Paris Ransom

by Charles Rosenberg

  Also by Charles Rosenberg

  Death on a High Floor

  Long Knives

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2015 by Charles Rosenberg

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477827710

  ISBN-10: 1477827714

  Cover design by Paul Barrett

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014958151

  This book is dedicated to my family and all those friends, new and old, who lent me their expertise, their time in reading and critiquing drafts, and their overall support, thus making this novel possible.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER 1

  Robert Tarza

  It was Christmas Eve, and it was growing dark and snowing heavily. I had gone out several hours earlier, when the sun was still warm on my shoulders, without a coat. Now, on my way back home, I was cold and shivering. It had happened before. My more than thirty years in balmy Los Angeles always seemed to prevent me from acknowledging that Paris, the city I now called home, had a real winter.

  Earlier that afternoon, Tess Devrais, the lovely française with whom I had been living, had proposed—out of the blue as far as I was concerned—that we get married. When I had not immediately responded with an enthusiastic “Oui!” she had gotten upset.

  She had gotten even more upset when, in foolish candor, I had explained the reasons—too great a gap in our ages (I was almost twenty years older, sixty-five to her forty-six) and too large a disparity in our wealth. I was very well-off myself, but I didn’t hold a one-half share in a twelve-passenger Citation X or own a high-floor four-bedroom apartment across from Notre Dame. She had replied, with some asperity, that I had seemed happy enough living across from Notre Dame with her for the last five years and had not appeared unduly bothered by flying around Europe in her plane. All of which she had said in French because her English isn’t up to slicing and dicing with so fine an edge. She had ended by calling me un crétin, which you can translate as “jerk” or “dumbass” or a lot of things in between.

  I told her I needed to think it through some more, so I left and went for a walk. I had not gone three blocks when a figure emerged out of nowhere directly in front of me, causing me to come to an abrupt halt. He was young, short and, like me, coatless. He shot out his hand and held up a gold-colored wedding band, almost touching my nose with it.

  “Sir, you dropped this, I believe,” he said in perfect English.

  I knew instantly what was about to go down. I was being hit with a common tourist scam. The guy’s goal was either to wheedle me into paying him for the stupid ring—it was probably lead, painted gold—or, better yet, get close enough to lift my wallet or my cell phone. Then, if I wanted to bother, I could spend Christmas Eve sitting in a Paris police station, waiting to report the theft.

  I snatched the ring from between his fingers, uttered the crudest insult I could muster in French—no doubt way over the top for the situation, but it’s hard to learn to curse at just the right level in a foreign language—and heaved it across the street. I watched it roll into a culvert.

  The guy looked taken aback. He’d clearly mistaken me for a foreign naïf and had probably expected, at the very worst, a polite rebuff. Without saying a further word, he turned on his heels and walked quickly away in the opposite direction. He didn’t cross the street to retrieve the ring.

  I walked on, trying to shake the event, which bothered me more than it should have. Petty street crime was rampant in Paris, and I don’t know why I had come to think of myself as immune. I finally realized that what really bothered me was that the guy had mistaken me for a tourist. Despite living in France, speaking French and buying most of my clothes in Paris—everything except for my shoes—I still apparently stood out as an American.

  Eventually, I ended up at my favorite Left Bank café and sat there for almost three hours, watching the snow start to fall and drinking Ricard. And I don’t even like Ricard. I decided Tess was right; I was being a jerk. I loved her and would enjoy being married to her. I’d return and say yes—assuming it was still a welcome response.

  On the way back home, I turned my thoughts to the evening ahead. We had invited two guests for a nine o’clock Christmas Eve dinner—Jenna James, my former law partner, who had gone on to become a respected law professor at UCLA, and Oscar Quesana, an eccentric, brilliant old criminal defense lawyer, also from Los Angeles. Both were spending the Christmas holidays in Paris. While the three of us had had quite a few raucous legal adventures together in the not-too-distant past, I was looking forward to an uncomplicated, convivial evening with old friends. Which would now be made joyous by, I hoped, Tess and I announcing our engagement.

  It didn’t exactly work out that way. And although I don’t believe in such things, I now look back on the ring incident as a portent of what was coming my way.

  CHAPTER 2

  Upon my return to our apartment building, I discovered that during my absence, Tess had replaced the brass name plate beneath the lobby buzzer for her apartment so that it showed both our names. It now read:

  “Tess Devrais

  Robert Tarza”

  I assumed that she’d had the new plaque prepared days before, in anticipation of my saying yes to her proposal. And now, even though I’d not yet said yes, she apparently believed that I’d return and agree. It was so very logical, and so very French.

  I wondered if the addition of my name would mean that Pierre Martin, the concierge—that fixture of French apartment buildings, part snotty doorman, part guardian of the gate, part busybody—would, snuggled inside his little glass booth in the outer lobby, deign to look up from his newspaper and actually greet me before I greeted him. And whether he’d let me into the elevator lobby without first checking to see if my name was on the guest access list, despite the fact that
I had a key to the apartment and had been coming and going for five years. But any reassessment of my relationship with the concierge would have to wait, because at that very moment there was a loud pounding on the outside door, and someone started to scream, “Help!” More faintly, I heard a second voice.

  My immediate thought was that it was the ring scammer—that he had somehow followed me to the café, waited, followed me back to my building with a friend in tow, and was trying to lure me out, intent on revenge. I looked over at the concierge for help, but he was calmly reading a newspaper. Whatever was happening was outside, and he concerned himself only with goings-on inside.

  But then I realized it was ridiculous to think it was the scammer. If he was after me, he would have attacked on my way to or from the café. I yanked the door open. To my astonishment, Oscar was standing there, struggling to hold on to a large box as a tall, thin, very young-looking guy dressed almost entirely in black from hoodie to toe tried to wrest it from him. Oscar tried to keep the box, failed and fell.

  Without thinking—had I thought about it I surely wouldn’t have done it—I ripped the box from the tall guy’s hands, gripped it to my chest and heaved myself on top of it. The man glared at me, seeming to assess the situation. I tried to get a good look at him, but it was already deep into twilight and between that and the snow I couldn’t see him very well. Instead of trying to take the box back, he fled up the street.

  I doubt the thief thought I was too much for him. More likely he thought it was just going to take too long to extract the box from under me. I also noticed a black car, which had been idling beside us in the street, accelerate and disappear into the traffic, its tires slipping on the snow.

  Oscar struggled up and held out his hand to help me up. “You okay, Robert?”

  “I think so, although my chest is probably bruised.”

  We both stood there, trying to brush the wet snow off. I looked around to see if there were any witnesses. I saw no one. Either no one had been around, or whoever had been there wanted to avoid spending Christmas Eve talking to the police. The concierge was nowhere to be seen, despite the fact that he must have seen the whole thing via the camera above the door that displayed its image on a little screen in his cubicle.

  I handed the box back to Oscar, and we walked into the building. The concierge looked at me, said, “Police!” and pointed to his cell.

  Oscar said, loudly, “No police! If you’ve already called them, please call them back and tell them not to come. That they mistook me for someone else, and they are long gone.”

  To my astonishment, Oscar had addressed every word to the concierge in, if not flawless French, perfectly understandable, grammatical French.

  “I didn’t know you spoke French, Oscar. Where did you learn it?”

  “During the war.”

  “Very funny. Assuming you mean World War II, you weren’t even born when that war ended.”

  “You’re right,” he said, smiling. “That was a joke. The true story is that my parents sent me to a French lycée in Los Angeles from preschool through high school. They thought it was more cultured or something.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I never knew.”

  By then we were in the elevator, heading up to Tess’s apartment on the sixth floor.

  “Thanks for rescuing the box,” Oscar said. “That was heroic. I owe you a debt of gratitude, but I’m so sorry you had to be subjected to this.”

  “What’s it all about?” I asked. “And who do you think they mistook you for?”

  He pointed to the small camera in the corner of the elevator cab and put his finger to his lips in the universal sign for “shh.” We rode the rest of the way in silence.

  I unlocked the door to the apartment and said, “Why don’t you set the box on the dining room table?”

  As Oscar plunked it down, Tess walked into the room. As usual, she looked quite soignée. Her freshly cut hair, done in a bob, showed off her high cheekbones to advantage, and she was immaculately dressed in an ecru blouse and a black wool skirt that hugged her slim thighs to just above the knee. She was wearing her usual Louboutin shoes, this time in suede.

  “Oscar, this is so great to again see you!” She gave him a hug and then a kiss on both cheeks. “What is this big box?”

  He leaned his head back and scanned the ceiling. “Are there any microphones turned on in here? Or hidden video cameras?”

  “No, of course not,” I said, although I noticed that Tess had not actually responded to his query.

  He looked around some more, as if expecting to find someone hiding behind the curtains, then said, “Alright, I will show you, and I assume you will keep this strictly to yourselves.”

  “Oh, of course,” I said. Tess nodded, in what I supposed was a yes. Oscar took out a small knife from his pocket, cut the string that was wrapped around the package and pulled away the butcher paper that enclosed it. That revealed a red cardboard box with a satiny finish, topped by a slightly crushed, paste-on white bow. It was the kind of box in which fancy shops often package their wares, so that the lid can be taken off without being unfastened. After Oscar lifted it off, I peered inside and saw five large cloth-bound books. They looked to be in pretty good condition, but they were clearly old, and each was protected by a clear plastic cover, like the kind I used in law school to protect casebooks I wanted to resell when I was done with them.

  “My friends, I have begun to collect antiquarian books,” he said. “And not just to collect them, but to sell them to others. To be a dealer. On a small scale for now, of course.”

  As a collector of ancient coins myself, it didn’t really surprise me that Oscar had acquired a collecting bug of some sort. He was fussy enough that it fit.

  “Now let me show you the jewel of my collection,” he said. “It’s a first edition in English of Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables. All five volumes.” He hefted the books out of the box and lowered them to the table.

  “What’s so special about that?” I asked. “Is it rare?”

  “Not so rare in general, Robert, but please pick up the first volume and open it to the title page.”

  I did, and read aloud the inscription. “‘Pour Charles Dickens, le plus grand écrivain en langue anglaise depuis Shakespeare.’ Wow. This looks like a British first edition of Les Misérables in English, inscribed by Victor Hugo to Charles Dickens, saying he’s the greatest writer in English since Shakespeare. Really? That’s incredible.”

  Tess took it from me, looked at it and said, “Incroyable.”

  Oscar beamed. “Yes, incredible is exactly what it is. But this edition was printed in America, not England. The Americans translated Les Misérables into English first.”

  “What is the little drawing after the signature?” I asked.

  “That’s what makes this piece so truly special,” Oscar said. “It’s a small self-portrait of Victor Hugo that he added after his signature. It may be the only known example of his having done such a thing.”

  “He was an artist, too?” I asked.

  “Yes, a great one. The man was a true polymath—artist, poet, novelist, playwright, politician. The list goes on.”

  “That must make this incredibly valuable,” I said.

  “It is.”

  “What is the folded piece of paper that’s sticking out of the last volume?”

  “It’s just a bill of sale,” Oscar said. “It’s of little importance, because I have an offer from a buyer to pay me a very substantial sum for it, vastly more than I paid for it.”

  “Why so much more than you paid?” I asked.

  “It’s a long story. I’ll tell you more when the sale is close to being finalized.”

  “Oscar, how do you know that this is real?” Tess asked.

  Oscar smiled, as if it was not the first time he’d heard the question posed. “We can get into that, to
o, a little later, Tess. Let’s just say for now that after a lot of research, I found what I call an authenticator. Something that sweeps away all doubt.”

  “Do you have that with you?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Well, why was someone trying to grab this from you out on the street?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure. There was another bidder for the book who dropped out. Maybe it was someone he sent, although I thought he was happy in the end. Perhaps it was just an attempted street theft. A random kind of thing.”

  Tess gave me a sharp look, and I could tell she was about to ask the details.

  “I will explain later,” I said.

  Tess didn’t challenge me on that, but just said to Oscar, “You must rest here until the dinner. It will be more safe.”

  “Thank you, Tess. I appreciate it,” he responded, and made a slight bow in her direction. “You see, I was nearby when it suddenly occurred to me that if you and Robert were home I might leave the box here for safekeeping while I continued to run some errands.”

  “Eh, I see,” Tess said.

  “May I, then, leave the box here?” Oscar asked. “If I’m being followed—and I don’t know that I am—but if, it will be safer. I ask only that you not tell anyone it’s here.”

  “But of course. We are able to put it in my study,” she said. Without waiting for him to agree, she picked up the box and headed in that direction. To my surprise, Oscar didn’t follow her.

  While we waited for her to return, I said, “Oscar, seriously, don’t you think we should call the police? I’m guessing that was not a random act out there. Someone must be following you.”

  “Look, my friend, I stand to make a profit of close to half a million dollars on this. I don’t want the police anywhere near it. If I involve them, there will be too many questions about the book.”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “Just questions.”

  We waited a few minutes, but Tess did not return.