“So you said.”
Hearing them sip, the major dared not move, and fought to slow his breath and heart as he unlocked the blade and slid it back in his pocket. Then he wrapped the rope around both of his gloved hands with fourteen inches of slack between, and waited.
“I’ve thought about nothing but you all week,” Henri said. “It’s been maddening we couldn’t meet, and…you know.”
“We needed a break,” Haja replied. “Kiss me?”
“With the greatest pleasure.”
Haja made a purr of contentment. There was a rustle of fabric, and Sauvage made his move, sliding out from behind the curtain. He spotted Henri on the couch, back turned in Haja’s embrace.
Stealthy and supple, the major took four silent steps up behind him.
Haja broke the kiss, laughed throatily, and pushed Henri back several inches. It was all Sauvage needed. He flipped the rope over the man’s head and wrenched it tight beneath his chin.
Henri began to struggle, his hands flying to the rope as he let out a squeal of disbelief and fear. The choked man kicked over the champagne bottle and one of the glasses. The major ruthlessly wrenched him off the divan and onto the stage floor.
“No,” Henri wheezed. “Please.”
Sauvage realized he was saying this to Haja.
But Haja only had eyes for the major as she rose from the couch and the older man’s struggles subsided into quivers and then death.
“You are a revolutionary, Émile,” she said as he lowered the dead man until he lay on his side. “A man on the right side of history.”
Twenty minutes later, they shut down the apron lights and made their way to the rear door of the backstage area. Sauvage opened it a crack and saw the security post still empty and cops, the guard, and other bystanders across the traffic circle watching firemen up on ladders, spraying down the smoking roof of the Galeries Lafayette.
No one gave them a second glance when he and Haja slipped out the gate and strolled up the Rue Scribe, arm in arm and heads tilted inward, like lovers heading home after a nice late night on the town.
Chapter 13
SEVERAL SHARP KNOCKS woke me.
Sweat poured off my head and I looked around wildly, realizing I was on the couch in the living room of my suite at the Plaza.
The knock came again. I glanced at my watch. Two minutes to seven.
“Coming,” I grunted, and got up to pad across the carpet to the door. I heard the shower start up again in Kim Kopchinski’s end of the suite.
I looked through the peek hole. Louis Langlois was out in the hallway behind a room service cart laden with baskets of croissants and delicate pastries, and two carafes of coffee that immediately piqued my interest.
“I didn’t know room service was part of your job description,” I said after opening the door to let him in.
“It’s not,” Louis said. “But I adore the croissants here, so perfectly buttery and flaky, you know? I just could not wait for you to make the order.”
When we returned to the living area, Louis began pouring us coffee. “She talk?”
“Never left her bedroom,” I said.
“What’s she been doing?”
“Showering, crying, sleeping, and now showering again.”
“Perhaps she is a compulsive obsessive?” Louis asked before taking a big bite of the croissant that melted his face into pure contentment.
“You ask her that,” I said before tearing off a piece of croissant and popping it in my mouth. The taste was simply incredible, not like the stuff you get back in the States, even in the best of bakeries.
“You like these, yes?”
“Extraordinary,” I said, chewing and then taking a long sip of perfect café au lait. “God, how is it possible that the French eat like this every day and don’t weigh three hundred pounds?”
“That is a cultural secret I am bound to keep,” Langlois said. He laughed and then sobered after glancing at the door to Kim’s room. “I suspect she has been abused.”
“Why would you think that?”
Louis drank more coffee and then said, “Many times when I have interviewed poor victims of such abuse, I have found that we could not collect evidence from their bodies because they had scrubbed them so clean.”
I looked at the closed door, wondered if that was the case. It would certainly explain why she’d been so reluctant to talk to us.
“Maybe we should bring in one of the women in your office,” I said. “Make her more comfortable.”
Louis shook half a croissant at me and said, “A good idea. I’ll see to it at once.”
He finished the pastry, drank down more coffee, got out his cell, and punched in the number for Private Paris. Interested to see what was going on back in the States on CNN, I turned on the television, getting instead a commercial for cheese on TF1, a French station. I was about to change the channel when the commercial ended and the screen switched to a Paris street scene at night. A crowd watched firemen spraying the roof of a smoking building.
“Garde will be here in half an hour,” Louis said. “She’s excellent.”
“What’s going on here?” I said, gesturing at the television.
He stepped up beside me, listened, and then said, “A fire last night at the Galeries Lafayette. No one was injured. Must be a slow news day.”
I looked from the television back to the closed doors to Kim’s bedroom. The shower was still going.
Walking to the doors, I knocked lightly and called, “Kim?”
I waited and then knocked louder, and called, “Kim, we have breakfast out here for you. Could you come out?”
Hearing nothing in return, I glanced at Langlois, who squinted and then made a twisting motion with his right hand. I found the door locked, so I knocked loud enough to be heard easily over the falling water. Nothing again.
“God help me if she’s cut her wrists in there,” I said, pulling out my electronic key card and jimmying the lock.
It took me less than fifteen seconds to pry back the hasp and push open the door to find a rumpled bed, an open window, and a closed bathroom door. I almost went to the door to knock again, but I noticed a note on a piece of hotel stationery sitting on the dresser.
Scrawled in big letters, it said, “Tell my grandfather I’m sorry to have bothered him in troubles of my own making. I’m sorry to everyone.”
Chapter 14
“SON-OF-A-BITCH,” I groaned, sure that she’d gone and done it-committed suicide on me.
I wrenched open the bathroom door and was enveloped in steam. The bathtub was empty. So was the shower.
“She’s running,” Louis said behind me.
“Impossible,” I said, rushing out. “How could she have gotten out of here?”
“The window?” He was already heading that way.
But we were eighty feet up. She’d have to be a human fly.
What about that locked door to that other bedroom? I ran to it, tried the knob, but found it still locked and no sign that the lock had been picked.
Then I noticed the chair in the closet. It faced shelves and drawers and, high on the closet wall, an air duct, which was missing its grate. The hole would have been impossible for me or Louis to squeeze through. But Kim Kopchinski was certainly small enough.
But could she get out? Or was she still in the ductwork somewhere?
Jumping up on the chair, I peered into the duct and saw, ten or twelve feet away, a thick beam of light shining in where another grate had been.
“Damn it,” I snapped, and jumped off the chair, finding Louis searching the bedroom. “She used the air system to get next door. But I heard her turn on the shower right before you knocked. She can’t be ten minutes ahead of us.”
Louis yanked out his phone again, punched in a number, and began barking questions in French. I went out into the living area, grabbed my shoes, and laced them quickly.
Louis stuck his phone in his pocket and started moving fast toward the suite door, saying, “My man outside, Farad, saw a woman matching Kim’s description leave the hotel ten minutes ago and head north. If she has not taken a taxi, we can catch her.”