The Diaries - 01 (48 page)

With his eyes
squeezed shut, Bruno gritted his teeth and jerked his legs to the side.
 
For a split second, nothing happened and his
heart leapt with joy.
 
Then the searing
natural gas-fed fireball enveloped his world.
 

Brothers Luc and
Bruno Florence were vanquished.

Chapter 12

Hours
before the blaze that
claimed Bruno’s life, Gage drove the blue Opel eastward on A4,
L’Autoroute
de
l’Est
, as the
tangerine sun began to creep up into the blackness of his rear view
mirror.
 
During a pit stop to use the
restroom, Gage purchased a map, an apple and a few power bars.
 
After walking around the auto center to
stretch his cramped legs, he was back on the road as the sun blazed forth, defeating
the cold of the night with the promise of the coming day.
 
Finally, when the sun was fully up in its
mid-morning position, Gage took the south exit toward the town of Château-Thierry.
 
He stopped for a cup of coffee in the only
open café after quickly surveying the small city.

He was familiar
with Château-Thierry’s significance in history, primarily due to military
action which had taken place there.
 
Situated ninety kilometers east of Paris, on the Marne River, it had
been ground zero for two epic battles, nearly one hundred years apart, during
the Napoleonic Wars and World War I.
 
Gage had taken time to read the placard under the bronze monument in the
town square before idly making his way to the café next to the five point
intersection.
 
As he leaned over the bar,
sipping a coffee laced with espresso, he beckoned the petite waitress to lean
closer to him.

“Do you know Nicky
Arnaud?” he whispered in English.

She reared back,
staring at him as if he had just asked her the craziest question she’d ever
heard.
 
“I take that as a yes?” he asked.

The young girl
glanced around, leaning in again and speaking softly in an admonishing tone.
 
“I do not know him, but I know of him,
of course
.”
 
She hustled away, taking the order of an
elderly gentleman at the other end of the bar, cutting her eyes back at Gage.
 
When she returned, Gage handed her ten euro
and motioned her in again.

“And where does Monsieur
Arnaud live?
 
I have something for him.”

She wrinkled her
brow and shook her head.
 
It was obvious
she was fully aware of the mobster’s reputation, fearful to even utter a word
about the man.

“Don’t worry,”
Gage said.
 
“This won’t get you in
trouble.
 
I was once a close friend and
he’ll be thrilled to see me.”

After glancing
around again, she sighed and whispered, “The village of Sur Marne.
 
The big, new castle over the river.”
 
She accepted the money and scurried away.

Gage downed his
coffee and walked outside, staring at the signs in the intersection.
 
The road leading west had a typical yellow French
road sign:

Essômes
-
sur
-Marne 2 km

Gage made his way
back to the Opel and took the road to Sur Marne.
 
It was curvy, located in the foggy river
valley and overshadowed by dormant Champagne vineyards on both sides.
 
He slowed the car upon seeing Nicky’s home.
 
The new castle, as the waitress had termed
it, was impossible to miss.
 
Made of
limestone, pink and white, it was perched on a hillside in a majestic setting—majestic
if it were not so garish—overlooking the Marne.
 
He continued past, alternating his view
between the road and the castle, studying it.
 
He made a U-turn further down the road, repeating the process six times
before he was satisfied to move forward with his rough plan.
 
Upon finding a concealed place to park the
Opel, between two empty buildings with real estate signs out front, Gage
retrieved his bag from the trunk and made his way down the street as the sun continued
to warm the chill day, signaling what would be the nicest day in weeks.

Just outside of
Essômes
-
sur
-Marne, he turned
right, walking on a nature trail bounded to the right by a stand of trees.
 
The pungent smell of pine cleared his sinuses
as he spied occasional glimpse of the Arnaud castle.
 
To his left was the rise, marked by the castle
at the summit, and then the drop to the river and valley below.
 
He stayed on the trail until he was parallel
with the castle.
 
At that point Gage
walked into the thick trees, making his way up the hill.
 
It was at the crest that he chose a tall
tree, donning a lanyard from his bag and climbing with only the rifle’s scope
in his pocket.
 
When he reached a suitable
vantage point, thirty feet up, Gage tested the lanyard before leaning outward
like a worker on a telephone pole.
 
Able
to relax, he retrieved the scope from his pocket and trained it on the enormous
residence.
 
Initially he saw no
movement.
 
The Schmidt & Bender scope
provided excellent magnification, allowing Gage to patiently survey the land
and the castle from his anonymous vantage point.

After he had
marked the position of two security cameras, Gage witnessed a man step out onto
the expansive patio.
 
As he eyed the
individual, a portly man who lit a cigarette, he watched as another man exited
the house and nodded as the smoker talked and pointed.
 
The second man then walked to one of the
cars, a Bentley, where he began to unload boxes from the trunk while the other
man smoked and watched.

Gage refocused on
the smoker, wondering if it might be Nicky.
 
He’d seen pictures of Arnaud on the Internet, but at this distance it
was too hard to discern facial features.

In order to get it
over with, he considered climbing down, assembling the rifle, resuming his
perch and getting off two shots.
 
He judged
the range to be eight hundred meters: a milk run for Kenny Mars’s prized Walther
WA2000 sniper rifle.
 
As he lifted the
scope back to his eyes, Gage considered the man who had finished unloading the
car, carrying the stacked boxes onto the patio.
 
After what appeared to be a brief conversation, Gage witnessed the
smoker clap the man on the back.
 
Minutes
later, the man who’d done the work emerged from the far side of the house,
pedaling an old-fashioned bicycle down the driveway.
 
He turned left on the main road and
disappeared.

Gage slowly
lowered the scope.
 
A servant?
 
Is the other man
Nicky Arnaud?
 
He shook his
head.
 
Something didn’t seem right.
 
When Nicky eventually heard about brothers
Luc and Bruno Florence (if he hadn’t already), Gage knew his guard would go
up.
 
Even still, he decided to be patient
in his approach.
 
Something about the man
on the patio didn’t seem in character with the Nicky Arnaud Gage had read about.

After climbing
down, he wolfed down a power bar and drank two bottles of water.
 
Next, he donned the olive and black fatigues
from his bag and smeared camouflage paint on his face.
 
Nightfall wouldn’t be for six more hours, and
he could not chance the shine of his skin alerting a day hiker or a roving
sentry.

***

Marcel was on his
third cigarette.
 
He glanced at his
watch, shaking his head.
 
Nicky was always
so damned slow, as if he were the only man in the world.
 
It was cool outside, but fortunately not nearly
as cold as it had been recently.
 
He
looked at the high clouds, squinting as he surveyed the broken sky.
 
There was to be a day of warmth before a coming
rain, and behind that more Siberian winds for central Europe.
 
Marcel and Nicky were due to drive to Paris
later in the day.
 
He dreaded refereeing
the meeting between Nicky and Horatio
Gaufois
from
the famed Corse.
 
The two “cooperating”
bosses loathed one another and the threat of bloodshed always hovered just
below the surface.
 
Marcel checked his
phone, silently praying for a cancellation.
 
There were no messages.

Today was going to
be a long day.
 

Not knowing what
the holdup was with Nicky, he walked back inside and retrieved the diary.

It had taken
Marcel a great deal longer than Gage to recognize Greta’s “lover” as Adolf
Hitler.
 
Typically unmoved by titles and
magnitude, Marcel was far more taken by her tragic and human plight.
 
Without Nicky’s even knowing of the diary’s
possession, Marcel had been devouring the pages at a torrid pace.
 
Sitting on the privacy of the toilet, with
his pants still on, he resumed his reading…

Liora
is now six weeks old and such a sweet child.
 
Her eyes are large and expressive and I’m
confident she now recognizes me due to her smiles.
 
I’ve learned some of her early fussiness was
from a condition known as colic.
 
Some of
the mothers on our street advised me of changes to what I eat and the situation
resolved itself in only a few days.
 
Since then she has been sleeping for over six hours at a time.
 
Liora
and I share a
room on the second floor.
 
Typically I
retire at ten, feeding her around four, and then we both sleep until
eight.
 
I haven’t felt so rested in ten
years and have wonderful Heinrich to thank for it.
 
He is selfless despite all of the unwarranted
challenges he has faced with his grocery business.

Now for the biggest news, diary!
 
Heinrich, sweet man he is, has asked me to be
his wife!
 
While this is momentous news
for me I feel so very deceitful for not telling him the truth about
Liora’s
father.
 
I’ve
prayed about this, struggled over it and, in the end, I feel justified (for
now) in keeping this horrible truth to myself.
 
My holding this in is not out of selfishness, it’s out of love for my
child.
 
She now has the chance to have a
true father to love and raise her.
 
While
I might someday tell Heinrich how she was conceived, I can never tell
Liora
.
 
It would be
too much for a person to bear, even in adulthood.

I’m staying up later than normal to write this
entry.
 
Heinrich’s proposal has made me
so happy I’m not sure if I will sleep at all.
 
But I also feel quite foolish!
 
Again, my consternation has been made better
by my wonderful Heinrich.
 
He proposed to
me today, sitting in the parlor, during
Liora’s
afternoon nap.
 
Once we had talked
everything through, not knowing what else to do, I attempted to engage Heinrich
by offering to join him in his bed.
 
While I could tell he was taken by my suggestion, he politely declined,
telling me we should wait until our ceremony has occurred.
 
Of course I felt terribly foolish afterward,
angry with myself and more angry with twisted Aldo for conditioning me in such
a lurid way.
 
Heinrich must have sensed
my anxiety, kissing me passionately and reassuring me that he felt honored by
my proposition and didn’t think badly of me because of it.

Diary, after so many awful years, I have found the
perfect man!

Thunderous booms
snapped Marcel from his engrossed reading.

“Are you in
there?” Nicky yelled, pounding on the door.

Marcel bit his lip
in a struggle not to shout something back.
 
Instead he flushed the toilet and ran the faucet while he concealed the
diary in a cabinet.
 
He emerged wearing
an irritated countenance.

“I walked all over
looking for you,” Nicky admonished, wearing flamboyant shooting gear and his
silly amber shooting-glasses.

“Sorry to put you
out.”

“Is it set up?”

“It’s
been
set up for hours,” Marcel
answered.
 

Nicky whistled and
Napoleon the Doberman appeared from his slumber in the reading room,
immediately sidling up to Marcel by the door.
 
Nicky frowned at the dog, snapping his finger and pointing to the floor
next to his feet.
 
Napoleon grudgingly
moved beside him, head down in what looked akin to human dread.

“You pamper him,”
Nicky said.
 
“That’s why he comes to
you.”

Marcel chose not
to reply, exiting the mansion and crossing the pea gravel driveway to the main
yard that overlooked the cliff, the Marne, and the flood plain that stretched
out before them.

***

Back in his perch,
Gage held his breath as he watched the two figures walk across the porch and the
turnout.
 
Both men were short, but the
one following was smaller, his mouth moving as he gestured all around the area.
 
Between the two men was a large black and
tawny dog: a Doberman.