by Gregg Loomis
“Juvenile orthopedist,” Lang supplied. “She spent a month out of every year working in third-world countries where her patients couldn’t afford medical care. Jeff was orphaned by an earthquake. She brought him home.”
“She also was divorced, was she not?”
Lang leaned forward to stir his coffee. It gave him something to do with hands that seemed useless in his lap. “Yeah, guy named Holt. We haven’t heard from him since they split seven, eight years ago. She kept his name ’cause that’s the one on her medical degree.”
“And obviously robbery was not a motive, not with the total destruction of the house.”
“Unless the thieves didn’t want anyone to know what was stolen.”
“Possible,” Patrick agreed, “but Madame Barkman had an extraordinary alarm system with interior burglar bars. Part of having lived in your New York, I suppose. The place was like, like . . . like the place where Americans keep their gold.”
“Fort Knox,” Lang supplied.
“Fort Knox. I would guess the intent was to destroy rather than steal.”
“Destroy what?”
“When we know that, we will be close to knowing who these criminals are.”
The two men stared at each other across the desk, each unable to think of something appropriate to say, until Patrick leaned forward. “I know it is small comfort to you, but the fire was intense. They would have died instantly from having the air sucked out of their bodies if the explosion did not kill them first.”
Lang appreciated the thought behind the effort and recognized it as a well-intentioned lie.
“The case is actually within the jurisdiction of the police,” Patrick went on. “I don’t know how long I can continue to convince them we have reason to believe it was the act of terrorists.”
Lang wanted the case in the hands of the DGSE for two reasons. First, his friendship with Patrick was likely to evoke more than the routine effort to see the case solved. Besides, the French security force was one of the world’s best. Second, the Paris police was a morass of political infighting. Peter Sellers’s Pink Panther rendition of the inept Inspector Clouseau had some basis in fact.
Mistaking Lang’s thoughts for uncertainty, the Frenchman continued, “Of course, every resource . . .”
“I’d like to go to the scene,” Lang said.
Patrick held up his hands, palms outward. “Of course. My car and driver are yours for as long as you wish.”
“And do you have any idea what they did the day before . . . ?”
Patrick touched the folder. “It is routine to check such things.”
Lang pulled the file over and opened it. With eyes stinging from tears as well as lack of sleep, he began to read.
3
Paris
The same day
Lang left his friend’s office to go directly to the Place des Vosges. Being here, the last place Janet and Jeff had been alive, somehow brought him closer to them. He paused a long time in front of the blackened cave that was number 26. Head bowed, he stood on grass that had been scorched brown. With each minute, his resolve to see the killers exposed and punished increased. He was deaf to the sound of the grinding of his own teeth and unaware of the scowl on his face. Residents, delivery men and the curious increased their pace around him as though he were potentially dangerous.
“I’ll get them myself if that’s what it takes,” he muttered. “Fucking bastards!”
A uniformed nanny behind him broke into a trot to get the pram and its cargo as far away as possible.
His next stop was to a mortician recommended by Patrick. The service was professional, cool and devoid of the oily faux sympathy dispensed by American funeral directors. He paid for two simple metal caskets, one only half-size, and made arrangements to have the bodies shipped back to the States.
He tried hard but unsuccessfully not to think about how very little of Janet and Jeff those European-shaped boxes would contain.
There was no rational reason to track his sister’s last hours other than a curiosity he saw no reason to deny. Besides, his flight didn’t leave till evening and he didn’t want to impose on his friend’s hospitality. Credit card receipts electronically summoned by Patrick provided a road map of Janet’s last day. She had visited Hermès and Chanel, making relatively small purchases: a scarf, a blouse. Probably more interested in souvenirs than haute couture, Lang decided. He did little more than peer through windows at mannequins too thin to be real and draped in outfits that exceeded the average annual American income. The number of Ferraris and Lamborghinis parked curbside dispelled any doubts he might have had as to the extravagance of the goods inside the shops.
The last credit card receipt led him to the Ile St. Louis. Overshadowed literally and economically by the adjacent Ile de la Cité and its towering Notre-Dame cathedral, the St. Louis was a quirky neighborhood in the middle of the Seine. Lang remembered eight blocks of tiny hotels, twenty-seat bistros and small shops filled with oddities.
Leaving Patrick’s car and driver in one of the parking spots so rare along the narrow streets, Lang climbed out of the Peugeot in front of a patisserie, inhaling the aroma of freshly baked bread and sweets. He walked southeast along Rue St. Louis en l’Ile until he came to an intersection where the curbs were even closer, Rue des Deux Points. He was trying to match the address on the receipt but street numbers were either hard to see or nonexistent. Luckily, there was only one shop displaying the sign magasin d’antiquités, antique shop.
An overhead bell announced his entry into a space crowded with the accoutrements of civilization from at least the past hundred years or so. Oil lamps as well as electric ones were stacked on sewing tables along with piles of dusty magazines and flatware tied in bunches. Bronze and marble statues and busts of goddesses and emperors paraded up and down aisles covered in shag carpet and oriental rugs. Lang resisted the image of cobwebs his imagination created.
The single room smelled of dust and disuse with a hint of mildew. Careful not to dislodge a record player and recordings that Lang guessed dated from the 1950s, he turned around, looking for the proprietor.
“Salut!” A head popped up in front of an amoire. “Can I help you?”
Like most Parisians, the shopkeeper had an unerring ability to recognize Americans on sight.
Lang held up the copy of the receipt. “I’m looking for information.”
An androgynous figure in black limped to the front of the shop. A wrinkled hand took the receipt and held it up to a light speckled with dust motes. Spectacles appeared from a pocket. “What do you wish to know?”
Lang thrashed around for a convenient story and decided upon at least part of the truth. “Janet Holt was my sister. She was killed in that explosion over in the Marais a few days ago while she was visiting here. I’m just trying to find out what she bought while she was in the city.”
“I’m very sorry.” The tradesman pointed to the wall, or rather to a gap between two dark pictures of people in nineteenth-century dress. “She bought a painting.”
“A portrait? Of who?” That would have been unusual.
The shopkeeper shook a gray head. “No, a painting of shepherds, of a field, perhaps some religious scene.”
That was more in keeping with Janet’s taste.
Lang started to ask another question and thought better of it. What did it matter what happened to the painting? Judging from its source, it was doubtful it had either artistic or monetary value.
“That painting,” the figure in black continued, “it had not been here long. In fact, a man came in right after your sister and was very upset it had been sold.”
Years of searching out the unusual, of recognizing anomalies, sent up antennae long unused. “This man, do you remember anything about him?”
“Near eastern, perhaps Arab, dressed in nice but inexpensive clothes. He spoke very good French.”
Lang ignored the implicit accusation. “Did he say why he wanted the picture?”
“No, but as you can see, I have many beautiful things for sale.”
Lang thought a moment. “You said you hadn’t had the picture long. Do you remember where you got it?”
Again the shuffling of papers. “From London, Mike Jenson, Dealer in Curios, Antiquities, Etcetera, Ltd. Number 12 Old Bond Street, London W1Y 9AF We buy inventory from each other.”
If it doesn’t sell one place, try another, Lang thought. “Could I borrow a pen and some paper?”
He wrote the name and address down, although he could not have explained why he thought it was important. Perhaps because it was the first detail of Janet’s last day that had been even slightly out of the ordinary.
“Thanks. You’ve been a big help.”
Outside, Lang began to repeat his path in reverse. So someone had wanted the picture Janet bought. Could it have been the reason for Janet’s death? But that made no sense. As Patrick had said, the house on Place des Vosges had been like Fort Knox. It strained the imagination to think someone had been so angry at Janet beating him to the purchase of a painting that he was willing to destroy it and her as revenge.
Still . . .
The buzzing in Lang’s mind was becoming louder and louder. So loud that he was surprised to suddenly realize he really was hearing the sound. He turned in time to see one of the City’s ubiquitous motor scooters increase speed and jump the curb. The driver, his features hidden in a full face helmet, must have been drunk or seriously ill, Lang thought.
The machine, still gaining velocity, was headed straight for Lang. As Lang shifted his weight to lunge into a doorway, the rider leaned towards Lang and sunlight flashed from his gloved hand. Lang threw himself away from the rider and felt something scratch his shoulder.
Furious at what he took for criminal negligence, Lang sprang to his feet ready to pursue and knock the driver off the machine’s seat. The cause was hopeless. The scooter skidded around a corner and disappeared from sight.
“Monsieur!” The shopkeeper rushed outside. “You are injured!”
“No, I’m fine,” Lang replied.
Then he followed the merchant’s eyes to where a trickle of blood seeped from a slash in his shirt. The glitter of a blade, the intentional swerve from the street. Someone had come close to cutting his throat.
“We have crime, just like any city,” Patrick said later that day.
Lang, his shoulder stiff under what he considered far too much bandaging, snorted. “Yeah, but this wasn’t any snatch and run. The fucker wanted to kill me.”
Patrick shook his head slowly. “Now why would he want to do that?”
That, thought Lang, was the real question.
CHAPTER TWO
1
Delta Flight 1074: Paris-Atlanta
10:35 P.M. EDT
Lang was exhausted, yet unable to sleep. Without seeing it, he stared at the comedy being shown on the 777’s overhead screen. A combination of grief, curiosity and fear of flying had kept him squirming despite the wide seat and ample legroom of first class.
Eyes open or shut, he kept seeing replays of Jeff and Janet. Then a man on a motor scooter with a knife in his hand.
Coincidence? His earlier training had taught him to distrust seemingly unrelated events. But who would want to kill a woman who devoted her life to her adopted son and other small children across a troubled globe? For that matter, who would want Lang himself dead?
An old grudge? He couldn’t think of any that would have survived fifteen years.
“Get you something?” The flight attendant had put on a smile along with fresh lipstick.
Lang shook his head. “I’m fine, thanks.”
But, of course, he wasn’t.
He forced the thoughts of Janet and Jeff from his mind as a parent might send unruly children outside to play. Thinking of the two metal boxes in the plane’s cargo hold wasn’t going to get him any sleep. Think of something pleasant, something soothing. . . .
Had it been only two nights ago, just hours before that phone call from Patrick?
He had spent the evening with Father Francis Narumba. They had dined at Manuel’s Tavern, a funky bar that was a hangout for students, politicians and the self-proclaimed local intelligentsia. It boasted a warm if seedy collection of wooden booths and worn bar stools. The food had never been great and the atmosphere less, but it was a place where a black priest and a white lawyer could argue in Latin without anyone noticing.
Lang and Francis had their own campaign to keep alive the language of Virgil and Livy. Both were victims of a degree in the classics, Lang because he was too stubborn to be pushed into business school, the priest because the language had been required in seminary.
Their friendship was based on mutual need: there were too few people around who viewed history as something older than last week’s People magazine. Although Lang tended to consider anything that happened after the first sack of Rome as current events, Francis had an astonishing recall of the medieval world. The Catholic Church’s role in that world provided a fertile field for friendly argument.
The priest had listened politely as Lang blew off more than a little steam about the inefficiency of the Fulton County prosecutor’s office, a matter motivated by more than the purely altruistic concern of a good citizen.
Having a client under indictment for over a year wasn’t good for business, particularly the client’s. An indictment works as a hardship, since in the public eye the accused is presumed guilty until proven otherwise.
“If the DA is as incompetent as you say, how’d he get the office?” Francis asked, regarding a badly overcooked filet of salmon. He shrugged at the hopelessness of Manuel’s cuisine. “Fabas indulcet fames.”
Latin aphorisms were a fiercely competitive game of one-upmanship.
Lang had ordered a hamburger, something requiring effort to screw up. “Hunger does indeed sweeten beans but you’d have to be pretty hungry to enjoy that,” he said. “In answer to your question, the DA owes his job to who he knows, not any ability, Ne Aesopum quidem trivit.”
“He has not even thumbed through Aesop?”
Lang was pouring from a pitcher of room temperature beer. “Believing in all those saints makes you literal. More liberally, he doesn’t know zip.”
The priest sipped from a glass that had to be as tepid as Lang’s. “Damnant quod non intelligunt.”
They condemn what they do not understand.
After dinner, Lang lost the coin toss for the check for the third straight time. Sometimes he thought Francis had special help in such matters.
“Janet and Jeff okay?” Francis asked as they walked to the car.
His interest was more than polite. Since her divorce, Janet had, paradoxically, become a staunch Catholic, active in Francis’s parish. Lang suspected she believed that the church’s position on remarriage might impede another poor choice. Jeff’s very foreignness made him special to Francis, a native of one of Africa’s less desirable homelands.
Lang reached in his pocket for the key to the Porsche. “Both fine. Took Jeff to the Braves’ opener last week.”
“Looks like you could afford a real car instead of this toy,” Francis grumbled as he contorted himself into the passenger seat.
“Enjoy the ride or take MARTA,” Lang said cheerfully. “By the way, Janet got Jeff a dog last week, the ugliest mutt you’ll see at the annual blessing of the animals.”
“Beauty is, as the saying goes, only skin-deep.”
Lang turned the key in the ignition. “Yeah, but ugly goes all the way to the bone. I think Janet picked the dog out as being the least likely to be adopted from the pound.”
Before reaching the part where Lang got home, he dropped into a dreamless abyss. He didn’t regain consciousness until the same flight attendant, with the same smile, shook him awake and reminded him to raise his seat back for landing.
2
Atlanta
Two days later
Lang thought he had grieved as much as a man cou
ld when Dawn died. The lingering illness, the agony of watching the woman he loved slip away had, he thought, seared his soul against further loss.
He was wrong.
As he watched the two caskets, one only half the size of the other, being lowered into the red Georgia clay, he lost the stoic exterior southern custom required of men. Instead, he wept. First wet eyes, then tears he made no effort to staunch. If anyone thought less of him for his anguish, screw ’em. He was not weeping only for Jeff and Janet, of course. He was crying for himself just as much. The last of his family gone. The thought filled him with loneliness he had never known existed.
He had lost friends and acquaintances before; any adult had. He had also known a few guys, fellow employees, who had perished in the occupational hazards of his former work, too. And he had lost Dawn, but he had had months to anticipate the inevitable. But his younger sister and nephew had been snatched away with a suddenness and in a manner that was incomprehensible.
The funeral had an air of unreality, something staged for his consumption alone. He watched the service as though witnessing someone else’s bereavement, perhaps in a film. But he was no mere spectator to the anguish that chewed at him like an animal gnawing its way free from a cage.
The holes that would receive Jeff and Janet were next to the marble with Dawn’s name on it, not yet weathered, the inscription as sharp as the loss he felt every Sunday when he placed flowers on the impersonal hump of earth. He would have two more graves to visit as Jeff and Janet shared eternity with Dawn on this same hillside.
Instead of hearing the words Francis read from the prayer book, he replayed every video game he had shared with Jeff, saw again every gold-starred homework assignment. He missed them both, but the death of a child was the bit of evidence that condemned the universe, that denied a sparrow-watching god.
By the time the mourners, mostly neighbors or Janet’s medical peers with a scattering of parents of Jeff’s friends, had finished their sincere if meaningless condolences, his grief had metabolized into fury. Whoever had done this would pay in spades. No matter how long it took, how much time was required, how far he had to travel, he would find him. Or them.