“In a perfect world, that would work. Especially if we had similar incomes. But we don’t. When we do get married, my widow’s pension from Mike goes away. If I don’t sign a new contract with the network, or if I decide to work in France, my American income will nearly disappear. If we need to depend on residuals from my old films and earnings from my meager investments to live there, we might end up sharing Casey’s dorm room.”
He laughed. “I hope, then, that she’s a better roommate than Luca was. Less smelly, anyway. But I have investments in America, so don’t worry, we won’t go hungry.”
“Jean-Paul, have you ever had to worry about money?”
“Please don’t hold it against me, but no. Early on, Marian and I had to keep a strict budget, and both of us had to work, but we never did without the essentials and a few luxuries. My parents went through the great depression and the world war, like yours, and vowed that their children would never be hungry or have holes in their shoes. They worked very hard to make that a reality. I understand their sacrifices, and I understand the toll the struggle took on them. And I fully realize the advantages I have had in life. If I have had any success, I give all credit to Maman and Papa.”
“Don’t forget,” I said. “They also gave you looks, brains, and charm.”
He laughed. “Are we talking about you, or about me?”
“Your family story could be mine, if you leave out surviving the Nazi Occupation.”
“If you mean your American family, yes.” He turned my chin to look up at him. “You still don’t think of your grandmother and your brother, and so on, as family, do you?”
“Not yet. I love Grand-mère, and I am fond of my uncle, my cousins, and Freddy, but I don’t know them well enough yet to think of them as family.”
“In time, maybe.” He kissed me. “Shall I give you the tour?”
I was relieved for the change in topic. Both topics, money and blood kin.
We went from room to room. They were all comfortably and practically furnished. Dom’s room was what one would expect for a teenager’s quarters, posters and books and computers, scuff marks on the walls, sports gear piled in corners. A framed portrait of his late mother sat on a dresser, with a school necktie draped over it. There were a couple of standard guest rooms. And then the master bedroom, the room Jean-Paul had shared with Marian. I felt a flutter in the pit of my stomach when he opened the door. But there were no ghosts. Marian’s side of the walk-in closet was empty. There were no half-used pots of face cream on the vanity or shrines to the dead wife on the bedside table. It was just a bedroom. A man’s bedroom.
Jean-Paul pulled out a familiar weekend bag and packed it with the efficiency of a frequent traveler while we talked about our horses and what to do with them. Mike and I had rescued two horses that we kept in a corral in the front yard of the house we had shared in the Santa Monica Mountains above Malibu. They were lovable if not beautiful nags, trail horses that we rode for fun. Jean-Paul belonged to a polo club and had kept a string of polo ponies, though he’d hardly had time to ride since I’d known him, and now had only two. What to do with all the beasts? I could not imagine old Red or Rover getting along with the polo crowd, but I thought that Jean-Paul’s ponies might be very happy ambling along our rugged mountain trails, assuming we would be in the U.S. often enough to ride them. That conversation got us nowhere, so we moved on to our offspring.
My Casey was at UCLA, a year from graduation, and then on to graduate or medical school somewhere. Jean-Paul’s son was in the first year of a two-year preparatory course before entering one of the Grandes Ècoles, the elite French colleges. Since fall, when Jean-Paul’s appointment to the consulate in Los Angeles ended and Dom and his father returned to France, Dom had lived with his maternal grandparents nearby in Versailles because Jean-Paul’s work required him to travel frequently. That is, our kids were grown, out of the nest. The issue of aging parents was more problematic, with many details to be worked out. Falling in love was the easy part. The issues that attached, not so much.
Jean-Paul took a coat of his own out of his closet and stuffed young Val Barkoff’s coat into a duffel. We stopped at his downstairs office for a laptop and a couple of files. He rolled back a Persian rug to reveal a safe built into the floor. He knelt, spun the combination lock, and pulled out some cash, a credit card, and a ring of labeled keys. The cash and the card went into a pocket, and everything else went into a leather messenger bag. On our way to the kitchen, where he retrieved a bottle of Port, he called Ari and told him we were leaving. There was a brief conversation about one of the horses and what to do with some produce in the refrigerator, some words of reassurance that Jean-Paul felt fine, and then he promised that we would be back soon.
“Ari worries,” Jean-Paul said as he put his phone into his cardigan pocket.
“Are you his family now?”
“His haven, certainly. Friend, yes, I hope. Family, no. Family sits down to dinner together, and they share the intimacies of life. Ari eats only halal food, so he cooks for himself in the guest house. He never drops in just to chat or watch a movie with me. I think I can best characterize our relationship as symbiotic—we need each other. I have watched him grow stronger with time. One day, he’ll be ready to go back out into the world. But for the time being, this arrangement works for both of us.”
Mentally, I added one more issue to resolve before we decided where we were going to live. And that was, Ari.
We ate lunch at a bustling bistro among the shops on the village’s main street. I was introduced to old friends, nodding acquaintances, and the proprietor who stopped by our table on the pretext of saying hello, but who actually wanted to know how Jean-Paul acquired his injuries. Jean-Paul’s simple answer to everyone’s questions, subtle and otherwise, was, “Slipped on the ice.” Some may have believed him.
After lunch, we followed Jean-Paul’s normal Saturday routine and shopped for groceries. His injuries earned him a bag of chocolate-dipped shortbread cookies from the sympathetic baker, an extra piece of cheese—excellent calcium for repairing bones—from the fromagère, and les bises from the butcher’s wife, though I suspected she was happy for the excuse, any excuse, to smooch him; I always was. A visit to the wine shop and the greengrocer finished the rounds. We stowed our purchases in the car, and headed back to Paris with Jean-Paul driving his Mercedes. The day was still frigid, but it had stopped snowing. The highway, the Autoroute de Normandie, was clear and traffic was light all the way into the city. We made the turn onto rue de l’Université twenty-five minutes after we pulled out of the Vaucresson car park.
Rue Jacob is a narrow, one-way street. Jean-Paul circled around the block to approach the apartment from the correct direction. As he turned off rue de Seine onto rue Jacob, we saw the flashing blue and red lights of an emergency vehicle and the usual gawkers gathered on the sidewalk. I craned up from my seat to gawk along with them as Jean-Paul slowed to a stop. There were an ambulance and two police cars, with various uniformed people milling about. Looking past the police cars, I could just see the top of the head of a person sitting in the open back doors of the ambulance, talking with the officials. As soon as I realized who it was, I was out of my seat belt, reaching for the door.
“Madame Gonsalves,” I said on my way out of the car. I ran. Jean-Paul was right behind me. In a few strides, he overtook me and got to the concierge before I did. She was conscious, alert, holding a towel to the back of her head while a paramedic examined her bloody knees and a policewoman questioned her. There was a puddle of fresh blood quickly freezing on the sidewalk.
“Monsieur Bernard,” she cried out, reaching a hand toward him, hurrying him. He sat beside her and wrapped his arm around her shoulders as he asked questions: what, who, how bad. Still holding the towel to the back of her head, she leaned against him and wept. After a great, heaving sigh, she composed herself, and blew her nose into the handkerchief Jean-Paul offered her.
“What happened?” Jean-Paul loo
ked from her to the hovering policewoman.
“He came up behind me.” The concierge pointed at me. “It was him. That man you showed me. He hit me on the head and grabbed my handbag.”
The policewoman scowled at me. “Do you know who is she talking about?”
I pulled my camera out of my pocket, opened the shot of Sabri Qosja, and showed it to Madame Gonsalves. “This man?”
She started to nod, but winced and didn’t. “Yes, that man.”
I handed the camera to the officer. “His name is Sabri Qosja. Interpol is looking for him.”
The young woman still scowled, clearly doubting me. Jean-Paul took over, explaining who to call, and why she should. She wrote down the names and numbers he gave her, pulled out a phone and stepped away, still holding my camera. When she gestured for Jean-Paul to come, I took his seat next to the concierge.
“I am so sorry,” I said. “Tell me what happened.”
She took a breath and let it out again, a long sigh. “That guy, he came up behind me and hit me with something. Then he grabbed the handle of my handbag and cut it. But—” The shadow of a smile crossed her face.
“What?”
“Le trou du cul made a mistake.” Her smile broke open. “He looks at me and he thinks, Ha! Easy target, just a weak old woman. He thinks that once he knocks me down on the ground, I’m finished, too feeble to fight him. Stupid con wasn’t expecting it when I gave him one of these.” She made a fist and feigned punching upward with the heel of her hand. “Technique I learned in commando training. If I’d had a better angle, I would have killed him. Surprised the hell out of him, though. Hurt him enough to drop him to his knees. When he was down, moaning like a baby, I followed with a swift straight-on kick to the face. Heel of my shoe smashed bone: I heard the nose go, I felt it flatten. That blood over there on the sidewalk, chérie? It isn’t mine.”
“Jesus,” I said. She spat, landed a loogie right in the middle of Qosja’s spilled gore. Turning away, I said, “He hurt you.”
“Just a bump on the head. Skinned my knees going down.” She reached around behind her and retrieved her handbag with the broken strap. “Grand espèce de voyou! Couldn’t even take a handbag from an old woman.”
Again, I didn’t know all the words, but the meaning was crystal clear. Somewhere in Paris that afternoon, there was a mercenary, un grand espèce de voyou, walking around with a broken nose and probably two black eyes. Poor bastard, not that I had sympathy for him.
“What did he want from me?” she asked with a palm-up shrug. “I have nothing.”
“I think he wanted your keys,” I said. “He was hired by someone who has been trying to get access to the library in the basement.”
She looked at me for a moment, then burst out laughing as she pulled her key ring out of her coat pocket and held it in her fist with keys jutting out between her knuckles like a weapon. “Fool. No woman buries her keys in her handbag where she can’t get to them if she needs them.”
There was a brief argument between Madame Gonsalves and the paramedics who wanted to take her to the hospital for overnight observation. She had too much work to do, and besides, she didn’t want to miss her Saturday night TV programs. Jean-Paul came over, took her hand, told her he wouldn’t be able to sleep worrying about her if she went home without seeing a doctor first. Besides, he promised, she would be able to watch television from her hospital bed. When she was ready to come home, he told her, we would come for her in the car. With that promise, she let the paramedics strap her onto a gurney. With a last wave, she was on her way.
As we watched the ambulance leave, I turned to Jean-Paul. “Where did she go to commando school?”
He shrugged. “Somewhere in the Pays Basque, probably. Up in the mountains. I told you she was an old Basque separatist, yes?”
“You did.” He took my arm and we walked back to the car, still parked in the middle of the street, blocking traffic. “How many refugees have you taken in over the years, Jean-Paul?”
“I hadn’t thought of her as a refugee, but I suppose she is. When we were looking for a concierge who would be able to handle Isabelle when she was off her meds, or when her meds weren’t working, I thought, who better than a trained commando who can make a magnificent pot of porrusalda.”
“Is that the soup we ate last night?”
“It is.”
“I would hire her for that alone.”
“Bien sûr. And so I did. She had no practical work experience, and after she came out of prison, what was she to do?”
“Prison?”
“Her separatist unit chose an unfortunate target,” he said with a little Gallic shrug. “She did her time, the separatist issue has been resolved. Now Madame Gonsalves makes her soup and guards the gate, and there you have it.”
“Another symbiotic relationship, sir?”
He laughed as he put me into the car. “We do whatever works best for all, yes?”
“Yes, my peacemaker.”
We followed the ambulance to the hospital and waited in a hallway while Madame Gonsalves was put through a series of tests, and then we waited beside her bed for the doctor to come in with the results. Though she smiled and tried to show a brave face, I could see her quaking under the thin sheet draped over her body. Three different times, she told us hospitals were where people went to die. Fighting off street thugs scared her less. While we waited, a nurse came in and tucked a heated blanket tightly around her body. Pulling an arm free, our concierge joked that it was too soon for them to fit her for a shroud.
“Don’t worry,” Jean-Paul said, patting her shoulder. “When the time comes, we’ll wind you in something nicer than a hospital blanket.”
She giggled and the tension in the room disappeared.
An impossibly young doctor came in with a sheaf of diagnostic printouts. He rested a comforting hand on her leg and said, with a smile, “There is no skull fracture, no brain swelling, no symptoms of concussion. Any scalp injury that breaks the skin just bleeds like a son-of-a-bitch: there’s a big blood supply up there and not much cushioning. We turned off the spigot and sewed the scalp back together, so except for some tenderness, Madame, consider yourself repaired. I am more worried about damage to the knees right now; you took a bad fall. X rays showed us some arthritis. After you’re released, if the knees start to bother you more than usual, you’ll need to see your regular physician for follow-up treatment.”
“So I can go home?” she said, throwing back the blanket.
“Not so fast,” he said, taking a corner of the blanket and covering her again. “I’m a bit concerned about the swelling on your right knee. I want to watch it overnight, just to be sure.”
Madame Gonsalves turned to us, and, batting her eyes, said, “This handsome boy likes my knees. He wants to spend the night with them.”
“Of course I do, Madame,” the young doctor said with a chuckle. “But after seeing what you did to your attacker, I will keep a respectable distance.”
“You saw him? He’s here?” I said, getting to my feet. “Where?”
“Don’t worry,” the doctor said, smile suddenly gone. “He’s under guard.”
“Lucky for him,” I said. Jean-Paul had his phone out of his pocket and was punching numbers. “Where is the bastard?”
The doc, nonplussed, faltered over a few starts before he managed to say, “Patient privacy forbids— I’ve said too much already. My apology.”
I was trying to hear Jean-Paul’s end of his telephone conversation, but the doctor was between us, and Jean-Paul had turned his back. The call was brief. Jean-Paul gave me a little nod as he slipped the phone back into his pocket. Then he turned his attention back to Madame Gonsalves. With a reassuring hand on her shoulder, he asked the doctor when he thought she would be released.
“If all goes well, and I expect it will,” the doctor said, regaining his cheerful bedside manner, “Madame will probably go home some time tomorrow.”
Madame argued that she wante
d to go home, now. She grumbled a bit about being in the same building as her attacker, failed to negotiate a suspended overnight sentence for herself, and in the end, picked up the television control, asked what was for dinner, and bid us a good night.
I slipped my hand around Jean-Paul’s elbow as we followed the doctor out of the room. In the hall, the men shook hands, the doctor promised to call if Madame needed anything or if there were complications during the night, we thanked him, wished him good night, and watched him walk down the hall toward the nurse’s station. We went in the opposite direction, toward the elevator.
“Who did you call?” I asked as Jean-Paul punched the down button. The door opened right away.
“A friend,” he said, waiting for me enter the car before him. That nebulous answer, yet again, was the wrong thing for him to say just then. I stuck my hand out to hold the elevator’s automatic doors open, balking, I suppose, until I got a little actual information from him. One look at my face and he understood he’d damn well better expand on his answer a bit; we’d had that conversation before. He put his head near mine, and quietly told me, “Sabri Qosja is downstairs, under guard, in a treatment bay. My friend with the city police has granted us permission to speak with the swine before he is formally booked.”
“A good friend to have,” I said, releasing the door and stepping inside the elevator. “Does he have a name?”
“Berg. David Berg.”
I had to hold my breath to keep from choking: David Berg was the Préfet of Police of Paris. The capital’s top cop. A man whose face had been on the news recently, addressing the public after a coordinated series of suicide bombings at a holiday concert created yet another round of public terror. By all accounts, he was well respected, a competent, calming figure.
As Jean-Paul pushed the button for the second floor, I asked, “Old friend from school?” because, of course, all his “friends” seemed to be old school friends.
With a smile, he leaned over and kissed me. “Bien sûr.”
7
Number 7, Rue Jacob Page 18