"Our unspoken island rule."
"Yes."
"But we're off that island now."
Silence. She was right. I had never told her what had led me to that island either-what had devastated me. So maybe I should go first.
"I was supposed to protect someone," I said. "I messed up. She died because of me. And to complicate things, I reacted badly."
Violence, I thought again. The undying echo.
"You said 'she,' " Terese said. "It was a woman you were supposed to protect?"
"Yes."
"You visited her grave site," Terese said. "I remember."
I said nothing.
It was Terese's turn now. I sat back and let her get ready. I remembered what Win had told me about her secret, about it being very bad. I felt nervous. My eyes darted about and that was when I saw something that made me pause.
The white van.
You get used to living this way after a while. On guard, I guess. You look around and you start to see patterns and you wonder. This was the third time I had spotted the same van. Or at least I thought it was the same van. It had been outside the hotel when we left. And more to the point, the last time I saw it, the traffic cop was asking it to move.
Yet it was in the exact same place.
I turned back to Terese. She saw the look on my face and said, "What?"
"The white van may be following us."
I didn't add, "Don't look," or any of that. Terese would know better.
"What should we do?" she asked.
I thought about it. Pieces started to fall into place. I hoped that I was wrong. For a moment I imagined that this could all be over in a matter of seconds. Ex-hubby Rick was driving the van, spying on us. I go over, I open the door, I rip him out of the front seat.
I stood up and looked directly at the van's driver-side window. No point in playing games if I was right. There was a reflection but I could still make out the unshaven face and, more to the point, the toothpick.
It was Lefebvre from the airport.
He didn't try to hide himself. The door opened and he stepped out. From the passenger side, the older agent, Berleand, stumbled into view. He pushed up his glasses and smiled almost apologetically.
I felt like an idiot. The plainclothes at the airport. That should have tipped me off. Immigration officers wouldn't be in plainclothes. And the irrelevant questioning. A stall. I should have seen it.
Both Lefebvre and Berleand reached into their pockets. I thought that they'd pull out guns, but both produced red arm-bands with the word "police" written on them. They slipped them up to their biceps. I looked left and saw uniformed cops heading toward us.
I did not move. I kept my hands to the sides where they could clearly see them. I had little idea what was happening here, but this was no time for sudden moves.
I kept my eyes on Berleand's. He approached our table, looked down at Terese, and said to both of us, "Will you please come with us?"
"What's this about?" I asked.
"We can talk about that at the station."
"Are we under arrest?" I asked.
"No."
"Then we're not going anywhere until we know what this is about."
Berleand smiled. He looked at Lefebvre. Lefebvre smiled through the toothpick. I said, "What?"
"Do you think this is America, Mr. Bolitar?"
"No, but I think this is a modern democracy with certain inalienable rights. Or am I wrong?"
"We don't have Miranda rights in France. We don't have to charge you to take you in. In fact, I can hold you both for forty-eight hours on little more than a whim."
Berleand got closer to me, pushed up the glasses again, wiped his hands on the sides of his pants. "Now again I ask: Will you please come with us?"
"Love to," I said.
6
THEY separated Terese and me right there on the street.
Lefebvre escorted her to the van. I started to protest, but Berleand gave me a bored look that indicated my words would be superfluous at best. He led me to a squad car. A uniformed officer drove. Berleand slipped into the backseat with me.
"How long's the ride?" I asked.
Berleand looked at his wristwatch. "About thirty seconds."
He may have overestimated. I had, in fact, seen the building before-the "bold and stark" sandstone fortress sitting across the river. The mansard roofs were gray slate, as were the cone-capped towers scattered through the sprawl. We could have easily walked. I squinted as we approached.
"You recognize it?" Berleand said.
No wonder it had grabbed my eye before. Two armed guards moved to the side as our squad car pulled through the imposing archway. The portal looked like a mouth swallowing us whole. On the other side was a large courtyard. We were surrounded now on all sides by the imposing edifice. Fortress, yeah, that did fit. You felt a bit like a prisoner of war in the eighteenth century.
"Well?"
I did recognize it, mostly from books by Georges Simenon and because, well, I just knew it because in law-enforcement circles it was legendary.
I had entered the courtyard of 36 quai des Orfévres-the renowned French police headquarters. Think Scotland Yard. Think Quantico.
"Soooo," I said, stretching the word out, gazing through the window, "whatever this is, it's big."
Berleand turned both palms up. "We don't process traffic violations here."
Count on the French. The police headquarters was fortress solid and intimidating and gigantic and absolutely gorgeous.
"Impressive, no?"
"Even your police stations are architectural wonders," I said.
"Wait until you see the inside."
Berleand, I quickly learned, was being sarcastic again. The contrast between the faзade and what lay inside was whiplash stark. The outside had been created for the ages; the interior held all the charm and personality of a public toilet along the New Jersey Turnpike. The walls were off-white, or maybe they'd been white but had yellowed over the years. They had no paintings, no wall hangings of any kind, but enough scuff marks to make me wonder if someone had maybe run across them with dress shoes. The floors were made up of linoleum that would have been deemed too dated for tract housing in 1957.
There was no elevator as far as I could tell. We trudged up a wide staircase, the French version of a perp walk. The climb seemed to take a long time.
"This way."
Exposed wires crisscrossed the ceiling, looking like central casting for a fire hazard. I followed Berleand down a corridor. We passed a microwave oven sitting on the floor. There were printers and monitors and computers lining the walls.
"You guys moving?"
"No."
He led me to a holding cell, maybe six by six. Just one. It had glass where there might normally be bars. Two benches attached to the walls formed a Vin the corner. The mattresses were thin and blue and looked suspiciously like the wrestling mats I remembered from junior high school gym class. A threadbare blanket of burnt orange, like something a bad airline had used for too long, lay folded on the bench.
Berleand spread his arm like a maоtre d' welcoming me to Café Maxim's.
"Where's Terese?"
Berleand shrugged.
"I want a lawyer," I said.
"And I want to take a bubble bath with Catherine Deneuve," he countered.
"Are you telling me I don't have the right to have a lawyer present during questioning?"
"That's correct. You can talk to one beforehand, but he will not be present during questioning. And I will be honest with you. It makes you look guilty. It also makes me grumpy. So I would advise against it. In the meantime, make yourself comfortable."
He left me alone. I tried to think it through, not making any rash moves. The wrestling-mat mattress was sticky and I didn't want to know from what. The smell in here was rancid-that horrible combo of sweat and fear and, uh, other bodily fluids. The stench climbed into my nostrils and hung tight. An hour passed. I heard the microwave. A guard brought me food. Another hour passed.
When Berleand came back, I was leaning against a somewhat clean spot I'd found on the glass wall.