Paris in the Dark

by Robert Olen Butler

  Fortier and I looked back to each other.

  He said to me, “You may translate for us now.”

  This was a tough-guy old man who knew some finesse himself. I was translating for “us.” He closed the loop between us and Trask. He knew I was his guy, not the chilly old man’s in the other chair. For some reason I felt inordinately touched by this.

  Fortier went on, “I am most worried about tomorrow morning and the conference. We have kept these explosions out of the press. But tomorrow a bomb anywhere near the Hôtel Lutetia will be impossible to conceal.”

  I translated for Trask.

  And I continued to do so as we went on to establish these things between us: The important people will be safe inside the Lutetia. The cordon of security around the hotel will be thorough and fierce. But the people of France must be free to see the efforts its government is making to find a winning strategy, to secure and engage its allies in a shared goal. President Poincaré himself made this public relations goal clear and urgent to Fortier. There will be impenetrable zones of security. But the eyes and ears of the French people must be quite near to the event. This was the basis of Fortier’s overarching worry. This German bomber was very clever to steal an American ambulance. The deaths he caused were despicable. We must expect him to somehow be clever tomorrow, and he might be willing to sacrifice his life.

  After all this went back and forth, though mostly forth from Fortier, the old tough-guy Frenchman leaned toward Trask and said, “I trust your man Cobb.”

  I translated.

  “So do I,” Trask said.

  “So does he,” I said to Fortier.

  “As much as I?” Fortier said.

  “Do you want me to translate that?”

  With a small smile, drawn sideways toward me and away from Trask, he said, “No.”

  I said to him, “Most of what we do in this line of work requires finesse, doesn’t it?”

  “It does,” he said.

  “But the jobs themselves seem to succeed only with an act that is its opposite.”

  “Your understanding of this is why I trust you,” Fortier said, and he immediately rose.

  The meeting was over.

  After the handshakes and au revoirs, as Trask and I walked the length of Fortier’s long office, I suppressed a smile. The tough old guy had not missed Trask telling us all when to sit. Fortier had just made it clear, with finesse, that he was calling the shots.

  With the last au revoir, he wrung from us a solemn oath to stand side by side on the barricades with him at the hotel in the morning.

  Once Trask and I were approaching the Pierce-Arrow, he said, “We did what we needed to do.”

  “Good,” I said.

  “What was that last part? You didn’t translate.”

  “He told me to go kill this guy.”

  “Good advice. Back to the surveillance?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Number nine, Rue Jean-Bart.”

  “You’ll guide me. I’ll drop you around the corner.”

  “My hotel first. It’s right on the way. I need a couple of things.”

  I’d decided not to put on an elaborate disguise. A convincing theatrical beard would take too long. Now that we were clear of our obligation to the French, I regretted each further moment away from Rue Jean-Bart. But my hotel was right on the way and what I needed would take only a few minutes to gather up.

  It was only a few minutes later that I brisked into the lobby of the Hôtel de Seine. The concierge hailed me at once.

  I stopped.

  He lifted a hand and opened a drawer in the front desk, saying, “A very insistent young man.”

  I strode to him, plucked the envelope from his hand. “When did this come?”

  “Perhaps an hour ago. Perhaps somewhat more.”

  I turned my back on the concierge, took a step away.

  I ripped open the envelope.

  I went straight to the signature.

  Cyrus Parsons.

  And the note, written in a cramped, upright hand, said:

  Perhaps you have not had time to write our first story. It was no doubt too late for the morning editions. I still hope you are the man for the job. With your own driver and a ruling class automobile, I worry, however, that I have misjudged you.

  Cyrus Parsons

  I took the stairs two at a time and burst into my room. I pulled a leather courier bag from the wardrobe and packed in my pouch of lock-picking tools, my flashlight, and some additional firepower—a Luger, which I’d appropriated without finesse in Istanbul this past spring.

  My urgency had kept at bay a full consideration of the note’s implications. This much, only sensed downstairs, now flared fully in my head: Cyrus was watching early this morning outside the gate of La Chapelle. He’d gone nowhere except into the dark across the road to wait. We had parked perfectly to give him a good show. And a good look at Sam.

  I shut the bag, slipped the shoulder strap over my head and across my chest, and I beat it down the stairs, thinking: Sam is a big boy. He’s armed.

  Trask was sitting behind the wheel.

  I circled the Pierce-Arrow, my mind sorting through things quickly. I knew at once that Trask should come nowhere near the scene of the surveillance in our ruling class automobile. But I needed to get to Rue Jean-Bart fast, so I was reaching in for the passenger door latch. How much to tell him at this moment was the big question. If we feared for Sam, he might want to intrude. Trask had never been an on-the-ground operative. I saw him as an operational liability. I slipped in beside him and kept my mouth shut.

  Except to say: “Don’t spare the horses. The longer Sam works this alone, the more risks we take.”

  “Agreed,” he said.

  We took off down the Rue de Seine, and when we turned and started to barrel west on Vaugirard, I told him to pull over just past the high back wall of the Luxembourg Palace, short of Rue Bonaparte. He did, sliding up to the curb across from the Musée.

  “You’ll be at your office?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  I started to open the passenger door but he put a hand on my arm to stop me.

  He said, “No finesse.”

  I’d skipped that whole remark in my translation. It did not surprise me Trask knew more French than he let on.

  “No finesse,” I said.

  I got out and strode off west.

  Trask did not pass me in the car, but turned onto Bonaparte behind me. I figured that I had to try harder to set aside the Cyrus in my head when I considered Trask. I needed to give my ruling class boss a bit more credit. But I also needed to keep connected to Cyrus. He was no hayseed. He was shrewd and aggressive beyond the dynamite.

  I was approaching the corner of Rue Jean-Bart. Staying alert. I could well confront Cyrus at any moment. He could be walking this way, intending to turn at the same corner. It was one of those moments when I found myself naturally aware of the weight of the Mauser against the small of my back. I strode harder and made an anticipatory decision. The simple thing—the only thing—if I found him before me would be to kill Cyrus immediately, on the street. Then Sam and I would go into the house on Jean-Bart and take care of Lacey.

  But now the corner was a few steps away and Cyrus was nowhere in sight.

  Fine.

  I turned the corner.

  The street was empty.

  The Renault was gone.

  28

  I stopped.

  Sam would not have driven away if Cyrus hadn’t shown up. Even if Cyrus appeared, Sam would have waited for me unless they’d gone out together carrying a satchel. Or unless there’d been an unexpected confrontation. And given the timing of the note and the revelation in it, I did not like the possibilities of a confrontation that made Sam vanish before my return.

  Either explanation told me what to do next.

  Go in.

  I hustled down the street.

  Before the metal door, I o
pened my courier bag and pulled out my lock-picking tools. I found the right skeleton, inserted it in the keyhole. The bolt moved. I edged the door open only enough to keep the lock undone. I put the tools away and took out the Luger. I released the safety catch at the top of its grip.

  I threw open the metal door, stepped in, quickly scanned the space with both hands on the pistol.

  No one was in the arc from one corner of the house in front of me to the other. All the windows were shuttered. Then on around to my extreme right. No one. Back to my extreme left.

  No one.

  A trash bin there. A rake behind it, some other tools sticking up. Close to the wall was a manhole with a drainage notch, laid into cobbles. The whole courtyard was cobbled. Like a street. A very old street.

  I closed the door behind me, thinking this space had not been designed as a courtyard. It might, indeed, have once been the street, or part of it, or a side street. A long time ago. That would explain the manhole. This was never a Haussmann neighborhood. Buildings just sprung up. The two that formed the sides of the courtyard had no entry into it.

  The only door was into the house before me.

  I stepped to it.

  A latch lock. But before I set to picking it, I tried the thumb lever.

  The door yielded.

  I carefully stepped through, into silence and darkness. I pushed the door closed without letting it snap shut.

  I did not move.

  I waited and listened, the Luger poised before me in the dark.

  I heard only faint familiarities. The buzz of silence. The ticking of timbers.

  The background smells were familiar as well. Mildew. German cockroaches. French, to the Germans.

  I pulled the flashlight from my bag and sent its beam down the corridor. It went ten or twelve feet and found a staircase to the right and a doorway across from it. Nearer to me, a couple of steps along, were facing doorways. I moved to the one on the right and the beam scanned an utterly empty parlor. The space opposite was larger, the sitting room. Also empty. In its back wall a doorway into darkness.

  I hesitated again. No sounds.

  I proceeded through the house, both upstairs and down, and I found very little. There were a few objects that might be left by a family thoroughly abandoning this place as the war came on and the father and the son went off to the trenches. A book, a shoe, a broken plate. A dozen other bland bits and pieces.

  In three rooms there were traces I tried to read.

  In two chambers upstairs, the dust that uniformly coated all the other floors was greatly disturbed, wide paths swiped and scuffled through, exposing the wood beneath. In each of the two was a clearing of dust that defined a space large enough for and vaguely in the shape of a sleeping bag. I thought: At least Cyrus escaped Lacey’s snoring.

  The third room was at the back of the first floor. The floor had been scuffed nearly clean. There was a woodstove and in it was ash with bits of charred hardwood. Recent embers. A large worktable sat in the middle. No smells. There wouldn’t be unless the dynamite was ancient and sweating nitro. But there was no dust. None.

  That was it.

  Not much.

  I was risking the usual. Seeing what I expected to see. Coming to conclusions that were, in fact, imaginings.

  Lacey did come in here.

  He was not here now.

  In that regard, one possibility was just off the room with the stove and the table. A door that led out back. I opened it. In the clouded afternoon light was a ragged space of grass and the rear of the buildings on Rue Madame.

  I’d seen enough.

  I retraced my steps down the central corridor and went out the front door and through the courtyard, trying to understand. The house might have been a staging area for bombs. Assembled there and then taken off to do their work. The two bombings that had begun this whole thing were within easy walking distance of Rue Jean-Bart.

  I stepped from the courtyard.

  The street was still empty.

  I closed the metal door and relocked it, in case nothing had changed, in case the surveillance would somehow resume.

  Maybe our Yankee anarchists did go out with a satchel. Sam had to improvise. If he didn’t have a clear shot, or if only one of them went out with the satchel—Lacey, with Cyrus still not having shown up, still off somewhere, vanished in The Zone or wherever—maybe Sam had to make a quick decision. Stick with the surveillance like Trask wanted so we could be sure to take them both out at once, even if that meant letting the bomb get delivered and detonated. Or follow the bomb and stop it.

  Maybe that’s how it went.

  Maybe Sam was safe, off being a hero.

  Or maybe Sam was dead. Maybe Cyrus arrived and recognized him at once and kept it to himself and went in and made a plan with Lacey and they went out the back and circled around from Rue Madame and one of them diverted him while the other killed him and the two of them took the body and the Renault away to dump them far from their hideout.

  Whatever happened, I could not afford to wait here and see.

  I needed to talk to Trask right away and the closest post office I knew of was on Saint-Germain near my hotel. But then I thought of the nearby Lutetia. The brand-new luxury hotel would have a telephone cabinet.

  I took off along Jean-Bart and then around the papal block once more and up Rue d’Assas. As I emerged onto Raspail just below the hotel, the first thing to see, west across Raspail, past the wall of a military prison and facing north on Rue de Sèvres, was a large loaf of neo-Gothic bread, still another Catholic church.

  I thought: If a great battle plan to defeat the evil Kaiser Wilhelm does not emerge from the Lutetia tomorrow morning, God does not exist. If He exists, He has the place sufficiently surrounded to get the job done.

  The police had been busy since this morning. A barrier of wooden saw-horses and attending gendarmes already controlled sidewalk access along the hotel. I approached the checkpoint and showed Fortier’s give-this-guy-what-he-needs letter from the Préfecture de Police de Paris. It got me through the saw-horses and, presented once more, through the front door of the hotel.

  Pairs of gendarmes, rifles across their chests, flanked the way from foyer to reception area, where the floor tile was laid out in a vast, slanting black-and-white chessboard with no edges, spaces proliferating outward, colliding with walls. A fitting comment on the task of the coming morning.

  The reception desk sent me through a wide doorway into the lobby lounge and an alcove in the corner containing a cabine téléphonique.

  I closed myself in.

  I rang through to Trask.

  “It’s Kit.”

  “This is too quick to hear from you on a telephone.”

  I said, “That’s right. And I want to be mindful, but you need to do something right away. You and the people you can marshal.”

  “All right.”

  “Our man and the car were gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Vanished.”

  I heard Trask grunt, as if he’d just taken a right hook to the body. He knew all the implications.

  I said, “I went inside.”

  He took a moment. “I understand,” he said.

  “No one. Nothing. An empty place with a bare few vague indicators. The two were there, I believe. But now, they and any clear trace of them are gone.”

  He grunted again.

  “No word from our man?” I had to ask but he’d have said already if so.

  “None.”

  A few moments of mere line static commenced. I tried to think of a mindful way to speak the thought that arose in me now and that I felt surely was rising in Trask.

  “You and your French friends should look. Quickly.” I hesitated to say it, but I added, “Look where an automobile can go nearby and be seen by no one, or only by the indifferent.”

  “Yes,” he said, and though it was brief and a single simple syllable and passing through the scrim of a telephone line, the word was filled wit
h something I had not heard in Trask.

  More static and thinking and then Trask said, “We have our duty tomorrow. You know what’s crucial now.”

  “I do,” I said. The Hôtel Lutetia.

  And that was that.

  I hung up the telephone.

  I turned and put my back against the side of the cabinet and leaned heavily there.

  What I felt seemed simply to be exhaustion.

  I had plenty of reason to feel that, though the afternoon was barely an hour old. It had been a long night and morning. I knew it wasn’t that simple. But for now exhaustion was sufficient.

  I returned to my hotel, went up to my room, and without undressing lay down to rest.

  For the second time on this day I was awakened by a banging at my door.

  I wobbled awake.

  The room was dim. The shutters were closed but the cracks were dark.

  More heavy knocking.

  Trask’s voice. “Kit. Are you there?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes.”

  I rose and crossed the room. I turned the switch to ignite the electric light and opened the door.

  His face was jaundiced by the light.

  We stood facing each other unmoving, unblinking, for an oddly long moment. I was still groggy. He was apparently dead from a bad liver. Or so it appeared. My mind was putting the scene into wry head-talk as I tried to clear away the residue of an exhausted afternoon nap.

  And then I understood.

  “Sam,” I said.

  “Sam,” Trask said.

  29

  Trask and I did not move.

  We let the details that should probably have been spoken remain unspoken for now, giving them time to dissipate in the fraught silence between us.

  Then Trask said, “I woke you. Do you even know what time it is?”

  “I do not.”

  “Half past six.”

  “That’s why I’m hungry. I don’t think I’ve eaten for a long while.”

  So Trask and I walked together down Rue de Seine, and at the Boulevard Saint-Germain he said, “This way,” and we went along the full Gothic length of the Church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and turned in at the Brasserie des Bords.