Number 7, Rue Jacob

by Wendy Hornsby

  Clearly, I had been followed, or somehow tracked, when I left the apartment earlier. Probably, I thought, the blondie had followed me in from the airport to find out where I was headed. He might have seen the water taxi pull away from the inlet where I was dropped, but because I’d had a head start and no one pulled in behind us, I strongly doubted that a tail would have seen which house I entered. Blondie could lurk on the piazza below and watch for me to emerge, but he still wouldn’t know which apartment I was in. Unless I snapped on the lights as soon as I got home and gave us away.

  In the bedroom, Jean-Paul snored softly. I peeled off my boots and jeans, climbed under the duvet beside him, and quickly fell asleep. Fireworks, probably from San Marco, woke me from a deep, dark place. Still groggy, I snuggled into Jean-Paul. While I slept, he had wrapped his free arm around me and pulled me close. I didn’t want to disturb him, so I just lay there, staying quiet. There was another boom! And a flash of red light.

  “Non!” he screamed and sat straight up in a panic. His eyes were open, but he was seeing something far away as he pleaded: “Je vous en prie!”

  “Jean-Paul.” I wrapped an arm around him and brushed his hair off his forehead. He wasn’t as warm as he’d been when I arrived, but he still had a fever. “Shh. We’re okay. It’s just fireworks.”

  He let out a deep breath and sagged back against the pillows. “Sorry. Bad dream.”

  “You cried out.”

  “Ah,” was all he said.

  “Hungry?”

  “Very.”

  I checked my watch. It was almost eleven; I had been asleep for nearly five hours. Reluctantly, I dragged myself to my feet and went to the bathroom to wash my face. Jean-Paul followed. He leaned against the door jamb, and watched me.

  “You made the rendezvous?” he asked.

  “Yes. I guess.” I filled a glass and gave him his next dose of meds. “Someone tapped my shoulder three times. What was supposed to happen?”

  “Did you check your right coat pocket?”

  “No.” I dried my hands and face and retrieved my coat from the bedroom doorknob. In the right-hand pocket there was a USB memory drive that I had not put there. I held it up to Jean-Paul, who stood nearby. “This?”

  “That.” He kissed me as he took it off my palm. “Congratulations.”

  “What is it?”

  “I told you I hired a hacker,” he said, following me back into the bathroom. “I asked him to check all of my accounts to see what has been hacked, and then to search backward to find out who is doing it. That little drive should have his work product to date. As soon as we can, we’ll find an Internet café, plug in the drive and see what he discovered.”

  “Your hacker can’t have come cheap,” I said, getting out the razor and shaving gel and guiding him to sit on the edge of the tub so that I could shave the left side of his chest before taping the dressing back over the shrapnel wound. “How did you pay him?”

  “I used a credit card. My hacker told me he wanted a fresh transaction to start his search.”

  “Do you trust this little criminal?”

  “I need to trust him.” When I finished patching him up, he took the razor from me to shave off his three-day beard. “For now.”

  “Why does that not fill me with confidence?” He was still naked, shivering. I picked up the nail scissors I’d left on the counter and headed out. “I’ll get your clothes.”

  I turned on the light over the stove, dumped out the shopping bags on the dining table, and started snipping tags. When Jean-Paul came in from the bedroom, freshly shaved, he dressed quickly, needing only a little help with buttons. He smoothed his shirt front, tucked in the empty sleeve, smiled, and said, “Thank you.”

  “Prego. How does everything fit?”

  He pulled out the jeans waistband to show me they were big. “I think I must have lost some weight after three days on canned sardines. A few days of Italian pasta and I’ll gain it back. What did you find to eat?”

  “Pasta.”

  I make no claim to being anything more than an adequate cook, if that. Everything I bought came in a package, needing only a little heating and assembling before it was ready to serve. We had fat sausage-filled ravioli, bottled sauce, some shredded Parmesan, and mixed salad greens poured out of a plastic bag into a bowl and tossed with the vinegar and olive oil that our erstwhile host, Gille, had left in a cupboard.

  After his first few bites, Jean-Paul looked up. “So, no trouble?”

  “Maybe.”

  He put his fork down. “Maybe?”

  I took the camera out of my coat pocket and found the shots I had taken of the tall blond man. “This guy was in the shops in Paris this morning, and on my flight to Venice, too. He tried to start conversations both times. When he turned up in Coin tonight while I was shopping, I got some help from the staff to duck out the back to avoid him. Do you recognize him?”

  “No.” He manipulated the image and handed the camera back to me. In the center of the screen now there was a second man, one I hadn’t noticed, standing a little distance away from the blonde, near the store’s front door, watching the crowd outside pass by the big windows. Or was he watching the store behind him reflected in the tall windows? There was nothing that made him stand out. He was compact, medium height, medium build, medium brown hair that was not neither long nor short. Average, ordinary, an invisible man in a crowd. Jean-Paul tapped the image. “Him I recognize. Sabri Qosja. From Kosovo. A different sort of explosive left over from a war.”

  “How do you know him?”

  “After the Kosovar conflict—this was fifteen, sixteen years ago—Qosja and his father, and some hundreds of others, were brought before a panel of the World Court in The Hague to testify about war crimes they had witnessed or were accused of committing. I sat on the panel and asked a question from time to time.”

  “You remember him out of some hundreds?”

  “Yes, and a few others,” Jean-Paul said. “Qosja’s story was a common one. When the war started, he was very young, very naïve, ripe for adventure of a certain sort. He joined a separatist faction with his father, and they went off together to fight. During the conflict, opposition forces took over their village, destroyed their home, their farm, slaughtered the mother and younger children. When the two surviving Qosjas learned what had happened, they went on a mission of revenge. Rape, torture: unbelievable cruelty. They weren’t alone in that. Our concern was that their personal war of revenge would escalate into full-scale war all over again. The reason I remember Sabri Qosja is that his father wrote out a confession, taking all blame for what happened and exonerated his son. Then he hanged himself.”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” I muttered. “What happened to Qosja, the son?”

  “Nothing.” Jean-Paul shrugged. “No legal punishment, anyway. I can’t speak for the state of his soul. I do know that when it was over, he had nothing to go back for. No home, no family, no education to speak of, other than what he learned on the battlefield. The only skill he had to fall back on was the craft of warfare. After the peace, he went rogue, became a hired gun, a mercenary. The element that makes Qosja and men like him dangerous is, they have no ideology, no code beyond loyalty to whoever is paying them at any moment.”

  “And perhaps nothing left to lose?”

  “Perhaps that,” he said.

  “Do you think he’s trying to get you out of revenge?”

  “After so many years?” He raised a palm, showing skepticism. “If he wanted revenge he could have taken me out at any time. No, I think someone sent him.”

  “So, the question is, who hired him?”

  “That,” he said. “And why.”

  “Time to find out. I saw an Internet café on Campo Santo Stefano that’s probably open most of the night,” I said. “After we eat, I’ll go try to find out what your hacker gave you.”

  “And if Qosja and friend are outside, waiting?”

  “We can’t hide here forever, Jean-Paul.
”

  He glanced at the front door, which I had bolted and chained when I came in. But he said nothing. I thought he looked frightened. The previous spring, we survived a harrowing ordeal. Together. I learned then that in a predicament I could always count on Jean-Paul to be, first, level-headed, and next, decisive. It wasn’t like him to be at a loss for what to do, or to hesitate to engage when a threat lay at his doorstep. It certainly wasn’t like him to run.

  I took his hand. “What happened in Greece shook you to the core, didn’t it?”

  He nodded. “I wanted to keep the young woman, Ingrid, safe. But she would have been better off anywhere that night than in a hotel room registered in my name.”

  “You can’t hold yourself responsible for what others did to her, Jean-Paul. Or did to you and Eduardo.”

  He met my eyes. “I thought I was protecting you by getting you out of Paris. But here we are.”

  “Exactly. Here we are. Now what?”

  For a few moments, he stared off into the middle distance, saying nothing. I began to worry that more than his body had been injured in the explosion. But then his focus came back to me and he smiled, that sweetly wicked smile that meant that all his circuits had come back on board. He said, “When you want to know where the enemy is, sometimes you have to run out of the forest to draw his fire.”

  “We’re going to make a run for it.”

  “We need to get back to Paris,” he said. “We have more resources there. I want to know what my hacker discovered, but first we need to get out of Venice.”

  “Shall I call a water taxi?”

  He dismissed that idea immediately. “We’d be too vulnerable alone. There’s safety in a crowd. The city always puts on late trains for Carnevale. Let’s try to catch the overnight to Milan or Florence. If we aren’t followed, we can catch a morning flight to Paris.”

  I sighed as I forked another ravioli; they were very good and I was very hungry. The apartment was warm and comfortable. I had hoped that we could hole up there for a while longer, to give Jean-Paul some time to heal, and for both of us to rest. Knowing who was waiting out there for us, however, made any thoughts of resting disappear.

  “First things first,” I said, catching his eye. “Eat your dinner. Who knows when we’ll eat again. Even the condemned are entitled to a last meal.”

  4

  We wedged our way onto a crowded vaporetto at the Accademia stop, headed toward the train station. I pushed in first, trying to protect Jean-Paul’s injured left side as he got on behind me, but it was useless. The crowd pressed in all around us, surging and swaying as the water bus moved along the black, storm-tossed water of the Grand Canal. He never complained, but by the time we reached the train station, his face was ghostly pale. We were disgorged with the mass onto the wet pavement, again with me leading the way. Rain had given way to heavy sleet and there were treacherous patches of ice underfoot. A woman in front of us slipped and somehow managed to kick both of us in the shins as she fell on her ass. I think she was drunk. I think a lot of the people around us were drunk. It felt to me as if we had landed into a noisy nightmare we couldn’t wake from.

  While Jean-Paul stood with his back to mine, scanning the crowd, on the lookout for the blonde or Sabri Qosja, I queued up at a ticket machine and used one of the prepaid cards to buy two first-class seats on the train to Padua, only because the train was already in the station and was due to leave in five minutes. Otherwise, we would have to wait nearly an hour to catch the connecting trains to either Milan or Florence. I thought that when we got to Padua, a short trip, we could figure out what to do next. Tickets in hand, I gripped the empty left sleeve of Jean-Paul’s coat in my right hand and used the backpack over my left shoulder as a sort of battering ram, muttering, “Scusi, scusi,” when anyone glared, to open a path among the crowd of aimlessly milling people on the platform so that we could board our train before it left the station.

  After a collision with someone who came in from the side, I heard someone behind me sniff, “And I thought the Canadians were supposed to be ever so polite.”

  Jean-Paul laughed, so I knew that he would be all right; I had been afraid he was on the verge of passing out. A conductor handed us into a first-class carriage just before he called out, “Signori, tutti in carrozza!” We sank into the nearest available seats and sighed in relief. We were in, the all-aboard had been called, and we were about to leave Venice. Intact. And that’s when I spotted them.

  The blonde and Qosja arrived by water taxi. They stood on the station platform for a moment, their eyes glued to their telephone screens like half the people we saw. Without looking up, Qosja’s index finger homed in on us as if it were the arrow of a compass and we were magnetic north. The blonde was searching at windows as they walked along outside our train, coming closer. I nudged Jean-Paul. He opened his eyes and looked up just as the two men hopped into the car ahead of ours. The train had already begun to huff, the whistle blew, and I felt the wheels under us rumble to life. I grabbed the backpack and we bailed out of our seats, staying low as we raced for the rear door. We were four steps from our goal when the conductor climbed in and pulled up his stool.

  I called out, “Scusi, scusi,” and pointed at Jean-Paul, who indeed did not look well. When I caught the conductor’s eye, I did my best to pantomime vomiting. The conductor, who would be the guy who had to clean up any mess if that sort of event actually did happen, understood well enough that, with a horrified look on his face, he handed us down onto the platform just as the train began to chug forward. We both faltered a step, off balance. This time, Jean-Paul grabbed me by the coat sleeve and pulled me into the middle of a clutch of well-lubricated youth who had watched our clumsy exit with great and noisy amusement. We ducked in among them, hunching low, using them as a shield against the eyes of anyone looking out from inside the train.

  “Shh,” Jean-Paul said to them, touching his lips. “Her husband is on that train.”

  A boy whose head was shaved except for a long green hank that fell over his eyes, aimed a grubby finger at the stitchery on Jean-Paul’s face. “He do that to you, mate?”

  With a nod, Jean-Paul said, “Bastard.”

  The kids, about an equal number of boys and girls, older teens, Brits from the sound of them, thought this was terrific fun and closed in around us, making a great show of nonchalance—nothing happening here, nothing to see—that would never win them any acting prizes, but did shelter us. I was able to peek out through gaps between shoulders, bags, and arms as the train gained momentum. Through the windows, we watched Qosja and the blond enter the rear of the car we had vacated, Qosja still with his eyes focused on his telephone screen, or whatever device he held. Before the inter-carriage door closed behind him, his head popped up. He looked around, confused. After another glance at the device he pivoted and pointed right at us as he shouted something at the blonde. But it was too late for them to get off the moving train. The last I saw of them as the train passed by was Blondie’s face pressed up against a window, mouth set in a grim and angry line as he searched the platform, looking for us.

  “Is that him?” one of the tattooed and pierced girls asked me. “That white-haired old wanker?”

  “Yes. That’s the beast. Thank you for your help.”

  “Prego,” she said with a self-conscious giggle. Then, with a wise-ass grin, she announced, “You see, as I was just saying, the whole world has gone to shit. If the mummies and daddies are fooling around, what’s left?”

  Jean-Paul and I both laughed as we straightened up and brushed ourselves off. These kids were just about the same ages as my daughter, Casey, and his son, Dominic. Would our beloved offspring have done the same for a couple of over-forty delinquents? I wondered.

  “The old wanker has a tracker app on ya’,” a tall, skinny sprig offered. “He put ‘un on your mobile like my dad did on me. Always knew where to find me, my dad did.”

  I looked at Jean-Paul and he nodded. The kid was right. We were being
electronically tracked. But how? Our pursuers couldn’t be using our never-used, anonymous, batteryless telephones to locate us. So, how were we giving off signals?

  Just then, a vaporetto pulled up to the stop outside the station and out poured another throng of chilled, party-weary humanity.

  Jean-Paul slipped his hand around my elbow. “Come along, my delectable little Canadian. Time to leave.”

  “It’s cold out here,” I said to the group, nodding toward a café on the far side of the platform that was still open. “Before your train comes, may we treat you all to a hot drink? Maybe a snack?”

  There was general agreement that that was a good idea. I folded some euros into the hand of the kid whose dad had put a tracker app on his phone and said, “This should cover the tab.”

  They walked us as far as the vaporetto stop, and after a round of farewells, they headed off toward the café amid a welter of chatter.

  The only other people on the vaporetto when it pulled away from the train station was a young couple necking on the rear seat, and the pilot. We sat near the front, ready to make a fast exit if we needed to.

  Jean-Paul cradled his left elbow, and I knew his shoulder ached. He was scarily wan. When I laid my hand along his cheek, he turned to me and asked, “How are they tracking us?”

  I had no idea. As the vaporetto carried us away from the train station, we went over everything in our possession. Without their batteries, the phones didn’t send out locator signals. I had disabled the picture-sharing capability on my camera before I left Paris. So, what was left? We emptied the backpack, making two piles on the seat between us: the freshly laundered clothes I brought with me, the things I bought for him that afternoon, the paperback book I picked up at Orly, the red handbag from the shop on the Rialto Bridge. One by one, we examined every item, and then gave the backpack I had found at the bottom of an armoire in Isabelle’s apartment a very thorough going-over before putting anything back inside. Even the leather bank pouch was turned inside out and prodded.