Number 7, Rue Jacob

by Wendy Hornsby

  So far, we had found nothing among our meager possessions that, even by the greatest stretch of the imagination, could be transmitting our location to someone. That did not change the fact that, somehow, we were doing exactly that. As I put the red handbag back into the backpack, I thought about how easy it had been for Jean-Paul’s hacker to slip the little memory drive into my coat pocket. All day, I had been surrounded by people, been pushed and crowded, bumped into, stumbled around, squeezed in beside. Anyone could have slipped a tracking device on me at any time.

  Except, it had to have happened before I left Paris.

  The first time I saw the tall blond man was in Paris. He came into the shop where I bought the telephones. It was a small shop, but even so, there was room for him to step aside when I wanted to leave. Instead, he crowded the door so that I had to brush against him and walk under his arm to get out. At the time, I simply thought he was creepy, and I was happy to get out of there. Later, when he showed up on the same flight, I thought it was just bad luck.

  I wrapped my Pashmina around Jean-Paul’s neck and said, “Give me your coat.”

  Without question, without hesitation, he did. I spread the heavy coat over our laps and as I examined it, I tried to remember everything I could about the brief moment of physical contact between me and the blonde in the electronics shop. He’d held the door open with one upraised arm, but where was the other hand? I remembered the blast of cold wind coming through the open shop door, and regretted that I hadn’t brought a scarf. Just as I walked past him, I flipped up the collar of Freddy’s coat to cover my ears.

  So, cuddled next to Jean-Paul on a hard vaporetto seat, I flipped up the collar of Freddy’s coat. And found it. The coat had a hood that folded into a slit under the base of the collar. A slender piece of molded black plastic, no more than a quarter of an inch wide and twice that in length, was attached to the fabric inside the hood slit by a pair of fine, sharp wire prongs. I pulled it out and handed it to Jean-Paul.

  “Merde,” he said, shivering, as he looked at the pernicious little device. “How easy it is, yes?”

  “Very.” I helped him back on with the coat. “You were right. They went after me as a way to get to you. I’m guessing that they put a watch on Isabelle’s apartment until I showed up. And then just followed me right to your doorstep. Jean-Paul, I put you in danger by coming.”

  “Maggie, mon coeur, how long do you imagine they would have been happy following you around the shops of Paris before forcing your hand?”

  “Maybe sent a loaded drone over rue Jacob to get me?” I tucked the ends of the Pashmina into his coat, smoothing it over his chest before buttoning him up. “We’re here now. What might have happened doesn’t matter now, does it?”

  “Non.” He tossed the tracker into the canal and watched the ripple it left after disappearing below the surface of the dark water. “Adieu, mes amis, adieu. But, what next for Maggie MacGowen and Jean-Paul Bernard? We can’t go back to Gille’s apartment. Any ideas?”

  “Just one,” I said. “I ran into an old friend today, Roddy Combes. Do you know who he is?”

  He nodded. “He has a talk show on American TV. He’s here, in Venice?”

  “Yes.” I pulled Roddy’s card out of my jeans pocket and handed it to him. “He’s throwing a party tonight on a yacht moored at Marina Sant’Elena. If we go to him, maybe he’ll give us a bed for the night. Or a warm corner to curl up in. He’s bound to have a computer we can use.”

  “Do you trust him?”

  “I do. As much as I trust anyone right now.”

  Jean-Paul seemed skeptical. “It’s late. Will he be up?”

  “He told me his party would start after ten, so he must be up still. Right now, I think our options are potluck at Roddy’s, or necking on the vaporetto all night.”

  “The latter would be lovely if these seats weren’t so damn hard. Save my spot, I’ll be right back.”

  He went forward to speak with the vaporetto pilot. There was a lot of gesturing and pointing and discussion. I pulled up my collar and settled down into my coat, hands in pockets, and watched beautiful Venice—La Serenissima, the most serene—glide by. At last, all was quiet. The pavilions had gone dark for the night, their raucous music silenced. Random lights from palazzo windows and verandas of small hotels tossed glitter across the caps of the rippled water. I have always loved the heady pleasures of Venice. But even though we had found the tracking device and disposed of it, menace seemed to lurk down every dark walkway or side canal. I shivered, and it wasn’t entirely because of the cold.

  Jean-Paul and the pilot shook hands and parted. As he settled back down beside me, he said, “We’ll change at San Marco; the vaporetto to the marina will be right along.”

  Happily, the crowds at San Marco were nearly gone, and those few people who were left weren’t headed toward the yacht harbor. We took seats a few rows from the front and huddled together against the cold.

  “So,” I said. “We’re partners.”

  He kissed the top of my head. “Through thick and through thin, yes?”

  “I meant business partners; rue Jacob.”

  “Oh.” A strange, pensive look crossed his face while he seemed to think that through. When he turned to me, there was a deep furrow between his brows. “I suppose, yes. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but yes, you and I now share ownership of number seven.”

  “Along with Uncle Gérard and Freddy.”

  “We really must get you a more informative notaire, chérie.” He wrapped his good arm around me and pulled me closer. “Isabelle and I bought out Gérard’s share a long time ago.”

  “That must have cost a bundle,” I said; just how wealthy was Isabelle? And Jean-Paul? I had never asked.

  “It would have been prohibitive if we had to come up with cash,” he said. “But the situation was more one of Gérard paying us back by signing over his share of the building than us paying out anything to him.”

  “He borrowed money from you?”

  Jean-Paul shook his head. “Not as simple as that, no. Number seven is a very old building, yes? Three buildings, in fact, tenuously connected by the cellars. There were some fixtures—a stone fireplace surround, about a hectare of hand-carved oak paneling, a few pieces of very old artwork, some books; that sort of thing—that Gérard removed during construction and sold. Without consulting Isabelle or me.”

  “He pocketed the cash?”

  With a little shrug, and a surprisingly fond smile, he said, “Gérard, toujours Gérard, oui?”

  “A lot of money?”

  He nodded, still smiling softly. It was a puzzle to me that Jean-Paul and Gérard were still good friends. But they were.

  “So,” he said, “Gérard has been out of the picture almost from the beginning; it was Isabelle who found him out. The next little item your notaire should have been clear about telling you is that Freddy has no inheritance rights of any degree to rue Jacob.”

  “How is that possible?” I asked, taken aback. “I thought all of Isabelle’s estate was to be divided equally between Freddy and me. Everything share-and-share-alike.”

  He looked at me askance. “Everything?”

  “Oh,” was all I could manage as several little cogs slipped into place. Everything in Isabelle’s estate was to be divided equally between Freddy and me, except for the tontine she set up with my father to make certain that any income from Dad’s patents and any earnings from investment of income from those patents, would pass directly to me, their natural child, and to me alone. Feeling a bit ill, I remembered Freddy once saying he wanted to tap his share of the equity in Isabelle’s Paris apartment—résidence—to help fund the building project in Normandy he was working on. I asked Jean-Paul, “Did Isabelle use royalties from her patents to invest in rue Jacob?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know where her money came from; I never asked. I only know that I share title in rue Jacob with a tontine that was originally owned jointly by Isabelle, someone named
Alfred Duchamps, and their daughter, Marguerite Duchamps. I only learned that Maggie MacGowen, a face familiar to me from American television, was in fact Marguerite, the sole survivor of the tontine, when your Uncle Gérard asked me to arrange the transport of Isabelle’s ashes home to France from Los Angeles. I admit I was intrigued by that, but until now I hadn’t really thought about the implications of sharing the property with you. Should we shake hands or something to seal this partnership?”

  “I could think of doing something more interesting than shaking hands,” I said. “But, in the meantime, do you know if Freddy knows he has no claim on rue Jacob?”

  “Bien sûr.” Of course. “Now he does, anyway. When Isabelle’s will went into probate, Freddy petitioned to separate his expected share of her ownership at rue Jacob from yours and mine so that he could use it as collateral for a loan. I would have turned down his petition even if you had co-signed it because such a loan could put the entire property at risk if he defaulted. But before I could respond, the notaire informed Freddy that he has no legal claim whatsoever to any part of number seven, rue Jacob.”

  “What a blow that had to be, with all the other crap he’s had to deal with. Was he angry when he found out?”

  “I asked Gérard to explain the facts to him. Your uncle had already turned down Freddy’s attempt to get a loan against his expected inherited share of your grandmother’s Paris townhouse, and for the same reason: A default would jeopardize Gérard’s share, and yours. Your uncle told me Freddy seemed to be more embarrassed than angry.”

  “When was this?”

  “Sometime last spring. April, May? After his wife’s trial, at any rate.”

  “I was with Freddy in Normandy most of the summer, and he never brought it up. But his wife—his ex-wife by then—had just been convicted and I know he had other things on his mind. And maybe after he heard from the notaire, he thought there was nothing to discuss.”

  “Or, was who inherited what from Isabelle a topic he was afraid to bring up?” He playfully nudged my shoulder with his. “Remind me, please, who was it his wife embezzled from?”

  “Me.”

  Jean-Paul took my arm and began to rise. “Here’s where we get out, partner.”

  Standing in the boarding float, waiting for our ride, I looked around, searching for a tail. But there was no one in sight. No one at all.

  “I think we shook them,” I said.

  “For now.”

  We were the last passengers on the last vaporetto run to Sant’Elena for the night. The marina was at land’s end, the last stop on the line. It was very late and very bitter out: Roddy could hardly turn us away. Could he?

  The long johns under my jeans helped to break the ­biting wind blowing in from the open water of the Adriatic as we walked along the marina causeway looking for Roddy’s berth. But it was still nasty and cold. I grew up in California so I just do not get along well with this phenomenon called winter. I longed to get inside somewhere warm, and happily would have crashed any of the parties we could see through the windows of moored yachts that we passed along the way. At the far end of the marina, tied stern-to-bow with a craft befitting a Greek shipping magnate, we found Roddy’s rented sea-going palace. A smartly uniformed behemoth came out to meet us as we started up the gangway.

  “I’m a friend of Roddy,” I said, showing the big man the card Roddy gave me that afternoon. Without saying anything, but never taking his eyes off us, he pressed a buzzer on a device in his hand. Immediately, a speaker somewhere crackled to life and Roddy’s voice boomed through the night: “Permission to board granted, Maggie MacGowen.”

  As we walked up the gangway, I looked for the security camera that had showed us to Roddy and found several. Jean-Paul saw them, too. He slid his hand through the crook of my elbow, leaned in close, and said, “Smile.”

  A steward appeared from nowhere to usher us into the main salon. We walked through big double doors and right into the hot glare of a bank of television lights and cameras. When Jean-Paul balked, I put my lips to his ear and whispered, “It’s okay, it isn’t a live feed. We won’t be anywhere near here when this airs, if it airs. And it could be useful later.”

  He seemed skeptical, but he didn’t run and he didn’t duck.

  Under the lights, I could just make out some details of the opulently appointed salon. Lots of polished brass, teak, and white leather upholstery draped with maybe a dozen of the current crop of Hollywood’s beautiful people. As a group, they looked too perfect to be real: perfect hair, perfect television makeup, perfect clothes on perfect bodies, all apparently perfectly happy to be where they were, that is, within range of an active camera lens. The steward was helping Jean-Paul and me off with our coats when Roddy, fully pumped up into his jolly on-camera-host mode, thrust a microphone toward us and launched into his patter. I thought he’d been tippling.

  “Hey, look who has just blown in off the minefields of Laos. My old friend filmmaker Maggie MacGowen and her handsome French diplomat boyfriend. Welcome, welcome, you two. Ever so happy to see you.”

  “You haven’t seen us,” I said, snagging a glass of wine off a passing tray. “We aren’t here. Haven’t been seen for days. Just, pfft, vanished, both of us.”

  Roddy leaned toward the camera and winked. “I wonder where they could be.”

  When he stepped back, he wrapped an arm around Jean-Paul and, with the microphone held close to his lips, he whispered: “Any clues as to when you two might return?”

  “None at all,” Jean-Paul whispered back into the mic. “We’re quite happy being nowhere.”

  Standing that close to Jean-Paul, drunk or not, dear old Roddy couldn’t miss the lines of fine black stitches and the sleeve without an arm. He backed up and said, “Dear God, man, did you step on one of Maggie’s landmines?”

  I caught Roddy’s eye and made the cut gesture with my hand. For just a moment, he hesitated. But then he looked straight into the camera and made the same gesture. The film lights went out, a grip came over and claimed the microphone, and, as if on cue, everyone in the room seemed to melt back into reality. As a group, without the camera to make them shimmer, Roddy’s guests looked a bit dispirited. Bored. The sudden shift was surreal.

  “Maggie,” Roddy said. “What the hell?”

  “Can we have a private word?”

  Without excusing himself, and without anyone seeming to pay much attention, Roddy led us out of the salon and down a short flight of stairs and into a small sitting room that had been set up as an office. He dropped into a big leather chair and said, “So tell old Uncle Rod what’s going on.”

  “We’re in a bit of a pickle, Roddy, and we need some help.”

  “A bit of a pickle, Maggie? Or serious trouble?”

  “Trouble enough.” I took out my camera and showed him the shots I had taken of our two shadows. “These men have been tracking us. The blond guy followed me from Paris this morning. The other one, Sabri Qosja, is a known hired gun. We have no idea what they want, though we have a hunch that whatever it is, we won’t like it. For now, we think we’ve shaken them off our tail.”

  He nodded toward Jean-Paul. “Did these blokes do that to you?”

  “Oui. They or their friends.”

  “With fists?”

  “No. Plastic explosives.”

  “You’re lucky to be alive, man.” Roddy leaned forward, sweetly concerned, and very serious. “What do you need from me?”

  “Tonight,” I said, “the use of your computer and a safe bed. We’ll do our best to disappear in the morning.”

  He took the camera from my hand. “I’ll print up some copies of your shots and have my security lads keep a watch out. Shall I send your photos to network research, see what they can pull up?”

  I looked at Jean-Paul. He thought for a moment before he said, “Pourquoi pas? That’s a better resource than anything I have access to at the moment.”

  “By the way.” Roddy extended his hand to Jean-Paul. “We haven’t a
ctually met. Roddy Combes here, general horse’s arse, but a well-practiced one.”

  Jean-Paul smiled as he took the offered hand. “Jean-Paul ­Bernard here, a sorry wreck of a man.”

  “Good to know you. Now: computer is on the desk behind you. I’ll have a steward show you to a stateroom when you’re ready. Have you eaten?”

  “We have,” I said. “Thanks, Roddy. Sorry to interrupt your party.”

  “If I were an honest man, I’d tell you that I wasn’t having the least bit of fun. And neither are they. Maggie, I’m getting too old to chat up this generation of celebrity kids. Bugger all if they absolutely don’t get half my jokes; no common frame of reference is the thing. And I refuse to even try to understand the crap they pass off as music. Rap? What the hell is rap, anyway? Lord, they bore me. And I know that the only thing about me that they find to be the least bit interesting is their fekkin faces in front of my fekkin cameras.”

  I extended my half-consumed glass of wine. “You need this more than I do.”

  He threw back his head and laughed his great big haw-haw laugh. “There’s plenty more where that came from; you keep it. Anything else I can do for you two?”

  “One thing,” I said. “Please hold that bit you shot with us upstairs. Pretty soon, someone is going to notice that Jean-Paul and I have fallen off the face of the earth, and there will be questions. If that happens, will you consider broadcasting the piece?”

  “What do I say about it?”

  “I don’t know. Jean-Paul?”

  “I think we dropped by on our way to sail the South Pacific. Tahiti bound. Maggie, have we eloped?”

  “Honeymooning in the South Pacific? Sure. Great idea.”