Paris Ransom Read online

  “Ah, no, officer, he is simply a lawyer from America on vacation here.”

  “Ah, so he is an American?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you not say so immediately?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “This is an important fact.”

  I was about to ask him why it was important, but I decided to suppress the urge to play lawyer.

  At that point, Jenna broke in. “Excuse me, do any of you speak English?” she asked, addressing the cops. “I don’t speak French, and I don’t understand what’s going on here.”

  “I’m sorry, Jenna,” I said. “I forgot that you can’t understand. They are asking if we know why he was kidnapped—I told them about the book—and they are wondering if he was involved in money laundering.”

  “What?”

  One of the other officers, who had not yet spoken, stepped forward and said, in pretty good English, “I speak English. I was an exchange student in Omaha when I was in the lycée—high school. I will translate for you, Madame, when it’s needed.”

  I thought, although I might have been mistaken, that he was looking at Jenna with an interest that was not entirely policier.

  The first officer then continued with me, in French. “Do you have a photo of this person, this Oscar Quesana?”

  “My friend here, Jenna, has a couple on her cell phone, I’m sure. She also has pictures of the car that took him.”

  “We need her phone, then.”

  “Jenna, they want your phone for any pictures you have of Oscar and pictures of the car.”

  The first cop held out his hand, and Jenna burrowed in the pocket of her coat and handed over her phone. Her hand was shaking from the cold and her teeth were chattering.

  “Will I get it back?”

  The officer who spoke English whispered something in the ear of the lead officer, listened for a second and said, “You will get it back.”

  “When?”

  “Soon. But it’s evidence, if you get me. Right now you need to chill.”

  Despite the seriousness of the situation, I almost laughed out loud. The guy’s Omaha experience had clearly taken place sometime in the ’90s.

  Jenna didn’t seem at all amused, and I feared she was about to hit him with a typical Jenna outburst—blunt and acerbic—when I put my hand up. “Let it go, Jenna. I’m sure you’ll get it back. Right now it’s more important to get Oscar back. And we need to get dry.”

  I addressed the lead cop. “Officer, can we go somewhere where we can dry off? We’re both cold, and my friend here is on the edge of hypothermia.”

  There was again a quiet conversation among the four of them that I couldn’t overhear. Finally, the officer in charge said, “You are both too wet to get in our cars. That would be very messy. Please get in the fourgon”—the official name for the panier à salade—“and we will take you where we are going.”

  “Which is where?”

  “To 36 quai des Orfèvres.”

  “Which is central police headquarters, right?”

  “How do you know that?”

  I knew it, actually, because I was a fan of the potboiler French movie of the same name, starring Gérard Depardieu, in which two cops compete to replace the retiring chief of the Paris police, but somehow I thought it was best not to mention it right then. “I don’t know,” I said, “it’s just something I know.”

  “I hope it’s not because you have watched that dreadful movie.”

  “What movie? I only watch American movies.”

  He gave me an odd look and waved toward the back of the van. “Please get in.”

  We climbed into the van and sat on the padded benches, facing one another. Shortly thereafter, someone closed the doors and the van began to move.

  “Are we suspects or what?” Jenna asked.

  “I don’t really know.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To police headquarters.”

  Just then my cell phone rang. It was Tess. “I got the message of Jenna. Where are you?”

  “In the back of a police van, heading for police headquarters.”

  “To 36 quai des Orfèvres?”

  “Yes.”

  “I will meet you there.”

  “I think that place is like a fortress, especially at night. How will you get in?”

  “I am Tess Devrais. This will not be a problem.”

  I knew of course that Tess hobnobbed at times with the wealthy and powerful in France. I’d even met some of them. But the police? That was a new wrinkle.

  CHAPTER 7

  We arrived at our destination within minutes, sirens whooping. We were ushered out of the van, through the inevitable giant metal gate, down a marble corridor, and into a small, sparsely furnished office. The cops who had transported us disappeared. Inside the office a uniformed woman police officer with gray hair sat at a desk piled high with papers. She was neither small nor large, but well-muscled, and looked like she could beat the shit out of me.

  After introducing herself as Capitaine Bonpere—using the French pronunciation—and inviting us to take a seat in two of the metal chairs scattered around the office, she looked closely at Jenna and asked, in French, if she was cold. I answered for her and said yes. The captain came around her desk, helped Jenna shed her soaking wet alpaca coat and left with it. She came back a few minutes later with a police jacket and draped it over Jenna with a motherly air. Then she left again and returned with two steaming cups of coffee and a big towel that Jenna used to try to dry her hair, face and arms.

  Captain Bonpere went back behind her desk and said in French, “Monsieur Tarza, do I understand correctly that your friend does not speak French?”

  “Correct.”

  “Okay, since we need to interview both of you, we will need a translator. The police officer who helped bring you here, Lieutenant Joly, speaks good English. I will see if he is still in the building.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” a voice behind me said in English. “I can translate.” It was Tess.

  Captain Bonpere jumped to her feet. “Bonsoir, Madame Devrais. I did not know you were involved in this. Had I known, I would have called.”

  “I’m involved here only on a personal basis. Monsieur Tarza and I are engaged to be married.”

  Jenna looked at me and asked, “What’s going on?”

  “Tess and I are going to get married.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll explain later.”

  Meanwhile, Captain Bonpere was finalizing with Tess that Tess would join us and translate.

  Once that was all taken care of, Captain Bonpere got started. Looking back and forth between the two of us, she said, “I assume you know that antiquarian books can easily be used to launder money.”

  I not only didn’t know that, but I found it highly unlikely and said so. Once Tess understood, she seconded my thoughts.

  “Madame et Monsieur,” Bonpere said, “let me assure you that you are utterly wrong.”

  “How can one possibly use an old book to launder money?” I asked.

  “It is simple, Monsieur, a person with cash he has made from, for example, smuggling drugs into Marseille from the Middle East, will use that money to buy a rare book. Let us say he pays one hundred thousand euros for it.”

  “Almost a hundred and forty thousand dollars.”

  She smiled. “Yes, but in real money, one hundred thousand euros. And so the bookstore owner, who is in the business of selling books, deposits that money in his bank along with his normal monthly receipts, and no one thinks anything of it. Or, if that is an extra-large deposit for him, he deposits about five thousand euros each month for ten months, varying the amount somewhat each month.”

  We waited a moment for Tess to catch up with the translation.
r />   Jenna listened and said, “Yes, I know how this works. What happens next is that the drug dealer, let’s call him Bob, puts the book on his own bookshelf, waits awhile and then sells it back to the same book dealer from whom he bought it in the first place. If Bob is later asked where he got the money, he says, ‘Oh we had a rare book in our family and I sold it.’ Of course, the book dealer gets a percentage for helping him out. Just as a bank takes a fee to change money.”

  Bonpere did not wait for Tess to translate. “That’s right,” she said. “And there are much more sophisticated versions of the same thing, using third parties.”

  Obviously Bonpere spoke at least some English.

  “What makes you think that Oscar was involved in this?” I asked.

  “Monsieur, was Oscar someone who collected these books all his life?”

  “No.”

  “Was he a man who was a trader in goods?”

  “No.”

  “Why then, Monsieur Tarza, do you think he became suddenly interested in rare books?”

  “If he was doing this for criminal reasons, as you seem to think, why did he let us in on it?” Jenna asked. “After all, he showed us the book and seemed very proud of it.”

  This time Bonpere waited for the translation. I realized, as she did so, that although she probably understood what Jenna had said, waiting for the translation gave her time to think about what she wanted to say in response.

  “I think,” Bonpere said, “that he had become afraid for some reason, and he allowed you to know about the book because he thought you could help protect him.”

  She had a point. The whole thing about leaving it at our place in a gift box and asking me to keep it safe, plus his startle when he heard Bukov’s name, fit with her theory.

  “Wait,” Jenna said. “This makes no sense at all. We know Oscar well. We’ve known him for many years. We’ve practiced law with him. He is not a criminal and this is simply not the kind of thing he would do.”

  Bonpere again waited for the translation, then said, “Sometimes those we think we know best we know least.”

  “Is that an old French saying?” I asked.

  “No, it is an old Bonpere saying.”

  At that moment, the cop whom I’d come to think of as “Officer Omaha” stuck his head in the door. “We can look at the film now,” he said in English. He took out an iPad with a bright green cover and handed it to Bonpere.

  Bonpere pointed to him and said, “I have asked Lieutenant Joly here to access the imagery that we have from a security camera not far from where the alleged kidnapping took place. We can all watch it on this iPad.” She set the iPad on a small easel on her desk, swiveled it to face us and walked around so she could see it herself.

  I noted with some trepidation that she had called it an “alleged” kidnapping. If it wasn’t a kidnapping, what was it?

  The film rolled, without sound. The image was fairly dark, but I could make things out. As we watched, I saw the three of us walking down the street, Oscar in the middle. Suddenly, there were flashes of light from the firecrackers all around us. I saw the black car glide to a stop beside us—I had remembered it as stopping more abruptly. The two rear doors sprang open, and the two big guys jumped out and shoved Oscar into the back seat, just as I remembered it. Then the car sped away. The image continued, showing Jenna and me standing there as Jenna snapped the three pictures of the car.

  Bonpere let it run for a few more seconds, then touched the screen and froze the image. “We will turn this over to our technical analysts for what they can see that perhaps we cannot see. But I note that the car has no license plate, and it is a recent model Mercedes D, of which there are thousands in Paris.”

  “Why did you call it an alleged kidnapping?” I asked.

  “Because there are certain things about it that look not like a kidnapping. Let me show you.” She touched the screen again, ran the film back to the beginning, and started it forward again, but on a slower speed.

  She froze it when it reached the frame where Oscar began to be pushed into the car. “First,” she said, “he ducked his own head when he got into the car. Usually, when someone shoves someone into a car against their will, they shield the victim’s head.” She ran the film for a second or two, and I could see that Oscar had indeed lowered his own head. “That is unusual. Even more important, though, is this.” She started it forward again on an even slower speed. “What do you see, Monsieur Tarza?”

  What I saw was dumbfounding. “He folded his umbrella before he got in. I don’t remember seeing that, though.”

  “People who are in shock are not the best observers.”

  I could tell that Tess had been struggling to keep up with the translation. “Give me a minute to catch up,” she said.

  Bonpere paused while she did that.

  After listening, Jenna said in English, “You have to know him. He is just very fastidious.”

  Bonpere looked to Tess. “What does this word fastidious mean?”

  Tess clearly didn’t know, so I added, “It means careful.”

  “I see,” Bonpere said. “Well, I have been in this police business a long time, and I have never heard of or seen someone who was under attack being careful enough to fold an umbrella in the middle of it.”

  Tess then said something to Bonpere in French so rapid, so intentionally slurred and so filled with words I didn’t know that I had no idea what she had said.

  Bonpere looked thoughtful and responded, “Non.”

  Tess continued, this time in French I could comprehend. “Capitaine, what is the next step?”

  “We have put out an alert for this car, although that is probably hopeless given how many of that model there are. Through other cameras, we have seen the driver turn onto a street where there is not a camera, and from that street, if he knows what he is doing, he can drive at least a kilometer without being watched by a camera again. And there are many other streets into which he can turn, also without cameras.”

  “But they have to emerge somewhere,” I said.

  “If they are smart, they took the car into a garage or parked it on the street. We are looking for it now, but even if we find it, they will not be in it. They will have transferred your friend to another car. And this car, if we find it, was probably stolen and so will not trace to them.”

  “Now you have to look for a car with three people in it.”

  “Monsieur, if he was truly kidnapped, he will now be in the trunk. And if he was not truly kidnapped, he is perhaps in the trunk anyway, with one other person in the car only—the driver. We cannot stop every car in Paris being driven by one person with no passenger. Or even with one passenger.”

  “Are you telling us that there’s nothing you can do?”

  “No, there is much we can do, but unless we are very lucky, it will not be by finding the car.”

  Tess stood up. “What do you want Monsieur Tarza and Madame James to do now?”

  “Lieutenant Joly will take them to another room and gather detailed personal information about the alleged victim and learn where we can contact them.”

  Lieutenant Omaha leaned over and whispered in Bonpere’s ear.

  “Ah,” Bonpere said, “it seems we cannot find where your friend Monsieur Quesana is living. We have checked, and no hotel in Paris has reported anyone named Oscar Quesana as a guest. You must know that all hotels are to report the names of their guests. Is he staying with any one of you?”

  There was silence.

  “We have also asked of hospitals and other places where a missing person might be. There is no clue of him in these places.”

  “Will you be the police officer leading the investigation?” Tess asked.

  “No, it will be given to the Brigade Criminelle de Paris. As I’m sure you know, they investigate certain types of major crimes, like kidna
pping.”

  “And like money-laundering,” Tess said. It was more a statement than a question.

  “Yes.”

  “Which one will be the focus here?” I asked.

  “Perhaps both.”

  “Is there anything else?” Tess asked.

  “Only if you learn where he was staying, please let us know immediately.”

  “Maybe his wife knows,” I said.

  “Where is she?”

  “In New York City.”

  “Are they having marital difficulties?”

  “Not that I know of,” I said.

  “It was just a thought.”

  “Captain, perhaps she knows where Oscar is staying. I’d call her and ask, but I’ve only met her once. Perhaps it would be better if you called.”

  “No. In my experience, it’s better if you, someone she’s at least met, calls her. She will also be more inclined to believe that her husband has been taken away if it comes from you. She will not think it is a bad joke. If that does not work, we will either contact her directly or have our friends in the NYPD call upon her.”

  “Alright, we will call her,” I said

  By “we” I knew we were talking about me. But oddly enough I didn’t feel I had the kind of close personal relationship with Oscar that I needed to be comfortable making that call. That was true even though Oscar had brilliantly created the winning strategy in my murder trial in Los Angeles. Without him as my defense lawyer, I would have lost. But despite the hundreds of hours we’d spent together during that trial, it was a professional kind of closeness we’d developed, not a deep personal connection. Calling his wife—whom I’d met only once—to tell her that her husband had been kidnapped in Paris was going to be hard.

  I saw a solution, though. “Jenna, why don’t you call her?”

  “You’re closer to Oscar, Robert. He and Pandy even visited you in Paris last year.”

  “Well, true.” I was about to add that Oscar had represented Jenna the prior year in that nonsense at UCLA about the dead student in her office, and that she’d therefore had the most dealings with him lately. Fortunately, at the last second, I realized that that was not the kind of dirty linen I wanted to wash in front of the Paris police.