Paul Christopher: The Templar Cross

"Been a cop long?" Holliday asked, looking for something to say. Japrisot wasn't the most voluble person he'd ever met, even though his English was excellent.

"Thirty-one years. Before that the Prevotales in Algeria."

"Prevotales? Provost Corp? Military Police?"

"Yes, Le Legion etrangere, what you call the Foreign Legion."

"Bad times," commented Holliday.

"Very bad," said Japrisot. He shrugged. "Better for me than others however," he murmured.

"How so?"

Japrisot's heavy shoulders lifted again.

"I wasn't at Dien Bien Phu."

"There is that," Holliday said and nodded. The Battle of Dien Bien Phu had been the last encounter of the war in Indochina for the French and a ghastly preview of the coming war in Vietnam for the United States. More than a thousand soldiers died during the prolonged battle and several thousand more were taken prisoner, never to be heard from again.

Japrisot stared out the window and smoked. Across the quay the Vieux Port was a forest of masts. Once the central port of the city, the Vieux Port was now reserved for pleasure craft and the local fishing fleet. On the far side of the narrow harbor a line of pale yellow seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings rose in a solid wall. At the far end of the harbor was a narrow plaza where the daily fish market was staged, and rising away from it was la Canebiere, a broad triumphant avenue that led up the steep hill the old city was built on, leading to the basilica on the summit. The only thing Holliday remembered about Marseille was that King Alexander Karageorgevich I of Serbia had been assassinated there in 1934, the first political murder ever caught on film.

"All I know about Marseille is The French Connection," offered Rafi.

"Popeye-goddamn-bloody-Doyle," muttered Japrisot, stubbing out his cigarette in a big enameled Cinzano ashtray in the middle of the table. "He put a curse on this place. Connard!"

"Things aren't as bad as the movie made out?" Holliday asked.

"They are actually much worse," said Japrisot. "Sometimes I think the film made it that way with all the publicity it was given. Still, the tourists come and ask if they can see where the heroin is made. Merde! It gives the place a reputation, yes? Not a good one. We have Disney cruise ships and you hear them talking, Gene Hackman this, Gene Hackman that."

"They don't smuggle drugs here?" Rafi asked.

"Of course they smuggle drugs here. They smuggle everything here," answered Japrisot. "Morphine, pornography, girls, Africans, toothpaste, cigarettes. Cigarettes. A great many cigarettes. Le Milieu smuggles anything to make a profit. Last year it was false teeth from the Ukraine."

"Le Milieu?" Holliday asked.

"Marseille's version of the Mafia, the underworld," explained Japrisot. "They started off mostly as stevedores, controlling the waterfront in the late forties and early fifties, then moved from there. After the war they got into drugs in a big way."

"Is our guy Valador one of this Milieu?" Rafi asked.

Japrisot let out a snorting laugh, smoke rushing out of his nostrils like an animated bull in a cartoon.

"Little Felix!?" Japrisot said. "Felix Valador barely knows his mother's name, let alone anyone in Le Milieu. He's strictly small-time. Sometimes he brings a few hundred cartons of cigarettes in for the Corsicans, sometimes knockoff Rolexes from a Hong Kong freighter. Connecting with La Santa is a big step up for him, believe me. We got lucky, my friends-of that, I have no doubt."

A boat came through the narrow entrance to the Vieux Port. It was an old- fashioned harbor trawler, perhaps forty-two feet long, the high deckhouse set far back toward the stern. Once upon a time she'd been painted blue and white; now she was just dirty, rusty tear tracks running down from her ironwork, dark stains everywhere from bilge runoff, her brightwork dull under a layer of grease. Her license number was painted in large figures on her bow and there was a nameplate on her transom as she passed, heading toward the tent-covered fish market on the plaza at the end of the harbor.

"That's her, Valador's boat, La Fougueux," said Japrisot. "In English, Tempestuous, I think."

"Now what?" Rafi asked.

"Perhaps we should go for a little stroll," suggested the French policeman. He lit another cigarette, stood up, flicked ash off his bright yellow tie and stepped out into the sun-dappled afternoon. Rafi followed. Sighing, Holliday dropped three fifty-euro notes on the table to cover their tab and went after them. Japrisot hadn't shown the slightest sign of paying for his own lunch even though he'd been the one to order wine. Apparently whatever his obligation was to the old lawyer Ducos it didn't include cash.

The Rive Nueve, the New Side of the old port, seemed to be wall-to-wall restaurants and bars. There was everything from a Moroccan place called Habib's to an Irish pub and a German beer garden called Kanter's. They made their way down the broad quayside, keeping on the shady side, threading their way around cafe tables full of patrons finishing lunch and enjoying the weather.

Holliday watched as La Fougueux tied up at the dock, nestled beside the little double-ended, black-hulled ferry that took tourists from one side of the harbor to the other for a few euro. A blond-haired man stepped out onto the foredeck wearing a bright red nylon shell. He looked tall and athletic, somewhere in his thirties. Another man appeared, shorter, heavier and older. Together they started hauling fifty-kilo rope-handled fish boxes up on deck.

Holliday, Rafi and Japrisot walked across the Rive Nueve and stood looking out over the water, leaning on the beige metal fence that ran around the seawall. Japrisot flicked the butt of one cigarette down into the oily water and lit another. A young woman was sunbathing topless on a sail-boat almost directly below them. The boat was a Contessa 32, named Dirty Girl. The sunbathing woman was much larger than that, at least a 38. Japrisot paid no attention.

"The one in the red shell is Valador," he said. "The older man is Kerim Zituni. A Tunisian. Some people say he was Black September once upon a time. Others that he was one of the Tunisian Black Suits-their secret police."

"Is that signifigant?" Holliday asked.

"He's old enough for it to mean that he probably worked with Walter Rauff," answered Japrisot.

"Never heard of him." Holliday shrugged.

"I have," said Rafi, his voice dull. "He murdered my grandparents. He was one of the men who invented the mobile gas trucks the Nazis used in the sub-camps. He was also in charge of the Final Solution in North Africa. He rounded up all the Jews in Morocco and Tunisia and exterminated them. If Rommel had taken Egypt, Rauff's next step would have been Palestine."

"What happened to him?"

"He died in Chile in 1984. Peacefully, in his sleep," answered Japrisot. "He was seventy-eight. He was an intelligence advisor to Pinochet."

"So we take it this Zituni is not a nice man," said Holliday dryly.

"And potentially very dangerous," Japrisot said and nodded.

They kept watching the ship as Felix Valador and his Tunisian companion continued to stack fish boxes on the deck. At forty boxes they stopped and Valador began humping the boxes down onto the narrow plaza and loading them into a bright red boxy old Citroen HY van with corrugated sheet metal sides. A sign on the side of the van read Poissonnerie Valador in gold with a phone number beneath. He loaded the first ten boxes through the side door and the rest through the doors at the back of the van.

"Notice the order," commented Japrisot, watching as Valador loaded the boxes one at a time.

"Last ones out of the hold went into the truck first," said Rafi.

"Remember that," said Japrisot.

"He's almost done," said Holliday.