by Cara Black
“You beat me, Jean-Claude,” Sidonie said. “I can’t have you using those files against me. No matter how you feel.”
That fractured French, that accent, that curve of her leg.
“Not against you, Sidonie,” he said, his voice thick. “I kept my promise. For once think of your daughter.”
She blocked the light, filled the sky—like she always had. “Who says I don’t? You know nothing of me now.”
Had he ever really known her?
And then Sidonie sat down and pulled him next to her. Her hair was different, black sunglasses masked her eyes. Tanned, she looked thinner. The carmine lipstick was the same.
Still a beauty. Ma belle.
“Living on the lam suits you, Sidonie.”
“How many years has it been, Jean-Claude?”
She knew. So did he. To the exact month, day, and the hour when he’d gotten her out of the French prison. But she’d never looked back.
“More than a few.”
Why was he so weak? Why did he want to take his wife in his arms—even just once? Erase everything, pretend none of the past had happened—her betrayal, how she left them with a big hole in their lives. Left his daughter without a mother.
“I’m running on borrowed time, Jean-Claude,” she said, her voice reedy. Alert, she glanced around. “Please, you swore.”
“And you swore you’d never come back.”
“Haven’t I kept my promise? Stayed away?”
His gut wrenched. So easy for her. She hadn’t changed.
“You’re assuming these files—”
“Are mine. And explosive if in the wrong hands. You promised, Jean-Claude. Swore to me.”
She read him so well. Yet still couldn’t trust that he’d find and destroy them. She’d come to save her own skin. Hurt, he wondered why he’d even worried about her.
“And I’ve spent most of my life lying for you, Sidonie.”
“Did I ever ask you to lie?”
He threw up his hands. “So you wanted Aimée to know about prison, the terrorism, the extortion?”
“Unproven. But the truth, that’s what I’ve wanted to tell her.”
“You mean to salve your conscience—” Merde, everything came out so judgmental. Priggish.
“Wrong,” she interrupted. “To save you.”
“That’s all you wanted?”
Her warmth against his arm traveled through his whole body.
“What I want doesn’t matter, Jean-Claude,” she said. “I’m facing a sham trial, Turkish prison. I signaled you because of your contacts. I knew you could get hold of what I couldn’t.”
“Not if you’re valuable to the CIA. Don’t underestimate yourself.”
“Meaning?” Her voice raised in accusation. So like Aimée.
“Let me see your eyes.”
She paused. Sensed his weakness the way a shark scented blood. “Will you tell me about her?”
Aimée, her daughter, and she couldn’t even say her name. As if she had ever acted like a mother.
“Don’t pretend you care. Or have shown any interest in all these years.”
“Trouble in med school?”
Shocked, he pulled back. “How in God’s name . . . who told you?”
“She’s doing it to please you. She’s young, Jean-Claude. Don’t push her.”
He wanted to shake her. “Where have you been in Aimée’s life? What gives you any right to say she—”
“Thinks that’s what you want?” Sidonie shook her head. “She’s not even twenty. Remember how you were? She’s afraid to disappoint you. She adores you, Jean-Claude.”
Shaken, he looked down at the yellow leaves. Was he pushing Aimée too hard—ignoring her doubts, not listening to her?
Sidonie took off her glasses. Those huge almond eyes, so like Aimée’s—blue now, she must wear contacts. He had to ask her the question that tormented him. The one that still woke him up in the middle of the night. Made him think of her every time he caught a whiff of muguet, or saw lily-of-the-valley blossoms—her favorite—at the flower shop on his way home. Or saw a woman resembling her on a Paris street. Pathetic. But he had to know.
“Where did you go, Sidonie? Another man, some cause? . . . just tell me. That’s all I want to know.”
Sidonie’s long fingers knit together. Silence except for the rustle of leaves.
“Don’t you owe me, for all that I’ve done for you, my renegade terrorist wife?”
He left out the black deals he’d made to free her from prison. The price he still paid now. Doing one more job when he returned to Paris.
“It hurts to say, Jean-Claude. You’re right.” Sidonie leaned back. “Call it a pebble that grew into a snowball. Mistake after mistake. I was coming back, Jean-Claude . . .”
“What do you mean coming back?”
“As usual, to meet Aimée when she came back from school, but I’d brought posters to the antiwar rally and it turned ugly. Violent. Before I could leave, protesters in our group got hurt. They wouldn’t go to the hospital. They were from the wanted Haader-Rofmein group, I learned later.”
The German terrorist gang of the seventies. Political when it suited them.
“I got caught up in it before I realized who they were.”
“Why didn’t you leave?”
“You think I didn’t try? The leader shot a policeman, things spiraled. We were on the run and it turned into a manhunt. The next thing I knew, we’d been smuggled over the border into Switzerland. Wanted. My face was the only one the authorities didn’t know—so they made me drive when they robbed clinics for medical supplies. That implicated me and put me on the run, too.” She shook her head. “Maybe you don’t believe me.”
He did. But maybe he wanted to believe her.
The crow cawed. Leaves rustled. “After prison what did you do?”
“The deal you arranged, getting me out, had strings, Jean-Claude.”
“Strings?”
“They wanted me to stay useful to certain people.” Her eyes, those eyes bigger than Juliette Gréco’s, drifted to the sky.
Jean-Claude’s mind raced. “To play both ends and set up your old cohorts?”
“Close enough. That was the rest of the deal, they didn’t tell you. That or do time in a maximum-security prison in upstate New York. But now I have a new identity. Once I destroy the evidence, I won’t need to run and hide anymore.” She played with her sunglasses. “I won’t have to be ‘on the road.’”
That damn beatnik bible she gave him when they first met.
Did she mean come back?
He wished he didn’t want that to be true. Why did he want her—for them to be together again, the three of them? Crazy.
“Your hair’s long, Jean-Claude.” She’d leaned forward, her arms touching his. “Remember when I used to cut your hair in our first apartment? That top floor overlooking the canal and only space for a bed?”
Hungry, he pulled her close. Her kiss burned his lips. He held her hard, tight, and felt her warmth fill his arms.
A horn blared twice.
She pulled back and ran her hand over his face. As if memorizing it. “I have to go.”
A dreamer, sucked in every time.
“You always have to go, Sidonie.” He felt the lingering warmth of her. “The Mossad wants your contacts.”
She nodded. “I know.”
A pause.
“Jean-Claude, I’m not asking you to wait for me, but . . . if . . . you decide . . .” Her voice quivered in the clear air. “I’ll never hurt you again.”
And then she’d gone, the muguet scent fading. The crow, he realized, had disappeared. Flown off with Sidonie’s soul.
Too late, he started after her, running through the dry fallen leaves. His foot caught on an exposed tree
root, and suddenly he was facedown on a lichen-laced slab.
By the time he’d picked himself up, ignoring the pain and blood dripping from his knee, he heard a car door slam. He ran faster, panting, and got to the stone gate in time to see a car pulling away across the street. A dark-grey foreign sedan in a street full of Soviet Trabis. The only ones who drove those worked at embassies. A car like that only belonged to les Américains.
Chambly-sur-Cher · Sunday, 11 a.m.
“Dufard and Royant called you my bloodhound?” said Elise. “I don’t know what they’re talking about.”
In the house, Elise paced on the rust-maroon carpet that reminded Aimée of dried blood. A tension thick as wool hovered in the over-upholstered salon.
Uneasy, she watched Renaud add logs to the fire, his overcoat beaded with rain. His car keys lay on the table and he was muttering about the damn Paris traffic.
Aimée had shown Elise Ninette’s diary. “I’m afraid it puts your father, all of these men, in a bad light.”
“That all happened during the war,” said Renaud, standing up and brushing ashes off his knees. “Difficult times. How do you know this diary’s authentic?”
The smell told her. “Take a whiff. That’s old paper. And be careful of the silverfish.” Aimée took out the ten or so photos from her pocket and spread them on the table—black-and-white village scenes, the boulangerie, children, dogs, men playing boules. “There’s your father, Elise, and the mayor who was shot. See the names written there.”
Aimée recognized a younger Royant and Dufard, without their double chins and large girths from years of good living. Suddenly, she was tickled by the thought that there was something familiar about the mayor’s face. What was it?
“May I?” Renaud picked up the photo and stared.
Aimée nodded. A blurred scene showing Dufard, Peltier, the mayor, and a young boy holding the mayor’s pant leg. “Apparently, some people remember him as an honorable man. A hero of the Somme,” said Aimée. “Madame Jagametti doesn’t believe he turned traitor or collaborated with the Germans.”
Elise’s chin quivered. “So she thinks my father did?”
Out for himself, maybe. “Not my call. But I don’t think this is about collaborating with Germans. It’s about stealing from the Germans. Gold, the diary says. Maybe there was art, valuables, I don’t know. But these men paid off the village to keep quiet.”
“What do you mean keep quiet?” Elise said.
“Madame Jagametti for one,” she said. “Ask Clément, he’ll tell you.”
Wasn’t Clément sweet on Elise? Could he be jealous of Renaud, her fiancé—did that play into this? But she’d think about that later.
“Tell me what, Aimée?”
“Elise, somehow this connects to the Givaray memorial to the sixty executed in reprisal for the dead German soldiers. See?” She showed Elise the October newspaper article she’d found. “Look at this about a sunken German truck linking back to the soldiers.”
“How? I don’t see a link.” Elise shook her head. “That’s years ago. My father was murdered last month.”
“But if he and the others were involved . . .”
Aimée waited, trying to guess how much Elise knew, and how much she was in denial about.
After a few moments, Elise sat down on a damask chair. “All of a sudden, two months ago, my father wanted me to take over the business. He insisted I give up teaching and come back to take over. He was incorporating all their interests—Baret, Dufard, and Royant’s. They’d all agreed on it. They were business partners, not enemies or rivals.” She picked at nubs on her sweater sleeve, rolled them between her fingers. “There was supposed to be a formal meeting of the board—a signing of papers . . .” Her eyes were tearing.
“But your father was murdered before the meeting.”
“It was postponed. But then the next meeting was cancelled when . . . ” Elise’s mouth dropped open. She’d put it together. About time for the economics professor. “I hadn’t suspected until now,” said Elise. “But what if Royant and Dufard really wanted total control? Killed him, then Baret, all to put me out of the picture?”
Aimée wondered. A possibility. “Speak with the flics, Elise.”
“And say what?” asked Elise. “They haven’t listened to anything I’ve said yet. There’s no proof of anything—the gold, the executions—it’s just theories and a sob story in a diary. The woman can’t even spell.”
Private diaries weren’t written for snooty grammarians.
“Or you’re worried this might bring attention,” said Aimée. “An investigation into how farmers bought apartments in the exclusive huitième? And set up a private bank with gold?”
“Who’s seen this Nazi gold?” Elise shook her head. “Long gone if it ever existed—that would be opening a basket of snakes. Bring Holocaust survivors and their children with claims for restitution, compensations.” She pointed to the newspaper. “Does it say what this truck transported? Whose gold? I don’t see that.”
She had retained Leduc Detective to learn the truth about her father. But Elise, the daughter of privilege, wasn’t so interested in the truth when it threatened her comfort, it seemed.
Elise thumbed through the photos. Her eyes somewhere else. “Papa looks so young. Here, that’s Mama. Look, the horse I fed when I was little. The draft horse. Then we moved away.”
And then Elise threw the diary in the fireplace.
Aimée yelped. “What are you doing? That’s not yours! You can’t burn the proof!”
“Lies.”
The flames licked the worn leather. Aimée grabbed a poker. Her attempts to retrieve the diary only pushed it deeper into the flames.
“But it could explain what’s happening now—”
“All lies.”
The fire smoked, crackled, swallowing the yellowed pages in moments. Renaud caught Aimée’s arm. With a whoosh the old diary pages curled, turning a burnt orange. “Let the past go.”
Too late now. And the guilty got away. Again.
Elise was gathering the photos, but Renaud stopped her. “Why throw these away, Elise? It won’t change anything. You’ll lose memories.”
Elise bit her lip. “Bon, I’ll keep the photos. Then I’ll confront Dufard and Royant, the liars.” She took a key ring from the bookcase. Swearing, she fumbled with the key until she’d unlocked the biggest drawer. “This will hold them. Keep them safe.”
Elise pulled an old wood box with leather handles onto the desk. Her hands shaking, she set each black-and-white photo inside, one by one. Tears were streaming down her face. Renaud rubbed her back, trying to calm her.
“You’ve upset Elise enough,” he said. “I think you should go.”
Aimée’s eye focused on the box. “What’s that?” Aimée rubbed her fingers on the box’s wood side. Dark soot, like charcoal, came off.
“What are you doing?” said Elise.
From this angle, in the slant of winter light, she’d seen something embossed. A design.
“It’s dirty, let me clean it off for you.” Aimée rubbed with her scarf. Spit on her scarf and rubbed again. Ancient black shoe polish, by the smell and smudge of it. “Your father’s box, that right?” Aimée asked.
Elise nodded.
She turned the now semi-cleaned box to reveal what she’d scrubbed and found.
Swastika. Eigentum der Reichsbank.
“Nice size for gold bars.”
On the Minitel in the Peltier’s hallway, she looked up the number of the man in the newspaper article. Called and arranged to meet him at the train station. She shouldered her bag and walked through the damp lanes, avoiding puddles in ruts made by old horse carts. Breathed in the rain-freshened air to clear her mind, put her questions together.
A few shops were open. She passed the boulangerie in the town square, the one she
’d seen in the photo. Little had changed in fifty years except for the posters of Johnny Hallyday headlining at Bourges, the Armistice ceremony commemorating the Great War. She envisioned the old guys with medals at the square, the doddering few veterans of la Grande Guerre, as they appeared every November. Sad, so sad—their eyes filled with memories and their numbers dwindling every year.
“Mademoiselle Leduc?”
“Oui?” She turned in the station hall to see a man peering over his newspaper as she stood in the ticket line. “Georges Ducray?”
He folded his newspaper, nodded.
“The reporter I spoke to had a lot more years on him than you.”
She caught the implication—she was too young to take seriously. She’d lied and told him she was a freelancer from Le Parisien interested in his allegations in the article.
“But the reporter never followed up on my information,” said Georges Ducray.
Good. Now she’d have an in.
“That’s why I came, Monsieur Ducray. I appreciate you meeting me.” She needed to question him before he asked why the story hadn’t been picked up by a national paper like Le Parisien. Or complained how a big city ignored the provinces.
Think, she had to think like her father. Ask the right questions.
Ducray—short, barrel-chested—was fortyish, with tight, greying curls like a wire-brush helmet. A red-embroidered train club patch on his jacket lapel. “You’d be better off catching the 12:04 at Vierzon straight to Gare d’Austerlitz.”
Mon Dieu, not one of those train enthusiasts. One of her father’s colleagues, obsessed with railroad minutia and locomotives, had dragged her as a teenager to his model train club under the Gare de l’Est. Grown men, she’d thought in disgust, playing with toy trains.
“The Vierzon line’s direct and quicker,” said Ducray.
A slight hiccup-like sound ended his phrases. A drinker? This early in the morning? She groaned inside.
Maybe this had been a bad idea.
“Otherwise you’ll wait forever,” he said.
“Still, it gives us time to talk,” she said, pulling out her anatomy notebook. She gestured to the benches. “I’ll take notes.”
