Paris Ransom

by Charles Rosenberg

  “Yeah. I should have thought of that to start with.” I popped up the GPS app.

  “Can you tell where we are?”

  “Not really. It doesn’t map true in here. The glowing dot shows us about ten feet to our left, in the middle of those tombs.”

  While we were talking, the mist had begun to close in. I looked down and realized I could hardly see my feet. As for the GPS, I was stymied by not knowing exactly where we had come in and the fact that the map showed several paths that led to the area where I thought we’d entered. I had to admit that it was also getting kind of scary. The tombs seemed to be closing in around us. Maybe I did believe in ghosts. I tried to cover up my anxiety with a joke. “I guess we should have left some glowing bread crumbs.”

  Jenna ignored me. “If that map isn’t doing us any good, you should shut it down. The glow in the mist is marking us as intruders.”

  “Okay. I closed it. But I can’t see a thing now. Can you?”

  “Shh. I just heard something that sounded like footsteps.”

  We both stood stock-still and listened. I heard faint sounds that might have been muffled steps, but then they stopped. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest. Jenna brought her mouth up to my ear and whispered. “We came uphill on our way in. Let’s go downhill. We’ll hit the outer wall. Then we can follow it around—we want to go left I think—until we get to the gate.”

  “Okay,” I whispered back.

  Just then a voice—not too far away, although it was hard to tell because of the way the mist distorted the sound—called out, “Allo? Qui est là?”

  I had no intention of answering his query and telling him who we were. We started to move downhill, following the road we were on. I thought I heard footsteps close behind us again. I put my hand on Jenna’s shoulder to stop her from walking and felt her trembling. We both stood and listened. I heard nothing. Maybe it had been my imagination.

  We finally reached the wall, went left and eventually stumbled upon the gate, which was locked with a chain and a padlock.

  “What do you think?” I asked. “Do we crawl through the culvert?”

  “I don’t know of any other way out,” she said. “The gate is locked with this padlock”—she tried opening it but it wouldn’t budge—“and we know there’s barbed wire on top of the wall. If you have a better idea, Robert, tell me.”

  “I don’t.”

  I dropped the picnic basket and crawled into the pipe. It was dirty, wet and cold. The only way I could move was by squirming forward on my knees and elbows. One of my gloves fell off, and my hand touched soft, cold muck. After not too far, I ran into a mesh screen that was clearly designed to keep intruders out. Or maybe spirits in.

  I felt Jenna bump into my feet. “What’s the problem?”

  “There’s a screen in the way. I don’t have any way to cut through it.”

  “Try pushing on it. Maybe it’s old and rusty.”

  I pushed but nothing happened. I pushed harder, and it still didn’t yield. I heard a voice behind us again, echoing inside the pipe, “Qui est là?” Finally, I put my head down, curled it into my shoulder and shoved with all my might. I heard a scraping sound as the screen gave way. I crawled over it, ripping my pants and my sweatshirt. A minute later I reached the other side, crawled out through the vegetation and stood up. Jenna emerged a few seconds after that, looking as dirty and ragged as I felt.

  I heard the guard making noises on the other side of the metal gate. I couldn’t see him through the thick mist, but I assumed he was peering out, looking for us, but unable see us. I heard him fiddling with the padlock on the gate.

  Just then, our cab drove up and slowed to a halt in front of us. We clambered into the back seat. The cabbie turned and looked at us. “You guys are filthy. You’ll get the back of my cab dirty. Please get out and clean yourselves off first.”

  “Forget about that,” I said. “We need to get the hell out of here! Now! Go!”

  He stepped on the accelerator and we took off down the road, slipping slightly on the wet pavement.

  Jenna looked at me. “That night guy guide has never been through that pipe,” she said. “We ought to demand our money back. If that screen hadn’t been rusted out, we’d still be in there and probably getting arrested.”

  “You’re right. But we got out.”

  The cabbie turned his head around. “You guys are really ruining my back seat.”

  “Look,” I said. “We’ve already paid you a thousand euros.”

  “For services already rendered.”

  I ignored the point. “Just use a little of that money to get your back seat cleaned off.”

  “Okay, but try not to move around too much. Really, it’s hard to get that seat clean when it gets dirty.”

  “Do you know the British phrase ‘sod off’?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well sod off and take us back to where you picked us up.”

  He was none too happy about it, but he did it.

  By unspoken agreement, Jenna and I avoided mentioning the purloined envelope while we were in the cab. We’d let the driver listen to a lot of stuff on our way to Paris from Digne, but this seemed like something we should keep to ourselves. As soon as we got out, Jenna said, “Do you think we need plastic gloves or something when we open the envelope?”

  “We can try to wipe our prints off later if we need to. And anyway, your prints are already on the plastic bag. Let’s find a place to open it.”

  CHAPTER 41

  We were about two blocks from Tess’s apartment. There were no open cafés nearby, so we walked up a side street and sat down on the curb. Jenna opened the bag and then the envelope, which wasn’t sealed, and took out a single sheet of folded paper. She took out her flashlight, scanned it and handed the document to me. “It’s in French. You read it.”

  It was handwritten, and it took me a minute to decipher. I read it through twice, to be sure it really said what I thought it said.

  “What does it say, Robert? Come on. Tell me.”

  “It’s a letter from François-Victor Hugo, who I think was one of Victor Hugo’s children, to someone named Charles Hugo.”

  “And?”

  “It says that he has finally persuaded ‘their’ father—so Charles Hugo must have been François-Victor’s brother—to inscribe a copy of an English-language edition of Les Misérables to Charles Dickens, with a personal and flattering message. And that when he is in London next month, he thinks he will be able to use it to arrange a dinner with Dickens for himself.”

  “Oh my God. That would authenticate the inscription in the book that Oscar bought, wouldn’t it?”

  “It would seem to. If it’s real it gets rid of all the arguments about how the inscription on the book must be fake because Hugo and Dickens didn’t know one another, met only once, that Hugo didn’t speak English well, et cetera.”

  “But how do we know it’s not itself a fake?” Jenna asked.

  “Exactly,” I said. “It might be part of a fake set, where each seems to authenticate the other.”

  “If it’s real, what do you think it does to the book’s value?” she asked.

  “Probably makes it even more valuable than if Hugo had signed it because he knew Dickens personally,” I said. “It gives the book a great backstory.”

  “So if the letter is real it works as an authenticator of the book,” Jenna said. “The son wanted his father, one of the most famous French authors, to inscribe one of his novels to make it easier for the son to gain an audience with the best-known English author of his time.”

  “Precisely,” I said. “If it’s real.”

  “Is the letter dated?” Jenna asked

  I looked at the letter again. “Yes. June 1, 1870.”

  I could see Jenna was excited. I was, too.

  “I
want to learn more about François-Victor Hugo before we jump to conclusions about the letter’s authenticity,” I said. “I mean, it makes sense on one level that the inscription he came up with for his father to sign would mention Shakespeare. He was the main translator of Shakespeare into French at the time. On another level, the whole thing seems too good to be true.”

  “That antiquarian bookstore owner told you about the Shakespeare connection, right?”

  “Yes. But here’s a puzzling question. If François-Victor Hugo gave the book with the inscription to Dickens, what’s it doing in France?”

  We hurried back to the apartment. When we got there, we discussed whether we dared look up what we wanted to know, or whether we should use an Internet café. In the end, we decided that even if our computers were being hacked, the hackers wouldn’t learn much just from seeing that we were researching Dickens, Hugo and Hugo’s children.

  I hadn’t spent more than a few minutes at the task when it became apparent why the book, if the inscription was real, had ended up in France.

  “It was bad timing,” I said. “Charles Dickens died on June 9, 1870. If François-Victor Hugo was writing to his brother Charles on June 1 of 1870 that he was going to England ‘next month,’ that would have put his trip in July. Dickens would already have been dead a month.”

  “Maybe François-Victor Hugo kept the book, and somehow, after he died, it was eventually acquired by the lecherous priest in Digne.”

  “We’ll probably never know how it got to Digne, Jenna.”

  Tess came into the room, dressed, as she had been when we left, in her bathrobe. “You two,” she said. “What have you found? What is this letter you are holding?”

  We explained the whole thing to her. She examined the letter and said, “It seems very old, the paper. An expert must examine it and the ink to be certain. And we must learn where Oscar is. But if we assume it is real . . .”

  “Yes,” I said, “if the letter is real, we have begun to solve the problem of the book’s authenticity.”

  “Except you have not solved much,” Tess said. “You still do not know where Oscar is, and you do not know where the book is. If the kidnappers kill Oscar, this letter is not of importance.”

  “I agree,” I said. “The question is whether there’s any way to use the letter to find both Oscar and the book.”

  Jenna looked thoughtful. “I have an idea.”

  “The last one ended up with me crawling through a drain.”

  “You got out, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. So, okay, what’s the idea?”

  “Do you know the old saying about how to catch a mouse?” she asked.

  “Put out the cheese?” I shrugged. “I’m afraid I find that not very helpful. Please explain.”

  “My thinking goes like this. The book alone, if all it has is the inscription, is worth something, but not much because everyone will say it’s a fake.”

  “Which is what they are in fact saying,” I said.

  “Right, but Oscar told us he had an offer to buy the book for a lot. So he must have told the potential buyer about this letter—the authenticator he mentioned. And the kidnappers must know about it, too. Otherwise, there would have been no reason to go through this whole exercise.”

  “But the kidnappers have not said a thing about the letter,” I said.

  “True,” Jenna said. “But if we let all the people we suspect know that the letter is here, whoever is behind the kidnapping will come and try to get it, whether they knew about it beforehand or not. It’s the cheese, and when they come we will catch the mouse.”

  “Let it be known how?” I asked.

  “We’ll send the info out on our cell phones so the general and the police can read it, and we’ll send a text to the kidnappers telling them somehow. I haven’t figured out the details yet.”

  “How will we know when they come to get it?”

  “Tess, do you have access to people who can put a camera in your study?” Jenna asked. “One we can watch from somewhere else?”

  “I think I can do this.”

  I had been mulling over the cheese ploy. There was something that troubled me. “Jenna, what if no one at all comes?”

  “If no one comes, I will agree that we should just turn this whole thing over to the police and go home—that we will have done all we can for Oscar, and that anything else we might do will be futile.”

  “Well, one other thing, speaking of mice,” I said. “Where is Olga?”

  “She went out early yesterday morning,” Tess said. “She said she will not come back until tomorrow after noon.”

  “How did you manage to speak to her?” Jenna asked.

  “Eh, we have been using Google translate, on the computer. She types a thing in Russian, and it translates to French. I read it and type in what I want to say back in French. And so the program translates it the other way, to Russian.”

  “That’s clever.”

  “Perhaps. But I think it is truly not necessary. Olga speaks French. I am certain of this.”

  “How do you know, Tess?” I asked.

  “Because I said in French, while I stood in front of her, ‘There is a spider in my hair,’ and began to touch my hair wildly to find it. I saw when I said this Olga started to find her own hair, then stopped. I think she remembered she pretends not to speak French.”

  “That’s a hard thing to pull off, pretending not to understand what people are saying all around you,” Jenna said.

  “Perhaps not for this girl. She told me she studies how to act in Moscow.”

  “Studies how to behave?”

  “No, no. How to be an actor.”

  With that information in mind, we spent the next half hour kicking around some ideas about how to implement our plan. Then we all went back to bed and slept late.

  Around ten the next morning, Tess, Jenna and I gathered at the breakfast table to plan the caper.

  “Let’s plan out Operation Cheese, as I now call it, in detail,” I said.

  “Okay. How do you want to go about that?” Jenna asked.

  “Since it was your idea, you should lead.”

  “Alright, we need to let each mouse know that we have the letter from Hugo’s son, what it says and where it is. That way, whoever now has the book will come looking for the letter so they can have the proof that the inscription on the book is real.”

  “Where are you going to leave it?”

  She looked at Tess. “In Tess’s study, if that’s okay with her.”

  Tess nodded her head. “Yes, certainly.”

  “How are you going to let them know about it?” I asked.

  “In the case of the hotel owner, I will simply go to the hotel and tell him about it and let slip where it is,” Jenna said. “In other words, I’ll play the dumb American who can’t keep her mouth shut.”

  “And what about the general?” I asked.

  “I will send you an email about it, Robert. And in that email, I’ll say how glad I am that we’ve finally encrypted our phones. The general will be able to read the email, think that we didn’t manage to encrypt it—that we screwed up—and he’ll have the information.”

  “In other words, once again, that you’re a stupid American.”

  “Yes.”

  “And Olga?”

  “Why don’t we have Tess just speak about it on the phone—in French—while talking to you? That way, if Olga really does understand French, she’ll get the information but assume we don’t know she has it. So she’ll just assume that you didn’t mean to spill the beans.”

  “Why do I want to spill beans?” Tess asked.

  I broke in. “It’s a metaphor. It means to give information away by accident or on purpose.”

  “Ah, we would say vendre la mèche.”

  “Doesn’t that
mean ‘sell the wick’?” I asked.

  “No, no, here it will mean the same as spill the beans. I will explain to you later how these words mean that.”

  “Well, wick or beans, I think it will work. But, Tess, what else are you going to do for the project?”

  “I will contact some people now to set up the cameras and alarms. You will see tomorrow.”

  The first workmen arrived the next morning at seven. They installed ten tiny camera lenses, each no bigger than a button. One held the entry door to the apartment in its gaze. The second through fourth focused on the walls of Tess’s study. Still others went into the living room, the dining room, my study and the guest room, along with motion detectors and microphones in each room. The only rooms they skipped were the bathrooms and the kitchen. They also installed an invisible-beam electric eye across the thresholds of both the front door and the study.

  When I went out to pick up some food for breakfast, I saw men working in the elevator and the building lobby, installing still more equipment. I nodded to Monsieur Martin as I passed him, and he nodded back. He appeared mesmerized by all of the activity. I wondered if he’d actually installed the new, automatically-recording camera he had told me about or if it was still in its box.

  I brought the food back and set it all down on the dining room table. Tess and Jenna were already there, observing the activity.

  “This is all very cool,” Jenna said. “But where is the feed going from all of these cameras?”

  “There is a vacant apartment on the floor above this one,” Tess said. “Yesterday afternoon, I rented it for one month. We will arrange to be out every evening and then stay in it and watch the screens.”

  “And when we see somebody come into the study and grab the envelope, what exactly are we supposed to do about it?” Jenna asked.

  “We will alert the police to our plan. They will be nearby and will arrest this person. They will have evidence from these videos. I have arranged with them how this will work. How they will capture the criminals.”

  “I don’t know if we can trust the police,” I said. “Whom did you speak to?”

  “Captain Bonpere. I think we can trust her. Do you not agree?”