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“Reporter from where?”
“A German newspaper.”
“That makes me wonder about Gossinger,” Delchamps said.
“I was born in Germany to a German mother. So far as the Germans are concerned, that makes me a German forever and eligible for a German passport. It’s a handy cover.”
“You going to tell me who Castillo is?”
“My father was a Huey pilot who got killed in Vietnam before he got around to marrying my mother. When I was twelve, my father’s parents found out about me and off I went to the States, with my father’s name on my American passport.”
Delchamps met his eyes for a moment but didn’t respond directly. Instead, he said, “I would say that maybe the KSK is involved, but—”
“The KSK?”
“Die Kommando Spezialkräfte, KSK, German Special Forces. You didn’t know?”
His German pronunciation is perfect. He sounds like he’s a Berliner. Well, he told me he’d done time in Berlin.
“Two of the guys in black were black-skinned,” Castillo said. “I never even thought they might be German.”
Which was pretty goddamned stupid of me.
Delchamps looked as if he had been going to say something but had changed his mind.
“Say it,” Castillo said.
Delchamps looked at him for a moment, then shrugged.
“Some of the kids—hell, thousands of them—in situations like yours had black fathers whose family didn’t take them to the States. When they grew up—and being a black bastard in Germany couldn’t have been a hell of a lot of fun—they found getting jobs was hard, but they were German citizens and could join the army. A lot of them did. And, by and large, most of them weren’t fans of anything American.”
“I should have thought of that,” Castillo said.
“That said, I think it’s unlikely that KSK would be involved in anything like what happened in Uruguay. Unlikely but not impossible. They keep them on a pretty tight leash.”
“There were some German Special Forces people in Afghanistan,” Castillo said. “I didn’t see any black ones.”
“So what do you want to do in Paris?”
“Can you get me into Lorimer’s apartment?”
“I can, but you’re not going to find anything there,” Delchamps said. “The Deuxième Bureau and the UN guys went through it as soon as he turned up missing. And so did I, when I learned there was interest in the bastard.”
He’s right. This has been a wild-goose chase.
Inspector Clouseau fucks up again.
“I just remembered,” Delchamps went on, “that I’m the guy who assured you that Lorimer had already been taken care of. So, okay. We’ll have another look. You looking for anything special?”
“Nothing special. Anything that’ll point me in the direction of whoever whacked Masterson.”
“And that’s all you came to Paris for?”
Castillo nodded.
“Where are you going from here, to see the German reporter?”
“To his newspaper. I want to talk to his editor.”
