They found themselves outside on the street opposite their parking place. Lucky!
Back in the van, Sebastian switched on the ignition and turned on the heater.
“All that for a geranium twig! Satisfied?”
“In more ways than one,” she said. “Think back to the broken glass, the open skylight.”
He nodded, taking a curve, then gunning his engine as they climbed the steep street.
“We might have discovered an escape route.”
Hot air shot from the floor vents, warming her frozen legs.
“Escape route?”
“The killer’s escape route.”
Later Monday Night
LUCIEN CLOSED HIS EYES. His mind flooded with childhood memories: his grand-mère’s high-pitched funeral chant as his uncle’s body lay stiff and waxen on the dining-room table. The women, all in black like a row of crows, wailing and the men pounding their rifle butts on the floor. The terrible rhythm had echoed off the stone walls. Sadness, borne on the dry wind, scented by the lavender and myrtle, had chilled him to the bone.
As long as he could remember, funerals had been the social gatherings in the village. Beyond it, the rutted road rimmed a turquoise sea whose waves beat upon the granite of abandoned Roman quarries. The stones were gouged as if the Romans had departed yesterday, not centuries ago.
That day, he and Marie-Dominique had taken to the mountain path, unseen, to escape the malaise clinging to the village, home of the old and infirm, like so many villages decimated by vendettas. They found the cave by a half-ruined shepherd’s hut nestled in the crag of a sheer granite face where graphite and mica crystals caught the copper sun. Every moment was still imprinted in his mind. Marie-Dominique’s long tanned legs ending in faded blue espadrilles. The fight her cousin Giano picked with him later in the bar, accusing him. . . .
“If you don’t mind asking your guests to form a line, Monsieur Conari?” the commissaire was saying. “Each must show us a carte d’identité, and answer a few questions. Just a formality, of course.”
With a start, Lucien opened his eyes. He was in Félix’s salon and Marie-Dominique stood somewhere in the crowd, not nestled warmly beside him in the cave. He felt for his wallet, looked inside, and panicked. It held only his Carte Orange pass and a dirty cough drop. He’d forgotten his ID. By law, anyone without ID was subject to arrest. That law was rarely enforced. But for Corsicans like him, the flics exacted revenge for the Separatist threats and applied the rules strictly. In his village, men evaporated into the mountains when a police car rolled into view. That was what he wished he could do now.
And the contract Conari had spoken of? Later. Now he had to take cover someplace in this flat and think what to do. Lucien tugged at the waiter’s sleeve as he passed. He had looked familiar. . . . “Compadre, where’s the restroom?” Lucien asked.
The waiter gestured across the long room in the same direction as the flics.
“Any place closer?”
Understanding showed in the waiter’s eyes. “Follow me.”
He showed Lucien to a water closet by the kitchen.
By the time Lucien emerged from the bathroom, he’d decided to ask Félix to vouch for him. He was already late for his DJ gig.
But in the hall, Marie-Dominique blocked his way. “Something wrong, Lucien?”
Wrong? That she was married, that he couldn’t take her warm brown shoulders in his arms? But he didn’t say that. He searched for words.
“Marie-Dominique, seeing you again after all this time . . . there’s so much to say.” For four years he’d dreamed of her but his words came out flat and inadequate.
“Lucien, you still make music and that makes me happy.” Her words hung in the air, full of the unspoken emotion.
A gardenia floated in a bowl of water on a table, a thin strand of diamonds around her wrist caught the light. Candles flickered, casting shadows on the moiré silk-patterned wallpaper above them. He longed to have time to watch her, to inhale the rose scent that surrounded her. The old thirties Tino Rossi song, “O! Corse, Ile d’Amour,” looped in his mind; it was the tune that had been on the radio that afternoon.
“It had to happen this way,” she said, as if reading his thoughts.
Startled, he clenched his hands into fists. “How can you say that? You know what we had, what I felt.”
“My family was opposed.” She looked away, her low voice almost a whisper. “My father knows the Armata Corsa for what it is. Terrorism.”
“When we all joined we were ignorant. But I never participated in any actions.”
Fool! He’d been a fool to join with his drunken friends, hoping to free Corsica from French rule. Free? Not with middle-ofthe-night bombings and the kidnappings for ransom, which the Armata Corsa used to buy guns. He shook his head, frustrated. He had to make her understand. “It’s true. I never realized.”
Marie-Dominique’s eyes blazed. “Didn’t realize the Armata Corsa was outlawed? After you left our island, the Armata Corsa plastered the walls with posters protesting the atrocities and with pictures of you.”
“But I had nothing to do with it. I only went to one meeting.”
“Your picture was on the posters,” she said.
So that had been the reason his mother had put a ticket for the overnight ferry to Marseilles in his hands and insisted he leave that very night. “I won’t lose another son,” she’d said. Meaning neither to the vendetta, the gendarmes, or the evil eye cast by the mazzera, the sorceress crone who dwelled high up on the mountain. No one disputed the mazzera, least of all his longsuffering widowed mother, who was convinced the evil eye had marked him. Sardinian by birth, his mother was still referred to by his grand-mère as “the foreigner” after thirty-five years on the island. She had ignored his reluctance, overridden his arguments that fleeing would be taken as an admission of guilt.
He’d waited tables in the Marseilles vieux port, deejayed using a friend’s cheap equipment, scraped by, and survived. A year later he’d moved to Paris. He’d bought turntables; it was a bare living.
“I wrote you letters explaining that I had to leave,” he told Marie-Dominique. “But they all came back, unopened.”
She looked away.
A flic in a blue uniform brushed by him, stopped, and took in Lucien’s black denims and worn boots. “Follow me, we’re questioning the staff in the kitchen,” he said.
“But, Officer, he’s our guest,” Marie-Dominique told him.
The flic raised his eyebrows and shot a pointed look at Lucien. “Of course, Madame. Please, join us in the salon.” He continued into the kitchen.
Lucien braced himself. Corsicans enjoyed “special treatment” during questioning at the Commissariat. Like his friend Bruno, who’d returned with a broken arm. The recent Separatist attacks had put the flics on edge. If they discovered he had no ID and lived on illegal, unreported wages from his DJ gigs, they’d take him in.
But if he left without signing the contract Conari had offered . . .
“I forgot my carte d’identité, Marie-Dominique.” He glanced toward the salon. Félix stood with Yann in a knot of men, speaking with the commissaire. A loose line of guests had formed by the drinks table.