Dead Line

Chapter Twenty-one

There’s nothing quite like a bad economy to make the persnickety French a whole lot more amenable to loathsome American visitors and the wallets full of money that we freely toss around.

I came to this realization on the Air France flight from Rome to Charles de Gaulle, when Vinny Mongillo, God bless him, told the flight attendant, who I swear must have been a finalist in the 2002 Miss Universe pageant and would have won if her lips weren’t so succulently swollen, “Mon chat est un blanc chapeau.”

What he wanted was a rum and Coke. Now I don’t want to be showy about the two years of intensive French studies that I undertook at South Boston High, but what I believe he said was, “There’s a fetid moose in your medicine cabinet.” So I pointed at the Coke can and one of those tiny bottles of rum that sat on her cart. She smiled, nearly causing the plane to do a loop-the-loop, and said in a delicious Parisian accent, and I quote, “That’s what I thought he wanted.”

Ah, love.

On the ground, it was much the same story. We made an effort to speak French, they rushed into English. Not once did I feel even the slightest need to remind anyone of how the US of A bailed out an entire continent back in WW-Two, their sorry little country included. Even the new currency, the Euro, seemed so wonderfully American, unlike the nine million drachmas to the dollar or whatever it was that they used to use.

It was only two in the afternoon, three full hours until our intended rendezvous, so at Mongillo’s insistence, we immediately made our way from the airport to the Louvre. It was, I should probably be embarrassed to add, my first trip to this fair city, and as such, my eyes were about to fall out of my head, not just from all the beautiful women, but from the stunning palace architecture, the flowers, the narrow streets, the patisseries, the boulangeries, the glaciers. I mean, how is it that the entire cigarette-smoking, cell phone — gabbing nation seemed so wafer-thin with temptations like these along every gently curving street?

We got out of our cab at the top of the U-shaped complex, though complex is entirely the wrong word because it implies something new, like a suburban office park. No, this was old, ancient, rich, and textured, carrying the type of history that wasn’t measured in decades, but centuries. It made me feel at once young and completely insignificant.

Speaking of which, I insisted that we case the pharaoh statue before we headed inside, so we could get the lay of the land. Ends up, the pharaoh wasn’t a statue at all, but a live human being dressed entirely in a shiny pharaoh costume, head-to-toe, available for hired photo opportunities, which seemed to have a strong appeal to Japanese tourists. I don’t know why this bothered me, meeting at a person rather than a monument, but it did, probably because my mind was now entering the realm of spy games, wondering who was inside that getup, and were they part of some larger, dangerous conspiracy. Could I be killed by someone who was dressed up as someone who was dead? Would that fact be the first paragraph of my obituary?

Mongillo assured me that the pharaoh was a fixture, that anyone of any decent breeding knows all about him, and that it was time for me to get a grip. Yeah, well, tell that to Hilary Kane, though it’s too late, which is exactly my point. So, inside we went.

They say it takes four days to properly tour the Louvre, see everything that needs to be seen, and appreciate everything that demands appreciation. And maybe that’s true if you happen to be an amputee or bound for any number of other reasons to a wheelchair that needs to have its axles properly greased. Me, I could probably make a few bucks teaching people how to see the entire place in under two hours, an idea that I ran by Vinny Mongillo, who in turn muttered for the third time in an hour, “Philistine.”

The first time, it’s worth noting, was in front of the Mona Lisa. After we fought through the crowd for an up-close look, I turned to him and said, “I thought it would be bigger.” The second time was when I tried ordering a Budweiser in the concourse snack bar, but I was only kidding there, having a little fun with my newfound friends, the Fronch.

Anyway, Mongillo was having more fun than I ever would or could, expressed at times in the oddest of ways. As he stood silently staring at a painting entitled Venus and the Graces Offering Gifts to a Young Girl, a Botticelli, I watched in confusion as he wiped a tear from his olive-colored cheek. He stared and he stared and he stared as a veritable United Nations of tourists had to walk around the hulking figure for their own look at the work.

Later, when I was denied my Bud and instead stood in the snack bar sipping on a four-Euro Coke, I asked him, “I’m not giving you a hard time. I’m actually curious. What made you so emotional over that Botticelli?”

“Jack,” he said, calling me by my given name, which meant that he had left the realm of the joke. “Did you look at it? Did you really, really look at it? Did you notice the soft colors and the light brushstrokes? Did you catch the earthiness of the young girl, the symbol of our youth, yet the essence of our mortality, our very mundaneness?”

Actually, I didn’t, or couldn’t. Or maybe, given who I am, just plain wouldn’t. What I saw was a bunch of pale-faced, virtually identical looking women and wondered how hard it would be to put together in one of those 10,000-piece puzzles that my grandmother used to spread across her dining-room table.

He went on, “The contrast, the heaven and earth, endless virtues faced with natural vices. It’s all there, right in front of you, the work of a master with a brush. And I couldn’t help it, looking at the raw beauty and all that it encompassed, so I cried.”

He paused and added, “Don’t tell the newsroom, asshole.”

He was kidding about that last part, I think. I said, solemn-toned, feeling a little self-conscious now, “No, I didn’t see it. Maybe I didn’t look hard enough.” My own pause here. “Or maybe I didn’t know how to look.”

We both stood in silence in one of the snack bars at the Louvre, Vinny eating a turkey sandwich on what I would imagine was French bread, though I guess any kind of bread you get in this country could be so described. I continued sipping on the Coke, my stomach tight from the meeting ahead.

I asked, “How long have you followed this stuff?” As I asked, it occurred to me that follow might be the wrong word. You follow the Red Sox or the Celtics or weather patterns that come across the Great Lakes and wreak havoc on your shallow little weekend plans to sit your fat ass on a Maine beach. You don’t follow Renaissance artists, assuming that’s what Botticelli was, and obviously, with me, that really is only an assumption.

Vinny, kindly, didn’t call me on it, though he did hesitate a bit before answering.

“Since I was a kid,” he said softly, looking down at his nearly eaten food.

Surprised, I said, “You were interested in Renaissance artists as a kid?” I mean, you look at Vinny and you picture him in his youth spattered in mud, his fist slammed inside an oversize bag of potato chips, a baseball cap cocked sideways, maybe trying to hustle a few pals in a game of jacks.

He nodded, but didn’t speak, and it was obvious that he didn’t want to. Didn’t matter to me. I asked, “What got you interested?”

He took the last bite of his sandwich and wiped his hands on a napkin that said The Louvre on it. All around us, tourists from every possible country and culture came and went, excitedly talking in languages that I didn’t understand, like Australian. We leaned against a metal counter that separated the shop from the hallway that ran past it.

Vinny met my gaze and said in a suddenly determined voice, “There aren’t a lot of things in my life, then and now, that are particularly beautiful. You know what I mean? I look in the mirror and—” he held his hands around his face now, as if presenting it—“this is what I see. I’m obese. I’m a greasy wop. I have to buy special clothes. People look at me wondering what the hell went wrong. I see some of them shaking their heads as if I did something wrong, as if me being me was somehow offensive to them, like I invaded their aesthetic just by crossing their line of sight.”

He kept the same tight-jawed tone throughout the monologue. I don’t know who he was most mad at — himself, the world, me, whomever — but an inner anger that I had never seen revealed in him was suddenly pouring forth.

He said, “I didn’t suddenly get fat; I’ve always been fat, as a baby, as a schoolkid, a teenager, a young adult, now. I’ve never had a beautiful woman in my bed, Jack. I’ve barely had any women in my bed. I don’t see what you see. I don’t get the looks that you might get, that any normal person gets. I have all the same hopes and God do I dream those same dreams, but it ends up being sad because I know deep inside that they’ll never be fulfilled.

“But just because I’m a fat slob doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate beauty or want it all around me. So when other kids were going off to the school dance or flirting with the girls in class, I looked at art. It was a beauty that I could have, right at my fingertips. I got to understand it, to live it, to appreciate it more than most people ever will. And to no small extent, it’s kept me going through all these many years and insults and insecurities. I love art, and it’s mine.”

What an utter, unambiguous, unadulterated ass I am. You think you know someone well. You’re around them virtually all day, every day. You do the same basic job. You respect their abilities to no end. You assume you understand their very core. And then you realize over a damned turkey sandwich and a Coke that what you’ve been looking at all these many years is not a person but a mask, and what’s underneath is probably more attractive, more interesting, than anything you could have imagined.

I didn’t know what to say, so what I said was this: “I wish you had told me these things a long time ago.”

“What, that I’m a fat fuck?” Vinny said. More jovial now. “That I’m depressed? That I’m in a cycle I can’t bail out of? That I’d like to nail a decent-looking dame?”

“So you’ll lose the weight now. You’ll knock your blood pressure down. Your cholesterol will fall.” I said this in a tone laced with almost too much determination, making the feat seem somehow harder than it should have been. I mean, come on. The entire world was on the Atkins Diet, eating a pound of bacon five times a day and somehow watching weight melt off them.

“I will,” he replied. “Problem is, I lose my career ambitions with it. But maybe it proves a small price to pay.”

With that, he looked down at the watch stretched tight across his wrist and announced, “Four-fifteen. We need a plan, and we need to get outside. Time to salvage what’s left of your sorry little career.”

The last time I sat outdoors watching a life-changing event unfold before my eyes, I was blissfully planted in Fenway Park, and the Red Sox were high-stepping toward the pennant. Four days later, I’m in the courtyard of the Louvre, watching any sense of professional pride, personal confidence, and self-esteem slipping toward the proverbial door. What a difference a few days makes.

Here, in a nutshell, is what happened. Vinny Mongillo and I took the long escalator up through the glass pyramid entrance. Outdoors, in a cloudy September chill, we separated and walked around the famous pharaoh in different directions, Mongillo to the left, me to the right. He stopped around thirty, maybe forty yards away, in an open expanse with an unimpeded view. I slowly made my way toward the costumed creature and pulled up about ten yards short. It was 4:30 P.M., thirty minutes to showtime. I was utterly without so much as a whiff of a guess as to where it all might go from there.

So I stood and I stood and I stood. Minutes moved slower than water through a drain at a men’s hair-loss clinic. The sky went from gray to slate. Waves of tourists flocked from the museum at closing time. The damned pharaoh, blessed with endless energy, kept beckoning to people, serving as a veritable magnet for virtually anyone of Japanese descent. They’d smile, place an arm around his shoulder, pose for a photograph, and they were off, another uniquely French moment to tell friends and families all about in the suburbs of Nagasaki.

The air turned from chilly to cold, and believe me, the Parisians are not to be confused with frontiersmen, not unless you consider a trip to Provence with a stay at a Relais & Chateaux inn in the company of a toy poodle to be the frontier. So they were all bundled up in black peacoats, the men as pretty as the women, and I watched them, wondering what was to come, waiting for it to arrive, fearing the results.

I thought back to that night at Fenway and how innocent life had been not all that long ago. Elizabeth and I were in those last clingy moments of our inevitable good-bye. The Sox were in the pennant race. I was in a slump, but I knew I’d break out of it; I always do.

Not this time, though. I killed a young woman, or rather, a story I dupishly wrote led to her death. Same thing, really, or maybe worse. And now another woman, an innocent human being, was being stalked by a killer or killers who wanted her dead. And what was I doing to help? Nothing, really, except putting her in harm’s way, forgetting to give her advice on how to save her life, in effect using her as I had used so many others before to try to get to the heart of a publishable truth. I’ve heard it said that newspaper reporting is like war, meaning that innocents will be hurt in the name of a common good. Even if that’s the case, this story of Toby Harkins was certainly an extreme.

I thought of Jankle, so confident the first time I met him, so confused the second. Was it an act? Was he behind any of this? I thought of Peter Martin back in the Record newsroom, relatively immune to all that was going wrong. He had a front-page story detailing the return of one of the world’s most valuable stolen paintings. To him, for him, death and destruction were the justifiable means toward a stunning, perhaps Pulitzer prize — winning, end.

I was, quite literally, more than an ocean away from anything that previously mattered in my life — a girlfriend who was no longer mine; a fluffy golden retriever that would be my best friend until the day he died; a career that seemed always on the incline. And here I was in this forlorn courtyard in a foreign capital with dark descending faster than an April tide watching it all flitter away and wondering why. Why?

Because I, Jack Flynn, should be renamed Jackass. That’s the glib answer. I needed more.

And more important than any of this, more important than the sad details of my own life, was the following question: Where was Maggie Kane?

At 4:55 P.M. I looked over at Vinny Mongillo, about half a football field away. He was taking in the scene through a small pair of opera glasses that I had no idea where or when he acquired. He was scanning the periphery of the park, refocusing back on me and the pharaoh, then to the edges again. He kept his face partially concealed with a folded-up newspaper, Le Monde, I believe, which I also believe stood for, “You’re screwed, vulgar Americans.”

I, too, looked around, but saw nothing — no pretty blondes, no shadowy killers lurking with a cache of deadly weapons, no great hope. I guess, in retrospect, I don’t know what I expected to happen. Did I really believe that as I stood near this bizarre pharaoh in a crowd of tourists within the shadows of the Louvre that Maggie Kane would come walking across the Jardin des Tuileries, tap me on the shoulder, and say, “I’ve been looking for you, Jack. Let me tell you everything.” And that at that point, we’d steal away to a French restaurant with a tuxedoed sommelier and order a fixed-price meal involving tender beef and a buttery Bordeaux and never would we hear from the would-be killers again.

In other words, which Dakota do I think I’m from?

Instead, five o’clock came and went with nary a tap, whisper, or flutter — my heart aside. I stood virtually frozen, trying to look anything but, glancing to my sides, occasionally turning around, trying to get a lay of this foreign, potentially dangerous land. Mongillo had my back, and my front, for that matter, perched across the way trying to blend into the scenery as well as a 300-pound American in a flannel shirt and khaki work trousers can in the heart of Paris, France.

Five-ten turned into 5:20, and nothing. At 5:30, a car pulled over at a nearby circle and a man in a black raincoat emerged from the passenger side. He walked in my general direction, took a long look around, then headed back to the car with neither an expression nor a spoken word.

By that point, the flow of people emerging from the Louvre had receded to a small trickle, then to barely nothing at all. At 5:40, the pharaoh picked up a canister of money from the cement path in front of him and walked slowly off toward the Tuileries, another day at the office behind him. At that point, Mongillo, now sitting on a bench in the distance, began walking toward me. I made a subtle motion with my hands that told him to stop, and he did. We stood awkwardly like that, forty yards or so apart, for another ten minutes, until I beckoned him over. By then it was 5:55, and we were alone in the cloudy cold, save for a few stragglers making their way toward the bridge over the River Seine.

When he drew close, Mongillo asked simply, “Now what?” and the very question, as well as the vacant tone in which it was asked, caught me oddly off guard. Vinny Mongillo, bereft not just of answers, but of ideas. We were exquisitely screwed, and his two words forming one question gave voice to just how badly.

Sternly, I replied, “Maybe she meant six o’clock. Maybe she’s messed up in the time zone changes. We wait longer.” I knew I was probably wrong, but how was I supposed to know for sure, so we sat on a bench in the middle of a stretch of park with grass and hard-packed dirt and some cement paths, and we waited some more, mostly in silence, but for the frequent sound of Mongillo’s cell phone vibrating. After a particularly long patch of nothing, he said, “We should eat well tonight.” But the line, the sentiment, would never be fulfilled; he knew that and so did I.

By 6:30, it was mostly dark — so much for Paris being the city of light — and I said in desolate frustration, staring at the perimeter of the park around us, “Where do you want to stay?”

“Don’t know. What’s that place Princess Di stayed on her last night, the Ritz?”

And for some reason, the thought of Diana’s death in Paris made me sad. Everything at that point made me sad — the mournful look of the darkened Louvre, the lack of a sunset over the Seine, the breeze that carried no good tidings.

“We stay at the Ritz, Martin will make sure its our last night alive.”

“No matter to me.”

Probably no matter to me, either, except I needed to be around to get thoughts into print to pull myself — and hopefully Maggie Kane — out of this mess. But for the latter, I suspected it was too late. If she wasn’t here, she was probably dead — a thought that thrust me into deep depression.

The breeze blew up off the river, the last bits of easy gray faded from the ceiling of clouds, and I said to Mongillo, “Let’s get out of this place.”

“Unfortunately,” he replied as we both struggled to our feet, our bones stiff from the cold, “I’ll never look at the Louvre the same again.”

We set off, down some wide steps, across the Tuileries, and veered right down Rue de la Paix, toward Place Vendôme, past one fabulously expensive boutique after another. We cut across the beautiful square and arrived at the door of the Park Hyatt Hotel, at which time Mongillo pointed to the sign and said, “Martin can’t get upset over a damned Hyatt.”

Five minutes later, when he plunked down his credit card for both our rooms — I didn’t want to use mine — at $450 a night, Mongillo said, “All right, so he can get upset. Thank God I’m leaving the paper.”

We must have looked like quite a pair, the rotund Italian-American who hadn’t had a wink of sleep in two days, and the beaten-up hero with a bruise on his lower chin, despondence in his deep blue eyes. Or something like that. I grabbed a copy of the Herald Tribune from the concierge desk, told Mongillo I’d meet him in the lobby champagne bar in an hour, and made my way upstairs.

Once in my room — my chambre, I think they might call it in France, I drew a bath. Truth be known, those are words — I drew a bath — that I never thought I’d utter. I mean, the only thing I’d ever drawn in my life was a king-high flush in a poker game at the University Club one night, but the damned thing looked so inviting, with brushed chrome handles on the deep soaking tub, a clever little spigot that was more like a waterfall, and a fluffy bath mat waiting to soak up the warm water from my tired feet.

I pulled a large bottle of Evian out of the minibar. As I opened it, I gazed at the little menu card and saw it cost $12. Too late now. I peeled off my clothes and climbed inside the tub, feeling much like I did during my Saturday night baths at our South Boston home when I was a kid. I picked up the Herald Tribune and scanned the front page — a corrupt finance minister in Italy (Stop the presses!), a squabble over NATO expenditures in Brussels, a bevy of cops indicted on brutality charges in Los Angeles. Ho-hum. I flipped inside to get more U.S. news, and scanned a column of brief stories from the States. It was the fifth one down that didn’t just grab my eyes, it all but poked them. “Masterpiece Returned to Boston Newspaper.” It mentioned The Concert and the Gardner and the damned thing had Vermeer and Flynn in the same sentence. Artists, both, at different times, in different ways, with different instruments. Who would have thunk?

I leaned my head back and, for reasons that I can’t properly explain, I thought about my father, a career pressman before he died, sitting at the kitchen table every morning eating a bowl of corn flakes with a sliced banana, still in the ink-stained hunter green apron that he wore through every one of his shifts, proud to be a part of an enterprise as great as the Record. He never lived to see my byline in his paper, but what would he think of me now?

After that, I thought of all those nights lying in my single bed in my tiny room in South Boston, the transistor radio under the pillow broadcasting the late innings of a Red Sox game or the final quarter of the Celtics playing at the old Boston Garden, Jo Jo White passing to Havlicek, Havlicek faking left even though everyone knew he couldn’t go that way, then driving right, another shot, another score. It was in the middle of these games that the train would invariably glide by in the distant night, sounding a horn that to some might seem forlorn, but to me was a beckoning — an invitation, the audible manifestation of an abiding desire to break the bonds, to be a part of a larger world, to shed the expectations that were never set high enough.

And here I was, a well-known newspaper correspondent, the bane of some famous people, the confidant of others, out there in that world that I so wanted to embrace. And now, all I wanted was a home that I could call my own, and at this very moment, the modest rowhouses on the ramrod-straight streets of my native South Boston would have been more than enough. Oh, to be able to go back in time.

This, of course, caused me to take a census of the important women in my life — Katherine and Elizabeth and Hilary and Maggie. Two of them were dead; one was missing by her own volition, the other by someone else’s. This is some life, Jack Flynn. So I shut my eyes in a marble bathroom in Paris, France, and I thought of Baker, odd as that may seem, loping across Columbus Park on the Boston waterfront in simple pursuit of a tennis ball, bounding back, dropping it at my feet, doing it all over again until it was time to go home and he’d happily tag along at my side. After Katherine died, I tried to convince myself that I could only miss what I still actually had, and right now, Baker was pretty much it.

Finally, I thought about the knock on the hotel door, three firm bangs, followed by a muffled announcement. I tried to holler back, but my throat was so thick that I couldn’t get the words out with any volume or velocity. The door immediately flung open and a man with a tray came walking in.

He saw me through the opening and said in the unapologetic tone that pretty much characterizes his country, “Pardon, monsieur.” Then he said something that sounded like “Free,” but after just a few hours in Paris, I knew that the concept didn’t exist in French culture, so the word probably wasn’t a part of their language. As he said it, he held up the tray, which bore a silver bowl containing apples, oranges and a bulging bunch of red grapes. At that point, my sophomore high school French came trickling back. Free was fruit. The fruit, hopefully, was free.

“Merci,” I said, and he placed the basket down and carried on his way.

Now I was left to contemplate the growing roll of the dead, and proceeded to how I would find Maggie Kane in a city of more than nine million people, a place where I had no friends to help me, no cultural knowledge to guide me, nothing so much as an English to French translation dictionary to assist me. Should I fly home the following day, or return to the Louvre and wait yet again, or simply wander the streets hoping for a stroke of blind luck?

I stepped out of the tub as I contemplated these miserable options, and though I’m honestly not prone to talking to myself, said aloud, “Where the hell are you, Maggie Kane?”

“Right here,” she replied. I looked up, and there she was, Maggie Kane, leaning in the bathroom doorway, her arms crossed, her legs long. She looked a little worse for the wear of the last few days, but perfect nonetheless. And there I was, naked as a walrus on an Antarctic iceberg. When I lunged for a bath towel, I actually heard her laugh — a sound no exposed man wants to hear.

“What the fuck,” I said, as much to the situation as to the woman who had created it.

“We have a thing about bathrooms, you and me,” she said, her eyes not even flinching from mine. I wrapped a towel around my waist. I shot her an angry look, but truth be known, I was anything but. What I really wanted to do was hug her, though in my present state of undress, reverted to Plan B, which is, when in doubt, get dressed.

“Give me a minute,” I said, and she turned and walked out.

I wrapped myself in what all the hotel brochures inevitably describe as a “plush terrycloth robe,” and grabbed my overnight bag from the bed. She had already begun feeding herself some of the grapes. I returned to the bathroom to get dressed and tried to control my feeling of unabashed elation. The return of the Vermeer aside, this was the first reasonably good thing to happen to me in a week.

Maggie Kane was sitting here in my hotel room, after seeing me naked, which I suppose was little more than a metaphor for this whole entire story. And now it was time to do what I do best, which is to push through the layers of intentional haze in pursuit of a clear and unimpeachable truth.