The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [186]
“What do you think?” McVey said to Remmer as the elevator doors slid closed. “They know we’re here?”
Remmer shrugged. “All I can tell you is that we were not followed from the plane to Berlin. Nor from the restaurant to here. But who knows what eyes we don’t see. Safer to assume they know, I think, yes?”
Noble glanced at McVey. Remmer was right: safer to be on guard than not. Even if the “group” didn’t know they J were here, they had to believe they soon would. They’d seen too much of the way they worked already.
At the sixth floor, the elevator stopped and they walked out into a reception area where they were ushered into a i private office and asked to wait.
“Do you know this judge? Gravenitz? That his name?” McVey looked around at what was obviously a civil servant’s office. The plain steel desk and chair that went with it would fit into any public building in L.A. So would the inexpensive bookcase and the cheap prints on the wall.
Remmer nodded. “Not well, but yes.”
“What can we expect?”
“Depends what Honig told him. Unquestionably it was enough for him to agree to see us. But don’t think because Honig set it up or Gravenitz agreed to see us right away it’s guaranteed. Gravenitz will take convincing.
McVey glanced at his watch and sat down on a corner of the desk, then looked at Osborn.
“I’m okay.” Osborn walked over and leaned against the wall by the window. McVey hadn’t forgotten his assault on Merriman and wouldn’t. That was something else he didn’t want to think about, not now. Still, it hung there because he knew at some point it would become an issue.
The door opened and Diedrich Honig came in. Judge Gravenitz, he apologized, had been delayed but would see them momentarily. Then he looked at Noble and told him a message had come for him to call his London office immediately.
“A break, maybe?” Noble went to the desk and picked up the phone. In thirty seconds he had his office. Twenty seconds after that he was transferred to the chief homicide superintendent of the London police.
“Oh God, no,” he said a moment later. “How did it happen? He had a twenty-four-hour guard.”
“Lebrun,” McVey breathed.
“Well where in God’s name is he now?” Noble said irritably. “Find him and when you get him, hold him in isolation. When you have any information at all, relay it through Inspector Remmer’s office in Bad Godesberg.” Hanging up, Noble turned to McVey with the details of Lebrun’s murder and the fact that Cadoux had disappeared in the confusion immediately following his shooting of the orderly.
“I don’t have to bet whether the orderly’s dead,” McVey said through clenched teeth.
“No, you don’t.”
Running a hand through his hair, McVey walked across the room. When he turned back he was looking directly at Honig. “You ever lose one of your friends in the line of duty, Herr Honig?”
“You don’t do this game without it . . . ,” Honig said quietly.
“Then how much longer do we have to wait for Judge Gravenitz?” It wasn’t a question, it was a demand.
94
* * *
GRANDIOSE, SHORT and red faced, with a shock of silver white hair, district Kriminal Richter Otto Gravenitz gestured toward a grouping of leather and Burmese teak chairs and bade them in German to sit down. Standing until they were seated, he crossed in front of them and sat down behind a massive rococo desk, the soles of his shoes barely reaching down to the oriental carpet beneath them. In contrast to the Spartan decor of the rest of the building, Gravenitz’s office was a rich oasis of taste, antiques and wealth. It was also a well-calculated display of power and position.
Turning to the others, Honig explained in English that because of Scholl’s prominence and the severity of the charge against him, Judge Gravenitz had chosen to conduct the deposition himself, without the presence of a state prosecutor.
“Fine,” McVey said. “Let’s get on with it.
Leaning forward, Gravenitz turned on a tape recorder “and, at three twenty-five, they got to business.
In a brief opening statement, translated