Free Son of Holmes by John Lescroart Page A

attention whatever, I realized that I was truly lost. Turning back wouldn’t help. There was nothing to do but continue walking, hoping I would stumble upon some familiar landmark.
    Everyone . . .
    Henri had been the next. It had come about naturally enough, since I bought my beer-making supplies from his shop. I remember the first time we’d gotten into a discussion of technique. He had a particularly dependable supplier of excellent German hops. German hops! His interest was so genuine, his personality so forthright, that I had spontaneously decided to ask him around.
    And he became the most regular of the guests. His attendance was never in doubt, which, now that I thought of it, was provocative. With a wife and a large family as well as a prospering business, he might have been expected to have the most demands on his time. Instead, our weekly gatherings were obviously a matter of great priority to him.
    Why, just the past night he’d left his wife in the middle of a disagreement, as Lupa had pointed out. Were our beer meetings more important to him than his domestic harmony? And if they were, why?
    Again I reflected on his bluff exterior—a happy, life-loving Greek. And the more I thought on it, the more incongruous were his business successes and his easy camaraderie with our varied and rather highbrow group.
    A dead-end street brought me up short. I was just as content to be lost—the physical disorientation matched my mental turmoil. I was losing faith in the world I lived in—a world where my friends were not as they seemed, where love and trust might be bargaining chips, and duplicity the coin of the realm.
    Everyone . . .
    I could not have met Georges more innocuously. Late last summer, just after I’d come down here, I was returning from a bit of business in St. Etienne in my motorcar when I came upon a well-dressed limping figure hitchhiking on the roadway. New to the area, Georges had miscalculated the distances between a few of his sales calls in St. Etienne and so had missed his train back to Valence. During the drive, we struck up a fascinating discussion on the question of reincarnation, and I sensed that he would fit in perfectly among my beer guests. And so it had proved.
    And yet there were coincidences that a mind more suspicious than my own might not have overlooked. That first Wednesday meeting with Georges in attendance was also Marcel’s first day back in the area. In other words, it was within two weeks of our first operative’s death. And that of course meant that Georges’s arrival in Valence occurred within days of that “accident.” Further, of all of our number, he had the least history. I had known of, or had references to account for, each of my other friends, each of the other suspects.
    Finally, and more subjectively, I have had a great deal of experience with members of my profession, and if there can be said to be a “type” of mind in the field, Georges’s most neatly fit that category—heavily reliant on facts, possessed of enough originality to deduce from those facts (Marcel’s glaring flaw and Lupa’s forte), plus a certain glibness, a way of getting by on the surface of events while chaos reigns on the operative level.
    The psychological babble was fine in its place, and yet the fact remained that Georges had not even been in the same room when Marcel had taken his last draft. And no service in the world would hire a man with Georges’s limp—it was simply unheard of.
    A recognizable square loomed ahead of me in the drizzle, and I found myself suddenly almost too dispirited to keep moving toward it. What was the point of going home? What, indeed, was home? Another hollow concept such as loyalty, duty, honor—all fine words to fight and die over, but nothing to take too seriously.
    But the old discipline directed my footsteps just as my training led my thoughts back to the issue. The stakes here were nothing less than survival, and sentiment must be viewed only as