Paris Ransom

by Charles Rosenberg

  My phone beeped almost immediately with the number.

  “Got it, and I will, as soon as we hang up. I hope he speaks English.”

  “Let me know what you find out, Jenna.”

  I figured there was no time like the present, so I found a park bench and dialed his number. He answered almost immediately.

  “Allo?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t speak French,” I said.

  “Ah, well, as happens, I also speak English. This is Colin O’Connor. How might I be of service to you?”

  As soon as he began to speak in English, the beautiful Irish lilt that emerged left no doubt where he had been raised, and it wasn’t France.

  I decided to be direct. “Hello, Mr. O’Connor, this is Jenna James. I’m a law professor at UCLA currently on vacation in Paris. I know this will sound strange, but I’m investigating the disappearance of a colleague, and I think you might have some information that would be useful to me. Would you be willing to meet me somewhere?”

  “For sure I can. Assuming you have ID that confirms you are who you say you are, come on over to my apartment, and we’ll have some fine Irish tea. Where might you be now?”

  I told him.

  “Ah, you are but a few blocks away. You can walk or hail a taxi. Do you know where rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré is?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “You are close. I’m near the corner of that street and rue des Saussaies. You can walk here in twenty. Give me your cell and I will text you the address and a map link.”

  I chose to walk, and it was soon apparent that I was walking through one of the wealthiest areas of Paris. I actually passed the Élysée Palace at one point and smiled at the uniformed guards at the gate. When I reached the address he had texted me, his apartment turned out to be in what otherwise looked like a commercial building, with ultra-swank shops on the ground floor and a marbled elevator lobby. On my way up the elevator to the sixth floor, I realized I had failed to ask the guy if he was a cab driver. Maybe Robert had found the wrong person named Colin O’Connor.

  The guy let me in without hesitation—which was a bit surprising considering I was a total stranger, but maybe five-foot-six women are somehow not threatening—and motioned me to a seat by the window. Between his lilt and his looks, there was no mistaking he was an Irishman. He was about five foot ten, with jet black hair and green eyes, a look I sometimes heard people call “black Irish” when I was in law school.

  “Would you like some tea?” he asked.

  The apartment was ultra-modern, in the style of the restaurant in which I’d dined with the embassy folks, with a huge window that looked out on the Eiffel Tower off in the distance, the Arc de Triomphe to the right and the gold-topped obelisk in the Place de la Concorde to the left. It was breathtaking.

  We introduced ourselves and, on his request, I showed him my UCLA ID card. He seemed satisfied, and busied himself getting the tea as I talked.

  He served it in beautiful cups and asked, “What might this all be about?”

  “I have to start by asking, are you a cab driver or do I have the wrong Colin O’Connor?” I raised my eyebrows and gestured at the sweeping view.

  He laughed, clearly getting my not-so-subtle question: How can a cab driver afford to live here?

  “My father made a fortune in Ireland and died young. I moved here to write a graphic novel set in contemporary Paris.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “It’s a new take on Victor Hugo’s L’Homme Qui Rit—The Man Who Laughs.”

  “I’m sorry, I’ve never heard of it.”

  “It’s the original inspiration, by way of some other works, for the Joker character in Batman.”

  “So how is yours different?”

  “Laughs more at himself than others.”

  “And driving a cab helps that how?” I asked.

  “Driving a cab helps me see the city and its people. And the tourists, of course.”

  “Do you work at it full time?”

  “No, I work two or three days a week, and I’m known to the company as someone who’s willing to work nights and holidays, and when it’s raining or snowing. The best stories are out there then.”

  “Do you wear a turban?”

  “I do.” He went into another room and came back with it on his head. It was indeed blue.

  “You like?” he asked.

  “Yes. Why do you do it?”

  “It encourages conversation with my fares. They can’t resist asking about it, and that always breaks the ice and I can find out about them.”

  “You speak French?”

  “I do. And German and Russian, so I can chat up a lot of tourists.”

  “Why blue?”

  “It has to be some color, so why not?”

  “Do you have other colors?”

  “I do not. But tell me why you are here. Surely ’tis not to find out about turbans.”

  I asked him if would agree to keep what I told him to himself. He agreed to do that, and I then explained it all.

  He listened patiently, pursed his lips and said, “I suppose it invades a customer’s privacy, but if he’s truly been kidnapped, there ought to be an exception to that.”

  “Yes, I would assume so.”

  “Alright, I recall your man, actually, even without looking at my log book. I picked him up at a small hotel over in the Marais. Do you know that area?”

  “Yes. Do you remember the name of the hotel?”

  “Yes. It’s called Hôtel des Antiquaires. I can give you the address.”

  “What kind of place is it?”

  “It’s a two-star hotel, I think, which means it will be clean and without obvious bugs, and it has a working elevator, but nothing fancy.”

  I thanked him for his time and we promised to stay in touch. He said if I needed more help to feel free to call on him. As he put it, “I always enjoy being part of a good story.”

  After I left, I called Robert and told him what I had learned.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Well, I need a place to stay other than the general’s apartment. I don’t really have any hard basis for thinking I’m being bugged there, and I know you thought it would be good for me to be watched over, for my own protection. Somehow, though, I feel like I’m under surveillance, which is different.”

  “Why do you feel that way?”

  “I can’t put my finger on the exact reasons, but I’m suspicious of the whole setup. And back when I was a lawyer, paying attention to my suspicion-o-meter, as I used to call it, often proved the right thing to do. So I want out. If this hotel has a room free, I think I just found a new place.”

  CHAPTER 20

  I stopped at an Internet café and made a reservation via the hotel’s website. The rate was reasonable, and I reserved the room for a week. The Google map estimated it was only twenty minutes by car from the apartment, so I could just take a cab. I went back to the apartment and packed.

  Once packed, I considered my problem: I had to get out of the general’s apartment without being detected. I was sure I would be if I just walked out the front door with my suitcase. I had noticed two large men loitering outside the building who looked nothing like bums and every inch—or, since it was France, every centimeter—like cops. They look alike everywhere, and I was sure they belonged to the general, who had, after all, said I would be “protected.”

  I had explored earlier and found a door at the back of the lobby, locked from the inside with a dead bolt. It led to the building’s trash cans, which were stored in an outdoor enclosure surrounded by a concrete block wall. Fortunately, I had traveled light and had only one small, wheeled suitcase. I packed, put on my blue jeans, took the steps to the lobby so as to avoid running into someone in the elevator, undid the bolt lock on the back doo
r, and walked out into sunshine. I tossed the suitcase up on top of the wall. Next, I hoisted myself up to the top, too—working on my upper body strength at the gym had paid off—and lowered myself down on the other side. I grabbed the suitcase off the wall and looked around. I was on a small side street. No one seemed to have seen me, and there were no goons in sight.

  I walked several blocks, hailed a taxi and was at the Hôtel des Antiquaires within twenty minutes. I noticed after exiting the cab that there was an antiquarian bookstore next to the hotel called À la Recherche des Livres Perdus. I wondered if it was under the same ownership. I would also need to ask the hotel owner what the name meant. Assuming, of course, that he spoke English.

  A bellman emerged from the hotel, which was six stories high, with a pastel front, red shutters on the windows, and geraniums growing in planter boxes set on tiny balconies. He took my bags to the front desk where a kindly looking, rather old gentleman with half-glasses on a chain around his neck looked up my reservation and asked, in English, to see my passport.

  He took it and said, “Do you speak French?”

  “No, I’m sorry, I don’t.”

  “Well, we will press forward, then, in English. I learned it during the Vietnam War—yours, not ours—when I was attached to the French embassy in Saigon. The city was full of Americans, so there was little choice but to learn English if I was going to have any friends beyond my own embassy.”

  “You learned it well,” I said.

  “Thank you.”

  He had been examining my passport as we spoke. “Do you want us to keep your passport for you? It would save you the risk of having it pickpocketed on our wonderful subways, which are filled with them. We would store it here, and you could retrieve it when needed.” He pointed to a row of numbered wooden cubbyholes behind him, some of which had passports resting in them, along with envelopes that were presumably arriving mail.

  “No, thanks. I think I’ll keep mine.”

  “Your choice, of course. May I also have your credit card? And will you please sign here and initial here and here.”

  As I completed the paperwork, I tried, surreptitiously, to see if there were any American passports in the slots, then stopped myself, realizing that in Oscar’s case it would have to be either a French passport or a French identity card. I decided to hazard getting some information.

  “Monsieur, I’m curious, do you offer the same passport protection services to your French guests?”

  He gave me an odd look and shrugged. “Yes, of course, but most of them use their French national identity card for verification of who they are. And most French would not wish to be separated from that card. If the police stop them and they do not have it with them they may go directly to jail.” He smiled. “Isn’t that the Monopoly game card, ‘go directly to jail’? We used to play that with our American friends in Saigon.”

  “What would happen if I did not have my passport?”

  “Eh, if they thought you were a tourist, they would take you back to your hotel to find it.”

  “And if they thought I was not a tourist?”

  “Go directly to jail!” He laughed uproariously at his own joke.

  “I see,” I said.

  Once the formalities were completed, the bellman took my bag up to my room on the 4e étage (what we’d call the fifth floor in the United States, because the first floor in France has a name instead of a number and isn’t counted).

  The elevator was old and positively creaked upward, but it was better than walking up four flights. The room itself was plain but serviceable. The bathroom was clean and the toilet didn’t run, even though it had one of those old tanks hung on the wall above the toilet bowl. I tipped the bellman, and as I handed him a two-euro coin. I asked, as casually as I could, “Are there other guests here who speak English?”

  “I do not speak anglais,” he said. “Désolé.” I was coming to understand that word meant “sorry.” I was embarrassed at having assumed that because the hotel owner spoke English, so did the help. In any case, my task now, without being too obvious about it, was to find out which room Oscar had been staying in and then get into it. That proved a little time-consuming, but not too difficult.

  I went to a stationery store and bought a big manila envelope and some copy paper. I filled the envelope with paper until it was bulky, then took the metro across town to a bicycle messenger service I’d found that advertised that they spoke English. I paid them cash to deliver my envelope livraison urgente (rush) to Oscar Brioche, care of the hotel. Obviously, if he hadn’t used that name to register—I suspected, of course, that he had used it—the delivery would fail, so I’d learn something that way, too.

  For a return name and address, which they required, I channeled my college art history course for a name and chose Charlotte Corday. For the address I used the address of the restaurant at which I’d dined with the diplomats. I was worried they would ask for ID, and was prepared to say I’d left my passport in my hotel room, but they didn’t ask.

  I took the metro back to the hotel. On the way, I bought a copy of the European edition of the Wall Street Journal and sat reading it in the hotel lobby, waiting for the envelope to be delivered. Less than forty minutes later, the messenger arrived, and I watched as the desk clerk signed for it and placed it in a cubbyhole behind the desk labeled “406.” So Oscar’s room number had to be 406, which was, by delightful happenstance, only two doors down from my own.

  Just then my throw-away cell rang. It was Robert. “Hi, where are you?” he asked.

  I insisted on walking out of the hotel before responding—my suspicion-o-meter was still showing a high reading—then briefed him on the name and address of the hotel, my room number, and the fact that Oscar had stayed at the same hotel, on the same floor, just two rooms down from mine. We agreed to meet at the hotel at 11 p.m.

  I waited about fifteen minutes, returned to the hotel and went back up to my room to consider my options. One option was to make up some excuse that would gain me access via the hotel’s master key, but I couldn’t think of a good excuse. Another was to steal a master key, but I couldn’t think of a safe way to do that, either. The third was to pick the lock. I had learned how to do that during my gap year after high school, which I had spent in Hawaii with my somewhat disreputable private detective uncle, Freddy. In recent years, though, I had restricted my activities to parties where I demonstrated to the hosts that I, a law professor, could pick the lock on their front door. Or at least most locks. I had even joined a local chapter of TOOOL (The Open Organization of Lockpickers), which ran contests like who could—legally—pick a lock the fastest. I was, at best, in the middle of the pack.

  But I was good enough, I thought, to take the lock on Oscar’s hotel room door without any trouble. The only problem was that I hadn’t thought to bring a lock-pick kit with me across an international border, since in some countries it’s illegal to possess lock-pick tools. That left me with what I had with me or could buy without suspicion. I checked my suitcase. I had packed a metal nail file, which would help. But I also needed a thin probe of some kind to hold the tumblers while I used the nail file to turn the lock cylinder.

  I dumped the contents of my purse out on a table to see what I had that might work. Amidst the debris there was a flat-sided bobby pin. With the rubber tip removed, it would probably do. I was going to have to wait, though, until very late evening, when the maids were gone, most guests had already checked in and the hallways were otherwise deserted. So I had some time to kill.

  I started by calling the general and reached him almost immediately.

  “Hi,” I said. “I wanted to let you know that while I appreciated the loan of the apartment, I’ve moved to a hotel.”

  “Why?”

  I had thought carefully about how to answer that question with something that was at least mildly plausible.

  “I ju
st had the sense that the kidnappers knew where I was staying, and although I appreciated the security you provided, I just feel safer being somewhere anonymous.”

  “You can tell me, certainly, where you are.”

  I had thought about how to respond to that, too.

  “I think my phone is being tapped. I keep hearing strange clicks. I’ll keep in touch, and let you know after I get a new phone.”

  “Well, I am glad you called.”

  “Why?”

  “The kidnappers have delivered an ultimatum.”

  “To you?”

  “It was addressed to you, care of us.”

  “But you opened it.”

  “Yes. Désolé. But it was necessary.”

  “Why?”

  “To protect you.”

  “Will I be unhappy with what it says?”

  “Probably, but I think you had better come here right away.”

  “To 36 quai des Orfèvres?”

  “Yes.”

  I had developed something of an aversion to the place, so I declined. “I’d rather go somewhere else. How about you buy me a late lunch?”

  “Okay. Where?”

  “I’ll find a place and text you the address in a couple of minutes.”

  “Alright.”

  I went on the Net and located a small restaurant about a thirty-minute walk from the hotel. I figured that would be far enough away that he wouldn’t be able to figure out where I had come from, and it was only a block from a metro station, so he’d probably think I’d taken the metro from some place much farther away.

  I texted him the time and place and made it a point to get there a little early.

  CHAPTER 21

  The restaurant was small—only about ten tables—and clearly a mom-and-pop kind of place. Mom was the waitress and Pop was the cook, and they kept yelling at each other. I couldn’t understand a word of it, but from gestures and context, Pop was saying, “Hurry up,” and Mom was shouting back, “No, you hurry up.”

  I watched the show for a while. Finally, the general arrived—about fifteen minutes late.