I was always running lately—running from somebody, running after somebody, running away from my own sorry life. It was never-ending, the motion, the sense of fleeing, as if once again I had arrived at the point where I couldn’t bear that which I had, so I chased something that I didn’t know. I thought of bolting down Boylston Street in Boston a couple of days before after the gunman who had shown a brazen predisposition to firing his weapon. Could it be my own mortality that I was shagging down? Was I in some odd way suicidal?
My mind flashed back to a scene many years ago that I wouldn’t have had any good reason to ever remember. It was a Sunday afternoon. I was living in Washington, in a house in Georgetown. Baker was but a puppy then. Katherine was my wife. It was one of those rare snow days in the capital when an entire panicked city seizes up and shuts down.
I had fallen asleep on the couch reading The New York Times, stretched out and impossibly comfortable, the light from the snow casting a warm glow through our tall windows all about the room. Katherine had taken the dog for a cold romp, and came walking back in with a movie from the video store. I don’t even remember what one. But she woke me with a kiss, her nose freezing cold, and when I opened my eyes, the dog ran his grainy tongue across my face. I lay there stunned, smiling, light with a feeling that what I had, all these wonderful things that were mine, would continue until the end of time. It was one of countless moments of pure, stable bliss, until one day all of it was gone.
I looked up at Mongillo, who had no idea, in the most figurative sense, where I had just been. Maybe he was right for leaving this business, for searching for a stability that I had loved and lost. Maybe I should do the same, chuck it all, become a consultant, maybe go to business school. It’s true, I had been dealt a miserable hand, but maybe it was my fault for not doing something more with my cards.
I was about to say something to him, but what, I didn’t know. I had no idea how we would find a woman who might already be dead in a capital on another continent. I had no idea how to even begin, what calls to make, who to go see. But it was then that Mongillo’s phone rang, a Hungarian marching song or something like it. He reached into the back pocket of his khaki pants and flipped it open with a simple “Hello.”
He looked into the dark, vacant air of the stairwell for a moment, then emotionlessly and without warning, he handed me the phone, saying only, “It’s for you.”
For me.
I took the phone, placed it against my ear as if this were all normal, and said, “Flynn here.” In retrospect, I don’t know what I expected. Probably Peter Martin. Maybe Tom Jankle. Possibly Elizabeth Riggs.
It was a woman’s voice. She sounded distant, surrounded by noise, a little panicked. “Jack,” she said, “it’s Maggie Kane.”
She paused here, giving me enough time to regroup and say, “Are you okay?”
“Am I okay?” she said, and then she laughed a low laugh. It wasn’t a funny laugh, or mocking, but almost as if she were losing her faculties, as if life had taken so many turns for her in the past couple of days that she didn’t have the capacity to do anything else, so she laughed. She added, “I’m in trouble. They found me in Rome. I think I got away. I took a flight to Paris.” Here, the laughter turned to tears. It’s amazing how close the two can sometimes be—laughter and tears, not Paris and Rome, though those too. “I need your help,” she said, her voice trailing off into emotion.
“Are you on a cell phone?”
“No, a pay phone.”
“I’ll be there this afternoon. Where do you want to meet?”
She paused, then said, “At the entrance to the Louvre, there’s a pharaoh. Meet me near him, five o’clock.”
“Maggie,” I said, my voice rising, “listen to me. Don’t use your credit cards, your calling cards, your cell phone, anything. I will bring you cash. But do not do anything that can lead people to you.”
By now, she was fully crying, convulsing, the fear overtaking the strength of her good intentions. “Five o’clock,” she said, and she hung up the phone.
I handed the cell phone back to Mongillo and walked toward the outside door. Maybe it was a ruse, some sort of setup, an attempt by kidnappers to get us out of town. But I didn’t have time to overanalyze. Usually, there are twists and contortions and distortions, but sometimes, life is what it is, and this time, it was time to go to France.
“Where we heading?” Mongillo said, bounding after me as we hit the parking lot of the hospital.
“Paris, on the next flight.”
“Oh, man,” he said. “I come all the way to Italy and don’t have so much as a bowl of pasta. It’s like going to one of those strip joints in Rhode Island where you’re not allowed to touch the girls.”
Yeah, something like that.
Then he said, “Martin’s not going to like this.”
“Tell me about it. Have you ever stayed in a Paris hotel room? They’re about $400 a night.”
Chapter Twenty-one
T here’s nothing quite like a bad economy to make the persnickety French a whole lot more amenable to loathsome American visitors and the wallets full of money that we freely toss around.
I came to this realization on the Air France flight from Rome to Charles de Gaulle, when Vinny Mongillo, God bless him, told the flight attendant, who I swear must have been a finalist in the 2002 Miss Universe pageant and would have won if her lips weren’t so succulently swollen, “Mon chat est un blanc chapeau.”
What he wanted was a rum and Coke. Now I don’t want to be showy about the two years of intensive French studies that I undertook at South Boston High, but what I believe he said was, “There’s a fetid moose in your medicine cabinet.” So I pointed at the Coke can and one of those tiny bottles of rum that sat on her cart. She smiled, nearly causing the plane to do a loop-the-loop, and said in a delicious Parisian accent, and I quote, “That’s what I thought he wanted.”
Ah, love.
On the ground, it was much the same story. We made an effort to speak French, they rushed into English. Not once did I feel even the slightest need to remind anyone of how the US of A bailed out an entire continent back in WW-Two, their sorry little country included. Even the new currency, the Euro, seemed so wonderfully American, unlike the nine million drachmas to the dollar or whatever it was that they used to use.
It was only two in the afternoon, three full hours until our intended rendezvous, so at Mongillo’s insistence, we immediately made our way from the airport to the Louvre. It was, I should probably be embarrassed to add, my first trip to this fair city, and as such, my eyes were about to fall out of my head, not just from all the beautiful women, but from the stunning palace architecture, the flowers, the narrow streets, the patisseries, the boulangeries, the glaciers. I mean, how is it that the entire cigarette-smoking, cell phone–gabbing nation seemed so wafer-thin with temptations like these along every gently curving street?
We got out of our cab at the top of the U-shaped complex, though complex is entirely the wrong word because it implies something new, like a suburban office park. No, this was old, ancient, rich, and textured, carrying the type of history that wasn’t measured in decades, but centuries. It made me feel at once young and completely insignificant.
Speaking of which, I insisted that we case the pharaoh statue before we headed inside, so we could get the lay of the land. Ends up, the pharaoh wasn’t a statue at all, but a live human being dressed entirely in a shiny pharaoh costume, head-to-toe, available for hired photo opportunities, which seemed to have a strong appeal to Japanese tourists. I don’t know why this bothered me, meeting at a person rather than a monument, but it did, probably because my mind was now entering the realm of spy games, wondering who was inside that getup, and were they part of some larger, dangerous conspiracy. Could I be killed by someone who was dressed up as someone who was dead? Would that fact be the first paragraph of my obituary?
Mongillo assured me that the pharaoh was a fixture, that anyone of any decent breedin
g knows all about him, and that it was time for me to get a grip. Yeah, well, tell that to Hilary Kane, though it’s too late, which is exactly my point. So, inside we went.
They say it takes four days to properly tour the Louvre, see everything that needs to be seen, and appreciate everything that demands appreciation. And maybe that’s true if you happen to be an amputee or bound for any number of other reasons to a wheelchair that needs to have its axles properly greased. Me, I could probably make a few bucks teaching people how to see the entire place in under two hours, an idea that I ran by Vinny Mongillo, who in turn muttered for the third time in an hour, “Philistine.”
The first time, it’s worth noting, was in front of the Mona Lisa. After we fought through the crowd for an up-close look, I turned to him and said, “I thought it would be bigger.” The second time was when I tried ordering a Budweiser in the concourse snack bar, but I was only kidding there, having a little fun with my newfound friends, the Fronch.
Anyway, Mongillo was having more fun than I ever would or could, expressed at times in the oddest of ways. As he stood silently staring at a painting entitled Venus and the Graces Offering Gifts to a Young Girl, a Botticelli, I watched in confusion as he wiped a tear from his olive-colored cheek. He stared and he stared and he stared as a veritable United Nations of tourists had to walk around the hulking figure for their own look at the work.
Later, when I was denied my Bud and instead stood in the snack bar sipping on a four-Euro Coke, I asked him, “I’m not giving you a hard time. I’m actually curious. What made you so emotional over that Botticelli?”
“Jack,” he said, calling me by my given name, which meant that he had left the realm of the joke. “Did you look at it? Did you really, really look at it? Did you notice the soft colors and the light brushstrokes? Did you catch the earthiness of the young girl, the symbol of our youth, yet the essence of our mortality, our very mundaneness?”
Actually, I didn’t, or couldn’t. Or maybe, given who I am, just plain wouldn’t. What I saw was a bunch of pale-faced, virtually identical looking women and wondered how hard it would be to put together in one of those 10,000-piece puzzles that my grandmother used to spread across her dining-room table.
He went on, “The contrast, the heaven and earth, endless virtues faced with natural vices. It’s all there, right in front of you, the work of a master with a brush. And I couldn’t help it, looking at the raw beauty and all that it encompassed, so I cried.”
He paused and added, “Don’t tell the newsroom, asshole.”
He was kidding about that last part, I think. I said, solemn-toned, feeling a little self-conscious now, “No, I didn’t see it. Maybe I didn’t look hard enough.” My own pause here. “Or maybe I didn’t know how to look.”
We both stood in silence in one of the snack bars at the Louvre, Vinny eating a turkey sandwich on what I would imagine was French bread, though I guess any kind of bread you get in this country could be so described. I continued sipping on the Coke, my stomach tight from the meeting ahead.
I asked, “How long have you followed this stuff?” As I asked, it occurred to me that follow might be the wrong word. You follow the Red Sox or the Celtics or weather patterns that come across the Great Lakes and wreak havoc on your shallow little weekend plans to sit your fat ass on a Maine beach. You don’t follow Renaissance artists, assuming that’s what Botticelli was, and obviously, with me, that really is only an assumption.
Vinny, kindly, didn’t call me on it, though he did hesitate a bit before answering.
“Since I was a kid,” he said softly, looking down at his nearly eaten food.
Surprised, I said, “You were interested in Renaissance artists as a kid?” I mean, you look at Vinny and you picture him in his youth spattered in mud, his fist slammed inside an oversize bag of potato chips, a baseball cap cocked sideways, maybe trying to hustle a few pals in a game of jacks.
He nodded, but didn’t speak, and it was obvious that he didn’t want to. Didn’t matter to me. I asked, “What got you interested?”
He took the last bite of his sandwich and wiped his hands on a napkin that said The Louvre on it. All around us, tourists from every possible country and culture came and went, excitedly talking in languages that I didn’t understand, like Australian. We leaned against a metal counter that separated the shop from the hallway that ran past it.
Vinny met my gaze and said in a suddenly determined voice, “There aren’t a lot of things in my life, then and now, that are particularly beautiful. You know what I mean? I look in the mirror and—” he held his hands around his face now, as if presenting it—“this is what I see. I’m obese. I’m a greasy wop. I have to buy special clothes. People look at me wondering what the hell went wrong. I see some of them shaking their heads as if I did something wrong, as if me being me was somehow offensive to them, like I invaded their aesthetic just by crossing their line of sight.”
He kept the same tight-jawed tone throughout the monologue. I don’t know who he was most mad at—himself, the world, me, whomever—but an inner anger that I had never seen revealed in him was suddenly pouring forth.
He said, “I didn’t suddenly get fat; I’ve always been fat, as a baby, as a schoolkid, a teenager, a young adult, now. I’ve never had a beautiful woman in my bed, Jack. I’ve barely had any women in my bed. I don’t see what you see. I don’t get the looks that you might get, that any normal person gets. I have all the same hopes and God do I dream those same dreams, but it ends up being sad because I know deep inside that they’ll never be fulfilled.
“But just because I’m a fat slob doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate beauty or want it all around me. So when other kids were going off to the school dance or flirting with the girls in class, I looked at art. It was a beauty that I could have, right at my fingertips. I got to understand it, to live it, to appreciate it more than most people ever will. And to no small extent, it’s kept me going through all these many years and insults and insecurities. I love art, and it’s mine.”
What an utter, unambiguous, unadulterated ass I am. You think you know someone well. You’re around them virtually all day, every day. You do the same basic job. You respect their abilities to no end. You assume you understand their very core. And then you realize over a damned turkey sandwich and a Coke that what you’ve been looking at all these many years is not a person but a mask, and what’s underneath is probably more attractive, more interesting, than anything you could have imagined.
I didn’t know what to say, so what I said was this: “I wish you had told me these things a long time ago.”
“What, that I’m a fat fuck?” Vinny said. More jovial now. “That I’m depressed? That I’m in a cycle I can’t bail out of? That I’d like to nail a decent-looking dame?”
“So you’ll lose the weight now. You’ll knock your blood pressure down. Your cholesterol will fall.” I said this in a tone laced with almost too much determination, making the feat seem somehow harder than it should have been. I mean, come on. The entire world was on the Atkins Diet, eating a pound of bacon five times a day and somehow watching weight melt off them.
“I will,” he replied. “Problem is, I lose my career ambitions with it. But maybe it proves a small price to pay.”
With that, he looked down at the watch stretched tight across his wrist and announced, “Four-fifteen. We need a plan, and we need to get outside. Time to salvage what’s left of your sorry little career.”
The last time I sat outdoors watching a life-changing event unfold before my eyes, I was blissfully planted in Fenway Park, and the Red Sox were high-stepping toward the pennant. Four days later, I’m in the courtyard of the Louvre, watching any sense of professional pride, personal confidence, and self-esteem slipping toward the proverbial door. What a difference a few days makes.
Here, in a nutshell, is what happened. Vinny Mongillo and I took the long escalator up through the glass pyramid entrance. Outdoors, in a cloudy September chill, we separated an
d walked around the famous pharaoh in different directions, Mongillo to the left, me to the right. He stopped around thirty, maybe forty yards away, in an open expanse with an unimpeded view. I slowly made my way toward the costumed creature and pulled up about ten yards short. It was 4:30 P.M., thirty minutes to showtime. I was utterly without so much as a whiff of a guess as to where it all might go from there.
So I stood and I stood and I stood. Minutes moved slower than water through a drain at a men’s hair-loss clinic. The sky went from gray to slate. Waves of tourists flocked from the museum at closing time. The damned pharaoh, blessed with endless energy, kept beckoning to people, serving as a veritable magnet for virtually anyone of Japanese descent. They’d smile, place an arm around his shoulder, pose for a photograph, and they were off, another uniquely French moment to tell friends and families all about in the suburbs of Nagasaki.
The air turned from chilly to cold, and believe me, the Parisians are not to be confused with frontiersmen, not unless you consider a trip to Provence with a stay at a Relais & Chateaux inn in the company of a toy poodle to be the frontier. So they were all bundled up in black peacoats, the men as pretty as the women, and I watched them, wondering what was to come, waiting for it to arrive, fearing the results.
I thought back to that night at Fenway and how innocent life had been not all that long ago. Elizabeth and I were in those last clingy moments of our inevitable good-bye. The Sox were in the pennant race. I was in a slump, but I knew I’d break out of it; I always do.
Not this time, though. I killed a young woman, or rather, a story I dupishly wrote led to her death. Same thing, really, or maybe worse. And now another woman, an innocent human being, was being stalked by a killer or killers who wanted her dead. And what was I doing to help? Nothing, really, except putting her in harm’s way, forgetting to give her advice on how to save her life, in effect using her as I had used so many others before to try to get to the heart of a publishable truth. I’ve heard it said that newspaper reporting is like war, meaning that innocents will be hurt in the name of a common good. Even if that’s the case, this story of Toby Harkins was certainly an extreme.
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