A Bouquet of Rue

by Wendy Hornsby

  She wagged a finger at me. “I can say nothing to you about Yvan Fouchet.”

  “Of course.” But she had already told me plenty, and I thought she was ready to send me on my way. Before she did, I said, “In your series on workplace harassment, you were very circumspect about identifying the women you interviewed. Do you ever follow up with them, stay in touch?”

  “The ones I knew before I wrote the series, of course, yes. It was not difficult to find friends with stories to tell. But the women my research led me to I rarely hear from.”

  “You have my card. If you happen to speak with anyone who might have something she feels like telling me about Monsieur Fouchet, I would be very grateful if you shared my contact information with her.”

  “You realize how risky that could be for her.”

  “A girl is missing. Maybe your source knows something that would help find her.”

  “No promises.” She picked my card up off the table as she rose from her chair. Offering her hand, she said, “I’m happy to have met you, Maggie. I hope to see you again.”

  “Thank you for speaking with me,” I said, taking her hand.

  “Sorry I couldn’t help you.”

  “But you have,” I said. “You have.”

  Even with Zed’s good instructions, I had so much to think about after I left Roni Pascal that I missed my first train transfer and had to double back. When, at last, I walked through the front door of Isabelle’s apartment, except for a fine layer of dust coating every flat surface, everything looked very much as it had when I handed the keys over to Guido. I ran my finger through the dust on the bare dining table and held it up to Guido. “I asked the cleaners to come in last Friday.”

  “Yeah, well.” Guido looked around. “They didn’t. Barry downstairs said there had been an incident between the cleaning ladies and one of your nephews—he pulled a hijab off one of them?—so when they saw I was here alone they wouldn’t come in.”

  “For the record, it wasn’t my nephew who did that, it was one of his friends. Anyway, if you want someone in to clean, ask the concierge. Madame Gonsalves likes to be helpful.”

  “I tried talking to her, but hand gestures only convey so much. Don’t worry about it. I can clean up after myself. I’ve just been so busy since I got here,” he said. “Come down and take a look at the work room. That’s where I’ve spent most of my time since we got to Paris.”

  Isabelle, my bio-mother, was an odd and complex woman, prone to whims fueled by manic episodes. At some point, without informing her investment partners who included Jean-Paul, during the renovation of the long-abandoned convent they acquired and its conversion into modern apartments, she had workmen build a private stairway that led from her own apartment down to two rooms she partitioned off from the rest of the cavernous cellar. On one side of the landing at the bottom of the stairs, she installed and stocked a wine cellar. On the other, a hidden door opened into a temperature-controlled space that housed a small library of rare and precious books that was left behind, probably forgotten, when the religious order was shut down by the Vatican and the last of the nuns was sent into retirement. When I inherited the apartment, along with Isabelle’s half of the entire building, after some righteous controversy, mayhem, and attempted murder, I sent the books away for safekeeping, freeing up that very comfortable library room for Guido and me to work in.

  “I met with Diane this morning,” I told Guido on our way down the narrow stairs. “Part One of the Normandy project will air in June at the end of the regular season, and Part Two will open the fall season in September. She wants us to give her a tentative outline for the four films to follow, one a month through January of next year. And then we’ll reboot, I guess, if ratings are good.”

  “Finishing one a month will be brutal,” he said.

  “If we had to do one a month, yes, it would. But from next week, when we hand over the finished Normandy film, we’ll have until October before the next one goes on the air. We aren’t making feature-length films, Guido. I think we can fill an hour time slot without too much grief once we come up with, in Diane’s words, good hard-hitting topics. If we’re very good children, we can have the entire remaining handful finished well before December.”

  When we reached the small landing at the bottom of the stairs, he opened the library door, now the work room door, and ushered me inside. Film topics and content were my area, the mechanics of filmmaking were his. While I worked out what we would focus on next he had been setting up a workplace.

  The four heavy library tables were now end-to-end down the center of the room with a power strip running along the entire front edge. On top of this expanse of tables was an array of the equipment Guido called his junk: three wide-screen computers, external data storage units, a videotape-to-digital converter, a film-to-digital converter, a CD reader, Wi-Fi boosters, emergency power backup, and a heavy-duty printer. His cameras, lights, cords, reflectors, tripods, tools and gaffer’s tape—duct tape—and a variety of whatevers were stowed in the glass-fronted shelves along the walls where books had once been. And attached to the far wall was a fifty-inch television.

  “Isn’t this great?” he said, grinning, holding his arms wide as if to embrace the entire space. “So much better than anything we’ve had before.”

  “Looks like home,” I said. “If home is a digital film lab.”

  “Sometimes I feel like I live in the work room,” he said, still smiling happily. “Gets a little lonely, though.”

  “Diane is ready to hire a staff and crew for us. Ask her for an intern or two, and maybe an assistant. I’m on the lookout for a researcher.”

  “We’re going to miss Fergie. Any chance you can talk her into coming over?”

  “I don’t know how,” I said. Fergie had been our general gofer and third pair of hands for about five years at the American network studio where we worked in Los Angeles. Talking her into, or even asking her to, abandon a union benefits package would be hard. The other little detail would be getting her a French work visa; there were plenty of available and willing hands in the country.

  “Anyhoo,” Guido said. “Any ideas about what we’re going to do for Diane after Normandy?”

  “Some.” I gave him more detail than I’d given Diane. He made some suggestions, but topics were generally left to me. He was more interested in where we would be shooting and what he would aim his cameras at than in why he was doing it. After we had a broad notion of what was to come next, we pored over the notes Diane had sent with me that morning and talked about final edits and cuts on the Normandy film. Some of Diane’s comments were impressively insightful. Others we debated before crossing out. Once the decisions were made about what to cut and what to keep, I left it to Guido to figure out how to implement them. Every television production needs to be tailored to fit certain time signatures with precision; never a second over, never a second under. Making that happen is an art form all its own, and Guido was the maestro.

  While Guido began finessing images against time restraints, I was superfluous except now and then when he asked for input about where to lose a few frames, where to extend. For something to do, I booted one of the other computers and pulled up several online personal sales sites. Unless Ophelia ran away to join a gypsy orchestra or had found some sort of Svengali, that cello would be cumbersome to travel with. It could also be a source of cash if she needed it. Or if someone else did. I searched the listings, looking for a cello. First, I looked for cellos in big red cases, and found one, but the listing was a month old and it came from Prague. I didn’t know the maker of Ophelia’s instrument, so all I could do was go through recent listings and look for possibilities. There were two. I left my contact information with the sellers, and before I logged off signed up for text alerts for any new listings from the three sites that had the largest number of musical instruments on offer.

  When I came up for air I found Guido watching me.

  “How are we doing?” I asked.


  “I’m going blind from looking at this monitor. How are you doing?”

  “Just peachy.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think you are. What’s up?”

  “Guido, did you ever run away from home?”

  “Oh hell no. I knew that if I did my mother would turn my bedroom into a sewing room and my dad would change the locks before I got to the end of the block. Why? Did you?”

  “I didn’t need to. My folks packed me off to a convent school and then they ran away on a sabbatical.”

  “It’s that girl, isn’t it?”

  “I’m afraid it is. The detective on the case called her a runaway delinquent. She said Ophelia had a history. I learned on the train this morning that she had run away before. I have a feeling that because of that history the police aren’t looking very hard for her. Other than running away, I wish I knew what she did that got her a bad reputation with the police. And I’d like to know what happened in her home that made her so angry that she would punish her parents this way.”

  “I seem to remember that Jean-Paul is good buddies with the Paris police chief, or whatever they call him.”

  “Oh sure, like I’m going to call David Berg and ask him to look up a juvenile’s record just because I’m nosy as hell.” Truth was, I was sorely tempted to do just that. “I would probably get better information out of the local cop than I ever would out of David. By the way, the local cops found the CCTV footage we pulled up helpful. Doesn’t lead to the girl, but it clears the boy.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Yeah. It is. So, what now, partner?”

  “For today? Je suis fini.”

  “I think you just said you’re dead, Guido. But I’m proud of you for working on la belle langue. Soon you’ll be speaking French like a native.”

  “Don’t hold your breath. I’m going to the movies tonight with my tutor. He says movies are the best way to learn how to talk dirty.”

  “Enjoy.” We stopped in the wine cellar where I pulled out a couple of bottles of Jean-Paul’s favorite Bordeaux to take home and Guido chose a very nice eau de vie, an aged apple brandy my cousin produced on the family farm in Normandy. Guido had developed an affection for the potent stuff during our summer of filming.

  On our way back upstairs, he asked, “What are you doing tonight?”

  “I’m hoping for a quiet evening at home with my true love. But one never knows.” I grabbed a shopping bag from the hook where Isabelle kept them, wrapped the wine bottles in a kitchen towel and carefully laid them inside the bag to carry home. “Guido, I almost forgot. My brother Freddy may call you. There are a few of Isabelle’s things that he and his sons would like to have. They’ll be in the city over the weekend, and if it’s okay with you, they’ll call and find a time with you when they can come fetch stuff.”

  He scowled. “What kind of things?”

  “My nephew Robert would like Isabelle’s computer and printer. We don’t need it. When they stay in Paris with Grand-mère Robert has to share with his father, and that isn’t working out. There’s an armoire in the smaller bedroom that is from Freddy’s father’s family and he wants it. They also plan to box up Isabelle’s books on math, physics, and agronomy for the library at Robert’s school in Normandy. I already sent her clothes to the charity shop and Grand-mère claimed the family photos and mementoes, so I’ve just about swept the last of Isabelle out of the apartment, but I told Freddy that if there’s anything he wants he can take it as long as he doesn’t cart off all the furniture and leave you nothing to sit on.”

  He looked horrified. “Is there a danger of that?”

  “No,” I said, confident in the answer. My half brother, Freddy, and his sons, Robert and Philippe, had been living in Isabelle’s house at the family farm estate in Normandy since he began his construction project there. That house was fully furnished. His own furniture was put into storage when he had to sell the family house to pay his wife’s, now his ex-wife’s, legal fees. He didn’t need yet another sofa.

  “Whatever. Want to grab some lunch?”

  “I’m meeting Jean-Paul. He came into the city early for meetings. With luck he’s finished for the day and we can go exploring after lunch.”

  “You kids have fun,” he said. “What’s on the schedule for tomorrow?”

  “Unless you have other ideas, I’ll leave you to work on the final edits and I’ll start work on a shooting script for the next blockbuster in the pipeline. When I have a draft to show you, we can work on the shot list.”

  “Dandy,” he said, showing me to the door. “I’ll call if I get lonely.”

  “Do that. You know, you can use the studio facilities if you want to be around people.”

  “I might do that at some point, but I like it here. Hell, I’m on the Left Bank in Paris. Any time I want to come up out of this hole in the ground, guess what? Paris is right outside. What’s not to like?”

  He walked me down to the front door and waved good-bye as I set off across the cobblestone courtyard. I stopped at the concierge’s apartment next to the street gates to say hello, but Madame Gonsalves wasn’t home. If she were, I would have heard her television. I went out onto rue Jacob and walked the few blocks to Le Procope where I was to meet Jean-Paul. The restaurant was the oldest in Paris. My first impression when I walked inside was red leather and white linen and the subdued murmur of many conversations, punctuated by the clink of glassware and silver. The maître d’ bowed slightly when I gave him Jean-Paul’s name and he escorted me down a hall to a smaller dining room in back. Jean-Paul was watching for me. He rose from a side banquette and came around the table to claim me. The man seated across from him rose as well.

  “David Berg,” I said, leaning toward the other man for les bises after exchanging same with Jean-Paul. “What a nice surprise.”

  “Isn’t it?” Jean-Paul said, the picture of innocence as he took the shopping bag with wine from my hand and seated me on the banquette next to him. He knew very well that there were questions I would love to ask David, and I knew that’s why David, the Préfet de Police de Paris, the head cop, with jurisdiction over not only the city of Paris but also the nearby suburbs including Vaucresson, had been asked to join us. Jean-Paul’s explanation was flimsy: “I was at a meeting at the Palais de Justice, so I dropped by Davey’s office to make sure he was staying out of trouble. He looked hungry, so what could I do but bring him along?”

  “It happened just like that?” I said, aiming the question at David.

  “Wouldn’t hold up under cross examination, but close enough,” David said, spreading his napkin on his lap. “I suggest we start with the oysters. They’re famous for oysters here.”

  “Well, well.” I looked from one man to the other and saw only innocent smiles. The two had been in school together. Not just any school, but one of the nation’s Grandes Écoles, the elite universities that produce the experts that go on to staff the upper tiers of the French bureaucracy or became leaders in commerce and politics. Dom was preparing to enter just such a university. If he did well, his future would be set. Because of his university affiliations, Jean-Paul seemed to know every person in a position of authority in France because it was likely that they were all alumni of the same school, or their professional colleagues were. Forget six degrees of separation. Among them there was rarely more than one degree of separation before they could connect with exactly the person they needed, whatever the situation. At fifty, Jean-Paul and David had successfully risen through the ranks to have reached if not the top positions in their fields, then the rungs immediately below. Their network ranged broadly, reached high.

  “After the oysters,” Jean-Paul said, “what looks good?”

  When I saw the prices on the menu the waiter placed in in front of me I had to swallow. Under the table I squeezed Jean-Paul’s hand. “Do you eat here often?”

  “No, but I thought you should, if only once. Can you imagine how many revolutions, coups, and wars were plotted in this roo
m? Here Franklin and Jefferson squeezed Jacques Necker until he released enough cash out of the French treasury to finance the American Revolution and bankrupt France in the process. Napoleon left his hat here once to cover a bar tab. I’ll show you on our way out; it’s in a display case.”

  “I’m surprised they let riffraff like that through the door,” I said, glancing at him over the top of my menu. “What do you recommend?”

  “After the oysters, I’m thinking about a salad au poire followed by a piece of beef, the onglet or a filet. What looks good to you, Davey?”

  They worked it out, consulting me about my preferences for each course before we each made our choices. This discussion around the table about assembling meals out of the available components was, I had discovered, part of the culture of dining out in France. When, at last, all was decided, we went on to the next topic: which wine? Jean-Paul patted the shopping bag on the bench beside him.

  “You visited Isabelle’s cache on rue Jacob?” he asked.

  I told him what was in the bag. Smiling, he planted a kiss on my forehead, an unusual public display for him, and summoned the waiter as he freed one of the bottles from its wrapping and set it on the table. The waiter saw what it was, bowed, and carried it off somewhere. When the bottle reappeared, it was in the custody of the restaurant’s elegantly garbed sommelier. With ceremony, he pulled the cork and sniffed it before pouring a soupçon from the bottle into the little silver cup he wore on a heavy chain around his neck. After he swirled it in his mouth and swallowed, he poured a similar amount into Jean-Paul’s glass. Jean-Paul sniffed it, swilled it, declared it potable, and we were served at the very same moment that tiny forks and small plates were set before us and a platter of raw North Atlantic oysters and lemon wedges was placed center stage, that is, in the middle of the table. Such an impressive feat of choreography would be expected, as dining in France generally does have a bit of theater to it.