Altar of Bones (29 page)

She looked around the place again. It was just the one room with a tiny bathroom between the window and the armoire. A microwave and an espresso machine passed for a kitchen.

Sergei hadn’t bothered to respond to her snark. He stayed with his back to her, his gaze on the street below, as if he were waiting for someone.

The telephone rang.

He quickly crossed the room to the table to snatch up the receiver on the second ring. He carried on a conversation in rapid French. Zoe couldn’t understand a single word.

He hung up the telephone and came right at her. She met his eyes, and inside she felt a lick of fear.

He reached into his coat pocket as he leaned over her, and she braced herself to be shot again with the tranquilizer gun. Instead he took out a pair of handcuffs, snapped one end around her right wrist and the other end around one of the brass pipes on the headboard.

“Oh, for God’s sakes, gimme a break.”

He startled her by laughing out loud.

Then he left her.

Z
OE CALLED HIM
every filthy name she knew while she jerked and wrenched at the handcuffs, but they were the real deal and weren’t going to pop open no matter how much she tugged at them.

She thought for a while that maybe she could fold her hand in upon itself and slip it out of the rigid cuff, but she wasn’t small-boned enough. She tried shaking the brass pipe loose from the crossbar on the headboard, but it was welded solid.

Damn the man. Damn him, damn him
.

She had to get out of here before he came back. She was the Keeper now, and even though she still didn’t know what it all meant, she figured she at least had to “keep” everything that had been in the casket out of the hands of men like Sergei. Was the film the altar of bones? No, she was being stupid again. Her grandmother had said the women of their line had been Keepers for so long the beginning had been lost in the mists of time. Yet the film had been made in the early 1960s.

Zoe lay back, stared at the ceiling, and tried to think through the pounding pain in her head. A cloud passed over the sun, and the room darkened. She looked at the lamp sitting on the table beside the bed. A lamp with a shade made of hundreds of red glass beads strung on wires.

S
HE COULDN’T REACH
the lamp with her free hand, and the silver clock on the dresser was ticking down the seconds like an ominous metronome. She doubted Sergei would be away long, he could come back
through the door at any minute and she’d have no more chances to escape.

She kicked off the heavy quilts and jackknifed her legs sideways, grabbing at the lamp with her feet. The lamp teetered and almost fell to the floor. At the last instant, she managed to snag it by the fringe with her toes.

She pulled it back onto the bed within reach of her free hand. It was harder to strip the beads off the wires than she had thought it would be. She ended up using her teeth.

She stripped six wires and wove them together until they were about an eighth of an inch thick. She wanted to make it thicker, but there wasn’t time.

She struggled one-handed with the pick, poking it into the cuff’s lock, jiggling it, poking, jiggling…. It wasn’t going to work and the damn clock was ticking louder than a drum now, louder than the pounding in her head—

The lock on the cuff snicked open.

Her nerves were screaming at her,
Hurry, hurry, hurry
. She jumped off the bed, and the floor tilted beneath her feet. Her muscles felt as mushy as overcooked spaghetti, her head throbbed.

She snatched up the film and stuffed it back in her satchel. The icon and the postcard with the riddle were still there, wrapped up in the sealskin pouch, but oddly the Marilyn Monroe photograph was gone. She checked her money, passport, and credit cards—all still there.

She was about to run out of the apartment when she suddenly realized that all she was wearing was her bra and panties. All this time she’d been half-naked, she thought, laughing out loud, and she hadn’t even noticed.

She found her leather jacket, boots, and socks next to the radiator, her jeans and sweater hanging over the towel bar in the bathroom. They were damp and clammy and smelled of the river, and she shuddered as she put them on.

Something was in her jeans back pocket … two soggy sheets of—
Oh, please, God, no
… But it was. Her grandmother’s letter.

Sudden tears burned her eyes, her chest ached. She must have stuck
the letter into her back pocket when she’d left the museum, and then she’d gone and jumped in the Seine. Her grandmother’s words were gone now, just smears of blue ink and—

Downstairs a door slammed, and she froze. Then she heard footsteps walking away out on the sidewalk and she let out a long, slow breath. She put her grandmother’s letter into her satchel, even though it was ruined now, and headed for the door.

S
HE WALKED INTO
the first bank she came to and rented a safe-deposit box. She wanted to put the icon and the film where no one could get at them.

While she was in the room with the safe-deposit box, she started to enter into her PDA the parts of her grandmother’s letter she could remember, but then it occurred to her that the battery might run out before she could recharge it, so she wrote it all down on a piece of the bank’s notepaper instead.

She left the bank with her satchel feeling a thousand pounds lighter. A trendy boutique blasted throbbing hip-hop music next door. She went inside and bought another pair of black jeans, a black wool turtleneck, some more underwear, and finally a new, trendier black leather jacket that was going to put a serious dent in her bank account.

The clerk was young, and friendly, and wanted to practice her English. Zoe asked her where she could get a taxi to take her to the Musée de Cluny.

Now that she was thinking again, she realized she should go back to the griffin shop and talk with Boris some more. He’d recognized Lena as a Keeper the first time they met because of her resemblance to the Lady. Surely there was some history, some more folklore, to go with the icon that he could tell her.

Z
OE ASKED THE
cabdriver to let her out across from the museum. But when she rounded the corner of the little side street, she was shocked to
see a crowd gathered in front of the old man’s shop, along with an ambulance and two cop cars with whirling red bubble lights.

She pushed through the crowd, her heart pounding slow, dull beats.
Please don’t let him be dead. Please don’t let him be dead
.

She wedged herself between a young couple, and a man wearing a stained butcher’s apron, just as the door to the shop opened and two EMTs in white smocks came out carrying a body bag on a stretcher. She heard the young man say in English to his girl, “One of the cops just said the guy’s eye was cut out.”

The ground lurched beneath Zoe’s feet, and she almost fell. She spun around, hot bile rising in her throat. She put a hand up to her mouth and pushed back through the crowd.

Oh God, oh God
. This was all her fault. She must have led the pony-tailed man right to the griffin shop yesterday, and now he’d killed the old man. But not before cutting out his eye, and there’d been no reason to do that. Boris didn’t have the icon anymore, and he had no way of knowing where it was.

She wove blindly down the jostling sidewalks, not knowing or caring where she went. Once she almost stepped off the curb and into the path of a bus.

She passed a huge multiplex movie theater and thought about losing herself inside, yet she walked on. She needed to find a hotel, a place with a shower and a bed. A place to lie low and think about what to do.

She found one that looked promising off one of the narrower side streets. It had a threadbare carpet and a half-dead palm tree in the lobby—definitely not a hotel you’d expect American tourists to flock to.

The man behind the front desk had a pathetic mustache and a snooty nose. He claimed to have only one vacancy, a small room on the top floor, facing the street and with only a shower, no bathtub. Was
madame
sure …?

Madame
was sure.

The elevator was smaller than a phone booth.
Madame
took the stairs.

N
OT UNTIL SHE
sat down on the bed did she realize how badly her legs were shaking. She was hungry, but she was afraid if she tried to eat now, she’d be sick. She couldn’t get the image of that body bag out of her head.

She curled up in a ball on the bed, hugging a pillow to her chest. She knew she ought to go to the French police and tell them about the ponytailed man, but she was afraid they would make her turn over the icon and the film because those things came from what was now a crime scene. She could even become a suspect herself, and she hadn’t heard very nice things about Parisian jails.

She lay there for a while, until hunger pangs penetrated her numb brain and she could smell the river on herself. She wanted to stay on the bed, curled up in a ball, but she made herself get up, shower, and change into her new clothes.

She left her ruined things in the hotel, but brought everything else along with her in her satchel. She took a table at the first café she came to, sat beneath a green-and-gold awning, and ordered a
salade Niçoise
and a bottle of Evian.