Rachel knew that when you extol the virtues of a city you love, you are supposed to mention aspects like its arresting monuments, its lush and well-groomed parks, its pleasing scents, and the beautiful way the light falls through the air. You are not supposed to wax lyrical about its public transportation system. But the fact was that although she did love all those other facets of Paris, she also deeply loved its métro. In Paris you were never more than a few steps away from a métro station, and on an unexpectedly chilly afternoon in late April that was nothing to dismiss lightly. The métro cars were warm and dry, and their doors had little handles that a rider flipped up and over in order to open them, an old-fashioned touch that never ceased to charm. As her train moved from the Saint-Paul station to Concorde; as she then walked the reassuringly identical white-brick passages of the Concorde station to change to a different line; and as she settled into her seat heading toward Notre-Dame-des-Champs and resumed her meditations, she was thankful for the métro all the while.
How did people do it? she wondered as she looked out the window of her carriage into the darkness of the tunnel. How did they manage to reconcile great moral complexity and ordinary life? In her own life, the worst thing that had happened was temporary poverty, the greatest moral conundrum the question of whether to keep the two hundred dollars she’d once found in an empty washing machine. What must it be like when the stakes were infinitely higher, when good and evil weren’t abstractions, but close at hand?
She tried to imagine Kiki’s experience, standing in a room with someone you knew had saved lives—a neighbor or someone you met at a party—someone who had made genuine moral decisions at a time when such decisions were dangerous. Or, less pleasant to imagine, standing in that same room with someone you suspected, or even knew, had done the opposite. If Kiki was right, in 1960s Paris there had been plenty of former profiteers and collaborators seated around dinner tables and taking up space at cocktail parties. How could you make idle chitchat with someone who you knew had benefitted from the Nazi occupation? Better for the soul, surely, to call people out and punish them accordingly.
But for what? she asked herself as she walked through the tunnels of Concorde station. Justice? As her shoes slapped against the black-painted cement, she thought of the ever more ancient Nazis still being unmasked, the old men being wheeled into courtrooms to face trial. As the accused aged—these days well into their nineties, and the witnesses not far behind—she had to admit to herself, with a certain amount of shame, that she didn’t see the point. What justice could be achieved by putting in jail for the few years left to him someone who had enjoyed seven decades of freedom and pleasure in the interim? What real justice had ever been achieved by jailing any Nazi, or even by executing one? What could balance the scale with the deaths of millions of people who were just as dead whether or not their murderers were alive? And since the scales could never be balanced, maybe the French choice of discretion and deliberate ignorance was a better way to move through life.
By this time, she was coming up from the Notre-Dame-des-Champs station. She stopped at the corner boulangerie to pick up some bread—only stale baguettes were left, but what could she expect if she bought at four in the afternoon?—and on a last-second whim, decided to get a bag of meringues too. She smiled apologetically at the woman behind the counter, who had to ring her up a second time. Then she gathered her bread, her meringues, and her shoulder bag and stepped out from the warm yeasty air into the chill of the late afternoon.
Thus burdened, she nonetheless managed to press the entry code on the panel next to her building’s door, push the door open with her shoulder, and step over the raised threshold into the inner courtyard. The mail had arrived, and she put down the shopping to collect it. Amid the pizza delivery flyers and bills in their blue metal mailbox, she saw a heavy cream envelope addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. Alan Field” in elaborately elegant calligraphy. She slit it open. An invitation to one of the many galas the financial community organized in support of various charities. These arrived on a regular basis—early in their marriage, Rachel had even served on the organizing committee for such a gala. As she remembered it, this mostly involved sitting around dining tables in gracious homes, discussing card stock weight and gift bags and who would be likely to buy the biggest table (and thus be named honoree, because in the strange world of charity galas, you paid to be honored). It was boring, but it was what you did if you were a young banker’s wife, trying to fit in.
And then, her drying bread on the shelf in front of her and her mail in hand, she was struck by a realization. She was a banker’s wife. And banker’s wives organized charity galas. If a banker’s wife wanted to meet with Antoinette Guipure to discuss making her brother a posthumous honoree at a gala, Antoinette Guipure would have no way of knowing that she’d stopped serving on organizing committees years before. And if a banker’s wife was honoring someone at a gala, it only made sense that she would need to gather a great deal of information about his life, his habits, his friends and colleagues in order to do the job well. Kiki was an old friend of the Sauveterre family—she had known Antoinette Guipure’s grandparents; she had lent her mother a lipstick. Old family friends could pave the way to meetings. And Kiki had said she was happy to help in any way she could.
“And she agreed to this?” On Rachel’s computer screen later that night, Alan’s face raised its eyebrows in disbelief.
“Yes.” In fact, Kiki had been delighted to do it. So mysterieux, so rusé—a little like a spy, eh? Infinitely more exciting than offering up her locks as sacrifices to Rachel’s picking skills. She would call Antoinette Guipure that very afternoon to offer her condolences and suggest a lovely way to memorialize her brother. Just an old family friend offering a thought.
When she told Alan this, he was skeptical. “It doesn’t sound like Kiki’s an old family friend. Maybe a passing acquaintance, two generations gone.”
“Oh, you know how those old money people are. They meet someone once, and as long as they’re the right class, they’re intimate friends for life.” She waved a dismissive hand.
But Alan went on. “I can’t see Antoinette Guipure falling for this. She graduated at the top of her class from Stanford School of Business, and she moved that company from start-up to profit in less than five years. She’s got a reputation as one of the most brilliant minds in major finance.”
“She doesn’t need to be stupid to entertain a suggestion from a family friend!” Rachel felt herself flushing. She said sulkily, “I thought it was a pretty good way to do some subtle investigating.”
Alan raised his eyebrows, but he didn’t respond. Instead, he said nothing for a long moment, then took a deep breath and began again. “A friend of my parents also just died.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. You should have told me sooner.”
“It’s okay—I didn’t know him. I wouldn’t even mention it except that his wife told my mother he died on a business trip to Paris, of all places. Just keeled over in his hotel room, apparently.”
“My God. Where?”
“Some hotel in the eighth.”
“Sauveterre’s headquarters is in the eighth!”
He gave a little sigh at the failure of his attempt to change the subject, then looked up into the camera. “You’re not going to like me saying this, sweet, but I don’t think you’ll find anything out at this meeting. It’s too soon. Not even two weeks after his death. They’re still going to be in shock. I’ve seen it in business after a CEO has died. People won’t be ready to talk. They’ll be busy trying to distract themselves, focusing on practicalities. You should go later. It’s going to be a wasted opportunity.”
“You may think that.” Rachel’s voice was cold. “I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.”