Number 7, Rue Jacob

by Wendy Hornsby

  “Maybe we could arrange a swap,” I said. “A lovely stolen Book of Psalms for a stolen Monet.”

  “Please don’t do that,” Phillipe said, with surprising heat. “Please. Mamie Izzy studied who should have the Russian books. But they can’t go to Russia. She said someone went to a lot of trouble to rescue them from destruction, and she couldn’t bear to see them sent back into what she called a cesspool of corruption. There was nowhere to send them: not the church, not the museums. She said the reactionary Patriarch of Moscow—he’s the head of the church—is in the pocket of the reprehensible Russian government and she would do nothing that would seem to support his sexist, racist, xenophobic agenda. And that anything sent to a museum or university would probably end up in the hands of some oligarch who would only sell it for cash to pay his whores.”

  “Your grandmother said that?” I asked. I didn’t necessarily disagree with her, but is that the way Isabelle spoke with her grandchild? Lordy, she was an ever-deepening puzzle to me.

  I looked up to see Jean-Paul watching me. The bob of his head told me that, yes, that was something Isabelle might say.

  Philippe was looking at the stack of books that his friend Val took off the shelves, when he said, “Mamie Izzy thought the best thing was to keep it all here, where it was clean, quiet, and safe, until she could figure things out. But, she died, and, well, that was it.”

  “Philippe, son,” Jean-Paul said, putting a reassuring hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Thank you for sharing your grandmother’s thinking. Isabelle was right. Until a solution can be figured out, it would be best to keep the Russian collection here, safe. And quiet. But I’m not sure, in light of recent events, how possible that will be.”

  “I’m an idiot for saying anything to Val, aren’t I?”

  “No, you’re not. We should be free to talk to our friends without worrying that they might steal from us. Or worse.”

  “Gentlemen,” I said. “It’s cold down here. Let’s go upstairs and see if I’ve managed to burn the soup.”

  “What should we do with those books?” Philippe asked, eyes again on Val’s pile.

  “Leave them for now,” Jean-Paul said. “We’ll want to take a closer look at what he found so interesting. But right now, let’s have something to eat, yes? I would not want to have to report to Madame Gonsalves that we ruined her soup through neglect.”

  We turned out the lights and locked the door behind us. About halfway up the stairs, Jean-Paul’s phone got a signal again and began to ding with messages that had come in while we were in the basement. As he passed through the kitchen, he excused himself, set the wine on the counter and continued on into the salon. I could hear him talking to someone, but not what he was talking about.

  Though the soup hadn’t burned, it had become thick enough to stand a spoon in. I filled a cup from the tap to thin it, but before I could dump water into the pot, Philippe stopped me.

  “Madame Gigi adds chicken broth when she needs to thin the soup.” He opened a cupboard, pulled out a liter box of chicken broth, and set to work.

  “You like to cook?” I asked as I pulled out the mortadella we lugged all the way from Bologna, and the cheese and bread we acquired in Vaucresson that afternoon. Leftover soup, a little salad, cold meat and cheese sounded like a perfect Saturday night meal to me.

  “I’d rather cook than study physics,” he said. “But I’d rather jump out a window than study physics.”

  “I think the physics gene skipped both of us,” I said. “What do you want to study?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing, really.”

  “When is your spring break? Sounds like you’re ready for it.”

  “Not for two more weeks.”

  “Think you can last?”

  He shrugged as he stirred the soup, but he smiled. We were talking about school and plans for the summer when Jean-Paul came into the kitchen. As he searched drawers looking for a corkscrew, he announced, “I hope it’s all right; David Berg is going to drop by.”

  “When?” I asked.

  “I just opened the gate for him.”

  “How lovely. Shall I open the wine?”

  “Do you mind?”

  What was there to say when the man was already driving through the gate? I reached for the corkscrew. “Of course not.”

  “Is there enough soup for one more?”

  I glanced at Philippe, he nodded, and I answered, “Certainly.”

  When Jean-Paul left to go downstairs to let in his friend, I appealed to my co-chef. “Guess we’re having a dinner guest. How thin can we make the soup?”

  “No worry.” He pulled a box of stewed roma tomatoes out of the cupboard, dumped them into the pot, added some tarragon and thyme, and the rest of the box of broth. Next, he cut a wedge off the mortadella, slivered it, dropped that into the pot, and chased it with a healthy shot of apple brandy he found somewhere.

  “I’m glad you’re here, Philippe,” I said. For my part, I took the roasted chicken we’d bought from the butcher’s smoochy wife out of the refrigerator. I thought I would slice it and we could eat it cold after the soup, but with what on the side? The edges of the salad greens had turned brown while they sat in the frigid car all afternoon, though the hothouse green beans looked just fine. I washed them, and holding the dripping colander over the sink, asked, “Any ideas about what to do with these?”

  “Sure, sure.” Philippe pulled out a sauté pan, olive oil and a head of garlic. I left him to it, picked up the wine and went out to greet our guest. Except, there were two men in dark suits taking off snow-flecked coats in the vestibule, not one.

  “Maggie,” Jean-Paul said, reaching for me. “This is my old friend, David Berg.”

  “Enchanté,” the older of the two said, an elegant man of about fifty, the same age as Jean-Paul. He offered his hand and leaned in for les bises. “I am so very happy to meet you at last.”

  “Monsieur le Préfet.” I sneaked a peek at myself in the mirror on the wall behind him. He looked as if he’d just stepped out of a showroom. I looked like I’d had a long day. “How nice to meet a friend of Jean-Paul.”

  Still holding my hand, he leaned in a bit again to say, in a low voice, “I beg you, call me David, or Davey, or anything else except Monsieur le Préfet.”

  “Shall I tell her what we called you at school?” Jean-Paul asked.

  “Please don’t.” Berg found a hook on the hall tree for his coat. “Maggie, I want you to meet Thierry Dusaud, my assistant.”

  I offered my hand to Dusaud. He took it and bowed over it, a more formal greeting than kissing the air around my cheeks. I said, “Welcome.”

  “I hope we aren’t a burden,” Dusaud said as he released my hand. “My wife would kill me if I dragged in dinner guests without advance warning.”

  I liked him right away. “Dinner, I’m afraid, will be potluck.”

  Berg unwrapped a cashmere muffler from around his neck and draped it on a hook beside his coat. “Something smells wonderful.”

  “I take no credit.”

  Philippe came out to the salon long enough to be introduced and to collect a short pour of wine, as is French custom, when Jean-Paul was serving the adults. He raised his glass with us, and then excused himself and, wineglass in hand, went back to the kitchen. He insisted, quite assertively, that he would set the table and serve dinner. He owed me, he said. And though I protested, I thought he was happy for the opportunity to be useful. It was probably better that he was busy elsewhere, out of earshot, while Jean-Paul answered his friend’s question, “What the hell is going on?” in some detail, beginning with the drone attack in Greece a week ago.

  A week ago? Could it be only a week ago? The last three days alone felt like months.

  “Maggie?” Berg sat forward in his chair, opposite my seat next to Jean-Paul on the sofa. He seemed earnest. “You arrived in Paris Thursday?”

  “Yes. In the morning.”

  “The last leg of your trip was from Abu Dhabi, yes?�
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  “You checked up on me?”

  “I didn’t,” Berg said. “But a one-hundred-and-ten-pound, fifteen-year-old hacker in Taiwan did. You were tracked from Vientiane, Laos, to the airport in Bangkok, on to Abu Dhabi, and finally to Paris.”

  “How did he track me?” I asked. “Through flight manifests or customs records?”

  “You tell me how.” He pulled a little notebook out of his pants pocket, and with a smile, reported: “Tuesday, at the airport in Vientiane, you bought something to read and something to drink. In Bangkok, it looks like you had both lunch and a late dinner in the airport, and then you went to a hotel. Your flight was delayed?”

  “Damn credit cards,” I said, knowing now the source of his information. “It’s such a bother when you’re in transit through a country to exchange currency just to buy a cup of coffee, a newspaper, and a sandwich. And yes, a delayed flight out of Bangkok. The first of several.”

  “A long trip, yes?”

  “Longer than it needed to be. If I’d known every purchase was being tracked, I would have stuck with airline peanuts and water.”

  “I have only one question,” Berg said, referring to his notes. “And that concerns what you were doing last Saturday afternoon.”

  “Saturday afternoon in what time zone?”

  He laughed. “Around the time our dear boy was being blasted by a toy drone.”

  “What time was that?”

  “After lunch,” Jean-Paul said. “Around two o’clock, maybe.”

  I had to think for a moment, but in the end, I gave up. “I don’t know. I think the time difference between here and Laos is five hours. Is Greece an hour ahead of us?”

  “I think so,” Jean-Paul said. “My watch changes automatically, so I don’t have to think about time zones anymore when I travel.”

  “Watch, past tense,” I said.

  “Ah, yes. Gone the way of my telephone.”

  Berg raised an eyebrow. “Blown up?”

  “No. It was still running when I traded it to some Greek fishermen for passage to Italy.”

  I looked across at Berg. “So, around six o’clock on Saturday, I was with my film crew in a tiny Lao village near the Thai border. Probably having dinner, or using a bucket to take a shower. Why?”

  “Thierry?” Berg turned to his assistant. “You’re primary on this, what do you know?”

  His assistant scooted a few inches forward on his seat and leaned toward me. “You disappeared from the hacker’s surveillance from Saturday morning until Monday evening. Something interesting must have happened during that time, because your bar tab in Vientiane when you reappeared on Monday was impressive.”

  “Believe me, I wasn’t in Greece launching a drone,” I said, though I knew that he was only looking for information and not accusing me of anything nefarious, except maybe having a drinking problem. “There are places in the world, my friend, where credit cards are useless. We could only use cash, Lao kip, in the village where we filmed that weekend, though the innkeeper was okay with U.S. dollars. We finished filming Monday afternoon, packed our gear, and headed for Vientiane. That night, I hosted a wrap party for the crew, as is our tradition when we finish final filming. They can drink impressive quantities of hooch. Tuesday morning, we all flew out. Or tried to fly out.”

  “I only asked because when we got hold of the hacker’s log this afternoon, we saw that you disappeared offline at about the same time as Monsieur Bernard—”

  “Jean-Paul,” Jean-Paul said.

  “Thank you,” Dusaud said, with a little nod. “We had some concern that something, let’s just say dire, was happening to you during the same time that Jean-Paul was under attack in Greece.”

  “Happily, no,” I said. “The more I think about how vulnerable we are to anyone who wants to, as you say, do something dire to us, the more I like that Laotian village. Even though we had to be vaccinated against several deadly diseases, walk gingerly around areas with live ordnance, and truck in our own water, I felt safer there than I do right now, here in very civilized Paris. So, what happens next?”

  “Davey?” Dusaud deferred to his superior.

  “Wish we knew. If we’d had this information sooner, I might have a better answer for you.” Berg set aside his wineglass and nailed Jean-Paul with the sort of look angry mothers aim at naughty children. “My dear old friend didn’t see fit to tell me a damn thing about what was going on for one long week. So, we’ve hardly had time to figure it all out. This afternoon, I did as you suggested, Jeep, and I called Luca Ponti for information. You might like to know that, based on the information you gave him yesterday, police in Taiwan took la petite merde who hacked your accounts into custody.”

  It seemed to me that Berg was truly hurt that Jean-Paul hadn’t come to him immediately. Why, I wondered, hadn’t he? I turned to Jean-Paul. When I saw his discomfort, I asked, “In this case, does the feminine article, la, refer to the gender of the person who is a little shit, or is shit a feminine noun?”

  “The noun is feminine,” Jean-Paul said. “But the hacker: Davey? Thierry?”

  Berg answered, unable to hide a little smile. “Your little shit is a boy.”

  I asked, “So why is merde a feminine noun?”

  Jean-Paul said, “If it makes you feel better, fart— pet—is masculine in French.”

  “It does, a little bit. And I’m happy that our petite merde will be separated from his computer for a while. But how does that help us? Won’t ProtX4 just go to the next hacker on their list in the same way that, if Qosja’s threat is correct, they’ll hire the next thug in line to come after us?”

  Berg sat up taller. “He said that to you?”

  “He did.”

  Dusaud moved the conversation back on topic. “We haven’t had time to learn much about either ProtX4 or InterCentro. After his arrest, the kid in Taiwan handed over every bit of information he had collected. But all he knows about whoever hired him are a bank routing number for the money that was deposited on his credit card and the access code for an anonymous message drop box. About ProtX4, we know only what anyone can find out by pulling up their web page. They seem to function entirely online. We left a couple of messages on their contact link, but they haven’t responded.”

  “Anything on InterCentro?” Jean-Paul asked.

  “Not yet,” Dusaud said. “Other than that they claim to be a center for the study of traditional Russian culture.”

  Philippe had been in and out of the salon, carrying dishes and eating implements as he set the table. Occasionally something that was being said would catch his attention and he would pause, but he generally went about the tasks he had taken on himself without paying much attention to the conversation on the far side of the room. The table was ready, a second bottle of wine was open and breathing on the sideboard, when he came in carrying a soup tureen. He set the soup near bowls stacked at one end of the table and announced, “À table.”

  “Gentlemen. Dinner is served.” I rose, and they followed. Jean-Paul still had the use of only one arm, so I asked Philippe if he would serve the soup, but his eyes grew wide with horror at taking over for the host, and instead he pulled out the chair in front of the tureen for me, putting me at the head of the table, instead of him. The soup was good. The stewed tomatoes and herbs Philippe added brightened Madame Gonsalves’s rather heavy, but delicious, potato-leek porrusalda. Conversation during dinner, like conversation during our lunch with Luca, went everywhere except anywhere near the real topic for the evening. We discussed children and parents and school, making films for television, hating or loving physics, fighting international terrorism. Philippe did his best to participate, and the men were gracious about finding subjects that included him. The soup was cleared and he brought out a platter with a heap of sautéed green beans in the center of a necklace of cold sliced chicken drizzled with a sort of sriracha aioli that he improvised, he told us, by adding a few drops of vinegar, olive oil, and hot sauce to the crème fraîche he fo
und in the refrigerator. It was delicious.

  “Young man,” Berg said after savoring a bite. “Did your mother teach you to cook?”

  Philippe blushed furiously: if there were a tabu topic, especially in my presence, it would be anything having to do with his mother. After taking a sip of water, he said, quietly, “No, my grand-mère is a famous cook.”

  I knew he did not mean Isabelle, but her mother.

  Jean-Paul raised his wineglass. “Here’s to the cook. Who the hell needs physics when he can throw together a meal like this from nothing?”

  The last course was cheese, fig jam, coffee, and brandy. As we lingered with the brandy, the conversation finally moved to the library in the basement, and to Val Barkoff’s interest in the ­Russian texts.

  “I remember when you found the old library,” Berg said, breaking off a chunk of aged Roquefort and daubing it with fig jam. “That time, you came to me because you needed my advice about what should be done with it.”

  “You were a great help,” Jean-Paul said. “I’m asking for your help again.”

  “Other than trying to keep you two alive just a little longer, what is it, exactly, that you want me to do, my dear Jeep?”

  “I have a question for Philippe first.” Making eye contact with Philippe, Jean-Paul asked, “Have you met your friend Val’s father?”

  “Yes, a few times. He came for sports days and parent meetings.”

  “Do you know his Christian name?”

  Philippe covered his mouth to hide a giggle. When he caught his breath, he said, “It’s Boris.”

  “Is that funny?” I asked him.

  “Well, yes, because he is short and fat, and his wife is tall and thin, and her name is Natasha. He’s Russian, and he always has these security men around him. So, Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale. Get it?”

  “You watch American cartoons?” I asked.

  “Sure. Rocky and Bullwinkle, moose and squirrel.”

  Jean-Paul said, “Maggie, I’ll teach you how to swear in French if you’ll help me with the American idiom. I have no idea what you two are talking about.”