The Sigma Protocol (49 page)

Anna nodded. “Safety in numbers.”

“Plus you’re still near local mass transit, a maze of streets, a fast train out of town, and the
Périphérique
. A good setup when you’re planning multiple escape routes.”

Anna smiled. “You’re a fast learner. Sure you don’t want a job as a government investigator? We can offer you a salary of fifty-five thousand dollars and your very own parking space.”

“Tempting,” Ben said.

They walked past La Flèche d’Or, the red-tile-roofed restaurant that was perched over a rusted ghost track. Then Ben led the way down another block to a small Moroccan café, where the air was humid and fragrant with various couscous dishes. “I can’t vouch for the food,” he said. “But the view has a lot to recommend it.”

Through the plate glass, they could see the stone triangle that was 1554 rue des Vignoles. Seven stories high, the building occupied a freestanding island surrounded by narrow streets on three sides. Its facade was stained dark with automotive exhaust and dappled with acidic bird droppings. Squinting, Anna could make out the anomalous remains of decorative gargoyles; erosion from the elements made them look as if they had melted in the sun. The marble ledges, ornamental revetment, and parapets seemed the folly of a long-ago builder, a throw-back to an era when some still harbored upmarket
dreams for the arrondissement. The building, unremarkable in most ways, breathed the gentle decrepitude of neglect and indifference.

“According to my source, Peyaud, he’s known as ‘L’Ermite.’ The hermit. He lives on the entire top floor. Makes noises from time to time, so they know he’s there. That and the deliveries he gets—groceries and the like. But even the delivery boys have never seen him. They drop off the stuff in the dumbwaiter, and collect their francs when the dumbwaiter comes back down. The few people who pay him any mind at all pretty much dismiss him as a real eccentric. Then again, this place is populated with eccentrics.” He tucked into his lamb tagine greedily.

“So he’s reclusive.”

“
Very
reclusive. It’s not just the delivery boys he avoids—
nobody’s
ever seen him. Peyaud talked to the woman who lives on the ground floor. She and everyone else in the building have decided he’s an elderly, paranoid, morbidly shy
rentier
. A case study in advanced agoraphobia. They don’t realize that he owns the building.”

“And you think we’re going to make an unannounced visit to this possibly unhinged, possibly paranoid, possibly dangerous, and certainly disturbed and frightened individual, and he’s going to pour us some decaf and tell us whatever we want to know?”

“No, I’m not saying that at all.” Ben gave her a reassuring grin. “It might not be decaf.”

“You have boundless faith in your own charm, I’ll give you that.” Anna looked doubtfully at her vegetarian couscous. “He does speak English?”

“Fluently. Almost all French businessmen do, which is how you can tell them apart from French intellectuals.” He wiped his mouth with a flimsy paper napkin. “My contribution is, I got us here. You’re the
professional; you’re in charge now. What do the field manuals say? What do you do in a situation like this—what’s the established modus operandi?”

“Let me think. The MO for a friendly visit with a psychotic whom the world believes to be dead and who you think holds the secret to a menacing global organization? I’m not so sure that one’s in the field manual, Ben.”

The lamb tagine started to weigh heavily in his stomach.

She took his hand as they stood up. “Just follow my lead.”

Thérèse Broussard gazed sullenly out the window, down at the foot traffic on the rue des Vignoles seven stories below. She gazed as she might have gazed at a fire, if her chimney hadn’t been plugged with concrete years back. She gazed as she might have gazed at her little television set, if it hadn’t been
détraquée
for the past month. She gazed to soothe her nerves and alleviate her boredom; she gazed because she had nothing better to do. Besides, she’d just spent ten minutes ironing her large, baggy undergarments, and needed a break.

A heavy-set, doughy-faced woman of seventy-four with piggy features and lank black-dyed hair, Thérèse still told people she was a dressmaker, even though she hadn’t cut a piece of fabric in ten years, and even though she was never particularly accomplished at it. She grew up in Belleville, left school at the age of fourteen, and was never pretty enough to count on attracting the sort of man who would support her. In short, she had to learn a trade. As it happened, her grandmother had a friend who was a dressmaker and who agreed to take the girl on as an assistant. The old woman’s hands were stiff with arthritis, and her eyes had grown dim; Thérèse could be helpful, though the old woman—Tati Jeanne, Thérèse
was encouraged to call her—always parted with the paltry few francs she paid her each week with an air of reluctance. Tati Jeanne’s already small clientele was dwindling, and with it her earnings; it was painful to have to share even a tiny amount with someone else.

One day in 1945, a bomb fell near Thérèse as she was walking down the Porte de la Chapelle, and, though she was physically unharmed, the blast entered her dreams at night and stopped her from sleeping. Her nervous condition only worsened over time. She would start at the slightest noise, and she began to eat voraciously, whenever she could find the food to stuff herself with. When Tati Jeanne died, Thérèse took on her remaining clients, but it was scarcely a living.

She was alone, as she’d always feared, but she had also learned there were worse things: she owed Laurent that much. Shortly after her sixty-fifth birthday, she met Laurent at the rue Ramponeau, in front of the Soeurs de Nazareth, where she collected a weekly parcel of food. Laurent, another native of the Ménilmontant area, was a decade older than she was, and looked older still. Hunched and bald, he wore a leather jacket whose sleeves were too long for him. He was walking a small dog, a terrier, and she asked the dog’s name, and they began to talk. He told her that he fed his dog, Poupée, before he fed himself, gave the dog first choice of everything. She told him about her panic attacks, and the fact that a magistrate for social services,
l’Assedic
, had once placed her under supervision. The magistrate also made sure that the state would provide her with five hundred francs a week. His interest in her perked up when he learned of the support she received. A month later, they were married. He moved into her flat near Charonne; to an impartial eye, it may have appeared small, spare, and dingy but it was still more appealing than his own place, from which he was about to
be evicted. Soon after they were married, Laurent pressed her to return to her sewing: they needed the money, the food parcels from the Soeurs scarcely lasted them half the week, the checks from
l’Assedic
were woefully inadequate. She told people she was a dressmaker, didn’t she? Why, then, didn’t she make dresses? She demurred, quietly at first, holding out her pudgy, blunt fingers, and explaining she no longer had the manual dexterity. He remonstrated, less quietly. She countered with no little vehemence, pointing out that he had a knack for getting fired from even the lowliest jobs, and that she would never have married him if she’d known what a drunkard he was. Seven months later, in the heat of one of these increasingly frequent arguments, Laurent keeled over. His last words to her were “
T’es grasse comme une truie
”—You fat sow. Thérèse let a few minutes pass and her temper subside before she phoned for an ambulance. Later, she’d learn that her husband had been felled by a massive hemorrhagic stroke—an aneurysm deep in the brain. A harried physician told her something about how blood vessels were like inner tubes, and how a weakness in a vessel wall could suddenly give way. She wished Laurent’s last words to her had been more civil.

To her few friends, she referred to her husband as a saint, but no one was fooled. Having been married was, at any rate, an education. For much of her life, she believed that a husband would have made her life complete. Laurent had showed her the untrustworthy nature of all men. As she watched various figures on the street corner near her hulking, poured-concrete apartment building, she fantasized about their private deviances. Which of these men was a junkie? Which a thief? Which beat his girlfriend?

A knock at the door, loud and authoritative, jarred her from her reveries. “
Je suis de l’Assedic, laissez-moi
entrer, s’il vous plaît!
” A man from the welfare department, asking to be let in.

“Why did you not buzz?” barked Madame Broussard.

“But I did buzz. Repeatedly. The buzzer is broken. As is the gate. Do you claim you didn’t know?”

“But why are you here? Nothing about my status has changed,” she protested. “My support…”

“Is under review,” the man said, officiously. “I think we can straighten this all out if we just go over a few matters. Otherwise, the payments come to an end. I do not wish that to happen.”

Thérèse trudged heavily over to the door and peered through the peephole. The man had the familiar haughtiness she associated with all
fonctionnaires
of the French state—clerks who imagined themselves to be civil servants, men given a thimbleful of power, and made despotic by it. Something about his voice, his accent seemed less familiar. Perhaps he came from a Belgian family. Thérèse did not like
les Belges
.

She squinted. The man from social services was attired in the thin worsted wool jacket and cheap tie that seemed to come with the job; his hair was a thatch of salt and pepper and he seemed an unremarkable specimen except for his smooth, unlined face; the skin would be babyish, if it didn’t look almost tight.

Thérèse unlocked the two deadbolts and released the chain before pressing the final latch and opening the door.

As Ben followed Anna out of the café, he kept his eye on 1554 rue des Vignoles, trying to fathom its mysteries. The building was a picture of ordinary dilapidation—too distressed to excite anyone’s admiration, while not so distressed as to arrest anyone’s attention. But looking at it carefully—an exercise, Ben imagined, that no one had
engaged in for many years—one could see the bones of a once elegant apartment building. It was evident from the oriel windows, crested with carved limestone, now randomly chipped and fractured. It was evident from the corners of the building, the quoins, where dressed stones had been laid so that their faces were alternately large and small; and the mansard roof, edged with a low, crumbling parapet. It was evident even from the narrow ledges that had once provided a balcony, before the iron rail was removed, no doubt after it had rusted to pieces and posed a hazard to public safety. A century ago, a measure of care had gone into the building’s construction, which decades of indifference could not entirely efface.

Anna’s instructions to him had been clear. They would join a group of passersby as they crossed the street, falling into rhythm with their stride. They would be indistinguishable from people whose destination was the nearby shop that sold cheap liquor and cigarettes, or the
shawarma
place next to it, where a large, fatty oval loaf of meat rotated, close enough to the sidewalk that you could reach out and touch it; certainly swarms of flies did. Anyone watching from the window would see no departure from the ordinary patterns of pedestrian traffic; only when they passed in front of the main door would the two stop and enter.

“Ring the bell?” Ben asked as they reached the building’s main entrance.

“If we rang the bell, we wouldn’t be unannounced, would we? I thought that was the plan.” Glancing around quickly, Anna inserted a narrow tongue of steel into the lock and played with it for a few moments.

Nothing.

Ben felt a sense of rising panic. So far, they had been careful to blend in, to synchronize their pace with those of other pedestrians. But now they found themselves
frozen in place; any casual observer would notice that something was wrong, that they did not belong here.

“Anna,” he murmured with quiet urgency.

She was bent over her work, and he could see that her forehead was damp with nervous perspiration. “Take out your wallet and start counting your bills,” she whispered. “Take out a phone and check for messages. Do something. Calmly. Slowly.
Languorously
.”

The faint sound of metal rattling against metal continued as she spoke.

Then finally, there was the sound of a bolt retracting. Anna turned the lever knob and opened the door. “Sometimes these locks require a little tender loving care. Anyway, it’s not exactly high security.”

“Hidden in plain view, I think is the idea.”

“Hidden, anyway. I thought you said nobody had ever seen him.”

“That’s true.”

“Did you stop and reflect that if he wasn’t crazy when he started out, he might have become so? Total social isolation will do that to a person.” Anna led him to the disheveled elevator. She pressed the call button, and they briefly listened to a rattling chain before they decided that taking the stairwell was the safer option. They made their way up seven flights, taking care to make as little noise as possible.

The hallway of the top floor, an affair of grimy white tiles, stretched before them.

Startlingly, the doorway of the sole apartment on the floor was already swinging open.

“Monsieur Chabot,” Anna called out.

There was no response.

“Monsieur
Chardin!
” she called, exchanging a look with Ben.

There was a movement from within, shrouded in the gloom.

“Georges Chardin!” Anna called again. “We come with information that may be of value to you.”

A few moments of silence followed—and then a deafening blast.

What had happened?

A glance at the hallway directly facing the open door made things clear: it was cratered with a deadly spray of lead pellets.

Whoever was in there was firing a shotgun at them.

“I don’t know what’s
wrong
with you people,” Thérèse Broussard said, color rising to her cheeks. “Nothing has changed about my circumstances since my husband died.
Nothing
, I tell you.”