“I thought you’d like it,” she said, drawing him back to her table. Hugo glanced at the proprietor again, but the man looked away, seeming not to care whether Hugo wanted coffee or not.
“So who were you interviewing?” Hugo asked.
“A dancer.”
“A real dancer, or someone who takes her clothes off and also dances?”
“Yes, Hugo, I was interviewing Mikhail Baryshnikov.”
“Wow, he launders his own clothes?”
She laughed. “And he wears women’s underwear.”
“Well, so do you.”
She squeezed his arm and gazed into his eyes. “Not always.”
“OK, you didn’t bring me to this drab little hellhole to tease me, did you?”
“No. To give you a scoop.”
“That’s the wrong way around. I’m supposed to tip you off.”
“Ah well. I have good sources, you don’t. Just take the information and be grateful.”
“Which has something to do with a connection between our dead girl, Al Zakiri, and Jane Avril. I’m all ears.”
“Right, but first about Jane Avril’s grave being robbed. I have a friend, no details, who works at the lab that French police use.”
“Lab?”
“She’s a forensic pathologist. Anyway, she says that only half of Jane Avril’s skeleton was taken. Lower half. She says no way someone randomly grabbing bones would come away with what he took.”
“Interesting. What else?”
“Well, you know why Jane Avril was famous, right?”
“The Moulin Rouge, she was a …” Hugo trailed off.
“A dancer. That’s right. Here’s the connection: so was Abida Kiani. At the Moulin Rouge.”
“Are you serious?”
“She started a month ago. Apparently very good, though had a tendency to moonlight after performances with customers in a way that management didn’t approve of.”
“Is that how she met Maxwell Holmes?”
“Right again.”
Hugo pictured the thin girl walking up the street as he’d exited the taxi. “Your source is another dancer. A reluctant source.”
“Most are. And yes, she is.”
“And no doubt you can’t give me her name.”
Claudia gave him a thin smile. “No doubt at all. You know the rules.”
“Of course. Does she know anything about Al Zakiri?”
“No. Never met him, never even heard Kiani mention him. The only man she ever saw Kiani with was Maxwell Holmes. Apparently she was crazy about him.”
“Senator Holmes isn’t going to like that. OK, I need to get over there, start talking to people. When is your story running?”
“As soon as I can get to a computer.”
“Then I’ll walk you to the metro. If you know where one is.”
They stepped outside and Hugo looked up at the sky. Dark clouds had formed overhead and the air had become still, the street as empty as it was before he walked into the laundromat. They turned right, the metro stop not even a mile away according to Claudia. As they walked, Hugo kept watch on the buildings either side of them, shuttered stores and silent tenements that might once have teemed with life but now crouched at the curb like abandoned pets, solemn and sad, waiting for a master’s return.
It was from a doorway that the two men came, the first people Hugo had seen on the street, leaning like pillars at the top of three stone steps, watching like owls in the night. Hugo had taken Claudia’s arm as they passed the men, boys really, and she’d held tighter to him, too, not worrying so much about the purse that was hanging from her right shoulder.
The boys had skipped down quietly, Hugo later assumed it was a plan they’d executed more than once, their timing told him that. The first kid sprinted between Hugo and the road, brushing shoulders with him, drawing his attention as the second boy trotted past Claudia and yanked at her purse, tearing it away from her before she knew what was happening.
Hugo took off after them, Claudia close behind, four sets of feet pounding the sidewalk. Hugo was faster than they’d bargained, Tom had said that much two decades earlier at Quantico during the sprints, and he made ground on them, street thugs dressed for the part of thieves but not athletes, tugging at baggy pants and billowing shirts that acted like sails to slow them down.
The leader, ten steps ahead of his accomplice, shouted, “Cata …” the word drifting apart before it reached Hugo. Five seconds later, an invisible signal snapped the kids left, across the road toward an alley between a rundown grocery store and an abandoned movie theater. As he crossed in pursuit, Hugo checked to make sure Claudia was close behind. She was, her face the picture of determination and outrage, her eyes not on him but on the men who’d robbed her.
Hugo slowed as he tilted into the alley. A brick wall less than thirty feet away told him the boys had taken a wrong turn, would be hiding in the shadows.
Claudia thumped into his back. “Merde. Where are those bastards?”
They peered along the narrow space, Hugo’s eyes drawn to the two dumpsters that backed up against the cinema’s wall. He reminded himself that his targets were young, looking for money or maybe a thrill, but probably not looking to hurt anyone. Drawing his gun wasn’t an option.
He moved slowly toward the dumpsters, Claudia an arm’s length behind him. Twenty yards away he knelt to look beneath them but saw no feet. He hurried and Claudia hurried with him, but when he rounded the stinking metal containers they both saw that they hid nothing. The alley was empty.
“Here,” Hugo said, shifting a four-foot-square plywood board that covered a hole in the theater’s wall.
“Be careful,” Claudia said.
“Always.” He stuck his head through the hole but saw nothing, only blackness. He waited and his eyes adjusted. The room was small, maybe an office but empty of furniture. It had a wood floor that, in the far corner, had been ripped up. It looked to Hugo like the entrance to a cellar.
He eased his body through the hole into the room and peered into the black space in the floor.
“Use this,” Claudia said, handing him a lighter.
“I thought you’d given up smoking.”
“I had. I’m rethinking that position.”
He flicked the lid open and sparked the lighter, holding the flame into the splintered hole. The light bounced off limestone walls and he could see that it was no cellar, more like a tunnel. A well-used one, judging by the beer cans and plastic bags that littered the floor. The flame leaned away from him, then whipped upright and flickered uncertainly as a breeze flowed across Hugo’s hand. He closed his eyes as an image fought itself into his mind, an image of two young men covered in dust, tired but content, riding the metro out of the city center back to the suburbs. He turned to Claudia.
“I know how he’s doing it.”
“Who?” she asked. “Doing what?”
“The Scarab. Père Lachaise.” A grin spread across his face. “I know how he’s getting in and out without being seen.”
Claudia’s face appeared in the ragged gap. “How?”
“Underground. Like this. He’s found a way underground into the cemetery.”
“Merde, are you talking about …”
“The catacombs.” Hugo moved toward her. “I should have seen it before, it’s the only possible way.”
“You really think so?”
“It must be. There’s a hundred of miles of tunnels under Paris, going every which way. If there’s a sewer line running under the cemetery, or just a collapsed grave, he can get there from pretty much anywhere in the city.”
She nodded and looked past him into the hole. “And my bag?”
“Halfway across Paris by now,” he said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll leave it at Père Lachaise for us.”
“You’re planning on going back there?”