by Gregg Loomis
“A pity,” Patrick said. “Perhaps I might interest you in a second bottle…”
Lang held up hands of surrender. “We Americans don’t function as well as you French do after a heavy meal and several bottles of wine.”
The Frenchman shook his head. “It is because you are weaned on McDonald’s and hot dogs.”
Lang grinned, shaking his head as he pushed back from the table and signaled for the check. He reached for his wallet. “We can argue American junk foods later. I appreciate your taking my suitcase home with you.”
“No need for you to carry it about when you are staying with us anyway.”
Patrick motioned the waiter to decline Lang’s money, tendering a credit card in its place. “It is a government card. Let the people of France thank you for the valuable intelligence you have brought with you. Shall I call a taxi?”
Lang shook his head. “No thanks. I need to walk this meal off before I go to sleep.”
Patrick lowered his voice. “And to make sure you are not followed. Do you have…?”
Lang put his fist to his mouth to stifle a burp and touched his back in the place he could feel the Browning in its holster. “I have.”
Forty minutes later, Lang sat in a small Left Bank bistro on the quai d’Orsay at its intersection with boulevard Saint-Germain. The sole entree seemed to be pizza for a few American tourists. Through the moisture-streaked window, he could see a fountain with a statue of Saint Michel, and behind it, follow the pewter-colored Seine to the misty ghost of Notre Dame, its gleeful Gothic spires stabbing the belly of low gray clouds.
He was not here for the postcard scenery.
He nursed the cup of coffee that would give him license to remain here as long as he liked. He was watching, making sure he had not been followed. The use of his own passport and credit card had been an unfortunate necessity, one the Chinese would discover sooner or later. Then they would come looking for him. Happily, Paris was a very large city.
He was reluctant to give up the dry warmth of the bistro, even though a lined Burberry purchased just minutes ago promised some degree of comfort against the cold drizzle that characterizes Paris’s winters. Slipping a euro beneath his cup’s saucer, he tightened the belt of his Burberry, got up and went outside to begin the uphill trek to the Sorbonne. He passed the fifteenth-century mansion of the Abbot of Cluny, built over Roman ruins and now a museum housing the world-famous unicorn tapestries. The Luxembourg Gardens, its normally lush grounds in winter drab, abutted the Luxembourg Palace. Headquarters for the German Luftwaffe in France during World War II, it was now home to the French senate. The architecture, more Italian than French, had been dictated by Marie de’ Medici, widow of Henry IV, to remind her of her native Florence.
At the top of the hill, Lang faced the Pantheon, designed originally to be a church dedicated to Saint Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris, by Louis XV in gratitude for his recovery from an illness. Unfinished by the time of the revolution and the rebellion against anything of a religious nature, the building’s facade was converted to a copy of a Roman temple and dedicated to France’s heroes.
Lang took out the professor’s card, reminding himself of the address, and began a slight descent along the left side of the building. This area had been the seat of the University of Paris since its founding as a place for sixteen poor students to study theology in the 11th century. In 1969 the university had been divided into thirteen different departments and disbursed throughout the city. Some lectures were still held in the building at 47 rue des Ecoles. From the card he held in his hand, Lang supposed history was one of them.
The street still had the slightly shabby, down-at-the-heels atmosphere common to neighborhoods where students congregate, with discount stores and bistros advertising low prices. Number 47 was a two-story brick building with little to distinguish it other than a pair of huge wooden doors. Lang entered a stone-floored foyer whose only feature was a spiral staircase. The stone steps were worn from centuries of student feet. Upstairs was a single corridor lined with doors with opaque glass above unvarnished wood.
Lang read the names in chipped black letters until he found the one marked D’TASSE. He knocked gently.
“Entrez!” came from within.
Had Lang asked a film company to create an office for an absentminded professor, they might have produced something very much like what he saw. A wooden desk was stacked high with a jumble of papers, single sheets, periodicals and notebooks. Behind it, a floor-to-ceiling bookcase sagged with the weight of dusty volumes, magazines and more papers. In the corner, an electric heater hummed in a futile effort to dispel the room’s clammy cold. At the desk was a man in a black turtleneck sweater. A sharply pointed Vandyke beard did little to minimize the chubbiness of the face. He peered at Lang though narrow slits of glasses.
“Professor D’Tasse?”
The man stood to a height that could not have greatly exceeded five feet. He extended a hand the size of a child’s. “You are Mr. Reilly, the American my good friend Patrick Louvere called me about?” he asked in accented English.
Not exactly how Patrick described the relationship.
Lang shook the hand. “Yes. He said you could help me.”
The professor sat back down. “Any friend of Patrick’s is, as you Americans say, a friend of mine.”
Lang looked over to where a straight wooden chair served as the depository for a stack of books. D’Tasse nodded and Lang moved them to the floor to take a seat after slipping out of his new coat.
“You have recently edited a diary of, I believe, Napoleon’s personal secretary?”
Behind the glasses, D’Tasse’s eyes narrowed. “What is your interest? I already have a publisher, and a number of American universities are interested. In fact, it has been previewed… is that the correct word, previewed? Yes, previewed in American University amp; College Review.” He held up a pack of printed pages. “I have had made an English-language translation to send them.”
Lang cleared his throat, giving him an added second to come up with a plausible story. He couldn’t. “Let us say I have a very practical interest in Napoleon, one I am not at liberty to divulge.”
“Ah, a secretive friend of the ever-so-secretive Patrick!” He put the papers down and leaned across the desk, resting on his elbows. “See here, Mr. Reilly, I must guard my work. It should be available to all at no cost. Protecting scholarly research from capitalistic exploitation is a duty of the academic community.”
More like academic penis envy.
D’Tasse continued. “I can tell you story after story of colleagues of mine who shared their work, only to see it for sale in some commercial publication.”
How many copies of People Magazine would the diary of Napoleon’s secretary sell?
Lang tried not to show his annoyance. Patrick knew a pompous ass when he saw one. “I can assure you, professor-”
The sentence was never finished.
The door slammed open. Lang swivelled his neck to see two men standing on the threshold, overcoat collars tuned up, caps pulled low. Lang’s first guess was that they were students, students very pissed off. Perhaps about a grade.
Then he saw the guns in their hands.
Somewhere in middle Georgia
The previous evening
The helicopter was approaching. Already Gurt could see a cone of light sweeping an adjacent field as it flew circular patterns, the standard search procedure. She guessed she had less than two minutes to do something.
She stood to reach inside the Hummer, turning off the remaining headlight. She then hurried to the rear passenger door and fumbled with the buckles on Manfred’s child seat. Whoever had designed the thing did not have a speedy exit in mind.
“Mommy, the copter’s coming,” he chortled gleefully, his fear now forgotten. “I want to see it!”
His hand in hers, she unlatched the rear compartment, letting Grumps out. He sniffed at the frozen grass, undecided where to leave his n
ext pee mail.
Gurt pointed. “Manfred, take Grumps to that shed over there and stay inside.”
“But I want to see…”
“MACH SCHNELL!”
His mother rarely raised her voice to him but when she did, particularly in her native tongue, Manfred knew there would be no subsequent conversation.
Taking a second to make sure she was being obeyed, Gurt watched the little boy, followed by the dog, trot inside the rickety structure. Boards were missing and, she was certain, so was part of the roof but it should shelter both from the probing skyborne eye.
She started to bend down and disconnect the tracking device. No, no good. The chopper was close enough to find her without it. Better to use their own weapon against them.
Climbing back into the Hummer, she snatched off the brake and shifted into drive while watching the helicopter’s pool of light skim ever closer. Thankful the cold weather had delayed the engine’s seizing, she stepped on the gas, easing the bulky vehicle back onto the dirt road. Once there, she shifted again into park. Using her seat belt, she lashed the steering wheel to hold the car straight in the road before slipping the gearshift again to drive. She grabbed her purse by the shoulder strap and jumped free as the Hummer lumbered forward.
With a little luck, the Hummer and its tracking device would be a mile or so down the road before loss of oil and coolant brought it to a stop.
By that time, she intended to be gone.
Where and how, she was not sure.
She made it back to the shed just before the light from the helicopter swept overhead, the aircraft’s twin-turbine engines roaring malevolently. She watched as the pool of light moved away before going outside to the pickup truck. Rusty hinges complained bitterly as she opened the door and felt for the ignition switch. She was grateful the truck was an older model without the complicated antitheft mechanisms. She was fairly certain she remembered Agency training for how to direct-wire the ignition, bypassing the switch itself. What was it Lang called the procedure? Hot-wiring, that was it. Now if only the battery in this dilapidated scrap heap was working.
There was something else in the training for doing this…
Oh! Her instructor had mentioned the surprisingly high percentage of drivers who left the keys in their cars. Perhaps the same was true of pickup trucks.
A quick search found a key on the driver’s sun visor. The owner had taken for granted his vehicle would be safe at a remote spot on his own property.
Gurt leaned over to search the sky, saw nothing and inserted the key in the ignition. Her fears swam to her mind’s surface when the engine whined as it turned over. She took her foot off the gas, fearful of flooding the fuel system.
On the next try, the engine gave a wet cough, whined again and caught.
Gurt reached for the lights and caught herself just in time. Instead, she felt out the manual transmission and eased it into first gear, inching toward the shed.
In less than a minute, Manfred was beside her, Grumps on the floor at his feet.
“You forgot the car seat, Mommy!” the little boy giggled, glad to be free of the restraint. “Vati will be mad if he finds out.”
That’s a bridge I’ll jump off of when I come to it.
“Why aren’t we in the Hummer? Whose truck is this? Did you ask if you could take it? What about our clothes and stuff?”
Gurt searched the night sky. Wherever the chopper had gone, it was out of sight.
“When will we get to the farm?”
Gurt was thinking about the cars she had smashed into. Surely there were others available. But there were a number of crossing highways shortly past where she had taken the dirt road. Did they have enough men and vehicles to cover all possibilities?
“Mommy, will Vati be at the farm?”
And the truck. It would be reported stolen. But with this weather and in the winter, she guessed later rather than sooner. She wondered if the farm’s pond was deep enough to conceal it.
“Mommy, why did we leave the Hummer?”
Manfred, like most small children, tended to ask questions not so much out of curiosity as for attention. For once, Gurt found them comforting. They kept her from thinking about what could have happened.
The Sorbonne
One of the two men in the doorway gestured with his weapon, speaking French to the professor. His harsh tone gave a sharp edge to words Lang did not understand. D’Tasse’s eyes went to the manuscript he had just shown Lang.
The first man saw the glance and stepped forward to reach for it. Whoever these people were, they apparently kept up with articles in American University amp; College Review.
D’Tasse snatched the papers up, holding them out of the man’s reach. The academic “duty” he had described included resisting armed robbers? Pompous or not, the little man had guts.
The first man spoke to the second in another language, one Lang thought might be Chinese.
Motioning Lang away from the door, the second man went to help his comrade, obviously thinking Lang presented no clear threat.
That told Lang two things. First, neither was the same man who had tried to firebomb the house in Atlanta. That man would know what Lang looked like from observing before he struck. Second, there had been a real failure to communicate by the People’s Republic. These would-be thieves of academic treasure, if they were even aware of the problems Lang had caused, had not expected him here.
The first man grabbed D’Tasse by the turtleneck, the collar of his overcoat falling away. Lang was not surprised to see he was, in fact, an Asian. So was the other.
As the first man used the hand not holding the gun to drag the diminutive professor across the desk by his shirt, the other tugged on the papers D’Tasse had clinched in his fist. Lang felt powerless. If he attacked either one of the assailants, he or D’Tasse or both were likely to get shot. If he pulled out the Browning, gunfire would follow, with the same result.
Before he could decide on a course of action, the decision was taken out of his hands. With the sound of ripping fabric, D’Tasse’s shirt tore, the inertia of his resistence sending him backward and into the bookcase behind the desk. With a crash, the bookcase slammed forward, showering D’Tasse as well as the other two men in a paper avalanche.
In an instant, the Browning was in Lang’s hand. A single step brought him next to one gunman still struggling to free his feet from the pile of books. Lifting his pistol above his head, Lang brought the barrel down sharply on the gunman’s wrist.
The crunch of shattered bone merged with a howl of pain as the man’s weapon hit the floor and spun across the room.
Lang whirled to face the second man, whose gun was already coming to bear. Lang squeezed off a shot, the sound physically assaulting his ears in the confines of the small office. His target staggered toward the door as a red splotch grew on his light-colored overcoat. His weapon dangled from his hand as though forgotten. Then he turned, raising it. Before Lang could fire a second time, the man’s knees gave way and he sunk to the floor and lay still.
D’Tasse yelled something, pointing. Lang turned just in time to see the other man sprint through the doorway, one hand holding both the smashed wrist of the other and the manuscript. Go after him? What was the point? What would he do even if he caught him? Besides, there was the possibility these two intruders had left backup outside.
“My article!” D’Tasse shrieked. “Do not let him get away with it!”
Lang holstered the Browning. “He only has the English copy. What’s the problem? I doubt he’ll have much luck selling it to Playboy.”
“It is my intellectual property,” the professor said huffily. “Allowing it to get into other hands almost guarantees it will be pirated.”
A man is possibly dead, another crippled, a second ago you were staring down the muzzle of a gun and you can only think about a few pages of paper being stolen?
By now, D’Tasse had a cell phone in his hand, talking-no, shouting-into it. It was m
ore than an even bet he had not called a friend to describe his good fortune in still being alive. Lang guessed the police would arrive shortly.
The stinking cordite fumes were bringing tears to Lang’s eyes, a man was bleeding on the floor, the office was a wreck and it was definitely time to take his leave unless he wanted to spend the rest of his time in Paris answering questions in whatever the current version of the Bastille might be. D’Tasse was so intent on yelling into his phone, he did not notice when Lang slipped one of the French copies of the manuscript into a pocket as he shrugged into his coat. Lang cautiously peeked out into what proved to be an empty corridor. The professor was so intent on making sure the police knew what had happened even before their arrival, Lang doubted he even noticed his departure.
On the first floor, Lang proceeded to a door with wc stenciled on it under the standard figure of a man. Inside, he took a stall and removed the Browning from its holster, transferring it to the pocket of his Burberry. If he had to use it, he was not going to have time to remove his overcoat.
He had not gone two blocks before a white police car wailed past, blue light flashing, in the opposite direction, followed only moments later by two more. A half block farther, half a dozen police carrying automatic weapons were walking up the hill, checking out every business as they came. A quick glance told him he was the only pedestrian in sight. Had the professor given a description of him?
Abruptly turning in the opposite direction would attract attention. Lang spied one of those street flower vendors common in European cities in the summer. Where this one had obtained her inventory this time of year was a mystery, perhaps North Africa. But the flowers’ source was not what interested Lang. To the flower seller’s surprise and delight, Lang purchased the first dozen roses he saw, paying full price without the haggling that takes place with those who do business on the streets.
Just as a pair of cops reached him, Lang continued the way he had been going, roses in hand. He drew no more than a cursory glance. A man carrying a handful of flowers along a Paris street was hardly a man escaping from just shooting and possibly killing someone. He was a man on his way home to please his wife. Or more likely at this time of day, his mistress.