Angel City (9 page)

“The plastic shell used in disposable diapers negatively affects the testicular cooling mechanism necessary for spermatogenesis in baby boys.”

Katherine's jaw dropped.

“You made that up just to scare me, didn't you?”

“It's scientific fact.”

“Okay, ouch to that idea.”

And that night in bed, sipping her Night Clouds tea, she wondered where Officer Jannsen ever learned such a thing as “testicular cooling mechanism,” because it sure as hell didn't sound like something they teach at Swiss cop school. Then again, having met Inspector Gobet, maybe they did. Then Katherine began to think that actually a testicular cooling mechanism sounded like some adult
spielzeug
. And if there wasn't such a toy, then maybe Katherine should invent one herself and sell it on eBay. Make gazillions.

Remembering it, Katherine laughed to herself, thinking how much her life had changed since Lausanne, thinking it wouldn't be a bad movie after all; starring Katherine Taylor as Katherine Taylor, and Brad Pitt as anyone as long as he was in it. She laughed again. From lesbo lust to dirty diapers to gorgeous man meat fantasy, all in a day.

“The shrink is so going to crap himself.”

She walked back to Max's room. He was sitting now. Rubber hammer in one hand, other hand reaching through the bars of the crib and holding on to Monsieur Booty's tail.

“Boo,” Max said. Max-speak for Monsieur Booty.

The beast always showed up this time of day to jump on the nearby stool for a bit of manhandling by Max. Whether it was having its ears pinched or whiskers twisted or tail pulled, Monsieur Booty always came back for more. The two of them seemed to have the most intense conversations, even if the entire vocabulary between them consisted of
mew
and
Boo
.

“Okay, gang, let's eat.”

She lifted Max from the crib and carried him into the hall and down the stairs. Max pointed the way as they walked—sort of. His fist did well, but his little finger always veered off at a twenty-degree angle. Monsieur Booty followed at Katherine's heels to halfway down the stairs, where he squeezed through the balusters and jumped to the ground floor and dashed ahead. Katherine went into the kitchen and dropped Max into his high chair. He still had his rubber hammer and proceeded to play Whac-A-Mole on the tray, using imaginary moles.

Whackwhack, whack.

“Go get 'em, tiger. It's the ones you can't see that'll bite your butt.”

She took Max's dinner from the warming oven. Dinners at the house were catered from Molly's Diner five nights a week. Turned out Molly had studied at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Chicago. Even had her own two-star Michelin restaurant on North Halsted, till she realized she was only a dope-loving hippie at heart. She sold the place, moved to Grover's Mill, and opened a diner just before Katherine arrived. Which was fine with Katherine, as cooking was never a required skill as a high-priced hooker.

“Look what Molly made for you, Max. Tofu burger with mushy peas.”

Whack.

“Goog.”

“You bet, and doesn't it look yummy?”

Katherine chopped up the food into tiny bites with a small rubber spoon. She scooped up a spoonful and lifted it to Max's mouth.

“Loff,” he said.

“That's a new one. Sounds German. Try it in English.”

“Goog.”

“Whatever. Open wide.”

Max loved Molly's cooking. He never spit up a morsel and he took his time with every spoonful. Savoring it like some food critic for the high chair and diaper set.

“Nnnn.” Max-speak for Officer Jannsen, just now walking in the kitchen.

Katherine felt herself blush.

“What's on the menu tonight?” Officer Jannsen asked.

“Tofu burger and peas.”

“He loves that one, doesn't he?”

“Sure does. And if the pizzas don't show up soon, I'm going to start sneaking bites. Is that okay with you, Max? Can I steal some of your dinner?”

“Goog.”

“Know something? You're getting to be a big boy now. You need to add a few more words to your vocabulary.” Katherine looked at Officer Jannsen. “Don't you think he should be reciting the Gettysburg Address by now? Or is all this English, French, German—”

“And Italian.”

“Yeah, that one, too. Is it all confusing him?”

“Don't worry, Kat. He's very busy internalizing linguistic patterns into a holistic structure.”

“What the heck does that mean?”

“It means he's exceptionally intelligent.”

Katherine gave Max another spoon of mushy peas.

“Okay, me no worry.”

Officer Jannsen sat next to Katherine. Max smiled at her, and mushy peas tumbled over his lips. Katherine scooped them up and held the spoon to his mouth.

“Why don't you let him try holding the spoon?” Officer Jannsen said.

“Are you kidding me? He'll put his eye out.”

“Actually, I was watching him play with crayons the other day. He has well-developed primitive tripod grasp skills.”

Katherine looked at Officer Jannsen a second.

“Do you just make stuff up to trick me into doing what you want?”

“What stuff?”

“‘Internalizing linguistic' things and ‘primitive tripods'?”

“I studied human development at EPFL.”

“Cop school?”

“École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.”

“Oh, yeah, I remember. It's on the lake. Full of geniuses and stuff.”

“Stuff?”

“Yeah, you know, scientific stuff.”

“Oh, that stuff.”

Katherine nodded to the gun on Officer Jannsen's hip.

“So how'd you end up a cop?”

“I wanted to make a difference in the world.”

“And here you are, stuck with Max and me in Grover's Mill. That's one big difference you're making in the world.”

“What makes you think I would rather be anywhere else?”

Their eyes met for a moment.

“Anne?”

“Kat?”

“I'm going to Control to check on the pizzas.”

“I can go.”

“No, that's okay. I'll do it. You teach Max about primitive tripod whatever. I'll be right back.”

Katherine hurried out the door and into the garden. She stopped a moment, took a breath of crisp evening air.

“Okay, that one was
not
an imagination. Must talk to the fucking shrink, like, tomorrow.”

She walked toward the garage, saw three Ford Explorers parked in the driveway. The pizzas had landed.

“Swiss Guard, big deal. Can't even deliver a pizza.”

She followed the flagstone path to the log cabin hidden in the trees. The front of the cabin had a screened-in porch, and she saw the door to the sitting room was open and the lights were on. She knocked on the screen door.

“
Allez!
We're hungry!”

No one answered.

She went inside, through the porch and into the sitting room and down a hall. She heard a voice:

“. . . details are still sketchy, and French police were seen confiscating press video and camera equipment, as well as the mobiles and cameras of onlookers in the name of national security. However, one piece of video has emerged on the Internet . . .”

She rounded the corner into a small room made even smaller by all the thirty-six-inch monitors on the walls, all displaying different angles of nearby roads, the grounds, hallways in the main house, Max's bedroom. Five large men, pistols strapped to their belts, crowded together in the middle of the room watching one monitor. On screen: a wobbly wide shot of a bridge above the river.

“. . . and again, this is amateur video, but you can clearly see members of the police on the Pont des Arts as the tour boat approaches . . .”

News, no thanks,
Katherine thought. Same shit, different day, over and over again. She saw a pile of unopened pizza boxes on a table just inside the door. She sorted through them looking for the one with anchovies. She found it at the bottom and was going to tell the boys thanks for nothing, but realized they wouldn't notice anyway. She headed for the door.

“. . . and there, that's it. A blinding flash of light and the bridge disappears in a cloud of fog, and look, look there. You can see the shadow of a man falling, almost flying, through the fog. He doesn't appear to be one of the police, and he appears to have a long knife in his hand . . .”

She turned toward the monitor, saw a fuzzy image on the screen. Zooming in, coming into focus. Katherine tipped her head to look at it.

“. . . jumping onto the tour boat, where police report they later found gruesome scenes . . .”

Another voice cut through the room:

“Schalten sie den fernseher!”

The TV shut off, the men turned to the voice, and so did Katherine. It was Officer Jannsen, standing in the doorway with a happy-to-see-everyone Max in her arms. Took a few seconds for Katherine to realize the only sound amid the sudden silence was that of Max sucking on his Mister Gummy. She looked at the Swiss Guard, then back to Officer Jannsen.

“What's wrong?”

Officer Jannsen shifted Max from one hip to the other, his diapered rear end now resting on the butt of her Glock.

“Nothing's wrong. I was wondering what took you so long.”

“You just barked at the boys in German.”

“I'm Swiss-German. German is the official language of the Swiss Guard.”

“It's also the language you bark in when you're officially PO'd.”

“PO'd?”

“Pissed off. I was trying to watch my language in front of the you-know-what in your arms.”

“I'm hungry,” Officer Jannsen said, “that's all. And you don't need to be watching the news.”

“I may be certifiable, but I'm with-it enough to know . . .”

She stopped talking, and her eyes took in the faces watching her. She looked at the darkened screen. Something felt familiar; something terrible. She looked at Officer Jannsen.

“This stuff on the news, does it have something to do with me?”

“How do you mean?”

Katherine felt a flash of rage. She tossed the pizza box on the table, walked over, and took Max from Officer Jannsen's arms.

“Don't give me that Swiss cop shit.”

“Kat—”

“No. You tell me what's going on. What's the big fucking secret?”

“Watch your tone of voice, Kat.”

“Don't fucking tell me to watch my fucking tone!”

She saw an expression on Officer Jannsen's face, saw her eyes pointing toward Max. He'd stopped sucking on his pacifier. He was staring at Katherine, holding his breath—he was frightened.

“Oh, crap, Max. I'm sorry.”

Officer Jannsen looked at the men, kicked her head to the door. They were gone without a sound. Katherine began to cry.

“I'm so sorry, Max. I'm so sorry.”

Max tipped his head to the side as if to study the tears in her eyes. Katherine took a quick breath and smiled and gently bounced him, trying to laugh.

“It's okay, Max. Don't pay attention to silly Mommy. Mommy's just a little cuckoo sometimes. You know, like the funny clock in the house . . . cuckoo, cuckoo.”

Max smiled, took the pacifier from his mouth, pressed it to her lips.

“Ciuccio.”

“No, not like Mister Gummy.
Cuckoo
, like the bird.”

“Ciuccio,”
Max insisted.

Katherine took the pacifier between her lips. She opened her eyes wide like she was tasting chocolate fudge ice cream. “Mmmmm.” Max pulled away the pacifier and reinserted it into his own mouth. He began to suck happily. Katherine kissed his forehead, crying and laughing at the same time.

“Oh Max, you've gotten stuck with such a lousy mother.”

Officer Jannsen stepped close to Katherine.

“No, Kat, you're a wonderful mother.”

“Oh yeah, scare my child to death. I'm so perfect.”

Officer Jannsen reached over to rearrange a few strands of Max's black hair.

“Yes, you did scare him at first. Then you guided him through his fear and gave him confidence. You taught him fear can be controlled.”

“You think?”

“
Observed Maternal Behaviors in the Transference of Human Emotions
was the title of my PhD thesis.”

Katherine rolled her eyes. “Of course, genius with a gun that you are.” She glanced toward the monitors. “And all that? What was it?”

“Kat, you know the doctor wants your Internet and TV screened.”

“Yeah, I know. But humor me, I'm nuts.”

Officer Jannsen nodded. “There was a terrorist attack in Paris. Nine people were killed. The news is full of pictures you don't need to see.”

“And that's it? Nothing to do with me?”

“That's it.”

“Okay.”

Max sensed a change in Katherine's mood. He broke into a drooling smile.

“Are you laughing at your cuckoo mommy for being afraid of the boogeyman?”

“Cuckoobug!”

“Yeah, cuckoobug for Cocoa Puffs. That's me.”

“Goog.”

“Oh, goog yourself.”

She tickled Max's belly. He squealed and giggled.

Officer Jannsen picked up the pizza and took Katherine's arm.

“Come on, Kat, let's go back to the house. I'll make you a cup of tea.”

M
ONSIEUR
D
UFAUX WORKED THE TABLES IN
C
AFÉ DU
G
RÜTLI,
chatting with his customers. He checked table six at the windows. The fellow sitting there had finished his dinner, pushed his plate aside, and was now leaning over the front page of
24 Heures
. Dufaux walked over, picked up the fellow's plate and cutlery, and saw the empty glass on the table.

“Voulez-vous une autre carafe?”

“Just a glass,
s'il vous plaît
.”

“Et l'addition?”

“Put it on the inspector's tab.”

Monsieur Dufaux picked up the carafe.

“And perhaps one day the inspector will grace me with a visit to pay this tab? I mean, yes, you only come in a few nights a week, but after a couple of years, a tab adds up. It's now longer than the Book of Numbers.”

Harper flipped over the newspaper. “Sorry?”

“Inspector Gobet's tab and the Book of Numbers. From the Bible. They both go on and on.”

Harper thought about it.

“Let me know when it's as long as the Book of Psalms.”

“Quoi?”

“One hundred fifty chapters. Longest book of the Bible.”

Dufaux scratched his chin.

“
Pas mal.
I must remember that one. I'll bring you a fresh glass, on the house. I'll join you, too.”

Harper watched Monsieur Dufaux make his way through the tables, the man's shoulders bouncing with chuckles. Harper made a mental note: Crack a joke in this joint, get a free glass. He turned his eyes to the windows. Outside, evening had given way to the dark. He focused on the pools of light beneath the streetlamps along Rue Mercerie. Unbeknownst to the locals, the streetlamps in the protected zone had been fitted with Arc 9 filters. Part of Inspector Gobet's plan to beef up security around Lausanne Cathedral. The filters slowed the speed of artificial light by fifty thousand microns per second. Didn't matter to the locals, but with Arc 9s, Harper's kind could detect minute spikes of black body radiation in the light. Or so went the theory. He flashed the light mechanic from Berne, six months ago, positively giddy explaining how the filters worked.

“You see, when applied to sodium vapor lamps in areas sealed with a level four time warp, such as the protected zone, Arc 9s will allow you to see around corners and back over your shoulder at the same time. We're very excited about it.”

“You don't say.”

The filters still had some kinks, the mechanic chattered on. Something about certain meteorological conditions interacting with negative resistance ions.

“As a result, a spike in black body radiation could be either a mortal threat moving through nearby shadows or a cat falling at terminal velocity.”

Harper stared at the mechanic.

“A cat. Falling at terminal velocity.”

“Cats, yes,” the mechanic replied. “You see, cats reach terminal velocity at one hundred kilometers per hour. That's a speed they reach when falling at a distance greater than one hundred feet. The
Felis catus
, or common domesticated cat as it's known, then has the ability to stabilize and spread its legs, forming itself into something of a parachute. Fascinating stuff. Did you know a cat has a better chance of surviving a fall from forty floors than four?”

Harper considered the mechanic's enthusiasm regarding the topic.

“Mate, are you telling me you've been tossing cats from windows to test your bloody lamp filters?”

The mechanic appeared pained.

“Why, no. It's only based on computer simulations. Goodness, I love my cats. I have two of them. Would you like to see their pictures?”

Harper blinked and turned from the window. He saw Monsieur Dufaux setting two fresh glasses and a carafe of white on the table. Dufaux sat across from Harper and poured.

“Santé.”

“Et toi.”

They touched glasses and sipped.

“So how have you been?” Dufaux said. “You haven't been in the café for, what, a week or two?”

Harper thought about it. He couldn't quite see his timeline. Mission debrief always included a memory scrub. Delete this, trim that. Made a jumble of things for a few days. He flashed the medics in the white coats at the Vevey infirmary. They checked, they scanned, they didn't like what they'd found. They strapped him to a stretcher, shoved him into a regenerative stasis tank for days. Today was only Harper's second day out.

“Had a bit of a holiday,” Harper said.

“Holiday. Good, very good. Need one myself. So, what's happening in our crazy world?” Monsieur Dufaux said, turning over the newspaper and looking at the front page. “What on earth?”

Oddly enough, that was Harper's reaction on seeing it, too. A grainy, backlit, and shadowy image of a winged form falling through the fog at Pont des Arts, side by side with a four-hundred-year-old painting of Saint Michael the Archangel. The headline above the pictures read: “Was This the Angel Who Fell from the Sky to Save Paris?”

“Good Lord,” Dufaux said. “Can you believe this?”

“Not sure what it's all about. Haven't been following the news of late.”

Dufaux took a sip from his glass.

“Well,” he said. “Let me tell you what you missed while on vacation.”

Seems while Harper was in the tank, the world's newspapers went heavy on Paris. The usual hard news up front: pictures of the
Manon
's wreckage, backstories about the dead and survivors. And, of course, the one picture of the man who fell from the sky at Pont des Arts. The French government's line was that a foreign power had conducted an illegal counterstrike against Muqatileen Lillah on sovereign French soil. After rounds of finger-pointing at London and Washington, D.C., with no joy, the French government then pointed to the Israeli Mossad. The French president referred to the Mossad's scorecard in assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists on Tehran's streets in broad daylight as a case in point. The Israeli government wouldn't comment, but seemed perfectly happy for the world to think,
Of course Israel did it. Israel is very good at this sort of thing. Don't fuck with Israel.

In answer to press queries regarding the type of WMD captured in the attack, the government would only reply, “We cannot comment at this time for reasons of national security.” The French press began to sniff out that the government was hiding something. Then came a scandal of lip-smacking proportions when it was learned the chief suspect in the counterstrike—the man falling from the sky at Pont des Arts—had escaped from La Santé Prison two days after being arrested. The French press went mad.

“Où Sont les Responsables?!”
the headlines read.

The press went from mad to crazed when the head of the French police held a press conference to announce he'd issued an arrest warrant for a man no one could describe with any accuracy, and that “the suspect's mug shots, fingerprints, and other relevant details have gone missing.” In an attempt to get a detailed description of the culprit, the twenty-one survivors from the
Manon
were reinterviewed by police sketch artists. None of the survivors could remember the man clearly.

“A normal reaction to a terrible shock,” the top cop said.

And with that, political commentators had a field day guessing the counterstrike was actually the work of France's own Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, who—in their greatest screwup since the 1985
Rainbow Warrior
incident—had not bothered to inform the French police of the operation. After all, the press concluded, who but the DGSE could arrange “an escape” from La Santé Prison? Then came the front page of
Le Monde
, suggesting that since the “unknown man who fell from the sky” had, in fact, saved Paris, the French president was duty-bound to identify the man and present him with the Legion of Honor. But with only nine dead in the attack, the press quickly lost interest and the world's headlines returned to a civil war in Syria, where pictures of slaughter were plentiful. By the end of the week, the attack in Paris had moved to page three. The final “all is well” story came in a fluff piece about Parisians returning to their beloved cafés for aperitifs and conversation. The man who fell from the sky was forgotten. Monsieur Dufaux paused for breath and took a sip of wine. He pointed to the front page of today's paper.

“And now comes this nonsense.”

Enter one Mr. Geoffroy de Villehardouin, blogger and amateur art historian from Dijon (where the mustard comes from, the
Daily Mail
was happy to mention). Mr. de Villehardouin recognized the similarity between the blurry image of the man falling from the sky and Guido Reni's seventeenth-century painting of Saint Michael the Archangel. Mr. de Villehardouin wrote:

“Of course, one must admit the ‘wings' I have highlighted in the photograph are, surely, no more than the tails of the man's coat flaring upward as he fell. Still, overall, the similarity to Reni's image is more than remarkable.”

Mr. de Villehardouin then posted the images side by side on his blog (a space usually reserved for discussions of religious architecture in the Medici era) and wham. The blog became an overnight sensation, with more than fifteen million hits. And today, the side-by-side images were making the rounds of the world's newspapers. Monsieur Dufaux pushed the paper aside with amusement.

“First he's a Jewish James Bond, then he's a beloved hero of France, now he's Saint Michael reborn. Oh, I tell you, people do see what they need to see.”

Harper pulled the newspaper from the table, dropped it facedown on the empty chair next to him. He jumped on the man's last words, happy to change the subject.

“What do you mean?”

Monsieur Dufaux laughed.

“Three years ago, I had a tour group from Mexico in the café; they came for fondue. I gave them a few lessons. You know, here's the fondue fork and here's how you spear the bread, so on and so forth. They were soon dipping their bits of bread in the pots and sopping up the cheese, having a real fiesta. I left them to it and went back to my kitchen. Not ten minutes later I hear a shriek from the dining room. I run back and see the lot of them on their knees, praying to my fondue pot.”

“What?”

“They were praying. To my fondue pot.”

Monsieur Dufaux paused for effect, took a sip of wine. No doubt he'd told the story a hundred times, Harper thought. No doubt it got better each time in the telling.

“So . . . what happened was one of them saw the face of the Virgin Mary in the crusted cheese at the bottom of the pot. My God, they were besides themselves, waving rosaries and singing ‘Ave Maria.'” They offered me a thousand Swiss francs for the fondue pot, on the spot.”

“What did you do?”

“What could I do? I gave it to them. For free.”

Monsieur Dufaux pronounced the
F
word in a manner that suggested it wounded him deeply.

“And did it?” Harper said.

“Did it what?”

“Did it look like the Virgin Mary?”

Monsieur Dufaux finished his wine, refilled both glasses.

“You know, everyone in the café came over for a look and agreed it was the face of the Virgin Mary. Only Marc Rochat said differently, after studying it from every angle.”

It'd been a long time since Harper had heard the lad's name. His face flashed through Harper's eyes for a second, then it was gone. One of the side effects of the memory scrub he'd gone through after the cathedral job. He could remember events on his timeline, but certain faces and names were redacted. A little something to remind Harper of one of the bigger rules and regs of his kind in paradise:
They are not us, and we are not them . . .
so get on with the bloody job, boyo.

“So, what did the lad say?” Harper said.

Monsieur Dufaux laughed.

“He said, very slowly and very deliberately, ‘It looks like the crusted cheese at the bottom of a fondue pot.' I tell you, the things that would pop from that boy's mouth!”

“Sounds like him, from what I can remember.”

Monsieur Dufaux sighed.

“
Mon Dieu
, I miss him. He always laughed at my jokes, even if he didn't understand them. Which was all of the time, come to think of it.”

Harper watched feelings of loss pass through the man's eyes. He tried to imagine what such a thing felt like.

“Came here a lot, did he?”

“Every night before he went to the tower to call the hour. He liked the food, he liked the crowd.”

Harper scanned the room. Everyone settled into their evening debate on the important affairs of the day, sans cigarettes. A smoking ban had taken effect in the bars and cafés throughout Switzerland. Many of the locals were unhappy.

“Such nonsense!” Madame Budry complained. “What will be next? Invading my home to test my bathwater to assure themselves it does not exceed the temperature decreed by some faceless
fonctionnaire
?”