“Je suis écrivaine.” I am a writer. That had a crumb of truth. I thought of the book I’d been so excited to write, not three weeks ago, the one my brother Tony had teased me about in my Georgetown kitchen. The politics of divorce in working-class, post-Napoleonic France. It was as though the idea had sprung from the mind of a completely different person. The topic now failed to interest me in the slightest. I began to talk instead about travel memoirs and fat war histories, slim volumes of poetry and novels with bleak endings that drove you to despair. About all the books I loved to read, and all the ones I wanted to write, and some of what I said was real and some of it I made up as I went along. His black eyes never left mine.
Shall I describe him for you? Fran?ois was pale with thick, dark hair that matched his eyes. Tall but delicately boned. He wore a black cashmere turtleneck and skinny jeans. But you already guessed that. He leaned down to kiss me and I let him. Smoke curled up from the cigarettes we held against our hips. He was so precisely my type that his lips felt already familiar. I had kissed a dozen boys just like him, on a hundred velvety Paris nights. Paris is a veritable ocean, wrote Balzac, but it is also, he conceded, a moral sewer. Un égout moral. This can be a good or a bad thing, depending on how remorseful one is prepared to feel the morning after.
If they ever called my name for a seat inside, I missed it. At midnight the candles on the tables had burned low. Every chair was still occupied. The hum of conversation, of easy laughter and whispered seductions, floated out to the sidewalk. The bartender eventually passed us the Vermentino bottle through the window, and we stood there, kissing and talking and smoking, until it was finished.
When he whispered that his apartment was close by, though, I broke away. I’ve had my share of lovers, but I’ve never picked up a stranger in a bar and slept with him. I’m no prude about such things. I simply think a man should have to work a bit harder than that. So much of the pleasure lies in the chase.
I kissed him, on the cheek this time, and said good-night.
“Attends,” he said. Wait. On a scrap of paper he wrote his name and a telephone number. I folded it, discovered I had no pockets, tucked it into the leather pouch at my neck.
Mist was rising off the Seine as I threaded my way home. I stopped every few hundred yards, listening from darkened doorways, making sure that neither Fran?ois nor anyone else had followed.
Fifty-six
* * *
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2013
You don’t tend to know when you’re about to have a momentous day.
Morning dawns like any other morning. You stretch, put the kettle on, feed the cat, pad around in blissful ignorance. Only later, when you unfold the fateful letter, or the knock sounds at the door, do you realize that the trajectory of your life has irrevocably been altered.
In my case, the messenger was a news website.
I bolted upright in bed shortly after 8:00 a.m., startled from sleep by the blaring horn of a city bus. On the past two days traffic had been light, but today Paris was roaring to life in full weekday-morning, rush-hour splendor. Madame Aubuchon lived in an elegant building with leafy views across the Bois de Boulogne. Half a block away, though, thrummed a major artery. You could almost feel the pent-up commuter frustration rising from the streets up to her balcony.
I padded to the kitchen and put the kettle on for tea. Toasted the last of the baguette and spread it with the dreaded raspberry jam. As I chewed, I scolded myself for being careless last night. I should know better. No more nights out snogging strange men. From this moment forward, my raciest evening encounters would be with a mug of herbal tea and one of Hélène’s dog-eared Jack Reacher paperbacks.
I had matters to attend to, now that I was rested. I needed to get a fake ID. I needed fresh clothes, the drabber the better. Most pressingly, I should find a new accommodation. Even if Madame Aubuchon did not crack under police pressure, this place was insecure. Staying here was tempting fate. I wanted rooms with no connection to the woman once known as Caroline Cashion.
In the shower I pumped out my usual shampoo dose, to find it was five times as much as my new pixie hair required. I made a mental note to add a razor to my shopping list. At this rate, I would soon have more hair on my legs than on my head. After toweling off I reached for the prepaid phone that I’d bought yesterday from the street vendor. I would check the headlines, crush the chip again, purchase yet another new phone while I ran errands today.
I began to read. At the first paragraph I went pale. By the third, I had crashed down on the side of the bathtub, my eyes twitching, breathing hard.
? ? ?
BETSY SINCLARE HAD given an exclusive interview to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She was pictured looking frail and wearing widow’s weeds. Above the article ran a banner headline: “Bereaved Widow Shares Saga of Terror, Tragedy.” The story that followed, written by a reporter whose name I did not recognize, bore no resemblance to events as I knew them to have unfolded.
Mr. and Mrs. Sinclare had been about to sit down to lunch together at their upscale Buckhead home, the newspaper reported, when their lives were shattered. Earlier that morning Mr. Sinclare had driven to Henri’s Bakery, where he was a regular customer, to buy his wife’s favorite sandwich.
“We love their pastrami,” said Mrs. Sinclare, her voice catching. “Ethan always goes out of his way to bring it home for me. And because he’d been out of town on business, he made a special effort. I came sailing in from my tennis match and found he’d set the table with our wedding china and crystal. Forty years of marriage, and he could still be such a sweetheart.”
Before the couple could enjoy their romantic meal, however, an armed man burst into the room, according to Mrs. Sinclare.
My mind reeled. I plowed on.
“He came out of nowhere,” she said. “He was wearing gloves and a ski mask, like you wear in Aspen, but you could see his eyes were bloodshot. He was yelling for money and he was waving a gun around and Ethan tried to stop him. They were wrestling, and then there was a noise like a clap of thunder.”