The Clasp (21 page)

“Kaaaaay.” She walked toward her bedroom, eyeing them both.

She opened the door to a perfectly made bed and a couple of nightstands (the same kind Meredith and Michael used). There were folding closets with a Céline bag hanging from the knob. A not-yet-assembled crib leaned against one of the walls. Nothing to see here, folks. Just a room. Unless the Céline bag was for her. Grey was nice; she wasn't that nice.

Kezia shrugged and put her luggage down, feeling for the zipper. There were no surprises and certainly no pistachio macaroons. What there was, however, was unwelcome moisture inside her bag. One of her travel bottles had exploded on the plane.

“Shit,” she said, sniffing for the offending tonic.

She needed to know what to be upset about. Depending on the vial, she was going to be pissed that she'd lost the contents or pissed that it had leaked on the outfit she planned on wearing to Claude Bouissou's factory tomorrow.

“Fucking shit,” she muttered and sniffed.

“You don't sound excited to see me,” came a male voice.

She yelped, falling backward over the corner of the bed. The closet doors opened from the inside to reveal a cackling Nathaniel.

He crossed his arms over his chest and fell backward onto the mattress, trust-test style. His hair stayed flopping after his body was still. She could hear Paul and Grey chuckling in the living room.

“Do you have a kiss for Daddy?” He snapped his eyes open and grinned.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

He rolled over and looked up at her. “Well, now you
really
don't sound excited.”

V
ictor found himself standing on a square of sidewalk on the lower end of the Upper East Side, examining a flag that read “fi:af.” In smaller type was printed “French Institute/Alliance Française.” He suspected it was the French impulse that caused the design confusion and the American one that caused the immediate explanation. Yesterday's research had provided him with a few clues but libraries were like doctors: it was time to see a specialist.

He walked through the double doors, holding one open for a woman wearing a neck scarf and pushing a stroller. A septuagenarian with a full head of gray hair sat mindlessly eating Pringles and watching the French evening news on a big-screen television. He probably comes here every afternoon, thought Victor. A hospice nurse read a tabloid magazine, looking up when the man munched too loudly. How nice it would be to be homesick for a place, Victor thought, to feel tethered to France just because one happened to be French. He rarely, if ever, longed for suburban
Boston and was not, when confronted with the scent of clam chowder or Dunkin' Donuts coffee, made moony.

“Do you guys have a library in here?”

“Second floor.” A security guard pointed at a directory nailed to the wall.

“Awesome!” Victor slapped the security desk.

The guard raised an eyebrow. In the past forty-eight hours, Victor had developed the swagger of someone who had no idea what he was doing but who had made a real commitment to doing it.

Victor hopped off the elevator. He supposed you could call this a library. The whole place, all rooms visible from where he stood, was peppered with blond desks and soft blue carpet that still had vacuum marks. It looked like a preschool before the children came. Three chic middle-aged ladies with crocodile accessories shared a copy of
Paris Match
. On the cover were European football stars and their big-breasted girlfriends.

Beneath a
CENTRE DE RESOURCES
sign sat a librarian with a high shelf of red hair, looking bored in beige.

“Excusez-moi, mais est-ce que vous—”

“
Est-ce que tu, est-ce que tu
,” the man corrected him.

Victor widened his eyes. Listen, Conan, he thought, you're lucky I got that much out. Any French acquired after seventh grade has been gleaned from Daft Punk.

“Right.
Oui
,” said Victor. “I was wondering,
avez-vous les livres
dans
, um . . .
dans
. . .”

He didn't even know how to say “jewelry” in French.

“Um . . .
avez-tu une livre avec les mots du
baubles?”

“Baubles?”

He pointed at the
Paris Match
ladies and drew a line around his own neck. Also the gesture for
I'm going to kill you later
.

“Ah,
les bijoux!
All right,” the librarian said in perfect English, looking Victor up and down. “What exactly are you looking for?”

He had a thick Southern accent. Mississippi, maybe. Victor tried to reconcile the jump.

“I'm not looking for a specific title. Do you have a jewelry section?”

He put his hand on his hip. “Not sure what we have, darlin', but it'll be here.”

He stepped out from behind his desk, motioning to Victor to follow him.

“Everything on fashion and design should be on these top two shelves. There's a stepladder in the corner but you can reach those, can't you? How
tall
are you?”

“Six feet four.” Victor cast his eyes downward. “I'm not really looking for books on French fashion. More historical texts.”

“Oh,
texts
,” said the librarian, as if it were the most unusual word he had ever heard, “you won't find those here. We're not a research library. We're all current press and literature. You know, basically just a bunch of random French crap.”

Victor wondered how anyone ever was employed anywhere.

“I'll look. Since I'm here.”

“Holler if you need anything.” The librarian winked.

Victor pulled out a chair, disturbing the vacuum marks. He sat between hanging racks of newspapers, the seams of
Le Monde
and
Le Figaro
wrapped around wooden poles, hanging like laundry. Conan was right about the lack of historical texts. There was only one bookcase for
littérature
and it boasted four copies of
Madame Bovary
, one copy of
Les Misérables
, and one illustrated copy of
Les Misérables
. The DVD rental section was more extensive. Victor got up. He found the ancient black Dell computer in the corner and started clacking away on the sticking keys. They
had computers like this in the reception area of mostofit. Model IIIs. Apple IIes. Commodore 64s. Fossils encased in glass, lest their obsolete cooties contaminate the air.

He keyed in his search using arrow keys.

They were all the same two titles. Two large photo books, one on Cartier and one on a company called Lalique. His parents owned a Lalique vase. He had accidentally cracked it in half as a child while practicing self-taught karate in the dining room. His legs had grown too fast for his brain.

The books were wrapped in plastic, Dewey decimals on their spines. According to the first one, Cartier was founded in 1847 but it didn't start making anything close to Johanna's necklace until the 1920s, well after the date on the sketch. The book name-checked big jewelers of the time: Lemonnier, Baugrand, and Mellerio. None of them had signed his sketch. But the drawings themselves, rendered
avec crayon
, looked so much like Johanna's— same yellowish brown paper, same descriptions scripted at a jaunty angle.

The
Paris Match
ladies returned their reading material, silently making their decision to leave. Victor looked at his phone. His stomach spun like an empty cement truck, but he still didn't want to go home. If he stayed away for long enough, he could trick himself into thinking he was coming back to his apartment after a hard day's work.

He looked again at the sketches in the books. Why couldn't Johanna's necklace be one of these? Boom: mystery solved, life
gotten on with. He was lost in a picture of aquamarine earrings, thinking vaguely of Kezia's eyes, feeling foolish for making the connection, when something caught his attention at the bottom of the page. It was a Moscow address, a store or a house near Red Square. Victor slid his chair closer to the desk. Then he started feverishly flipping through the pages. The numbers at the bottom of each sketch were not a weight or a price or some catalog code. They were street addresses. All of them.

Having scrutinized a blinding amount of these drawings, he could begin to fill in the blanks on his own. The arch of a 0 and the flat tops of 5s were easy enough, but now he could contextualize the whole string of numbers:
76550.
The rest was still unintelligible, either cut off or scribbled into oblivion. On his phone, he searched for “76550,” “necklace,” “address.”

Nothing.

He added “France” and “19th century.” Still nothing.

“76550 necklace address France 19th century jewelry” got him more nothing.

“76550 necklace address France 19th century jewelry shiny shiny fuck fuck” got him an impressive index of Victorian sex toys.

The necklace, with its single teardrop, was mocking him, mocking his alleged knack for data sleuthing. He shook his head. Circumstance left him no choice . . .

Victor approached Conan the Librarian. “Hi. I could use your help.”

“Château.” He rolled his eyes as he looked at Johanna's sketch. “It obviously says château.”

“Really?” Victor gingerly took it back.

“Anything
else
I can do for you?” Conan leaned on his elbows, swooping his eyes across Victor's shoulders.

Victor shook his head. “I'm good, I'm just gonna—”

Victor pointed at the computer console.

He pulled up the library's browser. Replacing the “shinys” and the “fucks” with a “château” got him an article from the French version of
Town & Country
, a story about private, single-family-owned French châteaus.

There was a slide show of châteaus from five separate regions of France: Burgundy, Brittany, Rhône, Upper Normandy, and somewhere outside Nice with a river that ran straight under the château itself. The owners of that château were sitting in a rowboat, oars up, twisting to face the photographer. Victor clicked through to the Upper Normandy one. The couple, standing against a brick wall shaded by a pear tree, forced smiles that did little to disguise their true feelings about being photographed for a magazine: They were the French version of
American Gothic
. Instead of a pitchfork, the man was holding a fistfull of radishes, mud still fresh on the ends. The woman looked somber. She had wide-set eyes, a long nose, and a haircut Victor recognized from seventies sitcom reruns. The husband was balding, and had one of the more perfectly round faces Victor had ever seen. Behind the wall stood a red brick structure, featuring dozens of windows, some cranked open. Victor scrolled down to the caption:

This was a larger-than-absorbable block of French. He gleaned the important parts. Money from the government . . . so long as random tourists can take the tour. He snorted. No wonder all the families looked so irritated—their days were filled with fanny-pack-wearing Americans squeezing through hallways meant for Marie Antoinette. Victor cleaned his glasses on his shirt and looked again at the faces. The Ardurats. That was their name. The two least-inviting-looking people on the planet. On the next screen the husband was leaning atop a marble bust of Guy de Maupassant,
auteur de nombreux livres
.

Yes, but one
livre
in particular, thought Victor, remembering the time he and Nathaniel witnessed their professor having a nervous breakdown over “The Necklace.” That felt like centuries ago.

In the last shot, the Ardurats walk away from the camera— their backs turned, headed back toward their grand house, followed by a final caption.

Victor moved his face toward the screen. He put Johanna's sketch side by side with the computer monitor and then over the monitor, pressing it to the screen like an X-ray. 76550 Tourvillesur-Arques. Guy de Maupassant. Johanna's necklace was not just a necklace. It was
the
necklace.

“Holy shit.” He gripped the table. “Holy shit!”

Conan creaked forward over his desk and shushed him.

“There's no one here.” Victor gestured around the room.

“Still. Shh!”

“Hey.” Victor jotted down Guy's full name and skipped up to the desk. “Is this a lending library?”

“What are you looking for now, honey?”

“Anything by or about this writer.” He slid the scrap of paper across the desk, knowing he'd butcher the pronunciation.

“It's in
littérature
. We have a couple of copies of the short stories.”

Victor remembered “The Necklace” clearly now; the sad story of a woman who borrows a necklace and loses it. He could see his professor, hysterical, passionate, passionately hysterical. He could practically smell the classroom. He opened one of the copies. According to the introduction, Maupassant had written hundreds of stories, one of the world's most prolific fiction writers, but “The Necklace” was the most popular thing he ever wrote.
First published in 1884 . . .

The sketch in his hand was created one year prior, when Maupassant would have been writing the thing. Victor turned to the first page of the story:

You and me both, sweetheart. He flipped the page.