Columbus (13 page)

I’ve been in a position to observe the inner workings of organized crime many times. Most mafias operate similarly: loyalty is rewarded; men rise through the ranks by some combination of battle-tested fealty and unfettered nepotism. Usually, this process can take an entire lifetime, and even then, a man’s stupidity or nerve can hinder him from rising past a low-level position within the enterprise. That Alex Coulfret ascended from armed stick-up man to a position powerful enough to fake his own death in such a relatively short time means my enemy is most likely intelligent, artful, and ruthless.

If I’m wrong, and the three mentions aren’t as colorful as I’m suggesting, then it does me no harm to assume the man is formidable. But I don’t think I’m wrong.

The next avenues I plan to investigate are the local police files on Coulfret. Perhaps they have more details tucked away in the back of a detective’s cabinet than in the database of the newspaper. Maybe the police know all about the man and are actively hunting him now, as I am.

I call BeBe at
Le Monde
from a pay phone near the Bastille and enlist her help in introducing me to a friendly police detective in the eleventh district. She is more than happy to do so; she knows just the man with whom I should speak, a detective named Gerard. How soon would I like to get started?

I hang up after agreeing on a meeting point and walk toward that creperie. I notice a young boy who can’t be more than six or seven, holding on to his father’s hand, coming toward me on the sidewalk ahead. The boy has to take two steps just to match his father’s pace, and the man never looks down at his child, lost in his own world. My mind turns to that silver wagon with the dropped handle. Why is that image so damned important to me? Why is it always on the edge of my mind, waiting like a stranger in the shadows, prepared to leap out and suffocate me at a moment’s notice?

I think I know the answer, though I don’t want to face it. Years ago, my father hired me to kill him, though I didn’t know all the details until the end. I thought I had mentally closed that door, put it behind me, walled it off, but maybe it can never fully be closed. At one time I thought I had control over the past, could shut it off from my mind like turning off a faucet, but I was wrong. Maybe it will always be with me, breaking its valve and pouring out whenever I’m vulnerable. Maybe. . . .

I catch a flash of silver ducking into a fabric shop across the street.

Something was off about it, something a little conspicuous, like a signal, and I cross the Rue Sedaine quickly, without thinking, reliant on years of heightened instinct. I know it’ll be a problem ducking into an unfamiliar store and there will be a delay as my eyes adjust from light to dark, but my feet carry me on, almost involuntarily.

What did I see? A piece of clothing? The flash of sunlight reflecting off of a gun barrel? I was too entranced in watching that kid and his father and that silver handle in my head and now I’ll have to grit my teeth and enter the place and if the Argentine woman wants to shoot me again then she should’ve pulled the trigger while my mind was on that boy who couldn’t remember his name.

She didn’t, though, and I’ll rely on my intuition as I pop through the door and scan the room. The fabric shop is small; there’s no one inside except an elderly Persian woman behind the cash register, but a carpeted stairwell with a sign pointing up reading “shawls” in English looms next to her.

I have my Glock in my hand as I head up the stairwell, trying to keep my footfalls silent, but the noise is deafening in the oppressive quiet of the store.

An uneasy feeling tightens my throat and I can feel the short hairs on the back of my neck rising. I’ve made many mistakes since taking that file from Ryan outside the cathedral in Turin, but this takes the fucking cake, plodding up a narrow stairwell toward a dimly lit second floor with a possible assassin at the top. If I get shot, I’ll go down pulling the trigger. If I get jumped, I’ll go down swinging. I’m ascending the final step, and there is an armed woman up here, but not the one I thought.

“She’s here.”

Ruby Grant, Archibald’s sister, stands next to a tiny window, peering down at the street. She nods for me to join her, and when I do, I catch a glimpse of another woman, this one with inky hair, stalking quickly down the sidewalk, searching, confused. I’ve seen her before, in a library in Chicago. The last time we met, I was ramming the back end of a yellow cab into the front end of hers.

Below, the woman breaks from our sight line and is gone.

Ruby appears amused, like she’s in the middle of telling a brilliant joke.

“That’s Llanos.”

“Yeah. . . . ”

“She got to Archie.”

“Got to him?”

“Well, got to talk to him, I should say. Archie’s good at talking. Always has been. He put her on your trail, then put me on hers.”

“He’s starting to rack up too many favors.”

“He likes you.”

I’m not sure how to respond to that, and Ruby sees it on my face. Her grin grows as effortlessly as an exhale, what must be a family trait.

“So you flew all the way here to warn me?”

“Don’t go gettin’ ideas. Professional preservation. At this point in the game, you being dead doesn’t do my brother much good.”

“What do you think me being alive does for him?”

Ruby shrugs. “Something I guess Archie will figure out at a later date.”

She nods out the window. “So how you want to handle this?”

“I’m going to drop her. Quietly.”

“I
know
that. I’m just asking if you want me to tag-team with you.”

“No. I’m afraid I already owe your family too much for my own good.”

“Suit yourself.”

I turn to head back down, hurrying so I don’t lose the trail of the woman who came here to kill me.

“Columbus. . . . ”

I stop.

“See you soon.”

I nod and clomp heavily down the stairs, afraid she’s probably right.

Llanos is half a block in front of me, addled. She was good enough to pick up my trail without alerting me, but not good enough to keep from losing the scent when I zigged when she thought I would zag. One mistake. As is the case so often in what we do, one mistake is the difference between Llanos living through the day and never seeing tomorrow’s sunrise.

She checks the street signs, watches the shadows, and I can see resignation manifest on her face. She lost me, even though she’s not sure how. She retraces her steps, bewildered, and then hurries in a trot toward the Rue de Lappe and the crepe shop where my meeting with the police detective is supposed to take place. So she must’ve been listening in on my call or wrenched the information from the PR woman at the newspaper, BeBe. I hope it is the former.

If I am going to ambush her, it is best to do it now, before she reaches the creperie a few blocks away, before the officer I’m supposed to be meeting witnesses the shooting.

An ambush is all about information and timing. I know where she’s headed, which allows me to dart over a block to the south, then up the street at a sprint, then over again to arrive in front of her. The timing centers on waiting until the final possible moment to take the first shot, to remove her defenses before she has a chance to engage them.

I stop at the corner, waiting for Llanos to materialize in front of me. She’s as oblivious as a rat sniffing cheese attached to a metal spring. I estimate I have thirty seconds before she emerges. The street is mostly deserted, so I’m not concerned about witnesses; perhaps the driver of a passing car will see something, but usually the shock of violence, the cacophony of a gunshot, gives me the freedom to hustle away unnoticed from the scene.

A door opens next to me and a crowd starts to spill out on to the sidewalk, children and parents and grandparents, and it is some sort of celebration complete with balloons and streamers and laughing and singing and they are passing me, heading for the corner directly in front of me, the intersection of the Rue de la Roquette and the Passage Thieré where I plan to take Llanos’s life.

She should be approaching any second now and she’ll be surrounded by the crowd, but she won’t be protected, and as I instantaneously form a new plan, my hand moves from the Glock inside my shoulder holster to the blade I keep near my waist.

The seconds slow and the world stops spinning and the children freeze in mid-smile as my senses warp like they’ve been jolted with electricity and Llanos steps out from the street into my view, and she’s ignoring the festive families, looking straight ahead when she should be checking around every corner instead of hurrying to make the next block.

I cut through the crowd like a scythe and her periphery vision kicks in as I approach with the blade in my hand and she’s a moment too late as I swing my arm in a fluid arc and the stiletto smashes into her throat at the precise point above where her windpipe disappears below her sternum.

I don’t break stride, keep moving, cross the street and duck a right, heading for the little bastion that started a revolution. When she falls to her knees, clutching her throat, trying to keep the blood from spilling out through her fingers, when the first child screams and when the parents pull all the boys and girls and grandparents away, hoping they haven’t seen too much, I will be gone.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE OFFICER SMILES WARMLY WHEN I GREET HIM, HALF STANDING BEHIND A WEDGE OF A TABLE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE CREPE SHOP AT THE END OF THE RUE DE LAPPE.
He has ordered a croque monsieur, devoured the first triangle and is two bites into the second when I shake his hand.

“You are Mr. Walker, yes?”

“I am. Thanks so much for meeting me.”

“It is my pleasure, my pleasure. Ms. Lerner tells me you are a writer?”

“Yes. . . . ”

“Very pleased to meet you. My name is Gerard. I too write a little fiction. Nothing published as yet, but I am delighted to say a little printing press from Lyon has been in contact with me recently and has expressed interest in reading my next submission.”

He is a round man, with wide shoulders and only a hint of a neck, constructed like a snowman. Somehow, he takes bites of his sandwich while maintaining the cadence of his speech, and words tumble out of him at the same time as his food disappears from his plate. It’s fascinating to watch, like a magician with a rabbit, and I have a hard time paying attention to what he’s saying.

“But they say writing is to write what you know and my occupation as an officer in Paris has led to many, many interesting stories, I can assure you, so let me, may I ask, what type of writing is it you do?”

“Well, a little bit of everything but mostly film writing.”

He pats his heart affectionately, a theatrical swoon. “Ahh, it is my dream, yes? Hollywood, movies, your words on the silver screen, yes? And what is it you have written that I might know?”

“Well, nothing that’s been produced as yet, but that’s why I’m here. Hoping to collect more information about organized crime in Paris.”

He winks, as happy as a child opening a present. “A
French Connection
, yes? That is what Ms. Lerner intimated to me, and I immediately said ‘ah, yes’ because you see I have been working on a crime story as well as I’m sure you can imagine. I hope you do not steal my story, no, ha, ha, I’m certain that there is plenty of crime to go around, certainly in Paris, yes?”

His radio squelches and I hear a burst of information in colloquial French about a stabbing but he moves his fat fingers down to his waist and quickly twists the knob to cut off the sound.

“Pssh, interruptions, interruptions, now let me tell you the story I am working on, yes, and then you can tell me how I may help you and maybe when I’m finished with my new manuscript you can sell the rights to Martin Scorcese for me, ha, ha, ha, yes?”

Without waiting for me to respond, he plunges into his tale of a put-upon French policeman in the Bastille district who is misunderstood because of his weight problem. He is the hero, you see, and much smarter than even his superiors care to admit. Twenty minutes later and Officer Gerard is finally concluding the narrative and somehow a croque madame has joined her husband in his stomach without the detective missing a single plot twist or stultifying morsel of dialogue.

When he finally reaches the end, breathless, I force on my most engaging smile and tell him I am certain my agent in Hollywood will want to read the novel as soon as it is finished. He laughs like I’ve told a hilarious joke, emits a greasy burp, and then shakes my hand without bothering to brush the crumbs from his shirt. “Maybe we will both be walking down the red carpet next year, yes, yes, ha ha.”

Thirty minutes later, we are inside the conference room dedicated to Organized Crime within his department’s headquarters, flipping through detailed files covering the last two decades.

It only takes a few more seconds of flattery before I am alone.

The first time Alex Coulfret officially came to the attention of the specialized branch of the French police was eight years ago. A new lieutenant named Chautier had been promoted within the Organized Crime department and was challenged with tightening a rope around the professional criminals moored in his district. He had been educated in New York and Washington and had returned to his native city with a different approach to tackling the problem, one that promoted sending a mix of uniformed and plainclothes police officers out onto the streets, not to make arrests or threaten incarceration, but simply to listen. A neighborhood is a living entity, Chautier preached: it sleeps, it eats, it breathes, and quite often, if you allow it a slight bit of freedom, it talks.

One name popped up on the lips of citizens again and again: Alexander Coulfret. From what the police officers could surmise after sifting through rumors and eyewitness accounts and exaggerations and embellishments, Coulfret had started as muscle for an aging boss named Dupris. He was used for everything from shakedowns to collections to enforcement, and his brutality earned trust and loyalty from his boss. This was at a time in the late nineties when French professional crime was changing from a family affair to an every-man-for-himself dogfight, and Coulfret was Dupris’s pit bull, a sure bet in a shaky world.