Shadow Knight's Mate (28 page)

Some time about midafternoon that wooden door opened. The young man in uniform who had brought Arden in stepped into the passageway. Jack smiled inwardly. Here it came. Arden's plan beginning. When she got them out she would also reveal herself.

“You have a visitor,” the guard said. Jack waited for Arden to stand up. She didn't move. Jack turned his head in exasperation and saw the guard looking at
him.
The man gestured impatiently.

Jack scrambled to his feet. No one would come visiting him. Unless the Circle had somehow managed to—

He looked through the now-open door and saw Yvette. The young woman from the night before. She stepped through the door, and her nose wrinkled at the stench from his cell.

Jack glanced at Arden, who was staring at Yvette. He had to admit she was worth a stare. Yvette had changed into tight silvery pants that ended about mid-calf. It was hard to tell where slacks stopped and skin began, they were so tight. Good legs. On top she wore a cowl-neck royal blue sweater that brought out her eyes.

“Jack, darling!” she said, and threw her arms around his neck. There she whispered, “You were right. And you're the only man who can make Paul jealous. I have to have you out.”

Drawing back, she said more loudly, “I wanted to bring you something, darling, but they searched me.
Quite
thoroughly.” She looked accusingly at the guard, who smirked. He was a young man, swarthy, with a very small moustache and a very large sidearm. He turned to look in the remaining cell at Arden and Jack saw, hanging from the guard's wide belt, a dagger. It looked ceremonial, something stolen from a museum, or a costume shop. But Jack didn't stop to criticize. He jumped forward and grabbed the dagger's hilt.

The guard turned quickly. The thing to do then was to run the blade across his throat, silencing him and killing him. But Jack had no experience of killing, and he had nothing against
this young man. It takes a very rare kind of person to make and act on the decision to kill a stranger, and Jack was not one of those people.

But he jabbed the dagger hilt first into the guard's stomach, making him grab there. Jack snatched the keys off his belt. He tossed them through the bars to Arden, who quickly began working on the lock.

“Who's she?” Yvette said. Then several things happened in about a second. The barred door swung open and Arden stepped out. The guard straightened and grabbed his pistol. And Jack jumped behind Yvette, putting the dagger to her throat. Then they all froze.

“Are you insane?” the guard asked in accented English. “Who is that woman to me? I'll kill both of you.”

“Waste this?” Jack asked unbelievingly. “Look at her.” The young guard did, still frowning. Yvette turned toward Jack with a protest. And Arden gave a long sigh and swooned.

She did it in a very dramatic, silent-movie fashion, putting the back of her hand to her forehead and swaying like a kite string before falling sideways. Atop the guard's gun. He tried to break her fall—she
had
gotten to him, at least a little—and Arden grabbed the gun. Jack stepped forward and punched the guard in the face. With the weight of the dagger still in his fist, it was a strong blow, and nearly broke his own fingers. The guard fell, but managed to hang onto his gun.

Arden grabbed Yvette, tripped her, and threw her down on the guard. Then she had Jack's arm, pulling him out the door. Jack looked back and saw Yvette giving him an outraged look. He didn't even have time to shrug in response.

Arden slammed the door closed, locked it, and threw the keys across the alley. “Come on!”

Instantly, the world seemed alive with the sounds of pursuit. “This way!” they both shouted, and Jack let Arden tug him her direction, thinking she'd had more time to check out the area before getting herself arrested. She ran in the direction of crowds, thinking they could lose themselves. To Jack they looked like
everyone else in town, in jeans and tennis shoes, but the gendarme coming out the front door of the police station looked straight at Jack and Arden and yelled for them to stop. They didn't. No longer hand in hand, they ran, turned the corner, jumped through people. They were in a shopping district, but not in the touristy part of town. Produce was being offered from wooden stands, and small shops sold essentials.

Arden darted into one, pulling his hand. This was a cafe, with only five small tables. Sleepy-eyed men barely glanced at them. Arden began arguing with Jack in French too rapid for him to follow, moving her arms and shoulders expressively. One man at a table smiled, but no one else seemed to pay attention. Jack slumped his shoulders, looking hangdog, but his act was wasted. No one was looking at him. The French didn't seem embarrassed by a public quarrel the way Americans would be, nor did they seem interested in it.

Arden kept moving, through a swinging door into a small kitchen crowded already with a middle-aged couple. The man began shouting, adding to the general clamor, but the woman just leaned her cheek on her hand and frankly listened to Arden's tirade, with a faint reminiscent smile.

Keep moving, that was the secret. They never stopped. Arden acted as if other people were mannequins in a stage set backing her performance. They went out the back door of the kitchen into another alley, where they turned left. Arden kept up whatever she was saying as they ran across the alley, tried two doors, and went through a third. They found themselves in a small storage room where they stopped to catch their breath. They were chest to chest, breathing hard.

“Which way is the—?” Jack panted.

“The what?”

“I don't know, don't you have a car or a way out?”

“I'm pretty sure they impounded my car when they arrested me.” She glanced at him. “Don't give me that look. I got us out, didn't I?”

“No, I think I did.”

They started out through another small shop, and saw a half-open door. Arden moaned. “Oh, look, a bathroom. I'm sorry, I've got to—”

“Go.”

“You first. You were inside longer, I can—”

“Go!”

She went inside. Jack was almost jumping from foot to foot now. He looked around the cluttered room. There was a small plant in a two-foot copper stand. The soil inside looked deep, and dry. Jack stared out the windows. They were alone.

Two minutes later Arden came out. “Okay, your turn. I'll keep watch.”

“It's okay. Come on.”

“Don't you—?”

“No! Come on.”

“Macho man. God, James Bond. I can—”

“Come on!”

“Okay, okay. Wait a minute. What's that smell?”

“Out, out, we've got to get out of here.” He grabbed her hand, hurried her toward the front door. This shop seemed to be closed, or at least empty of people, with the clerk taking a break. Arden looked out the small window beside the front door. A police car pulled up, with that whah-whah-whah European cop car thing. Without another word they ran back inside. They ran toward the back door, heard that same sound.

They looked at each other. No way out. One of them would have to sacrifice himself. Jack saw a small door down a narrow hall. “Quick!” She followed him as he ran. The small door gave, as he knew it would, onto a narrow staircase, going up.

“Come on!”

“Why?” She tugged at his hand. “There's no way out up there. Why?”

“I don't know. I always go up.”

As they pounded up the stairs, she asked, “Has this worked out for you in the past?”

Well, no. It was just an instinct. Monkey to the top of the
tree. They were probably trapping themselves. But he couldn't stop. At the top of the stairs they burst out into a hallway, ran down it. Doors left and right. Jack went left, Arden right. A few seconds later they ran into each other back in the hall. “No way—!” they both shouted.

At the end of the hall was a window. They were at it in a second. Down below, there were crashing sounds. Jack raised the window. There was a narrow alley below. Cobblestone street. The promise of broken legs.

They turned back the other way, heard the sounds of people filling the floor below. They stared at each other, the same thoughts crossing both their minds. Too many cops, no way to make a personal connection. “I'll—” But no plan emerged.

They turned back to the window. Now there was a sound from below. Something filling the alleyway. A small truck that seemed to be filled with straw. Perfect. Jack looked behind them. Arden looked at him. He shook his head. Her eyes met his. They took each other's hands, each put a foot up on the windowsill, and they stepped out the window. Arden screamed as they stepped.

The scream brought a French police officer, then another, up the stairs and down that hall to the window. The gendarme looked out and saw the truck going by. He screamed, the loudest sound on a noisy street, and everyone looked up at him. Some of his men appeared at the mouth of the alley and halted the truck. The policeman in the window made hand signals. Then he turned and gave explicit instructions to his subordinate, indicating the open doors along the wall. “Make sure they're not hiding in the rooms, trying to fool us.” The young recruit nodded wisely, eyes narrowing. He stalked into the first bedroom as his captain turned and ran out down the hall.

When the captain reached the ground floor his men had the truck surrounded, the driver out on the sidewalk waving his arms and shouting while everyone ignored him. Another officer explained quickly that all the doors along this alley had been locked. “And we had men at both ends of the alley. There is no way they could have gotten past us.”

The captain nodded intently. He dropped to the ground and peered under the truck. He was a man who didn't mind getting his uniform dirty in the performance of his duty. No one was clinging to the underside of the truck, but there was some kind of structure there, an extra appendage hanging down.

Plus all that straw in the back. And the cab of the truck itself. “Take it apart,” the captain said brusquely.

There was a shout from the open window that the fugitives had leaped through. The young recruit stood in it, waving his arm. “Not up here,” he cried. The captain waved him down, then stood frozen. Beside the young recruit, attached to the wall, was an old wooden fire escape. It went down, but also up, to the roof. It wasn't vibrating, there was no obvious sign of passage. Nonetheless, the captain screamed in rage, looking up toward that roof.

As he ran that direction, splitting up his men, he thought,
The scream.
The woman's scream. That's what had drawn him into what he'd done, without even looking upward until now: the scream of a woman jumping out a window, even fading as if she were falling.

It had been perfect.

Two blocks away, Jack and Arden, having gone over the roof of the building and down the other side, had escaped capture for the moment, but they were on foot. Within a minute Arden found a Citroen with keys in it. “Two blocks,” Jack said. “We'll just drive it a couple of blocks. I'm not stealing a car.”

They got in and took off, Arden driving. Jack looked back and saw a police officer emerge from a side street, putting his hands on his hips and staring first the other direction, then this way. Jack ducked his head. “Six blocks, tops,” he said.

“What do you think, Butch?” Arden and Jack huddled in a shop doorway across from a train station. “Hop a freight, or bluff our way on board?”

“The thing is,” Jack answered immediately, “I really don't know how to ‘hop' a train. I don't even think you can any more. I mean, look at them.”

The few trains they could see waiting in the yard were silver cylinders with no apparent handholds. Sleek and slippery and within a few yards of pulling out they would be going eighty miles an hour. Eventually a hundred and twenty. And no cattle cars or open baggage cars. Probably no unlocked doors one could open from the outside. The movies on which Jack and, apparently, Arden had been raised seemed useless here as training films.

“How hot are we?” Jack asked.

“I feel a little feverish.”

“I mean, I'm just a burglar, and you're just someone who came to see me. Or did you do something else to get thrown in jail?”

Arden shrugged, which made him give her a double take. “I killed DeGaulle,” she confessed.

“So there's really probably not that big a manhunt for us. Let's just go in and buy tickets.”

“You got money? Because they took mine when—”

“Excuse me a second.” Jack went into a men's room and was gone for a while. When he came out his face was very blank. In one hand he clutched some Euros, and in the other he carried a small key ring. Arden stared at him. “How did you do that? How did you keep anything through a police search?”

“Forget it.”

As he walked past, Arden turned and continued to stare. “I mean, the folding money I understand. But the keys?”

She followed him into the train station and past the ticket windows to a row of lockers. “You're kidding,” she said aloud.

Jack said nothing. He went into the second row of lockers, mostly hidden from view of passersby, and straight to an upper one. He opened it with the small key and pulled out a wallet, a small cell phone and charger, and an overnight case, black leather, the kind a sophisticated traveler would carry. Jack put the phone into the bag and peered into the locker. He seemed to be looking for something, but didn't find it.

Arden, hands on hips, said, “You keep a stash in the train depot in Nice?”

Jack closed the locker door. “Doesn't everybody?”

Jack bought them tickets, feeling as if he were glowing radioactively. Security was much tighter than it had been pre-9/11, but not like an airport. As they moved toward the train Jack looked fidgety.

“What's the matter?”

“I wish I had my PSPII.” Jack's fingers were moving involuntarily.

“Just as well you're leaving it behind,” Arden said carelessly. “That's probably how they were tracing you all over Europe.”