Central Park

by Guillaume Musso

  Alice counted on her fingers. “Ten at night, I think.”

  “Damn, he’ll be in the middle of a gig.”

  The call went straight to voice mail. Gabriel left his friend a message explaining that he was in New York and promising to call again later.

  He gave the phone back to Alice. She looked at her watch and sighed.

  Get a move on, Seymour! she pleaded silently, tightening her fingers around the phone. She had just decided to call her deputy again when she noticed the series of numbers scrawled in ballpoint on her palm. The sweat had almost erased them.

  “Does this mean anything to you?” she asked Gabriel, opening her hand in front of his face.

  2125550100

  “I found it when I woke up this morning, but I have no memory of writing it.”

  “Probably a phone number, don’t you think? Show me again. Yeah, that’s it! Two one two is the area code for Manhattan. Hey, are you sure you’re a cop?”

  How did I miss that?

  Ignoring his sarcasm, she typed the number into the phone. It was answered immediately.

  “Greenwich Hotel, Candice speaking, how may I help you?”

  A hotel?

  Alice thought quickly. Where was the Greenwich? Was it possible she’d been there this morning, however briefly? It made no sense, but she gave it a try anyway.

  “Could you put me through to Alice Schafer, please?”

  There was a silence on the line, and then: “I don’t think we have anyone staying at the hotel under that name, ma’am.”

  Alice persisted. “You don’t think? You mean you’re not sure?”

  “I am sure, ma’am. I’m sorry.”

  Even before Alice had hung up, Seymour’s number flashed on the screen. She answered her deputy’s call without even bothering to thank the hotel receptionist. “Seymour, are you at the office?”

  “Nearly,” a breathless voice replied. “So…this thing about New York…please tell me you’re joking.”

  “I’m afraid not. Listen, I don’t have much time and I need your help.”

  In less than three minutes, she told him everything that had happened to her since the previous evening: the night out with friends on the Champs-Élysées; the blank in her memory after she entered the parking garage; waking up in Central Park, handcuffed to a stranger; and finally stealing the cell phone so she could call him.

  “Oh, come on, Alice, enough with the joke! We’re busy here, we don’t have time for this. And the judge wants to see you—he refused our wiretap request in the Sicard case. And as for Taillandier, she—”

  “Listen to me, goddamn it!” she yelled. There were tears in her eyes and she was close to losing it. Even on the other side of the Atlantic, her deputy must have noticed the desperation in her voice. “I am not joking, for fuck’s sake! I’m in danger and you’re the only one who can help me.”

  “Okay. Calm down. Why don’t you just go to the nearest police station?”

  “Why? Because I have a gun that doesn’t belong to me in my jacket pocket, Seymour. Because there’s blood all over my shirt. Because I don’t have any ID. That’s why! They’d throw me in jail without a second thought!”

  “Not if there’s no body,” the policeman pointed out.

  “How do I know there isn’t? First of all, I need to find out what happened to me. And find a way to get out of these damn handcuffs!”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Your mother’s American. You have family here, you know lots of people.”

  “My mother lives in Seattle, as you know perfectly well. The only family I have in New York is one of my great-aunts. A little old lady living on the Upper East Side. We visited her the first time we went to Manhattan together, remember? She’s ninety-five years old—I kind of doubt she has a hacksaw on hand. You need to find someone else to help you.”

  “Who, then?”

  “Let me think. I have an idea, but I need to make a call first. Otherwise I might give you the wrong address.”

  “Okay, call me back. But please, do it quickly.”

  She hung up and balled her fists. Gabriel looked into her eyes. He could feel her body quivering with anger and frustration. “Who is this Seymour guy?”

  “My deputy in the Criminal Division. And my best friend.”

  “Are you sure we can trust him?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “My French isn’t great, but I didn’t get the impression he was exactly rushing to your aid.”

  She didn’t reply. He went on: “What about the hotel? No luck?”

  “No, as I’m sure you know, since you were listening to my conversation.”

  “It would be difficult not to at this distance. Please, madame, I hope you will forgive my indiscretion in light of the current circumstances,” he mocked in a posh French accent. “And anyway, as you’ve already reminded me, you’re not the only one who’s up shit creek without a paddle!”

  Exasperated, she turned away to avoid his gaze. “Jesus, stop staring at me like that! Don’t you have someone else to call? A wife, a girlfriend…”

  “No. A girl in every port, that’s my motto. I’m a free man. As free as the air I breathe, as free as the music I play.”

  “Yeah, right. Free and alone. I know the type.”

  “So what about you? Got a husband or a boyfriend?”

  She avoided the question with an indecipherable movement of her head, but he sensed that he had touched a nerve.

  “Seriously, Alice, are you married?”

  “Go fuck yourself, Keyne.”

  “Okay, I get it,” he said. “You are married.” As she didn’t deny it, he pressed on. “Why don’t you call your husband?”

  She balled her fists tighter.

  “Relationship on the rocks, huh? Can’t say I’m too surprised, given your charming personality.”

  She stared at him as if he had just plunged a dagger into her belly. Then her shock gave way to anger.

  “I can’t call him because he’s dead, you piece of shit!”

  Gabriel’s face showed his discomfiture at this clumsy faux pas. But before he could offer an apology, an awful ringtone—some improbable mix of salsa and club music—poured from the stolen cell phone.

  “Yes, Seymour?”

  “I’ve figured out how to solve your problem, Alice. You remember Nikki Nikovski?”

  “Remind me.”

  “When we went to New York last Christmas, we visited a contemporary artists’ collective…”

  “In a big building near the docks, right?”

  “Yeah, in Red Hook. We had a long talk with an artist who did silk-screen printing on sheets of steel and aluminum.”

  “And you ended up buying two of her pieces for your collection,” she remembered.

  “Yep, that’s her—Nikki Nikovski. We stayed in touch and I’ve just talked to her. Her studio is in an old factory. She has the right tools to get you out of the handcuffs and she’s agreed to help.”

  Alice sighed with relief. Clinging to this good news, she laid out her battle plan to her deputy.

  “You have to start an investigation, Seymour. Start by getting hold of the security-camera footage from the underground parking garage on Avenue Franklin-Roosevelt. Find out if my car is still there.”

  “You told me all your things were stolen, right?” Seymour said. “So I can put a trace on your cell phone and check any movements in your bank account.”

  “Good. And find out about any private jets that left Paris for the United States last night. Start with Le Bourget, then widen the list to all the business airports in the Paris region. Also, try to dig up what you can on a Gabriel Keyne—he’s an American jazz pianist. Check whether he was really playing a concert last night in a Dublin club called Brown Sugar.”

  “You’re investigating me?” Gabriel interjected. “You’ve got nerve!”

  Alice signaled him to shut up and continued instructing her deputy. “Question my friends too—you
never know. Karine Payet, Malika Haddad, and Samia Chouaki. We were in college together. You’ll find their phone numbers on my office computer.”

  “Okay.”

  Suddenly, another idea crossed her mind. “Oh, and just in case, see if you can trace a gun for me. A Glock twenty-two. I’ll give you the serial number.”

  She read out the series of letters and numbers engraved on the side of the pistol.

  “Got it. I’ll do everything I can to help you, Alice, but I have to tell Taillandier about this.”

  Alice closed her eyes. The image of Mathilde Taillandier, the chief of the Criminal Division, flashed in her head. Taillandier did not like Alice much, and the feeling was mutual. Since the Erik Vaughn case, Alice had asked several times to be transferred. Up till now, her bosses had refused the request, essentially for political reasons, and Alice knew her position within the division was still fragile.

  “No way,” she insisted. “Don’t tell anyone. You need to deal with this on your own. I’ve saved your skin plenty of times, Seymour—you owe me this, at least.”

  “All right.” He sighed. “I’ll call you as soon as I have any news.”

  “No, I’ll call you. I won’t be able to keep this phone very long, but text me Nikki Nikovski’s address.”

  Alice hung up, and a few seconds later, the address of the painter’s studio appeared on the screen. She clicked on the link and a map appeared.

  “Red Hook? That’s pretty far,” Gabriel commented, looking over her shoulder.

  Alice touched the screen to widen the map. The studio was located in Brooklyn. There was no way they could walk there. And public transit was out of the question.

  “We don’t even have cash for bus or subway fare,” Gabriel said as if reading her thoughts.

  “So what do you suggest, Einstein?”

  “Easy,” he replied. “We steal a car. But this time, you let me do it, okay?”

  Near the intersection of Amsterdam Avenue and Sixty-First Street was a little dead-end alley between two apartment buildings.

  Gabriel smashed the window of the old Mini with his elbow. He and Alice had spent nearly twenty minutes looking for a car that was parked in a quiet spot and old enough to be started the old-fashioned way.

  It was an antique Austin Cooper S with beige bodywork and a white roof, a late 1960s model apparently restored to its original state by a collector.

  “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

  Gabriel shrugged off the question. “Nothing in life is certain except death and taxes.”

  He put his arm through the smashed window and opened the door. Though Hollywood movies suggested otherwise, hot-wiring a car was no easy feat. And it was even more complicated when you were handcuffed to someone.

  Gabriel sat in the driver’s seat, then crouched under the aluminum-and-polished-wood steering wheel while Alice pretended to talk to him, leaning into the window.

  They worked together instinctively, Alice acting as lookout while he dealt with the mechanics of the theft.

  With one hard yank, Gabriel pulled off the plastic panels that slotted together to protect the steering column, exposing the electronics. Three pairs of different-colored wires emerged from a scuffed plastic cylinder.

  “Where did you learn to do that?”

  “School of hard knocks. Englewood, South Side of Chicago.”

  He carefully examined the bundle of wires before identifying the ones that activated the battery. Pointing to the brown wires, he explained: “These supply all the car’s electricity.”

  “For God’s sake, you’re not going to give me a mechanics class right now, are you?”

  Annoyed, he unclipped two wires from the cylinder, exposed their ends, and twisted them together to turn on the ignition. Instantly, the dashboard lit up.

  “Hurry up, damn it! There’s a woman watching us from her balcony.”

  “It’s not exactly a piece of cake when you’ve got only one hand, you know. I’d like to see you try!”

  “Well, don’t brag about your school of hard knocks, then.”

  Under pressure and against every rule of common sense, Gabriel used his teeth to expose the end of the starter wire.

  “How about giving me a hand instead of standing there whining? Here, take this wire. Rub it gently against where mine are connected. There you go, that’s it…”

  A spark was produced and they heard the engine fire up. A brief smile of complicity sealed this little victory.

  “Move over, quick,” she told him, pushing him toward the passenger seat. “I’m driving.”

  5

  Red Hook

  A FORD TAURUS POLICE Interceptor sporting the colors of the NYPD was parked at the corner of Broadway and Sixty-Sixth Street.

  Hurry up, Mike!

  Inside the car, Jodie Costello, twenty-four years old, drummed her fingers impatiently against the steering wheel.

  The young woman had finished the police academy earlier that year, and her job was proving a lot less exciting than she’d hoped. This morning, she had been at work for only forty-five minutes and she already had pins and needles in her legs from sitting still. Her patrol district, west of Central Park, was a wealthy area and way too quiet for her taste. Since she’d started this job, all she’d done was give directions to tourists, run after purse-snatchers, ticket speeding motorists, and clear drunks from the street.

  To make things worse, her partner was a numbskull named Mike Hernandez who was only six months from retirement and chronically lazy. All he thought about was eating and exerting as little effort as humanly possible. Like some cop caricature, he took regular doughnut, burger, and Coke breaks and would hang around to shoot the shit with storekeepers and tourists at the slightest opportunity—his own version of community policing.

  Come on, man, that’s enough! Jodie seethed. How long does it take to buy a bag of doughnuts, for God’s sake?

  She got out, slamming the door behind her. She was about to go into the Dunkin’ Donuts to chew out her partner, when she saw the group of six teenagers running toward her.

  “¡Ladrón, ladrón!”

  In a firm voice, she ordered the Spanish tourists to calm down and then listened to the explanations they gave in broken English. At first, she thought it was just a simple phone-snatching, and she was about to send them off to the twentieth precinct to file a complaint, when a strange detail grabbed her attention.

  “Wait, you’re sure the thieves were handcuffed?” she asked the boy in the soccer shirt, who seemed to be at once the ugliest and the least dumb of the group, a chubby-faced kid with thick-lensed glasses and an uneven bowl cut.

  “I’m sure! Yes!” the Spaniard replied, noisily backed up by his friends.

  Jodie chewed her lower lip. Fugitives? It was hard to believe. This morning, as she did every day, she had listened to the descriptions of wanted suspects on the APB, and none of them had sounded remotely like these two muggers.

  Following a hunch, she took her iPad from the car’s trunk.

  “What kind of phone do you have, kid?”

  She listened to his reply and connected to the manufacturer’s website. She then asked the teenager to give her his username and password.

  Once she’d done this, the app allowed her to access the user’s e-mails and contact list as well as the phone’s location. Jodie knew how to do this because she had used the same technique six months earlier for personal reasons. In the space of a few minutes, she had been able to trace her boyfriend’s visits to another girl’s apartment, giving her proof of his infidelity. Now she touched the screen to start the tracking process. A blue dot flashed on the map. Assuming the site was working properly, the kid’s cell phone was currently halfway across the Brooklyn Bridge!

  Optimistic thoughts were chasing away her bad mood—finally, she had a chance to work a real investigation.

  Theoretically, she ought to broadcast this information on the NYPD radio frequency so a Brooklyn patrol could arrest
the suspects. But there was no way she was going to just hand this case over to someone else.

  She glanced at the Dunkin’ Donuts. Still no sign of Mike Hernandez.

  Oh, well…

  She got behind the steering wheel. At just that moment, her partner came out the door. “Quick! Get in the car!” Jodie called to him.

  “What’s going on?” he asked, climbing awkwardly into the passenger seat.

  “I’ll tell you later. Let’s go!” And she set off for Brooklyn, siren screaming.

  The former working docks jutted out into the East River.

  The Mini reached the end of Van Brunt Street, the main road that crossed Red Hook. Beyond that point, the road gave way to a fenced-off industrial wasteland that opened directly onto the docks.

  Alice and Gabriel parked next to a broken sidewalk. Still hobbled by their handcuffs, they exited the car through the same door. The sun was shining brightly, but an icy wind roared at their faces.

  “Damn, it’s cold here!” the pianist grumbled, lifting his jacket collar.

  Gradually, Alice began to recognize her surroundings. The rugged beauty of the industrial landscape, the disused warehouses, the strange choreography of the container cranes, the freighters and barges sharing the same stretch of water. It was like the end of the world here, the ferry foghorns barely even audible.

  The last time she’d been here with Seymour, the district was still struggling to recover from the ravages of Hurricane Sandy, when the basements and first floors of buildings located too close to the water had been flooded. Today, thankfully, it looked as if most of the damage had been repaired.

  “Nikki Nikovski’s studio is in that building over there,” Alice said, pointing at an imposing brick construction that, to judge from its silos and chimney, must have been a major factory during Brooklyn’s industrial golden age.

  They headed toward the building, which faced out to sea. The docks were practically deserted. No tourists or joggers here. There were a few little cafés and stores lined up on Van Brunt Street, but none were open yet.