A World I Never Made

by James Lepore

  “Have you befriended him?” LeGrand asked.

  “No, but he has lost his daughter, his only child. I thought it right to offer to help:”

  “It is perhaps fortuitous that you did. We want you to continue to make contact with him. He may lead us to his daughter. And from her to others:”

  “Who is we?”

  “The Foreign Office, the Saudis, me:”

  “Does DST know?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why are we handling it?”

  “Because you have made contact with Nolan. He knows you. DST will shadow the investigation, but they want you to be at the point for now.”

  “What do the Saudis have?”

  “They were watching an al-Qaeda cell in Casablanca. One of their agents was working them. Nolan was involved with a member of the cell. She was staying at the Farah Hotel, one of the targets, until the day before it was bombed. One of the bombers survived. His belt pack did not detonate. His car was hit by debris and he was knocked unconscious. He says that Nolan helped plan and coordinate the attacks. After the bombings, both Nolan and her boyfriend disappeared:”

  “Who is the boyfriend?”

  “A Saudi national named Rahman al-Zahra.”

  “Is he supposed to be in France?”

  “It is thought that he may be, that he traveled with Nolan, under a fraudulent passport of course. Just before the bombings in Casablanca, the Saudis picked up chatter that may have been about an operation in France. There was mention of St. Florentin, which as you know has a large Muslim community.”

  “What does he look like?”

  “Unfortunately, there are no pictures. The agent was first put on to Nolan, and then, as soon as he discovered al-Zahra, the bombings occurred.”

  “There must be a description?”

  “He’s six-one, early forties, medium-to-slight build, dark hair, mustache, dark eyes, Arabic of course. No distinguishing features or marks:”

  “We are now down to one billion Arabic men. What about Nolan, the real Nolan?”

  “Here. This was taken in May.” LeGrand handed Catherine a manila folder containing an eight-by-ten color photograph of Megan shopping at an outdoor bazaar, presumably in Morocco. Despite the dust, the obvious heat, and the crowd around her, she looked coolly composed as she handed a trinket of some kind to the shopkeeper. Sunlight, diffused through the frayed awning overhead, cast her face and her long, reddish-blonde hair in a golden glow. She was a strikingly good-looking woman.

  “Is that her?” LeGrand asked.

  “It could be. The corpse I saw was emaciated, the head shaved:” She shrugged, handing the picture back to LeGrand.

  “She does not look ill in that picture:”

  “No.”

  “Monsieur Nolan was quite positive?”

  “Yes. Why don’t we ask him for blood or a tissue sample? We must have samples from the corpse to match them:”

  “We do not want to alert him to our interest:”

  “But he may be completely innocent and want to know that his daughter is alive:”

  “We cannot take the chance:”

  “What if he simply goes home?”

  “We would like him to stay in France at least until you can get a DNA sample. Surreptitiously, of course:”

  “Shall I get a sperm sample?”

  Catherine’s question was not sarcastic, but there was an archness to it that she knew was her rogue nature asserting itself despite, or possibly because of, the extreme gravity of the idea of a major terrorist attack on French soil. Her husband had thought her sense of humor maddeningly inappropriate at best and macabre at worst. Attracted to it while courting, it repulsed him after only three years of marriage. Looking over at Inspector LeGrand and seeing the deadpan, slightly disapproving look on her face, Catherine felt sure her spinster boss and her late husband would have been sympatico at least on this one issue.

  “His coffee cup will do:”

  “Yes, of course. How did the Saudis learn of the suicide?”

  “Nolan’s name was on a watch list. When I called about her diplomatic visa, the Moroccan Foreign Ministry notified their intelligence service, who notified the Saudis.”

  “And what is the basis of their doubts?”

  “They believe al-Zahra tried to fake his own death by giving one of the Casa bombers his papers. It is a common ploy in the world of terrorism. He and Nolan disappeared at the same time. There was the chatter believed to concern a similar operation in France. Nolan does not appear to be the least bit ill in her photograph. She is a redheaded American. She would be undetectable as a terrorist until it was too late. They need confirmation of her death, or of her continuing to live:”

  “Are they sending anyone?”

  “For the time being, no:”

  “Why the Saudis and not the Moroccans?”

  “The Saudis feel they are better situated to track down al-Zahra. He is one of theirs. The Moroccans have agreed to let them take the lead. They will be busy enough interrogating and then executing the thirteen men they captured:”

  “And my assignment is, exactly?”

  “Befriend Nolan. Find out if he is telling the truth. If his daughter is alive, he is our best hope of finding her. While you’re at it, get a saliva sample. That should be easy enough to accomplish. Report directly to me. And only to me:”

  “Where does DST come in?”

  “If you get a lead on Megan Nolan, they will take over the case. They want her, but they want al-Zahra more. He is a known terrorist. While you’re working Nolan, they’ll be checking out St. Florentin and the other Arab communities:”

  “What about my active cases?”

  “You went on leave this morning. Delayed grief. I’ll hand out your work to the others in your unit. If you need more time, I’ll post somebody temporarily from the ranks, somebody senior:”

  “You’ve thought of everything:”

  “Yes, Raimondi was quite forceful. There is enough in this one case, he said, to make or break several careers:”

  Pat Nolan stood on his hotel room’s balcony gazing absently down at the traffic on Avenue de Tourville. In his hand he held the prayer card that had fallen out of the roses the flower girl had given him. On the front was a haloed image of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux holding a spray of red and pink roses, her eyes sad and beautiful and looking right at him. On the back was a prayer to her in French. O Little Flower of Jesus, ever consoling troubled souls ... On his dresser was a white ceramic jar with a hinged top containing the ashes and small chunks of bone from the cremation of the body that was not Megan. He had spent the last two hours delivering the real Megan’s clothes and jewelry to the Salvation Army headquarters in the suburb of Nanterre with the help of an Algerian taxi driver who turned off his meter when he realized the point of Pat’s mission.

  Laid out on his bed’s pristine white counterpane were the items handed to him the day before by Detective Laurence: a photocopy of the suicide note; Megan’s passport, (last stamped on May 16 in Tafira, Spain); her empty wallet; a transparent plastic picture holder containing a snapshot of Pat and Megan taken in Prague in 1992 and one of Lorrie taken on their wedding day in Las Vegas; a withdrawal receipt from a Montmartre bank for twenty thousand euros dated December 23; and a receipt for a round-trip rail ticket from Paris to Lisieux dated December 24. These last two items Pat had found in between the back-to-back snapshots in the picture holder.

  Four stories below, across the street, the Christmas lights on the trees in a small park came on as a band began to set up on a concrete platform near the entrance. The weather had turned even nicer—it had reached sixty degrees today—and Paris was taking advantage. But Pat was not in Paris. He was in New Canaan, on the phone with eighteen-year-old Megan two weeks into her first semester at Bennington.

  I hate it here. They’re all elitist snobs. I’m going to Europe.

  And then he was sitting with her at an outdoor café on the sunny side of Prague’s
Old Town Square, crowded with people enjoying a brilliant fall morning in November of 1992. The waiter had just taken their picture with Megan’s Instamatic.

  “I told you, I hated Bennington.”

  “There are other colleges.”

  “This is my college.”

  “Prague?”

  “Europe.”

  “What about money?”

  “I told you in my letters. I’ve got two jobs.”

  “That looks like a nice street you live on.”

  “It’s cheap here.”

  “How long are you planning on staying?”

  “I don’t know. I’m having a good time.”

  Megan’s strawberry-blond hair glinting in the bright sun. Her beautiful green eyes happy and determined. Very little sympathy in them.

  “When will I see you again?”

  “Let’s meet somewhere at Christmas, It’s only a few weeks away. How about Paris?”

  “Sure, Paris sounds good.”

  Pat taking his wallet out of his jacket pocket, thumbing through the cash in the billfold and drawing out a crisp hundred dollar bill.

  “Your grandfather Connie was away a lot.”

  “Your dad.”

  “Yes. In the merchant marine. He be gone six, seven months at a time. He used to say that when people are separated, only two things will bring them together again: love or money. Every time he went away he tear two dollar bills in half and give half of one to me and half of the other to Frank. ‘You know I love you laddies,” he say to us, ut this is to make double certain I’ll be back.” He make a big show of sticking the two torn halves in his wallet. When we buried him, Frank and I tossed the last two halves he gave us into his grave. Here, take this.”

  Pat tearing the hundred dollar bill in half and handing one of the halves to Megan.

  “Inflation.”

  Megan smiling, putting the torn bill in her wallet.

  On the street below, the band struck the first dreamy note of Moonlight Serenade. This sound, sad but insistent, reached Pat and pulled him back to the here and now, where he found himself staring down at his oversized hands as they gripped the balcony’s ornate wrought iron railing. He released his death grip on the railing and was examining his hands—and thinking of Megan’s empty wallet on the bed behind him, the same one she had had in Prague—when the phone rang in his room.

  “Hello,” he said as he picked it up.

  “Monsieur Nolan?”

  “Yes.”

  “C’est moi, Catherine Laurence.”

  “Hello.”

  “Bonjour.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “I was wondering if you needed help delivering Megan’s clothes to charity. You mentioned you wanted to do that:”

  “It’s already done:”

  “Ah, I see. Will you be staying in Paris?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then perhaps I can make you dinner.”

  “Make me dinner?”

  “My father committed suicide when I was thirteen. He was a policeman. I thought we could talk:”

  “Sure.”

  “I live in Marais, on Rue St. Paul, number 221A:”

  “Is that in Paris?”

  “Yes, the Fourth Arrondissement. You take the Château de Vincennes line—the purple line—and get off at St. Paul. Can you make it at eight tonight?”

  “Yes,” Pat answered, looking at his watch. It was four PM.

  “Bien. Tonight then:”

  ~4~

  MOROCCO, JANUARY 3, 2003

  Megan Nolan sat in a compartment on the left side of the train as it steamed south, arrow straight, from Casablanca to Marrakech. She had taken this ride before and knew that there was nothing much to see except the ocassional man and mule or tin hut breaking up an otherwise monotonously flat and dun-colored coastal plain. The sun, setting now to her right, cast an elongated shadow of the train. A shadow that, for all its fun-house shape, seemed to gently caress the parched and lonely landscape that it so swiftly passed over.

  Lulled by the sound and movement of the train and the sight of its shadow double racing along with it, Megan fell to thinking of her father and of the Christmas-to-New-Year’s week they had just spent together in Rome. Why was it that the holidays, with their insistent sentimentality, distorted and blurred relationships, like the racing shadow she had been watching distorted and blurred the shape of the train? She had dragged him to midnight mass on Christmas Eve at St. Peter’s. It was a wondrous spectacle, but why had she done it? Why change their routine of fortune-teller and Chinese food on all the Christmas holidays they spent together in Europe ? Afterward they had had champagne and exchanged gifts in their hotel’s penthouse restaurant, Rome’s seven hills gleaming below them. That scene came back to her now: the smile on her father’s face as he opened his gift—a richly tooled wallet from Florence—and the awkward silences that followed.

  These were and were not the same as the silences, awkward and sad, that she had experienced as a child, both when Pat was away and when he was home, which in the early years seemed only to be at holidays. One Christmas, when she was seven or eight, after Pat had bought them the little house in New Canaan and Megan allowed herself to believe that all was finally well in her world, Pat left abruptly on New Year’s Eve for a job in Iran. She remembered watching him pack, wanting desperately to ask him to call her from this exotic place Iran, as she had heard from school-mates that their fathers did when away on business. But the words did not come, and Pat, in the short and brutal silence that followed, no doubt guilty and with a scotch or two under his belt, was soon dropping her off at Uncle Franks with a hurried kiss and barely a good-bye. She had turned the tables on him since then, but there was no great satisfaction in it after all. She hated New Year’s to this day.

  Six days later he was gone, relieved, she was sure, to be on his Alitalia flight to New York, scotch in hand. Something’s different, he had said to her on their last night together, at dinner. You seem quieter. He probably thought she had been jilted by a man, gotten her just desserts at last. Poor Pat, she had left him to work his life out on his own, much as he had left her when she was a child to work out her life on her own. He had years ago stopped asking her when she was coming home, which was too bad, because if he had asked her this year she might have told him she was thinking about a return trip. A trip to Connecticut—the word itself was oddly comforting—might be just the respite she needed. How would he have reacted?

  The sensation of the train gradually slowing interrupted this chain of thoughts. Megan first looked at her watch—they weren’t due to arrive in Marrakech for another forty-five minutes—and then out the window. She saw ahead an old and crumbling concrete siding next to a signal stand with one of its paddle arms broken off at the base. As the train came to a stop at the concrete platform, she could hear voices, men’s voices, jabbering in the corridor, and then, a moment later, a handsome, well-dressed Arab man slid open her compartment’s door and told her in perfect English that they were clearing the track for another train to pass and would be delayed a half hour or so. Familiar with the ways of the Maghrib—the so-called western Muslim world—she shrugged and went out to the cracked concrete platform to smoke, sitting on the edge of the equally cracked signal stand with her large, all-purpose carry bag at her feet. These feet, shod in skimpy gold sandals, their toenails painted red, were lovely and, she knew perfectly well, shockingly naked for a Muslim culture. But she made no concessions to any culture. Neither her faded jeans nor her pale green silk blouse were form-fitting, but it was obvious that she was shapely.

  The other passengers, all men, about a dozen in all, paced the platform or talked to one another in staccato Arabic or Berber. The handsome Arab went off toward a vendor who doubled as a taxi driver and who seemed to have arrived at the siding out of nowhere, which was what pretty much surrounded them in all directions. When he completed his transaction—talking and smiling as the vendor filled a paper cone with d
ates—the man turned and began walking toward Megan. The other passengers, in the frenetic style of the Muslim world, had accosted the conductor as soon as he stepped onto the platform. They stopped pestering him for a second to stare at the shockingly outré and discomfiting Megan and the totally Westernized and equally discomfiting Arab who was about to join her on the signal stand. Megan, who had seen the handsome Arab sitting in a private compartment aloofly reading the Herald Tribune as she made her way through the initially crowded train looking for a seat, was not certain that he would approach her. This was not, after all, a bar in a fancy hotel in Casablanca. This was in country so to speak, where there were no hotels or bars, and where the local Muslims took their code of conduct seriously, a code that abhorred fraternization with Western women in public or otherwise. But the man did approach, casting a casual glance at his fellow male Muslims and a quick sly smile in Megan’s direction as he crossed the platform.