Paris Ransom

by Charles Rosenberg

  “So,” Jenna said, “Oscar is almost as blank a slate as the location of the hotel and the place where he bought the book.”

  “Despite the fact that we’ve known him for quite a few years.”

  “Yeah. Hey, this is awkward,” Jenna continued, “but don’t we need to add a sheet for Tess? I mean, she is apparently some kind of cop.”

  “I asked her about that. She’s not a cop, just a once-in-a-while analyst when the government needs her.”

  “I still think she needs a sheet.”

  “No, Jenna. I’m not going to put the name of the woman I love on a suspect sheet.”

  “Okie dokie.”

  Just then I heard the snick of the electronic lock on the front door, and Tess walked in.

  “Hi,” she said. “I brought some things you will like, I think.” She was carrying one of those little white cardboard boxes that you get from neighborhood French bakeries when you buy more than one item. “I found a patisserie open today, even though it is New Year’s Day, and I have brought some things to eat.” She opened the box and revealed four beautiful fruit tarts. To the side of the box she placed a baguette. We devoured all of it in short order.

  “Alors,” she said, “have you two solved the mystery while I was out?”

  “No,” I said. “But we have put together three sheets of paper so that we can organize what we know.” I pulled out our three labeled sheets and showed them to her.

  “You two are very much lawyers,” she said.

  “Guilty. But it is a method that works. Gather the facts first.”

  “Let me see what you have put down.”

  She looked over the three sheets. “You do not know very much.”

  “No, Tess, we don’t,” Jenna said. “Can you add anything to any of them?”

  “Like I said last night, I know someone who is a seller of antiquarian books.”

  “What’s his name?” I asked.

  “He is Karl Deutsch.”

  “He’s German?”

  “I think no. His ancestors, they were perhaps German. He is very French. I know him since we are at the lycée together.”

  “Okay. I will go see him.”

  “I’ve already made an appointment for you to do that. Even though it is New Year’s Day, he has agreed to meet with you at eleven this morning.”

  “Great. Thank you.”

  “A suggestion, Robert,” Tess said.

  “Which is?”

  “You should buy a book from him while you are there. He will help you more if he thinks you will buy from him again one day. This thing you buy does not need to cost many euros.”

  I called Captain Bonpere twice more before I left to see Deutsch. On the first call, she again reported that they were “working on it” but had made no big breakthrough. I had expected her to be irritated that I was calling again, but if she was, she hid it well.

  On my second call, she asked if I had heard from Pandy, and I told her that despite having phoned her a couple of times after my first call, I had still only gotten her voice mail, and that I’d been unable to find her address on the Internet or learn what last name she was using. Bonpere said I should stop trying to reach her, that they would have the NYPD go find her, but to let Bonpere know immediately if Pandy finally called back. At the very end of that second call, I asked Bonpere the question that should have occurred to me earlier: “Do you think Pandy herself is at risk?”

  “This is a distinct possibility, Monsieur.”

  With that sobering thought in mind, I went off to see Monsieur Deutsch.

  CHAPTER 10

  Monsieur Deutsch’s store was located on a small street near the Odéon Theater. I decided to walk there, which took me through the student quarter, past the old stone edifices of France’s great medieval university. I still call it the Sorbonne, even though much of it is now called the University of Paris, accompanied by a numbering system so complicated I have been unable to master it. No one seems to mind that I still just call the whole thing the Sorbonne. Or perhaps they are just forgiving of an ignorant American.

  After about fifteen minutes, I came to Monsieur Deutsch’s shop, which was not a retail storefront, but a small office on the third floor of a nineteenth-century building. It was reached through a gate, which gave way to a shabby courtyard. On the other side, there was an elevator.

  I took the elevator to the third floor and rapped on the door using a wooden door knocker carved into the shape of a pointing human hand. It was clearly intended to be a three-dimensional copy of Michelangelo’s pointing hand of God on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. The door was opened after a few seconds by a tall, gangly gentleman with a thin face, whose straggly gray hair hung down to the middle of his back, even though he had no hair at all growing from the middle of his freckled scalp forward. He looked to be fifty or so and wore a gray suit, which hung loosely on him, almost as if he had once been much heavier but hadn’t found time to have his clothes altered to fit his reduced frame. Beneath, he had on a collared white shirt, but no tie. I could see the initials KD written in cursive script on the cuffs of the shirt.

  The office had no windows, just four walls of floor-to-ceiling oak bookcases, each shelf crammed end-to-end with books, most old looking, with beige or white sewn-on cloth covers, plus a few in tooled red or black leather. The only un-booked space in the room was the doorway in which I was standing. Being from Los Angeles, my immediate thought was not to admire the display, but to think that in an earthquake he’d be killed in an avalanche of falling books.

  “Bonjour, Monsieur Tarza,” he said, apparently oblivious to the danger. “Bienvenu. Parlez-vous Français?”

  “Oui,” I said and then added that although my French was passable, it was not as good as it might be, and I hoped we might switch to English if needed.

  He smiled, continuing in French, and said, “For an American, your French is quite good.”

  I wasn’t sure what to make of this damning by faint praise, but I decided to take it as a compliment and barged on in my “quite good” French.

  He moved behind his desk, an elaborate piece of furniture that, like Tess’s dining room table, had lion’s feet, while gesturing to me to sit in one of the two red velour chairs that faced the desk.

  “Well,” I said, after lowering myself into the chair and noticing that a puff of dust sprang up as I sat down, “my, uh, fiancée, Tess Devrais, suggested you might be able to help me with a problem I have concerning a rare book.”

  “Yes. She called to ask that I try to be of help, and I would be delighted to do so if I can. What is the name of the book?”

  “Les Misérables.”

  “A first?”

  “Yes.”

  “Those are not so rare. I have several. Are you looking for one in fine condition? I happen to have one on the shelf.” He turned, reached up and pulled a volume off the shelf directly behind him.

  “Yes, a first in fine condition. But I am focused on a first in English, specifically the one printed in the United States in 1862. And I am not looking for one to buy, I am inquiring on behalf of a friend, who is not so much looking for one, but already has one.”

  “And wishes to sell it.”

  “Not exactly but close enough.”

  He riffled through the pages of the book he had been about to show me, looking at it rather than at me. Eventually, just as his prolonged silence began to be awkward, he stood up, replaced the book on the shelf, turned back toward me and said, “Monsieur, perhaps you should tell me the full story.” He sighed. “Whatever it is.”

  “What makes you think there is a story?”

  “In this business there is always a story.”

  “I would like to do that, but I would need your pledge of total confidentiality.”

  “I cannot promise you total confidentiality if I am truly t
o help you. I can only pledge to be cautious with what you tell me, taking into due account the value to you and your friend of the information you entrust to me, while balancing your desire to keep it secret against your need to know things you do not currently know.”

  In a broad way, he was speaking truth. As a lawyer, I had sometimes taken liberties with confidential information entrusted to me, but in a way that I thought honored the spirit of the original commitment even if it might betray the letter of it.

  “Alright,” I said. “Here’s the story. My friend recently purchased, for a lot of money, a first American edition of Les Misérables. It was inscribed by Hugo to Charles Dickens.”

  “What did this inscription say?”

  “Pour Charles Dickens, le plus grand écrivain en langue anglaise depuis Shakespeare.”

  He raised his eyebrows and said, in English, his voice dripping incredulity, “To the greatest writer in the English language since Shakespeare?”

  “Yes. But there’s more. There’s also a self-portrait of Hugo after his signature.”

  He steepled his hands in front of his face, pressed them to the tip of his nose and said, returning to French, “A self-portrait? Really? Do you actually believe cette histoire à dormir debout?”

  Translated literally, he had just asked me if I believed “this story of sleeping while standing up,” and it took me a second to grasp that what he’d said must be the French metaphorical equivalent of “a cock-and-bull story.”

  “I don’t know,” I muttered.

  He slammed his hand down on the desk. “This has gotten out of hand!”

  “What has?”

  “These forgeries of famous authors’ inscriptions. And now the outrage of a supposed self-portrait.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “In the last ten years, we have had a plague of forged inscriptions supposedly from famous authors, with gullible people paying tens of thousands of dollars for them. And when that is revealed, it is not good for our business.”

  “Why has this happened?”

  “Because, you see, they are so easy to fake.”

  “Why so easy?”

  “Because the handwriting of these authors is easily available. Before the twentieth century, authors wrote their manuscripts in longhand. Thus a forger can just take a manuscript from the right time period—there are copies in many libraries and even high-quality copies on the Internet—look for each word he wants to put in the forged inscription, carefully copy that word or even trace it, and create something that, at least to a non-expert—or even sometimes to experts—will look real.”

  “Is it just as easy to fake the self-portrait?”

  “Probably easier, especially if it is just a few sketched lines. Is it?”

  “Yes.”

  “There you go,” he said. “The fraudsters have been driven to even greater outrages.”

  “Surely,” I said, “there must be a way to test the ink or the paper or something.”

  “The paper will be real enough.” He reached up, removed the first of Les Misérables that he had shown me earlier and handed it to me. “Please open it to the title page.”

  I did as instructed.

  “Do you see an inscription?”

  “No.”

  “Well, suppose there is a forger, Monsieur Tarza. All he has to do is buy this first from me—it is only three thousand euros—and then add the fake inscription and sell an inscribed copy of a French-language first of Les Misérables for five times that amount, depending on to whom it was supposedly inscribed. The book and the paper will be very genuine. Only the inscription will be fake.”

  “Are un-inscribed firsts hard to come by?”

  “I would guess that there are hundreds of them in France alone.”

  “Suppose I want to test the ink before I buy it?”

  “The seller will object that taking your ink sample will damage the book.”

  “What about lasers?” I asked.

  “What about them?”

  “Couldn’t I use one in some fashion to test the ink without taking an actual sample of it?”

  “Possibly, but a chemist can also use a laser to analyze old ink and figure out how to duplicate it and age it. Plus, it’s not hard to find nineteenth-century pens and quills to apply it. Indeed, a laser may have been used to create the very ink you are testing.”

  “What is a buyer to do then?”

  “There are two solutions, Monsieur. The first is to buy only books where the provenance of the inscription is known, and that means a book whose inscription was laid down during the author’s lifetime and mentioned at the time in reliable historical sources.”

  “For example?”

  “Mentioned by the author in letters—people back then wrote a lot of letters—or by the recipient.”

  “What are the other historical sources I could consult?”

  “Catalogs of the time. And you are in luck because I just acquired something like that.” He got up from behind his desk, walked over to a filing cabinet and pulled out a slim brochure that looked like a magazine. “This is a catalog of anciens livres, put out by a dealer here in Paris in 1890.” He opened it to a page in the middle and handed it to me. “Read the third item down.”

  I picked it out and read it. “It says that the dealer has for sale an 1831 first edition of Notre-Dame de Paris, inscribed from Victor Hugo to Sophie Bergeret, a maid in his household.” (The catalog listed the novel that is usually translated into English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame).

  “Yes,” he said. “And here we have a book being sold today that will interest you. Look at the page I have marked with a piece of paper.” He opened a side drawer in his desk and handed to me a glossy catalog that was dated only a few months earlier.

  I looked. “Someone is selling the same book that was sold in 1890. Or at least it looks that way, since it has the same inscription.”

  “And so do you see?”

  “Not exactly. What are you getting at?”

  “The very age of the inscribed book’s first sale tends to lend credence to its authenticity. It’s a pretty good authenticator.”

  “Why? It could have been a fraud back then, too.”

  “Yes, it could have been, but not likely. Because in 1890, Hugo had been dead only five or six years, and the maid herself might still have still been alive—or one of her children. Or if not the maid and her family, a member of Hugo’s family, or Hugo household help. So someone at the time could probably have authenticated the inscription. The fact that the book is still around today and is on sale without apparent challenge, more than one hundred years later, says that it’s likely real. And that’s especially true if the dealer can show us the name of each owner between 1890 and now.”

  “What if it was real and remains real, but today someone fakes that inscription and puts out a new book with that inscription which is fake?”

  He smiled. “You are clearly a clever man, Monsieur Tarza. Someone could do that, and if the forgery were well done, there might be no way to tell.”

  Then it occurred to me. “How do you just happen to have on hand a copy of a Hugo inscription in an old book when I pop into your office to ask about a Hugo inscription?”

  “When Madame Devrais called to arrange your appointment, she told me you were coming to try to authenticate a Hugo-inscribed book a friend had purchased.”

  “She did?”

  “Yes. And I did a little research before you got here and found I had something relevant in my files.”

  “I suppose she operates under the same flexible standards of confidentiality that you do.”

  “I should have mentioned that she had told me some of the details of your visit, but it seemed superior to me to hear the details directly from you since intermediaries sometimes get facts wrong or leave impo
rtant things out.”

  Had Tess also told him about the kidnapping? It seemed unlikely that she had gone that far, but I needed to find out.

  “Did she say anything else?”

  “Only that your French was limited. Although I think from talking with you that it is much less limited than she believes.”

  He took the catalog back from me, replaced it in the file drawer, and looked at his watch. “Is there more you would like to ask me? I have another appointment only a little time from now.”

  I did have one broad question, and I asked it. “Do you think it even plausible that Victor Hugo inscribed a copy of Les Misérables to Charles Dickens?”

  “I would like to tell you that it is. Imagine it!” He put his hands up in the classic French fashion. “The greatest modern French author complimenting the greatest modern English author and even adding a little sketch of himself to make it even more intimate. And whoever owns the book can know that both men held the book and feel somehow associated with each of them when he holds it.”

  “Is there a ‘but’ coming?”

  “Yes. The rational part of me tells me this is almost certain to be complete and utter nonsense.”

  “Why?”

  “Two reasons. First, I am not an expert on Hugo—I specialize in eighteenth-century French authors, not nineteenth. But I know a little, and I have never read or heard that Hugo spoke English well or at all, so how could he begin to say that Dickens was the greatest writer in English since Shakespeare? Victor Hugo was a serious man. I do not think he would have said such a thing unless he knew it to be true.”

  “And second?”

  “Do you know if Dickens and Hugo ever met or corresponded?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “That is the first thing I would try to find out. Because one does not write an inscription such as this one—not to mention the little drawing—to a stranger. And I have never heard that they were intimates. This kind of fact would be well-known.”

  “I can do the research you suggest, I suppose, and try to learn the answers to those questions. But I prefer to start by talking to people who are experts. Do you know an expert on Hugo and another one on Dickens?”