René tried to ignore his throbbing hip as he hobbled upstairs. He felt along the pebbled wall in the dark, ran into a rough wooden door and tried the handle. Locked.
So close.
He had to think fast. The third man was bound to arrive at any moment.
He called Aimée.
“René . . . don’t hang up,” she said. “Are you all right?”
“Aimée, I’m in Paris, underground someplace.”
“I know. Stay on the line,” she said, breathless. “Whatever you do keep the phone on. We’re triangulating your position.”
“Hold on. Don’t talk,” René said.
He kept the phone in his pants pocket and inched his way back down the steps, fighting for breath. The key had to be on the big red-haired man. He felt around in the pocket of his down-filled jacket and pulled out a cheap pocket calculator. It took him two tries to turn the unconscious man over so he could examine his shirt pockets and his pants pockets. A wallet. Then a ring of keys jingled, and he pulled them out.
René made his way up the stairs again, in the dark. He took one of the long-handled old-fashioned keys, reached up, and slid it toward the keyhole, but the bunch of keys fell from his still swollen fingers and vanished in the darkness.
Below, René heard one of the men stir and groan. René ran his fingers over the stone step. Nothing. He panicked.
If only he could see!
Then his fingers grazed the top of the keys. He tried to grasp them but his fingers just pushed them down into a narrow crack.
He needed something with which to pull them up to him.
He slid down the steps once more, saving his legs for the climb back, and with the knife cut some excess duct tape from the man’s wrists. He climbed back, his legs and hip protesting. He lowered the tape into the crack, tamped it carefully around the bit of key sticking up and prayed the tape would hold. Slowly, centimeter by centimeter, he lifted the keys. By the time he had them in his hand, perspiration was running down his forehead in rivulets and dripping into his eyes.
More noises came from the big man, a knocking and rustling as he struggled against his bonds. Then there was a metallic clang.
The kerosene lantern!
A crackle and thupt of something igniting. René’s hands shook. Despite the cellar’s dampness, with so much old wood and paper, the flames would catch, then suck up oxygen for fuel and create an inferno!
He reached up, aimed for the keyhole, and willed his hand to be steady. He missed. He tried again, leaning his short arm against the door. The key didn’t fit. Smoke and kerosene fumes rose, choking him.
René tried the next three keys. The fourth was the right one. He turned it, but the key stuck. With all his might, he pressed and turned. And tried again. The old-fashioned lock clicked and he rammed the door open with his shoulder.
He fell on a wet floor by bags of cement, striking a small cement mixer. A worker, wearing overalls and a bandanna around his head, jumped back in surprise.
“Where is this place?” René said.
“Señor, no habla Français,” he said, alarm in his eyes.
René crawled across the floor to pull himself up by the wall. Black smoke billowed up from the staircase. The worker yelled and grabbed a bucket of water.
René made his legs move. Step by step, past an open door and into a garden courtyard. Birds sang by a low ivy-covered wall. He’d never noticed the sweetness of the tang of wet leaves or realized how beautiful a gray sky could look.
Keep going, he had to keep going, follow the narrow lane past the parked vans, and get to the street. Get away. The arched porte cochère lay just before him and he heard a car slow down, shifting into first. He ducked behind a van as the car turned in. A black Peugeot.
Hurry, he had to hurry. Despite the searing ache in his thigh, he had to keep walking. The car pulled behind him, a door opened and shut. He panicked, knowing it would only be a few minutes before they discovered he’d escaped. He heard someone yelling to call the sapeurs-pompiers, the firemen.
He edged past the van, keeping close to the walls, and made it through the arch. Saw a narrow cobbled street lined with parked cars.
He looked up, wiped his brow and saw the street sign: rue Lemercier, a one-way street. He reached into his pants pocket for his cell phone.
“Aimée?” he said. “I’m on rue Lemercier, wherever the hell that is.”
“Near Clichy. Go to your right René. Walk.”
He heard honking. And there she was, jumping out of a taxi and running toward him.
For once in his life the earth and stars aligned: He’d done something he never thought he could do, and with arms opened wide she was running to him.
Somehow he walked, he didn’t know how.
“René!” Tears spilled from her eyes as she grabbed him.
“What took you so long, Aimée?” he said.
Thursday Afternoon
GASSOT, PICQ, AND PORTLY Nemours sat in the back of the Laboratoire de Prothèse Dentaire in Passage Geffroy-Didelot, Picq’s nephew’s denture-making shop. Acrid adhesive smells and sounds of running water came from the front.
“We’ve taken the matter into our own hands,” Picq said.
Gassot hoped his comrades hadn’t done anything stupid yet, but it sounded like they already had.
“That doesn’t make sense,” Gassot said. “Let’s wait and see.”
“We didn’t discover anything in the art gallery,” Picq interrupted.
“What do you mean?” Gassot asked, alarmed “Too cautious, as always, Gassot,” Picq said. “And considering your softness toward natives, dogs, and small children, well, we took care of business.”
Fools. “You broke into the gallery? Thank your stars you weren’t caught. Did the woman tell you anything?”
Gassot couldn’t fathom Picq’s steel-blue gaze.
“We’d have told you,” Picq said.
They hadn’t told him about anything else.
“What about Tran?”
“He’s going to the maison,” Gassot said.
“It’s time for action!”
Gassot expelled a breath of disgust and shook his head. “Always the hothead, aren’t you? It’s folly.”
The telephone rang.
Picq leaned over the counter next to a sealing machine. His frizzy white hair poked out from his cap. He was there to answer the telephone for his nephew, who’d gone to lunch.
“Oui, allô?” he said. “The dentures are ready for you, monsieur.”
He hung up and turned back to them. “The Castorama store off Passage de Clichy had everything we needed,” Picq said. “Fertilizer, plastic plumbers’ pipe,” he said, tapping the counter. “All under here. No one suspects us, even though it’s what they watch for now. Don’t you read the papers?”
Gassot read the PMU racing forms when he got his monthly pension, but that was it. He shrugged, “Et après?”
“We now have everything we need to make a simple pipe bomb,” Picq said.
“I don’t like it. C’est fou. We want the jade in one piece!” Gassot said.
His comrades had always preferred action to planning. Nothing had changed since Indochina.
“We have to open the safe in the house,” Picq said. “I was in the demolition unit, remember? I can do this with my eyes closed.”
“Never.” Gassot stood up. “If the jade’s in there, you’ll ruin it. I won’t have anything to do with this crazy scheme.”