Paris Ransom

by Charles Rosenberg

  “You too?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  He put the car in gear, burning rubber as we pulled away, which is really something for a French car.

  After a couple of blocks, he said, “Why are you staying at the Hotel des Antiquaires?”

  “It was cheap and they had a room available.”

  “It had nothing to do with the fact that Oscar was staying there before he was kidnapped?”

  I just looked at him.

  “I read the police report. It names the guest who was staying in the room where you picked the lock.”

  “Oh.”

  I felt stupid. Of course he had read the report. And of course the report said that.

  “Do you think, Jenna, you’ll be welcome back there after what you did?”

  “We’ll find out. But I paid for tonight, so I think they have to keep me. And as for the long talk, can we do it another night? I’m exhausted.”

  “No. We have to do it now.”

  So we had the long talk, which consisted, entirely, of him telling me, in rather strong terms, that I was being childish, that I was in over my head, that I was making his task more difficult, that I might get myself, not to mention Oscar, killed, that I might end up doing hard time in a French prison, and a variety of other ghosts and goblins that might come in the night to haunt poor little me. It reminded me, in tone, of my crazy mother, on a day she wasn’t talking to the house plants, telling me not to go to law school, that it would do all kinds of bad things to my already too-harsh personality, and in any case, I probably wouldn’t do very well there.

  I think you’re usually expected to say “thank you” after the kind of adult-to-errant-but-well-intentioned-child advice the general had just delivered, but instead I said nothing at all, which seemed to discomfit him. Which was exactly what I intended. When he was done, he dropped me off at the Antiquaires, but didn’t offer to escort me in. When I walked into the lobby, Robert was sitting in one of the chairs reading the Financial Times.

  “Robert! What are you doing here?”

  “We had an appointment at eleven o’clock, remember? I’ve been waiting for you for a very long time.”

  “I was in jail instead.”

  “I know.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Let’s go for a walk,” he said.

  We walked for two or three blocks in silence and finally sat down on a park bench.

  “I saw it all,” he said.

  “You did?”

  “Yes. I got here maybe fifteen minutes early for our meeting. There was no one at the front desk, which kind of surprised me, but since I knew your room number, I just took the elevator up.”

  “And?”

  “I got off the elevator just as three cops and an old guy were rushing into a room a couple doors down from yours. I ducked into a broom closet and waited. I left the door cracked so I could see.”

  “What did you see?”

  “After a while, I saw you being led away.”

  “Must have been a thrill.”

  “No, but after you were all gone, I noticed that in the excitement they had left the door to 406 open. So I went in. And I found something of great interest.”

  I found myself trembling with relief. “You found the book!”

  “Sorry, no. But I found these.” He reached in his pocket and handed me a small map, torn in half, and three other pieces of paper. I looked at them carefully, although the dim light made them hard to see.

  I held the two pieces of the map together. “This looks like the map of a cemetery.”

  “Yes, it’s a map of the Père Lachaise Cemetery.”

  “Why would Oscar want that?”

  “I don’t know, Jenna, but one of the other pieces of paper you’re holding is a metro ticket, which can also be used on the bus. On the back of it someone has written the number 69. I looked it up, and the number 69 bus goes to that cemetery.”

  “Does your cell phone have a flashlight app?”

  “Yes. Here.”

  I took it from him and turned on the app so that I could see better. “It’s hard to tell with just a number, but I’d bet that that’s Oscar’s handwriting. What are the other pieces of paper?”

  “One is a round-trip train ticket for one person to Digne-les-Bain, dated several days after Christmas. The other is a receipt from a cab driver in Digne-les-Bain, undated.”

  “Where were they?”

  “In the wastebasket in the bathroom, mixed in with lots of used paper towels, crumpled tissues, a few receipts for fruit from a nearby market, and a couple of colorful wrappers for something called Friandise Végétalien, which I think translates roughly as ‘vegan tidbit.’ Did you get to search the bathroom before you were, uh, interrupted?”

  “No, I didn’t search the bathroom—or much else for that matter. The police may not have searched the room at all since their main focus seemed to be on arresting me.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “Did you find anything else?”

  “No, and I looked around quite carefully.”

  “How did you manage not to be seen after you left Oscar’s room?”

  “I was seen. I followed the rule of ‘in order not to be noticed, pretend you belong.’ I took the elevator down, walked boldly through the lobby, said, ‘Bonsoir, Monsieur,’ to the desk clerk, sat down in a chair and began to read a newspaper.”

  “What should we do now, Robert?”

  “I think we’re going to Digne.”

  “What about the cemetery?”

  “I don’t know what we’d do if we went there. We have no idea what to look for, and it’s over a hundred acres.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I took a tour once, not long after I moved in with Tess. In fact, I think she went with me.”

  “Why would anyone tour a cemetery?”

  “Because there are a lot of famous people buried there. Chopin, Molière, Marcel Marceau and, of all people, Jim Morrison of the Doors.”

  “Does Jim sing at night?”

  “Very funny.”

  “I’m going to go out there.”

  “What for? What can you possibly find out?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m going.”

  “Jenna, that’s impulsive. Why don’t we wait until we know what we’re looking for at the cemetery?”

  “Okay, I guess, although sometimes impulsiveness works, you know?”

  “Other times it gets people killed.”

  “So what do you suggest we do now, Mr. Cautious? We can’t go to Digne, if we’re really going there, until tomorrow.”

  “It’s very late, Jenna. I, for one, am going to go home and go to sleep.”

  “I’m wired and don’t want to go to sleep right now,” I said.

  “Alright, why don’t we take a moment to visit the bookstore next to the hotel? It’s a logical place for Oscar to have gone with his book if he was looking for a buyer.”

  “But, like you just said, Robert, it’s late at night.”

  “Well, I noticed a light on there when I arrived. Someone may still be up.”

  CHAPTER 23

  As we approached the bookstore, I saw that there was indeed a light on inside, just as Robert had observed, although it seemed to be coming through the plate glass windows from somewhere in the very back of the shop. I had my hand raised to knock, when it suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t know why we were so focused on this bookstore. “Robert, what made you say this was a logical bookstore for Oscar to have visited?”

  “Because of its name. The title of Proust’s most famous novel is À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, often translated into English as In Search of Lost Time. The sign on the bookstore says ‘À la Recherche des Livres Perdus,�
�� which I’d translate as ‘In Search of Lost Books.’ So it must be a place that sells rare books.”

  “That’s seriously lame.”

  “Yes, it is. But at least it gets the message across.”

  I knocked, loudly. No one came. After a few minutes, I knocked again, even harder. Finally, I heard footsteps coming toward the door, and a few seconds later it was opened by a young man, maybe twenty years old, who said, “Alors, qu’est ce qui se passe? Il est tard et le magasin est fermé!”

  As usual, I didn’t know exactly what he had just said, although the scowl on his face made it pretty clear that he didn’t like being disturbed at such a late hour, and I knew from signs I’d seen in store windows that fermé meant “closed.” Robert then engaged him in French, and the guy opened the door wider and waved us in, although his body language said that the welcome was grudging. I knew it was irrational, but the inability of most people in France to speak English was starting to annoy me big time.

  After we got inside, the guy offered us seats at a small wooden table. As he and Robert began to converse in French again, I got up and started to examine the store’s books, which were shelved from floor to ceiling on all four walls. The owner raised no objections to my wanderings, even when I went farther back into a second, smaller room. I noticed that one shelf in that room held four or five copies of Les Misérables. I pulled the first volume of each set off the shelf and opened it to the title page, looking for inscriptions. There were none. One set, however, was a copy of the same 1862 American first edition that Oscar had shown us. All the rest were second editions or later, although all had nineteenth-century publication dates.

  Just as I was putting a volume back on the shelf, I noticed a door in the very back that was slightly ajar. I could see from moving shadows that there was someone inside. I moved closer, to see if I could catch a glimpse of whoever was there. I finally got so close that I could see someone on the other side of the door peering out. Suddenly, the door was flung open. There stood the general’s niece, Olga, in all her tall thinness.

  “Что ты хочешь?”

  I had studied Russian in college. She had just said, “What do you want?”

  Without missing a beat, I answered: “Что ты тут делаешь?”

  I could tell from the look on her face that she was not only shocked that I spoke Russian, but that I had had the temerity to ask what she was doing there without any of the myriad polite introductions, circumlocutions and endless toasts of which Russians are so fond before getting down to business.

  She responded in the same blunt fashion: “Я живу здесь. А теперь иди отсюда!” I live here. Now get out of here! She slammed the door in my face.

  The noise roused Robert from his quiet conversation with the owner. They both came rushing to the back.

  “What’s going on, Jenna?” Robert asked.

  “Olga, the general’s niece, is in there,” I said, pointing at the door.

  Robert turned to the owner, and they spoke rapidly back and forth.

  “What did he say?”

  “He said she is a friend of the owner of the hotel, who is also a part-owner of this bookstore. And that he requested that she be able to stay here. He says that she’s a pain in the ass, and he wants her gone.”

  “Did he say how long she’s been here?”

  “Since New Year’s Day.”

  “Did he say what she’s doing here?”

  “He says she just talks on the phone all day in Russian.”

  While we spoke, the owner had opened the front door of his shop and was gesturing toward it.

  “Bonsoir, Madame et Monsieur,” he said, as we walked through the door, “Bonne nuit.” He closed the door firmly behind us, and I heard the lock snap closed.

  “What else did you learn?” I asked.

  “He said he specializes in nineteenth-century French novels and that about two weeks ago, Oscar had tried to interest him in helping him market his inscribed first edition of Les Misérables. He says he passed on it because he thinks both the inscription and the self-portrait are obvious forgeries.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “Yes. He said that Victor Hugo had a huge ego. And if he was going to say that anyone was as great a writer as Shakespeare—in any language—he would have said it about himself.”

  “Was that it?”

  “No, he also said that Oscar, not knowing enough about France or Victor Hugo, was probably overly impressed by the surface plausibility of the story.”

  “Why is it plausible?”

  “Because one of Victor Hugo’s sons, Victor Charles Hugo, was the major translator of Shakespeare into French at the time. And because Victor Hugo not only wrote an introduction to that translation, but also wrote a book about Shakespeare.”

  “That makes it sound very plausible,” I said.

  “Yes, but he argues that, because Hugo didn’t speak English well and so far as anyone knows, the two men met only once and briefly, there was no personal relationship.”

  “When was that meeting?” I asked.

  “He said it was in 1843, almost twenty years before Les Misérables was published. Some kind of salon Dickens attended at Hugo’s house here in Paris, back when Dickens was a young writer.”

  “So his bottom line is what?”

  “That there was no opportunity for Hugo to meet Dickens long enough to strike up the kind of friendship where an egomaniac like Hugo would have been willing to pen such an inscription.”

  “What about the drawing?”

  “He says it’s total nonsense. Hugo never did that.”

  “Huh. So this all makes me wonder why the bad guys want it so badly,” I said. “They must have the same information.”

  “You’d think.”

  “Another thing,” I said. “Don’t you think it’s weird that Olga was there? And that she moved in the day after Oscar was kidnapped?”

  “Very weird. Although it could be a coincidence.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Wasn’t she supposedly staying with her uncle, the general? Isn’t that what they said on Christmas Eve?”

  “Yes, I think they did say that.”

  “Robert, there are too many connections here for this all to be just happenstance. Oscar stays at a hotel next door to a bookstore where he tries to get the owner to help market the book. The mention of Olga’s father makes Oscar turn white. Olga is now living at the bookstore, but doesn’t get there until the day after Oscar was kidnapped. I wonder what the owner of the bookstore is hiding from us.”

  “I agree,” he said. “But I don’t know if we’re going to learn more here. Let’s go to Digne.”

  “When?”

  “How about tomorrow. I’ll get us some tickets, and I’ll call you in the morning and let you know when we’re leaving. Do you want to stay here tonight or come back to our place with me?”

  “I’ll stay here at the hotel. I mean, what could happen that hasn’t already happened?”

  “I don’t know, Jenna. But I want you to promise me that you won’t pick any more locks or do anything else you know to be illegal.”

  “I promise.”

  “And promise you won’t go off on any more adventures by yourself.”

  “I promise that, too.”

  Of course, when I said that, I had my fingers crossed.

  CHAPTER 24

  Robert Tarza

  By the time I got home, it was well past midnight. Tess was still up, sitting in the living room reading. I updated her on all that had happened, including Jenna’s arrest and release.

  “The general,” she said, “is a good man.”

  “I agree he is a man.”

  “I do not understand what you mean with this.”

  “Never mind.”

&nb
sp; “Your friend Jenna, she is—I do not know the right word in English. She lacks the judgment.”

  “She is impulsive. That’s the word. But, on the other hand, sometimes her aggressive approach to life gets her very far.”

  “Perhaps. But the speech that the general made to her is right. This is not her country, and . . .”

  “If she’s not careful, she’ll get her ass in a sling.”

  “What is a ‘sling’?”

  I sighed. I was forever slipping up and using metaphors Tess was bound not to understand. “A sling is, in this case, a big bandage, like one you would use to support a broken arm.”

  “Eh, I do not understand this saying. I do not picture how an ass would be in a sling. This would not work. And even if in some way it will work, why is her ass in this sling a problem?”

  “Let’s skip the metaphor and just say she can get in trouble.”

  “Yes, in very big trouble. Our laws are harsh. And we do not like the foreigners to break our laws.”

  “She has promised me not to break any more laws.”

  “Good.”

  We sat in silence for a while. Tess went back to reading her book, and I picked up that day’s Le Monde, which was lying on a coffee table. After a while, I said, “Tess, have you ever been to Digne?”

  “No. I have only heard the stories passed from my arrière grand-mère.”

  “Your great-grandmother.”

  “Yes.”

  “Who was there almost a hundred years ago.”

  “Yes.”

  “Screwing the priest.”

  “That is a harsh way to say about it, Robert. But why are you asking me about Digne?”

  “Jenna and I are going there because we found a receipt for a train ticket to Digne in Oscar’s room. We have a hunch that many answers are there.”

  “What is this ‘hunch’?”

  “In French, un pressentiment.”

  “Ah, I see. Have you given this ticket to the police?”

  “No.”

  “This is not smart. They can help you.”

  “Jenna doesn’t trust them. She thinks they don’t really care about rescuing Oscar.”

  “And you? Do you trust the police, Robert?”