by Cara Black
She was late. Ahead, a snarl of buses and cars sat in midday stalled traffic. Pedestrians filled the zebra-striped crosswalks; the outdoor café tables on the sidewalks spilled over as the lunch crowd took advantage of the unexpected heat.
“Quai d’Anjou. Fifty francs extra if you skirt the traffic on rue Saint Antoine,” she said, perspiration dampening her collar.
The driver grinned and hit his meter.
Ten minutes later, she set her bags down in her sun-filled kitchen, where the wonderful scent of rosemary filled the air.
“Bought out the whole baby section, have you?” Michou pulled out pureed broccoli tips, yellow squash in small jars. “Quite the organic gourmet . . . but a thing this little won’t eat solids for a few months.”
She was useless. She couldn’t even buy the right food.
The baby cooed, wrapped in Aimée’s father’s soft old flannel bathrobe. Michou had improvised a bassinet from an empty computer-paper box resting on the table.
A surge of protectiveness overwhelmed Aimée. Duty—no law—required her to turn the baby over to the authorities. But the mother knew her name and had begged her not tell the flics. Until the autopsy result revealed whether Orla was the baby’s mother, she’d keep her and care for her.
She put the future out of her mind. She planned to monitor Regnault’s system, deal with their other contracts, and master diapers this afternoon. She lifted the lid of the copper pot simmering on the stove, swiped her finger across the surface, and licked it. “Ratatouille!” The last time she’d used the stove had been for heating up takeout. For her, that counted as cooking.
The wavering slants of pale light pouring through the window, the aroma of herbes de provence perfuming the kitchen, reawakened a warm familar feeling she remembered from the deep recesses of her childhood. Good homemade food had been as much a given as breathing in her grandmother’s kitchen. She recalled the hazy summer heat in her grandmother’s Auvergne garden; her mother’s laugh, her sun-warmed pockets filled with fragrant fresh-picked raspberries—red, glistening jewels exuding a scent that was so sweet. Her laughter as she popped them into Aimée’s mouth. Her mother . . . where had that memory come from?
“Take a cooking class, Aimée.”
“I’d do better to get a wife, Michou. Like you.”
Michou grinned. “Try cuisine dating. It’s for singles. You cook together, eat, and see if any sparks fly.”
Baby products, cooking classes . . . what next? As if she had spare time after completing her job: computer security, sysad-min, and programming. Let alone time to discover why a baby had been left in her courtyard, and why the mother, if indeed it was she, was lying in the morgue.
“At least you bought diapers. That’s a start, Aimée.” Michou shouldered his bag, rubbed his chin. “I need to wax my chin and iron my gown. We’re playing in Deauville tonight.”
She caught her breath. “Deauville? You’ll be that far away?”
“The casino.” He smiled. He patted her on the back. “You’ll do fine. Oh, by the way, the phone rang in the middle of her bath, but when I answered they hung up.”
She wondered if the mother had tried to make contact, then had hung up, scared by a man’s voice answering Aimée’s phone.
“Michou, did you hear voices?”
“Only in my head, chérie.”
“Wait a minute, Michou. You answered the phone, said, ‘Allô’—”
Common courtesy, of course,” Michou interrupted, putting “his wig case into his tote bag.
“Try to think, Michou. Repeat what you did and said. There could be a clue, some way to—”
“You mean like in Agatha Christie?” Michou’s plucked eyebrows shot up on his forehead. “Mais oui, I looked out the window.” He took a mincing step. “I showed la petite the birds nesting in the . . .”
“I mean when you answered the phone?”
“I bathed her in the kitchen sink, wrapped her in a towel, of course, but oui, right here.”
He took another step, gestured with wide arms to the open kitchen window. “Allô, allô . . . I kept saying allô, that’s all.”
From below came the churning of water, the lapping of waves against the bank as a barge passed them on the Seine.
“Michou, think back,” Aimée said, trying to keep her foot from tapping. “Did you hear anything in the background? Maybe traffic, indicating the call came from a public phone, or was it quieter, like in a resto or from a home. . . .”
“That’s why it seemed so hard to hear—it was the water.”
“Water?”
“C’est ça!”
“You heard water like the sewers being flushed or—”
“The river.”
Aimée controlled her excitement. “You’re sure?”
Michou’s eyes gleamed. “Over the phone, I could hear a barge whistle . . . that’s right. Like someone was calling from right downstairs.”
Hope fluttered in Aimée’s chest. There were no public phones on the quai downstairs but the mother was nearby, and alive, she sensed it. She would surely make contact again.
Michou shouldered his bag.
“Don’t forget, Aimée, keep the baby’s umbilical stump out of the water for at least two weeks.”
“But I don’t know how old . . .”
“I rubbed off all those ink marks. An infant’s skin is very delicate. Why in the world would anyone . . . ? But it doesn’t matter. She didn’t have an allergic reaction and they’re gone now.”
Good thing she’d copied them.
Aimée eased the pink bunny-eared hat she’d bought over the baby’s fontanel. “Never too early for a fashion statement, petite.”
“You’d like to keep her, Aimée.”
She froze.
“It’s written all over your face,” Michou said.
“She’s not mine, Michou.”
He sighed. “You’re becoming involved; it’s impossible not to with a baby. Aimée, don’t let yourself get hurt. . . .”
Of course she wouldn’t. She kissed Michou on both cheeks. “You’re a lifesaver, merci.
”
A tinge of color swept over Michou’s cheeks. He paused. She’d never seen him tongue-tied before.
“All in a working girl’s day, chérie.”
THERE HAD BEEN no call. Aimée rubbed her eyes, strained from monitoring Regnault’s system. Boring, tiring, drudge work. Several hours of it. The most lucrative in the business. The baby, on a pillow in a hatbox on the floor, gurgled.
She entered her old student ID number on a second computer and combed the Sorbonne student directory. She accessed the administrative files using the technique a savvy friend had shown her—useful for altering grades. She accessed the personal files of all the students, then narrowed her search to émigré-status students with the name Linski.
Voilà. Krzysztof Linski was an engineering major. She even found his class schedule, which she downloaded. Twenty years old, born in Kraków, Poland. Member of the chess club and an above-average student. And he knew about computers.
She copied the information, put it in a file. The baby let out a bleating cry and Aimée picked her up and rocked her.
With the baby in the crook of her arm, she hunted online for Orla, a search by first name. But the program, an old one, indicated that the last name was required. No go.
At least she could contact MondeFocus and seek some answers there. She telephoned the number given on the flier but a generic recorded message was the only answer: Sorry we missed your call. Leave a message. Frustrated, she left her name and cell-phone number and hung up.
Right now she should be questioning the garage owners for information about the woman who had used their phone. Again she wondered why the woman hadn’t called back. She stood the baby in her arms and reached for the group photo she had stolen from Linski’s room. Too bad there were no last names written on the back. She sniffed as she caught a rank whiff, then gasped in horror at what leaked from the
baby’s diaper all over the keyboard of her computer.
As she reached for a tissue, beeping came from her computer. Error code. GX55 flashed on the screen with respect to Regnault’s system. The beeping was a counterpoint to the baby’s cries. A system glitch. Perfect timing. Everything happened at once.
Tuesday Afternoon
BON, HÉLÈNE THOUGHT, counting eighty-four glasses. She hadn’t broken even one washing up! Her quavering hands rubbed the linen towel over the last champagne flute stem. She felt the warmth of satisfaction as she aligned the glassware in sparkling rows on the shelves just so. The Comte liked everything in order.
From the Polish Foundation’s kitchen window she could look out over the manicured garden in which trellised ivy climbed the courtyard walls. She imagined last night’s gala—the wax-encrusted candelabra she’d cleaned blazing with tapers, platters of hors d’oeuvres dotted with caviar she’d washed, the gowned and tuxedoed crowd milling in the high-ceilinged salon under carved gilt boiserie. Each detail to savor and recount later to her sister, Paulette.
“Hélène?”
She paused, startled. Listening, she took a deep breath. She suppressed her fear, the fear that was always with her, the fear that never went away.
“Hélène?”
Non, the voice was different, it was not the bad man. She gathered herself. “Oui, Monsieur le Comte?”
Comte Linski leaned on his cane, a strained smile on his gaunt face. “Please, no need for formality,” he said. “I’m the chargé d’affaires, only a glorified watchman, you know. And I’m even too old for that now, Hélène.”
Hélène folded the towel. Always too modest, the comte. “They’re lucky to have a cultured man like you. A decorated war hero.”
And she was lucky, too, that he asked her to work odd jobs after receptions and gave her the leftovers.
“A Polish community that’s dying out and a heritage to protect; it’s not an easy task.” The comte went on, “If only the young generation . . . ah, that’s another discussion. But I must thank you for your efforts.”
She beamed, smoothing down her apron, until he held out an application form to her.
“Hélène,” he said, “write down your address so I can process your paycheck.”
Paperwork . . . why did people always need paperwork? She avoided all banks, forms, bureaucracy.
“Mais, Comte, you’ve always paid me in francs before. I prefer cash. I don’t trust banks.”
“Now I must pay you by check,” he said. “We have to protect our nonprofit status should we be audited. Just fill this out, Hélène.” He set the form on the counter.
She untied her apron, folded it, backed away. No paper trail . . . never leave a way to trace her.
“I’m late, pardon,” she said.
The comte’s eyebrows rose.
A tall woman rushed into the kitchen and shot a withering look at Hélène. She was puffed up with self-importance, this one, Hélène knew.
“Comte, the director needs to speak with you about the Adam Mickiewicz display in the library. As he was the leading poet of Polish romanticism, the director deems it fitting that we—”
“Pardon, Hélène,” the comte interrupted. “Talk to me before you leave.”
Hélène nodded but she had no intention of doing so. She knew she could never come back here again. In the coatroom off the courtyard she gathered her shopping bags and put on her woolen jacket.
She paused at the glassed-in temperature-controlled storage salon, where paintings to be cataloged were stacked. She recognized the portrait in a gilt frame on the very top. A young girl on a swing, skirt trailing over the sun-dappled riverbank grass, painted by a Polish Impressionist. One of Paulette’s favorites, it had hung in her family’s brocante, once the only secondhand shop on the island.
Out on the quai, Hélène knotted her scarf over her white braids, picked up the shopping bags that held most of her earthly possessions, and tried to ignore the pangs of hunger. No leftovers this time.
Somehow she’d have to feed them.
She turned onto rue des Deux Ponts. At least the bains-douches municipaux were free. And warm. Inside the white-tiled bathhouse she set her bags down. The bored middle-aged attendant listened to the weather on the radio as he handed her a key. “Take cabin three,” he instructed her.
“Merci.” She took a towel from the pile on a plastic chair and shouldered her bags again, ignoring the curious look that he didn’t bother to hide.
She turned on the chrome shower faucets. Hot water steamed out into the warped wooden stall, which was like the one in which she and Paulette had changed their bathing suits at Dieppe. But instead of coarse sand underfoot, there was a slick tiled floor.
“I’ll wash all our socks,” she said. “It’s so hard to keep clean where we live.” She wondered how much longer they could stay there; the waters kept rising.
She undid her long white braids and pulled out the cheesecloth bag that held bits of Marseilles lavender soap. She’d saved these soap chips, like her maman had taught them to do during the war. Les Boches would like it if we were all dirty all during the Occupation, Maman had said, but they would save soap scraps and keep clean. So there.
“Hey, what’s going on? Only one person to a stall,” someone said.
She overheard the bath attendant. “She comes every week, keeps herself clean. Harmless.”
Not again. Another one of those hurtful people who ignored Paulette, never even offered her a bonjour as they entered a shop. These days only Jean, their schoolmate before the war, exhibited any manners. Most of the others were gone. Up in smoke.
She soaped up with the cheesecloth and lathered her hair.
“Paulette, don’t be afraid,” she whispered. “No one will hurt you. What? The bad one? We’ll never see that bad one again. Non, the bad one won’t hit you. I won’t let him push you in the river like he did the girl. I promise, Paulette.”
“So go farther down. Take cabin six,” the bath attendant said. “She’s talks to herself but she’s not dangerous, believe me.”
Why did people say that? Talk to herself? Not she.
“Paulette, stop that,” she said. “I told you. You’re fifteen now; act like it.”
Clear hot water ran over Hélène’s face. “Méchant! You are naughty, Paulette. Give me the towel. Bon. Eh? You’re safe. How do I know? Oh, I took care of him. I had to.”
Tuesday Afternoon
AIMÉE STARED AT the small bundle that was keeping her hostage in her own apartment. Her laptop had cleaned up well and apple vinegar had dispelled the odor. Wonder of wonders, it still functioned. But there were still deposits of baby spit-up dotting her father’s old flannel bathrobe, the sagging bunny ears of the cap, all over. Should she feed the baby again? Or maybe it had gas? Aimée needed a step-by-step manual.
The baby flexed her pearl pink toes and unfurled her small fists. Her hiccups reverberated against Aimée’s chest. Then a big burp and a sensation of warmth filling the diaper. Again.
“So that’s the problem. Warn me next time, eh?”
A gurgling stream of bubbles trailed from the side of the little mouth. “That’s your answer then?”
More bubbles.
Aimée changed her, becoming increasingly efficient with the help of the aloe-scented baby wipes and Michou’s detailed diaper diagram.
The group picture was burning a hole in her pocket. She needed to show this photo around, figure out the mother’s movements, and why she’d left the baby. And, of course, who she was.
But Aimée was loath to take the baby outside and possibly endanger her. This tiny thing with feathery lashes, whose chest rose and fell softly against her, who smiled in her sleep. “Gas,” Michou had informed her. ‘”It’s gas. They don’t smile until three months.” She disagreed.
She couldn’t keep calling her “it” or “the baby.” She thought of the stars patterning the night sky when she’d found her. Stella meant star; she’d learned that
on a holiday in Italy.
“Stella,” she breathed. “I’ll call you Stella because you glow like a star.”
René was working in Fontainebleau, Michou had gone to Deauville. She needed to get to the dry cleaner’s and to give Miles Davis another walk. Most of all, she needed a nanny.
Errands would have to wait. Other things couldn’t. She’d change her style, cover up Stella, and hope to blend in with the stroller crowd. From the collection in her drawer she chose large dark sunglasses, Jackie O style; a cap with STADE DE MARSEILLES printed on it; a black corduroy miniskirt; and metallic red Puma trainers.
She left her cell phone number on her answering machine. That done, she found the newly purchased baby sling, a striped affair of blue ticking, nestled Stella into it, and grabbed the dog leash.
DOWNSTAIRS IN THE courtyard, she paused before the concierge’s loge. A warm breeze ruffled the potted geraniums on the steps leading to the concierge’s door with its lace curtain panel.
“Bonjour, Madame Cachou,” she said, peeking inside, where a woman with steel gray hair was punching in figures on an adding machine.
“May I ask a favor, Madame? I’ve got to take Miles Davis out. Would you mind watching the baby, just for an hour?”
Madame Cachou’s lips pursed. “Mademoiselle Leduc, did you get the notice? The second notice, to move the items from your space in the cave? I put it in with your mail.”
Aimée groaned internally. Clearing her storage area was a task Madame Cachou deemed of highest importance due to the plumber’s whining that he needed more space to refit pipes under their building. On her return from a several months’ absence helping her sister, ill in Strasbourg, Madame Cachou had resumed her responsibilites with vigor. Aimée hoped the broken front door digicode would make her priority list.
“This weekend, Madame. My cousin Sebastian will help me.”
Madame Cachou, a widow, pushed her glasses up on her nose, then folded her arms over her ample chest. In her light blue smock, flesh-toned support stockings, and clogs, she personified the traditional concierge captured by Brassaï in old photographs. She was a rumormonger who delivered the mail twice a day. But Madame Cachou was one of the handful of concierges still working on the island and one of the fewer still who weren’t Portuguese. The new immigrant Portuguese women not only managed multiple buildings, they also juggled cleaning jobs and raised families, but rarely spoke much French.