Paris in the Dark

by Robert Olen Butler

  Shortly after sunlight began to make its entrance in our little scene, I took the binoculars.

  Not five minutes later, Lacey appeared.

  He emerged into the cobbled frontage of the hospital with Jones and another of the drivers. I quickly passed the binoculars to Sam, drawing his attention to our man.

  I was relieved. Sam needed to have a clear look at Lacey in the flesh before we needed to act.

  That necessity came within the hour. I’d slipped behind a forward plane tree and discreetly watched from there, getting a good angle on the south end of the frontage. The third man checked his tires and a thing or two under the hood and left a few minutes later. Jones and Lacey kept their hoods open.

  But I could tell Lacey had something going on. While Jones ran through what appeared to be a routine check of lubricating tank, grease boxes, crank chamber, and gearbox, Lacey fiddled around. He kept an eye on Jones, doing nothing much when the man was absorbed, returning to fiddling when Jones pulled back and seemed about to glance his way.

  Finally Jones closed his hood.

  The two men exchanged a few words.

  I felt certain I knew Lacey’s next move. By the schedule, the drivers needed to assemble now and remain on call. But as soon as Jones disappeared into the porte cochere, Lacey strode around to the back of his ambulance, leaned in, and pulled out his Gladstone bag, which was stashed there, no doubt during the night.

  Lacey was about to bolt.

  I beat it back to the car.

  I pointed at the crank as I approached and Sam nodded. He gassed the carburetor and I bent to the crank, and as we went through the drill to fire up the engine, I tried to interpret what I’d just seen. Lacey went for his bag without even taking time to close his hood. He knew he wouldn’t be back. No appearances to preserve. And he wasn’t going to take the Ford.

  The Renault sputtered itself alive and I circled toward the driver’s seat, not looking back, not showing my face. Even if Lacey glanced this way, I was just a man from behind, starting a car. “He’s on foot,” I said to Sam.

  Sam adjusted the throttle for me, watching through the front window. “There he is,” he said, starting to slide from under the wheel, toward the passenger door.

  I paused to keep my back to the hospital for a moment.

  Then Sam said, “Clear. Turned right on d’Inkermann.” He got out of the car. The plan was for him to follow on foot till Lacey took to a conveyance.

  I slipped up behind the wheel.

  By the time I was situated to drive, Sam, at a jog, was almost to the corner. Lacey was out of my line of sight. Sam slowed abruptly before he came into view of the receding Lacey, then turned the corner.

  I released the brake, put the Renault into gear, and accelerated to the end of the street, looking south as I approached the intersection, seeing Sam following Lacey, who was crossing Perronet at a moderate pace, not drawing attention to himself. Sam was striding faster, closing the gap.

  I rolled on into d’Inkermann without stopping. I had to hang back but I had to be near at hand when Lacey committed to his next move. Cyrus could be hidden somewhere near the hospital, within walking distance, and we’d keep up our little parade all the way there. Or Lacey was going to catch a fiacre as soon as he could, probably at the next intersection, the traffic circle on the Avenue du Roule. In that case, I’d pick up Sam and we’d follow. Or Lacey was going to soon turn east and head for the Porte Maillot Metro station. If that was his intention, I was done for the morning and I had to hope that Trask had hand-groomed Sam well.

  Sam was across Perronet and it was only a short block onward to the circle. I had a clear intersection and glided through without shifting downward.

  Up ahead, Lacey was approaching Avenue du Roule, and he was slowing. So was Sam. Lacey stopped, and Sam stepped into the doorway of a shop. I pulled up to the curb before him. I flashed him my palm as I kept my eyes on Lacey, who was standing with his back to us, ambiguously motionless.

  The Renault idled.

  I turned my face briefly toward Sam. We simply touched glances. He leaned a little forward to take a quick look to the traffic circle. I turned back to Lacey, who suddenly grew animated and raised his hand. He was hailing a fiacre.

  Sam and I both recognized the gesture at once and he strode across the sidewalk and around the car at the rear and slipped into the passenger seat.

  A fiacre with a swaybacked horse stopped before Lacey. He got in. I was happy for its classic, four-wheeled, sealed-up design, with a high back window the size of the cover of one of Lacey’s Joseph Lincoln novels. A couple of spies could follow him with impunity.

  Though slowly.

  By this time I fully expected all of us to head north and then east on the peripheral road, following along the Thiers Wall to an entryway into the Zone. But instead we turned south and then entered the widest thoroughfare in the city, the eastward-leading Avenue de la Grande Armée.

  At the pace of a marching band—though ours was invisible and silent and octogenarian—we paraded for a mile along this wide, straight, asphalt boulevard with its rows of horse chestnut trees all the way to the Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile where la Grande Armée turned into a mile and a half of the equally wide, straight, and horse-chestnuted Champs Élysées.

  We seemed to be making our swaybacked, second-gear way farther and farther from anything that could possibly hide Cyrus Parsons and his bomb making.

  But at the Place de la Concorde we crossed the Seine.

  We were on the Left Bank again. We followed the Boulevard Saint-Germain and then turned more sharply south onto the Boulevard Raspail, heading for the center of Montparnasse. Somewhere up ahead was La Rotonde, where nine days ago I was sipping a Bijou in the dark while Cyrus was walking out of the nearby café at the Hôtel Terminus, having left a satchel full of dynamite behind.

  He stirred in my head.

  I was getting close to him. Here on the Left Bank.

  That thought had just occurred to me when the fiacre slowed abruptly and I needed quickly to apply the brakes. Though the horse did not fully stop. We continued carefully through an extended intersection of three streets, and ahead, to my left, at the crossroads of two of them, was a familiar sight.

  Straight from the front page of yesterday’s Excelsior was the grand Hôtel Lutetia. A twenty-five-yard facade on the crossing Rue de Sèvres, with a ground-floor bistro and patisserie, and the long run of it around the corner, for a full block down Raspail. The gendarmes in their capes and brass buttons and flat-topped kepis were already visible in force, a dozen flanking the front entrance halfway along Raspail, rifles across their chests. Expecting the big brass. A city truck was parked at the small place where Raspail and Rue d’Assas met, more gendarmes unloading the stacked, unassembled parts of wooden barricades.

  We turned there, into Rue d’Assas, the old horse must have taken a few flicks of the whip, as I was able to upshift once again, from first gear into second.

  The street was paved in brick, angling in the direction of the Luxembourg gardens, but we didn’t stay on it for long. We passed the grounds of the old convent of the Carmelites and then the extended four-story, stone-and-brick building of the Catholic University of Paris. At its end, we turned left onto Rue de Vaugirard and tracked along another side of this papal Parisian block, glimpsing its centerpiece, the domed Church of Saint Joseph of the Carmelites, behind a passing, high, stone fence.

  At the next corner the fiacre turned right into a side street that I could see was not quite wide enough to fit the Renault and fiacre side by side. I had a hunch and shifted down before I reached the turn myself. I stopped, but kept the motor running.

  Sam looked my way.

  I leaned toward him and said, loud enough only to be heard over our motor, “If that’s the place, we’re going to end up sitting right behind him when he gets out.”

  Sam popped a confirming forefinger at me. He said, “Mr. Trask didn’t know to tell me that.”

&
nbsp; “Exactly.”

  Sam figured out what to do next, however.

  He slipped from the car and up to the corner, which was edged by a building. He took off his hat and executed a series of cautious peeks, followed by an extended half-face gaze.

  Finally, he pulled back and returned to his seat in the Renault. He said, “Got it. He went into an outer doorway, a wall of some sort, about a third of the way down on the left. The whole street is maybe a hundred and fifty yards long.”

  “Any vehicles?”

  “Twenty yards down on this side. A Unic Landaulette. Probably a taxi. But it’s half up on the sidewalk. Maybe a private one and the driver lives there.”

  “At least the Renault won’t be entirely alone.”

  But I didn’t like the setup.

  I put the car in gear and we took the corner slowly. “These are close quarters,” I said. “It’s safest to watch in the rearview mirror.” It was affixed just outside the passenger’s side, on a rod at the outer edge of the windshield.

  I passed the Unic.

  A moment later Sam said, “That’s it.”

  He nodded to a passing concrete wall, maybe ten yards wide and not much taller than a Senegalese company captain and his kepi. The wall joined a couple of two-story buildings at the sidewalk and a third building was recessed inside. Invisible was a small courtyard just beyond the metal door in the center of the wall.

  The door, I noticed, had an easy ward lock, if and when needed.

  And a number above it. Nine.

  I drove on, putting about twenty yards between the courtyard doorway and us. A couple hundred feet farther, Rue Jean-Bart ended at the cross street. I pulled to the right curb, going partly up onto the low sidewalk.

  I turned off the engine.

  “From that doorway they can’t see you sitting behind the wheel,” I said. “Let’s do the mirror.”

  Sam began to adjust it.

  He looked my way.

  “There,” I said. I could see the doorway.

  I looked at my Waltham. It was almost ten o’clock. The pursuit took nearly an hour. “Goddamn horse,” I said.

  Sam laughed. “We slid out of the twentieth century.”

  Once again I felt oddly much older than Sam. I realized I was more or less a man when the century turned and he was a child. A time when you could not find an automobile on a city street.

  “I should go,” I said. “Right now I’m recognizable by either of these guys at a glance. Cyrus might not have arrived yet. He could come from down there.” I lifted my chin in the direction of the cross street.

  Sam looked. “Of course,” he said. And then he turned to me. “I appreciate what you’re doing. I hope to learn a lot from you.”

  One more role I found myself playing. I was a goddamn repertory company.

  I said, “Then realize this whole morning has been sloppy. Because it was rushed. I should’ve been able to put you on the street now. On a doorstep dozing with a bottle, say. But you look like the embassy man you are, in your serge and trilby. We had no choice. You saw for yourself why we had to get straight to the surveillance.”

  “I understand. How long will you be gone?”

  “I hope only a couple of hours. Don’t try to take them both on alone.”

  “Good luck with the French.”

  “Right,” I said.

  I got out of the Renault.

  Sam slid over under the steering wheel.

  He reached back behind the seat and brought up a newspaper.

  He opened it and laid it on his steering wheel. He said, “The moment anyone comes around that corner.” He lifted his chin in the direction of the cross street.

  “But hold the paper low,” I said. “He doesn’t know your face. If you cover up, it’s a red flag. It could be anybody. Even me. Just don’t look at him till he’s in your mirror.”

  He nodded and said, “Jeez.”

  I assumed I knew what he meant. “Yeah. Very complicated.”

  He shot me a little smile.

  I turned and stepped to the back of the car.

  The street was empty to the far corner. I walked briskly away toward Rue de Vaugirard. I pulled my hat down and gave a quick look to the passing wall and its door and the upper story of the house at the back of the courtyard. The windows were shuttered.

  I had plenty of time to walk to Fortier’s office.

  I turned right on Vaugirard, glancing down the papal block to the left, the church, the Catholic University, the convent. I left it behind, thinking still of the Catholics and their tribulation under the Third Republic, which was born from the last big war with the Germans. And I turned up Rue Bonaparte. It surprised me almost immediately with the Church of Saint-Suplice, with its facade of double-stacked colonnades and twin kepi-flat towers. All of which had me trying to get inside Cyrus’s head again. Was he a clever man? An ironic man? Finding a hideout for a couple of anarchists in the middle of a seriously churchy neighborhood.

  Half an hour later I was looking into the Seine on the Pont Neuf between the Left Bank and the Île de la Cité, trying to create the story of a couple of German saboteurs. Just another role to play. Christopher Cobb the novelist.

  And then I was approaching Trask, who stood beside the Pierce-Arrow, which sat before Fortier’s town house on the Place Dauphine.

  He nodded.

  I nodded.

  We did not speak. He did not look at his watch.

  A gendarme led us up to the second floor and through the open office door. It was precisely eleven o’clock. As before, Fortier rose from behind his desk at the far end of the room, his boar, his rifle, and his wolf hanging behind him.

  27

  We approached.

  Two chairs were arranged before the desk.

  Fortier circled around to greet us. No handshake test across the desk this time.

  He even took a step toward me.

  I thought: Trask’s lie must be a whopper.

  Which was a thought that made the lingering, firm handshake I was having with this tough old man regrettably unsettling.

  Fortier said, “You are a special friend to France.”

  I thought: Oh shit.

  And even as I was thinking as one Kit Cobb, I heard another Kit Cobb offer a gentle correction to Fortier, in French, “America is a friend to France.”

  I felt Trask’s hand pat me on the shoulder at this and then guide me to one of the chairs. I obeyed. Fortier watched the process and smiled and took it as his cue to circle back behind his desk and sit as well.

  We were already calling the shots, we Americans.

  As we all settled into our seats I glanced at the wolf head on the wall behind Fortier. I was reminded of the first impression it had made, that it looked almost indistinguishable from an American farm boy’s sheepdog. And I thought: Indeed. Our ravenous wolf turned out to be a rogue sheepdog.

  Trask said to Henri, in slow, loud English, “I will recap what we know, Henri. I know you understand some English. But this is important, so I will have our man Cobb translate.”

  He looked at me and waited.

  I dumbly turned to Fortier.

  He was looking at me, waiting.

  I translated.

  And so it went for a few minutes.

  Trask’s words and my voice rolled out our fabricated explanation. How even after we all had at first fallen prey to convincing but bad information, I had never given up, even with no remaining leads. How America’s friendship for France and our refusal to accept terrorism anywhere in the world sent me back undercover. How I returned to my sources in the underworld of German immigrants in Paris. How, therefore, when an ambulance was stolen from the American Ambulance Hospital of Paris, I was able to uncover a lead. How we were right all along. How the flow of war refugees brought a resourceful German saboteur to Paris. How one of my German sources had seen a fellow immigrant with the ambulance. How I was presently pursuing consequent leads to find the Hun—leads too sketchy yet to
speak of but very promising—and I hoped to succeed within the next few days.

  That was our story. And how.

  Fortier had listened with a gaze focused on my face that did not waver for a moment, a gaze that one Kit Cobb fretted was a look of utter, damning skepticism but that another Kit Cobb—the main man at this moment and for however many necessary days to come—Kit Cobb the American spy—knew to be a look of tough-guy, fellow-spy admiration and approval.

  The silence that followed lasted the exact few seconds that admiration required. Then Fortier said to me, with bona fide warmth, in English, “Thank you, Monsieur Cobb.”

  “Please call me Kit,” I said. I wasn’t sure which of several possible Cobbs felt it necessary to make that distinction at this moment.

  But it pleased Fortier. He smiled. “Kit,” he said.

  Then he ignored Trask.

  He spoke only to me, in French. “They are your sources. I respect that. I do not ask you to identify them. But tell me. Do you trust them?” The bad taste was still in my mouth from the lies I’d endorsingly translated to an ally country fighting for their lives against some manifest bad guys. I felt compelled to mitigate those lies somehow. Even just operationally, for when Trask might have to undo them. I said, “I trust these sources as much as you trusted yours.”

  He flinched ever so slightly.

  I also know tough guys of a professional sort. I had confidently wagered this little combination left and right, in its playful aggressiveness and its candor, would win his respect.

  I saw him teetering between my hope and some degree of offense. I shot him a little smile and added, “But I won’t say that.”

  And he gave me a little smile back. “Thank you,” he said. “We both understand about sources.”

  I said, “But I can offer this. I do trust—and I am saying this with equal candor—that I will end the bombing within days if not hours.”

  “Very good,” Fortier said. “And I must remember how you finessed your reply. We French love finesse.”

  Trask cleared his throat loudly.

  Fortier and I both looked at him.

  He lifted his eyebrows at us. He didn’t know French but he recognized interesting body language and facial expressions when he saw them.