THE PACKAGE WAS DELIVERED shortly after nine. Pascal Lamartine, running late for his meeting, signed for it, shook it, and put it down on the breakfast table. No urgency: he would open it later. Meanwhile, he was trying to do several things simultaneously—make coffee, pack, check his camera cases, and, most difficult of all, persuade his daughter, Marianne, to eat her breakfast egg.
Packages, to Pascal, came in two categories. If they were flat, they contained photographs and might be urgent; if they were not, then they were usually something unimportant, promotional materials sent out by a PR firm. His daughter, Marianne, aged seven, saw things differently. To her, parcels signified Christmas or birthdays; they signified pleasure. When Pascal had completed his packing, and made the coffee, he returned to the table to find Marianne had the parcel in her hand. The egg—unappetizing, Pascal had to admit, but then, he could not cook the simplest things—was being ignored.
Marianne examined the parcel. She fingered its string. She fixed her father with an expectant gaze.
“A present,” she said. “Look, Papa. Someone’s sent you a present. You should open it at once.”
Pascal smiled. He concentrated on the task of mixing a perfect café au lait, Marianne-style. The drink had to be milky and sweet. It had to be served in the traditional French way, in the green pottery bowl his mother had given Marianne, a bowl she adored, which had an orange china rooster perched on its rim. The bowl then had to be positioned on the table so the rooster faced Marianne. His daughter had a passion for finnicky detail that sometimes worried him. Pascal feared that it might be a by-product of his bitter divorce. He stirred in three sugar lumps, and passed the bowl across to her. He looked at it sadly. The bowl, three years old, slightly chipped, was a relic: His mother had been dead almost a year.
“I’m afraid it won’t be a present, darling,” he said, sitting down. “No one sends me presents anymore. No doubt it’s because I’m so very very old. …” He hunched his shoulders as he said this, and stooped his tall frame. He pulled a long, melancholy face, and attempted to convey extreme decrepitude. Marianne laughed.
“How old are you?” she said, still fingering the parcel.
“Thirty-five.” Pascal resisted the temptation briefly, then lit a cigarette. He sighed. “Thirty-six this spring. Ancient!”
Marianne assessed this. There was a tiny flicker in the eyes, a pursing of the lips. To her, Pascal realized, thirty-five must indeed sound very old. My father, Methuselah. He gave a small shrug: Some shadow passed at the back of his mind. To Marianne, age was a fact without corollaries or consequences. She was still too young to associate aging with sickness or with death.
“The egg’s a failure, isn’t it?” He smiled. “Don’t struggle with it. Eat the tartine instead.”
Marianne gave him a grateful look and took a bite of the crisp bread with its coating of strawberry jam. Jam at once adhered itself to chin, hand, tablecloth. Pascal reached across tenderly and transferred a morsel from her chin to the tip of her nose. Marianne giggled. She munched with a contented expression, then slid the parcel across to him.
“It might be a present,” she said seriously. “A nice present. You never know. Open it, Papa, please. Before we go.”
Pascal glanced at his watch. He had one hour in which to deliver Marianne back to her mother in the suburbs, brave the rush-hour traffic back into the center of Paris, get to a meeting with his editor at Paris Jour, and hand over the new batch of photographs. If he was not delayed, he could easily make it to De Gaulle Airport for the noon flight to London. He hesitated. They should have left his apartment ten minutes before. …
On the other hand, Marianne’s expensive and pathetic suitcase, the suitcase he had bought her himself, was already packed. The menagerie of teddy bears and rabbits, and the sad stuffed kangaroo without which she could not sleep, were all ready and waiting in the hall. He hated to disappoint her, and he could see the expectation in her eyes.
“Very well,” he said. “Let’s see what I have here.” He drew the parcel toward him. Now that he examined it more closely, it did look interesting—and unusual too, not the kind of package sent out by PRs. Brown paper, new, enclosing some kind of box. Light in weight. A neat parcel about six inches square. The string binding had been knotted at intervals, the knots sealed with red wax. He had not seen, let alone received, such a parcel in years. His name and address, he saw, had been printed by hand in capitals with precise care. He looked more closely, and then realized that the precision could be explained—a stencil had been used.
He was careful to betray no reaction, but thinking back afterward, he realized he had moved too quickly, scraping back his chair. Perhaps he paled—there must have been some hint of his feelings, and Marianne picked up on it. She had an only child’s thin-skinned sensitivity to nuance, a sixth sense for trouble that had been honed by years of parental arguments behind closed doors. Now, as he casually picked up the parcel and began to move away, her face clouded. She looked at him uncertainly.
“Papa, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing, darling. Nothing.” He kept his voice level. “I’ve just realized the time, that’s all. Run and get your coat, will you?”
She sat for a moment, watching him. She watched him leave the cigarette burning in the ashtray. She watched him carry the parcel through into the kitchen and place it on the stainless steel countertop. She watched him start to run the water in the sink. Then, suddenly obedient, she climbed down from her chair.
When he next looked around, she had fetched her coat and returned to the kitchen. She stood in the center of the large room, watching him, the light from the tall windows striking her hair. On her face was an expression Pascal had not seen for months, an expression he had promised himself he would never provoke again once the divorce was over: a pinched expression of confusion and guilt. Leaving the package, Pascal returned to her. He kissed the top of her head, put his arm around her, and began to steer her gently toward the front door. She stopped just inside it and looked up at him, her face pink with anxiety.
“Something’s wrong,” she said again. “Papa, what did I do?”
The question cut Pascal to the heart. He wondered if this was the fate of all children of divorced parents—to go through life blaming themselves for their parents’ failings.
“Nothing, darling,” he replied, catching her against him.
“I told you—we’re terribly late, and I just realized how late, that’s all. Listen, Marianne …” He opened the doorway onto the landing and edged her gently outside. “I’ll open that stupid package later, when I get back from London. And if it’s anything exciting, I’ll phone and tell you, I promise. On with the coat, that’s it. What have we here? One bear, one rabbit, one kangaroo—now, I have an idea. You run downstairs and wait for me there, will you do that? Wait right by the door, don’t go outside, and I’ll be down in a second. Papa just has to find a few papers, his airline ticket. …”
It was working. Marianne’s face had cleared. “Can I say hello to Madame Lavalle, like I did last time?”
Pascal smiled. He silently blessed an amiable concierge, who was devoted to his daughter. “Of course, darling. Introduce her to the animals, I bet she’d like that.”
Marianne nodded, and ran to the staircase. Pascal listened to the clatter of her shoes as she descended, the sound of a door opening, then Madame Lavalle’s voice.
“My goodness, and what have we here today? A rabbit. A bear and—Mon Dieu, what can this be? I never saw such an animal!”
“It’s a kangaroo, madame.” Marianne’s high voice floated up the stairwell. “And you see, look, she can keep her baby very close, safe in this little pouch. …”
Pascal closed the door. He wiped the sweat from his brow. He walked back into the kitchen and stood looking at that neat old-fashioned parcel, foursquare on the counter, the knots neatly sealed. It was five years since he had covered the PLO story, six since he had been in Northern Ireland. His work now might be very different, but the wariness, once necessarily acute, still remained.
Reaching across, he rested his hand on the parcel lightly. He ran his fingers across the surface of the paper, feeling for ridges, for the telltale presence of wire.
He could detect nothing. He turned the package so the edges of the wrapping paper faced him. The overlap was unsealed but taut. He hesitated, then picked up his sharpest kitchen knife. He prised the seals loose first. He cut the string in four places and eased it off.
Nothing. He was already beginning to feel foolish, to see his suspicions as exaggerated. Yet why a stenciled address? He looked at the stains of developing fluid on his fingernails. He frowned at the parcel, and thought of the photographs packed in his briefcase, awaiting delivery.
To obtain those pictures he had donned camouflage clothing and crawled five hundred yards through the outlying scrub of a Provençal estate. He had carried with him a 1200mm telephoto lens that weighed more than twenty pounds, and a special low-level tripod made to his specifications. Together these insured that he could take clear, unblurred portraits at a range of three hundred yards from his unsuspecting quarry while lying on his belly like a snake. Once upon a time he had been a war photographer. The lessons and techniques learned then were now applied in other ways. What was he now, he wondered, still looking at the parcel. A paparazzo—not a man worth injuring anymore, not someone worth the damage a letter bomb could inflict. He felt a second of self-loathing, a familiar shame. Then with a quick movement he unfolded the brown wrapping paper and eased the lid from the box.
Inside the foldings and interleavings of tissue there was no note, no accompanying card or message, just a crumpled black shape that he took at first to be a scrap of material.
He drew it out, and found to his surprise that the material was leather, the finest, softest black kid, and the object was a woman’s glove.
A left-handed glove, and brand-new—unworn, he thought at first. Then he noticed the faint creases across the palm, as if a hand had worn this glove, if briefly, and that hand had been tightly clenched. He examined it more closely. It was narrowly cut, made to fit a delicate hand. An evening glove. Against a woman’s arm, he estimated, this glove would encase from elbow to fingertips.
He stared at it, trying to decipher its message. Was it meant to be seductive or threatening? Was it a clue or a prank? He was about to toss it back in its box, when a lingering curiosity made him examine it more closely. He pressed it against the back of his hand and felt it slip easily against his skin as if it had been oiled. Then he raised it to his face, and sniffed.
The glove had a pungent and disturbing scent. He could detect the odor of a woman’s perfume, and beneath that, imperfectly masked by ambergris, civet, and damask, another, earthier smell. Fish, blood—something like that. Suddenly the supple glove disgusted him.
He threw it down. Late, he thought, checking his watch one more time; that damned parcel had delayed him. He grabbed his briefcase, his camera cases, and the small battered valise of inexpertly packed clothes. As he opened the door, his daughter’s voice floated up to him. A week until the next visiting day. He felt a surge of love and protectiveness so painfully sharp that for an instant it immobilized him.
He stood on the landing, staring out unseeingly at a view of roofscapes, a pale, drab leaden sky. Rain today, rain yesterday, rain the day before that: endless winter. Spring, he thought with a sudden and passionate longing; and there, for a brief second, he glimpsed it, even sensed it on his skin, all the springtimes of his boyhood, the optimism and elation that accompanied them. He could see and smell the fields, the vineyards, the oak woods of his childhood. Across the endless gold of the long afternoon he heard his mother call to him, and watched the river coil through the valley below as the light paled to the silver of spring evenings.
Now that house was sold and his mother was dead. It was years since the coming of spring had brought him any sense of hope or renewal.
Nostalgia was weak. He slammed the door on it. From below, his daughter called to him. Shouldering his cases, Pascal turned and ran down the stairs.