PARAS WAS NOT normally of a philosophical turn of mind, but she was surprised at how natural this was, how easy, really. This was nothing compared to a workout around the dirt track at Maisons-Laffitte. So far, this was a sprint, hardly enough to cause a stayer like Paras to breathe hard. Why had she waited so long? That was the price of indecision, wasn’t it? And yet it was also the price of freedom. Although she now felt herself responsible for Étienne, as well as drawn back to Delphine and that former life of fitness and purpose, she understood that her days of doing what she pleased when she was pleased to do it were behind her. As she climbed the path, she drew in many deep breaths, not because she was winded, but because she loved the air, the smell of spring, of grass, of plants and flowers and dirt, so different from the smell of oncoming winter and dead leaves from the last time she was here. She could feel the boy swaying as she walked, his legs relaxed, his body never moving out of plumb. He was, as Delphine would have said, a natural. And he was her responsibility now. Well, she didn’t mind that. She was four years old, a mare—mares took responsibility for almost everything groups of horses might do.
Ahead of her, Raoul flew from tree to tree. He seemed to have nothing to say. Just for a moment, Paras regretted not having paused to say goodbye to Sid and Nancy. They would have been sleeping, but saying some last word was the friendly thing to do. She continued to climb, the dark bulk of the huge building warm and protective. And now there was the gate, the gate Frida had opened all those months ago. She halted. Frida stepped forward, got up on her hind legs, and opened the gate again. They went through. It was still darkest dark, and the Place du Trocadéro was empty. All the shops were lightless, the huge buildings were solid black, and that strange horse still stood up there in the sky, unmoving. Paras looked around. She could smell the forest, but how to get there was a bit confusing.
Raoul did not mean to be preoccupied with his own petty concerns—he had re-entered his former territory, and there was cawing, some of it on the order of “Oh, heavens, I thought you were dead!,” some of it on the order of “You need to watch your step!” He did not think there would be a mobbing, but you never knew. At least, it was less likely in the dark like this, in the spring, with nestlings everywhere. Even so, he perched not far from the horse, not far from Frida.
For her part, Frida also felt the gravity of returning to the Place du Trocadéro. She hadn’t seen the Pâtisserie Carette since her last sad meal. She could feel a train rumbling beneath her feet, which reminded her of those terrifying times in the Métro and where her hiding spot had been, behind the café, small and gritty. And up the avenue there, the one that ran not far from the river, was where Jacques had sat down one morning, played his instrument for a while, and then lain back, never to get up again.
Only Kurt was living in the present moment, and in the present moment Kurt saw cats, crouching here, sitting there, hiding everywhere. He squeaked and squeaked again. A cat crossed the street; a cat went behind a bush in the green area. Kurt dug all of his claws in even deeper, and just then, Paras ruffled her nostrils and Raoul and Frida shook off their blues and headed north of the cemetery, down a lovely avenue lined with dead cars, fluttering trees, and many buildings enclosing many sleeping humans, just the sort of outing Paras enjoyed. Her hooves clopped neatly on the pavement, tock-tock-tock-tock, big walking strides. Here and there birds flew up around them and a fox peeked out at them, but Paras moved along, Étienne’s fingers in her mane, his heels tapping her rhythmically. With every step, she could smell the turf and the leaves, hectares of greenery.
Étienne had not intended to get so far from his great-grandmama. He felt his thoughts about her getting no less sad, but thinning out among his other thoughts, his pleasure in this adventure, his curiosity about where they were headed, his sense of being surrounded by these friends. He, too, smelled a difference in the air, sensed a difference in himself, in his attachment to the horse. He knew every move she was about to make as she made it—his own back and legs connected with her back and legs. It was hypnotic. He was watching the scenery go by, noting lights in windows here and there, but all of that seemed unimportant compared with this tock-tock-tock-tock.
All Kurt cared about, since he was so strong now, was that they seemed to have left the cats behind.
And now they were into the woods. The turf beneath Paras’s hooves was springy and green. Frida took off at a run, disappeared, must have looped around, returned with Raoul not far behind. Her ears were up. Raoul was talking about some nearby statue, of his very own ancestor Raoul Corvus Corax, the thirteenth of that name, cawing, cawing, and then he shouted to Frida, “I can’t believe you never saw a rabbit before!” Frida barked, “It’s a hare!,” then put her nose to the earth and trailed the scent into the trees, as if in ecstasy. Paras followed after her, newly relaxed. They went deeper into the greenery.
SEVENTEEN
The gendarme had a nice breakfast, as he always did on his day off—a mushroom omelette, two pieces of nine-grain toast, a dish of strawberries, two cups of coffee, then a medicinal slug of aged Cognac. After that he performed a few other Saturday rituals—filing his nails, scraping his tongue, trimming his nose hairs. At last, he went to his closet and chose his outfit for the day, something uniform-like, but not a uniform. He spent five minutes choosing his shoes: he had a new pair that were very elegant, but a little stiff. He went back and forth, eventually opted for comfort over vanity.
Delphine, too, was getting dressed. All of the important decisions were over—the jockey, the training regimen, whether to enter Whiskey Shot in a race with so many other well-bred horses, whether to scratch him just out of sheer anxiety—all done. All she had to do now was choose a sweater—she had two worthy ones, a green Hermès and a blue Alexander McQueen. The question was not which one looked more flattering, but which one was luckier. She stared at them as the sunlight brightened through the window.
It was a beautiful morning in the Champ de Mars—perhaps, in terms of the plantings and the fixtures, the peak day of the year. Pierre and his workmen had all of the grass trimmed, all of the flowers weeded, all of the allées raked, all of the fountains spraying sparkling streams in the air. They might as well have polished the Tour itself, because it rose brilliantly into the sky, as gleaming as the day when construction was completed and it stood as the gate to the 1889 World’s Fair. Even the ducks and ducklings in the ponds looked as though they had been personally groomed by duck-grooming specialists. The tourists and runners and strollers and dog walkers parading along were well turned out, too. Pierre still had some work to do—sorting autumn bulbs—but he chose to stroll around and enjoy the fruits of his labors. When he first noticed the emergency vehicle on the Rue Marinoni, he didn’t think much of it, but after he turned around and headed back toward his shed area, he got more curious; the emergency vehicle was still there, more people had arrived, and a police car as well. He went around that corner where the shrubbery was so thick, and saw that the gate was ajar, and so he peeked in.
A door opened, and two men, supervised by a third, emerged, carrying a stretcher. They didn’t seem to be in a rush, and so Pierre deduced that the person in the stretcher was dead. He stepped backward, deeper into the courtyard, and of course he recognized the smell, the rich, sweet aroma of horse manure. He looked around. There was plenty of it, deposited in three spots, though a good deal had been distributed, as Pierre would have done, beneath the flourishing raspberry patch (Pierre plucked a few berries for himself—they were juicy and flavorful), along the roots of the shrubbery, and at the base of a row of ash trees, which were also vibrating with health. So this was where she lived, the whinnier. He walked around the larger courtyard, noticing the evidence—not only a mound of fresh manure, but well-cropped grass and weeds, a shallow depression where she must have been in the habit of rolling. As he was looking at this, he saw the tunnel underneath the fence, big enough for a large dog—the dog had lived here, too. He put his hands in his pockets, then went up the staircase to the grand entrance. The doors were wide open. He called out, “Hello?”