Number 7, Rue Jacob

by Wendy Hornsby

  Trevor and his parents stood with similar wide-eyed stares as they listened to Jean-Paul’s end of the conversation; the sister wasn’t bored anymore. When he put the phone away, I asked, “Luca?”

  “Under control. Bord is in hospital, and in custody. He was carrying an injection pen. It was sent for analysis, but Luca suspects he was ready to hit us, or one of us, with a dose of some sort of sedative.” When he handed the boy’s phone to the father, he said, “This isn’t a game your son has been playing. Some very dangerous people have devised this contest as a means to stalk my wife and me. You can see for yourself by looking at me what they are capable of. They are determined to hurt my dear wife as well. I hope, sir, that you think of your family’s safety and well-being and put an end to Trevor’s participation. If you asked me for advice, and you haven’t, I would tell you to destroy that telephone before they can use the information Trevor has already given them to track him and make a target of your family as well.”

  The father said, “Interpol?”

  “Indeed, yes.”

  Trevor looked horrified at the suggestion of destroying his phone. He held out his hand for it. “Sir?”

  Dad dropped the instrument onto the floor and crushed it under his heel.

  “Wise decision,” Jean-Paul said.

  We were no safer in that tony private lounge than we would be out among the hoi polloi. I gathered up our bags and we left, quickly, before the attendant could announce that our flight to Paris was boarding. Again, the fewer people who knew where we were going, the better off we were.

  Pre-boarding for our flight was underway when we reached our gate. I told Jean-Paul to lean on me and look pathetic when I told the gate agent that we needed extra assistance to board. She looked at the raw scars on his face and the empty sleeve, scanned our boarding passes, and waved us aboard. The flight was uneventful. And short. Alitalia got us into the air and back on the ground again in an efficient hour and a half. The flight was less than half-full, so deplaning in Paris was quick and painless, as well.

  My ear began to adjust from hearing Italian, which I do not understand, to French, which I mostly do, as we walked through the airport toward baggage claim and the exits beyond. Out at the curb, Émile and his wife, Jean-Paul’s sister, Karine, were waiting for us.

  I had met Karine the previous summer when I was in Normandy working on a film project. She is a painter, an art teacher, and though elegant in the way French women are, she was also just a bit Bohemian: the bright scarf with long, unruly ends; dark hair wound into a loose chignon anchored with a much-used paintbrush; a splotch of cadmium yellow on the elbow of her beautiful black leather coat. While her husband, Émile, a doctor, a man of science, was constant and steady, Karine had a passion for passions. They seemed to make the perfect couple.

  Les bises were exchanged on the sidewalk, and after the cheek kissing and much tsk-ing and oh-là-là-ing and rapid-fire questions about what had happened to Jean-Paul, we were released from their tender clutches to get into the backseat of the family car, a vintage Range Rover SUV with a tangle of easels piled in the back deck.

  “Be careful where you sit,” Émile cautioned as he handed me into the backseat. “There might be daubs of wet paint. There usually are.”

  Jean-Paul’s phone dinged as we merged onto the freeway into Paris. He read the text, then handed me the phone. The note was from AnoNino. The first part was, the contest to find us and keep us from getting to Paris was over, with no winner. The second part of the message, however, took away any relief we might have felt about the end of surveillance: Sabri Qosja was spotted in Paris, at the Gare de Lyon, ten minutes ago. If he caught a taxi at the train station and headed for rue Jacob, he could be there waiting when we arrived. Fighting rising dread, I handed the phone back to Jean-Paul. He sent a text to someone, and then he placed a call to Madame Gonsalves. He told the concierge to expect us soon, and warned her to be on the lookout for Qosja. He listened to her for a while, thanked her very much, and put away the phone.

  “Everything okay?” I asked.

  He nodded. “She knew there was nothing to eat in the apartment, so she stocked the kitchen. Just a few essential things, she said. Expect a feast.”

  “Nice of her.”

  Karine leaned around to speak to us. “Madame Gonsalves has a crush on Jean-Paul, so keep an eye on him.”

  “I can’t blame her,” I said. Then I asked, “You know her?”

  “Oh, yes. I am fascinated by the library your mother rescued during the renovations,” she said. “As soon as I heard about it, I knew I had to sketch it, just as it was found, before they organized everything. The original room was a beautiful mess. I spent about a week down there with my pad and charcoal. So, yes, I know Madame Gonsalves.”

  “I would love to see the sketches,” I said.

  “Any time; they’re up on my web page. I still go down from time to time to study the work of the scriptorium nuns; the calli­graphy and illumination are exquisite. Of course, the library looks nothing like it was originally, not since the librarians and historians got their hands on it. The collection has been tidied up, catalogued, and shelved on factory-made shelves in a climate-controlled room. Very orderly. The documents are magnificent—some of them, anyway—but something about the original state of the collection, the dusty patina the whole of it acquired with age and neglect, has been lost.”

  “You aren’t suggesting that we should have left the library as we found it,” Jean-Paul said.

  “No,” Karine said with a sigh. “But still.”

  Jean-Paul reached up and patted the arm she rested on her seat back. It was a gentle, fond gesture. She smiled back at him.

  “You’re going to look like a gangster, Jeep, with those scars.”

  “I’m aiming for swashbuckler,” he said. “Maybe I’ll grow a big beard.”

  Émile laughed. “Maggie, do you approve? Should he grow a beard?”

  “It’s his face, his whiskers, his decision. But it’s my choice whether to kiss it or not, right?”

  “Bien sûr,” he said with a chuckle.

  “Something to consider,” Jean-Paul said, scuffing my cheek with the five-o’clock shadow on his chin.

  It was early evening in Paris, after the worst of rush hour. When we came off the peripheral road, the City of Light was ablaze. A gentle snow fell. I held Jean-Paul’s hand and, with the sense of wonder I always feel in Paris, I watched as landmark after landmark rolled past the windows. Skillfully, Émile negotiated his way around the Arc de Triomphe’s insane roundabout and somehow emerged, intact, out the opposite side. I was impressed, and told him so. He shrugged; it was something he did twice a day, going to and coming from work. We crossed the Seine on the Pont d’ Alma, caught a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower awash in a shower of glittery snow, down rue de l’Université until it became rue Jacob, and then a long circle around the block because rue Jacob is a one-way street. We saw no one on the sidewalk, and no one followed us, but not seeing Qosja was little comfort. If Bord had followed me from Isabelle’s apartment on Thursday, Qosja knew where to find it on Friday.

  As we approached number seven, I pulled out the apartment keys Madame Gonsalves had given me and pressed the button on the attached fob to open the big iron gates. I sensed that Jean-Paul was as anxious as I was for them part quickly to let us in, and then to close quickly once we were safely through. Madame Gonsalves came out of her apartment next to the gate as soon as we drove in, and followed us across the courtyard carrying a large shoe box.

  “Zut alors,” she uttered when she saw Jean-Paul. “And how is the other man?”

  “In hospital,” he said. “But Maggie gets the credit for that.”

  “Maggie does?” Karine said, eyes wide.

  Jean-Paul squeezed my bicep. “Bien sûr. Comes by it naturally. Did I ever tell you about the time her grandmother slashed a Nazi’s throat?”

  “You did.” She seemed dubious.

  “Don’t make Maggie c
ross when she’s holding a knife, sister dear.”

  “Lordy,” I said, unlocking the front door and leading the parade inside.

  The apartment was spotless. Not a dirty towel or athletic sock in sight. As soon as we were inside, Émile, carrying his medical bag, took Jean-Paul by the arm and walked him down the hall to the bathroom to tend to his wounds. Karine went into the kitchen to find the bottle of wine Madame Gonsalves told us she had left on the counter next to the refrigerator. While the others were busy, the concierge emptied the box she brought in onto the table behind the sofa and began going through the contents with me.

  “These are the utility bills,” she told me. “Isabelle put them on automatic payment, and that was fine with Freddy when he and his boys lived here. But I thought you would want to see them and decide for yourself.”

  There were also a few Christmas cards from people who, clearly, hadn’t updated their mailing lists since Isabelle’s death; a professional journal with a notice that it was time to renew the subscription; some belated condolence notes addressed to Isabelle’s family; and a sheaf of maybe two dozen letters, most of them on university letterhead. Requests by scholars to access the library, Madame Gonsalves told me, snapping the rubber band that bound them together. No new permissions had been granted for well over a year because Jean-Paul had been in Los Angeles until recently and Isabelle was— Madame Gonsalves crossed herself instead of uttering the word dead. However, she told me, out of fairness, Jean-Paul had asked her to continue unlocking the library door for scholars who had work in progress when the event she would not name occurred.

  “You have access to the library keys, then?” I asked.

  “How else would they get in?” she said, leading me into Isabelle’s office. She opened the top desk drawer and took out an old tin box that had once held throat lozenges. She shook it, heard nothing, flipped the lid, dropped it onto the desktop when she saw it was empty and, with some urgency, began shuffling through the top drawer. Out came paperclips, rubber bands, pens, random notepads, and a stapler. Finally, after reaching to the very back, she found a set of keys on a brass ring. She handed me the keys, and went back to examine the old tin box, opening and closing the lid several times, hearing it click shut, with a look of consternation on her face. “The keys must have fallen out.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I had no idea where to look for them.”

  She opened and closed the box again, shrugged, and set it back inside the drawer.

  I took out the little volume I had found on Isabelle’s desk earlier and showed it to her. Her eyes grew wide.

  “How did that get here?” she said, scolding. “Madame was very strict, nothing leaves the library.”

  “It was on the desk when I arrived.”

  She started to shake her head, but when a thought occurred to her, she said, “You better ask Freddy.”

  Karine was coming in from the kitchen with a bottle of wine and glasses on a tray when we walked back into the main salon. She poured a glass, a deep garnet red, and handed it to me. “I think we all need this.”

  Madame Gonsalves declined the proffered wine, told me she was happy we were back, but she had a program coming on television in a few minutes. Before she went, I showed her the photos of Sabri Qosja and Johann Bord, and asked if she had ever seen them.

  “This one,” she said, touching Bord’s nose. “He came by a week ago—Wednesday, Thursday?—asking if there were any vacancies. I told him no, but he didn’t like the answer. He said he knew someone had died and that her apartment was still empty and he wanted to see it. I told him it wasn’t available. He wanted to know who he could call about it. I told him he was talking to her. Finally, he left.”

  “Where did this take place?” I asked.

  She waved over her shoulder. “He was outside, on the street, talking to me on the intercom. I don’t think he knew I was watching him on the security camera. He’d scrunch up his face and flip me the finger when he didn’t like what I said. Even if there was a vacant apartment, I wouldn’t let him have it. That guy, un joyeux trou du cul.”

  I didn’t understand the words, but I got their meaning well enough.

  “There’s soup on the stove,” Karine said. “Did you make it, Madame?”

  The concierge shrugged, dismissing her gesture, a very kind and generous gesture, as if it were of no importance, only what one does every day. She turned to me. “Monsieur Bernard, will he be all right?”

  “I’m sure he will,” I said. “Some scars, but he’ll heal.”

  “I worried, you know, when the delivery came from the pharmacy yesterday. You looked fine, so I knew it was for him. Tell him I’m glad he’s okay.”

  “Thank you. I know a nice bowl of your soup will make him feel a lot better.”

  The modest shrug again, but color rose in her face and she smiled. She got as far as the door, tapped her head as if she’d just remembered something, pulled a scrap of paper out of her apron pocket and handed it to me.

  “This little pest came by twice,” she said. “He was here at the New Year with Freddy’s boy, Philippe. Mon dieu, the racket those boys made. Poor Monsieur Griffith in the apartment below. He complained twice about all the running up and down on the stairs at all hours. Playing some game, the boys told him. After they offended the cleaners, I told them I was going to call Freddy if they didn’t stop.”

  “Did they quiet down?”

  She shrugged. “They left. Anyway, this one came by twice. He told me he left his coat behind and he needed it. Could he go back in and get it? I told him he could ask you when you got here, but I didn’t let anybody in without your permission, or unless Freddy was with him. I thought he might cry.”

  “When was this?”

  “Two weeks ago? Maybe three. That was the first time. Second time was last week sometime. Early in the week, I think. He said he had a note from Freddy so it was okay to let him in. I told him to slip the note under the gate. I took a look at it and I knew that Freddy didn’t write it. I told the kid I would call Freddy to check, and he said never mind. I haven’t seen him since.”

  The note made me smile. There was a time I regularly forged my parents’ signatures on notes that looked very much like this one, usually when I wanted to ditch school. I never got away with it. The nuns, my keepers in high school, had my parents’ signatures on file. If there were any doubt, they would call Mom and Dad to verify that I was a wannabe truant. The kid’s note read like something I might have written when I was maybe sixteen: “I give permission for Val Barkoff to enter the apartment to get his coat, the one he forgot. Signed Freddy Daymoulan.” He misspelled Desmoulins. I set the note aside to show Jean-Paul. Had Freddy or Madame Gonsalves mentioned young Barkoff’s name? Through the fog of a long day, it rang a distant bell. I understood why he would be upset when he couldn’t get his expensive coat back. I wondered whether Madame Gonsalves might have been more accommodating if she had come to like the boy. I was happy that she had not.

  “Everything all right?” Karine asked. She was in an easy chair with her stocking feet up on an ottoman, wineglass held between both hands, looking very comfortable.

  “At the moment, yes.” I took the stack of library requests and my wine and sat down opposite her. After a lovely sip or two, I set the glass on a side table and opened the first letter. “You called Jean-Paul ‘Jeep.’ A family nickname?”

  “When I was tiny I couldn’t say Jean-Paul, so he became Jeep, and Jeep he still is. For me, anyway. I love my big brother very much. Is anyone going to tell me how he got hurt?”

  “It’s a long story. I’ll let him tell you.” Out of curiosity, I scanned the letters as we talked, now and then passing an interesting one to Karine. They were exactly what I expected, earnest requests for access to certain texts or topics from graduate students or university faculty, though some were from independent scholars, with brief descriptions of research projects and the reasons those projects needed access to the convent library. Most h
ad enclosed a curriculum vitae, a summary of their academic accomplishments, and some graduate students added letters from senior faculty advisors. They came from across Europe, the U.S., and Canada. Several were second or third requests; no one had looked at the requests since Isabelle died, a year and a half ago.

  Madame Gonsalves had stacked the letters chronologically, with the most recent on the bottom. It was the last two letters in the pile that got my attention, both with the same letterhead, one sent early in January, the other on the first of February, three weeks ago. As soon as I saw the return address, I sat up straight and tore into the envelopes. I snapped open the folded pages inside, found a routine-looking access request and a follow-up. But it was the signature that got me to my feet.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “I need to speak with Jean-Paul.”

  On my way to the bathroom, I snatched up the note from Val Barkoff and the little book of Psalms from Isabelle’s office, and tried to keep from running down the hall. Karine followed close behind. I’m afraid I was so focused on getting to Jean-Paul that I ignored her stream of questions.

  “Almost finished here,” Émile said, looking up from the brace he was buckling around Jean-Paul’s torso. The shirt Jean-Paul had taken off lay in a heap on the floor with my homemade sling tossed on top of it. “The patient needed a bit of repair, just a few new sutures, but he’s healing well. As soon as he gets a shirt on, I want to take him over to the clinic to get a nice picture of that bone, just to make sure.”

  “Oh, Émile,” Karine said. “They’ve been through enough for one day. Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”

  “No,” he said, smiling sweetly as he made a last adjustment to the brace. “If Jean-Paul refractured the bone during the fall this afternoon, we need to reset it, now.”

  “What fall?” she wanted to know.

  “Jean-Paul,” I said, handing him the kid’s forged note. “Philippe’s friend, the one who left the coat, pushed this under the gate.”