Chasing Cezanne (25 page)

He peered through a crack in the shutter at the courtyard below, a two-story drop. If one could ever arrange for three people to join hands and take a dive, it would do the job. Broken necks all around. Fat chance. He took another sip of cognac and started pacing out the distance from the kitchen to the middle of the room. Where would they stop, all together? His eye was caught by an old, cracked painting leaning against a leg of the worktable. Picking it up, he placed it on the empty easel, draping the overalls over most of it so that one corner of the canvas was left visible. Who could resist uncovering it?

It took him an hour to rig the studio, cursing at the lack of time. Given another twenty-four hours to get hold of the right detonators, he could have booby-trapped the whole place and been back in bed when the fireworks started. But dawn wasn't far away, and before long the building would start waking up. This would have to do. He checked the
plastique
again, one charge attached to the easel, another to the side of the stove, the wire connecting the two taped to the molding just above the floor or pushed
into the cracks between the floorboards. He went back to the kitchen, turned the gas on low, and fixed the latch on the front door so that it could be opened with a twist of the handle. One final look around, and then he closed the door gently and went down the stairs.

They'd be arriving at ten, Holtz had said. He had just over four hours to kill, plenty of time to wait for a parking spot closer to the building. But first, coffee. He walked up to the Boulevard Saint-Germain as the night sky began to give way to the first gray signs of day.

Franzen sat on the edge of his bed. He had passed an uncomfortable and tiring night—fitful bouts of sleep interrupted by the recurring image of Holtz in the Ritz, squatting like a gargoyle over a suitcase filled with money, his finger beckoning. The little bastard didn't deserve the kind of work Franzen did for him. The Dutchman yawned and stretched, feeling the knots in his back. And then, rubbing the stubble on his chin, he smiled, suddenly in the best of moods. The one overwhelming consolation on this otherwise squalid and depressing morning was under the bed. He had the paintings.

He was whistling by the time he went downstairs to give in his key. The concierge, having exhausted the delights of his magazine, was staring out at the street with bored and bleary eyes.

“It was a night I shall always remember,” said Franzen. “The welcome, the room, the service—exquisite, all of it.”

The concierge lit a cigarette, not visibly moved by the compliments. “Did you take a shower?”

“There weren't any towels.”

“I have towels. Twenty francs.”

“If only I'd known,” said Franzen. With his overnight bag in one hand and sixty million dollars in the other, he walked around the corner to the Gare de Lyon, breakfast, and an assessment of his immediate future.

FRANZEN sat in the café on the main concourse of the Gare de Lyon and contemplated his croissant, golden in the middle and darker brown at each tip, the way he liked them. He dipped one end in his coffee, bit it off, and chewed thoughtfully. It was surprisingly good for a station croissant, still with its early morning freshness, and the coffee was hot, strong, and restorative. The inner Franzen began to feel slightly more human. The outer man, he noticed as he looked down at his wrinkled shirt and the traces of gravy on his tie, needed some attention. A shave, a shower, a clean shirt—then he would be ready to attack the day. As soon as he finished breakfast, he would find a proper hotel.

The thought of hotels took his mind to the Ritz and, inevitably, to the prospect of seeing Rudolph Holtz again. It had never been something that Franzen enjoyed, and now, after being evicted from his apartment, the Dutchman felt resentment boiling up in him like heartburn. When they had spoken on the phone, Holtz had treated him as though he were nothing more than a lackey; in fact,
their relationship, as he looked back on it, had never been much different. Holtz had the jobs, Holtz had the money, and Holtz took pleasure in making people jump. It was in his nature.

Franzen brushed the crumbs carefully from his mustache, and as he did so he found himself smiling. This time, it could be different. He glanced down at the case that was wedged beneath the table. He had the paintings, and while he had those he held the advantage. He was, despite his shady occupation, a man of some integrity and would never consider trying to extort more than the agreed fee. But there had to be a little give-and-take. He wasn't Holtz's exclusive property. It was only right that he should have the freedom to make an honest living, to forge for others when the opportunity arose. And just such an opportunity was on his doorstep, or would be in a matter of hours, when Pine and his friends arrived at the apartment.

Franzen fished through his pockets and took out Pine's card. He looked at his watch: still too early for a civilized man to be awake. He had plenty of time to find a hotel and call from there. Cheered by his decision, he gathered up his bags and went out of the station into the thin sunlight of a new and, he felt sure, better day.

Bruno Paradou sat in his car, watching the Rue des Saints-Pères come to life. A door opened, and a middle-aged, bespectacled man appeared—a pessimist, wearing a raincoat and carrying an umbrella in defiance of the settled,
cloudless blue of the morning sky. The man looked up, glanced at his watch, set off at a purposeful walk toward the boulevard: a subway man, of no use to Paradou.

It was half an hour before he saw what he had been waiting for. A woman crossed the narrow street to unlock a car almost opposite Franzen's building. Paradou pulled out and moved down, blocking access to the parking spot. The woman settled into her seat and embarked on a line-by-line review of her makeup in the mirror before taking a brush from her bag to arrange her already carefully arranged hair. Behind Paradou, a waiting driver sounded his horn. Paradou put his arm out of the window and made the time-honored gesture, then sounded his own horn. The woman turned to look at him, her face a study in scorn. With exaggerated deliberation, she took out a pair of dark glasses, put them on, and eased away from the curb.

Bon
. Paradou parked, cut the engine, and spread a copy of
Soldier of Fortune
, the magazine of the well-read mercenary, across the steering wheel. Not having more than a few words of English, and those mostly the scrapings of the language picked up in bars, he missed the subtleties of the editorial content. But he loved the pictures and the advertising. As a diligent investor might pore over the
Wall Street Journal
, so he pored over the announcements—fascinating if only partly understood—of new and improved tools of destruction. Today, his eye was first caught by the new Glock 26, photographed nestling in the palm of a manly hand. Nine-millimeter caliber, ten-shot magazine, weight 560 grams, the kind of gun you could
tuck in your double-knit, combat-tested Swiss army sock. Leafing through the pages, he paused at other advertisements: a knife that could sever a three-inch free-hanging manila rope, an enticing subscription offer from
Machine Gun News
, deerskin gloves with lead knuckles, night vision equipment of all sizes, a sniper training course, bulletproof vests. What a wonderful country America was, he thought, studying a picture of a blonde wearing an ammunition belt, an automatic weapon, and nothing else. From time to time, he looked up to check the street, but for the moment there was nothing to do except think of ways he might spend his fee. Seventy-five thousand dollars would go a long way, even with Uzis the outrageous price they were.

As it often does, jet lag proved to be more of a stimulus than any alarm clock. That, and Lucy's excitement at the thought of seeing more of Paris, led her and Andre down to breakfast at the Montalembert just after seven. They found Cyrus already there, pink-cheeked and smelling faintly of bay rum, looking through the
Herald Tribune
.

“Good morning, my dears,” he said. “I didn't expect to see you this early. What ever happened to breakfast in bed? A romantic boiled egg overlooking the rooftops of Paris, a splash of champagne in the orange juice …”

Lucy bent down to kiss him on the cheek. “I think it's time we found you a girlfriend.”

“Yes, please.” Cyrus took off his reading glasses to
look around the room. “Do you see anything here that might suit? A wealthy widow with an angelic disposition, a firm and opulent bosom, and an apartment on the Ile Saint-Louis. Ability to cook preferred but not essential; must have a sense of humor.”

“Have you tried room service?” asked Andre.

As the pots of coffee came and the room began to fill, they discussed what is surely one of the most pleasant dilemmas in the world: what to do on a fine day in Paris. There was, of course, the ten o'clock appointment, with the possibility of lunch with Franzen if all went well. But the afternoon was theirs, and Lucy was bombarded with well-meaning but infinitely confusing suggestions from Cyrus and Andre: the Musée d'Orsay had to be seen, the view from the top of the Arc de Triomphe, Sacré-Coeur, a
bateau mouche
, the café La Palette, where Andre had spent most of his university career, the pyramid of the Louvre, the final resting place of Oscar Wilde, Willi's Wine Bar, and on and on. At last they stopped, giving Lucy a chance to speak.

What she would like, she told them—what she would really like, corny as it might be—was to be a typical tourist, just for one day. The Champs Elysées, the Eiffel Tower, the Seine. And what would make her the happiest tourist in Paris would be for Andre to take photographs of her to send home to Grandma Walcott, who had never been further from Barbados than Port of Spain, when her nephew married a Trinidadian girl twenty years before. Was that too terrible, she asked, looking anxiously at the two men.

“How I long to see the Eiffel Tower again,” said Cyrus. “Don't you, dear boy?”

Andre was silent, watching Lucy's face. She wasn't sure whether Cyrus was serious or making fun of her, and there was a sweet solemnity to her expression. “You're not kidding?” she said.

“I never kid this early in the morning. Now, what shall we do first, before we see Franzen? The river or the tower?”

The river won. They left the hotel shortly after eight—only a few unfortunate minutes before a phone call came through for Monsieur Pine, suggesting some changes to the arrangements for the morning. The bellboy ran up to the boulevard in the hope of delivering the message, but he was too late. There was no sign of Pine among the figures hurrying to work.

As it happened, they had gone the other way, taking the backstreets to reach one of Andre's favorite corners of Paris, the area around the Rue de Buci, where every day seems to be market day.

The atmosphere here is more like that of a busy country town than a capital city. Stalls spill into the street; market dogs dispute among each other for scraps under the trestle tables; greetings, insults, solicitous inquiries after health in general and the condition of the liver in particular pass between stallholders and their regular clients. There is a great feeling of appetite in the air, with a spectacular abundance of cheeses, breads, and sausages; and vegetables of every shape and color, from the squat potatoes called
rats
to haricot beans little thicker than a match, so fresh they snap. There are permanent shops behind the
stalls, many of them
traiteurs
with their galantines and terrines and tarts and tiny, delicious birds arranged and presented in the windows like the works of art they are. On one corner, while the season lasts, there are barrels of oysters and a man with leather hands who shucks them and puts them on beds of crushed ice. And always flowers—flowers in extraordinary profusion, offering a variety of pleasures to the passing nose: the heady scent of freesias, the moisture of petals, the fine green smell of ferns.