by Steven Gore
Maybe Hennessy missed the signal, or worse, maybe he caught it but got stuck in traffic, his one chance lost—and he just gave up, broken under the strain of failure and of events he couldn’t control.
Gage’s eyes drifted higher toward the rooftops of surrounding office and apartment buildings and church bell towers, all places from which Hennessy could’ve watched—
Or could have been watched.
Had Hennessy been followed? And by someone who grasped the meaning in his motions and understood what he was trying to accomplish? Maybe just a hired hand like Gilbert and Strubb. Go. Hunt. Fetch. Don’t think. Just do.
And what steps had Hennessy taken to lose them? Abandon his car, grab a taxi, then ditch it and grab another—steal another? Each moment the clock ticking down.
Gage’s ringing cell phone crashed into his thoughts. He recognized the number. He stared at the bright screen as he forced Hennessy’s confusion from his mind, and then answered.
“Bonjour,” Tabari said. “How are the legs?”
While Tabari had driven back to Marseilles, Gage had taken the trail a few miles farther before he returned to Cassis, searching for evidence of Hennessy’s activities before his death. Gage wasn’t convinced that the stolen car found at the trailhead was connected to Hennessy. Suicides don’t wipe away their fingerprints, but car thieves do.
He hoped that Tabari could get time away from work, for today’s trip was supposed to take them to where Hennessy’s rental car had been discovered by the police three days after his body.
“I’m ready for more,” Gage said. “When—”
“It won’t be me. The transport workers have a strike scheduled for this morning. Days off have been canceled and everyone has been assigned to riot duty.”
Gage remembered reading about the last one, a month earlier. Young North African and Arab teenagers had used the pretext of a battle between the strikers and the police as an excuse to ransack and torch a hundred shops.
“My uncle is on his way to pick you up. He had a couple of errands to run beforehand, but he should be near you in a minute or two.”
And that would mean that the inspection would be all show with no chance at all of tell.
Gage scanned the storefronts, then started walking toward a canopied restaurant on the bottom floor of a triangular-shaped building at the terminus of Rue de Republic.
“Have him pick me up in front of Café la Samaritaine,” Gage said.
“No problem,” Tabari said. “I’m sorry I can’t help you more, but I hope today you’ll find the answers you’re looking for.”
Gage crossed the quay and sheltered himself under the café awning against the rising sun. From there he watched buses offloading office workers and listened to the distant wail of sirens. Two car honks from La Canebiere caught Gage’s attention a few minutes later. He looked over and spotted Benaroun waving from the driver’s window of his Citroën as he rolled to a stop along the near curb. Gage climbed in and Benaroun looped around the meridian and headed south, away from the chaos of the city and once again toward the turmoil that had been Hennessy’s last days.
CHAPTER 38
A yi Zhao stared down at her rice bowl, too tired after thirty-six hours without sleep to lift her hands and manipulate her chopsticks. She closed her eyes and sighed.
“My son is nothing but a criminal,” she said, then looked up at Faith. “Do you have children?”
Faith shook her head.
“It’s better that way.”
Faith reached out and held Ayi Zhao’s hand. “But then you wouldn’t have such a wonderful grandson.”
“I know, and it’s a shame that he’s been so humiliated by his parents. I hope he’s finding comfort in his faith.” She shrugged. “I don’t understand it. Christianity seems so odd. I try to imagine heaven and hell, but I can’t see them except as distorted reflections of what is around me. And I can’t imagine Jesus as a god, only as a foreigner’s benevolent ancestor.”
Ayi Zhao paused for a moment and her eyes went vacant, then she shook her head as if to say that she’d somehow gone off course.
Faith released Ayi Zhao’s hand and pointed at her bowl. “You need to eat.”
Ayi Zhao reached for her chopsticks and managed them well enough to capture a sliver of green bean lying on top of her rice. Instead of eating it, she said, “It bothered me that Wo-li traveled so much and that he’d never tell me where he was going or where he went. It bothers me even more now that I know what he was doing.”
Knocking on the open storeroom door drew their attention to Old Cat, who walked in.
“We need to know whether Wo-li will do it,” Old Cat said, looking back and forth between them. He spread his arms. “People’s courts have now sprung up in Chongqing and across the border into Qinghai and into the Muslim areas of Xinjiang.”
Old Cat reached into his pocket and pulled out a cell phone, and then held it in his hand by the edges, as though it represented an unfamiliar form of magic.
Faith guessed from his manner that he’d never handled one before this day.
“They’re looking at us for guidance,” Old Cat said.
Ayi Zhao and Faith understood exactly what he meant by guidance: If Chengdu could find a nonviolent form of justice, the others might follow.
“Your grandson was persuasive,” Old Cat said, “and for that reason I was willing to let a judicial process take place, but we’ve reached a stalemate with Wo-li, and the army can attack at any moment—it’s time to act.”
Faith was certain that Old Cat didn’t expect Ayi Zhao to plead for the life of her son and daughter-in-law, and she didn’t.
“If you spare their lives,” Ayi Zhao said, “Wo-li will tell you everything.”
Old Cat cocked his head toward the door and pointed at his ear. Only then did they notice the background murmur of voices in the hallway and the chanting from outside of the building.
As the chanting rose into cheering, Old Cat said, “We’ve liberated a forced labor camp north of the city—”
Ayi Zhao pulled back, as if jolted by Old Cat’s words.
“Does that mean that you freed Xing Ming and Wang Bai?”
Faith recognized the names: Xing and Wang were eighty-year-old women whose sentencing to hard labor for planning a protest at the Beijing Olympics had engendered worldwide condemnation.
Old Cat nodded. “The criminals imprisoned there have fled into the hills, but the political dissidents have joined us here. And having suffered the way they did, they have their own ideas of what should happen to Wo-li and his wife. Especially his wife.” Old Cat looked at Faith. “The party runs the slave labor system and she’s the highest party representative in Chengdu.” Old Cat shrugged. “So you see, their lives are not entirely in my hands.”
“Of course they are,” Ayi Zhao said. “You can let them escape after they cooperate.”
Old Cat squinted toward the ceiling, then looked back at her and shook his head.
“They’re too well-known and they don’t have false papers. Even if they could get to a foreign border, there’s no way they could cross.”
Faith raised her hand as a prelude to speaking, but then lowered it. The only immunity she possessed arose out of her position as “the anthropologist,” the nameless professional witness. She looked at Ayi Zhao and understood a mother’s duty, and then asked herself where her own duty lay—and she was neither a mother, nor a revolutionary, nor even Chinese.
But then an image came to her mind of a wire service photographer that she’d once seen in a newspaper. His laying down his camera and diving into a Rwandan river to rescue a Tutsi baby who’d been thrown in to drown by a Hutu militia man—except that Wo-li and his wife weren’t innocent children. They were despicable adults, but they had a mother who didn’t deserve to suffer.
“I can get them out,” Faith said.
CHAPTER 39
Where are we going?” Gage asked Batkoun Benaroun as he gunned the six cylinders o
f his Citroën around the rising curves of the Marseilles hills. He sped through the oncoming flow of commuter traffic like a salmon swimming upstream, and with the same driven instinct.
“I’m not allowed to say until we get there,” Benaroun said.
“Isn’t this a little silly?”
“Of course, it’s like dancing the rumba without music or watching The Man in the Iron Mask without sound.” Benaroun glanced over and smiled. “In any case, we’ve come to the point in the program where we’ll have to supply our own lyrics.” He pointed ahead to where the road rose between banks of apartment buildings. “All they found up here was the car Hennessy had rented. Nothing else.”
Benaroun reached into his glove compartment and handed Gage a map. Looking at it, it wasn’t difficult for Gage to guess their location. The port was to the north behind them. The Mediterranean to the west. And the Basilique Notre Dame de la Garde, overlooking the city, was high in front of them and now coming into view atop a limestone cliff.
They worked their way through the winding streets west of the church until the road forked, one prong heading toward the entrance, the other around the back. They then made a final ascent, and Benaroun drove to the base of the hill on the west side of the church, where it bordered a residential area composed of one-story bungalows and multistory apartments.
Just after he turned onto a narrow dead end street, Benaroun gestured toward the backs of the wall-to-wall hillside homes whose balconies on their far sides faced the sea a mile away.
“He parked just by that yellow one with the green shutters,” Benaroun said. “In front of the door.”
“You mean his car was discovered there,” Gage said.
Benaroun’s face reddened. “Sorry. I went a little beyond the evidence.”
He then made a three-point U-turn and pulled to the curb across from a spreading stand of aloe cactus and olive trees and bushes growing from patches of earth and from cracks in the hillside rock.
The sun that met them as they stepped from the car seemed to Gage to cast pure white light, hard and stark, that made the pastels of the houses and reds and blacks and blues of the cars on the street seem less like overlaid coloring and more like the things themselves.
Gage walked twenty-five yards to the end of the street. He stopped and looked west through a gap between the houses toward the Frioul archipelago a mile offshore. He could just make out the Chateau d’If, France’s Alcatraz, on the smallest of the four islands. It was where the French government once imprisoned political and religious dissenters. Despite the actual suffering inflicted there that Gage had read about in school, the castle-shaped structure now existed in the public imagination only as the setting for the fictional Count of Monte Cristo. He wondered whether Hennessy, too, had hesitated at this spot and saw Ibrahim and himself in the fictional mirror of a wrongful prosecution and a struggle for justice and redemption.
Gage continued a little farther, past the end of the pavement and onto a dirt trail. He walked another thirty yards to where he could overlook the port—and realized that Benaroun had not at all gone beyond the evidence.
Standing in this place with the city glowing gemlike below, even without binoculars Hennessy could’ve made out the north end of the grass meridian at the head of the port and the backdrop of buildings that framed it. With binoculars, the limousine procession would have passed before him like a line of ants under a magnifying glass.
Gage heard Benaroun’s footsteps come to a stop next to him.
“Is this where he was watching from?” Benaroun asked.
“No,” Gage said, staring down at the city.
Benaroun turned toward Gage and squinted up at him. “I don’t understand.”
Gage directed his thumb over his shoulder. “Hennessy wouldn’t have parked back there and then walked all this way. There was no reason to. He’d have parked where the pavement ended.” He thought of Hennessy’s wife and her smile when she mentioned her husband’s investigative techniques. “His FBI training would’ve insisted on it. He would’ve parked as close as he could to where he was headed and then faced the car in the direction he wanted to go when he left.” He smiled at Benaroun. “Just like you did.”
Gage turned and pointed up at the basilica, then drew a line with his finger from the gleaming golden statue of the Madonna and Child at the top and down to where Hennessy’s car had been parked and then back up again.
“He must’ve been a mountain goat,” Benaroun said. “Even if he wanted to park down here for some reason, there are stairs close by.” Benaroun made a curving motion to the right with his hand, indicating the far side of the hill. “Those would’ve been easier. Or he could’ve walked back down the main road until he reached the fork and then back up again to the front of the church.”
“It’s likely that he did just that,” Gage said, enacting in his mind what Hennessy might have been thinking. “I suspect that he was concerned about surveillance. He’d do some evasive driving through town to get here, then pretend to be a tourist. Take the stairs and mix in with the crowd. And if he became convinced that they’d caught up with him, he could slip into the shadows and work his way down the hillside.”
Gage pointed up at the church. “How about drive me up to the top and I’ll make my way back down. You come back here and search a strip along the bottom of the hill, maybe ten meters wide. See if you can find anything.”
Gage’s cell phone rang as they walked back to the car.
“I need the snakehead after all,” Faith said.
Gage didn’t express the relief he felt.
“You ready to come out?”
“I need to stay a little longer. It’s for the students and Ayi Zhao’s son and daughter-in-law.”
Benaroun cast him a puzzled look, and Gage mouthed Faith’s name.
“How soon?”
“Two days. Assuming Wo-li agrees to it.” “You mean the rebels are trading exile for information?”
“And Wo-li is deciding how much to give them. For him it looks like a long-term solution to what may be a short-term problem. If he spills everything and the rebellion fails, he’ll have torpedoed his future. The government will have to arrest him and will probably have to execute him as an example.”
“At least this way,” Gage said, “he saves his life, and once he’s out of the country he can find a way to catch up with wherever his offshore cash is hidden.”
“As much as she hates to do it, that’s the pitch his mother is giving him.”
“I’ll call Mark Fong and give him your number.”
“Won’t he want some money?”
“I’ll take care of it,” Gage said, then thought for a moment. “Make sure you gather up whatever identity documents Wo-li and his wife have and any extra passport pictures. Mark may need to fudge up some papers to get them across the borders.”
Gage called Fong after he and Benaroun had gotten back into the car.
“We’ll settle up afterward,” Fong said.
“How soon—”
“My cousin in Chongqing will rent a big van and arrive there tomorrow, me the day after. We’ll collect the students first”—Fong laughed—“and then the criminals.”
Gage then understood why Fong wasn’t worried about payment. Either Wo-li and his wife would direct their offshore banker to wire the fee into Fong’s account, or he’d make sure that they’d never make it out of China.
“If you have to leave them somewhere along the road,” Gage said, “then leave them, but make sure the kids get out.”
“Of course.”
Gage disconnected and slipped his phone back into his pocket.
Benaroun grinned at Gage as he turned the ignition.
“Exile?” Benaroun said. “Like the Dalai Lama?”
“Not exactly.”
“And you trust this snakehead? The name certainly doesn’t inspire it.” Benaroun smiled. “I think I’d have more confidence in something a little more marsupial.”
; “The situation calls for someone cold-blooded,” Gage said, “and I know of no one colder.”
CHAPTER 40
As Gage climbed the steps from the east parking lot to the entrance of the Basilique Notre Dame de la Garde, he was certain that Hennessy had ascended them with a stronger feeling of expectation than he did. Gage even suspected that he might be wasting his time, for he recognized that he was following a chain of possibilities and probabilities, no stronger than its weakest hypothetical link.
Even more, Gage wasn’t sure that he’d come to understand Hennessy any better for having retraced his route. But he had to do it. And he knew Benaroun had to do it. Despite his claims that his relegation to financial investigations was an anti-Semitic gesture by the commissioner, his compulsive, methodical persistence made him a perfect choice for that kind of work, and for this kind, too.
Without articulating the need, they both understood that neither one of them was willing to suffer the lingering thought that the Marseilles police had missed something. And Gage was already certain that the detectives had misunderstood why Hennessy had parked on the street below.
Gage attached himself to the trailing end of a German tour group as he passed through the wrought-iron front gates and ascended the zigzagging steps to the terrace. He stayed with them as they walked the low-walled perimeter. The angle of view toward the port was now more extreme and the entire meridian was visible.
Gage followed the group up another level, checked the perspective, and then walked back down and out through the gate.
A footpath to his left led away from the concrete walkway. He followed it along the arched walls at the base of the church, his view of the city curtained and shadowed by oaks, pines, and brush. He soon emerged into daylight and worked his way over a limestone bluff until he could see the yellow house next to which Hennessy had parked his car.
Gage glanced up at the golden Madonna statue, concluding it would’ve been the most visible landmark at night, then picked his way farther, in between aloe and evergreen bushes, until he was in a direct line between it and the car. But a few steps down showed him that a direct line didn’t mean a direct route.