Chapter 42
THE HOTEL WAS colorful, modern, and cheap — only 110 euros a night. Our room wasn’t ready when we checked in, so a bellman escorted us to a cozy little restaurant on the seventh-floor terrace, where we enjoyed steaming cups of frothy café au lait, flaky buttery croissants, strawberry jam, fresh fruit, yogurt, and a magnificent view of the entire district.
Forty minutes later the bellman returned and took us to our room. He set down the bags, and I tipped him, hung the NE PAS DéRANGER sign on the doorknob, and locked the door.
Katherine and I hadn’t been alone since she came by my apartment an eternity ago, and we couldn’t wait to get our hands on each other. Within seconds, our clothes were strewn on the floor and we were under smooth, cool sheets.
The sex was a little fast, but the afterglow lasted much longer. We talked, then drifted off to sleep. Katherine woke me three hours later, and again we made love, this time slowly and tenderly, then took a long, hot shower together and headed out to explore Paris.
“Where to first?” I said. “I can think of a dozen places I want to go. Right off the top of my head.”
“Lunch,” Katherine said. “But you have to let me buy.”
“Lunch?” I said. “Okay, sure.”
“Good. We have a one-thirty reservation.”
“We do?”
“I decided to stick with the surprise theme of our vacation.”
We caught a taxi. “Le Jules Verne restaurant,” she told the driver. Ten minutes later he dropped us off at the base of the Eiffel Tower. We walked under the tower to a yellow awning, where we were greeted by a smiling maître d’.
“Sanborne,” Katherine said. “We have a reservation for two.”
“I called from New York,” Katherine told me as the maître d’ checked his book. “It’s kind of popular. I was hoping to get a dinner rez, but that was impossible.”
We took a private elevator to a magnificent room that was suspended from the steel latticework of the Eiffel Tower. It afforded us a spectacular panoramic view of the city below.
A tuxedoed host escorted us to a table near the center of the room.
“There’s a six-week wait for a window table,” Katherine explained.
“I hope that’s not an apology for this one. I’m floored.”
It was the most fantastic lunch I had ever had. And the most expensive. I almost choked when I looked at the prices on the menu.
“Don’t worry about it,” Katherine said. “If you can spend all your ‘newfound diamonds’ on everything else, the least I can do is buy lunch.”
We were sipping champagne when the waiter brought a small, intricately decorated chocolate cake with a single candle in the center to the couple sitting at the next table. White-haired, well-dressed, and from the way they held hands across the table, very much in love, they had to be in their eighties.
The woman blew out the candle.
“Happy birthday,” Katherine said.
“Merci, no,” the old woman said. “It is our anniversary.”
“Congratulations,” I said. “How many years?”
The man smiled. “One-half,” he said. “Émilie and I have been dating for six months.”
The City of Love was living up to its reputation.
After lunch we went to the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts. It was Katherine’s idea. It’s the French national art school, where we could wander the halls, looking at works in progress by students.
“It’s just like Parsons,” Katherine said.
“Almost,” I answered. “Except for the fact that Monet, Degas, Moreau, and Delacroix didn’t go to Parsons.”
“True,” she said. “But Jasper Johns, Edward Hopper, and Norman Rockwell did.”
I winced. “As they say in Paris, touché, mademoiselle.”
“As they say in New York, gotcha, dude.”
After that, we hit the Louvre, along with about fifteen thousand other people. We didn’t see them all, but that’s how many the guidebook said show up on a daily basis. It could take a week to see all four hundred thousand pieces of art that are in the Louvre. We decided to spend two hours focused on a handful of works by Michelangelo, Raphael, and other Italian masters.
Then we did a one-eighty and took another taxi to the Galerie Mona Lisa. The average tourist wouldn’t know about it, but the elderly couple in the restaurant had tipped us off to it. It was jam-packed with works by contemporary artists. There was no single medium, no unifying school of thought, just great art from people who were still very much alive.
“One day you could be hanging here,” Katherine said.
“And the best part is, I don’t have to be dead to get in.”
We left the Galerie and were strolling along the Boulevard Saint-Germain when we took a random left turn on Rue de Buci and stumbled on Cacao et Chocolat.
The store was a work of art in itself, and every bit of it was edible. We sat in a booth while a petite waitress served us the thickest, richest cocoa I’d ever tasted. Then we fed each other chocolate truffles from a silver tray.
“I’ll be in a sugar coma in about five minutes,” Katherine said as she licked a bit of chocolat noir from my fingertips. “But what a way to go.”
Leaving the chocolate shop, we found our way to Le Bon Marché, a French department store that makes Bloomingdale’s look like a flea market. Katherine insisted she didn’t want anything, so I bought myself some Christian Maquer lingerie in Katherine’s size.
We weren’t ready to call it a night yet, so we walked past our hotel and across the river to the Jardin des Tuileries. Then we strolled hand in hand back to our hotel, and Katherine tried on the incredibly sexy sheer black camisole, and minutes later I removed it.
We turned out the lights, opened the blinds, and let the moonlight pour into the room as we made sweet, sweet love.
Chapter 43
NY1 ran Bagboy’s picture a dozen times. They’d have run it a lot more except for the crane collapse on 57th Street. One entire section came crashing down on a crosstown bus, killing three and injuring fourteen, including a pregnant woman. In keeping with the age-old tradition “if it bleeds, it leads,” the station abandoned Bagboy and focused on the crane disaster around the clock.
Even so, there were ninety-one tips waiting for Rice and Benzetti in the morning. They separated them into three batches. Solids, Possibles, and Nut Jobs.
Leonard Karns sounded like a Solid until they got to the part of the message where he said the guy he wanted to turn in was a “total fraud as an artist.” He sounded like someone with an ax to grind, which dropped his tip to a Possible. Then, just before Karns hung up, Benzetti could hear him cackling hysterically, as though he’d just escaped from the flight deck at Bellevue.
Nut Job, he decided.
It took the two detectives a full day to track down and question all the callers in the Solid and Possible folders.
“So far I got squat,” Rice said. “What have you got?”
Benzetti looked at his call sheet. “I got one lonely old lady who was angling to get me to come over for tea, three angry chicks hoping to pin a robbery on their ex-boyfriends, and a whole bunch of bullshit artists and hustlers trying to peddle bogus information to score the reward.”
“We might as well start calling the crazies,” Rice said.
He dialed Leonard Karns’s number.
“It’s about time,” Karns said as soon as Rice identified himself. “I called in the tip a day and a half ago.”
“You and a lot of other people,” Rice said. “You said something on your message about this guy being an artist.”