“I do clean linen, Madame?”
Amélie stood behind her, viewing the duffel bag. It lay there in the center of the room like an enormous telegram, heralding the arrival of its owner. In one hand, Amélie held a duster. In the other, the phone. She held it out.
Was it Jamie?
“Madame Gibson,” Amélie said.
Clare took the phone, cupping her hand over the mouthpiece. “Draw the curtains and open a window. But no need to change the sheets. They’re clean, aren’t they?”
“Oui, Madame.” They left unspoken the fact that enough time hadn’t elapsed since Jamie’s last visit for the sheets to have grown musty. Clare would miss Amélie when they went to Dublin, for the opposite reason she would miss Mathilde. Mathilde kept the household on its toes, and life interesting. Amélie was safe. She was kind also. Never grow too close to the staff was one of the first rules of diplomat living but when they were the people who knew her family’s secrets, when they were the people she saw day in and day out, the people she sometimes saw more often than her husband, substitutes for the spinster aunt or longtime neighbor or friend from grade school or widowed grandma, becoming attached to them was difficult to avoid.
In Dublin, there would be a whole new set of staff members to get to know, then have to say good-bye to. If they went to Dublin. There was tonight’s dinner still to get through. Plus Edward knew of other rumored candidates for British ambassador to Ireland.
“But none,” he had pointed out this morning, as they dressed, “is married to a girl named Fennelly. If nothing else, that should prove my commitment to continued good relations between the Crown and Ireland. You are my trump card, Clare. As always.”
“You mean continued domination,” she, at that moment crouched down giving a last-minute buff to one of his shoes, had said.
“I mean continued subjugation,” he’d answered, reaching over her for the violet tie she’d given him for his last birthday, which they both knew he hated, and looping it around his neck. She’d stood up to knot it for him. Then she’d turned her back, and he’d closed the clasp on her necklace, his warm fingers brushing her neck. That might have been the real moment she’d committed herself to getting him Dublin.
“Hello, Sally,” Clare said into the phone.
Sally Gibson’s son, Emil, had played soccer with Peter at the International School during their first posting in Paris. She and Sally had ended up manning many a soft-drink stand together and chaperoning numerous bus trips. Ever since their return to France, Sally had been after Clare to help with every committee she herself got involved with. Her latest was the Paris chapter of Democrats Abroad.
“I’m sorry, Sally, I really can’t join,” she said. Sally was a very nice person, and much too smart to be nothing more than a soccer mom in Paris, but she had the habit of acting like a dog with a bone when she got her mind set on something—maybe because she was too smart a woman to be simply a soccer mom in Paris. She and Clare had had this same exchange enough times already; Clare might have to tell Amélie to say she was out next time Sally called. “Never mind my own personal inclinations, which I’ve already told you are zero when it comes to politics, for me to join wouldn’t be right. The Foreign Office is devoutly apolitical, and expects its personnel, and their families, to be that way in public also.”
She checked her watch. 2:55 p.m. She’d lost too much time on all this other stuff already.
“Everyone is political, Clare. Especially in these days. You can’t avoid it.”
“Well, I am not.”
“You’re holding out on me. I know where your loyalties lie. And, Clare, this is important. We’re heading towards disaster. The sanity and safety of our entire globe could depend on this.”
Clare sighed. “Listen, Sally, I just can’t. I’m sorry. But are you running something for the school kermesse this year? Maybe there’s something I could do for that, even though both the boys are gone now. Maybe Mathilde can send over a couple cakes.” That sounded bad. She added, “I mean, maybe we could still contribute something.”
After she hung up, she headed down the hall towards the kitchen. She hoped Sally wouldn’t go talking behind her back, saying she was starting to act snobbish. People forgot—or maybe never knew in the first place—that none of the pomp and circumstance that surrounded a diplomatic family’s daily life actually belonged to them. The splendor belonged to the Crown; she and Edward were just staff (and she unpaid staff, at that). If anything, she and Edward belonged to the Residence more than it belonged to them. Not only would they pack up their things when Edward’s job in Paris was finished and move on as though from a hotel, she didn’t have much say about life within the Residence now.
“Attention!” Mathilde hissed before Clare managed to clear the kitchen doorway. She pointed a finger towards the oven then raised it to her lips.
“Is there a baby sleeping?” Clare said and immediately regretted her flippancy. She lifted the cloth covering the asparagus to check that the stalks hadn’t begun to yellow. They lay there like a mass of entwined lovers, lovely shades of white and purple. “They’re nice, aren’t they?”
“Hah, hah, très amusant, Mrs. Moorhouse, but un bon gâteau is as delicate as a baby.” Mathilde swiped the platter of asparagus from under Clare’s eyes and whisked it over to the sink. She ran water from the tap until she was satisfied at its chill, collected a few drops on her naked fingertips, and shook them over the stalks as though she were a priest anointing them. “Tastes better, though.”
“How do you know that, Mathilde?”
Mathilde laughed, not with her usual loud bark—so as not to disturb the cakes—but in a sort of silent version of it, hacking at the air. “A little backjaw from the minister’s wife, nae? A little cheeky? You feeling yourself, Mrs. Moorhouse?”
Despite her determination not to think about him anymore, the image of the wrestler’s shiny forehead rose in her mind. Clare looped a strand of hair behind an ear and crossed her arms across her chest. “Can an employer be cheeky to an employee, Mathilde?”
Mathilde wiped her damp fingers on the apron covering her broad chest and straightened the kerchief she wore over her graying hair. Then, gathering herself up as high as her diminutive height would allow her, especially when confronted with Clare at well over half a foot taller, she answered, “Anyone can be ill mannered. Even Monsieur le Président to a street cleaner.”
She looked fierce, and Clare remembered what Edward had said: We don’t need the wrath of Mathilde tonight. Besides, Mathilde was right. Everyone deserved respect. Even if that hadn’t been what Clare had been asking, and Mathilde knew it.
“You’re right.” She left the asparagus and peered into the fridge. The strawberries had been impounded. She shut the door. “Although, somehow I can’t imagine a French president chatting up a garbage collector.”
Mathilde snorted. “Neither can I. The French wouldn’t have it. So, I’ll be putting an orange Bundt into the oven tomorrow, n’est-ce pas?”
Orange Bundt cake was Jamie’s favorite. This was Mathilde’s way of making peace, at the same time as keeping the upper hand; tendering both a spontaneous offer to please Jamie and evidence of her awareness of his mid-school-week arrival. She probably also thought Jamie had eaten the strawberries. Well, good. Let her. She would forgive Jamie for it more easily than if the thief were she or Edward.
“That would be lovely, Mathilde.”
Two large tubs of plain yogurt stood on the counter, like country cisterns, white and thick.
“My wife, very good cooker,” the Turk had said, “She make very good yogurt, very good for body.”
If they were in America, this wouldn’t be true for him once they brought him in, no matter whether his wife was allowed to send him yogurt. If caught and convicted, the Turk could be sentenced to death. Hard to imagine of the man she’d walked down the street with just a couple of hours earlier, listening to him praise his wife’s cooking. Clare felt a pain in her chest, t
he wind knocked out of her. But no, capital punishment didn’t exist in Europe, neither in France nor Turkey. Only Americans, amongst the Western nations, clung to killing their killers.
That’s nuts, she thought. I’m feeling sorry for this man? He’s a terrorist.
He’d stepped out in front of her, holding a piece of paper in his hand, pressing it on her. But, back then, he’d been just some poor lost guy, sweating in a cheap leather jacket. How could that same man be an assassin?
There must be a mistake, she thought. Her mistake. There was an eyewitness.
“If you will be tearing your hair out, Mrs. Moorhouse, I’d ask you don’t do it around my cooking,” Mathilde said, pulling a tray of fish out of a fridge, where it had been marinating.
Clare dropped the wisp of hair she’d yanked from her skull, without realizing it, into the garbage. She noticed the clock on the oven door, which used the international standard notation: 15.25. Her appointment at the hairdresser was at 4:00 p.m. “What’s the yogurt for?”
“The dessert,” Mathilde said. She plopped the fish down on the counter, suddenly heedless of the cakes in the oven. “Along with the strawberries.”
Time to leave, Clare thought.
“What’s left of them, anyway,” Mathilde called after her.
Before going out, Clare slipped back into the study and turned on the television. But it was before the hour: no headline news. She flipped to CNN. Sports coverage. She flipped to BBC. A world business report.
She had arranged for a car to take her to the hairdresser’s; unless there was a demonstration clogging the streets, she had time to do a quick check on Google. She sat down at the desk and tapped the space button to close the screensaver. While she waited, she burrowed her hands in her sweater pockets, the triple-ply cashmere warm and soft against her fingers. She felt the cold crepe of thin paper and pulled a sheet out, not her to-do list, nor the Turk’s map, but the forgotten flower shop receipt. She’d failed to enter the sum into the day’s expense sheet.
She reached for the drawer containing the Residence’s expense ledger, but before opening it, she tapped a few words into Google. Then, as the site loaded, she trained her eyes over the receipt. Jean-Benoît wrote with a strange angular tilt, and his notation was as meticulous as his lettering. Instead of scrawling out the ultimate price, after calculating the fifteen percent embassy reduction, he’d begun at the beginning, marking down the precise number and regular cost of each element of each bouquet—lys jaunes/48 tiges/6,50 euros/312,00 euros—followed by the price adjustment. Even the exact time of purchase was specified: 10.12.
Clare glanced up at the computer screen, fixed now into a crossword of calibrated print and graphics.
His face was still there, his same droopy eyelid, his cheap jacket. She couldn’t have been mistaken. Her wrestler was wanted for shooting a French parliamentarian in front of Versailles at 10.30 this morning.
But that was not possible.
She checked Jean-Benoît’s receipt. There it was at the bottom.
Time of purchase: 10.12.
He’d crossed the street and almost been hit by a car. She’d waited to see he reached the other side safely and then waited to be sure he wouldn’t turn back. She’d seen his wide, dark form lumber down the Rue Saint-Placide, until he’d become just another urban spot amongst many. And then she’d glanced at her own watch.
10:29 a.m.
Her watch had read 10:29 a.m., and she’d calculated in her mind how much time she had left to finish her shopping and also stop at the pharmacy to pick up some homeopathic medicine for Mathilde before they arrived with the plate back at the apartment.
Clare looked at her watch now. The gold around its face twinkled up at her in the light reflected off the computer. 3:41 p.m. She checked the clock in the far right bottom of the computer. Also 3:41 p.m.
She picked up the desk phone and dialed. A sensible male voice: quinze heures, quarante-et-un minutes, trente secondes. She waited. Quinze heures, quarante-et-un minutes, quarante secondes.
She looked back at her watch. Even the second hand was accurate.
There was no way her Turk could have gotten to Versailles in one minute. Not even if he’d sprouted wings and flown. Versailles lay fifteen miles southwest of Paris.
Clare touched her spidery fingers to her forehead. She was careful not to groan or sigh, or make any sound the staff might hear.
She reached for the phone, but her hand stopped before dialing a number. She sat there for a minute, feeling the press of time, both past and present, on her. Then she laid the phone back down on its cradle. She still wasn’t going to call anyone—not the police, not Edward. Not until she’d thought this over. Never do anything impetuously. Never do anything without thinking through all the repercussions. She’d made that mistake once. She would not repeat it.
Her situation was complicated.
If she was wrong—although how she could be, she didn’t see at present—and provided this man with an alibi, she could be abetting an assassin. A man would have been murdered, his murderer would come away scot-free, and she’d be responsible.
If she was right about the timing but some other detail was wrong—maybe the wrong time had been reported to the news stations, either by mistake or on purpose for some tactical reason—the police wouldn’t take her support of his innocence seriously. She wouldn’t become responsible for freeing a murderer—but she might come under scrutiny herself. What’s this woman doing, not Turkish, not involved in this case, the Irish-American wife of a British diplomat, getting involved in this case? Defending a presumed political assassin? At best, this would be uncomfortable for Edward, particularly at such a sensitive professional moment. At the worst…
Not to be considered.
Either way, she’d have to search out the correct police station and go in to make a statement. That would mean, at the very least, abandoning her hair appointment, but God knows what else also, because how long might it take? French bureaucracy wasn’t exactly known for its efficiency, and this was the murder of a high-ranking French official. She could be down there for hours. She and Edward might even have to cancel the dinner.
Impossible.
If she was right, however, and her Turk was innocent…
She could single-handedly keep the police from following the wrong lead, and get them on track to searching for the real killer. She could be pivotal in catching the murderer. And she could be pivotal in sparing her Turk unnecessary harassment.
Unless…
Maybe they’d still hunt him down, even with her statement. There was an eyewitness. He was believed to have belonged to that organization. Why would they instantly believe her word about it?
So, it would become her word against that of the other witness.
Again, the police might have to start delving into her own history.
That was not going to happen.
She would wait. Meanwhile, tonight’s dinner would go on.
She pulled her sweater sleeve over her watch and, selecting a fine-tipped blue ballpoint pen, copied down the pertinent information from Jean-Benoît’s receipt in the ledger, immediately under the entry she had already made for the cheese and asparagus.
After she’d transcribed the amounts, she reviewed her work carefully. She did this, as she always did, because—just as she hadn’t immediately put together the time problem between when she’d last seen the wrestler and the reported time of the murder—numbers were the one weakness she couldn’t seem to shake. “Clare can’t remember our phone number,” one of her brothers had ratted her out to their mother when she was still in grade school, and she’d had to write the number on her thigh in ink before they’d sat down to that night’s dinner, slipping her skirt up high under the table to read it so as to prove him wrong. Even as she’d excelled in all her other courses, math class had always been a struggle. As she’d gotten older, she’d learned ways for coping with the problem without ever managing to overcome it. She’d de
vised elaborate tricks for memorizing her own cell phone number, and all the others she called regularly she had relegated to rapid-dial. “Don’t fuss too much over it. Everyone has to have some little foible and at least yours isn’t biting your nails or drink or betting on the horses,” Edward had said a couple years back when she’d stumbled upon an article about mathematical dyslexia. But she disliked having any perceivable weakness, and she continued to triple-verify any number she touched, including those on the Residence’s expense ledger.
She found one mistake. She searched in the desk drawer for white-out, blotted over the incorrect digit, waited a moment for the white-out to dry, and wrote in the correct figure. When she was sure the page was dry, she closed the book and replaced the ledger in her drawer.
His face was still staring at her from the computer. She might occasionally make mistakes with numbers, but she had not made a mistake about the time she’d met him.
She checked her watch yet again. The car she’d ordered to take her to the hairdresser’s would be waiting downstairs. There would be other cars blocked behind hers in the single-lane street, honking. Maybe one of the guards or a gendarme would approach the driver to complain. She looked at the phone but did not touch it again. She capped the pen she’d been using and placed it back in the desk’s pencil holder. She clicked off the Internet, the wrestler’s face popping out of sight at her touch. She rose. She withdrew her scarf from the back of the chair and wrapped it around her shoulders. Tonight’s dinner was fast approaching, and a distracted wife with unkempt hair was not the ideal spouse for a future ambassador to Ireland.
An Unexpected Guest Page 11