An Unexpected Guest (23 page)

She held her hand out for what seemed like ages, one long hot summer rising between them, twenty-five long cold years pressing back down beside it.

He held her wrist fast as he slid the ring off her finger. He turned it over in his hand, as though he were reading it. One arm looping around in platinum, two posed hands holding a huge heart-shaped emerald betwixt them, secured further by diamonds; how that ring had sparkled on her grandmother’s graceful, slowly aging hand.
Go Irish,
Granda had said and
Yah, I better,
Mormor had answered, the start of a love that had seemed to stretch beyond the grave. Every time Clare slid the ring over her finger, she felt the pride her grandfather had had for his motherland in having it made, as well as his pride in the woman who would wear it. All that love. All that certainty. In Niall’s hands now.

“It’s a claddagh,” he said softly.

She nodded. “Yes.”

“That can’t have come from your man.”

“No.”

He examined its deep green edges, felt the smooth of its facets with his thumb. “I’m not fighting anymore, Clare. If you were ever to read about some bastard down Derry way lifted for blowing up a police station, it wouldn’t be me. That much I can tell you.”

She hesitated. “You’re going home.”

He shrugged, held the ring under the light of the street lamp, causing it to sparkle. “If I tried to sell it, they’d think I stole it. Or worse, for both of us, that I blackmailed it out of you. Either way, it could come back to you.”

He didn’t say anything further for a while, and she had no idea what was going through his mind. She wasn’t sure what was going through her own. He looked up, gazing at her face with the same air of appraisal he’d given the emerald. “The British government didn’t give us any other choice, Clare.”

“I’m not saying you were bad men. I’m not saying I even understand any of it. But innocent people got hurt, on both sides, and that can never be right. There has to be a better way.”

“Not all wars can be fought around a conference table. You think we were risking our lives for a bit of craic?”

“Of course, I’m not saying that. But while very few things in the world are black and white,” she said, “maybe one or two things are. It can’t be right to kill innocent people. It can’t be right to go blowing up cars in the middle of the street on a Friday afternoon.”

He sighed. “Think what you want. I’m glad if it’s over. I’m not glad the British are still there, but I’m glad if there’s peace in the streets and bread on the tables. But remember this. You don’t get peace unless first you fight a war. And for the one man to be a peacemaker, the other has to have made the war. I don’t like those stories either. But we had our own stories.” He handed her the ring back. “Not enough, Clare. You keep your ring. You keep your guilt also. And I’ll keep mine.”

“Niall—”

“I deserve what I got, but not for what I tried to do. For the amateur way I went about doing it. And for involving an innocent American girl. I’m sorry for that, Clare. I am. Honest.”

“You aren’t hearing me, Niall. I
am
keeping my guilt. I know neither of us can change the past. But we can use it to do better tomorrow.”

The night air stirred, caressing her neck. A piece of paper glanced off her calf, vanished. Niall leaned against the door behind him and shook his head.

“I made a fecking hash of it, didn’t I?” he said. “But I paid the price, too, didn’t I? That’s the big laugh—I might as well have just gone straight to the R.U.C. myself, said I’d dropped the money in the Liffey, then after I got out of prison, told the lads the Brits took it off me. No one would have known about you, I would have done ten, fifteen years, been out in time to enjoy the benefits of the Good Friday Agreement. Not stuck in this hell of my own makin’.”

“So, you’re going home.”

He shrugged. “There’s my cousin.”

“Even without the money.”

“Feck the money. Feck it
all,
” he said, stepping out of the gloom. He drew her to him, kissing her as though he were kissing right through her. There was nothing but that feeling, that feeling of
him,
spreading through her gut, her limbs, into her fingers, obliterating all the time that had passed between.

He released her, and she felt him drain from her body slowly; a shock, that iridescent glow that came at dusk as the light leveled and faded until all that was left was a glimmer, a silhouette. It spilled away, another life’s blood, into the night, into the Parisian gutter.

His eyes searched hers, and she remembered the first time she’d seen them. How startled she’d been by their color. So bright, so clear, like a winter day.

She shook her head.

He held her in his gaze. Finally, he nodded. “You always were a clever one,” he said, for the third time, the last time.

She put her ring back into his palm. She folded his fingers around it. “Have it taken apart. It will be worth a lot. It’ll give you a head start.”

He lifted the ring in his hand, not so differently than he’d lifted her hand so many years ago in her aunt’s steamy kitchen, as though it were not just an object or a small piece of a whole he’d just come upon but something that, thanks to the greatness of its fragile beauty, possessed an existence of its own. After so many years, his history, her history, their history, had all been rewritten. She would no longer try to forget Niall, but he would no longer haunt her.

They looked at each other one last time.

“You go that way,” he said. He pointed down the unlit street towards a beacon of light, a busier thoroughfare. “I’ll watch till you’re out of the darkness before I go the other way.

“Good-bye, Clare,” he said.

She forced herself to say it. “Good-bye, Niall.”

S
he would not look back.

They’d said good-bye now; the good-bye they hadn’t said in Dublin. She placed one foot ahead of the other until her steps took on an existence of their own. She listened to the rhythm of her heels on the pavement and allowed it to lead her through the narrow cobbled streets of the fourth arrondissement. They twisted and turned, and slowly they felt firmer and surer, and she knew she was going in the right direction. Now she was on the Rue de Rivoli, and the street widened and flattened out. The Ile de la Cité was a short way; she would walk there. How far she had come from yesterday morning, when she’d woken up to the feel of Edward’s reassuring hand on her shoulder and the alarming thought of moving to Dublin. How much had happened! But this was life: random. What she would do next might make moving to Dublin impossible again, but that was hardly her purpose. The thought of moving to Ireland no longer scared her. The only thing that scared her now was the possibility of repeating her mistakes—and then watching her child repeat them also.

La Tour St.-Jacques jutted up into the blackened sky before her, its jagged heights looking like the peaks of an ornate sand castle after being hit by a wave. She turned left onto the Rue St. Martin. Again, awakened pigeons fluttered up, blackened silhouettes less a shape than a movement. They cooed overhead and bobbed from one sill to another. They were the carrion birds of the inner city, hovering over the decay and discard of urban life. A window was drawn shut, and they flew up then relanded, settling back down to sleep.

She reached the Avenue Victoria. A sprawl of couples spilled out of a restaurant across the street from her. The restaurant front read The Green Linnet, written in spindly white lettering against a green background. Of course she would now come upon an Irish pub, on probably the only street in Paris named for an English monarch. Could this day become stranger? But it was no longer the same day, or day at all. It was past midnight, in those odd hours where night flirts with morning. The women teetered on spiked heels, reaching for cigarettes and their companions’ arms to support them. The men bantered loudly amongst themselves. One pulled out a lighter. How happy they looked. How vulnerable! A violent burst of nails in a London tube stop during the morning rush hour, an airplane shoved through an office wall. Who was to say that a bomb wouldn’t go off right here, right now? La Conciergerie’s majestic spires rose up in front of her. People had died here already; Marie Antoinette spent her last hours here before being carted off to La Concorde for beheading. The tiny gilt tube of lipstick, smooth black-leather wallet, shoe heels, forearms, calves, and ankles, hours spent loving, dreaming, arguing, plotting, fussing…exploded into millions of pieces splashing through the air. It took one moment: the wrong place at the wrong time and someone with a wrongheaded notion of justice. How insane. She’d secretly lived a lifetime in the shadow of this world, well before 9/11 occurred and checking under waiting-room seats for unclaimed luggage became a global habit. But all those years of thinking about what might have happened, what she might have helped make happen, had taught her something. Fear could be converted into a kind of terrorism of its own. She had to live in the world, for good or for bad. She had to be part of it.

The sight of the Seine interrupted her thoughts. There was a song to the way the water moved. It swayed like a woman’s body, nudging the banks of the Ile de la Cité, the lights of the Pont Notre-Dame burnishing her liquid flesh in gold. Reaching the Ile de la Cité, the small island at the center of Paris in whose soil a raggle-taggle group of Celtics known as the Parisii first jabbed their spears and unfurled their animal skins amongst the willows, thus founding what was arguably the most lovely city in the entire world, Clare had to stop a minute to take it in, to make a final assessment of herself and her surroundings, before surrendering herself to someone else’s description. She was Clare Siobhan Fennelly Moorhouse, forty-five years old, married with two teenage sons. She was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and grew up in a suburb of false colonials with clapboard finishes. She was standing all alone on a bridge in the middle of the night in the middle of Paris, something she hadn’t done since she first visited the city as a college freshman. And the world before her eyes was beautiful.

A drunk passed by, his body bent in her direction by an invisible wind. She returned to walking. She crossed the bridge, reached the streets of the Ile de la Cité. A young couple, a careless amalgam of loosely draped scarves and shaggy hair, leaned into each other against a tree on the Quai de la Corse. She resisted the urge to stop and stare. She was walking through a coffee-table book of Paris. But she had her final errand of the day to carry out. She kept walking.

A few more moments of moving through the silence and she reached her destination. On her left loomed the monumental Hôtel-Dieu. On her right the massive stone walls of the Préfecture de Police. She’d been here before to process papers. Locals came to the Préfecture to obtain driver’s licenses, and foreigners to become legal. But criminal investigations were also launched within its warren of dim, dusty rooms, as well as projects for municipal public safety. She’d heard as much at a cocktail party. And an office was kept open twenty-four hours to receive criminal complaints.

First she needed to find it. Nothing was ever streamlined in France, least of all bureaucracy. She hesitated in the Préfecture’s shadows, wandering the length of the street until she reached the other bank and Notre-Dame Cathedral. She felt eyes on her, not those of late-night carousers or ambling tourists. Were there guards watching? Normally, she would have sought one out to ask directions, but these guards wouldn’t bob their caps toward her like those she passed every day and had come to know by sight along the Rue de Varenne. She waited until she saw movement around one corner. She followed in its direction. A lone policeman, obscured by the light of night.

“Officer,” she said in the politest French she could muster, “I’m looking for the police station.”

He screwed up his face.
“La Préfecture?”

The Préfecture loomed over their shoulders, a huge lacy monument to French bureaucracy. She shook her head. He must think her an idiot.

“No, I mean I wish to speak with someone. About a crime?”

“You have been a victim of crime?”

“No. Not exactly. I want to speak to someone about someone else’s crime.”

“You must go to your central police station if you wish to make a report. In your district.”

“No, but it’s not that kind of a crime. I mean it’s not related to my district.”

He continued to stare patiently at her. “Are you all right, Madame?”

“Yes, yes, I’m fine. It has nothing to do with me.” There wasn’t any point in arguing. Instead, she asked, “Could you tell me please where the closest central police station is?”

After he’d finished explaining, she turned back towards the right bank. The kissing couple was still there; the drunk had moved on. She crossed back over the bridge. A lone taxi waited at the stand by the nightclub. He must have just let someone out. She peered in and saw the driver speaking on his cell phone. She tapped on the window, and he jumped, then scowled with embarrassment. She climbed in.

“Bonsoir, Monsieur. Dix-huit, Rue du Croissant.”

When he drew up by the modern glass-fronted police precinct, the driver betrayed no interest. He put out his hand and accepted her money.

She showed her
carte speciale
to the policeman at the entry. He lifted the diplomatic identification card between two fingers to examine it, raised an eyebrow.

“Are you here alone, Madame?” he asked in French. And when she nodded, added “Why?”

“Because.”

He looked at her as though to check whether she was insulting him. When he seemed to have decided she wasn’t, he handed her ID card back and pointed to the waiting room. She tried not to look at the others who were waiting also—a young man with an old woman, two middle-aged men—willing herself to become invisible by virtue of not seeing.

Hours seemed to pass rather than minutes. Years, even. The time was late now; the very air felt tired. Finally, the policeman filing complaints motioned to her. To her surprise, when she approached the counter, he smiled.

“Bonjour, Madame.”

“I am here about the murder this afternoon at Versailles,” she said in French. “I have information about the suspect.”

Something almost imperceptible shifted behind the face of the police officer. His smile slackened, and he looked more closely at her. He requested her identification and studied it, glancing back and forth from the photo to her face. “Please take a seat right there,” he responded in French finally, pointing to a nearby chair. “It will be just a few minutes.”

She sat down to wait, his eyes keeping track of her. She felt as though there were eyes in the wall watching her, too, as though she might bolt for a door or evaporate or somehow disintegrate and the building itself wanted to be able to grab hold of her sweater before she might do that. About fifteen minutes later, a plainclothes detective appeared, with as many rings around his eyes as the cross section of a tree.

“Madame Moorhouse?” he said.

“Oui.”

“Suivez-moi, s’il vous plaît.”

He led her down a long, narrow corridor into a tiny linoleum box of an office.

“You are American,” he said in English after she was seated.

“Yes.”

He fingered the forms she’d filled out and the identity card she’d handed over. “But married to the second at the British Embassy here in Paris.”

“Yes.”

“Does your husband know that you are here?”

She shook away his question as though it were a fly buzzing around her.
“Monsieur—”

“There is no one here with you?” He looked around as though someone might have suddenly appeared. Finding no one, he looked back at her.

“The man you arrested—I saw him on the street yesterday. The reason I believe it’s the same man is I saw a photograph of him on a television broadcast. It looked just like him, even the clothing was the same as he was wearing.”

The detective nodded, curious but now impatient. She screwed up her courage.

“But I saw him in the center of Paris, miles away from Versailles, about two minutes before the assassination took place. I
spoke
with him.”

The detective laid his pen down. “You spoke with him.”

“He gave me a piece of paper that has his handwriting on it.”

“Where?”

“On the paper. It was a map.”

“No, I mean where were you when he gave you this paper?”

“On the Rue Chomel in the
septième arrondissement.
Outside a flower shop. I had been ordering flowers.”

He sucked the spaces between his teeth. He examined her face, seemed to be considering every last line and angle to it. His jacket was a worn gray herringbone weave; he wore no tie. Finally he asked, “What are you doing out alone at this hour, Madame Moorhouse?”

“Lieutenant,
s’il vous plaît.
”

“You understand that there is enormous interest in this case, yes? It is very high profile?”

She nodded.

“You are sure?”

“Yes.”

The detective said nothing, made no motion.

She repeated herself. “Yes.”

He waved a hand in the air. “
Alors.
You are ready to identify him? If it is the same man, you will sign an affidavit?”

She nodded.

“Very well.” He picked up the desk phone and began punching in numbers. “This is not the average crime, Madame Moorhouse, you understand. You understand this, Madame Moorhouse?” He addressed his attention to the phone.
“Oui, c’est tard.”
He continued in a low rumble for a few minutes. After he’d hung up again, he stood.

“Very well,” he said again. “We need to go to the
Direction centrale de la police judiciaire
at Rue des Saussaies.”

She followed him out of his office. She stopped to search the street before climbing into the backseat of his car. Was there someone walking towards them? Was there anyone there, a guard, to bear witness to her departure? She was used to climbing into backseats of cars, used to being driven, but this man was a stranger, and no one, not even Edward, knew she was with him. All around them night glistened; the dark lapped at the old stone buildings across the street from them and at the detective’s and her faces. No one at the French Ministry of the Interior would be happy if she discredited the arrest, no one in the French police force. No one at the British Embassy. The news would be on every television station in every city around the world. It would be in every newspaper. The wife of a prominent British diplomat frees a known terrorist and discredits the French police.

But the guy I spoke to on the street is innocent, she thought to herself. He didn’t do it. Not this crime, anyhow. Not if he is the same man they have in custody.

Another detective joined them from within the police station. He mumbled his name, nodded at her rather than offered his hand to shake. She ducked her head and clambered into the car. The front passenger seat was pushed back too far; there wasn’t room for her long legs. She turned them sideways.