Authors: Douglas Corleone
“That’s it,” I said quietly to Davignon. “Now the bad guys go to ground.”
We were standing outside a small café on Champs-Elysées, not far from the Hotel d’Étonner, as a drizzling rain bounced off our hard faces. It was only a few hours since I had left Remy’s, and although I hadn’t gotten any sleep, I felt wired. Unfortunately, however, that energy was quickly devolving into anxiety.
Davignon punched a button and put his phone to his ear. “Any sign, Bertrand?”
I finished my espresso as Davignon cursed and placed his cell in his coat pocket.
I said, “Nothing yet, I assume. Means our boy is more than forty minutes late. He’s gone, Lieutenant.”
We had been waiting for the bellhop Johan Fleischer to show up for work at the hotel. From the information I had gleaned from Remy the night before, Johan was now our link to finding Lindsay. There was little doubt that he was somehow involved. Too many coincidences otherwise. Remy had sold 007s to two German guys in Paris on business at a pub in the Marais, the same neighborhood where Johan Fleischer, a German national himself, was known to live. Only when Davignon’s men showed up at his flat at six in the morning to have another chat with him, Johan was nowhere to be found. He was due at the hotel for work at eight
A.M.
and still hadn’t shown. Johan Fleischer had vanished into the ether.
“Where do we go from here?” Davignon said tentatively without looking at me.
Davignon’s men had found me the Sorkins’ taxi driver and I’d chatted with him for half an hour this morning. The driver was a family man. Had two daughters of his own. Seemed sincere when he said he sympathized with the Sorkins. He had noticed little Lindsay. Adorable. Made a lot of noise, gave him a splitting headache, but adorable all the same. I believed him. He was clean.
So was Avril Severin, the desk clerk who had checked the Sorkins in. She was studying literature at Paris-Sorbonne University and would graduate next year. During my talk with her at the hotel this morning, she broke into tears. Not about the girl necessarily—she’d caught only a glimpse of Lindsay in her mother’s arms—but about the state of the world and how nothing seemed to make sense to her anymore now that she understood so much. I felt for her, and let her go after just twenty minutes.
I looked at Davignon. “Tell me more about the other little girls that went missing here in Paris this month.”
“Two others,” he said. “As I mentioned, not tourists. Both French citizens, both Arabic. Both from the Latin Quarter. The families did not know one another.”
“And the media?” I said. “Not quite as interested in missing Arabic girls?”
Davignon bowed his head, wiped a bit of rain off his face. “Not so much, no.”
“I’m not entirely convinced their disappearances are connected to Lindsay Sorkin’s.”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“But I’d still like a look at your reports,” I told him.
“Of course.”
The dilemma in my mind was how to approach this from the other side. My experience was in handling parental abductions. I was accustomed to knowing who I was looking for and why they’d committed the crime. But stranger abductions were a different animal entirely—an animal I wasn’t sure I was qualified to track. What if I took this investigation too far in the wrong direction? What if I missed an angle? What if my own incompetence became the reason why Vince and Lori Sorkin never saw their child again?
I couldn’t allow that to happen. I’d need to remain sharp, keep one eye on the details and the other on the big picture. I couldn’t let anything slip past. I’d need to examine the facts from every imaginable perspective.
The possibility that Lindsay Sorkin had been taken because of her father’s sensitive work was too compelling to dismiss. The problem lay in assigning the motive. Were we dealing with a state? A terrorist group? Mercenaries? Competitors? A professional crew seeking a big score? And if any of this was true, why hadn’t Vince Sorkin heard from the kidnappers before the involvement of the media, which complicated matters exponentially on all sides? It could be that they hadn’t yet gotten her someplace safe, somewhere from which they could communicate without worrying that the National Police would be beating down their door the moment they hung up the phone or logged off the Internet. The only other reason I could fathom was that something had gone wrong. Something unthinkable. In that case, we’d be searching for a tiny corpse. And, of course, the men responsible.
“So,” Davignon said, a beseeching look on his face, his voice barely audible over the sounds of city traffic, “with Johan Fleischer on the run, where do we go from here? With respect to your involvement, I mean.”
Whether Davignon intended to arrest me for retrieving the boy in Bordeaux and putting him on a plane back to the States was now irrelevant. Lindsay needed to be found, and I was in this for the long haul. Finding Lindsay wouldn’t mend the hole in me that had opened the day Hailey was taken. Finding her wouldn’t bring back Tasha, or numb me enough to prevent a single sleepless night. But I knew that leaving France without trying to retrieve her would be the end of me. And I wasn’t ready for the end quite yet.
Chapter 8
I took the Metro to the Bastille and from there walked in the rain to Rue Keller, where Johan Fleischer leased a studio apartment. Two plainclothes officers who were watching the block looked the other way when I walked by. The downstairs door was left unlocked, so I entered Fleischer’s building and bounded up a creaky wooden staircase to his flat. I didn’t bother to knock, didn’t waste my time picking the lock, just took a deep breath, lifted my right leg, aimed inches below the knob, and kicked in Fleischer’s door.
The studio apartment was dingy and as tight as a prison cell. A large black futon ate up most of the space. A stainless steel sink and minifridge to its immediate left made up the entire kitchen. In the rear I saw a gray-tiled bathroom with a scummy washbasin, shower, and toilet. The shower curtain was so cruddy, you wouldn’t wrap a dead body in it. I nearly dry heaved from the smell.
“So much for German discipline,” I muttered.
I went to work, digging through the few plastic drawers, checking the cabinets beneath the sink, opening the minifridge, poking around under the futon that served as his bed. Fleischer possessed a whole lot of nothing. In a corner of the room, a few electrical components were piled one atop the other. A portable boom box that played cassettes, a VHS player, an old-school printer with a tractor feed. But no computer.
I spotted a small plastic trash can and dumped the contents onto the floor. No question, this was where the rank odor was emanating from. I kicked aside the foodstuff and found some balled-up pieces of paper. Old-fashioned computer paper, unmistakable with those tiny holes on each side. The pages were wet, sticky, covered in what I assumed was maple syrup. I unrolled one at a time, flattening each against the floor, trying not to retch.
The first page was the printout of a Wikipedia entry for some band I’d never heard of, the second what appeared to be an abandoned attempt at poetry. On the third, I hit pay dirt. An e-mail from someone named Sandrine. “
Je t’aime,
” it read.
“À bientôt.
”
I love you. See you soon.
Below the e-mail was an electronic signature, complete with the sender’s full name, position, place of business, business address, telephone, and fax number.
Sandrine Bettencourt, human resources at Le Bon Marché, a department store located in the Left Bank.
I tore off the signature, folded the scrap of paper, stuffed it into my pocket, shot down the stairs and out into the rain, and made for the Metro at the Bastille.
*
The southern bank of the river Seine had inspired artists the likes of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, writers such as Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, not to mention the philosopher John-Paul Sartre. The area had also inspired the first department store in the world, Le Bon Marché, designed by Gustave Eiffel. Inside, Le Bon Marché was awe-inspiring, even for me, a widower who considered shopping slightly less desirable than dusting the furniture. Compared to finding your way around Le Bon Marché, finding your way around Paris was easy. Soon as I entered the monstrosity I became lost.
“Looking for human resources,” I said, just as some overzealous clerk attempted to spritz me.
“Top floor,” he said. “Sure I cannot interest you in some Guerlain to go with that splendid suit?”
“Never been so sure of anything in my life,” I said, suddenly wondering if I reeked of Fleischer’s rotting garbage.
I jumped onto the escalator. Given the wide berth fellow shoppers granted me, I figured I probably still smelled of rubbish. Of course, I hadn’t slept or showered, and I was wearing the clothes I’d worn to the clubs the evening before. Figured there would be plenty of time for bathing once little Lindsay was found.
When I passed the children’s department my mind flashed on Hailey. If my daughter were still alive we’d have recently celebrated her sweet sixteen. Sixteen. Nearing the end of high school, preparing for prom, visiting colleges, arguing over her borrowing the Volvo, things like that. She’d be dating. Looking for someone so unlike me you’d think we were a different species. But still Daddy’s little girl, Daddy’s little darling. If she were still alive. She could be. And that’s what really sent me over the edge on nights so dark I couldn’t burn them away with a million candles. Those were the nights I’d sit on the floor next to my bed, arms wrapped around my knees like a child sitting on the carpet of a library at storytime. Listening for her screams as though I could hear her no matter where in the world she was. Sitting. Listening. Rocking back and forth like an octogenarian passing time until death arrived. Sitting. Rocking. Thinking. Always thinking.
She could still be alive. It was that possibility that tore at me. Alive but not. Alive but trapped, held prisoner like Jaycee Lee Dugard or the daughter of that sick, sadistic prick Josef Fritzl over in Austria. Hailey in some shed, in some dungeon. Some monster laying his hands on her. What would
she
be thinking? What had she been told? That her parents were dead? Or worse, that they’d completely given up hope and stopped looking for her? That they’d moved on? Had another child, another little girl to replace her? Had she been brainwashed like Elizabeth Smart? Told the same damn lies again and again until she believed them? Was she tortured? If she were alive today would she loathe me? Would she even remember me? These were the thoughts that constantly clawed at my insides. And this was why I didn’t—why I
couldn’t
—take cases like Lindsay Sorkin’s. Like Madeleine McCann’s. Like—
“Excusez-moi, monsieur.”
“Sorry,” I said to the female clerk I’d bumped into. “Know where I can find human resources?”
She pointed. “Right back that way. I just left there. Actually, the girls are on their way to lunch. You may want to try back after one o’clock.”
“I’m looking for Miss Bettencourt.”
“Sandrine,” she said, smiling. She pointed across the floor to a tall brunette in a light blouse and dark skirt. “That’s her there, heading for the elevator.”
“Merci,”
I said, and moved away from her, watching the lights above the elevator. The door opened. Of course they were going down. Hopefully, to the ground floor. I hopped back on the escalator.
The women beat me to the street level, but I made it in time to see Sandrine walk out the front door by herself. I hurried after her, trying not to look too conspicuous. Easy to get away with in any big city like New York or London or Paris. Everyone’s always in a hurry. Only those who moved slowly appeared suspicious.
I stepped back into the rain to find that a sea of umbrellas had risen.
Damn,
I thought.
Now I’ve lost her.
But I hadn’t. I caught her lovely profile as she crossed the boulevard.
I followed. Running was no longer a problem. I was a man in a four-figure suit caught in the rain without an umbrella. What nutter wouldn’t run?
*
Ten minutes later we were aboard the Metro. I rode in the car just behind Sandrine’s so that I could see her without her seeing me. We stepped off at the next stop, on Rue du Bac. Just as I’d hoped, it appeared she was heading for her flat.
I waited until I thought she was upstairs, then climbed the steps to the door outside her small lobby. I searched the yellowed strips of tape for the name Bettencourt. Second floor, apartment B. I stabbed at the buzzer. If she didn’t answer I figured there was a good chance her boyfriend, Johan, was there. I waited thirty seconds, then descended the concrete steps. The rain was coming down harder. I rounded the corner and found the fire escape. It was creaking under the weight of a man carefully climbing down. A young man with light hair, who evidently had just stepped out of the second-floor window, where Sandrine stood, watching him nervously.
She turned her head and spotted me. Her eyes went wide, then she screamed out, “Johan!”
Fleischer spun around and saw me. He gauged the distance from his step to the ground and decided to jump. He landed on his feet, but barely. I’d already taken off in a sprint in his direction and I liked my chances of catching him, even if he did have the edge in age and knowing the territory. This was hardly my first footrace.
He turned right at the first corner and I bolted after him, my dress shoes now pounding cobblestone rather than grass, beating my soles into pulp. I kept going but I wasn’t gaining ground; on the contrary, I seemed to be losing it. Fleischer was faster than I had anticipated. And, as I’d expected, he knew his way, winding around corners and darting down narrow alleys like a ferret. I kept pace, tried to keep him in sight. I had to have an advantage in endurance. Long as I made this a marathon, I was in good shape. My training would pay off. All that cardio wasn’t just for my health, after all. It was for the chase.
Fleischer seemed to know it, too. He adopted a different strategy by breaking out of the maze. If he couldn’t outrun me, he’d put obstacles in my way. Moving obstacles. Two-ton chunks of metal and glass barreling down the pavement at forty to fifty miles per hour.