Well, something big is on fire....

The second fire engine in a row has just raced past my apartment building in the last 10 minutes.

fiction

"So, what are we looking for again?" Simmons asked. He had a first name. I just didn't care enough about him to remember it right now.
"Have you ever heard of a Jean-Phillipe Renard?"
"No."
"That's not surprising." I opened another box of old books and started looking through them. "He was a French doctor back in the mid 1700s. He died shortly before the French Revolution got into full swing, and his journals were supposed to have been donated to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France by a cousin of his."
"That doesn't explain why we broke in here."
"We didn't break in. We just didn't leave when we were supposed to. Technically, we'll be breaking out, though."
"It still doesn't explain it."

I looked over at Simmons. I had no idea why I had been saddled with him. Okay, I did tend to bend the rules a lot, but come on. There should be a limit to the amount of grief I get from the bosses.
"Remember that archive in Rome six months ago?"
"Yeah, I guess. It was a lot dustier then this. But you never said what you found there."
"You should learn to read Latin. You'd have found it very interesting. Or French."
"So, are you going to tell me?"

Nothing in this box either. Damnit. I was hoping it would be here, but it could take days to search every unopened box in this building alone, and if I had to listen to Simmons for all that time, I'd probably go mad. Or lock him in a vault. Or both.
"Fine." I turned to face him. "We were in Rome to collect some old manuscripts about obscure medical experiments sanctioned by the Vatican. Some of these experiements were the outgrowth of tortures performed by the Spanish and Roman inquisitions. Among those records was a notation about a French doctor..."
"This Renard guy."
"Yes. A notation that said he had performed a successful heart transplant. In 1763."
"Bullshit."
"Yeah, that's what I thought at first. I mean, blood typing and cross matching didn't start until the early 1900s, so even if Renard somehow managed a heart transplant 200 years before anyone else, it was a complete shot in the dark as to whether the patient would die anyway."
"Well?"
"Well, what?"
"Did the patient die?"
I grinned. Maybe there was hope for Simmons after all. He hadn't really been showing any actual inquisitiveness before this.
"Yes. Years later, during the French Revolution. Dr. Renard giveth, Dr. Guillotin taketh away."
"So we're here, looking for evidence of a medical procedure that should have been impossible at the time."
"Yep."
"Which box do you want me to start looking in?"