The Paris Mysteries Read online

  When Harry showed up, we loaded up our trays and walked together to an empty table.

  I was fully aware of the kids around us, with their racket reverberating through the big hall. They seemed so young to me, so innocent. Nothing like me or my brothers.

  I dipped bread in my soup, and as I ate, I kept my eyes on Harry.

  His face was flushed. His hair was wild. His glasses were seesawing on the bridge of his nose. He was elated and hyper, which stirred up my darker-than-dark mood.

  Harry said, “You okay, Tandy?”

  “Me? I’m fine.”

  “Oh, right,” he said. “What do you call that toxic cloud right over your head?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re lying. You know it. I know it. And you know—”

  “So what do you want to tell me, Harry? I’m not asking you again.”

  “I’m not going to tell you,” he said, “but I’m definitely going to show you. After school.”

  I was this close to losing it, but my brother was on fire, and whatever had lit that little blaze, I had to go with it. I really couldn’t let him down.

  With permission from Jacob, Monsieur Morel dropped Harry and me off at a tram that took us to Suresnes, a western suburb of Paris. Harry was still being a jerk, giggling, whistling through his teeth, as we walked to an address on Rue Honoré d’Estienne d’Orves.

  I followed my brother up a couple of steps to an unmarked door that had been painted an attractive marine blue. He pressed an intercom button and said his name into the grille.

  The door opened with a loud double click.

  What the hell?

  “Harry, where are we? Is this your studio?”

  “Brace yourself, Tandy. As they used to say when the Beatles walked out onstage, your mind is about to be blown.”

  Harry was one of the few kids in our generation who could get away with familiar references to the Beatles.

  But then, Harry was named for George Harrison.

  The mysterious blue door opened into a long, chilly hallway with awards and photos of recording superstars from several continents jam-packing the walls.

  I recognized almost all the names and faces: CeeLo Green, Flo Rida, Celine Dion, Meshell Ndegeocello, Zazie, Adele, Selah Sue, and Sens Unik. And there were others, too many to count. I thought I could feel a vibration in those walls. But then, I was kind of a human tuning fork today.

  I could feel everything, especially total awe that I was standing in a gallery of all-stars—and they had all probably come through the hallway where Harry and I were walking now.

  I looked up as a door opened at the end of the hall and a tall man in black with dreadlocks and sunglasses came out.

  “Heyyyyy, Harry.”

  Then he opened his arms and wrapped Harry in a huge hug, rocked him a little bit, and said, “How ya doing, muh man? You ready to show your stuff?”

  Harry grinned and gripped the man’s hand before turning to me. “Tandy, this is my agent, Michael Pogue. Michael, this is my twin sister, Tandy.”

  Agent? Mystified, I shook hands with Monsieur Pogue, who said, “Enchanté, Tan-deee. Very wonderful to meet you on Harrison’s big, perhaps life-changing, day. Come in, come in. Meet some good people.”

  Harry and I followed Pogue into the “mix room” and were introduced to three men arranged in comfy chairs around a plank coffee table. They were all wearing sharp business suits and had good haircuts, and one had an interesting sculpted beard. They were talking to one another, but when Harry and I came in, they all stood up. Each gripped Harry’s hand and clapped him on the back.

  I could see curiosity in their faces. And naked hope.

  I was also introduced. I was an afterthought, but I didn’t care. These men were all here for Harry.

  I switched my attention to the wall-to-wall console at the front of the mix room, with its hundreds of sliding levers and dials. When the two men sitting at the controls swiveled around, I recognized them as the famous producers and recording engineers Yves Creole and Winter Knight. They were the brains and the engine of this first-class international chain of mix rooms called the Smart Blue Door.

  They shook my hand—well, actually, Mr. Knight took both my hands in his and mumbled praise for “the great Harry.”

  This was a huge moment for Harry, and I was so glad to be there for it. I watched him step through the door to the “live room.” I could see him and the entire studio through the window in front of the mixing console.

  Harry took his seat at right angles to a Fender Rhodes piano and a Hammond B-3 organ, both of which had been set up just for him.

  Sitting behind the drums was a thin, balding man wearing denim and checkered black-and-white eyeglass frames that had been tattooed onto his face. He began speaking earnestly to my brother, who looked both younger and older than his sixteen years.

  Monsieur Pogue led me to a seat with a view, saying, “Tandy, I know you’ve heard Harry play many times, but do you know the new piece he played for us yesterday? He calls it ‘Montmartre.’ ”

  Monsieur Creole had put on his headset and was speaking through his microphone to Harry and the percussionist. No one else spoke, not even the important-looking men sitting around me.

  All eyes were fixed on my brother.

  And then, looking right at me, Harry leaned into the microphone and said, “I wrote this for my sister Katherine. Actually, it’s for all the lost girls in Paris.”

  There was a hush in both rooms.

  Then Harry put his left hand on the keyboard of the Fender Rhodes piano, placed his right hand on the Hammond B-3 organ, and began to play.

  From the first notes, I knew that Harry had the “it” factor, the rare and genuine real genius thing. This music of his was entirely original and entirely Harry, but with some new quality I’d never heard before.

  No one had.

  I rubbed my arms from the chill of witnessing his greatness unfold. But still, I listened with a critical ear to the introductory chords from the piano as they set the stage for a series of arpeggios—broken chords where the notes in a chord are played one at a time within one octave.

  And somehow, tucked beneath the chords and arpeggios, Harry’s melody slowly came alive.

  Oh my God, Harry. How did you do this in two days?

  The melody was quiet, haunting in a sweet and beautiful way.

  Sometimes, while he played, Harry seemed to be missing, lost in the folds of his mind. At other times, he swiveled on his seat to play two-handed on one or the other instrument while his drummer kept time on the skins. That was when Harry smiled. After all he’d been through, he was happy.

  More than happy.

  He was transported to a magical place he’d created on his own, and now the music itself was filling me up.

  I felt Paris in his music. I heard Paris. I saw in the chords the grand stone buildings flanking the sumptuous boulevards while the arpeggios signaled the action: the musical embodiment of people and taxis dashing and darting about.

  But I couldn’t ignore a sadness in the chords that made me think of Katherine. Of loving her, of the giant void she’d left and the tragedy that she only got to live for sixteen years.

  And to tell the truth, I didn’t want to go there.

  If I’d given in to that feeling, I might have had a really ugly cry, and I couldn’t do that to my brother. Just as I was biting my lip to hold back the tears, here came Harry’s delightful dancing notes, like bursts of hope and optimism that also reminded me of the Katherine I’d known and loved so much.

  My sister.

  And it occurred to me that Harry was also reaching into both sides of himself in this piece. Showing the sadness and the rising light. To be able to write something this strong from the heart, to be able to convey it in music, was Harry’s gift in full. And it was a gift to everyone who was hearing him play.

  I looked at the men sitting around me, as well as the seasoned pros at the console; they all looked as mo
ved as I was, and more—as though they’d been truly swept away. One of the men wiped tears from his eyes with the back of his hand. Another lay back with his eyes closed and his arms opened, taking in the sound of the music entirely.

  When Harry took his fingers from the keys, the live room filled with praise from the recording execs, who couldn’t wait to tell my brother what I knew he’d been waiting to hear forever.

  “Harry, you’re fantastic. That’s seriously good stuff, man!”

  Monsieur Pogue came over to me.

  He said, “You must be so proud. We think your brother has got something—I have to say—unique.”

  I looked into Monsieur Pogue’s face and was afraid to speak. I nodded, and Monsieur Pogue saw the magnitude of what I was feeling. He put his arms out and hugged me.

  He then joined the others in the live room, but I stood outside the glass and watched Harry’s triumph. I could still hear the melody of his portrait of Katherine.

  Harry hadn’t been allowed to go to his friend Lulu’s funeral. And so I wondered if Lulu, like Katherine, had been one of those lost girls of Paris.

  Maybe I was one of them, too.

  We weren’t very graceful as we stumbled down the stairs to the street. We were whooping and yelling and my arms were around Harry’s neck and I was jumping up and down and squealing like a groupie, telling him how freaking great he was, monster great. When just at the edge of my vision, I saw a black SUV down at the corner of the block.

  “Harry!” I shouted, turning him around so he could see what I saw. “It’s that car.”

  The headlights came on, and the car began to move off the curb. It was coming straight toward us. Again I screamed, “Harry!” I ran back to the Smart Blue Door and jammed down all the intercom buttons with the flat of my hand.

  Harry was tugging at me. “Tandy, no. That’s a limo.”

  By then the limo had cruised up to the curb and stopped. A man in a black jacket and chauffeur’s cap stepped out and opened the rear door for us. That’s when I saw the discreet Smart Blue Door logo on the car’s door. Yeah, I felt like a complete and total fool.

  Harry spoke into the building’s intercom.

  “Sorry, Michael. No, everything’s fine. Talk to you soon.”

  We got into the limo, and Harry told the driver our address. Then he fell back against the seat.

  “So this was maybe the best hour of my life.”

  “I don’t have enough words to describe what it was like hearing you. But we can just start with a-maz-ing.”

  He was amazing, but was it within the human high-genius range of amazing? Or was it something else?

  I took Harry’s hand and asked once more. “You have to tell me the truth, Harry. Are you using the pills again? Are you? Harry? The truth.”

  “Tandy? I’ve told you the truth. Don’t ever ask me again.”

  “I didn’t mean to insult you, bro. I’m afraid, and I have good reason to be afraid.”

  I looked at the back of our driver’s neck through the Plexiglas transom. I flipped the switch to shut off all communication between the front and back compartments.

  And still, I spoke in a murmur.

  “Get ready,” I said softly to my twin. “I have to drop some bombs. I went through the rest of the papers in the basement and found love letters from Uncle Peter to Kath.”

  Harry drew back. My gentle brother looked shocked and disgusted and completely horrified.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “I have the letters. You can read them yourself.”

  “No freaking way. Kath wasn’t just sixteen to his what—forty? She was his blood relative! Uncle Pig is a perv. I’ve hated him my whole life. I really want to throw the hell up.” Harry buzzed down the window and let air blow over his face for a while.

  I wasn’t finished. I had to confess to Harry what I’d done.

  “Last night,” I said. “I was feeling too much, Harry. Like I was lying on train tracks while a hundred-car train rolled over me. So I took Num.”

  “Ha!” Harry shouted. “So that’s why you keep accusing me of using the pills. Because you’ve done it.”

  “I made a mistake. All Num did was make me process every dark feeling even faster. I need to slow this bullet train down, Harry. For some very good reasons, I think you should do the same.”

  Once we were home, I turned up the oven to “roast,” rubbed spices all over some chicken, put the bird into the oven, and set the timer. I snapped some beans like they’d done something mean to me. I chopped some fresh fruit with the same attitude, splashed peach brandy over it, covered the bowl with a damp cloth, and stashed it in our immense, triple-wide fridge.

  After that, I set up a plate of cheese and crackers and cornichons and capers and took all of it to the media room, where Jacob and Hugo were watching one of the Bourne sagas.

  “Uncle Jake. Please mind the chicken. I’ve got homework.”

  “Very good,” he said. “Thanks, Tandy.”

  I went upstairs and locked my door. I opened my laptop and looked up news articles about Angel Pharmaceuticals. I easily found the whole sordid story of the bankruptcy of my mother’s hedge fund, the collapse of Angel Pharma, and about a hundred links to articles about my parents’ deaths and every putrid thing that had spilled from that.

  I didn’t need to read any more about the New York justice system and what my brothers and I had been through and somehow survived. But I did open every link to Peter Angel.

  I reacquainted myself with his medical degree in pathology from Cornell, his early training at Pfizer, and a discovery he’d made in his thirties for a drug that relieved pain in patients with stomach cancer.

  Then he’d gotten funding—no specifics on that—and started Angel Pharmaceuticals with his younger brother, my father, who was a statistician with a degree in pharmacology.

  Everything else I found on Peter Angel was social. Namely, his bachelorhood, his famous dinner parties, his theatergoing and philanthropy. Pictures of him showed his characteristic flyaway hair and loud, expensive suits. Close-ups on his narrow, piggy eyes. One photo was taken at an after-theater dinner party at the Palm.

  That photo at the Palm was a wide shot in a packed and narrow room. The light was golden, and I recognized the caricatures of celebrities on the walls and the giant slabs of steak in front of the diners.

  But my eyes locked on something else.

  There was a man sitting at the table behind Peter, someone I almost recognized. I read the caption under the photo. The name jumped out at me like a mugger in an alley. And there it was, another connection between Uncle Peter and our family enemy, my enemy in particular.

  The man sitting at the table behind my uncle Peter was Royal Rampling.

  I stared at the photograph that linked my uncle Peter and Royal Rampling, and I felt another mood come over me. A bad mood. Paranoia.

  I reflected on that super-romantic night in the Hamptons when James and I were, without warning, nailed to the dunes by blinding headlights, then snatched and separated, each of us screaming the other’s name.

  When I woke up—or more likely, regained consciousness—it was daylight. The van that had taken me was parked in the semicircular driveway of a sterile white building I later learned was a mental institution. I was dragged from the van, and for weeks after that, I was treated with talk, drug, and electric-shock therapy that together practically rewired my brain.

  I forgot about James. Forgot I ever knew him.

  And I forgot the faces of the men in the van.

  Suddenly, a new memory crept into my brain… one that I hadn’t recalled before.

  I remembered a man who stood by and watched as I was wrestled into the building, just after the hood was taken off my head. I saw his features now with a clarity I could hardly believe. I saw the messy ginger hair, got a glimpse of narrow, colorless eyes. It was my uncle Peter. Damn him.

  It wasn’t paranoia if my uncle Peter had his fingers in the pie. Make that a
hand. No, make that both hands, and maybe he’d even masterminded the whole criminal kidnapping affair for my parents.

  That frightening thought only made me question Peter’s older brother more, the brother Peter had called in to watch over the Angel kids.

  Yes. Uncle Peter had hired Jacob.

  True, Jacob had put us back together and practically hand-carried us to our grandmother’s house and our inheritance.

  But why had Peter turned us over to Jacob? Because he couldn’t be bothered being our guardian? Or because Jacob was an undercover agent?

  More questions without answers.

  I got up from my computer, pushed a slipper chair across the floor, and wedged its back under the doorknob. I double-checked the locks on the windows and drew the curtains. When I was sure no one could get in, I got into bed and opened my laptop.

  I had a letter in mind. I addressed it to my uncle Peter.

  I couldn’t write the word Dear in front of his name. I didn’t even want to call him my uncle. He wasn’t family to me anymore.

  I hated him more than anyone I’d ever known, and that put him at the top of a list of supremely heinous people.

  Peter had not just been a saboteur and a dark presence to all of us because he could get away with it; he had sunk below my lowest expectations when he wrote those pervy letters to Katherine.

  The letters were apologetic.

  What had Peter done to Katherine when he wasn’t writing to her? I wrote:

  Peter,

  I read what you wrote to Katherine, and it made me sick. How could you have designs on a child? I have a sickening feeling that I don’t know even a fraction of the evil you have done. You’re a psychopath. A real-life monster.

  Be warned, I’m onto you. I’m investigating you, and when I uncover your criminal activities, I will take action.

  Tandoori Angel

  I had Peter’s e-mail address. I could have easily sent this bomb right to his in-box, but I didn’t do it.