A World I Never Made

by James Lepore

  “Yes, I see, but it is imperative that I speak to her. Is she traveling?”

  “She didn’t say. She told me she located the girl and that you advised her that you would handle the arrest. She felt she was free to get away. Is there a problem? Can I assign someone else?”

  “No, that won’t be necessary. Can you give me her cell phone number?”

  “Of course. Hold on:”

  While he was on hold, Charles Raimondi swiveled in his chair to look out the sealed window behind his desk. From his thirty-fifth-floor perch, he could see the Arch de Triomphe below him to his right and the Eiffel Tower in the distance across the winter-brown Seine. Though it was only three PM, the street lamps lining the Avenue des Champs-Elysées were on. Snow was spitting from a leaden sky. Dirty weather, dirty business, he thought, wondering where Catherine Laurence had gone off to and whether he might surprise her there when his dirty business was done. Ms. Nolan had given him the slip, as they said in American gangster movies, but surely someone in the neighborhood had seen her.

  It was a pity Nolan was wanted so badly. She was strikingly beautiful, with her long reddish-blond hair and exotic eyes. And her unmistakable air of superiority. It would have been interesting to have met her under different circumstances. Catherine Laurence, however, was in the same category of beauty. Her provincial Frenchness worked against her, but after all he would not be marrying her. He was sure that there would be logical answers to the panicky questions raised by his Saudi Arabian contact. It would give him another excuse to speak with Catherine, perhaps catch her in her apartment as she was packing or getting out of the shower.

  “Here is the number, Charles:”

  “Yes, go ahead.” Raimondi wrote the number down. “And her home address?” He listened and wrote again.

  “Will you be needing anything else?”

  “No, DST will handle this from now on:”

  “I would have liked to stay on the case. A terrorist cell ... Good luck:”

  “Thank you, Geneviève, By the way—no one will approach you about this case, but if someone does, you must say nothing and call me immediately.”

  “Yes, of course, Charles. I understand:”

  No you don’t, Raimondi thought, smiling. Then he picked up one of his untraceable, throwaway cell phones—which he kept handy for purposes of liaison-making with the wives of fellow diplomats—and dialed Catherine Laurence’s number.

  “Are you going to answer that?” Pat asked.

  “No;” Catherine answered, reaching into her shoulder bag on the console between them, extracting her tiny silver cell phone, and pushing the off switch.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To a house that my husband owns—owned—in Rambouillet:”

  “‘Rambouillet.’” Pat repeated the word, attempting, not entirely unsuccessfully, to duplicate Catherine’s pronunciation.

  “Its not far, forty-five minutes:”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Let’s get there first. Then we can talk:”

  “No, Catherine. I want answers now. I want my own options:”

  “You have none:”

  “I’ll decide that:”

  They had approached the entrance to a highway marked A10 and Catherine slowed down and concentrated on slipping into its stream of traffic. When they were safely on, Pat said, “What about my hotel?”

  “You cannot return to your hotel:”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the men we just saw will come for you there:”

  “Good. I like to talk to them:”

  “No, Patrick, you would not. The one with the bandage is a wanted terrorist. He beheaded the Newsweek journalist in Karachi last summer:”

  “What?”

  “Yes, and now, for reasons I cannot understand, he is looking for your daughter. And I am not sure of this, but I believe he has the help of the French Foreign Office, and quite possibly the DST, which is our equivalent of your CIA:”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “I set up the raid in Courbevoie by telling the only DST man I know, the one who ordered me to follow you, a man named Raimondi, Charles Raimondi. The men who showed up were not DST, could not have been:”

  Catherine glanced over at Pat to see his reaction to this information. If he was shocked, or even mildly surprised, he did not show it. The wearily grave cast of his handsome features seemed merely to intensify.

  “And they think I will lead them to her?” Pat said.

  “Or that you are in league with her and know where she is:”

  “Unbelievable. I should have hit him again with the wrench last night. I should have killed the motherfucker.”

  Catherine did not respond. She had fired her police pistol several times in the line of duty. Accurately and without fear. For her, using a firearm was not related to gender. But perhaps striking another human being with a fist or a blunt object like a wrench was. She herself had never done it. There was, she admitted, something exciting, viscerally exciting, about the visual of Pat Nolan swinging that wrench against the side of Ahmed bin-Shalib’s face. It set him apart from her. She flushed, though she did not know why, at this thought, keeping her eyes on the road ahead.

  “What’s his name?” Pat asked.

  “Ahmed bin-Shalib.”

  “I’ve heard of him. The Pakistani:”

  “Yes.”

  “Why do you think your DST is involved?”

  Catherine did not answer immediately. The enormity of what they were discussing had not escaped her, nor had it Nolan, she assumed from his startled what? and the fierceness in his voice as he recalled his encounter with bin-Shalib. But neither had it fully penetrated. It was too big, flowing around them like a torrent that they refused to admit might sweep them to their deaths.

  “Have you told me everything, Patrick?” she asked finally.

  “Yes.”

  “Will you tell me about your daughter, her life, her values, her interests, her lovers?”

  “It’s not a simple story, but yes, I’ll try.”

  “She has an interesting array of people pursuing her.”

  “I heard you on the phone at the apartment. Why did you take a leave of absence?”

  “Because I may want to join the hunt in an unofficial capacity.”

  “Why? What about the DST?

  “I will tell you once we’re safely inside:”

  The road was like any to be found in America or elsewhere in the world: paved, divided, shouldered, designed with safety, convenience, and even beauty in mind. The falling snow—rare but not unheard of in the usually temperate Paris winters—seemed to be keeping traffic to a minimum, making it easier for Catherine, using her rear and sideview mirrors, to do three-sixty scans as she drove at the highway’s speed limit. Off the A10, they took a secondary road through a heavily wooded landscape of tall live oaks and beeches. Every mile or so these thick woods were interrupted by gatherings of giant evergreens reaching to the gray sky and imposing themselves over the forest with the silent power of ancient stone monoliths. Driving in silence, the car hermetically sealed against the winter wet and cold, they were soon on a tertiary road that followed a sharply winding river—the Eure, Catherine said, noticing Pat gazing at the now-diminishing snow melting on the river’s slate-colored surface. After some braking and slowing, Catherine found a landmark she was looking for and turned down a dirt road that ended, after a hundred meters or so, at a small clearing, on the opposite end of which stood the house—a tired old stone-and-timber affair sitting on a naked spit of land that formed one of the Eure’s many bends.

  Catherine turned the car off and began searching, head down, for the house keys in her bag. She stopped suddenly, a puzzled look on her face,and then, the puzzle solved, her head flew up at the sound of a car rushing up and coming to an abrupt stop behind her. She made an aborted attempt to replace the car key in the ignition, aborted because in an instant her car was surrounded by three men, all gr
im-faced and dark-eyed, all hooded against the snow that had now turned to a light rain. All pointing guns at her and Pat.

  Pat rolled his window down and was looking into the face of someone surprisingly young, and more surprising, vaguely familiar. It wasn’t Ahmed bin-Shalib, the man he wished he had killed last night. And then it came to him.

  “Exit the car, please Monsieur Nolan, with your hands on your head;” said the young man. “Quickly.”

  “You are Madame Jeritza’s grandson,” said Pat, who had not moved.

  “Yes, I am Doro. My grandmother is dead. And I will kill you if you do not do as I say.”

  “Dead ...” Pat said, and then, moving slowly, he unfolded his large body from the car, placed his hands on his head, and stood before Doro, all of nineteen but with a serpent’s coldness in his eyes. Catherine had exited on her side, and was standing quietly, calmly, her hands on her head while the man behind the car, also no more than nineteen or twenty, walked over and frisked her, not professionally but thoroughly nevertheless, extracting her police revolver from her arm holster and her Judicial Police badge and ID from her shoulder bag. The gun he put into his jacket pocket. The badge and ID he stared hard at before handing them to Doro. The man also frisked Pat and then led them inside.

  “Sit down,” Doro said once they were in the house. Pat and Catherine complied, sitting next to each other on one of several small couches that faced a wood-burning stove at one end of a long room. At the other end stood a rough-hewn trestle table surrounded by eight straight-backed chairs. Off to the right of the dining area, they could see into a kitchen. Above the living area the brass railing of a loft bedroom was visible.

  “Ephrem will make a fire,” said Doro. Ephrem, the youngest of the three at seventeen or maybe even younger, put his gun into a front pocket of his black leather jacket and went out through the door they had all come in.

  “How did you find us?” Catherine asked.

  “We have been following you since last night;” Doro replied. ”We saw you in the park. The man that got away, he killed Annabella today.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. I saw him leaving her store. When I went in, she was dead, her head crushed. Three of her fingers had been cut off.”

  Catherine did not reply immediately. “What do you want with us?” she asked finally.

  “I want to find the man who killed and tortured my grandmother. I think you know who he is. I do not want to hurt you, but I will do whatever is necessary to avenge my family’s blood:”

  “Why did you follow us last night?” Pat asked.

  “We saw the two Arabs following you. We were curious. We did not see mademoiselle until the shooting.” Doro nodded toward Catherine. “Afterward we were thinking of blackmail:”

  “Blackmail?”

  “Yes. You killed a man. You removed something from his body. You left him in the park:”

  “So you followed us from the park:”

  “Yes.”

  “And this morning:”

  “Yes.”

  Ephrem had returned with an armful of wood, which he loaded into the stove. Then he struck a match to its tinder box. While this was happening, Pat looked down and realized that he had taken Catherine’s hand. He let it go, gently, slightly embarrassed. Doro and his other partner were still facing them, their pistols, deadly-looking stainless steel affairs, pointing at Pat and Catherine.

  “You don’t need the guns,” said Catherine.

  “Who were those men?”

  “One was a known terrorist, the one that got away. He and the dead one were carrying the credentials of the Saudi Arabian Secret Police. Maybe stolen or forged, maybe not. Did you see the raid on the house in Courbevoie?”

  “Yes. He was there, the one with the bandage. He killed Annabella:”

  “Were there others?”

  “One other. What is his name, the killer?”

  “Bin-Shalib, Ahmed bin-Shalib.”

  “How can I find him?”

  “Put the guns down,” said Pat.“We’ll tell you all we know, but not with guns in our faces:”

  Doro stared at Pat, then at Catherine. The fire was now crackling, its pungent heat beginning to fill the room.

  “You are a policewoman,” he said to Catherine, keeping his gun pointed at her.

  “Yes, but not in this matter. I am a private citizen helping Monsieur Nolan find his daughter. It is she the terrorists are looking for:”

  “And they think you know where she is,” Doro said, turning to face Pat.

  “Yes.”

  “You can destroy me with a phone call, Doro,” Catherine said. “I killed a man last night and did not report it.”

  Doro put his gun into his jacket and nodded to his colleague, who did the same. Ephrem was sitting on a nearby couch, leaning forward attentively, his weapon still in his pocket. Neither he nor the third young gypsy had spoken. Outside, the rain was coming down harder, pelting the house’s ancient tin roof. Doro walked over to the stove to warm his hands, turning his back to Pat and Catherine. When he was done, he turned to face them again.

  “Your daughter stayed for several months with gypsies, tribesmen of ours, in Montmartre,” he said to Pat. “After I found Annabella’s body, I sent Ephrem to warn them, but they were gone. Annabella must have warned them:”

  “I was supposed to see Anabella tonight;” said Pat. “She was going to put me in touch with those people. Where are they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is Megan with them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you know about the child?”

  “Yes, it was delivered by a gypsy midwife. She is gone, too:”

  “Is the baby with Megan?”

  “No, your daughter delivered the child to the Carmelite nuns in Lisieux. To the orphanage there:”

  Pat shook his head. That explained the train ticket in Megan’s wallet. But it did not explain why the exquisitely selfish Megan Nolan would, after three abortions, go through the trouble of a full-term pregnancy—while in hiding from some obviously grave danger—only to give the child up almost immediately after it was born.

  “Who is the leader of your tribe, Doro?” Catherine asked.

  “My uncle, Corozzo:”

  “Ah, Corozzo, with the eye patch and the gold tooth:”

  “Yes.”

  “And the black heart:”

  If Doro was surprised by the fact that Catherine knew who Corozzo was, he did not show it. Gypsies and police all over the world danced perpetually to the music of mutual suspicion and often deep hatred.

  “Will he know where these people are?”

  “He knows everything about his tribe:”

  “Where is he?”

  “The last I heard in the Czech Republic:”

  “Can we contact him?”

  “He would never speak to you. I will contact him.”

  “And if he knows where Megan is?” Pat asked. He had gotten up from the couch and was now standing behind it, his hands resting on the carved wooden edge of its backrest. “She will not help you,” he continued, “unless I am involved.” This was a bluff, but he doubted Doro had any knowledge of his tortured relationship with his daughter.

  “You cannot come with us,” Doro answered.

  “You can reach us at this number,” said Catherine, reaching into her bag for a scrap of paper and and a pen, and then writing quickly. “Ask for mon petit oncle. Speak only to him. He will reach me.” She handed Doro the paper, which he looked at carefully before handing it to Ephrem.

  “I make no promises. Your daughter may not be with the same people. She may have gone off on her own:”

  “Doro,” said Catherine, “bin-Shalib—or whoever is behind him—wants Megan dead. They will stop at nothing. They will kill anyone who gets in their way.”

  “Yes, Mademoiselle Detective, I understand. But I am a gypsy. I am cunning by birth. I will draw Monsieur bin-Shalib to me and I will cut off his fin
gers and crush his head as he did to Annabella:”

  “Bien. Bonne chance.”

  “Merci, and what will you do?”

  “I believe Monsieur Nolan will want to go to Lisieux, to see his grandson.”

  “Yes,” Pat said, “that will be our first stop.”