"There's no sign of a struggle," answered Japrisot. "And there wasn't time. Strangulation is a very slow way of murdering someone." The policeman grimaced. "Also, his face would have become purple and his tongue would be sticking out." The Frenchman shook his head. "It was quick and it was a surprise."
The blaring first chords of ABBA's "Mama Mia!" boomed out. It was the ring tone of Japrisot's cell phone. He dragged the cell out of his pocket and held it to his ear.
"Oui?"
He listened, staring down at Valador's corpse and plucking a fleck of cigarette tobacco from his fleshy lower lip.
"D'accord," he said after a few moments.
He closed the cell phone and slipped it back into his pocket. He cleared his throat.
"According to my people the couple in the Audi are Antonin Pesek and his Canadian-born wife, Daniella Kay. They live on Geologika Street in the Barrandov district of Prague. They are contract killers. Assassins. They work regularly all over Europe. The Peseks, en famille, have worked for everyone from the East German Stasi to the Albanian Sigurimi. Monsieur Pesek's weapon of choice is a short-barreled CZ-75 automatic pistol. His wife prefers ornamental plastic hatpins. They go right past the metal detectors at airports. Apparently she is quite the artist. In her file it uses the phrase 'surgically precise.' "
Japrisot crouched down on his haunches beside Holliday and, still using the handkerchief, he gripped the ruby in Valador's ear between his thumb and forefinger. He tugged. The ruby slid out along with six inches or so of clear Lucite plastic. The hatpin made a slight grating sound as it was withdrawn from Valador's head, like someone chewing on a mouthful of sand. He held it up to the light. It was lightly greased with brain matter. A trickle of pink, watery blood drained out of Valador's ear.
"Surgically precise, indeed," murmured Japrisot, squinting at the needle-like murder weapon. "Into the middle ear and then through the temporal bone to the brain via the internal auditory nerve canal." The policeman nodded thoughtfully to himself. "It would take a great deal of skill."
"You sound as though you know your anatomy," commented Holliday.
Japrisot lifted his shoulders and sighed.
"I spent three years in medical school. My father, God rest his soul, was an otologist." The policeman shook his head sadly. "Unfortunately it was not to be. I could not face a lifetime of oozing pus and wax. Japrisot Pere was very disappointed, I am afraid."
He stood up, grunting with the effort. He turned and gently laid the ruby- ended stick-pin down on a convenient stack of Blue Willow polychrome dinner plates. The dinnerware was stacked up on a dusty chunk of architectural marble that had once been part of a fluted column on an old building.
"C'est ca," said Japrisot. "Now we shall see what this is all about." He went down the crowded aisle to the pile of fish boxes. Holliday and Rafi followed. The cop looked at the boxes for a moment, made a little grunting sound in the back of his throat and used one of his meaty hands to pry the close-fitting lid off the top of the box.
"Viens m'enculer!" Japrisot whispered, his eyes widening.
"What is it?" Holliday said, stepping closer and looking over the policeman's shoulder. He stared, gaping.
Carefully fitted into custom-made Styrofoam slots was a row of five gold bars, each one approximately five inches long and two inches wide. Japrisot reached into the box and pried one of the bars out of its nest. It looked about half an inch thick. Holliday reached into the box and took another one out. It was heavy in his hands, almost unnaturally so, and it had an odd, greasy feel to it that was unaccountably repellant.
The bar was rudely made, the edges rounded and the surface slightly pitted. "1 KILO" was stamped into the upper quadrant, the letters E.T. in the middle and an instantly recognizable impression in the lower end of the bar: the palm tree and swastika insignia of the German Afrika Korps of the Third Reich. There was no serial number or any other coding on the bar.
"Fifty kilos a box, ten boxes, five hundred kilos," said Japrisot quietly.
"One thousand one hundred and three pounds," murmured Rafi. "A little more than half a ton."
"Dear God," whispered Holliday, "what have we stumbled onto?"
"Clearly our Czech friends Pesek and his wife didn't know, either," said Japrisot. He put the bar back in its niche. "If they'd known what was in the boxes they wouldn't have been so quick to leave."
"At eight hundred an ounce that's about thirteen million dollars," calculated Rafi.
"Motive for any number of murders," said Japrisot.
"It's got the Afrika Korps Palmenstempel," said Holliday. "I doubt that the E.T. means extraterrestrial."
"Walter Rauff again," said Japrisot. "E.T. would be the Einsatzkommando Tunis, his unit."
Holliday stared at the buttery slab of bullion, horribly aware of its origins. He put it back into the fish box, a chill running down his spine. Suddenly he felt as though he was going to be sick. Rafi stepped forward and took a close-up shot of the gold with his cell phone. Japrisot did not look pleased.
"I am about to call in my people from Marseille. By helicopter it will take them no more than thirty-five minutes from the time I call. I have done the service required by my relationship with my friend M. Ducos. That obligation has been attended to. Unless you wish to become involved with a great deal of French police bureaucracy I suggest that you leave here immediately. Comprenez?"
"Of course," Holliday said and nodded. "One question."
"One only."
"Was Valador's boat capable of making the North African coast?"
"Certainement. Tunis is five hundred miles from Marseille. A boat such as his could make the trip in thirty hours or perhaps less in good weather. The ferry gets you there overnight."
"Thank you," said Holliday. "You've helped us a lot. Please extend my thanks to Monsieur Ducos as well."
"C'est rien," said Japrisot. It's nothing. "Now leave."
They did so, walking quickly down the hill from the corner.
"Now I see what must have happened," said Rafi. "Peggy and her expedition must have tripped over a cache of old Nazi gold lost in the desert somewhere. That's why no one's asking for ransom."
"The Vichy French and the Germans controlled most of North Africa for the first three years of the war," said Holliday, "and the Italians even before that."
"What's your point?" Rafi asked.
"If Rauff collected all that gold from North African Jews, you would have thought he'd have sent it back to Germany. So what was it doing out in the desert?"
They reached the bottom of the hill and flagged a silver Mercedes taxi cruising the harbor front, trolling for business from the restaurants overlooking the water. Twenty minutes later they'd booked themselves into a garish pink suite overlooking the crescent of beach in front of the Royal Casino Hotel in Mandelieu-la-Napoule.
"I guess the next stop is Tunisia," said Holliday, crouching in front of the minibar and getting out the fixings for a stiff drink. Both the sight of Felix Valador's grisly corpse in the cupboard and the nasty feel of the Holocaust gold in his hands had shaken him badly.
"Not necessarily," said Rafi, sitting on the edge of one of the beds and flicking through the channels on the big flat-screen TV. He dug into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone. He tossed it to Holliday. "Check out the shots I took."
Holliday put the phone in picture mode and scrolled through the photos. There were two or three general views of the antique store interior, one of Valador, dead in the armoire, the phony ruby in his ear, three pictures of the gold bar and two more of the old Bakelite wall phone between the Grecian columns. The first of the two was a wide shot of the phone's relative position between the columns and the last shot was a close-up of the phone itself.
"What do you see?" Rafi asked.
"A bad picture of an old dial telephone."