An Unexpected Guest

by Anne Korkeakivi

  Ten

  Clare could see her hairdresser, Marco, inside the salon, adjusting a square of foil in the hair of a seated customer. The woman looked like a project Peter had done for science class while he was still in elementary school, a doll robot with rolls of tinfoil encircling its head. Like the woman, the robot had borne a brightly painted smile.

  Behind her, Clare felt the weight of her driver’s gaze. She was grateful embassy drivers considered themselves quasi-​bodyguards, but his present concern made her feel as though she were a bug squashed between two glass slides under a microscope. There he was, waiting behind her, and there Marco was, waiting before her. She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and waved to the driver that he should leave. But she couldn’t bring herself to go into the hairdresser’s salon.

  She pulled her cell phone out of her bag and, in her mind, rehearsed what she might say.

  “I’m really sorry to bother you again, darling, but I have a quick legal question. If you were wanted by the police for a crime, here in France, but someone came forward who could provide an alibi for you, would the police stop hunting for you? Before you’d been caught and questioned? Would it change the investigation? And could that person offer the alibi, say, over the phone?”

  She didn’t unlock her phone. Edward would think she was nuts interrupting him, today of all days, to ask something like that. What explanation could she possibly come up with that he wouldn’t see through? Especially when she got to the next part.

  “And how about if there was a second witness, who claimed to have seen you commit the crime? Would they check into the backgrounds of both witnesses? Would it become a question of seeing which was more credible?”

  A trail of smoke, the remnant of a passerby’s cigarette, curled up into her face. The cigarette had been hand-rolled, of the sort she had smelled on her Turk’s jacket. When they were walking down the boulevard side by side, she’d contemplated how foolish he was to smoke, considering his medical problems. Good grief! She’d been worrying about his nicotine habits. They’d both had much bigger worries ahead of them. If she went to the police, at the very least there would be statements, and officials, and documents, and the press, and lots and lots of talk. Back when she first met Edward, she’d felt fear at the very sight of a policeman. She’d crossed streets not to pass in front of them; she’d turned her face so there was no chance they would see and recognize it from a description or drawing. In twenty years, she’d managed never even to be stopped for a traffic violation. She could smile at the gendarmes on her street, without a hint of hesitation, and wait for them to nod their hats back at her. She’d cleared her slate. She’d washed away the traces of her iniquity.

  Clare flicked the smoke out of her face with as subtle a twist of her hand as possible and glanced at the salon window. Marco was very specifically now avoiding looking in her direction. She was late for her appointment, and still she was on the street, standing there dumbly, cell phone in hand, acting like a confused puppy. She tucked the phone back into her purse, and tried to tamp down her thoughts in the same neat fashion.

  If the police managed to apprehend her Turk—which was in itself unlikely—she would step forward, if she had to. But she probably would never have to because the doctor he’d gone to see would be able to identify him just as well as she could. In fact, the doctor had probably already come forward to identify him. Or would this evening, once he turned on the evening news and saw the picture. Or would tomorrow morning, after he’d seen the morning paper. If no doctor ever came forward, that could only mean there was no doctor. That, in turn, would mean the Turk had lied to her—proof he was mixed up in this whole thing after all. How, she didn’t know, because the time conflict was undeniable. Either way, there was no need for her to get involved with the whole mess, and certainly not today.

  She reached into her sweater pocket, withdrew the Turk’s map, in its many folds, and zipped it carefully shut within her purse alongside her phone. Dinner was just over three hours away.

  She opened the door to the salon and entered what felt like a different world, adjusting her step to fit the beat of a female singer’s smoky alto. Carefully coiffed heads turned and nodded in her direction, a chorus of bonjours over the hum of blow-dryers and the tinkle of water running. Marco was waiting, with a shiny black smock in his hands. While an assistant hung Clare’s sweater, then placed her scarf and earrings on a black velvet tray and stowed them behind the salon counter, her hairdresser slipped one sleeve of the smock over one of her arms and, then, the other. The smock flapped and slid over her, as light as a casing of feathers. On an ordinary day, she would have smiled at the sensation, so reminiscent of Dorothy when she entered the Emerald City. But she felt a sudden chill, and shivered.

  “Are you cold, Clare?” Marco asked her in French, emphasizing her first name, as though he realized he was virtually the only service-providing person in Paris who didn’t “Madame Moorhouse” her. He probably did realize. He traveled regularly to London, where the salon had a sister business, and undoubtedly spoke fine English, but they always conversed in French, to the point of pronouncing immutably English-language words in a Gallic manner: le blow-drying, le hamburger. Marco was very chic, and very discreet.

  “I’m fine,” she responded, also in French.

  She allowed him to lead her to a chrome-colored seat before a large gilt mirror. “As usual?” he asked, pushing a few strands back from her forehead.

  Her face stared back at her, his face hovering just above hers and, beyond their two faces, the street. She felt as though she were looking at gradations of animation: her face pale, her hair pale, her expression as calm as usual, betraying none of the turmoil she’d been feeling; his face also serious and pale but his hair a brilliant reddish-black, and his eyes enflamed and searching; the world outside awash with the buoyant passage of pedestrians, the colors of spring.

  Tall plane trees, vibrant with shimmering chartreuse leaves, lined the traffic island in the middle of the avenue.

  She clutched the edge of her chair. The profile of a man’s body. The way he moved, just as she remembered. Lean and economic. Unpredictable. His body had never enveloped hers; instead, it had carried hers along. They’d been the same height standing face-to-face, the same length lying side by side. She turned her head to look directly through the windowpane. But there was no one on the traffic island, not even a body on which to pin a mistaken identity. She stared again at her own image in the mirror. She saw her face, her eyes, her hair. She closed her eyes, reopened them. She was still looking at her own pallid image. Everything as it should be, and yet, she’d had two sightings of Niall now, in one day, both of them so convincing. This shouldn’t still be happening to her. In the first years, decades even, she’d catch her breath and swallow her heart, sure she was catching a glimpse of him, and then the man she was looking at might turn his head and she’d see someone much older, or someone much younger, or maybe even a woman. Increasingly, however, the vision would move from her sight without her getting to view a face clearly, and she’d find herself left with the feeling that what she’d seen really had been him, even when there was no chance it could be.

  She didn’t want to think about what his face would look like now, deep in the ground, inside its casket. A dry skull, maybe some dark strands of hair. All that was left when all the bark and clamor had ended. Death knew no glamour.

  “As usual,” she said.

  She clasped her two hands in front of her, pressing the smock down against her thighs. If she kept seeing someone who was dead, and feeling almost one hundred percent certain about it, maybe she had also dreamt up her encounter with the Turkish wrestler. Maybe she was actually hallucinating. She’d read of stranger things happening to people. A chemical imbalance. Or guilt rising up from the past to pervert her brain, like Macbeth thinking he saw Banquo, or Lady Macbeth seeing bloodstains on her clean fingers. What was insanity, anyhow? Perfectly rational people imagined enemies in their nei
ghbors; maybe cool and collected women could start imagining encounters with murderers. Or, at the very least, dream up their resemblance to someone with whom they’d had an unsettling recent encounter. After all, bad skin and a cheap leather jacket—that could describe a good portion of the world’s population. Could she have conjured this whole connection up, just as she seemed to be conjuring up the figure of Niall on every street corner? Was the man she saw on television even the same person as the wrestler?

  “Perfect,” Marco said. “Shall we wash your hair, then?”

  She was glad she hadn’t bothered Edward. Really glad she hadn’t gone down to a police station. She lifted her hands and watched the bottom of the smock slither towards her calves, as she stood. Marco’s assistant led her to a washbasin, and she allowed her head to be tilted back, her neck to be slotted into cool porcelain. Water began to pour over her skull, filling her ears with warm, soft liquid.

  There were many dark-complected heavyset men with skin ruined by steroid consumption. Why shouldn’t there even be more than one with a droopy eyelid? How carefully had she really looked at him? She’d avoided his eyes at first and then they’d walked down the street side by side. It’s not as though they’d sat at a table across from each other. Just imagine if she’d gone in to defend the guy, they brought him for questioning anyhow, and it wasn’t even the same person. Not only would she have jeopardized tonight’s dinner for nothing, people would laugh at her. And then they might start saying she was crazy. Or had lied on purpose because she sympathized with the assassin’s cause. This was how it was nowadays—disagreeing with the authoritative majority was tantamount to being subversive, especially when related in any way to terrorism. When Jamie had bought a T-shirt condemning the war in Iraq, Edward had asked him not to wear it. “Not to school, at least,” Edward had said. “I know you do not mean it this way, and I completely agree with your right to disagree. But there are some people out there who will say it means you are supporting Al Qaeda.”

  Of course Jamie had worn the shirt anyway. From the youngest age, Jamie had bucked against anything he perceived as unjust. In kindergarten already, he’d come home with a bite on his arm for defending his snack against a bully. When President Bush had threatened to invade Iraq, he’d insisted on joining the throngs of protestors in the streets of Paris. He’d even begun interrogating a dinner guest from the American embassy one evening, until Edward had intervened. That had been embarrassing. But Jamie was young. Younger people were more quickly forgiven their opinions and the actions they took based upon them—until they came back to haunt them. The police had said the man in the photo belonged to an extremist organization, but they hadn’t said when. Maybe he was just a poor devil who had gotten himself caught up in more than he intended when still a kid—signed a petition written by an old school friend, attended a meeting or two run by a neighbor, and ended up with his name on a mailing list for the wrong organization, all back when he was an ardent innocent college student. Or a young man trying out his first job. Maybe he was just an ordinary fellow who’d made one very big mistake that would now follow him around forever, at the urging of a friend, or family member, or a lover. If he was apprehended and his case went to trial, this one mistake from his past would be his undoing.

  But, still. Even if he hadn’t been involved in the assassination, he couldn’t be considered entirely guiltless, could he? He did once make that choice, regardless of his age at the time. And if he had been involved in the assassination, even remotely? The thought left her dizzy. And she’d been standing on the street corner with him, chatting about yogurt and the eating habits of French women! He might have had the blood on his hands of civilian children and women, the invisible wing tips of their souls brushing his broad shoulders.

  There would be huge political pressure to solve this case, and quickly, to keep fear from growing amongst the populace. People were ready to believe anything about anyone once the word “terrorism” was mentioned. Terrorism was too frightening, too inhuman. The utter breakdown of civilization.

  Clare started up, causing water to cascade down her neck and into her collar.

  “Ça va, Madame?”

  “Oui, oui, excusez-moi.”

  She lowered her head back down, leaving her neck lifted slightly so the assistant could wipe off the back of it.

  Other than Niall, whose wake had been attended by family and friends, whose body had been checked by a coroner—so why did she continue to believe she saw him?—no one should have known about her trip to Dublin, or any of the rest of it. You never saw me, the man in the hotel had warned her—and she’d understood that idea to be mutual. Just as promised by Niall, the desk clerk hadn’t requested her passport. She’d paid in cash. No one who knew her had ever seen her alone with Niall, including her family. No one knew they’d become more than polite if somewhat distant housemates for two months of one summer. Even when she’d driven him up and down the Eastern corridor, she’d always stayed in the car, stayed on the beach, stayed in the motel room, stayed away from being seen with him. She could count the number of people who would have seen them alone together—a luncheonette waitress, a motel cleaning lady, a tollbooth collector. People who wouldn’t remember her or Niall more than two decades later. She and Niall had been two amongst the thousands of holiday-making lovers they’d poured coffee to, straightened the sheets of, accepted dimes from. Even if they said they could remember her, they couldn’t be considered credible witnesses. Twenty-plus years later? But she knew.

  The pressure on her skull stopped. The assistant had removed her fingers from Clare’s head. Clare opened her eyes and looked up.

  “Madame?”

  “Oui?”

  “J’ai dit: la temperature de l’eau? Ça va?”

  “Excusez-moi. Oui, c’est parfait.”

  The water returned, bubbling along the perimeter of her hairline, the frontier of her high forehead. Instinctively, she re-shut her eyes. The hands returned. They slid down to the base of her neck and made their way back up again, kneading, pressing, stroking. Droplets dribbled over her temples, wet lapped her cheekbones. All this mess, all relating back to that moment more than two decades ago when she’d stepped out of the shower, water trickling down her back and over her breasts, and found him standing there. And if she’d cried out or grabbed a towel or turned away? If she had blushed, even? She’d said, “You—” And then she’d said nothing. She’d stood there, naked in front of him, water pooling down around her toes. She, the girl who disappeared into the private dressing room to change at the pool, who pulled her sweats and T-shirts on in a toilet stall by the gym lockers. A false breeze, maybe just the movement of his arms, had stirred the wet on her body, lifting away the oppressive heat of that summer, of her own body. He’d raised the towel in his hands and begun to dry her hair, while droplets streamed down her back.

  Again and again, in her mind, over the decades, she’d revisited that moment. That delicious lifting of the heat. The delicious lifting of suspense, uncertainty, attente. The joy it had given her then. The horrible thrill it still gave her to remember despite herself.

  “You’re different from other girls in America.” The evening air was viscous around them on her aunt’s back porch in the Boston suburb; Clare felt it hugging her bare arms and legs like a wet bandage. Two weeks had passed since their weekend alone together, and, for the first time since, she and Niall were the only ones in the house. It wasn’t planned. Niall hadn’t shown any deference towards her since that weekend—not a word, not a glance. He hadn’t whispered a suggestion they meet someplace away from the house, nor hesitated when their paths had crossed under the eyes of her aunt and uncle. She understood he was pretending nothing had happened between them to save her from unnecessary trouble, because becoming a couple would cause a lot of talk amongst the family. From what she’d figured out, he was a cousin through her uncle, and it was Aunt Elaine who was her father’s sister. They weren’t blood related, therefore—but whether or
not they were would hardly have mattered. She was a Radcliffe girl. Niall was a high-school dropout from a worn-down street in Derry. Worse, he was a “cause,” she’d learned, for her aunt and uncle. He’s been getting himself into a mess over there, Uncle Pat had said a few nights after Niall had arrived. He’ll be ending up under lock and key, just like his father before him, before turning to flip a steak on the barbecue. God knows how he even got the fare to come over. But you know how El can never turn them down. He’d been talking to a friend, who’d nodded without asking for further explanation. She’d overheard, and understood the essential. Niall was never going to be a suitable match for her.

  But even as she’d admired his discretion, another part of Clare had begun to worry he’d forgotten about lying in the heat after wrapping her in a towel, after putting his arms around her. He was young and handsome. He was confident. God only knew how many women he’d slept with. Was sleeping with currently, while visiting Boston.

  Or was he showing no recognition of their intimacy because it was something he regretted? Could he be angry because of what she’d said about the English in Northern Ireland? Or had she been disappointing without her clothes on?

  In front of the others, he acted as though he’d love to have her if only he could. He made an open joke of it. “Why doesn’t Clare have herself a man?” he’d remarked over a family breakfast several mornings after he’d rubbed her naked body down with a towel and spread her wet hair across her pillow beneath him. She was on her way to work, her blond braid spun up in a bun, a clean cotton dress buttoned up her long spine. He’d been missing the last few days—or maybe just a couple days, but every day without any acknowledgment from him since the weekend that they’d spent together seemed like a month—and she hadn’t expected to find him amongst the others in her aunt’s kitchen.