I think my papa tried to drug me, when we were back in his suite at the Four Seasons. He called room service for coffee and stood by to make me drink some. I pretended to sip, and when the house telephone rang and he turned away to answer it, I poured the coffee onto the carpet.
“Good. Send her up.” My papa hung up. He seemed feverish again. He put his hand into his coat pocket and looked keenly at me. “You look sleepy. Go to bed now.”
Something was definitely up. What luck that Veek had frustrated his attempt to force me out of the country! I yawned and went to my room.
A knock came at the suite’s outer door. My papa went to answer it. I shut my own bedroom door, then eased it open a tiny bit. Voices came, becoming clearer as my papa returned to the suite’s lounge with his guest.
“I came because you sent men to question me. It’s late,” said a woman’s rich voice. “State your business.” Her accent was American, perhaps southern American?
“Madame Vulcaine, it concerns your kinsman—and—and mine,” he was saying with constraint. “M’sieur le Vicomte Montmorency. You perhaps knew him as Clarence de Turbin.”
“Indeed?” That voice gave nothing away. I risked a peek through the door crack and saw a middle-aged woman with a face like weathered bronze, gorgeously dressed in flamboyant African dress that made my father’s Savile Row suit fade to invisibility. Something in her expression made me jerk my head back, certain I had been seen.
Heart pounding, I lay my ear against the crack.
After a pause, the woman said, “You are keeping me from an important funeral.”
“Je regrette,” my papa said politely. I could hear the excitement trembling under his smoothness. “Perhaps this funeral is also the end of my own search. Who has died?”
“A kouzen,” she said, offhand. “He was much loved in my family. Every hour of delay dishonors him,” she added in a pointed tone.
“I would—it would be of great assistance to me, to my business, if I could have a tissue sample of your honored cousin.”
His guest drew in a hissing breath. I peeped. She looked shocked and dangerous. “That is impossible.”
My papa gave a light laugh. “Oh, no, no, you mistake my purpose. We do not practice vodou. I am French, of good family.” Ouch, Papa. “My need is for a sample of DNA—genetic material, you see. I am seeking to determine whether our joint relative Clarence de Turbin is living or dead. It is a matter of the most urgent to my family, to know if the head of our house lives, or if his dignities have at last passed to his heir.”
“His tissue sample will be dead, regardless.” I thought she was willfully misunderstanding him, perhaps taunting him. Not wise, I thought.
“Madame, who has died?” my papa demanded, as if his store of courtesy had burnt up in his madness.
“How should you know Jacob Pierre?” she said.
“Are you sure—did this man also—was he also called Jake? Was he born in the United States or in France? Is he the man who traveled so long with the Vicomte Montmorency?” My papa’s voice rose. “Or was it he himself who was the vicomte? Answer me!”
I peeped again. His hand was in his pocket again. The two of them stared one another down like a pair of angry swans.
“You have power,” my papa said at length.
“I have need of it,” Mme Vulcaine said. “When one hunts a creature of power, it is good to bear arms. You have some power of your own.”
My papa stood straight and proud. “It is the power of my birthplace.”
She grunted. Then she simply walked around him and out the door.