An Unexpected Guest (24 page)

The first detective drove. They raced along the Rue de Rivoli, and for the second time in twenty-four hours she felt herself drawn towards the centrifuge of the Place de la Concorde. He turned his car up the Champs Elysées. The two men sat up front while she sat in the back, like a criminal. Their heads from the back looked worn, as though they’d rubbed and rubbed against car headrests. The car smelled of stale cigarettes and fear. There was junk in the backseat: mail, newspapers, empty Vittel water bottles.

She looked at her watch. 2:00 a.m. She was tired, but she had no desire to sleep. On the streets, there were still people walking. She pulled herself to the edge of the car seat and stared out the window. Normal people going home from a night of revelry.

She sat in darkness on the edge of the hotel bed and waited for morning to come to Dublin. With the first light, she stood and went to the window. She tugged on a strand of her hair, pulling it out of the disheveled braid that crossed her shoulder. There was a man weaving his way down the street, a woman sweeping a doorway. The air felt damp, cold, in the hotel room. She drew her arms around herself. She couldn’t imagine that anyone could do what she had just done. She didn’t know how people like Niall, and now her, existed. He’d said bringing the money over would help people, but what had he meant? Help people do what? Was this money really going to help someone buy a First Communion dress for his daughter? Or was it to stain someone else’s dress with blood? She wished Niall had never shown her the contents of that duffel. She wished she had never seen the bills piled up so tightly within it. She wished they were back still combing the sands of the Atlantic while she pretended they were on their honeymoon. And still she wanted Niall with her. Her longing for him was so visceral that she had to sit back down on the bed. She wrapped her arms around herself.

The first time she saw him he was standing on a stone wall. Forever after, she would have the impression he was taller. He was wearing corduroy pants so threadbare she could see the white knobs of his kneecaps through them. He…

Clare’s head knocked against the car window. She sat back and tightened her seat belt as the detective swerved around a double-parked car. They were approaching the Arc de Triomphe. Clare tried to return to her memory, but the image of Niall’s face slipped from her, there but out of reach, like a fish in lake water.

Instead, she saw Jamie’s flushed cheeks, his lips swollen with sleep, her sweater wrapped close around him. She saw his face earlier in the evening as he sat on her bed while she dressed for dinner.

“Madame. Why didn’t you wait to come in the morning?” the detective behind the steering wheel asked her. He was viewing her through the rearview mirror.

In the morning, after the sun had risen, she would be en route to London with Jamie, to speak with the headmaster of Barrow before the weekend was upon them, if the police allowed her to leave Paris. Jamie was within his rights to dissent, but the method had been all wrong, and, just as he’d said, it wasn’t right one person take all the blame. Evasion wasn’t the same thing as absolution. She’d needed twenty-five years of silence and a fifteen-year-old son to make her see this, and she wasn’t going to allow Jamie to make the same mistakes. She would not let this episode become a dark package shoved to the back of his dresser. And she wasn’t going to leave him to return right back to it. If he believed what he had done was justified in some way, he needed to argue his side before facing his punishment. And then he needed to move on.

But she couldn’t leave Paris until she had finished with the police
.
Not without being sure the man they’d detained was guilty. What if she had not only refused to help Niall but had set herself to stopping him? She couldn’t let another man’s life be wasted because of her cowardice.

She shook her head. “Morning would be too late.”

The detective looked at her again through the rearview mirror. He raised an eyebrow. “Why did you not come earlier?”

She shrugged. She didn’t need to explain to him.

The two men conferred. The one in the passenger seat craned his head around to look at her. He wrinkled his brow and scratched his head.
“Vous ne voulez pas téléphoner à quelqu’un à l’Ambassade?”

She shook her head. No, she did not wish to call anyone at the embassy. They’d know all about this soon enough.

The men exchanged glances.

They wove through barren side streets, empty of life or sound, warrens of shadow. They stopped for traffic lights, or didn’t. They pulled up by a stolid fortresslike stone building with none of the glamour or grandeur of the central police station on the Ile de la Cité, though at least as many French flags flew before it. A no-nonsense, double-jointed metal door guarded the entrance. What the gates to Hell would really look like, she thought to herself. No Thinker, no Adam and Eve. No embellishment. She knew of this place. During the German occupation of Paris, it was used by the Gestapo for questioning prisoners. The Ministry of the Interior now had offices on this block.

The second detective slunk out of the car and opened the gate. She and the detective behind the steering wheel drove over cobblestones and through a shadowy archway. He pulled up in front of a group of buildings, got out, and stood there in the night, waiting.

She slid from the backseat.

The second detective joined them on the cobblestones.
“Par ici,”
he said, gesturing towards a door. There was a strange moment while they hesitated in the night, all unsure of the protocol. She was a female, a well-dressed and blond one at that, and a diplomat’s wife. A person of a certain importance. But she was a troublemaker. She stepped forward, leading them, leading herself. Now they followed her. The first detective reached out and opened the door for her. She passed through. They registered her with a clerk, who nodded his head to her but then took her cell phone, led her into an empty room, and asked her to wait. They left her alone with a long solid-wood desk, several folding chairs, not much else. Dustlets floated through the air around her like a clock with no sense of time. She didn’t bother to check her watch again. Eventually the detectives returned, led by a third man, more erect in bearing than the first two but with the air of having recently been awoken.

“Madame,”
he said. He stretched out a hand to shake hers.

“Commandant,”
she said, accepting it.

“Merci d’être venue.”

He spread a rack of photographs of different men in front of her. She felt a wave of exhaustion buffet her body. This day had been too long. She hesitated, one image swimming before her. Her Turk no longer wore the cheap leather jacket, and his face appeared bruised, or maybe it was just the photo’s lighting. Gone was that gentle expression when he told her about his wife’s homemade yogurt. Still, the photo seemed to be him. She brushed it lightly. The
commandant
asked her to consider again.

“C’est difficile avec une photo,”
she said.

“Il faut être sûr.”

She nodded and thought for a moment. The newscaster had said the suspect had been photo-identified by the witness to the assassination.
“Je veux le voir. Le prisonnier. En personne.”

The commandant considered her. He turned and spoke sharply to one of the detectives.
“Reveillez-le.”

They would rouse the prisoner. He was in a holding cell within the bowels of the building, awaiting the morning for further interrogation. Which they would want to avoid if they had the wrong man. Again—what a terrible embarrassment this would be for the French police services if the material proof she’d promised proved this to be the case. Even worse if in the meantime they’d mistreated the man they’d picked up. They’d been proud of the speed and efficacy of their forces; this man, the commandant, would have to step forth and admit to their error. His face, like hers, would be all over the newspapers.

She considered the moons on her fingernails, the shine of her engagement diamond, the blank space on the stretch of her hand where the emerald had sparkled and shone such a short while ago. They’d both walked away bearing their own responsibilities—no, she couldn’t go backwards. She couldn’t make what she’d done disappear. That would always be with her. But she could go forward. She no longer blamed Niall for anything.

“S’il vous plaît,”
the commandant said.

A part of her hoped against hope that their Turk would be another Turk that looked just like hers. Perhaps the news stations had mixed up her Turk and the police’s Turk’s photos? The man in this photo looked so faded, so crumpled, it was impossible to focus on him. Or maybe it was her exhaustion. She would peek at the real living body and shake her head. She would go home and slide into bed beside Edward and close her eyes against this whole day. She would not sign an affidavit; they would not file her report. No one would be the wiser for it. The British Embassy, the permanent under-secretary would never hear of it.

She shook her head. She and Edward would move to Dublin or not; it made no difference. And whether Niall was
alive,
whether he would return to the island he loved so much that he was willing to risk all for it, whether he would be forgiven his debt or not and, if he was lucky, meld back into the crowd, another fair-skinned freckled man nearing fifty, scraping by with whatever he could pull together—all of this made no difference to right now. She’d made her decision. And she was sure it was the correct one.

The room spun in front of her. She was so tired.

The second of the detectives returned. She rose and followed him and the commandant along yet another hall and down a set of stairs.

Reaching the bottom, the commandant slowed his step.
“C’était courageuse d’être venue,”
he said.

The numerous headlines and photographs and, after, the years of Internet traces. Every time anyone Googled her name: her photo, the Turk’s photo, little head shots side by side. Words underneath morphed into whatever shape the public wished to make it. What this might mean for Edward’s career. The boys’ friends, their classmates, their teachers staring at them, whispering as they passed:
His mother was the one that stepped forward for that terrorist.

Her, the detective’s, and the commandant’s footsteps slapped rather than echoed through the next hallway. She felt they must be underground, with nothing but earth beneath them, but she’d lost all bearing.

They reached a doorway, and the commandant stopped.
“Mais pourquoi vous n’êtes pas venues plus tôt? Pourquoi vous avez attendu pour minuit?”
He laid his hand on the doorknob and waited for her to explain. What was she to tell him? That she hadn’t come earlier because she was preoccupied with organizing a dinner party? That she’d waited to bid Niall good-bye, to make sure he could leave Paris without being followed, in case she would now be watched? That she might not have come at all had she not learned that her own son seemed close to repeating her own errors?

“Je suis venue,”
she said. That she had come had to be enough.

“Madame Moorhouse,” he said, suddenly in English. “You understand that this is a bad man. Even if he is not the one to do this murder today, this is still a bad man.”

“Because he belongs to a nationalist organization?”

“It has been associated with terrorist acts.”

“Is there any proof that
he
has?”

“Does that matter?”

“Maybe. Does he still?”

“Still?”

“Belong to this organization? Is he still active in it? And if not, was it involved in terrorist acts when he belonged to it?”

The detective shrugged. “Does this matter either?”

He opened a small window in the door.

She looked at the prisoner lying slumped over a cot. He looked yellower, but his breathing was slightly less heavy.

“He is ill?” she said to the detective. “He is on medication?”

“Yes,” he said, shrugging. “He had
une ordonnance
in his jacket pocket.”

“C’est lui.”

She withdrew the Turk’s crumpled map from her sweater pocket, with the name of the doctor scrawled on it. She pointed to it

“He was on his way to see this doctor. Here is the name and number,” she said. “It should correspond to the prescription, and if so, you will have a corroborating witness. That will make two witnesses in his defense to one against him. Contact him.” She paused, seeing the commandant’s hesitation. “This is the writing of the man I encountered in the street; you can easily check it against your prisoner’s. I got the map from him. It probably has his DNA on it as well. He was sweating so heavily, he probably sweated right onto the paper. You can check that against your prisoner as well.”

The commandant frowned. He took the paper from her. “Are you sure?” he said, giving her one last chance to turn away from her responsibility.

So little, in the end, was black and white. Perhaps the only thing was humaneness—the innate human response, the thing that made prison guards light a cigarette for a condemned murderer.
“Monsieur le Commandant,”
she said as he closed the door to the cell, “don’t you see? If you keep the wrong man, no matter what he may have once done, all you achieve is that someone is punished for what he didn’t do and the one who shouldn’t goes free.”

T
he commandant brought her back to the room in which she had waited. He handed her a pen. She accepted it. He laid an affidavit on the desk. She signed it. He nodded. He led her out to the foyer. A policeman handed her her cell phone, and she cradled it in her hand. It felt strangely warm, and she thought of how just pressing a few buttons would connect her directly to Edward and Jamie. The original detective, the one with so many rings around his tired eyes, reappeared, the lines in his face looking even deeper. The commandant explained Clare’s testimony.

“I shall drive you,” the detective said.

“No, that’s all right, thank you. Perhaps you could call me a taxi.”

He and the commandant nodded. There would be enough excitement surrounding her in the upcoming days without her now emerging from an unmarked car in the wee hours of the morning in front of the Residence. The concierges would have something to gossip about after all.

“Merci, Madame Moorhouse,”
the commandant said, extending a hand to be shaken.

“Merci, Monsieur le Commandant,”
she replied, accepting his hand.

The detective led her out. They trod across the cobblestones, the weakening moon still bright enough to show their way towards the entrance. He dragged open the heavy metal doors to the street with a creak and followed her out onto the sidewalk to wait for the taxi.

“What will happen to him now?” she asked.

“The prisoner?” he said.

She nodded.

He shrugged. “We will hold him until we speak with this doctor. You understand this is not that we do not believe you, Madame. It is how things are done. If the doctor can also identify him and we determine that this is entirely a case of mistaken identity, as he has no
carte de séjour
and does have a significant history, we will turn him over to the Turkish government. France will have no more interest in him. Maybe
les Turcs
will, maybe not. That’s a question for them. It will have nothing to do with this case and nothing more to do with
la France.
”

She nodded again. The Turk would be deported. His own government would scour his life for signs of unsavory connections and activity. Probably he hasn’t been active in this organization for years, maybe decades. But they would try to find something. Meanwhile, he would be photographed and interviewed, would possibly bring forth a complaint against the French police for their treatment. If the Turkish government did manage to find something they could hold against him, he’d go to prison there. If they found nothing against him, or maybe even if they did, outrage would be stirred up at the French government’s rash response to the crisis, their speed to mistake one Turk for another. Either way, a photo of her, dug up from some cocktail party or charity event or official gathering or another, would be produced beside his. Guilt by association, even with the nonguilty—the Internet was especially brilliant for innuendo.

“Excuse me,” she said to the officer.

She had one last thing to do before the sun rose.

She turned from him to press the familiar button on her phone.

“Edward,” she said when his sleepy voice answered. “I’m outside the Ministry of the Interior.”

She could feel his immediate transition to wakefulness. She’d witnessed his ability to do this before, from the depths of her own milky haze, in the middle of the night when he’d received sudden word of some crisis.

Now
she
was the tinny bearer of bad news on the other side of the receiver.

“You’re where? Are you all right?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “I am all right. I am fine. Wait.”

She cupped her hand over the speaker and turned back to the detective. “I am free to come and go from France?” she said. “You won’t need me on hand to bear further witness?”

“You plan to leave when?”

She considered. “This morning. Midmorning. I can be back by evening, or tomorrow.”

“Of course, Madame,” he said, his eyes with their multiple folds of tired skin blinking slowly at her. “We will need you only if we cannot find this doctor.”

She nodded and turned back to her phone again. “Yes, I’m fine. I will explain everything. But first I want to tell you: I’m going to go back to Barrow with Jamie as soon as he wakes up. To settle with the headmaster. And make plans for next year.”

“Clare—”

“I’ll try to set things up so he can finish out the school year without additional trouble. Maybe I’ll have to stay in London myself. But we can’t leave Jamie behind, alone, without support. Even if I hadn’t just spoken up about the assassination. This isn’t mollycoddling—trust me, Edward, I know something about this. He needs help. He needs us around him.”

Moonlight played on the paving stones, splashed across the metal gates, the car, her feet, her hands. The sun would be rising soon. She could imagine Edward sitting up on their bed, the room lit only by his phone’s screen. He would sit there like that for an hour if necessary, waiting for her to be ready to explain. He had been doing this already, after all, for the twenty years they’d been together.

“I’ve been in to give a statement to the French police,” she said. “I saw the man they picked up for murdering the parliamentarian today. I was with him at the time of the shooting. Just on the street; we crossed paths. I’ve borne witness to his innocence.”

“You were with him at the time of the shooting?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m sure of it. I happened to check my watch. I have the flower-shop receipt. I didn’t tell you right away because of the dinner.”

She could hear Edward breathe on the other end of the phone line. He was seeing it all in his head, all she’d seen herself: the photos of her with the captions, the phone calls both from the media and the embassy, the hate mail and threats that would arrive from people convinced she was part of a conspiracy against France, a defender of terrorists, of terrorism. He was seeing the permanent under-secretary considering whether or not her actions, and subsequent infamy, would make them unsuitable for the ambassador’s post in Dublin, or anywhere.

“Well, then,” Edward said, “you did a very good thing. You can’t let an innocent man go to prison.”

She reentered the courtyard of the Residence as the first hint of dawn lightened the facade of the building. She didn’t bother to press the hated elevator button but headed directly for the stairs. She opened the front door to the Residence, stopped to view the marine landscape by Turner, and stowed her purse inside the Regency console, mindful to settle her keys within the inlaid box from Croatia. She took a moment to breathe in the scent of the lilies and bells of Ireland.

She withdrew her feet from her shoes, leaving them by the door, and reached out to switch off the light. But she caught sight of her right hand and stopped. It was unadorned now, no emerald ring, nothing but the whorls of time to decorate it. But it was still graceful and tapering, her nails still smooth and rose-hued. Was that a new freckle by the wrist? She rubbed it gingerly. The spot did not budge.

She turned around to face the Turner. The painting was an early work, a minor watercolor, which Edward had bought from a great-aunt’s estate on the occasion of his and Clare’s first wedding anniversary, because Clare said she found it so beautiful. A funnel of yellow broke open over a mystery of pinks, then, below it, grays and violets and blues. White crests skipped across the bottom, where waves broke against a shore. Dawn.

These were the colors she had seen the morning that she and Niall had stood side by side along the Atlantic seaboard, the sand running over their toes and through Niall’s fingers, and dreamt that somehow they might have met in a different way or that somehow they might end up in some other way than they were destined. Nothing would stop this rising sun’s radiance, so delicate but determined. What joy the painting gave her every day as she entered and left the Residence, whatever residence she and Edward might be calling home. A quick feeling in her heart, a recollection of anticipation. And yet she never stopped, like she was right now, to really look at it. She traced the paint with a finger, allowing herself to touch its surface. She examined how strokes of white infused the yellow, giving it dimension. The blues and grays melted into each other, a smoky haze under the dazzle of the yellow.

She flipped off the light switch. She was lucky to have known so much love in her life. To think that she’d always considered it a burden.

She trod the length of the hallway and stopped at Jamie’s room. He was asleep still, cradled in the afghan she’d wrapped around him. Tomorrow, on their way to Barrow, she would begin to tell him about the mistakes people made, and the prices that had to be paid for them. She knew she wouldn’t be able to keep him from making his own. But at least she could try to keep him from the one he was in the middle of making and give him some thoughts to hold close for the future.

Edward was stretched out across their bed, awake, his eyes points of intelligence in the dark. He would go to England in the morning to face Barrow with Jamie if she asked, but she would not. There would be time enough for him to talk to Jamie, for him and her to talk together. Everyone was a compilation of right and wrong steps, like the steps that had brought her and Edward to the same stretch of road together. The point was that they kept on walking.

“I’m back,” she said.

She dropped her sweater on her vanity, next to the scarf she’d laid there so many hours earlier, and draped her skirt and stockings over it. She slipped into bed and felt against her bare arms the coolness of the sheets where her husband hadn’t been lying. He shifted his weight, making room for her.

“Clare,” he said, reaching out for her.

Yes, she said to herself. It’s Clare here.