The Girl Who Remembered the Snow (29 page)

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Authors: Charles Mathes

BOOK: The Girl Who Remembered the Snow
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“That's right, Moussy, go ahead,” barked Big Ed. “Hide your head in the sandbox like a ostrich. You can pretend all you want that this is all just accidents and coincidences, but that ain't going to make the truth out of it. Fact is, there's just one single solitary explanation for the murders of Jacques Passant and Henri-Pierre Caraignac, and his name is Bernie Zuberan. You know I'm right, don't you, Emma honey? Tell him that all this didn't happen for no reason at all.”
Emma gazed at the white hospital wall and didn't answer. Wherever the truth lay, she knew now that her grandfather had not been a smuggler and that Henri-Pierre wasn't a hit man. She was equally certain, however, that neither man had died a random, senseless death. There was a reason behind everything that had happened and Emma still had to find it. Clearly neither Ed Garalachek nor Charlemagne Moussy nor Bernal Zuberan knew what it was. That left only one place to look.
Emma stared at the stark white wall in front of her until it and the hospital and all the people around her vanished into a vast
snowy landscape, the snow that her grandfather had told her she must have imagined or seen in a movie or dreamed. Great stone houses soared out of the whiteness to the sky on either side of her, and Emma could once again feel the loving hand that held her tightly and kept her safe.
 
 
I
t was snowing real snow in Paris on the day before Christmas.
It had snowed yesterday and the day before that. Today's snow was a thick, wet bombardment that swirled crazily with each gust of wind and covered everything it touched. The wide, tree-lined boulevards and ancient rooftops of Paris seemed to be nestled under a great white blanket, but the wintery scene gave Emma no comfort.
 
She was standing, shivering, in the snow outside the great bronze door of Caraignac et Cie when the receptionist arrived. The Caraignac companies were involved in everything from precision valves and eyeglass frames to Canadian woolen mills and Swiss chocolates. Its headquarters were located on the Avenue de la Bourdonnais, a Parisian street of meticulous beaux arts buildings so exclusive and grand that they bore only address numbers, not signs identifying the prestigious occupants.
It was a little before eight-thirty, even earlier than Emma had arrived the previous two mornings. This time Mademoiselle Filante, the receptionist, did not offer a sunny
“bon jour”
and invite
Emma to come in and make herself comfortable, as she had the first day. She would have closed the door in Emma's face if Emma had let her.
“I have said to you before, mademoiselle,” Mademoiselle Filante declared as Emma followed her into the elegantly appointed reception room, all green marble and polished walnut. “Monsieur Caraignac is a very busy man.”
“Did you tell him what I told you? Did you tell him who I was?”
“I told him. He said he did not wish to see you.”
“Then I'll wait until he changes his mind,” said Emma.
“Monsieur Caraignac is not even in the country, as a matter of fact,” said Mademoiselle Filante, taking off her coat and beret and running a perfectly manicured hand through her short hair. “So it will make no sense for you to wait.”
“I'll wait anyway, thank you,” Emma replied, removing her own coat and taking her place on the canary-yellow sofa, as she had on the past two days.
It had taken Charlemagne a few days to find out that it was Armand Caraignac, Henri-Pierre's father and a well-known French industrialist, who had forbidden anyone in the Caraignac family from discussing why his son had made Emma his beneficiary. It had taken Charlemagne another few days to persuade the Drug Enforcement Administration and the San Francisco Police Department into letting her leave the country. Now that she was at last in France, Emma was going to stay until she had spoken with Armand Caraignac. Whether he wanted to or not.
For the next forty minutes Emma sat quietly as employees of Caraignac et Cie arrived. Most were middle-aged men with welltailored suits and the blank expressions of people who had worked too long for someone else. The few women employees all appeared to be secretaries—young and pretty and dressed as chicly as low budgets would permit, though all had the same subservient look in their eyes.
At nine o'clock exactly the door was opened by a man whose face was different from all the other faces. He was small and elderly and wore a quiet gray overcoat and a fur hat.
Emma had noticed the old man yesterday as he was leaving and only realized who he must be after it was too late. If she had needed any confirmation of the man's identity, Mademoiselle Filante provided it. The receptionist nodded and tilted her head almost imperceptibly toward Emma, then cast her eyes to the ground as the old man walked past.
Emma was on her feet before he had gotten halfway to the unmarked door behind the reception desk.
“I'm Emma Passant, Monsieur Caraignac,” she said in a loud, firm voice. “You'll have to see me sooner or later. I'll never go away. You'll never be rid of me.”
The old man stopped and turned, making eye contact with Emma for the first time. His face was long, deeply lined, hard—the face of a man who was used to being obeyed. His eyes were the same blue as Henri-Pierre's had been. His nose was surprisingly long and thin, almost as long and thin as Emma's own.
The man stared at her with a shocked expression, then looked away after only an instant and rushed through the door. Emma took a step to follow, but the receptionist stood and barred her way.
“You are not welcome here, mademoiselle. You must leave immediately or I shall call the police.”
“Go ahead and call them. Do the police arrest everyone whom Monsieur Caraignac refuses to see? Are they so obedient?”
“Please, mademoiselle. Monsieur is not a well man. Cannot you understand? Will you not respect his wishes?”
“No,” said Emma. They glared at one another for several seconds. Then Emma sat down.
Mademoiselle Filante, obviously angry, returned to her duties, casting a chilly glance at Emma from time to time, but making no move to call the gendarmes. After half an hour, as Emma was
beginning to lose hope, the telephone on the receptionist's desk rang. The young woman picked up the receiver and listened, frowning. Then she placed the phone in its cradle and stood up at her desk.
“Monsieur Caraignac has agreed to see you, after all, Mademoiselle Passant,” she said in a stiff, formal voice. “Please come with me.”
Stunned, wondering what had changed his mind, Emma followed the receptionist through the door behind the desk down a short, plushly carpeted corridor. At the end of the corridor was a short flight of stairs. At the top of this was an ornate mahogany door. Mademoiselle Filante knocked once, then turned the bronze knob.
Inside was a large, elegantly appointed room with a high ceiling. The furniture was much like what Emma had seen in Henri-Pierre's Madison Avenue shop—fancy French shapes and elegant fabrics. The old man who Emma knew was Armand Caraignac was sitting in a large armchair by a blazing fireplace. The expression on his face was that of a man who had just seen his own death. His eyes were red, his face ashen.
“Merci,
Annette,” he said in a high, cracking voice, rising laboriously to his feet.
“C'est tout.”
The receptionist nodded and left, closing the door behind her.
“I am Armand Caraignac, Miss Passant. Won't you sit down?”
The old man's English was perfect, barely accented, much like Henri-Pierre's had been. He gestured to a large, comfortable-looking armchair opposite his by the fireplace.
Emma walked over to the chair and sat.
“Will you have a coffee with me?”
“No, thank you.”
“I know I must cut down, but it is very good coffee and I am addicted. I can ring for tea if you would prefer that.”
“No. All right. I'll have coffee. I'm addicted, too. I take it black, no sugar.”
Armand Caraignac nodded. He picked up a hand-painted porcelain cup and saucer from the little table next to him and poured coffee from a matching coffeepot. When he had finished, he brought it over and placed it on the tiny fruitwood table next to Emma's chair. He poured a cup for himself, sat down and took a sip, stealing a glance at her as he did so, then looking away.
Emma picked up her cup. It was so thin that she could see through the porcelain to the level of the coffee inside by the light of the blazing fire.
“I have a million questions, Mr. Caraignac,” Emma said after a moment. “I don't know where to start. Surely you must have questions too. Like why your son made me his beneficiary. Why wouldn't you see me?”
“I will answer all of your questions, mademoiselle,” the old man said with a sigh. “It was wrong for me not to see you. I have been afraid,
n'est-ce pas?
And now there is so little time to make things right. I am like the old cheese which is getting moldy. They must cut off the bad pieces—a skin lesion here, a gall bladder there. Soon there will be nothing left.”
The old man stopped and rubbed his eyes. Emma said nothing. After a moment he continued.
“All my life I have thought of myself as a brave man, but with you I have been the vilest coward. I have turned my back to you, closed my eyes as if I could make you go away by sheer desire, selfishness, force of will. For this, for everything, I am more sorry than I can possibly say. You are the innocent victim in this whole terrible affair, the happy life you should have had destroyed by your own grandfather.”
“My grandfather never did anything to harm me,” exclaimed Emma angrily. “He was kind and good and never hurt anybody in his life.”
“I was speaking of your other grandfather,” said Armand Caraignac.
“What other grandfather?”
“Moi. Me. I am the villain. All the terrible things that have happened, they have all been my fault.”
“But how can you be my grandfather? Unless …”
“That is correct, mademoiselle. My son, Henri-Pierre, was your father.”
“What are you saying?,” whispered Emma, as the whole world shifted. “I don't understand.”
“I must tell you everything,” said Armand Caraignac, his voice filled with infinite sadness. “It all started more than thirty years ago. When Henri-Pierre was a boy. I used to take him on vacations each year with me. We went all over the world and were very happy, father and son. And then I took him to an island in the Caribbean. An island called San Marcos.”
“My God,” whispered Emma as the final pieces of the puzzle began clicking into place. “You were the tourists.”
“Yes, we were tourists.” Caraignac nodded in agreement. “We chartered a boat for a few weeks to do some skin diving, a boat owned by a man named Etienne Lalou. Over the course of those two weeks, Henri-Pierre became very friendly with Lalou's young daughter, Marie. I had no idea of how friendly until six months later, when Henri-Pierre came to me in a terrible state. It seems that Marie had written to him that she was pregnant. Henri-Pierre felt it was his duty to go to San Marcos and marry her.”
“But she was too young,” said Emma, remembering Zuberan's description of Marie. “She must have been only fourteen or fifteen.”
“Henri-Pierre himself was barely sixteen,” said Caraignac. “It is like the children today. The babies having babies. It seems impossible, but of course it is not. It is merely nature. Henri-Pierre was a responsible boy and he had real feelings for Marie Lalou. He wanted to do the right thing. I, however, was wise to the ways of the world. I convinced my son that this girl was merely after our money, that there was no way to know that he was really the
father, that marriage to her would ruin his life. Henri-Pierre finally listened to me, God help him. Not that he had much choice. I am a strong-willed person, Mademoiselle Passant, used to getting my way.
“I even intercepted Marie's subsequent letters to Henri-Pierre and returned them unopened to make it easier for him, to keep him isolated from his feelings, from hers. All was well for a while. The letters stopped. The girl seemed to have gone away. Then a letter came addressed to me, a letter from her father, Etienne Lalou. He told me that his daughter had died giving birth to Henri-Pierre's child. Lalou had named her Emma, after his mother. He wanted us to know.”
“I had no idea,” whispered Emma.
“I would have kept this news from my son as well,” said Armand Caraignac. “But my then-wife, his mother, told him, even though I had forbidden her to interfere. Henri-Pierre was devastated. Whatever guilt he had felt before was magnified now, tenfold, but still I would not leave the situation alone. Now that there was no question of marriage, I realized that the child was my blood. I am a greedy man, and I was greedy to increase the Caraignac line. I decided that it would be best for us to have custody of the child.”
“You mean me. I was the child.”
Armand Caraignac rubbed his eyes again and nodded.
“We invited Lalou to come here to Paris with the baby. The poor man did not have to contact us and tell us of the birth. He was merely being decent, but when he arrived here he was rewarded not with the Caraignac gratitude and sympathy, but by a legal assault such as only one like myself could muster. Using the best lawyers money could buy, I seized the child and petitioned the French court that Etienne Lalou was unfit to raise her alone, as he had sought to do. I won, of course. I always win. The Caraignacs took custody of the child. Of you, Emma.”
“How could you do it?” said Emma. “My grandfather had just lost his daughter. And then to lose me? He must have been heartbroken.”
“Yes, he wrote me letters, pleading for your return, but I ignored him. You were a Caraignac, I told myself. You belonged with us. Though he was just a boy, Henri-Pierre was distraught by my actions, taking you away from your grandfather, but he loved you dearly, as I knew he would. He was overjoyed just to see you each day when he returned from school. I told people that you were my own daughter out of wedlock. The French are more sanguine about such things than Americans, and besides, I did not care what people thought. I did not want Henri-Pierre's youth to be cut short. We had the best of servants to take care of you and protect you, lest Etienne Lalou try to take you back. You lighted our lives with your laughter.”

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