Maintenon: The Dead Man's Touch, Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery #11. Chapter Thirty-Six. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

Roger, Gilles and Hermione sat in Roger’s office. The commissioner had gotten a couple of technical people to bring in a full-frequency radio, to set it up and make it work. There were wires and cables going all over the place, but the thing had different components, all of which had to have power and it also had to be patched into the rooftop antenna. Even now, the senior man had headphones on and one of the newfangled tape recorders was rolling.

His eyes gleamed as he looked at the big map up on the wall and then caught Maintenon’s eye.

“Car one-oh-seven, come in please.”

“Car one-oh-seven, go ahead. Over.”

“Who’s car one-oh-seven?” Hermione, pencil poised over her steno pad, all set to take it down in shorthand.

“Firmin and Janine. They’re following Boitard.”

“Shush.” Roger was leaning forward, trying to catch every nuance, every inflection of the voices.

Boitard, and the chauffer, had taken off very early for them. About ten minutes after the steam-shovel had arrived on scene. Officers on the front door had been instructed to let them go, which wasn’t all that much of a gamble. If questioned, officers had been instructed to shrug their shoulders, say that they really didn’t know too much about it, and to refer them to Inspector Maintenon—which clearly hadn’t happened.

“Car one-oh-seven.”

That was car one-twenty-nine, LeBref and Margot.

Boitard knew what it was about all right, although it would not be considered definitive proof. It would carry some weight in court. Purely circumstantial though it might be.

So far, they had not gone to the bank. They had driven straight to the address believed to be that of the mistress…

“…where’s he going, car one-oh-seven…” Margot, on the passenger side and handling communications.

“Car one-two-nine. Straight to the fucking Croix de Feu, one would think…”

Both tails involved two cars, for reasons which would become readily apparent if someone had a puncture. Alphonse had lost a suspect once for just that reason—a flat tire. And a flat spare in the trunk. As Gilles recalled, that hadn’t been all that long ago, and they’d put all new rubber on the vehicle. He grinned at the thought. Good old Alphonse, always thinking ahead—

Considering the sheer numbers, they’d had to draft in a few officers, all of them in plain clothes and all the cars were unmarked.

“I wish I could be there.” Roger meant the bank.

“Hmn. Levain, Archambault, Pelletier and Hubert should suffice, and a handful of uniformed officers for security.” Gilles nodded. “If I’m wrong, we avoid the embarrassment of you being there.”

As it was, the branch would be closed until further notice, and with a seal on the door…

It wouldn’t be very long before the news-hounds got a hold of it, and then there would be the cameras and the flash-bulbs, a scrum, and with people shouting questions all at once.

It was better to wait and see.

“Huh.”

“And I get to wear the egg, all over my face, rather than you. But. I can always take early retirement…”

“Argh, Gilles.”

Whether his hunch was correct or not, they had the warrant, and they would find out soon enough.

Good old Rochfort! But they’d be serving up one hell of a pile of warrants this morning, and poor old Pelletier had been the one to type up the requests. After all of that, he’d be getting quite good at it…

“Okay. He’s coming out, car one-oh-seven.”

“Roger, one-two-nine.”

***

“Ah. Here’s the chauffeur with a couple of suitcases. Looks like the old man is going somewhere…there’s a lady in the window, left side, three floors up—that’s probably her.”

“Roger. We see him. And her.”

“I keep thinking they’re talking to me.” Roger—

“Thank you, one-two-nine. Over.”

“They are talking to you, Roger.”

Hermione smirked at that one and kept writing.

Roger engaged her with the eyes.

“Yes—I suppose they are at that.” He turned to Gilles. “That’s handy enough. A suitcase or two, and a change of clothes at the mistress’s place.”

“Huh.” Gilles was wondering what else might be in that suitcase.

Or even the car, which had never been closely examined.

But Boitard looked to be making a run for it.

***

They had their instructions. All border control points had been notified, with a long list of names, quite a few wire-photos, and the passport numbers of any suspect who had one. In the case of Monsieur Boitard, if he was heading for the airport, the detectives would wait until he had purchased a ticket and then arrest him before he could board an airplane.

They would grab the vehicle and the chauffer at that time as well.

In the case of a private aircraft, this process would be bypassed, in which case airport security would be manning all gates onto the field. They would be checking license numbers and ID. There would also be two cars and four officers right on their tails.

The same went for seaports, train stations, and border control points all over France.

Over at the Société Générale, where the Monsieur was general manager of the premier Paris location of the bank, officers weren’t arresting anyone. Not just yet.

Detectives would be questioning anyone who had access to the reserve. The regular daily cash, including yesterday’s receipts and tomorrow’s cash drawers, made up overnight, all set for the bank tellers in the morning, these were only a part of the picture.

What they were really interested in was the gold reserves…what they were really interested in was the tunnel. Which would have to be there somewhere, probably right at the back, in the farthest corner from the door of the reserve vault. With security guards in the building overnight, the actual work would have to be done as quickly and quietly as possible…with a good forty metres of digging up from the catacombs which were under the city, and almost completely unknown to most of its citizens.

The number of employees that had access were very small, two or three at most, and it was the sort of thing where they were never alone. Boitard, and the assistant manager, and never more than one other employee would go into the reserve vault. Every instance would be documented according to their information, provided by an old friend of Maintenon’s. Legitimate shipments would be undertaken by a separate armoured-security company, who would have their own controls and protocols. Those people would be closely supervised.

Roger Desjarlais was a financial consultant, a forensic accountant, and an expert witness in certain court cases. Usually on the side of the prosecution, but not exclusively. Not all cases were criminal. There were plenty of civil suits, and his expertise was in demand, to the extent his own trading activities had taken a back seat although he still had a seat on the bourse, otherwise known as the Compagnie des Agents de Change.

In a case like this, he was working for the police, and the information was usually pretty good. The old adage, suivez l’argent, follow the gold, still held true, and Roger was very, very good at it.

Gold reserves, movements of gold reserves, were something special in that it didn’t happen every day. The nation itself owned a good chunk of those reserves, and the banks had to maintain not only liquidity for day-to-day operations, but also to back up all those mortgages, loans and bonds. The nation, the state itself, had to fulfill its own obligations, and that took both cash flow and reserves for those rainy days, which came along often enough. All those international transfers of money, had to be based on something—according to Desjarlais, actual transfers of gold bars were relatively rare. If an Italian bank transferred ownership of significant gold, in coin or bullion, they simply gave up the share of gold that they owned—gold that was, by convention, already safely in the customer’s hands, what with it being locked up in a vault in their own bank.

It was largely a paper transaction, more of an accounting maneuver than actually shifting stuff around in armoured trucks. Which did happen, from time to time. Someone had to bring the gold from the mines and the refiners, after all…someone had to transport all those coins and bills from the mint. Someone had to truck bundles of money all over the country, in that sense gold was also trucked around, as regional banks had their own needs, and it dispersed the asset so that it wasn’t all kept in one place. It was legal to own gold in France, and it was legal to purchase gold bullion or gold coins, unlike some other countries, including the United States.

A good bit of that gold ended up in other countries, places where demand outstripped supply, and where it could be sold at a premium, and hence, a profit. The exit of gold from the country was always some cause for concern. That went about double when it had been stolen in the first place—

And gold, as everybody knew, was untraceable.

It was a combination of brain-storming, but also barnstorming to a certain extent, in the sense that they didn’t have all the facts and didn’t quite know what to expect.

A car with uniformed officers would be attending at the home of Monsieur Boitard’s mistress, whose name, even now, had not been confirmed.

“The time to interview the lady is right now. While she’s still upset. We can’t give her too much time to think, and even now, she must still feel some loyalty to the Monsieur.”

A man like that would have offered a little money, made a few promises, which he would not be able to keep, and as far as anyone knew, she was uninvolved in the criminal activities. Which seemed likely enough, and reality would eventually catch up to her.

“I agree, Gilles.” Roger went over to the radio in order to give the instructions himself; they had a few cars standing by for just such an event. “Car one-six-two, stand by for instructions…”

“Roger that—er, Roger, sir. Car one-six-two ready for instructions.” A couple of people from Inspector Martin’s unit, and not without their own sense of humour. “Angie’s got the pen and notebook, go ahead, sir.”

Roger read off the address, in case they’d missed it in the radio traffic. They were mostly all on the one frequency, but it would not be unheard-of for someone to drop out to another frequency, just to keep contact with their partner vehicle.

Louise Boitard had taken a taxi and gone out the night before. Victor Baille had been picked up, at his own front door and after dropping Louise off, the cab shared although they had arrived separately to a cozy little bistro in Montmartre.

He was in a cell, and Gilles would interview him when time permitted.

In the meantime, there was a lot going on all at once—

It was unbelievable, but there had been a tunnel in the back of a walk-in freezer at the Hemingway Room. That one connected to the sewer system, and officers would be going down there with lights and maps and hard-hats, looking for the other end, the connection to the bank. The freezer, ostensibly out of service, and waiting an interminable time for spare parts to arrive, including the compressor unit, or so it was being said by one of the more low-level suspects…Monsieur Auguste, who was singing like a lark, but who unfortunately didn’t seem to know all that much...at least not so far.

It was terribly difficult to believe that Faubert, and Fritz, didn’t know all about that one.

Sooner or later, someone with a sense of self-preservation would talk…someone that actually knew something.

In the meantime, they waited.

***

It had been one hell of a long morning, with a quick lunch sent in, and an even longer afternoon…

The phone rang and Roger snapped it up.

“Yes?” He listened, intently. “Thank you. Very well.”

He put it down.

“Okay. Monsieur Sylvain Duquesne has been picked up at the Italian border. They say he had one suitcase, and a couple of grand, all in small bills. Interestingly, he had a big bag of coins, like he smashed the piggy bank and just got the hell out of town.”

“Ah.”

“Anyhow, they’ll put him on a train with a couple of officers and he will be back here in a couple of days.”

Boitard. Don't mind me, I'm just on my way to Portugal...

“Hmn.”

As for Monsieur Boitard and the chauffeur, once they’d left the city and gone out of range of the radios, they would be relying on officers stopping along the way and phoning in reports. For this reason, there were now three cars following them, and also for this reason, smaller regional and municipal police detachments were being alerted along several projected routes just in case something went terribly wrong. To say they would be watched was an understatement.

As for where they were going, it was anybody’s guess, either Marseille, where they might find a ship, or possibly Spain and even Portugal.

This might have been in their original plan, rather than turning the other way and bolting straight for Germany, as Maintenon had initially figured.

They might be in for one hell of a long night, maybe even a very long weekend.

As for the two bodies found under the tarpaulin in the so-called Boitard vault, right beside a big stack of crates, full of gold bars, and seventeen bags of gold coins to go along with that, the odds were they had found Joachim and Carlo.

It would take some time to confirm that, but bodies were bodies and charges of homicide would be forthcoming no matter who they turned out to be. Not stabbed, they’d been knocked on the head and strangled with a cord found nearby or so it appeared. This implied at least two suspects…the job would have been a bit much for a lone killer.

Such charges were bargaining chips for most of their suspects. What they really wanted was the full story—and the right guys.

Joachim and Carlo, in Maintenon’s estimation, were the only ones who knew for sure where the gold was, in terms of the kitchen detail. They might have even done the digging. His surmise, was that they had pulled up behind the house, in a small lorry, at the crack of dawn, and simply let themselves in with a copy of the key.

Any neighbour across the way would simply think it was coal, or firewood, sacks of potatoes and crates of champagne, or any number of things being delivered. They had outlived their usefulness and they knew too much.

And other than that, dead men tell no tales—

END

Previous Episodes.