The Devil's Banker (34 page)

“May I ask you both one question?”

“Of course,” said Chapel.

Otto Menz came out of his chair an inch and leaned on his forearms. “What has Kahn given them in exchange for the money?”

Sarah stood by the lake watching a majestic paddle-wheel steamer approach the dock. A freshening breeze raised a small chop. Swans and ducks bobbed on the surface. In the distance, like hovering ghosts, the outline of the Glarner Alps was visible.

“Hello, Yossi,” she said, into her cell phone. “It’s Meg from London.”

“Hello, Meg from London.”

“Need your help a bit. Got a sec?”

“Always a sec for Meg from London,” said Yossi, who was from Jerusalem, a mover and shaker in the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service.

“I’ve run across one of your own in a little deal we’re following. Mordecai Kahn. A physicist. Name ring a bell?”

“Kahn, you say. Not off the top of my head, but let me check.”

“Sure thing.”

Sarah looked at Chapel, who was on his own phone, booking them return flights to Paris. He was making things complicated. He loved her and she knew it. She’d encouraged it. And what about her? She had only to catch his eye to feel his longing. He was staring at her now. Something in his brown eyes stretched her loyalties in three different directions. She wrote it off to her sentimental side. A needy man always provoked her weaker emotions. But love? She dismissed it out of hand.

“Hey, Meg . . .”

“Yes?”

“Never heard of him.”

“Too bad,” she said, knowing better than to feel disappointed. “Thanks for checking. I owe you.”

“Traffic goes both ways,” he said. “Just in case I get something, where will you be?”

“Just in case?”
Sarah hesitated a minute. Where would she be? Why, she’d be at the other end of her cell phone, that’s where. Yossi knew that.

“Yeah, you know,” he said. “If we need to get
in touch
with you.”

Oh, God,
thought Sarah.
It can’t be. It can’t have come to this.
The intent of Kahn’s payments was unmistakable. You only pay a nuclear physicist two million dollars for one thing these days and it wasn’t to build a better mousetrap.

“Paris,” she said. “Hôtel Splendide. I’ll even let you buy me a drink this time.”

But Yossi didn’t respond, not with a laugh or even a good-bye. Without another word, the line went dead.

Chapter 37

Marc Gabriel made his way through the arrival hall at Charles-de-Gaulle Airport, a hand in his jacket checking for his passport. He walked briskly, a man with somewhere to go. A man who would let nothing delay him. The boy had failed. Measures had to be taken. It was difficult to separate a father’s disappointment from a commander’s anger. Sidestepping, dodging, brushing past the relentless sea of tourists, he arrived at immigration control. He smiled perfunctorily for the passport officer, his fingers drumming the counter, itching to reclaim his documents.

“Welcome home, Mr. François.”

“Thank you,” he replied, already past the booth, making a beeline for the taxi stand.

It had been a long flight from Buenos Aires. The movies and meals had done little to pass the time. Alone with his thoughts, he’d played out every possible scenario. George had been arrested. George had been killed. But in the end, he was left with only one possibility: George had failed. He was trying to flee.
Measures had to be taken.

Outside, he raised his hand and whistled sharply. A silver Citroën docked at the curb. Gabriel climbed into the backseat. “Rue Clemenceau.”

“Address?”

“Near the corner of Avenue Marseilles. I’ll show you when we get there. And there’s an extra twenty euros in it for you if you get me there inside an hour.”

Gabriel stared out the window, eyes glazed, unfocused. It could only be a lack of moral conviction, he told himself, trying to account for what had gone wrong. The rot had corroded his son’s values. He himself was to blame. He had kept the family in Paris too long. So many years among the infidel, it was inevitable.

Islam was based on virtue; the word itself meant “submission.” It was not a religion, not simply a set of beliefs, but an entire way of life. The Koran did not simply govern one’s daily conduct, it extended to all aspects of society. To law and trade, war and peace, education and family.
Sharia
governed all.

By providing a sanctuary inside his home that valued these beliefs, he had hoped to mitigate the rot, but it had turned out to be too much. The temptations were constant and pervasive—the pounding amoral music, the lewd films, the relentless emphasis on sex, sex, sex. It was a form of intellectual colonization. Like syphilis, it entered the brain, eating away at it slowly, maddeningly, piece by piece, lobe by lobe, until there was nothing left but a hollowed-out rotten husk. There was no such thing as selective Westernization. You took all of it or none of it.

When the West had separated the realm of God from the realm of society, it had put itself on a collision course with Islam. It was a war, and either one side or the other would prevail. He’d felt certain that George knew all of this, that he believed it to the marrow of his bones. Yet, he’d been wrong.

It was the girl, of course. He’d known for quite some time that his son was seeing her. How could a father fail to notice when his boy had grown into a man? This, too, was his failure. He’d been slow to react. Soft. Sentimental. He’d informed himself about the girl’s family, where she lived, her record in school. She was
kuffar,
but a respectable child. A good student. A mature girl not given to childish fancy. Clearly, he’d missed something and he knew what that “something” was. He’d committed every father’s cardinal sin: He’d thought his son was different.

Marc Gabriel knew then that he, too, had succumbed to the rot.

The taxi dipped as it exited the freeway at the Porte de Clignacourt. Gabriel counted off the familiar sights, feeling calmer in the city he never wanted to see again.
Two days,
he said to himself. Two days until he was free of all of this. Until the desert wind seared his longing cheek.

“Rue Clemenceau,” called the cabbie over his shoulder as the taxi rounded a corner. “Which building?”

“One more block. There, that’s the one.” Gabriel pointed to a modern metal-and-glass apartment building halfway down the street. As the taxi braked, he closed his eyes and imagined a fist wrapped around his heart, clenched, constricting all emotion. George was his oldest, the firstborn, but he had six younger boys from his other wives. He would choose a successor from their ranks.

After paying the cabbie, he took his bag and walked up to the entrance.

“Ah, Henri,” he said, all camaraderie and good humor. “Have you seen the boy?”

“Me?” answered the Senegalese doorman. “No, sir.”

Gabriel couldn’t help but pick up on the man’s hesitation. Either Henri was a terrible liar or a first-rate con man. Snapping a hundred-euro note from his wallet, he pressed it into the doorman’s hand. “Our usual deal: a little something for your family, a little something for mine. The boy and I had a little disagreement. My wife is worried sick. You understand?”

Henri smiled sheepishly. “Two of them leave ’bout thirty minutes ago.”

“Really?” Gabriel affected amusement at the news. “Any idea of their destination?”

“Don’t know, sir, but the girl, she had a bag.”

“A purse?”

“No, a traveling bag. Bigger than yours.”

“That right?” Gabriel peeled off another bill, and Henri’s allegiance to his tenant, feeble to begin with, crumbled entirely.

“They cross the Pont d’Iéna, sir. Heading to the sixteenth, I think.” Suddenly, he smiled and his teeth shone like ivory. “I say to her, with a bag like that you need a taxi. Claudine say what she need is money for a taxi. Would I lend her some? She always joking, that girl.”

“She must be quite funny,” said Gabriel as he left the building. “I’d like to meet her one day.”

“Hurry up,” Claudine urged George Gabriel. “You can walk faster than that.”

“I can, but I don’t want to. We have plenty of time. No point in drawing attention to ourselves.”

“But everyone is walking fast—” Claudine caught herself. “You’re not thinking about your father? You said he only got back this morning.”

“His flight landed at seven-fifteen. That’s an hour ago.”

“You checked?”

“Of course.”

Claudine shot him a look that said he was being ridiculous.

“By now, he’ll know.”

“And then?”

Silently, George enumerated the possibilities. None was pleasant. “I don’t know.” Reaching for her hand, he brought it to his mouth and kissed it.

“Don’t draw attention to us,” she chastised him.

“He doesn’t know I have a girlfriend. You’re my cover.”

George Gabriel squinted into the morning sun. He had never spent the entire night with Claudine. Holding her in his arms as he awoke, he’d tasted, if only for a few minutes, what the rest of his life might be like. He was looking forward to arriving in Ibiza. She’d told him about the farmhouse and the pond it overlooked and the warm waters of the Mediterranean. He knew exactly where he wished to be tomorrow morning, and whose eyes he wished to look into when he woke.

Seeing the ATM a half block ahead, he nudged Claudine and the two stopped walking. “The code is 821985,” he said, handing her the bank card.

“Your birthday?”

“Just get the money and bring it back.”

“What else would I do?” Claudine rose on her tippy-toes and kissed him. “Aren’t you going to wish me luck?”

Marc Gabriel knew where his son would go. It had nothing to do with telepathy, premonition, or coincidence. It was a simple case of a father knowing his son.

Pointing to the nearest corner, Gabriel signaled the cabbie to stop. On the pavement, he set off down the block, an eye trained on the ATM cut into the wall of the Neuilly branch of the BLP. He’d given his son the bank card a year ago in April, when Gabriel had traveled to Israel to recruit the Professor and it was necessary for George to handle the weekly payments. The boy had done a competent job. Afterward, Gabriel had allowed him to keep the card, advising him to use it only for emergencies. He’d never given George much allowance. When his son needed something, he came to his office, they discussed it, and most times, Gabriel agreed. In the past sixteen months, the boy hadn’t made any unauthorized withdrawals, and Gabriel had viewed his fiscal discipline as proof of his maturity.

Taking up a position in a recessed storefront of a men’s boutique, Gabriel had an unobstructed view of the cash machine. Its current customer was an older man, wearing a black beret and leaning on a cane. Gabriel swept his eyes back and forth along the sidewalk for any sign of his son. Even among the throng of pedestrians, a man six feet two inches tall would be easy to notice.

It was a busy morning. Cars zipped back and forth on either side of the grassy median. Among them were a fair number of vans making their early deliveries. Dry cleaners, florists, caterers, cleaning services. An armored car lumbered to a halt in front of the bank, momentarily blocking his view. The rear doors opened. Two officers carrying gray twill sacks entered the bank.

Gabriel left his vantage point and advanced a few yards up the sidewalk. A woman had taken up position at the ATM. He looked past her, his eyes darting from man to man, seeking out his son’s clean-shaven skull, the broad shoulders, the dark, smoldering gaze. He wondered if George might have gone to another machine. A second ATM was only three blocks away, but as it was situated across the street from the local police prefecture, Gabriel doubted that he would go there. Besides, it was that much farther from Claudine’s building.

Claudine.

Gabriel returned his eyes to the woman at the ATM. For a moment, he’d forgotten that his son was traveling in a female’s company. He took a closer look at her, catching the subtle tap-tap-tap of her heel, the deft looks to her right and left. Though he’d informed himself about Claudine’s background, he’d never actually seen her. Could that be his son’s Claudine? He dismissed the thought. He’d thought of Claudine as a girl, but this was a woman with full breasts, childbearing hips, and an assured dignity about her. She looked too old for his son, but then Western teenagers prided themselves on looking more mature than their age. The overt and sickening seduction of the male species began at the age of twelve these days. The bared midriffs, the exaggerated bosoms, the whorish makeup.

Then he saw it and his heart jumped.

The girl—the woman—
Claudine, yes it had to be her!
—looked to her left, and catching someone’s eye, patted the air lightly with her hand as if to say “Calm down. I’ll be right there.”

Gabriel turned to the left, trying to spot whom she’d signaled, but he saw no one. With a minimum of fuss, he made a U-turn on the sidewalk and began to walk back up the block. He hugged the concrete façades and slowed at the storefront windows, a hand brushing his hair, dabbing his sideburns, anything to conceal his features. And all the while his eyes scoured the opposite side of the street—the café, the kiosk, the boutique, the bakery.

Claudine had left the ATM and was folding a wad of bills and shoving them into her pocket. All he had to do was follow her to his son. She waved ever so slightly and nodded her head. A greeting of conspirators.

Gabriel’s eye darted up the sidewalk and landed on a tall, rough-boned boy who had emerged from a public rest room. The boy was wearing baggy jeans, an oversize T-shirt bearing a scowling black youth’s face above the words “Fifty Cent,” and a baseball cap with its bill turned backward. Sunglasses hid the boy’s eyes, but there was no mistaking the face.

Marc Gabriel had found his son.

Chapter 38

“Miss Charisse, please come in. I’m Dr. Ben-Ami.”

Claire Charisse passed from the waiting room into the doctor’s suite of offices. “Thank you for seeing me,” she said, ever her officious self. “I know it was short notice.”