I walked along the alley and found doors into each building, although whether the doors were original or later alterations was impossible to say. The locks were old large-key door locks, the kind that were popular in Europe between the world wars. They probably dated from a renovation during that period, which I thought must have been the last major one. I glanced at Rodet’s back door. It was not alarmed, at least on the exterior, but high above, pointed down at a fairly steep angle, I saw a security camera. The thing seemed to be aimed straight at the doorway. If the video feed was not monitored inside the building, then it must be monitored off-site, which meant there was a dedicated telephone line or an Internet connection. I continued strolling along the alley, craning my neck left and right like your average tourist.
If you think it would be easy to go in through Rodet’s back door, think again. I would have bet serious money that the old door was there because local ordinances prevented exterior modifications on historical buildings. Immediately inside, I suspected, was another door, a steel one with terrific locks, festooned with alarms. Yet the exterior walls, with old metal drainpipes coming down off the roofs, could be climbed.
When I got back in the square I looked again at the roofs. Above Rodet’s apartment was an attic with dormer windows. I wondered if that attic was part of his apartment. A careful man could go over the roof and enter through one of those windows. It was something to think about.
I was also thinking about Marisa Petrou, Rodet’s mistress. Could I use the fact that I knew her to gain entrance to this apartment?
I spent the rest of my half hour just looking, trying to make the scene and details stick in the gray matter. Alberto Salazar and Rich Thurlow arrived right on time to pick me up.
“I thought we’d look at DGSE headquarters tonight and save the chateau for tomorrow,” Rich said after I was in and the car was rolling again.
“Sure. Drive on.”
We hadn’t gone two blocks before Salazar said, “Sure is different from Iraq, isn’t it?” He directed that comment at me. “There’s a place I don’t miss, let me tell you. Squalor, dirt, heat, fanatics, car bombs, blood on the street, body parts strewn around… It’s the contrast, y’know? I have nightmares about the place. How about you, Tommy?”
“Hard to forget a resort spa like that,” I agreed.
“Remember that time we located those explosives inside that house, and when the soldiers surrounded the place, that woman walked out? She was wearing one of those chadors, those black robes that cover her head to toe, and she had a baby in her arms, a kid maybe a year old. She walked right toward the lieutenant.”
I knew how this story ended, and I wasn’t in the mood for it. Let’s talk about something else, Al,” I suggested.
He ignored me. He glanced at Rich to ensure he was listening and continued. “She was walking toward the lieutenant and interpreter, who were standing behind an APC, when she blew up. Had explosives around her waist in some kind of belt. Goddamnedest thing I ever saw. One instant she and the kid were there, then they weren’t. Gone in the blink of an eye. When the smoke and shit cleared so we could see, there were little pieces of skin and bone and bloody tissue splattered for blocks. Everybody was watching when the bomb went off, so everybody got hit with this stuff, and six or eight guys got scratched up with shrapnel or something.”
“That’s enough, Al,” I said.
“If they try to send me back, I’m quitting.”
“Okay,” Thurlow said, “but enough’s enough. I don’t want to hear any more, either.”
“Fuck you,” Al shot back. “You too, Carmellini! Fuck both you dickheads.”
Of course, he would be the guy behind the wheel. He was hunched over, gripping the wheel so tightly his knuckles were turning white, staring straight ahead as the car rolled along.
“Hey, man, it’s over,” I said, trying to calm him. “You’re out of the sewer. Lay it down and let it go.”
“If I can’t talk to you guys about it, who the hell can I talk to?”
That, I thought, was the most insightful question I had heard in years. Be that as it may, I still didn’t want to chin about Iraq with Al Salazar or anybody on planet Earth.
If I never again set foot in Iraq, that would be fine by me. Remembering Grafton’s promise, I silently vowed to make this assignment my very last for the agency. After this, you can color me gone. Au revoir, baby.
The French spooks, the DGSE, had their offices in an unlikely building, the Conciergerie. This was an old, old building on the He de la Cite that had been used for a lot of things down through the centuries, including a prison. Here the revolutionaries imprisoned Marie Antoinette and Charlotte Corday, the assassin of Marat, as well as Danton and Robespierre before they each made their oneway trip to the guillotine. The history came from Rich Thurlow, who had apparently spent a few evenings with a guidebook. He said that during the Revolution over four thousand prisoners were held here. We found a place to park and did some walking.
Standing on the right, or north, bank and staring at the building, I thought it looked ominous. It was made of cut stone and stood about six or seven stories high — it was hard to say because I didn’t know how high the ceilings inside were. There were towers where the walls cornered, and the whole thing had one of those Paris roofs broken with dormers. The place had obviously been built as a medieval palace. In those happy days a palace was a fortress, a stronghold, where the king’s men could hold off starving mobs or armies led by unhappy lords and barons. The river had been the moat. No crocodiles, but since the Seine was the city sewer, who needed them?
“When was that thing built?” I asked Thurlow, our walking Baedeker.
“Thirteenth or fourteenth century. It’s roughly contemporary with Sainte-Chapelle, which is immediately on the other side of it.”
I knew about Sainte-Chapelle, a magnificent medieval church that King Louis IX built in the thirteenth century to house Christ’s crown of thorns and fragments of the true cross. He purchased these relics, properly authenticated, of course, from the emperor of Constantinople for an outrageous fortune. No doubt the emperor laughed all the way to the bank. This transaction set the record for the largest swindle ever successfully completed, a record that stood for centuries. If you take inflation into account, it may still be the con to beat. The pope was so impressed that he made Louis a saint; the good folks in Missouri even named a city after him.
Staring at the walls of the Conciergerie, I wasn’t in a laughing mood. I saw my share of old black-and-white movies when I was growing up, so I knew damn well what they had in the dungeons of that rockpile: lots of cells and a torture chamber. Probably had a rack and screw and a wall where they hung people in chains, the way the King of Id tortures the Spook. Just looking at those massive sandstone walls gave me the willies. I turned and looked the other way. Well, heck, half of Paris was to the north, and half to the south.
“You going in there?” Rich said, jerking his head at the building.
“I sure as hell hope not. But I do what Grafton tells me. He says go, I’m off like a racehorse.”
“More like a mouse.”
“That’s probably a better analogy, I suppose.”
“Better you than me.”
We discussed equipment, what they had on hand and what they could get in a reasonable amount of time. “Bugs,” I said. “Audio and video. How many?”
“We got about twenty of each on hand. Most of them are the new ones, so tiny you could swallow them and listen to your lunch digest.”
I grunted. One of my instructors had done just that to demonstrate the capability of the new units. It had been funny … then!
“Take me to a subway station and drop me off,” I said. “Tomorrow, when you’re clean, you come along this street right here, and I’ll be standing over there by that bus stop. About ten in the morning. Will that be enough time?”
“It’s after rush hour. We should be clean by then.”
“Have the guy driving the van meet us somewhere. I want to see him and the stuff in the van.”
“Okay,” Rich said, and flipped a cigarette away.
Al stood looking at the Conciergerie with his hands jammed in his trouser pockets. Finally he pulled one out, turned his jacket collar up to ward off the late-evening chill, then jammed that hand back where it belonged and started walking toward the car, which was two blocks away.
“Assholes,” he muttered.
I wasn’t sure whether he was referring to the French spooks or his present companions. He was going to be
