Private Paris Read online

  “You can see he’s still in some pain, but damned if he’ll tell anyone,” Justine replied.

  “Cruz?”

  There was a moment of silence before she said, “He’s in Phoenix. His mother has breast cancer.”

  “Tell him my prayers are with him and his mother.”

  “I’ll do that,” she said. “Thanks.”

  I told her about Sherman Wilkerson and his granddaughter.

  “Sounds like she’s been through something traumatic,” she said.

  “Yeah, I wish you were here, to see if you could get her to open up.”

  “You telling me to pack my trousseau and fly to Paris?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I need you there to work the L.A. end of this. I want you to take a team to Sherman’s home and office. Look for signs he could be under surveillance.”

  “By who? French drug dealers?”

  “Honestly, Justine, I’m still trying to figure that out.”

  When I hung up, the shower was still running at Kim’s end of the suite. She’d been in there almost thirty minutes. But then again, I could see her wanting a long hot shower before crashing.

  A knock came at the door. Room service. The attendant wheeled in a cart, and made a racket lifting the metal covers over the plates, showing me a prime steak with béarnaise sauce, fresh asparagus, and crisp shoestring fries.

  I noticed the shower was off when I settled down to my meal. The meat was tender, and the fries were out of this world: crunchy outside and soft inside, not even the hint of oil. So when I finished every last bit of it, and washed the meal down with a cold Coca-Cola, I was evidently a rare man in Paris: a truly happy camper.

  And then I wasn’t.

  Over the street sounds echoing through the open balcony doors, I caught poor Kim Kopchinski’s muffled sobs. They were coming from deep in her gut, and made me feel horrible, made me wonder what in God’s name had happened to her and who the pale psycho with the shotgun was.

  I went to the door and raised my hand to knock, to comfort her if I could.

  But her sobbing ebbed to painful moans that reminded me of my mother’s when she’d locked herself in her bedroom after fights with my drunken father.

  I dropped my hand and did what I’d done for my mother back when I was a boy. I stood guard at the door until the moaning died out altogether.

  Part Two

  AB-16

  Chapter 11

  9th Arrondissement

  April 7, 1:45 a.m.

  ÉMILE SAUVAGE LEFT the Chaussée d’Antin Métro station. The major had changed from his army uniform and now wore a dark brown fedora, a thigh-length black leather jacket, and dark pants, gloves, and rubber-soled shoes. He noted to his satisfaction that the lens of the CCTV cameras inside and outside had been sprayed with fresh black paint.

  Well done, Epée.

  Walking briskly west on Boulevard Haussmann, Sauvage felt jittery, like a junkie in need of a fix. The major had spent most of his career in reconnaissance. For years he had led an elite NATO scout squad that probed the enemy’s front lines. The job was not only to find and document Taliban or Al-Qaeda positions but also to draw fire from their defenses.

  It took nerves of titanium and a love of la pagaille, a French military slang word that means “chaos in battle.” Sauvage had both traits, and in spades.

  The major had been in thirteen full-on gun battles in Afghanistan. Other officers, lesser officers, had withered when bullets flew or they saw men dying around them. But Sauvage thrived under such pressure, excelled because he had almost instantly become addicted to the sensations of war.

  Man against man. Kill or be killed. It was all primal and pure, and he loved it. Especially when the fight was over something that he believed in or opposed.

  Like tonight.

  Sauvage kept to the shadows thrown by the triangular-shaped Société Générale building to his immediate left and by the massive Galeries Lafayette shopping center on the other side of the boulevard. The sidewalks on both sides of the boulevard were largely empty, save for the lone pedestrian or two. And the few cars that passed all seemed in a rush to be somewhere else.

  At the west end of the block, where the boulevard gave way to a traffic roundabout, Captain Mfune was coming in his direction, dressed in civilian clothes. As they walked past each other, the captain said, “They went in twenty minutes ago. I’ll give you three.”

  “All I need,” Sauvage said, and kept on.

  At the west end of the Société building, Sauvage affected a drunken manner and wove to his left, toward the back of the Palais Garnier, the older and more famous of the two opera houses in Paris. The front of the opera house, which faced the Avenue de l’Opéra, was famously ornate and opulent in the beaux arts style. But the architecture at the rear of the building was drabber, almost plain.

  Still, Sauvage took it all in as he crossed the Rue Gluck toward the back gate to the palace. The palace was set well back from the street, and the roof of the main hall dropped away almost six stories to the roof of the backstage area, which had two wings jutting off it, one to each side. On the walls of the wings, long banners promoted upcoming performances of Handel’s Giulio Cesare. Between the wings there was a courtyard protected by a tall curving wall interrupted by three iron gates.

  The first gate was closed, as was the middle one, which was the largest of the three. The far gate, however—the one closest to the Rue Scribe—was open. Only a narrow traffic control arm blocked the way.

  Sauvage had the hood of his raincoat up and sang a drunken song as he walked past the gate, aware of the security guard sitting in a booth there, but not paying him a bit of attention.

  The major had taken five strides past the gate when there was a soft thud somewhere behind him. He slowed, glanced over his shoulder, and saw the first flames rising off the roof of the Galeries Lafayette.

  Chapter 12

  SAUVAGE PIVOTED AND stood there, watching the flames grow taller and wider. Seconds later, the opera security guard was running across the island in the rotary toward the shopping center, his cell phone pressed to his ear.

  The major dodged into the gate and vaulted the traffic control arm. He used a tiny can of hair spray to coat the lens of the security camera mounted on the security booth and kept moving. Sauvage ran toward the rear wall of the opera house’s backstage area.

  The major dashed up stairs, hearing the first sirens in the distance, and sprayed the camera above a door. It opened. He slipped inside and softly shut the door behind him. Immediately, the sirens were gone, silenced by the opera house’s thick acoustical walls.

  Sauvage heard only the clicking of a woman’s high heels now. He turned and saw Haja Hamid in the security lights. Her hair was dyed red and pinned up. She wore stiletto heels and a tight, black sleeveless dress that showed off the iron worker’s powerful muscles. Haja glanced back over her shoulder at the major, revealing ruby lips and eyes that were no longer ice gray, but as brilliantly blue as tanzanite.

  Sauvage got out a folding pocketknife with a razor-sharp blade and nodded to her. Gesturing onward with her chin, she led Sauvage through several turns in dark hallways before halting when a man’s voice echoed from just ahead.

  “Mariama?” he called. “Are you there?”

  “Coming, Henri,” Haja called.

  She held her hand behind her, signaling to Sauvage to creep along, even as she sped up, her heels cracking off the wood floor until he could no longer see her. The major slipped off his shoes, leaving him in a pair of thin neoprene socks. He locked the knife’s blade open, and then went on as a dog might, pausing to listen for sound, sniffing the air, feeling his way forward until he reached the wings off the stage, where only apron lights glowed.

  “My God,” Henri said. “Look at you. You’re a goddess.”

  Haja laughed and said, “You’re sure we won’t be bothered here?”

  “By who?” He chuckled. “The guards? They wouldn’t dare.”

&n
bsp; The major eased up to one of the curtains. His left gloved hand found the ropes that controlled it before he peeked around the curtain. Haja stood about ten feet away at the head of an Egyptian-looking couch. She faced a tall, patrician man coming toward her in an expensive suit, no tie. He carried a bottle of champagne and two glasses.

  “Pour me some, chéri,” Haja said.

  “With pleasure, my dear,” he replied.

  Sauvage took that as his cue. Slipping fully behind the curtain, he reached up and, with the blade, cut the curtain rope just above his hand. Holding that end, he crouched and cut the rope again where it passed through a floor pulley, giving him about three feet in total.

  He heard the cork pop and champagne pouring.

  “Come,” Haja said. “Sit by me.”

  Henri made a murmur of approval. The divan creaked under his added weight. “What shall we drink to?” he asked.

  “The future,” she said.

  “The future,” he said, and glasses clinked. “You are my muse, you know.”

  “So you said.”

  Hearing them sip, the major dared not move, and fought to slow his breath and heart as he unlocked the blade and slid it back in his pocket. Then he wrapped the rope around both of his gloved hands with fourteen inches of slack between, and waited.

  “I’ve thought about nothing but you all week,” Henri said. “It’s been maddening we couldn’t meet, and…you know.”

  “We needed a break,” Haja replied. “Kiss me?”

  “With the greatest pleasure.”

  Haja made a purr of contentment. There was a rustle of fabric, and Sauvage made his move, sliding out from behind the curtain. He spotted Henri on the couch, back turned in Haja’s embrace.

  Stealthy and supple, the major took four silent steps up behind him.

  Haja broke the kiss, laughed throatily, and pushed Henri back several inches. It was all Sauvage needed. He flipped the rope over the man’s head and wrenched it tight beneath his chin.

  Henri began to struggle, his hands flying to the rope as he let out a squeal of disbelief and fear. The choked man kicked over the champagne bottle and one of the glasses. The major ruthlessly wrenched him off the divan and onto the stage floor.

  “No,” Henri wheezed. “Please.”

  Sauvage realized he was saying this to Haja.

  But Haja only had eyes for the major as she rose from the couch and the older man’s struggles subsided into quivers and then death.

  “You are a revolutionary, Émile,” she said as he lowered the dead man until he lay on his side. “A man on the right side of history.”

  Twenty minutes later, they shut down the apron lights and made their way to the rear door of the backstage area. Sauvage opened it a crack and saw the security post still empty and cops, the guard, and other bystanders across the traffic circle watching firemen up on ladders, spraying down the smoking roof of the Galeries Lafayette.

  No one gave them a second glance when he and Haja slipped out the gate and strolled up the Rue Scribe, arm in arm and heads tilted inward, like lovers heading home after a nice late night on the town.

  Chapter 13

  SEVERAL SHARP KNOCKS woke me.

  Sweat poured off my head and I looked around wildly, realizing I was on the couch in the living room of my suite at the Plaza.

  The knock came again. I glanced at my watch. Two minutes to seven.

  “Coming,” I grunted, and got up to pad across the carpet to the door. I heard the shower start up again in Kim Kopchinski’s end of the suite.

  I looked through the peek hole. Louis Langlois was out in the hallway behind a room service cart laden with baskets of croissants and delicate pastries, and two carafes of coffee that immediately piqued my interest.

  “I didn’t know room service was part of your job description,” I said after opening the door to let him in.

  “It’s not,” Louis said. “But I adore the croissants here, so perfectly buttery and flaky, you know? I just could not wait for you to make the order.”

  When we returned to the living area, Louis began pouring us coffee. “She talk?”

  “Never left her bedroom,” I said.

  “What’s she been doing?”

  “Showering, crying, sleeping, and now showering again.”

  “Perhaps she is a compulsive obsessive?” Louis asked before taking a big bite of the croissant that melted his face into pure contentment.

  “You ask her that,” I said before tearing off a piece of croissant and popping it in my mouth. The taste was simply incredible, not like the stuff you get back in the States, even in the best of bakeries.

  “You like these, yes?”

  “Extraordinary,” I said, chewing and then taking a long sip of perfect café au lait. “God, how is it possible that the French eat like this every day and don’t weigh three hundred pounds?”

  “That is a cultural secret I am bound to keep,” Langlois said. He laughed and then sobered after glancing at the door to Kim’s room. “I suspect she has been abused.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  Louis drank more coffee and then said, “Many times when I have interviewed poor victims of such abuse, I have found that we could not collect evidence from their bodies because they had scrubbed them so clean.”

  I looked at the closed door, wondered if that was the case. It would certainly explain why she’d been so reluctant to talk to us.

  “Maybe we should bring in one of the women in your office,” I said. “Make her more comfortable.”

  Louis shook half a croissant at me and said, “A good idea. I’ll see to it at once.”

  He finished the pastry, drank down more coffee, got out his cell, and punched in the number for Private Paris. Interested to see what was going on back in the States on CNN, I turned on the television, getting instead a commercial for cheese on TF1, a French station. I was about to change the channel when the commercial ended and the screen switched to a Paris street scene at night. A crowd watched firemen spraying the roof of a smoking building.

  “Garde will be here in half an hour,” Louis said. “She’s excellent.”

  “What’s going on here?” I said, gesturing at the television.

  He stepped up beside me, listened, and then said, “A fire last night at the Galeries Lafayette. No one was injured. Must be a slow news day.”

  I looked from the television back to the closed doors to Kim’s bedroom. The shower was still going.

  Walking to the doors, I knocked lightly and called, “Kim?”

  I waited and then knocked louder, and called, “Kim, we have breakfast out here for you. Could you come out?”

  Hearing nothing in return, I glanced at Langlois, who squinted and then made a twisting motion with his right hand. I found the door locked, so I knocked loud enough to be heard easily over the falling water. Nothing again.

  “God help me if she’s cut her wrists in there,” I said, pulling out my electronic key card and jimmying the lock.

  It took me less than fifteen seconds to pry back the hasp and push open the door to find a rumpled bed, an open window, and a closed bathroom door. I almost went to the door to knock again, but I noticed a note on a piece of hotel stationery sitting on the dresser.

  Scrawled in big letters, it said, “Tell my grandfather I’m sorry to have bothered him in troubles of my own making. I’m sorry to everyone.”

  Chapter 14

  “SON-OF-A-BITCH,” I groaned, sure that she’d gone and done it—committed suicide on me.

  I wrenched open the bathroom door and was enveloped in steam. The bathtub was empty. So was the shower.

  “She’s running,” Louis said behind me.

  “Impossible,” I said, rushing out. “How could she have gotten out of here?”

  “The window?” He was already heading that way.

  But we were eighty feet up. She’d have to be a human fly.

  What about that locked door to that other bedroom? I ran t
o it, tried the knob, but found it still locked and no sign that the lock had been picked.

  Then I noticed the chair in the closet. It faced shelves and drawers and, high on the closet wall, an air duct, which was missing its grate. The hole would have been impossible for me or Louis to squeeze through. But Kim Kopchinski was certainly small enough.

  But could she get out? Or was she still in the ductwork somewhere?

  Jumping up on the chair, I peered into the duct and saw, ten or twelve feet away, a thick beam of light shining in where another grate had been.

  “Damn it,” I snapped, and jumped off the chair, finding Louis searching the bedroom. “She used the air system to get next door. But I heard her turn on the shower right before you knocked. She can’t be ten minutes ahead of us.”

  Louis yanked out his phone again, punched in a number, and began barking questions in French. I went out into the living area, grabbed my shoes, and laced them quickly.

  Louis stuck his phone in his pocket and started moving fast toward the suite door, saying, “My man outside, Farad, saw a woman matching Kim’s description leave the hotel ten minutes ago and head north. If she has not taken a taxi, we can catch her.”

  We bolted from the suite, ran to the stairs, and took them two at a time, emerging in the wide hallway between the hotel lobby and the dining room. A maître d’ holding breakfast menus smiled and then frowned when we sprinted by him toward the lobby.

  But an absolutely huge man in a $5,000 blue suit got in our way. He was at least six foot five and 230 pounds of solid muscle, with a thin beard and mustache, and there was a twisting coil of tubing running up his neck to the back of his ear.

  “I’m sorry. You can’t enter the lobby just yet,” he said in a Texas twang.

  “We have to get outside!” Louis cried. “What is this?”

  “We have members of the Saudi royal family checking in. I’m sorry, sir. As I understand it, you may exit through the Dior spa downstairs.”