“Let me come to the point, the man continued. You and your three friends have spent a few weeks in Rome recently. I confirmed, yes, we had been in Rome. And you bought an old manuscript? he asked. I wouldn’t call it a manuscript, I told him. We bought a few sheets of paper with drawings on them. In between the drawings there were a few sentences, but we couldn’t read them. They were in a language we didn’t know.
“He then said unexpectedly, totally unexpectedly, if you bought what I think you bought, I am willing to pay a million euros for these sheets of paper.”
At this point Jean stopped talking. He looked at the people in the room. Did he really want to tell them the full story? This question was written on his face.
“Why did you and your three murdered friends buy these pages?” the commissaire asked.
Good question, Tony thought, not too direct, almost neutral, but still relevant.
“We went to Rome to look for new material to work with,” Jean replied. “Instead of copying famous paintings, as we had done for years, we wanted to explore new directions. Exactly what that meant, we didn’t know yet. The drawings inspired us. They were all in a square format, about four inches by four inches, eight drawings all together. I believe it was Henri who said, we could perhaps use them as basis for larger paintings. They were medieval drawings with knights, angels, devils and animals, that kind of pictures. We found the pages in an antique book shop. Actually, they were offered to us by the owner of the shop, an old and sick looking man. He said they were no longer any good for him.”
“Any good for him?” Nancy interrupted. “Any idea why he said that?”
“Pierre asked the same question.”
“What did the old man answer?”
“He said something about his age and about being close to death. Our Italian is not very good and what he said didn’t make a lot of sense to us.”
“Maybe it did,” Nancy said. “Maybe the pages contain a recipe and he had tried it and concluded that it didn’t work.”
Tony looked towards the commissaire and noticed that he was just about to join the conversation. Tony shook his head, hardly noticeable. The commissaire held back and said nothing.
Nancy continued the conversation. “In the meantime have you tried to find out what the words on the pages mean?”
Jean understood what Nancy was driving at. He was streetwise and intelligent and looked at her and said nothing. Nancy also said nothing. Everybody said nothing and was waiting for Jean. After two minutes everybody was still waiting. Finally, when Jean answered Nancy’s question, his answer consisted of a short two letter word. “No.”
The silence continued. This is unusual Tony thought. There is no reason why anyone shouldn’t say something now. Jean didn’t tell Nancy what she was hoping for. He only answered her question, nothing else. Nancy was hoping for more.
Finally, Jean ended the uncertainty. “You want to know what happened to the four sheets?”
“Yes, please,” Nancy replied. “Where are they now?”
36
“Tony Jackson left the hotel two hours ago,” Mike said after he had put down the phone. “He hasn’t left a forwarding address.”
“The French police should know his new location,” Christina reasoned. “I can’t imagine that they didn’t tell him that they may need to talk to him again.”
“True, but I don’t think we should contact the French police. You and I quit the New York Police very suddenly. Not only did we quit with a short text message – “Unable to continue employment due to personal reasons; please accept resignation effective immediately.” – we also disappeared and have been incommunicado ever since. I don’t think they would have liked that. Contacting the French police may be like stirring up a hornets nest.”
“Let’s go to Paris and instead of having only a refuelling stop there, let’s stay for a few days,” Mike’s mother intervened. “I have a friend in Paris. He is a retired police commissioner and maybe the time has come to visit him. He has good contacts and been inviting me for years.”
37
“I don’t know where the four sheets are,” Jean explained, “but I suspect they are in the possession of the people who killed my friends and are trying to kill me.” After a brief pause he continued. “As I told you, we were not interested in what was written on them, we were interested in the drawings. Each sheet contained two drawings. The paper looked old and valuable, although we were not experts in this and what the man sold us could well have been a forgery. But he didn’t ask for too much and he looked awfully old and sick, so we paid him the four hundred euros he wanted. He was not willing to negotiate. Each one of us paid him one hundred euros and in return took one sheet. The drawings were all equally interesting and we didn’t care about which piece of paper each one of us ended up with. Back in our hotel we put the sheets in our luggage and returned to Paris a few days later. We had bought all sorts of other prints of drawings and paintings; that one sheet that each one of us had became just another item in our collection.”
“Collection of souvenirs,” the commissaire threw in.
“Yes, you are not wrong, these were kind of souvenirs to us.”
“What did you do with your sheet?”
“I assume you have seen my studio?” Jean asked the commissaire.
“Yes, I have.”
“It is a big room with lots of tables, desks and shelves around the walls. I like to see things; I like my environment to be transparent. I placed all the paintings, prints and drawings I had bought in Rome onto one of the tables. It wasn’t a lot, just a small stack of paperwork, about one inch high. Somewhere in that paperwork was that one sheet that we are talking about.”
“Have you been in your studio since they tried to kill you there?”
“No, I haven’t. For a start, I understand it is still sealed with police tapes. Secondly, the guys who were trying to kill me might just be waiting for me to return.”
“There is just one thing I don’t fully understand yet,” Nancy said.
“You’re lucky,” Jean interfered before Nancy could finish what she was about to say. “To me it feels like there are dozens of things I don’t yet understand.”
“I know, the same to me. What I mean is this, as far as these four sheets are concerned, how do you know that they are what the bad guys were looking for? How do you know that they may contain a recipe for eternal life?”
“Good point. I didn’t mention this. Somehow I was side-tracked. Okay. The elderly gentleman who visited me initially offered one million euros in the event that the sheets of paper we bought in Rome were what he thought they were. Imagine, we paid four hundred euros and he offered us a million. I told him, if these sheets were of such great value that he was willing to pay an entire million for it, shouldn’t I check first if someone else wasn’t willing to pay two or even three million for them. He agreed and revised his offer. He said he would offer me one hundred thousand euros for photocopies of the four sheets and I could then do whatever I wanted with the originals.”
“I don’t believe this,” Nancy commented.
“Exactly what I thought,” Jean replied, “but you better believe it.”
“Why?”
“I allowed him to look through the stuff I had bought in Rome. He just paged through it, simply by lifting the edges of the various pieces of paper. It was obvious that he knew exactly what he was looking for. When he arrived at the sheet with the two drawings he focused for a minute or two on the few sentences on the sheet. Next he said that this was exactly what he had been looking for. I asked him what it was. It was part of a recipe for eternal life, he replied.
“Did he tell you what the words said?” the commissaire’s assistant asked.
“No. I didn’t even ask him. I guess I just don’t believe in this kind of stuff. Besides, I could give him only a quarter of the recipe, the other three quarters were with my friends.”
“How did he find you?” the commissaire asked.
>
“I left half a dozen of my advertising postcards with the old man in the antique bookshop. I leave my postcards everywhere I go. It’s still a bit of a habit from a time before I became a wealthy artist.”
“From the time before the court case?”
“Yes. The court case changed everything. It legitimised our business. The court case was a form of advertising you can’t buy with money.” Turning towards Nancy he continued, “I can’t tell you often enough how grateful I am for your help during those very difficult weeks. Gaston, Henri, Pierre and I spoke often about you. We called you our American Guardian Angel.”
“Don’t forget, we had good lawyers,” Nancy replied.
“True,” Jean agreed, “but don’t forget we had good lawyers because you hired them and you paid them.”
“Okay, let’s not forget we are dealing with murderers here,” the commissaire interrupted. Turning towards Jean he continued, “So, if I understand this correctly, the elderly man, an Englishman you said …”
“He said that he was English, from London, and in the book publishing business.”
“Okay. I guess you gave him then the names and addresses of your friends. We know from our investigations that they were also visited by an elderly and somewhat overweight gentleman.”
“No, I didn’t need to give him my friends’ contact details. He had them already. My friends had left their business cards with the bookshop owner in Rome and I assume he gave them to the elderly gentleman, just as he had given him my advertising postcard.”
Tony, who so far had said very little, he was just listening with his eyes half closed, stood up and stretched his arms, as if he felt a little stiff. The commissaire, his assistant, Nancy and Jean looked at him questioningly. “Well,” he said, “I guess that if you sold him a photocopy for twenty five thousand euros, the original should still be somewhere in your studio, unless the people who tried to kill you found it and stole it.”
“Okay,” the commissaire said, “let’s go to your studio and find out. Whatever else we have to talk about we can do in the car.”
38
The Gulfstream jet landed at the Charles de Gaulle airport. Less than an hour later, Mike, Christina, Mike’s mother, Sarah, Vanessa and Steven were in the process of moving into five rooms, all on the same floor of a five star hotel. They had left New York and arrived in Paris with brand new names, brand new passports and brand new backgrounds; only their personalities had stayed the same. (For the convenience of the reader, the following pages will continue to refer to them as Mike, Christina, Mike’s mother Natalie, Sarah, Vanessa and Steven.) An hour after their arrival at the hotel they had dinner and a further sixty minutes later they went to bed. The next day Mike’s mother would have lunch with Monsieur Bernard, the former Commissionaire de Police de Paris. Natalie had phoned him from New York. He immediately suggested that she could stay with him at his apartment at the Rue du Temple. His apartment was gigantic, he said, much too big for him. Since the departure of his wife nearly ten years ago he shared the apartment with a lady who did the cleaning, shopping and cooking for him; there were four empty guestrooms and Natalie could choose the one she preferred.
Mon cher ami, Natalie replied, she would love to stay with him, however, she only could make a few hours available at lunchtime. And so, the former Commissionaire was happy to invite her for lunch. He gave her the name of a restaurant, one of the best in the city, and they agreed they would meet there at eleven thirty. Unfortunately, Natalie pointed out, her time was very constrained, at the most she could only spend two hours in his company. Mon cher ami! he cried, que c’est impossible! Just to enjoy and to do justice to the hors d'oeuvre would take two hours. But Natalie insisted. She supposed that if she put a two hour time limit on her lunch with her old friend, she might be able to get away after three hours, definitely after four.
“The man who saved your life, Tony Jackson,” she told her son an hour after the conclusion of her five hour lunch, “and his girlfriend Nancy Baliva have moved to the hotel de Crillon.”
The former Commissionaire’s charm had been irresistible. Although he was nearly eighty years old, he still had the energy and intellectual brilliance of a man half his age. He and Nancy managed to entertain each other for five hours. They had been lovers briefly twenty years earlier; it had also been twenty years since they had seen each other, although they had stayed in touch all these years, generally with a couple of long letters annually. When Nancy looked at her watch the first time it was three thirty pm. She could hardly believe that four hours had passed; to her it seemed as if they had met for lunch an hour earlier at the most.
“Did he tell you anything else about him?” Mike asked his mother.
“No, nothing as far as his identity is concerned.”
“But?”
“He is very fast, very cool. He could be a professional.”
“What kind of professional?”
“A former policeman, a gangster … They don’t know. They asked the Americans if they knew anything about him, but they have not come back yet.”
“He saved two lives,” Mike contemplated, “he did nothing wrong. He could be just an ordinary guy, very fit, not easily frightened and willing to take a risk and do the right thing.” Admittedly, Mike thought, these men are getting rarer from year to year.
“You should go and visit him,” his mother said spontaneously.
Mike did not reply. He closed his eyes. He is listening – listening to the world, his mother thought. This is good. Visiting this Tony Jackson could blow our cover. He may have read or heard of Mike and Christina’s sudden departure from the NY police force. We don’t want him to tell anybody in the States that Mike is in Europe. This could make our disappearance transparent. On the other hand, there is something about this man. He saved Mike’s life, he saved another life here in Paris. Similar circumstances. It feels as if we are destined to meet him. This doesn’t make sense; not logically. Still, there is something about this man. He looks like someone … someone … one can trust. I can’t believe that I think this about a stranger. This is something for Mike. His decision. He is listening, this is good.
Mike opened his eyes. He had listened to the world for twenty minutes, perhaps a bit longer. Neither he nor his mother looked at their watches. He stood up and walked to the window. He looked at the traffic below, especially at the people on the footpath. How do they make important decisions, he wondered for a moment.
“I think you are right. Logically it would make more sense to stay away from him, catch the plane and go to Rome. However, something seems to draw us to him. We discovered his location with the help of your friend, the former Commissionaire. Strictly, logically speaking, this may not have been a good idea. Whatever we do now, there is already a link from us to this Tony Jackson via the Commissionaire. Maybe not a link to worry about, but nevertheless a link. But there is something else … I can’t put it in words. Something tells me it’s okay to meet him. I want to buy him a beer, say thank you. But that’s not it. There is something else. It feels okay, that’s all I can say. You’re right, I’m going to visit him.”
39
Tony read the Internet version of the New York Times. After he had finished reading several articles in the business section, he glanced through other parts of the paper on his iPad. He came across a report entitled Top Detective Mystery Deepens. Not a good heading, he thought, but then, on the other hand, it seems to do the job; I noticed it and now I am reading it.
After he had read the article he looked at the photograph of the detective who had disappeared. I know this man, he thought. Yes, I do know him, he’s the guy whose life I saved. How strange. Only a few weeks ago he was one of the most successful policemen they had and now they think he could be a crook. He doesn’t look like a crook; certainly not from how I remember him in the bar and certainly not in this picture – but then, on the other hand, I’m a conman and don’t look like a crook; at least I hope I don’t.
> Tony had spent the previous hours with commissaire Daniel Brice, his assistant, Nancy and Jean. First they had been to Jean’s apartment and then to the three murdered painters’ apartments. They were looking for four sheets of antique looking parchment paper, each with two drawings and with a few sentences. All the sentences together in the right sequence were meant to be a recipe for eternal life.
If the people who had searched the apartments after Jean’s escape and after they had killed the three painters knew what they were looking for, then it was likely that they had found it. The four painters had no idea of the value or importance of the four antique sheets they had bought for four hundred euros. They thought they had paid too much, but because they felt sorry for the old and sick looking bookshop owner and because they were reasonably wealthy artists they didn’t mind. Back home in their big studios it was likely that they all had done what Jean had done: put the stuff they had brought back from Rome onto a shelf, a table or perhaps into a drawer.
The intruders and murderers didn’t smash anything, they didn’t create a mess. They searched thoroughly; they moved things from A to B and from C to D and so on. Jean’s first reaction when he glanced around his apartment and studio was a sense of relief, almost happiness. He had expected chaos and damage, but what he found was a rearranged home. That wasn’t too bad. Nothing was where it was meant to be, but somehow everything – or almost everything – seemed to be somewhere.
“Have a look around and see if you can find that one inch stack of paintings and drawings that you brought back from Rome. If I understood you correctly, when they attacked you in the studio the stack was still lying on a table,” the commissaire said.
“It was on that table,” Jean replied and pointed to an empty table. Underneath the table and in front of it there were at least ten stacks of documents, letters, magazines, drawings, prints and paintings. Jean looked at the piles of paper, some only half an inch thick, some several inches thick. He bent down and picked up one pile and placed it on the table. With a sense of thoroughness he took one painting, print or drawing after the other, briefly looked at it and then moved it beside the stack. Slowly the old stack shrank in size and a new stack emerged. The moment came when the old stack no longer existed and Jean shook his head. “It’s gone,” he said. “They must have found it. I would say they knew exactly what they were looking for.”
An Almighty Conspiracy – A novel, a thriller, four people doing the unexpected Page 15