“Jenna, are you sure about the match?”
“Absolutely sure. And therefore certain this is no copy, but the very book that was stolen from Oscar’s hotel room. I don’t know if the other four volumes were switched, too, but this one was for sure.”
Tess collapsed into the big easy chair in the corner of the room and continued to repeat, “This cannot be.”
I retrieved the book from Robert and reshelved it. “It can be, and the question is, who put it here, to hide it in plain sight?”
“I suppose you suspect me, do you not?” Tess asked.
“You’re the logical person, the one who’s had the best opportunity to put it on the shelf,” I said.
“How do you imagine I removed it from the hotel room of Oscar, Jenna?”
“I don’t know that yet. Maybe someone else got it out of there and gave it to you to hide, and you picked this perfect place.”
“Who?”
“How about Olga?” I said.
Tess just stared at me. “What is my motive?”
“To replace your copy of the first volume of Les Misérables with one that is much more interesting. Not for the money—you have plenty of that—but just to keep yourself amused. So you will not have ennui.”
Robert just stood there, clearly caught between my logic and his loyalty to Tess.
“Jenna, I can’t believe Tess would do this,” he said. “The logical explanation is that Olga took the book when she was staying at the hotel and then managed to stash it here somehow when she arrived here as a guest.”
“Which means she was lying to us about what she was looking for at the bookstore in Digne,” I said. “She was actually after the authenticator.”
“That sounds right to me.”
“But going back to the book, why would she bother to hide it here, in a place she might lose access to?” I asked.
Robert shrugged. “How about as a temporary storage place while she and whoever she’s conspiring with figure out what to do with it? They probably think no one will bother to open Tess’s copy of the book. And, Jenna, if you hadn’t noticed the missing piece, they’d be right.”
“Why do you think Olga conspires with anyone?” Tess asked.
“Good point,” Robert said. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s because she’s young, so I underestimate her.”
“Maybe we should go out there and ask her. In whatever language she speaks,” I said.
“You go,” Robert said. “You can speak Russian to her. And report back to us.”
I looked at Tess, who was still collapsed in the chair, and thought to myself that I had left poor Robert the unenviable task of asking his fiancée some very hard questions. I felt bad I’d had to bring it up. But I had not seen any alternative. Perhaps some time alone would help, and in any case I had another mission to carry out.
CHAPTER 44
I marched out into the living room to confront Olga, who had returned to lying on the couch, her face again covered by a book.
Without further ado, I said, in Russian, “Пожалуйста,брось книгу подальше.”
She lowered the book and said, in flawless English, “You know, your Russian sucks. You meant to say, I think, to please put your book away, but you ended up saying ‘please throw your book away.’ Happy to help you out.” She overhanded the book across the room, where it landed with a bang in the corner.
I was simultaneously glad to have Tess’s suspicion that Olga spoke English confirmed, while at the same time enraged at Olga for deceiving us and angry at myself for having been stupid enough to talk about sensitive things in front of her as if she were deaf. I was also on some level amused as I recognized in her the same kind of easy insouciance that I had beamed out to the world when I was her age.
“Whether it sucks or doesn’t suck, please sit up so we can have a decent conversation.”
To my surprise, she complied.
“How many languages do you speak, Olga?”
“Three well—Russian, French and English. And a little German, too. Enough to get along there.”
“Where did you learn them?”
“I went to an international school in Moscow, where all the instruction was in English. I spoke Russian at home, and I took French lessons. German I picked up watching German TV. Does that answer your nosy questions?”
“Why did you hide that you spoke other languages?”
“I learned a lot that way, don’t you think? And I’m studying to be an actor. This was a great part. It’s actually hard to pretend not to understand what people are saying all around you.”
“Maybe you’ll get an Academy Award.”
“More likely you and your friends will share the dummkopf award.”
I was fast leaving being amused behind and entering into total anger. “How old are you, Olga?”
“Twenty. I’ll be twenty-one next month. Old enough to go to your country and get merked every night.”
“‘Merked’?”
“Drunk, whatever.”
“I doubt very much my country will let you in. At least not if I have anything to say about it.”
“Too late. I finished acting school in Moscow, and I’ve been admitted to college in the United States. I already have my visa.”
“Good for you.”
“Jenna, why did you bother to walk out here to talk to me? Aren’t your best buds back there in the study with the fake letter from François-Victor Hugo?”
“So you overheard that. What makes you think it’s fake?”
“It’s too convenient. Just one more person trying a clever way to pump up the price of that book with the fake inscription on it. All of the letters of Victor Hugo and his family have been pored over for more than a hundred years. How come someone just found that one?”
Olga was, of course, expressing the same doubts I’d been harboring since we first saw the letter. But there was no strategic advantage in letting her know that. “Other than that logic, what makes you think the letter’s a fake?”
“Just is, and I’m already totally tired of this whole conversation.”
I considered just walking away, but then thought better of it. Maybe if I asked her directly what I wanted to know, I’d get some answers.
“Olga, did you take the book with the inscription out of Oscar’s hotel room?”
“No.”
“You answered ‘no’ rather quickly. How did you even know what I was talking about?”
“I keep up. As you know, my father was very interested in this book.”
“Was?”
“Yes. He thinks now that both the book and letter are fakes, so he’s no longer interested in them. You can keep the letter and the book, too, if you find it. Two fakes aren’t any more valuable than one fake.”
I heard a noise behind me and turned my head. Robert and Tess had entered the room and were standing in the doorway.
“How do we know you tell the truth?” Tess asked.
“The truth about what?”
“That you did not take this book from Oscar’s hotel room. The judge who has this case told me you had the room next to Oscar.”
“You should believe me because I have no reason to lie about any of this. If I did, I’d still be acting my part, pretending not to speak English or French, you know? That way I could go on hiding in plain sight like before and spy on all you dumbos some more.”
“This argument does not prove you tell the truth, Olga,” Tess said.
“Whatever. I’m going out now. I’m getting together with my mains.” She got up from the couch and headed for the door.
I grabbed her arm. “You’re not going anywhere, Olga.”
“Let me go!”
“No. I think you should stick around until this is all resolved.”
“Unde
r French law, to prevent someone from leaving is kidnapping.”
“I’ll risk it,” I said. “Just think of yourself as our guest. And by the way, you should be careful whom you accuse of a crime.”
“Why should I? You’re nobody.”
“Well, some of my mains are at the American consulate here in Paris—drinking buddies, I’d call them. If I let them know a US visa holder is a suspected antiquities thief, you can kiss your sweet visa goodbye—ya know? But don’t worry, I bet you can still get into some acting school in Vladivostok or somewhere like that.”
She looked momentarily perplexed. Like I’d actually painted a picture of a future that she actively worried about.
“Why would I go to Vladivostok?”
“’Cause I’m guessing you were kicked out of your acting school in Moscow. Why else would you be here acting a part, as you put it, on this small stage? You’re not exactly performing a lead in Romeo and Juliet.”
As I was finishing my brief tirade, Tess came over and whispered in my ear, “Let her go. She is one of the mice we must permit to smell the cheese.”
I thought about what she said for a few seconds. She was right. There was no point in screwing up the experiment. I released my grip on Olga’s arm. “Olga, go where you want. But don’t come back.”
“Coming back to this shithole is of no interest to me.”
“So pack up your stuff and go.”
“Don’t have any stuff, remember? It’s all still in Digne.”
“Then go without stuff.”
She walked to the door, opened it, and, just before slamming it hard behind her, gave us all the finger, complete with upward thrust.
“Well,” Robert said, “it would seem her school in Moscow teaches even the small details of American cultural expression.”
Tess laughed. “In this you are right, Robert. Certainly, her hands do not speak French. We have different motions for this.”
“So,” I said. “Assuming her hearing is as acute as most people her age, she probably at some point overheard one of our discussions about this. Which means we have inadvertently notified one mouse that the letter is in the study.”
Shortly thereafter, Jenna and I left to see the hotel owner. We agreed that Tess would stay in the apartment until early evening. Then, as the evening wore on, we would let all of the mice know, by one means or another, that we had all gone to dinner and a late movie. At which point we would repair to the rented apartment.
CHAPTER 45
Robert and I returned to Tess’s apartment at about nine in the evening. Things had gone well with the hotel owner, Monsieur Crépin. We had exchanged apologies and then dined together in the hotel restaurant. There had been many toasts to future amitié and other things I couldn’t remember. By the time it was all over—at which point we told him we were meeting our friend Tess to go to a late movie—I had consumed more wine than I was used to, and I was feeling slightly buzzed. Or maybe more than slightly.
“So,” I said to Robert and Tess, “shall we trip off to the spy nest?”
Tess just looked at me like I was drunk, which perhaps I was. And the kidnappers must have thought so, too, when they received my next text message, which said that I was tired of talking to them that day and was going out to dinner and a late movie, and I hoped they’d do the same and enjoy their evening, and that I’d talk to them tomorrow. I sent it on my own cellphone so the general would be sure to see it, too.
Not long after, Tess and Robert actually went to the nearest movie theater—just in case anyone was tracking their location, too—and sent me a text message urging me to hurry up and join them. I sent them a message back saying I was on my way. Then they returned to Tess’s apartment via a circuitous route, taking, they later told me, three different cabs in a row and hoping that doing so made them hard to follow.
After their return we all took the elevator to the floor above and went into the spy nest to await a mouse. It was tedious work, in part because there were a lot of screens to monitor. And although Tess had a motion detector installed in each major room, we had to listen for the sound of those alerts, too.
We worked in thirty-minute shifts, which seemed about the limit of our attention spans for scanning the screens and listening for the hoped-for buzz of the motion alerts. For a long time, there was nothing. We had already rotated through several shifts when I took over again at eleven. A few minutes later, I heard a buzz. The blinking icon told me the alert was coming from the study, but as I swept my eyes across the screens, I couldn’t see anyone in any of the rooms.
Both Tess and Robert had dropped what they were doing, and were now standing behind me, looking at the displays.
“I see it now,” Robert said. “There’s an infrared image of someone crawling along the floor of Tess’s study. It’s hard to tell who it is, though, because they’ve turned off the lights.”
He was right. The blurry infrared image made it hard to be sure about the intruder’s gender, let alone his or her identity.
“I think it’s Olga,” I said. “Just from the size of the person.”
“Look,” Robert said. “She’s reaching up to the safe and pulling it open, and now she’s taking out the envelope with the fake letter.”
As I watched, she crawled toward the bookshelf that was just to the left of the safe, reached up and grabbed the volume of Les Misérables that had the inscription. Then she took a backpack off her shoulders and put both the book and the letter in it, turned around and crawled toward the study door. The alert from the study blinked again, telling us she had left the room.
“So she did know the book was there,” I said. “She lied to me. Again.”
“Not exactly shocking,” Robert said. “But how did she get in? The alarm on the front door wasn’t triggered, and she wasn’t detected in the living room by either the motion detector or the camera.”
“Merde,” Tess said. “She has come in by the back door in the kitchen. I forgot this. I took the garbage out and forgot to reset the alarm.”
Tess put her fist to her forehead, in what I assumed was the equivalent gesture to hitting your forehead with your open palm in the United States—how stupid am I.
“What door in the kitchen?” I asked.
Robert answered. “There’s a door in the kitchen that leads to a servants’ stairway. It goes all the way down to the trash room in the back of the building, and there’s a door from there to the outside.”
“Like the one I used to escape from the general’s wife’s apartment.”
“Yes,” Robert said. “And the very one through which the caterers covertly brought in Christmas dinner.”
“I forgot,” Tess said. “I forgot to reset.”
“Guys, let’s not dwell on it,” I said. “The question is, what are we going to do about it?”
“I will call Captain Bonpere for the arrest when Olga leaves the building,” Tess said. “The captain can send her men to the back door and find her there. This entry into my study is recorded and will be proof of a crime.”
“I don’t agree,” Robert said. “If we have her arrested, we won’t find out who’s really behind this. She must be like a drug mule—just the low-level person they sent to take the risk while the real perps hang back.”
“I think Robert’s right,” I said. “The kidnappers still have Oscar, and if we have Olga arrested, she won’t be able to call them or whatever she was planning to do to let them know she grabbed the book and the envelope and so they can let him go. We should have her followed instead.”
At that moment, there was a knock on the door. We all looked at each other.
“Qui est là?” Tess asked.
A female voice answered in English tinted with a French accent. “It is Captain Bonpere. We have seized someone at the back door.”
Tess opened the door, and Olga forced her way i
nto the room, brandishing a short-barreled shotgun, which she pointed directly at Tess.
“All of you get against that wall over there, with your hands on the tops of your heads. Now.”
I moved there. So did Tess and Robert.
“Alright. Now take your cell phones out, put them on the floor and kick them toward me.”
We complied.
“This is not smart, Olga,” I said.
“Shut up.”
“I’m not going to shut up. I don’t know what your exact plans are, but whatever, you’re going to end up in jail. And your father, too. The fact that he’s in Russia isn’t going to save him.”
She just stared at me, then reached into the pocket of her jacket and pulled out three pairs of plastic handcuffs. She slid them toward us along the floor. “One by one, pick up the handcuffs and cuff yourself to the radiator behind you.”
I looked behind me and saw that the radiator had a long pipe along the top, separated from the radiator body by about six inches.
My heart was beating fast, and I felt every part of me move to high alert as adrenaline flooded my body. I hoped Olga couldn’t sense it because, somehow, I was going to try to take her out.
“And if I don’t cuff myself?” I asked.
“I’ll shoot you, and then we will see if the others would like to comply.” From the look on her face, I thought she’d probably do it, but I thought it was still worth trying to talk her out of it.
“Olga, it will make it a lot easier for you to escape responsibility for this if you just let us go,” I said.
“Yeah, sure, it’ll be messy, but you know, at least I won’t have to listen to your big mouth anymore—in any language. Particularly when you butcher Russian.”
“I think your plan has a big problem,” Robert said.
“Yeah? I don’t think so. But if you three don’t cuff yourselves now, you will not get to tell me about this problem.”
Both Robert and Tess cuffed themselves to the radiator. I listened as they did it. When they thrust the hasp into the cuff, it made only a single click instead of the sound of a ratchet closing, as it would in a professional pair. So they were cheap models, probably kids’ cuffs she’d bought in a toy store.
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