by Jon Steele
“You see, when applied to sodium vapor lamps in areas sealed with a level four time warp, such as the protected zone, Arc 9s will allow you to see around corners and back over your shoulder at the same time. We’re very excited about it.”
“You don’t say.”
The filters still had some kinks, the mechanic chattered on. Something about certain meteorological conditions interacting with negative resistance ions.
“As a result, a spike in black body radiation could be either a mortal threat moving through nearby shadows or a cat falling at terminal velocity.”
Harper stared at the mechanic.
“A cat. Falling at terminal velocity.”
“Cats, yes,” the mechanic replied. “You see, cats reach terminal velocity at one hundred kilometers per hour. That’s a speed they reach when falling at a distance greater than one hundred feet. The Felis catus, or common domesticated cat as it’s known, then has the ability to stabilize and spread its legs, forming itself into something of a parachute. Fascinating stuff. Did you know a cat has a better chance of surviving a fall from forty floors than four?”
Harper considered the mechanic’s enthusiasm regarding the topic.
“Mate, are you telling me you’ve been tossing cats from windows to test your bloody lamp filters?”
The mechanic appeared pained.
“Why, no. It’s only based on computer simulations. Goodness, I love my cats. I have two of them. Would you like to see their pictures?”
Harper blinked and turned from the window. He saw Monsieur Dufaux setting two fresh glasses and a carafe of white on the table. Dufaux sat across from Harper and poured.
“Santé.”
“Et toi.”
They touched glasses and sipped.
“So how have you been?” Dufaux said. “You haven’t been in the café for, what, a week or two?”
Harper thought about it. He couldn’t quite see his timeline. Mission debrief always included a memory scrub. Delete this, trim that. Made a jumble of things for a few days. He flashed the medics in the white coats at the Vevey infirmary. They checked, they scanned, they didn’t like what they’d found. They strapped him to a stretcher, shoved him into a regenerative stasis tank for days. Today was only Harper’s second day out.
“Had a bit of a holiday,” Harper said.
“Holiday. Good, very good. Need one myself. So, what’s happening in our crazy world?” Monsieur Dufaux said, turning over the newspaper and looking at the front page. “What on earth?”
Oddly enough, that was Harper’s reaction on seeing it, too. A grainy, backlit, and shadowy image of a winged form falling through the fog at Pont des Arts, side by side with a four-hundred-year-old painting of Saint Michael the Archangel. The headline above the pictures read: “Was This the Angel Who Fell from the Sky to Save Paris?”
“Good Lord,” Dufaux said. “Can you believe this?”
“Not sure what it’s all about. Haven’t been following the news of late.”
Dufaux took a sip from his glass.
“Well,” he said. “Let me tell you what you missed while on vacation.”
Seems while Harper was in the tank, the world’s newspapers went heavy on Paris. The usual hard news up front: pictures of the Manon’s wreckage, backstories about the dead and survivors. And, of course, the one picture of the man who fell from the sky at Pont des Arts. The French government’s line was that a foreign power had conducted an illegal counterstrike against Muqatileen Lillah on sovereign French soil. After rounds of finger-pointing at London and Washington, D.C., with no joy, the French government then pointed to the Israeli Mossad. The French president referred to the Mossad’s scorecard in assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists on Tehran’s streets in broad daylight as a case in point. The Israeli government wouldn’t comment, but seemed perfectly happy for the world to think, Of course Israel did it. Israel is very good at this sort of thing. Don’t fuck with Israel.
In answer to press queries regarding the type of WMD captured in the attack, the government would only reply, “We cannot comment at this time for reasons of national security.” The French press began to sniff out that the government was hiding something. Then came a scandal of lip-smacking proportions when it was learned the chief suspect in the counterstrike—the man falling from the sky at Pont des Arts—had escaped from La Santé Prison two days after being arrested. The French press went mad.
“Où Sont les Responsables?!” the headlines read.
The press went from mad to crazed when the head of the French police held a press conference to announce he’d issued an arrest warrant for a man no one could describe with any accuracy, and that “the suspect’s mug shots, fingerprints, and other relevant details have gone missing.” In an attempt to get a detailed description of the culprit, the twenty-one survivors from the Manon were reinterviewed by police sketch artists. None of the survivors could remember the man clearly.
“A normal reaction to a terrible shock,” the top cop said.
And with that, political commentators had a field day guessing the counterstrike was actually the work of France’s own Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, who—in their greatest screwup since the 1985 Rainbow Warrior incident—had not bothered to inform the French police of the operation. After all, the press concluded, who but the DGSE could arrange “an escape” from La Santé Prison? Then came the front page of Le Monde, suggesting that since the “unknown man who fell from the sky” had, in fact, saved Paris, the French president was duty-bound to identify the man and present him with the Legion of Honor. But with only nine dead in the attack, the press quickly lost interest and the world’s headlines returned to a civil war in Syria, where pictures of slaughter were plentiful. By the end of the week, the attack in Paris had moved to page three. The final “all is well” story came in a fluff piece about Parisians returning to their beloved cafés for aperitifs and conversation. The man who fell from the sky was forgotten. Monsieur Dufaux paused for breath and took a sip of wine. He pointed to the front page of today’s paper.
“And now comes this nonsense.”
Enter one Mr. Geoffroy de Villehardouin, blogger and amateur art historian from Dijon (where the mustard comes from, the Daily Mail was happy to mention). Mr. de Villehardouin recognized the similarity between the blurry image of the man falling from the sky and Guido Reni’s seventeenth-century painting of Saint Michael the Archangel. Mr. de Villehardouin wrote:
“Of course, one must admit the ‘wings’ I have highlighted in the photograph are, surely, no more than the tails of the man’s coat flaring upward as he fell. Still, overall, the similarity to Reni’s image is more than remarkable.”
Mr. de Villehardouin then posted the images side by side on his blog (a space usually reserved for discussions of religious architecture in the Medici era) and wham. The blog became an overnight sensation, with more than fifteen million hits. And today, the side-by-side images were making the rounds of the world’s newspapers. Monsieur Dufaux pushed the paper aside with amusement.
“First he’s a Jewish James Bond, then he’s a beloved hero of France, now he’s Saint Michael reborn. Oh, I tell you, people do see what they need to see.”
Harper pulled the newspaper from the table, dropped it facedown on the empty chair next to him. He jumped on the man’s last words, happy to change the subject.
“What do you mean?”
Monsieur Dufaux laughed.
“Three years ago, I had a tour group from Mexico in the café; they came for fondue. I gave them a few lessons. You know, here’s the fondue fork and here’s how you spear the bread, so on and so forth. They were soon dipping their bits of bread in the pots and sopping up the cheese, having a real fiesta. I left them to it and went back to my kitchen. Not ten minutes later I hear a shriek from the dining room. I run back and see the lot of them on their knees, praying
to my fondue pot.”
“What?”
“They were praying. To my fondue pot.”
Monsieur Dufaux paused for effect, took a sip of wine. No doubt he’d told the story a hundred times, Harper thought. No doubt it got better each time in the telling.
“So . . . what happened was one of them saw the face of the Virgin Mary in the crusted cheese at the bottom of the pot. My God, they were besides themselves, waving rosaries and singing ‘Ave Maria.’” They offered me a thousand Swiss francs for the fondue pot, on the spot.”
“What did you do?”
“What could I do? I gave it to them. For free.”
Monsieur Dufaux pronounced the F word in a manner that suggested it wounded him deeply.
“And did it?” Harper said.
“Did it what?”
“Did it look like the Virgin Mary?”
Monsieur Dufaux finished his wine, refilled both glasses.
“You know, everyone in the café came over for a look and agreed it was the face of the Virgin Mary. Only Marc Rochat said differently, after studying it from every angle.”
It’d been a long time since Harper had heard the lad’s name. His face flashed through Harper’s eyes for a second, then it was gone. One of the side effects of the memory scrub he’d gone through after the cathedral job. He could remember events on his timeline, but certain faces and names were redacted. A little something to remind Harper of one of the bigger rules and regs of his kind in paradise: They are not us, and we are not them . . . so get on with the bloody job, boyo.
“So, what did the lad say?” Harper said.
Monsieur Dufaux laughed.
“He said, very slowly and very deliberately, ‘It looks like the crusted cheese at the bottom of a fondue pot.’ I tell you, the things that would pop from that boy’s mouth!”
“Sounds like him, from what I can remember.”
Monsieur Dufaux sighed.
“Mon Dieu, I miss him. He always laughed at my jokes, even if he didn’t understand them. Which was all of the time, come to think of it.”
Harper watched feelings of loss pass through the man’s eyes. He tried to imagine what such a thing felt like.
“Came here a lot, did he?”
“Every night before he went to the tower to call the hour. He liked the food, he liked the crowd.”
Harper scanned the room. Everyone settled into their evening debate on the important affairs of the day, sans cigarettes. A smoking ban had taken effect in the bars and cafés throughout Switzerland. Many of the locals were unhappy.
“Such nonsense!” Madame Budry complained. “What will be next? Invading my home to test my bathwater to assure themselves it does not exceed the temperature decreed by some faceless fonctionnaire?”
Everyone nodded in agreement. Even the small white dog on the stool in the corner wagged its tail with a hearty “Hear, hear.”
“It is quite the crowd,” Harper said.
Monsieur Dufaux lowered his voice. “I’ve been meaning to ask you. I heard you were with him when he died.”
Harper scanned the man’s eyes. Dufaux was ex–Swiss Guard, and his café was a live drop site for partisans in service to Harper’s kind. Two of them, the Algerian street cleaners, were coming into the café, just now, for espresso. The older one, the one with the white scarf around his neck, signaled Harper that all was well in the Saint-François quarter. Yes, Monsieur Dufaux would hear things. Didn’t mean Harper could add to them, even if he wanted to.
“Sorry, there’s nothing I can tell you, Dufaux.”
Dufaux raised his glass.
“To absent friends, then?”
Harper tried to see the lad’s face. He couldn’t.
“Sure.”
They drank.
“Does the new one ever come into the café?” Harper asked.
“The girl, you mean.”
Took Harper a moment to recall it was a young woman calling the hour now. She was from Iceland. She played classical guitar next to Marie-Madeleine to keep the old girl company. That’s what Harper had been told, anyway.
“That’s right, the girl. Does she ever come to the café?”
“Not yet, but Monsieur Buhlmann says to expect her soon.”
“Buhlmann?”
“You know, old fellow from the cathedral. Le guet before Marc Rochat. Buhlmann says the girl is still living at the school.”
“Mon Repos?”
“Oui. But she’s just turned eighteen and they’re letting her roam about town. And get this, she’s a vegetarian. Can you imagine it? A vegetarian in Switzerland? Like an Eskimo lost in the Sahara. Then again, we’ve never had a girl calling the hour before. Anyway, old man Buhlmann asked me to add a few plates of rabbit food to the menu to attract her attention. Give her a safe place to spend her evenings. I hear she’s quite pretty, but very shy.”
Harper looked down into his glass.
“Wouldn’t know. I’ve never seen her.”
“Up close, you mean.”
Harper felt something, as if something dark had passed through the room. He scanned the locals; nothing. He looked at Dufaux. The man was smiling.
“Sorry?” Harper asked.
Monsieur Dufaux nodded out the windows to Escaliers du Marché and the wooden steps leading up the hill to Lausanne Cathedral. He spoke softly.
“Your new flat is up those steps and just behind the cathedral on Rue Vuillermet. Top floor studio, little balcony with a view of the belfry. And you’ve been living there for the last nine months.”
Something moved in the corner of Harper’s eye. Heavy curtain at the door billowing, someone coming in. He looked at Dufaux, the man’s face still smiling. Ex–Swiss Guard or not, no bloody way the man should know that one. Harper reached for the killing knife under his sports coat.
“How do you know where I live, Dufaux?”
Monsieur Dufaux shrugged, emptied the carafe into their glasses.
“Because I own the building, monsieur. Which reminds me, when you ask the inspector about the tab, tell him to not forget the rent. Bon, back to my kitchen. I need more practice with my bulgur, lentil, and tofu casserole. Le guet’s favorite dish, Buhlmann says. Bonne soirée, monsieur.”
“Right. Cheers for the glass.”
Harper watched Dufaux hurry around the tables and disappear into the kitchen. Harper looked toward the door, saw two regulars coming in. The professor from the university and his wife, both of them with books under their arms. For a moment, Harper couldn’t find his breath. He released his grip on the killing knife. He looked down at his hand . . . trembling. He rolled his fingers into a fist and squeezed till the trembling stopped.
“Fuck sake. What the hell was that?”
He drank the last of his wine, put on his coat, and eased through the tables. The locals had come to accept Harper’s presence in the café, especially after Monsieur Dufaux passed the word that the tall, quiet Englishman worked as a security consultant for the International Olympic Committee in Lausanne. Made Harper something of a celebrity in the café. Harper shuddered to think what the locals would’ve made of him running a killing knife across Monsieur Dufaux’s throat for no apparent reason. No doubt Madame Budry would have fallen into paroxysms of disquiet.
He pushed through the curtains, pulled open the door, and stepped outside. He walked along Rue Mercerie and ducked in the first shadow he could find. He found a loose gold-tipped fag in his coat and fired up. It tasted bitter, but he drew on it anyway, waiting for relief. It was slow in coming.
Nine deep-throated bells sounded in the night.
He looked up the wooden steps of Escaliers du Marché. Saw the trees along Rue Viret, saw the floodlit belfry of Lausanne Cathedral. An illuminated, solitary pile of rock. He imagined the new one, the girl from Iceland, already standing on the e
ast balcony, waiting for the last bell to fade, waiting to raise her lantern and call the words of comfort over Lausanne. If he waited long enough, he’d see her round the tower and come to the south balcony, and he’d hear her call the hour. Harper lowered his eyes, dropped his smoke on the ground, kicked it down a drain.
“Cras credemus, hodie nihil.”
He walked across Place de la Palud toward the Saint-François quarter for a bit of look-but-never-touch at GG’s nightclub. The barkeep always poured a healthy splash and the scenery was good, especially the midnight show. And in one darkened corner there was a table with a good view of anyone, or anything, coming through the door.
Just ahead, around the corner at Rue Madeleine, Harper saw something flutter in the light. His eyes registered a spike in black body radiation. He opened his coat, pulled his SIG Sauer. The closer he got to the corner, the more the spikes modulated heavily in the six-hundred-nanometer range. He raised his SIG, pulled the slide, loaded a round into the firing chamber. Whatever was waiting for him was bloody big.
“Here, kitty, kitty.”
He lunged around the corner, smack into the death end of a gun. Make that two guns. One for each of his eyeballs.
“Good evening, Mr. Harper.”
“Did we startle you?”
Harper tilted his head and looked beyond the barrels. Two bulldozer-sized men at the trigger ends. No doubt about it, Harper thought; the light mechanic’s Arc 9 filters need work.
“Well, well. Mutt and Jeff. Long time no see. What brings you boys to town, besides trouble?”
