Thrillers in Paradise

by Rob Swigart

  Rossignol pulled out box 108 and placed it on a small shelf. He pressed his forefinger against an oval on the top. When nothing happened, he tried his other forefinger. Software in the lid selected at random the one that would open the box. This time the lid clicked open.

  He removed a bronze disk a little over three inches in diameter. It had a hole in the recessed center. Around the rim were inscribed the alphabet and a series of numbers. A dark patina gave it the appearance of great age.

  He slipped it into his pocket and spent a few moments longer looking into the empty box. This was what remained of Raimond Foix, his friend for nearly thirty years. This disk. Now it must go to the young American girl. Foix had chosen her and Rossignol, servant of the last Pythos, knew the burden she would have to carry. It was his duty to transmit to her the secret of a tradition thousands of years old, and what he knew of the struggle it represented. The world, if it were not to descend into chaos and death, depended on her taking up the burden.

  He also knew she wasn’t ready, and he would have to prepare her carefully, but there was only so much he could tell her. Foix had many secrets, even from his private banker and closest advisor. Before he gave her the disk they would have several conversations. He would have to lay the foundation. It was too much for anyone to take in all at once.

  And then there was this disk, and what it represented….

  He closed the box. There was a muted buzz as the print recognition software reset. He replaced it and closed the door.

  They repeated the process in reverse, lowering the grill, relocking the vault. Upstairs in the apartment Alain said, “Good luck, M. Rossignol.”

  “Thank you, Alain.” He glanced out the window but the nun was no longer there. Resolutely he turned back. “I can tell you only that her name is Lisa Emmer.”

  “I understand.”

  When he emerged from the building under scattered clouds, there was a dark gray van screening him from the street. “AGON?” he read aloud from the side of the truck. He had only a moment after that to register that the nun in a wheelchair nearby was the same one he had seen in the garden. He turned back toward his entrance, but it was too late. She stood and blocked the way. The door of the van slid open and someone grabbed him from behind and hauled him inside. The door slid closed behind him, something slipped over his face and the world went dark.

  Brother Cedric collected the folding barriers and replaced them in the back of the van. He stowed the wheelchair while the nun opened the passenger door and disappeared inside. Cedric closed the back, retrieved his broom and sauntered down the street.

  The van moved away. Another car filled the empty parking space.

  12.

  Lisa, Hugo and Viètes frowned at the string of letters. The doctor straightened. He spread his hands and shook his head. “I just don’t get it.”

  Hugo said, “What is it?”

  “It’s a message,” Lisa said. “Just as you thought, Dr. Viètes.”

  “I see some words in English,” Viètes said. “Out, and wit and tire and tune. But they don’t make sense. ‘O Tuner?’ ”

  “No,” she agreed. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “And Greek letters,” Viètes continued, “as well as Roman. And that thing.” He pointed at the odd character: ϝ.

  “An F,” Hugo suggested.

  “Funny F,” Viètes commented.

  “It’s a Greek letter, abandoned early,” Lisa said. “It stood for a sound something like a ‘w’ in English, a Gamma with an extra arm, a Digamma.”

  Hugo straightened. “So, what is it?”

  “As I said,” Lisa answered, looking around, “it’s a message. Of course!” She took down the desk lamp and removed the shade.

  “What are you doing?” Hugo asked.

  “It would certainly be easy for anyone to decipher this today but it’s just the sort of thing Raimond would think of, a skytale, an ancient method of secret communication. You can read about it in Thucydides. The Spartans used it to send messages to their generals.” She wrapped the strip of tape around the five-sided body of the desk lamp, anchoring the beginning with her thumb. When she had finished the letters lined up and the message leapt out at them:

  LAMEMISERTHEDOOROPENSTHEDRAWERSEEKTHEPROCROFTΔϝILOVEYOUBECAREFULLISTENTORΓΝΩΘΙΣΕΑΥΤΟΝFOIΓΝΩΘΙΣΕΑΥΤΟΝ.

  “I still don’t understand it,” Hugo said.

  “The words are all run together,” Viètes said. “See. ‘LAMEMISER.’ What’s that, Lame Miser? ‘Lame’ is a blade in French. Miserable Blade?”

  “It’s an anagram of my name,” Lisa said.

  “Of course!” Hugo nodded. “Sure. Lame Miser. Are you a lame miser?”

  Her smile was grim. “Raimond’s joke: he often said I was stingy. My apartment in the Buttes aux Cailles is too small, too cheap. I shop at the outdoor market on Auguste-Blanqui and sometimes stay after it closes to scavenge free fruit and vegetables, stuff they would otherwise throw away. I consider it a form of recycling.”

  “You’re not lame,” Hugo accused. “You’re a gleaner.”

  “No, I’m not lame. He just thought it was lame, the way I lived. It’s a joke in English, not French… unless you think ‘lame’ is for blade, in which case I guess you could say it cuts both ways.”

  She was rewarded by a brittle laugh from both men.

  “Anyway, all we have to do is punctuate it.” She wrote it down on a page from Hugo’s notebook.

  LAME MISER, THE DOOR OPENS THE DRAWER. SEEK THE PROCROFT Δ ϝ. I LOVE YOU. BE CAREFUL. LISTEN TO R. ΓΝΩΘΙ ΣΕΑΥΤΟΝ. FOI. ΓΝΩΘΙ ΣΕΑΥΤΟΝ.

  “More puzzles,” Viètes said. “What’s the Greek?”

  “It’s an old saying,” Lisa replied. “It means, ‘Know thyself.’ ”

  “Ah,” the doctor breathed. “Very nice.”

  “Shouldn’t you be getting back to your dead bodies?” Hugo asked him.

  “Yes, of course, but this is too interesting.” Viètes saw the detective’s expression and backed away, hands raised. “All right, all right, I’m going. But I want to know what happens, what this message means. After all, I’m the one who found it.”

  He left.

  Hugo turned back to find Lisa poring over the strip of letters with a magnifying glass, pausing to write on a scrap of paper. After a moment she crumpled the paper, stuffed it in her bag and took out Rossignol’s card.

  “What is it?” Hugo asked.

  “May I use your phone? Raimond’s doesn’t work. You see, ‘Listen to R’? That has to be Rossignol. I need to call him.”

  Hugo handed her the phone. Almost immediately a man answered, “Private banking.”

  “M. Rossignol, please.”

  “I’m afraid he’s not in. This is Steve Viginaire, his assistant. Can I help you?”

  “Lisa Emmer.”

  “Ah, Mademoiselle Emmer, he said you would be calling. He went out. He should be here soon. In fact, he was due back a half hour ago.”

  “You must find him. I think he’s in danger.”

  He didn’t hesitate. “One moment.” A minute later he said, “He doesn’t answer his portable. Where are you?”

  “Raimond Foix’s apartment, rue du Dragon.”

  “I’ll be right over. Are the police still there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell them M. Rossignol is missing. And wait there. Don’t move. Don’t say anything more to the police, and don’t move.”

  The line went dead.

  13.

  Lisa stood at the open window behind the desk, watching a policeman remove the barricades at the end of the street.

  What had Raimond meant by closing the shutters on the court and leaving them open to the street? Why were the windows closed? Was Raimond afraid someone would shoot through them? Or was he saying something about transparency, about seeing or not seeing?

  He wanted her to see something, but she couldn’t imagine what it was.

  The restaurant across t
he way was only open for dinner. The curiosity seekers had faded away, and the rhythm of the city gradually reasserted itself. People walked by. A car drifted up the street and disappeared around the corner.

  Lisa Emmer was just a woman in a Paris apartment idly looking out at the street.

  In the windows of the building opposite filmy curtains furled gently in the slight breeze. Along the top floor a series of planters bloomed crimson with geraniums. The roof sprouted the usual complement of satellite dishes and chimneys. In the kitchen directly opposite Lisa, a woman was preparing lunch. Once she glanced up without curiosity. Lisa lifted her hand and the woman nodded.

  It was completely ordinary, yet a few hours before, during the darkest hours of the night, Raimond Foix had coolly prepared a series of messages for her, knowing he was about to die. Then someone killed him. One or two of the messages she had understood. The easy ones, she thought. He was deep and subtle and he loved her. He was telling her something very important, and she didn’t know what it was.

  A dark shadow passed along the street, altering the quality of its colors, turning the vibrant geraniums abruptly gray and lifeless. She looked up. The sky was a flat monochrome. For some reason the increasing cloud seemed to bring more heat.

  When the doorbell rang she made her way to the landing. It must be the man she had spoken to, Rossignol’s assistant. Even from there she could see the tall man crossing the foyer to shake hands with Hugo had eyes as blue as her own and close-cropped blond hair over a lean, intelligent face. She approached them and Hugo turned. “Ah, Mademoiselle.”

  The newcomer extended his hand. “Lisa Emmer, I presume?”

  She had no choice but to shake it.

  Still holding her hand he turned back to Hugo. “You’re searching for him?”

  “His man said he left there at 11:12. He was very precise, this man, Alain, very precise, a man who attends to detail.”

  “Yes, Alain is conscientious.”

  “No one saw him after that,” Hugo continued. “The owner of a bar across the street reported a gray van parked in front of his building, but that’s all. It stayed only a short time and left. There was writing on the side but he didn’t remember what it said. I can tell you this matter has very high priority.”

  “Yes.” The blond man turned back to Lisa and said, “Steve Viginaire.”

  “So I guessed. You aren’t originally French, are you?”

  He smiled, showing even teeth. His good humor reached the corners of those sharp blue eyes. “You are astute. I’m Quebecois, from Montreal. Is my accent so strong?”

  She felt a rush of something unexpected, a sense that she was close to safety.

  She thought, this is insane, yet she found herself smiling back. He released her hand and it dropped to her side. Suddenly she didn’t know what to do with it, so she slid it into the pocket of her dress. “No, your accent is very light, lighter than mine, certainly, but there is a hint of someone not originally Parisian. Just enough, I think, to be exotic.”

  He bowed his head. “Too kind,” he murmured, and at once turned serious. “We share a problem, I believe. Our client, Raimond Foix, is dead, and now my boss is missing. The two events are certainly connected.”

  Hugo looked curiously from one to the other.

  “Raimond left a message,” Lisa said.

  Hugo said, “A tape he had wrapped around his desk lamp.”

  “Ah.” Steve hissed. “A skytale.”

  Lisa gave him a quizzical look. “You’re familiar with this?”

  “I’m a banker, therefore I’m interested in cryptography. The skytale is part of the history.”

  Hugo cleared his throat. “He said, ‘Listen to R.’ We assumed R meant M. Rossignol.”

  “I’m sure it did,” Steve agreed.

  Lisa and Steve appraised one another in the following silence, which grew awkward.

  Hugo excused himself with a slight bow, retreating toward the kitchen where they could hear Mathieu and Bernard talking on the radio.

  When the door had swung shut behind him, Lisa whispered, “That wasn’t the message I meant. There’s another one.”

  “Really?” If Steve was surprised it didn’t reach his eyes. “Where?”

  “Come upstairs.”

  In the study she leaned over the tape unrolled across the desk. “When I was a kid I loved logic puzzles, M. Viginaire. The kind that start out, The Brit lives in a red house, the Swede keeps dogs.” She smoothed the strip with a finger. “I was compulsive about solving them. Still am. Now I study old writing. Sometimes it’s literary, but mostly what I look at are letters written home by lonely soldiers, deeds to small properties, accounts, marriage proposals, invitations – daily stuff. Style of handwriting is important for dating these documents and to recognize the writer. So we look at how the letters were formed, the ‘hand.’ Raimond knew this and wrote some of the letters backwards. It’s like a logic puzzle.”

  “Backwards?” He bent over the tape. “I don’t see anything.”

  Lisa explained, “He made the strokes of certain letters in reverse, starting the lines where most people would end them. You can see a little blob at the end of the C, for instance. Most people would start at the top and curve down, but he began at the bottom and drew it back and up.”

  “Ah, yes, I see. So?”

  She took the crumpled scrap of paper from her bag and spread it out on the leather. “These letters are written that way, end to beginning: C L N O I E P Ο.”

  “An anagram,” Steve murmured. “You’re right, Mademoiselle Emmer.”

  “Lisa,” she responded reflexively, shaking her head. “It’s a warning.”

  “Warning?” Hugo asked from the doorway. “You did speak of another warning, Mademoiselle Emmer. Was it concealed in the message, the skytale?”

  Steve said, “Yes. He wrote some of the letters differently. They make an anagram that spells…”

  “It’s not important,” Lisa said anxiously.

  “No,” Steve agreed. “It’s not. It spells out ‘Nice loop,’ no doubt referring to the skytale itself.” He slipped the paper into the side pocket of his suit jacket.

  “Yes, that’s it!” Lisa gave Steve a thin smile. “Certainly, Captain Hugo. ‘Nice loop’ must mean the tape.”

  “That doesn’t sound much like a warning,” Hugo answered dubiously, entering the room.

  Lisa shrugged. “I think he was trying to tell us there’s something else about the tape, some chemical, perhaps, or even a recording.”

  “It will be analyzed,” Hugo said, holding out his hand.

  Lisa rolled up the tape and handed it to him. “Please tell me what you find.”

  Hugo bowed and left.

  “Thank you,” Lisa whispered.

  Steve nodded. “You’re welcome. Now perhaps you can explain to me why Dr. Foix would hide ‘No police’ in an already concealed message.”

  “Why did you tell me not to say more to the police? It seems you both had the same idea.”

  “I spoke of the privileged relationship between a banker and his client. This is something different. Why is he warning you against them?”

  She turned away. “I don’t know, M. Viginaire.”

  “Steve,” he said. “Please.”

  She turned back. Was he mocking her? “He had some reason, but I don’t know what it is. I do know he didn’t want me to tell the police too much. He was trying to tell me to be careful.”

  “Why would he do that? You’re innocent.”

  “Of course I am! But I’m pretty sure the police suspect me of killing Raimond.”

  Steve stared. “What?”

  She let out a long, ragged breath. “Because I know the door code. I have a key to this apartment. According to Hugo there was no sign of forced entry, which meant whoever got in here were professionals who knew how to get in undetected, or, more probably, had a key and the code, which suggests someone who knew Raimond, someone who was close to him.”

  �
�I see.”

  She went to the window. The woman across the street had disappeared. She must be serving lunch. Lisa realized she was hungry.

  Could she trust Steve Viginaire?

  Did she have a choice? Her position was precarious. Raimond had tried to tell her something and she needed time to think. She straightened her shoulders and turned back.

  “Raimond had time to prepare these messages for me. He knew, I don’t know how, that the police would suspect me and was trying to warn me to keep things to myself. Now I’m concealing evidence, which must make me seem even guiltier. They would have to admit it’s unlikely I know how to blow up a door, but that only means I must have had an accomplice, perhaps someone in a wheelchair that left impressions in the carpet.” She lifted her shoulders and let them drop, suddenly drained. She went on tonelessly, “So we – I and my accomplice – broke into the study. I shot three times, hitting him twice, killing him in cold blood. Then I went home, I guess, and carried on with my day – or night. I must be a very cool customer.”

  “Cool customer?”

  Her laugh brought some animation back to her face. “Old American expression.”

  “Ah.”

  “I have to get out of here. I’m hungry and I need time to think, someplace away from Captain Hugo. I have to find out why Raimond was warning me and I don’t think I have much time.”

  “I know a place,” Steve said, taking her arm. They went down the stairs together. Voices came from the kitchen. Steve pushed open the door. “We’re going to get something to eat,” he said.

  Hugo came out. “All right,” he said. “I have your cell number, M. Viginaire. You two will remain together?”

  “Yes,” Steve said with a quick glance at Lisa.

  “Very well, for now, you’re free to go, but I’m quite certain we’ll need to see you again, Mademoiselle Emmer. I’ll call if I need you.”