“My daughter Janine’s deaf,” Fran?oise said. “But she reads lips, and she says you’re lying.”
Should she look for another way out and cut her losses? Stall them while she escaped and let them finish whatever game they played? “What do you think, Fran?oise? Tell me the truth. Before you answer, remember that your daughter’s involved now. If she’s hurt, they’ll only regard her as collateral damage.”
“I think you’re rude, abrasive and smart,” she said. The doorbell rang. “And you’re right in only one assumption—that if we don’t leave now, we won’t leave at all.”
“Then how do we get out?”
“This way.” Aimée followed Fran?oise, who had the bulging Hermès carryall tucked under one arm and Filou under the other, back through the dark kitchen and the pantry and out through the servants’ door. On the leaf-clogged path to the service gate, Fran?oise pulled her elbow.
“Over here.”
Janine led them through the dark garden. Nestled behind a purple-flowering paulownia tree was a glass-paned hothouse, a winter garden. Janine opened the door and they stepped in; it was filled with orchids and humid air.
Janine took a key from under a flowerpot and opened the rear glass-paneled door to another door in the stone wall. A click and that door opened to a narrow allée—so narrow Aimée’s shoulders scraped the stone. A moment later they emerged onto Avenue de la Bourdonnais.
They kept to the shadowed doorways until they reached rue Saint-Dominique. By the time Aimée was sitting in the front passenger seat of a taxi with Filou on her lap, four blue-and-white police cars had whizzed past with their sirens screaming.
“Gare du Nord, s’il vous pla?t,” she said, panting, to the driver.
Aimée caught her breath as the brightly lit iron lady, the sparkling Tour Eiffel, shrank in the rear viewmirror. She thought as quickly as she could. Not counting on their luck to hold, she opened her cell phone’s speed-dial contacts and punched the SNCF booking number. She knew it would come in handy someday. Moments later, she’d reserved two seats and Filou’s accommodation on the last Eurostar departing for London.
“Fran?oise, do you remember how many joggers went by the bench?”
“Two, three?” She thought. “Non, it was the same one with a headlamp. He went by twice, that’s right. I almost ran into him.”
Of course. Aimée should have noticed.
The black Seine quivered gel-like below them as they crossed Pont Alexandre III. Aimée would worry about the jogger later. Right now she had to get as much information as she could from Fran?oise.
“Did you and Roland ever speak about Drina or her sister Djanka?”
“We only ever discussed private issues.”
She realized Janine was watching her lips. “Tell Janine this is personal and to close her eyes, d’accord?”
The taxi bumped over the cobbles in Place de la Concorde passing the obelisk, a needle-like shadow against the sky.
“I’m waiting, Fran?oise.”
“But I can’t talk with the driver listening.”
Aimée turned toward the driver, a bearded older man in a plaid scarf, and gestured to the headphones looped around his neck. “Mind wearing those?” She slipped a fifty-franc bill on top of the Discman on his lap.
“Pas de problème,” he said and stuck them over his ears. “I love good music. Les Temptations—magnifique.”
She smiled. Janine had closed her eyes. The taxi driver honked at a bus.
“We’ve got maybe fifteen minutes, Fran?oise. Get talking.”
Pain clouded those blue-violet eyes. “Roland wanted us to rekindle what we had before. True, I still think he was the love of my life, once. But …” Her knuckles whitened on the Hermès bag strap. “I said I’d have to think about it. So much has happened, and my life’s in London now.”
A sob escaped her.
“Fran?oise, tell me what you know about Pascal’s lover, Djanka. I think it’s related.”
“Pascal loved her, wouldn’t give her or the baby up. Pah—the only decent thing about him.”
Did this all boil down to avoiding the scandal that would erupt from a ministry official having an affair with a Gypsy and recognizing their love child?
“What else, Fran?oise?”
“On the park bench Roland told me he’d been threatened with blackmail. Something about Pascal’s death, I don’t know.”
“By who, Fran?oise?”
“Didn’t say. But Roland knew nothing, had always thought it was suicide.”
“An opportunistic journalist who’d twigged Pascal’s name in the tell-all memoir?”
“I don’t know.”
Or the murderer? The taxi passed the church of Saint Madeleine with its spotlit columns and turned onto les grands boulevards.
“But recently Roland had started to think it was murder. He just wanted to protect me.”
“Protect you from what?”
“Implications over Gerard? I didn’t understand. Didn’t care.”
“And what had he learned about Pascal’s death?”
“A murder, he kept saying. Covered up years ago. Djanka’s, too.”
“You mean Roland thought they were both murdered to mask their affair, prevent a scandal?”
“He didn’t say how or why he thought that. They had a grand amour, Djanka and Pascal—Gerard always said that.” A shrug. “But I kept asking Roland, why did it matter now? Stupid. What was the point in bringing all this up yet again? Roland said there was a cover-up, a Monsieur X who had pulled strings and who still holds power. He wants to keep the facts from getting out now. He abducted the Gypsy’s sister to shut her up.”