The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [217]
She remembered hanging up and feeling only numbness. Nothing existed. There was no François Christian. No Dr. Paul Osborn of Los Angeles. Nor was there a Vera Monneray who could go back to her apartment and her life in Paris and carry on as if nothing had ever happened. Four people were dead at a farmhouse behind her and the only men she had ever known and cared about, loved as completely and deeply as she had, were gone, vanished, like steam into the air. It was then a sense came over hen that what was happening was only a prelude to what was to come. And once again she felt the awful and shadowed echo of her grandmother’s past, and the horror and unending fear that went with it. The only answer seemed to lie in Berlin, as it had in her grandmother’s day. Only now it had become a great deal more personal. Whatever had happened to François was part of it, but Osborn was too because he was on the same path as well.
She’d checked into Avril’s room and found Avril’s clothes already there. Then room service brought her breakfast. On the tray had been the newspaper and the word of François’ suicide. Feeling faint at first, she knew she needed to get outside and into the air to recover, to think, to plan what to do when and if someone contacted her. Or what to do if they did not, and if she should simply go to Charlottenburg that night alone. So, hiding her passport under the mattress for fear someone would discover who she really was, she’d gone out.
It was while she was walking she’d come upon the Church of Mary Queen of Martyrs. Ironically it was a religious memorial, dedicated to the martyrs for the freedom of belief and conscience from 1933 to 1945. It was like an omen beckoning her, and she thought that inside she might find some kind of answer to what was happening. What she’d found instead were the German police waiting when she came out.
Detective Schneider had lied when he’d told Osborn that if anything happened he was to take him back to the hotel. The truth was that if Vera Monneray was found, Osborn was to be taken directly to where she was being held. McVey wanted Osborn and Ms. Monneray to think they were alone, thereby giving McVey the chance to garner whatever candid information such a meeting would reveal. The idea was to make it seem the concept had been Osborn’s; and with Schneider’s help it worked; Osborn had played right into it.
Suddenly the door to the interrogation room was pulled open. Osborn swung around and saw McVey coming through the doorway. “Get him out of here, now!” McVey said angrily, and abruptly two uniformed federal policemen were jerking Osborn to his feet and hustling him out. “Vera!” he cried out, trying to look back. “Vera!” His second cry was followed by the booming slam of a heavy steel door. Then he was walked quickly down a narrow hallway and up a short flight of stairs. A door was opened and he was taken into another white room. The policemen I went out, and the door was closed and locked.
Ten minutes later McVey came in. His face was red and he was breathing heavily, as if he’d just climbed a long flight of stairs.
“What’d you get on the tape? Anything of interest?” Osborn said icily the moment the door opened. “Convenient” for me to get there first, wasn’t it! Maybe, she’d tell me what she wouldn’t tell you or the German police and the mikes would pick everything up. But it didn’t work, did it? All you got was the truth from a terrified woman.”
“How do you know it was the truth?”
“Because I do, dammit!”
“Did she ever mention Captain Cadoux of Interpol— ever talk about him, say his name?”
“No. Never.”
McVey glared at him, then softened. “Okay. Let’s believe her. Both of us.”
“Then let her go.”
“Osborn. You are here because of me. And by that I mean not dead on the floor of some Paris bistro with a Stasi shooter’s bullet between your eyes.”
“McVey, that has nothing to do with this and you know it! The same as you have no reason to hold her. You know that too!”
McVey never took his eyes from Osborn’s. “You want to know the why about your father.”
“What