by Cara Black
“Someday . . . you’re always asleep when I’m working.”
The oven timer beeped and Montard sprang into position, reaching with a long wooden paddle to hoist the baked loaves onto cooling trays. She walked past the industrial-sized aluminum mixer and hundred-kilogram sacks of flour and bins of Maldon sea salt to open the fire exit door. Threading her way through the courtyard, past a dormant rose trellis and hedges winding by an old well, she emerged by her own courtyard’s old carriage house. She paused until she was sure that no one was following her. Shining her penlight in the corners, she checked her courtyard again. And then trudged upstairs. In her apartment bedroom, René, his sleeves rolled up, sat on the floor working on his laptop. The baby cooed on the duvet.
She pulled the gauze draperies aside and peered out the window. Shadows wavered on the quai below.
“Someone followed me.”
“So you led them here?”
She pulled a crisp, warm baguette from her pocket. “I took a minor detour at the baker’s.”
She needed a cigarette. Too bad she’d stopped smoking last week. Again.
“Did the mother call yet?” she asked.
René shook his head, grabbed the nub end of the baguette, and chewed while he scanned the computer screen. His flexed his toes in their black silk socks. “You might want to put the tabs right.”
Curious, she sat next to him cross-legged, scanning the report displayed on the screen of the laptop, and asked, “Didn’t I?”
“The diaper tabs.” He pulled the blanket away to show her the cooing baby’s legs.
She stared at the now properly arranged diaper.
“You put the diaper on backward,” René said.
A kitchen towel wreathed the baby’s neck like a bib. Aimée’s large lime bath towel propped her on her side.
“I checked with my friend, a pediatric intern. He said it’s better for their digestion for them to lie like that. I’d say she’s ten days to two weeks old.”
Surprised, she bent forward, scanning the baby’s face.
“How can you tell?”
He shrugged. “See.” He lifted some sheets of paper covered with blurred black-and-white images. “He faxed these photos of umbilical cords from his textbook. And told me to check the soft crevice on her head, the fontanel. It’s much too early for it to close so don’t drop her on her head.”
René pulled on a corner of the blanket and the baby stiffened, her arms shooting out, fists clenched.
Like a fit, or a convulsion. Aimée’s mind raced ahead to the emergency room, huddled doctors, forms to fill out. Inconvenient questions.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, worried.
René thumbed through the faxed pages.
“Let’s see, I read about it . . . here, it’s a Moro reflex, it says here. It’s normal. If she didn’t have reflexes then you would worry.”
“How can you—?”
“Stroke the sole of her foot,” he interrupted. “From heel to toe.”
She brushed her fingers across the warm foot. The baby’s toes flared upward and then her foot curled inward like a wrinkled peach.
“Eh voilà, the plantar reflex,” he said. “They’re just little bundles of reflexes when they’re not poop machines. My friend said they even have an en garde fencing reflex.”
She stared, amazed. There was so much to know. And it was such a responsibility.
“Notice her perfectly shaped head?” The baby’s nose crinkled in a yawn and her eyelids lowered, and a moment later they heard her little snores of sleep.
Every baby was cute, she thought.
“They don’t all come out like that, my friend said. Probably a C-section.”
René put the faxed sheets down on the parquet floor.
“How do you know you were being followed?” He didn’t wait for her answer and shook his head. “It’s your overactive imagination as usual.”
“I didn’t imagine a tire iron!” she said. “Or ruin a good pair of silk Chantal Thomas stockings for fun. Hold on, I’ve got to change.” She went into the bathroom, peeled off her shredded stockings, and wiggled out of the Chanel. By the time she rejoined René, she’d put on leggings and a denim shirt.
“It doesn’t make sense, René, unless someone’s watching for her outside.”
“What do you mean?”
She told him about the shuttered garage, the figure with the tire iron chasing her across Place Bayre.
René’s eyes widened.
“That’s why the mother hasn’t come back—she’s afraid.” She paused. “Or more than afraid. She may be injured. Or worse.”
“Call the flics,” René said.
Aimée had to make him understand. “I don’t know how, but this woman knows me, René,” she said. “And I believe her; she was fearful for a reason. Would you feel better if the baby was at social services when she shows up? Then she would be hauled into jail for abandoning her infant, all because she begged me to watch the baby and I wouldn’t help her for a few hours.”
“Did I advise that?” He averted his eyes.
That’s what he’d meant.
“I’ll tell her—non, convince her—to speak to the flics once she turns up.”
“But you don’t know how to care for a baby.”
Like she needed him to remind her!
“I’ll do what I can.” The rest, well . . . she stared at the phone, willing it to ring.
Tuesday Morning
PENETRATING THE FOG of sleep, Krzysztof heard a long, piercing whistle. He blinked awake, panicking, grabbing at what enfolded him. The stinging welts on his back flamed. He realized he was lying inside a sleeping bag on the floor. The memory of last night’s surprise attack came back: the CRS truncheons, sirens, revolving blue lights, Gaelle’s blood, their group scattering. The peaceful organized march shattered. Running, escaping through the wet bushes. The ransacked MondeFocus office and Brigitte’s anger and accusations.
Something clanged and sputtered. He inhaled the aroma of fresh-ground coffee and just-baked bread. His eyes cleared and he saw a red-haired woman sipping a soup bowl–sized café crème at a worn farm table. Despite the frigid air, she wore a lace halter top and torn jeans, and her feet were bare.
Now he remembered finding this safe place, a squat the others had told him about. No one would bother him here. He checked his cell phone for voice mail. Nothing. Why hadn’t Orla returned his call? He’d left three messages on her phone last night.
“Coffee, Prince Charming?” The woman grinned. La rouquine, the redhead, they’d called her. A steam kettle boiled on the stove in the squat’s industrial-sized kitchen.
He saw her blowtorch leaning against the battered Indian-style sandalwood screen. Gaelle had told him last week about this artiste who was sympathetic to their cause. She welded metal sculptures and could hold her wine. Last night’s empty bottles filled a corner. He had seen how much she could drink before he’d passed out.
The files were gone, Gaelle was in the hospital, MondeFocus was against him. Very well, he would act on his own.
He winced as he got to his feet, still in his Levi’s and half-buttoned shirt, and joined her by the stove, from which heat slowly emanated. She kissed him on both cheeks and handed him a bowl. Her hands, he saw, were rough with blackened fingernails. From the blowtorch, no doubt. The squat was on the site of what used to be an old farm, now scheduled for demolition. The last farm remaining in Paris, it was the abode of artists, political types, and immigrants without papers who hid there. Like him. No one would trace him here.
“I’m late, ma rouquine,” he said, glancing at the salvaged train-station clock hung on the peeling plastered wall.
“Come back, Krzysztof,” she said. “We’ll have a long lunch.”
He saw the dancing look in her gray-speckled eyes. But he had no time for that.
KRZYSZTOF GOT OFF the Number 38 bus by the Sorbonne. The headline of Le Parisien read RIOT BY MONDEFOCUS AT L’INSTITUT DU MONDE ARABE OIL C
ONFERENCE: TWENTY JAILED. He took a deep breath; if hadn’t known what to do before, he knew now.
His student ID folded in his back pants pocket, he walked between the pillars of the entry gate and hurried up the wide stone staircase to the library. The wood-vaulted reading room smelled of age—antique mahogany had warped with time and the walnut oil that had been rubbed into it for years had given the wood a rich patina. Krzysztof eyed the room, which was covered floor to ceiling with books but vacant except for a few older scholarly types bent over their work. Most of his fellow students were attending lectures.
He had to find proof. The proof that had been stolen from the MondeFocus office.
The librarian took his ID and he sat down at a computer terminal. He logged on using “Sophocles,” the user ID and password of a philosophy professor that he’d found taped under the desktop in a deserted office last week at noontime. It was so easy to steal passwords and IDs. Krzystof imagined that professor abhorred computers and preferred contemplating his navel, as did most of the tenured staff.
Last week he’d accessed Alstrom’s Web site. Alstrom was the oil conference’s major sponsor. Their external site displayed nothing but blatant propaganda about how their oil exploration enriched the world. Enriched their pockets, more likely.
Now he was going to try the site of Regnault, Alstrom’s PR firm. Operational files might contain telltale documents under a code or project name. He’d seen parts of environmental reports that had been withheld from the media, suppressed. And they’d made him sick.
He logged into a privileged user account and told the system to add a new user, Sophocles. So far, so good.
Ready for the plunge, he logged into Regnault with Sophocles. If Alstrom had bribed ministers to overlook discrepancies in its environmental reports and he could find evidence of this, he could salvage their protest and stop the execution of the proposed agreement.
His fingers tensed on the keyboard, feeling that particular rush, the crackle of expectation. In seven keystrokes he’d be inside Regnault’s network, scanning their operational documents. They’d never know their system had been infiltrated. Nine out of ten times they didn’t recheck privileged user accounts or monitor their firewall.
But a message flashed on the screen: If you read this, you’re dead.
Krzysztof froze. Someone was on to him.
Or . . . ?
He logged off and grabbed his hooded sweatshirt. He kept his head down, grabbed his ID, and passed through the turnstile before the librarian turned her head.
Tuesday Morning
AIMÉE STARED AT the clock. It was 6:00 A.M. Still no word, no call from the baby’s mother. The dried blood on the baby bag, the figure who had chased her in Place Bayre—these thoughts had kept her up half the night. Yet the responsibility for this small human terrified her most of all.
Streaks of an apricot dawn sky filtered in through the tall window, showing her vintage Chanel, now filthy, hanging from the armoire door. She envisioned the dry cleaner, hand on her hip, rolling her eyes, saying, “Miracles, Mademoiselle, cost more.” Reports were stacked on the desk, talcum powder dusted the duvet. All night she’d listened, alert to the breathing of the sleeping baby beside her, afraid at every hiccup that it would stop.
For a moment she imagined the room strewn with baby-care manuals, plush toys, dirty diapers, and a fine spray of pureed carrots decorating the cream moiré wallpaper. And herself, with sleep-deprived eyes and a misbuttoned sweater dotted with spit-up, like the bookstore owner’s wife around the corner who had three young children.
Next to her on the duvet, a little fist brushed her arm. The phone receiver stared her in the face. She had a business to run: a client meeting to attend, office rent to pay, and the sinking feeling she’d run out of diapers.
The phone rang. She picked it up on the first ring.
“Oui?”
“You sorted things out, right?” René said. “Had a good sleep?”
“Snatched an hour or two, René.”
The sound of a coffee grinder whirred in the background, a kettle hissed.
“You mean . . . the baby’s still there?” René asked. “Are you all right?”
She rubbed her eyes, torn between alternatives. She didn’t know what to do.
“I’m fine,” she said.
The coffee grinder sputtered to a halt.
“You know, and I know, that you’re an innocent party, Aimée,” he said. “But you could be accused of kidnapping.”
“Me, René?” she asked. “Her mother asked me to keep her for a couple of hours.”
“Don’t wait to read about a missing or kidnapped baby in this morning’s paper. It’s time you called Brigade de Protection des Mineurs, the child protective services,” René said, his voice rising. “You don’t know what’s going on. The longer you keep her . . . well, why get yourself in trouble?”
She gazed at the baby’s fingers, so small, curled around hers. She stroked the velvet fuzz on the baby’s head, like the skin of a peach. All night she’d racked her brain, trying to figure out who the mother could be and how she knew Aimée and had gotten her phone number.
René made sense. But she couldn’t send the baby away. Not yet. The woman had been in fear for her life and for the baby’s; she hadn’t even diapered her infant. Aimée knew she had to give the woman more time.
“She knows me, René, and she’ll be back,” Aimée assured him, wishing she felt as certain as she sounded.
“You’ll have to wing the Regnault meeting on your own, Aimée. Can you manage?”
“What?”
“I’m off to Fontainebleau,” he said. “The client likes the proposal but has questions to be answered before they sign a contract. This morning. You know how skittish they’ve been.”
A big, fat contract, too, if he could seal the deal.
“Don’t worry, I’ll think of something.”
There was a pause.
“Think of the baby. The mother could be in jail, or on the run. Or . . . gone.”
She heard a thupt from a gas burner.
“Hasn’t that crossed your mind, Aimée?”
Just all night long.
“Promise me you’ll call child protective services.”
“I’ll take care of it, René.” She hung up.
In the stark daylight his words made sense. She should call the agency. Go through proper channels. But visions of a dreary nursery, short-staffed like all government institutions, filled her mind. Crowded, babies crying, indifferent social workers and judges and reams of bureaucratic red tape. She couldn’t bring herself to turn this tiny mite over to them.
Dulcet tones came from the covers. The little mouth was smiling like a cherub. Aimée lifted her arms up to tickle her and the yellow shirt rose on her birdcage chest. Bluish marks showed by a fold of skin under her armpit. Bruises. An awful thought struck her: this newborn might have been mistreated. Had an abusive mother abandoned her child, thrusting her into Aimée’s care? René was right. She was an idiot; she should have checked the baby more closely last night. Come to think of it why hadn’t René noticed?
Sick to her stomach, she peered closer. What she had thought were bruises—blue marks—looked more like scribbling with a pen. She could make out letters and numbers, a part of a word—“ing”—a name? Then “2/12,” part of a date? Odd. The mother hadn’t had the time to diaper her, yet she’d written. . . .
She grabbed the first thing she saw on her bedside table—a chocolate-brown lip-liner pencil—and copied into her checkbook the letters and digits she could make out.
The fax machine groaned as a page began to emerge from her machine. Due to scheduling conflicts, the Regnault meeting has been moved up to 8:00 A.M. Please bring the programming reports. Nadia Deloup, secretary.
Aimée thanked God she’d downloaded them last night. She glanced at the old clock and panicked. She had an hour. There was only one person she could call on.
“YOU DO NEED HELP,
” Michou said. He pulled off his red wig, stepped out of a sequined sheath, and hung it on a hanger under plastic. “You don’t know the first thing about them, do you?” He rolled his mascaraed eyes. “Sealing a diaper with packaging tape?”
She’d ruined three diapers and ended up taping one together.
Michou, René’s transvestite neighbor, stepped out of his pantyhose and into sweats. “You said it was an emergency so I came straight from the club.” He slathered his face with cold cream, using a counterclockwise motion. “I won’t be a minute.”
“Does Viard know about your maternal talents, Michou?” He and Viard, the crime-lab head Aimée had introduced him to, had been together for eight months . . . a milestone for both of them.
“Every man wants Paul Bocuse in the kitchen, Mother Teresa to care for his children, and a whore in the bedroom.”
No wonder she had no man. “What kind of dinosaurs think like that?”
“Not that we get it.” He grinned. His face wiped clean, Michou reared back in horror. “What did you do to this formula? It’s like cement, nom de Dieu!”
Aimée rubbed her eyes. “I was up all night, Michou, watching her, afraid she’d stop breathing. I couldn’t figure out that damn diaper. And this formula . . .” She shrugged. “You get it in and it comes right up again.”
Michou patted Aimée’s arm. “You need some coffee.”
AIMÉE SHOWERED, SLICKED back her hair, hoped that concealer would cover the rings under her eyes, then rimmed her lids with kohl. She slid into her pinstriped suit, a Dior from a consignment shop, and picked up the daily Le Parisien from outside her door.
In the kitchen Michou hummed, hot milk frothing on the stove as he held the baby in his arms. Rays of sun haloed the baby’s head. Through the open window, Aimée saw sunlight glinting on the Seine, a tow barge gliding under the Pont de Sully’s stone supports. Another warm day. She scanned the quai for someone surveilling the apartment but saw no one lingering behind the plane trees or the stone wall. Just the man she recognized from the first floor walking his dog, a plumber’s truck idling out front. A morning on the Ile Saint-Louis, like any other. No sign of a stalker.