A World I Never Made

by James Lepore

“It’s Pat. Remember?”

  “Yes, of course. Good night, Pat.”

  In her study, which she had transformed from an old walk-in closet across the hallway from her bedroom, Catherine dusted and lifted the fingerprints on her makeup mirror, then scanned them into her computer. She stared at them on the screen for a long moment, mesmerized, as though she might find the secret to evil in the world hidden in their delicate whorls and loops. Then she sent them to her uncle, Daniel Peletier, a retired Gendarmerie forensics expert, hoping he would be awake and at his computer in Normandy, in his stone-and-timber farm house on Cap de la Hague overlooking the English Channel, winter-mad with storms and gales this time of year. Call me, her e-mail said. While her bath was running, she made a pot of hot chocolate and put slabs of fresh butter on several chunks of bread leftover from her breakfast. These she took—along with her cell phone—into her bathroom with her, eating and drinking while she slowly undressed. Unhappy before and then guilty after Jacques’s death, she had ignored her body for long stretches. Tonight, with a strange and handsome man in the house, she looked at it. Acknowledged it. Her tiny black bra and panties punctuated this acknowledgement as she dropped them to the white tile floor. Crossing past the living room with her food and phone, she had slowed for a second to see Patrick Nolan asleep on his back on her sofa, his bandaged arm across his chest, his good arm hanging straight down, the hand resting with curled fingers on her Persian carpet. A band of yellow light no wider than an inch or two, spilling from the half-closed kitchen door, lay diagonally across Nolan’s face, illuminating his lustrous dark brown eyelashes and a brow furrowed more in sleep than when he was awake.

  She finished her bread and chocolate while soaking, and then afterward she put on silk pajamas and a robe and sat at her desk to read the flimsy file entitled In the Matter of M. Nolan. It contained the responding officer’s report, a statement from the concierge at the Hotel Lorraine, the autopsy report, Megan Nolan’s passport and Moroccan visa, and Catherine’s half-page report of Pat Nolan’s positive ID at the All Souls morgue. Attached to the visa was a note dated January 1 in Inspector LeGrand’s hand of her call to Rabat to inquire about the visa’s provenance. There was no note indicating that her call had been returned. She saw at the bottom of the autopsy report that copies had been sent to Insp. LeGrand, etc. She made some notes of her own, questions to ask Uncle Daniel, and then leaned back in her leather chair to stare up at the painted tin ceiling of her hundred-year-old apartment. When she and Pat exited the Metro near Rue St. Paul, she had stopped at a pay phone and called the police precinct in Montmartre to report, anonymously, that she had been out walking her dog and had heard gunshots and then seen a man running from the area of the small park near Rue Volney. She knew they were gunshots, she said, because her husband was a hunter and had taken her along on several trips to shoot quail in Normandy. She did not know if quail were to be found in Normandy, and if they were if they could be shot there, and now she smiled to herself at this thought. By now the police would have found the body.

  The ringing of her cell phone interrupted this chain of thoughts.

  She picked it up and flipped it open. “Hello.”

  “Catherine, c’est moi, Daniel:”

  “Uncle:”

  “How are you, ma petite niece?”

  “I am well, mon petit oncle.”

  “I have received your prints:”

  Daniel Peletier, now seventy-two, and his brother, Jean-Paul—Catherine’s father—five years younger, had both had long and respectable careers in French law enforcement. Daniel as a forensic scientist and Jean-Paul as a gendarmerie detective in St. Lô, their home city in northwestern France’s Manche province. They were uneventful, unspectacular, plodding careers in the old-fashioned practical way of the mid-twentieth-century French middle class. So plodding, so evenly paced, that unless you observed them periodically and with a skilled eye, you would not know that from one year to the next they accomplished all that they had set out to do in their lives: perform honorably at their jobs and raise their families in as much security and comfort as they could. It was her father’s sudden death in his sleep in 2001—she had lied to Pat earlier in order to get him to have dinner with her—that unmoored Catherine and left her stranded, with only a desolate marriage. Her mother, suffering from multiple sclerosis for twenty years, had died a year earlier, but even then it had never occurred to Catherine that Jean-Paul, only sixty-four, her childhood hero in his stylish uniform and hallmark gendarme’s hat, could conceivably leave her. She had no siblings. Uncle Daniel, retired these past two years, childless, also a widower, was all she had left.

  “What is it?” he asked. “What are you working on?”

  This question aroused Catherine from her brief reverie. She did not know at the moment exactly what it was she was working on. The Saudis would not be involved, Inspector LeGrand had said. The impact of the risk she was taking by leaving a dead body in the park and letting the injured man get away without pursuit hit her fully now. A simple call to the local precinct would have kept her career on its so far straight and narrow course.

  “I cannot say at the moment,” she replied.

  “Have you been promoted?”

  “No.”

  “You want these prints run, I take it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Whatever I do will leave a trail:”

  “Give me your password. I will do it from my computer.”

  “Impossible. The software includes voice recognition:”

  “Forget it then:”

  “Too late. I have already run the prints through:”

  “I told you to call me first, Uncle:”

  Catherine took a deep breath, her lips tightly set. She had put Uncle Daniel in danger. Tomorrow, or later tonight, she would make up a story to explain the whole thing to LeGrand.

  “And the results?” she asked.

  “I do not have them yet:”

  “How long will it take?”

  “An hour or so:”

  “Let me ask you:”

  “Yes.”

  “You have read autopsy reports?”

  “Thousands.”

  “If a woman had delivered a child, say within two weeks of death, would there be signs?”

  “Yes, of course:”

  “Would a woman in the last stages of ovarian cancer have been likely to have been pregnant and delivered a baby two weeks before she died?”

  “You must tell me more, my dear. What does this relate to?”

  “A faked suicide:”

  “Is there DNA available?”

  “No, but the thing is, we know it’s a fake. I just want to know who else might know.”

  “Ah, someone who has read the autopsy for example:”

  “Yes.”

  “All autopsies on women will note certain conditions regarding pregnancies and childbirth. For example, nulligravida means never pregnant’; nulliparous means ‘never given birth; and so on:”

  “It’s that simple?”

  “Yes.”

  “Call me on my cell when you have the prints results, and use yours:”

  “Catherine, I am worried, of course:”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “In France, the world’s greatest and most arrogant bureaucracy, it is anathema to go around the system:”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “And you will not tell me more?”

  “No.”

  “On the other hand, there is something in your voice. Have you returned to us? Is there a man involved?”

  “There’s a man sleeping on my couch right now, but it’s not what you think:”

  “I see. Promise me something:”

  “Yes.”

  “Whatever is happening, don’t try to do it alone. Call on me. I am old and tired of feeling useless. Your word, ma petite.”

  “Yes, you have my word, Uncle:”

  Catherine hung up the phone and leaned back in her chair. She removed the towel
from her wet hair and let it fall to the floor. In the pocket of her thick terrycloth robe was a pack of Galloises and a disposable lighter. Before Jacques died, she had struggled unsuccessfully to quit smoking, making of it unconsciously a metaphor for what she saw as her cowardly inability to end her marriage. After his death she lost her taste for cigarettes—except for when it returned at moments she least expected—while bathing, for example, or while standing on one of Paris’s bridges watching a barge emerge like a sea monster from the morning mist on the Seine. She was free now, free to smoke and free to live, but her conscious mind would not let her assimilate this fact. She lit a Gallois and stepped to the large mullioned door that led to a balcony overlooking Rue St. Paul. Across the street a young man—no more than twenty or twenty-one, with beautiful long black hair—was standing under the cone of light of a street lamp, also lighting a cigarette. Catherine stepped back into a deep shadow and watched as the man smoked for a second or two and then moved slowly on without looking up. She smiled as she remembered that both her father and Uncle Daniel had reminded her often that paranoia was a good detective’s radar. The blips on its screen should always be tracked.

  Both nulligravida and nulliparous were noted on the Megan Nolan autopsy report. Whoever knew that the real Megan Nolan was pregnant and had seen the autopsy report would know irrefutably that she was alive and had gone to great trouble to fake her suicide. Five people—not counting Catherine—knew about the “suicide” of Megan Nolan: Patrick Nolan, his brother, Inspector LeGrand, Charles Raimondi, and an unknown person in the Moroccan diplomatic service in Rabat. An Arab. And then two Arab men, professionals on one side or the other of the law, or perhaps both, appear in Paris to abduct Nolan père at gunpoint. How did they know how to pick up his trail? Catherine finished her cigarette, sucking in the last drag like the narcotic it was. As she was stubbing it out in a thick glass art deco ashtray on her desk, her cell phone rang.

  “Here are your prints;” said Daniel without preface. ”The first set matches to Ahmed bin-Shalib, twenty-five, Pakistani, wanted on a terrorist warrant issued by the US.”

  “Anything else on him?”

  “They are associating him with the death of the American journalist in Karachi, the beheading:”

  “Michael Cohen.”

  “Yes.”

  The two paused to assimilate this information. Catherine could hear her uncle breathing softly through her phone’s high tech receiver.

  Daniel was the first to speak. “Where is he now, Catherine?” “Somewhere in Paris. And the other?”

  “No match. Where is be?”

  “Probably in a morgue:”

  “Is that a good thing?”

  “Yes.”

  “You do not sound—how shall I say it-elated:”

  “Bin-Shalib got a good look at me, and I him.”

  “I see. Why don’t you take a ride up to see me? We can talk. It is lonely up here at the end of the world:”

  “I will, Uncle, and maybe sooner than you think:”

  “Don’t fret, ma petite, I will make it all well:”

  “Yes, just like Papa:”

  “Just like Papa:”

  ~9~

  PARIS / COURBEVOIE, JANUARY 4, 2004

  The next morning, while Pat was still sleeping, Catherine went out to pick up a copy of Le Monde, which she skimmed through quickly at an outdoor table of a patisserie. She found no mention of a shooting in Volney Park or the discovery of a dead Arab anywhere in Montmartre, or Paris for that matter. She bought croissants and, once at home, placed them on a white china plate that she covered with a fresh cotton napkin and placed on the center of her small kitchen table. Outside, the early sunlight was fading as storm clouds gathered. She turned up the heat in the apartment and, while putting on a pot of coffee, heard the comforting hiss of her steam radiators responding. Pat still slept. In her study she made a series of calls. The first was to the police precinct in Montmartre, the last to Charles Raimondi. When she was done, she returned to the kitchen to find Pat splashing water onto his face and running it through his thick wavy hair with his hands. She took a dish towel from a drawer and handed it to him as he finished. It looked more like a handkerchief in his hands as he dried his face and used it to try to pacify his unruly black mane. He was still wearing the clothes he had slept in. He had even put on and laced up his sturdy and severely unfashionable American walking shoes.

  “How did you sleep?” she asked.

  “Well. Thank you:”

  “And the arm?”

  “It’s fine. A little sore:”

  “Are you hungry? I have bought croissants:”

  “I’m very hungry

  “Moi aussi. Sit:”

  In a few minutes the half dozen pastries were gone and they were each sipping their second cup of Catherine’s strong African coffee.

  “This coffee is good,” said Pat.

  “It’s the last of my husband’s:”

  “Oh ... where is he now?”

  “He is dead. He was killed in a terrorist bombing in Casablanca last May. He was a consultant to importers and exporters. Coffee was one of his specialties:”

  “What was his name?”

  “Jacques.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yes, I am too ...”

  As she was finishing this sentence, the phone rang in Catherine’s study. She rose quickly to get it.

  “I am going out to meet a colleague,” Catherine said, reappearing in the kitchen five minutes later. She had put on lipstick and was standing before Pat in a stylish black overcoat with a dark green, yellow-bordered silk scarf around her neck.

  “You look beautiful,” Pat said.

  Catherine frowned, and her heart sank a little, though she wasn’t sure why. Many men had told her she was beautiful. Charles Raimondi, for example, whom she was meeting for coffee in fifteen minutes. Could there, however, be two men more opposite than Charles Raimondi and Pat Nolan? This thought raised her spirits, though again she wasn’t sure why. Unless she was attracted to Nolan. It had been so long, she had forgotten how it happened, real attraction to a man. Confused, she did not reply, only nodded and turned to leave.

  “We need to talk,” Pat said.

  “If you are here when I return, we will talk,” Catherine answered, turning back to face Pat.

  “Where would I go?”

  “I don’t know To continue your search for your daughter.”

  “It’s a matter for the police now, isn’t it?”

  “That’s what I”m trying to find out:”

  “I don’t understand:”

  “The dead man was not found in the park. According to the police in Montmartre there was no shooting, no dead body.”

  Yes, Patrick, Catherine thought. You beard me correctly. The police may not be the good guys in this case. In which event you, your daugbter and I are in a lot of trouble.

  “I’ll be here,” Pat said.

  “Good. I won’t be long:”

  “I have found Megan Nolan.”

  “Excellent.”

  Catherine had come almost immediately to the point, as, she noted, had Charles Raimondi. They were seated at a window table at a small café just around the corner from Catherine’s apartment. She had arrived early and watched as Raimondi pulled up in front, parking his diplomat-tagged black Citroën in a clearly marked no-parking/loading zone. As he stepped out of the car, his black hair perfectly groomed, his movements graceful and erect, in a cashmere overcoat and soft wool Burberry scarf, he seemed as elegant—and haughty—as a swan. Watching him coolly survey the street before entering the café, she was reminded of their last meeting, when she had been repelled as much by his unselfconscious arrogance as by the transparency of his motives in attempting to befriend her.

  “How did you know she wasn’t dead?” she asked. “Inspector LeGrand said something about faked suicide as a terrorist MO, but that seemed too vague to me. Was it something in the autopsy report?”


  Raimondi was lifting his espresso cup to his lips as Catherine asked this question. His arm paused in midair for a fraction of a second before he completed the movement—sipping and gently replacing the cup on its small saucer. He remained silent, assessing Catherine Laurence perhaps for the first time as a detective.

  “You were copied on it;” Catherine said. One of her calls earlier that morning had been to the pathologist who performed the postmortem and dictated the report. He recalled that the etc. at the bottom of the last page was meant to indicate that a copy had been sent to the Foreign Office, to a Florence Natale, whom another call revealed was Raimondi’s administrative assistant, French-speak for secretary. The pathologist had been requested to leave no trace of the Foreign Office on the report, but his cover-your-ass bureaucratic instincts had insisted on some record of the transaction.