A Magnificent Crime (19 page)

At this point, all conversation in the group ceased. Hell, I think maybe the string quartet even stopped playing.

I knew in an instant, by the woman's offended expression, that I had selected the worst possible thing to say.

“I am not pregnant,” she said through her teeth.

The smile remained frozen on my face as I struggled for damage control. But what could I possibly say? My eyes flicked down to her belly again—I couldn't resist—and,
damn it,
she really did look pregnant. I felt awful, but this was an innocent mistake. Anyone could make it. I glanced at the other women to see they were not on board with this.

I took a big gulp of wine and scanned my brain for damage-control strategies. The instant I swallowed, I remembered a key point:
not my wine.

Oh God.
I raised my hand to cover my mouth as a wave of queasiness pulsed over me.

At that moment, someone across the circle said, “Hey! Is that my pashmina?” She was staring directly at the pashmina I was wearing draped across my shoulders, one that I had most definitely swiped.

“Hmm? No, I don't think so . . . ,” was all I could say, feigning confusion.

She reached across and grabbed the bottom corner. “It
is,
” she said. “Here's where I spilled red wine earlier.” Sure enough, she held up the pashmina to reveal two telltale drops of red wine, like the blood on Lady Macbeth's hands.

“Oh, ha-ha,” I said weakly. “I suppose I did grab it by mistake. I have one just like it.” I promptly removed the pashmina and handed it to her.

At this, the women turned on me like bad cheese.

It was time to exit stage left. See what I mean about having better luck with a group of men?

I slunk off to the side under disgusted glares of contempt. French women, I might point out, have no natural urges to hide such emotions out of politeness.

But now I was exposed again. Fortunately, the wedding planner was on the other side of the room. For now.

At that moment, I spotted Atworthy. I headed straight for him, keeping one eye locked on the wedding planner. I walked up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder.

He turned, his expression a mixture of surprise and confusion, and then a smile played over his face.

“Catherine,” he said. He turned to place his empty glass on the bar. “Good girl.”

We slipped away and found a corner of the lobby lounge.

“I probably have only a few minutes,” he said. “I'll be required back in the dining hall for the speeches and all that. I'm the emcee.”

He looked at me carefully and began to smirk.

“You probably don't have long, either,” he said. “Has anyone here told you who you're a dead ringer for?”

And then I learned about the one thing guaranteed to interfere with a successful wedding-crashing effort: if you resemble too closely the groom's mistress.

Awkward.

So that was it. I got straight to the point after hearing that. I described everything that had been going on. I needed some strategies for dealing with the panic attacks.

“I need to know. How do I get over this fear?”

“I don't know if I can tell you that, Catherine. I'm not a psychiatrist.”

“But what strategies did you use when you were afraid?”

“Well, do you feel like you're floating away? Like you're going to disappear? Hold on to something tangible, something real. Like keys. Or a door frame.”

I thought of the tarot card I carried everywhere with me now. Maybe that was what I was attempting to do with that card.

“What if I'm already doing that and it's not working?”

“You need to make sure you're breathing. You know, diaphragmatic breathing. And maybe you need to work on some meditation.” I was taking mental notes. This was good stuff.

“But you know what I think is going to help you the most, Catherine?”

I waited.

“I think you need to embrace the fear. I think you need to dance with the black beast, instead of running away from it.”

It wasn't the first time I'd heard this piece of advice. I just didn't know how to begin to do it. Atworthy watched me struggle with that, and then he said, “Listen, maybe the words of Victor Hugo will help.”

“Hugo?” I said, looking up sharply. As my professor, he was striking a chord, of course. My field of study was nineteenth-century French literature, after all. Hugo was a demigod in that world. In any world, really, but especially in the particular field Atworthy and I had in common.

Atworthy nodded. “In
Les Misérables
he wrote, ‘Diamonds are to be found only in the darkness of the earth, and truth in the darkness of the mind.'”

I sat there, stunned, for a moment. Hugo had said that? I'd read
Les Misérables
many times. How was it possible I'd forgotten that passage? It was like he was speaking right to me.

At that moment the bride and her wedding planner were marching over to where we were sitting.

With homicidal expressions.

I needed to get out of there posthaste. I thanked Atworthy and made a quick exit. I slipped out the side door and climbed into one of the hired cars waiting in line. As the car pulled smoothly away from the curb, my phone rang.

“We've got a meeting with Lafayette,” Ethan said when I answered the call.

“Excellent!”

“There's a catch. He won't meet with me. He'll meet only with a woman. It's got to be you.”

“What? Okay, well, it is my job, so that's fine.”

“Um, don't say that just yet. You might want to hear where the meeting is taking place, first.”

“Where?” An uncomfortable feeling crept up my neck and over my scalp.

“The Eiffel Tower. The top.”

Sunshine illuminated the emerald-green lawn that spread out behind the Eiffel Tower like the train of a formal gown. People lounged everywhere, picnicking and taking pictures of one another, using the tower in the background as a prop: jumping onto it, biting off the top of it, leaning on it.

The air smelled of popcorn and fresh cut grass. Sounds of laughter rose up everywhere as kids chased each other in circles and begged their parents for an ice cream cone.

The tower itself speared the sky, its curly iron fashioned like lace. And it drove no small amount of terror into my heart.

I hoped this would be worth it. Ethan had learned Lafayette was still a guard at the Louvre, still very much of the disgruntled variety, which I hoped meant he would be willing to share a little insider info.

He'd done it before, after all. The fact that he had subsequently double-crossed that person was a detail I needed to put out of my mind. Knowing the mistake of trusting this guy, I wouldn't be providing any information, of course. This was an exercise in information gathering only.

My disguise for today was a little bit librarian. I wore a mop of black, curly hair in the form of a wig, heavy-framed tortoiseshell glasses, and a floral-print dress with a light spring coat and flat shoes.

He'd never know who I was, never know what I was up to. If I could help it.

Now, I just needed to get over my paralyzing horror of this damn structure, and everything would be fine.

I just had to keep in mind everything Atworthy had told me yesterday.

Besides, Ethan would be right there on the tower with me, in a tourist's disguise of walking shorts, sandals, hat, guidebook, and camera around the neck. He'd never be far away, and he'd be in my ear the whole time.

I slid a hand into my coat pocket and rubbed my thumb over the smooth tarot card I had tucked in there.

At the bottom of the tower I watched people in long snaking lines, and I knew I was putting off the inevitable. Elevators moved up and down, and hordes of people marched up the open stairs that zigzagged through each leg, climbing like ants in an ant farm. Surely some of these people were afraid to go up. Not everyone was so keen. Right?

I took a deep breath, attempting to slow my racing heart. I stared at the open-lattice staircases and elevator shafts and wondered: did Gustave Eiffel have something against people with a fear of heights?
Damn you, Gustave.

It wasn't the first time I'd seen the Eiffel Tower, however. Jack had brought me here two years ago. It was our first romantic trip, taken when we'd first fallen in love, and the memory clutched at my heart.

And a twinge of guilt immediately followed. Here I was in Paris again, this time practically joined at the hip to Ethan Jones.

But I couldn't think about that stuff right now. I needed to gather my nerve to go up. I couldn't afford to have a panic attack and show that degree of weakness to Lafayette. It was time to deal with this fear. Today was the day.

“Ethan, are you there?” I said discreetly, knowing my voice was being picked up by the micro-receiver in my ear. “I'm going up.”

“I'm here, Montgomery. You're looking good.”

I approached the tower and elected to take the elevator. Neither the elevator nor the stairs were particularly appealing options, to be honest, but at least the elevator would be quicker, like ripping off a Band-Aid. Besides, the staircase was open, like a rather elaborate fire escape, so you could clearly see through the grating of the steps to the ground below. I didn't trust my knees to carry me the entire height.

I waited to get into the elevator. My hands were clammy, and I wiped them on my printed dress. This was so ridiculous. How was I going to do this job if I couldn't even go up a goddamned elevator?

Calm down, Cat.
I took three deep breaths, which helped a little.

I stepped onto the elevator, and once it was jammed full of people, we started our climb. We were shoehorned in there, and the tween girl standing next to me was chomping grape-flavored bubble gum with a smell so strong, it made my eyes water. The tracks slanted with the changing angles of the tower, contributing to the strangest elevator experience you can imagine. I tried to ignore the hiss and groan of the hydraulics and cables.

The elevator stopped briefly on the first floor and continued on to the second floor, where I exited. Once I focused on the task at hand, my nerves quickly settled. As I walked around, taking pictures, I blended right in. There were young couples and students and small clutches of retirees and families, all enjoying the views and posing by the guardrail for photos with the city of Paris sprawling in the backdrop.

The wind whistled through the open tower, fluttering my dress. I tried to stay well away from the outer edges.

I hadn't even circuited the second floor once before I spotted Lafayette. I recognized him from the photograph Ethan had supplied.

“Got him,” I said to Ethan through the micro-communicator. “South pillar.”

I walked up beside Lafayette to stand at the edge, looking out over the city. I pulled out my camera and started taking pictures. Up here on the second level there weren't quite so many tourists. There was nobody in the immediate vicinity to eavesdrop. Even so, I used the code phrase.

“The cherry blossoms are lovely this time of year, aren't they?” I said.

“Yes, but they make a mess of the sidewalks,” he said, the expected reply.

After speaking, he looked at me sharply, somewhat negating the whole purpose of our clandestine code phrase. Hmm. Clearly, the man was not a professional.

“So. What you want to know?” Lafayette grunted in French, looking away, out over the city.

“Did you bring the Louvre schematics?” I asked.

Gladys had furnished me with most of the security detail of the Louvre. The only part she couldn't obtain specs on was the newly renovated wing. This was what I was hoping Lafayette would give me.

“Yep, got 'em right here,” he said.

I was about to give him instructions to fold them inside an Eiffel Tower guidebook and leave the book on the bench behind us so I could pick it up after he walked away. Instead, he simply pulled them out and stuffed them into my hand.

“Here ya go.”

I cringed. Well, there was nothing clandestine about that. The guy was about as effective as the tiny red string in Band-Aid packages. I glanced around at the people within view; nobody seemed to be paying attention, thankfully.

I asked him about the security measures for a few of the Louvre's treasures, leading him on a bit of a wild-goose chase, hoping to throw him off the scent, before asking him what I really wanted to know.

“So what can you tell me about the security involving the Hope?”

Lafayette laughed. “The
Hope?
That's what this is about?”

I said nothing, simply waited.

“Well, you can't get near it in the display case. It's too public, too exposed. The security is in layers. Vibration sensor in the glass, temperature sensor inside the case, three-inch bulletproof glass.”

I stared straight ahead, my mind churning.

“But at night it often goes into the vault.”

“The vault?”

“Yeah, but that's impossible, too.”

“Why?”

“Because it was modeled after the Geneva Freeport vault. Severin has a total hard-on for that vault and made pretty much an exact replica of it, installed in the basement of the Louvre.”

I knew all about the Geneva Freeport vault.

It was a private, super-high-tech secure site where the billionaires of the world stored their priceless art and wine . . . and various things they weren't supposed to have. Drug lords and royalty alike used freeports like the one in Geneva.

This job was looking increasingly difficult. Not impossible, though. There was almost always a way.

“Of course, there's also the issue of drowning to death if you try to breach the vault,” Lafayette said.

“I'm sorry. What?”

“Well, there's this rumor that Severin is so psychotic and takes the idea of someone stealing something so personally that he made the engineers create a booby trap. If the vault chamber is tampered with, it instantly fills with water directly from the Seine. Or so the story goes.”

“What? That's ridiculous,” I said.

Lafayette shrugged, that classic French gesture. “It's an underground vault. It's possible.”

There were so many rumors about the underground world of Paris, like the secret lake underneath the Palais Garnier—supposedly the inspiration for
The Phantom of the Opera
—and the bands of people who allegedly lived in the catacombs. Not to mention the giant rats and mutant fish.

But as for a vault chamber that would fill with water . . . Could that possibly be true? This job just went from difficult to impossible.

And then I noticed we were being watched.

Well, not so much me as Lafayette. A man lingered by the souvenir shop, and his gaze was pinned on the Louvre guard. He was average height, with red hair, and perfectly matched the photograph Gladys had supplied of the Interpol agent Ludolf Hendrickx, who, Faulkner had said, was on the case.

My mouth went dry. I had to get out of there. Although it looked like Hendrickx was primarily interested in Lafayette, I couldn't be sure he wasn't following me, too.

Question was, did I warn Lafayette? I felt tempted to just go and leave Lafayette to his own devices. But he was so useless and helpless, I just couldn't do it.

“I think we need to end this conversation,” I said to Lafayette. “We're being watched.”

Lafayette's eyes went wide. The guy was a terrible actor and a very unprofessional operative—his reaction told me in a minute, he knew nothing about Hendrickx.

“Just be casual,” I said. “If he knows we've spotted him, he may be more tempted to act. Whatever you do, don't run. We'll separate. You casually stroll around to the east side, take a few pictures, and then go down. I'll go the opposite way, weave my way through the gift shop, and go down after that.”

Lafayette nodded, his eyes darting. How the hell did this guy get a job as a security guard, anyway?

And then, just as I turned to do my part, I saw rapid movement in the corner of my eye. I turned and saw Lafayette disappearing into an elevator just before the doors closed. He was off like a prom dress.

Shit.

My gaze went immediately to Hendrickx. Frustration and anger flashed on his face as he saw Lafayette disappearing. Then he rapidly looked back at me, and we locked eyes.

I was the new target.