Twenty minutes later, I stopped across the river from the Eiffel Tower. Calling up the picture, I looked at the woman and wondered if she and AB-16 wanted to topple the Eiffel Tower and all the great monuments of Paris. It had been Hitler’s plan once. Were they really out to obliterate French culture like that? Were they really out to see Paris burning?
Those questions put me in a foul mood and I walked on, thinking that I needed to eat. The Plaza was a few blocks away, and there were several cafés from which to choose. But before I decided, the phone I’d just bought rang.
“Louis?” I answered.
“Louis told me to call, Jack,” Michele Herbert said. “I hope that was okay.”
“More than okay,” I said, feeling tension drain from my shoulders. “Would you like to have lunch?”
There was a pause, and then she said, “I’d like that very much.”
I hailed a taxi, giving the driver the address of a café that Michele Herbert had suggested in the 6th Arrondissement, not far from L’Académie des Beaux-Arts.
We got there at virtually the same time. Just seeing her made me forget all about terrorists and bombs and burning horses. For an hour, anyway, I wanted to put it all aside and find out more about her.
But when we took a table, all she wanted to talk about was the night before and what I’d seen and done.
“You were a big help, by the way,” I said. “That guy, Epée? I followed him to the factory that burned down last night and that horse statue. Did you see it?”
“All of France has seen it,” she said. “Is he in custody?”
“Not that I know of,” I said.
Between breaks to order food, I told her the rest of it.
“You saved that cop’s life,” she said, shaking her head.
“Anyone would have,” I said.
“This is not so,” Michele said with a dismissive flick of her fork. “So what then? You went back to the factory? You saw the horse burn in person?”
“I did.”
“Though I hate to admit it, I thought the sculpture and the way it burned were brilliant. Was it as spectacular in person as it was on-screen?”
“Awe-inspiring, and unforgettable,” I said. “I guess that was the point.”
“Point taken,” Michele said. “So what will happen tonight? Will AB-16 attack again?”
“The police and army better assume so.”
That seemed to upset her. “I want to fight them, but I don’t know how.”
“I hear you, but this is a national security deal now.”
“The government pursues leads?” she asked. “That is the word, isn’t it?”
I nodded. “I’m sure they are. But they should be looking for this woman.”
Getting out the phone and calling up the picture, I said, “Even though she looks a lot different here in the robes and head scarf, I think she was the same woman I saw on a bus just before the Sevran explosion.”
Intrigued, Michele took the phone. She looked at the picture blankly at first, but then her facial muscles twitched and she enlarged the phone so the face of the woman filled the small screen.
For several moments, the art professor gazed at the picture, blinking as her other hand came slowly to her lips.
“My God,” Michele whispered. “Why didn’t I see it last night?”
Chapter 94
12th Arrondissement
1:10 p.m.
A TAXI DROPPED us down the block from our destination.
Michele looked nervous. “What if I’m wrong?”
“Then we walk away,” I said.
“And if I’m right?” she said.
“I take a picture, we walk away, find the police.”
The art professor chewed the corner of her lip.
“You said you wanted to fight them,” I reminded her.
That pushed her over the top. She led the way to a four-story apartment building that had recently been sandblasted. She rang a bell and waited. She rang again, looked back at me, and made a “What do I do?” gesture.
An older man exited the apartment building. Barely giving us a glance, he walked away, the door closing slowly behind him.
I grabbed the door before it closed.
“I can’t be part of a break-in,” Michele said quietly, looking after the old man.
“All you’re doing is knocking on a door,” I said, and then told her what I had in mind.
She was doubtful, but went inside the building and started up the stairs. I went back up the street, counting doors-seven-and hung a left and then a quick left again into an alleyway I’d seen on the Google Maps app on Michele’s smartphone during the taxi ride over from the restaurant.
I counted rear exits and found scaffolding set up behind the seventh building. The workers appeared to be on break, so I started climbing. As I did, I noticed a Dumpster beneath the scaffolding and flower boxes behind it.
When I reached the fourth floor, I texted Michele. “Knock.”
I heard a dull rap-rap-rap coming from one of the windows. The shade was drawn. The window was shut and locked.
I checked the alley again and looked over my shoulder at the building behind me. I had the place to myself.
I drew the Glock and used it to bust in one of the windowpanes. Reaching in, I tore down the shade and undid the latch.
Then I climbed inside, gun first.
Chapter 95
THE APARTMENT SEEMED to be a home for hoarders. I stepped in on a toolbox wedged between stacks of newspapers and magazines. A hodgepodge of broken furniture was piled along the walls. There were dozens of lidded five-gallon buckets too-stacks of them.
Rap-rap-rap.
I picked my way through the mess, threw the bolt, and opened the door.
Michele slipped in and I shut the door behind her.
“I don’t like this,” she said. “I shouldn’t be here.”
“All we need is a picture that confirms it. And then we go. But all this crap? Does it make sense? It feels like a storage unit for a slob.”
“Think of it as a supply warehouse,” Michele said. “These are materials.”
“You’re the artist,” I said, and then found the kitchen, which was tidy and uncluttered.
There were still droplets of water on the insides of glasses sitting upside down in a rack. Used very recently, probably within the last hour.
But beyond that, there was nothing on the counters or cabinets, and no pictures-no touch of home at all. For all the junk in the outer room, the mind behind this was ordered and operating in a stripped-down fashion. Whatever this place was, it was not a home.
That feeling hung with me when I returned to find Michele in the storage area with the lids off several buckets filled with metal parts, nails, and short lengths of iron rod. Seeing the contents, I became single-minded and walked down the hallway to the bedroom and the bath. I was positive we were in the right place; now we just needed to prove it.
In the bedroom I found stripped twin beds, two empty dressers, and bare walls. Except for a few hangers, the closet was also empty. And there was a bleach smell in the air. This was either the lair of someone who swept tracks or more likely someone who’d just cleared out.
“Merde,” I said.
“Gone?” Michele asked as she came into the room.
“Probably for good,” I said.
I took a step and raised the bedroom window shade, throwing light across the wood floor. By the discoloration, I could tell that there’d been a rug there by the bed, and by the scratches, a chair and table of some sort up against the wall.
I mentioned it, and Michele said, “Drafting table.”
I pushed up the sash, looked out the bedroom window, and saw that the apartment below had a window box with churned earth and freshly planted flowers. Something small and golden that I couldn’t make out sparkled in the dirt.
But I was more interested in the Dumpster in the alley directly below the window. People who leave places for good throw away their trash and whatever else they don’t want before they move. I squinted. Was that a piece of a cell phone down there?