by James Lepore
Instead of getting a civil engineering degree and designing megaprojects around the world, he went into business with his older brother, Frank, building homes, strip malls, and car dealerships in the tristate area. When Frank had retired last year, Pat sold Nolan Brothers. He wanted no part of the office work that Frank had handled for thirty years. Since then he had been entertaining offers to manage projects, large and small, near and far, from companies and architects he had met in the course of a long career of completing jobs on time and at or under budget. He had brought a folder of these offers with him, and started looking for a not too pretentious café where he could sip coffee and read through it to kill time until twelve o’lock.
He found a place on a corner across from the Pont de la Concorde. It was nearly empty and its outdoor tables were set up to take advantage of the surprisingly balmy weather: fifty degrees Fahrenheit or so under a cloudless pale blue sky diffused even in the dead of winter with Paris’s famous silky light. Pat expected the waiter to sniff at him, and he did, his large Gallic nose rising higher with each step as he made his way from the front door to the table Pat had chosen in the full sun near the sidewalk. In his jeans, worn-out workboots, and thick black sweater, his Americanness was obvious.
Parisian condescension was not new to Pat. He had spent Christmas with Megan in Europe, usually Paris, for the past twelve years. In between they talked on the phone a few times and occasionally she sent him a short letter or a cryptic postcard. The Christmas just past had been the first one since she left home that they had not spent together. And neither had he heard from her since he left her in Rome the year before. She had finally called on Christmas day.
A few days later she killed herself.
Pat sat now, and instead of looking at his folder, which he carried in a canvas knapsack slung over his shoulder, he sipped his coffee and reviewed that last conversation.
“Dad, hi.”
“Hello.”
“How are you?”
“I’m fine. Where are you?”
“Paris.”
Pause.
“Where have you been?”
“Traveling. No place special.”
Pause.
“How are you?” (Megan).
“I’m okay:”
Pause.
“I’m sorry, Dad.”
“For what?”
“That Lorrie died and not me.”
“Is that why you haven”t called?”
“I’m calling now.”
“How long will you be there?”
“I’ll probably leave tomorrow or the next day.”
“Where to?”
“I’m not sure exactly.”
“Megan ...”
“You’re angry, I know. I’ve had a hard year.”
“A hard year?”
“It’s almost over. My birthday’s coming up. You can bring me a present.”
“Megan ...”
“I’m sorry, Dad. I have to go. I love you.”
Click.
One of Megan’s former lovers, a famous novelist, had described a beautiful, twenty-five-year-old female character as having the ability “to slip in and out of your psyche in a matter of a few hot and thrilling seconds, exposing the thing you loathe most about yourself while whispering a promise of joy to your secret heart. Afterward you wanted more, oblivious to the bruise on your soul.” When the book came out, Megan sent Pat a copy of the page on which this passage appeared with a note on the margin that read, “Dad, I would sue this guy, but the writing’s so bad I be too embarrassed.” Pat knew the Megan the spurned writer was describing. The heartless Megan. Megan the cynic. This knowledge was one of the few ties that he felt bound her to him. Other fathers felt more positive things of course, but this was something. Something to cling to. He did not know the Megan he talked to on Christmas day, the one planning to kill herself. Such a bitter thing not to know, invalidating as it were their tenuous bond, exposing it for the sham it was.
Pat walked along the river after finishing his coffee, then turned away from the water in the neighborhood of the Eiffel Tower, which was teeming with tourists, who, trancelike, were streaming to the giant structure like insects to the sacred seat of their queen. His hotel was in this neighborhood, as was the Rue des Fleurs, which he decided to visit before being “collected” by Officer Laurence. He knew from looking at his city map the night before that it ran only two blocks, from Rue de l’Universitè roughly southerly to Rue de Montessuy. When he made the turn from Rue de l’Universitè onto Rue des Fleurs, he saw a city worker in hip boots using a hose connected to a truck that followed him slowly as he methodically sprayed the sidewalk on Pat’s side. Rather than backing up, Pat stepped into a doorway that turned out to be the foyer of a small apartment house. There, squatting before him, was a woman arranging bouquets of flowers in two large wicker baskets.
“Would you like to buy a bouquet of flowers, Monsieur,” she said without looking up, apparently deducing from his shoes and jeans that he was a man. “For your daughter? Your wife?”
The woman’s hair was pitch-black, and at first Pat thought she was one of the gypsies who pestered the tourists in virtually all of Europe’s capitals. Then she stood and Pat saw that she was not a gypsy and not a woman, but rather a girl of thirteen or fourteen with large luminous eyes set in a pale face of immaculate complexion and indecipherable national origin. The foyer was small, only ten feet by ten feet, but its richly paneled walls reached up some twenty feet to meet in a darkly latticed cathedral ceiling. The floor beneath them was a pink-and-gray striated marble. The transom above the front door was made of stained glass of pale blues and greens, and the light spilling from it cast the girl’s face in an angelic glow. Outside, the street washer was passing. The girl, holding a bouquet of roses in one hand and wiping the other on her poorly cut cloth coat, smiled and said, “The street cleaner has sent you to me:”
Pat could not find his tongue for a second and then, without thinking, he reached into the back pocket of his jeans and withdrew his wallet, a slender beat-up leather affair with little in it except some cash, his driver’s license, two credit cards, and a picture of Megan. This he slid from its clear plastic cover and showed to the flower girl.
“This is my daughter,” he said. “Do you know her?”
“Oui, Monsieur,” the girl answered. And then, switching back to her lilting schoolgirl’s English, “She told me you would come:”
“She told you I come?”
“Oui, Monsieur.”
“When was that?”
“When she purchased flowers from me last week:”
“What kind of flowers?”
“Roses. Comme ça.” She looked down at the bouquet in her hand and then back up at Pat.
“What else did she tell you?”
“Rien, Monsieur, just that you would be coming.”
She’s dead, Pat wanted to say. I’m too late. But he could not form the words. He heard them echoing in his head, but though he tried he could not get them to his lips. Then suddenly he was crying, holding his hands to his eyes to hide his tears. Embarrassed, he opened his wallet again and began fumbling in it for euro notes to pay for the bouquet. The girl, however, gently clasped her hands over his, forcing them to close the wallet and at the same time deftly placing the flowers into his right hand. There was more comfort in her touch than Pat had felt in years. He stood there mute, wondering at the sweetness of this child who was a head shorter than him but whose presence seemed to fill every corner of the small room.
“She was troubled, Monsieur.”
“Troubled?”
“Yes, Monsieur. It is good that you have come. You must go to her:”
There was no point in telling the girl that Megan was dead, that in a few minutes he would indeed be going to her, but only to her corpse.
“I am going to her now,” he said.
“Have faith, Monsieur. You will be led to her.”
~2~
PARIS, JANUARY 2, 2004
Pat arrived at his hotel at a few minutes before noon, which gave him just enough time to put the roses into a vase with water and wash his face and hands before going down to the lobby to meet Officer Laurence. When he unwrapped the roses, a prayer card of some kind fell out; he put this in his pocket without thinking much about it. He told the desk clerk that he was expecting an Officer Laurence of the Paris police and pointed to a stuffed chair in a corner where he would be waiting for her. There he sat and began to ponder his strange meeting with the flower girl, but within seconds, or so it seemed, he was interrupted by a tall angular woman in her mid-thirties dressed in a chic dark blue suit over a white silk blouse. Her nose was on the large side and slightly bumpy, and would have dominated her face except that it was nicely in proportion to her high, wide cheekbones and full-lipped broad mouth. The eyes in this face, forthright eyes that met his squarely, were an arresting shade of gray-green that Pat had never seen before. Her gold bracelets jangled as she extended her hand to him and introduced herself with a half smile and a nod of her head.
“Do you speak French, Monsieur Nolan?”
“Un peu.”
“You prefer English?”
“Yes.”
“Mais oui. Of course. You seem surprised, Monsieur. I am not dressed to chase criminals today.”
“I was expecting someone in a uniform. Inspector LeGrand said you were an officer.”
“I am an officer of the judiciary police. In America I would be a detective.”
Pat was surprised at Laurence’s appearance, but it wasn’t at the way she was dressed. Nor was it solely how lovely she was, although she was quite lovely to look at. It was, he realized, how interesting the look in her beautiful eyes was. There was no French arrogance in them, but its opposite, something akin to humility or a complicated, frustrating sadness not unlike his own. This look, whether imagined or real, and the thought it sparked in his overworked mind, took Pat for a moment—a very brief moment—out of himself, a process that on some wider level he observed with gratitude.
“Shall we go?” Laurence said softly, bringing him swiftly but gently back to the grim task at hand.
The ride to the hospital in Laurence’s black Peugeot station wagon was short and quiet. Once there, Laurence spoke rapidly in French to a desk clerk, then shepherded Pat into an elevator which took them to the basement.
“Wait,” she said when they exited the elevator; then, turning, she walked quickly down a long corridor, her high heels clicking on the tiled floor. She disappeared behind double swinging doors, reemerging a moment later and gesturing to Pat to come. It was a long walk for Pat, longer even than the one he had taken twenty-nine years ago to confirm for himself that his wife of eight months was dead. Laurence held open one of the swinging doors for him and he entered a squarish, harshly lit room with a wall of stainless steel body lockers at one end and an autopsy station at the other, where a lab technician in a white smock stood next to a gurney. Pat took this scene in for a moment and then felt Officer Laurence’s hand on his left forearm. At the gurney, Laurence nodded to the technician, who pulled down gently on the pale green sheet. Pat’s eyes went first to the shaved head, then to the crude sutures at the right temple, and then finally to the face, white and stony in death these last four days. It was not Megan. It was a woman generally of Megan’s age and size and coloring, but it was not her.
“This is your daughter, Monsieur Nolan?”
Pat’s mind had stopped working for a second, but it started again when he heard Officer Laurence’s voice. Other voices then filled his head.
My birthday’s coming up. You can bring me a present.
A quick cremation.
Have faith, Monsieur. You will be led to her.
Megan was alive but wanted the world to think she was dead. The world except for Pat and the flower girl on the Street of Flowers.
“Yes,” he answered, nodding, and at the same time reaching out and placing his right hand over the body’s left hand. He pressed through the sheet to feel for the heavy silver ring that he had bought for Lorrie on their honeymoon and then given to Megan when she turned sixteen. To the best of his knowledge, she had not taken it off since. He confirmed its absence, then stepped away from the gurney, keeping his eyes on the unknown woman who had visited Megan on December 30 and killed herself in furtherance of what dark and strange conspiracy—a conspiracy he had now joined—Pat could not fathom. Why, Megan? And where are you?
“She has lost weight from her cancer,” said Laurence.
“Yes.”
The detective nodded to the technician, who pulled the sheet up and began wheeling the gurney toward the lockers.
“Detective Laurence,” Pat said.
“Yes.”
“I would like to have my daughter cremated today if possible. Can you help me?”
“Yes. Upstairs we will sign papers to release the body. We will call a crematorium from my cell phone:”
“And her personal effects?”
“I have them in my car. I will take you to her room if you like:”
“Yes. I would:”
“Perhaps you would like something to eat first, a drink?”
Yes, I could use a drink, a long night of drinking, Pat thought, realizing, as Laurence stared intently at him that the stunned look on his face was not what she thought it was, sorry that he had had to lie to her.
“No,” he said, thanking her with his eyes for the sympathy in hers. “Let’s get it over with:”
~3~
PARIS, JANUARY 3, 2004
“I have had a visit from Charles Raimondi from the Foreign Office. Do you know who he is?”
“One of de Poincare’s boys:”
“Yes, the inner circle:”
Inspector LeGrand, apparently organizing her thoughts, remained silent for a second or two, drumming her fingers on her desk. As she did, Catherine Laurence recalled her one brush with Charles Raimondi. At a Europol conference in Brussels two years ago he had traced the back of her hand lightly with his fingertips and asked her to be his mistress. Handsome, but effete and arrogant, he seemed to guess that she was unhappy in her marriage, and, worse, to assume that she would be honored to receive the sexual favors of the man who was the Foreign Minister’s liaison to the DST, France’s very powerful equivalent of America’s CIA. When she turned him down, the serpentine flash of anger that he could not—or would not—keep from his eyes told her all she needed to know about Raimondi.
“The Saudi government,” LeGrand said,“is interested in Megan Nolan.”
“But she is dead:”
“They think not:”
Catherine Laurence’s distasteful memory of Charles Raimondi was immediately displaced by this startling piece of information. It was not every day that a father misidentified a dead child’s body, or willfully participated in a faked suicide. Or that the Foreign Office and the Saudi government were at once interested in a case she was handling. “What is their interest?” she asked.
“The suicide bombings in Morocco in May.”
Laurence and LeGrand were sitting in LeGrand’s corner office the day after Laurence had accompanied Pat Nolan to the morgue. The Seine shone in the midday sunlight, and beyond it one could see a wide swath of the Right Bank in its staid and stately patterns. The sounds of traffic, muffled by the thick stone walls of the police building, seemed distant to Laurence, as if coming to them from another dimension, far away and not connected to Paris. Her husband, Jacques, had been killed in one of those bombings in Casablanca. She had not loved Jacques for several years before he was killed and had occasionally fantasized about his sudden and unexpected death. That part of her life seemed likewise to have occurred in another dimension, one not quite connected to her. She remained silent for a moment as she contemplated the deep irony of bringing to justice someone involved in the bombings that made her fantasies come true.
“The Saudis,” LeGrand continued, “have someone they
wish to view the body.”
“The body was cremated this morning,” Catherine replied.
“So quickly. Are you certain?”
“I drove Monsieur Nolan to the crematorium:”
“You drove him?”
“Yes.”
Again Inspector LeGrand was silent. Again she drummed her desktop with her fingers. I have irritated her, Catherine thought, again, recalling the puzzled look, the slight but insistent frown on her boss’s face in the days after Jacques’s death, when Catherine had quietly interred his remains—literally what was left of him—and returned immediately to the homicide she had been working on when she received the shocking news. Catherine knew what LeGrand and others in the department thought of her. Arrogant. Aloof. Whatever. She didn’t care. Raised by old-school gendarmes—a cop’s daughter and niece, and proud of it—she was very good at what she did, her closure rate and fearlessness on the street earning her a grudging respect. But her inner life she did not share, and this kept her from making lasting friends and from participating in the politics of police work that were a prerequisite to full acceptance and advancement. So be it.