Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(88)

Jean-Yves glowered at him. “You don’t know?”

Rudi shook his head. “There are just the details of payments. And they were not easy to come by.”

“I am Charpentier,” said Jean-Yves. “How did you find me?”

“My father left me some... items,” Rudi said. “They led me to a trust fund of some nine hundred and seventy million dollars. I can only assume my father intended me to take his place as trustee.”

“How did you find me?” Jean-Yves asked again. “No one was supposed to be able to find me.”

“Well, I had a head start, with the details of the trust fund,” Rudi said reasonably. “It wasn’t easy, if that’s any consolation; my father laid quite a paper trail.”

“Yes,” said Jean-Yves. “Yes, I remember. Evil little bastard. I always said we shouldn’t have trusted him.”

“To be fair, you may have been the only people in my father’s life who were justified in trusting him. In his very long life.”

Jean-Yves looked at the two men. “And what about you?” he asked the white-haired one.

“Me?” said Forsyth in surprise.

“Yes, you. Is your father mixed up in this catastrophe somehow?”

“This man is under my protection,” said Rudi. “And when did this become a catastrophe, precisely?”

“When you turned up at my front door,” Jean-Yves said angrily. “No one was supposed to visit me in person. Ever. I’m supposed to be dead, for Christ’s sake.”

“Yes, since 1978,” said Rudi. “I read your obituary. That was one of the questions I was going to ask you.”

The Frenchman rubbed his eyes. “You have no idea what you’ve done, coming here like this.” He stood up. “You have to get me out of here. Right now.”

“Now wait a moment,” said Rudi.

“No.” Jean-Yves stomped over and poked Rudi in the chest. “I’ve spent decades hiding from them. And you just come waltzing in here with Christ only knows who following you. This is your responsibility.”

This was not going quite the way Rudi had envisaged it. He said. “I can relocate you, certainly, but not on the hoof. It’ll take time.”

“I don’t have any time. We have to go now.”

Rudi looked at Forsyth, who was following the conversation with a baffled expression. He said to the Frenchman, “But how can you trust us? I could have come into possession of these bona fides by any number of routes.”

Jean-Yves stomped across the room to the coat rack and grabbed his jacket. “Because if you have control of the money you wouldn’t be here asking me questions; you’d have killed me on the spot. Now let’s go.”





FORSYTH DROVE. RUDI told him to head in the direction of Radom, and then busied himself with his phone for an hour or so while the Frenchman sat beside him in the back of the car, fuming gently and occasionally shaking his head and uttering swear words in four different European languages.

“How old are you?” Rudi asked at one point, between flurries of texts and emails.

“I’m ninety-two years old this year, f*ck you,” Jean-Yves said.

“Your obituary says you were born in 1895. You were photographed at the Treaty of Versailles. You are not ninety-two years old. Look at me, please.” He took a photograph of the Frenchman with his phone. “Thank you.”

Jean-Yves snorted and crossed his arms and stared pointedly out of the window at the passing scenery while Rudi went back to sending and receiving messages.

It took them an hour and a half to reach Radom, and when they got there Rudi told Forsyth to turn west towards Cz?estochowa.

“How much do you know?”Jean-Yves asked.

“I know the Sarkisian Collective was a group of mathematicians and topologists and cartographers, which in certain circles is very significant,” Rudi told him. “I know you’re a lot older than you look, and that makes me suspect that you and your colleagues spent a long time in the Community. I know you have a lot of money, and I know you employed my father to look after it. I know you’re afraid of someone.”

The Frenchman sighed. “Did you find the others?”

“I found details of two other sets of disbursements, both of them discontinued.”

“So they’re both dead.”

“I don’t know. One of the disbursements was to a bank in Cannes, the other to a firm of attorneys in Montreal.”

“Roland,” said Jean-Yves. “Roland always said he wanted to visit Canada.”

“What I don’t know, Professor, is what you’ve done,” Rudi said.

“I don’t have to tell you that.”

“You do if you don’t want us to stop the car and leave you at the side of the road,” Rudi told him. “I have control of your money, Professor. What are you going to do without that?”

Jean-Yves rubbed his face. “I was born in Avignon,” he said. “My father was a patissier, my mother a seamstress. My mother was also a genius; if she’d been given the chance she would have been one of the most naturally talented mathematicians in Europe. I think she wanted to live the career she never had through me; she would have beaten me black and blue if I had wound up as a small-town pastry chef.”