[JJ06] Quicksand (6 page)

CHAPTER 10

“What does he want you to steal?” I asked, my eyes fixed on the innocuous envelope. After learning the invitation I’d received the previous week had been secretly bugged, I didn’t think I’d ever look at a piece of mail the same way again.

Lane shoved two pieces of paper back inside the envelope. “The less you know, the better.”

“You’re not going to tell me? I’m the reason you’re in this mess!”

“No, you’re not, Jaya. I got into this all by myself. I’m only sorry I dragged you into it with me. I’m serious. The less you know, the better.”

“You have to tell me.”

“Things are a bit more...
challenging
than I anticipated.” He downed the last of his drink.

I followed suit. This was not the time to savor good Scotch. I was going for its medicinal effect as a reliever of shock. “Nothing good can come of you keeping things from me,” I said. “Let me help.”

For a moment it looked as if he was going to object—but then he grinned at me. It was the first real happiness I’d seen that day.

“God, I missed you,” he said. He took my empty glass and enveloped me in a hug. Though he looked calm on the outside, before he let me go I felt how quickly his heart was beating.

“Tell me what you’re supposed to do,” I said.

“I’ll do better than that. Grab your shoes.”

“Where are we going?”

“To the Louvre.”

“It’s almost eight o’clock at night. And we’ve barely touched our food.”

“It’s open twice a week in the evening.”

“You’re not going to—”

“No, I’m not going to steal anything tonight. I haven’t visited lately. I want to get the lay of the land.”

The phone on the side table rang. Lane picked it up. He listened for a moment then held the phone to his chest.

“Would you like to walk or have a car pick us up?” he asked.

“If this weren’t super-creepy,” I said, “I could get used to this.”

“You want the car?”

“How far is it?”

“Twenty minutes on foot. Maybe half an hour.”

“I’ve been sitting for over ten hours. Let’s walk.”

The waterfront walk was beautiful. It was a chilly evening, but the night sky was clear. The moon even cooperated, providing a romantic, moonlit walk along the Seine. I glanced over my shoulder. The stylishly-dressed Frenchman who’d brought Lane the envelope was a few yards behind us, ruining the mood. I tucked up the collar of my coat and nearly tripped on a cobblestone. Lane took my hand to steady me.

“How come you’ve never been to Paris before?” he asked.

“Why does everyone keep asking me that?”

We walked in silence for several minutes, hand in hand. It was past evening rush hour, and cars whizzed past us only sporadically. Lane pulled me away from the river and we crossed the street.

“This is the start of the Louvre complex,” he said.

“Really?” I paused in front of the thick stone walls, surprised at Lane’s statement. The sprawling, connected buildings in front of us looked more like a royal estate in the countryside, not a museum in the center of Paris.

“Wait until we get to the courtyard.”

As we stepped through a stone arch, the famous pyramid I’d seen in pictures came into view. The modern steel and glass structure emerged from the ground and gave light to the subterranean ticket lobby. Smaller pyramids flanked the big one. It was after sunset and the courtyard was bathed in light from the buildings and old fashioned streetlights.

Before reaching the indoor ticket booths, there was a security checkpoint visitors had to pass through to enter the museum. Beyond the security station and the lobby’s ticket booths were four different entrances to choose from, each leading to a different wing. We checked our coats, then Lane led the way to the Richelieu wing, our shadow following.

“Can we stop by the painting with the haunted chandelier?” a voice from behind us asked in a faint French accent.

Lane turned and raised an eyebrow.

“We all know I’m here,” the man said. “I might as well have the opportunity to see this painting I like.”

“Sure,” Lane said, stifling a laugh. “Why not? I want to go through the whole museum anyway. We’re tourists, after all.”

I found myself straggling behind the two men as Lane led us through several rooms full of priceless paintings and sculptures. Beautiful, powerful works of art I’d seen in textbooks or online, all right here in front of me. There were also plenty of plainer objects that must have had fascinating histories attached to them. We paused briefly as we passed through a section of antique desks that were far from ornate. Were they desks of famous painters? I began reading the placard next to a particularly ordinary desk that had once been used for decorating illuminated manuscripts. Before I could learn more, Lane said we had to keep moving. I tried to keep up, but as we moved through another section, I fell behind.

“Jaya,” Lane said. “What are you doing?”

“That’s Winged Victory,” I said, gaping in front of the headless sculpture. It was bigger than I’d imagined it would be.

“
Regardez,
” North’s associate said. But he wasn’t pointing at the sculpture. He was making shadow puppets on the wall that mimicked the wings of the masterpiece.

“We’ll be coming back,” Lane said, rolling his eyes at both of us. “The museum is only open for another hour tonight.”

I trotted after the two men. When we reached a grand room of oil paintings depicting gruesome mythological scenes, they slowed down, stopping in front of a small Expressionist painting dwarfed by the larger pieces in the room.

“Where are all the people?” I asked. “I thought the Louvre was a crowded museum.”

“It usually is,” our handler said. “But not as much in the evening.” 

“He’s right,” Lane said. “At eleven o’clock in the morning you don’t want to be here. It’s wall-to-wall people, including tour groups who stop moving in the most inconvenient places to listen to their guides.”

“
That’s
when you want me to look at the art I want to see?”

“Marius, I don’t suppose you’d let Jaya look around on her own? No? I didn’t think so. Sorry, Jones.”

So that was his name. Under the circumstances, it had seemed strange to enquire.

“
Merde
,” Marius muttered.

“I was only joking,” Lane said. “Where’s your usual sense of humor?”

“Not that.” Marius tilted his head toward a man who was approaching us.

“Hugo?” Lane said.

A wide-eyed, spectacled man walked toward us. When he came within a few yards of us, he nearly dropped the fedora he held in his hands.

“
Je suis désolé
,” the newcomer said, his eyes darting between the three of us.

“Hugo,” Marius said, his voice clipped. “What do you think you’re—”

“I did not see you there, Marius.” The man’s voice shook, and his stance indicated he might turn and run at any moment. If this was one of Lane’s “associates,” he was clearly in the wrong business. 

“Hugo must have confused the dates his services are required,” Marius said, shaking his head and keeping his eyes on Hugo. “There’s to be no discussion of future assignments until North has completed this current job.”

“I merely wished to visit an old friend,” Hugo said, holding up his hands in a placating gesture. “There is no misunderstanding.”

Lane was the only one of the three men who appeared calm. “It’s good to see you, my friend.” He shook Hugo’s hand. The juxtaposition between them was striking. Though they both had fair hair and looked around the same age, Hugo wasn’t much taller than I was, and he might have been even skinnier. I wondered if he was the little guy they used to fit through tiny windows.

“This is Jaya,” Lane continued, ignoring a sharp glare from Marius. “Jaya, Hugo.”

“
Enchanté,
” Hugo said. He gave me a warm smile and shook my hand. Unlike Lane’s other associates, I liked Hugo immediately. It’s a funny thing how people make snap judgments about one another. As surely as I’d known I didn’t want to go with the unpleasant man at the airport who North had sent to pick me up, I knew if this had been the right time and place, I’d want to be friends with Hugo. It wasn’t only because he was a fellow tiny person. It was the genuine warmth in his eyes.

I felt all eyes on me and Hugo, including those in the Old Masters portraits surrounding us. Silence hung in the nearly empty gallery.

Hugo broke the silence. “
Je suis désolé, mes amis.
I should not have come.”

“How did you find us?” Lane asked.

“You changed your phone and email, my friend,” Hugo said. “This is the third time I’ve visited to the Louvre this week. I knew you would come.”

Marius responded to Hugo in French. Three days of intensive French lessons weren’t enough to understand their terse words, but the intonation made it clear Marius was angry. Hugo spoke a few words in French, before switching back to English as he turned to me.

“I have decided to retire, you see,” Hugo said. “I merely wished to see my old friend Lane before I did.”

Marius crossed his arms. “Go ahead. Say your farewells.”

“You’ll be leaving Paris?” Lane asked.

“Perhaps,” Hugo said, glancing nervously at Marius before turning back to Lane. “I love my flat on Rue Sainte-Croix de la Bretonnerie. I would miss the way the light falls on my statue of Michelangelo’s
Angel
in the window if I were to leave.”  He had to be talking about a replica, didn’t he? “But when one wishes to cut ties...” He shrugged, causing his wire-rimmed glasses to slip down his slight nose.

“I plan to leave Paris very soon,” Lane said. “Otherwise I’d suggest we meet in a few days. But as things are—”

“Of course, of course.”

While Hugo and Lane spoke for several minutes, with Marius watching them, I looked around at the paintings in the room. Lane had led us through much of the museum, but he hadn’t told me what it was he was supposed to steal. I turned back to the men. They hadn’t moved from their spot in front of the tiny Expressionist painting. Was there a reason they lingered in front of that particular painting?

“Don’t go far,” Marius called after me as I stepped away from them to look more closely at the masterful art encircling us.

Why were Lane and Hugo going through the charade of saying stilted farewells with Marius looking on? I froze. Marius wasn’t only watching. He was
listening
. Hugo had gone through a lot of effort to find Lane, and he’d been so nervous when he realized Marius was there. There was something Hugo wanted to tell Lane. And with us under surveillance, he
had no way to tell him.

CHAPTER 11

After our unsettling encounter with Hugo, the mood shifted for the remaining time at the museum. Lane, Marius, and I walked silently through the nearly empty rooms, the sound of my heels clicking on the marble floors echoing around us.

When we left, a car was waiting for us on the street outside the courtyard. Dante, the driver from the airport who’d also dropped off Lane’s bag of clothes, was behind the wheel. The black SUV was larger than most of the cars on the streets of Paris, but I was glad for the space as Lane, Marius, and I climbed into the back seat. Marius sat in the middle. In spite of the cold, I wished we were walking.

“It was one of the paintings in the room where Hugo found us,” I said, “wasn’t it?”

Marius shot Lane a pointed look.

“North didn’t say anything about keeping secrets from me,” I said.

Marius sighed. “You two interrupted my dinner for this excursion. I know a superb place not far—”

“We’re not hungry,” Lane said.

“I wasn’t asking for your input,” Marius said.

“I, for one, am starving,” I said. “I
still
haven’t eaten.”

“As the lady says,” Marius said. “Dante, change of plans. Take us to my favorite bistro.”

Dante nodded from the driver’s seat. He changed course abruptly, causing me to knock into Marius as he made a u-turn onto a bridge.

A few minutes later, Dante dropped us off at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in an alley barely big enough for a single car to slip through. Stepping out of the SUV, we were greeted by the sound of a pumping drum beat from a nightclub next door. As soon as we stepped through the ivy-lined doorway of the narrow restaurant, the thumping sound fell away. Small candle-lit tables lined the brick walls, a formally-dressed waiter effortlessly maneuvering through the aisle with a tray of wine and bread.

A pretty hostess greeted Marius warmly with air-kisses next to his cheeks, and led us to the farthest table in the half-full bistro. A rainbow of wax drippings covered the wine bottle that served as a candle holder. The candle flickered as we sat down.

“Listen,” I said, “I’m already in, so why not let me help?”

“First,” Marius said, “we order food and wine. I realize you’re an American, but this is a civilized country.”

Over a bottle of Burgundy and plates of stroganoff, Marius regaled us with stories from the novel he was writing, a humorous tale of the life of a charming French thief. “It is based on my life, you see,” he said. “Therefore I must write under an assumed name, since it will become a bestseller.”

“Won’t the publisher need to know your true identity?” Lane said. “Seems awfully risky.”

Marius frowned at him. “What is the American expression? You are a
buzz kill
?”

“What about this particular job?” I said, getting the conversation back on track. “Will it go in your book?”

Marius shrugged.

“You were right about the painting you asked about, Jaya,” Lane said. “That’s the item that’s involved.”

After the briefest hesitation, Marius nodded for Lane to continue.

“
We’ll be taking it,” Lane said, “and then putting it back.”

“You mean you’re taking it and replacing it with a forgery?” I asked, feeling my cheeks flushing with anger. How could Lane think that giving a forgery to the Louvre was acceptable?

Lane shook his head. “We’re not stealing the painting. We just need to borrow it.”

“But they’ll notice it’s gone,” I said.

“Will they?” Marius asked, smiling as he cut his food into delicate bites.

I stared at them. “You’re after something hidden behind the painting’s canvas. That’s it, isn’t it?”

“Jaya,” Lane said, “please don’t insist upon knowing all the details.”

“Exactly,” Marius said. “That’s enough talk about business. Now about my book—”

The awkwardness of knowing your room is bugged doesn’t fade. At least not within a day. I slept far away from Lane that night, and it took me ages to fall asleep.

In the morning, I found a note in plain sight.

Had to go out to get some things together. Marius is with me. Dante will go with you if you want to go anywhere.

Did Lane really think I was going to go sightseeing while he was off planning a heist? A heist that
wasn’t
a heist. Dammit, I hated that I was such a sound sleeper.

I grabbed my cell phone and checked for email and text messages. Which, of course, I now knew North was reading as well. I threw the phone onto the couch.

I flipped on the TV, expecting to find everything in French. Besides news channels in multiple languages, it was.

A strange feeling snuck up on me as I stared at the television, hitting me with full force. I was homesick.

It was a strange sensation, and not one I was used to experiencing. I’m used to feeling like I don’t fit in. My dad is an American who went to India to find himself, and he stayed on after he met my mom. I spent the first seven years of my life in Goa. After my mom died, my dad moved my brother and me to Berkeley. I’m used to being asked “where I’m from” in both places I’m from. Lane had grown up overseas after spending the early part of his childhood in the Midwest. That experience of being uprooted at a young age and never quite fitting in is one of the things we had in common. But this situation was different. I was in a country and a situation that were both truly foreign to me. I didn’t speak the language, I was being coerced into going along with a frightful plan, and my sort-of boyfriend was out in Paris without me, planning the art heist we’d been forced to go along with. I’d say I had a right to feel homesick.

I found my phone between the couch cushions and pulled up Sanjay’s number. An illustrated poster from one of his “Hindi Houdini” magic tours popped up on the screen. I felt immediately better looking at the silhouette of Sanjay in a bowler hat, his arms raised as he conjured a fierce Kathakali dancer. The illustration was in the classic style of the magic posters of the early 1900s, where magicians like Thurston and Kellar were drawn with apparitions of ghosts and devils swirling around them.

I stopped myself before hitting the button to call Sanjay. Not just because it was the middle of the night in San Francisco, but because I couldn’t tell him anything that was going on.

Then it hit me. Even though I couldn’t get help through conventional means without being found out, I knew how to communicate with Sanjay in an unconventional way. Sanjay had taught me how to read minds when I helped him with a magic show. It wasn’t actually reading minds, but that was the trick. It was knowing how to communicate with your accomplice in a secret way that the audience didn’t understand. This time, instead of the crowd of a theater, North was my audience.

Since North would be reading everything I typed onto my phone, I could use that to my advantage. My plan wasn’t to ask Sanjay to call the police. I could have done that myself, but unfortunately Lane was right that it would be a terrible idea. My idea in contacting Sanjay was to find out if I could communicate with him like this, in case there was an opportunity in which sending a coded message would help.

Sanjay had a magician friend in France, so I decided that’s what I’d ask him about. The email I composed used the principles of the mind reading trick, in which we could either use coded words that meant other words, or signal different letters of the alphabet, for more complex messages. I had to do the latter in this case.

I constructed a short email telling him on the surface that the France trip was a bust—but that underneath was asking the question of what his magician friend’s name was, and if he’d be someone I should be interested in visiting while in France.

The trickier part was thinking of how to signal to Sanjay that he should read the email as a coded message in the first place.

I lay back on the brocade couch and stared at the ceiling, pretending to be frustrated that I couldn’t e
mail with my friend openly—which was easy, since I wasn’t pretending. I couldn’t see any surveillance cameras, which made them all the more creepy. North’s tiny cameras could be anywhere.

Focus, Jaya.
The last time Sanjay and I had done the mind-reading illusion together was at the Folsom Street Theatre. I hoped that would be a big enough signal. I sat up and finished the email, smiling as I typed the last line: “I hope your current show is going as well as our show at the Folsom Street Theatre.” The show had been a disaster, and he knew I would never say anything otherwise.

Sanjay loved puzzles, so he would easily believe that if I was bored, I would make the effort of writing him emails in code, just because.

While I waited to hear back from him, I ordered room service: a full French breakfast of coffee, croissants, bread, jam, butter. When it arrived, I was disappointed by how small each of the items was, but then I took a bite of a croissant. I don’t know what they put in the croissants in France, but the sensation of them melting in my mouth stimulated my senses almost enough to make me forget how apprehensive I was.

By the time I’d polished off the last fluffy croissant dipped in black cherry jam, Sanjay had already emailed me back.

Sorry everything blows. Anyway, sadly this illusion eludes new assistant. Really, everyone needs a usable distraction. (How hard is that? That’s the whole point of a magician’s assistant! Do I ask too much???) Nevermind about new trick.

Endearingly,

Sanjay

I smiled to myself. There was no way Sanjay would have written such an awkward email if it wasn’t a code. Bad grammar, using the word “trick” to describe one of his illusions, and a clunky sign-off. The parenthetical part of the message was his real voice, so I knew to omit that part of the message when I decoded it.

I wished I could have written out the message on a notepad to more easily decode it, but the cameras were watching. I read the email slowly, reading it for what it truly meant.

S
orry

e
verything

b
lows.

A
nyway,

s
adly

t
his

i
llusion

e
ludes

n
ew-assistant.

R
eally,

e
veryone

n
eeds

a

u
sable

d
istraction.

N
evermind

a
bout

n
ew

t
rick.

E
ndearingly,

S
anjay

Sébastien Renaud. Nantes.

The name of a man and a city in France. The code had worked. I now had a way to communicate with the outside world that only I knew about.