Private Paris Read online

  Chapter 81

  THE HILLY TERRAIN on the other side of the wall was covered in dense rows of stained grave markers, ornate mausoleums, and marble and limestone statues set amid leafy hardwood trees that made it difficult to see far. So I jumped.

  I landed in a crouch inside Père-Lachaise cemetery and scanned all around me. I didn’t see him at first. But then I caught sight of his head and shoulders about a hundred yards ahead. He was weaving through the tombs, heading northwest at an angle away from me. Had he seen me?

  I ran forward to the nearest large crypt and peeked around the corner. Piggott hurried on, but no longer sprinted. He hadn’t seen me come over the wall.

  Had he seen me back there? He’d definitely seen Louis, but me? Once he had committed to fleeing Louis, I never saw him look back. He’d never hesitated because he’d scouted his escape route, and knew that the wall to Père-Lachaise cemetery would be a barrier to most pursuers.

  Epée had not gotten a good look at me, I decided. But I couldn’t take any chances. I had to change my look and I had to do it fast. Stripping off my jacket, I tossed it on a grave, leaving me in jeans and a pressed white dress shirt as I hustled to keep him in sight.

  I soon spotted him again, continuing northwest. He kept checking his back trail, but I’d gone off it by fifty yards or so, paralleling him through the gigantic graveyard for ten minutes, maybe more.

  Then he stopped to take a sweeping look around. I had no place to hide, so I just went to my knee and acted grief-stricken before the nearest gravestone.

  Epée turned and walked on. He had to have seen me there, but to my relief, he had not bolted. Still, with the white shirt, I was sure he’d recognize me the next time he checked for followers.

  I wasn’t wearing an undershirt, so stripping a layer was not an answer. I’d almost surrendered to the idea that he was going to spot me at some point when he led me to the answer.

  Epée skirted a large group of people gathered at a grave I remembered. I kept the crowd between us as I hustled toward the mourners, already hearing the music of the Doors playing.

  Fifty pilgrims of all ages, sexes, and sizes surrounded Jim Morrison’s grave this time, so I had my pick of disguises. I chose a beefy guy with an Irish pie face who looked fairly drunk on his bottle of Jim Beam.

  “Son of Fenway?” I asked, whipping out my wallet. “I’ll give you a hundred euros for your Sox hat and sweatshirt.”

  “Nah, man. We’re talking Boston Strong here.”

  “Three hundred euros,” I said, pulling out a wad of bills.

  He shrugged, took the money, and handed me the red hat and matching hoodie. I had to jog to catch up this time, tugging the sweatshirt on over my shirt and pulling the cap down tight over my blond hair.

  For several nerve-racking minutes I thought I’d blown it, that Epée had doubled back or used some other technique to shake me. Then I spotted him far ahead, moving northeast.

  Using that parallel trailing technique, I followed him to a gate that opened out onto Rue des Rondeaux. He crossed the street and continued on the Avenue du Père-Lachaise, with me hanging well back in pedestrian traffic until I saw him enter the Place Gambetta and circle toward the Métro stop.

  I sprinted after Epée and was less than twenty yards behind him when he went through the turnstiles. I waited until he was well down the stairs to jump the stiles and race after him, a Métro worker ranting behind me.

  I got on the subway car behind the tagger, heading east on the 3 train, and then managed to loosely trail him through the Père-Lachaise Métro station to the 2 train northbound. I got into a car in front of him. He got off five stations later, at Jaurès, which also serves the S line.

  Jaurès was a small station, but I’d bought a dark blue Windbreaker from a college kid on the train and wore it as I exited after Epée, and got on the same car going in the direction of Bobigny.

  I stood with my back to Epée, and never looked his way.

  Epée got off at the fifth stop, Église de Pantin. I waited until the last second to toss away the Red Sox hat and get out the door. There were no more than seven people leaving the train, so I wasn’t going to hide easily. I improvised, picking up a discarded newspaper and putting it under my arm.

  Exiting the station, I spotted a clear public trash bag, went to it, and fished out a plastic bag filled with the remains of a meal. The light was fading now, and I hoped I’d be able to avoid detection if I just kept switching up the things I carried or wore, and stayed back.

  Epée turned left out of the station and then left again onto a pedestrian mall that wandered north. Trees made the mall a place of shadows and a surprisingly popular hangout for the youth of Pantin.

  Using the shadows and the thirty or forty teenagers smoking and posturing in the area, I was able to stay in visual contact with Piggott until he reached the far end of the mall and took a right onto a footpath.

  The footpath ran along a canal. There were many joggers on the path. Still, I felt uneasy as I followed Epée past construction sites toward abandoned factories and warehouses along the canal’s south side.

  Light was fading. We were a solid eighty yards apart, but I didn’t think I could remain below his radar if he led me to a less frequented spot. Piggott neared a bend in the path and an old building covered in brilliant graffiti. The tagger didn’t give the art a second glance.

  He did, however, stop to look back along the footpath, and there weren’t enough joggers in the way to shield me. He saw me ambling along for sure.

  But I didn’t seem to pose a threat because he calmly pivoted and strolled on beneath a pedestrian bridge that spanned the canal. The closer I got to the bridge, the more I thought about the fact that he had ignored the graffiti on the building. Even in the streetlight, the colors were impressive.

  Then it hit me. He knows this place. He comes here often enough that he wouldn’t give the artwork a second glance. Epée was close to his destination.

  A jogger went by me, and up the stairs to the pedestrian bridge. I followed him. The bridge had high steel-mesh walls to keep people from jumping off into the canal, which stank.

  I walked out onto the bridge and casually glanced back along the footpath. Piggott had turned toward a large four-story building. It was old, perhaps the oldest of all the abandoned buildings in the area, and the only one that seemed to have been constructed entirely out of wood.

  The roof had once been tin like the others, but it looked as though the metal had been stripped for salvage. There were stacks of it leaning up against the front of the building, partially covering faded white paint and the word linen.

  Walking on across the bridge toward the north bank of the canal, I saw Epée go to a door that had a condemnation notice on it and knock. A moment later, the door opened and he disappeared inside.

  Chapter 82

  Pantin, northeastern suburbs of Paris

  6:15 p.m.

  HAJA CLOSED THE door behind Epée, saying angrily, “You’re not supposed to be here. We’re just about to leave.”

  He noticed that she and Amé were wearing robes.

  “What’s going on?”

  “What’s going on is you’re not supposed to be here.”

  “Why are you wearing robes?”

  “Forget the robes,” Amé said. “Why are you here?”

  The tagger said nothing for several beats before blurting out, “Louis Langlois—the head of Private Paris—he came after me as I was leaving my flat.”

  Haja’s expression soured. “What do you mean, came after you?”

  “He was just there all of a sudden, saying something about my father. But why would he be there, you know?”

  “So what happened?” Amé demanded. “What did he say? More importantly, what did you say?”

  “I didn’t say a goddamned word,” he replied fiercely. “I took one look at him, figured it couldn’t be a good thing, and took off. He’s, like, in his fifties. Didn’t stand a chance. I climbed the
back wall of Père-Lachaise, and it was over.”

  “You’re sure you weren’t followed?” Haja asked.

  “Like I said, it was over at the wall.”

  “But now he thinks you’ve got something to run about,” Amé said.

  “I do have something to run about. We all do.”

  “Have you told Sauvage?” Haja asked.

  “I don’t have his new burn cell number, or Mfune’s.”

  “I’ll call him,” Haja said. She punched in the number, handed the phone to Epée.

  He told the story again. Sauvage said nothing until the end.

  “You’re positive you were clean after the cemetery wall?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want you out of Paris immediately,” the major said. “Haja will give you money and the address of a safe house in the south. Let me speak to her.”

  Epée handed Haja the phone.

  Haja took the phone, listened, and nodded. “I’ll get both taken care of.”

  She hung up and said, “We’ll give you ten thousand euros, and the address. Move in disguise. Use burn phones.”

  “Okay,” the tagger said.

  “It’s out in the factory with the creature,” Haja said, and went through another door into the cavernous space that held her sculpture.

  The place was only dimly lit, but the beast loomed above them, looking otherworldly and fantastic. Epée tripped over electric cables on the floor.

  “It’s all hitched up?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Haja said curtly as she went to the table where she kept her tools.

  Epée peered at the creature and thought he saw where the electrical cables attached to the lower legs of the beast. He pivoted to ask her if he was—

  Haja’s powerful arms and shoulders were already swinging a piece of rebar. It cracked against the side of the tagger’s head. Fire and pain seized his brain, and he crashed to the ground.

  Haja stepped over Epée’s quivering body and hit him again, so hard she heard and felt his skull cave in.

  “God. What did you do that for?” Amé whined.

  “He became a liability,” Haja replied coldly. “Émile said we had to martyr him for the cause.”

  Chapter 83

  DARKNESS FELL. THE number of joggers running along the canal dwindled to stragglers, and all of them were on the better-lit south bank, which was a problem.

  In the twenty minutes that had passed since Epée went into the old building, I’d wanted to call Louis and tell him roughly where I was. But the two or three runners who came by either laughed at my pitiful efforts at French—one of them said that I spoke the language like a Spanish cow—or shook their heads at my request to use their cell phones, and carried on.

  I decided to go back across the bridge and was a quarter of the way across when the door that Epée had used opened, and two Muslim women wearing dark brown robes and head scarves exited and headed west carrying large shopping bags with a logo on them that I couldn’t make out. One of them glanced up at me as I continued to cross toward them. She craned her head around and did it again after they’d walked beneath the south end of the bridge.

  I continued on, as if I hadn’t a care in the world. When I started down the stairs, I meant to find a cell and wait for Louis before entering the building in search of Piggott. But when I looked after the retreating figures of the Muslim women, there was something about the way they were walking, as if there was something heavy in their shopping bags.

  Blame it on my time in Afghanistan, because there was nothing rational or logical about it, but at the bottom of the stairs I decided to go with my instincts, abandon Piggott, and follow the women. They seemed even warier than Epée. It took all of my skills to stay below their radar. They turned left into that pedestrian mall. I stripped the Windbreaker, leaving the red hoodie exposed, and ran to catch up.

  Fewer than half the teens were still hanging out in the area, but there were still enough of them that I didn’t seem to arouse the attention of the two women as they headed toward the main drag.

  Instead of turning right toward the Métro station, however, they hung a hard left past a bar called the Pause, which was bustling with a happy hour crowd. I drifted toward a group of men and women chatting merrily, but stayed focused on the two women hurrying down the sidewalk.

  I had a moment of doubt, thinking that I should go back and sit on Piggott, but then the women veered toward a small blue Suzuki two-door SUV. They opened the driver’s and passenger doors and popped forward the front seats so they could put the bags in the back.

  They climbed in and started the car.

  I didn’t know what to do. They pulled out of their parking spot and up to a red traffic light. I went to the curb as if I meant to cross the street. I memorized the license plate but could tell little about the women because they had their visors down.

  The light changed. The engine revved and the vehicle drifted forward. For an instant a streetlamp lit up the interior enough that I could see the shopping bags.

  The driver must have slipped her foot off the clutch pedal because the Suzuki suddenly bucked. Several pieces of what looked like white gravel fell off the rear bumper into the gutter. The car caught gear and roared off.

  Stepping down off the curb, I picked up a piece of the gravel and saw that it was actually a powdery blue color. I smelled it, tasted it, spit it out, and felt my suspicions become hard convictions.

  Spinning around, I jumped out into the street in front of an oncoming maroon and black Citroën, waving my hands wildly. The old car skidded to a stop inches from my knees, and I could see that the elderly woman driving was wide-eyed and scared.

  I came around, opened the door, and climbed in. She was hunched over and gray, easily in her late seventies, but she began to hit me backhand with her fist and scream, “Non! Non! Police! Police!”

  “Je suis avec police!” I said, fending off the blows, trying to dig out my ID. “Privé Paris police. Suivez la voiture bleu là! Le Suzuki! C’est les defaceurs de l’Institut de France! AB-16. Vous comprenez?”

  I was butchering the language, but she must have gotten the gist of what I was trying to say, because she stopped hitting me and looked down the street, where the Suzuki was making a U-turn to go east on the N3 highway, before crying in an angry voice, “Ah bon!”

  Then she pegged the gas, popped the clutch, and we squealed out of there with the tires smoking.

  Chapter 84

  SHE SPOKE NO English and suffered badly from scoliosis, but that old lady was sharp as a tack and could have given Danica Patrick a run for her money.

  Weaving in and out of traffic with deft shifting of the gears and an easy touch at the wheel, she Tokyo-drifted us through the U-turn, and quickly brought us to within two cars of the Suzuki in moderate traffic. She chattered almost nonstop, as if she hadn’t had a listener in a while, and even though I was definitely missing the nuances of her monologue, I learned that her name was Eloise La Bruyere. Madame La Bruyere was a retired librarian. She had learned to drive from her husband, who had been involved in rally car racing and was now deceased.

  At seventy-nine, Madame La Bruyere lived alone and rather liked it that way. Her children—two sons and a daughter—did not visit enough. She had six grandchildren, one of whom had purple hair. Best of all, she took great pride in France and her culture, and therefore hated AB-16, which she knew all about from the newspapers.

  “We have to fight them,” she declared more than once, shaking her bony fist. “France cannot be destroyed. We must throw them all out!”

  When I finally got a word in edgewise, I managed to ask her if she had a cell phone, and she shook her head and muttered something dismissive about them that I didn’t get.

  The Suzuki stayed on the N3 for five or six miles before taking the N370 north. Madame La Bruyere trailed them like a pro, keeping three, four, and sometimes five cars between us, and all the while fuming about the “Muslims and immigrants” out to destroy her
beloved country. Indeed, when she saw the two women get off at the Sevran exit and head east, Eloise went into a minor tirade about the area and the immigrants who lived there.

  She drove us down the Boulevard de Stalingrad, past shabby shopping malls and drab clusters of high-rise public housing projects. Judging by the broken shop windows and charred cars along the route, Sevran had been a hub of violence the night before.

  The people on the sidewalks seemed tense, in a hurry to be home and off the streets as armed French soldiers prepared for curfew. I thought about having Madame La Bruyere stop so I could tell one of the soldiers what was going on, but feared losing track of the two women.

  The Suzuki took a left and headed north on a side street. We lost them several minutes later, when an ambulance blocked us from following them onto the narrow, windy Rue de Rougemont.

  “Où sont-elles?” Madame La Bruyere kept saying, meaning, “Where are they?”

  I was peering anxiously down every alley and side street and didn’t see the women anywhere. I feared we’d been spotted. A sinking sensation was drilling through my lower belly when the road bent hard left. Going around that tight curve, I got a good look down a lane that led to an old church.

  The Muslim women had parked, back bumper facing the wall of the church. They were out of the vehicle, toting those heavy shopping bags, and heading from right to left and out of my vision.

  For a beat I couldn’t remember the word for stop, but then sputtered, “Arrêtez! Arrêtez!”

  Madame La Bruyere screeched the old Citroën to a stop. I kissed her on the cheek, jumped out of the car, and said, “Merci, madame!”

  Chapter 85

  Sevran, northeastern suburbs of Paris

  7:10 p.m.