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He handed me the phone. Now, the last time I’d heard from Sherman Wilkerson like this, out of the blue, there were four dead bodies on the beach below his house. I admit that there were nerves in my voice when I said, “Sherman?”
“What are you doing in Paris, Jack?” Wilkerson demanded.
“Visiting one of my fastest-growing offices.”
Sherman Wilkerson was a no-nonsense engineer who’d built a wildly successful industrial design company. By nature he dealt with facts and often understated his opinion of things. So I was surprised when he said in a shaky voice, “Maybe there is a God after all.”
“You’ve got a problem in Paris?” I asked.
“My only granddaughter, Kimberly. Kimberly Kopchinski,” Wilkerson replied. “I just got off the phone with her—first call in more than two years. She’s in an apartment outside Paris and says there are drug dealers hunting for her, trying to kill her. She sounded petrified, and begged me to send someone to save her. Then the line went dead and now I can’t reach her. Can you go make sure she’s safe? I’ve got the address.”
“Of course,” I said, signaling to Louis to pay the bill. “How do we find her?”
Wilkerson read me out an address.
I wrote it down and said, “Can you text me a photograph? And tell me about her? College student? Businesswoman?”
Louis laid down cash on the table and gave me the thumbs-up during a long pause.
“Sherman?” I said, standing. “Are you there?”
“I honestly don’t know what Kim’s been doing the past two years, and I know little of her life over the past five,” Wilkerson admitted as we left the café and Louis called for a car. “Her parents—my daughter, Pam, and her husband, Tim—they died in a boating accident six years ago.”
“I remember you telling me that,” I said. “Sad.”
“Very. Kim was in her senior year at USC, and back from a junior year in France, when it happened. She was as devastated as we were. Long story short, she inherited a bit of money along with a trust, and she turned wild child. She barely graduated. When she did, she went straight back to France. For a time I know she was working for the Cannes Film Festival organizers. We tried to stay in touch, but we heard from her less and less. Before today, there was a Christmas card from Monaco, and before that, a condolence card when my wife died.”
The car pulled up. Louis opened the door, and I climbed in, saying, “Don’t worry, Sherman. We’re on our way.”
“Thank you, Jack. You’ll call when you have her?”
“I will.”
“Protect her, Jack. I beg you,” Wilkerson said. “She’s my only grandchild—my only living relative, really.”
“You’ve got nothing to worry about,” I said, and hung up.
After filling Louis in on the conversation, I handed him the napkin on which I’d written the address. “Know it?”
Louis put his reading glasses on and studied it, and his nostrils flared as if he’d scented something foul. Then he looked up at me and with a definite edge in his voice said, “Look up trouble and danger in a French dictionary, and you get a picture of this place.”
Montfermeil, eastern suburbs of Paris
4:45 p.m.
Shortly after Louis Langlois and I spoke with Sherman Wilkerson we headed east out of Paris in workmen’s blue jumpsuits that featured the logo of a bogus plumbing company. Louis drove a Mia electric-powered delivery vehicle, which looked like a minivan back home, only much smaller. The tiny van had the same fake plumbing logo painted on the rear panels and back door.
Louis said he used the Mia and the plumbing disguises often during surveillance jobs, but tonig
ht we were using them to stay alive.
“The areas around the Bondy Forest have always been places of poverty, crime, and violence,” Louis explained. “You’ve read Les Misérables?”
“Years ago,” I said. “But I saw the movie recently.”
“Okay,” he said. “That scene where Jean Valjean meets Cosette getting water? The inn where the Thénardiers robbed their customers? All in Montfermeil. It looks different today, of course, but the dark spirit of the place continues. Montfermeil is like your Bronx was in the nineteen seventies, or South Central L.A. in the nineties: high unemployment, high crime rate, and lots of gangs, drug dealers, and violence. Add an angry Muslim and young immigrant population, and it’s unimaginable to me why Mademoiselle Kopchinski would take refuge in Les Bosquets—one of the worst housing projects in France.”
I shrugged. “We’ll find out, I guess. You’re sure about the plumbers’ gear being the right way to go?”
