Marie-Dominique shoved the image away. At least here she wasn’t the object of constant scrutiny in an isolated hamlet with its archaic code of honor, presided over by a village chief whose other job was running a corner grocery. Paris might be gray, people living on top of one another, yet here the corner café-tabac owner knew her name but not her history. In short, she was free. Until Lucien walked back into her life.
In the huge gourmet kitchen where she never cooked, she tore off a hunk of baguette and smeared a Corsican brébi goat cheese over it, imagining the look of horror the high-strung photographer would give her if he knew. “Salt! You’ll plump up. Diuretics work too slowly, do something immediately.” She’d heard him say this to a beanpole-figured young girl who’d obediently gone and thrown up in the bathroom.
A voice came from Félix’s study. Félix! Had his plans changed? Eager, she opened the door to surprise him and then stared.
Petru, Félix’s factotum, sprawled over the armchair facing the window, murmuring into Félix’s private phone. The way Petru took over in Félix’s absence irritated her. When Félix had hired him this year, she’d nicknamed him “the bodyguard”. His hair was black today. Yesterday it had been white blond; he dyed it more often than the stylists she worked with.
“. . . of course, Lucien’s implicated,” Petru said, with a low laugh.
Implicated? She caught her breath, tugged the smooth brass doorknob back, and put her head to the crack between the door and the wall. What she heard startled her.
“The flics arrest him at the studio,” he was saying.
Will arrest him or he had been arrested? Who was being discussed? Lucien? He’d denied being political. But was he telling the truth?
“Armata Corsa pamphlets, the works.”
Just as she’d thought. Lucien was with the Armata Corsa. The liar!
“Everything’s arranged. I put them there myself.”
Her heart dropped. No wonder his conversation had sounded ambiguous. Petru was sabotaging Lucien.
“In less than an hour,” he said. Then he turned toward the bookcase.
She couldn’t hear the rest. She was about to storm in and confront Petru but she realized that bursting in wouldn’t help Lucien in time if evidence had been planted already. She had to warn him. Thwart Petru’s plans. But how?
Corsicans betrayed each other but never to an outsider. Unless . . . she looked at her Patek Philippe watch, Félix’s wedding gift. She ran to the hallway, grabbed her shoes and coat. Out in the street, she called Félix. Busy.
She left him a message. Her hands trembled as she pushed the numbers. It was happening all over again.
Wednesday Evening
“MADEMOISELLE ROUSSEAU'S condition remains unchanged,” said Dr. Huissard from Hôtel Dieu in a harried voice.
It had taken Aimée twenty minutes on the phone persuading a liaison at the Préfecture to give her authorization and another twenty being switched around departments at the hospital before she was able to reach the doctor who was treating Laure.
“She’s young, that’s in her favor,” Dr. Huissard said. “We’re running tests. She’ll have a CT scan this evening. For now, that’s all we can do.”
“Please don’t think I’m telling you how to do your job, Doctor, but your service provides basic care,” she said, aiming to be tactful. “Can’t you transfer her to another more specialized ward in the hospital?”
Should she ask Guy to put in a word of recommendation? Despite his surgical excision of their relationship, she could call him. Perhaps he could help somehow. For Laure she would beg.
“Doctor, I know an eye surgeon.”
“No outside specialists, they don’t allow it. She’s being treated by the specialists here.”
“Her condition’s deteriorating, as I understand, or it may. Why won’t—?”
“I shouldn’t say this.” She heard the doctor sigh. “I’ve already requested that Neurology take over. Right now, they’re overcrowded. As soon as a bed’s free, she’s next on the list for a neurology consult. She could be moved within the hour or later this evening.”
“May I see her?”
“No visitors. She’s in critical condition. We’re not equipped, as you know, in the criminal ward.”
“How soon could she—?”
“Mademoiselle, I promise you she’s next on the list,” Dr. Huissard said, his voice not unkind. “I need to get back to my rounds.”
“Merci, I appreciate all your efforts, Doctor,” Aimée said.
She opened the shoebox-sized refrigerator under the kitchen counter. On the shelf with the bottle of champagne and yogurt past the due date was a white wax-paper packet of butchers’ scraps.
“Miles, à table,” she said, putting the scraps into his chipped Limoges bowl.
Miles appeared with what looked like a rag in his mouth.
“What did you find this time?”
He dropped it on the floor, licked her leg, then bent over his bowl.
She picked it up. Guy’s washcloth. She caught the clinging scent of his vetiver soap.
“I miss him, too.” Her lip trembled.
Miles Davis looked up from the rim of his bowl, his head cocked to the side. Sometimes she’d swear he could understand.
She turned on her radio, a 1960s aqua rectangle with a JOHNNY HALLYDAY LIVE AT THE OLYMPIA! sticker she’d found on the street. She turned to a talk-radio station. But the callers complaining about their apartment neighbor’s cat or the higher tax on cigarettes didn’t drown out her thoughts of Guy.
On the next station was an interview with the breathy, vaguely sexy voice of Madame Claude, notorious for her exclusive maison close that had hosted an elite ministerial clientele in the seventies. Now Madame Claude peddled her memoirs instead of high-priced girls.
She switched the channel to Macha Meryl’s show on RTL, the intime hour for the lost, the lovelorn. For years, Macha, a brusque therapist, had dispensed advice on late-night radio of the tough-love variety, often to the rejected, loveless callers. To the pathetic like her.
“Caller, c’est simple,” Macha said, “a man leaves for two rea- sons: another woman, or the woman he thought he loved isn’t whom he thought. Et voilà, it’s not rocket science. My advice for when a man leaves? Shut the door behind him.”
The husky cigarette-laced voice had gotten that part right. Get on with one’s life!
Aimée put Guy’s washcloth and the moonstone ring inside an envelope and addressed it to him at the hospital. She wished she didn’t long to hear his voice one more time. One last time. Could she make an excuse and ask him for a referral for Laure?
Non, dumb. Don’t call, she told herself.
A moment later, she took a deep breath and punched in the number of his hospital.
“Doctor Lambert?” the receptionist said. “We’re referring his patients to the acting head of staff.”
Odd. “For any particular reason?”
“Doctor Lambert’s taken a post with Doctors Without Borders in the Sudan.”
The Sudan? She grabbed the door frame.
“Just like that?”
“An unexpected position came up. Few have Doctor Lambert’s qualifications in ophthalmological surgery. There’s a desperate need. He decided, overnight.”