This is a place that exists for the night. In daylight it’s robbed of its vitality, as hushed as a morgue, shabby and spent. The owner, Michelle, perches on a barstool, her glasses sliding down her aquiline nose as she reconciles receipts.
“For you, my friend,” I say in French, handing over the bouquet.
“Merci,” Michelle replies, surprised and pleased. “What’s the occasion?”
“Landlady appreciation day,” I call as I hurry through the cigarette-smoke-infused velvet and satin of the cabaret seating area.
“Oh, honey, you know I’m no lady,” Michelle banters back, in a voice suddenly more baritone than soprano.
I reward her with a chuckle as I wend my way through the cramped backstage.
In the attic, Jake lies just where I left him. I check his breathing: shallow, even, steady. I stride over to the pair of dormered windows. Inch one of the velvet curtains open.
Arpad and his scrawny pal are still on the street below. Smoking. Talking. I watch. The minutes tick by.
Four unmarked cars converge on rue des Archives slowly, with no fanfare or alarm. The street is packed with pedestrians, the cars must patiently nudge themselves into position in order to block off the Hungarians’ possible escape routes.
Two suit-clad men emerge from each vehicle. They descend on Arpad and his confederate before the pair have even registered the threat.
The Hungarians are cuffed. Whisked into separate cars. Driven away. It’s all done with an efficiency and restraint that I admire. The crowd on the street scarcely reacts. A handful of officers remain behind as a tow truck arrives and hoists up the Renault Talisman.
There may not have been anything illegal in the car when Arpad arrived in it, but there’s a satchel full of plastic explosives in it now, thanks to Jumah’s sleight of hand.
A well-timed anonymous tip can accomplish so much.
Uncle Frank had been awful tonight after Hannah brought her back. Told her to sit her ass down for a talk. He ranted on about himself, the fucking narcissist, as if he was the only one in the world! His anxieties. His divorce. His children. His burdens and obligations and sacrifices on her behalf.
Natalie pulled into her little snail shell and let him hammer away at her while deep inside she burned. What about me?
Where was the sympathy? The concern for her health? Where were the desperately needed reassurances: No, Jake couldn’t have killed your father, of course not!
Why was Uncle Frank so angry? Why did he seem so unhinged?
After the tirade flowed and ebbed and finally petered out, they’d shared a pot of chamomile tea in perfect silence and then Natalie retreated to her room.
Huddled there now, pretending to sleep (Uncle Frank presumably doing the same—sleeping or pretending), Natalie restlessly turns things over in her mind.
They’ve always shared secrets, she and Uncle Frank. Ever since Natalie was a little girl. Ever since he caught her at age five, with her fingers plunged in the chocolate icing swirled on Jake’s birthday cake.
Uncle Frank had put his index finger to his lips, signaling Natalie to be quiet. Called to her mother to stay put, that he would bring the cake into the dining room. He told Natalie to lick her fingers clean. Then pulled out a butter knife, smoothed the cake so all looked perfect, and with a wink went about the business of candles and matches.
After that they had other “little secrets.” Uncle Frank slipped her ten bucks. Or let her have a soda when they went out to lunch. In turn, Natalie solemnly offered “big girl advice” about Ana and Addy, what birthday presents the twins might like, for example, gleaned by casual interrogations of her cousins and then whispered in her uncle’s ear.
When Natalie was thirteen, she caught Uncle Frank kissing her friend Melissa’s mother at the family New Year’s Eve party. “Blame the mistletoe,” Frank had shouted jovially as Sunny had giggled and escaped into the kitchen. Then he’d leaned down to whisper in Natalie’s ear, “Just our little secret. Right?”
Natalie was thrilled. She felt “in” on some exotic grown-up intrigue, and excited to see how it progressed. She nobly decided it would be wrong, cruel even, to tell Melissa what she had seen until things developed further. So she kept her mouth shut while she waited for the next chapter to unfold. But she vowed she would be the best damn friend possible to Melissa as her parents’ marriage tragically collapsed and Sunny ran away with Uncle Frank. And hell, then they’d be best friends and first cousins, sort of, so there was an upside!
Unfortunately, Uncle Frank stayed with that bitch Della. And Sunny stayed with boring old Benton.
But Natalie discovered having a secret gave you a kind of power. She could make Sunny blush with merely an intense stare and a meaningfully cocked eyebrow. Natalie exploited this delicious trick until the novelty waned. It was the least she deserved for her chivalrous silence.
She’d developed a taste, so Natalie expanded her craft, collecting salacious tidbits about her schoolmates or teachers. Sometimes she simply gloried in the knowing power of these secrets and held them close. Other times she played them like a hand of cards.
Until now, Natalie had believed that the particular pool of secrets she shared with her uncle formed the building blocks of an essential trust; they were bound after all. He was a nag sometimes, sure, but wasn’t their well-being linked? Wouldn’t he always look out for her? Hadn’t he proved that?
Would he still?
Or will he abandon me like everybody else?
Natalie’s thoughts twitch to the knife in her bag.
Char. Scar. Trich. Bit. Always reliable. Unlike so much else in Natalie’s life.
Jake will be here soon. I’ll feel better then. I can resist, I promise. I’ll be grateful for every day.
Something tickles at the edge of her memory, tantalizing, irritating.
Le Boy Bleu. The address in Bastille had been easy enough to find when Hannah mentioned the name of the place, God bless the Internet. But Natalie had seen a flyer for Le Boy Bleu before, hadn’t she? Or an ad? Something, anyway.
She closes her eyes and tries to remember. A white and red background, jaunty blue script, a picture of a half-naked man, chest and abs rock solid and glistening with oil, crotch captured in skin-tight pants. The man’s image was cropped at the chin, leaving him faceless, the same kind of objectification to which women were usually subjected. Natalie remembers thinking that when she saw the flyer.
But where had she seen it?
Memory swims into focus.
A stack of flyers in Jake’s duffel bag.
Is that right?
Her eyes open.
Natalie steals out of her bedroom and into the living area. There’s Jake’s duffel in the corner, clothes erupting from its jumbled midst and spilling onto the carpeted floor.
She searches efficiently, folding Jake’s belongings as she goes, welcoming the sense that in doing so she is in some way caring for her brother.
There are the brochures and flyers. Natalie sorts through the stack. Sure enough, Le Boy Bleu, just like she remembered it.
Jake had asked her if she’d put them there. She hadn’t known what he was talking about. But if she hadn’t put them there, and Jake hadn’t, there is only one other possible choice.
Uncle Frank.
With a scissors I cut away the bindings around Jake’s wrists. I lift the hood from his face and pull it off his head. Tuck the bindings and hood deep into one of my bags. Insert a quick hypodermic into a pale blue vein in the crook of his elbow. Grab a bottle of water to have at the ready and sit down on a stool, facing Jake on the cot.
Jake’s eyes peel open. He pulls himself up to a sitting position, groggily.
Fear fills his eyes. “Who are you?” he croaks. “What do you want?”
“Here.” I offer Jake the bottle. He eyes it suspiciously. Then snatches it away from me, closely examining the seal to make sure it’s unbroken. Satisfied, he twists the bottle top off and gulps the water down gratefully. His
wary eyes never leave mine.
“Did you drug me?” he sputters, once the water bottle is drained.
“Of course not. You passed out. I helped you.”
He rubs his wrists, urging circulation back into the reddened, pressed flesh. His eyes skitter down to his hands. “What about my wrists?”
“What about them?”
“I was tied up.”
“Don’t be absurd.” I say it authoritatively. “You must have slept on them funny.”
The kid was a mess when I found him, physically beaten, emotionally destroyed. If I’m canny, it won’t be too difficult to persuade him around to my version of events, PTSD being what it is.
I briskly introduce myself as Hannah Potter. Show American ID that gives truth to the lie. Use the same fiction I’ve told everyone about how I knew Brian. I clock that Jake gives a quick jerk of the head at the mention of the “grief group.”
I explain I came across Jake accidentally while trying to find his sister, who their uncle believed was in turn out looking for him.
At least that much is true.
“I was just going into the Mandarin to see Hank Scovell when you came out and collapsed.” My tone is uninviting of dispute.
“Why would Natalie go to see Hank?” Jake asks with a crack in his voice. Some emotion here is running hot.
“I don’t know.” I shrug. “I was checking every logical place, everyone she knew in Paris. Your uncle has been worried sick about both of you,” I add reproachfully.
“Why are you doing any of this?”
Isn’t that always the question?
“I like to be of help where I can,” I reply.
That much is true as well.
Jake goes silent then. I can’t tell what he’s thinking, but I just need enough plausible deniability to deliver him safely back to his uncle. I can’t work if I’m babysitting.
I let us stew in silence for a while. It’s often the best way to invite conversation, even confession. Most people feel compelled to fill in the space.
“I’m not surprised Dad was going to a group. I knew something was stirring shit up for him,” Jake offers up finally, no exception to the rule.
“How do you mean?”
His eyes flicker around the attic, taking in the sparse furniture, the piles of discarded, glittering cabaret costumes, the folding table with my laptop and emergency pack. “Where are we?”
“A friend’s place,” I tell him. “It was convenient.”
Wary confusion plays across his face. It’s not the first time I’ve been grateful for my nonthreatening appearance. As I’m currently dressed, black tank top, jeans, high-tops, I could be a suburban kindergarten teacher on her summer vacation.
And surely better to believe one was rescued by a friendly face than drugged and bound by an unknown enemy? Maybe, just maybe, he hallucinated the hood, the plastic digging into his wrists, the barely remembered prick of a hypodermic needle?
“You would have seen it too if you knew how Dad usually was,” he finally blurts.
“Seen what?”
“How agitated he was. Ever since my mother died, well, it was like he had this hard shell on all the time, and then, one day, right before we left for Paris, it cracked. Got worse once we were here.”
Jake levels his eyes with mine as if daring me to believe him. “He was scared of something.”
I nod, careful to keep my face impassive. “You’re not the only one who thought that, Jake. A couple of his co-workers said the same. I believe you.”
Jake pulls a deep breath into his lungs. He rises and stretches, unsteady on his feet. He shambles about the attic. Fingers a length of sequin-laden satin. Takes a peek out the window.
Natalie’s anguished cry rings in my ears: “He never, ever could’ve killed Daddy.” I want to believe she’s right. I want to know more about where Jake was the night Brian’s throat was cut.
I offer up the lost-my-family Hannah Potter details, speaking with somber urgency about the horrific deaths of my little boy and husband. I’m not even a decade older than Jake, but this is a boy who’s lost his mother and his father and I pull ruthlessly on the string of grief.
Gradually, he opens up to me like a budding flower in the warm spring sunshine.
He broaches his Will Crane suspicions. I remember the name, of course—the killer who claimed Jake’s mother, his lover, as his victim before vanishing into thin air. The bastard I didn’t stop in time. I settle my face like a mask over the ricochet of complex and painful emotions brought on by hearing Crane’s name.
“Tell me more,” I encourage Jake, thinking about the gaping wound in Brian Burrows’s neck. It suggested that Brian knew his attacker, allowed his killer to get close enough to seize his head from behind and drive his bloody point home.
Jake has two theories. The first is that Crane, still bitter about Mallory’s defection back to her family, tracked Brian to Paris and killed him. The second is that Brian had found Crane, maybe even took the job in Paris because he knew Crane was here.
Jake could be right. Maybe Crane did emerge from hiding to torment and kill Brian Burrows. Or maybe Brian had hunted Crane and met him willingly, looking for closure. Or vengeance. Before it all went wrong.
Jake elaborates, his young face lit with excitement. He details his study of the security cameras around their former apartment. I’m impressed with his initiative.
Jake confesses that when he went to the police to report his suspicions, they in turn told him they knew he’d lied about when he returned to Paris. That they suspect him in his father’s murder.
He looks at me with tortured defiance. I feign both surprise and shock. Murmur another “That must be so hard for you.” Followed by, “And it’s absurd, of course.”
A palpable wash of relief passes over Jake’s face. He’s so grateful to be listened to, believed, that all reticence fades. Words tumble from his lips.
Jake tells me about his agreement of silence regarding his whereabouts the day he returned to Paris in order to protect another’s reputation. How torn he is about holding this secret tight. I sense that a bit of heartbreak, or at least a painful rejection, lies underneath the tale. I think about Hank Scovell and his overt sexual aggression toward women, about Jake’s distraught state upon leaving the Mandarin hotel. I wonder if it was Scovell who patched up Jake’s face.
I find I like Jake Burrows. Quite a lot. He’s smart. Emotionally intelligent too, self-deprecating about his anger issues, trying hard to do right in a world that’s frequently done him wrong. I realize with a bit of shock that our empathy isn’t faked.
It occurs to me that Jake is the one member of the Burrows family that I haven’t yet asked about Victor Wyatt. I fish the phone with the actor’s picture on it out of my pack.
“Do you recognize this man?”
Jake peers intently at the image. “No, I don’t think so. Should I?”
“His name is Victor Wyatt. Someone hired him to follow your father in the days before he was killed.”
“I don’t know him.”
“Are you sure? He works for an escort service, Le Boy Bleu?”
“Well, that’s a little weird.”
“Why?”
“I found a bunch of brochures and postcards for gay clubs and stuff inside my duffel bag. One was for Le Boy Bleu. I asked Natalie, but she said she didn’t know anything about them, so I thought it must have been my uncle. At the time I thought he was, you know, trying too hard to be cool, but…” Jake trails off with a shrug.
Caution’s siren wails in my gut, call it instinct. This could be meaningless. But somehow I don’t think so.
Natalie tiptoes out of her room and down the hallway. She knocks softly at Uncle Frank’s door. No answer. She taps again, a little harder this time.
A muffled groan. Natalie takes this as a “yes.” Opens the door. Peers in from the hallway.
The blinds and curtains are drawn. Indistinct shapes hulk in the gloom. As Natalie’s
eyes adjust she sees clothes piled on the armchair, a fan of papers on the desk pinned under an open laptop, Uncle Frank huddled under the blankets, lying on his side, his back to Natalie.
Frigid air-conditioning blasts into the room from the unit under the window.
“I can’t sleep,” she confesses softly. “Can we talk?”
Frank lifts his head and trains bleary eyes on Natalie. Hands clasped behind her back, swimming in oversized sweats, hair hanging across her downcast eyes; Natalie knows she looks a pathetic sight.
Frank pats the bed. “Come. Sit down.”
Meeting her uncle’s eyes fills her with panic. Maybe this is a bad idea.
Frank beckons to her. Pulls himself up to a sitting position. Natalie hangs back in the doorway.
“Come on, Nat, what’s on your mind, honey? I know things got a little rough between us earlier, but—”
“Have you heard of transitive doorway effect?” she interrupts.
“What?”
“Transitive doorway effect. It’s a real thing. It’s when you cross through a doorway and forget why you entered the room in the first place. It’s because the act of entering a new physical environment makes the brain sort of, like, clear itself for new information.” She knows she’s babbling but she can’t stop.
“That’s very interesting, Natalie, but I can’t believe you woke me up in the middle of the night just to tell me that.” Frank laughs, pulls off his covers, and rises from the bed. Walks toward her.
She backs away from him. He comes closer.
Natalie’s heart flutters in her chest.
“And I don’t believe you’ve forgotten why you came in here either, for that matter. So what is it that’s on your mind?”
Natalie’s mind spins with questions, but her words are stuck in her throat.
Frank’s eyes are pooled in shadows, his jaw rigid and set. He shifts into the rectangle of light cast by the open door and their eyes meet.
His eyes are bloodshot, red-rimmed. There’s a glint of anger.
And a hint of something else: a cold desperation that chills Natalie to the core.
The Burial Society Page 16