Chapter 4
After leaving Smallville, Clark flew patrols over Vienna, Moscow, Berlin, Rome and finally Paris. When he'd moved to Europe he'd stopped focussing his time on any one city, hoping to distance Superman further from Clark Kent. He'd also starting handling mainly larger emergencies, reasoning that covering all of Europe meant that he had less time to be able to handle the more day to day stuff.
While he circled over Paris, he puzzled over the story. It had been months since he'd worked on a story that was actually challenging, and he missed it. The kind of reporting he'd been doing... it had its good points. You got to meet a lot of interesting people and travel the world.
But ... he'd travelled the world for years before moving to Metropolis. All the places he'd been as part of his current job ... he'd already been there. It just didn't have the excitement, the pull of investigative journalism – at least not for him.
Their current story ... they'd hit a dead end with Mathieu's background, and the research that Jimmy was doing for them might not pay off. What they needed was a new lead. Then it hit him.
The security cameras.
They hadn't checked to see if the security cameras at the Louvre had been working when the artworks had been stolen. He knew that the majority of the visible security cameras at the famous gallery were dummies, the same as they were in most museums that size. Security camera systems to cover all of the massive gallery were prohibitively expensive as they would require an enormous full time workforce to monitor them all. What museums the size and prestige of the Louvre predominantly relied on was containment security – trapping any would-be thieves and preventing them from escaping with their valuable haul.
He'd bet that the security cameras on entrances and exits would be real, however. Which meant that there might be a chance of him being able to get a hold of the tapes from the days in question.
Changing course, he hovered over the Louvre, high enough to avoid detection. Using his x ray vision, he scanned the enormous former palace and pinpointed the location of the security monitoring room. It would be easy for someone of his unique abilities to get into and out of the monitoring room without detection. All he needed was to be able to find the tape. If he could find it, he could take it back to the Planet, copy it, and return the original to the Louvre with no one the wiser.
He headed for the alleyway nearest his apartment block, hesitating as he passed near to Lois' hotel. She might not appreciate being left out of this particular excursion, but he didn't think he'd be able to get both of them past security and she didn't speak French well enough to be able to bluff her way out of trouble if something went wrong. Regretfully he left her hotel behind.
Touching down in the alley behind his apartment, he changed back into his Clark clothes and went inside.
He was out again in a matter of seconds, this time dressed in form fitting black clothes and knitted cap, the better for hiding in the shadows.
* * * * *
Moving faster than the human eye could see, Clark darted past the staff in the restorations department. It had proven easier to enter through the loading dock – just as the thieves had discovered themselves. Now came the difficult part. He had to traverse a section of the public gallery to get to his destination, and he couldn't take a chance that the security cameras he could see were fakes.
At this time of night, the public areas were lit with a low intensity red light, the better to protect the invaluable artworks from the damaging effects of normal lighting. Thankfully his vision was much more acute in low levels of light than a humans would be. He floated carefully a few inches off the floor in case of pressure sensors and made his way along the gallery, avoiding the security cameras as he went.
Up ahead there was a slight creak and a beam of light intruded on his sensitive vision. Quickly Clark levitated further, flattening himself to the roof and holding his breath as the guard passed beneath him. He super-sped the rest of the way to the monitoring room door and scanned through it, looking for at least one of the tapes he sought.
Locating one, but not the other, he shifted back into super speed. Moving at faster than detectable speeds, he was in and out of the room with the tape before the guard observing the monitors was aware of his presence.
Once he was safely away from the Louvre complex, Clark stripped off the knitted cap and ran a hand through his hair. He stuffed the cap into his pocket and continued on to the Planet office.
Once there, he borrowed one of the big video recorder units the newspaper owned and quickly ran a copy of the tape. He stashed the copy in the drawer of Lois' desk for safekeeping and went to return the original to its rightful home.
Properly tired for once from the long and eventful day, he finally made his way home to his tiny apartment and collapsed into bed.
* * * * *
Clark looked marginally better this morning, Lois noted. The dark circles under his eyes had receded somewhat and he'd actually greeted her with a smile when she'd opened the door of her hotel room at his knock. It was a pale imitation of the megawatt grin she'd seen so many times back in Metropolis, but it was a definite improvement on the grim Clark of yesterday. He'd even brought her a cup of excellent coffee and a chocolate croissant.
She opened the drawer of her desk in the Planet newsroom to deposit her purse and hotel key inside and was surprised to see a videotape. Lifting it out, she found it was unlabelled. Showing it to Clark, she asked
“Do you know anything about this?”
“Oh, that. I put that there last night.”
“What is it?”
He came closer, lowering his voice. “It's security camera footage from the Louvre loading dock. From the day the painting went missing.”
Her eyes widened. “How did you get this?”
He looked around. “I paid their security office a little ... visit.”
She gathered that his visit hadn't exactly been sanctioned – and she was willing to bet he'd employed a few of his superpowers to get the tape.
“You stole it?” she asked in amusement.
“Not exactly. I ... borrowed it. That's a copy. The original is right where they left it.”
“Did anyone see you?”
“He gave her a small smile. “Not unless their equipment is a lot more sensitive than it looks.”
She was right; he'd definitely used his powers. Not for the first time, she wondered how often he'd used them on stories in Metropolis. They would certainly give him – them – an edge when it came to investigations, especially the more covert ones they'd embarked on.
“Have you seen it yet?”
“Not yet.” He shook his head. “I figured I'd wait for you. It's your story.”
“Our story.”
Clark shook his head again. “I leave this afternoon, remember? I'm just helping while I'm here.”
“About that.” She leant back in her chair as far as she was able in the cramped confines. “Do you have to go to Vienna? If there's so many of you going?”
“Yes, I do. Look, we all do different things. Paul does economics. Pierre is our military expert. Arms talks are part of the summit, so Raoul is covering those. Michelle does trade and Alex is covering the single European currency negotiations.”
“What about you? What's your speciality?”
“Clark is our secret weapon.” Joe's voice came from behind her. “He's covering all the big sessions. With his language skills, he can translate all the statements and we can get the story out on the wire while the rest of the English speaking papers are still waiting on the official translation.”
“Oh.” She could see why Joe was anxious for Clark to be at the summit. Every editor she'd ever met thought in terms of scoops, and this one would be a major coup.
“I just came over to see how the story's going” Joe explained.
“Slowly” Clark put in. “But we've got a few leads we're chasing.”
“All right then.” He nodded and moved away.
Clark picked the tape up off Lois' desk. “Let's see if there's anything on this.”
He led the way to the conference room they'd used yesterday. There was a television with attached VCR on a stand in the corner. Clark went over to the unit and fed the videotape into the appropriate slot.
“Clark?”
“Yeah Lois?”
“Just how many languages do you speak?”
He turned from setting up the television.
“Fluently? Not counting dialects... About 50.”
“Fifty!”
“I can get by in more.” He went back to looking at the TV set.
She regarded him suspiciously. “How many more?”
“All together... 347. But a lot of those are dialects.”
Lois' mind boggled. She couldn't even name 347 languages, let alone speak them.
“Is that one of your powers?” she asked, deliberately keeping her voice low.
He shrugged. “I don't really know. I've always had an ear for languages, and I've travelled a lot. But I don't know if it's a super thing or not.”
He pushed a button on the front of the VCR and suddenly a picture appeared on the screen.
“There.”
He straightened up from his crouch and took a few steps back to stand next to her. “What time did Pascal say the painting was picked up?”
“Around lunchtime.”
“Right.” Judging by the time stamp on the screen, this particular tape started at around 9 o'clock in the morning. Clark used the remote to fast forward through the first couple of hours of tape. “I hope I got it all. I used the longest tape I could find to copy the original, but it might not have been enough.”
They watched at double speed in silence. Very little activity had been picked up by the camera, mainly the various workers entering and exiting the building on their various errands and breaks. Finally, a worker approached the camera and the feed went dark.
They looked at each other. “What was that?” Lois asked.
“Looks like he covered it with something.”
Clark fast forwarded the tape again. Just as suddenly, the feed resumed. All they could see was the slight figure of Pascal staring down the road to the loading dock and the very end of what might have been a white van in the distance.
Clark paused the tape. “There.” He pointed to what looked like a shadow at the edge of the screen.
“What?” Lois asked. “That shadow?”
“It's the worker that covered the camera.”
He looked at her. “You can't see it?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Clark, all I can see is a blur.”
He picked up the remote again, skipping the tape back at the slowest speed possible, then pointed at the screen again. “There. Just his profile, but that might be enough.”
Lois moved closer to the television and squinted slightly. There was a very blurry – to her – image of what might be a person's face in profile. “You might be able to see that, but I doubt it's good enough to give us a description.”
She turned. Clark had found a piece of printer paper and was sketching rapidly, his glasses halfway down his nose as he looked up at the screen and back down again.
She'd seen him with his glasses halfway down like that many times and never picked up on the significance of the action.
“Why do you do that?”
He looked up at her, his glasses still hanging off the tip of his nose. She stifled a giggle. He looked like an absent minded professor.
“Do what?”
“Pull your glasses down like that.”
“Oh.” Self consciously he slid them back up. “My vision powers won't work through them.”
She looked at him strangely. As Superman, she'd seen him look through – and burn through – materials much tougher than glass, so why would a simple pair of spectacles stop him?
“Why?”
“They're not normal glass- it's lead crystal glass.”
“Why lead crystal?”
“I can't see through lead. It was my parents' idea. When I first got my powers sometimes I'd have trouble controlling them. The lead crystal stopped me from using them when I didn't mean to.”
He stopped drawing and held up the sketch.
“Hopefully that's good enough for us to find the guy.”
* * * * *
They took the sketch to the Louvre. Heading to the loading dock where Clark had entered the night before, they were prevented from getting inside by an officious security guard who was checking each worker's identification.
By mutual agreement, they retreated to near the end of the road to the loading dock and tried to catch the attention of a passing worker.
It took time and some rapid, persuasive sounding French from Clark, but finally they found a worker who admitted knowing the man in the sketch.
Clark returned looking triumphant.
“Evan Williams”, he stated. “He's American, and should be here any moment.”
They tried to be as inconspicuous as possible, and soon their patience was rewarded.
“That's him” Lois pointed out.
Clark called out the man's name. He took one look at them and bolted.
“I hate it when they run” Lois commented as they took off after him.
They rounded the corner to see Williams disappear into an alleyway and followed more cautiously.
The alley was littered with detritus of various descriptions. Clark paused at the entrance and retrieved an old tyre. Taking careful aim, he threw it in Williams' direction. It landed around Williams' shoulders, pinning his arms and knocking him to the ground.
Lois stopped in amazement. It was one thing to know that Clark was Superman and another to see him performing superhuman tasks with casual ease. She'd known about his alter ego for months, but somehow seeing him in action made it more real for her in a way it hadn't been before.
She took a couple of deep breaths to steady herself. She couldn't let on to their quarry that there'd been anything unusual about his capture.
Clark stood the captive back on his feet. Close to, Lois realised that Williams was little more than a kid, a college junior at the oldest.
“We just want to ask you a couple of questions” he told Williams
“You cops?”
“No. We're reporters.” Clark pulled out his press pass and showed the younger man.
“I don't have to talk to you” Williams said belligerently.
Lois stepped forward. “No, you don't. But we found you on a security tape.” She looked at Clark. “Do you think the police might be interested in that tape?”
“I think so.”
She leant closer to the struggling man. “So here's the deal. You tell us what we want to know, and the tape disappears. If you don't talk to us, the tape ends up at the nearest police station.”
The youth hesitated.
Lois turned and started to walk away.
“Okay, okay.”
She took the few steps back to their quarry. “You'll talk?”
“Yeah. Just get this thing off me.”
Clark lifted the tyre off the smaller man. “Start talking” he advised.
“Look, I don't know much. This guy, he comes to me and says he'll pay me to cover the outside camera for half an hour between 11.30 and midday three days ago.”
“How much?”
“30000 francs.”
Clark let out a low whistle.
“Yeah. I dropped out of college and I'm out of money to get back home. I need the cash. So, I said I'd do it. $5000 just for covering a camera? It was easy money.”
“The guy who paid you. What did he look like?” Lois asked.
The younger man thought for a moment. “He was French. Tall, kind of heavy, you know? Blond hair, green eyes. Looked like he'd been n a few fights.”
“How tall?” Clark asked.
“Taller than you. Maybe six three, six four, somewhere around there.”
“How old?”
“Late forties, I'd guess. Listen, can I go now? I need this job.”
Clark put a hand on Williams' shoulder, stopping him from leaving.
“One more thing. Why'd you run from us?”
“Oh. I thought you were cops. I'm on a student visa, see. I'm not supposed to be working.”
Clark lifted his hand and let him go, then turned to Lois.
“Sound like anyone you know?” she asked.
He shook his head. “No. I think we might have hit another dead end.” He checked his watch. “I'm running out of time.”
* * * * *
Back at the office, Lois made a beeline for her desk. Logging on to the computer, she opened the email program. It was a long shot considering the time difference, but ...
“Yes” she exclaimed under her breath.
Clark leant on the edge of her desk.
“What is it?”
“Jimmy sent the registration list through.”
“He's in early” Clark commented.
“Or late.” They exchanged looks. It was unlike Jimmy to go home before Perry did, and they both knew the editor-in-chief's work ethic. It was entirely possible that neither Perry nor Jimmy had gone home.
Lois opened the file attached to Jimmy's email and sent it to the printer. A few moments later they heard the unmistakeable screech of a dot matrix printer coming to life.
“Hopefully we'll find something in that -” Clark's head snapped up and he looked off into the distance.
“Lois, I've gotta go.”
“What? Go where?”
Her questions fell on thin air. Clark was already gone.
Behind her, someone called out “Hey turn that up!”
She got up and went to see what the fuss was. On the television set mounted above the bullpen was a news program. A 'special report' banner scrolled along the bottom of the screen, and the picture showed a plethora of emergency vehicles on airport tarmac.
“What's going on?” she asked the person nearest to her.
“An aeroplane is trying to land at Orly without engines.”
There was a pause in the rapid flow of French from the television, then Lois caught the phrase “Superman est arrive.”
She breathed a sigh of relief. That must have been where Clark had gone.
Dimly she was aware of reporters leaving, rushing to get to the scene – and the story. At home she would be one of them, but now she stayed where she was. She watched as the jumbo jet came into view, the enormous bulk of the aircraft dwarfing the red and blue figure beneath its fuselage.
It was hard to reconcile the man that performed all these amazing feats with the kind, unassuming gentle man who'd worked beside her for two years. When she saw him do something like land an aeroplane – like he was doing now, she saw on the screen – she still felt a sense of awe. It was odd to think that it was done by the same man she'd shared pizza and Lethal Weapon movies with.
She watched as he settled the plane onto the tarmac and waved to the pilots, hidden behind their cockpit glass. Then he flew off, without talking to the assembled reporters – or exchanging greetings with the plane load of rescued passengers.
That was strange, she thought. When he'd had time in Metropolis, he'd always stayed long enough to at least check his rescuees were okay. He'd even had photos taken with many of them. Here, it was apparently a different story. The unusual grimness she'd noticed in Clark obviously extended to his behaviour as Superman.
Thoughtfully, she settled back down at her desk.
Clark had always been quick to laugh – a low chuckling sound that sent thrills up and down her spine – and even quicker to smile. But she'd been in Paris a full day and barely seen him smile. And she hadn't heard him laugh once. Lois had never seen a truly unhappy Clark. If he was that miserable, why didn't he just come home? Perry had never replaced him, so getting a job wouldn't be a problem.
“Excuse me.”
The voice from beside her snapped her out of her reverie. Next to her desk, a paunchy, balding reporter that Clark had pointed out as one of the other foreign correspondents was watching her, an enquiring look on his face.
“You are Lois, yes?” He had a slight French accent that reminded her of Claude. She suppressed a shiver.
“That's right.”
“I am Pierre. I am travelling to Vienna this afternoon with Clark and I wanted to see how he was getting to the airport. Do you know where he is?”
“Ah ... He went to pick up uh ... his dry cleaning. His dry cleaning, yes” she stumbled over the explanation.
Pierre gave her an odd look. “Okay. When he returns, can you tell him I am looking for him?”
“Sure.”
“Suddenly I know why all of his excuses are so flimsy”, she muttered under her breath. It was harder to think of them on the spot than she thought it would be, and she didn't even have the distraction of trying to get somewhere in a hurry. Lois collected the bulky printout from the printer and settled down to start reading through it, keeping one eye out for Clark's return.
When an hour had passed without him coming back she put down the stack of papers. She'd been unable to concentrate on them anyway, being too busy wondering where he was. The plane rescue hadn't taken that long.
Grabbing her purse out of the drawer, she left in search of a decent coffee.
Walking back towards the Planet building, she heard familiar footsteps fall into step beside her and turned her head.
“Hey. I was wondering where you'd gotten to.”
* * * * *
“Sorry. There was an explosion in Italy.”
It had been a bomb actually, one of the local terrorist groups protesting ... something ... by blowing up a cafe. Six people had died, and for what? His jaw clenched. Such a waste. The pointless loss of life both angered and frustrated him.
“Pierre was looking for you. He wanted to know how you're getting to the airport.”
He nodded absently, his mind still on the appalling scene in the bombed out cafe in Bologna.
She laid her hand on his arm, bringing him back to the present. “Clark? Is everything okay?”
“I'm fine, Lois.”
She surprised him by shaking her head. “No. No, you're not, Clark.” She paused. “Is this what you really want? Not having a place to call your own? Bouncing from country to country all the time? You're miserable here Clark, I can see it. And we miss you in Metropolis. I miss you.” She smiled at him. “Come home, Clark. I need my best friend back.”
He stopped in his tracks, his shoulders drooping. He wanted to go back so badly. He missed Metropolis, working at the Planet, missed Perry and Jimmy … but most of all he missed Lois, so much that it had become almost a physical ache.
But the ache was nowhere near as bad as the daily torture of spending almost every waking minute with her and not being able to express how he felt about her.
Ahead of him, Lois had realised he was no longer keeping pace with her and had turned back, her smile fading into a questioning look.
“Clark?”
“I can't, Lois.”
“Why not?”
“You want your best friend back. And I just can't do it any more. I can't go back to being just Clark, your friend and partner. I can't go back to pretending I'm not hopelessly in love with you.”
It was the first time he’d admitted that he loved her since before her engagement to Luthor. She stared at him in shock.
“Look, Lois, I know you don't feel the same way. And it's okay. I accepted that a long time ago.” He watched her uneasily. “Lois, say something.”
“Fine. You say you love me. Why should I believe you? You left, Clark.”
“Yes, I left. I left because it was too painful to stay! Do you have any idea what it's like, to work and spend time with the one person you've ever loved and know they don't feel the same way? To see you with Dan when I'd give anything – anything – to be in his shoes?” His shoulders sagged. “And- I hoped that if I left, maybe it would get easier. That maybe if I didn't see you every day I might start to get over you.”
“Has it worked?” she asked quietly.
He shook his head. “No.” He didn't think anything ever would.
“This is all my fault” she murmured.
He started to reassure her but she cut him off.
“When you asked me out, last year ... I panicked. I've never been in a relationship that hasn't been a federal disaster, Clark. And then you asked me out and I couldn't risk it. You're my best friend. Every guy I've ever gone out with, I've wound up hating them and I didn't want that to happen with you.” She took a deep breath. “So I said no and told myself that it'd be okay, you'd get over it and I'd get to keep my best friend. When you left, I took it as a sign that I was right ...”
Clark listened with a growing sense of anger and disbelief. All this ... Because she was scared? He'd been going through hell, because she'd panicked?
“Why couldn't you just tell me that?! I left my job, my friends and my home ... I've been miserable for 6 months, Lois!” He took a deep breath, willing himself to calm down. As quickly as it had risen, the spike of anger disappeared.
Softening his voice, he continued “I wish you had told me, Lois. I would've told you that I'm scared too.”
Her head came up. “But Clark, you're Su-” she cut herself off, looking around and lowering her voice. “You go into burning buildings and - and eat bombs and lift rockets into orbit!”
“That's different. Mayson told me once that Superman isn't heroic because the things he does don’t require him to risk anything. And she was right. I rescue people knowing that I won't get hurt. I don't risk anything by going in to burning buildings or – or catching aeroplanes. But asking you out? I was scared. No matter what you said, our relationship would change. You're the best friend I've ever had, Lois. I don't have many people that I can truly call a friend. And I knew I was risking that. Even if you had said yes, if you'd felt even a little of what I feel for you, that possibility scared me too. I've never let anyone in before, Lois. I've had to spend my whole life keeping everyone at arm’s length because of what I am. Letting anyone, even you, get that close is – is terrifying.”
He sighed. “I decided it was worth the risk, but it still took me a long time to work up the courage.” Awareness of what he'd been saying struck him and he gave a bitter, mirthless laugh.
“I've done it again.”
“Done what?” she asked, puzzled.
“I told myself I'd never do this again, that it hurts too much. But yet again I've laid myself out in front of you.” He smiled sadly. “That's the last time, Lois. I love you. I always have. But ...” He sighed again, his shoulders drooping. “I wish you hadn't come.”
Heavy hearted, he walked away, blocking out the sound of her calling his name. Ducking into a nearby alleyway, he changed into the Suit and took off in the direction of the airport. He'd come back for his luggage later. Right now he needed to get to Vienna.
