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“How’s that?” Louis asked.
“Taggers are like most artists. They start out copying others. Once they’ve mastered their techniques, they start introducing their own methods,” she said.
“So your old student remembered someone who copied Zee Pac-Man?”
“Someone who was once a suspect in his murder.”
“Pac-Man’s?” Louis asked.
“Correct,” she said.
“Name?” I asked.
“Piggott,” she said. “Paul Piggott, but he calls himself Epée, like the dueling sword. Besides graffiti, he’s obsessed with parkour.”
Louis scribbled on a pad of paper and showed it to me.
“I know Epée,” his note read. “Arrested his father once.”
“Does that help?” Michele asked over the speaker.
“Most definitely,” I said. “In fact, I owe you dinner before I leave Paris.”
“I’d like that, Jack,” she said. “Very much.”
Chapter 80
20th Arrondissement
5:15 p.m.
LOUIS AND I slid into seats outside a café on the Rue de Bagnolet, where we could see the front door of an apartment building that had seen much better days. Louis had pulled strings in France’s motor vehicles department and gotten the address for twenty-eight-year-old Paul Piggott, a.k.a. Epée.
We also had a three-year-old driver’s license photograph and Epée’s rap sheet, which featured multiple counts of destruction of property for putting up graffiti art. The only felony Piggott had ever been convicted of was assault and battery five years before. He had spent eight months in jail for the offense, and had been clean ever since.
We had Petitjean and Vans digging into his background while we staked out his apartment.
“He doesn’t look like your average Islamic militant,” I said, studying the driver’s license photo.
“They come in many shapes, shades, and sizes,” Louis said. “But you know, come to think of it, his father was…merde! There he is!”
I twisted in my chair and saw Piggott turn away from the door to his apartment building. Long, lean, and athletic, he wore a black warm-up suit, gym shoes, and a black-and-white checked scarf around his neck. A black messenger bag was slung across his chest, and he snugged it to his hip as he walked east.
“Let’s get to it,” Louis said.
We bolted from the café. Louis crossed the street. I paralleled him on my side. When Louis was less than twenty feet from Piggott, he called, “Hey, Paul. How’s your old man doing?”
Still moving, Epée glanced over his shoulder.
“Remember me?” Loui
s said.
Piggott seemed to remember Louis all right. He swiveled and took off like a four-hundred-meter sprinter, long legs and arms pumping as he accelerated, with Louis and me in pursuit.
True to his nickname, Epée had uncanny reflexes and remarkable evasive instincts. He parried and cut through the late-day crowd as if he’d memorized every move, and we almost immediately started to lose ground. Then I jumped out into the street and ran between the parked cars and oncoming traffic.
With no one to avoid, I was catching up to him when he took a hard left onto Cité Aubry, where he left the sidewalk and ran up the middle of the residential street. Where the paved way veered left, he continued straight ahead on a cobblestone street called Villa Riberolle.
