After this was over — after Zurich, where there were sure to be more delays — he’d reward himself with a trip to Florence and perhaps Rome. He might take a few weeks and do some of his own work, play with a few sketches, before taking up the other projects he’d agreed to.
But how to kill these two hours?
He saw the Metro entrance ahead, and reached into his pocket for the carnet of tickets he had purchased upon arriving yesterday. Nothing like the subway for wasting time.
“Buggers,” Nessa muttered to herself. Then she raised her voice to read the name of the Metro station, making sure the microphone tacked below her collar could pick it up and broadcast it to her companions.
Plunging down the stairway, she broke into a trot trying to find her subject. Jairdain should be coming down the other side somewhere — she looked for him as she jostled the contents of her purse for a Metro ticket.
They’d foreseen this, talked about it, planned for it, and yet here she was, nearly falling to pieces.
Inside, the place was a maze. Left or right at the tunnel intersection? There were different lines traveling in cross directions.
Jairdain would take one, but which?
“Go right,” he said in her ear.
“Oui. Thank you.” Nessa turned and trotted onward, craning her neck upward, ducking around a small pack of Korean tourists. A man with a suit was walking about twenty meters ahead. Music filtered in from the platform beyond the access, then the soft rush of the rubber-wheeled train arriving.
“Damn,” she said, throwing herself into a run.
Too late. The rush had been of the train leaving, not arriving.
Nessa was so busy cursing herself she almost bumped into the tall, thin American standing in front of the advertisement for the Louvre at the end of the platform. He held his elbows in his palms like an X across his chest, and frowned at her severely as she recovered her balance.
Crisscrossing aimlessly on the subway lines, Elata arrived finally at Sully-Morland with only a half hour more to kill. He came up from the Metro and walked down the Rue de Birague, turning toward the Maison de Victor Hugo, the home of the famous author, which had been turned into a museum.
He glanced at his watch. Though less than five minutes had passed since he had emerged from the subway, fear paralyzed him — he was going to be late. He turned and began running, streaking across the Place des Vosges, dodging the strollers like a madman. He ran up Rue de Turenne, bolting through traffic. Elata ran every day at home, but rarely this hard; he reached the Musée Picasso with fifteen minutes to spare.
He was at the far end of the ground floor, studying the greens of Woman Reading when the fire alarm sounded. By then he had caught his breath. He walked down the steps deliberately, went straight as directed by the guards, down another flight, moved back, turned left, and found the steps.
A woman in her thirties pushed into him. Her strong perfume caressed his nose. He felt her push the envelope into his pocket; he slipped it into his breast pocket and continued to walk, once more following the guards’ directions.
There were sirens outside, police and fire trucks arriving, someone yelling that they had seen smoke in the basement, someone else swearing there was smoke in the back gallery of the first floor — both were correct, as it happened, though in neither case would the small devices emit enough agent to damage the museum or its treasures.
Elata ignored the rushing firemen and the crowd gathering on the sidewalk. A taxi was just reaching the curb. He pushed past two tourists who had queued for it, ignoring their protests as he threw open the door and jumped in. The taxi lurched away without pause; its driver knew already where he was to take his passenger.
Jairdain slammed his hands on the trunk of the car as Nessa reached the curb.
“J’suis dans la merde,” said the French Interpol agent.
Pierre ran up to him, immediately joining in the coarse denouncing of their fate.
“Calm down,” Nessa told them when she arrived.
“To have lost him here,” said Jairdain before cursing again.
“Easy now, lads,” she said. “Someone in the museum passed him something when the alarm sounded. We’ve just got to track it down.”
“Oui?” said Pierre. “Who?”
“There was a woman on the steps, two guards, and someone who looked like a tourist,” she told them. “We’ll hunt down the tourist first. She’s the only one likely to get away.”
Gabriel Morgan had seen both great opportunities and great trials in his life, but the torture he faced presently must surely rank among the most acute. For here he was, in one of Zurich’s newest and finest restaurants — A, which might stand for America, or the beginning of the alphabet, or anything else one wished — and he could not, or should not, choose from any of the excellent entrees. Not American wild duck in a blueberry-tarragon sauce, which carried with it unadvertised hints of mustard and sherry. Not the exotic but somehow pleasing foie gras soup peppered with ostrich bits in sake with white bean coulis and red pepper tortillas. Not even the deceptively simple sole in vermouth, which was built from a beurre blanc that would have left Escoffier speechless.
Morgan could have none of these dishes. Or rather, he could have any of them, if he was prepared to pay the price. His intestines had plagued him intermittently over the past six or seven months; the doctors offered different theories and countless remedies, though their advice came down to the same thing: eat plainly. No cream sauces, no spices, no exotic meats. They would prefer that he stay out of restaurants entirely, but if he must go, he should order something simple—baked capon, with no spices, no sauce, no salt, no pepper, no skin. They might just as well have told him not to have sex.
Perhaps not, for he could exert enough willpower most days to limit his diet. His other appetites, however, were more difficult to curb, as the Mieser twins, sitting across from him at the table in A’s exclusive red room, would surely attest.
He glanced at the girls, who had already settled on what they would eat — salmon and turnip daube in a radish-mango sauce for Lucretia, who loved the cornichons that came with it; American Cajun-style blackened catfish for Minz, who hungered for all manner of heat. Lucretia met Morgan’s gaze with a smile that hinted his hunger might be easily satiated. Minz, always so competitive with her sister, reached her hand beneath the table and raked his leg gently with her fingernails.
Morgan liked to bring the girls here mostly for the scandalous effect they had on the natives who considered themselves daring enough to venture beyond the traditional German-inspired restaurants in the town’s exclusive residential sections. Besides their Italian actress mother, the twins’ ancestors included three different dukes and an uncrowned German prince. And while the exact content of their father’s extensive pharmaceutical holdings were the subject of much local rumor and debate, their own assets were hardly obscured by the sheer blouses they wore above only slightly more modest black skirts. Morgan returned to the menu. He could choose the planked salmon, which was relatively plain and had not upset his stomach in the past. But it bothered him considerably that, rather than being cooked on American northwest cedar, it was prepared on local pine. Whether that made a major difference in its taste, he could not say, but the knowledge that he was eating a dish flavored by ersatz wood reminded him that he was doomed to an existence removed from the real thing, perhaps forever. And the fact that he could not easily return to the States vexed him far more severely than serial indigestion.