“The editions in English?”
“Yes. The history goes that they were the only books my great-grandmother could grab quickly in the wine cellar where the priest kept all his books, even though, at that time, my great-grandmother, she could not speak English.”
I did not know Tess at all well, and I did not know how sensitive she was about the family history she was telling us. I hesitated to say what I was about to say, but I went ahead and said it anyway. “So she stole them?”
“In the family, we say she borrowed them. But, Jenna, that was not the only thing she took away from Digne.”
“What was the other thing?”
“My grandmother.”
“She was pregnant?”
“Yes. And that is the story of how I got the books. I inherited them.”
Finally, I said, “Is there more to the story?”
“I wish you would not call it a story, Jenna, because it is true.”
“Tess, in English stories can be true.”
“Yes, but you have two words in English, history and story. We have only one word, histoire, for both. When you and Robert use ‘story’ I think it means you do not believe what I say. It is only when you use ‘history,’ that you think it is fact.”
Robert, who had been silent for some time, spoke up again. “Jenna, since I speak both languages, and we are talking about this whole thing about story versus histoire, let me ask some questions.
“Tess, what happened to Dauphine when she got back to Paris?” he asked. “Her parents must not have been happy.”
“When she returned to Paris from Digne, they learned in not too long that she was enceinte—pregnant. That was an even bigger scandale than the affair, and you are right that they were not so happy.”
“Did she have the baby?”
“Yes. But before she could show, they sent her to live with a friend in London. They made up a story—that she was a young widow of the war. That her husband had been killed by the Boches. After that my grandmother, Marie-Claire, was born in London, and when she grew up she married an Englishman.”
“Wow,” Robert said. “You never told me. Is that why you’re named Tess? It is not a common French name.”
Tess laughed. “Yes, my grandmother, she loved Thomas Hardy. I am named for Tess of the D’Urbervilles. She made my mother name me this.”
Robert was smiling. “I don’t know why I never asked you before how you came to have that very English name. But anyway, what happened next?”
“My grandmother’s English husband died in 1945, in the last year of the second Great War. Marie-Claire and my great-grandmother, Dauphine, returned to Paris after the liberation. Marie-Claire married again, a Frenchman this time, who was my grandfather.”
“Do you have pictures of these people?”
“Yes. There is an album.” She climbed up on a small library ladder and pulled down an old red leather photo album. She spread it open to a page in the middle and pointed to the first picture. “This is Dauphine when she was seventeen. Before she went to Digne.”
“Are there any pictures of her while she was in Digne?” I asked.
“No, and there is not even a single one when Dauphine was in England, pregnant with Marie-Claire. The next picture of Dauphine is from when Marie-Claire is five.” Tess turned the page and pointed to another picture, which showed a woman in her early twenties in very conservative dress—long wool skirt and high-collared gray blouse—standing beside a little girl, who wore a heavy, dark-colored sweater and a dark skirt.
“May I take the picture out of the album and look on the back?” Robert asked.
“Certainly, but why?”
“Sometimes people write things on the back of photos that are interesting to know.” He lifted the photo out of its tabs and turned it over.
“Alors, is there something there of interest?”
“No, afraid not. It just has their names, which we already know.”
“This does not surprise me.”
“But,” Robert said, “there is something that puzzles me, Tess. I thought it was okay for French people to have affairs. Your last three presidents have had them. Openly.”
“It is okay for men, Robert. It is not so okay for women, and in 1914 it was not okay at all. Pas du tout. Even today, it would still be a scandal if it became known. You will both keep this histoire of my family to yourself even now, eh?” She looked from me to Robert and back again.
“I will,” I said.
“Thank you, Jenna. And you, Robert, will you also keep this secret?”
“Yes, I will, too. But may I ask you another question?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know this histoire is true?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, did you know your great-grandmother Dauphine?”
“No. She died before I was born.”
“So you did not hear this histoire from her.”
“No. I heard it from my grandmother Marie-Claire, and also from my mother.”
“How do you know that Dauphine didn’t make a lot of it up to make her histoire sound more romantic?” Robert asked. “And that she didn’t just buy all of the novels in an English antiquarian bookshop after she got there? I mean, maybe she just had an affair with the local bookseller in Digne, and not with this world-traveling monsignor. Maybe she learned about books from him, but didn’t take anything with her at all.”
“Why do you think this, Robert?”
“Because it is a much simpler story—I mean, histoire. Otherwise, I have to believe there was a priest in Digne who not only seduced seventeen-year-old girls, but also collected first editions of Victor Hugo novels in, among other languages, English.”
“That is not so complicated an histoire,” Tess said.
“It is, Tess, when you have to add to it that your great-grandmother managed to stuff four novels—which would equate to about twenty big volumes—into a trunk without the priest or anyone else noticing that they were missing. Or coming after her to get them back.”
“I think Dauphine’s parents, they would have killed him if he had followed her to Paris.”
“Maybe,” Robert said.
I was beginning to feel a bit uncomfortable. Robert had dropped into his life-long role as an adversary—a skeptical listener, an asker of questions, a pusher of boundaries. And yet he was doing it to his own fiancée.
Tess felt it, too, clearly. “Robert,” she said, “I feel like you are a lawyer asking me questions before a judge.”
“I can’t help being a lawyer.”
“Well, Monsieur l’Avocat—Mr. Lawyer—is there anything else you want to know?”
“Yes. After you got the novels, did you want to collect more antiquarian books?”
“Non.”
“So you didn’t catch the collecting bug?”
“Non.”
“But you have figured out the value of these books you own, right?”
“Sûrement. I have not become rich in ignoring of the value of things.”
I looked at Robert and then at Tess, who had their eyes locked on one another. I was starting to feel uncomfortable about the tone of the conversation. It reminded me too much of the way my father used to question my mother about how much she had spent at Marshall Field’s on her frequent trips to Chicago. But it was continuing . . .
“You know, then, at least a little bit about the world in which these rare books are bought and sold,” Robert said to Tess.
“Oui.”
There was silence all around.
“Robert,” Tess asked, “are you now terminé with this inquisition?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Good. Go for your walk in the park with Jenna, then. While you are not here, I will put the copies of my books on the open bo
okshelf. I am proud of them. I do not need to hide them away like this.”
At which point, with Tess pulling books out of the closet and re-shelving them on the open shelves, we left.
CHAPTER 18
As we closed the apartment door behind us and waited for the elevator, Robert was unusually quiet.
“Hey, are you upset with Tess?” I asked.
“Wouldn’t you be?”
“I don’t know. I think she genuinely thought the fact that she owned a first edition of Les Misérables in English wasn’t important. At least when it all first came up.”
“I’ve lived with Tess for over five years. I thought we shared pretty much everything.”
The elevator doors opened and we got in.
“Plus,” Robert said, “I am generally not welcome in her study. She calls it her private space.”
“So?”
“Well, the fact that this book was in there makes me wonder what else is in there.”
“Haven’t you wondered that before?”
“Not with such intensity.”
“What about the whole spy thing?”
“She’s not a spy.”
“Okay, what about whatever it is that she is?”
He didn’t answer, and a few seconds later we reached the ground floor. We were in one of those old-fashioned elevators where the door doesn’t open automatically. As Robert reached for the handle to open it, I put my hand on his arm to stop him, so that we remained in a private space.
“What is it, Jenna?”
“Robert, I think that what you’re upset about isn’t that Tess kept the book thing from you, or that you don’t know exactly what’s in her study or that she might be a spy or any of that.”
“What is it then?”
“You’re upset that your whole relationship with her is shifting. Once upon a time you could afford to ignore certain things or not know certain other things because, however long you’d been together, nothing was permanent. And you had made no commitment. Now she wants to get married, and you feel you need to know everything.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
“So you want some advice?”
“Sure.”
“When this whole thing with Oscar is over, the two of you should go away somewhere for a long weekend and agree that you’re going to tell each other your complete stories, no holds barred, no secrets, no embarrassments.”
“God, then I’d have to tell her about my first wife.”
“Can I be there for that part?”
“No.” He reached for the door and pulled it open. I noticed the concierge sitting there, looking toward the elevator, no doubt wondering why we hadn’t emerged right away and probably imagining all the wrong reasons.
“One other thing, Robert. Don’t forget to be nicer to the concierge. He could be of use at some point.”
We exited the elevator and Robert practically shouted to the concierge, “Bonjour Monsieur Martin! Comment ça va?”
Monsieur Martin looked surprised at the greeting—apparently Robert often didn’t greet him at all—and said, “Ça va bien, merci. Et vous?”
The two of them then proceeded to have a voluble conversation in French, in which, toward the end, Pierre pointed toward his head a lot. As in most situations in which people are speaking a language in front of me that I don’t understand a word of, I just stood there feeling slightly uncomfortable.
Finally, after they finished talking, Pierre gave us both a rather friendly seeming version of the standard quasi-distant French goodbye, complete with hand-wave and “au revoir, bonne journée!” and we walked out the front door and headed for the Jardin.
“What did he say?”
“He apologized for not having had the recording feature on. He tried to explain why he had not found it important—none of which made sense to me—but said the building has just given him a brand new camera that is even better because it records automatically, and although it’s still in its box, he will install it right away. But then he said something really interesting.”
“What?”
“He said that he did recall that when Oscar’s taxi arrived, the driver came around and opened the passenger door for him. And he recalled it because it’s unheard of for a Parisian cabbie to do that unless the passenger is old or infirm or something.”
“Maybe Oscar offered him a big tip.”
“Maybe. But here’s the really interesting part. He remembered that the cabbie was wearing a blue turban.”
We stopped walking and just stood and looked at each other.
“So are we thinking the same thing?” I said.
“I’m thinking, Jenna, there can’t be too many taxi drivers in Paris who wear blue turbans. If we can find him, maybe we can find out where Oscar’s hotel is, if that’s where the cabbie picked him up.”
“My thoughts exactly. But I thought you were withdrawing from this whole thing and were inclined to let the police handle it.” I put on my best sardonic smile.
“Yeah, I know I said that. But finding a cab driver with a blue turban sounds like fun—like a puzzle—and I don’t see how it can be dangerous. If we find him, and he can identify the hotel, you can follow up on that part.”
“Okay. I’ll do that. But the big question is, how are we going to find him?”
“I don’t know, but I’m going to text Tess about it and see if she has any ideas. After all, she lives here and understands how you find things out in Paris.”
After that, we walked in the Jardin for almost an hour, mulling over various strategies for finding the blue-turbaned driver. We even detoured a few blocks out of the park to use an Internet café, thinking maybe we’d luck out and just by chance we could quickly find something about the taxi driver on the Net. But we couldn’t.
Finally, I said, “You know, Robert, we could crowdsource it.”
“How would that work?”
“I’d put up on my social media pages—Facebook and Twitter and maybe some others—that I’m looking to connect with a blue-turban-wearing taxi driver in Paris. And ask my friends to ask their friends, and so forth.”
“Sounds promising. Do you have any friends in France to ask?”
“Just Tess, but her friends will ask their friends and it will multiply. But maybe that’s the answer. We ask Tess to crowdsource the problem among her French friends.”
“Will that improve the odds?”
“Sure, because if Tess does it, it skips one degree of separation from me to people in France, and it’s people here who are most likely to know the answer. Let’s go ask her.”
“We can ask her later. Right now I want to continue my online research for the blue-turbaned cab driver.”
CHAPTER 19
I decided to change Internet cafés again, just in case. I left the Left Bank and took the metro to the glitzier side of town, down by the Place de la Concorde, even though that particular plaza tended to give me the creeps. Every time I went there, I couldn’t get it out of my head that I was standing where over one thousand people had been guillotined during the part of the French Revolution known as the Terror. The last time I had been there, with Robert, when we had tried to get into the American consulate, I hadn’t mentioned it to him. It was the kind of fear he tended to make fun of.
I started my search for the blue-turban guy by doing another, even more extensive online search, using all of the search engines I knew about. Nothing turned up. Before I moved to trying to crowdsource it on social media, I decided that I needed some plausible story as to why I wanted to know. After a little bit of thought, I decided to say I was involved in a scavenger hunt. Then I put up a request on Facebook, tweeted the question out on Twitter, posted it on Reddit, and put up a query on LinkedIn. I even used the largely impenetrable Google+.
I didn’t expect any instant response
s, so I went off to have a late morning snack in a café near a big cab stand. Maybe through some lucky twist of fate, blue-turban man would show up there. But an hour later, after an apple tart and three cups of tea, all strung out to maximum eating and drinking time—no one ever asks you to leave a French café, no matter how long you linger—I had seen cabbies wearing caps and fedoras, colorful scarves and assorted kaffiyehs, but nary a turban.
I kept checking my various social media accounts to see if anyone had responded. As usual, quite a few people had, but the responses were all jokes of one kind or another. Seems as if the similarity between turban and turbine inspires all kinds of punsters. The worst one began “a turban and a turbine walk into a bar . . .” By mid-afternoon, I was discouraged, even though I knew crowdsourcing could take days and my lack of contacts in France was likely to make it an even a longer process.
I paid my bill and left. On my way to the metro, my phone rang. It was Robert.
“I have something exciting to tell you,” he said.
“What?”
“I found a picture of the cabbie with the blue turban and his name.”
“How?”
“On Pinterest. There’s a picture of him standing beside his cab. The number’s visible and it’s labelled with his name.”
“I’m shocked you even know about Pinterest.”
“I’m very Internet savvy, Jenna.”
“No you’re not. You can hardly boot up your own computer. Who suggested you try Pinterest?”
“Tess. Just a few minutes ago, when I told her what the concierge had said and how we were trying to look for the guy using the Net. She instantly said, ‘Try Pinterest,’ and suggested I search under ‘blue turban taxi Paris.’ Apparently Tess is a big pinner herself.”
“Strange. But anyway, what’s his name?”
“Colin O’Connor.”
“Why would someone named Colin O’Connor wear a turban?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him? He’s listed. I’ll text you his phone number.”
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