Black Friday (or Black Market) - James Patterson [46]
The street sounds he heard pressing against the limousine were like the rattling of old bones. For Carroll, Paris was a city of sharply painful memories. Paris was Nora and himself in another age and time. Paris was a fading decal on which was imprinted the spectral shapes of two young, carefree honeymooners, who wandered all the boulevards holding hands, who stopped to kiss every so often, who couldn’t keep from constantly touching each other.
Carroll stared at the two American flags that flapped on either fender of the luxury car.
Make believe you’re someplace else, he told himself.
Christ, though, the memories kept coming back like a tide.
Nora sipping cafÉ au lait on the crowded Boulevard St Germain.
Nora smiling and laughing as they made all the tourist stops—the Eiffel Tower, Montparnasse, the banks of the Seine, le Quarto’ Etudiant.
Carroll felt something grab tight around his heart. It was a sense of the injustice that had ended Nora’s life, and it uncomfortably crowded him now.
Near the OpÉra Gamier, a crouching man with a reptilian face made as if to hurl a spoiled grapefruit at the smooth, cruising symbol of American wealth and power.
Seated in the gray velvet rear seat of the car, Carroll flinched at the sight of the man. But when the prospect of the grapefruit assault had passed, he relaxed a little and tried to shake his head free of the fog of overseas jet lag and confused time zones.
He opened his bulky Green Band file and looked over scribbled notes because he knew work would be a salvation from the memories of this town. If he dug into his material on Green Band, he could make himself a foxhole safe from the scenes that passed outside the windows of the car.
How could Green Band have isolated itself so well from the terrorist underground? How could there be no rumor, no concrete leads anywhere out on the street? And what was the ultimate reason for the New York financial district bombings?
Something else occurred to Carroll now: What if he was still looking in all the wrong places?
“SociÉtÉ GÉnÉrale Bank, monsieur. Vous Êtes ici Yon have arrived safely, comfortably I hope…. This is le Quartier de la Bourse.”
Arch Carroll climbed out of the official American limousine and slowly walked inside SociÉtÉ GÉnÉrale.
The bank building itself, the cavernous lobby, the hand-operated elevators, were all carved stone and exquisitely gilded. Everything was regal and impressive, the kind of background against which American tourists would take pictures of their European tours to later paste in scrapbooks.
The prestigious French financial institution reminded Carroll of another era. Compared with Wall Street, it was visually softer and more civilized. It was as if money were not the major game being played here. The aim was something less vulgar, something even spiritual, perhaps.
In actuality le Quartier de la Bourse occupied the former site of a Dominican convent. On this same site another God had achieved divinity. No matter the history of the place, no matter the artistic appeal, it was the same religion you found on Wall Street. Gentility and manners, these were only illusions. It was the same old God.
Michel Chevron, Carroll thought, remembering why he was there. Chevron and the secretive European black market.
The question was whether Chevron really fit into the frustrating Green Band puzzle, and whether there was a bridge, even a frail one, linking Chevron with Monserrat.
The French bank executive’s personal assistant was a thin man of perhaps twenty-eight. He had white-blond hair, closely cropped, almost suggestive of punk in style.
He sat behind an antique desk, which in New York would have seemed inappropriate for anyone except a chief executive. He wore a double-breasted pin-striped suit, a funereal, mauve four-in-hand tie.
Carroll tried to imagine applying for a loan from this chilly character, something for home repair, maybe, a room extension, an underground sprinkler system. He could see the bank assistant sniffling over the application papers with an expression