“I do, but they put me here.”
“The bossy Supervising Nurse.”
She reached up and slapped me again on the cheek. Only a tiny bit less softly. “You liked that nurse bossing you in the dark.”
“I liked her well enough,” I said.
At this, she stirred again against me, not putting any distance between us but going briefly restless in her legs and letting the one that was draped over me undrape. If, knowing my job, I could communicate over a silent telephone with Trask, I could read Louise in the bed next to me. This moment had stopped being playful. I connected the withdrawal of her leg with a clue from our first time together.
So I said, “No, I do not think you a wanton.”
The leg returned at once and she lifted up and laid her chest on mine and brought her face very near.
Now I could make out her eyes.
“Who are you, Kit Cobb?” she said.
Not what I expected from her.
In this city, in the dark, at this moment, this was not a question for which I could find a simple answer.
She did not demand one. Instead she kissed me. And I returned her kiss just as ardently. Perhaps, for now, as a sufficient answer to her question.
Then she laid her head on my chest and said, “He never mentioned another place.”
I had no more questions for her. Not that I could ask. The one that suddenly sliced its way into my head was: Does he know where you live? The knife edge of it was that he could be a danger to her. But I could not tell her why I asked. That he was a dangerous anarchist bomber and it was my duty to find him without the authorities being involved because I was an American spy. And if I could not tell her why I asked, it would sound as if I were suspecting her of wantonness.
I had to apply my reportorial skills.
I said, “It sounds as if he wasn’t close to anyone. But if he has second thoughts or realizes he needs help, can you think of anyone he’d possibly reach out to? Did anyone at all give him a sympathetic ear?”
She considered this. Then: “I can’t say yes, really. If not John.”
I was on the verge of gently suggesting her when she said, “Perhaps me. I did listen.”
“And you admired his tenderness. Did he realize that?”
“I didn’t express it to him with that term, of course. But yes. I let him know I was sympathetic with his feelings. Shared them even.”
“So he might reach out to you.”
“He might. I hope he does. Perhaps I can persuade him to come back. To find counsel for his feelings.”
I was a damn fool. I was putting dangerous ideas in her head. But I remembered his knowing look at me and at her as we all parted after the New York Bar. When it became clear that I was a threat to him, he might try to get at me through Louise. I said, “If he wants help, he might not want to return to the hospital. Is there any other way for him to find you?”
I found it hard to draw a breath in the silence that followed. Then she said, “I don’t think so. Outside of the hospital … That night we all met at the New York Bar was only the fourth or fifth time I’d gone. But a couple of times he was there too. Should I go? He might show up?”
“No,” I said with perhaps too much force.
She lifted up from me at the chest.
“Sorry about the vehemence,” I said.
It was highly unlikely he’d return there. But I had to discourage her from any contact with Cyrus.
She was still hovering over me.
I said, “But I’ve seen sides to him you haven’t. He might be in a difficult mood. A man’s mood. I will find him, I assure you. Please leave it to me.”
“I will.”
She settled down upon me once more.
I wanted to make her promise, but I knew that was going too far.
She said, softly, not unsympathetically, “Men have their moods.”
“We do.”
She moved her head to the hollow of my shoulder and sighed an off-to-sleep sigh. My brain was rattling with so many scraps and shards from this day that I could focus on no one of them, and so I soon followed Louise to sleep.
Till the banging on the door thrashed us both upright in the dark.
23
Rapidly came a dream-thought that it was a bomb and then it was Cyrus at the door, even as Louise threw her arms around me and I slipped one of mine tightly around her waist.
Banging still.
Then I thought of Trask, the yielding to him of this address.
The banging paused.
And I realized from the pull and press of her that Louise had her arms around me to protect me, not to be protected. My tough girl.
Then three more fist-bangs. Measured now.
Fortier’s people had found the ambulance.
I disentangled from Louise.
“I think I know who it is,” I said.
“Cyrus?”
“Not him.”
A voice now from outside the door. “Mr. Cobb.”
I rose quickly, groped into the dark.
“I’m Mr. Trask’s man,” the voice said.
I found my pants, pulled them on. My back to the bed, I wrapped the rest of the clothes together, the Mauser secreted at the center of them.
“What is it, Kit?” Louise said.
“I’ll tell you in a moment,” I said.
Though I was far from sure I’d figure out how.
“Stay here,” I said.
I stepped from the bedroom and closed the door behind me. I laid the clothes down.
Two more bangs.
“I’m on my way,” I said.
A muffled “Sorry” on the other side.
I turned the knob bolt and opened the apartment door.
The light was dim in the hallway, but there was enough of it to recognize the wide-shouldered bulk of him and his young man’s tightly cropped beard. It was the muscleman who’d been driving the Pierce-Arrow.
“Sorry,” he said again. “He sent me to you. We located the ambulance.”
“Right,” I said. “I need to dress.”
Now the man offered a hand. “Sam Mandeville,” he said.
“Kit,” I said. We shook.
“I’ll wait downstairs.”
I closed the door.
I put my clothes on, thinking hard, trying to phrase an effective lie of omission.
I strapped the Mauser into the small of my back.
I knocked lightly at the bedroom door. “Louise?”
She opened it.
She was wearing her kimono.
“Who was it?” she said. “What’s happening?”
“I have a friend at the American Embassy,” I said. “I asked him to alert the French police and let me know as soon as the ambulance was found. This was a man who works for him. They found it.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know yet. I need to go now. Cyrus might still be nearby. He might have been seen. We have to catch his trail if we can.”
She stepped to me, embraced me. “Will you return tonight?”
“I’ll try,” I said.
“I’m on the same shift the rest of the week. Come as soon as you can.”
“I will.”
And a few minutes later I emerged into Rue Perronet. The Pierce-Arrow sat at the curb. Mandeville stood in his accustomed place beside the vestibule door. He straightened at the sight of me and reached for the handle.
I approached. “I’ll sit in the front with you,” I said.
He nodded, clicked the door back shut, slipped over to the driver compartment door and opened it.
As I was stepping in, he said, “Mr. Trask has put me on call for you. Till your mission is complete, he said.”
“Good,” I said.
“Mr. Trask briefed me fully last night.”
“Fully?”
“Yessir. About Cyrus Parsons.”
“Then my first instruction is that you stop opening doors for me.”
“Thank y
ou,” he said.
A courteous young man, but not afraid to let me know, in his tone, that he wasn’t crazy about opening doors in the first place.
The Pierce-Arrow had a self-starter and we took off down Perronet.
“Where is it?” I said.
“The hospital facilities at La Chapelle,” he said.
“La Chapelle?” A rhetorical question. Expressing my surprise.
“Yes sir.”
“Parsons wasn’t there with it?”
“No sir, he wasn’t.”
The question had been rhetorical. Louise would have assumed, would have hoped him to be. But that was a possibility only if I’d been wrong about him.
I wasn’t.
So what was this move of his, abandoning his ambulance at La Chapelle? I tried to picture him. Tried to crawl inside his head. He made his break in Compiègne, secured his dynamite, arrived in Paris. He unloaded the dynamite at his hiding place. He had to get rid of the ambulance and he had choices. He could have driven it anywhere away from his living place. Left it on a street in Paris, walked to a Metro station, vanished. He didn’t have to hide his true purpose anymore. He’d already let me figure him out. That was the point of his telling me as much as he did. I was to report on the carnage. I’d explain how an anarchist looks at that. That it was all homeopathy. Administer doses of carnage to those in power or in safety to initiate their natural antidotes. The press would help deliver the antidotes into the general bloodstream. So since I already knew who he was, why the ambulance at La Chapelle? As if he cared about the hospital operation and its equipment. Was he trying to look to the rest of the world like an innocent man? He was leaving hospital service, but he was scrupulous about returning their goddamn ambulance? That didn’t fit.
I went cold.
I turned to Mandeville. “When did we learn about this?”
“Within the hour.”
“How?”
“A call to the embassy.”
“From who?”
“I didn’t take the call. A man who didn’t identify himself. We assumed one of Mr. Fortier’s informants.”
“So he was French-speaking?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
“Only a few words. Just that the missing ambulance was in La Chapelle.”
“Did you inform Mr. Trask?”
“They were putting in a call when I left. He’d said to come to you instantly.”
Something didn’t seem right about this, Fortier having eyes on La Chapelle in the middle of the night.
That the caller came off as French gave me pause. But my instincts told me there was only one answer. Cyrus had tipped them off.
And if he’d tipped them off, I understood something else. Cyrus didn’t unload quite all of his dynamite. He left a bundle and a time-fuse.
I would be happy to be wrong, but I couldn’t assume it. I said, “No talk now, Sam. Get us there fast. As fast as you possibly can. Lives are at stake.”
“Yes sir.”
Sam opened the throttle and the streets were clear in this late hour and soon we were racing fast along the city’s periphery road, just inside the Thiers Wall. Our six cylinders pounded us through the dark and every moment was crucial, but I myself had no choice but to sit there, impotent to shave even a single second from our arrival.
I sat back. I closed my eyes. Forced into passivity. I thought of that earthen wall whisking by in the dark. Seven decades old. Keeping people out. And beyond it, in this modern age, the ones excluded. Cyrus’s precious gypsies and ragpickers.
And it struck me: He was there. I still feared what he’d left for us inside the ambulance. The fuse might be sparking into the powder even as these thoughts passed through my head. But there might have been another reason as well for the placement of the first bomb of his siege. He could park his ambulance and walk across the road and into the other Paris, the Paris of the poor and the beaten up, the outsiders and the forgotten and the thrown away. The people in Paris he felt to be his brothers. He could vanish in there.
And we whisked past the Porte de Clignancourt, swerving a little and crying our Klaxon’s ah-oo-gah at a ragpicker’s cart emerging from beyond the wall, and I knew La Chapelle was near, a fraction of a mile. I looked ahead, guessing its place in the dark, and the sky was quiet, no smoke, no aftermath, and I thought We might be on time, I might act swiftly enough, or I was wrong and even as these words rushed through me they vaporized with a sharp slam of sound and in a slice of dark above La Chapelle a roiling flame leaped up, shaping into a fireball, bulbous and bright.
“Holy Jesus,” Sam said.
“Cyrus Parsons,” I said.
The great orb of fire rose and loosened its smoking tendrils and rose and dimmed and vanished into the night sky, leaving a thrashing thicket of flame below, the burning wreckage of whatever building Cyrus had chosen.
Sam had instinctively let up on the gas. We’d slowed.
“Keep on,” I said.
He throttled up.
I thought about Cyrus arranging this. I could read the explosion. The sound of a stick or two of dynamite had been instantly dissolved into the sound of gasoline exploding. He’d probably taken pains to fill the Ford’s tank. I figured I knew where he parked.
And soon we approached the train yard. I said to Sam, “Pull over outside, near the entrance. Keep things clear for fire and rescue wagons.”
Sam slowed and slid over and parked just off the road. When we were stopped I said, “I’ll walk in. Wait here.”
There was no one at the entrance. The security hadn’t been severe even in the morning I’d come here. They never dreamed the place would be a target, and they knew who was coming out. In the early morning, if there was anyone here he’d be heading for the fire, which was deep into the grounds.
If I wanted to talk to them, I’d have to return tomorrow. But it would be a waste of search time. At best I’d confirm, by their description of a man walking away, what I already knew. That it was him. Maybe I’d learn in which direction he turned. But I’d still be left with hunches. And I had a good one already.
I walked on. Quickly. Down the cobbled street toward the southern end of the warehouse park, toward the bright burning center of the dim shapes ahead.
As I drew near the working buildings, I could see first the massive warehouse receiving station. Unscathed. The fire was beyond. I began to jog. I realized I was thinking too much. Casting myself in the role of utter outsider. Instead, I might be of some use.
The warehouse loomed and then I was passing along its canopied platform. And now the flames surprised me. I thought I knew what Cyrus’s target would be. The cluster of cottages where the wounded officers lay. But I was wrong. They were farther along. These flames were closer. Much closer.
Ahead was shouting, was the rushed movement of a dozen men, paths crossing, buckets in hands, pointing, flashing out of sight toward the fire. Behind me, in the distance, the hooting whine of fire trucks and city ambulances. Civilian ambulances coming for the wrecked bodies of men already wrecked and ambulanced from elsewhere.
I emerged from the loom of the warehouse.
Cyrus had bombed the nearest of the large, stuccoed treatment pavilions. It was always nearly filled with those waiting for transfer to a hospital. The pavilions. Parsons had gone after not the officers he despised but the poor poilus he was supposed to feel such compassion for. But of course. The officer cottages were smaller. Less populated to start with. And the officers had received their ruling class privilege for priority transportation to a hospital bed. The carnage was Parsons’ goal. Seeing the masses suffer. It was all a dramatic tableau. The poilus were better theater.
The pavilion was awash in flame now from end to end and side to side. And downstage center, in the midst of the fire, was a dark specter, the skeletal metal frame of the ambulance. The ambient heat was searing and I backed off a ways. Half a dozen smoldering bodies lay on the cobbles. Some of the night staff we
re crouched over them. Other staff stood watching. Simply watching now. Some had buckets in hand but they knew how useless they were. The inferno ruled.
The carnage was sufficiently clear.
24
And Cyrus had declared himself. To all of us. Or so he intended. But Trask had this covered. The way he’d played it, the bomb only made the speculative thief in our lie a confirmed truth to the French. We were up against one or more clever German saboteurs. And so it would fall once more on me to find the bomber. The lead this time would be our own. A stolen American ambulance. The French had no idea how well I already knew the bomber.
But I had to know him better still. I had to think like him. Another role I had to play, at least in my head. I still had nothing else to go on.
I walked back out of La Chapelle.
As I emerged from the gateway of the freight station onto the boulevard, I heard the starting sputter and then the roar of an automobile engine. I turned to face the Pierce-Arrow, and its headlights flared up from the tops of its fenders.
The driver door was opening.
And it struck me, hard, that it was Cyrus.
His plan was inside my head: Plant the bomb. Wait in the shadows for Cobb to arrive. Confront him. Kill him as the final touch on the evening. Only then walk into The Zone and disappear.
I stepped toward the car, my hand moving to the small of my back, the Mauser there.
With the motor still running and the lights illuminating him, Sam crossed the bright beam and stood waiting for me, framed by the headlights.
Not Cyrus. Sam.
Cyrus was capable of what I’d envisioned, but if he’d wanted to kill me at this point, it would have been in Compiègne. He did not know I was an agent. He did not know I was actively pursuing him. He did not yet know I had absolutely no intention of writing a single word in a newspaper about his anarchist sophistry.
I approached Sam.
“You okay?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Is it bad?”
“It’s bad.”
Without another word we broke off, moved to the car. He revved the engine, made a half-circle turn, and we headed back west on the peripheral road.
“Where to?” he said.
I didn’t have an answer.
Paris in the Dark Page 16
