part0006

Havilah Gaie awakened to the voice of the man she liked. A lot . Not loved. It was too soon for all that. She still had an ex-fiancé back in Nashville, Tennessee to get over, Lucian Patrick, Dean of Astor University’s Law School, who was actually arriving in Paris in one day for a law conference. She was also a professor at Astor. But she had decided to take her one-year research sabbatical as far away from Nashville and Lucian Patrick as possible. She had chosen Paris, France as her refuge.

She was pretty sure Lucian still hoped that she hadn’t gotten over him despite his broken promises; that this Thierry Gasquet, whose voice had awakened her this morning, was just a passing French-Moroccan fancy fueled by her narrow escape from two murderous miscreants in the South of France just three months earlier. His repeated texts, calls, emails, and now this trek to Paris for an annual academic conference he had generally skipped and that she had usually attended fed her suspicions. But since she had belatedly discovered that she was a terrible reader of men, she wouldn’t allow herself to be certain of anything— most especially of what a man might be thinking or feeling.

No, I’m not sure at all. That’s what she was thinking after she’d answered her cellphone.

“Good morning, Havilah.”

Thierry’s deep voice sliced through the wireless network and warmed her in interesting places. It was the kind of voice that started ‘over-the-telephone’ love affairs— calm yet commanding— particularly if you had accidentally dialed the wrong number. She was having a serious man-crush moment where flirting and coy banter were de rigueur in anticipation of a Sunday kind of love.

“Back at you,” she whispered hoarsely into the receiver. Her morning voice was still catching on her vocal cords.

She rose from her bed and searched out the remote to open the automated shutters. As the aluminum rungs rose one by one, the floor to ceiling windows let in a flood of light. She squinted briefly. She then held her cellphone in one hand, as she turned the multiple locks to her front door and crossed the threshold onto a small walkway that opened up onto a large, Brazilian wood terrace where she had clear views of the Eiffel Tower. The wood planks were warm beneath her bare feet. A balmy breeze caused the pink and red geraniums in terra cotta planters to shed loose petals. The dark, iron lattice tower was free of tourists packed in its elevators. The tours usually started around 9ish. The French lived on normalement time. And besides, the tourist hoopla would definitely not begin before the workaday Parisian had had his or her petit dejeuner or could enjoy a modicum of what the French called une grasse matinée, or sleep-in, on a Sunday.

“What time is it? I have to be at the studio by 11. I should never have let you talk me into going to the Caveau de la Huchette last night.”

She had danced to jazz and blues until 2 am that morning. It was hot and crowded, touristy, but so much fun. They had walked to the club from Thierry’s apartment on Île Saint Louis, passing by Charlemagne’s statue and Hugo’s gargoyles at the Notre Dame Cathedral on Île de la Cité.

“Seven-thirty. I’ll bring you breakfast,” he volunteered enticingly. “Your favorite pain perdu with confiture and chausson aux pommes from Pierre Hermé.”

Conceptually, she understood why French toast was called “lost bread,” which was really leftover, old bread. But the way the bakeries prepared it in France, it was a pastry: flaky, sturdy, layered pieces held together by a delicious jam and topped with powdered sugar. Just thinking about the warm, buttery apple turnovers called chaussons made her mouth water. Her stomach growled loudly. She pressed her hand to her abdomen, hoping that Thierry hadn’t heard the visceral response her stomach had at the mention of food. He knew she was a gourmand , a woman who never passed up a well-prepared meal. Yet the early morning roar of a hunger pang was slightly embarrassing.

“They don’t open until ten.” She mock-pouted into the phone.

“That just means you want to see me sooner. Poilâne’s bakery it is. They open at 7:30.”

“It would be rather rude of me to turn down an offer of freshly baked breakfast,” Havilah flirted back. She imagined him with those threads of gold in his chestnut hair and sea green eyes.

In boy-shorts pajama bottoms and a skimpy white t-shirt on which were screen-printed women of varying hues, hair colors, and textures, and the words, Femmes et Fatales , she shivered in surprise when her foot touched the cool wrought iron gates that partially enclosed the terrace.

“I’ll be chez toi in twenty minutes.” He clicked off before she could protest.

They’d been seeing each other since the early summer. Each time they met, no matter how late or where, the rendezvous always ended with their retreating to separate apartments or hotel rooms. After her failed attempt at seducing him in Cassis, France, she was admittedly a little embarrassed and had returned happily to her pledge of celibacy. Nine months and counting , she thought. The truth was, that when Thierry Gasquet had asked her back in June in the wee hours of the morning in a hotel room housed in a building sculpted from iridescent white rocks above the Mediterranean Sea, if making love to him was really what she wanted, she knew then that she was being supremely impulsive. She, who was rarely ever impulsive for fear of losing self-control, who abhorred the idea of being a damsel in distress even for a moment, was swept up in the idea of a French romance after the adrenaline rush of a death-defying getaway.

Hers was a story replete with clever villains, an irresistibly handsome, cosmopolitan, and witty hero of exotic origins, a plucky and resourceful heroine— her imagined self— and a postcard-like Provençal village whose harbor led to the Mediterranean Sea. Add rolling lavender fields, the Provence sun, and sparkling rosé wine— then shake and stir.

To complete the story’s arc, she thought a whirl in the bed with the French agent sent to protect her was a fitting end. The last part required little prodding, leastwise because Thierry Gasquet was hands down fine with his tall, lean muscular frame, olive-toned skinned, and green eyes. But that was not to be. And then he didn’t call. For four days . She bit down on her plump bottom lip and pulled pensively at a long, red-gold curl. And then he showed up at her apartment. And then she prudently decided that intimacy versus sex was much better suited for the ‘getting to know you phase’.

The sun’s rays streaked across her coffee-with-a-spoonful-of-milk-colored face. She turned back towards the apartment’s doors. After she washed her face and brushed her teeth, she began making the French press coffee that she couldn’t drink because of caffeine intolerance and the ginger and lemon verbena tea that she could. Une infusion , the French called the herbal concoction.

As she reached into the refrigerator for the orange juice, she was thinking that she didn’t know how much longer they could hold out. There had been a lot of kissing, cuddling, handholding, and hugging. Their attraction was at a fever pitch, cooled only temporarily by her frequent departures to do research on immigration, citizenship, and statelessness in Europe and the United Kingdom. Yet, when she traveled to Rome, Italy, he insisted on joining her and even suggested they travel together to Positano. She had relented. During her two weeks in Oxford, England, he coaxed her to Bath where, between sips of tea, he read her excerpts from Austen’s Persuasion while feeding her a toasted Sally Lunn bun with lemon curd at the historic eating house of the same name. Thierry Gasquet was an incurable romantic , her too-practical-self thought.

She could smell the coffee percolating. The electric teakettle whistled. She opened her laptop and arranged her workspace on the round dark wood dining table before hurrying to the kitchen to prepare the tea with a slice of lemon and a teaspoonful of honey. Once seated, her hands tapped over the keys, opening pages to catch up on the news before actually beginning to tweak her presentation on immigration for the conference and reread her prep notes for her guest appearance later that morning on Les Râleurs , or The Complainers , the French equivalent of the defunct American television program Politically Incorrect . Its French host, Jérémie Dacian, like Bill Maher, was funny, irreverent, and left of center politically. She had been invited to present the American perspective on all things French.

The Huffington Post headline flashed: “Right wing Talking Head Found in the Seine.”

“C’est impossible !” Havilah said aloud. She was stupefied. “Frédéric Lemieux’s been murdered?”

She pushed the teacup away and continued moving from one online news site to another in disbelief. She turned on the television in the salon and listened intently.

She wondered if anyone from Thierry’s agency had been protecting Lemieux. Thierry Gasquet was an agent with an elite division of the French National Police that protected high value personalities, the Service de Protection des Hautes Personnalités . SPHP. They were the chicly dressed men in black. She called him and pounced before he could greet her with, “Allô oui ?”

“Did you know Frédéric Lemieux was fished out of the Seine early this morning?”

“Havilah,” he said calmly, “I’ll see you in ten minutes.”

“Wait! No, wait!”

He was gone. He was obviously already on a call. She wondered how long he had known. Before or after he called her. He was impossibly inscrutable.

Havilah had always despised Frédéric Lemieux. His wild, wiry white hair matched up perfectly with his outlandish opinions. He would have seemed a likely candidate for SPHP protection given his connection to the Élysée Palace, the French president’s residence. Lemieux was a râleur par excellence. He railed against Muslims praying, mosques in Paris, women who wore the hijab , immigrants, mostly from North and West Africa, who resisted, he argued, assimilating into Frenchness, and who also happened to be sucking the French republic dry, from his perspective, with their dependence on social services. These were the criminals, the thugs, the terrorists in waiting, the polygamists, the Islamists, the anti-assimilationists, the residents who lived mostly in and around the 19th and 20th arrondissements of Paris and in the outer-cities, or poor suburbs, that ringed the capital city.

In a Europe in the midst of a global economic meltdown and continued high unemployment and underemployment, Lemieux’s rhetoric, at least according to the latest French opinion polls, was becoming increasingly mainstream. His scholarly mien, pitch perfect delivery in the most tediously grammatically correct French earned him weekly newspaper editorials, an eponymous television show, millions of followers on le Twitter, and a seat at the French president’s— Nicolas Sarkozy— political table. Indeed, many believed Lemieux had coached Sarkozy in his far rightward lurch. He’d claimed he belonged to no political party, but he frequently counseled the OFS, the Organisation des Français de Souche , a far right wing political party supposedly composed of “purebred, native-born, non-immigrant French” as opposed to those French with ethnic or immigrant origins. The OFS had gained more and more seats in political offices around France and in the European Parliament.

Havilah had found herself on Lemieux’s show just last weekend. Between his barking and braying, spittle landed on her chin. Her spirited pushback earned her multiple invites on other querulous televised formats. She was popularly referred to as L’Américaine . It was all a ratings boondoggle. She played the left-wing American intellectual far too tolerant of multiculturalism, micro-communities, and hyphenated identities to his irascible, wise statesman advocating one-culture-one nation, xenophobic French nationalism. And of course, he began his rebuttal with, “Les Américains ne sont pas de tout bien civilisés. Mais le problème vachement maintenant, ce sont aussi les immigrés, les barbares …. Uncivilized Americans… blah, blah … our real problem is we also have too many barbarous immigrants.” Goodness , she sighed, thinking about Lemieux and his finger-wagging.

His remains were found floating in the Seine in the wee hours of the morning, the reporter breathlessly announced on her television screen.

French and American media outlets singled out the Frères Beurs-Blacks as responsible for the curmudgeonly Frenchman’s demise. Her head snapped to attention. Not for one second did anyone contemplate Lemieux’s death as a suicide. FBB’s organization members were primarily French citizens descended from North and West African immigrants. The radical group made up of French Blacks and beurs (slang for French citizens of North African origin), had not claimed responsibility for Lemieux’s death as yet. The media are playing a very dangerous and unscrupulous blame game , she huffed.

Havilah continued clicking pages, each detailing Lemieux’s last days. A series of interviews. A dinner with likeminded intellectuals at Prunier in the sixteenth arrondissement. There must have been a lot of bloviating in that restaurant last evening , she sneered, blowing on the still scalding tea. She reflexively snatched her index finger from the cup’s hot exterior and placed it on the thick white porcelain handle.

Lemieux ended the evening at a sex club, according to one American outlet. Between the live feed from the television and laptop, her apartment filled with a cacophony of French and American voices. The respected French news outlets didn’t find such details as shocking and titillating as their prim American counterparts; hence their coverage of l’affaire Lemieux , as the murder had been dubbed, barely mentioned the underground sex club near Les Halles, a large complex of shops and restaurants in the first arrondissement. Havilah wrinkled her nose, though she tried her level best not to be a priggish American.

She’d accidentally found herself in one of those clubs with two French male companions late one evening during her junior year abroad. She had met the one, Alain, as she waited for her roommate, Tessa, in the glass-enclosed lobby of their apartment building in the chichi sixteenth arrondissement. Alain had spied her from his outsized kitchen window across the street. He came rushing over to tell her she was exotic and beautiful and invited her to a party at his apartment. His tricked out flat was a far cry from Madame d’Aumont’s Old World chintz and prints digs. The two Americans had been assigned to Madame d’Aumont as part of their French homestay experience.

The Americans were the party’s highlight. Their butchering of the French language especially charmed the French guests. Afterwards, Alain and Henri, a wealthy businessman who owned a home in Versaille, took her and Tessa everywhere in Paris in their shiny luxury cars, including high-end restaurants. Régine. The Élysée Matignon. Both exclusive, members-only clubs where a bottle of spirits, of which the Frenchmen drank amply, ran upwards of 2000 francs. This was before the arrival of the euro. And Havilah and Tessa were just young enough to be very impressed.

She had assumed this latest cave-like, smoky club blaring American music was no different. Until around 1 a.m. As she danced, a woman dropped her red dress and began twirling about nude. Havilah bolted from the dance floor in search of her companions, only to find them in a corner with a gaggle of onlookers watching a woman perform fellatio on another patron.

She might have been free, black, and twenty-one in Paris, but she was thoroughly shocked by it all. She represented that most repressed of America’s citizenry— a New Englander descended from an affluent family who’d been property owners in Rhode Island and Massachusetts as early as the mid-eighteenth century because of the not so repressed slaveholding Obadiah Scholl’s hanky-panky with her great, great, great, great enslaved grandmother, Hannah. Hers was the cotillion and debutante ball class, the tweed and plaid patrician set, who taught thrift and hard work as values while still managing to go yachting off the coast of Cape Cod and golfing at the Newport Country Club— once they accepted black members, of course.

Havilah made a loud fuss in English until her companions dragged themselves away from the sex show. Each one shamelessly blamed the other for selecting the club. There had been lots of expensive dinners, clubs, and cafés over the course of a few months. She was naïve and impressed by their gallantry, their patience, and seeming expectations of nothing in return. Only later, upon exiting the club, had she realized that the outing was a warm-up to an Eiffel Tower in which she would have been the base and they the tower. To their credit, they took her directly home as she yipped and yapped accusatorily. They continued to apologize even after she slammed the passenger door of the Mercedes hard and turned on her heel, fleeing to the bourgeois shelter of Madame’s chintz-and-prints wallpapered apartment.

The swank dinners and outings abruptly stopped, as they never called upon her and Tessa again— which was too bad because Havilah had had to go back to eating baguettes filled with tomato and camembert for lunch and sometimes dinner when the Madame didn’t cook. She chuckled softly at the memory, her curls lightly shaking. I was terrible at reading men even then.

She scanned the webpages, thinking none too kindly that the pervy Frédéric Lemieux was now probably dead because of his beliefs. His body was found under the Pont Neuf, the oldest bridge on Paris’s Seine, though its name translates ironically into “New Bridge.”

Thierry tapped on the orange steel door. It was then that she remembered that he had the codes to the multiple doors that separated her top floor apartment from Rue Notre Dame des Champs. She had not given him a key, though he had offered her one to his apartment. When she greeted him at the door, he looked at her attire appreciatively and kissed her long and softly on the lips, which had a lightning-and-thunderbolt effect on the rest of her body. He smelled good and he looked even better. Such was her distraction that she had even forgotten about Lemieux.

“It’s tense in Paris,” he said as he closed the door behind him and handed her a bag of still warm pastries and a baguette, and an assortment of fresh fruit he had obviously picked up from one of the outdoor markets.

She nodded. She knew he meant that she needed to be particularly mindful of what she said during her appearance on Les Râleurs. Fear, anti-immigrant rhetoric, denunciations of Islam, and accusations of terrorism would inevitably intensify.

She went to the kitchen to pour him a cup of coffee. Thierry pressed the volume button down on her computer; they both now stared intently at the television. The French journalist warned viewers about graphic photographs.

Lemieux’s ghoulish white and gray face appeared before the next photo flashed. The announcer continued, explaining the cause of death as a homicide by drowning. Yet a large amount of barbiturates had been found in the right-winger’s system.

Drugged and drowned. Havilah wondered why whoever was responsible hadn’t simply overdosed him instead of hauling him to the Seine. It seemed a less risky proposition. She shook her head as the journalist continued to babble on rapidly in French. It dawned her then that the killing and the discovery of the body were meant to be spectacular. The death could not be interpreted as accidental. It was purposeful and deliberate and showy.

Lemieux’s scrawny, waterlogged frame now filled up the screen. She gasped audibly. A wood board had been tied about his neck and stomach. Spray painted in black were the words: Menteur . Vérité . Immigré .