I still don’t understand why Benny was abducted here. And why make the call to Switzerland so soon after roughing me up and warning me here in France? There’s a disconnect somewhere. A huge missing piece.
I get up and walk around for a minute, sit down on the bed with my back to the headboard, stare at the phone, then at nothing. There comes a moment when I think I’ve fallen asleep but realize my eyes never closed. I seemed to have been suspended in a terrified trance.
A siren in the near distance startles me. Seconds later, it’s grown louder and is joined by another, and another still, until
a whole chorus of quavering cries seems to be coming from the center of town.
I freeze at the window, the stroboscopic lights and klaxon-like sirens messing with my nervous system.
“Sounds like a four-alarm fire,” Oliver says.
“What’s
happening
?”
“It can’t have anything to do with us.”
But the sirens don’t let up.
I cover my ears like a child.
“Mom. Hey. Sit down. I think it’s near the roundabout. Petit’s talking on his phone.” Oliver pushes open the window but keeps his face behind the drape. “I don’t smell smoke, but with the rain—”
“This town’s not big enough to have that many fire trucks or police or whatever they are,” I say, my ears still covered, my eyes squeezed shut. “Oliver, please. Get
away
from the window.”
“Mom?”
“
Close
it,” I say.
He does, but the sound radiates through the glass as if it’s nothing more than cheap muslin.
Oliver kneels in front of me, lowers my hands and holds them. “I think you should see a doctor. You’re at some kind of breaking point.”
I pull away, suddenly unable to bear his touch. “Isabel’s running around loose, Benny’s god knows where, someone’s willing to do god knows what to one of us if we don’t come up with twenty million euros, so why would I
not
be at a breaking point?”
Oliver gives me one of the same patronizing sighs Benicio was doling out before we came here.
“Don’t
do
that,” I say.
He almost does it again.
Instead, his shoulders let down. He takes a breath. “You have every right,” he says. “I just mean your body’s absorbed so much stress, I’m worried.” He tries touching me again, delicately this time, as if trying not to burst a soap bubble.
I nod.
After a moment, he says, “We have to keep things in perspective. They’re watching Isabel—if she comes for Benny, they’ll find her and him both. And the ransom? That’s good too. It pushes things…forward.”
“I wish it were that simple.”
“I know,” he says. “But maybe it is.”
I try to relax the muscles of my face, but they seem to be losing their flexibility. “Well, maybe it’s exactly what’s needed. Maybe the mouse will lead them to the cheese,” I say, more cuttingly than I’d intended. “I’m sorry,” I go on. “It’s just this place, the sirens, and everything, reminds me—”
“I know. Me too.”
Of course. He was there.
Oh, Oliver
.
After a moment, he says, “I don’t think it’s a fire…I think I should go see.”
“
No
,” I say. “If you want you can talk to Petit.”
Oliver looks past the drapes. “He’s not in his car.”
“Well, Petit is useless. He probably went to gawk, himself.”
Throughout the hotel, doors and windows creak and slam.
Everyone
must be heading out to gawk.
“After what the guy said on the phone, I feel like they have their eyes on everyone connected to me. You’re vulnerable, Oliver. Please stay here.”
The look on his face makes clear he’s going, no matter what.
“Listen. I haven’t checked my e-mail since my laptop was stolen. Someone could be trying to reach me that way. Why don’t we do it now?”
“Let me at least ask down at the front desk. They might know what the deal is.”
I nod unhappily.
He opens the door and there stands Petit.
“Oh,” Oliver says.
I’m on my feet. “What is it?”
“Stay in your room, please,” Petit says.
He starts to enter, but Oliver blocks the way. Petit gives a half-irritated shrug and stands half-in, half-out. “There’s been an accident,” he informs us.
“What
kind
of accident?” I say.
Petit ignores me.
“What aren’t you telling us?” Oliver asks.
Petit makes the face of an officious bureaucrat. “I cannot tell you what I do not know,” he says.
Oliver shuts the door in his face.
He picks his jacket up from the back of a chair.
“Going out doesn’t seem smart,” I say, the weight of too many confused decisions bearing down on me. “What if we need to get out of town fast? What if he sees you on the street?”
“The man from the train?”
“Or the man who called.”
“You’re sure they’re not the same person.”
“Yes,” I say. But am I? The voices were different, but how hard would it be to fool me? It’s just that, all in all, it feels like we’re dealing with a machine that has many moving parts.
“Anyway, how would he know who I am?” Oliver says.
“We have to assume he does.
Please
.”
“What if whatever it is out there
is
related to us?”
“How could it possibly?”
“I can’t imagine,” Oliver says. “But why did Petit stonewall us?”
The sirens continue to wail. The entire Saint-Corbenay police force must be down there—which can’t amount to much—plus some of Aix’s.
Oliver stands, looking at me.
Then he says, “I’m sorry. I have to find out.”
His journalistic instincts have taken over. There’s no use arguing anymore, no use asking him to at least wait until Benicio arrives.
“I’ll leave you my cell,” he says, zipping the jacket, then working the sweatshirt hood up over his head.
“
No
. There’s a phone in the room,” I say. “
You
need yours.”
“What if Isak calls again?”
“You could just stay here.”
“I’ll hustle back.” He kisses my cheek, says, “Lock the door,” then he’s gone.
I move to the window, and soon spot his silhouette disappearing toward the blurry, flashing lights in the rain. For another few moments, I watch umbrellas bump and bob along the sidewalk as people make their way toward whatever catastrophe has taken place.
I return to the idea of a
disconnect
. If this business is bigger than my “family’s money,” as the man in the alley insisted, then why ask for twenty million euros?
Oddly, when I picture him again, I seem to be retrieving his image from the file marked
Faces I Know
. Is it just because that first day on the train seems so long ago—weeks, months? Actually, it seems to belong to another lifetime, or some parallel surreal dimension. Over and over, I told everyone I’d never laid eyes on him before, but now my dead certainty seems to have been
sucked into the swirl of other questions circling us. Is he someone I’ve seen in the States? Is he
reminding
me of someone?
After a while, I open Oliver’s computer. The Internet here connects at glacial speed. I sit skimming the papers on the bed, including the only independent description of the man, Helena Watson’s, and I’m back to wondering if her omission of the wedding band means anything, and again I don’t know.
I get up and check the window, then the peephole in the door, and see no sign of Petit either place.
With Oliver out of the room, I let myself entertain the idea that Isabel’s release might be a good move, after all. But when I return to the computer, online at last, his file on Emily is up on the screen, and pretty soon I’m thinking,
Or am
I
the gullible one? Here I am lapping up
Benicio’s
story
. Maybe she’s keeping her real agenda from him. Maybe this is a long-delayed payback, made viable unexpectedly by having Benicio drop back into her life. Stealing a child takes a special kind of malice. You never know how much distance lies between someone’s public and private lives, yet nothing Oliver dug up, or Benicio told me, suggests a woman tortured by her past. Her days seem full and open to scrutiny.
Looking at these images of her is hard, though—lovely manicured hands, skin, gleaming cascade of hair. I remember Oliver’s words:
sassy, young, so different from you
. And I remember the shots of her and Benicio at the premiere of
In the Company of Harold’s Daughter
—his arm about her, the two of them so palpably gorgeous together.
Nor is it hard to remember the story of his deportation, the sundering of the beautiful pair. It must’ve been traumatic, heartbreaking, to learn he wasn’t coming back for her but had instead run off to Switzerland with me. What if the
entire
restaurant story is a fabrication, and he
is
sleeping with Emily again? What if he’s
managed to convince her he stayed with me purely for Benny’s sake?
The boy’s been through so much already—
This is ridiculous. It doesn’t explain the ransom call with its even more ridiculous demands.
I set the computer aside, stand, walk to the bathroom, close the door, and momentarily brace myself against the sink. Its faucet has dripped so long there’s a rusty stain worn clear through the porcelain. I watch a drop appear, fatten, quiver, fall, then another, and another, mesmerized by this little drama. And all at once, a little membrane in my mind bursts, and I’m flooded with an icy knowing.
Helena Watson is the one who took Benny.
I rush out of the bathroom and go to the window and scan for Oliver but see only the same shuffle of strangers and dripping umbrellas.
I dial his cell from the room phone. Six rings and it goes to voice mail. “Goddamn it, where
are
you?” I scream.
After a few seconds, I try again, then clunk the receiver down, get up, and check the peephole again, but the hallway is every bit as vacant as it was before.
I’m shivering once more, arms and legs, in the throes of another adrenaline storm. It can’t be true. It
cannot
. And yet I see it, I
smell
it. The gardenia perfume lingering in the train’s washroom. An old lady’s perfume. Who’d give it a second thought if they saw her walking by with a young boy? The elderly, like the Romani, living invisibly among us.
And Benny. I see Benny’s eyes look up at her, so trusting. What boy wouldn’t trust a grandmother if she asked him to come along with her, perhaps carry something or find her way? And of course she spoke English too.
Then what? Did she hand him off to the very man she went on to describe to the police, the American with the dark-stained
nails? I see it so
vividly
. The two of them trading Benny back and forth, so that the man was free to help me look, and she was free to describe her partner who, by then, was nowhere to be found. But why Benny? Why
my
son?
This time I try Benicio but slam the phone down on his voice mail.
I dig through my purse to find Moreau’s card. With every drawn-out ring, I think of Helena Watson’s description of the “Frenchman.” Having just seen the man myself, I realize she made no effort to throw the police off. Why provide all those precise details, accurate except for the missing ring?
I hear Moreau’s voice, then realize it’s his voice mail. “At La Moisson,” I say. “Call me,
now
.”
Once again, I peer outside. I dial Oliver’s cell, and again, no answer. It must be impossible to hear in all the noise. I’m starting to feel trapped in this room. Afraid to stay, afraid to walk out. If there is anything I hate, it’s feeling trapped.
Another fifteen minutes and still no Oliver.
I can’t stop thinking about how they got Benny off the train. No doubt they hurried him off at the front where the platform ended, then around the engine, as we’d thought. But what about the people on the platform, the woman who’d fainted, and the others helping her?
Then I remember that they’d been holding up a blanket—seemingly to block the sun, but perhaps really to block the passengers’ view of Benny. Could that all have been an elaborate charade—the sabotaged air-conditioning providing the context, the medical emergency ensuring the stop at Saint-Corbenay? What was it I told Louise Lawrence, the hypnotist? That they all looked like they’d come from Southeastern Europe? Romania?
I try Benicio again, tell the voice mail, “Call me the
minute
you get this.” I turn to the laptop again and sign into my e-mail, thinking I’ll leave a message for him there on the off chance that his cell is dead.
But an e-mail address I don’t recognize in my inbox grabs my attention.
[email protected]
. Sent yesterday, subject line
Benny
. With a paper clip icon.
Oh god
.
My fingers hover. Then, without getting the go-ahead from my conscious mind, I tap, the e-mail opens, a photo begins to unfold. Millimeter by millimeter a blank white wall comes into view, the top of a white, triangular lampshade, a wall switch, then dark, wayward hair, mussed the way it is when he first wakes, then the top of the forehead, the perfect eyebrows, lashes, eyes. How tired they look. And finally, his mouth, a small smile curled on dry-looking lips. I touch the screen, his hair, his cheek, his chin.
My sweet boy
.
How did they get him to smile, if only this much? He seems older, his eyes larger than I’ve ever seen, his lids heavier, a pale lavender along the edge. From crying? From lack of sleep? From
pain
?
“
What is it
?” I wail at the screen. “What do you people
want
!”
I don’t recognize his shirt. Blue. Polo. Nothing he owns. The light switch behind him is European. Similar to the one in my hotel room. The e-mail was sent yesterday, though of course the photo could have been taken days ago. I don’t care. My instincts tell me he’s still in France. I believe in my heart that he’s right here in this town. I scour the photograph and it is only now that I see the small line written in the body of the e-mail.
Never yours to begin with
.