Underground L' autre Métro: SEVEN PARIS MYSTERIES, #6

By Peggy Kopman-Owens

Cover Art © Roger Kopman. Who knew? Spies read! Best friends will discover some secrets should remain hidden… underground. Ignoring his best friend's warning to stay out of Paris, mystery writer Jamie Litton leaves the Côte d'Azur and returns to Paris to investigate yet another unexpected death and a mystery evolving at Maxmillian's apartment. While Jamie is in Paris learning the secrets of his eclectic Café Society, best friend Ben Foulof goes it alone in South America to investigate rumors surrounding a murder in the Paris antique store L' Indice. Was Claude, a German collaborator or a hero? The young French doctor disappeared from Paris at the end of WWII, but could his fading path to Brazil, or the artwork in the attic, condemn him? 

• Language: English
• Publisher: PKOBOOKS LLC
• Release date: Mar 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215181157

Peggy Kopman-Owens

Peggy Kopman-Owens writes suspenseful fiction, gentle mysteries with touches of romance that inspire readers to search for their passports. Her literary properties, reflecting her work in 35 countries, include three series set in Paris. SIMON PENNINGTON MYSTERIES, MRS. DUCHESNEY MYSTERIES, and SEVEN PARIS MYSTERIES now available in eBook, paperback, hardcover, and / or audiobook. (author's photo: © Michael D. Owens)  Cover Art © Roger Kopman. Online gallery at KOPMANPHOTOS.com "My mother wrote stories and songs, becoming my inspiration, teaching that passion and patience are inseparable partners. From my father and mother, both musicians who loved to travel, I learned to embrace a world full of diversity and endless possibilities. I can never thank them enough for bestowing this lovingly unselfish gift of intellectual freedom."

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Chapter 1

Singapore Dali

Paris was dangerous. My best friend was, by nature, too vulnerable. It was best that he had moved away from Paris and to the Mediterranean where, if necessary, I could rescue him... again.

BEN WENT OVER JAMIE’S words in his head, then, laughed softly. Who was saving whom in Jamie’s newest manuscript? Ben thought he had been very convincing, explaining why Jamie should move away from Paris.

L’ Indice along with its hidden treasures in the attic and the cellar needed to remain an unsolved mystery. Living above the antique store, Jamie was bound-to-be targeted by someone. Ben could not tell him all of the reasons why. He had been sworn to secrecy. If Jamie discovered the secret on his own, that would be different. Ben hoped, with his best friend out of Paris, it would never happen. Some stories were meant to stay in the past.

Ben was more concerned about the changes Paris had made in Jamie’s life. In Montmartre, the impossible had happened. The shy mystery writer had become a social creature, one far too involved in the lives of his café society friends. In New York, in their early days, Ben would have never suspected it of his nearly recluse roommate. Jamie’s self-imposed isolation in Manhattan had provided a bubble of protection, a lack of interference for both of them. When Jamie burst out of that bubble in Paris, he had invited outsiders. Possibly, someone among his friends had become a threat.

It wasn’t that Jamie couldn’t be trusted or that, most of his friends could not be trusted. Rather, it was that Jamie’s life in Paris was no longer private. His books had become too popular. Too many readers were now interested in the bestselling mystery writer’s private life. Having been educated as a journalist, Ben knew that no person in Jamie’s life was beyond reach of a good investigative reporter, particularly one who might have a sponsor with deep pockets. Jamie’s success had opened the door. The notoriety of the antique store L’ Indice, above which Jamie had lived for only a few months, with its murders and the international intrigue generated only magnified the public’s curiosity.

While Jamie’s publisher’ might have delighted in the unexpected publicity, Ben did not. No. his friend needed to be reminded that his past was Ben’s past. Friends, even those with the best intentions, might be careless, talk too much. There were those in the world who would trade their best friend for fifteen minutes of fame and pocket the change. While the majority of Europeans seemed unaffected by this phenomena attributed primarily to the American culture, Ben knew that there was always an errant ego and a bank account somewhere in need of plumping up. Who could say – who among Jamie’s café society was immune?

Perhaps, as Ben had suggested, Jamie already had revealed a morsel to his friends about him, the real Ben, not the fictional character whom Jamie persisted writing about in his novels. Perhaps, one of his friends was paying too much attention to a clue, looking for more detail, listening to Jamie’s every word. Jamie had always been too honest for his own good. That, paired with the fact that he had also become a gossip, a characterization Ben would have never assigned to his shy classmate from college, only heightened Ben’s concern. Jamie too enthralled with the attention that his gossip could garner among his friends could not see danger coming at him, not in the way an experienced man of the world could.

The ragged history of Jamie’s love life alone was proof enough. On that point, even Jamie would have to agree, because his past included a litany of failures with women and this was no secret. In fact, it had become the fodder of many late nights that had ended with him drowning his sorrows in alcohol. Ben on many of those nights had stepped in to see him home safely, or if already home, to keep him from falling off the face of the Earth. In love, Jamie had always been a drama queen. Ben would have never tolerated it from anyone else, but somehow his best friend, for better or worse, deserved his efforts. After all, who else had witnessed fully Ben’s darker side? Fair was fair.

Years earlier, when Ben life’s expanded past Manhattan, its acceleration had left Jamie in the dust. Ben discovered that the world of endless possibilities, only dreamed of in college, could include also nightmares. He began living them on assignment overseas, but he could not share them with Jamie. This frail soul did not have the stomach for the kind of challenges that Ben faced. 

Jamie had never experienced the real world, the one Ben had known, living in the shadows, hiding underground, changing identities. It was not Jamie’s fault. He just was the way he was, a natural innocent who saw the world through the romantic pink lens of a fiction writer. To him, Paris would always be La Vie en Rose and everyone in it was of noble heart. He had remade the world on paper, so that it could be whatever he wanted it to be, full of love and romance or mystery and intrigue.

Ben accepted that his best friend would always remain a novice, afraid of his own shadow, sometimes afraid even of those he created on paper. And Jamie would never fully understand Ben’s world of cloak and dagger, but it was ok, if he wrote about it. In fact, Ben had insisted. It was helping to keep him alive and his enemies confused and at bay. In many ways, for many reasons, Ben did not want his friend to change.

Jamie’s innocence represented their youth, a time when the world seemed theirs alone to explore. Visiting Jamie occasionally, albeit rarely, exchanging secret messages, reading his manuscripts before they were published, kept the possibility alive. It was this impossible possibility, that Ben could return home to a place and time that existed before he had agreed to become a spy, before he decided to quit, and before someone was assigned to find and kill him, that held them together, forever bonded in heart and mind. Jamie kept alive the hope that the world he invented, romantic, idealistic, and recorded on the pages of a book, could become the real world, again. ... and that the one Ben was forced to live, always on the run, trying to stay one step ahead of his enemies, was only a nightmare.  

Perhaps, one day, he would wake up in Jamie’s world. 

Had he asked too much of Jamie? To leave his daughter behind in Paris? To leave the city he loved? To leave his friends, his café society?

For a split second, Ben questioned his own motives. He rarely did. Could it possibly be that jealousy over this life his best friend enjoyed without him had motivated his decision? Ben entertained the thought only briefly, before casting it aside. He was not that callous. Rationalizing his own selfish demands, he was convinced that he only wanted Jamie to be safe and happy, but mostly...safe.

Jamie had been his best friend since college. There was no one else on the face of the Earth, who knew so much about him. If their situations were reversed, and Jamie had imposed such restrictions on him, would he have been so gracious? No, Ben answered his own question. He had never bent to someone else’s will. It was both his strength and his weakness, but he would never give up his freedom, no matter who asked. He was admittedly a control freak. Jamie was far from that and this was why their friendship had survived. 

Ok. So, he felt a little guilty, but there were worse things he had done, acts for which he should feel genuine remorse. However, strangely, for most he did not. His training wouldn’t let him. This uncomfortable feeling, this sense of moral dilemma would pass because he hated it. He hated being emotionally sucked into drama and would do almost anything to avoid feelings of ... to avoid feeling. Period. His happier side quickly rebounded. Jamie had willingly agreed to leave Paris. No one had twisted his arm. Besides ... wasn’t it Jamie, who had begun complaining about his beloved city of light with its gray skies, his cold apartment, and inescapable dog poop?

No, Jamie was where he needed to be. Away from Paris, away from his friends, he only had to wait for Jamie’s natural paranoia to kick in and minimize the risk of exposing them both to danger. Ben did not have to impose restrictions upon him. There were worse fates than being exiled to the south of France. Once they had agreed, Jamie seemed content, reassuring his friend that he loved the Côte d’Azur. Whether or not it was true, this gesture was not lost on Ben. Jamie had acted as if his friend needed reassurance that leaving Paris was a good idea. Change was difficult at best for Jamie, but in the words, If it’s this important to you... Ben had heard a magnanimous confirmation of their friendship. Then, again, he was sending Jamie to the Côte d’Azur, not the jungles of Central America. How much was that to ask of someone?

Ben picked up his mojito, and wondered how Jamie had spent the last few years, adjusting to his new environment. Certainly, Ben was having no problems adjusting to his, but, at this particular moment, a cold apartment sounded good. The heat here was insufferable. Steady rain dripping off the palm fronds pooled beneath his feet as he watched it roll in narrow streams towards the cracks in the floor. In similar fashion, the sweat was dripping down his back and falling onto the red Saltillo tiles, to merge with the tiny rivers of rain. The heavy wet heat permeated everything as he struggled to catch a deep breath, feeling as though the insides of his lungs, too, were sweating.

The tropical forest with its visible heat waves, rising up like fingers from the Earth, begged for relief from the low-hanging ceiling of gray. The distant scene was familiar after all these weeks, as too was the rain with its arrival becoming an afternoon ritual celebrated with rounds of rum-soaked sugar cane, tequila, and limes. Today was no exception as the bar was starting to fill with the usual faces. At the beginning of the week, they were new. By the end of the week, he had memorized each of their faces. It was an old habit. Each afternoon, Ben sat in his corner of the open sided shoreline bar, silently, if reluctantly sharing his space with others who managed to drag themselves off the beach in anticipation of yet another spectacular sunset.

The thick, muggy air reminded him of long ago, when he was lost outside a small village high in the hills of Malaysia. There on a difficult assignment, he had climbed a tree to gain perspective and to check his coordinates. Perched above a low-hanging cloud caught between Heaven and Earth, rain below, sun above, he watched for signs of anyone approaching, hoping it was the correct rendezvous spot. There, too, the heat had been wet, clinging, smothering his every breath, but not his fear. Fear had kept him alive on several occasions. He did not resist it, but rather, as he had been taught in training, used it to heighten his awareness of sounds, smells, movement.

Fear was good. Fear was a friend. They had been right. Fear was the friend who gave you a heads up, the second or two to move before the explosion, before the sound of the gun, before you see the look in their eyes. Remember, they said.

Ben remembered the moment as though it were yesterday. He remembered too well the uneasy feeling that he had missed the arranged transfer hour and that someone’s life might be lost because of his error in calculating the distance he had walked. He remembered his relief when he could see two men approaching below in the jungle - one holding an automatic weapon, the other staggering half-dead with wrists and ankles locked in rusty cuffs. He could still see the dark green emeralds sparkle in the light, each a galaxy unto itself, as he bartered for exchange of the political prisoner. It would be his first big score.

Something bit his leg. Ben glanced down noticing that even the bugs on the ground had stopped moving, as if the burden of crawling had become too much for them. One fell over on its side and he hoped that it was the one that had bit him. Perhaps, he had just witnessed its death. He bent down and touched it. It did not move, not even as he flicked it into the high grass.

Insects, less enchanting than the huge butterflies on the eco-tour brochures also grew to monstrous proportions in this environment. He avoided stepping on them as they, too, held a respected place in the lifecycle of the planet. However, he hated their blistering bites and those of the other little winged bastards who managed to make it under his mosquito netting at night. His legs were covered with scores of red lumps because, when he sat in the bar, and later, when he tried to sleep, human flesh became an all too attractive entrée for these gargantuan bloodsuckers. It was one more reason to stay on the water as long as possible every day.

He took another sip of his drink, before opening the small, plain brown envelope, which Jamie had handed to him just before he sailed away from Antibes. The envelope was torn, and covered in oily stains, but inside it held a treasure, a link with an imaginary world thousands of miles away, all captured on Jamie’s flash drive. Ben put down his drink, pulled a small flat device from his pocket, and plugged in the tiny black thumb. He reread a passage of Jamie’s last manuscript, then, stopped. He had reread it a hundred times, each time knowing that it should be the last time and he should purge the data. Somehow, he couldn’t.

It had been his only remaining connection with Jamie. It might be his last. For that reason alone, he had risked it being discovered among his few possessions. Perhaps, his ego enjoyed reading the description Jamie had created. His best friend had always managed to make him appear bigger than life on the pages of his books. It was a kick to imagine that he could really become that character.

In Singapore, Ben lived a low-profile existence in a high-profile business. Art collectors were often celebrities and power brokers, but Ben made a point of meeting with them in the privacy of his gallery office, never in public venues, never where photographers gathered. Ben convinced his clients, that it was better for everyone, especially for those wishing to avoid publicity and extravagant taxes. He preferred to negotiate behind closed doors, his closed doors.

They did not know that their every word was being captured, as voice recognition and iris images were extraordinarily valuable barter on the underground market. These keys to high-technology corporate security systems rewarded Ben with far better income than the sale of stolen art. The business had become so profitable, as to tempt Ben to stay in Singapore, permanently. There were worse places to die.

IT WAS TIME. BEN TOOK a long drink, then, wondered, Did Jamie really mean to write that? ... worse places to die? Ben had given Jamie the changes he had wanted in the book, when they were still together in Antibes. That was before Jamie gave him the flash drive with the final draft on it. Why had Jamie added this passage? It seemed overkill. The unspoken words made Ben mutter under his breath, Jamie." He picked up his drink, again, and joined the others now mesmerized by the imminent setting of the sun marking yet another day of doing nothing in celebratory style.

The sky was ablaze with hot pinks and brilliant oranges as the sun became a drop of red blood about to disappear below the horizon. The coastline was beautiful this time of day, primeval, expectant of dinosaurs lumbering across its shoreline. Ben forgot Jamie’s words, content to watch the last of the afternoon’s rainstorm walk across the water and dissolve into the purple haze of the mountains. Years earlier, he had started a new game giving each sunset a rating. On a scale of one to seven, today’s was a five. Better than the one at Witches Rock, but not as brilliant as several at Playa Hermosa. The ocean waves, which had been thunderous earlier in the day, were settling down for the night, as were the surfers who had ignored the storm, content to ride through the torrential rain. Earlier in the day, he had been one of them.

The day melted away with the rain... drip, drip, drip, from the thatched roof above his head. The chair rail was perfect for rubbing sand off his feet. On the water, he had felt 20 again, but now he was exhausted, sunburned. On the water, he could ignore the gray hair and the wrinkles. Only at the end of the day, when his muscles began to ache, did he feel his age. Out there on a board, it did not matter that one leg was shorter. The scars left from the explosion in the Middle East were not noticed. Only back on land, did the world expect an explanation as to who he was and how it had happened. He had told so many lies over the years... jeep collision, rock-climbing, shark attack... that he sometimes forgot which story was the latest. Sometimes, he wondered who he had become.

He tossed off the negative thoughts and laughed louder. No one in the bar noticed as he muttered that he should have been the one to become the bestselling author, not Jamie. His imagination was better. He used it more often. He muffled, this time, a sarcastic laugh.

Ben caught the eye of the bartender, then, ordered another mojito with the catch of the day. It didn’t matter what it was. The bar only served two things, booze, and fish. He didn’t care how old the booze was, only how fresh the fish. He regretted that he would be leaving soon, as the bar had become a second home. His room, one of three rented from another surfer down the road about 300 meters, was in a run-down shack hidden in the thick underbrush. It was convenient and cheap. He shared the floor with lizards, the roof with monkeys, and a common bathroom with three other beach bums.

However, at night, when he could not sleep or the guy in the next room got lucky, and noisy, he could walk to this bar that never closed. The path was down a long narrow path in the dark, but he had found it often, returning before dawn to sleep until the heat of the day woke him. Each day began and ended on the surf. Every day had become like the day before. Locals expected to see him at his usual table every afternoon, and later, in the corner of the bar when he could not sleep. In his complacency, he was committing a fatal error by becoming predictable.

Ben looked around, taking mental pictures and making memories to take with him. The lifestyle, the beach, even the bar reminded him of Corfu, with only a few exceptions. One was the coati or pizote, tropical white-faced raccoons, who wandered freely everywhere and who were not at all reluctant to grabbing dinner right off your plate, when you weren’t looking. Some were cute and friendly, others far too aggressive to be entertained as dinner guests.

The bartender, using a broom as his weapon, shooed the latest group, three adults, and four babies, away for a third time. Ben laughed aloud, again. This time, people seated nearby did notice. Was he drunk? He saw the question in their eyes, cleared his throat and lowered his head to stare into his glass. To them, he imagined that he seemed excruciatingly old. He caught a murky reflection of himself in his glass, confirming what he imagined. An old man was looking back. He was not yet 50, yet he looked much older, as if his years on the run had caught up with him. Life on the water, too, had its price.

Perhaps, it was these young 20-something backpackers, who had found their way here from all over the world and who gathered on the beach every night, bringing back the memories of Greece. At night, he could see their bonfires from his room. He could hear their music, their laughter. It fueled his jealousy of their youth, of the years they had left to enjoy and those he did not. In his room, he could lay in the dark and remember Ryka and the taverna Υπόσχεση. Looking through his window toward at the beach, listening to the waves, he could imagine that it was Pelekas, and that in the next room, Ryka was preparing to join him in bed.   

The rain stopped as suddenly as it had started and ended Ben’s daydreams. It would return tomorrow afternoon, as this was the rainy season. He could set his watch by its arrival. He felt guilty that he had allowed himself to become so predictable. The weeks had turned into months here, as he had lazily followed the surf down the coast from Tamarindo in the north to Mal Pais in the south. He preferred the southern Puntarenas, a preference now based upon real knowledge of the Pacific coastline. He hadn’t planned on staying as long as he had, but he had fallen under Costa Rica’s spell. He had been warned, but he could not fight its seduction. For anyone who wanted to throw his watch away, along with his past, this was the place.

Central America held the dream of every surfer half his age, a place to catch the perfect wave. He had heard about it, read about it, before he consciously made it part of his quest, traveling from one beach to another. At Pavones, his patience was finally rewarded. The timing of his arrival, the season, and the weather, all converged at Pavones to give him an once-in-a-lifetime ride, a three, possibly four-minute curl. The memory of it still thrilled him, making it that much harder to contemplate leaving. However, he had to remember that he was on a journey.

Pavones, like Mal Pais, was only a stop along the way, not his final destination. When he first stumbled upon this area, he was on his way out of the country, heading south and less than a day’s drive from Panamá’s border. Once he saw this strip of beach, he chose to stay longer because it felt safe, isolated. It had required a four-wheel drive to reach it, and based upon the number of times his jeep had been stuck in the mud, horses might have been a better choice. The locals had already settled upon that idea and, in fact, horses were ridden along narrow trails to the beach every morning, where they were used to gather seaweed. This low-tech, four-legged form of transportation had met the needs of the locals for centuries and served a more modern purpose, when rented to tourists during high season.

The locals were comfortable with what the tourists perceived as a primitive lack of modern conveniences. No cell service. No internet. No television. This also meant there was less interference from government officials, a benefit not lost on Ben or others in this beach community, who hoped