The paris widow, p.26
The Paris Widow, page 26
Two black sneakers step up on either side of his head—Lucas, moving into close range, positioning his body above Adam’s for the kill shot. I squeeze my eyes shut and wait for it, which means I don’t actually see what happens next. I only hear the stampede of boots clomping up the stairs, the shouting in urgent French. Margot’s gasp. The dull thud of metal skidding across the floor.
My eyes open, and it takes a few seconds before my brain registers what I’m seeing. Big men in uniforms, carrying big guns. The lieutenant colonel standing in shock at the doorway, his eyes as wide as those kids at the Galerie d’Anatomie Comparée as he takes in Margot’s treasures. Margot’s look of horror when she realizes he’s come for them.
Adam’s lips, wet and red, as he tries to speak. Nothing comes out, not even the softest sound, and yet I hear his words clear as day: I’m so sorry.
Thirty-Five
The Pitié Salpêtrière is like every other hospital waiting room on the planet. Floors of tired gray linoleum. Unnaturally bright thanks to the cheap bulbs overhead, casting the room in a sickly green glow. The air is laced with the scent of latex and sanitizer and fear, wafting off my fellow emergency room comrades. They’re slumped on chairs or milling around like schools of fish, their faces long with strain. Their loved ones are lying behind those double swinging doors, too, their bodies hooked up to monitors and machines that pump blood, fill lungs, keep them alive, but for how long?
I shiver, not from the air-conditioning but from terror. From the bullet lodged dangerously close to Adam’s heart. That’s what one of his surgeons told me in excellent English, that he’s lying in an operating room somewhere with his chest spread open with a giant metal claw so the doctors have room to work.
The image of Adam, ghostly pale, leaking blood onto Margot’s Persian rug, flits across my mind like a film on repeat. Of the paramedics shoving me out of the way so they could strap an oxygen mask on Adam and send a bag of fluids rushing into his veins. I didn’t catch half of what they said as they worked, but I understood the urgency in their voices, the gravity dragging down their expressions.
Just like his surgeon’s face when I asked if he’d be okay. Nobody dares to answer that question. I pick at a speck of his blood on my jeans and try not to scream.
A big body sinks onto the stool next to me, passing me a steaming Styrofoam cup. “Here. Brought you a cuppa.”
I look over to find a scruffy Finn, his hair mussed like he just rolled out of bed. He looks like me, like he hasn’t slept in days, and I’m only a little bit surprised to see him here, though I don’t have the energy to muster up much of a response. I blink at the liquid in the cup, beige water with a milky film on top. “A cuppa what?”
“Earl Grey, supposedly. The milk is a bit gone off, but at least it masks the grocer bag.”
“I have no idea what any of that means.” I take a sip and wince. “This is awful.”
Finn slumps farther into his seat. “I know. That’s why I only brought one.”
I set the cup on the tiny table beside me. “Was it you? Who called the police, I mean.”
For hours now, the scene has been flashing across my brain like a horror movie interrupted halfway through. What if the police had stormed the place five seconds later? What if they’d come five seconds earlier? All the what-ifs, all the alternative endings are making me crazy. I know I need to stop overthinking, but I don’t know how.
“Not me. An anonymous call from an untraceable number. A burner, most likely. Whoever it was spoke perfect French.”
Eleven million people living in and around Paris, sixty-eight million in France. It could have been any of them. Call it a hunch, but I don’t think it was one of them.
“Why didn’t you just tell me you were with MI6?”
“Would you have confided in me?”
I shrug. “Probably not right away, no. But I might have come around.”
“There are some very smart people back in London who think otherwise.”
“The same people who told you I was here, I’m guessing.”
“You guess right.” He wriggles in his chair, crosses and uncrosses his legs. “Jesus, these chairs are shite. Any news?”
I sigh, my gaze wandering to the big double doors that lead deeper into the hospital. I will Adam’s surgeon to appear in the twin windows, but there’s nothing behind them but a plain white wall.
“Every thirty minutes or so, one of the surgeons comes out to scare the living crap out of me, but the only thing they tell me is that he’s still in surgery.”
“Well, if it helps any, this is the best place for him to be. Jacques Chirac, Ronaldo, Prince Rainier of Monaco, Gérard Depardieu, Princess Diana. They brought her here after the car—Shit. Forget I mentioned that one, eh?” Finn looks over with an apologetic wince. “The point I’m trying to make is, these docs are world-class.”
A finger of fear shimmies down my spine. My eyes sting from exhaustion, from the harsh lights overhead, from terror. Everything.
Finn blows out a sigh, letting his gaze run over the faces in the room. “Look, I don’t know how much you know, so I’m going to tell you what I can and leave you to fill in the blanks yourself. Does that sound okay?”
I nod, grateful. There’s still so much I don’t know. Still so much I don’t understand. “Yes.”
“This business your husband is in, it’s supremely complicated, and not just in terms of the finances. It’s the structure, the way the antiquities trade has this baked-in moral ambiguity. Every country has their own rules, and not every country is serious about enforcing them. There’s a lot of gray area when it comes to things like origin paperwork or vendors operating without official licenses. But these relics Adam is selling, make no mistake—they don’t call them ‘blood antiquities’ for nothing. By trading them, Adam is financing terrorism.”
Finn’s words thrum, hot and angry, like a heartbeat under my breastbone. He said the relics Adam is selling. He said Adam is financing terrorism. Even now, after everything, I have an inexplicable urge to defend him. “That seems like an awful lot to put on one man’s shoulders.”
“Not just him. Adam is one little cog in an enormously intricate machine that, on the surface, often looks legit. An antique dealer burying an Egyptian mosaic in a container filled with tiles carrying the proper paperwork, sneaking it past customs agents who are too overworked or undereducated to know the difference. World-famous museums purchasing these artifacts without bothering with due diligence so later, when we confiscate them, they can say ‘oops, sorry, we didn’t know.’ But did they really not know, or did they simply turn a blind eye?”
“By your tone, I’m guessing the latter.”
“The point I’m trying to make is, the art world has no morals. Absolutely zero. From the gallery owners and auction houses and museums, and this has been the case all throughout history, starting with the British. All this history, all this beauty, but in the hands of cold-blooded killers, the same people trading drugs and weapons and humans. Some seriously dodgy assholes.”
“Le marché noir.”
Finn nods. “Them, plus every other criminal organization you can think of. And the kind of money people pay players like Adam only ups the ante. Higher prices drive higher demand drive more looting in conflict areas. It’s a vicious cycle.”
“It wasn’t a criminal organization who tossed Kat out of that window, though. Margot copped to killing her. She was wearing the Oscar Wilde ring that Kat was trying to return.”
Finn looks away, but he doesn’t look surprised. “What happened to Kat was a goddamn shame. She was a hero, like your husband was trying to be.”
“That’s not what Margot said. Margot said Kat and Adam were working together. Apparently, they were selling forgeries.”
I picture her face when she elbowed the vase from the stand, the fury as she hurled that mask at Adam, her almost gleeful expression when it hit the floor and shattered into a million pieces.
And then I think of something else.
“Hang on. Adam said Kat was going to report him and Margot to the authorities. That Kat had evidence, that she was going to take both of them down.”
“Kat did, or she tried. She bypassed the Dutch police and went straight to Interpol. They offered her protection, but Kat didn’t want it. She said it would interfere with her work.”
“Is that why you came after Adam, then? Because Kat reported him?”
“No, I’d been chasing Adam for much longer than that. Your husband is good. I’ve been watching him for years now.”
“But why Adam? You just said he is one of a hundred. Why wouldn’t you go after the terrorists, the looters, the guys running le marché noir? Seems like there are so many bigger fish.”
Finn looks at me then, and he stays silent. He holds my gaze, his eyebrows raised, and for so long that I fidget in my chair. He’s giving me space, waiting for me to figure out for myself why Adam.
Because Adam is a big fish?
No, that can’t be right. Finn just called Adam a little cog. He talked about all those seriously dodgy assholes.
And then Finn’s other words come back to me, the ones he said to me on the bridge. He said Adam was not the bad guy here. He said he was on Adam’s side.
Understanding hits me in a flash of heat. Finn is going after them. That’s why he’s here, talking to me now, waiting for the surgeon to give us news. Finn is worried about Adam. He’s worried about the fate of his witness.
“Adam turned himself in, didn’t he?”
Finn gives me the tiniest ghost of a smile. “About four years ago. He called me up out of the blue and gave me an address for a bar on the east side of London. He told me to leave the handcuffs at home. We drank beer and shot the shit for a while, and then he told me he’d met a girl. He said she was a game changer. The kind of person that comes along once in a lifetime.”
Tears flood my eyes because four years ago... Finn is talking about me. I’m the game changer. The reason Adam wanted to make a change, not just for himself but his whole entire circumstances—because of me. He flipped because of me. It’s too much. I pinch the bridge of my nose with two fingers and let the tears fall.
“He offered me a deal that day. He said he’d start compiling evidence, irrefutable proof that would take down everyone, from the big names running the show at the top of the pyramid all the way down. You might not understand what a carrot that is for someone like me, but I’m here to tell you it’s like winning the jackpot. Criminals don’t do things by the books. They don’t write receipts or keep ledgers for people like me to follow their tracks.”
But Adam did. He kept receipts and saved them onto a SIM card like a ledger. One giant register of names, amounts, transactions. That score Adam was keeping was for Finn.
“Did he give you the proof you were looking for?”
“He gave me a steady stream, mostly suppliers and customs officials, occasionally a fellow dealer. I kept pressing him for the big players, but he said he needed more time. He promised me it would be worth the wait. But that deal we made all those years ago, he did have one stipulation, though.”
“Which was?”
“You. You were off-limits. I wasn’t to approach you, at all, ever. He said you didn’t know anything about what he was doing, that you were innocent. He wanted your record wiped clean.”
I look away so Finn can’t see my surprise. All this time, I thought it was Sully who did that, wiped my record clean, though it makes more sense that it was Finn. How else would he know to bring it up that day on the bridge? Because he was the one who buried it.
“And Kat knew what he was doing?”
Finn shakes his head. “Like I said, Kat worked alone, but she was one of the good guys. That’s all she’s ever been, which in the beginning put her and Adam on opposite teams. She didn’t know he was working with me, and she almost blew his cover. But by then he’d come up with a way to salvage some of the artifacts, and he needed her help. He started making forgeries, really good ones, to sell to his clients, and giving Kat the real pieces to return to their rightful owners. For the record, I advised him against it. For the most part, these relics are one of a kind, and people in the industry like to talk. It was only a matter of time before one of his clients figured it out.”
“Like Margot did with the ring.”
“Exactly. It was reckless, but I don’t have to tell you Adam is a stubborn bastard.”
“She tried to kill him for it.”
“And what do you think the rest of his buyers will do if they find out Adam is alive? What do you think they’ll do to you?”
“Me? I had nothing to do with any of this. Until a literal bomb ripped my life apart, I had no idea Adam didn’t make his money selling reclaimed floor tiles.”
“Come on, Stella. Do you think any of that will matter? Adam kept receipts. He was working with me to take down all the most powerful fuckers. He had proof that would put them away for a really long time. Unfortunately for you, as his wife, that makes you fair game.”
Again, not surprised, because what was it Zoé said? That my connection to Adam puts me in danger. Finn is only confirming it. No matter what happens behind those big double doors, there’s no going back. No long airplane ride back to Atlanta, to my job and my house and my old life. Even if Adam doesn’t survive the bullet in his chest, I’ll still be a target.
“I tried to warn you, so you know. I said you were digging your own grave.”
So Finn was the source of that mysterious text way back at the beginning of all this, the “friend” reaching out from an unknown number. “You probably don’t have many friends, do you, because that’s not how it works. A real friend would have been supportive instead of threatening, and he would have given me concrete advice, not vague messages. So...what now? I live the rest of my life looking over my shoulder, running from danger?”
I think of Sully in his bulletproof Maybach, the way he surrounds himself with men like Mustafa to make him feel safer, and in some weird way, I suppose it does. Because that’s the thing about danger—it heightens your sense of being alive. Makes you intensely aware of your heartbeat, your lungs filling with air, the touch of another person’s skin. Because how can you feel anything but alive when you’re being chased by people who want you dead? But the feeling is only temporary. Sooner or later, these people will penetrate your defenses. It’s only a matter of time until one of them succeeds.
The thought is like a heavy, heavy weight, pushing down on my shoulders. I’ve lived like that, once, and it didn’t take me long to realize it was unsustainable. I might as well save everyone the trouble and give myself up now. It’ll be faster and less stressful that way.
“I’m not like you, Finn,” I say. “I’m not physically or mentally prepared to live on the run, and I certainly don’t have the means to pay for protection. What do I do now?”
“I wish I could help you, Stella. I really do. But I’d never get protection past the higher-ups. Not unless you have something to trade.”
I can sense Finn watching the side of my face, his steady gaze waiting, hoping. Adam said he was compiling proof. Stockpiling collatérale—not to protect his own hide, but to save mine. Finn thinks I might have some.
I think of Adam’s words when he gave me the heart in Venice. How he leaned in, his gaze intent despite all the people and noise in the piazzetta. If anything ever happens to me, just remember you always have my heart. A message and a gift, all in one.
I stare at the double doors, willing Adam’s surgeon to appear in the glass. Is he alive? Is he dead? There is no sense of time inside a hospital waiting room—nothing to indicate how long I’ve been sitting here, waiting to hear my husband’s fate. The windows stay empty and still.
“What if I do?” I say, turning away from the doors, looking at Finn. “Have something to trade, I mean.”
Thirty-Six
Paris
Three months later
A chilly breeze whips up from the Seine, sending white-blond curls dancing across my cheek, tangling in my earrings. The terrace is sheltered behind a glass windscreen, but the morning sun is milky at best, and dark clouds gather in the distance. September in Paris is a fickle bitch, but I won’t be here long. I chose this spot, a busy terrace on a busy square, on purpose.
The waitress catches my eye, and I order a café au lait, even though caffeine is the last thing I need. I’m jittery enough, my foot already bouncing with nerves. I shift on my chair, crossing and uncrossing my legs and scanning the people passing by on the street. No one followed me here, at least I’m certain of that.
“Quel terrible gâchis,” an elderly woman two chairs down says, what a terrible mess. She bats a spotted hand at this morning’s newspaper, spread out on the table before me.
I look down, pretending to study the article, even though I’ve already read it twice since purchasing it from the newsstand on the corner. Another one of Finn’s successful stings, this time across the German border, three enormous reliefs and six bronze statues that once belonged to Josef Mengele, recovered from an underground bunker in Bad Dürkheim. Pieces that were lost for decades, vanished into the hands of Soviet troops until early last year, when Kat and Adam met a German businessman looking to sell some Nazi memorabilia.
