by C. J. Lyons
And why not? He thought with a groan. Who was he to her? Another mouth to feed, another man who could get her or the people who worked with her killed. After their raid on the hospital to retrieve his fallen colleagues, he thought he’d sensed more from her, but now he realized that all she felt for him was a sense of responsibility.
And all she would feel for him once he was gone would be a sense of relief for another bullet dodged.
He cursed his idiocy and tried to force himself asleep. Tomorrow would be grueling—a ten-hour climb through rough mountain terrain. Their highest ranking officer, Lt. Carstairs, was still not fully back to normal after his head injury. It would be up to Paddy to lead his men to freedom.
The door creaked open and he sat bolt upright, fumbling for the pistol on his bedside table. A flicker of candlelight appeared, followed by a woman’s form. The door closed and she advanced. Paddy caught his breath. It was Rosa.
She placed the candle on the washstand beside the bed and stood before him. Her hair was down, framing her face in a cascade of curls. She wore a simple blouse and wool skirt, with a heavy quilt wrapped around her shoulders. In the dim light, she no longer appeared as the formidable resistance leader, La Tempête, but rather as a scared woman-child.
“Is something wrong?” he asked, holding his blankets tightly around his nearly naked body. She stood before him, silent. “What is it, Rosa? You’re frightening me.”
His words earned him a pensive smile. “You frighten me.”
He blinked in surprise. “I frighten you? How? Why?”
“Your feelings. For me.” The smile that crossed her face now had nothing of a child in it, but was all woman. “When you look at me, when your hand brushes mine, I feel—” She broke off, spun around to reach for the candle. “This is a mistake. Je regret.”
Oh no, she wasn’t getting off that easy. Paddy lunged for the candle, ignored the bedcovers falling away from his body, and grabbed her arm.
“No regrets, no mistakes,” he told her, holding her firm, looking into her eyes. She met his gaze, didn’t seem to have noticed his lack of clothes. “Other men look at you as I do, other men want you—I’ve seen you brush them aside without a second glance. Why do I frighten you, Rosa? The truth.”
She glared at him, squirmed to get away for one infuriating moment, then drew her breath in. “I have lived with fear for years now—the Germans came after my people long before they went after the Jews. I’ve been captured…I was frightened, but I escaped. I’ve almost died, have been forced to face my fear and kill others, and I survive. And by surviving I have been able to keep on fighting against the people who killed my family, everyone I held dear. Even though through this fight, I have earned the wrath and scorn of my own people—that was once my greatest fear, but now,” she shrugged, “being cast out as unclean seems—what do you English say? Small potatoes.”
“You bloody well know I’m not English, so get to the point. Why are you here?”
Her gaze darted away from his and his breath caught. He remembered how calm she’d been that first night, holding a dagger to Maguire’s throat, facing down two dozen angry men, but now she couldn’t meet his eyes?
Finally her whisper broke the silence. “You make me afraid—afraid not of capture or death, but afraid of failing. Failing them, you—disappointing you. I’m afraid of wanting more—wanting tomorrow—”
She shook her head, as if words failed her. She knew half a dozen languages, yet she had no words for hope.
The thought ambushed Paddy. He pulled her into his arms, bowed his head over hers as she silently wept, her tears hot against the bare flesh of his chest.
“Rosa, my Rosa. You could never fail me. It’s all right to have hope—it’s what we all need to make it through this God awful mess of a world with our souls intact. It’s all we have, don’t forsake it.”
She sniffed and looked up at him, her heart-shaped face glowing with wet tears in the candlelight. “Cat traieste omul spera, life is hope,” she said. “My grandmother used to say that. I never listened. I hated her.”
Paddy laughed at that. He hadn’t cared much for his gram either. “My gram said the same thing. ‘Life is love, love is hope.’ Maybe the old hags knew what they were talking about after all.”
Her hands skimmed up his bare arms, sending a thrill through him before coming to rest on the sides of his face. She raised herself up onto tiptoe and he lowered his lips onto hers.
When he woke the next morning, he felt changed forever, ready to face anything. He’d lead his men over the mountains to freedom. And then he would return for Rosa.
Stretching lazily, he reached for her. But the other side of the bed was cold. Before he had the chance to feel regret, the door eased open. It was Rosa, fully dressed, that crazy quilt of hers wrapped around her so she looked more like an old crone than a young girl. It was sodden wet.
“We’re not going, are we?” he said when he saw the look on her face.
“No. A storm has moved in. The worst I’ve ever seen.”
Spreading the quilt over a chair near the fire to dry, she didn’t turn to face him. “It’s worse. Marshal Petain is on his way for his grand inspection. He’ll be here tomorrow at the latest. The police are rounding up everyone considered undesirable or dangerous and imprisoning them on a ship, the Senaia.”
Finally, she turned to him. “They’ve already raided two of our houses, taken half my people.” Her face was ashen. “There’s nothing I can do. I’ve failed them.”
Paddy left the bed to gather her into his arms. She wasn’t weeping, although her entire body trembled. He wished she would cry, let out some of the pain.
But that wasn’t his Rosa. The best he could do for her—the only thing he could do for her—was hold her tight.
Chapter 24
DRAKE WAS STILL staring at the phone in his hand when Jimmy joined him out in the hallway. “What did Kasanov want? Were you able to get proof of life?”
“He wants her.” Drake nodded toward where Alicia waited inside her salon. “And I have a feeling she knows it.”
“Yeah, she’s playing this much too cool,” Jimmy agreed. “Why hasn’t she called her lawyer or the mayor or whoever, fry our asses already? She didn’t even seem surprised to see us.”
“I need to know what’s really going on here. What Kasanov’s game really is.”
“What did he tell you?”
Drake had an eidetic memory when it came to visuals and his auditory skills were almost as good. He repeated Kasanov’s demands verbatim. Jimmy shook his head as if trying to rattle his brain cells into forging new connections. “You’re not giving her to him, of course.”
“What makes you so certain?” Drake hated to admit it, not even to Jimmy, but if he thought for one second he could trust Kasanov, he’d sacrifice Alicia in a heartbeat.
“For one, you’re not an idiot. You know it’s some kind of set-up. For another, either your mom or Hart caught wind of you making a stupid ass move like that, they’d kick your butt from here to Norway and back again.”
Drake’s lips tightened, but he nodded a grudging agreement. “But now we know it’s personal. Something between her and Kasanov.”
“And you. Something he thinks you slacked off on—a case?”
“I never worked any case involving the Eastern European mob or Alicia Fairstone. Hell, I never even heard of Alicia until she approached my manager about Steadfast.”
“Yeah, but what else could it be? Romero is running all your past cases to see if there were any ties to the arson last night. Let’s see if throwing Kasanov and Alicia’s names into the mix pops something.”
“In the meantime, what do we do with her? It’s obvious Kasanov’s people are watching her.”
Jimmy scowled. “I say we arrest her as a material witness and haul her privileged ass down to the station house. With the holiday, no matter how much money she has, no judge will hear her case until Tuesday at the earliest.”
; “If we’re wrong, it’s a good chance it will mean our jobs.” Drake was perfectly willing to take the risk, but he couldn’t let Jimmy. Jimmy had a family to support.
Jimmy didn’t even bother answering. Instead, he strode back into the salon and pulled his cuffs out.
<<<>>>
TURNED OUT THEY didn’t need the handcuffs. As soon as Jimmy told Alicia they wanted to bring her in for further questioning and would arrest her as a material witness if need be, she seemed almost relieved. Instead of calling her attorney, she’d grabbed a coat and bag and followed them meekly out the door.
The only time she’d appeared at all apprehensive was during the short walk from her front door to the car. Guilty, every cop instinct in Drake’s body screamed. But of what?
He felt better once they were safely inside the Zone 7 station house. Not relaxed, but at least able to divest enough of the apprehension that had hijacked his nerves so he could concentrate. Jimmy escorted Alicia to an interview room—he was much better at getting guilty consciences to unburden their secrets than Drake was—while Drake went in search of Romero, the arson investigator.
He found him in the briefing room where they worked major cases. With Romero were Janice Kwon and Don Burroughs, fellow detectives from Drake’s squad. The room lacked the fancy technology the feds boasted but made up for it with dedication. Romero in particular was bleary eyed—he’d clearly been working the case ever since Drake left him earlier this morning.
“Cleared the list you gave me,” he greeted Drake. It was better than empty words of sympathy.
Drake looked past him to where Janice was erasing names off a white board. Burroughs worked a computer at the table across from where Romero was surrounded by stacks of paper case files and murder books. “Still can’t find any connection between any of your collars and Kasanov.”
“Add Alicia Fairstone to the mix,” Drake told them. He’d called the feds from the car and had them running their own data search, but some things wouldn’t show up in the national databases. “Kasanov called, said Alicia had to pay for a crime—something he blames me for not solving.”
“I reviewed your open cases,” Kwon said. “There’s nothing tied to Kasanov.”
Drake knew that. He and Jimmy had one of the best clearance rates in the city; the few cases they hadn’t closed were long cold. A John Doe found naked under a bridge with his skull bashed in two years ago. A junkie who’d OD’d of a hotshot delivered by her ex, but the DA said they didn’t have enough probable cause to charge the man. A carjacking that had ended with the victim in a coma for the past fourteen months.
Romero looked up from the file he was reading. “There was one thing I wanted to ask you about. A hit and skip fatality from a few months ago.”
Drake remembered the case. “The CMU student? That wasn’t my case—belongs to Jo Anderson over at traffic.”
“But your name was on a few of the witness statements.”
“Sure, I was the on-call detective that weekend, got things started. Then Jimmy and I helped out with the canvass.” He nodded to Burroughs. “Don, you were there as well.”
“Yep. Poor kid, had all sorts of reflector shit on his bike and still some sonofabitch ran him down. I remember there were no skid marks, no sign the driver stopped at all.”
“Jo’s team was able to narrow the vehicle’s make and model down to Jaguars sold in the past two years,” Romero told them.
“Good for her. Did she make an arrest?” Drake asked.
“No. But one of the Jaguar owners she spoke to was—”
Shit. “Alicia Fairstone.”
“Bingo. No sign she was involved, no damage on her vehicle—but it was days later before anyone got around to talking to her.”
Electricity surged around the room as the cops shook off their fatigue and became energized by the lead, no matter how slim.
“Tell me about the victim,” Drake said.
“Anton Lavelle, nineteen. Studying computer security. No arrests, no warrants, nothing at all in NCIC.”
Drake paced to the white board where Janice wrote Anton’s name and particulars in her precise printing. He circled the table and ended standing behind Romero, who was leafing through the case file.
Romero made it to the end of the file that contained all the handwritten notes and other paper detritus that even in this computer age still drove an investigation. “Nothing much here. Lived alone. Friends and professors all said he was a quiet guy, nice, reliable, really smart but not obsessed with anything except school and biking.”
Burroughs typed on the computer. “Nothing here either. I’ll get Jo Anderson on the line. Maybe there’s more that didn’t make it into the file.”
“Next of kin?” Drake asked
Romero flipped back to the front of the file. “That’s weird. None listed. Looks like his emergency contact was his landlady and she made all the funeral arrangements.”
Drake frowned, the myriad of pieces swirling through his brain. “Let’s see if the feds can make any sense of this.” He called Prescott. “Can you run Anton Lavelle? See if there’s a connection to Kasanov?”
“Let me give you to Taylor.”
Drake gave the FBI agent the particulars, his words punctuated by the sound of keys being tapped at lightning speed. “I’m wondering if this kid is somehow related to Kasanov.”
“No sign of it on the surface,” Taylor answered. “But you said Anton was studying cyber-security? Maybe we need to dig deeper.”
Then it clicked. “You said Kasanov was close to going out of business because he couldn’t compete with the mobs who’d turned to cyber-crime. Maybe Anton was his lifeline back to solvency?”
“Looking at the kid’s grades, he had the skills. Oh, lookee here,” the agent’s voice up ticked in excitement. “His high school transcripts are fake. So is his birth certificate. Looks like there’s no real record of Anton Lavelle before he came here to start college.”
“He had to come from somewhere.”
“Not as far as I can tell. I’m running his photo and prints through the Homeland Security facial recognition database—if he came here from another country, we’ll find it. Might take some time, though.”
Drake stared at the photo of Anton from the file. Not the postmortem one, but the one from his college ID. In his mind he superimposed Nickolai Kasanov’s image. Same cheekbones, same cleft chin, same brow line and deep-set eyes.
“I think he might be related to Kasanov. Maybe his grandson?”
“You think Kasanov sent him here to learn the skills necessary to save the family business only to have the kid get killed in a hit and run?”
“I know it’s thin, but it’s all we’ve got.” Drake paused as Janet Kwon handed him a printout. “The plot thickens. Apparently his landlady—the one who took care of his remains and was listed as his only emergency contact—doesn’t exist either.”
“Makes sense. If Anton was family, Kasanov would never send him here alone. What’s her name?”
“Natasha Mulo, age forty-nine.” He gave Taylor the particulars. “Kwon just ran her and can’t find anything, like she’s a ghost.”
“I’ll keep working here, but I’m not sure it helps—where’s our leverage to use any of this to get your mom and Hart back?”
Drake glanced at the door leading back out to the squad. “Down the hall. I hope.”
Chapter 25
ROSA GATHERED HER people, sending as many as she could out to warn her hidden refugees, while she, Paddy, Dex, Fernando, and Matilde, the woman who ran the brothel, gathered in the dining room and tried to prepare for the worst.
Paddy stood on the other side of Rosa as they stared out the window. A police wagon, panier a salade Rosa’s people called the bowl-shaped vans, passed on the street below, its wheels raising plumes of mud and water so high it was rendered invisible. Rain pelted the windowpanes, mixing with the fog. It was as if the bright and raucous Marseilles he’d come to know had suddenly been transport
ed into a gray, barren dreamscape populated only by ghosts.
The view outside didn’t worry him as much as Rosa. Her face and body hidden from the others by the thick drapes, he sensed her dejection and despair as she pressed a hand against the glass.
Behind them the others kept up their funeral dirge, bemoaning their fate alternating with outlandish ideas for escape or protestations of how they’d never be caught alive. Empty words all of it.
The door crashed open and Bernard Lavelle, one of Rosa’s lieutenants, ran inside. “They picked up Varian Fry, his entire office staff. Most of his refugees as well.”
“All to the Senaia?” Fernando, the Basque, asked.
“Loaded up in a panier a salade and carted off to the docks.” Bernard didn’t join the bedraggled group around the table. Instead, he leaned against the still open door. Staring at Rosa, a challenge in his eyes. Paddy was glad Rosa had her back to Bernard, although her posture stiffened as if she felt his gaze.
During his time here, he’d learned that Bernard was a gypsy, like Rosa, but from a different clan. For some reason, that seemed to give the man the idea that he was superior to Rosa. More than that, Barnard often had a possessive attitude about Rosa—Paddy had come across them screaming at each other in their own language, followed by Barnard stalking away after hurling insults at Paddy.
Despite the fact that he was married, it was clear Barnard wanted more from Rosa than she was willing to offer. And that he resented Paddy for gaining her favor.
“I told you,” Dex said, his voice filled with false joviality as he reached for the last of the bottle of Armagnac. “When a dictator comes to town, the best thing to do is to flee for the country.”
“Any word on when Petain is due to arrive?” Rosa asked, still staring out into the fog.