“My name is Marcel Dumont, Mr. Carlyle: chief inspector of the Surete Generale. The gentleman on your left is-”
“My name does not matter,” interjected Jean Valette. “But I’m the one responsible for bringing you here. And again, I apologize for the way it was done. My only excuse is that I thought you would probably want to come and it was the only safe way to get you here.”
Jean Valette turned to Hart, who still did not know who this Mr. Carlyle was, except that he was an American in his early thirties who kept staring at him as if he had just discovered gold.
“Philip Carlyle, Mr. Hart, is a reporter: a colleague of your friend Quentin Burdick, if I am not mistaken.”
Carlyle looked across at Dumont.
“Chief inspector? The Surete? I’m in France, somewhere in Paris?”
“In France, but not in Paris,” replied Jean Valette. “You’ll go there next, with the inspector, if, after hearing what we have to say, you decide that is what you want to do.”
Carlyle was confused. He glanced at Hart, and then again at Dumont.
“The senator is wanted for murder, conspiracy to murder the president, but instead of placing him under arrest, you have me kidnapped and flown across the ocean?”
However much he might disagree with what Jean Valette had done, dealing with the accusations of this American was a different matter. Folding his arms across his chest, Dumont fixed him with a look of studied indifference.
“Would you like to leave now, flown back home? It can certainly be arranged.”
The young reporter could not keep his eyes off Hart who was sitting there, just a few feet away, the story that would make his career.
“Really,” persisted Dumont, rather enjoying it. “We can have you on a plane in an hour. And perhaps, after all, it’s for the best that you go.” He glanced at Jean Valette. “I told you this was not a good idea, forcing someone to come here against their will, just to give Mr. Hart, who despite the fact that we have reason to believe he is just a pawn in someone else’s game, is still wanted by the American authorities, a chance to tell his side of the story. You had no business doing this. It could put the French government in a very difficult position should Mr. Carlyle here decide to make a formal complaint.”
“Me? No, I’m not complaining about anything!”
“But you were kidnapped, ‘grabbed off the street in Manhattan,’ is the way I think you put it,” said Dumont, shaking his head in evident disapproval of the way the young man had been treated. “And tied up and blindfolded, besides. This is a very serious matter, Mr. Carlyle.”
Carlyle could not take his eyes off Hart.
“No, really, I’m sure there were good reasons,” he insisted.
Jean Valette took his cue.
“If anyone had known where he was going,” he explained to the inspector, “if anyone had known whom he was going to see, I doubt very much that Mr. Carlyle would still be alive.”
Dumont stroked his chin as he appeared to take this possibility under advisement.
“Yes, perhaps. But tell me, Mr. Carlyle: Other than the fact you were taken against your will, have you been otherwise ill-treated? Have you been fed properly?”
Carlyle’s blue eyes lit up at the memory of what he had been given, better than any restaurant, at least of the kind he could afford.
“And the room was terrific,” he added, eager to start asking questions of his own. “Everything has been great. And if I had been allowed to see anything except the room I was staying in, and now this one, I’d probably never want to leave.” His eyes shot back to Hart. “You didn’t do it-you weren’t involved? Then how in the hell did all this happen?”
“Did you really think I was?” Hart asked with a stern, caustic glance. “How well did you know Quentin Burdick? Did you know what he was working on when he was killed?”
“Not exactly.”
“What do you mean, ‘not exactly’?”
“I knew he was supposed to see Constable, but then Constable died-murdered, as it turns out-and I knew he went out to California to talk to Frank Morris and that Morris was killed. He told me that someone had broken into his apartment the night he got back. He told me he thought everything was connected to something called The Four Sisters.”
“And your Mr. Burdick was right,” said Jean Valette, exchanging a glance with Hart. “But put that aside for the moment. There was another murder, here, in Paris-”
“Austin Pearce,” said Carlyle, with a quick nod. “And the head of the political section of the embassy.” He reached inside his jacket for his notebook and then looked from face to face. “You don’t mind if I start making notes?”
“So long as you don’t use my name,” continued Jean Valette.
“I don’t know your name.”
“I insist on anonymity, and not just my identity, but where we are. No one can know where this conversation took place. Do you understand that?”
“But I don’t know where I am, except that it is somewhere in France.”
“Do you agree?” asked Jean Valette.
“Yes, I agree.”
“Then, my name is Jean Valette, and I am the head of investment house known as The Four Sisters.”
“The Four Sisters? Burdick said everything led back to-”
“And it does, as I just told you. But first, the murder of Austin Pearce. Marcel, perhaps you could explain.”
Placing both arms on the table, the inspector hunched forward and began to describe what had happened the night before last in the apartment of Aaron Wolfe in the 18th arrondissement.
“And so you see,” he said when he was finished, “Mr. Hart arrived only after the two killers were already there. He was downstairs talking to the landlady when the shooting stared. That means, as you can see, that they were sent there, the two Americans from the embassy-both of them with one of your intelligence agencies, unless I miss my guess-to kill Pearce and Wolfe. There could be only one reason for this: to keep them from telling what they knew about who killed your president.”
Carlyle scribbled furiously a moment longer and then looked at Hart.
“You didn’t have anything to do with this-I don’t mean the murder of Austin Pearce-the murder of the president?”
“Because he slept with my wife? It never happened. This whole thing is a set-up, a way for the real murderers-the real conspirators-to get away with what they did. I didn’t hire that woman, the one who supposedly died trying to get away. And all that evidence they found-bank transactions, money I paid into her account-do you really think a paid assassin would keep records like that, and keep them in a place where they could so easily be found?”
As Hart watched Carlyle, measuring his reaction, he was reminded of Quentin Burdick. There was the same focused attention on the matter immediately at hand, the same concentration on getting the basic structure of the story right. Carlyle did not yet have Burdick’s years of experience, but he had that deep curiosity about things that experience, by itself, could not teach.
“I told Quentin almost everything I knew. I’m the one who confirmed that the president had not died of a heart attack, that he had been murdered instead.”
The next question was out of Carlyle’s mouth before he even thought about it.
“And who told you, how did you know Constable had been murdered?”
“Constable’s widow, Hillary, the day her husband was buried.”
Carlyle did a double-take.
“She knew it then, that soon?”
“She wanted me to find out what I could about who might have done it, what reason they might have had. She thought-or at least she said-that if we didn’t know something before the story became public the rumors would never end. She may have had another reason.”