Columbus (16 page)

When he disappears, I reach down and help the lady to her feet.

“You all right there, missy?”

“That’s Ruby to you,” she says with a smile.

When I reach the Café de la Comedie, Mallery is sweating. There is an empty glass in front of him, and I’m guessing he’s drunk at least half of a bottle of wine. He almost upsets the table in his hurry to greet me, eager for my approval.

“It’s done, correct?”

“Yes,” I smile. “You did well.”

“Just as instructed.”

He’s like a dog. Unsatisfied with just a pat to the head, he needs a scratch behind the ears.

“Yes.”

“I did not look back.”

“Good. Then no one will have followed you.”

“I heard sirens. Sitting here. Waiting for you. I was worried.”

I had seen police blowing past on the way to a motorcycle accident up the road. I didn’t think about it at the time, but I’m glad Mallery believes the sirens belong to our affair.

“Never worry about me. Only yourself.”

“We will do this again?”

I shrug. “We’ll see what Coulfret says.”

“You will tell him about today? How I composed myself?”

“Of course. Have another drink.” I grab the waiter as he passes and order a fresh bottle of wine.

“I can’t believe it,” he says, true wonder in his eyes. “He usually uses me for. . . . ” and he makes a couple of punching motions, a jab, an uppercut. Then pops one of his big fists into the other hand. “But this. . . . ” He shakes his head. “How much, do you mind my asking?”

“How much what?”

“How much do you collect for a kill?”

I’ve got him now, though he doesn’t know it.

“A hundred thousand Euros.”

His eyes light up, filled with dollar signs. “Maybe I can . . . maybe he’ll use me more for. . . . ”

“Maybe. We’ll see what Coulfret says.”

A couple of glasses more and he’s relaxed, giddy, speaking maniacally, the adrenaline getting the best of him.

It only takes a nudge from me. Information and timing.

“Let me ask you a question. I heard Coulfret faked his death a few years back.”

“Oh, yes. Brilliant.”

“Why would he need to do that?”

“You don’t know this story? A story-teller like you?”

“Please.”

“How much time do you have?”

“At least another bottle of wine’s worth.”

“Done!”

And he pounds the table as a third bottle arrives.

Alex Coulfret’s first love wasn’t a woman, but a building. He grew up in the Eleventh arrondissement, a block away from the Bastille, in a Haussmann-era residential edifice on the Rue Saint Maur. The building had twenty-two apartments, the smallest of which belonged to his father and mother. The apartment was in the basement, and they’d never have been able to afford if it hadn’t been for his father’s position as resident supervisor, a nice way the French have for saying “custodian.”

The older of two brothers, Alex often accompanied his father on the daily tasks involved in keeping twenty-one tenants of a nineteenth-century building satisfied. Leaky pipes, peeling wallpaper, backed-up sewer lines, cracked windows, chipped floor tiles, faulty wiring, elevator repairs . . . Alex and his old man took care of all of them, working odd hours, always at the beck and call of the residents. In a building where everyone was of the same social stratum, the lower class consisted solely of this one family in this one apartment.

Alex spent his childhood learning every inch of that building. The crawl spaces, the roof, the rest of the basement with its clattering laundry machines, the copper pipes running behind the walls, the tiny balconies facing the courtyard, the floor drains leading down to the sewers. The residents looked on him and his brother with genuine affection, always ready with a pat to the head or an offered piece of peppermint candy. There were few children in the building, and the ones who were around Alex’s age went to private schools and had their own sets of friends.

Alex’s father died while carrying a bag of cement across the roof. His heart gave out: he dropped the bag, sat down, and died. Alex was fifteen, and it was like someone had cut out the best part of him. When the owner of the building, Mr. Hubbert, came round to pay his respects and tell his mother they would have two months to find a new apartment, Alex was ready. He showed the owner how to repair the washing machine, how to refill the split plaster on the second-floor corridor, how to keep birds from settling on the roof. He proposed that he would drop out of school and take over the duties of his father, that he knew the building better than anyone, that the free place to live for the three of them was all he needed . . . he’d find other ways to supplement his income. Mr. Hubbert was sympathetic and agreed to Alex’s terms on a trial basis. If tenants complained, he would have to make changes. But no tenants complained.

A genial man on the second floor, a retired professor named Mr. Condrey, gave Alex books to read to whittle away his evenings: Hugo and Dumas and Maupassant and Maugham. He taught him to dig deeper, behind the hero’s journey and into the themes buried just below the surface: loss of innocence, jealousy, revenge as well as hope, patriotism, love. He found Alex to have a rapier mind and a thirst for intellectual stimulation. Alex, in turn, taught his brother, Jerome. If Alex couldn’t go to school, he’d be damned if Jerome was going to miss a single day. Maybe he wasn’t Jerome’s father, but he damn sure acted like it.

The family still needed to put bread on the table, and Alex’s mother took a job at a local bakery, selling croissants to tourists. Even bringing home the unsold pastries wasn’t enough to keep the lights on, to keep wood in the fire. They needed more income, something, anything.

Alex had heard of Augustus Dupris from a pair of gossips who frequented the meat market. Dupris ruled the neighborhood (and several others), working and living out of a building two blocks away from Alex’s. He had set up narcotics lines directly into Afghanistan and had profited greatly importing opium and heroin into the capital. In turn, he parlayed that business into providing protection, gambling, and prostitution in a city where most citizens turned a blind eye toward individual hedonism.

Still age fifteen, Alex presented himself to Dupris, explaining who his father had been, where he lived, what had happened to the family, what they were subsisting on, and how he could be of use to the professional criminal. He did his best to speak deferentially and intelligently, to make his case, explain how he could be an asset. He said he’d do any work the boss demanded.

Dupris slapped Alex across his face and told him to go back to school, go back to his family, to leave, and never to return. His men escorted him out of the building and Alex walked the two blocks home with his tail between his legs, but with a strong sense that he was being tested. Determination rose within him.

For weeks, Dupris couldn’t leave the building without seeing Alexander Coulfret. The teen followed the middle-aged boss like a dog looking for scraps. When Dupris asked one of his men for a newspaper, Alex was already there, holding the latest edition. When he cut the tip off a cigar, he’d find Alex before him, holding out a struck match.

“You aren’t going away?” the man finally asked the kid outside a hotel. “You aren’t going to do as I tell you and leave?”

Alex shook his head.

Dupris smiled, like he couldn’t quite figure out what made Alex’s clock tick. “Then come to my building tomorrow at ten. And bring me some coffee.”

Alex ran all the way home. That night, he cooked a ham for his mother and brother, the first meat they’d had in a week.

In the beginning, he delivered things for Dupris, sometimes to people who didn’t want to be reached. He grew a reputation for being extremely clever, an intellectual cut above most of the mutts who worked for the boss. Where this might foster resentment, Alex had a way of recognizing trouble before it emerged, like a firefighter watering down fields to control the path of the flames. His cohorts couldn’t help but like him, and he pulled their strings like a master. He was a man who could talk at any level depending on to whom he was speaking, who knew the language, the idioms, the dialect of the streets, who could hold his own with the lowest pigeon on up to the boss himself. Guys he worked for found themselves working for him without quite understanding how the reversal had transpired.

By the time he was twenty, he had been arrested a couple of times but slipped any sentence harsher than a slap on the wrist. He taught Dupris how to maximize his gains by being merciless, by squeezing the suckers for every dime. In turn, his bank account grew.

His mother suspected something evil behind the income, but was so pleased to have food on the table, so pleased to see her younger son attending a private school for gifted students, that she instinctively knew better than to ask questions. She just wanted to put her feet up after a long day at the bakery and have wood to burn in the fireplace. Alex thought about telling her to quit her job—he was making more than enough to cover their expenses—but he resisted. The work kept her going, kept her vigorous, and somehow he knew it helped her to cope with the illicit money coming into the apartment.

When he turned twenty-three, he was Dupris’s right-hand man, mostly working from the shadows. Dupris was starting to fear him as much as admire him, but the kid was like watching an avalanche cascade toward you and only being able to appreciate it. Alex was as devious as he was cunning, and he wasn’t afraid to get his own hands dirty to prove a point.

All the while, he, his brother, and his mother stayed in that little apartment in the building on the Rue St. Maur. The residents still looked down their noses at the family in the supervisor’s flat, and Alex never strayed from fixing the faucets and the leaky pipes and the faulty heaters.

When Alex turned twenty-four, a real estate mogul named Saulter made a bid to buy the building. The original owner, Mr. Hubbert, was growing old and his only heir lived in the United States. The son wanted whatever price his father could get for the building. He had never set foot inside it and had no plans of moving back to Paris. Saulter made his offer. Paris was growing more expensive and the mogul felt if he could renovate the apartments, he could make a sizable profit. His plans for renovation also included getting rid of the current occupants.

Alex had by this time amassed enough wealth to buy the building himself for a fair price, and made an offer to Mr. Hubbert, but Saulter didn’t give a damn about fairness. He was a capitalist in the true sense of the word; the biggest stack of dollars determined the winning bid, and he was prepared to outbid the son of the janitor.

Alex met with Mr. Hubbert for the second time in his life. The man was close to dying, was exhausted, and he spoke in a whining whisper.

“What do you want me to do, Alexander? What would you do? Ask yourself. I am doing this for my son in America. If you had come to me first, if there was no other choice, I would happily sell the building to you. I know you would take care of her like she was your mother or your wife. But Mr. Saulter came first and he will outbid you until you cannot match his offer. What would you have me do?”

Alex told him he was responsible for his own decisions.

“I know how you acquired your wealth,” the old man said. “The things you’ve done for Augustus Dupris. If you say I
must
sell to you, then I will do so. I do not want trouble.”

Alex repeated to the old man he was responsible for his own decisions, but assured him since he had shown Alex’s family trust and kindness, no harm would befall him.

Mr. Hubbert told him he intended to sell the building to the mogul, Saulter.

Alex made two stops on his way home. First, he asked Dupris for an advance of two million francs so he might match Saulter’s offer. But Dupris was drunk and with a woman and chose an inopportune moment to put Alex Coulfret in his place. He denied his request and called his prodigy a homesick fool. He offered Alex some wine and when he declined, protesting how important the building was to him, Dupris told him to lighten up and enjoy himself and to quit being so goddamned serious. Alex left enraged.

His next stop was Saulter’s private residence in the heart of the Seventh arrondissement. When he went to bed that night, Saulter had three German shepherds and a German wife. When he awakened from a fitful sleep, he had none. Alex was waiting for him on a chair in the corner of the room. He told Saulter to move away from Paris and never look back, but not before Saulter phoned Mr. Hubbert to withdraw his offer for the building.

Augustus Dupris felt two emotions upon learning the next day that Alex Coulfret was the new owner of the building he had grow up in on the Rue de Maur. Anger and fear. He did not like the way those two emotions made him feel, like a weight had settled in his stomach. He did not like the way his second-in-command had circumvented his decision-making. He did not like the way his other foot soldiers looked at Coulfret—the same way they used to look at him.

He decided to hire some dark men. He might have been successful except that a low-level hood named Martin Feller saw the future and made the decision of his life, rolling the dice and putting his hat in the ring with Alex. He had overheard Dupris bragging about the contract he had taken out on his right-hand man’s life. And so Feller tipped off Coulfret.

Alex could’ve brought it to a head the moment he found out about the hit, could’ve walked the two blocks to Dupris’s house, forced his way in, and shot the man and everyone who stood with him. God knows he wanted to. But the chess player inside him won out; instinctively, he knew that if the last rung of the ladder on the rise to the top is stepped on with brute power instead of
earned
through cunning, through artful intelligence, then his reign would always be contested, would always be marked with bloodshed.

So he faked his death. He waited for the right opportunity, then put money in the palms of a trusted few, and convinced Dupris and his hired killer that they had lucked out, that nature and a fickle god and two vehicles colliding had done their dirty work for them, that sometimes things have a way of working themselves out.