I looked at Jean-Paul for an explanation. He said, “A negotiated agreement to get along in the future and perhaps to go for counseling.”
“That’s it?” I said.
“Yes,” Sam answered. “Unless it could be shown that the child was in physical or psychological danger.”
“By running away and changing her appearance, was Ophelia trying to show that her mental state had been changed?”
Sam raised his hands. “When you find her, ask her.”
] Nine
When we finally got home, the house was dark except for a light in the kitchen. Apparently, everyone was already tucked up for the night. I was tired, but too wound up after a crazy day to go bed.
“I think I’ll have a swim,” I said as we walked through to the salon. “Will you join me?”
“Yes.” Jean-Paul said, and crossed the room to flip on the pool and terrace lights. Right away his phone dinged with an incoming text from Ari. He read it to me: Ari thought he might have found a new living arrangement for Diba and Nabi until the end of the current school term, but if it worked out they would need to stay with us through the weekend unless that was a problem. It wasn’t, of course. As we walked upstairs to change, Jean-Paul said, “As Ari seems to be awake still, out of respect for his traditional sensibilities, will you mind terribly wearing a swimsuit?”
I laughed because with so many people in the house it hadn’t occurred to me to swim au naturel. My American prudery? I said, “Sure, not a problem, this time.”
We put on suits and collected towels and went back downstairs. The pool was solar heated to about seventy degrees. At first the water felt cold, but before the end of the first lap I didn’t notice. Through college, I was a competitive swimmer, not gold-medal caliber but fairly competent. Early on, to filter out crowd noise and other distractions, I learned to put myself into a sort of oblivious or meditative zone by concentrating on nothing except the movement of my body through the water. That’s where I was when Jean-Paul gave my foot a tug. I was startled, a little disoriented for a moment before I figured out that he was trying to get my attention. I swam beside him to the side of the pool and that’s when I heard the ruckus somewhere on the foot path beyond our garden wall.
As I hauled myself out of the water I heard our neighbor, Holly Porter, and at least two men, arguing. She yelled, “Stop it right now,” in English. From the tone of it, the response had to be a French obscenity, followed by a third voice demanding in heavily accented French, “Put that down! Step away!”
I grabbed a towel and tied it into a sarong around my waist as I followed Jean-Paul to the gate. He yanked it open and with it came a hulking youth who, caught off guard and off balance, fell flat on his face onto the stone pavement of the terrace. The kid must have been leaning against the gate, maybe trying to cover his handiwork on its backside. I grudgingly appreciated his skill as a cartoonist while deploring the obscene image he had created of a bearded man wearing only Arab headgear committing a bestial act on a still incompletely drawn squealing pig. When Jean-Paul pulled the kid to his feet, a wide-tipped felt marker and a flashlight rolled from his hands.
Holly and the man with her, who I assumed was her husband, Kevin, stood in the open gateway, eyes wide, mouths agape when they saw blood spurt from the boy’s nose and stream down his face and onto his shirt.
“Dear God,” Holly said. Then she shook herself and aimed her flashlight at the drawing on the gate, outrage taking over. “Do you see what he was doing? We were out for a walk and we caught this kid defacing your property with that nasty picture. Kevin was just calling the police when— Oh hell, Maggie, this is just so awful.”
Hearing the commotion, both Ari and Nabi came out of the guest house. I took Holly by the arm and brought her into the yard, the husband right behind her, and closed the gate before Nabi and Ari could see the graffiti on the back.
“Louis?” Nabi said, venturing around the end of the pool toward us. “What are you doing here?”
The bloody boy, Louis the tormentor, apparently in his humiliation at being caught began to cry, a catch of breath at first, followed by choking sobs. I untied my wet towel and pressed it to his bleeding nose. I said, “You better sit down, Monsieur Roussel. We’ll call your father.”
“No, please, don’t,” he begged.
“You know this kid?” Holly asked.
Nabi answered: “We go to the same school.”
Holly got her first look at Nabi’s battered face, and then she looked at Louis, whose nose might be broken. She asked Nabi, “Did he do that to you, son?”
Shyly, Nabi nodded.
Louis turned to him. “It wasn’t just me, you know.”
Jean-Paul laughed, one short bark. “You aren’t helping yourself, Louis. Sit down and let Doctor Massarani look at that nose.”
Ari hesitated before he agreed to help the little miscreant. He leaned over the kid, pinched the bridge of his nose and gently wiggled it, then gave it a sharp snap to realign the displaced cartilage. He had Louis put his head back so he could get a look into the nostrils, though with all the blood I doubted he could see much. When he was finished, he stepped back and announced, “Yes, broken. By morning you should have two black eyes. Not as bad-looking as the ones you gave Nabi but really ugly just the same. With a broken nose, as with Nabi’s broken ribs, there isn’t much that can be done. Your parents might want to take you to the clinic in the morning, but there’s no emergency. Just try not to fall on your face again until it has healed.”
Ari started to say something more, but stopped, took a deep breath and dropped his head. After a moment, he put a hand on Louis’s shoulder. “Forgive me, young man, I should never have spoken to you in that way, but my anger at you got the best of me. Please, Louis, help me understand why you continue to harass Nabi. You’ve been removed from school on a discipline advisory and, I hope, punished by your parents as well. Yet you persist. Why?”
Nabi pulled up a chair and, elbows on knees, chin on fists, watched Louis search for an answer. Having none to offer, Louis said, “Don’t look at me, Nabi,” and started to cry again.
I turned to Ari. “Icepack?”
He nodded. “Please.”
When I came back outside with a plastic bag of crushed ice wrapped in an old towel, the Potters, who had introduced themselves to Jean-Paul and Ari, were taking their leave.
“Our munchkin is in bed, in theory at least,” Holly said. “The au pair we loved went back home last week so Kevin and I can only sneak out together for quick evening walks until we find someone else. We need to get back before the kiddo misses us. Call if you need us to testify or anything.”
“I doubt things will get that far,” Jean-Paul said. “But thank you.”
She took a step toward Nabi. “Are you the violinist we hear?”
Nabi, chagrined, blushed under his bruises. “I’m sorry if I disturb you.”
“Disturb us? Oh, heavens no. When my daughter hears you play we go outside to listen. She has just begun piano lessons, but I think she likes violin better. Please, keep playing.”
“All right,” he said with a shy nod. “I will.”
When the Porters were gone, Jean-Paul handed his phone to Louis and told him to punch in his father’s number.
“You can’t tell my parents,” Louis said, sounding panicky. The hand holding the icepack shook, and not from cold. “My mother is in the hospital again and my father is with her. Please leave them alone.”
“No, Louis,” Jean-Paul said. “What you have done is far too serious. Your father needs to get you help before you dig yourself in so deep no one will be able to get you out again. Now, your choice, give me your father’s number, or I go to the hospital and get him.”
Louis gave in, put the ice down on a table and tapped his father’s number into Jean-Paul’s phone. While Jean-Paul did his best to explain the situation to Guy Roussel, I went upstairs and got dressed. On my way back outside, I detoured to the garage and found a pla
stic tarp and some painter’s tape to cover the graffiti on the gate. No one needed to see that obscenity, certainly not Nabi. Or Ari. While we waited for Roussel père to arrive, with Louis being tended by Ari, Jean-Paul got dressed and I shrouded the image on the gate, after taking photos of it.
By the time I finished, Ari had managed to engage both Louis and Nabi in a quiet conversation about school and their mutual difficulties with a chemistry class.
“I’m lost,” Louis said. “I know I’ll never pass the science portion when we take the baccalauréat exams. My father will kill me if I don’t qualify for university. And now, until the end of the term I’m on home instruction and it’s even worse. What am I supposed to do, teach myself what I don’t know?”
“If I didn’t get help from Doctor Massarani,” Nabi said, “I would be in big trouble.”
“You’re doing better than me,” Louis said.
“Nabi will be home from school recovering from his beating for the rest of the week,” Ari said. “Why don’t you join us for a chemistry session tomorrow morning? Ten o’clock.”
Nabi nailed his bleeding tormentor with a stare as if daring him to accept. After a pause to consider, Louis said, “Thank you, sir, yes, thank you. If it’s okay with Nabi.”
“Whatever,” Nabi said, but I thought I saw a small glint of victory in his attempt at nonchalance.
While I eavesdropped on this interesting exchange, I picked up Louis’s discarded icepack and laid it on my itchy hand. Ari noticed.
“Are you injured, Maggie?” he asked.
“No. I ran across something in the woods today.” I showed him my puffy rash. “I was told it may be a reaction to rue.”
“Calamine lotion might help. Just keep it out of the sun or it might blister more.”
Nabi said, “Rue,” not much more than a sigh as he looked at my hand.
“Rue?” I repeated.
“It’s just— Random thought. In Hamlet when Ophelia goes crazy she says something about rue. I don’t remember exactly how the speech goes but it’s something like ‘you wear your rue with a difference.’” He said the line in English. “Friday night when I was walking with Ophelia to the train I teased her about it, because she wears those black clothes and her name is Ophelia, and she had lied to her parents about what she was doing. My French isn’t so great and maybe it just didn’t translate. She said rue is a noxious weed and you shouldn’t touch it. One time when she tried to hide overnight in the haras, she got a bad rash from rue. I tried to explain to her then that rue can also mean regret, but she didn’t get it. She said I wasn’t making sense. I told her to look it up.”
“Shakespeare?” I said. “You quote Shakespeare, Nabi?”
I’d embarrassed him. “No,” he said. “Yes, well, I think about it sometimes, because of my father. When my father was a student in Scotland he went to all the Shakespeare plays he could because he thought if he was there he should study the culture so he’d know what people were talking about. To be, and not to be, and all that. When we decided to leave Afghanistan he hoped that, somehow, we would end up in Britain and if we did then knowing Shakespeare would be useful. We read the plays together and he explained them. He said that Shakespeare is like opera, you have to know what the story is about before you go see it so that you can appreciate the presentation, the way it sounds and the way it looks, because it’s hopeless trying to understand what anyone is saying.”
“Your father was an amazing man,” I said.
Nabi smiled, and nodded. “Because I know Hamlet I met Ophelia. Because of her name. I never knew anyone named Ophelia before. I asked her why her parents named her that.”
“It’s a pretty name.”
“I guess, but Ophelia is so sad she kills herself. So I wondered why they chose her name for a baby.”
Louis, who seemed confused by the entire conversation, suddenly sat up. “Ophelia killed herself?”
“In the play,” Nabi said. “Not in real life. Not our Ophelia, just the character in the play.”
Nabi was still trying to explain things to Louis when the doorbell rang. On my way to let in Monsieur Roussel, I overheard Louis ask Nabi what it was like to lose his mother. Nabi told him, “It’s very lonely.”
] Ten
I think we might find more peace and quiet together in a tent in a snake-infested jungle than we seem to have at home,” Jean-Paul said Friday morning as we drove through the gates that hid the courtyard of number seven rue Jacob from the prying eyes of passersby on the street outside. “Maybe it’s time for us to just sneak away.”
“Not today, though,” I said. “After lunch, Guido and I will screen the final cut of the Normandy piece for Diane Duval. If she signs off on it, we’ll decide on the rest of our fall projects. Diane has been great this week about giving me space to settle in, but from here on, my work schedule will get more intense. Doesn’t mean you and I can’t sneak away for a long weekend soon. Sans snakes, preferably.”
“I’ll look into it. Maybe the Edinburgh Shakespeare Festival, whenever that is.”
I laughed. “Why not? What’s on your schedule today?”
“The usual, some meetings to talk with people about this and that,” he said as he parked next to a tiny red Smart Car in front of the blue door that led to Isabelle’s second-floor apartment. “Mostly a lot of that, not enough agreement on this.”
“This and that, huh? I think one day I’ll walk around behind you all day with a camera and try to figure out what exactly you do.”
“The camera would probably self-destruct out of boredom.”
“After what you told me about holding your finger in the dike, I sincerely hope that’s true.”
We unloaded gear left in the trunk the day before after filming at the school and the pond and hauled it all upstairs. I had an apartment key, and Guido expected us, but I knocked; it was his pad now and who knew what we might walk in on. Detective Delisle answered the door.
“Bonjour, good morning,” she said, gathering us in. Her hair was down loose and she wore skinny jeans, a linen shirt, and no shoes, looking very comfortable, indeed. There were roses in her cheeks. “Guido is setting up in the basement for a last peek before the studio screening. He said to send you down. Would you like coffee?”
“Please,” I said with a smile, ignoring the elbow Jean-Paul shot into my back; she seemed very proprietary. He came downstairs with me only to help carry gear and to say hello to Guido. He visited the wine cellar and chose half a dozen bottles to take home, and then he left to do whatever it is he does. Guido and I settled in for a look at the last go-around of film edits and transitions that we had discussed earlier before handing our final cut over to Diane. I was more than happy with the piece as it was now, which mattered not one bit if Diane was unsatisfied with something.
Guido clinked his coffee mug against mine and said, “Merde,” for good luck.
“Same to you, partner. Ready to go?”
“Not yet,” he said. “I want to show you something I smashed together based on our conversation about a harassment film.”
Guido had made a five-minute piece, a teaser, using bits from the film I made for Delisle, clips from the school assembly, and some footage he had shot during his explorations around Paris: a swastika spray-painted on the main Paris synagogue, the burned-out remains of a kosher market, a white-haired matron confronting a young woman about her hijab, women in a street demonstration against sexual harassment carrying signs with their motto, balance ton porc—Out the Pig. The soundtrack was Nabi playing a serene passage from Debussy, Op. 10, a stark contrast to the ugly images.
“Wow,” I said. “You put this together this morning? What was Detective Delisle doing while you were sequestered down here?”
“Fleur went out for an early run. Then she came back and kibitzed; she is quite interested in filmmaking after yesterday. Actually, I’ve been tinkering with this little teaser for a while, ever since you brought up the issue. All I did this morning was splic
e in some of yesterday’s footage. What do think?”
“As a teaser for a film about harassment, it’s powerful.”
“Harcèlement, you mean,” he said, doing his best to growl the R at the back of his throat. “There’s some mean shit going on over here, Maggie. Just like everywhere else.”
“What do you think about expanding our project to look at the issue of harassment across the eurozone? It will mean some travel.”
“Time might be a problem, but yeah,” he said without hesitation. “Definitely.”
On foot, Guido and I followed Delisle’s little red Smart Car across the cobblestone courtyard and out the gates onto rue Jacob. She turned one way, we the other.
“So?” I said after waving her on her way.
“We’re good,” he said. “Fleur doesn’t waste any time waiting for invitations, but so far that’s okay. The language thing is awkward, but she doesn’t waste a lot of time talking, either.”
“Watch six, my friend,” I said as a caution to watch his back. “And don’t give her a key to the wine cellar.”
At the Odéon Métro stop we descended into the underground transport maze that took us across Paris to Issy-les-Molineaux, where we came up into daylight again. The walk across the bridge to reach the studio was to be the last of the sun I saw until just after five o’clock that afternoon when I crossed the river again to catch the train home.
Diane Duval and I sat across from each other at a table in an open sort of hub area among the various production offices under her command. I leaned forward, elbows on the polished surface, in business mode. But she was the image of unhurried casual elegance, sitting sideways on a chair pushed a few feet away from the table, an elegant arm poured over the chair back, one slender leg draped over the other.
A Bouquet of Rue Page 19
