Achille got out of the taxi the moment it stopped at 15 Hertford Street. In the elevator he readied his keys to open the door, and stepping over Cesar, he hurried to the desk and grabbed his passport. Cesar meowed. Achille hesitated, went into the kitchen, took the entire bowl of chopped shrimp, and left it on the floor. He walked out of the flat without stopping to lock up.
Once in the taxi, he told the driver to take him to Heathrow, international departures terminal.
“Yes, sir. For twenty pounds, I’ll take you to the moon.”
Achille sank back, the blood pounding in his temples. He thought only of Estella. What could he tell her?
“Mr. van Golk? It’s not Thursday!” the ticket clerk said.
“I know.”
“I hope nothing’s wrong with Mrs. van Golk.”
“It’s an emergency.”
“Let me see if Flight 68 has taken off yet. Perhaps I can hold it.” She picked up the telephone. “Hello, I have an emergency VIP. Can you hold sixty-eight? Just long enough to get through passport control. He’s right here. Thank you.”
She stepped around the counter and took Achille by the arm, noticing how pale and shaken he was. “Let me help you, Mr. van Golk. You look rather upset.”
“Thank you.”
“Mrs. van Golk must be a wonderful woman. Your devotion is legendary.”
They arrived at passport control. “Why, Mr. van Golk, it’s not Thursday,” the inspector said. “I hope there’s not something wrong.”
“We’re holding Flight 68. Can we hurry, please?” she asked.
“Of course. May I just have your passport and ticket, Mr. van Golk?”
Achille reached into his pocket and gave the inspector his passport. “I have no ticket,” he said.
“There’s no time. We’ll put it on your account.”
The inspector stamped his passport. “I hope … I mean … I’m sorry.”
The girl held Achille’s arm and led him through the empty check-in lounge and down the stairs to the waiting VIP car. She helped him inside and gave the driver instructions. When they reached the plane, the three stewardesses from first class waited atop the ramp to glimpse the VIP.
“Mr. van Golk!” Miss Schnee called out. “Oh, my God. It’s finally happened.” She ran down the steps to help Achille up the ramp. “Clear out row A,” she called to the other stewardesses. “You poor man, you look dreadful. I know I shouldn’t ask, but is it… is it over?”
Achille looked at her and shook his head yes.
“Oh, I am so very sorry. Is there something I can do?” she asked.
“Leave me alone,” he said. “Alone.”
“But Mr. van Golk, it’s not Thursday!” The Swiss immigration officer looked first at Achille and then at Miss Schnee, who motioned him to keep quiet. “I’m sorry,” he said. Achille walked through immigration to customs.
“But Mr. van Golk, it’s not Thursday!” Miss Schnee motioned to hush the customs inspector. She and Achille passed through and walked to the taxi stand. “Shall I go with you?” Miss Schnee asked. Achille looked at her with contempt and ripped her hand from his arm. She stood speechless, frozen by the anger in his eyes. He stepped into a taxi.
“Bonjour, monsieur.”
“The Enstein Clinic. Hurry.”
“But Achille, it’s not Thursday!” Estella van Golk stood in the doorway to her room. “You’ve made a terrible mistake.”
Estella was an incredibly beautiful woman, taller than Achille and with the bearing of an Austrian empress. Her flaming red hair was parted in the center and fell about her shoulders in masses. Her oval face belied her more than fifty years. She wore no make-up to cover her luminous pink skin and naturally rouged cheeks. Her eyes were enormous, bright, blue, and clear. She wore an ankle-length, pale-blue satin smock that tied at the neck in a large floppy bow. She turned her back and walked into the room. She moved with a slender grace punctuated by the sweeping gestures of her outstretched arms.
Estella’s room did not belong in the rarefied atmosphere of a sterile Swiss clinic for the insane. Originally two rooms, she and Achille had spent months redesigning the space into a combination bedroom, parlor, and office. The ceiling and walls were pale blue and matched the broadloom. A bright-blue floral-print fabric was set into the panels on the walls. It was used again as drapes, and also gathered itself atop Estella’s bed as a canopy. Blue vases overflowed with yellow roses. A double glass door opened onto a terrace that offered an uncluttered vista of blue sky and white-capped Alps. In one corner of the room was Estella’s French provincial desk and a series of file cabinets that had been covered in drapery fabric. The desk was cluttered with galley sheets, color separations, and photographer’s proofs.
“Just how much more of your bumbling must I take?”
“What have you heard?” he asked, nearly collapsing onto the sofa.
“There’s nothing I need to hear.” Estella walked behind her desk and lit a cigarette. “I still have eyes. I can see.” She pointed to the galleys and photo proofs. “I can see, Achille, that the Easter issue is a disaster. I simply will not approve it for printing.” She put her palms on the desk, leaned forward menacingly and shouted, “There are seven typographical errors!”
“I’m sorry, Estella.”
“Sorry? Don’t you think it’s a bit late to be sorry? There are seven mistakes, Achille. Do you know how many mistakes that makes so far this year?” She turned to her file cabinet and took a ring of keys from her pocket. She unlocked the top drawer. It was empty except for a single sheet of paper. “One hundred and twelve,” she said, waving the paper. “Of which the most misspellings are words beginning with B, L, and D. Why those letters, Achille?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t know or won’t tell? Which is it?”
“I have no secrets from you, Estella.”
“You know what this means.”
“Another list.”
“Yes. But, I wasn’t expecting you today. I’ll write it now. So that you don’t forget, my little bumbler bee.” Estella slammed shut her file drawer and locked it. She sat down at her desk and took a piece of pale-blue notepaper. She dipped her pale-blue quill pen into a crystal inkwell filled with blue ink. She wrote in a large hand, scratching angrily at the paper. Estella rose and walked to Achille. She handed it to him. He looked at the message. Scrawled across the page was KILL THE PROOFREADER KILL THE TYPOGRAPHER. “I can’t be certain which of them is more responsible for the errors so you’d best kill them both.”
He stared into Estella’s eyes, eyes that had once looked at him so adoringly. He searched for compassion, but found only rage. Estella stopped at the window on her way back to her desk. She leaned against the terrace door and stared out at the mountains. “It doesn’t even look like Thursday. Why are you here today? Why are you here on the wrong day?”
“I wanted to be with you.”
After a long moment, she turned from the window. Her face was beaming. “Poor bear, it must be so lonely for you. But I’ll be home soon.” She walked to the sofa and sat next to him. “It will be as we remembered it. Lying on our bed. Sipping champagne. Proofreading together till dawn.”
Achille raised his arm and put it around Estella. Despite the pain, his fingers pressed greedily at the satin to feel the outline of Estella’s shoulder. “Estella, I miss you so much.”
“Tell me, darling, how has your week been? Did you kill Natasha?”
He pulled his arm away and walked to the window. “No.”
“Did you say no?” she asked unbelievingly.
“I did not kill Natasha.”
“But why not? You got my instructions?”
“Yes.”
“There were no errors in them. I proofread them a dozen times to make certain. Why didn’t you use the mixer?”
“I didn’t say I didn’t use it.”
“Well, then she is dead. Dinner is over.” Estella got up and went to Achille. “I am so very proud of you, darling. Killing the chefs may have been your idea for a foolproof diet, but I devised the plans so brilliantly. We should really write it up for one of the medical journals.”
“Natasha isn’t dead. The mixer killed the wrong person.”
“What? You made a mistake, Achille?”
“I did not make a mistake. There was simply nothing I could do. Everything had been set up perfectly. Then, at the last minute, someone else turned the mixer on. I did not make the mistake, Estella. Something unforeseen happened at the last moment.”
“That, Achille, for your future reference, is known as a mistake. Something that happens at the last moment contrary to one’s plan is a mistake and you have made a mistake. Oh my Cod. After all I went through! To have you make a mistake at the last minute. Oh, how like you that is, Achille. You send me corrected galleys and I find seven mistakes in them. I suppose I shouldn’t have expected you to carry out the killing of the chefs any better than you carry out the preparation of your manuscripts.”
“Estella, listen to me. There was nothing I could do.”
“Life is filled with alternatives, Achille. I’m sure you could have done something. Surely you could have done something other than come here to upset me. And you came here on the wrong day!”
“Estella, the mixer, and not I, killed the wrong person.”
“An innocent person?”
“Yes.”
“Dreadful.” Estella walked to her desk and sat down. “The most dreadful mistake of all.” She put her hand to her forehead. “An innocent person. You’ve never killed an innocent person before. We’ve always been so civilized about it. Who was it?”
“Hildegarde Kohner.”
“Oh.” Estella lit another cigarette and fanned the match out slowly, a puzzled look on her face. “Her?” She exhaled a long stream of smoke and then said, almost cheerily, “Well, that’s not so bad. I never liked her. But a mistake is still a mistake, Achille. It was unspeakably careless of you.”
“It might not have happened if we had followed my original idea to lock Natasha inside a freezer.”
“Such a boring way to die.”
“But it might have worked. And I could have finished off my dinner without indigestion.”
“Well, then I guess it’s back to the old boring board.”
“Estella, you’re ridiculing me.”
She smiled and put her hand to her breast in mock amazement. “I? Ridicule you? No, darling, you must be thinking of a hundred other people.”
“Estella, I’ve come here because I need your help.”
“But you’ve always needed my help, Achille. From the very beginning. Well, what kind of help do you want now? Do you want more money to start another magazine? Do you want a loan to buy a freezer? Perhaps you’d like me to lose the weight for you? By the way, darling, you don’t look any thinner to me. Have you really been dieting, or are you still glutting yourself like a Périgord goose?”
“I demand you stop this at once,” he shouted. “Don’t you realize that the police will be after me?”
“Why? You didn’t mean to kill Hildegarde. It was an accident. However, you did make a serious mistake, Achille. You should have stayed there as we had planned. As though you were innocent. Instead, you’ve focused needless attention on yourself. But they have no evidence. There’s nothing they can prove. I’m the one who bought you the false passports, the mixer, and the explosive. And as long as you’re a good boy, all of Estella’s horses and all of Estella’s men will keep little Achille safe again.”
He watched her as she walked from window to window correcting the way the drapes were hung. Estella was right. What could they prove? He could say he had run from Harrods because he was upset. That he wanted to see Estella. And that was the truth. But she thought he had made a mistake. Suppose she sought revenge and abandoned him?
“Estella, if you say anything to the police, ever, you will become an accessory to the murders. They will take you out of your robin’s egg and put you into a small, dark, damp cell in which you will spend the rest of your life. The only mistakes you’ll chart will be those of the rats who gnaw hungrily at your tattered clothes. The police will lock you up forever.”
“They can’t. It was you who made the mistake. It was your mistake, not mine. Give me back my list.”
Achille handed it to her. She tore it into shreds and sat down at her desk. She took a fresh sheet of blue notepaper and dipped her pen into the ink. “Here,” she said, holding out the freshly scratched note, “I’ve revised my instructions.” He took the note and stared disbelievingly at the scrawled message.
He had lost Estella forever. The finality was overwhelming. The grief unbearable. He said for the last time, “Estella, I have always loved you.”
“And I have endured you, Achille. I don’t want to see you any more. You are repellent to me. You’ve allowed too many mistakes. Seven typographical errors in one issue! God knows how you managed to keep the murders quiet.” She went to the file cabinet and unlocked it. She opened the second drawer. It, too, was empty except for a single sheet of blue notepaper. “My count is twelve photographers, twenty-eight proofreaders, six editors, fourteen printers, and the secretary who spilled tea on one of the galley sheets. How did you manage to kill them without a mistake?”
“Estella, for years I have been taking your little blue notes home with me. Kill the photographer. Kill the proofreader. Kill the editor. Kill the printer. Do you know, Estella, what I did with those little blue notes? I threw them away. I tossed them out I dismissed your instructions. Listen to me carefully, Estella. I did not kill them.”
“Well, then, who did?”
“No one did. They are all still very much alive. The twelve photographers, the twenty-eight proofreaders …”
Estella stepped back. She put her hand to her mouth and screamed. “You betrayed me! You told me they were dead.”
He smiled. “They are alive, Estella. At this very moment, they are taking out-of-focus photographs, they are misspelling words, they are making mistake after mistake after mistake.”
“Liar! You told me you had killed them. Achille, tell me they’re dead!”
“Some of them are even hyphenating words incorrectly.”
“Oh, my God. They’re all still alive. Then the only one who was killed was the first one. The one I killed. You’ve lied to me all these years. You never killed anyone for me. You only killed for yourself. What kind of marriage is that?” She began tearing all of her blue notepaper into shreds.
“And, Estella, there’s something else I haven’t told you. Something you certainly should know. There were not one hundred and twelve errors. There were one hundred and thirteen. The one hundred and thirteenth was such an obvious one. How could you have missed it?”
“There were one hundred and twelve!” She began throwing the galley sheets at Achille. “You’re trying to destroy me. But no matter how hard you try, I’m on to you now. I know they’re alive. And I’ll get them. I’ll correct every last mistake.”
A nurse ran into the room. “Mrs. van Golk, what is it?”
“Get him out of here. He’s a liar. Get him out of here. It’s Wednesday. He’s made a mistake. He’s not supposed to be here. It’s Wednesday.”
“Please, Mr. van Golk.”
“They’re all alive. He didn’t kill them for me. They’re all still out there. I’ve got to stop them. I’ve got to get out of here.”
Two male attendants ran into the room and held Estella while the nurse injected her with a tranquilizer. Achille’s eyes filled with tears. He crumpled the note on which Estella had written KILL YOURSELF and dropped it to the floor.
“Get him out of here,” she shouted as he turned to leave. “It’s not Thursday.” Achille walked down the corridor. Frightened faces peered out from open doorways as Estella’s screams were heard.
“Monsieur.”
Achille had not seen the police approaching him. “What is it?”
“We must ask you to come with us at once. Scotland Yard has ordered your immediate return to London.”
“Indeed.” But there was no evidence, he thought. Estella was right, as always. There was no evidence. He had just destroyed the last of it.