Peace, at last, I thought, looking out across the lawn, enjoying the fresh breeze off the Bay, the slight salt tang in the air mixed with jasmine growing on a trellis in the Lopers’ side yard. There had been a time when I knew every person on the street. During the short time I had been back, I came to understand that the big secret my family kept, namely my origins, was petty stuff compared to the secrets some of our neighbors held tight. What a terrible burden, I thought, a secret could be.
I said a silent farewell to them all, and went inside to pack.
Sometimes, when something is entirely out of place it takes a moment to realize what you’re actually seeing. The red leather jewel box was lying in the middle of the upstairs hall, open and upside down. I felt a moment of panic until I saw the dragonfly brooch a few feet away and apparently intact. It was only when I stooped to pick up the brooch that all the implications of it being where it was flooded in, and real panic ensued. I pushed open the door to the room I had been sharing with Jean-Paul and saw a jumble of clothes and books and overturned drawers in the middle of the floor. All of the furniture had been pulled away from the walls and left in higgledy-piggledy disarray.
My first thought was that one of the cleaners had come upstairs looking for loot, but that made no sense. A little pilfering, sure, but not this, not a thorough tossing; a member of the crew would be sure he’d be caught. That’s when I saw that a window in my former bedroom was broken. I went over and looked down, saw the ladder against the side of the house. During the cleaners’ hubbub downstairs behind the plastic wall, someone had broken in upstairs. My next thought was to get the hell out. Now.
I ran down the hall, clutching the brooch in one hand while I tried to pry my phone out of my pocket with the other. He was no more than a blur, a flying tackle launched from the side out of Max’s bedroom door. He dropped me on my belly and slapped the phone out of my hand as he pulled my arm behind me, bending it up toward my shoulder until I thought it would pop out of the socket. With his other hand, he pressed the tip of a knife against my throat.
I cried out, “What do you want?”
“You know damn well.” He stank of old sweat and hot fear. “Where is the letter?”
“What letter?”
“Her letter. She hid it in this house.”
“I don’t know anything about a letter.”
“You do,” he said. “You showed it to my son-in-law.”
I heard what sounded like “whuff,” and suddenly his weight was off me; his knife hit the wall beside my head and skittered down the hall. I came up off the floor running.
“Maggie?”
I turned at the sound of Jean-Paul’s voice. He had Chuck Riley face down, hog-tying him with the cord from Uncle Max’s bathrobe.
“Did he hurt you, chérie?”
I shook out my arm; it hurt. “Where did you come from?”
His chin flicked toward the end of the hall. “I came up to find you.”
“But-”
“Please telephone,” he said as he bounced Chuck’s head on the floor and ordered him to quit squirming.
I retrieved both my phone and the knife. Why bother with 911? I called the chief of police. “We have your man,” I told him. “Please send someone before he gets too squirrelly.” And then I called Uncle Max, who was still in the front yard, and suggested he should get upstairs, pronto.
“Chuck,” I said, keeping my distance in case Jean-Paul lost control of him. “Tell me about the letter.”
“Fuck you,” he said.
“Okay, then. Who pulled the trigger that day? You were standing behind Trinh Bartolini when she was shot. Who pulled the trigger?”
He strained to look up at me, seemed confused by the question. “How could you know that?”
“Who shot Trinh Bartolini?”
He suddenly lost his starch, stopped struggling and turned his face to the wall. Through choking sobs he said, “God, she was so beautiful.”
“Was it Duc?”
“That damn gook, he didn’t have to do that.”
“He was aiming at you.”
“He was only supposed to scare her,” he said. “To make her back off. The feebs were asking questions. We needed her to stop before she fucked up everything.”
“You gave him the gun,” I said.
“So what?”
“You blackmailed him after he shot her, didn’t you?”
“I couldn’t let him get off scot-free, could I?”
“For killing her? Or for failing to kill you?”
“Both, I guess. But it doesn’t matter anymore.”
“What have you been looking for?”
“A letter.” He raised his head as sirens approached. “She said she wrote a letter, and that if anything happened to her or to your family, the letter would come to light.”
“You think it’s in this house?”
He dropped his face to the floor, defeated. “I know it is.”
“You broke in to look for it.”
“Old George Loper was afraid someone would find Al’s gun,” he said with a smirk. “Fuck the gun. That letter is a bomb. A nuclear bomb with my ass in its sights.”
Chapter 22
“Jean-Paul.” I snuggled against him in the backseat of the San Francisco consul general’s Town Car, happy that Rafael was driving us to the airport. “What is it that you really do? I mean, what did you do before you accepted the consular appointment? I know what you’ve told me, but you’re always just a bit vague about it.”
That shrug again. “I’m a businessman. A quite boring businessman.”
“That’s what you always say, but I don’t believe it anymore.”
“No?” He smiled, a funny little smile that was full of secrets.
“No. Exactly what kind of business are you in that you can make a call and someone tells you that Thai Van, an obscure man, died in a jungle shootout thirty years ago? You traced a very old shipment of guns, with serial numbers, from the manufacturer to the U.S. Army by placing a call. Another call and someone faxes equally old records of Khanh Duc’s international bank transfers from a bank in Berkeley to an account in the Cayman Islands, and from there to Bangkok, as well as regular payments to his ‘employee’ Chuck Riley. Quite boring businessmen don’t have that variety of contacts no matter where they went to school.”
“But, my dear, it was a very good school.”
“But a school of a very certain sort,” I said. “They also teach whatever form of martial arts you used to take down Riley?”
“When a man sees the woman he loves held captive with a knife to her throat, who knows what he is capable of doing to free her?”
“You never quite answer the question, do you?” I said. “Monsieur Bernard, when you go back to France and pick up where you left off, exactly what will you be doing?”
“I won’t pick up where I left off at all,” he said, smooching my cheek. “I will be with you, a fresh start.”
“Okay,” I said, pulling a slender book out of my carry-on bag. “Let’s trade information. I will give you this book if you give me a straight answer.”
He looked at the title and laughed: Opticks: Or, a Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions, and Colours of Light, by Isaac Newton. “This is what you have to bargain with?”
“All things are not what they seem,” I said. “Pure sunlight seems to have no hue, no color at all. But in fact, it has all the colors that exist. You wear the mantle of a quite boring businessman, but we both know you are anything but; you are, my friend, very colorful. The same can be said for this book.”
“You find this book fascinating?”
“No, quite boring,” I said. “Difficult to read, especially for a child. After my father read it with me when he was teaching me about optics, he could be very confident that I would never open that book again. But, like you, it holds a very interesting secret.”