But I had a feeling she wouldn’t. I couldn’t tell you why, other than that she seemed a deeply private person, who would view what she chose to do with her house keys as a private matter. She was also deeply intelligent. She would read between the lines of the press coverage. She would realize it must have been Ethan Sinclare who had killed my family; she would grasp what I had done, and why. Madame Aubuchon had her own history with a violent man. I thought—I hoped—she would not give up another woman in crisis.
The train from Frankfurt did not rumble into the Gare de l’Est until midnight. It would be pushing one in the morning by the time the Paris metro deposited me outside Hélène’s building. I took a man’s navy scarf from my bag—another item appropriated from the train’s overhead bins—and wound it around my head and shoulders. I was cold, and the beige sweater had by now been captured by closed-circuit cameras in transit hubs across Europe. I took a deep breath and steeled myself for what I hoped would be the final leg of this journey. I was nearing a state of such exhaustion that if sirens and police vans were indeed waiting for me outside Madame Aubuchon’s flat, I was no longer sure I cared.
Fifty-three
* * *
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2013
Paris est un véritable océan, wrote Balzac in 1834. “Paris is a veritable ocean. Sound it: you will never know its depth.”
Yes, there are bigger cities. Some 2 million people live in Paris proper; it is nothing to today’s megacities of Mumbai or Mexico City, S?o Paolo or Shanghai. But I didn’t have the keys to an apartment in those cities, did I? And Paris is big enough. I know some streets here like the back of my hand. The rue Jeanne d’Arc, for example, in the thirteenth arrondissement, home to my favorite butcher shop. The seedy street in the Marais, where I had lived for two years while researching and writing my PhD dissertation. There were whole neighborhoods, though, where I had never walked. Countless streets where I would not be recognized, where I could prowl undetected. Less a woman than a shadow, a silhouette against the sky.
You can scour Paris, Balzac wrote, but there will always be another wilderness. His actual phrase was un lieu vierge. A blank or virgin place. A place with no history, at least none of your own, a place where you might assume a different identity altogether.
Few of us ever get the chance to reinvent ourselves. I mean, genuinely reinvent ourselves: new name, new city, new life. I had already done so once. I had been Caroline Smith, and then, with the stroke of a pen, I became Caroline Cashion. That time I had been a child; my new home and new identity had not been of my choosing. This time, though, I had control. Whom would I become, now that I could no longer publicly move through the world as Caroline Cashion? Now that the woman who had used that name for thirty-four years must—for official purposes—cease to exist?
I have always loved the name Simone. Simone Moreau has a nice ring to it. Or Simone Guerin, perhaps. Dubois? Durand? It would need to sound commonplace. An unremarkable name, a name you might forget. I didn’t know how one might go about acquiring false identity papers. Presumably such things could be accomplished, if tackled with the right combination of determination, cunning, and cash.
That was a task for tomorrow. Next week, even. Today I slept until late afternoon, and when I woke up, I was ravenous. Madame Aubuchon’s pantry was bare. I found a jar of raspberry jam and smeared it onto shards of melba toast so old they were turning to dust. Eventually I gave up and gobbled the jam directly from the spoon. There were tea bags but no milk, tinned tuna but no bread. A strange meal.
Afterward I lay back in bed and watched the stars prick the sky, one by one.
Paris is a veritable ocean. You can scour it, Balzac wrote, but there will always be another wilderness, always “a hidden den, flowers, pearls, monsters.” Indeed. The monsters were a certainty. My adversaries would be waiting for me, ready to pounce the moment I was careless, the second I let down my guard. As for hidden dens, as for flowers and pearls . . . Well. We would have to wait and see.
Fifty-four
* * *
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2013
I did not have Madame Aubuchon’s stamina. In her own hour of need, Hélène had holed up inside this apartment for seven weeks. I didn’t last two days.
I forced myself to wait until twilight before venturing out. Under normal circumstances, this would not have been a challenge. The flat was spacious and tasteful, the furnishings more minimalist than I would have predicted for a woman in her seventies. Perhaps this was the boy-toy husband’s influence on display. The walls were lined with books, mostly in French. On the upper shelves were smaller but still sizable collections in English, Italian, and Russian. The literary canon was well represented, but there was also a suspicious number of mysteries and thrillers. I would have chalked these up to Jean-Pierre, except that Madame Aubuchon appeared to follow a strict labeling system with her personal library. Penciled inside every front cover, in what I recognized as her handwriting, was her full name and a year. Presumably the year she had read the book. Madame Aubuchon had devoured everything --P. D. James and Ian Rankin had ever written, along with Lee Child’s entire Jack Reacher series. God, it was too good. The prim head of Georgetown’s French Department—a leading authority on the seventeenth--century playwrights Molière and Racine—was secretly addicted to page-turners about a testosterone-drenched, ex-army cop. I would have given quite a lot for the chance to drop that into casual conversation in the faculty lounge.