by Jack Du Brul
River of Ruin
( Mercer - 5 )
Jack Du Brul
Jack Du Brul
River of Ruin
Paris, France
The auctioneer’s gavel came down with a stinging crack that carried across the ornate salon. “Sold for forty-seven thousand francs to bidder number 127.”
A digital board on one side of the elevated stage showed the exchange rates for each bid as they were acknowledged. The book held aloft by a white-gloved assistant standing behind the auctioneer had just been purchased for nearly seven thousand dollars.
The bid had actually been placed by an auction-house employee who fielded business from buyers either unable or unwilling to attend Paris’s premier rare book and manuscript sale. There were several such bid takers grouped together in an area like a jury box, each person equipped with telephones and an Internet-connected computer. The rest of the high-ceilinged room was given over to ranks of comfortable chairs for buyers in attendance. Derosier’s Librairie Antique was offering today’s books from a collection entitled “Patriarchs of the Industrial Age.” Tomorrow’s auction, the main event for the three-day affair, included dozens of Renaissance Bibles and a partial da Vinci manuscript expected to fetch millions of dollars.
There was a period of murmuring and catalogue rustling before the next book was brought out and its picture flashed on the projection screen at the back of the stage.
Philip Mercer had waited for the diversion before crossing the marble floor to a seat near the rear. A few elegant patrons frowned at the noise made by his wet, squelching shoes. He was more amused than embarrassed by their haughty reaction. Outside the tall, hemisphered windows, a fierce autumn rain pounded the streets. The leaden sky would not let the city shine. Still, the room managed to glitter with gold leaf on the ceiling and burnished woods covering the walls.
Mercer caught the eye of the auctioneer as he sat. Jean-Paul Derosier inclined his head slightly, careful not to show deference to any one client. Mercer knew his old friend was glad to see him. It was Jean-Paul himself who had enticed him to Paris with a list of what was coming to the block for this particular auction.
They knew each other from many years ago when Jean-Paul was simply Gene and pronounced his last name with an American hard r. They had been high school friends in Barre, Vermont, both outcasts in a sense because both wanted a life far beyond the confines of the small New England town. Derosier had somehow developed a taste for life’s finer things and was determined to have the means as well, while Mercer possessed an incurable wanderlust inherited from his parents, who had died in Africa when he was twelve. He had lived in Barre with his paternal grand-parents. Years later, Mercer and Derosier crossed paths again when business success allowed Mercer to indulge his interest in rare books. By then, Jean-Paul was well established in the trade.
Thumbing open the glossy catalogue, Mercer noted what lot number was due up next, and cursed. Today’s auction was just about half over. A business delay had ruined his plan to arrive in Paris a few days earlier. Had he not scheduled a meeting the following day, he would have canceled the trip altogether and bid through a proxy. He’d only just gotten into town and had taxied directly from Charles de Gaulle Airport.
The next book being offered was a personal journal written by Ferdinand de Lesseps during his sole trip to Panama in 1879. By the time the famed builder of the Suez Canal ventured to Central America, he had already convinced a syndicate of investors that he could repeat his triumph by carving a sea-level trench across the jungle-choked isthmus. Of course, his attempt ended in failure and the deaths of twenty-three thousand workers, as well as a financial crisis that rocked France to its core.
This was one of the most important items for sale today, expected to fetch around twenty thousand dollars.
Mercer scanned the rest of the catalogue and let out a relieved sigh. The manuscript he’d come to bid on hadn’t yet come up. Relaxing for the first time since his plane touched down, he used his palms to press rainwater from his dark hair.
“And our next item before a short recess is number sixty-two.” Jean-Paul Derosier knew to allow his voice to rise an octave, feeding the palpable wave of anticipation sweeping the room. Mercer also detected a vague sense of anger from the bidders that he couldn’t understand. “This one-hundred-and-seventy-page handwritten journal by Ferdinand de Lesseps was penned during his voyage to Panama. As you can see, the manuscript is bound in maroon leather with de Lesseps’s name on the cover and is in extraordinary condition.”
Derosier continued to expound on the virtues of the journal as pictures of individual pages were flashed on the screen behind him. He spoke in French, and while Mercer had once been fluent in the language, he couldn’t concentrate. Instead of paying attention to a book he had no interest in, he gazed out one of the windows, wishing he’d had time to at least change his shirt from the flight. His suit felt clammy and his tie dug into the stubble on his neck.
Jean-Paul ended his pitch by saying, “We will start the bidding at fifty thousand francs.” The phone operator holding a sign for bidder number 127 nodded her head and the audience let out a tired groan.
Mercer immediately recognized that this mysterious bidder had been bullying the auction by overbidding on the books he or she was interested in. In a minute-long frenzy, the price was driven up to thirty thousand dollars. Those bidders who nodded at the incremental increases did so with a resigned fatalism, knowing they were going to lose. However, it seemed they derived a perverse enjoyment from making bidder number 127 pay far more than the journal was worth. The telephone operator’s impassiveness began to crack as the bids passed the fifty-thousand-dollar mark, two and a half times the journal’s estimated value. Mercer could imagine the anger she was hearing in the voice of whoever she represented.
Then it was down to just two bidders, the mystery person on the phone and an American Mercer had seen at a Christie’s auction in New York about a year earlier. Like Mercer, this man was here for the love of the books, not their resale value. Mercer recalled the man was some kind of oil executive and had pockets deeper than the wells he drilled, but at seventy-five thousand dollars even he had to bow out with an angry shake of his head.
Following Jean-Paul’s cry of “Sold!” there wasn’t the normal round of applause for such a high sale. The room vibrated with an ugly tension. The operator who represented bidder number 127 would not look up from her desk, as if ashamed of the domineering tactics she’d been forced to use.
“There will now be a twenty-minute break,” Derosier said. “Champagne is available in the foyer outside the salon.”
Mercer accepted a fluted glass from a waitress and waited while Jean-Paul chatted up old clients and worked to make new ones. A cut across the knuckles on Mercer’s left hand had reopened and he dabbed at the blood with napkins. Patrons might have wondered about the man in the Armani suit with his injured hands, but none approached. It wasn’t that he seemed out of place, rather he appeared so self-contained, more comfortable in the opulent surroundings than they themselves felt despite the wet shoes and bloody wound.
He threw away the stained napkins when he’d stanched the cut and offered a disarming shrug to a staring matron as if to say, Don’t you hate when this happens? It was a curious, bonding gesture, like she’d been the one being judged and that she’d passed his inspection. Her dour facade cracked and she returned a smile.
Derosier finally disentangled himself from an elderly woman in a ridiculous blue hat and came over to where Mercer leaned against a damask wall. They were the same height, around six feet, but Mercer appeared to be the larger of the two men. Jean-Paul’s lustrous skin, boyishly long eyelashes, and animated mouth made him pretty rather than handsome
. In contrast, Mercer’s good looks came from more masculine, squared features and bold gray eyes that could be as alluring as silk or rage like an arctic storm.
Mercer couldn’t bring himself to use Derosier’s full French name, so he compromised by calling him Jean. “Do I want to know what’s been happening in there, Jean?”
The true contrast between the old friends was apparent when they shook hands. Jean-Paul’s were slim and pampered, while Mercer’s were crisscrossed with scars and calluses like a relief map detailing years of physical labor. Derosier had spent so much of his life in Paris that his English was tinted with an accent. “Mercer, mon Dieu, I didn’t think you were going to make it.”
“I got stuck at a job in Utah and missed my connecting flight through Dulles. I didn’t even have time to go home.” Mercer lived in a town house in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Arlington. “My luggage is full of dirty clothes and mineral samples for my collection.”
“Gold, I hope.”
“Nothing so fancy. A copper-mining company was looking to get a sizable loan from an investment bank. The bankers hired me to check the company’s geology reports and oversee a series of bore-hole tests to verify the claim that there was a mother lode of extractable ore at the site.”
As an independent mining consultant, such jobs were Mercer’s stock-in-trade, and earned him considerable fees as well as a reputation as one of the foremost mine engineers in the world. His word was enough for companies to commit billions of dollars and thousands of lives into the subterranean world.
Jean-Paul gave a little Gallic shrug. “Filthy way to make a living, but I suppose it pays the bills.” He slapped at Mercer’s flat stomach. “And apparently keeps you in shape. I’m fighting a losing battle at a gym four hours a week and you look like you’re in better shape now than when we graduated high school.”
“You were the one who married a professional chef, not me.” Mercer chuckled. “The fact that I’m single and can’t cook worth a damn is what keeps me thin.”
“I understand congratulations are in order. Do you remember Cathy Rich, our high school yearbook editor? After all these years, she still e-mails me updates about old class-mates. She told me you might be working in the White House.”
“Well, not in the White House,” Mercer dodged. “It’s an advisory position to the president. Once I get through some indoctrination I’ll only be going there when called. Kind of a part-time thing.”
The job was actually Special Science Advisor to the President, a position specifically created for Mercer that would be outside the chief executive’s regular staff of advisors. The offer had come following an unusual job in Greenland that had turned into a violent confrontation with a terrorist cell trying to steal a lethal radioactive isotope called Pandora.
“I don’t think you are telling me the whole thing,” Jean-Paul said, “but I congratulate you anyway.”
“Thanks. So, what’s up with the auction? Who’s doing all the buying?”
“Goddamned Chinks,” Derosier spat. “I hate them.”
“Not very politically correct.”
“I’m a Parisian now.” The auctioneer grinned. “We hate everyone equally.” Jean-Paul grew serious. “All I know is he’s Chinese and that a few days after the contents of this auction became public, he sent an intermediary to the family who was selling all the Panama Canal documents in an attempt to buy them outright. As you’ve already guessed, he’s taking everything even remotely connected to the canal while ignoring all the rest. A lot of my regulars are leaving here empty-handed.”
A look of concern crossed Mercer’s face.
“Don’t worry,” the expatriate soothed. “When I invited you to this auction, I promised that you’d be able to buy the Godin de Lepinay journal and I’m keeping my word.”
Mercer understood what Derosier was intimating. “Jean, thanks for the offer, but don’t do anything you wouldn’t for any other client.”
“Too late. At the beginning of the auction, I announced that Lepinay’s journal was no longer for sale. You pay me the estimate, I think four thousand dollars, and it’s yours. Listen, you’re one of my only clients who actually reads what he buys. I’m sure you’ve already read a translation of Diderot’s twenty-eight-volume Encyclopedie Methodique after I helped you complete the set. I hate that the Panama books I’m selling today are going to end up on some businessman’s shelf because he thinks they’re decorative.”
A chime rang in the main auction hall. “I’ve got to get back,” Derosier said. “Meet me after the auction and I’ll give you Lepinay’s diary.”
Mercer waited for the tide of people to return to the salon before reaching inside his jacket for the cell phone his friend Harry White had gotten him for his birthday. The number had already been programmed into the device so he held it to his ear as it beeped through an international exchange. The connection took a full minute.
“Hola?” a woman’s voice answered.
“Maria, it’s Philip Mercer.”
“Mercer”-her English was good, but heavily accented-“are you already in Panama City? You sound so clear.”
Maria Barber was the Panamanian-born wife of Gary Barber, a native Alaskan whom Mercer had met while attending the Colorado School of Mines. Mercer was there having just completed his bachelor’s degree in geology on his way to an eventual doctorate. Gary was two decades older, and had already laid claim to a sizable gold strike when he’d gone to the famed mining school. Gary had dropped out after a single semester, and returned to his four-man operation in Alaska. Mercer had gone on to graduate near the top of his class. They retained a loose friendship of a couple of calls a year and dinner whenever they were in the same city.
About five years ago, Gary had unexpectedly sold his claim to a business partner and moved to Central America to take up a new venture-treasure hunting. He’d tried to explain to Mercer that tramping through jungles in search of lost artifacts was no different from panning hundreds of miles of streams looking for placer gold.
Mercer had always disdained treasure hunters. He felt they rarely considered the long odds of their endeavors, and sustained themselves with the false hope of a quick strike. All but a well-publicized few ended up broke and embittered after decades of fruitless work. He likened them to people who thought state lotteries were an investment plan. Mercer couldn’t change Gary’s mind and the tough Alaskan had gone off with an enthusiasm that had damned so many like-minded people.
Mercer had to give Barber credit, though. Five years of turning up nothing had yet to dampen his spirits. In fact, he was more excited now than ever. He had recently convinced himself that he was on the trail of a lost Spanish treasure larger than any ever found. Gary had called Mercer a month ago after tracking the Lepinay journal to this auction, offering to pay half just so he could read it. He was certain the last piece of the puzzle he was trying to solve lay somewhere in its pages. Mercer thought Gary was self-deluded, and wasn’t close to a breakthrough, yet did agree to the deal.
He was going to buy the book anyway for the simple reason that he was interested in the man who, in 1879, first proposed the lake-and-lock-type canal that the United States had eventually built a quarter century later. Derosier was right. He would read this journal. Devour it, most likely.
“No, Maria, I’m still in Paris. Is Gary there? I’ve got some good news for him.”
“He’s in the middle of the Darien Province, south of El Real,” Maria Barber said with a trace of hostility. She did not share her husband’s interest. “Fooling around in that damned river again. I haven’t seen him in weeks.”
“Can you contact him?” Gary had shown Mercer a picture of his much younger wife the last time they’d gotten together. She was a pretty, raven-haired woman, not yet thirty, but her eyes were sullen. She cast a sober look in the photo, as if she’d fit more life into her years than she should have. Gary explained her melancholy by telling him that she’d been raised in the slums of Panama City’s Casco V
iego district.
“Si, we speak on the radio yesterday. I am calling him in an hour.”
“When you do, tell him I’ve got the Lepinay journal and I’ll be in Panama the day after tomorrow.”
“He will be pleased,” she said with little enthusiasm. “Am I to still pick you up at the airport?”
“Yes, my flight connects through from Martinique.” The clothes in his luggage, once laundered, would serve him well enough in the tropical sauna of Panama. “I arrive at about ten in the morning on the seventeenth.”
“The last time Gary and I talked, he said that he had something very important to show you. He wanted me to make sure you will be here for a week at least.”
“Tell him that we’ll see,” Mercer hedged. He hadn’t been home in nearly a month and wasn’t planning on more than a few days in Panama. He was looking forward to a quiet couple of weeks before reporting to the White House for long rounds of tedious briefings and staff meetings.
“I will tell him,” Maria Barber replied. “And I will see you at Tocumen Airport in the morning of the seventeenth. Then I will take you to where Gary is working. And, ah. .”
“What is it?”
“It is just that increased antidrug efforts in Colombia have forced many rebel soldiers into the southern Darien Province. I thought you should know.”
“Thanks for the warning,” Mercer answered, but she had already clicked off.
He returned to the main auction gallery. Jean-Paul was just about to announce the next item. Back in his seat, Mercer listened idly as the sale continued around him, only showing interest when something pertaining to the Panama Canal came up. Like before, bidder 127 bought everything, often paying double what the material was worth. He knew that such buyers sometimes sent silent proxies to an auction to report on who they were bidding against. From his vantage at the back of the room, Mercer surveyed the well-dressed crowd but saw no Asians; not that one of the Europeans couldn’t be in the enigmatic Chinese’s employ.