Angel City

by Jon Steele

  Officer Jannsen bit her tongue.

  “Je suis désolé. I meant to say ‘Madame Taylor.’”

  “On the contrary, you present the opportunity to discuss your relationship with Madame Taylor.”

  “Sir?”

  “In monitoring the house feeds of the public areas, I haven’t failed to notice Madame Taylor has developed emotions of great affection toward you, and that she takes comfort in those emotions. I have also noticed what I consider to be a similar affection on your part.”

  Officer Jannsen looked at the screen. Katherine was looking at the drawing now and smiling; her eyes were bright.

  “Sir, let me state for the record that nothing improper has occurred in the public or private areas of the house.”

  “You misunderstand my comment, Officer. There is nothing improper in the expression of human emotion between human beings. You are one of them, and not bound by our rules and regulations regarding familiarity with locals. I should think a natural development regarding such emotions might be helpful in Madame Taylor’s recovery.”

  Officer Jannsen felt the blood rush to her face, like she’d been caught with her pants down. Then she realized it wasn’t shame, it was rage.

  “Sir, are you ordering me to sleep with Katherine Taylor?”

  “Certainly not. I am simply reminding you how deep was the madness from which we rescued her. As long as she is under our protection, it is critical you do everything in your power to prevent her from falling back into the abyss.”

  “And if the time comes when we have to cut them loose?”

  “Then you, and we, will do just that,” Inspector Gobet said. “That’s the way of things in our line of work.”

  If she could’ve reached him, she would’ve slapped him.

  Then she remembered her oath: To protect them, to die for them.

  EIGHT

  THE TGV SLOWED WHERE THE FRENCH COUNTRYSIDE GAVE WAY to the concrete slums surrounding Paris, some of the tenements standing so close to the tracks, the train seemed to pass through sitting rooms. Here was a woman reading a magazine, here was an old man staring at his television, here was a little boy watching the train go by. Crossing the trestle at Charenton-le-Pont, the train slowed again, and coming into the rail yard at Bercy, the train jerked and swayed over switches and tracks till it eased into Gare de Lyon. It groaned to a stop at Platform E. Harper looked at the clock above the station platform: 18:29 hours. He looked at his watch, still five minutes back. He adjusted his watch to real time.

  “Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.”

  He stayed in his seat, watched locals struggle with bags and alight from the train and push their way through oncoming passengers headed for the 18:46 to Avignon. When he saw there were no French police on the platform looking for a man of his general description, Harper followed the locals to the arrival hall. The place was jammed with people looking for connections, bums looking for spare change, gypsies looking for suckers. He turned up the collar of his coat, lowered his eyes, moved unnoticed through the crowd. He climbed the iron staircase to Le Train Bleu restaurant. He took the table next to the tall windows, the one marked RÉSERVÉ. A waiter in a blue tunic arrived and bowed.

  “Puis-je prendre votre commande, monsieur?”

  Harper checked the waiter’s eyes. They were clean.

  “Vodka tonic. Sans vodka, sans tonic.”

  The waiter bowed and said, “J’arrive,” as if the order made sense. He returned two minutes later with a cheap mobile on a silver tray. He lay the tray on the table, did his bowing thing again, and left. Ten seconds later, the mobile rang. Harper picked it up and connected the line, didn’t say a word. Then came a sepulchral voice wrapped in a French accent: “You were not followed?”

  Harper looked out the windows. Hundreds of locals hustling through the forecourt of the station, hundreds more pounding the pavement along Boulevard Diderot.

  “Only by you, it seems,” Harper said.

  “Then things are as they should be. See you in church.”

  “What church?”

  Harper heard the clink of a glass down the line, then the voice.

  “Le Monde taxi, ID number 3476. Outside, under the clock tower in five minutes.”

  Harper dropped the mobile on the tray and found his way to the gents. Clear. He reached for his SIG Sauer to load a round into the firing chamber. Ended up patting the place where his gun wasn’t. So far, things were going according to plan. Not that he knew what the plan was, exactly.

  “It’s a recon mission, Mr. Harper, leave your kill kit behind,” said the cop in the cashmere coat back in the vineyards of Grandvaux. “A Do No Harm order is in effect in this case for the moment. Are you clear on that point, Mr. Harper?”

  “Crystal.”

  Harper ran through what he did know. Inspector Gobet’s SX squad had been scanning through the events of the last two weeks—the enemy strike on the river Seine, his bloody photograph spread over the Internet, being exposed to the details of the life and death of Captain Jay Michael Harper—looking for intersecting lines of causality. Contacts with underground elements had been made and a person of interest popped hot, needed to be scanned for light. That’s all the inspector would tell him, besides . . .

  “Oh, there is one more thing, Mr. Harper; you’ll be flying blind.”

  Harper knew the drill. No advance knowledge as to the identity of the target. No advance knowledge of his own bloody cover till it was revealed by the target. Some of the locals, the sensitive ones, could sense the presence of Harper’s kind in their midst. Flying blind was a defensive maneuver; one more way of hiding among men. It was also a great way of crashing head-on into a wall named trouble. He deleted the thought from his mind, found another one sitting in its place: the last time he’d been in a church. It ended with the lad with the lantern, le guet of Lausanne Cathedral, lying dead on the esplanade beneath the belfry. Harper leaned over the sink and splashed cold water in his face. He looked at his reflection in the mirror.

  “Living the dream, boyo, one day at a time.”

  He found his ride under the clock tower, climbed in, took a magical mystery tour around Paris for the better part of an hour. Must’ve crossed every bloody bridge over the river Seine, twice. And at each crossing, Harper lowered his eyes to avoid making eye contact with the French police patrolling the parapets. Crossing the intersection onto Pont de l’Alma and entering the taxi lane on Avenue Bosquet, Harper realized the taxi had yet to stop for a red light. He tried to figure the odds of such a thing in a town like Paris. He gave up, left it at “ever such a lot.”

  The driver made a quick left onto Rue Saint-Dominique. Harper saw a decent-looking tabac on the right, small café tables under an awning. As the evening so far had consisted of driving in ever lessening circles, Harper thought about asking the driver to pull over so he could grab a glass and a smoke. Maybe anticipating the question, the driver hit the accelerator, crossed through Les Invalides and ran onto Boulevard Saint-Germain. Sixty-seven seconds later, the driver cut a sharp left onto a cobblestone square and hit the brakes. Harper looked out the window. Up against the evening sky was the floodlit, limestone tower and the façade of a very old building. Late tenth century, from the looks of it.

  “What do you know, it’s a church.”

  “Monsieur?” the driver said.

  “Out there. It’s a church.”

  “Bien sûr, monsieur. C’est l’Église de Saint-Germain-des-Prés. It is the oldest church in Paris.”

  Harper looked around the square. Tourists with maps, Parisians with attitude. Whole scene read all’s well. He spoke to the back of the driver’s head.

  “I don’t suppose you’d have any idea what I’m supposed to do about it. The oldest church in Paris, that is.”

  “Mais oui, you are to go inside and find René Descartes, monsieur.”

 
Harper’s mind scanned episodes of the History Channel, landed on Great Minds of the Scientific Revolution. René Descartes: mathematician and philosopher. Born in Indre-et-Loire, France, March 31, 1596. Came up with the Cartesian coordinate system leading to analytical geometry and calculus. Came up with Cartesian skepticism leading to cogito, ergo sum. Died in Sweden, February 11, 1650.

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, but Descartes has been dead awhile, hasn’t he?”

  The driver looked back over his seat. His shrug was perfect.

  “Oui, monsieur, il est fucking mort, and I am late for my fucking supper. So how about getting out of my taxi before I ask you to pay the fucking fare?”

  Harper did as suggested. He watched the taxi rumble away over the cobblestones and disappear up Rue Bonaparte.

  “Et bon fucking appétit.”

  A cold breeze whipped his back. He checked the sky. Heavy clouds moving in from the northwest, pulling a veil across what was left of the third quarter moon. He searched the pockets of his coat, found his cigarette case. He pulled a smoke and lit up. He drew a hit of radiance, checked the sky again. Looked like rain, nothing more.

  “So far, so good.”

  He did a slow three-sixty, took in the sights. There’s Saint-Germain-des-Prés Métro and Brasserie Lipp across the boulevard, there’s Les Deux Magots café just across the cobblestones. He was standing in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He was also standing barely a kilometer from where the Paris job went down on the river Seine, two weeks ago.

  Funny, he thought.

  Then he thought, Not really.

  He pulled another hit of radiance, checked the entrance of ye olde church. A tramp sat on the steps of the portico. He was wrapped in a wool coat, and his wool cap was on the ground next to him; overturned, waiting for donations. He was killing time reading a book. Someone was behind the tramp, half-hidden in the shadows of the portico. Someone in blue jeans and a hooded black sweatshirt. The hood was pulled over his head like a monk’s cowl. A bell, a deep hollow sound, rang the hour. Eight o’clock in the evening. Harper checked his watch. On the dot, to the bloody second.

  “Not bad.”

  Harper dropped his smoke on the cobblestones, crushed it into dust, and walked toward the church. He passed the tramp, dropped a two-Euro coin in the wool cap. The tramp looked up to Harper.

  “Merci, monsieur.”

  The tramp’s eyes were clean. Harper glanced at the tramp’s book, open to Canto X of Dante’s Purgatorio:

  WHEN WE HAD CROSSED THE THRESHOLD OF THE DOOR

  WHICH THE PERVERTED LOVE OF SOULS DISUSES,

  BECAUSE IT MAKES THE CROOKED WAY SEEM STRAIGHT,

  RE-ECHOING, I HEARD IT CLOSED AGAIN.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  Harper passed the someone half-hidden in the shadows of the portico. He could just make out the face under the hoodie. The someone was a kid. Fourteen, fifteen maybe. He was staring at the ground.

  “Bonsoir,” Harper said. “Ça va bien?”

  The kid didn’t answer, kept his eyes drilled to the ground.

  “No worries, I know the feeling,” Harper said.

  He pulled open the door and stepped inside the church. He waited to see if one or both of the characters outside would be following him. Nobody. He went into the nave, gave the dimly lit place a recce. Same as walking into Lausanne Cathedral . . . the sensation of rising up to endless heights within an enclosed space bound by stone. It was a swell trick, Harper thought, given this space wasn’t endless at all. Sixty meters long, maybe, twenty-some meters wide, nineteen meters high. Harper imagined the whole place would fit into Lausanne Cathedral four times over, and there’d still be room for a parking lot. But as his eyes adjusted to the sombrous light, colors began to emerge from the arches and columns of the nave. Reds and greens, blues and gold. The columns drew Harper’s eyes upward to the ribbed vault where a skobeloff-tinted sky was filled with thousands of stars.

  He looked back at the entrance door. No one coming in.

  He walked east up the main aisle, saw a dozen locals scattered about the church. Some lighting candles before the statues of saints in the south aisle, some sitting on the side benches along the north aisle, some kneeling in the nave offering whispered prayers. Harper stopped at the crossing where the transept divided the nave from the chancel and main altar.

  Here, the stone surfaces seemed to vibrate with color.

  The columns and arches of the apse were decorated with geometric patterns of red and green, and the walls above the arches were painted like some Garden of Eden wherein dwelled the twelve apostles and the four winged creatures of the synoptic gospels. Closer to the crossing, either side of the chancel, two huge murals, more like medieval tapestries than paint on stone. On the north wall, Christ the Triumphant enters Jerusalem. On the south, Christ the Condemned drags his cross down Via Dolorosa.

  Harper stared at the murals, musing on a thought. Why did the target pick this place for a meeting? And what did a philosopher-mathematician dead for the last 360 years have to do with it? And by the way, where was the great dead man?

  He looked left, right.

  A darkened stained glass window and small altar were set in the north transept, but it was the tomb in the south transept that Harper walked to. A statue of a chap in dramatic pose topped the tomb. As Harper got closer, he discovered it wasn’t the great dead man he was looking for. This tomb held the remains of one Ioannes Casimirus, Dei Gratia rex Poloniae, magnus dux Lithuaniae, Russie, Prussiae . . . The list went on to mention the chap had also been the hereditary king of the Swedes, Goths, and Vandals.

  “Right, so where’s the other guy?”

  He walked along the ambulatory between the chapels built into the outer walls and the high, wrought iron fence surrounding the apse. He stopped at the easternmost point of the church, at the Lady chapel. There was a statue of the Virgin Mother holding the Holy Child. A hundred votive candles burned at her feet, and she appeared to float on a cloud of light. He stared at the statue. Mother and child. He felt a twinge of familiarity, as if he’d seen them before. Then again, with a billion such statues in the world, crafted in everything from medieval stone to glow-in-the-dark plastic, why should this one be different?

  He walked on past Chapelle Sainte-Geneviève, Chapelle Sainte-Anne. Nothing. At Chapelle Saint-Benoît, he saw three marble slabs set in an unpainted stone wall. Black, eight feet high, Latin lettering carved into the faces of each slab. He walked into the chapel. Two long-dead monks of the medieval abbey that was Saint-Germain-des-Prés lay entombed to the left and right. In the middle:

  MEMORIAE RENATI DESCARTES

  RECONDITIORIS DOCTRINAE

  LAVDE

  ET INGENII SVBTILITATE

  PRAECELLENTISSIMI

  Harper ran the words: In memory of René Descartes, famous through the praise of a better founded science and the sharpness of his mind. First to defend the right of human reason and . . . He stopped, sensing a presence behind him, then the same voice he’d heard over the phone at Gare de Lyon.

  “It is strange to think the man who first articulated the concept of human reason as a proof of physical existence has no head, non?”

  Harper looked back, saw the form of a man standing in the shadows of the ambulatory. Everything about it read target acquired.

  “Sorry?”

  The form stepped from the shadows. He looked a big man, the kind who could take care of himself in a barroom brawl. He wore dark blue glasses over his eyes, and a ragged scar ran down his right cheek. He had a head of wild black hair with a Ho Chi Minh beard to match. He nodded toward the tomb.

  “Him. The one in the middle. Descartes. When he died in Stockholm, he was buried in a graveyard reserved for unbaptized infants. The French, being French, demanded his remains be returned to the land of his birth so that they might honor him. It too
k some time for his body to make the trip, and along the way, pieces of him disappeared. Some of his bones were fashioned into rings to be worn as jewelry. But it was his head that suffered the greatest indignity. The soldier responsible for the remains cut off the skull and replaced it with another. Descartes’s skull became quite the objet d’art among the enlightened wealthy of Europe. It was bought and sold many times. Each owner participated in the grotesque practice of inscribing his own name into the skull. It’s at the Palais de Chaillot, in the Musée de l’Homme. The rest of him is here. Quite the honor, non?”

  Harper had been staring at the man’s mug since he stepped from the shadows, waiting for an image association to lock on. Nothing. He looked at Descartes’s tomb, then back to the man.

  “If you say so. By the way, who are you?”

  The big man walked into the chapel and stood before the tomb. He traced his fingers over the black marble slab where it read, Now he relishes the sight of truth . . . The man turned and faced Harper.

  “My name is Astruc.”

  Closer to him, Harper tried to read the eyes hidden behind the blue lenses. No luck.

  “Astruc, right. And you know who I am, of course.”

  “I do.”

  A moment of silence passed between them.

  “Right. So now that I’m here and you know who I am, perhaps you’d care to tell me why it is I’m here.”

  Astruc tipped his head and looked behind Harper. “Search him, Goose.”

  Harper felt a pair of hands run across his shoulders and down his back and sides. Feeling the pocket of his coat holding his wallet and cigarette case. The hands pulled them out quickly, tossed them to Astruc. The hands continued around Harper’s waist and down his legs and ankles. They pulled away, and whoever owned the hands walked to the side of the chapel and into Harper’s line of sight. It was the kid who’d been standing outside the church. The cowl of his sweatshirt was pulled from his head now. Harper stared at him.

  Goose—the name fits, Harper thought. The kid’s long neck poked from his sweatshirt and his underdeveloped ears were pinned to the sides of a small round head. Harper tried to get a read on the kid’s eyes. The irises were opaque, colorless, and glassy as hell. The kid was on something. Swell, Harper thought. One barroom brawler in blue shades, one kid stoned to the bloody moon. Can’t get a read on either of them. Should be a swell evening.