She imagined the two women, wanted, trying to escape from the police—or someone—unable to keep the baby at the hostel. Again she drew a blank. Pieces of the puzzle were missing—the why and who.
She left the church. Would she have the heart to turn Nelie in? Turn her in like someone had turned her own mother in, to go to prison?
And then . . . foster care, or that of distant relatives, or adoption for Stella? She was rationalizing.
She shivered in the rising wind and rain, called her friend Martine, and left a message. On the narrow street, a man brushed by, a small child atop his shoulders. The wet-haired child, laughing, ordered, “Gallop faster, Papa!”
“Chocolat chaud to the winner,” the red-cheeked mother said, bringing up the rear.
She couldn’t test René’s already frayed patience any longer. She, too, ran.
SHE FOUND HER apartment as warm as an oven, the printer running. René’s voice came from the kitchen.
“The database, oui,” he was saying. “I’ve entered the information. Bien sûr, the framework’s been redesigned. You’ll appreciate the new ease of use.”
He was talking into the speaker phone. A laptop screen displaying an antivirus program stood on the kitchen counter. His gold cuff links were in the soap dish by the sink.
She stared, openmouthed, watching him stand on a chair to reach into a high cabinet, the sleeves of his handmade Charvet shirt rolled up, a lace-fringed apron tied around his waist. Steam rose from the kettle humming on the stove. Miles Davis lay curled, his tail wagging, next to Stella, who was sleeping in a computer paper box together with a stuffed pink pig. Where had that come from?
The domestic scene, the result of fortuitous circumstance, gave off a sense of family. For the moment, it felt like her family.
In her room she took off her wet blouse and skirt. She searched her armoire and found jeans, a black cashmere sweater, and an old Sonia Rykiel lined khaki raincoat. Urban chic? Non. She decided on a warm waterproof parka from her Sorbonne days. Nondescript and utilitarian. She picked items from her computer tool kit and stuck them in her backpack.
Back in the kitchen she said, “We have to talk, René.”
Startled, he reached to untie the apron. “I didn’t hear you . . .”
“You’ve got it all under control,” she said. “Amazing.”
René’s large green eyes took in her outfit. He frowned. “You didn’t tell Morbier, did you?”
“He called in favors I owe him. So I’ve agreed to assist him.”
“And somehow neglected to mention Stella.” He jerked his thumb at the baby. Relief or something else filled his eyes.
“Her mother’s alive. And wanted.”
René lost his balance and grabbed the cabinet handle. She reached him before he fell and helped him down. He took off the apron, summoning a stern look.
“What do you mean ‘wanted’?”
“Martine’s checking on that. But if students can ‘steal’ from a secure nuclear fuel processing site, military security’s in trouble.”
René gave a wry smile. “And I’m six feet tall.”
“I’ve got to find her first, René. With you here, I will. Here’s the deal—I’ll take the late shift—”
“And put our work in jeopardy?”
She ignored his reproach. “Tonight I’ll continue monitoring the network and finish the firewall protection. Hell, we can do this half awake.”
She squeezed the stuffed pink pig at Stella’s side and it squeaked. A price tag on the floor caught her eye.
“She’ll love that, René.”
He turned away but not before she saw the funny look on his face.
As she raced down her worn marble steps, she wondered why René hadn’t admitted where the stuffed toy had come from.
Tuesday Night
IN THE GALLEY kitchen in the back of his brocante, or secondhand shop, Jean Caplan sighed and smeared a knife full of Nutella onto a warm baguette. Better humor her as usual, he thought. The poor thing.
He shuffled past a chair piled with melamine ware, cracked Ricard ashtrays, and old Suze liquor bottles, all layered with a film of dust.
“Voilà, Hélène.” He set the chipped Sarguemines plate on the marble-topped table next to which the old woman sat. Rain pattered outside on the courtyard, streaming from the gutter, beating a rhythm on the metal well cover.
“So thoughtful, Jean!” Hélène said, reaching a thin blue-veined hand out to help herself. Her nearly transparent paper-white skin barely covered her protruding bones.
He’d been sweet on her then, he was sweet on her now. Hélène had sat in the wooden school desk in front of him and he’d dipped the tip of her ribbon-tied braid in his inkwell. He still saw traces of that feisty young girl although the long braids were now white and tied together at the back of her head with string.
“Haven’t seen you for a few days,” he said, combing back his thick white hair with his fingers. He’d worried with all the rain . . . where was she living now? He pressed a wad of francs into her hand.
“Jean, non! This kind of money I can’t take from you.”
“I sold the armoire—you know the seventeenth-century one the baron gave me on consignment, eh? And you never let me take you for a meal.”
“Merci.” She rolled her dark blue eyes, violet ringing the irises. There wasn’t a wrinkle on her smooth face; her skin was that of a young woman, only her jaw was more pronounced than it had once been. She was clean and neatly dressed . . . only, if one looked closely enough, the shopping bags gave her away as a street person. Yet for periods of time she’d stay in a city-run pension, hold a job, and blend in with the anonymous older generation.
“The baron? Up to his tricks again. Tell me more.”
Someone had to show her kindness, Caplan thought. She’d been traumatized during the Occupation. Out of sync, out of step, after the war. But then, deep down, who wasn’t?
Her family had owned this store on Ile Saint-Louis until Libération. Now he did. The Wehrmacht’s fault. Their boots had strutted over the bridge, back and forth, between the town house they’d requisitioned—now the Polish Center—and the shops on rue Saint Paul in the nearby Marais. Those were all gone. The bordello, whose attic his family had hidden in after the 1942 raid, was gone, too. The whole block of stores had been torn down and it was a manicured garden now.
“Well, our playboy baron keeps asking me to sell his lower-end furnishings, if you call seventeenth century low end, piece by piece to finance his rent boys.” He leaned back on the marquise chair, his weight straining the curved legs. “He needs more money to attract them the older he gets.”
“You remember the parties . . . the Polish diplomatic receptions and how we’d peek at the guests over the hedge?” she asked.
Jean grinned. A memory they shared from before the time of the marching jackboots. She loved talking about the island as it had once been, long ago.
“If those walls could talk! Remember the masked costumed party, the servants dressed as Nubian slaves?”
She was mixing the eras up. This party had taken place in the seventies; it was still a legend but a legend for a set that was dying out. None of the very rich lived like that anymore. Today socialites mixed Cartier diamond watches and designer jeans. It was another world now, déclassé, common.