“Very well, miss,” was his response, his eyes stuck on the ground and a hand behind his back. “Thank you for asking.”
“Very well, huh? I suppose it must be nicer guarding Matilde than me.”
Sándor looked up, frowning, as if he hadn’t understood her declaration. Yasmín’s lips slowly fell open at the beauty of those sky-blue eyes framed by the thick, dark lashes; she had had so few opportunities to look at him directly.
“No,” Sándor answered in a dry, almost offensive tone. “Get in right now. You’re putting yourself at risk.”
Yasmín sat behind the passenger seat. The Huseinovic siblings took their seats, and the car pulled out behind the Rolls-Royce. Nobody spoke. When she dared, Yasmín would peek at Sándor’s reflection in the rearview mirror and once, when their eyes met, she smiled at him timidly. Sándor didn’t return her smile and, after a few seconds, looked straight ahead once more.
There was a different atmosphere in the Rolls-Royce. With the exception of the serious faces of the driver and the man riding shotgun—both suited, with cables spiraling from their right ears and under the collars of their jackets—the other faces were illuminated with smiles. Matilde and Juana exchanged a pleased look when they noticed Francesca had wrapped her throat in the Emilio Pucci scarf they had given her for her birthday; it suited her very well in contrast with her white cashmere coat.
Francesca displayed her customary kindness and seemed interested in the progress Leila was making; she congratulated her as if she had passed an exam. Then she told the story of the nun Catherine Labouré, who said that the Virgin Mary had asked her to mint the famous medal. Matilde didn’t know the story even though she had worn the Médaille Miraculeuse for over ten years.
They entered the chapel through the convent of the Soeurs de Saint Vincent de Paul, located at 140 Rue du Bac. The building had a simple facade. There was a large crowd of people on the sidewalk, and Madame Francesca’s bodyguard cleared the way. Sándor and Diana stuck close to them. Matilde glanced at Yasmín and saw an anxious expression on her face.
“It won’t be necessary for you to accompany us inside,” Francesca instructed the guards.
“Ma’am,” Sándor objected, “if your son Eliah knew that we had left Miss Matilde’s side even for five minutes, Diana and I would be in trouble.”
Francesca smiled at Matilde, while Yasmín admired Sándor, how resolutely and politely he addressed her mother in a language that wasn’t his own. Although his pronunciation wasn’t very good, he spoke fluently; she was fascinated by his serious, gravelly voice, and she imagined it whispering to her in Bosnian. She was jealous at how zealously he had protected Eliah’s woman and grew bitter once more.
Francesca’s bodyguard stayed with the car while the Huseinovics guarded the party of five women as they went through the doors of the convent. It was right in the middle of Paris, but the place was as silent as if a spell had been cast within the walls. They heard the cold wind and the birds. People were moving about silently and carefully. Francesca guided them up one side toward the chapel and, in a quiet voice, gave them some facts about the frescoes, the tabernacle and other fixtures. Matilde went down the four marble steps that led to the altar and stopped, her face tilted up toward the statue of Mary. She didn’t pray, but rather thought about the events of the previous weeks, the dizziest, most important weeks of her life. Finally, she prayed for Roy’s soul and for the Blahetters to come to terms with his death. She found Leila at her side; she seemed to be praying too. Was she Christian or Muslim? Eliah had explained the Huseinovics came from a region of Bosnia where the population was generally Islamic. Her doubt was resolved when she saw how fluently she made the sign of the cross. Leila went on toward the little chapel where the preserved body of Saint Catherine rested. Francesca approached Matilde and whispered to her, “We’re going to the office where they present the medals and rosaries and then we’re going to be blessed. Are you coming?”
“I’d like to stay here and pray a little more.”
Juana, Francesca and Yasmín left the chapel, followed by Sándor, while Diana kept watch over Matilde from the doorway, as if she refused to go inside. She stood with her legs apart, her hands held together in front of her and her chin lightly elevated in a masculine, challenging posture, as if she was openly defying the Virgin.
The chapel seemed to have emptied suddenly, there were very few people, so Matilde decided to slip behind the tabernacle to see the apse of the chapel; she had always felt a fascination for apses, and she remembered how she used to let go of her grandmother’s hand and sneak behind the back of the altar of the Capuchin chapel in Córdoba.
Someone took her by the waist, and Matilde smiled, thinking that Eliah had shown up on Rue du Bac to surprise her. She turned in the embrace, and her smile vanished; Eliah wasn’t the man standing in front of her. As soon as she locked eyes with this man, she knew that she was in the presence of pure evil. Panic spread through her bloodstream, compromising every part of her body; the first thing she felt was a cooling and tightness in her lips. Inexplicably, she didn’t scream as she struggled in the arms of this giant. She was paralyzed by the macabre face of her assailant as he pulled back his lips and bared his teeth in a smile completely devoid of humanity. Suddenly he gave her a slap with the back of his hand and Matilde crumpled like a rag doll. She’s as light as a feather, Udo thought, hoisting her up to carry her out of the side door he had found in the left wing of the chapel.
A sudden pain followed by a crunching sound stopped him, and he instinctively dropped his victim to put his hand to the back of his head. He had blood on his fingers. He spun around and saw a woman who was still brandishing the candelabrum she had hit him with.
“Mariyana! Mariyana!”
Diana ran toward the shouting, and then Sándor appeared, coming back into the chapel with the three women. Juana, Francesca and Yasmín didn’t realize what was happening: “What’s going on? Where’s Matilde?” They hurried toward the altar and stopped dead when they saw Diana struggling with a man behind the tabernacle. Sándor dragged Matilde away from the fight. Francesca turned and fled the chapel.
The girl was good, Udo had to admit. Al-Saud had trained her well. She knew how to use her long, thin legs to deal painful blows and she was also skilled at blocking his punches. However, for a brief instant she came into range with her face unprotected and Jürkens launched his fist into her jaw, knocking her out. Al-Saud’s woman was gone already. He went out through the tabernacle and realized that the commotion had attracted more people. He decided to beat a retreat when he saw the bodyguards from the yellow Rolls-Royce approach, followed by Al-Saud’s mother. The side door wasn’t an option anymore—that was where the guards were heading—so he went to the right to blend in with a group of people and escape through the front door.
Sándor settled Matilde on the first pew and realized that the attacker was escaping out through the right wing of the chapel. He jumped over the back of the pew, hopping between the rows, and threw himself onto the man. They fell heavily and immediately started tussling. Yasmín watched the scene, unable to shake herself out of the stupor that kept her rooted to the spot. She wanted to scream, but the screams building up in her chest suffocated her, overloading her nerves. She was only able to release them with a clamor that shook the walls of the chapel when she saw the attacker aim his gun and shoot Sándor in the heart.
The screaming spread to the crowd and it dispersed in panic. The chaos gave Jürkens a few seconds to climb up the statue of Saint Vincent de Paul and, with an agility that belied his solid frame, grab the bars of the banister of the internal balcony. He was exposed, hanging there, and one of Francesca’s bodyguards was able to shoot and wound him on the upper part of his right thigh. Jürkens bit his lip to overcome the pain as more shots rained around him. With titanic strength, he pulled up his body and climbed onto the balcony. He shot at the stained-glass window several times and finished knocking out the glass with the butt of hi
s Colt M1911. He cut his arms and ripped the fabric of his pants on what was left of the glass hanging from the metal frame like stalactites. Still, he kept on going until he got to the roof of the convent and fled.
Yasmín fell to her knees next to Sándor. Panic prevented her from thinking properly. She didn’t know how to proceed, her hands were trembling, tears were blinding her. She moved away quickly when she saw Matilde leaning over Sándor with a calm, professional demeanor in spite of the blow she had received. She laid his head down delicately and opened his eyelids to check the reflexes of his pupils. Yasmín realized that Matilde was calling his name and urging him to wake up, not because she heard—the buzzing in her head drowned out everything else—but because she was reading her lips. Matilde tried to revive him with some swift slaps and by pinching the skin on his hand. She couldn’t hear what she said to Juana, who was ripping open Sándor’s shirt. Then she saw the bulletproof vest, and a small ray of hope made her smile.
“He’s not breathing!” Juana was alarmed. “His pulse is very weak.”
With the help of Francesca’s bodyguards, they got him out of the vest. The bullet had wounded him right over his heart, and the hematoma spread across his chest, staining his flesh red up to the shoulder.
“The force of the impact was incredible!” Matilde exclaimed.
“What the hell did he shoot him with?” one of the bodyguards asked, studying the mark left by the bullet on the vest.
“I think he had a Colt .45,” the other answered.
“No wonder! A Colt .45 at such close range…”
“Even so,” the bodyguard insisted, “it wouldn’t cause this much damage. What type of bullet was it?”
“He has no pulse!” Juana shouted. “He’s going into cardiac arrest!”
“My God, please, no! My God, no!” Yasmín cried out, suffocated by tears, and burrowed into her mother’s arms to cry.
“Juana, breathe into him! I’ll do the compressions.”
Juana covered Sándor’s nose and blew air into his mouth twice. Matilde was already there, with the sternum isolated and her arms and fingers in the correct position. She pumped five times. Juana blew again. They gave him another five pumps and breathed again, and during each gap, Juana checked whether his blood was flowing again.
“I feel his pulse!”
“Thank God!” Yasmín sobbed.
“Keep giving him air,” Matilde instructed. “I’ll watch his pulse. It’s low,” she whispered a few seconds later, “forty beats per minute.”
The crowd swirling around them parted to clear a path for the paramedics, who immediately confirmed that the patient was breathing on his own. By now Matilde and Juana could express themselves well enough to bring them up to date with the situation, and as Matilde told them that she was a doctor and insisted, they let her accompany Sándor in the ambulance.
Thérèse passed Eliah the call from his mother. Seconds later, she exchanged a look with Victoire as she heard him raise his voice. They didn’t understand what he was shouting, because he was speaking Spanish. Al-Saud burst out of his office with his leather jacket half on, gripping his car keys in his mouth. He shot by like a lightning bolt without offering explanations and they didn’t dare to ask for any.
Al-Saud felt as though the elevator at the George V was taking longer than normal to get to the basement, where his Aston Martin was parked. On the street, he sped through red lights and darted around cars as though he was in a race. He got to the Hôtel-Dieu, the emergency room closest to Rue du Bac, in seven minutes. He leaped up the stairs three at a time to the second floor and ran down the hall, searching frantically for Matilde.
Yasmín, standing in front of the coffee machine, saw him coming and intercepted him. She hugged him.
“It was horrible! That man attacked Matilde. She said that he snuck up from behind and tried to grab her. Sándor intervened and he shot him at point-blank range. I thought he was dead!”
“Let me get to Matilde,” Al-Saud said desperately, and tried to throw Yasmín off him. “Let me go, Yasmín!”
“Eliah, wait a minute. Listen to me! It was that man!”
“Who? I don’t understand you, Yasmín! Let me through!”
Yasmín grabbed his face in her hands and made him look at her.
“The man that tried to get Matilde was the same one who tried to kidnap us in 1981.”
If Yasmín had hit him with a brick, it wouldn’t have stopped him as dead as what she had just said.
“No, my God,” he muttered. “Are you sure?”
“I’ll never forget that face, Eliah. It was him. I knew it as soon as I saw him. He hasn’t even changed much, the son of a bitch. I haven’t mentioned it to Mama.”
Yasmín stood to one side and Eliah devoured the distance that separated him from Matilde. She saw him coming, got to her feet and ran to him. Francesca saw the moment when Matilde disappeared into the arms and jacket of her son. She stood contemplating the scene, impressed by the energy in Eliah’s embrace, by the eloquence of his closed eyes and the ardor of the kisses he planted all over her head. They separated, and Eliah took out his handkerchief to dry Matilde’s tears. She had given birth to him and knew him like no one else, but this Eliah was completely new to Francesca.
“I thought it was you,” Matilde sobbed, and Al-Saud led her back to the seats in the waiting room. “He grabbed me from behind, around my waist, and I thought it was you, that you had come to surprise me.”
“Mon Dieu,” Al-Saud burst out, and traced his index finger along the bruise that had colored her left cheek blue and violet. “Fils de pute. I’m going to kill that bastard.”
“It’s nothing,” she assured him. “They already checked me out, there’s no fracture. Just the bruise.”
Yasmín approached and held out a Styrofoam cup of hot chocolate.
“Go on, drink a little,” Al-Saud urged her. “The sugar in the chocolate will help you to feel better.”
Diana, who had already received some stitches in her split lip, came over to complete the story.
“When Leila saw that the guy was trying to take Matilde, she whacked him on the head with a candlestick and screamed for me.”
“Where were you?” Al-Saud was bothered.
“In the door of the chapel, but I didn’t see Matilde because she had gone behind the altar. That’s where the guy intercepted her.”
“And you didn’t see the guy follow her?”
“No,” Diana admitted, looking down.
“Shit, Diana! Shit and shit a thousand times!”
“Eliah, please,” Matilde interjected, squeezing his hand.
“I’m sorry, Eliah.”
“Where was Sándor?”
“He had left the chapel to cover your mother and Miss Yasmín.”
“And you,” he spat at his mother’s bodyguards, “what the hell were you doing? Attending Mass?”
“I told them to wait outside,” Francesca intervened, and held her son’s furious gaze until he looked away.
Al-Saud got to his feet when Olivier Dussollier showed up in the waiting room. Francesca noticed that he didn’t take his fingers off Matilde’s shoulder, as if he was afraid someone would steal her away while he was distracted talking to the police inspector.
Kamal and his older sons showed up at the Hôtel-Dieu soon after Francesca called them. Kamal embraced her as fervently as their third son had held Matilde. André, Yasmín’s boyfriend, arrived minutes later and hugged and kissed her. Matilde saw that Yasmín barely touched him and didn’t hide her annoyance at his displays of devotion.
“Enough, André. Don’t squeeze me, you’re going to suffocate me. I’m fine. I’m fine. Sándor’s the one in trouble.”
“Don’t you want to go to my house? You could take a shower…”
“Didn’t you hear me? Sándor is in very serious condition. I’m not leaving until the doctors tell me that he’s out of danger.”
Eliah spoke with Dussollier a little ways off an
d looked at the bulletproof vest that one of Francesca’s bodyguards had gone to fetch from the trunk of the Rolls-Royce.
“I have to take this as evidence.” Al-Saud nodded. “This isn’t a normal everyday vest, like the ones police officers use.”
“No. This is the kind soldiers use in war.”
“Is it Kevlar?”
“No. Kevlar isn’t resistant to the highest caliber or automatic weapons, and it doesn’t stop knives, either. It also degrades over time and loses resistance. This vest is made from a different kind of synthetic fiber, stronger than ceramic plating. But it’s still light and can be worn under clothing.”
“It’s a marvel. It must cost a fortune.”
“Yes. But my men are worth it.”
“Yes, of course. And we can see that it works. I think this boy would already be playing a harp with Saint Peter if he had had a Kevlar vest. Look how the bullet almost got through!”
“Amán,” said Al-Saud, signaling one of Francesca’s bodyguards, “says that Sanny was shot at point-blank range with a Colt M1911. In any case, it wasn’t an ordinary bullet. It might have been explosive, with a hollow point.
“Another dumdum? The experts will determine that. I’m sorry, Eliah, but everyone present in the chapel will have to come in to testify. It’s necessary. Could the young lady provide us with an Identi-Kit of the man who tried to attack her?” As he turned toward Matilde and looked at her, Dussollier frowned. “That’s Roy Blahetter’s wife!”
Al-Saud looked at Matilde, who seemed so small and pale next to Juana.
“Yes,” he admitted reluctantly, “his widow.”
“This can’t be a coincidence, Eliah. We need her to give us a description of the attacker.”
“She will, Olivier. She said that she saw him from the front. Ahmed,” Al-Saud said, indicating the other bodyguard, “shot him in the back of the right thigh.”
“We’ll alert the hospitals.” He leaned forward as though to impart a confidence. “I know that this isn’t the moment to mention this, but thanks to my friendship with the head of Forensics, I have an advance on the autopsy of the Iraqi boys.” Al-Saud nodded, indicating that he should go on. “It seems that they were sprayed with some kind of nerve agent.”
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