“Again, I’m really sorry about that bit. They are true professionals, and I didn’t mean to besmirch their good name,” I countered, then I reached out to touch his hand gently. “I wish we could have met on different terms.”
“Me too.” There was a long pause, and then Nate went back into information-seeking mode. “Joan, somebody followed you to my hotel. They waited for you to exit. Then they informed the driver you were leaving the building and exactly where you were standing on the street. There must be some reason, and it must be tied to these sketches.”
I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders.
Nate now appeared eager to get moving, like he was determined not to let my drama become his drama. “First, I don’t think staying in that hotel is a good idea. You’re in danger there.”
For one tingling moment, I thought Nate was going to insist I stay with him. A picture of the two of us napping in his suite with Eiffel Tower views popped into my head. And the next moment, I was annoyed he was telling me what to do.
“What about your friend? The one who married the lawyer? Can you stay with her?” I hesitated one instant, and Nate said. “Oh, is she made-up, too? She’s not real, is she?” No mistaking the edge in his voice. We wouldn’t be napping together anytime soon.
“No. Polly is real, a real person with a real backstory. We did go to high school together and she did marry a French lawyer. She’s out of town this weekend, but I’m hoping I can at least stay at her place and regroup.”
“Good. You need to alert the authorities and get out of Paris as soon as you can. There’s no other solution.” Nate’s voice had taken on the tone of a concerned adult.
I could think of a hundred other options, starting with tracking down art agent Beatrice and getting the name of the mystery buyer out of her. If Nate wasn’t the crook, and I was 98 percent sure he wasn’t, maybe the mystery buyer had lured me to Paris and waited to steal the piece rather than buy it outright. That didn’t explain the attempted murder, of course. I know Nate meant well, but I felt like if I could wait it out until Monday and talk to Beatrice, I still had a shot in recovering the sketchbook. No way I was getting on a plane to go home. I’d watch my step and be fine. As chilling as the last hour had been, I was starting to get my groove back. Invincible Joan circa 1999 was on the rise.
I took a sip of hot chocolate as a stall tactic. “You know, Nate, I’ve done this before. I mean, not the part about losing the artwork and the car almost running me down, but I’ve handled a lot when it comes to logistics . . . and life. I can handle this. I’ll go back to my hotel and call my security team in California, too. They have resources and will be able to tell me the best course of action.”
“You’re right. This is your call.” Nate signaled the waiter and signed the check to his room. “But I insist on taking you back to the hotel.”
Back at the H?tel Jeu de Paume, Claude was not particularly happy to see me, as if I had brought a contagion to the place, when here I was thinking that I was the victim. “Mademoiselle, you have several messages. Please let me know if I can be of any assistance.”
I took the pile from Claude, some paper slips and an envelope. I looked through the messages, one from Inspector Agnier and one from the car service I used yesterday. It seemed like a throwback to call the hotel and leave a number when I had a cell phone and email, a sign that they wanted to talk to me but not really. “Thank you, Claude.”
Gallic Shrug with Lips Pursed.
My guess is both calls were to tell me they knew nothing about the theft—the car service as a courtesy and the police as a follow-up to the call to the car service. I’d call them back from my room, as even Claude seemed like a suspect now, someone monitoring my movements. I turned to see Nate sitting in the small lobby bar, scrolling through messages on his phone. He’d done what he said he would do, escorted me back to the hotel safely, and now he wanted out of this circus. “I guess I’ll go up and make some calls. Thank you for seeing me back to my hotel, Nate.” I shifted the envelope from right hand to left in order to shake hands.
“What’s in the envelope?”
It hadn’t even registered that I was holding it. “Probably something from the police. A report of some sort.” An address label on the outside was printed with my full name, Joan Bright Blakely. That seemed odd, as if the police had gone back to the precinct, or whatever they call the damn place in French, and Googled my full name. Then I remembered handing Inspector Angier my passport. Of course, my passport had my full name on it. I relaxed as I opened the closure and pulled out a piece of eight-by-eleven paper, a copy of something. I focused on the lines on the paper. It was no police report. It was a page from one of my father’s notebooks.
One of the notebooks that I thought had been destroyed on September 11.
Chapter 10
My parents didn’t fight very often, but when they did, they could get loud. I don’t recall specifics from their arguments, but the general gist of most of them seemed to be that my father would get lost in his work for days and weeks on end and ignore my mother and me. I didn’t notice his absence because I was used to him being gone, but my mother would begin to get restless and resentful after a week or so. I realize now that she must have felt abandoned and frustrated in a suburban town, driving carpool and wondering what had happened to her jet-set life. But at the time, I had no perspective on what my mother gave up being the wife of Henry Blakely. It was only when she became the widow of Henry Blakely that I understood her sacrifice.
If he was in the middle of a project, my father would come and go at odd hours, if he came home at all. There was very little conversation, and what there was centered on the logistics of married life. Will you be home tonight? Did you call the eye doctor about an appointment? Can you take a look at my car? The engine light is on. My mother would ask the questions, and my father would answer vaguely.
During one particular fight, the night of my tenth birthday, the issue was my father’s absence. He had failed to make the after-school party at a bowling alley, the dinner at home, even the cake cutting. He was in the midst of a museum commission, but from the vitriol in my mother’s voice, she didn’t care if he was designing the Taj Mahal. In fact, I think she said that: “I don’t care if you’re working on the Taj Mahal; you could have shown up for ten minutes.” When my mother really wanted to get under my father’s skin, which wasn’t often but occasionally, she’d compare his work to some tourist attraction. Caesars Palace! Times Square! The Taj Mahal! It made him furious.
I was brushing my teeth when I heard the arguing start. I crouched behind a wall on the upstairs balcony, listening to the noise, my mother’s clear frustration and my father’s resistance. This was it, I thought.
I was sure they were going to get divorced because my friend Jessica’s parents had split up and she had to go visit her father every Saturday in downtown LA where he was living at his fancy club with the Oriental rugs. Sometimes Jess begged me to go with her so she didn’t have to be alone with her father, a partner at a big law firm, because she’d never really spent any time alone with him, and it was uncomfortable to all of a sudden have to spend an entire day with him. We’d swim at the indoor pool, then have lunch in the dining room, where they served mac and cheese on china. Then we’d go home, smelling like chlorine. I was sure my parents were en route to that sort of break-up because of the volume of their fight. As an only child, I had no one to talk with about my parents, so I closed myself up in my room and lay in bed listening to music until I fell asleep.