Vango (28 page)

Once she’d sat down in the bus, which was heading along the Quai des Grands-Augustins, Ethel took out of her bag a small and very slim brown file that she’d found on one of the shelves in Boulard’s office. A file on which two words were visible:
THE CAT
.

And below that were two more words, underlined in red ink: “Investigation abandoned.”

It was the only file that had looked interesting to her. And it just happened to be the file of a girl with a close interest in Vango. Ethel opened it. It was empty.

In the theater, it was now Act Three. Ethel was listening to Juliet’s father swearing that his daughter would be forced to marry the man he had chosen for her. Juliet was resisting. Her heart belonged to Romeo.

Slippery as an eel, Ethel was avoiding Tom’s hand. She was watching Juliet standing up to her father.

Cameron senior kept sending satisfied signs to his son. Thomas Cameron was trying to put on a brave face, but he was clinging to his seat so as not to throw himself into the orchestra pit. She didn’t love him. How would he survive? How could he ever tell his parents?

On stage, Juliet’s father was booming:

But fettle your fine joints ’gainst Thursday next
,

To go with Paris to Saint Peter’s Church
,

Or I will drag thee on a hurdle thither.

In the box next to Ethel and Tom’s, silence had been restored. The blond man was still watching the performance attentively.

His name was Sergey Prokofiev. And during the summer of 1935, he was working on a ballet score inspired by
Romeo and Juliet
. He had heard about this production in Paris and had been granted permission to come and see it.

But he was under escort and would be heading back to the Soviet Union the next day.

The curtain fell. The houselights came up. It was intermission.

Three quarters of the auditorium leaped to its feet, as if this were the moment everyone had been waiting for. Plenty of spectators only go to the theater for the intermission.

“Are you coming for a drink, Ethel?”

“No, thank you. I’ll stay here.”

Thomas stood up, trembling at the prospect of what he had to reveal to his father.

Ethel glanced over at the blond man. He hadn’t moved. He was staring at the curtain as if he could still see shadows moving on it. Someone leaned over and whispered in his ear. Ethel could only see the back of this second man. When he turned around, she felt her heart pounding very fast.

It was the marksman from Notre Dame.

He had shaved off his mustache, but his portrait, which she’d seen only a few days earlier in the office at the Quai des Orfèvres, was so clear in Ethel’s mind that there could be no doubt about it.

Boris Petrovitch Antonov might not have seen Ethel.

He was there to accompany Comrade Prokofiev, the composer. There were also two representatives from the embassy as well as Comrade Vladimir Potemkin, the ambassador himself, plus four security guards. It was a major responsibility.

And so he might not have seen Ethel, but for the fact that the composer’s eyes met those of the young woman at precisely the moment Boris was staring at the composer. It was like a ricochet effect. Ethel’s look of astonishment piqued the composer’s curiosity. And seeing that curiosity in Prokofiev’s eyes made Boris turn his head to discover Ethel, a few meters away, sitting in an almost deserted theater, with Tom’s bunch of flowers still in her hands.

They stared at each other.

For a moment, Ethel thought he was going to run away. She was ready to give chase and was already cursing the fact that her choice of dress would make her hobble. It was a black dress in which Ethel had disguised herself in her bedroom, during those years of mourning when she was just a little girl, with the dress trailing behind her to form a long, tragic train.

Ethel was already unbuttoning a short tight coat that came to her hips and restricted her movements. She wasn’t going to let this man get away a second time. Suddenly she froze.

Their roles had just switched.

No, the man wasn’t going to get away. Boris Petrovitch Antonov was staring at her intensely. He had gauged Ethel’s determination. He knew she would always be behind him, getting in the way of his work. And so he had just decided to eliminate her.

“Will you excuse me for a moment, Comrade Prokofiev?” he inquired with a polite smile.

Addressing the composer in what was now a completely empty auditorium, he exited the box.

“Well?”

Two floors lower down, in the theater foyer, surrounded by the throng of spectators, Thomas was looking very pale in front of his parents. Lord Ronald Cameron had a bottle of champagne in one hand and was filling the glasses.

“What are we drinking to, Junior?”

Tom hated it when his father called him Junior.

Lady Cameron was blushing and in a state of suspense at the news her son was about to announce.

“Well?” she urged him again.

“Well, I spoke to her. . . .”

“And?” his father went on, his face contorted with excitement.

“And she said . . .”

Suddenly, the lights went out. All around them, people shrieked in fright.

A second earlier, Boris had appeared in Ethel’s box. She was standing in front of him. He was holding a knife between his fingers, the blade hidden in his jacket sleeve.

“You really do get everywhere, Mademoiselle. But not for much longer.”

He lunged in her direction, and right at that moment, the lights went out. Refusing to deviate from his plan, he plunged the knife with the precision of a street fighter. When the lights came back on ten seconds later, Boris Antonov let out a roar of anger that was drowned out by the racket going on elsewhere. He had sliced through the red velvet of the chair. Ethel had vanished.

Over in the theater bar, the moment when the lights came back on was met with a sigh of relief. Champagne flutes and glasses started clinking again.

The Camerons resumed their line of questioning.

“Where was I?” asked Tom.

“She said . . .” chorused his parents.

“She said . . .”

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He was remembering Ethel’s rebellious fingers escaping his own.

“She said yes,” Tom lied. “Ethel told me that her answer is yes, but we’ve got to wait a bit before we announce it to her brother. He’s very lonely, her brother. She doesn’t want us to talk about it until then, not even with her.”

The parents fell into each other’s arms, moaning with joy. It was terrifying to witness. Without realizing it, each of them emptied the contents of their champagne glass behind the other’s back. They let out little squeals of delight. They were all puffed up with pride. They didn’t make a single gesture in their son’s direction.

This was their victory.

Ethel had leaped from her box into the circle below before tearing down the stairs. Who could have cut the power with such split-second accuracy? She ran down corridors without knowing where she was headed and arrived at the main entrance, but Boris Petrovitch was already in front of the doors, giving orders to the men there. So she started running backward, bumping into the usherettes.

There was a door with a security guard at one end of the stretch of red carpet. Ethel made her clothes look respectable again and walked hastily toward that exit. It was the only way to the wings.

“I should like to see Romeo,” she told the guard in her pretty accent.

“Not during intermission. You can come after the performance. That’s when the actors receive visitors in their dressing rooms.”

“I’ve come all the way from the Highlands of Scotland to see Romeo. I’ve brought him flowers.”

“Yes, I can see you’ve had a bit of a journey!” He sniggered, looking at her wilted bouquet. “Like I said, come back at the end.”

She heard a noise behind her in one of the circles. Her pursuers were hot on her heels. Ethel’s heart was palpitating.

Just then, a mysterious voice from the wings said, “Let her in. I can vouch for her.”

The porter stepped aside. She passed inside. There, with his shoulder pressed against the wall, was a short bald man.

“I’m sorry I’m not your Romeo, Mademoiselle.”

She didn’t know it, but this man was none other than the columnist Albert Desmaisons, who had been singing her praises in the press. She hesitated.

“Hurry up, little lady. You have someone to see. And the intermission is almost over.”

Ethel gave him her bouquet and a peck on his left cheek.

“Thank you, Monsieur. Thank you.”

Listening to the sound of her heels lightly heading off, the columnist stood there marveling. He was seeing stars and didn’t even notice the three unleashed men who, having pushed the guard out of the way, rushed furiously past him, trampling his roses underfoot.

During the final acts, Boris and his acolytes turned the wings upside down and inside out. But they didn’t find anything. A couple of hours later, once the performance was over, they accompanied Prokofiev back to the embassy on Rue de Grenelle.

Ethel was on the roof of the theater. Below her, all of Paris was bathed white by the moon.

Ethel was almost asleep now.

A fifteen-year-old girl who looked like an angel perched in the flies had whistled to her in the wings.

“Over here! Come on!”

The girl had made Ethel climb the rungs of the ladder two at a time, then slide into an invisible passageway. This girl had saved her life.

Now they were buried in each other’s arms, between two zinc walls, beneath the summer sky.

“Who are you?” Ethel asked.

“I was the one who turned off the electricity.”

“It was you?”

“I’ve been keeping an eye on the Russian for almost a year.”

“What’s your name?”

“The Cat.”

Paris, seven days later

Voloy Viktor was sitting on a steel seat that was fixed to the floor. His eyes were closed.

His hands and feet were attached to the chair by leather straps. A wide metal belt prevented his upper body from moving.

His face looked calm and confident. It was reasonably handsome and appeared almost indifferent to the light of the lamp that had been angled to shine down vertically onto him.

A projector was hanging from a wire just above his head. Voloy Viktor was breathing calmly. The projector swung gently at the end of the wire, casting disturbing shadows across his features. The rest of the room in the basement of the Quai des Orfèvres was in darkness.

In the shadows, behind a glass panel, Boulard was watching the scene. He had returned to Paris five days earlier. Standing on his short legs, he dipped a piece of buttered baguette into a cup of coffee the size of a chamber pot.

Boulard was waiting for Zefiro. He was fully aware of the danger to which he would be exposing the monk who had already worked so hard to secure Viktor’s capture. And he knew that out on the street in front of the police headquarters, any passerby, any innocent ice-cream seller, might in fact be one of Voloy Viktor’s men, waiting for Zefiro to emerge from his hole so they could spot him and give chase.

Boulard’s team had offered the monk an armored van to transport him to Paris from the port of Marseille, but Zefiro had refused, letting it be known that he would arrive under his own auspices. No one knew the day or the hour: simply that he had agreed to turn up before the last day of July.

The month of July would be over in a matter of hours.

“No news of Z?” Boulard asked his second in command, who couldn’t take his eyes off the man presumed to be Viktor.

“No,” replied Avignon.

“If he doesn’t come, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“You said that you trusted this Monsieur Z.”

The superintendent nodded.

“We’re not going to be able to keep Viktor much longer,” said Boulard. “If Z doesn’t come to identify him, the game’s up. He’ll be free tomorrow. There’s already a huge amount of pressure to release him.”

“There was another call from the minister’s office.”

“I know. They’re all scared of Voloy Viktor.”

“The minister’s special adviser wanted to inform us that Gaston Balivert, a beaver-skin trader, had been arrested by mistake at a French border,” Avignon added, “and the Canadian authorities are demanding that their man be released.”

Boulard was so angry he nearly choked on his baguette.

“He’s not Balivert! His name is Viktor! And Canada hasn’t requested anything at all. I have the proof that his passport is a fake. The real Gaston Balivert died twelve years ago when he slipped in his bathroom. I am convinced that the man in front of us is Voloy Viktor. And the minister knows that as well as I do. But seeing as Viktor pays half the rulers of the world in emeralds and rubies from Anvers, they’re all worried they won’t be going on vacation next year. . . .”

Behind three thick layers of glass, Voloy Viktor couldn’t hear any of this conversation. But he still had a smirk on his face and was staring directly at Boulard, who was shifting about uneasily in the gloom.

In the main waiting room of the police headquarters, Ethel was sitting with her hands on her knees.