CHAPTER 15

The Oriflamme trooper at the door of the Count’s headquarters greeted me warmly this time, like a comrade-in-arms. He ushered me into the Count’s antechamber, bowing and scraping before me as if I were some foreign potentate. Even Pierre was attempting a smile, though his twitching right hand belied what he really wanted to do, which was to shoot me.

He was about to knock on the Count’s door when the man himself opened it, hugged me, and kissed me on the cheeks four times, twice on each. In France, you did four with close family or old friends. Judas kisses, I thought to myself.

The photographs on his desk had been pushed closer to my chair than before. The Count placed a photograph of Daphne in front of me, together with a copy of the ransom note from Buster that Robinson had already shown me and what looked like a summary of the ransom arrangements, typed out neatly. The ransom was to be left in a locker at the Gare du Nord. Beside my chair was a plain brown leather satchel. I picked it up; it weighed a ton.

“Miss Robinson’s ransom in banknotes and gold bullion?”

“Yes,” he replied. Pierre went to the rosewood bar, filled two snifters with Domfront calvados, and placed them before the Count and me. Pierre stood at attention, staring at a point a few feet above my head.

“Pierre will track Bartholomew down, aided by some of my crack troops.” He rang the handbell twice, and Pierre cut a smart about-face and marched out of the office. After the door clicked shut, the Count continued, “Pursuant to Bartholomew’s instructions”—he pointed to Buster’s scrawlings—“I should like you to deposit the bag in a locker in the central locker service at the Gare du Nord, and bring me its key.” He sipped at the calvados and said, “I can divulge to you that, at twelve thirty tomorrow afternoon, Miss Robinson will be sitting at a table in a private room in the La Pérouse Restaurant, awaiting you for lunch. I have paid in advance for the two of you to celebrate with champagne and caviar before you return her to her father.”

“How will Buster . . . Bartholomew collect the ransom?”

The Count sipped his calvados and then bore his hard blue eye into mine. “All is arranged.” The Count’s face reddened in anger.

“So, this has all been Bartholomew’s doing?” I asked in a cynical tone. “Mr. Count, I’ve known your protégé for a long time and, excuse me for saying it, but he doesn’t have the brains to write a ransom note or to ‘arrange’ anything.” I picked up Buster’s nearly illegible ransom note and continued, “I worked my backside off teaching him to write, and this is probably the best penmanship job he’s ever done. Somebody else must have come up with those ‘arrangements’ of his.”

“He’s more thanjust a protégé to me,” the Count shouted. “And he is not as stupid as you think! He has distinguished himself in my employ.”

The violence of the Count’s reaction made me suspect that he had manipulated Buster into fronting the ransom scheme from the outset. Now he was using me as a ransom delivery boy for some murky purpose. I wondered again if the ransom would end up in the Oriflamme coffers.

I didn’t really care anymore about who was behind the kidnapping or who ended up with the ransom, so long as I could bring Daphne back alive and unharmed. I would have fulfilled my contract with Robinson III and paid Tex O’Toole back for his friendship and for helping me out so much during and after the war. I stood up, looked the Count squarely in his eye, and said, “Can you guarantee that if I put the money in the locker and bring back the key, the girl will be at La Pérouse tomorrow? That I can take her to her father afterward? I don’t know what’s going on, but I’ll do what you ask if you swear . . . ”

He drilled his eye into my face as if boring into my soul.

“I did not believe all of those letters from the New Orleans priest”—he pretended to search for the name—“Father Gohegan, yes?” I nodded. “Until you came to my office last Wednesday and I saw you face to face.”

That enraged me, and I yelled, “You’re lying! Your man, Pierre, burned down the Waifs’ Home. You ordered him to kill Father Gohegan. Why?”

“You will come to understand in due course,” he said.

“Why?” I repeated, screaming at him again. His cold blue eye rested on me, then looked beyond me, as if at the distant past.

“The priest knew too much of our history. Yours and mine.”

I was the boy at the Waifs’ Home again, with Louis “Strawberry” Armstrong beside me, watching Father Gohegan burn to death after throwing me the handbell with the Count’s crest on it and begging me, with his last breath, to find the monster before me.

“That’s no reason to burn a man to death! To drive us out of the only home we’d ever known,” I screamed.

“But yes! Our history is ours to write. Because we are the d’Uribé-Lebrun. You know, when you were born, we were masters of the richest sugar plantations in Louisiana.”

I was horrified that he had said “we,” and my face showed it.

He laughed. “Yes, my dear Brown, ‘we.’ You are my son. The last of my d’Uribé-Lebrun lineage.”

“You used my mother like a whore, a slave.”

The Count held up his hands, trying to calm me down. “She was in no way a slave, I can assure you. On the contrary. I helped her in many ways, even after her death.”

I lunged for him then, and he coolly whipped out a gold-colored pistol and motioned for me to sit down, which I did. He placed the gun in front of him, as if daring me to go for it.

“I left New Orleans because I discovered that I loved France more than I could love any person. Your mother is the only woman I have ever loved with all of my heart.”

“Don’t talk that nonsense to me. You ran back to France because my mother wasn’t white enough for you. Look. I’ll do what you want if you promise that the girl will be at La Pérouse tomorrow. Then it’s over. I don’t want you or your men to come anywhere near me again. ’Cause if you or they do, you’re going to get hurt, real bad.” I took out my Colt and put it on the table in front of me. “You want war, you’ll get it. I’ve got a lot of friends that would love to take you and your Nazis on. Just one question, though, what are you after? You want to be a new Napoleon? Dictator of France? King, Emperor? What do you want, man?”

The Count picked up his pistol, stood up, and walked past the gallery of ancestors peering down from the walls. He twirled around and said, solemnly, “I want to recognize you. With your real name, which is Charles-Emmanuel d’Uribé-Lebrun. I want that, nothing more.”

I holstered my gun, put my Homburg back on, and hefted the brown leather satchel, so that I could swing it over my shoulder.

“Father Gohegan named me Urby Brown, and that’s final.”

“Urby Brown,” he said, disdainfully. “That’s not your real name, nor is America your real country.” He glared at me, snarling and defiant. “We are the last of the d’Uribé-Lebrun. Only you will live on after me to carry us forward.”

“Forward?” I asked, pointing at the portraits on the walls and then picking up the gold-framed photograph of the Count and Adolf Hitler. “Forward to them, to him?”

“When Maréchal Pétain takes power, he will restore our family, and France, to their rightful place. He will grant you French nationality immediately. Hitler is only one stepping stone to our future.”

I made my way toward the door. “Mister, I’m stepping out of that future right now.”

“You have no choice. It’s a matter of blood.”

“You want my ‘tainted’ blood in your future?”

“Those who know that have been or will be liquidated.”

“Pierre knows, my friends know. You gonna rub them all out?”

“Naturally,” the Count replied, indifferently.

The man was a dangerous lunatic. I had to leave now or do him serious harm.

“I’ll get the locker key back to you in an hour. I won’t be bringing it back, though. I hope never to set foot here again. The man with the key will be a big fellow named Jones. Think of him as an hors-d’oeuvre to a feast of pain for you if Daphne isn’t at La Pérouse restaurant tomorrow at twelve thirty in the afternoon sharp.”

Lonny Jones delivered the locker key to the Count two hours later, he told me. Five of the biggest Oriflamme men escorted him to the Count’s office as Lonny chewed away at his toothpick, eyeballing them one by one. When the office door cracked opened, Lonny said he just threw the key inside, spun on his heels, and sashayed along the hallway, hawking loudly and spitting on the fine Persian carpet on his way out the front door. Lonny said, “Don’t worry none, brother Urby. Them snail-chompers wants trouble, my ‘peoples’ slice them up like bacon.”