by James Lepore
The Paris Métro was easy to navigate, but the labyrinthian streets of Montmartre were not. It was full dark by the time Pat walked through a bleak pocket park that looked familiar and spotted Madame Jeritzas sign in the middle of a crooked street lined with the detritus of Paris’s retail world: a shabby pawn shop; a cobbler whose window was filled to the top with old shoes and boots of every size, shape and color; a wiccan bookstore; a used clothing shop with two naked and headless mannequins guarding the entrance. In the light spilling from the window and neon sign of a tobbaconist, Pat saw two young men on their knees working on the engine of a vintage motorcycle while a third sat in the sidecar and smoked.
Just beyond them was Madame Jeritza’s storefront, its picture windows draped in dark brown from top to bottom, its solid wood doorway dark and unpromising. Pat knocked, not expecting an answer, and there was none. He knocked harder, and then after a moment of silent listening he walked toward the picture window to his right, where there was a slight opening in the drapes, to see if he could get a look inside. As he did this, one of the young men called to him, “Monsieur, pardon. Madame Jeritza est fermé.”
“Parlez-vous Anglais?”
“No”.
A fair amount of Pat’s high school French, drilled into his brain for four years by the Jesuits at Norwalk’s St. Ignatius Academy, had surprisingly stuck and then been reinforced by his visits with Megan, who spoke it fluently and used it as her second language throughout Europe. He had all the guidebook phrases down and could speak in full sentences as long as he stuck with the present tense and a basic vocabulary. He was far from confident, but determined to make himself understood. After Annabella Jeritza there was the town of Lisieux, population forty thousand, where he knew of no one connected to Megan, and then he was out of leads.
“Connaissez-vous Madame Jeritza?”
“Oui.”
“Je suis le père de Megan Nolan.”
“Le père de Megan Nolan?”
“Oui. Il est très important que je parle avec Madame Jeritza ce soir. Immediatement.”
“Immediatement?”
“Oui.”
“Porquoi? Êtes-vous la police?”
“No. S’il vous plait. Ma fille ... ma fille est morte. Pouvez-vous dire Madame Jeritza?”
The neon light above the tobacconist’s door described the outline, in bright yellow, of a cigarette, with dashes of smoke, flicking on and off, emerging from its glowing red tip. When the young man stood to talk to Pat, his face was washed by this eerie light. His shiny black hair was tied back in a ponytail. His eyes were like a cat’s, dark and piercing. He held a wrench in his hand. Pat stared back at him, ready to throw the kid and his friends through the tobacconist’s window if he had to. He had been an amateur boxer for three years after high school and had never lost the ability to throw a killer punch. Twice he had been arrested for assault for bloodying the faces of union goons who occasionally harassed the workers on his nonunion jobs. He was still very strong and agile, and in a way relished the idea of a brawl. It might release the frustration that had been building in him since the morning before, when he had discovered that Megan was not only not dead, but that she was in some sort of exotic, Meganlike trouble. And that he was expected to find her in a country of forty million people, none of whom he knew, and most of whom he assumed were antagonistic to Americans because they had chosen to fight back when attacked by terrorists.
“Attendez,” the young man said, holding up the index finger of his right hand and breaking abruptly into Pat’s overheated chain of thoughts. Turning, the youth spoke rapidly in French to his friends and then went into the tobacconist’s shop. His companions watched him for a second, then kicked the motorcycle down from its stand and rolled it into an alley to the right of the shop, quickly disappearing into the darkness. The wooden wine crate they used as a toolbox remained on the sidewalk. Pat reached into it and picked out a spanner wrench with a heavy rolling head, which he put into the right front pocket of his leather jacket. A few minutes passed in which it occurred to Pat that he had been abandoned, but then the tobacconist’s lights went out and ponytail appeared in the doorway motioning to Pat to come in. Pat did, following him through the darkened shop into a rear storeroom, and from there through a door that opened into a rear room of Madame Jeritza’s quarters. The room was small and sparse, its floor covered by a stained and yellowed linoleum. On one wall stood a porcelain gas stove on lion’s claw legs, on another a row of shelves containing a samovar, which Pat recognized, some china cups, and canisters of tea and spices. At a small formica-topped chrome-legged table sat Annabella Jeritza, in the same—or much the same—head scarf, hoop earrings, and multilayered silk gown that she had had on the last time he had seen her five years ago.
“S’asseoir,” she said, “sit;” motioning to the chair across from her.
Pat turned to see that ponytail had not followed, and then sat. The only light in the room came from a white candle in a brass holder on the table between them. Though the glow from the candle was soft, Pat could see that the intervening years had taken their toll on the gypsy fortune-teller who had befriended his daughter. The roughly applied rouge and eyeliner did nothing to hide the sallow and wrinkled flesh of her face. Her hair—what he could see of it—was dry and tangled, its original henna, whatever color it had once been, now a brassy orange. Only her eyes remained the same: calculating, intelligent, alert to the danger that gypsies expect to see on all sides. As Pat gazed into these eyes, he could also see that they were red and slightly swollen, as if the old woman had been crying.
“Thank you for seeing me,” he said.
“De rien. You have brought bad news:”
“No, Megan is alive:”
“Alive? But my grandson said she was dead?”
“I had to get your attention. I had to see you:”
“Where is Megan?”
“I don’t know. I thought you could tell me:”
“I can’t.”
“When did you last see her?”
“What has happened, Monsieur Nolan?”
Pat had had his hands in his jacket pockets, ready to wield the wrench, still half anticipating trouble. Now he took them out and placed them palms down on the table. Five years ago, Annabella Jeritza had taken his left hand before reading it and placed it against her heart. “That is the sound of a heartbeat,” she had said. It had startled him, as had her next statement: “You feel you have been cheated. But perhaps you have been given a great gift:” Her predictions—“I see two marriages. I see children”—made while gazing at his left palm, holding it gently but firmly in her slender, still-feminine hands, he had dismissed with a smile, relieved to know that she was just another hustler after all.
“The American consul called me to tell me that Megan had killed herself,” Pat replied. “I came to Paris to identify the body. It was not her, but I said it was:”
“Why?”
“She went to great lengths to fake her death. She must be in trouble. I have to find her. I believe she wants me to find her.”
“Do you love your daughter, Monsieur Nolan?”
“Madame Jeritza ...”
“Do you know why she left home?”
Pat remained silent. This was a question he had asked himself for years, growing tired at last of the embarrassing triteness of the only answers he could think of. She had no mother. She spent more time in day care than she did with him. She sensed that he blamed her for Lorrie’s death, for the loss of the life he really wanted to live. All true and all bullshit.
“Perhaps she has always been in trouble;” Madame Jeritza said. “Perhaps she always wanted you to come looking for her.”
“I’m looking for her now.”
“Let us hope it is not too late:”
“Madame Jeritza, have you seen her?”
“She came to see me on November 2, the day of All Souls. Do you know what that day signifies? Le Jour des Morts?”
“I’ve forg
otten:”
“The dead return to their homes that night, where it is warm and where supper is put out, so they can eat the food of the living. In Brittany, where I was born, the peasants go at nightfall to kneel at the graves of their loved ones, to pour water or milk into the hollows of their tombstones. Prayers are said for the souls in purgatory to hasten the day when they will see God.”
“What does this have to do with Megan?”
“She came to pray for the souls of the three children she had aborted. To leave cakes and milk out for them:”
“Christ.”
“Yes, Christ:”
Pat looked into Annabella Jeritza’s eyes and then down at his hands. He had used these hands to do and fix many things. Move the earth with a giant machine, tear apart and rebuild a car engine, make a soda box wagon for Megan. He sometimes thought that whatever he was good for in life was contained in his hands. But now he had entered the territory of the broken heart, which hands could not repair.
“She also wanted the name of a midwife;” Madame Jeritza said. ”She was pregnant:”
“Pregnant?”
“Yes, and she wanted no record of the child’s birth:”
“No abortion:”
“No.”
Pat was silent. Three abortions. He was not surprised or shocked. Megan’s entire life, her inner life, the one that mattered, was a secret she kept from him. A weapon. But Megan giving birth, passing a child from her womb into the world, Megan a mother ... The feelings these images stirred in his heart did surprise him, so forcefully did they announce themselves.
“Where was she staying? Where did she go?” he asked.
“She was staying with gypsies here in Montmartre. I found her a midwife in that neighborhood:”
“Did she have the child?”
“Yes, a boy. She brought him to me for a reading:”
The candle between them had nearly burned down. Before it did, Annabella reached to the shelf behind her for a new one, which she lit from the old one’s sputtering flame and then stuck into the melting wax in the bottom of the brass holder.
“Where did she go?”
“I don’t know. She left a few days after the baby was born:”
“The people she was staying with, do you know them?”
“Yes.”
“Can I speak to them?”
“Yes, but I must speak to them first. They will not speak to a stranger. Come tomorrow, in the evening. Doro—my grandson—will take you to them:”
Outside, Pat made his way to the small park, the only route he was certain would lead to a Métro station. Entering it, he was oblivious to the wind whistling softly through the naked branches of its trees or the chill that had descended on Paris. Against this chill he put his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, finding in the right one the wrench he had lifted from Doro’s toolbox. Its heft and rough metallic texture comforted him. It was a tool, something familiar that, unlike the souls of the dead and the murky world of gypsy fortune-tellers and midwives, he could put his hand around and know what to do with. Ahead, the path was lit by an ornate lamppost with only one of its cluster of three ball-shaped lamps working. In its dim light he saw two men in ski jackets walking slowly in his direction. As he neared them, he moved to his left, but they blocked his path and suddenly one of them had him by the arm and was sticking something hard and metallic into his ribs—a gun—and saying in thickly accented English, Be silent, Mr. Patrick Nolan, and come with me or I will shoot you through the heart.
Reflexively, Pat pushed the man away and in the same motion pulled the wrench from his pocket and swung it at his head, where it crunched against bone and knocked him flat onto his back on the park’s cinder pathway. At the same time there were two gunshots. Pat whirled in the direction of the second one in time to see the other man falling to the ground clutching his chest and a woman in a black trench coat walking quickly toward him: Officer Laurence.
“Step away, Monsieur Nolan. Step away. Vitement!”
Pat took two steps back and watched as Laurence, whose long brown hair shone in the glow from the broken lamp, nudged the second man over onto his back with her foot. There was a large blotch of blood on the front of his gray sweater, still oozing. In his right hand he was gripping a small gun. She kicked the gun away, then knelt and placed two fingers against his carotid artery. She quickly turned to the man Pat had felled, who was lying on his side breathing heavily, moaning softly. Taking her makeup case out of her shoulder bag and flipping it open, she pressed two fingers of the man’s right hand against its mirror. After a rapid search of his pockets, she tore open his sweater and found a leather neck pouch with a passport and other papers in it. These she leafed through quickly before slipping them into her trench coat pocket. She then went about the same process with the man with the chest wound. While she was occupied with him, the man Pat had felled rose slowly to one knee. Blood was streaming from a gash above his left eye. With his good eye he stared hard at Laurence kneeling over his partner and at Pat looming over him only a few feet away. Then suddenly he was on his feet and running toward the wooded area to his left. Pat, his adrenaline level in the red zone, spotted a gun on the grass a few meters away. He raced for it, but it was too late. The injured man had vanished into the pitch-black shadows of the woods. Pat took a step in that direction, but was stopped by Laurence’s voice behind him.
“Let him go,” she said. “We will never catch him in the dark:”
“What about him?” Pat said, nodding toward the man on the path.
“He is dead:”
“What are you doing here?”
“I was following you:”
Pat took this in, remaining silent, trying to decide which of several logical questions to ask next. He was still holding the wrench, which was stained with blood on its business end. Seeing it, Pat recalled with a slight jolt the thud of metal against skin and bone as he whacked his assailant.
“Give that to me;” Laurence said, extending her hand. Taking it, she wiped it clean on the front of the dead man’s jacket and put it in her coat pocket.
“Following me?”
“Yes,” Laurence replied, “but there is no time to talk. Help me.”
Turning, she lifted the dead man under his arms and began dragging him off the path. Pat took hold of the man’s legs and together they deposited him at the edge of some nearby bushes, but in plain sight.
“Let’s go,” Laurence said, “we will use the Métro.”
“First tell me who they are:”
“What is that on your hand?” She took hold of his sleeve to get a better look. A trickle of blood ran down to his fingers. There was a perfectly formed bullet hole in his leather jacket at his bicep, which was also oozing dark red.
“We will talk at my apartment:”
“Who are they?” Pat asked again, pulling his hand away.
“They are Mabahith, Saudi Arabian Secret Police:”
~7~
MOROCCO, FEBRUARY 5, 2003
“How was Zagora? Did you find your family?” Abdel al-Lahani asked.
“I did,” Megan answered.
“And? Is there a story?”
“No.”
“No? Why not? It seems perfect:”
“I was hoping to find a terrorist, but I didn’t.”
“A terrorist. My God. Are you serious?”
“Yes, I am:”
“But I thought you wanted to write a story about the natives. The blind family.”
“I was told that the sighted son had terrorist ties. That was the story. His parents told me he was attending university in France. I turned up nothing to indicate otherwise:”
“You did not tell me this. You did not trust me. You think because I am Muslim I am sympathetic to terrorists.” Lahani smiled as he said this, modulating his deep, rich voice to a pitch somewhere between mock sternness and mock hurt, supremely self-assured, as Megan was learning he almost always was. What he did not know was that her con
fession was a tactical one, meant to stroke his already bloated ego, to dull his senses to her cunning if and when she decided to really use it.
“We had just met,” she said, looking down as if embarrassed.