As the train slid into the station and the doors opened, enough people left that I could turn around, but the bastard, if he was still there, knew how to dissemble well, because there was no indication on anyone’s face — and believe me, I looked. I had to squeeze through the closing doors to avoid going past my station.
The experience had shaken me up, and once above ground I looked for a place to sit and gather my wits.
Overnight, it had clouded up and a cold wind was blowing from the east. After the previous day’s weather, nobody looked particularly happy. Near the old canal that runs up from the Seine and right under the Place de la Bastille is a small park. I found a bench and plopped myself down, hands still shaking from what had happened on the Métro. For the next ten minutes, I distractedly watched the demolition derby that is Parisian driving as vehicles circled the huge July Column in the centre of the Place with seemingly complete abandon.
The cold wind finally forced me to my feet, and I made my way around the west side of the roundabout, keeping a wary eye on the traffic whizzing by as I crossed two streets.
Tree-lined Boulevard Beaumarchais is the heart of a very welcoming, picturesque Paris neighborhood, and it struck me once again how different the area was from the places in North America where one generally finds dealers selling motorcycles. I’m well aware that not all people who love motorcycles are hoodlums or even bad people, but that’s what many think of when the machines are brought up in conversation. This neighborhood was delightful, even on a cold day in late fall. Not a biker in sight. I began to feel hopeful.
Walking up the east side of the street allowed me to scope out the bike shop from a distance. The business seemed to have spread over several storefronts, and while appearing neat and tidy, it didn’t have the same swish factor as the first place I’d visited. Being a weekday morning, things looked rather quiet, so I crossed myself and crossed the street.
The greeting I got as I entered the shop was almost the same as the previous day. An older man, who stepped out of the back room as a bell on the door tinkled, stared at me balefully as I walked toward him, once more sliding into character.
“Oui, Madame?” he asked.
I went into my routine about wanting to surprise my husband with some part or other for his “secret” motorcycle project. Carefully scanning the man’s face, especially his eyes, my pulse quickened as I began to suspect he might know who I was talking about. When I produced my two photos, he looked them over carefully but would not commit himself.
“Madame must understand that we serve many customers here, including several from your country. I may know this person, but it is hard to tell with so old a photograph.”
With my brain racing to try to think of some way to break this impasse and get the information I had come all this way to find out, I was saved by a young man who came through the same rear doorway. Dressed in greasy blue coveralls and wiping his hands on an equally dirty rag, he, at least, looked like he belonged in a shop that sold motorcycles.
“Hey, what you looking at, Alain?” he asked, snatching one of the photos from the old man’s hand. “It’s Luc! But who is this woman with him?”
The old man hissed over his shoulder, drawing attention to me with a jerk of his head, “It is his wife.”
In back of the counter, the tension was suddenly thick and I saw immediately how to play this: I began to cry.
I made a big production out of searching my pockets for a handkerchief. Two were immediately offered, one greasy, the other pressed and pristine white. It wasn’t hard to make a choice. The young lad got dispatched for water, and the older man fussed over me. Finally, I wiped my eyes, which I’d actually managed to get wet, and blew my nose.
“I am so sorry,” I said in a shaky voice. “I should not have lied to you.”
“Lied to us, Madame?”
“My husband left me over two years ago and I have been looking for him ever since. That pig of a brother of his finally admitted to me that Marc was living near Paris, so I came over here to find him. Ever since he ran out on us, I have been forced to work two jobs so that I can keep our house. Even so, it has now become impossible, even if I had three jobs. I took the last of my money to come here and beg on my knees for him to help us!”
The young guy had returned and I could hear him grumbling. His superior remained skeptical.
“How did you know to look here for him?”
“His brother Guy. He told me that Marc was building a motorcycle.” I pulled out my list of shops. “I have been to most of these. He would need parts. Many people have refused to speak to me, and I know you would not have, too, if it had not been for the slip of this young man here, thank our Virgin Mother!”
The old man sighed heavily. “As you have probably guessed, your husband has another woman. I hesitated to give him away. He is a good customer.”
“He also constructed some wooden racks for parts in the back room,” the young one said. “He is a handy man.”
“You called him Marc just now,” said the old one.
“So he has made up a name for you?” I shot back scornfully. “That is because he ran out on his obligations to his family. The court ordered him to pay child support and he did not want to! My husband’s name is Marc Tremblay and he came to France to hide.”
“He told us it was Luc Duchene.”
“Please, Monsieur, would you tell me where he lives? I beg you!”
Before he could be shut up, the young man said, “Beauvais. It is north and west of the city. You can get there by train from Le Gare du Nord.”
I pounced. “Do you have his address or phone number?”
“No,” said the old one.
“But of course,” said the young one at the same instant.
The old man shrugged and left the room.
“You must excuse him,” my saviour said. “He is from the old school. To him, discretion about our customers is everything.”
“Even when the customer does not deserve it?”
“You know that, and I know that, but if someone spends their money here, then he believes we must be discreet if questions are asked.”
I pressed. “Do you have my husband’s address or a phone number?”
An order book was produced from under the counter. “There is a small hotel and bistro in Beauvais. I believe your husband works there.” He scribbled something on a piece of scrap paper and slid it across the counter. “Here is the name, address, and phone number. He has ordered several parts from us. In fact, one is on order now.”
I grabbed the young man’s hand and brought it to my lips. “You have helped my family and me very much and I thank you for it. Au revoir!”
“Bonne chance, Madame,” he called after me as I left the shop.
Walking back to the Bastille Métro station, I wiped my mouth on my coat sleeve. This role playing was hard to stop once you got started.
I looked at my watch and saw that it was still quite early. I’d need to do a bit of online research, but I saw no reason not to go to Beauvais right away and strike while the iron was hot. Hopefully, the old man at the shop wouldn’t rat me out. It would be a real kick in the head to finally find where my husband was hiding, only to discover he’d flown the coop again.
Back at the apartment, I fired up the computer, went to one of those map sites Tony had showed me how to work, and looked up Beauvais. It didn’t have much to recommend: a large cathedral and some old buildings was about it. Located about halfway to the coast, the train schedule said I could get there in an hour and the departures were frequent.
If the stars were aligned right, it wouldn’t be long before I’d be standing in front of the man who’d almost ruined my life and had cost several people theirs.
Chapter Nineteen
“Beauvais, messieurs, dames. Nous arrivons au terminus de Beauvais.”
The confidence I’d been feeling that morning had slowly oozed out of me with each passing mile as the train drew closer to t
he town where I expected to find my husband. My mood had been buoyant right until the train began easing away from Le Gare du Nord shortly before one. All the doubts, the uncertainties began creeping up on me as Paris slowly melted away into countryside. At each stop the train made, I’d known that I had one chance fewer to put a halt to everything. Then I’d thought about Lainey and Sébastien in Montreal, Peter in Vancouver, and the person who had actually died in the house fire at the farm. Those evil bastards were still out there. I couldn’t stop now, no matter how much I might have wanted to.
The dark heart of my doubts, though, was this: was I doing this because I wanted to set something right, or because I wanted to hurt Jean-Claude as much as he’d hurt me?
Now we were in Beauvais. I’d been told Jean-Claude lived here. The final decision was staring into my face. I could either go on with this to the end, or just sit and wait for the next train back to Paris. Once I walked out of this station, that would be it. Did I want to or not? At the last moment, I slipped on my coat, wrapping my scarf tightly around my neck, and departed the train. The die had been cast.
Exiting the station, I found myself on the southwestern edge of this Picardie market town. At my back stood an ugly industrial area and in front, two restaurants, one closed, one open, neither looking welcoming. A cold rain from the nearby Atlantic coast forced me back inside the station while I consulted my hand-drawn map for about the tenth time.
It became clear I would be waiting in vain for a taxi to show up, so I took out a beret I’d brought, jammed it on my head, and hit the road.
A check on the Internet had told me that Beauvais is very old, having been around since Roman times. Obviously, it had never risen above being a backwater country town. Toward the centre, Saint-Pierre de Beauvais — the partially built gothic cathedral for which the town is most noted — glowered down, greyly dominating the skyline as it had for nearly eight hundred years. A cathedral unfinished for that long was a pretty good indication of how things stood locally.
The address I’d been given at the motorcycle shop was between where I stood and that cathedral, so I crossed the road and headed off to find out where fate was taking me.
Part of it was the greyness of the late fall day, part of it was the bleakness of my mood, but this provincial town seemed unbearably grim as I walked down a long street of fast food shops and stores selling junk and services on the cheap.
Turning right at the first busy intersection where a sign pointed to Centre-ville, the shops began inching up the economic scale toward some sort of respectability.
With two more glances at my map, I managed to find Place Jeanne Hachette, the ancient town square now half parking lot, half park. Shops lined three sides of it, and the old town hall filled the remaining one. Beauvais’s historic heroine, Jeanne Hachette, whose twice life-size statue dominated the plaza, had obviously been a determined woman. Depicted wielding her intimidating weapon in a rather operatic manner, she looked like someone I certainly wouldn’t want to run afoul of.
The hotel/brasserie where Jean-Claude worked was on the west side of the square, directly in front of me as I stepped around the statue.
Getting closer, I saw the place was nearly empty, since it was a good half hour past the end of the lengthy French lunch interval. Two waitresses cooled their heels near the bar at the front, clearly eager for the last of the dawdling matrons and businessmen to depart. My husband was nowhere to be seen.
What was I possibly going to say when I came face to face with the rat who’d put me through so much agony? “Hi! Remember me?”
There was no way I was walking into that brasserie without some sort of great line. I had nothing, not even a mediocre one. Knowing Jean-Claude, he would seize the moment, say something incredibly brilliant and totally decimate me.
The cathedral looming over the tops of the buildings beckoned, offering me an excuse to avoid walking into that restaurant. Despite feeling like the biggest coward in the world, I dodged to another street and made my way there. The closer I got, the more overwhelming that grey hulk appeared.
It was the oddest church I’ve ever been in, seeming to go up more than it went out. I felt like I was in a huge tower with stained glass windows. The space was awash with thundering sound — someone was practising Phantom of the Opera music on the large pipe organ. I stopped to wonder at organists who have to do their “dirty work” in public, mistakes and all. I certainly wouldn’t want to. Perhaps that’s why they’re often such strange people.
Off to the side, I lit candles for my two parents and Sébastien, then sat down nearby to think.
My inability to make those final few steps was really quite ludicrous. I’d come all this way, gone to so much trouble, stirred up so much shit. People had died because of my poking my nose into the situation, and here I was dithering at the very end of my journey. It was not only cowardly, but disgusting.
I put my head into my hands.
I’ve never been all that religious. The last time I’d spoken to God, I was in the throes of despair over supposedly losing my husband, and I was not kind in my words. Quite frankly, even though my faith had been on the wane over many years, that dark evening I’d severed all emotional and spiritual ties with Mother Church and hadn’t been back until now.
I waited for twenty minutes, but God again didn’t speak to me, so I got up and left.
The restaurant was completely empty when I got back.
The door to the hotel portion of the establishment was to the right of the brasserie, and through the glass, I could see a narrow set of stairs going up.
Taking a deep breath to steady my nerves, I opened the door and went in.
At the top, I found the hotel’s small front desk, behind which a thin elderly woman was typing furiously at a computer as she leaned forward, squinting at the screen. Clearly, she was too vain to wear the glasses hanging around her neck.
I watched her for a good twenty seconds with no response, so I pointedly cleared my throat.
“Oui?” she asked, obviously put out that I’d interrupted her.
I answered, imitating Jean-Claude’s accent as best I could. “I am looking for a friend from back home —”
“From Quebec, are you? You’ll want Luc, then. He should be downstairs cleaning up.” She dismissively waved her hand at the stairs behind me and turned back to the computer.
I went back down to street level again and moved to the corner of one of the big glass windows of the restaurant, waiting for my husband to appear.
Even though I’d imagined over and over during the past two weeks what the moment would be like, my heart still leaped into my throat as he appeared in a doorway at the back of the long room, a large plastic flat of clean glasses tucked under one arm.
Now that I had a chance to study him, Jean-Claude certainly looked quite different. Most startling was his shaved head, something I hadn’t noticed that fateful day at the Métro, because he’d been wearing a beret. The goatee and moustache changed the whole lower portion of his face, and he appeared fit and athletic, having lost a fair bit of weight. It made him seem taller.
Would anyone else have recognized him? I didn’t know, but I certainly would have, even in a crowd. Every single movement he made as he arranged glasses on the shelves behind the bar had been imprinted on my memory during our brief time together.
What did I feel? I had believed my husband irrevocably lost to me, and yet here I was spying on him like a guilty child, watching him as he did small things, unaware of anything but his task.
I waited until he’d brought out a second flat of glasses and his back was turned, intent on his work again. With sweaty hands and heart beating molto vivace, I pushed open the door.
“I am sorry but we are closed until five-thirty,” he said without turning around.
His accent was softer, less twangy and angular than I remembered. In short, Jean-Claude definitely sounded more French than Québécois.
“Well, fancy finding you
here,” I responded in English.
The effect of my words couldn’t have been greater if I’d dumped a full bucket of ice water over his head. His hands froze halfway to the shelves, a glass clutched in each, and stayed that way for several seconds. Then he slowly put them down as he gathered himself, not turning around but looking at me warily through the mirror at the back of the shelves.
“Nothing to say?” I prodded when his silence had stretched a good ten seconds more. “I’ve never known you to be at a loss for words, Marc. Or would you prefer me to call you Jean-Claude, although I understand it’s now Luc.”
His shoulders sagged as he turned and his expression held only apprehension. “How did you find me?”
“You ran out of luck back in September. It was at the Sully-Morland Métro station. You were running for the entrance just as I was coming from the opposite direction.”
“I had heard that you were in Paris.”
“I thought I was losing my goddamned mind,” I snarled, unable to restrain my anger. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done to me, not to mention other people?”
“Have you told anyone about seeing me?”
“Didn’t you hear what I just said? Are you just going to ignore it? Don’t you think you owe me at least a frigging explanation?”
“Marta, please. Lower your voice.”
“Why? Afraid someone might hear what a rat bastard you are, might find out about your sordid past?”
He stepped around the bar and moved toward me, attempting to take my hands, but I drew back.
“I do not blame you for being so angry with me, Marta. I did what I did because I had to. It was actually to protect you.”
“What a complete load of shit!” I enunciated each word separately, practically spitting them at him. My body shook with the sudden uncontrollable rage boiling out of me.
Masques and Murder — Death at the Opera 2-Book Bundle Page 22