*****
The man glared at Gerard from across the café table. All along the Rue de la Clignancourt, shopkeepers were opening their doors and beginning the morning ritual of hosing down the patch of sidewalk in front of their stores.
The Sacré-Coeur was just visible in the distance, its bone-white onion dome dotting the horizon like a bright exclamation point. Every time he saw the cathedral, Gerard thought of his grandmother, that ferocious old crow who every Sunday would drag him and his brother—unprotesting but unwilling—up the hundreds of steps to Mass. He could still feel the pinching grip of her withered old hand clamped on his wrist.
His eyes shifted away from the church and back to his companion. He eyed the filthy bundle of flesh and clothes across from him.
“As I have said before, Vadim, I have not seen Nadia in more than six months. And even then, we were merely acquaintances.”
“Of course,” the man said. “That’s understood. You wouldn’t be alive at this moment if it were otherwise.”
Gerard licked his lips. He had been a fool to think they wouldn’t look for him in Paris.
“Her father believes you were one of the last people to see her before she disappeared.”
“Surely disappeared is a bit dramatic? Perhaps she went back to Russia.”
“Her family there says no.”
“Then she ran off with a lover.”
“Did she run off with a lover, Monsieur Dubois?”
“Well, I don’t know. Why do you assume anything at all happened? Nadia was a free spirit. Unpredictable. Who is to say where she would go?”
“She left her little dog that she loved so dearly. She left her father and a two million euro pied-a-terre in St-Tropez. Her spirit was not that free.”
“But, if you haven’t found a body, and I assume there have been no reports of suspicious deaths along the Côte d’Azur, why do you assume the worst?”
“It is true there have been no reports of unidentified bodies, accidental or otherwise, on the coast. None except for your own poor wife, of course,” the man said, grinning obscenely at Gerard. “But a body is not a difficult thing to make disappear, if one is determined.”
“Look, like I said, I haven’t seen her in months. I have no idea where she might have gone.”
“My employers are prepared to be kind, Monsieur Dubois, to have the truth in order to go forward.”
Gerard hesitated. “I can ask around, Vadim. See if anybody has seen her.” He raked a hand through his thinning, reddish-brown hair.
“You do that, Monsieur Dubois.” The man’s watery eyes blinked malevolently at Gerard. “You do that as quickly as you can.”
It’s as if he already knows, Gerard thought as a sudden, terrible coldness began to seep into his bones.
But how could he?
Murder in the South of France, Book 1 of the Maggie Newberry Mysteries Page 22
