A mattress lay on the floor in one corner. There was little else in the room—a table, a chest of drawers, a couple of beat-up chairs, an improvised bookshelf of stacked wooden crates. There appeared to be no closet. Clothes hung from hooks on the wall.
The stale smell of cigarette smoke and human funk was strong.
Despite the desperate tawdriness of the place, it was surprisingly neat. The floor looked clean, and a stained quilt was tucked neatly over the mattress. There was a single lamp on the floor beside the mattress, and a stack of books on the quilt. A pile of pillows propped against the wall indicated that the man had been reading.
“My name is Joe Slater,” he said. He sat at the table and gestured toward the other chair. Stewart walked over and sat down.
Slater waved a hand around, inviting his guest to take in the surroundings. “Not exactly avenue Foch, is it?” he joked.
“Are there some people watching you?” Stewart asked.
Slater laughed. “You mean those guys across the street?”
“Who are they?”
“Fucked if I know. I don’t pay any attention to them.” Slater looked toward the kitchen. “I got a couple of beers in the fridge.
Alsatian, not too bad….”
“No thanks.”
“A man never thinks his life’ll come to this,” Slater said.
“Christ knows I didn’t. I would have thought this romantic as all hell when I was in my twenties. But now . . . now it’s just pathetic.
I’m pathetic. I’ll be fifty-three next birthday. I really didn’t expect to live this long, you know that? I guess that’s part of my problem. I’ve outlived myself. Hey, but you didn’t come here to listen to my problems.”
“I’m looking for Kirsten Amster.”
“Yeah, you told me.”
“Does she live here?”
“Not anymore.”
“Where does she live?”
Slater’s eyes narrowed. “She doesn’t live anywhere. She’s dead.”
The news jolted Stewart powerfully. When he had recovered, he asked what had happened to her.
“She drowned. In the Seine. Last October.”
“An accident?”
“That’s what the police say. I think she was killed.”
“Why?”
“That fucking genetic computer program.”
“I paid her for it over a year ago. She cheated me. She sold me a disk with only half the program on it.”
“You’re not the only one. Everybody was after her for it.”
“Everybody? Who?”
“I don’t know who they were. It was none of my business. I told her to get rid of the fucking thing. But no. She kept dangling it out there, like bait, and upping the ante. She said she was going to make a killing with it. Well, she did that all right.”
“Did she sell it to anybody?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
“What happened to it? Do you know?”
Slater took a sip of his beer and said nothing.
“Do you have it?”
Slater looked Stewart over. “Yeah, I have it. Or I should say I know where it is.”
“I’ll pay you for it.”
Slater gazed at him with his sad, rheumy eyes. After a pause, he shook his head in resignation.
“Ten thousand dollars,” Stewart said. “Five in cash today. The rest as soon as I can verify that it’s genuine.”
Slater still didn’t respond.
“I’ve already invested a small fortune in that program,” Stewart added.
“And I’ve already paid for it once. It’s really my property.”
Slater rubbed his face and sighed. “I won’t argue with you, Stewart.
But if I were you, I’d forget about it. Leave the goddamned thing alone. It’s cursed. Look what happened to Goth.
Look what happened to Kirsten.”
“Will you take the offer?”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Develop it, of course.”
“Of course. And make more billions, right?”
Stewart didn’t bother to reply.
“What do you need more money for?” Slater demanded. “What the hell do you do with it all? Does it make you feel good? Secure?
Superior? What does it do for you?”
“It’s a measure of success,” Stewart answered. And failure as well, he thought.
“Is it?”
“Most people’d say so.”
“Sort of a way to keep score, eh? The guy with the most marbles wins.”
“Something like that.”
Slater yawned. “You know what? It sounds pretty fucking boring.”
Stewart felt the need to justify himself. “Not for me it isn’t.
There’s plenty of risk. Uncertainty. You’d be surprised.”
“Probably. You’re taking a big risk here, I’ll tell you that.”
“Why?”
“I told you. The program’s cursed. This guy Goth was playing God. He was fucking around with the fundamental mystery of life on earth. He was creating his own specs for building a human being. Stealing God’s own thunder. Or trying to. How blasphemous can you get? But it so happens I need the money….”
“Where is it?” Stewart demanded.
“Where it belongs. In Hell.”
“Hell?”
Slater laughed. “Yeah. The Paris version.”
Leonora, the Stewarts’ upstairs maid, came into Anne’s bedroom and began dusting the furniture. She paused at the dressing table, picked up one of Anne’s hair brushes, and examined it, looking for loose strands of hair in the bristles. There were none. Two other brushes on the table were similarly clean.
She went to Anne’s bed, picked up a pillow, and carried it over to a window. She found several strands of Anne’s hair on the pillowcase.
She removed them carefully, then fished in her apron for the small letter envelope. She folded the strands inside, licked the flap, and sealed it shut.
After cleaning the bathroom and making Anne’s bed, Leonora went into the bedroom across the hall from Anne’s, where her husband, Dalton Stewart, usually slept. She located more strands of hair on the pillowcases on his bed and sealed them in a second envelope.
She made his bed, cleaned the bathroom, dusted the furniture, and then moved down the hall to the room where the Stewarts’ daughter slept.
She examined the crib mattress and the bumper for loose hairs, but could find none. She located a few strands on the changing table nearby, but it was impossible to be certain whose head they had fallen from—the child’s, her mother’s, or her nanny’s.
Leonora finished cleaning the front rooms and moved to the north wing.
Mrs. Callahan was in the nursery, reading a magazine. Whenever Leonora saw her, she seemed to have her nose
1 94 stuck in a magazine. Except when Mrs. Stewart was around, of course; then she was all bustle and business.
The Stewarts’ daughter was sitting in the middle of the floor, stacking alphabet blocks. Mrs. Callahan looked up, saw Leonora, and turned back to her magazine. As for the child, she was concentrating so intently on her blocks that she seemed not to notice the maid’s entrance at all.
She was a beautiful Anglo child, Leonora thought, with the same angelic disposition as her mother; but there was something disturbing about her. The girl had a peculiar way of looking at you. She acted as if she were seeing something on you—as if you had a big spider crawling on your head, or something. It was a little bit spooky.
Leonora sometimes wondered if the child might be possessed.
Her aunt Carolina, in El Salvador, had seen such cases. Still, there was nothing evil about the girl that the maid could see. It was just that funny look she had, as if she were seeing things that weren’t there.
The maid dawdled, stretching out her cleaning chores, hoping Mrs.
Callahan might leave the room for a mom
ent. She knew the woman suffered from a bladder problem.
Leonora turned on the vacuum cleaner and worked it back and forth on the carpet. Genny waved her little arms, afraid the vacuum was going to knock over her blocks. The maid moved the machine around them with great care.
Finally Mrs. Callahan stood up. “Watch her for me, Leonora.
I’m going to the bathroom.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The moment the nanny disappeared through the doorway, Leonora turned off the vacuum and knelt behind Genny. From her apron she extracted a small pair of fingernail scissors and quickly snipped off a strand of Genny’s blond locks. The girl felt the back of her head with her hand and quickly looked around.
“Buenos d1as, nina,” Leonora said. “Que tal?”
“Buenos dr’as,” Genny replied, imitating the maid’s accent perfectly.
“Why did you cut my hair?”
“Just a little piece,” Leonora said, tucking the hair into a third envelope and sealing it. “For my collection. I collect hair from all my friends.”
Genny regarded the maid with those laserlike gray-blue eyes.
“I think that’s silly,” she declared, in a very adult voice. She turned back to her blocks.
Mrs. Callahan returned and Leonora quickly finished her cleaning. As she was leaving, the alphabet blocks Genny was playing with suddenly caught her attention. The maid had been studying English very diligently, and she was proud of her reading ability.
Genny had arranged some of the blocks in a long line. The side facing Leonora showed all capital letters: WHATEVERYWOMANSHOULDKNOW. At first they appeared to be randomly arranged, but on closer inspection, Leonora thought that they spelled out something. She puzzled over them a few moments longer. Then the individual English words jumped out at her: “What every woman should know.”
“Madre de Dios,” she whispered. She hurried from the nursery, feeling short of breath.
Later, riding into town with Mrs. Corley, the housekeeper, Leonora realized that what the girl must have done was copy the letters from the cover of one of Mrs. Callahan’s magazines. She couldn’t remember seeing any magazine on the floor anywhere near the child, however. And she had vacuumed every inch of it.
How could that little nina be so smart? The child must be a very special gift from God, she thought. Or the Devil.
In town, Leonora met the man in the greeting card aisle at the big CVS
drugstore, as arranged. He dressed very well and had excellent manners. That seemed to be true of most of the Asians she had seen since coming to the United States.
She gave him the three envelopes. She had marked them clearly, but he ripped them all open right there in the aisle and looked inside each one. Finally he nodded and smiled and told her that she had done an excellent job.
She had met him the week before. He worked for a big shampoo manufacturer. His company was doing a big study on rich women’s hair.
It was all part of a major project to develop a new shampoo. Muy importante, very hush-hush. She had to promise J u t . .. w . …never to tell anyone of her secret little mission on the company’s behalf.
He handed her an envelope from his inside suit pocket and, with a small bow, turned and left the store. The envelope contained five twenty-dollar bills.
The man’s story was a bit farfetched, but Leonora hardly cared.
If he wanted a few strands of someone’s hair, what could be the harm?
Especially if he was willing to pay her a hundred dollars for them.
Leonora slipped the bills into her purse. And speaking of hair, she thought, she ought to take a look at those elegant new electric razors for women she had noticed at the front counter.
Dalton Stewart and Joe Slater emerged together from Slater’s studio apartment on the rue Blondel. The fat woman was still by the doorway, smoking a cigarette.
Stewart noticed a couple of prostitutes huddled in the shadows of a narrow alleyway across the street. Behind them, Stewart glimpsed the same two men he had seen earlier. They were sitting on chairs tilted back against the alley wall. As soon as they saw Slater and Stewart they stood up.
“Are they going to follow us?” Stewart asked.
“Afraid so.”
“Who are they?”
Slater pulled up the collar of his coat against the damp. “I told you—I don’t know.”
“You know what they want?”
“What do you think?”
Stewart watched the men out of the corner of his eye. They had come out of the alley and were walking single file along the narrow sidewalk on the other side of the street. Their presence unnerved him. “How do they know you have it?”
“They don’t,” Slater said. “Right after Kirsten was killed some people approached me and offered me money. I told them I didn’t know anything about any computer program. After that, these guys appeared. I’ve tried a hundred times to shake the bastards.
I even moved twice. But somehow they always find me again.
1 9 8
They’ve ransacked my apartment five times. They’re waiting for me to lead them to Jupiter. I know it.”
“What are we going to do?”
“Lose them.
They took the Metro to Denfert-Rochereau, changing cars several times en route. From there they walked a few blocks down the boulevard Saint-Jacques, turned right onto the rue Dareau, then left onto the rue Broussais, and finally left again onto the rue Cabanis, which ran along the grounds of the Centre Hospitalier Sainte-Anne.
Slater stopped in front of a small shop window. “Let’s wait here. See if they’re still around.”
Five minutes passed.
“No sign of them,” Stewart said, getting impatient.
“Don’t be hasty. They’re clever bastards. Follow me.”
Slater retraced their route all the way back to Denfert, his eyes probing every doorway, alley, and storefront for any sign of a tail.
Satisfied at last that they had lost them, he led Stewart along an even more circuitous route back to the rue Cabanis.
“This way.” Slater climbed over the low stone wall that bordered the hospital’s small park. Stewart followed, feeling increasingly foolhardy.
Slater led him a short distance through some heavy bushes until they came to a low shed used to store equipment for ground maintenance.
Slater yanked open the shed’s door and ducked inside.
He took a shovel leaning against the back wall and scraped several inches of dirt from the floor until he had unearthed an old iron manhole cover. He pried the cover up with the blade of the shovel and slid it aside.
Stewart peered down into blackness. “Where the hell does it go?”
“To the catacombs,” Slater replied. “Kirsten’s idea. She had a job here at the hospital lab. Some co-workers showed her the entrance.
They used to go down here sometimes, just for the evil thrill of it.
Used to party down there, she told me.” Slater pulled a pair of small flashlights from his pocket and handed one to Stewart. “You’ll need this.”
Slater lowered himself into the opening, feeling for the top rungs of the iron ladder attached to the stone-lined walls of the well. He turned on his flashlight and began a cautious descent.
Stewart took a deep breath to steady himself, then followed.
A hundred rungs down, ten stories under the city of Paris, Slater stepped off the ladder onto a dirt floor and shined the flashlight around. Stewart, his arms and legs trembling from the exertion, reached the floor right behind him.
They were standing at the edge of a network of underground passages that honeycombed the earth underneath the “three mounts” of south Paris—Montsouris, Montrouge, and Montparnasse. The huge warren of tunnels dated back to the Roman era.
Sections of it were open to tourists during the summer months.
But now, in early spring, the catacombs were locked, cold, and dark.
Slater led the way, stepping care
fully, swinging his flashlight back and forth ahead of him to scare off the numerous rats that inhabited the dank underworld. He frequently caught their eyes in the light, and their dark brown backsides as they scurried into the protective dark.
“Christ, they’re as big as cats,” Stewart said.
“The French Resistance used the catacombs to hide out from the Germans,” Slater replied. “The krauts were afraid to come down here.
I’m not too crazy about it myself. It’s goddamn spooky.”
Stewart agreed. It was all he could do to fight off the impulse to turn and flee back up to the surface.
After nearly a mile’s walk through damp-walled, narrow tunnels, they arrived at the section known as the Ossuary. Here, in countless rows along the cave walls, were arranged the bones of hundreds of thousands of skeletons removed from the cemeteries of Paris at the end of the eighteenth century. The long galleries of neatly stacked human skulls and tibias branched out in every direction to form a uniquely macabre spectacle—a veritable subterranean world of the dead.
Stewart followed the beam of his flashlight, staring openmouthed at the morbid panorama that surrounded them. It was l so utterly ghoulish, he thought—like a scene from Dante’s Inferno, or the literal Hell of a medieval morality play. Stewart shivered involuntarily.
They arrived at a small, steep-vaulted chamber off the main galleries, where the bones were arranged in a low semicircular wall to form a kind of altar. Slater shined the flashlight through the eye sockets of a skull sitting at the top of a neatly stacked pile. He patted the skull. “Probably a beautiful woman, once upon a time. Or maybe a whore with the pox. Or a thief who beat his wife. Hell, maybe it was Marie Antoinette. We’ll never know.”
The stale, humid air seemed to swallow up Slater’s words even as he spoke them. Stewart shuddered again. “Hurry the hell up.
This place is getting to me.”
Slater lifted the skull from the top of the pile, set it aside, and reached in among the bones to retrieve a metal strongbox. He twirled the tiny combination lock and the lid popped open. Inside, swathed in several layers of bubble wrap, was a single black plastic RCD computer cartridge. Slater closed the box and handed it to Stewart. “You take it. I don’t even want to touch it. As I said before, the fucking thing’s cursed.”
Tom Hyman Page 19
