I thought of Jankle, so confident the first time I met him, so confused the second. Was it an act? Was he behind any of this? I thought of Peter Martin back in the Record newsroom, relatively immune to all that was going wrong. He had a front-page story detailing the return of one of the world’s most valuable stolen paintings. To him, for him, death and destruction were the justifiable means toward a stunning, perhaps Pulitzer prize–winning, end.
I was, quite literally, more than an ocean away from anything that previously mattered in my life—a girlfriend who was no longer mine; a fluffy golden retriever that would be my best friend until the day he died; a career that seemed always on the incline. And here I was in this forlorn courtyard in a foreign capital with dark descending faster than an April tide watching it all flitter away and wondering why. Why?
Because I, Jack Flynn, should be renamed Jackass. That’s the glib answer. I needed more.
And more important than any of this, more important than the sad details of my own life, was the following question: Where was Maggie Kane?
At 4:55 P.M. I looked over at Vinny Mongillo, about half a football field away. He was taking in the scene through a small pair of opera glasses that I had no idea where or when he acquired. He was scanning the periphery of the park, refocusing back on me and the pharaoh, then to the edges again. He kept his face partially concealed with a folded-up newspaper, Le Monde, I believe, which I also believe stood for, “You’re screwed, vulgar Americans.”
I, too, looked around, but saw nothing—no pretty blondes, no shadowy killers lurking with a cache of deadly weapons, no great hope. I guess, in retrospect, I don’t know what I expected to happen. Did I really believe that as I stood near this bizarre pharaoh in a crowd of tourists within the shadows of the Louvre that Maggie Kane would come walking across the Jardin des Tuileries, tap me on the shoulder, and say, “I’ve been looking for you, Jack. Let me tell you everything.” And that at that point, we’d steal away to a French restaurant with a tuxedoed sommelier and order a fixed-price meal involving tender beef and a buttery Bordeaux and never would we hear from the would-be killers again.
In other words, which Dakota do I think I’m from?
Instead, five o’clock came and went with nary a tap, whisper, or flutter—my heart aside. I stood virtually frozen, trying to look anything but, glancing to my sides, occasionally turning around, trying to get a lay of this foreign, potentially dangerous land. Mongillo had my back, and my front, for that matter, perched across the way trying to blend into the scenery as well as a 300-pound American in a flannel shirt and khaki work trousers can in the heart of Paris, France.
Five-ten turned into 5:20, and nothing. At 5:30, a car pulled over at a nearby circle and a man in a black raincoat emerged from the passenger side. He walked in my general direction, took a long look around, then headed back to the car with neither an expression nor a spoken word.
By that point, the flow of people emerging from the Louvre had receded to a small trickle, then to barely nothing at all. At 5:40, the pharaoh picked up a canister of money from the cement path in front of him and walked slowly off toward the Tuileries, another day at the office behind him. At that point, Mongillo, now sitting on a bench in the distance, began walking toward me. I made a subtle motion with my hands that told him to stop, and he did. We stood awkwardly like that, forty yards or so apart, for another ten minutes, until I beckoned him over. By then it was 5:55, and we were alone in the cloudy cold, save for a few stragglers making their way toward the bridge over the River Seine.
When he drew close, Mongillo asked simply, “Now what?” and the very question, as well as the vacant tone in which it was asked, caught me oddly off guard. Vinny Mongillo, bereft not just of answers, but of ideas. We were exquisitely screwed, and his two words forming one question gave voice to just how badly.
Sternly, I replied, “Maybe she meant six o’clock. Maybe she’s messed up in the time zone changes. We wait longer.” I knew I was probably wrong, but how was I supposed to know for sure, so we sat on a bench in the middle of a stretch of park with grass and hard-packed dirt and some cement paths, and we waited some more, mostly in silence, but for the frequent sound of Mongillo’s cell phone vibrating. After a particularly long patch of nothing, he said, “We should eat well tonight.” But the line, the sentiment, would never be fulfilled; he knew that and so did I.
By 6:30, it was mostly dark—so much for Paris being the city of light—and I said in desolate frustration, staring at the perimeter of the park around us, “Where do you want to stay?”
“Don’t know. What’s that place Princess Di stayed on her last night, the Ritz?”
And for some reason, the thought of Diana’s death in Paris made me sad. Everything at that point made me sad—the mournful look of the darkened Louvre, the lack of a sunset over the Seine, the breeze that carried no good tidings.
“We stay at the Ritz, Martin will make sure its our last night alive.”
“No matter to me.”
Probably no matter to me, either, except I needed to be around to get thoughts into print to pull myself—and hopefully Maggie Kane—out of this mess. But for the latter, I suspected it was too late. If she wasn’t here, she was probably dead—a thought that thrust me into deep depression.
The breeze blew up off the river, the last bits of easy gray faded from the ceiling of clouds, and I said to Mongillo, “Let’s get out of this place.”
“Unfortunately,” he replied as we both struggled to our feet, our bones stiff from the cold, “I’ll never look at the Louvre the same again.”
We set off, down some wide steps, across the Tuileries, and veered right down Rue de la Paix, toward Place Vendôme, past one fabulously expensive boutique after another. We cut across the beautiful square and arrived at the door of the Park Hyatt Hotel, at which time Mongillo pointed to the sign and said, “Martin can’t get upset over a damned Hyatt.”
Five minutes later, when he plunked down his credit card for both our rooms—I didn’t want to use mine—at $450 a night, Mongillo said, “All right, so he can get upset. Thank God I’m leaving the paper.”
We must have looked like quite a pair, the rotund Italian-American who hadn’t had a wink of sleep in two days, and the beaten-up hero with a bruise on his lower chin, despondence in his deep blue eyes. Or something like that. I grabbed a copy of the Herald Tribune from the concierge desk, told Mongillo I’d meet him in the lobby champagne bar in an hour, and made my way upstairs.
Once in my room—my chambre, I think they might call it in France, I drew a bath. Truth be known, those are words—I drew a bath—that I never thought I’d utter. I mean, the only thing I’d ever drawn in my life was a king-high flush in a poker game at the University Club one night, but the damned thing looked so inviting, with brushed chrome handles on the deep soaking tub, a clever little spigot that was more like a waterfall, and a fluffy bath mat waiting to soak up the warm water from my tired feet.
I pulled a large bottle of Evian out of the minibar. As I opened it, I gazed at the little menu card and saw it cost $12. Too late now. I peeled off my clothes and climbed inside the tub, feeling much like I did during my Saturday night baths at our South Boston home when I was a kid. I picked up the Herald Tribune and scanned the front page—a corrupt finance minister in Italy (Stop the presses!), a squabble over NATO expenditures in Brussels, a bevy of cops indicted on brutality charges in Los Angeles. Ho-hum. I flipped inside to get more U.S. news, and scanned a column of brief stories from the States. It was the fifth one down that didn’t just grab my eyes, it all but poked them. “Masterpiece Returned to Boston Newspaper.” It mentioned The Concert and the Gardner and the damned thing had Vermeer and Flynn in the same sentence. Artists, both, at different times, in different ways, with different instruments. Who would have thunk?
I leaned my head back and, for reasons that I can’t properly explain, I thought about my father, a career pressman before he died, sitting at the kitchen table every mo
rning eating a bowl of corn flakes with a sliced banana, still in the ink-stained hunter green apron that he wore through every one of his shifts, proud to be a part of an enterprise as great as the Record. He never lived to see my byline in his paper, but what would he think of me now?
After that, I thought of all those nights lying in my single bed in my tiny room in South Boston, the transistor radio under the pillow broadcasting the late innings of a Red Sox game or the final quarter of the Celtics playing at the old Boston Garden, Jo Jo White passing to Havlicek, Havlicek faking left even though everyone knew he couldn’t go that way, then driving right, another shot, another score. It was in the middle of these games that the train would invariably glide by in the distant night, sounding a horn that to some might seem forlorn, but to me was a beckoning—an invitation, the audible manifestation of an abiding desire to break the bonds, to be a part of a larger world, to shed the expectations that were never set high enough.
And here I was, a well-known newspaper correspondent, the bane of some famous people, the confidant of others, out there in that world that I so wanted to embrace. And now, all I wanted was a home that I could call my own, and at this very moment, the modest rowhouses on the ramrod-straight streets of my native South Boston would have been more than enough. Oh, to be able to go back in time.
This, of course, caused me to take a census of the important women in my life—Katherine and Elizabeth and Hilary and Maggie. Two of them were dead; one was missing by her own volition, the other by someone else’s. This is some life, Jack Flynn. So I shut my eyes in a marble bathroom in Paris, France, and I thought of Baker, odd as that may seem, loping across Columbus Park on the Boston waterfront in simple pursuit of a tennis ball, bounding back, dropping it at my feet, doing it all over again until it was time to go home and he’d happily tag along at my side. After Katherine died, I tried to convince myself that I could only miss what I still actually had, and right now, Baker was pretty much it.
Finally, I thought about the knock on the hotel door, three firm bangs, followed by a muffled announcement. I tried to holler back, but my throat was so thick that I couldn’t get the words out with any volume or velocity. The door immediately flung open and a man with a tray came walking in.
He saw me through the opening and said in the unapologetic tone that pretty much characterizes his country, “Pardon, monsieur.” Then he said something that sounded like “Free,” but after just a few hours in Paris, I knew that the concept didn’t exist in French culture, so the word probably wasn’t a part of their language. As he said it, he held up the tray, which bore a silver bowl containing apples, oranges and a bulging bunch of red grapes. At that point, my sophomore high school French came trickling back. Free was fruit. The fruit, hopefully, was free.
“Merci,” I said, and he placed the basket down and carried on his way.
Now I was left to contemplate the growing roll of the dead, and proceeded to how I would find Maggie Kane in a city of more than nine million people, a place where I had no friends to help me, no cultural knowledge to guide me, nothing so much as an English to French translation dictionary to assist me. Should I fly home the following day, or return to the Louvre and wait yet again, or simply wander the streets hoping for a stroke of blind luck?
I stepped out of the tub as I contemplated these miserable options, and though I’m honestly not prone to talking to myself, said aloud, “Where the hell are you, Maggie Kane?”
“Right here,” she replied. I looked up, and there she was, Maggie Kane, leaning in the bathroom doorway, her arms crossed, her legs long. She looked a little worse for the wear of the last few days, but perfect nonetheless. And there I was, naked as a walrus on an Antarctic iceberg. When I lunged for a bath towel, I actually heard her laugh—a sound no exposed man wants to hear.
“What the fuck,” I said, as much to the situation as to the woman who had created it.
“We have a thing about bathrooms, you and me,” she said, her eyes not even flinching from mine. I wrapped a towel around my waist. I shot her an angry look, but truth be known, I was anything but. What I really wanted to do was hug her, though in my present state of undress, reverted to Plan B, which is, when in doubt, get dressed.
“Give me a minute,” I said, and she turned and walked out.
I wrapped myself in what all the hotel brochures inevitably describe as a “plush terrycloth robe,” and grabbed my overnight bag from the bed. She had already begun feeding herself some of the grapes. I returned to the bathroom to get dressed and tried to control my feeling of unabashed elation. The return of the Vermeer aside, this was the first reasonably good thing to happen to me in a week.
Maggie Kane was sitting here in my hotel room, after seeing me naked, which I suppose was little more than a metaphor for this whole entire story. And now it was time to do what I do best, which is to push through the layers of intentional haze in pursuit of a clear and unimpeachable truth.
Chapter Twenty-two
A fter she finished the grapes, she started in on the red pear, which, truth be known, I had my eye on myself.
“You want me to order us some room service?” I asked.
She nodded her head. I had dressed quickly in my one remaining change of clothes, combed my wet hair, and emerged into the bedroom. She was sitting in an upholstered chair next to a small café table. I handed her the leather-bound room service menu that had been resting on a nightstand, and then I sat on the edge of the bed.
Make no mistake, this was one striking woman, even in her current state. Her short, moppy blonde hair was ruffled in the back. Her cheeks were streaked by tears and slightly stained by dirt. Her pretty blue eyes, unusually deep-set, were rimmed by red. And yet she carried an unmistakable look of relief, as if she had finally found a sanctuary right here in the Park Hyatt Hotel, in the company of Jack Flynn. I wish more attractive women adopted this exact attitude.
Five days ago, she had led what I suspected was a relatively unremarkable life, a description that isn’t intended to be in any way a slap or knock. Suddenly, her sister is dead. She’s shot at on the streets of Boston. She escapes on a flight to Rome, runs for her life on the crooked byways of that ancient city, and then finds herself in Paris.
And here’s what she had to say: “I’ll have a hamburger, medium, cheddar cheese, extra fries, with a glass of Pinot Noir, oh, and a Coke.” She said this while scanning down the menu with her index finger, then looking at me without a hint of embarrassment. I think that might have been the point at which I began falling in love.
“No dessert?”
“The chocolate mousse cake.”
So I ordered two of everything, just to make things easy, create some camaraderie—a pair of like-minded people dining on the same things as they move toward a common goal. That and the fact that I also craved a juicy burger, and if the French don’t know how to make fries, then who the hell does?
She put the menu down and looked around the room, which I began noticing for the first time. “Nice place,” she said, and she was right. It had tall ceilings, maybe twelve feet high. The palette was one of total neutrality, various shades of tan melded with touches of dark wood, all to create a chic, minimalist feel that flies in the face of most things Parisian. The place whispered luxury rather than screamed it.
“Thank you,” I said, and she looked at me oddly, almost as if she were looking through me.
As we waited for the room service, I asked her how she had found me and where she had been, and she walked me through the hell that was her last few days. She had fled Copley Square by subway, got off at the airport, grabbed the first flight out of town, which happened to be to Rome. Once there, she holed up in a room at the Raphael, paying by her own credit card, which was undoubtedly the source of the problem. She stayed inside until breakfast, but as she sat on the roof terrace, she saw a familiar face that she couldn’t quite place. So she left. In a hurry.
She bolted safely through old Rome as I was serving the q
uasi-useful purpose of being someone’s punching bag. She jumped into a taxi and headed back to the airport and jumped on a flight to Paris. She had no choice, she said, but to pay by credit card, so someone somewhere surely knew that she was here. Fortunately, Paris is a big town—a fact that I was ruing just a few moments before.
Once here, she hid out in the Louvre, watching our rendezvous location through an upstairs window with the help of a pair of cheap binoculars. She left the museum when the pharaoh did, and followed us through the Tuileries, across the Place Vendôme, and to the hotel. She snuck into my room when the server delivered the fruit basket, which she had arranged.
All in all, this was one resourceful woman.
“What’s your day job?” I asked out of raw curiosity when she finished her tale.
“Third-grade teacher,” she replied. Of course.
The food came, and I’ve got to admit, those French chefs know their way around the old Gaggenau, if you know what I mean. The French fries were so good I was ready to strip off my clothes and lie on the plate next to them, though maybe that’s just me. Actually, it’s not. I looked over at Maggie and she was outright moaning as she took bite after ravenous bite of her perfectly seasoned burger. I mean, never in my life had I been alone in a bedroom with a woman in this state of advanced ecstasy.
She saw me looking at her, shoved the last of her food into her mouth, and laughed a complicit laugh. “I haven’t eaten a thing in two days,” she said.
She put her napkin up to her face, and then pressed the palms of her hands against her temples, pressed them hard, and when she let her arms fall back on her lap, the light seemed to have left her eyes, the softness gone from her mouth.
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