Central Park

by Guillaume Musso

  The inside of the taxi stinks of sweat. The radio is on full blast and the meter is already showing ten euros. I give the address to the driver—a building on Rue Parent-de-Rosan, in the sixteenth arrondissement—and tell him to lower the volume. His response is contemptuous until he sees my cop’s badge.

  I feel feverish and start shivering, overcome by hot flashes.

  I need to calm down. In my mind, I test out an improbable theory, but one I want to believe. Erik Vaughn, an employee in the lost-and-found office, uses his job to target his victims. Clara Maturin, Nathalie Roussel, Maud Morel, and Virginie André all came to see him, but he never entered their names in the office computer. That is why Dalmasso couldn’t find any trace of them. Vaughn managed to win their trust, got them to talk, squeezed as much information as he could out of them. He knew their addresses; he knew they lived alone. After that first meeting, he let a few days go by and then went to his target’s home, claiming to have brought her the missing object. Unfortunately for them, all four women invited him inside. Who ever suspects a bearer of good news? Each was so relieved at having found her favorite scarf, her cell phone, or her son’s teddy bear that she opened the door, even if it was past nine p.m.

  No, I’m just raving. What are the chances of this theory being correct? One in a thousand? And yet…

  The trip passes quickly. After driving back up Boulevard Victor-Hugo, the car passes the Georges-Pompidou hospital and crosses over the Seine, not far from the Porte de Saint-Cloud.

  Don’t do this on your own…

  I know as well as anyone that solving a crime is not a solo job but the culmination of a long-term team effort. There are well-defined procedures and clear rules, which is why I would really like to call Seymour and let him know what I’ve discovered. I hesitate, then decide to wait until I’ve learned the dates that Erik Vaughn worked in the lost-and-found office.

  My phone vibrates. I check my e-mail. Dalmasso has sent me an Excel file showing Vaughn’s work schedule. I click on my screen, but the file refuses to open. Incompatible format.

  Fuck.

  “This is it.” Unsmiling, the driver lets me out halfway along a small, one-way street between Rue Boileau and Avenue Mozart. The rain is falling even harder now. It streams down the back of my neck. I can feel the baby’s weight, very low and very dense, making it increasingly painful to walk.

  Turn around.

  Among the town houses and small residences, I spot a grayish façade that bears the number the secretary wrote on the Post-It note. A typical 1970s apartment building—a long concrete construction with a sinister, ugly look.

  I see the name VAUGHN on the intercom and press the button.

  No response.

  Out on the street, in the parking spaces reserved for two-wheel vehicles, there is a motorcycle, an old Yamaha Chappy, and a three-wheel scooter.

  I keep pressing the buzzer and eventually try all the buttons until someone in the building lets me in.

  I note the floor where Vaughn lives, then walk slowly upstairs. I can feel the baby kicking inside my belly again. As if he’s trying to warn me.

  I know this is a dumb idea, but something urges me onward. My investigation. I don’t turn on the light. I climb the stairs one by one in darkness.

  Sixth floor.

  Vaughn’s door is half open.

  I take my gun from my purse, congratulating myself on the intuition that made me bring it along. I hold it in two hands.

  Sweat and rainwater trickle down my back.

  I yell: “Erik Vaughn? Police. I’m coming in.”

  I push open the door, both hands still gripping the butt of the gun. I move along the corridor. I press the light switch, but the power has been cut. Outside, rain hammers on the roof.

  The apartment is half empty. No light, almost no furniture, a few cardboard boxes on the living-room floor. Clearly, this bird has flown.

  My anxiety goes down a notch. I remove my right hand from the gun to reach for my phone. As I’m typing in Seymour’s number, I sense a presence behind me. I drop my phone and spin around. A man in a motorcycle helmet.

  I open my mouth to scream, but before any sound comes out, I feel the blade of a knife sink into my flesh.

  The blade that is killing my son.

  Vaughn stabs my stomach again and again.

  My legs give way and I collapse to the ground.

  In a blur, I feel him pulling off my tights. Then I feel myself swept away on a river of hatred and blood. My last thought is of my father. More precisely, I think of the words he had tattooed on his forearm:

  The devil’s finest trick is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist.

  9

  Riverside

  Hell’s Kitchen, New York

  Today

  11:15 a.m.

  ALICE HAD FINISHED telling him her story a minute ago. Still frozen in shock, Gabriel said nothing. He tried to think of something comforting to say, but, fearful of making things worse, he decided it was better to stay silent.

  Alice squinted at the yellow leaves as they flew around in the wind. The buzz of the city was very distant. They could almost hear the sound of birdsong and the murmur of the fountain that stood in the center of the little garden. It had been painful but cathartic to relive the past in front of this stranger. Like talking to a shrink. Suddenly, out of the blue, a thought startled her.

  “I know how to open the briefcase!” she exclaimed to Gabriel’s surprise. She grabbed it and placed it flat on her knees. “Two locks controlled by a double code of three figures,” she muttered.

  “Sure,” he agreed, raising his eyebrows. “So?”

  She leaned forward and lifted up the sleeve of his shirt, revealing the series of numbers carved into his skin: 141197.

  “Let’s see…”

  She tested the combination by playing with the different thumb wheels, then pulled at the two locks at the same time. There was a click and the briefcase popped open.

  Empty.

  Or at least so it appeared. Alice spotted a detachable compartment separated by a zipper. She opened it, revealing a false bottom. Inside was a little tan alligator-skin travel bag.

  Yes!

  Hands trembling, she pulled it open. Inside, secured against the lining by an elastic, lay a large syringe, its needle protected by a plastic cap.

  “What is that thing?” Gabriel asked.

  Without removing the syringe from its holder, she examined it more closely. Inside the thick cylinder, a very pale blue liquid sparkled in the sunlight.

  Some kind of medicine? A drug? Twenty milliliters of an unknown substance.

  Frustrated, she zipped the travel bag shut again. If she were in Paris, she’d be able to run an analysis on the substance, but here, that was impossible.

  “If you wanted to know what that stuff does, you’d have to be brave enough to inject yourself with it,” said Gabriel.

  “Stupid enough to inject yourself with it, you mean,” Alice corrected him.

  Grabbing his jacket, he used his hand as a visor to protect his eyes from the sun.

  “There’s a pay phone at the end of the street,” he said, pointing. “I’m going to try calling my friend in Tokyo.”

  “Okay. I’ll wait for you in the car.”

  Alice watched Gabriel walk to the phone. Once again, she had the depressing sensation that her brain was working furiously and getting nowhere, constantly conjuring questions without answers.

  Why did she and Gabriel have no memory at all of what had happened to them last night? How had they ended up in Central Park? Whose blood was all over her blouse? Where did she get this gun? Why was a bullet missing from its magazine? Who had written the hotel’s phone number on her palm? Who had carved the briefcase code into Gabriel’s arm? Why had the briefcase been electrified? What did this syringe contain?

  This flood of questions made her reel.

  She felt like that other Alice, the one who fell down the rabbit hole into a land wh
ere nothing made sense.

  She was tempted to call Seymour to ask whether he’d found anything from the security cameras in the parking garage or the list of Parisian airports, but she knew her friend would need more time to carry out his inquiries. In the meantime, it was up to her to keep going. She needed to do what she did best: investigate.

  Using only what I have on hand.

  A police car appeared at the intersection and drove slowly up the street. Alice lowered her eyes, praying they would not see her. The Crown Vic passed by without stopping. It was a warning, and Alice took it seriously. More than an hour had gone by since they had stolen the Honda. Plenty of time for its owner to have reported the theft and given the cops a description of the woman who stole it. Keeping the car was too big a risk.

  Having made her decision, Alice gathered her belongings—the knife from the café, the new cell phone, the packet of ibuprofen, the wet wipes, the travel bag containing the syringe, the scrap of bloodstained fabric—and shoved it all in the army bag. She put the holster she had bought on her belt and slid the Glock inside it, then got out of the car, leaving the keys on the seat.

  Use only what you have on hand, Alice.

  What would she do if she were in Paris? She would begin with a fingerprint analysis of the syringe. But what could she do here? As she walked toward Gabriel, an idea started forming in her head.

  “I got a hold of Kenny,” Gabriel announced with a big grin. “He’s happy to lend us his apartment if we need it. It’s in Astoria, in Queens. Not exactly close by, I know, but it’s better than nothing.”

  “Come on, Keyne, let’s go! We’ve wasted enough time. And I hope you like walking, because we’re leaving the car here.”

  “And where are we going?”

  She smiled. “A place you ought to enjoy, given what an overgrown kid you are.”

  “Is that all you’re going to tell me?”

  “It’s almost Christmas, Gabriel. I’m going to buy you some toys.”

  10

  Fingerprints

  ALICE AND GABRIEL weaved between the tourists in the courtyard of the General Motors Building at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Ninth Street.

  At FAO Schwarz, two doormen dressed as toy soldiers greeted visitors to this old New York institution with wide, welcoming smiles.

  The iconic Manhattan toy store was already crowded. The first floor was like a circus tent, almost entirely devoted to life-size stuffed animals: a roaring lion, a tiger jumping through a flaming hoop, an elephant carrying three monkeys dressed as bellboys. Farther off, there was a space outfitted like a hospital nursery, with employees dressed as nurses holding chubby-cheeked dolls so realistic that they could easily be mistaken for real babies.

  “Are you ever going to tell me what the hell we’re doing here?” Gabriel asked.

  Ignoring the question, Alice took the escalator. As she rushed across the second floor, the pianist dreamily followed her, watching the kids around him with a certain amusement. Some were jumping on the keys of a giant piano mat on the floor, while others begged their parents to take a picture of them next to six-foot-tall Star Wars characters made out of Lego. Another group of kids was watching a Muppet-style puppet show.

  Still in Alice’s wake, Gabriel checked out the aisles, allowing himself a brief nostalgic return to childhood: plastic dinosaurs, five-thousand-piece Ravensburger jigsaw puzzles, Playmobil figures, Matchbox cars, electric trains, labyrinthine tracks.

  Kid heaven.

  In the costumes section, he put on a Groucho Marx mustache and an Indiana Jones hat, then joined Alice in the Science and Education area. With intense concentration, the cop was carefully examining the boxes on display: microscopes, telescopes, chemistry sets, plastic skeletons, and so on.

  “Hey, if you happen to find a whip…”

  She looked up at him and frowned at his getup. “Are you ever going to stop clowning around, Keyne?”

  “What can I do to help?”

  “Never mind,” she said dismissively.

  Annoyed, he moved away. He returned a few minutes later.

  “I bet this is what you’re looking for,” he said, showing her a cardboard box with the logo of a well-known TV show.

  She glanced up at the toy set he was holding—CSI: Junior Investigator Kit, $29.99—then grabbed the box from him so she could study its contents more closely: a roll of yellow crime scene tape, a magnifying glass, a detective’s badge, Scotch tape, glue, fingerprint powder, evidence bags, a magnetic fingerprint brush.

  “Actually, that’s exactly what we need,” she admitted.

  Alice went to the back of a long line on the second floor to pay for her purchase. It was only when she took the escalator down to the first floor that she saw Gabriel again. The pianist had swapped his Indiana Jones fedora for a magician’s top hat. Wearing a black cape, he was performing tricks for a crowd of spectators whose average age was five and a half. Alice watched him for a few seconds, baffled and fascinated in equal measure by this strange man. Dexterously and with evident pleasure, Gabriel was pulling all kinds of stuffed animals from his hat: a rabbit, a toucan, a kitten, a hedgehog, a tiger cub.

  Her smile soon faded, however. The presence of children was still difficult for Alice to bear, reminding her brutally of the fact that she would never give her son his bottle, never drive him to school or soccer practice or judo lessons, never teach him to defend himself and face the world.

  She blinked several times to rid herself of the tears that had formed in her eyes and then took a few steps toward Gabriel.

  “Stop messing around, Keyne!” she ordered, pulling him by the arm. “The police are looking for us, remember?”

  With a sweeping gesture, the magician removed his cape and sent his top hat flying onto the shelf where it belonged.

  “Mandrake the Magician bids you farewell!” he called out, bowing at the laughter and applause of the children.

  On Madison Avenue behind St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the Pergolese Café was one of the oldest diners in Manhattan. With its Formica tables and green leatherette benches, it was like something from the 1960s. It didn’t look like much from the outside, but it was famous for its crunchy salads, tasty burgers, eggs Benedict, and pastrami in truffle oil.

  Paolo Mancuso himself, the elderly owner of the establishment, brought over the dishes ordered by the young woman with the French accent and her companion: two lobster rolls, two cartons of homemade fries, and two bottles of Budweiser.

  No sooner had his food been served than Gabriel dived into it, stuffing a handful of fries into his mouth—crisp and salted to perfection.

  Sitting across from him, Alice took only a few bites of her sandwich before clearing a space on the table. She placed her satchel there, unfastened the two straps, and pulled out the travel bag they had found inside the briefcase. Using a paper napkin, she carefully removed the syringe from the pouch’s leather lining, then got down to work.

  After tearing the plastic wrapping from the CSI kit, she chose a vial of powder, a magnetic brush, and an evidence bag.

  “Um, you do realize they’re just toys, right?” the pianist said.

  “They’re good enough.”

  Alice cleaned her hands with a wet wipe and examined the quality of each item. The black powder, composed of carbon and thin iron filings, would work perfectly. She dipped the end of the brush into the little vial containing the powder and painted the outside of the syringe. The powder stuck to the oils left by the skin that had touched the smooth plastic, gradually revealing several clear fingerprints. Alice tapped the syringe with her nail to get rid of the excess powder, then scrutinized each print, all of them clearly recent. One of them in particular stood out: the almost whole print of an index or middle finger.

  “Cut me a piece of Scotch tape,” she said.

  Gabriel picked up the roll. “Like this?”

  “A bit longer. And be careful not to touch the sticky side!”

  She took the rectangle
of tape from him and used it to cover the fingerprint, smoothing it flat to avoid air bubbles. Then she removed the tape, turned over the coaster that her drink had been sitting on, and applied the tape to the blank cardboard. She pressed down on it firmly with her thumb to transfer the pattern to the coaster.

  When she removed the tape, a clear black fingerprint was visible on the coaster’s white surface. Alice squinted, examining the intertwining of grooves. Lines and ridges formed an unusual pattern: an arched print broken by a tiny cross-shaped scar.

  She showed the print to Gabriel and then, satisfied, slid the coaster into an evidence bag.

  “Okay, that’s very nice,” he admitted, “but what good does it do us? Wouldn’t we have to scan it into a police database to find out whose it is?”

  Alice nibbled a few fries while she mused out loud: “Your friend’s apartment in Queens…”

  “Yeah?”

  “I imagine he’ll have a computer with an Internet connection.”

  “He may well have Wi-Fi, but if he has a computer, it’s probably a laptop—and that will be in Tokyo. So I wouldn’t get your hopes up.”

  Alice’s face crumpled with disappointment. “How should we get there? Taxi, subway…”

  Gabriel looked up. On the wall above their table, amid a hodgepodge of photographs of celebrities posing with the café owner, he saw an old city map pinned to a corkboard. “We’re not far from Grand Central,” he said, pointing to the map.

  Grand Central…Alice remembered that extraordinary train station, which Seymour had shown her during one of their trips to New York. Her colleague had taken her to eat oysters and shrimp at the Oyster Bar, a fantastic seafood restaurant situated in a large vaulted room underground. Recalling that visit, she suddenly had an idea. She looked at the map. Gabriel was right—Grand Central Station was only a few blocks from where they sat.

  “Let’s go!” she said, sliding out of her seat.