[JJ06] Quicksand

by Gigi Pandian

  “He has no connection to me,” Lane said. “If he’d been caught, he’d still have created a diversion, and since his intention had never been to steal the painting, he wouldn’t have gotten much jail time.”

  “How thoughtful of you.” I said sarcastically.

  “He’s done things like this before,” Lane said. “He’ll take credit for this one, too. I merely provided his next opportunity.”

  “While you were in another wing.”

  Lane nodded. “It was important that the crowds be heavy for the plan to work—for both of us. That’s why things had to move forward today, on the most crowded day of the month. It worked perfectly. As soon as the guards and docents started leading people to the main lobby from the wing I was in, I began planting seeds of alarm within the crowd. People began pushing and shoving to get out. In the commotion, I ‘accidentally’ fell against a desk. What nobody else knew was that there was a secret panel in that particular desk.”

  “The information I acquired told of the secret panel,” North said, “as well as the steps needed to unlock it. My client will be overjoyed. He’s a rich collector nearing the end of his life, and he desperately wanted the page for sentimental reasons because of his family’s history. The precarious nature of his health meant there was some urgency in acquiring it for him. When I learned that the desk had been inconveniently acquired by the Louvre some years ago, that complicated things, but I still had to act quickly. I knew the perfect man for the job.”

  Instead of looking at North with disgust, Lane was almost giddy. “It worked like a charm. While I pretended to right myself after being pushed into the desk, I was able to press the right combination of spots along the side of the desk and liberate the parchment from its hiding spot.”

  “You two are having far too much fun with this,” I said.

  Lane cleared his throat. “Let’s go, Jaya.”

  “Why the rush?” North asked. “You two don’t want to stay to join me for lunch? This place has an excellent pot-au-feu.”

  “We’re done here? My obligation is fulfilled?”

  “With flying colors.” North patted his lips with a napkin and gave Lane a nod. “Nice doing business with you. I know we no longer see eye to eye about this line of work, but I hope it’s a small consolation that I’m being paid enough for this parchment that I’ll be taking a long holiday.” Turning to me, he said, “Though it was lovely meeting you, I trust we won’t meet again.”

  I should have been relieved, but I was too busy puzzling over why the brief glance at the illuminated manuscript page had sparked a sense of recognition.

  Lane stood to depart, pulling me up with him. My hand felt so natural in his that I’d forgotten they were intertwined.

  North, ever the gentleman, rose along with us. “I’ll see to it,” he said, “that those documents of yours don’t make it into the wrong hands.”

  The documents North had showed me.

  North’s words took all the wind out of me. I swayed, and Lane steadied his grip on my hand. I squeezed back. I needed all the strength I could get.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m not cut out for this line of work.” I desperately hoped North believed me. That he hadn’t just figured out that I knew what he was up to. That I knew, now, that this wasn’t the end.

  It was only the beginning.

  CHAPTER 20

  Lane led us to a taxi. It must have been cold, because snowflakes stuck to my clothing, but I don’t remember anything about the walk.

  North’s last remarks were niggling at the back of my mind. I wasn’t crazy, was I? Those papers were the key to the importance of the stolen parchment. Not the fake documents with evidence of plagiarism, but the East India Company man’s letters North showed me “as a test.” I went over everything that had happened since I arrived in Paris. As much as I didn’t want to believe it, it all fit.

  “Now that your adrenaline is wearing off,” Lane said, misinterpreting my spaced-out silence, “the shock is kicking in. But it’ll soon pass. Don’t worry.”

  “Lane, we need to talk about—”

  Lane held a finger to his lips. “Soon,” he said, giving me a pointed look. Were we still being monitored?

  The taxi dropped us off at the hotel. As he had on our way out, Lane spoke loudly in an English accent about our friends who we were visiting at the hotel. If anything went wrong and we’d been identified at the museum, we didn’t want to be traced.

  Once we reached the room, Lane again held up his finger. He quickly discarded his disguise and gathered up his belongings, asking me to do the same. I put on a change of clothes that had been laundered by the hotel, then shoved the rest of my clothing and my shoulder bag into my backpack. Within the space of five minutes, we looked like ourselves again and had packed our possessions. Lane left a big tip on a side table, and I took one last look at my prison before hoisting my backpack onto my shoulders.

  I trotted to keep up with Lane as we swept through the hotel lobby. “I really need to—”

  “We’ll have plenty of time to chat on the train,” Lane said, cutting me off. “The metro is nearby, so that’s the easiest way to get there.”

  The train?

  The metro station, only a block away, was crowded. It was mid-afternoon on a Sunday, but I had a feeling Paris was always bustling. Though the entrance had been close to our hotel, we maneuvered our way through what felt like several city blocks underground, including several sets of stairs.

  Lane led us to a platform where we boarded a crowded car. I desperately needed to tell Lane of my suspicions, but not while we might still be under surveillance. I sighed and followed along.

  We walked out of the metro station and straight into a fast food restaurant. A fast food restaurant? I had no idea such things existed in Paris. Lane handed me a small stack of clothes from his bag, and motioned for me to give him my backpack.

  “Why—?”

  “One second,” he said as he scribbled a few words onto a piece of paper. He handed it to me.

  “Go to the women’s restroom and put this on,” the note read. “I’ll meet you back in this exact spot in five minutes.”

  With that, he was gone.

  In a stall of the women’s restroom, I opened the bag he’d handed me. It consisted of a dark green raincoat in my size, a flattened black cloche hat, and thick tortoiseshell glasses that looked nothing like the pink cat-eye glasses I’d worn at the Louvre. I tucked my hair under the stylish hat. I didn’t look half bad. I did, however, look like a completely different person—again. I wondered where he’d gotten these new items.

  I stared at the woman in the mirror, almost unrecognizable. Another woman said something to me in French, and I realized I was blocking the sink. I moved and she kept speaking in French. Maybe I could pass as French in this attire. I smiled at her and departed, my old self gone, a different person in her place.

  I did a double-take when I saw the man standing where Lane had told me to meet him. He looked nothing like Lane. There’s something intangible that makes a person who they are. It’s amazing how small alterations change someone’s whole appearance. In Lane’s case, it didn’t even have to do with clothes. Instead of the tall, confident man in jeans, a dress shirt, and sexy glasses that he really did need, I stood in front of a mousy, stooped man with bad hair and small eyes. His jeans sagged and the sleeves of his shirt were awkwardly rolled, giving him a disheveled appearance. He hadn’t changed a single item of his clothing, except to remove his glasses, yet the seemingly-insignificant alterations had transformed the whole man.

  “Shall we?” His hesitant voice matched the mousy appearance. He held up my backpack. The movement of his arm was different than usual. He was playing a role. But when he caught my eye, the look he gave me was all Lane Peters. The emotional intensity he conveyed in that moment was n
early crushing—a mix of sorrow for what was going on and happiness that I was there with him.

  “There aren’t any surveillance devices in our bags,” he added in a quieter voice as we walked out the door. I gaped at him and he shrugged. “I’d be stupid to trust North completely.”

  “About that,” I said. “We need to talk.”

  “Can it wait until we get to the airport?”

  I stopped walking, causing a man behind us on the sidewalk to shake his head and mutter about tourists as he darted around us. “I thought we were going to the train station.”

  “I said that for the benefit of North, in case he was listening.”

  “Why are we going to the airport?”

  His face fell. “We need to get you home, Jones.”

  “You don’t understand. This—”

  “I’ll look into Hugo’s disappearance. Once all this is over, maybe we can—”

  “You’re not listening to me!”

  Several people on the sidewalk glanced our way.

  “This isn’t the place—”

  “There’s never a good time and place,” I said, feeling icy snowflakes fall onto my face. “But you have to listen to me. I know what North is doing. It wasn’t only the illuminated manuscript page that he was after. North lied to us. He’s after something much bigger than a single piece of parchment from an illuminated manuscript.”

  CHAPTER 21

  “You’re sure?” Lane asked.

  I hesitated. “Pretty sure.”

  Lane swore and looked up at the descending snow. Easy for him to do. He was the one no longer wearing glasses. My own vision was obscured by droplets of melting snowflakes on my fake lenses. I shivered under the light rain coat that wasn’t meant for snow.

  “This isn’t just a hunch because you don’t trust North?” he asked.

  “I wish that were the case. But it all fits. It all points to—”

  “Let’s get off the street and go somewhere we can talk privately.”

  “Hiding in one of these cafes?” Within my field of view were three sidewalk cafes, two of which had set up plastic tarps and heat lamps to accommodate the French pastime of simultaneously smoking, drinking (either coffee or wine), and people-watching. Even in the light snow, the tiny tables with chairs that faced outward were half filled.

  “That’s not what I had in mind.”

  “Then where are we going?”

  The brief smile in Lane’s face took some of the chill out of my bones. “A place that three days ago I thought I’d never be able to show you.”

  Twenty minutes later, we emerged from a metro stop and walked down three side streets before Lane stopped in front of a run-of-the-mill Parisian apartment building—by which I mean beautiful architectural details surrounded each narrow window in the five story Baroque building, and a brass lion’s head greeted us at the front door. At home in San Francisco, the building would have been a historic landmark.

  In the time we spent on the crowded metro, I was able to solidify my thoughts about what North was up to. I was more certain than ever that the hidden parchment meant something very different from what North had told us.

  “Home sweet home,” Lane said as we climbed a narrow, twisting flight of stairs. Was it my imagination, or had he said it with an English accent?

  “You’re living here?”

  “For the moment.” It wasn’t my imagination. He’d taken on a British accent. He was also still walking in the stooped manner he’d assumed when we changed clothes before hopping on the metro. I wasn’t sure who Lane was putting on the show for, but I was tired of thinking.

  With two separate keys, Lane unlocked a narrow door on the first landing. I stepped into an apartment that must have been 200 square feet, at most. It made me think of the small hotel room at The Fog & Thistle in Scotland. Lane and I had known each other for less than a week when we’d been forced to share that microscopic room with a sloping ceiling. Through a door that Lane would have to stoop to walk through lay a bathroom, the only separate room in the apartment. A small cut-out held a kitchenette with a fridge tucked under the counter, two stove-top burners, and a sink with a removable stainless steel cover so it could serve as added counter space in the tiny area. The largest pieces of furniture were a couch that looked like it doubled as a bed and a reclaimed wooden dining table with two chairs tucked underneath. Bookshelves and art lined nearly every square inch of wall space. Philosophy, art history, and mystery fiction filled the shelves, their spines cracked from repeated reading. Above the shelves hung reproductions of paintings from India and photographs of temple art in Cambodia. I wished I’d been there under other circumstances, and that I didn’t have to tell him what we had to do.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said. As I spoke, an item on the largest bookshelf caught my attention. I lifted the small pewter frame. Inside the woven ivy design was a photograph of me. Lane had taken it in Scotland.

  “What can I say?” Lane said, taking the picture of me from my hands and straightening up to his usual way of carrying himself. “I can’t resist beautiful things.”

  Unsure of how to respond under our bizarre and urgent circumstances, I turned away. I dropped my bag on the hardwood floor, kicked off my shoes, and peeled out of my wet coat.

  “My safe house North found was a decoy,” Lane said. “This is the real one. I never meant to live here for a long period of time, but...Life gets in the way of life sometimes.”

  “I know. God, I know.”

  “I wish...I wish a lot of things, Jones. But right now, you need to tell me what you mean that the parchment isn’t North’s end game. This apartment is safe. We can talk here.” Seeing me shiver, he turned the dial on a rusty radiator.

  Standing so close to Lane, I hardly remembered what I was supposed to be thinking about. I took a step back and tucked my hair behind my ears. Even before he said so, I knew this apartment was safe. It had only one window, which was made of frosted glass. The glass was so thick I couldn’t tell if it faced an inner courtyard or the busy street from which we’d entered.

  “I don’t know where to start,” I said, “so I’ll start at the beginning, before you ‘liberated’ that parchment from its hiding place. The East India Company letters North showed me weren’t just a test. He really did want my expert opinion as to whether the documents were authentic.”

  Lane shook his head. “That doesn’t sound like North. Not if the letters would clue you in to something he was doing.”

  “He would,” I said, “if he knew there was no way I could put it together with the theft he wanted you to do for him. Remember, one of the letters had been ripped in half. He didn’t want me to see it in its entirety.”

  “But you saw something?”

  “Nothing I realized was important at the time. He was careful to remove any references that would alert me to what he was doing with them. But—” I shook my head.

  “What?”

  “He set things up perfectly! I wasn’t thinking. I’d just stepped off a transcontinental flight, walked back into your life, was absorbing the fact that I was being blackmailed or coerced or whatever it was, and didn’t have much time...I did what any historian would do at first. I started with the author, date, and location—who, when, and where. These letters were written by a man working for the British East India Company who was in Pondicherry in 1793, when Britain had recently regained control of the city and the French East India Company was dissolving. The French were miserable colonizers compared to the British.”

  “What does that have to do with the parchment I got out of the desk?”

  “I’m getting there. Local Indian rulers got in the middle of the two European powers, backing different nationalities for political reasons. Tipu Sultan in nearby Mysore had the support of the French in his battles against the E
nglish. Tipu, who was both a military leader and a scholar, was a hugely important ruler during the 18th century. He had a vast estate of riches that were divided up after his defeat, including the famous Tipu’s Tiger automaton that’s now at the Victoria & Albert museum in London.”

  “I’m not following.”

  “You’re not supposed to. That’s why North thought it was fine for you to steal the manuscript page, because you never would have made the connection. Indian rulers often presented lavish gifts—treasures—to their European allies. In addition, when the British or French won a battle, they claimed Indian treasures as the spoils of war. That’s how men like Robert Clive accumulated so much wealth.”

  “Clive of India,” Lane said, “whose gold coins sank on an East Indiaman ship before it reached England. But weren’t more of his stolen Indian treasures auctioned off for close to ten million dollars at Christie’s a few years ago?”

  “At least that much,” I said. “Because they were once owned by such an important historical figure. He was instrumental in securing the British East India Company’s stronghold in India through his military moves against England’s rival for colonial control: the French. He was successful because of his brave leadership in battle—which was actually reckless, youthful bluffing that happened to turn out for the best because the French never believed he could be so stupid...but I’m getting off topic.” I warmed my hands over the radiator. When I looked up, Lane was smiling at me.

  “I love it when you get carried away,” he said, unable to hide a smile.

  “You’re not taking this seriously enough!”

  “You’re shivering. I think you caught a chill outside. I’ll make tea.”

  “How can you think about tea at a time like this?”

  “You haven’t told me what I need to take seriously.” He filled an iron tea kettle with tap water and lit a gas burner with a match. “A letter from a homesick Englishman is hardly reason enough to think there’s more going on. And I know a thing or two about illuminated manuscripts. This page wouldn’t be particularly valuable, aside from the way North mentioned. You’ve been through a lot these last few days. I know it’s difficult to believe it’s over.”