by AD Davies
“She is not with them,” Fanuco said. “Your girl, Sarah.”
We stopped beside the bed. Blinked away a speck of dried mud.
What I thought were bathrobes in my hazy state were actually women wearing bathrobes. No older than eighteen, any of them. Some far younger. Unconscious rather than asleep.
I said, “What did you do to them?”
Fanuco sat on the bed, stroked the youngest one’s blond hair from her face. The girl, maybe twelve years old, did not stir.
He said, “My people cleaned them, disposed of their clothing. Provided these robes. Someone will bring suitable attire, and then they will be revived.”
“I mean, what’s happened to them?”
It may have been my depleted mental reserves, but right at that moment, I thought I saw a tear in the Botox-ridden man’s eye. His nostrils flared with every loud intake of breath, his lips pushed together. He leaned down and kissed the girl’s forehead, before wiping it away with his thumb, as if he might transfer something of himself to her.
“I have never harmed a child,” he said. “That place they took you, the quarry, my men observed it from afar. A building in the middle of those holes, beside a field that once grew maize. Before the land was sold.”
“A farmhouse,” I said.
He nodded. “With a cellar. A dungeon, really. My men met with little resistance. It served as a halfway-house, ready to ship people back to Mr. Anh’s homeland, or to his partners … elsewhere. Girls, taken from streets all over France. Some are like Marie, the one Sammy gave away, people who would not be missed by family. But others … these I do not recognize. Not all are working girls. Especially this tiny angel. They must have paid Mr. Anh a fortune for her. Millions.”
He picked more loose strands of hair gently out of her face, smoothing each perfectly in place. Those that did not settle, he curled behind her ears.
“She is called Henrietta.”
“Henrietta Dupree,” I said.
“She is missing for a month. The Police believe she is dead or taken out of the country. They are about to pass the case to Interpol. And so I have a dilemma.”
He lay Henrietta’s head on the bed, slid out his hand so very slowly, then stepped over to the window. Opened it to the sound of the odd moped, and the squeal of high-pitched police sirens in the distance.
“I cannot hand her over,” he said, “or I will be seen as a conspirator of the gendarmes. But despite what Bertrand believes, I am not an evil man.”
“Tell that to your old business partners. Tell that to Sammy.”
His glare would have melted iron. “That is business. And none of yours.”
“Violence is all you bastards understand.” I held up my left hand for emphasis.
“Violence is what freed these girls.” He stood over them again, gazing down, his eyes hooded in shadow. “Mr. Park, you claim to be one of the good guys? Yet you strike without hesitation. I heard what you did to Sammy’s men in Anh’s bar.”
“I had no choice.”
“You are not afraid of falling into the same darkness as the rest of us?”
“No,” I said. “Your goals are selfish—power, money, whatever—I’m trying to help others.”
The window filtered the first light of dawn, casting a cirrhosis hue on Fanuco’s skin.
“You are like a reflection,” he said. “The sun shining on a street, half in shadow. But the light bounces off a pane of glass, and this throws a glow onto the pavement.” He faced the window. “You may be from light originally, Adam, but you are reflected in my shadow.”
“Was Sarah there?” I asked. “At the house? Before you got there?”
“She was not in any of the buildings we searched. The police will dig up the land. I think she is not in France, though. They may have taken her, or she may have left with the man you look for. But that is for tomorrow.” He turned himself fully toward me. “Today, now, you will take Henrietta. You will proceed south, across the Seine, and wait beside the Eiffel Tower—”
“Bertrand’s ‘greatest monument.’ Why the theatrics?”
“The Vietnamese presence in this city is all-but gone. I hold their territory now. Bertrand will be made to look a fool with my escape, and again when you, my accomplice, delivers the girl his unit were unable to locate.” He placed both his hands on my shoulders. “Adam … if you had not come looking for Sarah, I would still think Sammy is loyal, and Henrietta would be … I do not know what would have happened to her. I thank you.”
I tried to find it in me to be insulted, angry at his thanks. But it stayed within me, smoldering, lacking the energy to ignite. Perhaps I was too tired. Perhaps it was something else.
I took a few seconds to make sure I wouldn’t collapse from exhaustion. When I was certain, I took hold of Henrietta in both my arms, supporting her head like a baby’s. She was so light, I was surprised gravity didn’t let her go, float her off into the atmosphere.
“You will get out of Paris unharmed by me,” Fanuco said. “But do not think this will save you if you cross me. Find the girl and her boyfriend. Find the data stick. Think of your friend in England. And remember, my reach is greater than just Paris. Now go.”
I stepped out into the landscaped gardens of what turned out to be the Fierté en France hotel. Sneaking low, I hurried out the back gate and searched the skyline for the Eiffel Tower. Pedestrians dotted my route, but nothing compared to the bustling metropolis this would, within a couple of hours, become. No one interfered with me.
Don’t mess with a beaten-up guy coated in drying mud and carrying a young girl through the streets.
Soon, the lightest girl in the world began to weigh down on me and I was drenched in sweat. The grand form of the Palais de Chaillot loomed behind me, and the bridge guarded by golden cherubs and a couple of knights, Pont d’léna, stretched toward la Tour Eiffel—the Eiffel Tower. There was no sweeter vision in my recent memory.
I crossed the bridge to the sight of a squad of police cars—the Police Urbane—set up beneath the monument I had snobbishly avoided on all my travels. More than halfway over, I knelt on the rough pavement, my legs and lungs unwilling to function.
One of the gendarmes called, “Regardez!”
Here’s where everything stuttered into slow motion. Like I was watching a replay on television.
Me, holding Henrietta to my chest, cradling her as if the police unit arrowing my way would harm her … its blue lights flashing, doors shutting.
Two men, all jumpsuits and guns, stern and threatening, calling French things I don’t even try to understand as they jog toward me.
My nerves, frayed, some sense of justice steeling me against surrendering.
They are the law. I am the good guy. I am trying to help an innocent.
I look past them to the Tower. A blue van parks beside a closed souvenir stall.
One occupant that I can see.
Pierre Bertrand drops his cigarette and crushes it underfoot.
The first gendarme stands beside me, both hands gripping his gun…
Me, still on my knees…
A tear, cutting a path through the grime on my cheek.
“Please…” I say. “I’m so close.”
More French assaulting my ears, but I can’t concentrate, can’t even get the gist.
Me, pulling Henrietta closer.
“Monsieur Park?” Pierre Bertrand, urging the officer to holster his sidearm, crouching to my eye-level. “Are you there?”
Me, nodding, rocking back and forth, the pavement hard, so hard. But not wet. Not even damp. Odd, after so much rain.
Bertrand touches the top of Henrietta’s head. I snatch her back.
Me, flush against the wall now, the golden cherub high above me on its pedestal, and I have the urge to climb it, get away.
“Monsieur,” the other gendarme is saying. “La fille…” Reaching for her …
And then, with a jolt, I was back. I relinquished Henrietta like a doll into Bertra
nd’s arms. Blue flashes filled the night, tears blurring. All Bertrand seemed interested in was her, the girl. He felt for her pulse and his smile was so wide that it stretched beyond his wild beard. There was more grey in there than when I first met him.
The two gendarmes helped me up, my legs barely able to hold my weight. I should have been happy, overjoyed at having delivered this girl safely. But I had other things to worry about. Other destinations.
Bertrand ushered me aside, away from the others, still holding Henrietta, his colleagues straining to see what had filled the press monkey with such glee.
“Fanuco,” he said.
I leaned on the wall, ready for the cuffs. “Gone,” I said.
Bertrand’s glare drilled through me before gazing back toward Henrietta. “You think this will make me forgive you?”
“No.”
Every cop, to a man and woman, wanted to see Henrietta, the girl they failed, the one rescued by a psychopath and a British enquêteur privé.
Chapter Twenty-Six
After cleaning me up and furnishing me with a musty-smelling red tracksuit, the origin of which I did not probe too deeply, the police administered professional medical attention, my little finger injected with painkiller, then re-set and strapped with fresh bandages. My other injuries, including my ribs, were deemed non-urgent and I was allowed to sleep for two hours. Those two hours was how long it took to get Henrietta to a hospital and to contact her parents, and for whatever red-tape the French police endured when arresting a foreigner. I was then shaken awake and questioned for a further two hours in a sterile room with a fixed table, two molded chairs and a mirrored wall. The first hour of my stay was consumed by a black-eyed, fire-breathing Pierre Bertrand and, when I refused to even acknowledge his presence, the second was hosted by someone I hoped was on my side.
Terrance Potter was a fiftyish man standing five-ten and weighed around two-hundred-and-eighty pounds. It was nine a.m. when he entered but he looked like he’d done a full day’s work already. When he took off his cheap suit jacket and slung it over the back of a plastic chair, his pits were stained with sweat—what we used to call “disco rings” back in my youth. After identifying himself and presenting Foreign Office ID, he spoke in a language I did not grasp much more than I did French.
Politician-ese.
The gist of it was that I had created an international incident. It was being handled by various ministries, but even intervention by the prime minister himself might not prevent me doing time in a French jail.
“So what happens next?” I asked when a lull appeared in Potter’s dialogue.
He said, “You might get lucky.”
When I registered nothing, he sighed and laid a copy of le Monde on the table. A photo of Pierre Bertrand carrying Henrietta into the station filled half the page. In the background, there was me, being led by a mustachioed gendarme into the building, the cop’s hand on my back like a congratulatory gesture. The man’s body obscured my cuffed hands. Potter translated the headline: “Hero brings Henrietta home.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Your friendly neighborhood Adam Park.”
Potter slammed his hand on the desk. “You think this is funny?”
“Get to the point.”
Potter took the newspaper and read from it. “In the early hours of this morning, an unidentified British man was the toast of France as he tracked down the missing Parisian girl, Henrietta Dupree, blah blah blah. The Parisian police possessed neither the intelligence nor the resources to rescue her, et cetera. Yet, one man from England was able to extricate Henrietta and six other victims.”
Potter flattened the paper in front of me. The photo, my part specifically, was not that clear, taken on a phone, most likely. At a push, friends and family would recognize me, but I wasn’t going to be signing autographs as I swanned around the city’s watering holes. If I was ever freed.
“You should feel honored,” Potter said. “The French press are not usually given to praising the English.”
Shortly after that photo was taken, I was thrown to the floor and Bertrand knelt on my spine, demanding to know where Fanuco was, threatening death, jail house beatings, big dirty penises in my mouth and rectum.
“So you’re a hero,” Potter said sarcastically. “And you have some very good lawyers.”
“I do, don’t I?” When I was allowed to make a phone call, my only recourse was Park Avenue Investigations. I reminded them that, even if I’d done wrong, I was entitled to “all the legal clout PAI commands,” and emphasized the company’s reputation may be in danger.
Potter stood and gathered his papers and picked up his jacket. “Yes, very good lawyers indeed. Keeping your name out of the press. For now. You are being bailed until a hearing in four days. Providing the hero angle plays well in the French media, you will likely be represented by the best money can buy.”
“Cold-hearted capitalism has its uses.”
“Indeed. Just do not get involved in anything else in the meantime.”
I gestured to the newspaper. “No mention of dozens of bodies, I notice.”
“Not yet. But it’ll come out soon enough. Maybe you’ll be a hero twice.”
He waddled out as if late for another appointment, and a couple of uniformed officers entered immediately. I did not see hide nor hair of Pierre Bertrand as I was escorted from the building.
Both the police and the foreign office declined to offer me a lift, which was particularly galling because a marked police car followed my cab back to the Grecian. They had rather miraculously found my wallet in the quarry and returned it to me, so I was able to pay the driver. Back in my room, I peeled off the tracksuit and dumped it in the waste bin, slipped into the hotel bathrobe, and sat on the bed. Sleep nagged at me, and I had not forgotten about the hire car parked illegally on a footpath outside The Golden Lion, although that may already have been taken and burned out somewhere. Maybe that’s where the younger Vietnamese men went.
I could address neither of those issues yet.
I placed a video-call to Jess via my iPad. In the PAI lab, she looked tired, but not as bad as I felt, which she was quick to remark upon. I told her there was some trouble and added the requisite, “But nothing I couldn’t handle.”
She knew about Harry by now, but kept focus, and updated me on the credit card check and confirmed that the trail matched almost exactly that of Gareth and Sarah’s known movements: activated in Leeds, spent on in Paris, then on a number of purchases in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s former capital, previously known as Saigon.
“Thanks, Jess,” I said. “I really owe you for this.”
“Yes, well, I expect more than a P45. I want dinner and the most expensive wine on the menu.”
“You’ll get it.”
“When, and only when, you clean yourself up.”
The smile felt alien on my face, like a breaking scab. “I’ll even buy a new suit.”
That seemed to satisfy her. “Anything else, boss?”
She had done as much as I could have hoped. But I needed a different angle.
“If I find Sarah, I still need ammunition,” I said. “Work on Curtis Benson himself, specifically his monthly shipments and anything else about his pint-sized bulldog.”
“It isn’t a lot to go on,” she said.
“You’ve worked wonders with less.”
She said, “Gee, thanks,” and hung up.
On the surface, it was likely the pair travelled together, but there was no trace of their plane tickets on either card. They could have bought them on the clones made by Madame Rouge, but Sarah and Gareth had crossed paths with Sammy LeHavre and the Vietnamese gang-masters. Was it dumb luck that I’d gotten so deeply involved, while Sarah and Gareth simply took off to the same country those people came from? It was impossible for so many lines to intersect so randomly. There was more to this.
Someone knocked on the door.
I put down the iPad and peeked out through the eyepiece.
&n
bsp; The receptionist.
She checked one way down the corridor, then the other. She’d seen me come in wearing the hideous tracksuit but my shaggy hair was still filthy, as was the five-day stubble grown in two-and-a-half days.
I opened the door and she said, “This is for you.”
I accepted the brown envelope, holding it with my thumb and two fingers. “What is it?”
“A boy dropped it off and gave me fifty euros tip to leave it out of our register.”
Ah, I knew what it was now. I thanked her and she went on her way, and I emptied the contents on the bed.
Fast turnaround.
I examined the passport and credit card. Said my new name aloud: “Tomas Gerard.” I repeated it a few times, getting the feel of it on my tongue. A French name, of course.
I twitched the curtain to check on the police car. They made no secret of watching me. Thanks to Roger Gorman’s desire to protect his share price, as opposed to protecting me, he’d hired the priciest lawyers in Paris to look after my case, but with this surveillance I could not simply up and leave.
In the bathroom, I showered for twenty whole minutes, the water cocooning me in heat, in steam, washing over my aching limbs and joints. After, wrapped in the robe again, I opened my new passport to the photo I supplied to Madame Rouge. It was taken in the days when I was still traumatized by my experience in Thailand: shaved head, dark goatee, a stud in my ear—my attempt to look like a dangerous guy, a true hard-man.
When the shower-mist cleared, I snipped at my hair with scissors until it was as close to my scalp as I could make it, then covered the remaining patchy growth in shaving foam. I used a razor I bought in reception to remove the final layer of bristles, a couple of tiny nicks but they would heal in an afternoon. I applied more foam to my face and shaped my advanced stubble to match the passport—a scratchy circle of hair around my mouth, darker on the chin. Not quite as thick as I’d like, but it appeared intentional rather than scruffy.
