by Cara Black
Like putting an animal down. Sick, he was sick. Did he actually think she’d stand by and watch him bludgeon Nelie to death? Nelie, the mother of his child? He was a monster. Why the hell hadn’t René picked up when she’d tried to phone him? Where was the SAMU?
“You followed Hélène here, didn’t you? You could have taken the baby from her. No one would have paid attention to what she said. . . .”
“Aimée, you’re not listening.” His voice, his tone, were soothing, reasonable. “Nelie knows. She knows too much. She’s the only one who can prove that I spied on MondeFocus and informed Alstrom about their plans. I have to dispose of her so we can have a life together. So we can take care of my daughter together.”
But wasn’t he forgetting something? Now she knew, too.
The tools hanging from his utility belt were silhouetted in the light. There was a heavy-duty flashlight in addition to the walkie-talkie and the hammer. It would be so easy for him to pound Nelie’s skull to fragments. And then hers. He’d escape, disappearing in the vast warren of tunnels and quarries that lay beneath Paris. And surface somewhere . . . but not in Zurich. No one would ever catch him.
“What about your documentary?” she asked, saying the first thing that came into her head. She had to distract him until help came. “Were those all lies you told me?”
“The money’s come through,” he said. “Now, with what I’ve been paid, I can make it happen. It’s taken years, but I’ll be able to finish my video and begin work on new projects.”
“You did it for the money? But everything you said about your mother—a committed Socialist, a union organizer . . .”
“Did you have holes in your shoes when you were a kid? Did you grow up with your neighbors jeering, ‘Commie, Commie’ at you? They recruited me, but it wasn’t too hard.”
“Halkyut recruited you?”
“I didn’t go looking for them, Aimée. At first, they just asked to see my footage of the environmentalists’ demonstrations. Their money helped me keep going. Then they asked me to do a little bit more, to document who attended and who the leaders were. I realized I could live like the other half. Now I won’t have to scrounge in commune kitchens, licking the pot after the others have eaten. Neither will my daughter.”
She had to keep him talking. “But why did you have to kill Orla?”
“I didn’t mean to. You have to understand that,” he said. “She argued, she wouldn’t listen to reason. She ran away, then she slipped off the quai.”
“Slipped, Claude? I think you threw her into the river after hitting her with a tire iron.”
His eyes narrowed. “Never mind about Orla. It’s you and me now. We’re alike, Aimée. Each of us was abandoned by the one person who should have put us first. I know you could be a wonderful mother. I’ve seen you with the baby. Don’t disappoint me.”
Nelie was moving, struggling, the blanket falling open. He was holding a gun. Where had that come from?
She saw Claude aim at Nelie’s head.
“Stop, Claude, the flics are coming. You don’t have to do this.” She reached for the Jacadi baby clothes bag.
“I can buy my baby everything she wants now. We can both live the way we were meant to.”
“We’ve all had crap in our childhoods, Claude. Get over it. Her mother’s right here.”
“I grew up without a real mother. Just a woman wrapped up in causes, dragging me to strikes. Never home after school. No father. No real home. My daughter won’t be brought up like that, poor and ashamed and lonely.”
He was playing his vulnerable card again. But he’d said the wrong thing. She hated men who whined.
“Do you own that copyright, Claude?” she said. “I don’t think so.”
“You refuse to understand,” he said, aiming at Nelie, pulling back the safety.
“Wrong, Claude,” she said. “I do understand.”
She fired the Beretta through the Jacadi bag. The first shot hit his shoulder; the second, his kneecap.
She let him live. After all, he was Stella’s father.
Saturday Afternoon
AIMÉE CLENCHED HER fist around the sponge, watching the slow trickle of her blood dripping down the clear plastic tube. She cleared her throat and read aloud from the special edition of L’Express: “Colonel Lorrain of the Ministry of the Interior has called for the cessation of the Alstrom oil negotiations and for an immediate inquiry into toxic substance dumping. Certain reports with respect to an oil tanker crew and to uranium poisoning have come to light . . .”
She paused, glancing at the occupant of the hospital bed.
“Nelie,” Aimée said, “did you hear that? Alstrom’s finished.”
But Nelie, eyes closed, was asleep. With satisfaction, Aimée saw that there was a flush of color in her cheeks.
“Half a liter, Mademoiselle Leduc,” the white-coated attendant said, pulling the needle out of her arm. “But we don’t know if your blood will match.”
“I understand,” she said. “I just wanted to do something.”
“Someone will benefit,” the attendant assured her.
“Thank you for letting me come up here to do this so I could spend time with her.”
“What my boss doesn’t know won’t hurt him.” The attendant winked. “Pretty tough, eh?” He pressed the gauze down over the needle site with a firm hand. “And you with stitches!”
He cocked an eyebrow as he taped the gauze in place. “Are you all right?”
She wished she were.
IN L’HÔPITAL NECKER’S linoleum-tiled hallway, laced with the odor of alcohol, Aimée joined René at the nursery window. A row of swaddled babies lay in white Plexiglas tray tables. Some were connected to tubes.
“Our girl’s a trouper,” René said. He pointed to the far right.
Stella’s toes kicked the blanket. Her little balled fists flailed. A basket of stuffed pink pigs sat by her.
“She loves pigs,” René said. “She laughed when I went oink, oink.”
Impossible for a two-week-old, the manual said, but Aimée let that pass.
René slipped his arms into his Burberry raincoat and picked up his briefcase. “Got to rush, Aimée. Now that I’ve got your signature on the Fontainebleau contract, I’ll messenger it to them from the office.”
“Fantastic.” He’d made enough to pay the rent and much more.
“Me, I’ve got a network to monitor,” Aimée said, glancing at the time. “Talk to you later.”
René paused and shot her a look.
“Feel up to a rave with me and Magali tonight?”
“Non, merci. Magali must wonder what’s become of you.”
She couldn’t meet his eyes. She knew he’d cancel his date and hold her hand if she asked him to. But he had a life of his own and she couldn’t intrude on it.
“Stella will be raised by her mother,” René said. “You made that happen. You did a good thing.” He took her hand and rubbed it.
“It’s for the best, Aimée. You know, I’ll miss her, too.”
He looked away.
Aimée swallowed. At the hospital door, René turned and stared at her as if he were reading her thoughts. “A baby would slow you down. Not your style, you know that.”
She summoned a grin. “All those dry-cleaning bills, not to mention the cost of diapers!”
At the hospital gate she watched René’s Citroën turn the corner onto rue Vaugirard, then she turned and walked back. One last look. That’s all.
She stood at the nursery window until a nurse appeared and picked up Stella. Aimée waved good-bye as they left the ward. She waved good-bye to those little pink toes.
Long after Stella had gone, Aimée’s breath clouded the glass. Of course, Stella should be with her mother. But deep inside she ached for that warm bundle beside her on the duvet. Those blinking blue eyes filled with wonder. Somehow it could have been her style. People did it all the time. She would have managed. She would have been the mother she’d never had.<
br />
She made herself walk down the chilly corridor. She could do this. But the ache inside wouldn’t go away. She collapsed onto a waiting-room chair, sobs choking her. A hand began stroking her back. She looked up into the eyes of a nurse.
“Lost someone?” the nurse asked.
I’ve lost her forever.
Aimée rubbed the tears from her face and sniffled.
“I’m sorry,” the nurse said. “Trite as it sounds, every day the pain will lessen. It never goes away but you’ll remember the good things.”
Aimée nodded, took a deep breath, and hurried down the hallway.
SHE CLIMBED THE STEPS to her apartment and opened her door to Miles Davis’s wet nose pressed into her palm. But the high-ceilinged rooms were empty of a cooing Stella.
She washed the streaks from her kohl-smudged eyes. Dotted eye cream, for puffiness, in circles beneath them, using the last squeeze of Dior’s fine-line concealer. At this rate, she’d need extra-strength putty.
Concentrate. She had a network to monitor, systems to check, work, there was always work to be done. At her desk, she booted up her laptop; Miles Davis nestled at her feet. Outside her open balcony doors, the Saint-Louis-en-l’Ile bell chimed the hour and leaves scuttled in the rising wind.
She performed routine maintenance, monitored the router connections, the firewall design. Yesterday’s cold espresso sat forgotten by her keyboard. That done, she hit Save for the backup copy. Not bad—only ten minutes to get the system online once more.
Someone was knocking at her front door. She hit Send and grabbed her scarf from the duvet. The faint odor of talcum powder rose from it. She chewed her lip trying not to think of what could have been.
At the front door she peered through the keyhole and saw the hem of a blue smock and the legs of her concierge encased in their support pantyhose.
“Another box, Mademoiselle,” Madame Cachou said, frowning with disapproval as Aimée opened the door. “You’re lucky I didn’t throw the others out, but the—”
“Désolée,” Aimée interrupted. “I forgot, deadlines . . . I know, the plumbers complained.”
The box sagged open, contents spilling over the parquet—letters in her grandfather’s scratchy handwriting and something white.
“Not the plumbers, Mademoiselle,” Madame Cachou said. “This was on my steps today, blocking the way. A lady left it.”
Curious, Aimée bent to peer closer.
In the box lay a long lace christening gown smelling of cedar. On top of it was a color photograph protected by plastic, the colors still vivid. In the photo, a smiling couple held an infant by a baptismal font. She recognized the dark brown wood font of Saint-Louis-en-l’Ile and a younger version of her father in his good blue suit, her grandfather with a black mustache, a slimmer Morbier, and the woman who must be her mother.
Her stomach knotted. She hadn’t seen a photo of her mother since her father had burned them, right after she’d left them.
Young, hair in a simple knot, a light in her eyes that the camera caught. Those carmine red lips. And for the millionth time Aimée wondered what had happened to her mother.
“Beautiful,” Madame Cachou said. “You don’t see many christening gowns like this anymore. Friends of your family, Mademoiselle?”
Aimée’s thoughts returned to her dim hallway and the flushed face of Madame Cachou. She felt stupid, sifting through memories, wallowing in self-pity. But she couldn’t help thinking that the christening gown would fit Stella.
She nodded. Her grandfather must have saved this and it had gotten mixed up with other people’s boxes in the basement. She had better make nice, keep Madame Cachou on her good side.
“I’ll have to apologize and thank the tenant who left this. Which floor does she live on?”
“No tenant that I know of,” Madame Cachou said. “Et alors, the way people come and go these days, it’s like the Gare du Nord.”
“What do you mean?”
“The lady said you might need this.”
“Need this?”
“For your baby,” Madame Cachou said.
The hair rose on the back of Aimée’s neck.
“You modern career women!” Madame Cachou sighed, hands on her ample hips. “Rushing everywhere. No time to cook.” She glanced into Aimée’s hallway. “Or clean. At least someone respects tradition.”
But the baby’s not mine, Aimée almost said.
“What else did this woman say?”
Madame Cachou shrugged. “She wasn’t French. That accent, eh, I could tell.”
Her mind went back to the woman’s figure on the quai and the feeling of being watched. Hope battled against disappointment as she took a deep breath, a little girl again.
“Of course, you wouldn’t have noticed, would you?” Aimée paused. “She didn’t look like this woman, did she? Older, I mean.”
Madame Cachou scratched her arm. She shrugged, pointing to Aimée’s mother in the christening photo. “Too hard to say.”
“Of course.” Hopes dashed, Aimée got to her feet.
“Same carmine lipstick, though,” Madame Cachou said. “You don’t see that shade much anymore.”
Just then a warm breeze swept through the balcony doors. The breeze enfolded Aimée, like a pair of warm arms.
*Thirteen to fourteen feet
**Centigrade
FB2 document info
Document ID: e3205072-6234-4374-a260-95fd81be5441
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 29.11.2012
Created using: calibre 0.9.7, FictionBook Editor Release 2.6.6 software
Document authors :
Cara Black
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