“He was just there all of a sudden, saying something about my father. But why would he be there, you know?”
“So what happened?” Amé demanded. “What did he say? More importantly, what did you say?”
“I didn’t say a goddamned word,” he replied fiercely. “I took one look at him, figured it couldn’t be a good thing, and took off. He’s, like, in his fifties. Didn’t stand a chance. I climbed the back wall of Père-Lachaise, and it was over.”
“You’re sure you weren’t followed?” Haja asked.
“Like I said, it was over at the wall.”
“But now he thinks you’ve got something to run about,” Amé said.
“I do have something to run about. We all do.”
“Have you told Sauvage?” Haja asked.
“I don’t have his new burn cell number, or Mfune’s.”
“I’ll call him,” Haja said. She punched in the number, handed the phone to Epée.
He told the story again. Sauvage said nothing until the end.
“You’re positive you were clean after the cemetery wall?”
“Yes.”
“I want you out of Paris immediately,” the major said. “Haja will give you money and the address of a safe house in the south. Let me speak to her.”
Epée handed Haja the phone.
Haja took the phone, listened, and nodded. “I’ll get both taken care of.”
She hung up and said, “We’ll give you ten thousand euros, and the address. Move in disguise. Use burn phones.”
“Okay,” the tagger said.
“It’s out in the factory with the creature,” Haja said, and went through another door into the cavernous space that held her sculpture.
The place was only dimly lit, but the beast loomed above them, looking otherworldly and fantastic. Epée tripped over electric cables on the floor.
“It’s all hitched up?” he asked.
“Yes,” Haja said curtly as she went to the table where she kept her tools.
Epée peered at the creature and thought he saw where the electrical cables attached to the lower legs of the beast. He pivoted to ask her if he was-
Haja’s powerful arms and shoulders were already swinging a piece of rebar. It cracked against the side of the tagger’s head. Fire and pain seized his brain, and he crashed to the ground.
Haja stepped over Epée’s quivering body and hit him again, so hard she heard and felt his skull cave in.
“God. What did you do that for?” Amé whined.
“He became a liability,” Haja replied coldly. “Émile said we had to martyr him for the cause.”
Chapter 83
DARKNESS FELL. THE number of joggers running along the canal dwindled to stragglers, and all of them were on the better-lit south bank, which was a problem.
In the twenty minutes that had passed since Epée went into the old building, I’d wanted to call Louis and tell him roughly where I was. But the two or three runners who came by either laughed at my pitiful efforts at French-one of them said that I spoke the language like a Spanish cow-or shook their heads at my request to use their cell phones, and carried on.
I decided to go back across the bridge and was a quarter of the way across when the door that Epée had used opened, and two Muslim women wearing dark brown robes and head scarves exited and headed west carrying large shopping bags with a logo on them that I couldn’t make out. One of them glanced up at me as I continued to cross toward them. She craned her head around and did it again after they’d walked beneath the south end of the bridge.
I continued on, as if I hadn’t a care in the world. When I started down the stairs, I meant to find a cell and wait for Louis before entering the building in search of Piggott. But when I looked after the retreating figures of the Muslim women, there was something about the way they were walking, as if there was something heavy in their shopping bags.
Blame it on my time in Afghanistan, because there was nothing rational or logical about it, but at the bottom of the stairs I decided to go with my instincts, abandon Piggott, and follow the women. They seemed even warier than Epée. It took all of my skills to stay below their radar. They turned left into that pedestrian mall. I stripped the Windbreaker, leaving the red hoodie exposed, and ran to catch up.
Fewer than half the teens were still hanging out in the area, but there were still enough of them that I didn’t seem to arouse the attention of the two women as they headed toward the main drag.
Instead of turning right toward the Métro station, however, they hung a hard left past a bar called the Pause, which was bustling with a happy hour crowd. I drifted toward a group of men and women chatting merrily, but stayed focused on the two women hurrying down the sidewalk.
I had a moment of doubt, thinking that I should go back and sit on Piggott, but then the women veered toward a small blue Suzuki two-door SUV. They opened the driver’s and passenger doors and popped forward the front seats so they could put the bags in the back.
They climbed in and started the car.
I didn’t know what to do. They pulled out of their parking spot and up to a red traffic light. I went to the curb as if I meant to cross the street. I memorized the license plate but could tell little about the women because they had their visors down.
The light changed. The engine revved and the vehicle drifted forward. For an instant a streetlamp lit up the interior enough that I could see the shopping bags.
The driver must have slipped her foot off the clutch pedal because the Suzuki suddenly bucked. Several pieces of what looked like white gravel fell off the rear bumper into the gutter. The car caught gear and roared off.
Stepping down off the curb, I picked up a piece of the gravel and saw that it was actually a powdery blue color. I smelled it, tasted it, spit it out, and felt my suspicions become hard convictions.
Spinning around, I jumped out into the street in front of an oncoming maroon and black Citroën, waving my hands wildly. The old car skidded to a stop inches from my knees, and I could see that the elderly woman driving was wide-eyed and scared.
I came around, opened the door, and climbed in. She was hunched over and gray, easily in her late seventies, but she began to hit me backhand with her fist and scream, “Non! Non! Police! Police!”
“Je suis avec police!” I said, fending off the blows, trying to dig out my ID. “Privé Paris police. Suivez la voiture bleu là! Le Suzuki! C’est les defaceurs de l’Institut de France! AB-16. Vous comprenez?”
I was butchering the language, but she must have gotten the gist of what I was trying to say, because she stopped hitting me and looked down the street, where the Suzuki was making a U-turn to go east on the N3 highway, before crying in an angry voice, “Ah bon!”
Then she pegged the gas, popped the clutch, and we squealed out of there with the tires smoking.
Chapter 84
SHE SPOKE NO English and suffered badly from scoliosis, but that old lady was sharp as a tack and could have given Danica Patrick a run for her money.
Weaving in and out of traffic with deft shifting of the gears and an easy touch at the wheel, she Tokyo-drifted us through the U-turn, and quickly brought us to within two cars of the Suzuki in moderate traffic. She chattered almost nonstop, as if she hadn’t had a listener in a while, and even though I was definitely missing the nuances of her monologue, I learned that her name was Eloise La Bruyere. Madame La Bruyere was a retired librarian. She had learned to drive from her husband, who had been involved in rally car racing and was now deceased.
At seventy-nine, Madame La Bruyere lived alone and rather liked it that way. Her children-two sons and a daughter-did not visit enough. She had six grandchildren, one of whom had purple hair. Best of all, she took great pride in France and her culture, and therefore hated AB-16, which she knew all about from the newspapers.