A World I Never Made (6 page)

She sent Alain home and spent the rest of September 11 herself glued to the television. The next day she went to Paris’s huge Bibliothèque Publique where she read all of the national and international papers. Then she saw a free computer, went to it, and typed
al-Qaeda
into its search engine. That click of her mouse had since led her down many paths in Europe and the Middle East. The latest had taken her to Morocco, where she was researching a story not about the blind family in Zagora but about its one sighted member, the eldest son, whom she had reason to believe was a member of an obscure terrorist group called the Al Haramain Brigade. And now there was another irony. There was a new rich man in her life, the first man, period, since the effete Alain Tillinac. This man had already been helpful. He had driven her in his Mercedes limousine from the train station to the Sultana, where he arranged for her to get a quite beautiful room overlooking the courtyard with its lovely fountain. He had also promised to find a competent and trustworthy driver/translator to take her to Zagora, a rugged drive across the Middle Atlas Mountains, nearly to the edge of the great Sahara. And he was a sophisticated Muslim, a Saudi who could perhaps help her gain insight into Wahabism, the most extreme form of Islamo-fascism, a “religion” that called for the murder of all infidels, including not only Christians and Jews, but all non-Wahabi Muslims as well. The ultimate in ethnic cleansing.

Abdel al-Lahani was handsome and sexy and exuded power, and she hadn’t been with a man in over a year. He saw her, she was certain, as the next in a long line of sexual conquests. Perhaps she could pick his brain and his wallet
and
disabuse him of such thoughts all in one fell swoop. Smiling to herself, she turned and went into her room, where she would soak in her bath and reintroduce herself to the old Megan Nolan.

~5~

PARIS, JANUARY 3, 2004

Catherine Laurence had called Pat Nolan on her cell phone from the lobby of his hotel. Afterward she crossed the street and found an empty park bench from which she could watch Le Tourville’s elegant front entrance. She wore a suit similar to the one she had worn the day before. This one was a charcoal gray. Under it she wore a pleated tuxedo-style blouse with a black string tie and a silver choker at her neck. Underneath she had on the simple, barely-there black bra and panties that had driven her husband wild when they first met. Her half-heels were not stylish, but she walked a lot in her job and, at her height—close to five-ten—she really didn’t need to accentuate legs that, though men clearly noticed and seemed to like, she felt were much too long. On bad days she felt like a giraffe, or a newborn colt.

The knot that she had felt in her stomach yesterday when she met Nolan had surprised and pleased her. Surprised because she had felt nothing like it for several years, and pleased because she could savor it without having to even think about an entanglement with Nolan, whom she had assumed until an hour ago she would never see again. It was likely the protection afforded by this thought that emboldened her to don her sexy underwear that morning, to go forth as a sexual being once again. She had pictured the tall and handsome American on an airplane, not sitting across from her at dinner in her apartment in Marais.

Catherine, her legs crossed, her black trench coat on her lap, listened idly to the band while reviewing the strange case now solely, it seemed, in her hands. She had been a policewoman long enough to know that she could believe anything of anybody. But the years had also taught her to trust her intuition, and her intuition told her that Pat Nolan was no aider and abettor of terrorism. There were, however, missing pieces to the Pat Nolan puzzle. Why the rush to cremation? Why the reaching and touching of his daughter”s left hand through the hospital sheet? And, most intriguing, why the sharp look, fleeting but discernible, in Pat Nolan’s eyes when the sheet was pulled down to reveal Megan’s face? A look that spoke not of anguish or of relief, but of something closer to surprise and possibly confusion. Nolan, who had been told to expect the worst, did not look like a man who would be surprised or confused by much.

It was also in Catherine Laurence’s intuitive nature to question authority. Her periodic performance reviews made consistent reference to her “difficulty in adapting to situations,” which in French politically correct newspeak meant she refused to follow orders to a T, to bow without dissent to the dictates of all superiors. Why, Catherine asked herself now, was the antiterrorism division of the Judicial Police not involved in the Nolan matter, a case with grave national security implications? Why the DST on its own? Why were the Moroccans not interested in pursuing a man who had killed thirty of their citizens? And why was LeGrand taking orders from Charles Raimondi? Perhaps he really was DST, but Catherine would have bet her pension—the sacred cow of all French statists—that he was not. Underneath that facade of glamour and smugness he was a coward, and no coward could last long in the DST, with its roots in la
Resistance
and its line of unsung but true heroes from then until the present.

With the band between songs, Catherine stopped her analysis, and in the last of the day’s light, made her second careful sweep of the park, taking in the entrance at the corner of Avenue de la Mottes Picquets, where a middle-aged man in a tan trench coat was buying a bag of roasted chestnuts from a street vendor; the people walking on either side of a low wrought iron fence; the bandstand with a small group of jazz lovers standing nearby waiting for the next selection, and those sitting on benches situated, like hers, on the edge of a manicured lawn. On one of these were two young Arab men in jeans, athletic shoes, and down jackets, unzipped in the mild weather. When she first spotted these two, on entering the park, she thought she saw, briefly, a patch of dark brown leather tucked under the rib cage of the one nearest her. When she looked now she saw that his red jacket was pulled closely to his chest.

The endpoint of her sweep was Le Tourville’s elegant entrance, with its Belgian block courtyard and tall glass doors under a stylishly undulating portico of stone and glass. Standing under the portico, in khakis and a weatherbeaten leather jacket, was Pat Nolan. He looked better-groomed than he had the day before, with his five o’lock shadow gone and his thick wavy hair parted and brushed away from his forehead. She could see the whites of his eyes as he, too, seemed to make a casual reconnaissance of the hotel’s busy courtyard, as if contemplating whether or not to hail one of the cabs parked near its entrance. Catherine watched as Nolan instead put his hands—large and cleanly sculpted hands, masculine hands, she remembered—in his jacket pockets, made his way out of the courtyard, and then turned right, in the direction of the Métro station on the corner. The Arabs, she noted, rose and headed, not quite casually, in the same direction.

She made it to the platform in time to follow all three of them onto a train heading north across the river. She took a seat at the far left end of the car. The Arabs, perhaps in their mid-twenties and evenly matched in height and wiry build, one in red and the other in a blue jacket, stood a few meters away, holding on to the chrome poles that marked the car’s center sliding doors. Beyond them by another meter or two, Nolan sat on a side bench. Settling into the gentle rocking motion of the train, Catherine wondered where they were going and what would happen when they got there.

~6~

PARIS, JANUARY 3, 2004

Inspector LeGrand had asked Pat if he was aware of any friends or associates that Megan may have had in Paris, and he had answered no, which was the truth at the time. But the bank receipt in Megan’s wallet had reminded him of one: a gypsy fortune-teller named Annabella Jeritza, whose storefront operation in Montmartre Megan made it a point to visit at least once a year, around the Christmas holidays if she could at all arrange it. Megan had spoken of Madame Jeritza over the years, but it was not until she dragged Pat with her in 1999 that he realized that an incongruous but genuine friendship had taken root between them. Megan had brought her a Christmas present that year, and though the old crone had charged them each the full fare for telling them their futures, afterward she had closed the shop and fed them tea from a samovar and flaky pastries dripping with honey. There had been a firm knocking at the front door and the telephone had rung several times, but Jeritza seemed oblivious as she concentrated on their small party, which ended when her son, a swarthy and swaggering little man in his forties, came home drunk and knocked over the whiskey bottle that Annabella had been using to fortify their tea. Pat, though more than a little drunk, did not miss the light that appeared in the old crone’s eyes when she looked at Megan, whose hand she occasionally held and quietly stroked.

The Paris Métro was easy to navigate, but the labyrinthian streets of Montmartre were not. It was full dark by the time Pat walked through a bleak pocket park that looked familiar and spotted Madame Jeritzas sign in the middle of a crooked street lined with the detritus of Paris’s retail world: a shabby pawn shop; a cobbler whose window was filled to the top with old shoes and boots of every size, shape and color; a wiccan bookstore; a used clothing shop with two naked and headless mannequins guarding the entrance. In the light spilling from the window and neon sign of a tobbaconist, Pat saw two young men on their knees working on the engine of a vintage motorcycle while a third sat in the sidecar and smoked.

Just beyond them was Madame Jeritza’s storefront, its picture windows draped in dark brown from top to bottom, its solid wood doorway dark and unpromising. Pat knocked, not expecting an answer, and there was none. He knocked harder, and then after a moment of silent listening he walked toward the picture window to his right, where there was a slight opening in the drapes, to see if he could get a look inside. As he did this, one of the young men called to him, “Monsieur, pardon. Madame
Jeritza
est
fermé
.”

“Parlez-vous Anglais?”

“No
”.

A fair amount of Pat’s high school French, drilled into his brain for four years by the Jesuits at Norwalk’s St. Ignatius Academy, had surprisingly stuck and then been reinforced by his visits with Megan, who spoke it fluently and used it as her second language throughout Europe. He had all the guidebook phrases down and could speak in full sentences as long as he stuck with the present tense and a basic vocabulary. He was far from confident, but determined to make himself understood. After Annabella Jeritza there was the town of Lisieux, population forty thousand, where he knew of no one connected to Megan, and then he was out of leads.

“Connaissez-vous Madame Jeritza?”

“Oui.”

“Je suis le père de Megan Nolan.”

“Le père de Megan Nolan?”

“Oui. Il est très important que je parle avec Madame Jeritza ce soir. Immediatement.”

“Immediatement?”

“Oui.”

“Porquoi? Êtes-vous la police?”

“No. S’il vous plait. Ma fille ... ma fille est morte. Pouvez-vous dire Madame Jeritza?”

The neon light above the tobacconist’s door described the outline, in bright yellow, of a cigarette, with dashes of smoke, flicking on and off, emerging from its glowing red tip. When the young man stood to talk to Pat, his face was washed by this eerie light. His shiny black hair was tied back in a ponytail. His eyes were like a cat’s, dark and piercing. He held a wrench in his hand. Pat stared back at him, ready to throw the kid and his friends through the tobacconist’s window if he had to. He had been an amateur boxer for three years after high school and had never lost the ability to throw a killer punch. Twice he had been arrested for assault for bloodying the faces of union goons who occasionally harassed the workers on his nonunion jobs. He was still very strong and agile, and in a way relished the idea of a brawl. It might release the frustration that had been building in him since the morning before, when he had discovered that Megan was not only not dead, but that she was in some sort of exotic, Meganlike trouble. And that he was expected to find her in a country of forty million people, none of whom he knew, and most of whom he assumed were antagonistic to Americans because they had chosen to
fight back
when attacked by terrorists.

“Attendez,”
the young man said, holding up the index finger of his right hand and breaking abruptly into Pat’s overheated chain of thoughts. Turning, the youth spoke rapidly in French to his friends and then went into the tobacconist’s shop. His companions watched him for a second, then kicked the motorcycle down from its stand and rolled it into an alley to the right of the shop, quickly disappearing into the darkness. The wooden wine crate they used as a toolbox remained on the sidewalk. Pat reached into it and picked out a spanner wrench with a heavy rolling head, which he put into the right front pocket of his leather jacket. A few minutes passed in which it occurred to Pat that he had been abandoned, but then the tobacconist’s lights went out and ponytail appeared in the doorway motioning to Pat to come in. Pat did, following him through the darkened shop into a rear storeroom, and from there through a door that opened into a rear room of Madame Jeritza’s quarters. The room was small and sparse, its floor covered by a stained and yellowed linoleum. On one wall stood a porcelain gas stove on lion’s claw legs, on another a row of shelves containing a samovar, which Pat recognized, some china cups, and canisters of tea and spices. At a small formica-topped chrome-legged table sat Annabella Jeritza, in the same—or much the same—head scarf, hoop earrings, and multilayered silk gown that she had had on the last time he had seen her five years ago.