6

“That was a first for me,” I said, fluffing my pillow before lying back on it.

“What was?” Jean-Paul draped a leg over mine.

“Sex with a one-armed man.”

“Oh yes? Something you might consider again?”

“I might.” I kissed the side of his face. “I very well might.”

He laughed and pulled me against him. “What else is on the agenda for the day?”

“A shower, coffee, whatever Madame Gonsalves left in the kitchen for us to eat, and then down to the library. I am dying of curiosity.”

“I pray you aren’t dying of anything,” he said, disentangling himself from me and the sheets. “Don’t forget, someone is coming to install a security system this morning.”

I groaned, got to my feet, and found something clean to wear in the suitcase I had left open on the floor of Isabelle’s room the night before. “How does your shoulder feel this morning?”

“Better, much better.”

“I am very happy you didn’t re-break the bone when you hurled yourself into Bord.”

“I’ll be happy when this damn brace comes off,” he said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Back to the agenda: I would very much like to go by my house today. I need to get some clothes and pick up a laptop. But I also want you to look around the place and decide if it feels haunted or if it’s just too hideous for you to ever consider as a place to live.”

“I doubt it’s hideous,” I said, turning around to look at him. “Why did you say that?”

“One day, soon I hope, we need to decide on a place, or places, to land together. I assume we will always have two homes, but what will they be? Will you keep your house in California or find a pied-à-terre? We’ll be there often, of course, but how often will depend on where either of us is working. The same for France. Do we keep my house, this apartment, or do we start over and find something of our own? So much to consider. I have only one requirement, and that is, whatever we decide, we will end up in the same place most of the time.”

Jobs, families on two continents, friends, finances, houses full of stuff: so much to sort out. My head was spinning a bit, so I sat down on the bed beside him. He put his arm around me and none of that seemed to matter anymore. I looked up at his handsome, scarred face, and changed the subject. “How long will the workman be here?”

A little shrug: “Not very long. Once he has the cameras installed outside, all he has to do inside is connect the wires to a control panel he’ll put on the wall near the front door.”

“Where will the cameras be?”

“He’ll tie you into the existing street camera, and put up new cameras over this building’s outer door and your apartment door. You’ll be able to monitor all three from inside. The street-cam works through a Wi-Fi connection, but the cameras on this building will be hard-wired and connected to nothing except your control panel.”

“No one can hack them.”

“Exactly. You can come and go without putting on TV makeup because you won’t be on camera.”

“Good.” I took a deep breath. “Shower, food, camera guy, your house, library—in that order. Does that sound all right?”

“Perfect. I’ll take you to lunch at my favorite local.”

“It’s a date.” I gave him a last kiss and headed for the bathroom.

We just sat down to eat when the security camera installer arrived. As Jean-Paul had said, it didn’t take very long to drill a hole to connect a wall panel to the cameras the man had already installed outside. He was showing me how to toggle between cameras when our first test of the system knocked on my door. A tall, distinguished, angry-looking man stood on my doormat. With Jean-Paul and the installer as backup, I risked opening the door.

The man standing there seemed about to launch into a verbal fusillade, but stopped abruptly when he actually looked down and saw me. Scowling, he said, “Who—?”

“I believe that’s my question to you. Who are you?”

“I happen to live in the apartment downstairs. The formerly very quiet apartment downstairs. Whoever you are, I want you to know that I have no intention of putting up with any more racket from you people. I got my fill over the holidays, thank you very much. And now you’re at it again. I came in from the bakery to a cacophony of machinery shaking the very walls.”

I put out my hand. “You must be Barry Griffith, my new neighbor. Lovely to meet you. I am Maggie MacGowen, Isabelle’s daughter. This is my fiancé and your other landlord, Jean-Paul Bernard, and this is the workman who has installed new security cameras over the doors. I am profoundly sorry about the noise; we should have warned you. He’s just finished. Won’t you come in for some coffee? There are croissants, as well, but I’m afraid they’re yesterday’s.”

He took in a deep breath, thought for a moment, and then he smiled. “I am delighted that at last we meet, Madame MacGowen. And Bernard, my apology, sir. I didn’t see you there.”

Jean-Paul bobbed his head, accepting the apology. “Monsieur Griffith.”

Griffith held up a net shopping bag that smelled deliciously of fresh bread. “Thank you, yes, I would love coffee. It’s damn cold out and I am numb to the core. Keep yesterday’s croissants, I bear fresh brioche, still warm from the oven.”

I found cups and plates, spoons and knives in the sorts of places where they are usually stowed in a kitchen, and butter, jam and milk in the refrigerator, thanks to Madame Gonsalves. The men helped carry things out to the big dining table in the salon. I was becoming adept with the French coffee press, the cafetière, and showed off a bit with the plunger before pouring the coffee. Barry Griffith, a francophone Canadian from Montreal, turned out to be interesting, smart, and very funny. I had some questions for him about building etiquette, trash days, recycling, and things I needed to know to get along with our neighbors.

Each wing of the résidence functioned as a separate building. Jean-Paul told us that this was a matter of safety and efficiency, to prevent people, water, and fire from wandering where they shouldn’t. The only area accessible from all three wings was the basement, because utilities and storage were below. However, residents only had keys to the basement door that led into their own central hallway, and not for the doors up to the other two wings.

Mention of the basement brought up the issue of Philippe and his noisy friends over the holidays. According to Griffith, the boys had engaged in some sort of electronic tag or war game that they played in the basement and up and down the stairs that led past his doorway up to Isabelle’s, and even the two floors above. Griffith, on the ground floor, heard them below him, in the basement, at all hours of the day and night, slamming heavy doors, yelling, running, and generally making an unholy noise. He said that Philippe, who had always been such a nice youngster, seemed powerless to stop his friends, even though he could be heard pleading with them to quiet down. The last straw was on their last day there, when they could be heard arguing. Doors banged, feet pounded down the stairs, and then silence, blessed silence, reigned once more. Until the installer showed up with his drill that morning. Again, I apologized for not warning him.

When Jean-Paul went out to speak with the workman, I moved the conversation with Griffith to the topic of the library. He told me that Isabelle had invited him down several times. Turns out, he taught history at the Sorbonne, and though his area of expertise was twentieth-century Asia, he thoroughly appreciated the collection and cherished those invitations.

“Knowing what’s below my feet, I feel sometimes as if I’m living above a secret pirate cache, a treasure worth more than its weight in gold.”

“How much do you think it’s worth?” I asked.

He drew back, appalled. “You aren’t considering selling, are you?”

“Of course not,” I said. “But treasure inspires lust in the hearts of some men. After the gauntlet we’ve had to run during the last few days, I am wondering if maybe there isn’t a pirate with a shovel out there, just waiting to dig up this particular treasure.”

“A gauntlet, you say?”

“I don’t know how else to describe it,” I said, pouring him the last of the coffee. “But what do you think the collection downstairs might be worth on the open market?”

He shook his head. “There are all sorts of documents down there, some are priceless, some are little more than interesting relics. Value can only be set by the marketplace. If I were a wealthy man, and I am not, I would certainly make a bid on some of the ornate government records deposited here during the Russian Revolution, if only to save them from some oligarch buying them to frame and hang over his sofa.”

“Why did you say oligarch?” I asked.

“Did I?” He furrowed his brow and thought for a moment. “I suppose that came to me because some weeks ago, when I had a few colleagues in for drinks, a friend in medieval studies told me that a Russian man came into the department asking for information on how to gain access to the rue Jacob library. She knew he wasn’t an academic because he wore a custom-made suit and was followed by a complement of burly bodyguards. But she was intrigued enough by the story that she shared it with me, knowing that when she was in my apartment she was standing nearly on top of the library.”

“Did she get a name?”

“It wasn’t she who spoke with the man, but I’ll ask,” Griffith said. “Is it important?”

“Possibly.” I put the lid on the jam pot and covered the butter. “Mr. Griffith, do you know what happened to the convent that was here?”

He shrugged, a very French shrug. “Changing mores, probably. You know Saint Jérôme Émilian was originally a haven for bastard daughters? With better birth control, more opportunities for women no matter their origins, the extraordinary cost of keeping an official mistress; over time the convent lost its raison d’être. The stream of young illegitimae and the endowments attached to them dried up. From what Isabelle told me, by the end of the Second World War, the convent was only surviving on fumes and the random sale of furnishings.”

Jean-Paul closed the door behind the workman and asked Griffith and me to come and check out the new system. We fooled around with it, toggling between cameras, seeing cars spray slush as they passed by on rue Jacob. A cat ventured out onto the snow-covered courtyard. No one stood in the hallway outside Isabelle’s apartment.

“Could I be connected to this?” Griffith asked. Jean-Paul handed him the workman’s card and told him he would need to install a separate system, but it could be done.

“Maggie,” Jean-Paul said after a last look at the weather on the street outside the gates. “If we’re to get to Vaucresson for lunch, we should go soon.”

“Ah, Vaucresson. Such a lovely area,” Griffith said, clearly in no hurry to leave, though he did get back to his feet. “There’s a wonderful public garden. But of course, how silly of me; it must be covered in snow.”

Jean-Paul opened the door, we thanked Griffith for the brioche and the conversation, told him we would love to come down for drinks sometime very soon, good to meet you, nice to see you, and good-bye.

Griffith was nearly out the door, when he turned. “I haven’t seen a car in your space. How are you getting to Vaucresson?”

“Train,” Jean-Paul said.

“The weather is filthy. Let me drive you to the station. Don’t say no; I’m heading off to Amboise for lunch with friends, so I can drop you on the way.”

We were very happy to accept the offer. After we bundled up, we checked the street again on the new monitor to make sure that anyone we didn’t want to see wasn’t lurking outside the gate, and went downstairs to wait for Griffith.

Jean-Paul told me earlier that his home was an easy commute, as long as the trains were running. On that snowy Saturday morning, we sped west through the outer neighborhoods of Paris, to the white-shrouded suburbs. One village or town looked very much like the others: shops, houses, open space, followed by houses, shops, open space; like a string of beads along the rail line. Through a curtain of snow, I saw some men on a golf course, well bundled up, hitting bright orange balls across a pure white green.

“Dedicated golfers,” I said.

“Idiots,” he answered, with a fond smile.

The Vaucresson station looked like any suburban commuter station; we might as well have been in Connecticut. I don’t know what I expected, but I was a bit disappointed that it was so ordinary. Jean-Paul took my arm and we walked along the platform to the parking lot, where his black Mercedes waited, with motor running.

“How did you arrange that?” I asked when I saw it.

“I called Ari and asked him to meet us.”

“Ari?”

“My factotum,” he said. “He is caretaker, gardener, house cleaner, repairman, horse groom, and sometimes driver.”

“Where did you find such a person?”

“In a refugee camp. Ari was a medical doctor in Syria before the civil war. Lost everything. He’s a good man. But I have to warn you, he suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, so avoid making loud noises or sudden moves around him.”

Ari, a tall, slender man with close-cropped hair and a perpetual-looking five-o’clock shadow, climbed out to open the car’s back door for us. The two men greeted each other with an embrace and les bises. I was introduced, and offered a perfunctory, rather shy, handshake; he did not meet my eyes.

We drove through streets lined with naked trees. The houses I could see were large, usually set back from the road, shielded behind landscaping. Did I say big? Ari turned into a long graveled drive that ended at a stark, ultra-modern confection. Except for garage doors and narrow window slits, the two outer walls I could see were featureless slabs of sandstone that was disconcertingly very nearly the same color as my winter-white flesh. I had the feeling that if I stood nude against those walls I might disappear altogether, except that my curves and bumps might give me away against that flat surface. And in that weather, I’d turn blue and freeze my naked ass off, so this wasn’t something I actually contemplated doing.

Ari pushed a button, a garage door opened, and we drove into a comforting clutter of garden tools, a collection of bikes and ski gear, broken lamps, and drippy paint cans. After the stark exterior, the house’s warm interior was a surprise: rustic wooden floors, stair rails, and beams; comfortable-looking, practical furnishings. Essentially, the house was a giant triangle. Garages, offices, utility room, kitchen, and upstairs bedrooms were built along the right-angled back wall. The rest of the house was a single, vast open space with soaring ceilings. The hypotenuse of the triangle was a long glass wall, two stories tall, that opened out onto a large terraced garden with a swimming pool and a small guest house, where, Jean-Paul told me, Ari lived.

“Not what you expected?” Jean-Paul asked, wrapping his good arm around my waist as I stood at the edge of the space between the kitchen and the massive salon, taking it all in. The interior, if not cozy, was accessible, friendly, stunning. That much I expected. The scope of the wealth that made these casual comforts possible was the surprise.

“I didn’t know what to expect,” I said. “Except maybe stables.”

He pointed across the garden. “Go through that gate. The stables are at the riding club next door.”

Looking up at the beamed ceiling, I said, “We’ve never talked about money.”

“What’s to say?” he said, nuzzling his chin against my temple as he followed my gaze upward.

“Quite a lot, I expect.”

He shrugged, making light of what could be a very touchy subject. “We’ll need to sit down with a pencil before we take the next step, of course. But after I show you mine and you show me yours, what’s left to discuss? The tax and exchange issues involved in moving money back and forth between France and America can be difficult and costly. I believe that the ideal situation would be to use any American income and assets as much as possible when we are there, and French income and assets when we are here. What do you think?”

“In a perfect world, that would work. Especially if we had similar incomes. But we don’t. When we do get married, my widow’s pension from Mike goes away. If I don’t sign a new contract with the network, or if I decide to work in France, my American income will nearly disappear. If we need to depend on residuals from my old films and earnings from my meager investments to live there, we might end up sharing Casey’s dorm room.”

He laughed. “I hope, then, that she’s a better roommate than Luca was. Less smelly, anyway. But I have investments in America, so don’t worry, we won’t go hungry.”

“Jean-Paul, have you ever had to worry about money?”

“Please don’t hold it against me, but no. Early on, Marian and I had to keep a strict budget, and both of us had to work, but we never did without the essentials and a few luxuries. My parents went through the great depression and the world war, like yours, and vowed that their children would never be hungry or have holes in their shoes. They worked very hard to make that a reality. I understand their sacrifices, and I understand the toll the struggle took on them. And I fully realize the advantages I have had in life. If I have had any success, I give all credit to Maman and Papa.”

“Don’t forget,” I said. “They also gave you looks, brains, and charm.”

He laughed. “Are we talking about you, or about me?”

“Your family story could be mine, if you leave out surviving the Nazi Occupation.”

“If you mean your American family, yes.” He turned my chin to look up at him. “You still don’t think of your grandmother and your brother, and so on, as family, do you?”

“Not yet. I love Grand-mère, and I am fond of my uncle, my cousins, and Freddy, but I don’t know them well enough yet to think of them as family.”

“In time, maybe.” He kissed me. “Shall I give you the tour?”

I was relieved for the change in topic. Both topics, money and blood kin.

We went from room to room. They were all comfortably and practically furnished. Dom’s room was what one would expect for a teenager’s quarters, posters and books and computers, scuff marks on the walls, sports gear piled in corners. A framed portrait of his late mother sat on a dresser, with a school necktie draped over it. There were a couple of standard guest rooms. And then the master bedroom, the room Jean-Paul had shared with Marian. I felt a flutter in the pit of my stomach when he opened the door. But there were no ghosts. Marian’s side of the walk-in closet was empty. There were no half-used pots of face cream on the vanity or shrines to the dead wife on the bedside table. It was just a bedroom. A man’s bedroom.

Jean-Paul pulled out a familiar weekend bag and packed it with the efficiency of a frequent traveler while we talked about our horses and what to do with them. Mike and I had rescued two horses that we kept in a corral in the front yard of the house we had shared in the Santa Monica Mountains above Malibu. They were lovable if not beautiful nags, trail horses that we rode for fun. Jean-Paul belonged to a polo club and had kept a string of polo ponies, though he’d hardly had time to ride since I’d known him, and now had only two. What to do with all the beasts? I could not imagine old Red or Rover getting along with the polo crowd, but I thought that Jean-Paul’s ponies might be very happy ambling along our rugged mountain trails, assuming we would be in the U.S. often enough to ride them. That conversation got us nowhere, so we moved on to our offspring.

My Casey was at UCLA, a year from graduation, and then on to graduate or medical school somewhere. Jean-Paul’s son was in the first year of a two-year preparatory course before entering one of the Grandes Ècoles, the elite French colleges. Since fall, when Jean-Paul’s appointment to the consulate in Los Angeles ended and Dom and his father returned to France, Dom had lived with his maternal grandparents nearby in Versailles because Jean-Paul’s work required him to travel frequently. That is, our kids were grown, out of the nest. The issue of aging parents was more problematic, with many details to be worked out. Falling in love was the easy part. The issues that attached, not so much.

Jean-Paul took a coat of his own out of his closet and stuffed young Val Barkoff’s coat into a duffel. We stopped at his downstairs office for a laptop and a couple of files. He rolled back a Persian rug to reveal a safe built into the floor. He knelt, spun the combination lock, and pulled out some cash, a credit card, and a ring of labeled keys. The cash and the card went into a pocket, and everything else went into a leather messenger bag. On our way to the kitchen, where he retrieved a bottle of Port, he called Ari and told him we were leaving. There was a brief conversation about one of the horses and what to do with some produce in the refrigerator, some words of reassurance that Jean-Paul felt fine, and then he promised that we would be back soon.

“Ari worries,” Jean-Paul said as he put his phone into his cardigan pocket.

“Are you his family now?”

“His haven, certainly. Friend, yes, I hope. Family, no. Family sits down to dinner together, and they share the intimacies of life. Ari eats only halal food, so he cooks for himself in the guest house. He never drops in just to chat or watch a movie with me. I think I can best characterize our relationship as symbiotic—we need each other. I have watched him grow stronger with time. One day, he’ll be ready to go back out into the world. But for the time being, this arrangement works for both of us.”

Mentally, I added one more issue to resolve before we decided where we were going to live. And that was, Ari.

We ate lunch at a bustling bistro among the shops on the village’s main street. I was introduced to old friends, nodding acquaintances, and the proprietor who stopped by our table on the pretext of saying hello, but who actually wanted to know how Jean-Paul acquired his injuries. Jean-Paul’s simple answer to everyone’s questions, subtle and otherwise, was, “Slipped on the ice.” Some may have believed him.

After lunch, we followed Jean-Paul’s normal Saturday routine and shopped for groceries. His injuries earned him a bag of chocolate-dipped shortbread cookies from the sympathetic baker, an extra piece of cheese—excellent calcium for repairing bones—from the fromagère, and les bises from the butcher’s wife, though I suspected she was happy for the excuse, any excuse, to smooch him; I always was. A visit to the wine shop and the greengrocer finished the rounds. We stowed our purchases in the car, and headed back to Paris with Jean-Paul driving his Mercedes. The day was still frigid, but it had stopped snowing. The highway, the Autoroute de Normandie, was clear and traffic was light all the way into the city. We made the turn onto rue de l’Université twenty-five minutes after we pulled out of the Vaucresson car park.

Rue Jacob is a narrow, one-way street. Jean-Paul circled around the block to approach the apartment from the correct direction. As he turned off rue de Seine onto rue Jacob, we saw the flashing blue and red lights of an emergency vehicle and the usual gawkers gathered on the sidewalk. I craned up from my seat to gawk along with them as Jean-Paul slowed to a stop. There were an ambulance and two police cars, with various uniformed people milling about. Looking past the police cars, I could just see the top of the head of a person sitting in the open back doors of the ambulance, talking with the officials. As soon as I realized who it was, I was out of my seat belt, reaching for the door.

“Madame Gonsalves,” I said on my way out of the car. I ran. Jean-Paul was right behind me. In a few strides, he overtook me and got to the concierge before I did. She was conscious, alert, holding a towel to the back of her head while a paramedic examined her bloody knees and a policewoman questioned her. There was a puddle of fresh blood quickly freezing on the sidewalk.

“Monsieur Bernard,” she cried out, reaching a hand toward him, hurrying him. He sat beside her and wrapped his arm around her shoulders as he asked questions: what, who, how bad. Still holding the towel to the back of her head, she leaned against him and wept. After a great, heaving sigh, she composed herself, and blew her nose into the handkerchief Jean-Paul offered her.

“What happened?” Jean-Paul looked from her to the hovering policewoman.

“He came up behind me.” The concierge pointed at me. “It was him. That man you showed me. He hit me on the head and grabbed my handbag.”

The policewoman scowled at me. “Do you know who is she talking about?”

I pulled my camera out of my pocket, opened the shot of Sabri Qosja, and showed it to Madame Gonsalves. “This man?”

She started to nod, but winced and didn’t. “Yes, that man.”

I handed the camera to the officer. “His name is Sabri Qosja. Interpol is looking for him.”

The young woman still scowled, clearly doubting me. Jean-Paul took over, explaining who to call, and why she should. She wrote down the names and numbers he gave her, pulled out a phone and stepped away, still holding my camera. When she gestured for Jean-Paul to come, I took his seat next to the concierge.

“I am so sorry,” I said. “Tell me what happened.”

She took a breath and let it out again, a long sigh. “That guy, he came up behind me and hit me with something. Then he grabbed the handle of my handbag and cut it. But—” The shadow of a smile crossed her face.

“What?”

“Le trou du cul made a mistake.” Her smile broke open. “He looks at me and he thinks, Ha! Easy target, just a weak old woman. He thinks that once he knocks me down on the ground, I’m finished, too feeble to fight him. Stupid con wasn’t expecting it when I gave him one of these.” She made a fist and feigned punching upward with the heel of her hand. “Technique I learned in commando training. If I’d had a better angle, I would have killed him. Surprised the hell out of him, though. Hurt him enough to drop him to his knees. When he was down, moaning like a baby, I followed with a swift straight-on kick to the face. Heel of my shoe smashed bone: I heard the nose go, I felt it flatten. That blood over there on the sidewalk, chérie? It isn’t mine.”

“Jesus,” I said. She spat, landed a loogie right in the middle of Qosja’s spilled gore. Turning away, I said, “He hurt you.”

“Just a bump on the head. Skinned my knees going down.” She reached around behind her and retrieved her handbag with the broken strap. “Grand espèce de voyou! Couldn’t even take a handbag from an old woman.”

Again, I didn’t know all the words, but the meaning was crystal clear. Somewhere in Paris that afternoon, there was a mercenary, un grand espèce de voyou, walking around with a broken nose and probably two black eyes. Poor bastard, not that I had sympathy for him.

“What did he want from me?” she asked with a palm-up shrug. “I have nothing.”

“I think he wanted your keys,” I said. “He was hired by someone who has been trying to get access to the library in the basement.”

She looked at me for a moment, then burst out laughing as she pulled her key ring out of her coat pocket and held it in her fist with keys jutting out between her knuckles like a weapon. “Fool. No woman buries her keys in her handbag where she can’t get to them if she needs them.”

There was a brief argument between Madame Gonsalves and the paramedics who wanted to take her to the hospital for overnight observation. She had too much work to do, and besides, she didn’t want to miss her Saturday night TV programs. Jean-Paul came over, took her hand, told her he wouldn’t be able to sleep worrying about her if she went home without seeing a doctor first. Besides, he promised, she would be able to watch television from her hospital bed. When she was ready to come home, he told her, we would come for her in the car. With that promise, she let the paramedics strap her onto a gurney. With a last wave, she was on her way.

As we watched the ambulance leave, I turned to Jean-Paul. “Where did she go to commando school?”

He shrugged. “Somewhere in the Pays Basque, probably. Up in the mountains. I told you she was an old Basque separatist, yes?”

“You did.” He took my arm and we walked back to the car, still parked in the middle of the street, blocking traffic. “How many refugees have you taken in over the years, Jean-Paul?”

“I hadn’t thought of her as a refugee, but I suppose she is. When we were looking for a concierge who would be able to handle Isabelle when she was off her meds, or when her meds weren’t working, I thought, who better than a trained commando who can make a magnificent pot of porrusalda.”

“Is that the soup we ate last night?”

“It is.”

“I would hire her for that alone.”

“Bien sûr. And so I did. She had no practical work experience, and after she came out of prison, what was she to do?”

“Prison?”

“Her separatist unit chose an unfortunate target,” he said with a little Gallic shrug. “She did her time, the separatist issue has been resolved. Now Madame Gonsalves makes her soup and guards the gate, and there you have it.”

“Another symbiotic relationship, sir?”

He laughed as he put me into the car. “We do whatever works best for all, yes?”

“Yes, my peacemaker.”

We followed the ambulance to the hospital and waited in a hallway while Madame Gonsalves was put through a series of tests, and then we waited beside her bed for the doctor to come in with the results. Though she smiled and tried to show a brave face, I could see her quaking under the thin sheet draped over her body. Three different times, she told us hospitals were where people went to die. Fighting off street thugs scared her less. While we waited, a nurse came in and tucked a heated blanket tightly around her body. Pulling an arm free, our concierge joked that it was too soon for them to fit her for a shroud.

“Don’t worry,” Jean-Paul said, patting her shoulder. “When the time comes, we’ll wind you in something nicer than a hospital blanket.”

She giggled and the tension in the room disappeared.

An impossibly young doctor came in with a sheaf of diagnostic printouts. He rested a comforting hand on her leg and said, with a smile, “There is no skull fracture, no brain swelling, no symptoms of concussion. Any scalp injury that breaks the skin just bleeds like a son-of-a-bitch: there’s a big blood supply up there and not much cushioning. We turned off the spigot and sewed the scalp back together, so except for some tenderness, Madame, consider yourself repaired. I am more worried about damage to the knees right now; you took a bad fall. X rays showed us some arthritis. After you’re released, if the knees start to bother you more than usual, you’ll need to see your regular physician for follow-up treatment.”

“So I can go home?” she said, throwing back the blanket.

“Not so fast,” he said, taking a corner of the blanket and covering her again. “I’m a bit concerned about the swelling on your right knee. I want to watch it overnight, just to be sure.”

Madame Gonsalves turned to us, and, batting her eyes, said, “This handsome boy likes my knees. He wants to spend the night with them.”

“Of course I do, Madame,” the young doctor said with a chuckle. “But after seeing what you did to your attacker, I will keep a respectable distance.”

“You saw him? He’s here?” I said, getting to my feet. “Where?”

“Don’t worry,” the doctor said, smile suddenly gone. “He’s under guard.”

“Lucky for him,” I said. Jean-Paul had his phone out of his pocket and was punching numbers. “Where is the bastard?”

The doc, nonplussed, faltered over a few starts before he managed to say, “Patient privacy forbids— I’ve said too much already. My apology.”

I was trying to hear Jean-Paul’s end of his telephone conversation, but the doctor was between us, and Jean-Paul had turned his back. The call was brief. Jean-Paul gave me a little nod as he slipped the phone back into his pocket. Then he turned his attention back to Madame Gonsalves. With a reassuring hand on her shoulder, he asked the doctor when he thought she would be released.

“If all goes well, and I expect it will,” the doctor said, regaining his cheerful bedside manner, “Madame will probably go home some time tomorrow.”

Madame argued that she wanted to go home, now. She grumbled a bit about being in the same building as her attacker, failed to negotiate a suspended overnight sentence for herself, and in the end, picked up the television control, asked what was for dinner, and bid us a good night.

I slipped my hand around Jean-Paul’s elbow as we followed the doctor out of the room. In the hall, the men shook hands, the doctor promised to call if Madame needed anything or if there were complications during the night, we thanked him, wished him good night, and watched him walk down the hall toward the nurse’s station. We went in the opposite direction, toward the elevator.

“Who did you call?” I asked as Jean-Paul punched the down button. The door opened right away.

“A friend,” he said, waiting for me enter the car before him. That nebulous answer, yet again, was the wrong thing for him to say just then. I stuck my hand out to hold the elevator’s automatic doors open, balking, I suppose, until I got a little actual information from him. One look at my face and he understood he’d damn well better expand on his answer a bit; we’d had that conversation before. He put his head near mine, and quietly told me, “Sabri Qosja is downstairs, under guard, in a treatment bay. My friend with the city police has granted us permission to speak with the swine before he is formally booked.”

“A good friend to have,” I said, releasing the door and stepping inside the elevator. “Does he have a name?”

“Berg. David Berg.”

I had to hold my breath to keep from choking: David Berg was the Préfet of Police of Paris. The capital’s top cop. A man whose face had been on the news recently, addressing the public after a coordinated series of suicide bombings at a holiday concert created yet another round of public terror. By all accounts, he was well respected, a competent, calming figure.

As Jean-Paul pushed the button for the second floor, I asked, “Old friend from school?” because, of course, all his “friends” seemed to be old school friends.

With a smile, he leaned over and kissed me. “Bien sûr.”