She almost hadn’t, I thought as I trudged up the stairs. She’d only handed it to me as an afterthought. Was she going to leave it hidden in the mail slot and her conscience finally got the better of her, or had she genuinely forgotten about it? As soon as I entered the apartment I put Liam in his crib, protesting loudly, and sat on the bed, turning the postcard over in my hands. Who could have known I was here and sent me a postcard? And if someone had bothered to do so, why was there no message on it?
I looked at the picture on the front again. An attractive painting in the Impressionist style of a woman drinking tea. That was all. I carried it over to the window and stared at both sides in the light, wondering if there might be some kind of hidden message. But there was none. “To the Lady from New York” … the person who had written this didn’t even know my name. Unless “the Lady from New York” wasn’t intended for me at all, but for either Sid or Gus. Perhaps I was hoping for too much from this postcard, thinking it might be some kind of message for me. Perhaps the simple explanation was that Gus had admired a painting. Someone she had been chatting with had seen a postcard with a rendition of this painting on it and sent it to her as a kindly gesture.
I sighed, put it down on the bed, and went into the kitchen to prepare an evening meal for us. I tried to put it from my mind, but it was the first communication of any sort I had received, even if it made no sense to me. A woman drinking tea from an elegant little cup. Were Sid and Gus in some kind of danger? Did they want me to meet them at a tea salon? Might they have left a message for me there?
I remembered the worrying thought that had occurred to me earlier—that the Cosa Nostra gang in New York had somehow managed to find out I was coming to Paris and had harmed or kidnapped my friends. But then why leave me unharmed, walking around the city for three days? Nothing had made sense since I arrived in Paris. Nobody in the artistic community seemed to have seen Sid and Gus recently. Their cousins were happily going about their business. And yet someone had murdered a fellow artist and I had come to not believe in coincidence. Tomorrow I would make a list of tearooms in Paris and see if that produced any result.
Liam had a bad night. I suspect his stomach could not handle the amount of food that Madeleine had tried to put into him. I took him into bed with me, lying him on my own stomach and feeling the comforting warmth of his body against mine. I longed for Daniel and his arms around me. How soon could I hope for a letter from him, I wondered. I lay there, listening to the noises of the street below—laughter, shouts, singing. It sounded as if the rest of the world was having a good time in Paris. Eventually I drifted off to sleep and dreamed of the woman in the painting. “Really it’s quite obvious, isn’t it?” she said to me and put down her teacup with a bang.
I awoke, realizing that the bang that had woken me had been a shot fired in the street. I laid the sleeping Liam beside me and went over to the window. I opened the shutter but heard nothing more. I remembered all the talk of duels and Picasso saying that he hadn’t shot his pistol for days. This was a violent city. Lots of things could go wrong here. I tried to fall back to sleep, wondering what the woman in my dream had meant when she said it was quite obvious.
The next morning I awoke with a headache that thundery weather and lack of sleep would always bring on in me. Liam seemed quite recovered from his fretful night and was raring to go. I nursed him, fed him farina for his breakfast, and then made myself a boiled egg with yesterday’s stale bread. I wasn’t going down all those stairs just to get a fresh loaf. Then when we were both washed and dressed I took Liam back to the bakery.
“If I am imposing on you too much, please tell me,” I said.
Madeleine looked amused. “Too much? Madame Sullivan, I grew up looking after seven younger brothers and sisters and helping out on the farm. Two small children and one small apartment seems like a holiday for me. Besides, I like to play with your son. My own baby is still too small. All he wants to do is eat and sleep. Your boy makes me laugh.”
So I left him with a clear conscience, knowing that Madame Hetreau would probably be gossiping again with the neighbors about the flighty woman from America who was off gallivanting and leaving her baby to strangers. I had asked the baker whether there might be any tearooms in the neighborhood. He mentioned a couple of cafés that served tea. “But not exactly tea salons, Madame. For those you must go to the better arondissements—the first and the sixth. That is where people do not have to work hard all day and have time to take tea with their friends,” he said.