Into The Fire (29 page)

‘Where would you place your men?’

He swings round. To his left, the river winds back towards Paris. Somewhere distant is la Chapelle.

All around is open countryside with bands of thorns and the occasional oak. The only wrinkle in the land is to his right, where the meadow dips away in a shallow groove.

‘There?’

She nods.

He feels like a boy again. Looking away from the mercury sheen of the water, his eyes grow more used to the dark. Still, he sees nothing.

‘Lady?’

‘Men. At least a dozen, but there will be others.’ She strips off her gloves with her teeth, puts her thumbs to her lips and makes the call of the owl that is her night signal. Shapes grow out of the ground; two men, then three, then six and more.

She has a permanent detachment of a dozen French men at arms who will kill for the privilege of escorting her, and half as many Piedmontese mercenaries, led by a gunnery captain called Pietro di Carignano, who has brought them across Europe to fight with the Maid.

At her silent signal, they begin to move towards the dip in the ground. Her glove is back on, and her blade now free. Tomas checks the knife under his sleeve as he follows.

The moon makes a mirror of her plate. She is a beacon, traversing the countryside. She sends out her men in a broad sweep, half to the left, half to the right. By following the trajectory of their movements, he sees what she has seen: a clump of shadows too dense to be thorns, moving with such slowness that they could as easily be stationary.

Tomas’s mouth dries; his head grows light. Like all the rest, he has not fought since Patay. Oh, for his hammers. Or a longer blade. And not to be wearing a white habit under moonlight. He would be better naked. The Maid and her men are within bowshot of the enemy. If they have bodkin tips that can pierce armour …

This is not the plan. He cannot breathe.

And then he can, because the two groups are within closing distance and nobody has fallen. He hears a shout. In German. Mercenaries. The Germans are better than the English, better than the Genoese or Venetians or Poles; more disciplined, better trained, fond of the big
zweihänder
blades that are lethal in spread combat.

They are more expensive than the Piedmontese, who might be able to match them. Bedford, it would seem, is putting considerable gold into the defence of Paris, which may be wise, but suggests a distressing lack of faith in his servant Tomas Rustbeard.

He hears a crisp command, no attempt at concealment now. ‘Links. Geh’ Sie
links
!’

‘My lady, have a care! They are flanking to your right!’

Running towards the fight that has not yet begun, his sandalled feet slither on tussocky grass. His knife is out, but he is watching for the first man to fall, for the first dropped blade, axe, hammer …

He angles to the right, listening for the brisk, clear, foreign commands. He is slow, and yes, men have fallen. He scoops up an axe; not perfect, but better than nothing, and soon after, a heater shield with the mark of Luxembourg on it, the lion rampant
queue fourchée
in saltire gules. He runs to the far end, where he can outflank the flankers, but the Piedmontese are already there, curving round the back, and he is redundant, left to watch for solitary men trying to leave the field. There are none.

The fight is short and relatively straightforward. The Maid has brought crossbowmen. A simple expedient, but he doesn’t know they are there until he sees the glint of the bow to his left, and hears the particular hard-spring
whup
of a shot. He cannot possibly see the bolt, but his eyes furnish him with an imaginary flicker of silver and shortly after, satisfyingly, one of the big Germans deflates, making short choking noises, like a dog that has swallowed a too-big bone.

Three men dive for the
Zweihänder
that falls as a result. There’s a sense of invulnerability that comes from wielding so large a blade, even if it needs training to do it well. The crossbows take out four more and then there are only a handful still fighting around their captain, who is, by the sound of him, French, or Burgundian, or a Luxembourgian, these three being the same in all things but those that matter. At any rate, his blade is of ordinary length.

The Maid is opposite him, and nobody will shoot a crossbow while there is any chance they might hit her by mistake. They match, Maid and man, blade to axe, axe to blade.

Tomas has not, now he thinks about it, seen her fight one on one before, with men standing back to watch.

It is hard to focus on the individual moves in this dance. Their blades are sparks of living silver. The sound is crisp on the warm night. He hears a sigh from the watching men, sees the Maid sway a long way to her left, and, coming upright, cut a clever backhand to the knees, that is blocked and turned with a flick of the wrist; whoever he is, her opponent is good.

But not good enough. Perhaps here, when she is under moonlight, on French soil outside Paris, nobody would be good enough. There’s a twist and a slide and a crack, hard, of metal on metal and a sword spins across the turf.

It comes to rest near Tomas. He picks it up, feels the weight, the balance of pommel and blade. It’s broad at the hilt, with a clean guard and a strong handle, bound in oxhide, resilient and not likely to slip. The pommel is solid silver, or so it looks. This is German-made, but there is no questioning the identity of the captain who held it: the lion rampant is stamped on the head and after all, Luxembourg is allied to Burgundy.

‘A blade fit for battle, lady.’ He gives it to her as they ride back to la Chapelle. ‘God’s gift, perhaps, to replace your Crusader blade.’

She has given her miracle-blade to the shrine of Saint-Denis, patron saint of France. Himself, he wouldn’t have done something quite so ostentatiously pious, but then she was petitioning the king for permission to assault Paris: she had to do something to counteract Regnault de Chartres.

And it has worked. They arrive back in the small hours of the morning to find d’Alençon pacing outside her tent, his face alive with battle-joy.

‘He said yes! The king is coming from Compiègne. He says we can attack in two days’ time. If we are ready.’

You could see the shine of her smile from the heart of Paris.

‘We shall be ready.’

SOON.

Soon Picaut must have answers, because only four full days of campaigning remain until the polls open and if she was in any doubt that the arson had a political motive, the assault on Luc’s project has quashed it. She has no idea how the fires might escalate in the short time left, only that it will happen.

She has spent two hours with the forensic teams in the burned-out warehouse, but the wreckage has told her nothing that the CCTV had not already done: that her best and most fertile lead points to Cheb Yasine, the drug dealer who lives in the nearest Orléans has to a slum.

So now Garonne is down at street level, sitting in a car near the private apartment in which Yasine is spending his evening, with a directional microphone pointed at the windows.

And Picaut is in the lookout set up by Rollo on the third floor of a block that looks directly over the bulk of Yasine’s territory. The floor is hard under her abdomen. Binoculars press red rims to her eyes. She could feed on the tobacco smoke in the air and not go hungry. She could pillow her head on the hip hop beat pulsing up from the floor below. Insofar as it is possible these days, she is at peace, wrapped in the focused attention that she can never sustain in the chaos of the outer world but always comes with a stakeout.

Sylvie is here with her, monitoring the wire taps on Yasine’s landline and his three known mobile phones. In theory, Rollo is asleep. Certainly, he has accepted the order to leave and go home, but everyone says he becomes undead in times like this, that he stands in his kitchen with one hand on the kettle making and drinking coffee after coffee until she summons him again. He inhabits a place apart, invincible, immortal; only a silver bullet will kill him.

There are no silver bullets here, only young Algerian men in trainers and hip-slung jeans who slide back and forth under the streetlights on skateboards; young women with scarves on their heads and great brown eyes whose gazes linger nowhere for long; children and grandparents, harassed mothers and working fathers; Cheb Yasine’s drug dealers work openly throughout the ghetto.

It wouldn’t be hard to pick them up, but there would be no great value in it. They’d be replaced within the day and Picaut would be no closer to discovering whether he is lighting the fires, and why.

They haven’t located the car that Patrice identified on the CCTV yet. It hasn’t been reported stolen or missing, or found burned out or crashed or dumped in the river. Garonne keeps looking. Nobody else dares to go out on the streets; they’d be too obvious, and the last thing Picaut wants is to spook Cheb Yasine when she has this one tenuous, beautiful lead.

Her mobile quivers to an incoming text from Patrice.

L
ET ME IN
!

Picaut holds it up for Sylvie, who shrugs. Neither of them has seen him come near, which is probably just as well. His kingfisher hair is a beacon that would mark him out here as different even faster than a leather jacket on a woman. She walks over and opens the door.

‘What on earth are you doing here?’

He’s there on the doorstep, a long, lean youth in a hooded sweatshirt and tattered trainers, with jeans slung so low they show a three centimetre rim of tanned skin and lean muscle above the waistband. He’s got a bag slung over one shoulder and a skateboard with a luminescent stripe balanced on the other. If he hadn’t texted her to say who he was, she’d have her gun out, ready to take him down.

He grins. ‘I’ve found it.’

‘Found what?’

‘The Civic. Are you going to let me in?’

Pushing past her, he sinks down in the foul armchair that is one of the few pieces of furniture left in this deserted apartment. He unhitches his satchel and brings out a flask, heavy with the scent of Éric Masson’s Peruvian coffee.

He holds it out. ‘Want some?’

Her own supply ran out an hour ago. ‘If you can spare any.’

‘You can have it all. I wasn’t planning to stay.’

A laptop follows the flask out of the bag. Opened and fired up, the screen displays three photographs of the Honda that was used in the arson attack on Luc’s Project.

‘It’s about four blocks away, parked behind two others. I’ll look to see who lives near here when I get back behind a firewall, but I need to leave you with this so you can check on it while I’m away.’

He has already closed the images and is typing fast, his tongue trapped between his teeth in concentration. Text stutters across the screen with many line breaks.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Hacking.’ He speaks without looking up. ‘I put a tracker on the Civic. With a bit of tweaking, Google Maps will let you know if it moves and give read-outs of where it is every fifty metres. Just hold your breath a bit …’

Picaut and Sylvie go back to watching the street. Patrice gives a huff of satisfaction, stands, and brings the laptop over to show them what he’s done. On the screen, a red dot blinks within a map of the ghetto.

‘If it moves, it’ll grow larger. The further and faster it goes, the larger it’ll get. I could set up an audible alarm, but—’

‘But not while we’re trying to keep quiet for the sake of those below. Thank you.’

‘My pleasure.’ He’s ready to go, flipping his skateboard up with as much ease as any of the youths on the street. ‘Let me know if they move it. I can follow.’

‘You’re not going down there again?’

‘Why not? I can skate better than any of these guys.’

‘Patrice, they’ll tear you to ribbons.’

‘Only if they find out I’m working for you. Which they won’t, unless you tell them. Which you won’t, so I’m safe.’ His grin is brilliant and carefree. He blows her a kiss and is gone.

Picaut is not relaxed now, watching the street; she is watching the lean, hooded figure of Patrice and trying not to imagine how he will look if Cheb Yasine practises on him with his power drills.

Patrice wasn’t working for the department when Rémi’s drug team lost their man; he never saw the body, he just heard about it afterwards, which is never the same. There’s a raw terror that he lacks.

It’s not a good train of thought and it doesn’t get better when Patrice skates out of sight and she’s left watching a nearly empty street. Cheb Yasine is having dinner nearby, but that apart, the ghetto is in party mode, with loud music and the stink of cannabis layered through the air.

Yasine himself is quiet to the point of being introverted. Picaut is beginning to understand why Rémi had such a hard time reeling him in. Mid-thirties, hard, with a penchant for gold chains and cigarillos, he is none the less the epitome of the successful businessman, husband and father, outwardly at least, careful in his work as the owner of a string of mobile phone shops, adoring of his two teenaged daughters, carefully respectful of his wife.

He may be a pimp’s pimp, but he has not been known to use prostitutes of either sex or any age. He sells drugs, but never takes them. He runs bars, but doesn’t drink anything more potent than fresh peppermint tea laced with a near-fatal dose of sugar. He is a model of the community he rules, and everyone knows it.

He’s out there with his wife, Jasmina, and their two daughters, dining with his cousin Ferhat, eldest of the sprawling Amrouche clan; one of the middle-ranking ones owns the car that Patrice has just found. Garonne is nearby in his car, watching the places she can’t see, pointing his directional microphone at the windows, taping the conversations taking place within. He has a radio link to Picaut that Patrice swears is untappable.

It hisses to life now as Garonne says, ‘Moving.’

‘How many?’

‘Three adults, two children. Coming your way.’

They are relaxed, happy, peaceful, like any other family taking an evening stroll. Picaut watches them go past, notes the time in the log, initials the entry. It is this precision that brings results in the end, but she would do it anyway; time matters. Garonne comes in soon after, drops in a recording of the evening’s conversation, takes a look at Patrice’s laptop and leaves.