Final justice - W.E.B. Griffin [71]
After a brief stop at the constabulary office in Cognac-Boeuf to report the suspect was in custody--there was no telephone in Piaf Mill, and the radios in the gendarmes' Peugeots were out of range of their headquarters--the man, still denying he had ever even heard of Isaac Festung, was taken in a gendarmerie car to Gradnignan Prison in Bordeaux, fingerprinted, and placed in a cell.
Forty-five minutes after that, a technician of the French Surete, sent from Paris, after comparing "Stillman's" just-taken prints with a set of prints of one Isaac David Festung, furnished via Interpol by the office of the Philadelphia District Attorney, declared that it was his professional opinion that they matched beyond any reasonable doubt.
When confronted with this announcement, Isaac Festung shrugged his shoulders and said that it was sad but he wasn't surprised, that it had been inevitable that the American CIA would finally gain control of Interpol and finally be able to silence him.
Madame "Stillman," meanwhile, back at the Piaf Mill, had gotten dressed and then driven to the telephone office in Cognac-Boeuf. There she had made several telephone calls, and had then come out to repeat more or less what her husband had said in Bordeaux: He was being persecuted by the American FBI and CIA both for being a peace activist and "for what he knew." What he knew was not specified.
He had fled the United States, they both said, after he was arrested on a preposterous charge of murder. Furious that he had escaped their clutches, the CIA and FBI had arranged for a kangaroo trial in absentia, which had predictably found him guilty and sentenced him to death.
One of the telephone calls Madame Stillman/Mrs. Festung made was to a lawyer in Paris, who promptly called a press conference to make public what outrageous violations of law--and common decency--the barbaric American government was attempting to perpetrate.
The next day, the newspapers of France--and elsewhere in Europe--carried the story, often accompanied by outraged editorials.
For one thing, the European Convention on Human Rights had declared that an accused criminal was entitled to his day in court, which meant that he had the absolute right to be physically present in the courtroom to refute witnesses making, for example, preposterous charges that he had beaten and/or strangled his girlfriend and then stuffed her body into a trunk, which he then stored in a closet in his apartment, until the odor from there had caused his neighbors to call the police, asking them to investigate.
As astonishing an outrage as that was, the Americans had the incredibly barbaric arrogance to sentence the man illegally tried to an illegal sentence, that of being put to death by electrocution.
The death penalty was not permitted under French law. Extradition of someone sentenced to death, even in a trial at which he was present when a jury of his peers had found him guilty, was absolutely forbidden.
Many of the editorials demanded both that Mr. Festung be immediately set free and that the French government make, in the strongest possible language, their outrage known to the United States government.
The government of France wasn't willing to go that far, possibly because the United States government suggested that if it did, the United States government would no longer honor requests of France passed to them via Interpol.
The matter would be decided, the French government announced, as soon as humanly possible, in a French court. France being France, that took six months, during which Mr. Festung remained confined in Gradnignan Prison in Bordeaux.
Mrs. Festung visited him frequently, sometimes daily, while they waited for the wheels of French judicial bureaucracy to grind inexorably.
The United States government then contracted