French Kiss, page 49
She shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. It is the peculiar ability of the French to make everyone else feel inferior through our art.”
They were surrounded by perhaps the most famous columns in Paris. On them were paintings and drawings by Picasso, Chagall, and Léger, Parisian artists who were penniless more often than not. In this city of light their art had been their only wealth. With it they ate and drank and, here, passed the time in each other’s splendid company.
He sipped his beer. “What did you think of it?”
“Well…” It was at that moment that Soutane realized she could not remember one piece of art they had seen. For that matter, she couldn’t recall what the interior of the Musée d’Orsay looked like.
The afternoon had not gone as planned. Having gained the Left Bank, she had made them turn around. But, returning to the hotel, they had not found Chris, and he had left no message with the desk as to where he had gone.
It was already dinnertime when they had emerged from the museum. Soutane had phoned the hotel, but Chris had not yet returned.
“What’s up?” Seve said, pushing his plate away. He didn’t know whether it was the headache or the pains in his neck, but he had no appetite. “In Spain they say it is easier to talk to someone who hasn’t shared your life.”
“Is that where you’re from? Spain?”
“Where my brother and I were born, yeah.” He shrugged. “I don’t remember it, though. My folks came to the United States when I was two. I think it was the best thing they ever did.” He had that pride in America all immigrants shared. He looked over at her plate. “Are you gonna eat those?”
“No. Do you want them?”
“Absolutely not,” he said, calling for the waiter. “It’s just that the smell is making me sick. What part of the pig are they made from?”
Soutane laughed. “In your state you’re better off not knowing.” With the table cleared, they ordered coffee.
She saw him looking around at the spacious room with its clusters of brass-rail-topped booths, crammed with diners, and said, “What are you doing?”
“Aren’t there always celebrities here?”
“There are, but don’t look for them. What is most important at La Coupole is maintaining le snobisme. When Giacometti would spend rainy afternoons here sketching on napkins, no one stared. When Beckett and Buñuel and Josephine Baker sat down to eat, no one pointed them out. One observed them out of the corners of one’s eyes.”
“Those are names from long ago.”
She shrugged. “The same holds true for Catherine Deneuve or Jean-Paul Belmondo.”
“It’s not the same,” he observed. “Once there was Fitzgerald, Modigliani, and Man Ray.”
She nodded. “Nothing’s the same. You should know that.”
“In a cop’s world,” he said, “everything stays the same. Don’t you know that’s how we catch criminals? In the end they can’t help repeating themselves over and over. It’s pathetic, really.”
He went off through the gold and red glow to try calling Diana, but had no luck. When he returned, he said, “Seriously, what’s the matter? You didn’t eat a thing.”
“Neither did you.”
“I’ve got an excuse. I’ve got more aches and pains than an eighty-year-old, and God alone knows what these pills are doing to my insides. What’s your story?”
Soutane stirred sugar into her coffee. When she had watched the spoon revolve long enough, she said, “Last night, in bed, I called out Terry’s name.”
“Yeah? So?”
“I was with Chris at the time.”
“Ah.”
She licked the spoon, put it aside. “Now there’s a cogent statement.”
“Well, I didn’t know—that is, it hadn’t occurred to me that you two—“
“And now that you do?”
“I wonder what it’s like to sleep with two brothers.”
Soutane almost threw the coffee into his face, and he knew it. Nevertheless, he did not move.
Soutane said, “Unless you’re gay, you’ll never know.”
“Brothers, sisters, what’s the difference? You know what I meant.”
“Oh, I know, all right.” She was very angry.
“It’s only natural to wonder about it. I’ll bet Chris was thinking the same thing just after you said ‘Terry’ in his ear.”
“Nonsense.” But she could see the peculiar look on Chris’s face when they left him in the hotel, and she knew Seve was right.
Seeing her expression, Seve said, “I’m a stranger, see. I figure if you ask a question, I can tell you the truth.” He downed half his coffee. “By the way you showed commendable restraint there when you kept your coffee in your cup.”
“How is it you can make me laugh even when I’m angry at you?”
His grin widened. “It’s something my old man taught me. He told me it was a survival trait. That and carrying bricks was all he knew.”
“Chris left a girl behind in New York.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“You do?”
“Only from the police file. Her name’s Alix Layne. She was severely injured when Trangh broke into Chris’s apartment. She’s an assistant district attorney. Do you know what that is?” Soutane shook her head. “A prosecuting lawyer for the city of New York.”
“He’s been trying to get through to her in the hospital.”
“Well, I think that’s a lost cause,” Seve said.
“Why? How badly was she hurt?”
“Bad enough. Trangh slit her throat.”
“Oh, God.” Her spoon clattered against the side of her cup.
“It was a mess, all right.” He was looking at her shrewdly. “What are you thinking, that Chris will go back to her because of what she’s been through?”
“Right now I don’t know what to think, except that I wish this were all over. I wish Trangh were dead.”
“You and me both, lady.”
She put her head in her hands. “But he’s not. Somewhere, he’s out there. We’ve got to find him and stalk him so that we can get to the Magician.”
“Listen,” Seve said, “you don’t have to do anything. You can walk away right now, and forget Trangh ever existed.”
“Do you think I can forget that Terry ever existed, or what Trangh did to him?”
“It’s not the same.”
“Why? Because I’m a woman?”
“Because you’re not a cop.”
“That wasn’t what you were going to say and you know it.”
He looked down into his coffee cup. He tried to imagine Diana tracking down Trangh, if Trangh managed to kill him. He could not. He didn’t think she could. “You’re right,” he admitted. “Being a cop—having a cop’s mentality is part of it. But the truth is I don’t think a woman’s got either the fortitude or the single-mindedness to see this kind of manhunt through to the end.”
“I suppose you think a woman will stop to have a baby or two and then, maternal instincts rampant, will forget all about it.”
He smiled a little at her facetiousness. “Women always seem to have more on their minds than death. Let’s just say that Jack the Ripper could not have been a woman, and leave it at that.”
“I’ll find Trangh,” Soutane said, “and I’ll kill him.”
“Don’t do it on my account, lady.”
She snorted. “I wouldn’t worry about that.”
He grinned, and she saw that it had all been a ruse to keep her in the hunt. What did he know about Porte de Choisy, or Paris, for that matter? He needed her, as bait and as a guide.
“What would you do without me?” she said.
He drank his coffee. “All female bravado aside,” he said, “I don’t want you tackling Trangh alone. You’ve done that once before, and we know the result.”
Her face went white with rage. “That bastard Chris. I told him in confidence.”
Seve nodded. “Maybe so. But the situation’s changed radically. He told me out of concern for you. He—“
“I don’t care why he told you.”
“I don’t believe you. It would take someone inordinately stupid or ignorant to feel that way, and you’re neither.”
“You think you know it all, don’t you?”
“I am a seeker after truth,” he said. “My profession demands that knowledge be the most valuable commodity.” He pushed his cup around on its saucer. “To answer your question in a less oblique manner, I know what I see and hear, nothing more.”
“When I see Trangh again,” she said, “I’ll kill him. You’re a fool if you don’t believe that.”
Seve shrugged. “I don’t doubt that you’ll want to try, and that would be a shame, because right now Trangh will eat you up. According to Chris’s account, you’re far too frightened. Is he wrong?”
Soutane turned her head away, but remained silent.
“It would be unnatural for you not to be terrified of Trangh,” Seve said gently.
“It’s not Trangh I’m scared of,” she said. “It’s myself.” She told him of how she had been trained, of how Mun had taught her how to kill. But she stopped short of telling him that she had killed someone. That part was too private, too painful—she had already questioned the wisdom of telling Chris. His knowing about the murder, and how her subsequent remorse had caused her to try to take her own life, made her feel weak and vulnerable. Seve had a disturbing way of making her feel that way as it was.
“It sounds to me like Mun had the right idea in training you.”
“That’s a simplistic way to look at it.”
“Yeah? I think it’s realistic.”
Soutane cocked her head. “How does your wife react to your lack of emotion?”
“I’m not married.”
“Your girlfriend, then.” She looked at him. “You do have a girl back in New York.”
“A girl?” he said, thinking of Diana. “I don’t know.”
She laughed. “What kind of answer is that, you don’t know?”
“There is someone,” he said tentatively, “but I’m not sure—“
“About her, or about yourself?”
He finished his coffee. “Let’s go. This place is too crowded, anyway.”
“Just like New York, isn’t it?” She put a hand over his. “Sit down. Please. Didn’t you say that we were both strangers? There isn’t anything we shouldn’t be able to say to one another.” She laughed. “Besides, you don’t know me well enough to be offended by anything I’ll say. And I don’t know you well enough to feel I have to lie to protect your feelings.”
Seve settled back down. In the wooden booth next to them, a woman in a black raw silk Chanel dress and a leopard-skin hat pinned to her blond hair with a diamond brooch was busy eating oysters. She hadn’t bothered to remove her opera gloves.
“This isn’t at all like New York,” Seve observed. When more coffee had been brought, he told her about Diana, winding up by saying, “I’ve never been good at relationships. My job takes up too much of my life.”
“That must be convenient.”
“What?”
“I mean, it must make it easy for you to get out of relationships when they start to get too serious, or too uncomfortable.”
“Hey, you’ve got it all wrong. It isn’t like that at all.”
“No? Don’t you like your bachelor comfort?”
“A cop—especially one like me—doesn’t know the meaning of comfort. More often than not, I spend all night in the front seat of my car. I eat cold, greasy french fries, and coffee so thick you could use it as lampblack.”
“I wasn’t talking about your job,” Soutane said. “I was talking about you. I think serious emotions from anyone who is close make you uncomfortable.”
“Jesus, I don’t even know what serious emotions are,” he said.
“Stop kidding yourself. Everyone knows. The only question is whether they choose to acknowledge them.”
“How come you know so much about this?”
“I’m surprised you have to ask,” she said. “I love two brothers, and it’s tearing Chris up inside.”
A group of teenagers came slouching through the glass doors and, at the behest of the maître d’, threw themselves into a booth. Within moments there was enough cigarette smoke around them to start a funeral pyre.
Seve seemed to stare at them or at nothing, for a long time. At last he turned back to Soutane. “The truth is, I’m frightened.”
“Of getting involved? Everyone is.”
He shook his head. “That’s not it, or at least not the important part.” He looked around. “I want to order a drink.” He asked for a whiskey, and she watched him swallow it in one gulp. “What I am afraid of is death.”
“But that’s ridiculous,” she said. “Look at what your profession is. You should have become a bookkeeper or a librarian.”
“Maybe. But I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself.”
“So you became a cop to prove to yourself that you weren’t afraid.”
He nodded. “In a way.” He thought of his father. Maybe it was to prove it to you, Pop, he thought. “It was why I enlisted in the army, anyway. After I got back home, it seemed the logical thing to continue to protect and serve.”
“And your girl?”
“It’s bad enough, this fear, with just me. But with a family…”
“Maybe a family would make the fear go away,” Soutane said. “Did that ever occur to you? In a way, a family is the continuation of life, even after death.”
Seve felt the warmth of the liquor still burning in his chest. The woman in the Chanel dress was finished with her oysters. Now he could see, sitting beside her, a curly-headed miniature poodle, quiescent and trusting, its eyes filled only with her.
On the other side of the room the teenagers in the booth were lost in a Gauloise haze. Two of them—a pair of girls in sleeveless tops and skirts like sagebrush—were dancing, taking turns twirling and being twirled down the aisles. The white-jacketed waiters sidestepped this apparently dangerous missile with admirable sangfroid. They had seen it all before.
He closed his eyes. “Can we go back to the hotel? My head hurts.”
When Alix opened her eyes, she saw an unfamiliar face. The last she remembered was a vague feeling of motion as they had wheeled her, already half out, into the operating room. An impression of white and stainless steel, a womb run by a gigantic engine, throbbing with the double beat of a heart.
And then a dream of falling, endlessly falling. The farther she falls, the more terrified she becomes because the more certain she is that she will never survive the end of the descent. Because the deeper she goes, the faster she falls, and the closer she is to the end.
Then, in the dim, subterranean light she sees Dick standing on a ledge. She calls out to him, he turns his head to grin at her as she flashes by.
She screams.
And below her, sees Christopher standing on another ledge. He holds out his arms, and she knows that he has the strength and the courage to catch her. He is not afraid, as she suspects Dick was, of her weight and momentum flinging him off the ledge.
He smiles as she nears his outstretched arms, and she knows she is saved. Until, at the last instant, he snatches his arms away.
No! she screams. No!
Falling.
Faster and faster, until…
“Alix, can you hear me?” Max Steiner said.
Alix blinked, searching her memory for a name to go with the face. “Do I know you?” she said.
She saw etched on his face an expression somewhere between concern and elation.
“My God,” he said, “I’ve got to get the doctor. You can speak!”
She reached out tentatively. She was going in and out, nothing seemed real. Part of her, having been betrayed by Dick and Christopher, was still falling. Grabbing onto his sleeve made holding on to consciousness that much easier. Still, it taxed her. She was very tired.
“Don’t go.” Her voice, more a blistered croak, sounded odd. But good. So good!
“My name is Max Steiner,” he said. “I’m a friend of Chris’s.”
“You’re taking care of my son.”
He nodded, happy to be having a conversation with her at all. “He’s a fine boy, Alix.”
“Is he all right?” Her eyelids were drooping. She lacked the energy even to keep them open. But there was so much she wanted to say, so much she needed to tell him. First and foremost about Dick. She wanted Dick out of there. She wanted Max to keep him away from Danny.
But she was falling, faster and faster, into night.
“Jesus, look at you,” Brad Wolff said. His men, coming off the launch, were all over the boat. They were better than bloodhounds.
He beckoned, and a tall, bespectacled man with thin hair and liver spots on the backs of his hands cracked open an old-fashioned doctor’s bag. “Give her the once-over,” Wolff said.
Diana, wrapped in a coarse blanket, was sitting up against a bulkhead. She thought that Wolff had responded to her call in record time. No wonder Seve trusted him.
She gave Wolff the ten digits. “Run it through the phone company and see what you get,” she said. “It was the number Parkes was calling when I got to him.” She winced as the doctor got to the area where she had been kicked.
“Nothing broken.” The doctor seemed to be talking to his liver spots.
Wolff, staring at Parkes’s body through the forest of forensic specialists, said, “You didn’t get all your training at the academy.”
Diana gave him a little smile, then immediately bit her lip as the doctor hit another sensitive point. “I had some private lessons.”
“With what, a Mack truck?”
Now she did laugh. “Ow. No. Someone a bit more refined.”
“There’s nothing refined about what you did to Reed Parkes.”
“He was going to kill me.”
“Hey.” Wolff swung around. “That wasn’t a rebuke. I’m damn glad I sent you and not another operative who would have been less qualified to handle this monster.”
“Still, I killed him. He was our only lead. From what he said, you were right. Monique was fronting for him.”
“You got the phone number, anyway.” Wolff shrugged, then, unthinking, squeezed her shoulder in reassurance. “Sorry,” he said, as she winced. “Maybe you got us the wedge we need.”
