Authors: John Jakes
“Ask the ones you know to recruit as many others as they can. The whole left bank needn’t be scoured. You said you’d heard that Lepp buys the favors of students.”
“That’s true. What of it?”
“Have the girls work the Latin Quarter first. The places near the Sorbonne where idlers congregate—the Maube, the Boul’ Mich. I know it’s a slim chance. But there’s no other starting point. If anyone finds Lepp’s hideaway by this time tomorrow—this time but no later—I’ll pay a hundred francs to the girl and another hundred francs to any informant she uses.”
Lisa whistled. “Why didn’t you mention those prices before? They’re better than what the most popular girl gets for a whole night with some rich man at the Hotel Meurice! We won’t have any trouble putting platoons of young ladies on the street. Indeed, I venture to say every slut from here to Marseilles will want to join the search.” Her cynical jocularity disappeared all at once. “I shouldn’t be laughing. This is urgent business, isn’t it?”
“Urgent.” He nodded.
“Bad, too, uh?”
“Yes, ugly.”
“I thought so. I’ve never seen you so wrought up—except when you’re discussing artistic theories with your colleagues, of course.”
“The life of my friend Strelnik may depend on what your girls learn, Lisa.” And if Yuri Strelnik’s claim that Bismarck was maneuvering to put a Hohenzollern on the Spanish throne ever reached Louis-Napoléon’s hands in documented form, the lives of hundreds of thousands of others might be affected by the diplomatic repercussions. The whole basis for Strelnik’s abduction still seemed absurd to Matt. Though he found it idiotic and almost inconceivable that some men actually cared about such things as kingships and spheres of influence, his friend’s danger was horrible proof that they did.
“One more thing, Lisa. Do you know a shop that sells good secondhand revolvers?”
Gravely, she nodded. “Yes, my Virginia dove. I do.”
Lisa’s girlfriends spread out through the student section of the left bank before the night ended. By eight o’clock the following evening, one returned with what she said was a reliable address. A tenement in the Rue Cujas just a block from the Boulevard Saint-Michel and the Sorbonne.
The girl had obtained the address from a young Alsatian boy she met in a café. The boy, a philosophy student, had hired himself out to a German. The boy remembered the German well, and bitterly regretted ever agreeing to spend a night in his rooms. He was ashamed of the incident, he said, but he didn’t keep quiet about it because he wanted to warn others to stay away from the man, whose name was Gruen. Even by the liberal standards of the Latin Quarter, Gruen had depraved tastes.
Matt paid the young prostitute and gave her the agreed-upon price for the informer as well. Then he set out for the left bank in a heavy rain that had started shortly after his talk with Lisa the preceding evening. The air had turned sharply colder during the day, and still the rain came down. His teeth chattered as he crossed the Seine by the Pont Neuf.
God, how he wished he weren’t out on such a miserable night. And on such a dangerous errand. He remembered a letter his father had sent him shortly after he’d arrived in Paris. Jephtha had spoken of the Kents as people of conscience. Cursed if he wasn’t right.
Bent against the wind, he hurried on. In one pocket of his shabby overcoat he had a scrap of paper with the tenement address jotted on it. In the other he had a .41 caliber LeFauchaux revolver, model 1861, bearing the mark and identification of the arms company’s Belgian works. The revolver was fully loaded.
“N
O, I HAVEN’T
any tenant named Gruen. Now go away!”
Hard rain pelted the small window in the front wall of the ground-floor foyer. A calèche with its top raised against the storm and its running lamps alight went clattering down the incline of the Rue Cujas toward the Boul’ Mich. The concierge, a sour little woman with a flickering candle in her hand, had obviously given Matt the answer she was paid to give.
He decided to try a bluff. He hoped his smile was suitably sleazy. “But he’s expecting me. He paid me to come here.”
The concierge’s old eyes gleamed with rheum. She squinted at him, searching for truth or falsehood in what he’d said. Her candle provided the only illumination in the foyer. Up the stairs lay a darkness full of rustling sounds, creakings, faint cries of passion or pain. The whole four-story tenement seemed astir with unseen life.
Suddenly the concierge said, “He told me it was a young lady—and that she wouldn’t arrive till midnight.”
Matt kept the lewd smile in place. “Oh, he changed his mind, you see.” He winked. “On both counts.” With a faintly shaking hand, he slipped a few sous into hers.
“Well—all right. But if there’s any difficulty, I’ll say you slipped past my door without my seeing you. Do you know where it is?”
“No.”
“Top floor. All the way back.”
She scratched herself in a vulgar way, turned and began counting the sous as she returned to her foul-smelling room. Lightning whitened the street outside. Thunder rocked the building, loud as huge howitzers firing close by. The concierge’s door slammed, blotting out the candlelight. Matt shivered; his overcoat was soaked. He reached into his pocket to grasp the revolver.
During the war he’d carried a pistol for protection in certain ports. On calm days at sea he’d practiced marksmanship off the stern and found he had a fair eye. But shooting at a bobbing barrel for sport was one thing, defending yourself quite another. Never in his life had he fired a shot in anger. He didn’t know whether he could.
Reluctantly he started up the stairs in total darkness relieved intermittently by a glow of lightning through the foyer window. By the time he reached the first-floor landing, even a brilliant burst down below provided very little light.
He felt his way around the walls of the landing. He gasped when his right foot struck something soft. A pale flicker from below showed him a ghost’s face, a gaping mouth wet with saliva.
His heart pounded. He stepped over the outstretched leg he’d bumped. The derelict didn’t stir.
Matt could smell wine in the darkness. But he could hear no breathing. His scalp crawled. Was the man dead? He didn’t linger to investigate.
On the next landing he heard a faint squeal and a ticking of claws behind one wall. He touched the walls, damp, springy with rot. The ticking continued. Rats running?
He kept climbing, sickened by the stenches of the place. Rotted meat. Slops. God knew what else. If Strelnik was being kept in another location, could he force the Prussian to tell him where? Was anyone with Lepp this moment? The questions seemed to turn his mind to soup. Sweat broke out on his forehead although the rest of his body still felt cold.
On the top floor, he crept down the hall until he’d gone as far as he could. He found Lepp’s door with an outstretched hand, sidled closer, listened.
He thought he heard the Prussian laughing against a curious background noise—heavy rhythmic grunting.
He wiped his wet forehead. Drew the LaFauchaux from his coat. The thunder boomed. The tenement actually shook on its foundations.
As the reverberations died away, he knocked.
The curious rhythmic sound stopped. There was a long interval of silence within the flat. On a lower floor, a woman or a child screamed. Matt rapped again, using the muzzle of the revolver this time.
He heard a whispered colloquy. Two voices, the words unintelligible. Once more he pounded the door.
Rapid footsteps approached. They sounded light, as though someone small were coming to answer. Then he heard the gnome say, “Who is it? Herr Gruen isn’t expecting anyone at this hour.”
He disguised his voice, as best he could, lowering and roughening it. “Tell Lepp to open up. There’s trouble.”
“Who is that? Who’s out there?”
“I said there’s trouble. They know we have Strelnik. Open the damn door!”
More conversation. Matt chose an imaginary point in the darkness, approximately where he thought the gnome’s head would be, and fixed his eye on that spot. It was a wise precaution. When the door jerked open suddenly, he was prepared—looking straight at the gnome’s torso, and the nickeled revolver rising in front of it in the dim light.
Matt shoved the gnome against the doorjamb, pinning his gun hand between his side and the wood. If the little man fired in that position, he risked putting a bullet into his own ribs.
The gnome wriggled, stamped on Matt’s foot, squealed, “Colonel, it’s the American from the Rue—”
Matt jumped back suddenly. The absence of his weight threw the gnome off balance. Matt grabbed the little man’s stiff collar and dragged him outside. With his revolver he whacked the gnome’s forearm twice.
He caught the nickeled gun as it dropped from slack fingers, then laid the barrel of the LeFauchaux against the gnome’s temple, stunning and felling him in the hall. He felt only faint guilt over assaulting someone so small. He knew the gnome would have shot him if he’d had the chance.
He darted into the apartment, bolted the door. Then he caught his breath, unprepared for the cleanliness of the place, or the furnishings, or the play of soft multicolored light from paper-shaded lanterns.
Artifacts from China and Japan had become a craze in the West in recent years. Jim Whistler crammed some of his pictures with Oriental objects and costuming, and his fondness for good Chinese porcelain was practically a mania. Someone with similar tastes had decorated this hideaway. There were ornamental screens around the room, low lacquered tables, bamboo mats instead of carpet, and on the walls delicate brush paintings of gardens with willows and lily ponds and graceful bridges.
Matt was still recovering from his surprise when he heard a door open. The door was concealed by a screen standing in front of the wall to his left. The screen fell forward—pushed—and Lepp stared at him.
Matt’s belly began to ache. He didn’t see Strelnik anywhere. Lepp’s bright eyes flicked past him, hunting for the gnome. Then the Prussian darted a look at Matt’s revolver.
Lepp was barefoot and clad in a black kimono with two Oriental characters painted in white on the left breast. Through the open doorway Matt glimpsed a bedchamber where layers of sweet-smelling smoke moved slowly. The room’s sole illumination seemed to come from a metal statue of a fat little god with a cavity in his belly. Lumps of charcoal glowed in the cavity.
On a pallet, a beefy young man with blond curls and immense forearm muscles lay belly down, his head turned toward the outer room and a drowsy, half-witted smile on his face. The charcoal that made the whole flat insufferably hot put red highlights on the young man’s sweaty shoulders and biceps.
“Heaven knows how you found me, Kent,” Lepp said at last. “It was rash of you to come here, you know. Rash and stupid.”
He took a step toward Matt, his smile blazing suddenly. “I don’t believe you’ll shoot me. I don’t believe you’re the sort who can murder an unarmed man.”
Desperately Matt scanned the room again.
Strelnik wasn’t here!
He was aware of Lepp taking a second step but didn’t realize how close he’d gotten until the Prussian gave a hard exclamation and jumped him.
Lepp’s hands shot out. Just as he’d predicted, Matt jerked the revolver up in a protective way but didn’t fire. Lepp seized the gun, tore it from Matt’s hand and rammed his bare knee into Matt’s groin.
Lepp uttered a short, self-satisfied laugh as Matt reeled backward. The Prussian pressed his advantage. He crowded the American against the wall and drove his knee in and out again, harder this time.
Matt managed to turn aside and take the third blow on his hip. He was in hellish pain. Everything around him was tilting. The paper-shaded lanterns multiplied and transparent pastel rainbows arched between them—or was that only in his dazed head?
Lepp’s kimono came undone. His naked body was hard and muscular, the body of a splendidly conditioned soldier. The beefy young man in the bedroom started asking questions in French, in a surprisingly girlish voice. Lepp didn’t answer. His attention was fixed on Matt, who was swaying back and forth, barely able to stand.
Lepp still had the revolver. With a smug smile he dropped the gun on the floor behind him.
Shouts and loud pounding came from the corridor: the gnome trying to get in. Lepp ignored that, too.
With blurring eyes, Matt saw Lepp’s guest creep across the doorway, bare butted and with his clothes in his hand. The young man vanished, evidently fleeing through some rear exit. Lepp stepped back. His bare instep came down on the revolver handle. Angered, he bent over and tossed the gun a yard away.
“I don’t need that to deal with a foolish person like you, Herr Kent. First, however, I’ll show you something.”
He paced swiftly to a corner, lifted a wooden framed paper screen aside. Strelnik lay motionless on a mat. Large bruises discolored his face.
“Oh, don’t worry. He’s breathing,” Lepp said. “We keep him pacified with a special draft concocted by a chemist we know. You came to the right place, you see.” He stopped smiling. “But you shouldn’t have.” He still had one hand on the frame of the screen. Without warning, he threw the screen at Matt’s head.
Matt tried to keep the thing from falling on him. His fist tore through the paper as he flung the screen off, unhurt.
But Lepp hadn’t meant to hurt him, only distract him. The Prussian grabbed Matt’s left wrist, whipped him around and hurled him against the wall with terrible force.
Matt shook his head and pushed off from the wall. The collision had started his nose bleeding. Something warm trickled over his mouth to his chin. He tried to focus his eyes as he turned back to face the Prussian.
Lepp was closer than he’d anticipated. The Prussian rammed his knee toward Matt’s genitals again. Without thinking, Matt caught Lepp’s leg and lifted. The Prussian was unprepared. He tumbled over, landing on his spine with an outburst of breath and skidding on a bamboo mat on which he’d fallen.