The Pegasus Secret (3 page)

“Salut!” A head popped up in front of an amoire. “Can I help you?”

Like most Parisians, the shopkeeper had an unerring ability to recognize Americans on sight.

Lang held up the copy of the receipt. “I’m looking for information.”

An androgynous figure in black limped to the front of the shop. A wrinkled hand took the receipt and held it up to a light speckled with dust motes. Spectacles appeared from a pocket. “What do you wish to know?”

Lang thrashed around for a convenient story and decided upon at least part of the truth. “Janet Holt was my sister. She was killed in that explosion over in the Marais a few days ago while she was visiting here. I’m just trying to find out what she bought while she was in the city.”

“I’m very sorry.” The tradesman pointed to the wall, or rather to a gap between two dark pictures of people in nineteenth-century dress. “She bought a painting.”

“A portrait? Of who?” That would have been unusual.

The shopkeeper shook a gray head. “No, a painting of shepherds, of a field, perhaps some religious scene.”

That was more in keeping with Janet’s taste.

Lang started to ask another question and thought better of it. What did it matter what happened to the painting? Judging from its source, it was doubtful it had either artistic or monetary value.

“That painting,” the figure in black continued, “it had not
been here long. In fact, a man came in right after your sister and was very upset it had been sold.”

Years of searching out the unusual, of recognizing anomalies, sent up antennae long unused. “This man, do you remember anything about him?”

“Near eastern, perhaps Arab, dressed in nice but inexpensive clothes. He spoke very good French.”

Lang ignored the implicit accusation. “Did he say why he wanted the picture?”

“No, but as you can see, I have many beautiful things for sale.”

Lang thought a moment. “You said you hadn’t had the picture long. Do you remember where you got it?”

Again the shuffling of papers. “From London, Mike Jenson, Dealer in Curios, Antiquities, Etcetera, Ltd. Number 12 Old Bond Street, London W1Y 9AF We buy inventory from each other.”

If it doesn’t sell one place, try another, Lang thought. “Could I borrow a pen and some paper?”

He wrote the name and address down, although he could not have explained why he thought it was important. Perhaps because it was the first detail of Janet’s last day that had been even slightly out of the ordinary.

“Thanks. You’ve been a big help.”

Outside, Lang began to repeat his path in reverse. So someone had wanted the picture Janet bought. Could it have been the reason for Janet’s death? But that made no sense. As Patrick had said, the house on Place des Vosges had been like Fort Knox. It strained the imagination to think someone had been so angry at Janet beating him to the purchase of a painting that he was willing to destroy it and her as revenge.

Still . . .

The buzzing in Lang’s mind was becoming louder and
louder. So loud that he was surprised to suddenly realize he really was hearing the sound. He turned in time to see one of the City’s ubiquitous motor scooters increase speed and jump the curb. The driver, his features hidden in a full face helmet, must have been drunk or seriously ill, Lang thought.

The machine, still gaining velocity, was headed straight for Lang. As Lang shifted his weight to lunge into a doorway, the rider leaned towards Lang and sunlight flashed from his gloved hand. Lang threw himself away from the rider and felt something scratch his shoulder.

Furious at what he took for criminal negligence, Lang sprang to his feet ready to pursue and knock the driver off the machine’s seat. The cause was hopeless. The scooter skidded around a corner and disappeared from sight.

“Monsieur!” The shopkeeper rushed outside. “You are injured!”

“No, I’m fine,” Lang replied.

Then he followed the merchant’s eyes to where a trickle of blood seeped from a slash in his shirt. The glitter of a blade, the intentional swerve from the street. Someone had come close to cutting his throat.

“We have crime, just like any city,” Patrick said later that day.

Lang, his shoulder stiff under what he considered far too much bandaging, snorted. “Yeah, but this wasn’t any snatch and run. The fucker wanted to kill me.”

Patrick shook his head slowly. “Now why would he want to do that?”

That, thought Lang, was the real question.

Delta Flight 1074: Paris-Atlanta
10:35
P.M
. EDT

Lang was exhausted, yet unable to sleep. Without seeing it, he stared at the comedy being shown on the 777’s overhead screen. A combination of grief, curiosity and fear of flying had kept him squirming despite the wide seat and ample legroom of first class.

Eyes open or shut, he kept seeing replays of Jeff and Janet. Then a man on a motor scooter with a knife in his hand.

Coincidence? His earlier training had taught him to distrust seemingly unrelated events. But who would want to kill a woman who devoted her life to her adopted son and other small children across a troubled globe? For that matter, who would want Lang himself dead?

An old grudge? He couldn’t think of any that would have survived fifteen years.

“Get you something?” The flight attendant had put on a smile along with fresh lipstick.

Lang shook his head. “I’m fine, thanks.”

But, of course, he wasn’t.

He forced the thoughts of Janet and Jeff from his mind as a parent might send unruly children outside to play. Thinking of the two metal boxes in the plane’s cargo hold wasn’t going to get him any sleep. Think of something pleasant, something soothing. . . .

Had it been only two nights ago, just hours before that phone call from Patrick?

He had spent the evening with Father Francis Narumba. They had dined at Manuel’s Tavern, a funky bar that was a hangout for students, politicians and the self-proclaimed local intelligentsia. It boasted a warm if seedy collection of wooden booths and worn bar stools. The food had never been great and the atmosphere less, but it was a place where a black priest and a white lawyer could argue in Latin without anyone noticing.

Lang and Francis had their own campaign to keep alive the language of Virgil and Livy. Both were victims of a degree in the classics, Lang because he was too stubborn to be pushed into business school, the priest because the language had been required in seminary.

Their friendship was based on mutual need: there were too few people around who viewed history as something older than last week’s
People
magazine. Although Lang tended to consider anything that happened after the first sack of Rome as current events, Francis had an astonishing recall of the medieval world. The Catholic Church’s role in that world provided a fertile field for friendly argument.

The priest had listened politely as Lang blew off more than a little steam about the inefficiency of the Fulton County prosecutor’s office, a matter motivated by more
than the purely altruistic concern of a good citizen.

Having a client under indictment for over a year wasn’t good for business, particularly the client’s. An indictment works as a hardship, since in the public eye the accused is presumed guilty until proven otherwise.

“If the DA is as incompetent as you say, how’d he get the office?” Francis asked, regarding a badly overcooked filet of salmon. He shrugged at the hopelessness of Manuel’s cuisine. “
Fabas indulcet fames
.”

Latin aphorisms were a fiercely competitive game of one-upmanship.

Lang had ordered a hamburger, something requiring effort to screw up. “Hunger does indeed sweeten beans but you’d have to be pretty hungry to enjoy that,” he said. “In answer to your question, the DA owes his job to who he knows, not any ability,
Ne Aesopum quidem trivit.”

“He has not even thumbed through Aesop?”

Lang was pouring from a pitcher of room temperature beer. “Believing in all those saints makes you literal. More liberally, he doesn’t know zip.”

The priest sipped from a glass that had to be as tepid as Lang’s.
“Damnant quod non intelligunt.”

They condemn what they do not understand
.

After dinner, Lang lost the coin toss for the check for the third straight time. Sometimes he thought Francis had special help in such matters.

“Janet and Jeff okay?” Francis asked as they walked to the car.

His interest was more than polite. Since her divorce, Janet had, paradoxically, become a staunch Catholic, active in Francis’s parish. Lang suspected she believed that the church’s position on remarriage might impede another poor choice. Jeff’s very foreignness made him special to Francis, a native of one of Africa’s less desirable homelands.

Lang reached in his pocket for the key to the Porsche. “Both fine. Took Jeff to the Braves’ opener last week.”

“Looks like you could afford a real car instead of this toy,” Francis grumbled as he contorted himself into the passenger seat.

“Enjoy the ride or take MARTA,” Lang said cheerfully. “By the way, Janet got Jeff a dog last week, the ugliest mutt you’ll see at the annual blessing of the animals.”

“Beauty is, as the saying goes, only skin-deep.”

Lang turned the key in the ignition. “Yeah, but ugly goes all the way to the bone. I think Janet picked the dog out as being the least likely to be adopted from the pound.”

Before reaching the part where Lang got home, he dropped into a dreamless abyss. He didn’t regain consciousness until the same flight attendant, with the same smile, shook him awake and reminded him to raise his seat back for landing.

Atlanta
Two days later

Lang thought he had grieved as much as a man could when Dawn died. The lingering illness, the agony of watching the woman he loved slip away had, he thought, seared his soul against further loss.

He was wrong.

As he watched the two caskets, one only half the size of the other, being lowered into the red Georgia clay, he lost the stoic exterior southern custom required of men. Instead, he wept. First wet eyes, then tears he made no effort to staunch. If anyone thought less of him for his anguish, screw ’em. He was not weeping only for Jeff and Janet, of course. He was crying for himself just as much. The last of
his family gone. The thought filled him with loneliness he had never known existed.

He had lost friends and acquaintances before; any adult had. He had also known a few guys, fellow employees, who had perished in the occupational hazards of his former work, too. And he had lost Dawn, but he had had months to anticipate the inevitable. But his younger sister and nephew had been snatched away with a suddenness and in a manner that was incomprehensible.

The funeral had an air of unreality, something staged for his consumption alone. He watched the service as though witnessing someone else’s bereavement, perhaps in a film. But he was no mere spectator to the anguish that chewed at him like an animal gnawing its way free from a cage.

The holes that would receive Jeff and Janet were next to the marble with Dawn’s name on it, not yet weathered, the inscription as sharp as the loss he felt every Sunday when he placed flowers on the impersonal hump of earth. He would have two more graves to visit as Jeff and Janet shared eternity with Dawn on this same hillside.

Instead of hearing the words Francis read from the prayer book, he replayed every video game he had shared with Jeff, saw again every gold-starred homework assignment. He missed them both, but the death of a child was the bit of evidence that condemned the universe, that denied a sparrow-watching god.

By the time the mourners, mostly neighbors or Janet’s medical peers with a scattering of parents of Jeff’s friends, had finished their sincere if meaningless condolences, his grief had metabolized into fury. Whoever had done this would pay in spades. No matter how long it took, how much time was required, how far he had to travel, he would find him. Or them.

They had screwed around with the wrong family. He had no experience in law enforcement but he did have a
unique repertoire of acquaintances, people who had access to information unavailable to police. If he had to call every one of them to find the guilty party, he’d do it.

The anger was strangely comforting. It brought order to an otherwise senseless world. He imagined the taste of revenge against persons unknown, ignoring the growing impatience of the cemetery’s crew. His lingering at graveside was postponing the removal of the Astroturf that had concealed the mound of raw dirt from sensitive eyes, the return of the backhoe that would push the mound of soil onto coffins that had remained closed during the service.

A gentle hand touched his shoulder. His thoughts scattered as Francis patted him on the back. Lang had asked him to officiate not only as Janet’s priest and friend but also as his own friend.

“Lang, you need to be thinking of Janet and Jeff, not revenge.”