Columbus

by Derek Haas

  Alex’s father died while carrying a bag of cement across the roof. His heart gave out: he dropped the bag, sat down, and died. Alex was fifteen, and it was like someone had cut out the best part of him. When the owner of the building, Mr. Hubbert, came round to pay his respects and tell his mother they would have two months to find a new apartment, Alex was ready. He showed the owner how to repair the washing machine, how to refill the split plaster on the second-floor corridor, how to keep birds from settling on the roof. He proposed that he would drop out of school and take over the duties of his father, that he knew the building better than anyone, that the free place to live for the three of them was all he needed . . . he’d find other ways to supplement his income. Mr. Hubbert was sympathetic and agreed to Alex’s terms on a trial basis. If tenants complained, he would have to make changes. But no tenants complained.

  A genial man on the second floor, a retired professor named Mr. Condrey, gave Alex books to read to whittle away his evenings: Hugo and Dumas and Maupassant and Maugham. He taught him to dig deeper, behind the hero’s journey and into the themes buried just below the surface: loss of innocence, jealousy, revenge as well as hope, patriotism, love. He found Alex to have a rapier mind and a thirst for intellectual stimulation. Alex, in turn, taught his brother, Jerome. If Alex couldn’t go to school, he’d be damned if Jerome was going to miss a single day. Maybe he wasn’t Jerome’s father, but he damn sure acted like it.

  The family still needed to put bread on the table, and Alex’s mother took a job at a local bakery, selling croissants to tourists. Even bringing home the unsold pastries wasn’t enough to keep the lights on, to keep wood in the fire. They needed more income, something, anything.

  Alex had heard of Augustus Dupris from a pair of gossips who frequented the meat market. Dupris ruled the neighborhood (and several others), working and living out of a building two blocks away from Alex’s. He had set up narcotics lines directly into Afghanistan and had profited greatly importing opium and heroin into the capital. In turn, he parlayed that business into providing protection, gambling, and prostitution in a city where most citizens turned a blind eye toward individual hedonism.

  Still age fifteen, Alex presented himself to Dupris, explaining who his father had been, where he lived, what had happened to the family, what they were subsisting on, and how he could be of use to the professional criminal. He did his best to speak deferentially and intelligently, to make his case, explain how he could be an asset. He said he’d do any work the boss demanded.

  Dupris slapped Alex across his face and told him to go back to school, go back to his family, to leave, and never to return. His men escorted him out of the building and Alex walked the two blocks home with his tail between his legs, but with a strong sense that he was being tested. Determination rose within him.

  For weeks, Dupris couldn’t leave the building without seeing Alexander Coulfret. The teen followed the middle-aged boss like a dog looking for scraps. When Dupris asked one of his men for a newspaper, Alex was already there, holding the latest edition. When he cut the tip off a cigar, he’d find Alex before him, holding out a struck match.

  “You aren’t going away?” the man finally asked the kid outside a hotel. “You aren’t going to do as I tell you and leave?”

  Alex shook his head.

  Dupris smiled, like he couldn’t quite figure out what made Alex’s clock tick. “Then come to my building tomorrow at ten. And bring me some coffee.”

  Alex ran all the way home. That night, he cooked a ham for his mother and brother, the first meat they’d had in a week.

  In the beginning, he delivered things for Dupris, sometimes to people who didn’t want to be reached. He grew a reputation for being extremely clever, an intellectual cut above most of the mutts who worked for the boss. Where this might foster resentment, Alex had a way of recognizing trouble before it emerged, like a firefighter watering down fields to control the path of the flames. His cohorts couldn’t help but like him, and he pulled their strings like a master. He was a man who could talk at any level depending on to whom he was speaking, who knew the language, the idioms, the dialect of the streets, who could hold his own with the lowest pigeon on up to the boss himself. Guys he worked for found themselves working for him without quite understanding how the reversal had transpired.

  By the time he was twenty, he had been arrested a couple of times but slipped any sentence harsher than a slap on the wrist. He taught Dupris how to maximize his gains by being merciless, by squeezing the suckers for every dime. In turn, his bank account grew.

  His mother suspected something evil behind the income, but was so pleased to have food on the table, so pleased to see her younger son attending a private school for gifted students, that she instinctively knew better than to ask questions. She just wanted to put her feet up after a long day at the bakery and have wood to burn in the fireplace. Alex thought about telling her to quit her job—he was making more than enough to cover their expenses—but he resisted. The work kept her going, kept her vigorous, and somehow he knew it helped her to cope with the illicit money coming into the apartment.

  When he turned twenty-three, he was Dupris’s right-hand man, mostly working from the shadows. Dupris was starting to fear him as much as admire him, but the kid was like watching an avalanche cascade toward you and only being able to appreciate it. Alex was as devious as he was cunning, and he wasn’t afraid to get his own hands dirty to prove a point.

  All the while, he, his brother, and his mother stayed in that little apartment in the building on the Rue St. Maur. The residents still looked down their noses at the family in the supervisor’s flat, and Alex never strayed from fixing the faucets and the leaky pipes and the faulty heaters.

  When Alex turned twenty-four, a real estate mogul named Saulter made a bid to buy the building. The original owner, Mr. Hubbert, was growing old and his only heir lived in the United States. The son wanted whatever price his father could get for the building. He had never set foot inside it and had no plans of moving back to Paris. Saulter made his offer. Paris was growing more expensive and the mogul felt if he could renovate the apartments, he could make a sizable profit. His plans for renovation also included getting rid of the current occupants.

  Alex had by this time amassed enough wealth to buy the building himself for a fair price, and made an offer to Mr. Hubbert, but Saulter didn’t give a damn about fairness. He was a capitalist in the true sense of the word; the biggest stack of dollars determined the winning bid, and he was prepared to outbid the son of the janitor.

  Alex met with Mr. Hubbert for the second time in his life. The man was close to dying, was exhausted, and he spoke in a whining whisper.

  “What do you want me to do, Alexander? What would you do? Ask yourself. I am doing this for my son in America. If you had come to me first, if there was no other choice, I would happily sell the building to you. I know you would take care of her like she was your mother or your wife. But Mr. Saulter came first and he will outbid you until you cannot match his offer. What would you have me do?”

  Alex told him he was responsible for his own decisions.

  “I know how you acquired your wealth,” the old man said. “The things you’ve done for Augustus Dupris. If you say I must sell to you, then I will do so. I do not want trouble.”

  Alex repeated to the old man he was responsible for his own decisions, but assured him since he had shown Alex’s family trust and kindness, no harm would befall him.

  Mr. Hubbert told him he intended to sell the building to the mogul, Saulter.

  Alex made two stops on his way home. First, he asked Dupris for an advance of two million francs so he might match Saulter’s offer. But Dupris was drunk and with a woman and chose an inopportune moment to put Alex Coulfret in his place. He denied his request and called his prodigy a homesick fool. He offered Alex some wine and when he declined, protesting how important the building was to him, Dupris told him to lighten up and enjoy himself and to qu
it being so goddamned serious. Alex left enraged.

  His next stop was Saulter’s private residence in the heart of the Seventh arrondissement. When he went to bed that night, Saulter had three German shepherds and a German wife. When he awakened from a fitful sleep, he had none. Alex was waiting for him on a chair in the corner of the room. He told Saulter to move away from Paris and never look back, but not before Saulter phoned Mr. Hubbert to withdraw his offer for the building.

  Augustus Dupris felt two emotions upon learning the next day that Alex Coulfret was the new owner of the building he had grow up in on the Rue de Maur. Anger and fear. He did not like the way those two emotions made him feel, like a weight had settled in his stomach. He did not like the way his second-in-command had circumvented his decision-making. He did not like the way his other foot soldiers looked at Coulfret—the same way they used to look at him.

  He decided to hire some dark men. He might have been successful except that a low-level hood named Martin Feller saw the future and made the decision of his life, rolling the dice and putting his hat in the ring with Alex. He had overheard Dupris bragging about the contract he had taken out on his right-hand man’s life. And so Feller tipped off Coulfret.

  Alex could’ve brought it to a head the moment he found out about the hit, could’ve walked the two blocks to Dupris’s house, forced his way in, and shot the man and everyone who stood with him. God knows he wanted to. But the chess player inside him won out; instinctively, he knew that if the last rung of the ladder on the rise to the top is stepped on with brute power instead of earned through cunning, through artful intelligence, then his reign would always be contested, would always be marked with bloodshed.

  So he faked his death. He waited for the right opportunity, then put money in the palms of a trusted few, and convinced Dupris and his hired killer that they had lucked out, that nature and a fickle god and two vehicles colliding had done their dirty work for them, that sometimes things have a way of working themselves out.

  A week went by, two. Dupris inquired about buying the building himself, but Jerome Coulfret, the brother, resisted. His education had instilled in him a keen business sense, a sense that would serve him well in the jewelry trade years later. The ownership of the building suddenly became important to Dupris, like having a tangible trophy to put in his case, a symbol for the rest of his men to see what happened if they chose to tangle with the boss. He became obsessed with owning it, refusing to let Alex’s pissant brother keep this prize from him.

  Recognizing the volatility of the situation, Jerome told Augustus Dupris he feared for his and his mother’s safety, and he wanted assurances that if Dupris bought the building, no harm would befall them. Dupris agreed but Jerome wanted a commitment in person; he insisted that Dupris come to his small janitor’s apartment in the basement of the building and he would sign over the papers in front of witnesses.

  Dupris brought three of his most trusted bodyguards, men whom he used for intimidation and enforcement. They entered the building on the Rue de Maur, suspecting nothing. They paraded down the hallway, suspecting nothing. They piled into the cramped elevator and pressed the appropriate button, suspecting nothing.

  The cable snapped and the elevator car plummeted, dropping thirty feet in three seconds and slamming like a thunderclap into the concrete foundation. It bounced, crumpling like a crushed soda can, and came to rest at an eighty-degree angle at the bottom of the shaft, like a domino about to topple. Dupris and his men were injured, sure, but nothing life-threatening. That part would come in a moment. They were more shocked and confused, still trying to figure out what happened.

  The doors just above their heads pried open from the outside, and light spilled into the car. They looked up expectantly, eager for aid, for someone to help them out of the collapsed car.

  A ghost stared down at them: Alexander Coulfret, back from the grave, resurrected in a building he knew better than anyone. His face was sinister; there was triumph in his eyes. He glared at the men, as helpless as sardines packed in a tin, and started firing.

  Maybe Mallery didn’t tell the story quite so fully, but he laid out the broad strokes, and it didn’t take much digging to fill in the details. I’ve found that once you possess a few nuggets, it’s much easier to pry the whole story out of people. If you listen, a neighborhood will talk.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  HE’S IN THE BUILDING ON THE RUE DE MAUR, OF THAT I’M CERTAIN. And either he’s a complete recluse, holed up in a tiny apartment, running his kingdom from the shadows, or he had his face changed, happy with the way the police or perhaps his rivals were fooled by his accidental death ruse. My guess is the latter. The men in his organization are way too deferential for Coulfret to be a shut-in. That kind of power comes only from a firsthand, iron-fisted rule. The fact that the police never quite bought the ruse tells me he didn’t need to use it for long.

  To get to him, to end this, I have two choices. Try to infiltrate his building, or try to flush him toward a place of my choosing.

  I mentioned a few ways I go about gathering information: I can steal it. Or I can force someone to give it to me under duress. Or, like with Mallery, I can feign friendship in order to extract what I need. But there is another way, one I’ve employed on occasion. It’s tricky, but it can be effective.

  I buy a cheap camera from a souvenir shop near the Rue St. Denis and start scouring the sidewalk for prostitutes. The ladies populate this street at all hours of the day, dressed in their dystopian view of evening wear, ready to approach a john for business as soon as his gaze lingers for more than a fleeting moment. There is no cream of the crop here, no high-priced whores, no beautiful young women lost under a layer of makeup. The women on the Rue St. Denis are well past the age and weight when they should be parading their wares.

  My eyes settle on a particularly homely sample and I speak to her as best I can in French.

  “How much?”

  “Thirty.”

  “How would you like to make three hundred?”

  Her eyes reflect the age-old battle between fear and avarice. I can read her thoughts as easy as if she spoke them aloud: Whatever he wants me to do can’t be good for my health, but three hundred euros is more than I’ve made in a month.

  “What for?”

  “To ride in a taxi and take some photos.”

  “With you?”

  “By yourself.”

  “Psssh.” She waves at me like I’m insane.

  “I have a taxi waiting.”

  “I don’t know what cheat this is. . . . ”

  “No cheat. Here’s thirty just for listening to me. Here’s two hundred and seventy, which I’ll give you if you take this camera in that taxi and fill the camera with photos of the second block of the Rue de Maur. You’ll be back here in thirty minutes.”

  Her brain is trying to calculate the percentages of risk versus reward but the entire effort is simply too much and her eyes refocus on the money in her hand and the rest of it within grabbing distance.

  “You do this right and there’ll be more jobs like it, all over town, paying even more.”

  “Just take photos?”

  “When you approach the block, hold the camera like this, here, not up to your eye, but down at the bottom of the taxi’s window. Click, wind here, click, wind . . . do it on both sides of the street. I’ve instructed the taxi to drive slowly, but not too slowly. Take as many as the camera will allow. The taxi will then return you here.”

  “Fifty more now,” she croaks. Two of her teeth are missing and the remaining ones are stained with lipstick.

  “Not a euro more until I have a full camera.”

  She grimaces and then shrugs, takes the camera, and waddles over to the taxi.

  I keep my word when she returns. She’ll try to remember me, the man wearing a hat and dark glasses, should I come back to the Rue St. Denis, but by that evening, I have no doubt alcohol will have wiped her memory clean. Besides, I have no plans to return t
o that particular street.

  I develop the pictures at a one-hour photo on the opposite side of town, far away from the Bastille district Alexander Coulfret calls home. Nothing from the photo-shop worker indicates that he gave my pictures anything more than a cursory look. And why would he have noticed anything more than typical tourist photos of a sleepy Parisian block?

  Back in my hotel room, the photographs are laid out across an ottoman I’m using for a desk. The whore wasn’t exactly Ansel Adams, but she did an adequate job, all things considered. She took thirty-six photos, covering the entire block, and only had her thumb in one frame.

  Here’s what I learned that I didn’t already know by way of the internet. The block has five buildings on either side, with a series of shops fronting most of them. The adjacent buildings to the one owned by Coulfret contain apartments above a pastry shop and a dressmaker’s boutique. The location where a shop would be at the bottom of Coulfret’s particular building is a mystery; paper blinds fill the windows.

  Across the street stands a trio of similar buildings, containing two clothing stores and a pharmacy. All six shops—including the empty one—have cameras facing the street, sophisticated equipment for disparate places, all made by the same manufacturer. It seems Coulfret’s real estate ambitions have grown to include most of his block. I wonder if all six buildings are connected, and, if so, how. Paris has an extensive underground sewer system, and perhaps he’s taken advantage of it.

  The whore’s photographs also reveal men sitting with a certain lassitude on three benches positioned on both sides and across the street from Coulfret’s front door. Six hard-looking men, three benches. My guess is they rotate out regularly, and who knows how many more are waiting inside that shop with the papered-over windows?

  Storming the building is starting to look like an ugly proposition, a long-odds loser.

  Ruby Grant smiles over her cup of coffee. We’re on the Left Bank, in the back of a café once frequented by Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Joyce.