Number 7, Rue Jacob

by Wendy Hornsby

  He bobbed his head, meaning, grudgingly, yes. “But I could hardly stay at the MSF facility and take up one of their scarce beds, could I?”

  “Some people could.” I wiped my eyes on the corner of his damp towel. “You’ve pulled out a few of the stitches and it looks like the wound is infected. Why didn’t they at least start you on antibiotics?”

  “They offered, of course, but Maggie—”

  “I know. Scarce supplies.”

  “I thought I would be in Athens the next morning, where I could get the prescribed drugs. But things don’t always happen as planned, yes?”

  “Too true.” As gently as I could, I spread antibiotic ointment around the wound. “When I go out for food, I’ll try to find some butterfly bandages to close the edges until we can get you to a doctor. One with plenty of beds and drugs, I hope. In the meantime, I’ll lay new gauze over it and hope you lie still until I get back from the market.”

  I spread out the original, sodden, sling on the floor and studied it for a minute, trying to figure out its structure. Then I did my best to fold lengths of the clean sheet to match what I saw. The trickiest part would be putting the new sling on Jean-Paul without disturbing the clavicle or touching the wound over it. For a moment, I considered giving him a second pain pill to knock him out for a while, because I knew any movement of the shoulder and the infected sutures would hurt. While I mulled over-dosing him, I assembled the new sling. It would be neither as intricate as the original, nor as pretty, but I thought it would do its job of keeping his shoulder immobilized until we could find a doctor.

  “Your Japanese orthopedist must have studied origami,” I said as I eased the fabric under his bent elbow and laid it over his right shoulder, avoiding the wound on his left. “I can’t recreate what he did, but I think I understand what he was trying to do.”

  As a distraction while I struggled with the sling, he said, “We have hardly spoken since you landed in Vientiane. Did all go well in Laos?”

  “Ah, Laos,” I said, leaning around him to tie the two ends behind his neck. “I don’t know where to begin. Laos was amazing. Warm. Beautiful. Deadly. I hate to admit this, but the twerp at network who put a cork in my Normandy project and sent me off to chase down unexploded bombs was right. Finding dead German soldiers in Grand-mère’s carrot field and the conversation about unexploded ordnance from World War Two was probably the most interesting part of the Normandy footage for viewers. Going into Flanders, Germany, Ukraine, expanded that theme, and we shot great stuff. But Laos, my God, Jean-Paul, it’s the scope of the problem there that blew me away.”

  “Pun intended?”

  “Ka-boom is certainly the topic of the day, isn’t it?” The sling supporting his elbow was in place. I set to work on the second part, immobilizing the left arm with a second binding that wrapped around his torso. “When the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam, we left behind something like eighty million tons of unexploded shit in Laos. That’s a little more than eleven pounds of ka-boom per capita. And it’s everywhere.”

  “Merde,” he said, smiling his usual ironic smile. “And here I am whimpering over the effects of a single insignificant little bomb.”

  “Oh, go ahead and whimper,” I said as I tied the last of the fabric ends. “How does this feel?”

  “Good,” he said. “Solid.”

  When he had convinced me that the construction was, indeed, quite comfortable and that I hadn’t cut off circulation to his left hand, he asked for the clothes he’d left in a heap on a chair. I could smell them before I touched them; a holey fisherman’s sweater, a pair of well-worn denim dungarees, and flimsy rope-soled canvas shoes.

  “Where did you get those things?” The clothes stayed on the chair while I helped him lie down. I pulled the duvet over him and tucked it in; he was shivering. I retrieved the apples and the bag of trail mix I had acquired in Paris and gave them to him.

  “My kind fishermen gave me those handsome clothes,” he said, patting the bed beside him. I kicked off my boots and lay down with him, exhausted. “My own clothes were shredded, of course. I left the hospital wearing scrubs. I planned to pick up something to wear and a new telephone—mine was destroyed—at the local shops when I was driven into the village. But—” He hesitated too long.

  “Something happened, yes?”

  He nodded, munching trail mix. “Long version or short version?”

  “Long version, please.” I scrunched a pillow under my head and settled in to listen.

  “Because of his injuries, Eduardo had to stay behind at the MSF hospital, some concern about broken ribs puncturing a lung. But after I was patched up I managed to catch a ride into the village along with a young volunteer nurse from Sweden. Her service time was up, and she was on her way home. The local airport is very small, only two commercial flights a day, one in early morning and one late in the afternoon. Before we left the camp, I booked a room in the village hotel, and planned to leave in the morning. The nurse, Ingrid, was scheduled to leave on the afternoon flight, but because of all the fussing over me at the hospital, and the bomb crater on the access road, Ingrid missed her flight. She had no choice but to stay over. But the village inn was full by the time we arrived. What else could I do, but give her my room?”

  “Please tell me you didn’t sleep on a bench somewhere.”

  “Non.” He crumpled the empty trail mix bag and tossed it onto the bedside table with surprising force; a great black pall seemed to have dropped over him, an unbidden sadness. Before continuing, he was quiet for a moment, rubbing the injured shoulder as if to comfort it. I wondered whether I’d worn him out. Probably, I had. All I could do was be there close beside him until he was ready to go on with his story. After a deep breath, he turned to give me a game little smile and the we’re-in-the-hands-of-fate shrug with his one good shoulder.

  “Our driver, a young local,” he said, “knew a fisherman’s family that had a spare room they rented out. We three, the driver, Ingrid and I, ate dinner together in the hotel restaurant. I handed her my room key, we all said good night, and the driver and I went to the fisherman’s house. In the morning, we stopped by the hotel to pick her up to go to the airport. When she didn’t answer her phone, we asked the desk to have a maid check on her. I thought she might have overslept or was in the shower. But—”

  His voice caught and he needed another moment before he could go on. In a quavering voice, he said, “In the night, her throat was cut.”

  “She was murdered?”

  “Oui.”

  I met his eyes. “You think it was meant to be you?”

  “My first thought was that we should never have left her in the hotel alone; the village is a bit rough. But she was not assaulted, nothing was taken. There were no signs of struggle. Apparently, sometime in the night, while she slept, someone slipped in, slit her throat, and was gone. It made no sense. But then, my shoulder began to throb and I remembered Eduardo sitting at the edge of the road, bleeding, trying to breathe, and it occurred to me that the room was registered in my name, paid for with my credit card. We told no one in the hotel that Ingrid would be staying in the room instead of me; we thought she would be safer that way. In truth, by the time we finished dinner there was no one around to tell. The reception desk was dark, the hall was empty. No one else knew she was there. So, unless that isolated village harbored a madman, Ingrid was not the intended victim.”

  “What did you do?”

  “First I checked on Eduardo; he was okay. So, was I alone the target?” He cocked his head and looked me in the eye. “What does your Big Bird tell you to do when you’re trying to find something?”

  I had to think. “Walk backward through your memory.”

  “That’s exactly what I did. If I was the target, how were my attackers finding me with such precision? The drone hit was spot-on, but the hotel was a miss. So, what was different?”

  He waited for me to mull that through. I went back over his story, and found a little detail. “Your pho
ne was destroyed. They tracked you using the GPS locator function in your telephone until the phone was destroyed. Even then, they could find you by hacking into your credit cards to see where you used them.”

  He reached out and pulled me tight against him and planted a noisy kiss on my forehead. “How do I love thee, Maggie? Let me count the ways…”

  “That explains why you want to stay off the grid. So, what’s the next move?”

  “You fight fire with fire, yes?” He raised his palm with an apple on top of it, as if holding up the obvious answer, and smiled his upside-down smile. “So, I thought, I’ll fight a hacker with a hacker. I went to the best I know, a little sixteen-year-old misfit who lives here in Venice, over on Giudecca. And, my love, I’ll need you to rendezvous with him at exactly forty-two minutes past five o’clock tonight.”

  “You’re a fun date, Jean-Paul.” I kissed his cheek. “I never know what’s going to happen when I’m with you. But I always know it will be interesting.”

  He laughed. “I can say the same about you.”

  “You can’t just disappear, though. Not after what happened to you and Eduardo. People must be worried about you.”

  “I told everyone who counts that I was sneaking away with you for a week or two, and threatened dire consequences to anyone who dared interrupt us.”

  “So, why am I here, except to offer succor?”

  “I hope that’s reason enough. As you can see, I need your help. I was also worried that whoever is doing this would make a target of you, to get to me. And I couldn’t bear that risk. So, I knew I had to make you invisible, and get you out of Paris as soon as I could. But I didn’t know when you would arrive. You were expected two days before you turned up.”

  “Bad weather, delayed flights, cancelled flights; I had only been at Isabelle’s about an hour or so when you called.”

  He nodded, clearly no surprise there. “I asked Madame Gonsalves to call me as soon as you showed up.”

  My first thought was that the old bat did know I was coming, after all. But my next thought had a strange and gritty edge that made me sit straight up. I wanted to hear him repeat something he’d said. “You had Madame Gonsalves call you?”

  The question seemed to puzzle him. “Yes.”

  “The concierge at Isabelle’s building?” I watched his face.

  “Yes. She saw you at the gate and rang me immediately; there is a security camera.”

  “She left me standing out in the street, in the cold, while the two of you chatted?”

  He smiled sweetly as he bit into the apple. “She told me you were getting impatient; I could hear the street buzzer through the phone.”

  “You know her that well?”

  With a dismissive shrug, he said, “Bien sûr.”

  “Of course? What do you mean, of course? How the hell do you know the concierge at Isabelle’s apartment so well? No, why would you know her?”

  “I hired her.”

  “You did? Why you?”

  “Your Uncle Gérard asked me to find someone who could keep an eye on Isabelle.”

  “But why would Uncle Gérard have anything to do with hiring their concierge?”

  “Their?”

  “The building’s owners.”

  For a moment, he looked at me with pure confusion written on his face, at a loss for an answer to a question he either could not parse or the answer to which was so obvious that the only mystery for him was that it wasn’t obvious to me. And then, a light seemed to flicker on behind those deep brown eyes. He pushed himself up against the headboard and took my hand.

  “Maggie, have you read the terms of your mother’s—Isabelle’s—will?”

  “Read it?” I said. “Hardly. It’s complex and it’s written in French legalese. I wouldn’t understand all of it even if it were written in English. I turned the pages while my notaire explained it to me. Does that count?”

  “Did your notaire explain to you about number seven, rue Jacob?”

  I settled back down, leaning on my elbow, watching his face while I thought about the question. No glimmer of light flickered on for me. I shrugged and said, “She told me that I have inherited an interest in Isabelle’s apartment on rue Jacob.”

  “Apartment? Is that the word she used?”

  I thought for a moment. “No. She said residence.”

  “Aha.” He picked up my hand and kissed it. “I think I see now where the canyon in this conversation opened up. When the coast is clear and we are back in Paris, we will find you a notaire who speaks better English. But for now, let me explain rue Jacob.”

  He let out a long breath while he decided where to begin. “So, ma chère Maggie, you know that from time to time Isabelle battled personal demons.”

  “She was bipolar.”

  He nodded. “When she was in balance, she was remarkable. A force, yes?”

  “So I hear.”

  “You know she was a scientist with many accomplishments. But you may not be aware that she was also a very astute businesswoman. When she first saw number seven, rue Jacob, the place was a disaster. Part of the roof had caved in, there was water damage, the leaky plumbing was a century old, or more, the electricity—impossible!—floors had collapsed, and there had never been central heat. But Isabelle saw its potential when anyone else would have seen a tear-down, and she was determined to acquire it.”

  “Who owned the place?”

  “That was the first issue for Isabelle to conquer,” he said. “Both the Vatican and the local diocese claimed it, but a defunct order of nuns still held the title. To complicate the issue, the neighborhood, afraid some big chain store, like the Gap or Benetton up on the boulevard, would move in, had the property designated as a historic treasure to protect it.”

  “It was a convent?”

  “It was. The Little Sisters of Saint Jérôme Émilian ran a school and orphanage there for centuries. But times change. By the 1970s the order was impoverished, reduced to just a few very old women. The Vatican closed the order and sent the survivors to a retirement facility in Switzerland. The place remained empty for decades, deteriorating, until Isabelle decided she wanted it. She moved, you could say, heaven and earth, and somehow she managed to strike a deal that both the Vatican and the diocese accepted, and that appeased the neighbors at the same time.”

  “What about the nuns?”

  “Long gone,” he said. “Silenced by the grave.”

  I scrolled mentally through the bits and pieces I had gleaned about Isabelle over the last year and a half. A project of that scope just did not seem economically feasible for a civil servant like Isabelle to undertake, even with the earnings from the tontine. I said, “To buy and restore that property would cost a fortune. Where the hell would Isabelle come up with that much capital?”

  “Restore?” He chuckled. “It was a complete rebuild, from basements to attics. And yes, it cost a fortune. Three fortunes to be exact. Isabelle came up with considerable capital, but she still needed financing, and she needed someone with building experience. So, she invited her brother, Gérard, to join her as a partner.”

  “Makes sense. Uncle Gérard is a developer. He has worked on far larger projects than that one.”

  “He certainly brought the expertise, but he was, as usual, embarrassed for cash. He made up for his deficit by borrowing, let’s say, much of the building material and some of the work crews from a large project he was directing in southern England.”

  Good old Uncle Gérard. “He stole the building materials?”

  “You say tomayto, he says tomahto, but yes, we discovered later that some of the material was delivered without invoices. And someone else paid the salaries of some of the workers. Your uncle gave a whole new dimension to international partnership on this one.” He set aside his apple core. “Britain will find that Brexit hinders many little larcenies, n’est-ce pas?”

  I looked at him askance, seeing a whole new dimension to the man. I found his complete lack of moral outrage
to be oddly sexy. But then, after a couple of months apart I found even the bit of towel lint caught in his three-day beard to be sexy.

  “Don’t you worry about my Uncle Gérard. He’ll find a way to work around the barriers and be just fine, whatever the future holds,” I said, knowing only too well what my uncle was capable of. “I’m afraid to ask, but you said the project took three fortunes. Who was the third? Their pigeon? Their cash cow?”

  “Moi.” He grinned, kissing me full on the lips.

  “I should have known,” I said, getting to my feet. “And that explains how you came to hire Madame Gonsalves. Is the woman part of your vast information network?”

  “Not mine,” he said. “But someone’s. Your concierge is an old Basque separatist. Probably still good in the trenches.”

  “Something to keep in mind.” I found a pad and a pencil on the nightstand. “Tell me your sizes and I’ll get you some clothes while I’m out.”

  “Um.” He paused, blushed. “Mon coeur, maybe we should just wash that wretched pile in the chair. It’s my turn, I’m afraid, to be embarrassed for cash. At the moment, I have very little and I don’t know how long my scarce resources need to stretch.”

  “Ne t’inquiètes pas,” I said, Don’t worry, as I retrieved my coat from the bathroom. I pulled out the green bank pouch, unzipped it, and handed it to Jean-Paul. With a look of wonder on his battered face, he thumbed the sheaf of bills inside.

  “What did you do, rob a bank?”

  “No. I just walked through the front door and said, Please.”

  “How much is this?”

  “I withdrew ten thousand. Then I bought a few prepaid phones and some credit cards. There should be something around sixty-eight hundred in there.”

  Laughing, he took my hand and kissed the palm. “Ma chère, you never cease to surprise me. I certainly picked the right sidekick to go into hiding with.”

  “Glad you think so. Anyway, we won’t have to hitch a ride out of here on a fishing boat,” I said. “The condition you’re in, that’s a good thing. But, Jean-Paul, why, exactly, are we hiding? Can’t you just go to the authorities and ask for protection? Or summon one of your well-connected friends?”