![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
realthogThanks to e-mails from Dan Brown fans the world over, I've been encouraged to post the next chapter of that spinechilling epic Da Easter Bunny Code, which would most certainly have been optioned for film by now had it not been for the covert intervention of the Vatican.
You have been warned.
Those who are courageous Seekers After Truth can find the book's blurb at http://realthog.livejournal.com/6036.htm
Chapter 2
Roger Lapin, the foremost symbolatrist in the entire world, had not in fact waited a full hour for Cardinal Josef Lebowski in the bar of the Hôtel d'Angleterre at number 44 rue Jacob, but a mere forty minutes. He had been prepared to give the prelate a while longer - after all, Lebowski had told him to charge the drinks to the Vatican's tab, and the Côtes du Rhône which Lapin had finally settled upon after the bartender had refused his demands for some nice Lancers had been tasting better by the bottle - but then Lapin's table in the bar, and his privacy, had been intruded upon by two leggy cabaret dancers accompanied by a marmoset, all three of whom smelled strongly of canned tomato sauce. When it had become evident even to Lapin through his Côtes du Rhône-enhanced bonhomie that the redhead with the strand of spaghetti draped decorously over one ear was attempting to pick him up, he had made his apologies and departed for the sanctuary of his room, a bellhop following him respectfully bearing the couple of extra bottles Lapin had ordered to help him get over his jetlag and in the event proving a useful guide when the symbolatrist had attempted to use his plastic room key to open the elevator shaft.
But now Lapin was safely ensconced in room 1433, with its view out over the illuminated trottoirs of Paris's heart, where the traffic streamed like moving vehicles with their headlights on. The bellhop had left him without a corkscrew with which to attack the Côtes du Rhône and he'd wisely forborne from biting off the necks of the bottles for fear of cutting his lips. Now he was instead whacking into the litre of Peruvian double-strength brandy he'd bought at duty free in Newark Liberty International Airport using the credit card issued to him by the Symbolic Department at the University of Patterson, his employer.
Having located the slot for the Magic Fingers, he lay back on his luxurious king-size bed and sighed happily to himself.
Life was good.
A little blurred around the edges, but good.
Ever since Lapin had applied for his post at the University of Patterson, his rise to become the world's foremost and most distinguished symbolatrist had been nothing short of meteoric. (He wrinkled his eyebrows in momentary puzzlement as he reflected upon this: Surely meteors fall, not rise? Oh well, gulp, glug, to heck with it.) The irony was that he had started his professional career with different intentions entirely, serving in the percussion section of the Boston Pops before finding himself out of a job for reasons not unrelated to the cures he prescribed himself for jetlag, insomnia, colic, depression, flu, "just a touch of the colly-wobbles" and the like.
His explosive emulation of Ginger Baker during a performance of Debussy's L'Apres midi d'un faun had been the final straw so far as the orchestra's fuddy-duddy establishment administrators had been concerned, and so he'd found himself combing the job ads in the back of the Boston Globe. There he discovered that University of Patterson, with that cheerful insouciance towards spelling that characterizes modern American faith-based academia, had advertised for a full-time cymbalist . . . and the rest was history.
After he had assumed the professorship of the university's Symbolic Department, he had found the teaching burdens placed upon him to be light - quite drastically light, in fact - leaving him free to respond to the summonses he received from all over the world from ecclesiastics in search of an expert symbolatrist who might help them solve a variety of murder mysteries involving earth-shaking revelations about conspiracies related to the early Church. In some instances his efforts had been triumphantly successful, in others . . . well, it was perhaps best to forget about his interpretation of Stonehenge as a preliminary sketch for Salvador Dalí's The Great Masturbator. Which was more than the female staff at the university would do, with their persistent habit of taunting "Wanna show me your dolmen, mister?" and then running off giggling to lock themselves in the ladies' room.
His latest summons had come from Cardinal Josef Lebowski, a leading light of the Vatican beloved by tabloid journalists everywhere for his feisty extracurricular attempts to modernize the Catholic Church by example. He'd been widely tipped for the ultimate elevation before some wag at the Daily Mirror had headlined a story on the succession "THE FIRST THREE-IN-A-BED POPE?" - with the photographs to prove it - after which Lebowski's star had faded a trifle. Even so, he was widely regarded as still a force to be reckoned with in the inner sanctums of Vatican politics, and so Lapin had responded immediately on receiving the fax:
COME TO PARIS IMMEDIATELY ON MATTEUR OF UTMOST IMPORTANCE CONCERNING NATURE OF DEITY.
He'd responded immediately by searching all over the fax for a phone number or at least a return address, the instruction being rather vague. In the end he'd been rescued by the formidable Symbolic Department secretary, Miss Goldstein, who'd battled her way through the Vatican's computerized multiple-choice telephone answering service for an hour and a half until finally a crossed line had permitted her to speak to a human being. The janitor concerned, who'd been trying to put through his weekly phone call to his elderly mother in Athens, had ungraciously connected her to Lebowski's office, and so the appointment here at the Hôtel d'Angleterre had been set up.
But Lebowski had been a no-show.
Which didn't bother Lapin one iota.
Tomorrow would be soon enough to sort out whatever was bothering the "Boinking Bishop", as the Sun had catchily if inaccurately dubbed the man in a retaliatory attempt to claw back a few of the sales it had lost to the Mirror through the latter's first-strike headline.
Breep! Breep!
It was the telephone.
Lapin's near-comatose brain registered the fact with interest. After a few seconds, he wondered how he could get the phone to stop breeping at him. Aha! He could answer it - there was in idea! But first he had to find it . . .
After having picked up and said "Hello" into his electric shaver, his duty-free carton of cigarettes, the brandy bottle - difficult to achieve while simultaneously swallowing - and his shoe, he settled on the plastic object with the flashing red light that sat on his bedside table.
"Hello?"
The voice that sounded in his ear was breathy, voluptuous yet somehow virginal, and strongly perfumed by an accent he rapidly identified as French.
"Professeur Lapin?"
"C'est moi."
"Ah, vous parlez français?"
It was the very last question Lapin had been expecting, and it flustered him. "Good heavens, no! Why the blue blazes would you think that?"
The voice at the other end of the line was silent save for an insucking of breath.
Then it resumed.
"You are in very grave dangeur, Professeur Lapin. Very grave indeed."
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to offend you . . ."
"Non. I did not mean that. We shall your boorishness discuss later once we have in advance made for you an appointment with a dentiste. But I talk of far greater dangeur than merely incurring the wrath of a passionate Frenchwoman, if such a thing est possible."
"You mean . . .?"
"Yes, Professeur Lapin. There are those who would wish to see you - what is your English word for it? Resembling a doornail?"
"Dead?"
"That is it! The word I am seeking. Thank you, monsieur."
The caller hung up.
Feeling an unwelcome chill of sobriety start trickling through him, Lapin stared at the receiver in his hand. So someone wanted to kill him. He couldn't help feeling the caller might have been a little more specific. Kill him how? Kill him where? Most important of all, kill him when? And who was the mysterious someone, anyhow?
Come to that, who had the enigmatic caller herself been? From her voice his keenly honed symbolatrist intellect had been able to tell him that she was youthful, leggy, proud-bosomed and beautiful, probably an auburn-redhead, but nothing more. Oh, and French - mustn't forget that bit.
Perhaps she would call back?
He continued to stare at the receiver, waiting.
Finally he put the receiver back in its rest. So much for her calling back.
Instantly the phone breeped again.
He grabbed up the receiver.
"I 'ave been trying to contact you again, professeur, but your line has been - 'ow you say? - engage."
"Important international conference call," Lapin bluffed.
"As you will."
"Look . . . look, who are these murderous ill-wishers you mention?"
"I can tell you so little over the telephone. This line may be buggered. I will tell you more when I see you."
The evening was looking up. "When will that be?"
"As soon as it can be."
Standing by the bed, Lapin gazed down at his dishevelled self. After using the bathroom on arrival in his room he'd managed to catch his shirt-tail in his fly, so that now a scut of white cloth protruded obscenely. He was definitely not looking at his best.
"Give me a few minutes."
The voice giggled. An effervescent giggle. A completely enchanting giggle. "Oh, non, Professeur Lapin - I could not come to your room. Not unescorted. It would be . . . indecorous. I shall call you again later when I am able to fix up a rendezvous."
He glanced at the Hôtel d'Angleterre's cheap clock radio. 22.51. Rapidly converting from the twenty-four-hour system of timekeeping customarily used on the European continent, he translated this to be nearly nine o'clock.
"How much later?" he said.
"I do not know, Professeur Lapin." A little hiccuping sob came down the line. "I have much I must do tonight. Mon oncle - my uncle - he has been murdered!"
"Murdered?"
"Yes! It is as I say!"
"As in doornails?"
"He is, I am told, even deaderly than the nail, yes."
"But that's ghastly! How terrible for you! Are you in need of some . . . comforting?"
"Not over the telephone, Professeur Lapin. I am not that kind of fille."
"Then . . .?"
"Later, professeur," she sighed. "Later."
Giving him one final belt of erotically charged breathiness, she hung up once more. This time with finality.
He put the phone down.
She hadn't even given him her name!
Damn! The woman could turn up at any moment. She'd said she wouldn't come to his room, but that might have been just a cunning Gallic ploy designed to mislead any snoops listening in to what was undoubtedly a bugged line. He was in France, after all, where bugged lines were by all accounts de rigueur. Thank goodness that back in the States there was the Patriot Act to protect people from such privacy intrusions!
He began to struggle with his jammed zip, tearing at the cotton of the shirt-tail.
A cotton tail. Was there symbolatrism there? His mind was too frenzied - and, if he were honest with himself, still too filled with that damned Frog apology for wine - to decipher any symbolatrism there might be.
The phone breeped again.
She was on her way! He attempted to rip at the offending cloth with his teeth, but couldn't reach.
Snatching up the receiver with his free hand, he grunted, "I am not quite ready yet."
This time the breathy sigh was subtly . . . different.
"Professeur Lapin?" said a deep voice. Male.
"This is he."
"This is Alphonse, your waiter, from downstairs."
What the hell can the man want? Didn't I leave him a big enough tip? Now that I think of it, did I leave him a tip at all?
"There are some men 'ere to see you, professeur," continued Alphonse, oblivious to the thoughts lurching headlong through Lapin's mind. "They are from the Surete."
"Cops?"
"Mais oui."
Surely this was overreacting more than somewhat to a forgotten tip? On the other hand, these people were French - like so many Parisians - and everyone knew how hot-tempered and impetuous the French could be.
"What do they wish with me?" said Lapin nervously.
"They do not say." Alphonse paused. When he spoke again his voice was slightly muffled, as if he had put his hand over his mouth to shield his words from listeners in the room behind him. "But they 'ave told me they will come up to your room unless you come downstairs 'ere to the bar tout de suite."
"'Toot sweet'?"
"Immediatement."
Lapin drew in his breath and back his shoulders. "Tell them I'll be there in just a few minutes. I have to . . . ah . . . change my clothing."
Alphonse chuckled oleaginously and made some derogatory remark about vomissement that Lapin couldn't quite catch.
"Cinq minutes?" said the barman.
Lapin thought swiftly. Fifteen minutes should be plenty. "Yes - I mean, oui."
"Bon."
The line went dead.
#
Ten minutes later, his anonymous mystery caller completely forgotten, Roger Lapin was re-entering the bar at the Hôtel d'Angleterre that he had left a mere fifty-two minutes earlier. The bar was decorated around the walls with tiles of teak veneer that were each about 3.937 inches square. The tiles had been manufactured by the German company of Steiflehamp, who claimed that the teak had originally come from Africa, although they were unspecific as to the particular country of origin, far less the region. The beer tankards used in the bar bore no maker's mark, but each was designed to hold, for some reason, about twelve percent more than the US pint which Lapin was accustomed to drinking at home in Patterson. The bartender, Alphonse, had earlier declined to serve him his Côtes du Rhône in these tankards, instead insisting that Lapin use the bar's standard-issue wine glasses, which were imported from England, where they were manufactured by Waterford - of Waterford Crystal fame. Because the Hôtel d'Angleterre bought its wine glasses in bulk, the unit cost of them was . . .
"Professeur Lapin?"
The question jolted the symbolatrist out of his reverie.
"Cette me," he acknowledged fluently.
"My name is Escargau," said the uniformed flic who had hailed him. The man flashed his badge, with the words Bien Surete prominently visible.
"Pleased to meet you," said Lapin affably. "Care for a quick hair that bit the dog?"
"Ze hair that bit ze dog?"
"A snifter. A snort. A jigger of the old vino, or whatever it is you French cops drink."
Escargau smiled, gesturing toward his glum-faced colleague sitting at a round table in one of the bar's secluded, green-plush-lined alcoves. The table was made of Umbrian oak, and had been assembled from a flat-pack by . . .
"Zat depends," said Escargau in his remarkably good English, "on who is, 'ow you say, picking up the tab."
"This round's on the Vatican," said Lapin smugly.
Escargau's eyes darted quickly at those of his as-yet-unnamed colleague, and a message shot between them.
"Kindly order the drinks, professeur," said Escargau hastily, "and after you 'ave done zis we shall tell you some astonishing nouveaux - news. I will have a litre bottle of the '84 Beaujolais Villages, and mon ami will be well served likewise."
There was something going on here that Lapin couldn't understand, despite reflexive symbolatrist analysis, but he went ahead and ordered the drinks anyway. On Escargau's hastily whispered advice, he requested an absinthe for himself. Alphonse greasily took the orders, writing them down on a small but sweaty note pad, his shaved eyebrows rising at the mention of the absinthe.
Escargau - with difficulty, because his shoes kept coming off - led Lapin across to the table and introduced him to his stone-faced fellow cop.
"Pleased to meet you, Caporal Gaulois," said Lapin, settling himself comfortably on the alcove seat, which was upholstered in dark-green leatherette by Simmons of Marseilles, a company that proudly boasted in its publicity material to have been Upholsters by Appointment to no fewer than four European monarchs.
"Merde, un yanqui ouanqueur," responded the other man pleasantly enough.
"Now, what's this piece of news you're being so secretive about?" said Lapin to Escargau.
"Wait until the drinks are ici," said the flic enigmatically, rubbing the side of his nose with one forefinger. Gaulois merely grunted, targeting the nearest spittoon. The excessive designer stubble on the man's florid cheeks indicated that he had not shaved for at least a couple of days. If Lapin had met Gaulois in a dark alley he'd have turned and run as fast as his feet could carry him, and it was only a minor reassurance to know the man was a cop. Still, he supposed this was what French cops were like - probably it came from eating all that garlic.
He and Escargau talked of inconsequentialities, with Gaulois being a sort of expectoral presence in the background, until Alphonse brought the drinks. Once satisfied that the wine and absinthe had been successfully charged to the Vatican, Escargau adopted a grave face.
"The homme you came 'ere to meet, Professeur Lapin . . ." he began tentatively.
"Yes, Cardinal Lebowski - what of him?" The symbolatrist spoke absentmindedly, being fascinated by the smoking, oily liquid in the glass in front of him. Already it had stripped the skin off the olive and was making encroachments upon the structural integrity of the stick.
"He is," Escargau continued, "'ow you say? Resembling a doornail?"
Lapin, fittingly for one in Paris, had a sudden sense of dejà vu.
"Dead?" he said.
"That is it! The word I am seeking. Thank you, monsieur. 'E 'as turned up ses doigts de pied."
"But how?"
Escargau's voice dropped an octave. Alphonse, replacing the spittoon with a fresh one, swayed toward the table as he strained to hear.
"'E was . . . murdered!"
"Murdered?"
"Bien sur. Exactement. Vous avez hit the doornail droit sur la tete."
Lapin's mind raced. He'd seen enough Fox News documentaries to know that Paris was the most dangerous city in the world, filled as it was with snail-eating, syphilis-infested Frenchmen and their bestial libidos, all in search of an army to run away from - why, they'd even had the impertinence to claim that the most All-American of gourmet foods, Freedom Fries, were a French invention. Even so, it was horrific to be confronted by the evidence that Paris was indeed the Murder Capital of the World, as no less an authority than Bill O'Reilly had solemnly intoned, going on to demonstrate conclusively that this was because private assault weapons were relatively hard to obtain among the chicken-hearted French. If Lapin alone had a personal connection to two violent deaths in a single evening, that must mean there were hundreds of them going on in the city even as he sat here in the seemingly rather boring tranquillity of the Hôtel d'Angleterre bar!
"Murdered?" he repeated. "That's . . . that's terrible!"
Gaulois paused mid-spit to glare at him out of the corner of one rheumy eye. "Giton americain," he pronounced.
"Are you sure you know rien about it?" said Escargau, leaning forward earnestly, a sudden air of alertness about him.
"I have never met the boi . . . the good cardinal," declared Lapin. "I was to meet him this evening, but he never turned up."
"Are you certain about this?"
"Not unless he was dressed as a cabaret dancer. Two cabaret dancers. I could believe anything of Vatican vestments, of course, but not that Lebowski had such excellent legs. And other parts."
"Other parts?"
Lapin made a universally comprehensible infinity shape in the air with his hands.
"Ah, yes, I comprends," said Escargau, nodding. "We are both, 'ow you say, hommes of the monde, are we not, professeur? These people with the legs, they were wearing spectacles? But what is it that makes you sure, if you 'ad never met heem, that the Cardinal Lebowski, he too not wear the spectacles, hein?"
"That wasn't what I . . ."
Gaulois, midway through lighting up yet another eponymous cigarette, snickered. It was not a pretty sound.
"Tu as ta tete dans ton derriere," he said cryptically, seemingly addressing the butt end of his cigarette.
"I don't quite . . ." began Lapin.
Escargau flushed in embarrassment. "Pay my colleague no attention. 'E was merely remarking to me zat ze investigation is not much progress making, no? He zinks we should take you downtown to ze commissaire and use . . . physical methods to get ze trut' out of you."
Lapin blanched. "But surely you cannot seriously suspect I could be involved in this . . . this dastardly crime. And against a man of the cloth, no less. I tell you, I've never met Cardinal Lebowski in my life. I was looking forward to it. Besides he is - was - my ticket to free . . ."
He let his voice tail off. Perhaps this was not the most decorous time to start publicly worrying as to who was going to settle the bar tab.
Escargau cleared his throat and the dregs of his Beaujolais. "Zen why would the boink . . . ze good cardinal ask you for an assignation here in Paris if he had not ever met you?"
"I have no idea. His invitation came as a complete bolt from the blue." Lapin explained quickly about the enigmatic fax. "All I could tell was that it was a matter of the utmost urgency," he concluded, "and one does not lightly turn down a summons from someone so renowned and revered as Lebowski is - was."
"I zink you must tell all zis to Inspecteur Gaston Cluedeaux of the Surete," said Escargau after a long moment.
"I'll tell it to anyone you wish, so long as they believe me," proclaimed Lapin stoutly.
Another long moment's silence ensued, punctuated only by a sotto voce "Merde!" from Gaulois as for once he missed the spittoon.
"I cannot promise you l'inspecteur will believe you," said Escargau in a low, slow voice, "but tell him your fabric . . . tell him your story you must, non?"
"Gladly so."
"Then we must make great haste to the Louvre."
"The Louvre?"
"Mais oui."
"I thought that was some sort of art museum, not a cop shop?"
"You thought vraiment, monsieur. But it is at the Louvre that Inspecteur Gaston Cluedeaux currently is.
"And it is there that we shall join him. Allez vite, mon ami!"
Roger Lapin, the foremost symbolatrist in the entire world, had not in fact waited a full hour for Cardinal Josef Lebowski in the bar of the Hôtel d'Angleterre at number 44 rue Jacob, but a mere forty minutes. He had been prepared to give the prelate a while longer - after all, Lebowski had told him to charge the drinks to the Vatican's tab, and the Côtes du Rhône which Lapin had finally settled upon after the bartender had refused his demands for some nice Lancers had been tasting better by the bottle - but then Lapin's table in the bar, and his privacy, had been intruded upon by two leggy cabaret dancers accompanied by a marmoset, all three of whom smelled strongly of canned tomato sauce. When it had become evident even to Lapin through his Côtes du Rhône-enhanced bonhomie that the redhead with the strand of spaghetti draped decorously over one ear was attempting to pick him up, he had made his apologies and departed for the sanctuary of his room, a bellhop following him respectfully bearing the couple of extra bottles Lapin had ordered to help him get over his jetlag and in the event proving a useful guide when the symbolatrist had attempted to use his plastic room key to open the elevator shaft.
But now Lapin was safely ensconced in room 1433, with its view out over the illuminated trottoirs of Paris's heart, where the traffic streamed like moving vehicles with their headlights on. The bellhop had left him without a corkscrew with which to attack the Côtes du Rhône and he'd wisely forborne from biting off the necks of the bottles for fear of cutting his lips. Now he was instead whacking into the litre of Peruvian double-strength brandy he'd bought at duty free in Newark Liberty International Airport using the credit card issued to him by the Symbolic Department at the University of Patterson, his employer.
Having located the slot for the Magic Fingers, he lay back on his luxurious king-size bed and sighed happily to himself.
Life was good.
A little blurred around the edges, but good.
Ever since Lapin had applied for his post at the University of Patterson, his rise to become the world's foremost and most distinguished symbolatrist had been nothing short of meteoric. (He wrinkled his eyebrows in momentary puzzlement as he reflected upon this: Surely meteors fall, not rise? Oh well, gulp, glug, to heck with it.) The irony was that he had started his professional career with different intentions entirely, serving in the percussion section of the Boston Pops before finding himself out of a job for reasons not unrelated to the cures he prescribed himself for jetlag, insomnia, colic, depression, flu, "just a touch of the colly-wobbles" and the like.
His explosive emulation of Ginger Baker during a performance of Debussy's L'Apres midi d'un faun had been the final straw so far as the orchestra's fuddy-duddy establishment administrators had been concerned, and so he'd found himself combing the job ads in the back of the Boston Globe. There he discovered that University of Patterson, with that cheerful insouciance towards spelling that characterizes modern American faith-based academia, had advertised for a full-time cymbalist . . . and the rest was history.
After he had assumed the professorship of the university's Symbolic Department, he had found the teaching burdens placed upon him to be light - quite drastically light, in fact - leaving him free to respond to the summonses he received from all over the world from ecclesiastics in search of an expert symbolatrist who might help them solve a variety of murder mysteries involving earth-shaking revelations about conspiracies related to the early Church. In some instances his efforts had been triumphantly successful, in others . . . well, it was perhaps best to forget about his interpretation of Stonehenge as a preliminary sketch for Salvador Dalí's The Great Masturbator. Which was more than the female staff at the university would do, with their persistent habit of taunting "Wanna show me your dolmen, mister?" and then running off giggling to lock themselves in the ladies' room.
His latest summons had come from Cardinal Josef Lebowski, a leading light of the Vatican beloved by tabloid journalists everywhere for his feisty extracurricular attempts to modernize the Catholic Church by example. He'd been widely tipped for the ultimate elevation before some wag at the Daily Mirror had headlined a story on the succession "THE FIRST THREE-IN-A-BED POPE?" - with the photographs to prove it - after which Lebowski's star had faded a trifle. Even so, he was widely regarded as still a force to be reckoned with in the inner sanctums of Vatican politics, and so Lapin had responded immediately on receiving the fax:
COME TO PARIS IMMEDIATELY ON MATTEUR OF UTMOST IMPORTANCE CONCERNING NATURE OF DEITY.
--JOE LEBOWSKI (Cardinal)
He'd responded immediately by searching all over the fax for a phone number or at least a return address, the instruction being rather vague. In the end he'd been rescued by the formidable Symbolic Department secretary, Miss Goldstein, who'd battled her way through the Vatican's computerized multiple-choice telephone answering service for an hour and a half until finally a crossed line had permitted her to speak to a human being. The janitor concerned, who'd been trying to put through his weekly phone call to his elderly mother in Athens, had ungraciously connected her to Lebowski's office, and so the appointment here at the Hôtel d'Angleterre had been set up.
But Lebowski had been a no-show.
Which didn't bother Lapin one iota.
Tomorrow would be soon enough to sort out whatever was bothering the "Boinking Bishop", as the Sun had catchily if inaccurately dubbed the man in a retaliatory attempt to claw back a few of the sales it had lost to the Mirror through the latter's first-strike headline.
Breep! Breep!
It was the telephone.
Lapin's near-comatose brain registered the fact with interest. After a few seconds, he wondered how he could get the phone to stop breeping at him. Aha! He could answer it - there was in idea! But first he had to find it . . .
After having picked up and said "Hello" into his electric shaver, his duty-free carton of cigarettes, the brandy bottle - difficult to achieve while simultaneously swallowing - and his shoe, he settled on the plastic object with the flashing red light that sat on his bedside table.
"Hello?"
The voice that sounded in his ear was breathy, voluptuous yet somehow virginal, and strongly perfumed by an accent he rapidly identified as French.
"Professeur Lapin?"
"C'est moi."
"Ah, vous parlez français?"
It was the very last question Lapin had been expecting, and it flustered him. "Good heavens, no! Why the blue blazes would you think that?"
The voice at the other end of the line was silent save for an insucking of breath.
Then it resumed.
"You are in very grave dangeur, Professeur Lapin. Very grave indeed."
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to offend you . . ."
"Non. I did not mean that. We shall your boorishness discuss later once we have in advance made for you an appointment with a dentiste. But I talk of far greater dangeur than merely incurring the wrath of a passionate Frenchwoman, if such a thing est possible."
"You mean . . .?"
"Yes, Professeur Lapin. There are those who would wish to see you - what is your English word for it? Resembling a doornail?"
"Dead?"
"That is it! The word I am seeking. Thank you, monsieur."
The caller hung up.
Feeling an unwelcome chill of sobriety start trickling through him, Lapin stared at the receiver in his hand. So someone wanted to kill him. He couldn't help feeling the caller might have been a little more specific. Kill him how? Kill him where? Most important of all, kill him when? And who was the mysterious someone, anyhow?
Come to that, who had the enigmatic caller herself been? From her voice his keenly honed symbolatrist intellect had been able to tell him that she was youthful, leggy, proud-bosomed and beautiful, probably an auburn-redhead, but nothing more. Oh, and French - mustn't forget that bit.
Perhaps she would call back?
He continued to stare at the receiver, waiting.
Finally he put the receiver back in its rest. So much for her calling back.
Instantly the phone breeped again.
He grabbed up the receiver.
"I 'ave been trying to contact you again, professeur, but your line has been - 'ow you say? - engage."
"Important international conference call," Lapin bluffed.
"As you will."
"Look . . . look, who are these murderous ill-wishers you mention?"
"I can tell you so little over the telephone. This line may be buggered. I will tell you more when I see you."
The evening was looking up. "When will that be?"
"As soon as it can be."
Standing by the bed, Lapin gazed down at his dishevelled self. After using the bathroom on arrival in his room he'd managed to catch his shirt-tail in his fly, so that now a scut of white cloth protruded obscenely. He was definitely not looking at his best.
"Give me a few minutes."
The voice giggled. An effervescent giggle. A completely enchanting giggle. "Oh, non, Professeur Lapin - I could not come to your room. Not unescorted. It would be . . . indecorous. I shall call you again later when I am able to fix up a rendezvous."
He glanced at the Hôtel d'Angleterre's cheap clock radio. 22.51. Rapidly converting from the twenty-four-hour system of timekeeping customarily used on the European continent, he translated this to be nearly nine o'clock.
"How much later?" he said.
"I do not know, Professeur Lapin." A little hiccuping sob came down the line. "I have much I must do tonight. Mon oncle - my uncle - he has been murdered!"
"Murdered?"
"Yes! It is as I say!"
"As in doornails?"
"He is, I am told, even deaderly than the nail, yes."
"But that's ghastly! How terrible for you! Are you in need of some . . . comforting?"
"Not over the telephone, Professeur Lapin. I am not that kind of fille."
"Then . . .?"
"Later, professeur," she sighed. "Later."
Giving him one final belt of erotically charged breathiness, she hung up once more. This time with finality.
He put the phone down.
She hadn't even given him her name!
Damn! The woman could turn up at any moment. She'd said she wouldn't come to his room, but that might have been just a cunning Gallic ploy designed to mislead any snoops listening in to what was undoubtedly a bugged line. He was in France, after all, where bugged lines were by all accounts de rigueur. Thank goodness that back in the States there was the Patriot Act to protect people from such privacy intrusions!
He began to struggle with his jammed zip, tearing at the cotton of the shirt-tail.
A cotton tail. Was there symbolatrism there? His mind was too frenzied - and, if he were honest with himself, still too filled with that damned Frog apology for wine - to decipher any symbolatrism there might be.
The phone breeped again.
She was on her way! He attempted to rip at the offending cloth with his teeth, but couldn't reach.
Snatching up the receiver with his free hand, he grunted, "I am not quite ready yet."
This time the breathy sigh was subtly . . . different.
"Professeur Lapin?" said a deep voice. Male.
"This is he."
"This is Alphonse, your waiter, from downstairs."
What the hell can the man want? Didn't I leave him a big enough tip? Now that I think of it, did I leave him a tip at all?
"There are some men 'ere to see you, professeur," continued Alphonse, oblivious to the thoughts lurching headlong through Lapin's mind. "They are from the Surete."
"Cops?"
"Mais oui."
Surely this was overreacting more than somewhat to a forgotten tip? On the other hand, these people were French - like so many Parisians - and everyone knew how hot-tempered and impetuous the French could be.
"What do they wish with me?" said Lapin nervously.
"They do not say." Alphonse paused. When he spoke again his voice was slightly muffled, as if he had put his hand over his mouth to shield his words from listeners in the room behind him. "But they 'ave told me they will come up to your room unless you come downstairs 'ere to the bar tout de suite."
"'Toot sweet'?"
"Immediatement."
Lapin drew in his breath and back his shoulders. "Tell them I'll be there in just a few minutes. I have to . . . ah . . . change my clothing."
Alphonse chuckled oleaginously and made some derogatory remark about vomissement that Lapin couldn't quite catch.
"Cinq minutes?" said the barman.
Lapin thought swiftly. Fifteen minutes should be plenty. "Yes - I mean, oui."
"Bon."
The line went dead.
#
Ten minutes later, his anonymous mystery caller completely forgotten, Roger Lapin was re-entering the bar at the Hôtel d'Angleterre that he had left a mere fifty-two minutes earlier. The bar was decorated around the walls with tiles of teak veneer that were each about 3.937 inches square. The tiles had been manufactured by the German company of Steiflehamp, who claimed that the teak had originally come from Africa, although they were unspecific as to the particular country of origin, far less the region. The beer tankards used in the bar bore no maker's mark, but each was designed to hold, for some reason, about twelve percent more than the US pint which Lapin was accustomed to drinking at home in Patterson. The bartender, Alphonse, had earlier declined to serve him his Côtes du Rhône in these tankards, instead insisting that Lapin use the bar's standard-issue wine glasses, which were imported from England, where they were manufactured by Waterford - of Waterford Crystal fame. Because the Hôtel d'Angleterre bought its wine glasses in bulk, the unit cost of them was . . .
"Professeur Lapin?"
The question jolted the symbolatrist out of his reverie.
"Cette me," he acknowledged fluently.
"My name is Escargau," said the uniformed flic who had hailed him. The man flashed his badge, with the words Bien Surete prominently visible.
"Pleased to meet you," said Lapin affably. "Care for a quick hair that bit the dog?"
"Ze hair that bit ze dog?"
"A snifter. A snort. A jigger of the old vino, or whatever it is you French cops drink."
Escargau smiled, gesturing toward his glum-faced colleague sitting at a round table in one of the bar's secluded, green-plush-lined alcoves. The table was made of Umbrian oak, and had been assembled from a flat-pack by . . .
"Zat depends," said Escargau in his remarkably good English, "on who is, 'ow you say, picking up the tab."
"This round's on the Vatican," said Lapin smugly.
Escargau's eyes darted quickly at those of his as-yet-unnamed colleague, and a message shot between them.
"Kindly order the drinks, professeur," said Escargau hastily, "and after you 'ave done zis we shall tell you some astonishing nouveaux - news. I will have a litre bottle of the '84 Beaujolais Villages, and mon ami will be well served likewise."
There was something going on here that Lapin couldn't understand, despite reflexive symbolatrist analysis, but he went ahead and ordered the drinks anyway. On Escargau's hastily whispered advice, he requested an absinthe for himself. Alphonse greasily took the orders, writing them down on a small but sweaty note pad, his shaved eyebrows rising at the mention of the absinthe.
Escargau - with difficulty, because his shoes kept coming off - led Lapin across to the table and introduced him to his stone-faced fellow cop.
"Pleased to meet you, Caporal Gaulois," said Lapin, settling himself comfortably on the alcove seat, which was upholstered in dark-green leatherette by Simmons of Marseilles, a company that proudly boasted in its publicity material to have been Upholsters by Appointment to no fewer than four European monarchs.
"Merde, un yanqui ouanqueur," responded the other man pleasantly enough.
"Now, what's this piece of news you're being so secretive about?" said Lapin to Escargau.
"Wait until the drinks are ici," said the flic enigmatically, rubbing the side of his nose with one forefinger. Gaulois merely grunted, targeting the nearest spittoon. The excessive designer stubble on the man's florid cheeks indicated that he had not shaved for at least a couple of days. If Lapin had met Gaulois in a dark alley he'd have turned and run as fast as his feet could carry him, and it was only a minor reassurance to know the man was a cop. Still, he supposed this was what French cops were like - probably it came from eating all that garlic.
He and Escargau talked of inconsequentialities, with Gaulois being a sort of expectoral presence in the background, until Alphonse brought the drinks. Once satisfied that the wine and absinthe had been successfully charged to the Vatican, Escargau adopted a grave face.
"The homme you came 'ere to meet, Professeur Lapin . . ." he began tentatively.
"Yes, Cardinal Lebowski - what of him?" The symbolatrist spoke absentmindedly, being fascinated by the smoking, oily liquid in the glass in front of him. Already it had stripped the skin off the olive and was making encroachments upon the structural integrity of the stick.
"He is," Escargau continued, "'ow you say? Resembling a doornail?"
Lapin, fittingly for one in Paris, had a sudden sense of dejà vu.
"Dead?" he said.
"That is it! The word I am seeking. Thank you, monsieur. 'E 'as turned up ses doigts de pied."
"But how?"
Escargau's voice dropped an octave. Alphonse, replacing the spittoon with a fresh one, swayed toward the table as he strained to hear.
"'E was . . . murdered!"
"Murdered?"
"Bien sur. Exactement. Vous avez hit the doornail droit sur la tete."
Lapin's mind raced. He'd seen enough Fox News documentaries to know that Paris was the most dangerous city in the world, filled as it was with snail-eating, syphilis-infested Frenchmen and their bestial libidos, all in search of an army to run away from - why, they'd even had the impertinence to claim that the most All-American of gourmet foods, Freedom Fries, were a French invention. Even so, it was horrific to be confronted by the evidence that Paris was indeed the Murder Capital of the World, as no less an authority than Bill O'Reilly had solemnly intoned, going on to demonstrate conclusively that this was because private assault weapons were relatively hard to obtain among the chicken-hearted French. If Lapin alone had a personal connection to two violent deaths in a single evening, that must mean there were hundreds of them going on in the city even as he sat here in the seemingly rather boring tranquillity of the Hôtel d'Angleterre bar!
"Murdered?" he repeated. "That's . . . that's terrible!"
Gaulois paused mid-spit to glare at him out of the corner of one rheumy eye. "Giton americain," he pronounced.
"Are you sure you know rien about it?" said Escargau, leaning forward earnestly, a sudden air of alertness about him.
"I have never met the boi . . . the good cardinal," declared Lapin. "I was to meet him this evening, but he never turned up."
"Are you certain about this?"
"Not unless he was dressed as a cabaret dancer. Two cabaret dancers. I could believe anything of Vatican vestments, of course, but not that Lebowski had such excellent legs. And other parts."
"Other parts?"
Lapin made a universally comprehensible infinity shape in the air with his hands.
"Ah, yes, I comprends," said Escargau, nodding. "We are both, 'ow you say, hommes of the monde, are we not, professeur? These people with the legs, they were wearing spectacles? But what is it that makes you sure, if you 'ad never met heem, that the Cardinal Lebowski, he too not wear the spectacles, hein?"
"That wasn't what I . . ."
Gaulois, midway through lighting up yet another eponymous cigarette, snickered. It was not a pretty sound.
"Tu as ta tete dans ton derriere," he said cryptically, seemingly addressing the butt end of his cigarette.
"I don't quite . . ." began Lapin.
Escargau flushed in embarrassment. "Pay my colleague no attention. 'E was merely remarking to me zat ze investigation is not much progress making, no? He zinks we should take you downtown to ze commissaire and use . . . physical methods to get ze trut' out of you."
Lapin blanched. "But surely you cannot seriously suspect I could be involved in this . . . this dastardly crime. And against a man of the cloth, no less. I tell you, I've never met Cardinal Lebowski in my life. I was looking forward to it. Besides he is - was - my ticket to free . . ."
He let his voice tail off. Perhaps this was not the most decorous time to start publicly worrying as to who was going to settle the bar tab.
Escargau cleared his throat and the dregs of his Beaujolais. "Zen why would the boink . . . ze good cardinal ask you for an assignation here in Paris if he had not ever met you?"
"I have no idea. His invitation came as a complete bolt from the blue." Lapin explained quickly about the enigmatic fax. "All I could tell was that it was a matter of the utmost urgency," he concluded, "and one does not lightly turn down a summons from someone so renowned and revered as Lebowski is - was."
"I zink you must tell all zis to Inspecteur Gaston Cluedeaux of the Surete," said Escargau after a long moment.
"I'll tell it to anyone you wish, so long as they believe me," proclaimed Lapin stoutly.
Another long moment's silence ensued, punctuated only by a sotto voce "Merde!" from Gaulois as for once he missed the spittoon.
"I cannot promise you l'inspecteur will believe you," said Escargau in a low, slow voice, "but tell him your fabric . . . tell him your story you must, non?"
"Gladly so."
"Then we must make great haste to the Louvre."
"The Louvre?"
"Mais oui."
"I thought that was some sort of art museum, not a cop shop?"
"You thought vraiment, monsieur. But it is at the Louvre that Inspecteur Gaston Cluedeaux currently is.
"And it is there that we shall join him. Allez vite, mon ami!"
