X. STRANGERS ON A TRAM
Raffael was doing his best to handle his nerves each day knowing that his sister and her daughter were in the hands of these evil people. He knew he was being watched around the clock and he heeded the warning not to contact any authority. However, the pressure was taking its toll. He understood that what the kidnappers wanted him to do would destroy the super hadron collider, a multi-billion dollar project that was the pride of the European Union and the premiere example of international cooperation in big science. Yet, how could any price be put on the lives of his innocent niece and sister?
Upon returning home to his empty house in the evening, his hand shook as he fumbled to get the key into the lock. With his overcoat still on, he poured wine into a glass. Every night now he drank to calm his nerves. He had shunned all his friends, shutdown and erased all trace of his Facebook and Twitter accounts, and avoided any contact with anybody, as instructed. Whenever the kidnappers were going to have him do their bidding, he hoped it was soon; he couldn’t take this much longer. The cell phone they had given him rang.
“You took the tram today,” Maya’s flat voice stated.
“Yes, I hadn’t slept at all last night; I didn’t want to drive and have an accident.”
“There was a man in a brown coat; was he a policeman?”
“Who? What — a policeman? What man?”
“Do we have to send you Kirsi’s right eye to help you remember?”
“No, no, I tell you! I spoke to no one!” His mind raced, who is she talking about? He replayed the tram ride. Then he remembered the man who stood next to him for a time; he had a Bluetooth earpiece and was chatting to someone. “Wait, there was a man next to me talking on his phone, but not to me; it was a small earpiece; you couldn’t see it? I didn’t speak to him at all.”
There was a long pause. The sweat beaded on Raffey’s forehead. These animals on the phone acted swiftly and with no mercy. How could I have been so stupid to take a public tram? “Please believe me, I didn’t speak to anyone; I wouldn’t; he wasn’t talking to me! I wouldn’t do anything to hurt them.” More silence. Then the line went dead. “No! No! I didn’t do anything wrong. Don’t hurt them — please,” Raffey cried out as he strangled the phone in his right hand. He crumpled to the floor and whimpered, imagining the horror he had just brought down on little Kirsi.
Then the cell phone rang again. He fumbled with it to open it. “Please, please…”
“We will allow this one breach. But now the punishment doubles — if you disobey us, both eyes.” She hung up.
Raffey screamed and began to shake uncontrollably.
Being former FBI has its cachet, and still being an active FBI agent had perks, so Brooke, the current, and Joey, the former, stood before Paul Dumond, the chief of Station Interpol, Paris. His office looked as though it had been painted a semi-gloss putty color twenty years ago. It gave the place the same dismal funk as a South Bronx precinct house.
“We think we have found your mystery man. His name is Parnell Sicard, a.k.a. Percival Smyth, Percival Cutney and Percival Wallace. He is dead, 1983 Beirut. He was a Jesuit missionary trying to help the Christian sect in Lebanon when he died in the Hobart Towers blast.”
“Well, now we got a problem because, as I said, “Percy” was very much alive when the Surté snatched him right out from under me at the train station,” Joey said.
“Ah yes, that ‘incident’ officially never happened.”
“Wanna run that by me again?” Joey leaned onto his desk, his palms nearly missing an old spike onto which an inch of phone message slips were shish-kebabbed.
“I mean, there is no record, no radio calls and no judge’s decree on file.”
“Wait a minute; the director of French intelligence was there with Mr. Palumbo. Surely he has corroborated his story,” Brooke said.
“We have spoken with Director Dupré. He maintains the documents were authentic and he had no choice but to comply. Since there was no outstanding warrant to the contrary, he could not detain Sicard, especially with the clarity of the judge’s orders.”
“Can you at least tell me which judge signed the order?”
Even for a French guy, the look on his face said, ‘Oops, I didn’t think of that’ as he reached for the phone and told his secretary to contact Dupré.
Seven minutes had passed. Joey was looking out a nicotine-tinged windowpane at the comings and goings of the Parisians on the street. He realized that few were actually coming or going, as most were sitting at sidewalk tables, on benches or steps. Everyone was smoking and drinking coffee. This whole friggin’ country is one big Starbucks.
The phone rang; it was Dupré. Dumond put him on the speakerphone. “I believe it was Magistrate Vaval.”
“This is Joey Palumbo; what was the cause of the order?”
“The order read ‘person of interest’ in a Grand Inquiry.”
“Agent Brooke Burrell, FBI here. May I ask, inquiry into what?” She looked down at the phone as she talked.
“Ah, bonjour mademoiselle, that only the judge can say.”
“It’s like your Grand Jury, only a lot more secretive. Our liable laws and privacy statutes demand that all inquiries into possible wrongdoing be held in the closest confidence until, and only if, there is an indictment,” Dumond said, shaking his head in apology.
“That explains why there is no record of a file.” Brooke said.
“I work directly for the president of the United States. Do you think the judge will tell me?” Joey said.
Both Dupré on the phone and Dumond in the office said simultaneously, “You can try!”
It took all of two hours, but the American ambassador to France, the French charge d’affair, a handful of French diplomats and Joey were huddled in the judge’s outer chamber. His clerk emerged and announced that the judge would see only the ambassador. Joey thought better of protesting as the ambassador was well briefed and a good negotiator.
Ten minutes ticked by as Joey sat in the judge’s anteroom, which smelled of steam heat and plaster. His eyes kept falling on the visages of past magistrates, frozen on canvas in the somber hues of cracked oils, each one looking fouler than the last. It was as if their game face was scorn — a way of letting the Jean Q. Publis know his place in their legal system.
The ambassador exited and nodded for Joey to follow. As was good practice in foreign government buildings, they both walked in silence.
It wasn’t until they were in the ambassador’s limousine that the man spoke. “Well, that cost me.”
“He charged you for the information?” Joey asked.
“In not so many words. He knows my brother is the dean of admissions at Harvard and, well, the judge has a niece — ”
“Oh, dear God.”
“So he asked me to call my brother right from his office.”
“Okay, can we get to Cutney, eh, Smyth, damn it, Sicard? Who is he and why did the judge pull him from me?”
“He would not say.”
“Whoa, I thought you were good at this? You got the girl into Harvard and walked away with Stu?”
“I’m sorry, Stu?”
“Stu Gatz!”
The Ambassador wasn’t familiar with the slang Italian term meaning ‘nothing,’ whose actual translation was “testicles.” When the old men at the barbershop would say a deal didn’t work or fell through, or they didn’t win the amorous attention of a lady, they would ceremoniously grab their crotch and say, “Stugatz.” It was sometimes shortened to I got or didn’t get ‘Stu.’ Although not in the lexicon of the diplomat, he got the gist of it by its usage. “Now, I did get some information. It seems Sicard was called in for questioning about a long-abandoned case.”