Final Justice (Badge of Honor 8)

The most important factor in the equation was that the French really hated America and Americans. The Italians were grateful that the Americans had run the Germans, and the native fascists, out of Italy in the Second World War, and grateful again for the American relief effort after the war, and for American help in keeping the Communists from taking any real power in Italy.

The French were privately shamed that the Americans had twice been responsible for chasing the Boche from French soil. American aid to France after the war had made France resentful, not grateful, and France had been relieved when the Americans took a whipping in what had been French Indochina. It would have been almost too much for the French to bear if the Yankees had beaten the Vietnamese into submission after they had failed.

Dien Bien Phu was just one more name on a very long list of battles that the proud French Army had lost, something one would never suspect watching them strut down the Champs Elysees on Bastille Day with flags flying.

Fort saw proof of his theory in French automobiles. Most of them, he thought, in addition to being notoriously unreliable, were spectacularly ugly. And they had yellow headlights. No other country in Europe put yellow headlights on their cars. So far as Fort could tell, the only advantage of the yellow headlights was that they immediately identified a car as having been made in France.

They couldn’t even sell French cars in the United States. They didn’t meet American safety standards. Automobiles made, for example, in Korea did. And that was not even getting into the comparisons that could be made between Peugeots and Citroens and the Mercedes-Benzes and Porsches made by the hated Boche on the other side of the Rhine and which were highly regarded around the world.

There were, when he had time to think about it, literally hundreds of other proofs of France’s general inferiority and the French unwillingness-perhaps inability-to accept it.

What this all added up to was that when a Frenchman found himself in a position where he could tell the United States to go fuck itself, he could count on hearty cheers from the great majority of his countrymen.

The issue, in other words, no longer had anything to do with what happened in Philadelphia so many years ago, or with Fort Festung.

It had become a question of the French Republic proving its sovereignty and independence before the world. France, the world’s center of culture and civilization, was not about to bow to the will of the goddamned uncultured, uncivilized, and despicable United States of America.

Vive La France!

In the meantime, living in Cognac-Boeuf wasn’t at all bad. He admitted he missed the excitement of Philadelphia, and obviously, he could never go back there. But with this business all out in the open, when the Supreme Court issued its decision, he would be able to travel all over France, which meant Paris.

And in the meantime, Fort Festung thought, as he got out of bed and put on a loosely fitting shirt and baggy cotton trousers, and slipped his sockless feet into thong sandals, life here in Cognac-Boeuf wasn’t at all bad.

He could, for example, get on his bicycle, ride into Cognac-Boeuf, take a table at La Relais, have rolls fresh from the oven, locally made butter, coffee, and a hooker of cognac placed before him, and consume them while he explained to the locals what the stories in Time and the Trib really meant.

And that was exactly what Isaac David Festung did, while Officers Hyde and Cubellis remained on patrol in Philadelphia, maintaining as well as they could peace and domestic tranquillity in the City of Brotherly Love.

When Captain Henry C. Quaire walked into Homicide a few minutes after eight the same morning, he saw Sergeant Matthew M. Payne sitting on a chair outside the chief of Homicide’s office. Sergeant Payne rose when he saw Captain Quaire.

“Good morning, Sergeant,” Quaire said, smiling, and then waved his hand toward the door of his office. “Come on in.”

Matt Payne followed him into the office.

“One of your major responsibilities, Sergeant,” Quaire said, pointing to his coffee machine, “is to make sure that one of your subordinates makes sure that machine is tended and ready for service by the time I walk in here.”

“Yes, sir,” Matt said.

Quaire poured an Emerald Society cup full, and turned to Payne.

“Help yourself, Matt, and then pull up a chair.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you.”

Privately, Henry Quaire was not overjoyed at the assignment of Sergeant Payne to Homicide. For one thing, he’d

had nothing to do with it. Almost traditionally, the chief of Homicide had been able to select his men, and there were a number of sergeants-three, in particular, who wanted the assignment-whom Quaire considered to be far better qualified to be a sergeant in Homicide than Sergeant Payne.

But the commissioner had had his off-the-wall idea of giving the top five guys on the sergeant’s list their choice of assignment, so Payne’s assignment was a done deal, and there was no way he could fight it.

Not that he really wanted to, he decided. For one thing, he was off the hook about picking one of the other sergeants. If he had had to make a choice between them, two of them would not have gotten the assignment, and they-and their rabbis- would have been disappointed, and their rabbis probably pissed.

Now they could be pissed at the commissioner.

And it wasn’t as if Payne was an absolute incompetent getting shoved down his throat. He was, in fact, a pretty good cop, who would probably do a good job in Homicide before moving onward and upward in the police hierarchy. Like his rabbi, Inspector Peter Wohl, he was one of those people who seemed predestined for ever-greater responsibility and the rank that went with it.

Nor was there going to be, so far as Quaire sensed, much-if any-resentment from the Homicide guys about having a brand-new sergeant with just over five years on the job as a Homicide supervisor.

For one thing, Payne was close to the two most respected people in Homicide, Lieutenant Jason Washington and Detective Tony Harris. Washington had no problem with Payne’s assignment, and when Quaire had asked Tony Harris, Harris had been almost enthusiastic.