I smiled and said, “It can’t be that bad.”
Amused, Louis shook his head and said, “It is a fact that having fun, laughing, and generally enjoying life in Paris is a clear indication of latent insanity, or at least that you are visiting from an inferior place, which means anywhere outside the city limits.”
“C’mon,” I said, chuckling now. “People seem genuinely nice. Even the waiters have been great so far.”
With a dismissive flip of his hand, he said, “They seem nice because, at long last, they understand that Paris is the number one tourist destination in the world, and that tourism is the biggest moneymaker in the city. At the same time, they know you are a tourist from America—the land of the absurdly obese, the absurdly wealthy, and the absurdly ignorant—and they hope you give them an absurdly big tip. You must believe me, Jack. Deep inside, Parisians are not enjoying themselves and find it upsetting when others appear overly happy.”
I raised my eyebrows skeptically.
“Don’t believe me?” he said. “Watch.”
Louis threw back his head and began roaring with laughter. The laugh seemed to seize control of him, and shook down through his entire body as if he were scratching his back with it.
To my surprise and amusement, the patrons around us, and even the waitress who’d just delivered our wine, were now glancing sidelong at him. That only encouraged Louis, who started howling and slapping his thigh so hard tears streamed down his face. I couldn’t help it and started laughing too. The people around us were gaping openly or sniffing at us now, as if we were refugees from a funny farm.
At last, Louis calmed down and wiped away the tears, and when the café had returned to normalcy, he murmured, “What did I tell you? I use this—laughter—to upset suspects many times. To the people of Paris, a policeman who sees humor in everything, he must be crazy. He must be dangerous. He must be feared.”
I held up my hands in surrender. “Your city, Louis.”
“My adopted city,” he said, holding up a finger. “I do not think this way, but I understand it well.”
Thirty years ago, Louis left his home in Nice in the south of France and joined the French National Police. His extraordinary emotional intelligence, his understanding of the French people, and his unorthodox investigative instincts had propelled him swiftly into a job in Paris with La Crim, an elite investigative force similar to the major case units of the New York and L.A. police departments.
For twenty-nine years, Louis served with distinction at La Crim. The day before his retirement, I offered him a job at three times his old pay. He now ran the Paris office of Private, a global security and investigative agency I founded and own.
You’ll hear people refer to Private as “the Pinkertons of the twenty-first century.” I don’t know if we warrant that high praise, but it’s flattering, and the reputation has helped us grow by leaps and bounds over the last few years, especially overseas, which causes me to travel more than I’d like.
I’d been visiting the Berlin office for a few days and arrived in Paris the evening before. After a series of meetings with the local staff during the day, Louis suggested we go out for a few drinks and then a fine meal. That brilliant idea had brought us to one of his favorite cafés and led him to begin to explain to me the intricate mysteries of Paris, its citizens, and their way of thinking.
Before Louis could move on to another subject, his cell phone rang. He frowned and said, “I asked them not to call me unless it was important.”
“No worries,” I said, and took another sip of wine.
Even if the Parisians weren’t happy, I was. Louis Langlois was a funny guy and Paris was still one of the most beautiful cities on earth, filled with interesting and sometimes shocking people, art, and food. In an hour or two, I’d no doubt be eating an incredible meal, and probably laughing a whole lot more. Life, for the foreseeable future, looked very good.
And then it didn’t.
Louis listened to his phone, nodded, and said, “Of course I remember you, Monsieur Wilkerson. How can Private Paris be of help?”
Wilkerson? The only Wilkerson I knew was a client who lived in Malibu.
I mouthed, “Sherman Wilkerson?”
Louis nodded and said into the phone, “Would you rather talk with Jack Morgan? He’s right here.”
He handed me the phone. Now, the last time I’d heard from Sherman Wilkerson like this, out of the blue, there were four dead bodies on the beach below his house. I admit that there were nerves in my voice when I said, “Sherman?”
“What are you doing in Paris, Jack?” Wilkerson demanded.
“Visiting one of my fastest-growing offices.”
Sherman Wilkerson was a no-nonsense engineer who’d built a wildly successful industrial design company. By nature he dealt with facts and often understated his opinion of things. So I was surprised when he said in a shaky voice, “Maybe there is a God after all.”
“You’ve got a problem in Paris?” I asked.
“My only granddaughter, Kimberly. Kimberly Kopchinski,” Wilkerson replied. “I just got off the phone with her—first call in more than two years. She’s in an apartment outside Paris and says there are drug dealers hunting for her, trying to kill her. She sounded petrified, and begged me to send someone to save her. Then the line went dead and now I can’t reach her. Can you go make sure she’s safe? I’ve got the address.”
“Of course,” I said, signaling to Louis to pay the bill. “How do we find her?”
Wilkerson read me out an address.
I wrote it down and said, “Can you text me a photograph? And tell me about her? College student? Businesswoman?”
Louis laid down cash on the table and gave me the thumbs-up during a long pause.
“Sherman?” I said, standing. “Are you there?”
“I honestly don’t know what Kim’s been doing the past two years, and I know little of her life over the past five,” Wilkerson admitted as we left the café and Louis called for a car. “Her parents—my daughter, Pam, and her husband, Tim—they died in a boating accident six years ago.”
“I remember you telling me that,” I said. “Sad.”
“Very. Kim was in her senior year at USC, and back from a junior year in France, when it happened. She was as devastated as we were. Long story short, she inherited a bit of money along with a trust, and she turned wild child. She barely graduated. When she did, she went straight back to France. For a time I know she was working for the Cannes Film Festival organizers. We tried to stay in touch, but we heard from her less and less. Before today, there was a Christmas card from Monaco, and before that, a condolence card when my wife died.”
The car pulled up. Louis opened the door, and I climbed in, saying, “Don’t worry, Sherman. We’re on our way.”
“Thank you, Jack. You’ll call when you have her?”
“I will.”
“Protect her, Jack. I beg you,” Wilkerson said. “She’s my only grandchild—my only living relative, really.”
“You’ve got nothing to worry about,” I said, and hung up.
After filling Louis in on the conversation, I handed him the napkin on which I’d written the address. “Know it?”
Louis put his reading glasses on and studied it, and his nostrils flared as if he’d scented something foul. Then he looked up at me and with a definite edge in his voice said, “Look up trouble and danger in a French dictionary, and you get a picture of this place.”
Montfermeil, eastern suburbs of Paris
4:45 p.m.
Shortly after Louis Langlois and I spoke with Sherman Wilkerson we headed east out of Paris in workmen’s blue jumpsuits that featured the logo of a bogus plumbing company. Louis drove a Mia electric-powered delivery vehicle, which looked like a minivan back home, only much smaller. The tiny van had the same fake plumbing logo painted on the rear panels and back door.
Louis said he used the Mia and the plumbing disguises often during surveillance jobs, but tonig
ht we were using them to stay alive.
“The areas around the Bondy Forest have always been places of poverty, crime, and violence,” Louis explained. “You’ve read Les Misérables?”
“Years ago,” I said. “But I saw the movie recently.”
“Okay,” he said. “That scene where Jean Valjean meets Cosette getting water? The inn where the Thénardiers robbed their customers? All in Montfermeil. It looks different today, of course, but the dark spirit of the place continues. Montfermeil is like your Bronx was in the nineteen seventies, or South Central L.A. in the nineties: high unemployment, high crime rate, and lots of gangs, drug dealers, and violence. Add an angry Muslim and young immigrant population, and it’s unimaginable to me why Mademoiselle Kopchinski would take refuge in Les Bosquets—one of the worst housing projects in France.”
I shrugged. “We’ll find out, I guess. You’re sure about the plumbers’ gear being the right way to go?”
“Bien sûr. Everybody needs the plumber at some time, in some emergency. Non? Plumbers can come and go at all hours and no one thinks anything of it other than some poor bastard has a backed-up toilet. And plumbers tend not to get hassled even in places like Les Bosquets. Why is that? Because everyone needs the plumber! Someone shakes the plumber down, and soon no plumbers will come, and no one wants that. Not even there.”
“This wouldn’t fly in the States,” I said, gesturing at the full jumpsuit. “People would know we weren’t plumbers.”
Louis seemed taken aback by that. “How would they know?”
“No American plumber would wear a coverall like this. If they did, they couldn’t show their ass crack, and that’s a requirement in the States.”
Louis glanced, and then laughed. “This is true?”
“No.”
My cell phone buzzed, alerting me to a text. It was from Sherman Wilkerson and included a photograph of a pretty young woman with sad eyes sitting at a bar. At a red light I showed it to Langlois, saying, “It’s the most recent picture of her Sherman’s got. He said it’s at least four years old.”
“As a rule I don’t like babysitting jobs,” Langlois said.
“Neither do I,” I agreed, pocketing the phone. “But when a client like Sherman asks Private to look after his granddaughter, we answer.”
Twenty minutes later, and less than eleven miles from the chic streets and genteel parks of central Paris, we entered a world apart. Out the van’s window, the area didn’t look too bad at night. It kind of reminded me of East Berlin, with big clusters of drab, uniform, state-designed high-rise apartment buildings—a communist’s decaying vision of ideal housing.
Then I started seeing the graffiti. “Fuck the police” was a common theme. So were images of faceless men in dark hoods with flames painted behind them and Arabic scrawled above them.
“Was this project part of those riots a few years back?” I asked.
“Les Bosquets was in the thick of it,” Louis confirmed. “And it’s home to a vicious gang that specializes in targeting tourists who take the train from de Gaulle to Paris. A few months ago, they put a car on the tracks to stop a train holding more than a hundred Japanese visitors, then went on board and robbed everyone at gunpoint.”
“Brazen.”
“Yes, but there are reasons,” Louis replied. “Back in the sixties and seventies, when France was on the up economically, we needed labor, so they allowed anyone from a current or former French colony to immigrate here. They built the projects, and a generation later the economy busts, and the immigrants stay on, having children, lots of children. Fifty percent of the population out here is younger than twenty-five. And they can’t find jobs. So they live in terrible conditions, with no purpose. It’s a recipe for disaster for everyone involved.”
“Can’t they work their way out of it through school?” I asked.
Louis wagged a finger at me and said, “You are thinking of the States again, Jack. In France, it is not the same. There are proven paths to power here—the right schools, the right friends—and these paths are shut off to the immigrants. Worse, there is no public transportation in these areas. Without a car, you go nowhere. You’re trapped. You get angry. You explode.”
Louis flicked his chin toward the windshield. “There it is. Les Bosquets.”
The project consisted of eight decaying high-rise apartment buildings. Clotheslines hung from windows, as did immigrants of all ages and skin colors. Louis pulled over on the Avenue Clichy-sous-Bois.
He opened the glove compartment, got out a Glock 19, and handed it to me.
“I’m not licensed to carry this in France,” I said.
“You’re not a licensed French plumber either, Jack,” Louis said. “Put it in your pocket, and let me do the talking.”
It’s hard to argue with a guy who knows his turf as well as Louis. I decided to trust his judgment and nodded. We got out and grabbed toolboxes and flashlights from the rear hatchback. Men across the street had checked us out when we pulled up, but now they were ignoring us.
“You see?” Louis muttered as we headed down the road that ran north into the complex. “Everyone needs us, even if we don’t show the butt cracks.”
5:15 p.m.
Louis was right about plumber being the perfect disguise.
We passed four or five small groups of menacing-looking types, and as soon as they’d had a hard stare at our plumber’s logo, they relaxed and looked away. The last group was out in front of the entrance to the address we’d been given, a building at the rear of Les Bosquets.
I remembered enough from high school French class to understand when one of the guys asked where we were going. Louis never broke stride, just went past him saying something I couldn’t follow. It seemed to do the trick, however, because no one trailed us into the lobby, which featured poor lighting; a wall of mailboxes, many broken; and a cement floor that was cracked and offset in several places.
“What did you tell those guys?” I asked.
“I said that the toilet in 412 was backed up and there’s shit all over the place. It shuts down their curiosity every time.”
We didn’t have to use a buzzer, because there was no buzzer or security of any kind. A young Muslim woman in black robes and head scarf came down the stairs and glanced at us with enormous brown eyes that showed suspicion until they focused on the logos on our jumpsuits. She nodded and went on. Two Asian teenagers came bouncing down the stairs as we climbed, and never gave us a second glance. Nor did the African woman carrying a load of laundry.
“I’ve got to remember this,” I muttered to Louis as I followed him toward a cement staircase.
“Plumbing is a beautiful thing,” he replied.
When we reached the fourth floor of the tenement we opened the door into an empty hallway with a rug frayed down to the floorboards. The smells of the place hit me all at once: lamb cooking in garlic and onions, cigarette smoke, marijuana smoke, and the odor of too many people living in tight quarters.
The apartment walls and doors could not have been very thick or insulated, because a general din filled the passage: babies crying, pots banging, men shouting, women shouting back, televisions and music blaring in Arabic and other languages I couldn’t identify. It all felt depressing—suffocating, even—and I’d been in the building less than three minutes. Louis said there were people who’d lived in Les Bosquets their entire lives, and I began to understand some of the pressures that contributed to the riots.
But why had Wilkerson’s granddaughter come here of all places?
Louis knocked on the door to 412. Several moments later, a woman’s voice asked who we were, and Louis replied that we were from Private and had been sent by Kim’s grandfather.
A minute passed before a dead bolt was thrown. The door opened on a chain, and a wary woman who looked Polynesian and was wearing a blue skirt and floral blouse looked out at us, and asked to see our identification. We showed it to her, and she shut the door.
Nothing happened for seve
ral minutes, and Louis was about to knock again when we heard the chain slide, and the door opened. Louis stepped inside a dimly lit, narrow hallway, and I followed.
The door shut behind us, and I turned to find myself face-to-face with Kimberly Kopchinski. In her late twenties now, wearing jeans, a black blouse, and a rectangular silver thing on a chain around her neck, she was undeniably beautiful in person. But I could tell by the color of her skin and the way she held herself that she’d been through some terrible physical ordeal recently, and that she was very, very frightened.
We introduced ourselves and showed her the badges and identifications.
“How do I know my grandfather sent you?” she asked.
I showed her Sherman’s text and the picture of her. Kim stared at the picture for several moments as if she barely remembered the girl in it.
“He says you’re in danger,” I said.
“I am in danger,” she said.
“He said something about drug dealers?”
“I just need somewhere to go, to disappear for a while,” she said in a strained whisper. “Can you help me do that?”
“We can,” I replied. “But it helps if we know who we’re hiding you from, Kimberly.”
Her face twisted with inner pain, and she said, “Call me Kim. And can we have this conversation later? Once I’m somewhere safe? I can’t stay here anymore. My friend’s husband is coming home from Lyons in a few hours. He doesn’t know I’m here, and if he did I’d be…”
Her lower lip quivered.
“Don’t worry, Ms. Kopchinski,” Louis said. “You are under the care and protection of Private Paris now. Already you could not be safer. We’ll take you to the same hotel where Jack is staying.”
“A hotel?” Kim said, alarmed. “No, that’s too public.”
Louis said soothingly, “This hotel is the most discreet in Paris. Already I have you registered there under an alias.”