An Unexpected Guest

by Anne Korkeakivi

  The room spun in front of her. She was so tired.

  The second of the detectives returned. She rose and followed him and the commandant along yet another hall and down a set of stairs.

  Reaching the bottom, the commandant slowed his step. “C’était courageuse d’être venue,” he said.

  The numerous headlines and photographs and, after, the years of Internet traces. Every time anyone Googled her name: her photo, the Turk’s photo, little head shots side by side. Words underneath morphed into whatever shape the public wished to make it. What this might mean for Edward’s career. The boys’ friends, their classmates, their teachers staring at them, whispering as they passed: His mother was the one that stepped forward for that terrorist.

  Her, the detective’s, and the commandant’s footsteps slapped rather than echoed through the next hallway. She felt they must be underground, with nothing but earth beneath them, but she’d lost all bearing.

  They reached a doorway, and the commandant stopped. “Mais pourquoi vous n’êtes pas venues plus tôt? Pourquoi vous avez attendu pour minuit?” He laid his hand on the doorknob and waited for her to explain. What was she to tell him? That she hadn’t come earlier because she was preoccupied with organizing a dinner party? That she’d waited to bid Niall good-bye, to make sure he could leave Paris without being followed, in case she would now be watched? That she might not have come at all had she not learned that her own son seemed close to repeating her own errors?

  “Je suis venue,” she said. That she had come had to be enough.

  “Madame Moorhouse,” he said, suddenly in English. “You understand that this is a bad man. Even if he is not the one to do this murder today, this is still a bad man.”

  “Because he belongs to a nationalist organization?”

  “It has been associated with terrorist acts.”

  “Is there any proof that he has?”

  “Does that matter?”

  “Maybe. Does he still?”

  “Still?”

  “Belong to this organization? Is he still active in it? And if not, was it involved in terrorist acts when he belonged to it?”

  The detective shrugged. “Does this matter either?”

  He opened a small window in the door.

  She looked at the prisoner lying slumped over a cot. He looked yellower, but his breathing was slightly less heavy.

  “He is ill?” she said to the detective. “He is on medication?”

  “Yes,” he said, shrugging. “He had une ordonnance in his jacket pocket.”

  “C’est lui.”

  She withdrew the Turk’s crumpled map from her sweater pocket, with the name of the doctor scrawled on it. She pointed to it

  “He was on his way to see this doctor. Here is the name and number,” she said. “It should correspond to the prescription, and if so, you will have a corroborating witness. That will make two witnesses in his defense to one against him. Contact him.” She paused, seeing the commandant’s hesitation. “This is the writing of the man I encountered in the street; you can easily check it against your prisoner’s. I got the map from him. It probably has his DNA on it as well. He was sweating so heavily, he probably sweated right onto the paper. You can check that against your prisoner as well.”

  The commandant frowned. He took the paper from her. “Are you sure?” he said, giving her one last chance to turn away from her responsibility.

  So little, in the end, was black and white. Perhaps the only thing was humaneness—the innate human response, the thing that made prison guards light a cigarette for a condemned murderer. “Monsieur le Commandant,” she said as he closed the door to the cell, “don’t you see? If you keep the wrong man, no matter what he may have once done, all you achieve is that someone is punished for what he didn’t do and the one who shouldn’t goes free.”

  Eighteen

  The commandant brought her back to the room in which she had waited. He handed her a pen. She accepted it. He laid an affidavit on the desk. She signed it. He nodded. He led her out to the foyer. A policeman handed her her cell phone, and she cradled it in her hand. It felt strangely warm, and she thought of how just pressing a few buttons would connect her directly to Edward and Jamie. The original detective, the one with so many rings around his tired eyes, reappeared, the lines in his face looking even deeper. The commandant explained Clare’s testimony.

  “I shall drive you,” the detective said.

  “No, that’s all right, thank you. Perhaps you could call me a taxi.”

  He and the commandant nodded. There would be enough excitement surrounding her in the upcoming days without her now emerging from an unmarked car in the wee hours of the morning in front of the Residence. The concierges would have something to gossip about after all.

  “Merci, Madame Moorhouse,” the commandant said, extending a hand to be shaken.

  “Merci, Monsieur le Commandant,” she replied, accepting his hand.

  The detective led her out. They trod across the cobblestones, the weakening moon still bright enough to show their way towards the entrance. He dragged open the heavy metal doors to the street with a creak and followed her out onto the sidewalk to wait for the taxi.

  “What will happen to him now?” she asked.

  “The prisoner?” he said.

  She nodded.

  He shrugged. “We will hold him until we speak with this doctor. You understand this is not that we do not believe you, Madame. It is how things are done. If the doctor can also identify him and we determine that this is entirely a case of mistaken identity, as he has no carte de séjour and does have a significant history, we will turn him over to the Turkish government. France will have no more interest in him. Maybe les Turcs will, maybe not. That’s a question for them. It will have nothing to do with this case and nothing more to do with la France.”

  She nodded again. The Turk would be deported. His own government would scour his life for signs of unsavory connections and activity. Probably he hasn’t been active in this organization for years, maybe decades. But they would try to find something. Meanwhile, he would be photographed and interviewed, would possibly bring forth a complaint against the French police for their treatment. If the Turkish government did manage to find something they could hold against him, he’d go to prison there. If they found nothing against him, or maybe even if they did, outrage would be stirred up at the French government’s rash response to the crisis, their speed to mistake one Turk for another. Either way, a photo of her, dug up from some cocktail party or charity event or official gathering or another, would be produced beside his. Guilt by association, even with the nonguilty—the Internet was especially brilliant for innuendo.

  “Excuse me,” she said to the officer.

  She had one last thing to do before the sun rose.

  She turned from him to press the familiar button on her phone.

  “Edward,” she said when his sleepy voice answered. “I’m outside the Ministry of the Interior.”

  She could feel his immediate transition to wakefulness. She’d witnessed his ability to do this before, from the depths of her own milky haze, in the middle of the night when he’d received sudden word of some crisis.

  Now she was the tinny bearer of bad news on the other side of the receiver.

  “You’re where? Are you all right?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “I am all right. I am fine. Wait.”

  She cupped her hand over the speaker and turned back to the detective. “I am free to come and go from France?” she said. “You won’t need me on hand to bear further witness?”

  “You plan to leave when?”

  She considered. “This morning. Midmorning. I can be back by evening, or tomorrow.”

  “Of course, Madame,” he said, his eyes with their multiple folds of tired skin blinking slowly at her. “We will need you only if we cannot find this doctor.”

  She nodded and turned back to her phone again. “Yes, I’m fine. I will explain eve
rything. But first I want to tell you: I’m going to go back to Barrow with Jamie as soon as he wakes up. To settle with the headmaster. And make plans for next year.”

  “Clare—”

  “I’ll try to set things up so he can finish out the school year without additional trouble. Maybe I’ll have to stay in London myself. But we can’t leave Jamie behind, alone, without support. Even if I hadn’t just spoken up about the assassination. This isn’t mollycoddling—trust me, Edward, I know something about this. He needs help. He needs us around him.”

  Moonlight played on the paving stones, splashed across the metal gates, the car, her feet, her hands. The sun would be rising soon. She could imagine Edward sitting up on their bed, the room lit only by his phone’s screen. He would sit there like that for an hour if necessary, waiting for her to be ready to explain. He had been doing this already, after all, for the twenty years they’d been together.

  “I’ve been in to give a statement to the French police,” she said. “I saw the man they picked up for murdering the parliamentarian today. I was with him at the time of the shooting. Just on the street; we crossed paths. I’ve borne witness to his innocence.”

  “You were with him at the time of the shooting?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m sure of it. I happened to check my watch. I have the flower-shop receipt. I didn’t tell you right away because of the dinner.”

  She could hear Edward breathe on the other end of the phone line. He was seeing it all in his head, all she’d seen herself: the photos of her with the captions, the phone calls both from the media and the embassy, the hate mail and threats that would arrive from people convinced she was part of a conspiracy against France, a defender of terrorists, of terrorism. He was seeing the permanent under-secretary considering whether or not her actions, and subsequent infamy, would make them unsuitable for the ambassador’s post in Dublin, or anywhere.

  “Well, then,” Edward said, “you did a very good thing. You can’t let an innocent man go to prison.”

  She reentered the courtyard of the Residence as the first hint of dawn lightened the facade of the building. She didn’t bother to press the hated elevator button but headed directly for the stairs. She opened the front door to the Residence, stopped to view the marine landscape by Turner, and stowed her purse inside the Regency console, mindful to settle her keys within the inlaid box from Croatia. She took a moment to breathe in the scent of the lilies and bells of Ireland.

  She withdrew her feet from her shoes, leaving them by the door, and reached out to switch off the light. But she caught sight of her right hand and stopped. It was unadorned now, no emerald ring, nothing but the whorls of time to decorate it. But it was still graceful and tapering, her nails still smooth and rose-hued. Was that a new freckle by the wrist? She rubbed it gingerly. The spot did not budge.

  She turned around to face the Turner. The painting was an early work, a minor watercolor, which Edward had bought from a great-aunt’s estate on the occasion of his and Clare’s first wedding anniversary, because Clare said she found it so beautiful. A funnel of yellow broke open over a mystery of pinks, then, below it, grays and violets and blues. White crests skipped across the bottom, where waves broke against a shore. Dawn.

  These were the colors she had seen the morning that she and Niall had stood side by side along the Atlantic seaboard, the sand running over their toes and through Niall’s fingers, and dreamt that somehow they might have met in a different way or that somehow they might end up in some other way than they were destined. Nothing would stop this rising sun’s radiance, so delicate but determined. What joy the painting gave her every day as she entered and left the Residence, whatever residence she and Edward might be calling home. A quick feeling in her heart, a recollection of anticipation. And yet she never stopped, like she was right now, to really look at it. She traced the paint with a finger, allowing herself to touch its surface. She examined how strokes of white infused the yellow, giving it dimension. The blues and grays melted into each other, a smoky haze under the dazzle of the yellow.

  She flipped off the light switch. She was lucky to have known so much love in her life. To think that she’d always considered it a burden.

  She trod the length of the hallway and stopped at Jamie’s room. He was asleep still, cradled in the afghan she’d wrapped around him. Tomorrow, on their way to Barrow, she would begin to tell him about the mistakes people made, and the prices that had to be paid for them. She knew she wouldn’t be able to keep him from making his own. But at least she could try to keep him from the one he was in the middle of making and give him some thoughts to hold close for the future.

  Edward was stretched out across their bed, awake, his eyes points of intelligence in the dark. He would go to England in the morning to face Barrow with Jamie if she asked, but she would not. There would be time enough for him to talk to Jamie, for him and her to talk together. Everyone was a compilation of right and wrong steps, like the steps that had brought her and Edward to the same stretch of road together. The point was that they kept on walking.

  “I’m back,” she said.

  She dropped her sweater on her vanity, next to the scarf she’d laid there so many hours earlier, and draped her skirt and stockings over it. She slipped into bed and felt against her bare arms the coolness of the sheets where her husband hadn’t been lying. He shifted his weight, making room for her.

  “Clare,” he said, reaching out for her.

  Yes, she said to herself. It’s Clare here.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to my mother, MaryAnn, and my late father, William, and to my sisters, Alice and Caroline.

  Thank you to the peerless Gail Hochman, and everyone at Brandt & Hochman.

  Thank you to Judy Clain, Michael Pietsch, Nathan Rostron, and the whole wonderful team at Little, Brown.

  Thank you to Alice Mattison and C. Michael Curtis.

  Thank you to Mina Samuels, Eva Mekler, Laurel Zuckerman, Anita Chaudhuri, Ronna Wineberg, Louise Farmer Smith, Susan Malus, and Melanie McDonald.

  Thank you to the many others who also offered valued pieces of advice, assistance, and information, including but not limited to Ian Whitehead, Jocelyn Ferguson, Sandee Roston, Tom Kennedy, Julie Metz, Nancy Woodhouse, Niamh Casey, Stef Pixner, Corinne McGeorge, and Christina Haag. Thank you, Jörg Brockmann.

  I am indebted to Drue Heinz and the International Retreat for Writers at Hawthornden Castle, within whose ancient stone walls in Scotland I was fortunate enough to undertake a last revision.

  Last but never least, thank you to Antti, Susanna, and Laura.

  About the Author

  Anne Korkeakivi was born in New York City and currently lives in Geneva, Switzerland, where her husband, a human-rights lawyer, is with the United Nations. They have two daughters. Her short stories have been published by The Yale Review, The Atlantic, The Bellevue Literary Review, and other magazines, and she is a Hawthornden Fellow. Her nonfiction has run in numerous periodicals in the United States and Britain, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Times (London), Gourmet, Ms., and Travel & Leisure. She has also lived, among other places, in France and Finland.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2012 by Anne Korkeakivi

  Cover design by Julianna Lee

  Cover photograph by Kapo Ng: Eiffel Tower © Shutterstock Images; woman © Getty Images

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

 
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  Lines from The Inferno courtesy of The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Laurence Binyon.

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  ISBN: 978-0-316-19676-5

  Contents

  Title Page

  Welcome

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright