by Michelle Wan
“Christine,” they both said at the same time.
Julian took a deep breath. “Apart from Joseph, she’s the only one in a position to negotiate with Montfort-Izawa. If they’re already distributing brochures, they must be pretty damned confident they have the space they need. You said Joseph would never sell, but Christine might, if she can get power of attorney over Joseph’s affairs. And if he’s deemed unfit mentally—”
“Or if he dies …” Mara cut in. “And if Montfort-Izawa is steaming ahead with the development now, it can only mean that Christine intends to get Joseph out of her road, one way or the other, and very soon.”
• 29 •
Huguette Roche is early with Joseph’s meal today. She brings it in a basket.
“You’ve heard there’s another big storm coming in?” She looks a little windblown, like a precursor of the storm itself. She sets his supper out on the counter: potato soup in a jar with a rubber bung; a hearty pot-au-feu, boiled beef with vegetables, in a covered earthenware casserole; a wedge of prune tart between two plates. It’s the kind of food Joseph is used to, not that steak haché Mara gives him.
“If you don’t want it now, you can heat it up yourself later, can’t you?” she asks. “I have to get back and help Jean-Marie tie things down. The last big storm we had, it blew our wheelbarrow right into the next field.” She tells him to leave the dishes in the sink. She’ll return in the morning to take care of everything.
“You’ll be all right?”
“Oui, oui.”
“Bon. Is there anything else I can do before I go?”
Joseph shakes his head.
“Okay. A demain.” Huguette hurries out, relieved to be away.
Joseph is glad Huguette does not have time to visit with him. He does not want to hear any more about the weather, or the local gossip, and Mara has already talked to him about golf courses and condominiums. She was there earlier in the day, sitting forward in her chair, making short, sharp gestures with her hands, filling his kitchen with words. So many words make it difficult to think, and he needs more than anything to think. It will be dark soon, and he knows he has very little time. He looks about him to see what he can use, what he will be physically able to move. He already fears that whatever he can do will not be enough to keep out the coming storm or the headless monster that will arrive, riding like a bird of carrion on its back.
•
“We have to find a way to protect Joseph,” Mara said as she and Julian hurried back to the house. Their weekly get-together with Loulou at Chez Nous was at eight that evening, and it was already a quarter to seven.
“Protection is a job for the gendarmes, Mara,” Julian said severely. He looked over his shoulder. The livid stain that passed for a sunset was bleeding quickly from the sky. A gusting wind flattened the grasses at the sides of the road. The predicted storm was on its way.
Mara shook her head. “They wouldn’t believe us. To the police he’d just be a sick old man suffering from hallucinations.”
“Well,” said Julian, “there is always the possibility that Joseph really is imagining things. Look, you’ve warned Christine off. If she did have designs on her father’s life, I doubt she’ll try anything now.”
“We can’t be sure of that. There could be a lot at stake for her. And Donny O’Connor, for that matter. Maybe that’s why Daisy’s been pushing to get Joseph into a nursing home.”
“Donny, maybe. But I honestly get the impression that Daisy is genuinely attached to Joseph. In her own way, I think she wants what’s best for him.”
Mara looked unconvinced. “Why do I have this awful feeling that Joseph’s life is hanging by a thread and I’m the only one worried?”
“You have a hypersuspicious mind.”
The phone was ringing as they opened the door. Mara shot a look of foreboding at Julian.
He raised a reassuring hand. “Probably just Iris,” he muttered, pushing past her. “With more bad news, I don’t doubt.”
Mara kicked off her shoes and unzipped her jacket.
“Comment?” She heard Julian say. He continued in French, “Well, can’t you tell me now? All right. I’ll be right there.” He slammed the receiver down.
“It’s Joseph, isn’t it?” she cried out.
“No, it’s Osman,” he shouted, going for his car keys. “That was Betul. Something has happened. She won’t tell me on the phone, but she sounds really frightened. She’s asking for my help.”
•
The dogs shot out of the house ahead of them and into the van as soon as Julian yanked open the driver’s door. Mara, one arm in her jacket and struggling to insert the other, climbed in on the other side.
“This is crazy,” she yelled as the van roared up the road. “Christine is a job for the gendarmes, but the Ismets aren’t? Their son was up to his eyeballs in drugs, probably murdered by Ton-and-a-Half or his hatchet man, don’t forget.”
“I’m not likely to, am I?” Julian retorted grimly. Irritably, he shoved Jazz’s head away from its accustomed position on his shoulder. An exploratory nose, cold and wet, probed the back of his neck before the head, heavy and persistent, returned. He shoved again, harder. Grumbling, Jazz retreated and lay down on the bed of the van. A slash of lightning split the sky, followed by a great crack of thunder. Bismuth, shaking so hard that his teeth chattered, tried to burrow under the bags of potting soil.
“Julian, you’re speeding. Slow down.”
They drove into the leading edge of the storm, which arrived in heavy spatters against the windscreen. By the time they reached Brames, ragged sheets of rain were blowing down the main street of the town. They parked in front of Lokum and raced for the entrance. Betul was watching for them at the door, her face a circle of white within her head scarf, her eyes terrified.
“Are you all right?” Julian asked as they pushed inside, dripping water on the floor.
“Yes, yes. It’s Osman.” Betul hardly took Mara in, accepting her presence without question. “I didn’t want to say on the phone. He’s been beaten up.”
“Beaten up? By whom?”
“He won’t talk. Just that it was two men. I think it has something to do with drugs. Please reason with him, Monsieur Wood. He’s upstairs. Make him see sense. Make him go to the police.”
She led them up the narrow stairs into their red sitting room. Osman sprawled on the divan. His eyes and nose were swollen. The front of his shirt was bloody and torn.
“Who did this to you?” Julian confronted the Turk.
“Go away,” Osman said, refusing to look at Julian.
“Was it Rocco Luca and his men? Was it Serge Taussat?”
“I don’t talk to you.”
“What did they want?”
“I am Turk,” Osman recited in a cracked voice. “I am correct, hard-working—”
Julian lost all patience with the man. “You’re a fool. Osman, you’ve got to take this to the police.”
“No. No gendarmes,” said Osman, looking directly at Julian for the first time.
“At least tell us what happened,” Mara urged, stepping forward.
“Who’s she?” Osman demanded suspiciously.
“A friend,” said Julian. He made a tardy introduction that neither husband nor wife acknowledged.
Betul went into the kitchen and reappeared a minute later with a cloth in a basin of steaming water. She moved a small table near the divan, set the bowl on it, and wrung out the cloth.
“Stupid,” Betul muttered as she bent to wipe her husband’s face. He flinched and pulled away. She flung the cloth into the basin. “Stupid, stubborn man. They will kill you. Then where will I be? No son, no husband. How will I live?”
“Is nothing!” Osman shouted with sham courage. “Is only fight. Racist thugs.”
Julian’s temper flared. “You’ve tried that racist line before, and see where it’s got you. Betul’s right. If this is about drugs, Osman, these people won’t hesitate to step up the violence. You
got a couple of black eyes and a punch in the nose this time. You were lucky. Next time, you’ll end up in hospital, or—or worse.” He almost said: “In a garbage skip, like your son.”
Osman maintained a sullen silence.
“I’ve had enough of this,” Julian said. “Give me your phone, Mara. I’m calling the police.”
Osman lurched off the divan, knocking Betul and the bowl of water aside. He lunged at Julian but tripped on the fringed edge of the rug. Julian caught him as he went down.
“Why don’t you want the police?” he shouted over the Turk’s roar of pain. “What is it you’re hiding?”
Osman sagged. Julian let him drop the rest of the way to the floor. Betul was crying. Osman shoved himself up on his elbows and shouted something at her in Turkish. She shouted back. Osman groaned and slumped down again.
Betul turned to Julian. “He says he doesn’t know who the men are who beat him up, but they said they will finish him if he speaks to you.”
“If he speaks to me? Why me?” Julian exclaimed, startled.
“They think you are under cop,” moaned Osman.
“Undercover police,” Betul translated.
Julian and Mara exchanged shocked glances.
“They know you were looking for Kazim, and now they threaten to kill Osman if he talks to you. Then they will also kill you.”
• 30 •
Joseph has gathered logs, one by one, from the woodshed. He has found a large, empty feedsack and a length of rope, and now he is pushing the wooden table across the kitchen floor. The table is heavy and difficult for him to move, even though it is set on wheels. They roll with a screeching sound and catch on the uneven flagstones. Sometimes he has to shuffle around to the front of the table to lift it over slight impediments. His breath squeezes out of him in shallow gasps, his legs feel as if they are filled with wet cement.
The table is too wide to go through the doorway. He bends stiffly to tip it back so that it balances on two legs. The table’s weight nearly pulls him over with it. However, he lets go just in time. The table crashes onto its side. He leans against it, stooped and shaking and momentarily stunned.
By angling the table back and forth, he maneuvers the forward legs through the doorway. The wheels, adding length to the legs, make the job harder. Then, as laboriously, he angles the table the other way to accommodate the back legs. Now he is in the hallway, which stretches like an endless tunnel before him. He has to stop to rest. It is a mistake. Disastrously, his brain switches off, and his body freezes.
The freezing has happened to him several times in the last few months. He knows the name of this inability to move—akinesia—and it is one of the many indignities of his disease. He can go neither forward nor backward, and in this wavering limbo his balance deserts him. He falls sideways, toppling like a drunkard to the floor where he lies unmoving, face down.
He is still lying on the floor when the storm hits. Rain slashes against the windows. The wind rattles the shutters. He flinches, and the house, as if in sympathy, seems to recoil as well. Somehow, the sounds galvanize him, and miraculously he is able to move again. He pushes himself to his hands and knees, uses the table to haul himself up. Then, with tremendous effort and by bracing his shoulder against the wall, he cants the table forward until he has righted it. He rests a moment, trying to dominate the wild inner choreography of his body, and then, step by step, he resumes his journey, pushing the table, wheels complaining, down the hall.
He is almost to the end of the hall when he remembers there is a second door to negotiate. He must repeat the whole terrible, exhausting process of tipping and angling and righting to get the table into the bedroom, where he will make his stand against the monster of the storm. And then it happens to him again. His feet freeze in place, leaving him wedged helplessly between the table and the wall. Long minutes pass. The wind is roaming like a beast of prey outside the house, and still his legs remain locked. He knows now that he won’t make it. He has been beaten. An ocean of despair floods his chest, fills his eyes. And for the first time since Amélie’s death, Joseph is able to shed tears, not only for the wife who left him but for the helpless thing he has become.
Time was when he could have picked up and tossed aside something like a table with ease. A young Hercules, people round about had called him. It was what Amélie had liked about him. “You’re the back,” she had often said. “I’m the head. A strong back doesn’t need a good brain.” He had left the thinking to her.
Now he must think for himself. His thoughts drift out on a dark tide. What was it he had to do? And how was he to do it? Yet even as he stands there stranded, five hundred years of peasant stubbornness, bred in the marrow, come to his aid. With great effort, he remembers one of the kick-starting techniques that Jacqueline has taught him, slapping his leg. It is a feeble motion, as if he is brushing at a drowsy fly, but it is enough to get him moving again. With a broken sob of relief he finds that he is able to force his will once more to the task he must accomplish before the monster comes. For it will arrive with the darkness. It will come in the door, and down the hall, making the floorboards squeal. And if he cannot secure himself against it, it will bend over him. Then it will push his face into the pillow and hold him fast until the brain that Amélie had always said he did not need goes dark.
•
The road before them was a dancing sheet of water. Their headlights and wipers were totally ineffectual in the downpour. Rain hammered loudly on the roof of the van. Julian drove slowly, hunched forward over the steering wheel in a misery of wordlessness that was more deafening than the rain.
“Julian!” Mara had to yell to be heard. “You can’t go on blaming yourself. Drugs are a violent business. What happened to Kazim and Osman may have had nothing to do with you.”
“It has everything to do with me.” He slammed his hand against the steering wheel. “If I hadn’t been nosing around after Kazim, Luca wouldn’t have killed him. He wouldn’t be threatening Osman. You heard what Betul said. Luca thinks I’m an undercover cop.”
“But the Ismets asked you to find their son.”
Julian made no reply.
Mara cried out in exasperation, “For heaven’s sake, you might as well say none of this would have happened in the first place if you hadn’t tried to do a deal with Osman about salep to save your damned orchids!” In the semi-darkness, she saw him stiffen immediately, and she regretted the words even as they came out of her mouth.
“That was a low blow.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. But isn’t it true? Doesn’t it always somehow boil down to orchids with you?”
“If that’s what you think, you really don’t understand me.”
“Then tell me.” Mara braced herself against the dashboard as the van lurched over unseen potholes. “What is it I don’t get?”
He just shook his head and concentrated on steering.
Mara threw up her hands. “I despair of you. Of us. Why do you always close down on me? How do you think it makes me feel? How can we make any headway in our relationship if you won’t talk to me?”
“Why do you always have to bring our relationship into it? And where the bloody hell are we supposed to be going?”
“Nowhere,” she shouted, “if you constantly shut me out. That’s my whole point!”
“For pity’s sake,” he exploded, “what is it you want? A dissection of my feelings? Okay. I confess. I’m not good at talking about the things you want to talk about. I’ve got a thing about orchids. I’m not—what’s the word you like to use? Proactive. I go with the flow. I let things slide. In fact, if you want me to lay it out for you, I’ve a bloody lifetime behind me of things left undone or done too late that somehow add up to one dead nineteen-year-old kid. Is that good enough for you? And now, if you don’t mind, I think I’ve had enough soul-searching, and I’d like to concentrate on getting us out of this.”
He fell into a deafening silence.
“A
ll right,” Mara said, more quietly. “It’s all your fault, if that’s how you want it. So what do you plan to do about it?”
Julian stared bleakly through the frantic rise and fall of the windshield wipers. “The only thing I can do. If Osman won’t go to the police, I’ll have to do it for him.”
“And what if Ton-and-a-Half decides to make good on his threat?”
“It’ll be up to the gendarmes to give the Ismets protection.”
“I assumed that. I was talking about you.”
“Luca and his boys may know I was asking around after Kazim, but they don’t know who I am.”
“I think they do. You said you gave Nadia your card. If Kazim called you, it probably means she gave it to him. If Serge killed Kazim, he probably took your card off Kazim’s body. Commissaire Boutot said nothing about finding your business card among Kazim’s effects, did he?”
“Er—” said Julian, “no.” He had to swing wide suddenly to avoid a torrent rushing off a hillside that brought with it a wash of mud and stones.
“Julian,” Mara shouted, “we can’t drive through this! Pull over.”
“Pull over where? I can’t see a thing. We’ll end up in a ditch.”
A few hundred meters later they had no choice but to stop. A whole section of road had washed away. Mara saw the crater, like a mini Niagara Falls, just in time and screamed. Julian slammed on the brakes. The van slithered to a halt.
“That was bloody close,” said Julian. “We’ll have to go back.” He craned his head around and began reversing. After a minute or two, he gave up. “It’s no good. We’ll have to stay put until it stops raining. Or until daylight.”
“We can’t just sit in the middle of the road,” Mara objected. “Someone will come along and smash into us. At least put your flashers on.”
“They won’t be able to see our flashers. Besides, who in their right mind would be out on a night like this?”