Paris Ransom

by Charles Rosenberg

  “You, too, Jenna,” she said. “Hurry up.”

  I put the cuffs on and looped one around the radiator pipe.

  “Okay, Robert, what is this big problem with my plan?” Olga asked.

  “The book you have in your backpack isn’t the one with the inscription in it,” he said.

  “Bullshit. The plastic protector has the same the little triangular piece out of it as it did when I put it on the shelf,” Olga said. “So it’s the right one.”

  “Oh it’s the right plastic cover alright. But after we discovered your little swap, I found Tess’s original under the bed in the guest room, where I assume you dumped it when you made the switch. So I put Tess’s original in the plastic cover with the piece missing and put that one back on the shelf. And then I took the one with the inscription and hid it where you’re not going to find it if you kill us.”

  I saw Olga’s eyes widen as she realized that she had just grabbed the book from the shelf without checking the title page to see if the inscription was there.

  “I think you’re lying,” she said. She crouched down, shotgun still pointed at us, and, using one hand, swung the backpack onto the floor in front of her. She reached in, pulled out the book, laid it flat on the floor and thumbed to the title page. “Shit. This isn’t even a copy of Les Misérables. It’s The Three Musketeers.”

  “I thought it was kind of appropriate,” Robert said, grinning.

  “That doesn’t change anything,” Olga said. “I’ll just go back downstairs and find the right one.”

  “Good luck with that,” Robert said. “I doubt you’ll ever find it.”

  “You’re going to come with me and show me where it is. If you don’t, I’m going to kill your girlfriend and Jenna, too. Right now.”

  “Since your plan is apparently for all of us to die, why should I bother to come with you?” Robert asked. “Let’s talk this through instead. I mean, why are you even doing this? You’re young and have everything to live for. This will ruin your life.”

  “My father can’t afford for me to go to college in America. He used to be rich, but now he is broke. I have found a buyer in Japan who will take the book for a lot of money. If it is together with the letter, he will pay even more. I will be rich for the rest of my life, and I won’t have to go back to fucking Russia.”

  “What makes you think you won’t get caught?”

  “Everyone with evidence to convict me will soon be dead. The bookstore owner in Digne is already dead.”

  “You are making that up,” I said.

  “He committed suicide, and although he lingered awhile, he is now very dead. I know this.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “I have my sources.”

  “Who?”

  “This is not your business, and anyway, you and Robert will soon be dead, and so will Oscar. The GIGN is on its way to him, and he will be killed, along with the kidnappers.”

  “Do you know the kidnappers, Olga?”

  “They are high school classmates who are in med school here. They are too stupid to understand what a GIGN siege is like. They are expendable.”

  Tess had been utterly quiet, but suddenly said, “Olga, I have much experience in these things. Something will not be right and you will be caught.”

  I was developing a plan, but I wanted to keep her talking for the moment.

  “You know, there’s a judicial investigation going on down there, and it will lead to you,” I said.

  “Maybe, but it won’t result in anything. I followed Oscar to the railroad station the day that he went to Digne. I loitered nearby and heard him buy the ticket. When you found me there, I had gone by myself to see if the letter from François-Victor Hugo was hidden in the store. I never talked to the owner about why I was there. And since he is dead now, it doesn’t matter what he knew.”

  “Not so fast,” Robert said. “The authorities in Digne are no doubt looking into exactly what went down with bookstore owner. Sooner or later, they will come looking for you, too.”

  “I’ll just have to deal with it.”

  “The hotel owner will rat you out,” I said.

  “I am paying the hotel owner one-third. He will keep his mouth shut, and his bookstore will get a percentage for the actual sale, off the top.”

  “How much will you obtain, Olga?” Tess asked.

  “I am also taking one-third.”

  “And the final third?”

  I would have loved to have known the answer to Tess’s question, but the time had come. Olga had her eyes on Tess, and she seemed increasingly anxious. If I waited much longer, she might just go ahead and kill us. I didn’t know if it was going to work, but I thought it worth the try.

  I lunged at her and heard the hasp of the toy handcuff break away from the pipe behind me, even as my wrist screamed in pain. She pulled the trigger. There was a tremendous blast as heavy shot from the gun blew by me and shattered the window.

  Olga had been holding the shotgun out in front of her, without cradling it against her shoulder—she had probably seen too many movies where people held shotguns that way. The recoil from the blast spun her around, toppled her over and knocked the gun out of her hand. Her head hit the floor with a distinct thunk, and then I was on top of her, hands gripping both sides of her head, pounding it into the floor as hard as I could. I heard her skull crack and watched as her eyes rolled back. I don’t know why, because she couldn’t possibly have grabbed the gun, but I kicked it away. I was appalled at what I had done to her head, but at the same time I wanted to go on pounding it until it turned to mush.

  “Jenna, can you get the key out of her pocket and let us out of these cuffs?” Robert asked.

  “Just pull hard on the cuff, Robert. They’re kids’ toys, and they will come apart with just a little effort. You can probably thank whatever the French equivalent is of the Consumer Product Safety Commission for our survival. I guess they don’t let kids’ handcuffs really work here.”

  “You’re right. It just comes apart. Well, I guess we’ll never find out who was getting the other third, but thank God you did that, Jenna.”

  A voice behind me said, “I was going to get the other third.”

  I turned and saw the general standing in the open doorway, holding a large black handgun. He looked down at Olga. “Is she alive?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “She’s my only child.” He bent down, still keeping the handgun trained on us, and put two fingers against her neck to take her pulse. He looked up. “She’s dead.”

  I should have been taken aback at having killed someone or been worried that the general would now kill me. Instead I felt an intense desire to pound Olga’s head into the floor five or six more times, just to be sure. And at that point I didn’t care whose daughter she was.

  “You are her father?” Tess asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Who is the mother?”

  “Do you recall the cute little blonde barista who worked in the embassy coffee bar?”

  “While you were going out with me?”

  “Of course. I am French.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Robert react to that. If we all survived this, Tess would have some explaining to do. It seemed unlikely we were going to survive, though.

  “And you put her up for adoption?” Tess said.

  “No. She has been raised by my brother in Russia. But we have kept in touch as father and child. In close touch.”

  “And her barista mother?”

  He shrugged. “Disappeared. Somehow.”

  “What are you going to do now, Jean?” Tess asked.

  “I am going to kill all of you, then take the book and the letter. And then do what Olga and I started out to do.”

  “What about Oscar?”

  “He wil
l likely die in the GIGN attack, which is due to start”—he glanced at his watch—“in about ten minutes.”

  “Unfortunately for you, General, the real book isn’t in the backpack,” Robert said. “Nor the real letter.”

  The general shrugged. “I will find them, presumably in Tess’s apartment. But if not, not. And you will all die no matter what, and pay for the death of my daughter. Tess first.” He gripped the gun with both hands and aimed at Tess.

  I tried desperately to think how to save us. But my brain wasn’t really working anymore, and neither was my body. I was beginning to shake badly, and my limbs felt like rubber.

  Out of nowhere, a man appeared behind the general in the doorway and clubbed him sideways across the head with a large object. The general fell to the ground. I stumbled forward and pried his gun out of his hand. Tess, who had released herself from the handcuffs, snatched up the shotgun.

  The man who had clubbed the general was none other than Pierre Martin, the concierge. He had used the building’s new surveillance camera—a self-recording one, not yet installed—as his weapon.

  He and Tess exchanged several sentences of rapid French.

  “Robert, what did they just say?” I asked.

  “Pierre said that Olga offered him a cup of coffee and left to come up the elevator, but he didn’t drink it because it smelled weird. And then the general came running through carrying a gun and Pierre saw him holding a gun on us.”

  “How did he see us?”

  “When Tess’s people were here installing the equipment, he asked them to install a camera in the hallway on each floor with the screens in his office, so he was able to look through the open door into this apartment. When he saw the general holding a gun on us, he decided to do something about it.”

  I suddenly remembered what the general had said just before he was clubbed with the camera. “Oh my God,” I said. “We need to stop the GIGN.” I knelt down beside the general’s body and fished his cell phone out of his pocket.

  I asked of the room, “What was the name of the man he said was in charge of the GIGN unit?”

  “I think it was General Lemoins,” Tess said.

  I searched the directory on the phone for the name and found it. I handed the phone to Tess, “Please call him off.”

  “I can do that,” a voice said. It was Captain Bonpere, standing in there in the doorway. It seemed like that door had become a new exit from Alice’s rabbit hole.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “We were waiting outside on the street,” she said. “The general called and told us to go home, that the action was over tonight. But when we drove by, we heard the gunshot and saw the window blow out and came to investigate.”

  She looked at Tess. “Please give me the phone. I will talk to General Lemoins and call off the attack.”

  Bonpere spoke on the phone for a few minutes, at one point raising her voice to a shout, then said to us, “Lemoins refuses to call off the assault on the barn on my word alone. He says I am not a member of the Gendarmerie, and he will take orders only from the proper constituted authority. He will not say who that is. We do not have much time left. I need to call someone higher up.”

  Suddenly, another voice spoke in rapid French. It was Judge de Fournis, a new apparition in the doorway. Bonpere said something in French and handed him the phone. He put it to his ear, spoke briefly and listened for a few seconds. Then the pitch of his voice deepened, and even I could tell that he was issuing a stern order.

  He handed the phone back to Bonpere.

  “Robert, what just happened?” I asked.

  “He threatened to have General Lemoins investigated for murder if he did not call off the assault and any harm came to anyone.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Apparently.”

  “But why did the judge even come here?” Tess asked.

  “I will ask him,” Bonpere said.

  After a moment of conversation in French, Bonpere said, “It is complicated for me to explain this in English.”

  “I’ll translate,” Robert said. “The judge said that moments ago, he met at a restaurant near here—the Casimodo—with the GIGN’s chief negotiator. The general had informed him that this negotiator was the point person in negotiating Oscar’s rescue. But at Casimodo, the negotiator told him the true story. The negotiator’s superiors at the GIGN told him there was no need for his services in Oscar’s case because they were planning a straight assault on a group of terrorists. No negotiation.”

  “Oh my God,” I said. “They weren’t planning to rescue him at all. They were going to kill him. But, Robert, how did the judge know to come here?”

  “He says he was passing by, on his way home from his meeting with the negotiator, thinking about what he’d just been told. And trying to put it together with what he’d learned in the hearings. Something that you said, Jenna, was the key for him.”

  “What was it?” I asked.

  Robert laughed. “He says it was your suspicion-o-meter, which your lawyer told him about. He was impressed when your meter correctly predicted that the general would try to get to the hotel before you. He said that after he met with the negotiator he decided to follow your lead and treat every single thing the general had said as false. Doing that told him Oscar was in great danger from the GIGN.”

  “Okay, but how did he get here?”

  “It was pure serendipity. He was walking by, having just left the Casimodo, trying to figure out what to do next, when he saw Captain Bonpere rush into this building. He knew it was Tess’s building because he’d seen her address in his case dossier. He figured something bad was going on and followed the captain up here. Except she took the stairs, and he took the elevator. That’s why he was slightly behind her. He said he should have taken the steps himself—he was once a paratrooper—but he is out of shape.”

  “You know, I don’t know if I buy all of that,” I said. “It’s just too convenient. Call me suspicious.” To myself I thought, that’s true only if pigs can fly. It didn’t, however, seem like the right time to say so out loud.

  I looked over at Tess, who had been listening to both the judge’s explanation in French and Robert’s translation, and saw her smiling. Maybe after she and Robert got married she’d tell Robert how the judge really came to be there, and he’d tell me.

  After that, more police came, along with the emergency people, and I watched as they handcuffed and tried to revive the general—who looked to me to be dead—and worked on Olga, who seemed to be breathing. The general had apparently been wrong when he said she was dead, which was too bad.

  I caught the judge’s eye. He smiled, gave me a thumbs-up, turned and disappeared back through the doorway through which he had come.

  While we stood there, Bonpere interviewed us briefly about what had gone down before she arrived, and then, not long after, Robert and I found ourselves once again in the back of a police van headed for 36 quai des Orfèvres. I was still shaking badly. I looked over at Robert, and he was, too. Our trip to Number 36 this time was to be debriefed further. Tess went too, but she got to ride in Captain Bonpere’s squad car and was brought up to date in a separate room.

  CHAPTER 46

  It took two days of negotiation by Anton Morel, but Oscar was finally released unharmed. He had all of his fingers. The kidnappers eventually surrendered.

  We had to wait two days after Oscar’s release to actually see him. They wouldn’t even let us talk to him on the phone before that. Captain Bonpere said they were still interviewing him and tending to his physical needs. We decided to take her at her word.

  When he finally walked—well, shuffled—through Tess’s door, I was shocked. His face was gaunt and his clothes hung loosely from his skeletal frame. Where was the always-dapper Oscar?

  I rushed up and gave him a hug, but gently, as you mi
ght embrace an elderly relative. I could feel his ribs through his sweater.

  “Welcome back, Oscar,” I said. “We were so, so worried about you.”

  “Thank you. It is very good to be back.”

  As we ended the hug, I thought I saw a tear trickle down his face, and I had trouble holding my own tears back. And then I thought to myself, just like the old song, why can’t I cry if I want to? And I did.

  Robert and Tess came up and hugged him next. I noticed that Tess didn’t give him the two-cheek French kiss, but just hugged him tightly. Maybe too tightly. He winced a bit. By the time they were done, we were all crying.

  Captain Bonpere had come through the door right behind Oscar, and she, too, looked close to tears.

  “My friends,” Oscar said, “I need to sit down.” He headed for the big wing chair in the corner and sank into it with a distinct exhale of breath.

  “Do you wish something to drink or eat?” Tess asked.

  “Yes, yes. That would be good, Tess, thank you. They didn’t feed me much, and the doctors have told me that I must go easy for a few days. I would love a cup of coffee with a little milk or cream and something like a small sweet roll.”

  We had, of course, in preparation for his coming, bought a party’s worth of pastries, four bottles of fine wine and a case of beer. A few minutes later, Tess returned with the coffee and a small Danish.

  Captain Bonpere had warned us in advance that Oscar was suffering from at least a mild form of post-traumatic stress disorder, and that, although she understood we were all very anxious to know what had happened, we shouldn’t push him if he didn’t want to talk about it.

  We said that, of course, we wouldn’t push him.

  She also reminded us that the police, under the guidance of the public prosecutor and a soon-to-be-appointed investigating judge, had begun an inquiry into the whole thing. Because we would be witnesses ourselves, and could testify best if our memories were not clouded by others’ accounts, we might want to avoid discussing certain topics. Plus, the story had become known to the press, and she would just as soon we not know certain things so we would not be tempted to tell them too much.