chapter 17

Li Jiang stands on a narrow path in the city of the dead with his hands in the pockets of his light grey suit, waiting for Frederick Chopin to speak to him.

It’s never as easy as that, of course. The voices come when they come, of their own accord, and it is rare indeed for them to identify themselves. It has always been more of a soft but insistent swirling of sound, more of a low symphony of murmurs, and he has been listening for the music of the departed since he stepped from the cab and strode with map in hand through the pedestrian gate on the Rue du Repos, down the tree-lined Chemin de l’Ancienne Porte, past a dizzying array of tombs, deeper into the necropolis of Pѐre Lachaise.

Now, standing silently before Chopin’s resting place, Li thinks that the pictures he has seen of this tomb have never done it justice. The photographs, of course, were perfectly accurate in their way: all showed the composer’s face carved in relief into the white marble base, while above, also in white marble, the muse of music bends grieving over her lyre. The physical reality of the tomb is as familiar to Li as an old friend – but what the photographs never conveyed was the feeling of melancholy, the aura of sadness this monument wears like a cloak. It is as if the sculptor has carved a Nocturne out of white stone.

Chopin may come, he may not, but composers, Li thinks, speak in more than just words. As he turns from the tomb, his fingers close around the phone in his pocket. He has no headphones, and he knows that streaming any sort of music will consume a scandalous amount of cellular data, but the phone belongs to MSS and, in any case, this is a business expense. He needs a clear mind, and Nocturne Op.48 No.1 should do the job.

The roadbed of Chemin Denon is uneven, and as he walks his eyes move from road to the distance and then to the screen of his phone. No one is in his path, and he brings the screen to life with the sweep of a finger.

Chopin’s Nocturne Op.48 No.1. Any performance will do, but Rubenstein’s would be best – he found the sorrow buried between the notes, the shadows and the desolation, the sense of longing – and if it isn’t enough to convince Chopin to come, it will at least banish the other song from Li’s mind, the one that’s been playing since he walked through the pedestrian gate on Repos, the one he tells himself is drowning out the voices, the one that stretches back across the decades.

As Li reaches his index finger toward the screen, the silenced phone begins to vibrate. He only recognizes the city code of the number displayed. An incoming call with a Paris number.

“Yes?”

“Sir, this is Yang Sun. I work out of the Paris office, and Bik Muan ordered me to keep track of Mary Alice Delacroix. I regret the interruption, but I cannot reach Ms. Bik. Mrs. Delacroix left her apartment and has stopped at the cemetery called Pѐre Lachaise. It is…”

“I am familiar with it.” Li continues walking. “Go on.”

“Sir, she parked along the Rue des Rondeaux and went into the cemetery through the gate known as the Gambetta entrance. We have eyes on Mrs. Delacroix’s car, but we were not set up to conduct surveillance on foot, so we are not in pursuit.”

“Understood, Yang. Stay with the car. I imagine she will return before long.”

“Sir, pardon me, but there’s more. It may only be a coincidence, but two men in a black Audi A6 parked not far from Mrs. Delacroix’s car maybe 30 seconds after she entered the cemetery. We observed one of them making a phone call of approximately a minute in length. Once the call was terminated, both men got out of their car and walked into the cemetery.”

Li reaches into his jacket, pulling a paper map from the breast pocket. “When did Mrs. Delacroix enter the cemetery? How long has it been?”

“Around 5 or 6 minutes, sir.”

“Please describe what she’s wearing.”

“Sir?”

Li unfolds the map. His eyes drift from the Chemin Denon to the small red X he’d drawn on the paper earlier that morning. “Describe what Mrs. Delacroix is wearing, please, Yang.”

“Yellow summer dress, knee length, with blue highlights. Flat shoes. White Gucci Marmont shoulder bag.”

“You’re sure it’s a Marmont shoulder bag?” Li smiles as his eyes skim up the map to its northern edge and the entrance marked “Gambetta.” “Making the most of your time in the Paris office, I see.”

The woman on the other end of the phone laughs. “Yes sir. Looking, but not buying.”

“With what we pay, I’m afraid that’s how it’s going to be.” His eyes move back down to the red X, tracing the quickest path a person could take through the maze of cemetery streets and alleys. “Describe the two men, please.”

“Both in their mid-30s, well-built. Both Caucasian, with close-cropped dark hair. Both wearing dark suits.”

“Probably brothers paying a visit to their mother’s grave.” His eyes return to Chemin Denon and its juncture with Chemin Talma, where he now stands. “You did the right thing to call me, Yang. Follow Mrs. Delacroix when she returns.”

“Thank you, sir. Understood.”

Li slips his phone back into his pocket. Even with her head start, he knows Mary Alice won’t be able to beat him to what must certainly be her destination. He must move with purpose, but not with haste. As for the two men, they are likely nothing, but he will take up a position near the red X, near the Delacroix mausoleum, and observe what there is to observe.

Chemin Talma, even narrower than Chemin Denon, follows an uphill course and the scattered shade cast by the chestnut trees and slender birches that line its sides offer only intermittent relief from the heat. Li walks briskly up the hill. The Nocturne will have to wait. Chopin hasn’t come. There is only the other song, soft and insistent; only the other voice: a ghost singing to the dying and the dead.

It is a song he first heard under a jungle canopy on a night so hot and humid that today’s heat would have been a relief. A song in a minor key, and mournful; the hiss of the American cassette recorder did nothing to mask the power of the singer’s voice, or the pain in it. He once translated the words for his comrades after they had crawled back from the edge of an American forward base. They had gotten so close they could have stood and joined the Americans in conversation.

The words play through his mind, the cassette in a continuous loop:

Of our elaborate plans…the end

Of everything that stands…the end

No safety or surprise…the end

I’ll never look into your eyes again

Can you picture what we’ll be?

So limitless and free

Desperately in need

Of some stranger’s hand

In a desperate land

The words had begun to come soon after he’d passed through the gate, they had stayed as he’d walked Chemin de l’Ancienne Porte, and they’d followed him as he made his abrupt turn away from the path leading to Chopin, down Chemin Serré to Chemin Lebrun and then up the cobblestoned alley into a cloud of marijuana smoke and slurred voices to come face to face with the graffiti-marred stone bust of the man who sang those words into his ear under that jungle canopy all those years ago.

“I don’t understand.” Li’s voice is soft in the heavy air. He slips a hand back into his pocket. “I don’t understand. What are you saying to me?”

Chemin Talma bends to the right and his feet carry him through the slow curve, between the grey and white houses of the dead. Under his fingers, the coin is cool and smooth. He can feel that the silver lady is a shadow of what she was when she came to him. Not surprising after so many years of being turned over and over, the key to so many problems he was trying to solve.

All her years and experience do not help. She cannot answer his question. Perhaps she knows, as he does, that memories have their own music, and there are some songs that never end.

chapter 18

“I’ve never been here. Have you?”

“I haven’t.”

“It always struck me as something the tourists do,” Shaun says. He holds his phone lengthwise, touching his thumb and forefinger to the screen. “And I suppose it is.” He spreads his fingertips, slipping them over the cool glass, and the interactive map of Pére Lachaise grows larger in the palm of his hand. “Like going up the Eiffel Tower or patting a gargoyle on the head at Notre Dame.”

“Or visiting the Statue of Liberty if you’re in New York,” says Delphy, crouching at the intersection of the Avenue Circulaire and the path from the Réunion gate beside a young woman lying supine on a low bed of rain- and time-stained white marble. She wears a flowing ankle-length gown, its folds rippling and bending back upon themselves, and her hands are folded gently beneath the gentle swell of her breasts. Her eyes are closed, her face calm and placid. She is made of copper, and splotches of black dot the muted green of her gown and her body.

“Lived there for five years. Never went.” Shaun studies his map, looks up, looks back at his map. “Don’t feel like I really missed out on anything. This, though…this is pretty impressive.”

“No question.” Delphy lays her hand atop the woman’s clasped fingers. The metal of her skin is warm to the touch.

Her partner, his phone at his side, strolls smiling toward her. “Looks like you found her sister. All she needs is a crown.”

“La reine en repos,” says Delphy, picking up her coffee from where she’d placed it on the path and rising up to standing.

“The queen at rest, indeed,” agrees Shaun. “Did you know there’s a Statue of Liberty here in the city? A lot smaller than the real one, but otherwise exactly the same, apparently. I haven’t been to see that one either.”

Delphy is nodding. “It’s on an island in the Seine, the Île aux Cygnes, it’s south of Tour Eiffel. Don’t bother going, you aren’t missing much. I had a date take me there once. I think he thought the American would be thrilled to see a little slice of home.”

“You don’t sound thrilled.”

“I was thrilled that he’d brought me to literally the only ugly part of Paris for our first date.” Shaun laughs, and she smiles. “It’s horrid. Modern architecture and dumpy apartment blocks. You feel like you’re anywhere but Paris. Horrid. Don’t go.” She pauses. “Actually, I’m being a little too rough on him. I will say that, from the base of the statue, you have a nice view of the Mirabeau Bridge to the south…and that’s no small thing if you were ever a teenage girl in love with Apollinaire.”

“Apollinaire…wait…author. Poet. He wrote “‘Les Fleurs du Mal.’”

“That was Baudelaire, not Apollinaire.” Her partner laughs again, shaking his head in mock self-disgust, and this time she laughs with him. “You got the poet part, though – and you do like the Smiths. There’s hope for you yet, Mr. Historian.”

“Much appreciated, Mademoiselle Moreau.” Shaun glances at his phone, taking note of the time. “Shall we press on? We have a grieving billionaire widow to meet.”

They cross the intersection, joining the broad 2nd Avenue Transversale on its long run to the cemetery’s far wall. Scattered tourists dot the Transversale, some near and some far, some strolling and some resting on benches, all appearing to be sweating profusely, but after only a few yards Shaun and Delphy bear left at a narrow stone tomb sealed with a grey iron door and walk downhill, alone, on the cobblestones of the maple-shaded Chemin Abadie.

“He’s in here, you know. Apollinaire.” Shaun gestures vaguely back uphill, toward the Transversale. “Somewhere over there. I saw his name on the map earlier. He’s not all that close, though.”

Delphy is quiet for a moment. And then she recites:

Passent les jours et passent les semaines
Ni temps passé
Ni les amours reviennent
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine

Chemin Abadie branches, and they take the right hand path up a gentle hill. At its crest, they follow the cobblestones in a hairpin turn back down the slope they’ve just climbed, down Chemin Suchet et Masséna.

“Ok. I’ll take a stab at it.” Shaun purses his lips, then draws in a breath and says:

The days pass and weeks drift by without end
Time passed is past
Love will not come again
Beneath the Mirabeau Bridge flows the Seine

Delphy looks sideways at him. “Nice. Very nice.”

They make their final turn, bearing right at a stone tomb with the dimensions of a dinner table. A crack, fingernail’s-width and lightning-jagged, runs down the center of its covering marble slab, through the family name of those interred beneath it. The path beside the tomb runs straight for 20 yards, then bends off to the right. Around that bend, maybe 50 yards down, is the tomb of the Delacroix family.

“I had to work for that one.” Shaun says. “Am I sweating? Am I soaking through my shirt? Because that was tough.”

“Have a sip. Cool down,” smiles Delphy, gesturing with her half-full cup of coffee. Shaun shakes his head in refusal, returning his partner’s smile as they enter the bend in the path.

“Honestly, that was really good,” she says. “I’ve never heard it translated quite like that.”

“And on the fly, too. Did you like how I kept the rhymes in it? A little ragged on the rhythm, I’ll admit.”

“Army Ranger, historian, fraud investigator, and the heart of a poet beating beneath it all.”

“Exactly right,” laughs Shaun. “Next time you see Marcel, you tell him that.” He slows his pace. “Ok. We should have timed this pretty well, but let’s not get too close. If she’s coming, and she’s got to be, she’s going to come around that bend down there and head right for us,” he says, pointing.

“Where’s the Delacroix tomb?”

“Based on the map, I’m going to say around 40 yards up on the left. Don’t know which one it is. Maybe the one with all those statues on top. It doesn’t matter, though. She’ll show us.”

“And we give her a little time at the tomb and then we make the approach. Works for me. So, I guess for now, we can pay our respects to the…” Delphy peers down at the closest tomb, through a riotous profusion of carved urns and stone flowers that sprout mushroomlike from every possible surface, trying to find the name of its residents. “…the Bronnec family. Sounds good.”

They study the marble slab, circling it, gazing down at it from every angle. Shaun is counting the grey pansies in a mica-flicked urn for the third time when Delphy speaks, softly.

“Here she comes.”

A blonde woman in a yellow summer dress, her hair pulled back and a white bag slung over one shoulder, approaches from the far end of the shady cobblestoned path. If she is bothered by, or even notices, the man and woman standing by the Bronnec family tomb, she makes no sign of it. She comes to a stop before a tomb of pinkish granite, forty yards down the path.

“The one with the statues. You were right.”

“I’m on a roll today.”

The blonde woman spends several seconds in silence before the Delacroix tomb, then moves closer, gazing at the monument’s base. Shaun and Delphy move forward as the woman circles the tomb in small steps, reading as she goes. They’re thirty yards from her when they slow their pace and then stop. Two young men in dark suits have come around the bend at the far end of the path, the bend that the blonde woman had just recently come around.

Shaun turns to look at the nearest tomb, as if it is the next stop on his personal cemetery tour. “Let’s let them pass. Looks like they’re going to go by her right around the time we’d get to her. That might feel weird for her. Too many people. Let’s wait.”

Delphy nods her assent, staring at a tomb of someone she’s never heard of. “Sure, good idea…wait a minute. They’re slowing down.”

As Mary Alice Delacroix steps back into the path and returns her attention to the base of the Delacroix tomb, the two men position themselves behind her, one on either side, making her the apex of a triangle.

“What’s that about? What’re they doing?”

“Maybe asking directions,” Shaun says quietly. “Maybe they know her. Sit tight.”

One of the men speaks. His voice is a low murmur in the heavy air, distant and indistinct. Mary Alice responds, and then the second man flashes forward, taking hold of her arm. She tries to pull away, stumbles, is pulled back up to standing, and the first man moves in closer.

“No.” Delphy’s voice is low, and firm. “No.”

“Delphy…?”

“No. Fuck that.” She steps around an urn and into the path. “Fuck that. Not again.”

“The girl of last summer…” mutters Shaun, moving to his partner’s side. “Guess she’s innocent.”

“They’re not taking her. They’re not taking another woman. Not this time.” Delphy’s eyes are hard. “I lost Laura by being too slow. That’s not happening again.”

“You didn’t lose Laura…I was there too.”

“And you’re here now.” Her eyes meet Shaun’s, then flick to Mary Alice and the broad-shouldered back of the man who obscures her face from view, then back to Shaun, then down to the blue-grey stones set in the path beneath her feet.

Shaun knows what he’s seeing, and gives his partner a chance to think in silence. The three figures before the tomb move into the path, Mary Alice pressed between the two men.

“You ready?”

Shaun looks back at Delphy, who is loosening the lid on her plastic cup of coffee. “You thirsty? Is that the idea? Share some coffee and we’re all friends?”

“Something like that.” She meets Shaun’s gaze. Her eyes are pools of deep ocean blue, and he smiles at what he sees there.

“You got something planned? Okay, you do. Right.” He tosses her a tight sharp nod, then follows the sign with words. “I’m in. You lead.”

“Stay a step behind me.”

“On it.” He rolls his shoulders, loosening them. “I know you know, but they might be carrying. We’re carrying coffee. Not what you want to be bringing to a gunfight.”

“Agreed. And we’re going to have to outfight them. After we outwit them.”

“‘After we outwit them?’”

“After we outwit them. You're a Smiths fan -- you know who else is buried here, right?” Delphy brings her turquoise to her lips, then flashes a crooked smile of her own as she lets the stone drop back to her chest. “'Keats and Yeats are on your side, while Wilde is on mine'...let’s see if he really is.” And she strides down the path, toward the Delacroix tomb.

--© 2017, Terry & Kevin Jones