Columbus (17 page)

A week went by, two. Dupris inquired about buying the building himself, but Jerome Coulfret, the brother, resisted. His education had instilled in him a keen business sense, a sense that would serve him well in the jewelry trade years later. The ownership of the building suddenly became important to Dupris, like having a tangible trophy to put in his case, a symbol for the rest of his men to see what happened if they chose to tangle with the boss. He became obsessed with owning it, refusing to let Alex’s pissant brother keep this prize from him.

Recognizing the volatility of the situation, Jerome told Augustus Dupris he feared for his and his mother’s safety, and he wanted assurances that if Dupris bought the building, no harm would befall them. Dupris agreed but Jerome wanted a commitment in person; he insisted that Dupris come to his small janitor’s apartment in the basement of the building and he would sign over the papers in front of witnesses.

Dupris brought three of his most trusted bodyguards, men whom he used for intimidation and enforcement. They entered the building on the Rue de Maur, suspecting nothing. They paraded down the hallway, suspecting nothing. They piled into the cramped elevator and pressed the appropriate button, suspecting nothing.

The cable snapped and the elevator car plummeted, dropping thirty feet in three seconds and slamming like a thunderclap into the concrete foundation. It bounced, crumpling like a crushed soda can, and came to rest at an eighty-degree angle at the bottom of the shaft, like a domino about to topple. Dupris and his men were injured, sure, but nothing life-threatening. That part would come in a moment. They were more shocked and confused, still trying to figure out what happened.

The doors just above their heads pried open from the outside, and light spilled into the car. They looked up expectantly, eager for aid, for someone to help them out of the collapsed car.

A ghost stared down at them: Alexander Coulfret, back from the grave, resurrected in a building he knew better than anyone. His face was sinister; there was triumph in his eyes. He glared at the men, as helpless as sardines packed in a tin, and started firing.

Maybe Mallery didn’t tell the story quite so fully, but he laid out the broad strokes, and it didn’t take much digging to fill in the details. I’ve found that once you possess a few nuggets, it’s much easier to pry the whole story out of people. If you listen, a neighborhood will talk.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

HE’S IN THE BUILDING ON THE RUE DE MAUR, OF THAT I’M CERTAIN.
And either he’s a complete recluse, holed up in a tiny apartment, running his kingdom from the shadows, or he had his face changed, happy with the way the police or perhaps his rivals were fooled by his accidental death ruse. My guess is the latter. The men in his organization are way too deferential for Coulfret to be a shut-in. That kind of power comes only from a firsthand, iron-fisted rule. The fact that the police never quite bought the ruse tells me he didn’t need to use it for long.

To get to him, to end this, I have two choices. Try to infiltrate his building, or try to flush him toward a place of my choosing.

I mentioned a few ways I go about gathering information: I can steal it. Or I can force someone to give it to me under duress. Or, like with Mallery, I can feign friendship in order to extract what I need. But there is another way, one I’ve employed on occasion. It’s tricky, but it can be effective.

I buy a cheap camera from a souvenir shop near the Rue St. Denis and start scouring the sidewalk for prostitutes. The ladies populate this street at all hours of the day, dressed in their dystopian view of evening wear, ready to approach a john for business as soon as his gaze lingers for more than a fleeting moment. There is no cream of the crop here, no high-priced whores, no beautiful young women lost under a layer of makeup. The women on the Rue St. Denis are well past the age and weight when they should be parading their wares.

My eyes settle on a particularly homely sample and I speak to her as best I can in French.

“How much?”

“Thirty.”

“How would you like to make three hundred?”

Her eyes reflect the age-old battle between fear and avarice. I can read her thoughts as easy as if she spoke them aloud:
Whatever he wants me to do can’t be good for my health, but three hundred euros is more than I’ve made in a month
.

“What for?”

“To ride in a taxi and take some photos.”

“With you?”

“By yourself.”

“Psssh.” She waves at me like I’m insane.

“I have a taxi waiting.”

“I don’t know what cheat this is. . . . ”

“No cheat. Here’s thirty just for listening to me. Here’s two hundred and seventy, which I’ll give you if you take this camera in that taxi and fill the camera with photos of the second block of the Rue de Maur. You’ll be back here in thirty minutes.”

Her brain is trying to calculate the percentages of risk versus reward but the entire effort is simply too much and her eyes refocus on the money in her hand and the rest of it within grabbing distance.

“You do this right and there’ll be more jobs like it, all over town, paying even more.”

“Just take photos?”

“When you approach the block, hold the camera like this, here, not up to your eye, but down at the bottom of the taxi’s window. Click, wind here, click, wind . . . do it on both sides of the street. I’ve instructed the taxi to drive slowly, but not too slowly. Take as many as the camera will allow. The taxi will then return you here.”

“Fifty more now,” she croaks. Two of her teeth are missing and the remaining ones are stained with lipstick.

“Not a euro more until I have a full camera.”

She grimaces and then shrugs, takes the camera, and waddles over to the taxi.

I keep my word when she returns. She’ll try to remember me, the man wearing a hat and dark glasses, should I come back to the Rue St. Denis, but by that evening, I have no doubt alcohol will have wiped her memory clean. Besides, I have no plans to return to that particular street.

I develop the pictures at a one-hour photo on the opposite side of town, far away from the Bastille district Alexander Coulfret calls home. Nothing from the photo-shop worker indicates that he gave my pictures anything more than a cursory look. And why would he have noticed anything more than typical tourist photos of a sleepy Parisian block?

Back in my hotel room, the photographs are laid out across an ottoman I’m using for a desk. The whore wasn’t exactly Ansel Adams, but she did an adequate job, all things considered. She took thirty-six photos, covering the entire block, and only had her thumb in one frame.

Here’s what I learned that I didn’t already know by way of the internet. The block has five buildings on either side, with a series of shops fronting most of them. The adjacent buildings to the one owned by Coulfret contain apartments above a pastry shop and a dressmaker’s boutique. The location where a shop would be at the bottom of Coulfret’s particular building is a mystery; paper blinds fill the windows.

Across the street stands a trio of similar buildings, containing two clothing stores and a pharmacy. All six shops—including the empty one—have cameras facing the street, sophisticated equipment for disparate places, all made by the same manufacturer. It seems Coulfret’s real estate ambitions have grown to include most of his block. I wonder if all six buildings are connected, and, if so, how. Paris has an extensive underground sewer system, and perhaps he’s taken advantage of it.

The whore’s photographs also reveal men sitting with a certain lassitude on three benches positioned on both sides and across the street from Coulfret’s front door. Six hard-looking men, three benches. My guess is they rotate out regularly, and who knows how many more are waiting inside that shop with the papered-over windows?

Storming the building is starting to look like an ugly proposition, a long-odds loser.

Ruby Grant smiles over her cup of coffee. We’re on the Left Bank, in the back of a café once frequented by Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Joyce.

“I’m worried about you, Columbus. For a loner, you’re starting to ask me to hook up with you quite a bit.”

“Who says I’m a loner?”

“Every file ever written about you.”

“What do the files say about you?”

“If I see any, I’ll let you know.”

“You’re a blank slate. . . . ”

“With this face, I’m sure a few people have noticed me. Right before I shot ’em.”

“You ever think about checking out?”

She looks at me sideways. “Of the game? Nah, I’d just waste away. You?”

“Just thoughts.”

Goddamn, I have no idea why I’m telling her this. It’s like I’m floating a balloon. Maybe if I can practice here with Ruby Grant, I can persuade myself to put this life behind me the next time I see Risina. Jesus, is that it?

I discover a tiny bit of disappointment in Ruby’s eyes.

“Well, I’d stop thinking those thoughts if it were me. You start going down that road, you don’t realize you can’t turn around until you hit a dead end.”

I nod. “Ahhh, I’m just blowing air. This life is all I got.”

She knows I’m snowing her now, but she’s happy to get off the subject.

“Archie really has a file on me?”

“He’s got a file on everyone he ever met. Says you shot a cigarette out of his mouth once in Boston.”

“Well, that’s true.”

She laughs, an effortless, warm sound.

“All right . . . you know so much about me, time for you to ’fess up.”

She spreads her hands out like she’s ready for me to ask anything.

“Tell me how you started pulling trigger for your brother. I’ve never seen that before, a brother–sister, fence and assassin.”

“Ahh, it’s nothing. I worked for him for a while . . . helped him put files together . . . got into places he probably wouldn’t be able to get into. A couple of years at that, and I told him I was itchy to try it.”

“And he just said ‘okay’?”

She looks at me out of the tops of her eyes. “Oh, I get it. I see what you’re doing here. You wanna hear about my first time?”

It’s my turn to shrug.

“Fine, fine. You can be the first to hear it, then, other than Archie who knew the story anyway. Just go get me one of them macaroons they got up in the window there and then settle back, ’cause I got a tale to tell.”

I do. And she does.

“The first time—you never forget the first time, you know what I’m saying? Well, Archie was worried about me, even though I was born for this, truth be told. So he just kept putting it off and putting it off until I told him, ‘Archie, if you don’t hurry up and give me an assignment, I’m liable to just go ahead and make you my first target.’ At this point, I’d been following marks for at least a couple of years, and Archie knew I could handle my business, but he was reluctant to let me out of the starting gates.

“Finally, he relents, looks at me sideways, and hands me this file.”

“A creampuff,” I offer.

Ruby laughs. “Oh, yeah. A cakewalk. An easy-greasy, ‘stroll down Broadway and collect two hundred dollars as you pass Go’ kind of hit. Archie’d just been waiting for a tasty peach like this so I could pop my soda.”

“I don’t blame him.”

“Shit, I don’t either. I didn’t. Not then, at least. So I look over the file, and it’s exactly what you’d expect. Some mid-level guy works in a paper mill, up for a union position and I guess someone didn’t think too favorably of that. This guy, shit, I don’t even remember his name, Black or Brown or something like that, we’ll just call him Brown, well, Brown’s got a routine he’s been following every work day for twenty years. Gets up—”

“Family guy?”

“No, never been married, lives alone, all by his lonesome. . . . ”

It’s my turn to laugh, “Jesus.”

“I know! Anyway, gets up, goes to this little diner slash coffee shop, eats two eggs, two pieces of toast, two strips of bacon . . . ”

“Two cups of coffee.”

“You got it. Then he drives in to work, punches the clock, works his eight, punches out, hits a bar named George’s along with half his co-workers, and heads home. Wash, rinse, repeat.”

“A creampuff.”

“Ain’t that the truth. A guy stuck in a rut. A thousand ways to drop this guy and all of ’em as clean as a whistle, as my mom would say.”

She stops to take a bite of the macaroon, then swallows quickly so she doesn’t lose momentum.

“So here’s the kicker. Archie tag-teams it—”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. Wants me to double up with a long-time shooter he’s got in the stable, name of Tuesday—Tuesday Schmidt or something like that. Ever heard of him?”

I shake my head, and she waves like it doesn’t matter.

“Why would ya? Anyway, this guy’s pulled jobs for Archie for as long as I’ve known him and I’ve read his file and he only works once in a blue moon, but he seems good to go, so whatever. I mean, I’m annoyed, but whatever.

“Archie assures me this bagman is going to just show me the ropes, but I’ll get the kill shot, and I guess that’s what matters, because the truth of it is . . . how will I react? It’s one thing to follow a mark and make notes in a file, another to actually—ah, hell, you know what I’m talking about. Jesus, how long is this story? You sick of it yet?”

“No, believe me, I’m entertained.”

“I’ll try to pick up the pace just the same. So Archie puts us together and I meet Tuesday for the first time, and he’s not at all what I was expecting. Maybe his file needed updating or something, but this guy is a biscuit away from three hundred fifty pounds and he’s gotta be at least sixty years old.”

“Christ.”

“Tell me about it. I start thinking maybe Archie’s doing the favor for
this
guy, not me. So we ride around together and we stake Brown for at least a week to make sure the file’s up to snuff, though I know it’s going to be. Say what you want about my brother, but Archie can put a file together, that’s for sure.

“Anyway, we sneak into this mark’s house when he’s at work to get the lay of the land, we eat breakfast at the diner, we even get into his mill and scout it out, all the homework, you know. Tuesday’s pretty entertaining, actually, got a million stories he’s spooling out like fairy tales—the moral of this story is ‘don’t leave your safety on,’ the moral of this story is ‘carry an extra clip in your bag’—that type of thing. He’s got me in stitches half the time we’re working this job.