by Cara Black
He reached over and untied her hands. She inhaled a metallic whiff of blood, his perspiration.
“Use this.” He handed her a travel-sized sewing kit. A small bottle of liqueur, airplane-sized, and a white embroidered towel. “Clean it right.”
She didn’t want to touch him.
“Or I use this.”
One hand held the gun; the other pulled back the matted black hair from his temple.
She winced. “Bring the light closer so I can see.”
The kerosene lantern scraped over the stained concrete floor.
Black slivers studded his eyelid; deep red cuts scored the edge of his eye. She sucked in air. “I need tweezers.”
“Eh? Just clean and sew it up.”
“But there are pieces of something in there. If you don’t take them out, you’ll get an infection. Now if I had my bag with twee … zers.… ” Her teeth chattered again.
He reached over, took her vanilla leather Birkin bag, and dumped out the contents: her new Vuitton wallet, agenda, checkbook, receipts, key ring, and cell phone tumbled on the rust flakes.
Her cell phone.
Her hopes lifted. A chance now. She’d help him, gain his confidence, and call for help.
“Check the side pocket for the tweezers,” she said. “Beside my lipstick.”
She pulled his jacket around her legs, glanced up. Giant tarnished metal cranes loomed over them, suspended in the air, like giraffes caught in flight. A slanted industrial glass roof above what looked like an assembly line. Wheels and rubber conveyor belts strewn on the floor. A familiar insignia with an R molded into one of the iron pillars.
R for Renault. She realized they were in the derelict Renault auto works on Île Seguin. The old production plant on the outskirts covered the island in the Seine. It had been abandoned for years. She’d gone by the plant countless times on the way to school when her father was posted to the Paris embassy. As a little girl she’d watched the finished cars loaded onto barges, fascinated.
She had to get her phone. Give the location. Grab a taxi and slip in the embassy back door, no one the wiser.
She poured the liqueur on the tweezers and over his cheekbone. He made a light intake of breath. Considering the blood he’d lost, he should be ready to pass out.
He grabbed the bottle, took a long drink. Then another.
If he passed out drunk, even better.
“Hurry up.”
She got to work. Instead of clubbing, she found herself in a freezing abandoned auto works swabbing a terrorist’s wound. But she had a plan.
“My friend’s mother’s people come from Basse Navarre,” she said, chewing the thread off with her teeth, determined to make conversation, relax him and lull him to carelessness. “Know it?”
“Why?” His chest muscles flexed. Hard. He grabbed her hair.
“Oww … your accent’s like her uncle’s. That’s all.”
“Rich brat, what do you know?” He relaxed the grip on her hair. “What’s this?” He picked up papers from her bag, her student card mired in the puddle. He stared at it. “You study?”
“No, I’m just a spoiled brat shopping and lunching with my girlfriends.” Anger flushed her cheeks. “I take design courses. Function in architecture. Model a bit on the side. Not.… ” She stopped before she said “a kidnapper like you.”
“Impressive. Maybe you’ll give me design tips.”
He nudged her with the gun.
Feeling more confident now, she tried to keep the conversation going. “I’m moving in with my boyfriend next year.”
“Does your father know?”
“My boyfriend’s a photographer,” she said. “An artist.”
“Art’s political.”
What did that mean? Art went on the wall. “Ready?” She probed deep with the tweezers.
He squinted, closing his eyes, his teeth grinding.
Her pink phone gleamed in the beams of kerosene light just a reach away. She edged toward it.
His left hand grabbed hers in a grip like steel.
“What’s this?” Her tweezers held a blackened sliver of sharp metal.
“Shrapnel.” The lines in his brow relaxed. “Take it all out.” He drank more.
“Shrapnel … you mean from a bullet?”
Horrified, she dropped the tweezers, which clattered on the wet cement.
“Did you kill someone?”
He leaned back, still pointing the gun at her. “Struggle has to be seen within the political context,” he said. “There are people who choose nonviolent struggle; and then us, who have another vision and use other tactics.”
He’d never before said so many words in a sentence. He reminded her of her friend’s uncle, a stocky farmer with long ears who was short on conversation.
“The government outlaws the Basques’ right to decide our future,” he said. “No one wants violence. But struggle demands sacrifice.”
She’d seen the bombings on the télé. The rehearsed speeches and demands by men in ski masks with guns. Like him.
“But deep down, you can’t mean you’d shoot—”
“Ask the seven hundred prisoners held in Spanish jails, the corrupt French flics who rule Basse Navarre,” he interrupted, letting out a deep breath. “Or ask my brother. Tortured. My father. A cripple for life.”
She didn’t know what to say.
“But the law … ?”
“Welcome to the real world,” he said sarcastically. “It gets down and dirty outside the palace.”
“What palace? My father works. So does my mother.”
An awful fear filled her. What if Lucas and these terrorists meant to hold her for ransom?
“Take the pieces of shrapnel out. Now.” He held the gun, his fingers looser. His Adam’s apple bobbed. She rubbed her hands in the cold. Trying not to look at her phone. So close. How with one little reach … maybe with her toe.…
He growled. “What are you waiting for?”
She hid her disgust. Coating crime with politics got no sympathy from her. Just a renegade, like all the bandits, those smugglers high in the Basse Navarre. A Basque stronghold. Since time immemorial, holing up in remote villages, banding together, spitting in the eye of authority and the government. Robbing pilgrims, the innocent, the desperate, whether they were fleeing from the Inquisition, the Bourbons, or the Nazis along the ancient paths and escape routes through the Pyrénées.
“Pull more splinters out, understand?” he said, gasping in pain.
Her breaths frosted in the air. She edged her numb foot forward. Further. Her big toe touched the pink casing.
Loud crashing noises. Then the tramp of boots.
“Why the hell didn’t you answer?” asked a gravel-voiced man in a black ski mask.
Terror gripped her. Another man leaned down, riffling through the strewn contents of her bag. Grabbed her cell phone. “Pink?”
Mud rimmed his boots. The mixed smell of earth and algae as he kicked the bloody bandages. “Letting her play doctor, Joxi?” he said. “And messy. I don’t like messy.”
The gravel-voiced one gestured to the mec. “Pick this up. All of it.”
Panic sliced across her like a blade.
Joxi groaned and fell back.
“Time for a real doctor.” His black eyes glittered behind the eyeholes in the mask. “Tape her back up. Put her in the van.”
“W-wh-where?” Her voice chattered with cold.
He looked at her, back at the other mec, and just laughed.
Wednesday Evening
MIST HOVERED LOW over the hedgerows, silent and damp. A gust of wind stirred the dead leaves. Not even a twitter came from the bushes. A wave of relief passed over her as she saw Sebastian’s secondhand van, a Berlingo, at the curb.
She switched off the scooter’s ignition, pulled off her helmet, and noticed a run in her black stockings. A new pair, too.
“Tool set, like you ordered, all loaded in back,” Sebastian said.
Sebastian
, her younger cousin, stood a head taller than Aimée. He sported a wool cap over his dark blond hair, jeans and a hand-knit fisherman’s sweater accentuating his lean frame. A former junkie, he’d been clean for several years.
“You’ve put on weight, Sebastian,” she said.
A good sign.
“Blame it on Regula’s fondue, and the raclette.”
His new girlfriend Regula, Swiss and steady, cooked with the chefs collectifs, which put on roving underground gourmet events. Exclusive and only by word of mouth.
“The framing shop business good?”
Sebastian had expanded his framing business to a third shop. She’d cosigned the loan. He owed her.
“Orders and more orders.” He grinned. “I’ve only got an hour.”
“No problem.” She squeezed his arm. “I’m happy for you.”
She helped him load her scooter into the back of his van. “Ready. You remember how to dust for prints?”
“There’s a Web site, Aimée.”
Like for everything now.
At Agustino’s she didn’t know what they’d find. But they’d find something.
He gunned his van down Avenue Mozart. Skeleton-branched chestnut trees shuddered in the wind.
“All over this quartier you see neo-Cubist architecture fighting the flourishes of Art Nouveau,” Sebastian said. “Neo-Cubism speaks to the Bauhaus and Gropius influence.” He pointed out his open window, respect in his voice. “Between the wars, ‘the style international’ was the hit at the Decorative Arts Exposition in 1925.”
She stared at Sebastian. “My little cousin knows Bauhaus from a boudin sausage?”
“Courtesy of my client on neighboring rue de l’Assomption,” Sebastian replied. “When I called Bauhaus a très cool DJ, he set me straight. He’s a real Mallet-Stevens buff.”
Aimée pointed to a spot in the lane. “Park it here.”
She grabbed two flashlights and handed him one. “Let’s go.”
She retraced her steps from yesterday past the almost-hidden Fondation Le Corbusier annex sign.
Sebastian’s work boots crunched on the gravel and packed dirt. Secluded darkness, a perfect place to hide. She shivered.
The damp bushes trembled in the gentle wind. A quiet breeze rippled the sparse carpet of brown leaves. The derelict hôtel particulier was a dark shadow in the background. Ahead, Agustino’s lit atelier was like a beacon.
She wished she’d worn wool socks and Doc Martens like Sebastian, instead of high-heeled Prada boots. Skittering noises and thumping came from the tree branches overhead.
Sebastian hissed. “Over there.”
Something darted in the glistening wet hedgerow. A shadow moved on the white stone wall separating the atelier from the garden. Startled, she felt Sebastian grab her arm, shove her down in the wet grass.
Wednesday Night
MARIA SHIVERED IN the bone-chilling cold. The jacket over her torn silk chemise offered little protection from the dampness. She couldn’t distinguish night or day in the stone-vaulted cavern. She knew she was underground somewhere, her purse and phone gone. Periodic pumping sounds came from above, punctuated by the whine of a bell. Hours ago she’d heard ducks quacking, caught the odor of water, before the men herded her, with the bag over her head, down a sloping ramp.
Now she saw a line of electric lights receding down the long tunnel, shadows in cell-like caverns like the one she huddled in now, chained to the metal pipe.
Voices murmured in a mixture of Basque and French. She could pick out words, part of a phrase, but they were speaking a rural dialect.
“You worry too much” came from one with a gravelly, grating voice. “The Gestapistes used it. No one heard the screams down here.”
Her heart thumped, looking around at the blackened stone. A Gestapo torture chamber? She didn’t doubt it.
Her bare feet skittered on the loose pebbles and crumbling plaster. How could she escape? What had happened to the wounded one they called Joxi?
“Fascinating, eh, the underground.” The mec wearing blue trousers and work jacket stood still in his ski mask. “Historic. Like the caves in my valley.” He handed her a rag, acting solicitous. “Wipe those eyes, eh. Cooperate and you go home.”
Her chained hands reached for the rag.
He tore the duct tape off her mouth with a loud rip. Her eyes blinked, tearing with pain from her raw skin.
“You’ll let me go?”
“Behave, or it goes back on.”
It would anyway. But they needed her alive.
“What … what do you want?”
“Read this. Word for word.” He thrust the card at her.
She shivered. “Did anyone … get killed?”
“Not yet.”
Liar.
He checked the time. Pulled out a small tape recorder.
“Read just what it says.”
Garbage. Lies. She spit and it landed on his sleeve.
“Full of spirit, eh? Better speak better than you aim.”
He wiped his arm. Reached for a hunting knife with a bone handle and ran the tip along her chin. “That’s if you want to live.”
She struggled to kick her feet, but her ankles were taped.
“Read it, Princess, a simple thing. Then you’re free, back home like you never left.”
“Bombing buildings, shootings … all that violence goes nowhere,” she said, gasping for breath. “Didn’t you learn that in the eighties? That’s passé … the Basques I know want peace—”
“Et alors, you’re a patriot,” he interrupted. “Like us.” Only his dark eyes were visible behind the ski mask. “But if you don’t read, you die, others die. What will that prove?”
Her shoulders shook. Fear rippled her insides.
“So, Princess?” The cold knife tip touched her chin bone.
A steady drip, drip, drip came from the corner. She took a breath and read: “I support and advocate the autonomy of the Basque region. And ask my father to do the same.” Her throat caught. He pressed the knife tip harder against her chin. Somehow she made herself keep reading. “Not only should there be cultural centers teaching Basque history and language, but there must be the release of all Basque prisoners, and a new referendum.”
She stifled a sob.
He hit STOP, rubbed his neck, impatient now. “Keep reading. Convince your father.” He moved the knife blade to the jugular vein in her bare white throat. “Talk.”
He hit RECORD.
She stumbled a few times but continued to the end.
“You think I’m a bargaining chip, a means to some end?” Her lip trembled. “Kidnapping me won’t give Basques autonomy. Don’t you understand?”
He stuck the duct tape back on her sore, bleeding mouth.
Wednesday Night
“JUST SQUIRRELS, SEBASTIAN.” Aimée pulled herself up from the wet ground, brushed herself off. A run in her stocking, now a mud-coated sleeve, grass clinging to her mascara. Picture-perfect.
In Sebastian’s flashlight beam, a quartet of arched squirrel tails disappeared up the linden tree trunk. “Quit scaring the marrow from my bones.”
She heard strains of baroque music drift from Agustino’s atelier. “Ready?”
Not waiting for his answer, she knocked on the glass door.
A split second passed before Agustino opened the door.
“You stood me up, Agustino—”
He clapped his thick paint-spattered hand over her mouth. Shoved her outside, down the path.
“Go away. Now.” His words didn’t hide the fear vibrating in his voice. “Forget what I said. Leave.”
Had the terrorists coerced him?
“Not until you tell me who murdered Xavierre. How you knew the referendum—”
“Who’s he?” His grip tightened on her arm. She saw a nervous shift in his thick shoulders.
Sebastian shifted from leg to leg behind the bushes. A telltale sign. “My cousin. He needs to pee. The cold does that to him. Can he u
se your—”
“With a night sky like this and all the bushes you could want?” Agustino shook his head. “Over there.”
She jerked her chin toward his atelier and mouthed, “The princess?”
Agustino stood dead still. A long moment passed. Then came a little shake of his head. Then he pointed to her watch, showed ten fingers.
“Ten o’clock?” she whispered.
He shook his head. Sebastian returned from watering the bushes and shot Aimée a look.
“Here? They’ll bring the princess here?”
“I don’t know, I swear,” he whispered. The volume of the melancholy string music rose. Agustino’s shoulders twitched. “I have to go.”
“Did Xavierre’s murderer kidnap the princess?”
“Give me time to get away,” Agustino said, “ten minutes.”
“Why? What’s going on?”
“Please, do this for me. Wait before you alert the flics.”
A cell phone trilled from his pocket. He answered, muttered a brief “Oui,” then hung up.
“They’re almost here. Just ten minutes.”
He backed up, but not before she caught his arm. “Not until you tell me—”
“They call him Txili.”
“I want his real name, Agustino.”
“His nom de guerre, that’s all I know.” Agustino shot a nervous look at the atelier, held up ten fingers, and then was gone.
* * *
SEBASTIAN TOOK OUT an Indonesian cigarette. Lit it. The pungent clove-spiced smoke caught in her nose.
“Saw something while you were watering the bushes, Sebastian?”
He shook his head. “But I heard noises over the music.” He pursed his lips. “Like scraping, pulling something heavy over the floor.”
She took a drag from his cigarette. The smoke seared her windpipe and she choked. Cloves were for pork roasts, not inhaling.
Light glimmered above the atelier drapery, rimming the canvases blocking the view inside.
“You believe him?” Sebastian asked.
Did she? Did she owe him time to get away? But get away from what?
“He didn’t know about the princess,” she said. “I believe that.”
And it bothered her. Besides Sebastian with his tool kit, she had no other backup. Why hadn’t she brought her Beretta? Stupid.