Number 7, Rue Jacob

by Wendy Hornsby

  “I know,” I said. “He’d have to kill me.”

  “So let me tell you,” Luca said, sitting back again. “Jean-Paul is the ultimate consultant. He is brought in by companies and public agencies to solve problems. He goes in, he looks around, listens to people, puts his thumb on the problem, delivers a report, and then he goes home for dinner. Unless someone sends in a loaded drone.”

  I looked at Jean-Paul. “That’s it?”

  He shrugged, smiled. “I think you would say that’s it in a nutshell.”

  “Sometimes, do people take offense?”

  “Bien sûr. Usually the ones who are at the center of the problem I’m there to help resolve.” He stood up and stretched. “But no Russians I can think of. Certainly no one on that list.”

  “Luca,” I said, glancing at my watch. “Do you need to get back to your office?”

  “Not for a while. In Italy, my dear, lunch takes as long as it takes.”

  “May I borrow your computer, and a pen?”

  With a little bow, he moved the laptop in front of me and took a pen out of his case. Using the list he gave us, I started Googling and making notes next to the names on the list. In January, one of the two men in Brussels, and his wife, attended a gala celebrating a Tchaikovsky series performed by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra. The man in Shanghai was present last week at the opening of an exhibition of the tsars’ Fabergé eggs at an art museum. The exhibit would run through Easter. On Tuesday, the man in London was scheduled to present a lecture in Canterbury about holy ikons of the Russian Orthodox church. He was also on the board of the Parent Sport Council at a school in a London suburb; his son captained the rugby team. And so on. Everything I saw seemed innocent and, with the exception of rugby, it was all arts-and-culture related. If so, I asked Jean-Paul and Luca, why did their company, InterCentro, hire people to drop a bomb on Jean-Paul, try to blow a hole in a yacht while we slept, and follow us around? No one had an answer.

  “What now?” I asked Jean-Paul.

  “Home, I hope.” He sat down beside me in front of the computer, opened a travel information site, and looked for flights between Milan and Paris. He found several with open seats that were scheduled to leave later that afternoon. He made notes on the back of Luca’s list of names, folded the sheet, and tucked it into my not-a-Prada handbag. He saw the wrapped knife I had put there after we saw the blonde at the airport. We made eye contact, but he said nothing. Before he zipped the bag closed, he took out his next dose of antibiotic and swallowed it with cold coffee. “We’ll wait to buy the tickets at the airport, d’accord?”

  “Yes,” I said. I did agree. We didn’t want to give the gamers who were tracking us any more lead time than was necessary. I erased our search history and gave the computer back to Luca. “Thank you.”

  We rose; it was time to go. There was a little back-and-forth between the two men about which airport to use, and the best way to get there, before Luca called for a car to take us to Malpensa, the largest of the three regional airports. Luca kissed my cheeks and told me how lovely it was to meet me, at last. But when he turned to Jean-Paul, he clamped a hand over his good shoulder and held on.

  “We have been friends a very long time, have we not? Like brothers,” he said, searching Jean-Paul’s face. When Jean-Paul agreed that they had, Luca began to scold him. “So why did you wait so long to come to me? Eduardo told me you went into hiding after the drone incident. That was five days ago. You know I would have come for you. I would have sent tanks in for you if necessary. But did you call? No. Have I done something that makes you distrust me?”

  “Luca.” Jean-Paul pulled him into a one-armed embrace; Jean-Paul was a full head taller. “You have to understand. I was afraid. I saw our friend Eduardo blown into the air and covered in blood; I had to breathe life back into him. That same night, a young woman who was sleeping in the hotel bed where I should have been was brutally, coldly, murdered. No one outside of the commission that sent us knew where Eduardo and I were going; it was an inspection tour. So, had a friend, a colleague, done this terrible thing to us? When I found out that I had been hacked and was being followed, I was afraid. I was afraid for myself, and I was afraid for everyone I know. I felt I was poison. Even though I know now that they have targeted only me and Maggie, I still feel like poison. So, Luca, my dear Luca, how could I risk contacting you until I knew it was safe to do so? What if your grandchild never got to know you because I asked you for help?”

  Luca pulled back, but didn’t let go. With a wicked little smile, he kissed Jean-Paul’s cheeks, looked ceilingward, and said, “Dear Lord, if the baby is a boy, please don’t let him go bald because of me.”

  “I hope he has your pure heart,” Jean-Paul said, grinning. “But you might save those lifts for him.”

  “I’m praying for a girl.”

  Jean-Paul laid his hand along Luca’s face. “All forgiven?”

  “Almost.” Luca took a step back, pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket, and blew his nose. His telephone buzzed. “The car is here. I’ll ride shotgun to make sure you get to the airport.”

  Outside the room, we were helped on with our coats and handed the shopping bag. I exchanged shrugs with Jean-Paul. We had dragged the bag and its contents around for hours. He smiled. “Let’s hang on to it. Might be our dinner tonight,” he said.

  “Unless a genie filled the refrigerator at rue Jacob, I’m afraid it might.”

  He slipped his hand around my elbow and we followed Luca back down the elevator to the lobby. As we walked across that expanse of polished marble, we could see a black Alfa Romeo Stelvio waiting at the curb with its back hatch and passenger-side doors open. Before we went out the front door, both Jean-Paul and I hesitated, taking time to check the area around the car; I saw no one. Luca went straight ahead, gesturing for the driver to shut the hatch—we had no luggage—as he stepped out onto the sidewalk. Seeing nothing to worry about, we scurried behind him, headed for the car’s open back door.

  There was a blur to my right and the blonde, Johann Bord, seemed to fly at us. I don’t know which of us he was aiming for, but Jean-Paul stepped in front of me to intercept him, and took the blow. Time seemed to speed up and slow down at once as I saw Jean-Paul fall, hard, onto his injured side, but he had managed to deflect Bord, to knock him off balance. Something metallic clattered to the pavement as the big man flailed the air, trying to right himself. He stooped and scrabbled around trying to retrieve whatever it was. I grabbed my handbag’s zipper pull, gave it a yank, found the knife, and plunged it, still wrapped, into the underside of Bord’s forearm, driving the blade in through muscle and tendon until it hit bone. The brown paper wrapping around the knife blossomed bright red.

  “What do you want?” I demanded, seething, as I withdrew the blade. He gripped his arm and fell to his knees. The wrist hung loose, a marionette with its strings cut. I held the knife back, ready to plunge it into his flesh again if he got up. “Tell me what you want with us.”

  “Stay away,” he said, grimacing and pale. “Just go away and stay away.”

  Luca had Jean-Paul by the waist, got him to his feet, and impelled him head first into the car before two security men hurrying toward us across the lobby could make it out the door. With a signal from Luca, the driver was in his seat behind the wheel with the motor running. Luca took the knife from my hand and gave me a firm push toward the car. I piled in and he slammed the door behind me. I rolled down the window. “But, Luca—”

  “Go,” he said. “I’ve got this. Just go.”

  “We can’t leave Luca,” I said as the driver maneuvered into traffic.

  “Sí, signora,” the driver said, but kept going.

  Jean-Paul was still on the floor between the seats, where he landed, gray with pain, struggling to keep himself upright when the driver made the first turn to put distance between us and the scene developing on the sidewalk. The last glimpse I had of Luca, he was talking to the security men. And the big blonde looked like
a pile of cast-off clothes someone had dumped on the sidewalk.

  There was a stunned silence in the car, though my heart pounded so hard I couldn’t hear the thrum of the car’s engine. I got down on the floor beside Jean-Paul, out of sight. With shaking hands, I helped him off with his coat, afraid of what I would find when I unbuttoned the cardigan and the shirt underneath and peeled them away from his injured shoulder. Some of the gashes made when flying shrapnel hit his upper chest were deep, needing both internal and external stitching to hold the edges of the torn flesh together. Some of the sutures had pulled free and now bled. I took gauze and sterile wipes and antibiotic ointment out of the backpack.

  Making busyness a distraction from thinking about what just happened, what might have happened, I tore open a wipe and cleaned Bord’s blood from my hand, rubbing hard to still the shaking.

  Jean-Paul took my hand and kissed the palm. “Don’t worry about Luca, ma chère. By now, he has contacted Interpol. They will come in to advise the local police about Bord’s history, and the situation will be managed. Trust me, he is better off without us there.”

  “Luca does more than track counterfeit handbags, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes. When he said he would have sent in tanks to help me, he wasn’t necessarily exaggerating.”

  “And you?” I asked. “Do you do more than help people resolve problems?”

  “Not much more, no. But some of those problems might need Luca’s ability to call out tanks to resolve.”

  “I thought that was probably the case.” I put pressure over his wound until the bleeding stopped. Then I cleaned the area, replaced the dressing, and adjusted the sling. After his shirt was buttoned again, I handed him the water bottle and a pain pill; he hadn’t taken one since the night before. He hadn’t needed one. Now he would.

  He put the cap back on the water bottle and caught my hand when I reached for it. His color was coming back.

  “How do you feel?” I asked.

  “Fortunate,” he said. “And vulnerable.”

  “How did he find us?”

  “Hacked taxi dispatch? Who knows?” He settled back against the seat. “When we get to Paris, I want to lie low until I have two useful arms again.”

  “You’re plenty useful as you are, but I like the idea of staying out of sight for a while, as long as you’re there.” I straightened his collar. “You took quite a blow, but you stopped him. He had something in his hand. Did you see what it was?”

  “I didn’t see anything until he was on top of us. Where did he come from?”

  “Behind a planter, I think. Whatever he had, you made him drop it.”

  “Maybe Luca found it. We’ll ask him about it later.”

  “Poor Luca. What a mess we left him.”

  “Luca is in his element. He’ll be fine. But you: you went after Bord like a ninja. Where did you learn to do that?”

  “Nowhere.” I shook my head. “Credit pure adrenaline. There was no time to think, I just acted. Lucky the knife was in the handbag, otherwise I’d have swung the shopping bag and beaned him with a very nice chunk of mortadella.”

  He chuckled. “Another reason to hang on to that bag.”

  By then, we had left Milan and were on the Autostrada dei Laghi, speeding toward the airport. We scooted up onto the seat and fastened the seat belts. Jean-Paul leaned his head back and closed his eyes as the pain pill began to work. I pulled out a phone and the card that his brother-in-law, Émile, had given me in Paris, and called the mobile number. Émile took the call, but didn’t speak; he wouldn’t have recognized the number I was calling from.

  “Émile, it’s Maggie.”

  “Where are you?”

  “On our way to Paris. I’ll let you know when we get in. Can you come by the apartment on rue Jacob tonight?”

  “We? Jean-Paul is with you?”

  “He is.”

  “How sick is he?”

  “You can ask him yourself. But when you come, bring a suture kit and a proper sling for a broken clavicle, please.”

  Jean-Paul opened his eyes as soon as he heard me say Émile. I handed him the phone. A few bruises, a little patching up, nothing to worry about, he told his brother-in-law. Yes, please reassure Maman everything is fine. Yes, Sunday lunch would be lovely. Yes, we’ll call with flight information as soon as we have it. He said good-bye, closed the connection, and handed the phone back to me.

  “Émile will pick us up when we arrive.”

  At Malpensa Airport, the driver parked in a red zone, and the police patrolling traffic said nothing to him. He escorted us to the ticket counter, probably as instructed by Luca, tipped his hat, and said good-bye. We bought tickets for a flight leaving for Charles de Gaulle Airport in an hour. The agent asked for our passports. She looked at mine and handed it right back. But she gave Jean-Paul’s careful scrutiny. I expected her to say that the Italian police were coming for us, so we should wait. But what concerned her was the condition of his booklet. The passport had been in Jean-Paul’s jacket pocket when the drone blast hit him. The cover was scuffed and singed, and there were brown, bloody fingerprints on one corner. She looked from the document to the empty sleeve of his coat, raised her eyebrows, and asked if he needed special accommodation. He smiled, thanked her, and said that early boarding would be appreciated, telling her she was très gentille—very kind—for asking. She blushed.

  Friday afternoon in the dead of winter wasn’t a bad time to get through the security checkpoint in Milan, especially if one carried nothing except a string bag with cheese and garlicky sausage, and a few clothes stuffed into a backpack. We shuffled through security without any issues and made our way to a VIP departure lounge with forty minutes to spare before takeoff. Jean-Paul got us through the lounge door with an electronic key card. The only other people in the private lounge were a family of four—mom, dad, two young teens—from England, and two businessmen who spoke quietly together in Arabic. As people do, all of them looked up when we came in, then lost interest and went back to whatever they had been doing. The lounge attendant brought us tea, as requested, and we settled in to wait for our flight to be called.

  The English parents seemed to be a bit frazzled, and their youngsters, a boy of maybe fifteen and a girl a year or two younger, were restless. From their conversation, I gleaned that their scheduled flight to Heathrow that morning had been cancelled because of weather, and it would be several more hours before they could catch a flight out. The girl announced that she was bored, but her older brother seemed mesmerized by whatever he was fiddling with on his phone. I rested my head against Jean-Paul’s intact shoulder and closed my eyes, feeling suddenly exhausted; a post-adrenaline let-down, probably.

  “Mummy!” I was startled upright by the boy’s voice. “Look quick. It’s them, you see? It’s them.”

  “Don’t point, Trevor,” the mother admonished.

  “Sorry. But do you see?”

  There was a moment of quiet before the mother said, “Yes, you may be right, darling. But no need to make a fuss.”

  The father said, “What is it?”

  “That silly contest Trevor got caught up in this morning,” the mother said. “You know the one, spot these people and win a prize. Trevor has been prowling the airport half the day looking for them.”

  Jean-Paul rose, went over to the boy, and took the phone out of his hand. I followed and looked over his shoulder. There we were, captured in a series of photos taken throughout the day. The most recent was about three hours old, snapped as we dashed for a cab at the Milan railway station. I had every intention of getting out of Italy without another photo of us going out into the ether, so I looked from the mother to the father.

  “How appalling,” I said. “Who would do something this despicable to us? What a horrible invasion of our privacy.”

  The father held out his hand and Jean-Paul gave him the son’s phone. He scrolled through the photos. “Explain this, Trevor?”

  Trevor seemed to shrink a bit. In
a shaky voice, he said, “It’s just a game, sir. Kids all over Italy have been playing it today.”

  “A game?” The mother wanted to know, taking a turn to look at the kid’s phone. “How can it be a game if this lady and gentleman aren’t engaged in the play? Explain to me exactly what you are to do.”

  “If you find these—” He held an open hand toward us, an alternative to pointing, while he searched for a way to explain to his parents what he was up to. “These targets. If you find these targets before they get to Paris, take a photo, submit it, and then detain them for a bit, you can win the prize. It’s a big one, Mummy, five hundred euros.”

  “Detain us how?” I asked.

  “They only said to be creative.”

  “Creative?” Jean-Paul asked. “What would that entail? Interfere with us? Kidnap us?”

  “I guess. I suppose. I don’t know.”

  “Trevor,” the mother said. “How very dreadful. What did you plan to do if you found them?”

  “He’s just a boy, Sherry,” the father offered, obviously hoping to sweep this all away.

  “Whose game is it?” Jean-Paul asked, nailing the kid in the eye.

  The kid just shrugged and thrust his hands into his pockets, looking thoroughly abashed. “I don’t know.”

  “You must know if you hope to claim the prize,” I said.

  When the kid only hung his head and did not answer, the mother snapped him to attention with a single, sharp “Trevor.”

  Trevor took the phone from his father, pulled up a new tab, and gave it to me to see. AnoNino had already told us that the offer was made through the hacker in Taiwan, but this was the first time we had seen the actual posting. The bit about keeping us from reaching Paris was a new and interesting nugget.

  Jean-Paul had his own phone out. When the other end was picked up, he explained where we were and what was happening. Then he read off the information on the kid’s screen that gave information for logging onto the so-called contest and submitting photos. He said yes and no a couple of times, and then he asked, “What happened after we left?” He listened for a moment, then asked, “Did Interpol intervene?” Another pause to listen. “Who took him into custody? Maggie said he dropped something.”