VIII
“Hullo,” said Oliver.
Will blinked and looked around. He was back in the pharmacy lab.
Oliver was beaming proud. “Surprised to be here? Well, yes, I always say, never underestimate the possibilities of pure adrenaline,” he said, holding up an empty syringe. “Had to dig through the cabinets to find it. I thought it was worth a shot, so to speak. Wonderful stuff. Simply wonderful.”
Behind Oliver stood two of the jazzmen, Kelly and Red, wearing their matching blue suits. Both the men were mud-stained and sweaty and both were breathing hard. They each held a smoking Thompson submachine gun pointed down at two giants, who each lay stretched out on the floor, pistols still in their hands and sizable chunks missing from their heads. Blood covered the walls and oozed out from their bodies, pooling across the concrete floor. Flats stood by the closed door, watching out the window with a Johnson rifle in his hands. Bendix himself was nowhere to be seen.
Then Will saw her, she had been standing in the shadows by the staircase, watching the scene shyly with her arms crossed. She stepped forward with a small smile and a look of relief on her face. Moving slowly, depleted of strength, he pushed himself up out of the chair and took her in his arms. He held her for a long time without saying a word.
Twenty minutes later, he watched as the jazzmen stowed the guns and stuffed the shovels into the back of their impossibly small car.
“You have quite a woman there,” Red told him, nodding to Zoya, who stayed on Will’s arm.
“If you’ve got any issue coming up with the cash you owe us, I know some Berbers who will take those Thompsons off our hands, along with the rest of the stuff,” Flats told Oliver.
Oliver nodded. “No need to bring in the Berbers, Flats, I’m good for the cash. Hold on to the guns till you hear from me.”
“Okay, just trying to be accommodating.” With that, the jazz boys rumbled off in their car and were gone.
Now Will was riding shotgun with Oliver behind the wheel. Zoya rested in the back. They were driving fast through the night, heading out of town, toward a friend of Zoya’s who she said might help them. Oliver filled Will in as they drove: “The whole adventure was torn right from the pages of Poe. Did you ever read “The Cask of Amontillado”? It was like that, only, thankfully, without the fatal immurement. The map turned out to be accurate, you see, the guns were stashed in the sealed-off catacombs over in Montparnasse, right beneath the cemetery. It makes sense, it’s close to the station, so I suppose my soldier cached it all away before he caught the westbound train. The catacombs down there are littered with piles upon piles of skeletons.”
“I know about the catacombs, Oliver.”
“Oh, sorry, of course, I always forget you’re not a tourist. In any case, there’s a hidden street entrance to the lower levels, and once we got in it was merely a matter of identifying the right crypt. Luckily the map was very good, that fellow must have been well trained by the OSS, because we found the spot in no time. I’ll say, though, it was rather amusing watching the jazz boys dig through the ossuary, throwing those ribs, shinbones, and skulls about like mad dogs. At one point I tried doing the ‘Alas, poor Yorick’ bit but no one was amused.”
“Where was she?” Will asked, gesturing toward Zoya, asleep in the backseat of the car.
“At the top of the stairs, keeping watch. We were in and out in half the time I thought it’d take. Then it was simply a matter of dashing back to the pharmacy and coordinating a successful attack.”
“How’d you pull it off?”
“Oh, well. I had a rather elaborate charade cooked up involving dressing the boys in overalls and pretending to be EDF electricians, but then Red suggested we simply kick in the front door and start firing. We had them out-armed and we possessed the element of surprise, so his plan made sense. Besides, I don’t know where we would have gotten the overalls.”
“So, you kicked in the door and started shooting? With me just sitting there?”
“Well, there was a bit of reconnaissance, but I know what you mean. As I said, I would have preferred some intrigue involving handlebar-mustache disguises and whatnot.” He smiled. “But it all worked out. The jazz boys are crack shots, you know, they were all front-line infantry during the war. It was a fortuitous team to have on hand for the job. I must say, you are a lucky man.”
Will rolled down the window a crack and leaned his head against it. The fresh night air cleared his thoughts a bit, but not enough to make sense of things. He reached his arm over the seat and wrapped his hand around the sleeping Zoya’s ankle. That helped.
IX
The guard came for Elga early. She acted as though she were fast asleep when he rousted her, though she was already well prepared. Slowly, she stepped over the sleeping whores and out of the cell, trudging ahead of the officer. She waited as he unlocked the heavily secured doors and took her up the narrow stairs. The main rooms of the station house were mostly empty at that hour; only two officers were in sight, one yawning, one picking at a roll and sipping coffee as he read the morning edition of
The guard walked her down the hall and around the corner, where they came across three men standing around a desk. Her guard interrupted the conversation.
“I have Elga Sossoka here,” the guard said to the man Elga guessed was his superior, a police captain perhaps. “Which room do you want her in?”
“Put her in two,” said the captain. Elga noticed that when the guard had said her name, one of the other men in the group, a tall fellow with a bruised cheek who was wearing a rumpled gray suit, reacted almost as if he had been lightly slapped. It was a small and slightly suppressed expression, no one else seemed to notice it. But he eyed her now with a curious interest that Elga did not like. She looked down at her feet and tried to look stupid.
The guard took her arm and they continued down the hall. The exchange had bristled her nerves. She wondered if she was merely being paranoid, but as they came to the door marked “Room 2,” she looked over her shoulder and saw that the tall man was ignoring his companions and focusing all his attention on her. She knew this wasn’t good; she would have to work fast.
Room 2 was empty except for two chairs and a metal desk. A notebook and a pair of pencils lay on the desk. The guard seated her in the chair by the wall and then departed, locking the door behind him. Sitting alone, she collected her thoughts. She guessed that the man’s having noticed her had set off the old impatient celestial clock’s ticking, and she knew she would have to act fast to escape the fate it was running toward. She took a deep breath; even pondering the effort ahead wearied her. She had seen too much excitement in the past few days. She remembered back to when she lived by herself in the forest: countless seasons would pass without the need for a major spell; small ones, yes, to lure in squirrels, moles, and tasty field mice, or to catch pheasants and quail, but other than that she had enjoyed the long silence of those years. Of course, that could not have lasted, once the steady industry of man found its fuel and it began burning and digging and wrenching everything in its omnivorous fashion; it was only a matter of time before it burned down her door. Now the world had no silence, it was full of tin radio sounds and fat Victrola tunes and constantly ringing telephones, the voices on the other end of the line always busily killing and clearing for what was to come next. Even the village church bells that once taunted her hourly with their misguided faith were now drowned out by bleating horns and sputtering engines, and she was sure that densely tangled tranquility of forest she had lived in had long ago been cleared for corrugated wheat fields and the hungry harvest threshers that went with them. One had to move fast now to dodge the massive crush of the machinery, the gears gnashing with their atonal screech and grind, as if a thousand grand pianos were constantly falling from the sky and crashing down on the pavement all around her. It was no wonder that she had a hard time concentrating. Alone in the room, she spat on the floor.
A moment later, the door opened and the captain they had met in the hall entered the room with a second
