The Lucifer Gospel (16 page)

“Signorina, per favore…”

And then, suddenly, miraculously, she had it, complete with that strange twang like a Cajun on steroids that always lurked in the back of Celine Dion’s voice when she talked to Larry King. Finn let out a torrent of words, most of them to do with Raymond and his student-exchange visit and how exciting it was and all of it somehow remembered chapter, verse, and word perfect from her junior-year textbook,
Premières Années de Française
. She buried the Milanese plainclothes cop in it up to his eyeballs, all at blinding speed, along with the atrocious accent. It seemed to work. Finally Finn ran out of Raymond and his new friend Elaine’s exploits, so she just shut up and smiled. The big man turned to his partner.

“Esse un po’ di fuori,”
he said, which meant that Finn was a nutcase. She smiled even more. She waved her ticket.

“Canadian?” said the first cop.

She gave the cop her best revolutionary student glare.
“Non, je suis Quebecois!”
She laughed, waved the ticket, and said,
“S’il vous plait, messieurs! Mon train est on depart à ce moment!”
It was true, the Lyon train gave a shrieking blast on its whistle. Last call.

They let her go. She made it to the train, showed her ticket to the official on the platform, and climbed aboard. The night train was one of the slower and older Corail TRNs that were being slowly replaced by the high-speed bullet-nosed TGVs, the Trains a Grande Vitesse. She found her compartment, empty at the moment, and sighed with relief. Half a minute later the whistle shrieked again, and true to Mussolini’s promise, the train began to move, right on time.

Trains in Europe are almost all electric, so there was none of the North American diesel pull-and-tug as they started; the train simply began to move in a gentle, gradually accelerating motion that swept them out of the massive station and into the dark of Milan’s industrial suburbs. The small compartment remained empty and Finn began to relax. It looked as though they had made it—if Hilts had managed to make it onto the train.

“This seat taken?” Hilts stepped into the compartment and slid the door closed behind him. He sat down across from her.

“You made it.” She smiled.

He didn’t look as happy.

“So did Badir,” he answered.

“Who?”

“Badir. One of the stewards at the Adamson site. He was shadowing those two cops at the gate. He followed me onto the train.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’ve got a pretty good memory for faces. He’s no steward, and he probably never was. He’s muscle.”

“You think he’s after us?”

“I don’t think he’s on the train to do any damage, and I’m pretty sure he’s alone. I think they put him into the station on the off chance we’d show up, and we did. He’s tailing us.”

“With a cell phone.”

“No doubt.”

“We’re screwed.”

“No doubt.”

“So what do we do?”

“Get off the train before they can bring in reinforcements.”

“Where?”

“Where the hell are we going again?”

“Lyon.”

“Main line or local?”

“It’s not a bullet train, it’s one of the old ones, so it’s probably local.” She shrugged. “I’m not really sure. Does it make a difference?”

“Some. That’s why I didn’t want to go straight into Switzerland. They’re not EU, they’re neutral, so they still check your passports. Sometimes they spot-check them on the fast trains too, but if we’re on a local there’s less chance.”

“We’re going to need passports sometime.”

“Let’s both be Scarlett O’Hara and think about that tomorrow,” Hilts suggested. “For now we have to ditch our Libyan friend Badir.”

Finn and Hilts sat in the bar car of the humming train as it threaded itself through the alpine darkness. Finn was drinking black coffee as Hilts nursed a bottle of grape Fanta. Marco the bar-tender was fast asleep on his stool behind the U-shaped counter, arms crossed, head back and snoring. Badir, smoking endlessly and sipping from a foam cup of cold tea with lemon, was seated at the other end of the car, pretending to read an old copy of
Jours de France
. It was almost two in the morning and they were the only people in the bar car except for an old woman fast asleep over her knitting, a plastic aperitif glass vibrating gently on the round table in front of her.

“Where are we?” Hilts asked, taking a sip of Fanta and puckering at the unbelievable sweetness of the concoction. Finn had taken a sip just for fun. It tasted like liquid bubble gum.

“According to the porter putting down our bunks, we’re right on the border,” Finn answered quietly. “A place called Bardonecchia. We’ll be going into the Frejus Tunnel in about three minutes. The tunnel is the border. We come out in France. A ski town named Modane.”

“Do we stop?”

“Five minutes to switch crews.”

“That’s when we dump him, then.”

“How?”

“You’ll see.”

A moment later the train slid into the tunnel and the lights flickered and died. In the darkness Hilts stood up, grabbed Finn’s hand and headed back toward their sleeping car. Almost immediately they heard the sound of Badir as he clambered to his feet. Hilts pulled open the door leading into the next car and there was a sudden explosion of sound from the tracks below. Instead of moving into the adjoining car, Hilts pushed Finn into the small bathroom cubicle and eased the door shut behind them. Finn’s nostrils suddenly filled with the smell of antiseptic and liquid soap. She couldn’t see a thing. They heard the heavy door being pulled open a second time as Badir headed into the next sleeping car and then there was silence.

“Come on,” Hilts whispered. He led Finn out of the bathroom cubicle and they stepped back into the bar car. Hilts headed back the way they’d come with Finn trailing behind. It was still almost pitch dark but there was a warning flicker from the lights overhead. “Hurry!”

They made their way into the sleeping car ahead of the bar. A passage curved to the left. Moving around the corner Finn saw that the carriage was the same as their own: passageway to the right with a line of windows, a dozen or so compartments on the left, each compartment with a varying number of bunks, from the private two-bunk room like theirs to the Cabine 8, where the narrow beds were crammed in four to each side with no more than a foot between your nose and the bottom of the bed above. They moved along the passage as the blue night-lights overhead began to flicker on again. The doors to the compartments were all closed. At the very far end of the carriage they found a Cabine 8 with the door open, which meant presumably that it was unoccupied.

“In here!” whispered the photographer.

Finn stepped into the compartment and pulled back the curtain over the lower bunk on the right. Before she could slip into it, the curtains on the bunk above slid open and a pajamaed hand clutching a very realistic-looking rabbit appeared and then spoke in English, with a dreadfully theatrical French accent.

“Bonjour, mon ami, my name is Henri. Would you like to come fishing with me?” Henri then rolled his eyes and gave a fiendishly evil laugh, like a furry Hannibal Lecter.

“What the hell is that?” said Hilts from behind her.

A face appeared behind the rabbit—a young boy with dark tousled hair, big intelligent eyes, and his other thumb stuck securely in his mouth. He took the thumb out of his mouth and poked it hard into the pale fur of the rabbit’s chest. There was a brief pause and then the French accent again: “Bonjour, mon ami, my name is Henri. Would you like to come fishing with me?”

Then the boy put the rabbit down, drying his wet thumb in the armpit of his pajamas. “My name is Harry. I’m on vacation with my mother and father, who are sleeping in the next compartment, so you’d better not try anything funny. My rabbit’s name is Henri. Do you like him? I do. Are we in France yet? What is France?”

Finn held her finger to her lips. “Shhhh,” she whispered and smiled at the little boy. He didn’t smile back.

“Why should I shhhhh? You’re not my father or my mother. I don’t have to do as you say.” Young Harry poked Henri in the stomach again and the bunny repeated his suggestion. Hilts leaned in over Finn’s shoulder.

“I’m not your mommy or your daddy, but if you don’t be quiet and go back to sleep I’m going to twist your stupid rabbit’s head off and cook him up in a frying pan over a red-hot fire for breakfast, okay?”

Silently the boy and Henri retreated behind the curtain, which closed with a swish. Hilts gestured toward the lower bunk directly opposite. Finn slid into the bed and Hilts came in after her. He scrunched around so that he could look back through a crack in the curtains. They could hear a faint sniffling sound coming from the other side of the compartment.

“You didn’t have to be so hard on him,” whispered Finn.

“It worked, didn’t it?” Hilts said. “Besides, the rabbit was a pervert.” Suddenly Hilts pushed himself back onto the berth, squeezing Finn against the rear wall of the compartment. He eased the curtain completely closed. It was pitch-black in the berth. Finn could feel the hard muscles of the photographer’s back against her chest and wondered if he could feel the pounding of her heart. She heard the sound of the compartment door opening. She knew if it was Harry’s mother coming to check on the boy then they were doomed. There was silence for a few seconds, and then a voice.

“Bonjour, mon ami, my name is Henri. Would you like to come fishing with me?”

Finn froze, waiting, wondering if Badir was armed. There were a few whispers and then silence again. A second or two passed and then Finn heard the compartment door open and shut again. The train began to slow. In the darkness Finn felt Hilts slip off the bunk. She followed him out into the cramped, eight-bunk compartment. Hilts opened the sliding door and peered out. In the spill of blue light Finn could see Henri staring at them from between the curtains across the aisle. Hilts turned back to Finn.

“All clear,” he whispered. “Looks like we gave him the slip.” He stepped out of the compartment. Finn patted Henri between the ears.

“You did good, rabbit,” she said and grinned. Henri was silent. Finn followed Hilts out of the room. Ahead of her he opened the door at the end of the car and motioned her forward, and she stepped into the small area between the cars.

“He’s somewhere up ahead, I think,” said Hilts.

Finn nodded and Hilts threw open the door of the train car. He jumped down to the ground without letting down the short flight of metal stairs built into the car and looked left and right. Satisfied, he gestured to Finn, and she dropped down to the concrete platform. She shivered. Even in midsummer it was cold this high in the mountains. She stifled a sneeze. Ragweed. The air was full of pollen.

“I don’t see him,” Hilts said quietly.

Finn looked up the platform. At the head of the train she could make out a small cluster of figures. The train crews changing. There was no one else on the platform. She could see the station, a long, alpine-roofed chalet-style building with a quarried stone foundation. Behind it, a hundred yards away, was a modern building about ten stories high. A hotel perhaps. Beyond were the huge dark shapes of the Haute Maurienne, the sharp-toothed chain of mountains that marked the border between France and Italy and the southern edge of what had once been the infamous Maginot Line, the hugely expensive and utterly useless chain of defenses that was supposed to protect France from her enemies prior to the savage wake-up call that had been World War Two.

“Which way?” said Finn.

“There.” Hilts pointed to the near end of the building and they ran, reaching the shadows and pausing to look up the platform again. Still no sign of Badir, or anyone else. There was a whistle shriek, then the train lurched and began to move.

“We did it,” said Finn, exultant.

As she spoke a figure appeared in the open door of the sleeping carriage, crouched, and then jumped as the train began to gather speed.

“No suck luck,” said Hilts.

“Now what?”

“Find some transportation out of here.”

They slipped around the rear of the building and found another set of tracks between them and the roadway. Finn could see a second station building and the hotel complex behind it. There was a parking lot to the right of the station with half a dozen cars. Hilts peeked around the corner of the building, then turned back to Finn.

“He’s going the other way, come on.”

They turned and ran, jumping off the concrete platform, slipping on the wet gravel of the roadbed, then hopping across the tracks. They reached the far platform and ducked behind it. Hilts waited for a long moment then checked to see if Badir was following.

“Still no sign of him. Maybe we got lucky.”

“Don’t hold your breath.”

They headed to the parking lot beside the darkened station building, ducking low. Hilts went from car to car, checking through the windows. Finn chose a vantage point and kept her eyes on the tracks and the larger station building beyond, watching for Badir. There were a few tall pole lamps, but half of them had shattered bulbs and the whole platform area was in shadow. Across the road the hotel was a brightly lit beacon by comparison. She could see the sign over the door: HOTEL OLYMPIC.

She suddenly had an aromatic vision of Jack and Benny’s, a greasy spoon near the campus of Ohio State University in Columbus. Breakfast. Perfectly cooked bacon and eggs, eggs over easy, bacon crisp, home fries, toast with strawberry jam and coffee. Her stomach rumbled. She couldn’t remember when she’d last eaten. Somewhere on the road between the old man’s villa and Milan. Hilts came back.

“What is it with this place? Every car’s got an alarm. I break in we’re going to wake up the entire neighborhood.”

Finn heard the crunch of gravel and a voice spoke out of the darkness.

“Please keep your hands where I can see them.”

She froze. A figure stepped out of the shadows. Badir, with a gun in his hand. A small, flat automatic.

“You will step back this way, out of the light.”

“And if we don’t?” Hilts said.