Stone Angel

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 1It was the kind of April in Paris they wrote the song about when a submachine gun began hammering at me from the other side of the Rue des Rosiers.

Paris is nothing like Chicago. Not the Chicago where I did most of my growing up, and definitely not the Chicago of the bootlegger battles that still fascinate Europe. Sometimes the same things happen in Paris, but usually for different reasons.

There’d been no response when I’d buzzed Sarah Byrne’s apartment, so I’d crossed the street to have an exotic lunch before pursuing the matter further. In central Paris the sort of pastrami on rye you can get in any American delicatessen is exotic. I know only two places you can get one: Fischman’s Café and Jo Goldenberg’s Restaurant. Both are on the same short, narrow street in the Marais quarter, in the heart of what was a small Jewish ghetto as far back as the twelfth century.

It seemed a funny place for an American girl of Irish extraction to live. But not funny-peculiar, at that point. Like most big cities, Paris has become increasingly patchwork as space gets harder to come by. There is now a Tunisian shop between Fischman’s and Goldenberg’s, plus a chic Scandinavian boutique at one end of the street and a trendy Russian bar at the other. The old ghetto ambience is hanging on there by its fingernails.

I settled down with my beer and sandwich at one of the little tables between Fischman’s bar and the long plate-glass window fronting the Rue des Rosiers. That gave me a narrow view of the entrance to Sarah Byrne’s apartment building, if I tilted my head to peek between some of the matzo boxes stacked high against the window. The barricade of boxes had been erected to prevent people outside from getting a clear view of the interior—a precaution instituted after Goldenberg’s down the block had been hit by a grenade and gun attack the year before.

I had finished half my sandwich and was swabbing mustard on the other half when Little Yuri walked in. He hadn’t changed in the more than a year since I’d last seen him. Still short and plump, in a rumpled suit that did nothing to make him taller or slimmer, still wearing the troubled expression of an overage student hoping to finally pass his exams but skeptical about his chances.

He spotted me and came over with a cherubic smile. “That’s a great suntan you got there, Pete.” He’d spent some years in the States, and his English was on a par with his French: pretty good. “Still spending most of your time down on the Riviera?”

“About half and half.”

“Lucky you. So what’re you doing around here?” The question seemed as casual as his first one, but it wasn’t.

“Having a pastrami on rye,” I told him.

That’s when the submachine gun cut loose outside.

The window exploded in at me, along with bullet-shredded boxes of matzo. I dived for the floor and tried to burrow into its black and white tiles. Shards of jagged glass rained on top of me. People began screaming, both inside and out on the street. The submachine gun kept hammering, the bullets lashing the cafe’s interior from the front toward the dining alcoves in the rear. A series of bursts overturned tables and chairs, punched holes in the take-out counter and bar, disintegrated bottles and ripped through tin trays loaded with pastries, thudded into walls and smashed tiles.

Yuri had fallen beside me and for a second I thought he’d been hit. Then he rolled up on one hip and tugged a Beretta 92 pistol from inside his jacket. I doubted that the French government would give somebody like him a permit to carry a concealed weapon. But what French law permitted and what French cops tolerated could, like medical theory and practice, be light-years apart. The government had been letting Arab agents get away with murder for the last few years. Some cops compensated by ignoring the activities of shadowy Israelis like Yuri.

The bullets were coming in at a downward slant. With the side of my face pressed to the floor tiles I could see the snout of the weapon angling from a second-floor window across the street. The shooter was hidden in shadow behind it.

Sarah Byrne’s sublet was in that building: same floor, same side.

Abruptly, the barrage stopped—for about three seconds. Then it resumed, swinging in the other direction this time, raking the inside of the cafe from the rear toward the front.

Yuri got his feet under him and launched himself toward the front door, leading the way with his Beretta and going fast enough to stay ahead of the submachine gun bursts. I stayed prudently where I was. First of all, I didn’t have a gun. With or without one, I wasn’t crazy enough to charge out into the open against a submachine gun operating from a prepared vantage point behind cover. Men like Yuri have careless survival instincts—one result of growing up surrounded by enemies who outnumber them thirty to one.

He barged out the door, snapping off two fast shots as he vanished into the street. I saw both bullets kick stone dust from the wall just below the second-floor window. The weapon up there jerked back out of sight, momentarily quiet again.

Walt Fischman popped up from behind his checkout counter with a Colt .45 held in both skinny hands. He was jumping for the door when the submachine gun let go another long burst. He kept going, out onto the sidewalk. People who survived childhoods inside Nazi death camps are another breed tending toward fatalism about mortality.

A woman lay against the base of the bar, moaning softly, her face slack with shock. One sleeve of her blouse was bullet-ripped and drenched with her blood, but she wasn’t aware of it. She was staring down at the little girl she was holding. An overturned table hid most of the child from me. All I could see were two thin, sprawled legs, not moving.

I crawled to them. When I got around the overturned table, I saw there was nothing I or anyone else could do for the little girl. Not in this life. Concentrating on the mother, I ripped away her sleeve. A bullet had torn her upper arm. It was bleeding profusely. I began fastening the sleeve as a tourniquet above the wound. She didn’t notice, continuing to moan as she cradled the dead child with her good arm.

A little old man crawled over and asked politely, “Are you a doctor?”

“No,” I told him, “but—”

“I am,” he snapped. “Get out of my way.”

I let him take over, being careful as I turned away not to let my eyes drift to what had become of the child’s head. I was still dizzy from the one brief glimpse.

The gunfire outside had stopped. All that was left were the sounds of shouting, crying, screaming. I got up and walked out the riddled front door. A stupid thing to do. The shooting could have broken out again right then. But I was having trouble thinking straight.

Walt Fischman sat in the near gutter, cursing as he tightened his necktie around his bleeding thigh.

“Yuri?” I growled at him.

He nodded toward the opened entrance to the building from which the attack had come. “Went in there.”

Fischman’s .45 lay in the gutter beside him. I scooped it up and crossed the street. I was near the entrance when five gunshots boomed inside the building. Two from one handgun, then three in rapid succession from another of different caliber. I stuck the Colt in my belt, hidden by my jacket, and began to run. Not into the building, but up the block on that side of the street.

Nobody involved in shooting up the cafe would be dumb enough to try escaping via the Rue des Rosiers. Too many merchants there had, like Fischman, acquired weapons since last year’s strike at Goldenberg’s. By now they would have them ready to use. No, the attackers would head through the interior of the block to the Rue des Francs Bourgeois on the other side. The blocks in the old sections of Paris are huge and ancient, each a miniature casbah, honeycombed by multiple courtyards, interior and exterior passages and stairways, roofs of differing heights. Mazes in which one can quickly lose pursuers.

I turned the first corner and kept running. It took over three minutes to circle the block and reach the Rue des Francs Bourgeois, panting and perspiring.

The block there was longer, with more than a dozen large attached buildings. I took up a position across the street, about halfway between the ends, turning my head to scan the many doors. People came out and others went in. More people crowded along both sidewalks, going about their own business. None seemed aware of the violence that had just occurred on the Rue des Rosiers. The walls of the huge block, interior and exterior, were too thick and too numerous for the noise to have penetrated this far.

I began to feel foolish about my round-the-block sprint. There was no way to identify which of the people coming out of any of the doors might have taken part in the shooting. Nobody was likely to come out this side still carrying a weapon in plain sight.

One of the buildings I had under surveillance was the Hotel d’Albret. Back in the seventeenth century it had been the palatial residence of the favorite mistress of King Louis XIV. Now its interior was being gutted for extensive restoration as an office building. All of its windows and doors were boarded up except for a wide opening used by workmen pushing wheelbarrows of debris out to a dump truck. The fifth or sixth time I glanced that way, a figure came out dressed differently than the demolition workers: skintight Levi’s and stylish denim jacket, shiny black boots and a motorcycle helmet with a bubble visor that concealed head and face. The figure was tall but unmistakably female: narrow waist, full bust and hips.

The concealing helmet was not necessarily suspicious. Motorcycles are a popular means of transportation in Paris, used by everyone from students to attorneys who have to make swift trips between offices and law courts without getting stuck in traffic. Helmets are legally required, and that style was in vogue.

The Air France flight bag she was lugging in one hand was big enough to hold a submachine gun if its stock was folded. But it was also the right size for a load of books or anything else heavy you might think of.

She stopped at the curb behind the dump truck and two motorcycles roared past me, coming to a halt in front of her with their motors idling. Both drivers wore similar helmets. The tall woman swung on behind one of the drivers and leaned her helmet against that of the other driver to tell him something.

I looked at their license plates. Both were so smeared with dirt they were impossible to read. I started across toward them on the diagonal, dodging cars and shouting for the three of the motorcyclers to stay put or I’d shoot. By then I was almost sure they were involved in the attack. My hand was inside my jacket, ready to draw the Colt if they put up a fight.

They didn’t; they didn’t even glance back in my direction. Both motorcycles screeched away from me, swinging around the dump truck and speed-weaving off between slow-moving cars.

I left the .45 in my belt and brought my hand out empty. There were too many people around who could get hit by a bullet that went on through any of my targets. Even without that hazard, almost sure was not sure enough for killing. So I just stood there feeling useless and watching them disappear. Motorcycles are the best getaway vehicles in a crowded city. There’s no way a pursuit car can catch one through heavy traffic, or even tail it for any distance.

People who were close enough to have heard what I’d shouted were staring at me, uncertain if I was dangerous, just a nut, or some new kind of street entertainer. I grinned reassuringly and turned into the working entrance of the Hotel D’Albret, leaving the gawkers behind. Most city people are predictable: too busy with their own interests to take much time off for satisfying idle curiosity.

I met Yuri coming through a partially demolished interior wall, his right hand out of sight in his jacket pocket with the Beretta. “Did the other one come out here?” he asked, not at all surprised to see me there.

The other one—that probably meant he’d gotten whoever else had been part of the attack, somewhere inside the guts of the big block—the one the second motorcycle had been waiting to pick up.

“Tall girl,” he added quickly. “Long black hair, long sharp nose, carrying an airline bag and a motorcycle helmet.”

“She was wearing the helmet when she came out,” I told him. “Took off on a motorcycle.”

“You didn’t move fast enough to stop her.”

“Afraid not.”

“Get the motorcycle’s number?”

“No.”

“Wonderful. I can see why the American police fired you.” Yuri’s eyes narrowed on me. “Okay, what were you doing around there?”

“Nothing of interest to you. I’m just looking for an American for her parents, and she happens to live in this neighborhood.”

“Where, exactly?”

“Concentrate on your own problems, and let me take care of mine.” Harry and Maureen Byrne weren’t paying me to get their daughter into worse trouble than she might have already managed for herself.

Yuri’s eyes narrowed a bit more. “Couldn’t she by any chance be the girl I was chasing?”

I shook my head. “Mine’s short, with a tendency to plumpness. Light brown hair, not long, and a snub nose.”

“What’s her name?”

“Not your business.”

“You’re one hundred percent sure of that.”

I wasn’t, so I changed the subject: “Think it was you they were gunning for?”

“I doubt it. People who know what I am are professionals. Mostly with Arab hit squads. The woman you let get away didn’t look Arab. Her partner definitely wasn’t. And any real pro would have tried for me just before I went into the cafe or waited until I was coming out. No, this was random c*****e by some homicidal anti-Semites having a little fun. Like last year all over again.”

There’d been a spate of such attacks around the time of the one at Goldenberg’s by several small French neo-Nazi bands: a Jewish kid stabbed on a train by three thugs wearing swastikas, a Dutch tourist who had both of her legs blown off by a bomb near a synagogue in the Latin quarter. The worst had been a car explosion outside a synagogue near the Arc de Triomphe that had killed four people and injured thirty.

“You figure this was one of the same extreme right groups?” My question wasn’t idle curiosity, and he didn’t exactly answer it.

“Fanatics of the right, fanatics of the left—it’s getting hard to tell the difference between the two lately.”

“Let me know if you find out.”

Yuri gave my request some thought. “Sure. Right now I’d better get lost.”

“I’d advise it.” By now police of all kinds would have converged on the Rue des Rosiers. It wouldn’t take some of them much longer to work their way through the block to this side.

“I’ll be in touch. Maybe about this American girl you’re looking for.” Yuri strolled out into the street, joining the crowds and drifting away. I gave him thirty seconds and then headed back around the block.