in the Cosmos Bank in Geneva.”
De Serre gasped.
“You’re going to cooperate with me, Monsieur de Serre. Because if you don’t, I’m going to ruin you. By the time I’m finished with you, your wife won’t have enough money to bring you oranges out at Fresnes.”
Bertrand relaxed the pressures on de Serre’s collarbones and allowed his voice to take on a more gentle tone. “But if you do cooperate, I’ll promise you this. What brings me here is very important. So important that I shall go personally to the President of the Republic and intercede with him on your behalf. I’ll see that this is written off as completely as your little episode in India was.”
De Serre’s face was gray now. His chest heaved twice and his jaw fell open.
My God, Bertrand thought, the bastard is going to have a heart attack on me. A gagging sound rumbled up from the depths of de Serre’s bowels. The scientist let his cognac glass tumble to the floor and clapped his hand to his mouth to staunch the flow of vomit that spurted through his fingers and cascaded in a vile-smelling yellow-green stream down his burgundy dinner jacket’s lapels and onto the lap of his black trousers. Desperately, he pawed at his pocket for a handkerchief.
Bertrand grabbed his own handkerchief to clean him up, but the scientist had already half collapsed, holding his head in his hands, his chest shaking with sobs.
“Oh God, oh God!” The voice was shrill. “I didn’t want to do it. They made me!”
Bertrand picked up the cognac glass, went to the bar and filled it with Fernet Branca, the dark-brown liqueur the French use to settle queasy stomachs. He had his man. There was no need to continue playing the Spanish Inquisitor. He brought the glass back to the shaking scientists. As de Serre gratefully sipped it, Bertrand dabbed at the worst of the mess on his dinner jacket.
“If you were coerced,” he said, his tone as reassuring as that of an aging family physician at the bedside of a familiar patient, “it will make everything easier. Begin at the beginning and tell me exactly what happened.”
De Serre sobbed. “I didn’t want to,” three more times before he was able to continue.
“Every weekend I used to go down to Leptis Magna. One could find things occasionally in the sands there, particularly after a storm.” He took out a handkerchief and blew his nose, fighting to regain his composure. “There was a Libyan guard I met there. Sometimes, for a few dinars, he’d indicate where I could find things. Then one day he asked me into his but for tea.
He had that bust.” He pointed to the stone head glowing in its cabinet with what seemed now a mocking beauty. For a pathetic instant, de Serre stared at it as an older man might look at a younger woman with whom he is desperately in love at the moment of parting. “He offered it to me for ten thousand dinars.”
“An insignificant sum, 1 suppose, for such a piece?”