An Unexpected Guest (11 page)

“That would be lovely, Mathilde.”

Two large tubs of plain yogurt stood on the counter, like country cisterns, white and thick.

“My wife, very good cooker,” the Turk had said, “She make very good yogurt, very good for body.”

If they were in America, this wouldn’t be true for him once they brought him in, no matter whether his wife was allowed to send him yogurt. If caught and convicted, the Turk could be sentenced to death. Hard to imagine of the man she’d walked down the street with just a couple of hours earlier, listening to him praise his wife’s cooking. Clare felt a pain in her chest, the wind knocked out of her. But no, capital punishment didn’t exist in Europe, neither in France nor Turkey. Only Americans, amongst the Western nations, clung to killing their killers.

That’s nuts, she thought. I’m feeling sorry for this man? He’s a terrorist.

He’d stepped out in front of her, holding a piece of paper in his hand, pressing it on her. But, back then, he’d been just some poor lost guy, sweating in a cheap leather jacket. How could that same man be an assassin?

There must be a mistake, she thought.
Her
mistake. There was an eyewitness.

“If you will be tearing your hair out, Mrs. Moorhouse, I’d ask you don’t do it around my cooking,” Mathilde said, pulling a tray of fish out of a fridge, where it had been marinating.

Clare dropped the wisp of hair she’d yanked from her skull, without realizing it, into the garbage. She noticed the clock on the oven door, which used the international standard notation: 15.25. Her appointment at the hairdresser was at 4:00 p.m. “What’s the yogurt for?”

“The dessert,” Mathilde said. She plopped the fish down on the counter, suddenly heedless of the cakes in the oven. “Along with the strawberries.”

Time to leave, Clare thought.

“What’s left of them, anyway,” Mathilde called after her.

Before going out, Clare slipped back into the study and turned on the television. But it was before the hour: no headline news. She flipped to CNN. Sports coverage. She flipped to BBC. A world business report.

She had arranged for a car to take her to the hairdresser’s; unless there was a demonstration clogging the streets, she had time to do a quick check on Google. She sat down at the desk and tapped the space button to close the screensaver. While she waited, she burrowed her hands in her sweater pockets, the triple-ply cashmere warm and soft against her fingers. She felt the cold crepe of thin paper and pulled a sheet out, not her to-do list, nor the Turk’s map, but the forgotten flower shop receipt. She’d failed to enter the sum into the day’s expense sheet.

She reached for the drawer containing the Residence’s expense ledger, but before opening it, she tapped a few words into Google. Then, as the site loaded, she trained her eyes over the receipt. Jean-Benoît wrote with a strange angular tilt, and his notation was as meticulous as his lettering. Instead of scrawling out the ultimate price, after calculating the fifteen percent embassy reduction, he’d begun at the beginning, marking down the precise number and regular cost of each element of each bouquet—
lys jaunes/48 tiges/6,50 euros/312,00 euros
—followed by the price adjustment. Even the exact time of purchase was specified:
10.12.

Clare glanced up at the computer screen, fixed now into a crossword of calibrated print and graphics.

His face was still there, his same droopy eyelid, his cheap jacket. She couldn’t have been mistaken. Her wrestler was wanted for shooting a French parliamentarian in front of Versailles at 10.30 this morning.

But that was not possible.

She checked Jean-Benoît’s receipt. There it was at the bottom.

Time of purchase: 10.12.

He’d crossed the street and almost been hit by a car. She’d waited to see he reached the other side safely and then waited to be sure he wouldn’t turn back. She’d seen his wide, dark form lumber down the Rue Saint-Placide, until he’d become just another urban spot amongst many. And then she’d glanced at her own watch.

10:29 a.m.

Her watch had read 10:29 a.m., and she’d calculated in her mind how much time she had left to finish her shopping and also stop at the pharmacy to pick up some homeopathic medicine for Mathilde before they arrived with the plate back at the apartment.

Clare looked at her watch now. The gold around its face twinkled up at her in the light reflected off the computer. 3:41 p.m. She checked the clock in the far right bottom of the computer. Also 3:41 p.m.

She picked up the desk phone and dialed. A sensible male voice:
quinze heures, quarante-et-un minutes, trente secondes.
She waited.
Quinze heures, quarante-et-un minutes, quarante secondes.

She looked back at her watch. Even the second hand was accurate.

There was no way her Turk could have gotten to Versailles in one minute. Not even if he’d sprouted wings and flown. Versailles lay fifteen miles southwest of Paris.

Clare touched her spidery fingers to her forehead. She was careful not to groan or sigh, or make any sound the staff might hear.

She reached for the phone, but her hand stopped before dialing a number. She sat there for a minute, feeling the press of time, both past and present, on her. Then she laid the phone back down on its cradle. She still wasn’t going to call anyone—not the police, not Edward. Not until she’d thought this over. Never do anything impetuously. Never do anything without thinking through all the repercussions. She’d made that mistake once. She would not repeat it.

Her situation was complicated.

If she was wrong—although how she could be, she didn’t see at present—and provided this man with an alibi, she could be abetting an assassin. A man would have been murdered, his murderer would come away scot-free, and she’d be responsible.

If she was right about the timing but some other detail was wrong—maybe the wrong time had been reported to the news stations, either by mistake or on purpose for some tactical reason—the police wouldn’t take her support of his innocence seriously. She
wouldn’t
become responsible for freeing a murderer—but she might come under scrutiny herself. What’s this woman doing, not Turkish, not involved in this case, the Irish-American wife of a British diplomat, getting involved in this case? Defending a presumed political assassin? At best, this would be uncomfortable for Edward, particularly at such a sensitive professional moment. At the worst…

Not to be considered.

Either way, she’d have to search out the correct police station and go in to make a statement. That would mean, at the very least, abandoning her hair appointment, but God knows what else also, because how long might it take? French bureaucracy wasn’t exactly known for its efficiency, and this was the murder of a high-ranking French official. She could be down there for hours. She and Edward might even have to cancel the dinner.

Impossible.

If she was right, however, and her Turk was innocent…

She could single-handedly keep the police from following the wrong lead, and get them on track to searching for the real killer. She could be pivotal in catching the murderer. And she could be pivotal in sparing her Turk unnecessary harassment.

Unless…

Maybe they’d still hunt him down, even with her statement. There was an eyewitness. He was believed to have belonged to that organization. Why would they instantly believe her word about it?

So, it would become her word against that of the other witness.

Again, the police might have to start delving into her own history.

That was not going to happen.

She would wait. Meanwhile, tonight’s dinner would go on.

She pulled her sweater sleeve over her watch and, selecting a fine-tipped blue ballpoint pen, copied down the pertinent information from Jean-Benoît’s receipt in the ledger, immediately under the entry she had already made for the cheese and asparagus.

After she’d transcribed the amounts, she reviewed her work carefully. She did this, as she always did, because—just as she hadn’t immediately put together the time problem between when she’d last seen the wrestler and the reported time of the murder—numbers were the one weakness she couldn’t seem to shake. “Clare can’t remember our phone number,” one of her brothers had ratted her out to their mother when she was still in grade school, and she’d had to write the number on her thigh in ink before they’d sat down to that night’s dinner, slipping her skirt up high under the table to read it so as to prove him wrong. Even as she’d excelled in all her other courses, math class had always been a struggle. As she’d gotten older, she’d learned ways for coping with the problem without ever managing to overcome it. She’d devised elaborate tricks for memorizing her own cell phone number, and all the others she called regularly she had relegated to rapid-dial. “Don’t fuss too much over it. Everyone has to have some little foible and at least yours isn’t biting your nails or drink or betting on the horses,” Edward had said a couple years back when she’d stumbled upon an article about mathematical dyslexia. But she disliked having any perceivable weakness, and she continued to triple-verify any number she touched, including those on the Residence’s expense ledger.

She found one mistake. She searched in the desk drawer for white-out, blotted over the incorrect digit, waited a moment for the white-out to dry, and wrote in the correct figure. When she was sure the page was dry, she closed the book and replaced the ledger in her drawer.

His face was still staring at her from the computer. She might occasionally make mistakes with numbers, but she had not made a mistake about the time she’d met him.

She checked her watch yet again. The car she’d ordered to take her to the hairdresser’s would be waiting downstairs. There would be other cars blocked behind hers in the single-lane street, honking. Maybe one of the guards or a gendarme would approach the driver to complain. She looked at the phone but did not touch it again. She capped the pen she’d been using and placed it back in the desk’s pencil holder. She clicked off the Internet, the wrestler’s face popping out of sight at her touch. She rose. She withdrew her scarf from the back of the chair and wrapped it around her shoulders. Tonight’s dinner was fast approaching, and a distracted wife with unkempt hair was not the ideal spouse for a future ambassador to Ireland.

C
lare could see her hairdresser, Marco, inside the salon, adjusting a square of foil in the hair of a seated customer. The woman looked like a project Peter had done for science class while he was still in elementary school, a doll robot with rolls of tinfoil encircling its head. Like the woman, the robot had borne a brightly painted smile.

Behind her, Clare felt the weight of her driver’s gaze. She was grateful embassy drivers considered themselves quasi-
bodyguards
, but his present concern made her feel as though she were a bug squashed between two glass slides under a microscope. There he was, waiting behind her, and there Marco was, waiting before her. She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and waved to the driver that he should leave. But she couldn’t bring herself to go into the hairdresser’s salon.

She pulled her cell phone out of her bag and, in her mind, rehearsed what she might say.

“I’m really sorry to bother you again, darling, but I have a quick legal question. If you were wanted by the police for a crime, here in France, but someone came forward who could provide an alibi for you, would the police stop hunting for you? Before you’d been caught and questioned? Would it change the investigation? And could that person offer the alibi, say, over the phone?”

She didn’t unlock her phone. Edward would think she was nuts interrupting him, today of all days, to ask something like that. What explanation could she possibly come up with that he wouldn’t see through? Especially when she got to the next part.

“And how about if there was a second witness, who claimed to have seen you commit the crime? Would they check into the backgrounds of both witnesses? Would it become a question of seeing which was more credible?”

A trail of smoke, the remnant of a passerby’s cigarette, curled up into her face. The cigarette had been hand-rolled, of the sort she had smelled on her Turk’s jacket. When they were walking down the boulevard side by side, she’d contemplated how foolish he was to smoke, considering his medical problems. Good grief! She’d been worrying about his nicotine habits. They’d both had much bigger worries ahead of them. If she went to the police, at the very least there would be statements, and officials, and documents, and the press, and lots and lots of talk. Back when she first met Edward, she’d felt fear at the very sight of a policeman. She’d crossed streets not to pass in front of them; she’d turned her face so there was no chance they would see and recognize it from a description or drawing. In twenty years, she’d managed never even to be stopped for a traffic violation. She could smile at the gendarmes on her street, without a hint of hesitation, and wait for them to nod their hats back at her. She’d cleared her slate. She’d washed away the traces of her iniquity.

Clare flicked the smoke out of her face with as subtle a twist of her hand as possible and glanced at the salon window. Marco was very specifically now avoiding looking in her direction. She was late for her appointment, and still she was on the street, standing there dumbly, cell phone in hand, acting like a confused puppy. She tucked the phone back into her purse, and tried to tamp down her thoughts in the same neat fashion.

If the police managed to apprehend her Turk—which was in itself unlikely—she
would
step forward, if she had to. But she probably would never have to because the doctor he’d gone to see would be able to identify him just as well as she could. In fact, the doctor had probably
already
come forward to identify him. Or would this evening, once he turned on the evening news and saw the picture. Or would tomorrow morning, after he’d seen the morning paper. If no doctor ever came forward, that could only mean there
was
no doctor. That, in turn, would mean the Turk had lied to her—proof he was mixed up in this whole thing after all. How, she didn’t know, because the time conflict was undeniable. Either way, there was no need for her to get involved with the whole mess, and certainly not today.

She reached into her sweater pocket, withdrew the Turk’s map, in its many folds, and zipped it carefully shut within her purse alongside her phone. Dinner was just over three hours away.

She opened the door to the salon and entered what felt like a different world, adjusting her step to fit the beat of a female singer’s smoky alto. Carefully coiffed heads turned and nodded in her direction, a chorus of
bonjour
s over the hum of blow-dryers and the tinkle of water running. Marco was waiting, with a shiny black smock in his hands. While an assistant hung Clare’s sweater, then placed her scarf and earrings on a black velvet tray and stowed them behind the salon counter, her hairdresser slipped one sleeve of the smock over one of her arms and, then, the other. The smock flapped and slid over her, as light as a casing of feathers. On an ordinary day, she would have smiled at the sensation, so reminiscent of Dorothy when she entered the Emerald City. But she felt a sudden chill, and shivered.

“Are you cold, Clare?” Marco asked her in French, emphasizing her first name, as though he realized he was virtually the only service-providing person in Paris who didn’t “Madame Moorhouse” her. He probably
did
realize. He traveled regularly to London, where the salon had a sister business, and undoubtedly spoke fine English, but they always conversed in French, to the point of pronouncing immutably English-language words in a Gallic manner:
le blow-drying, le hamburger.
Marco was very chic, and very discreet.

“I’m fine,” she responded, also in French.

She allowed him to lead her to a chrome-colored seat before a large gilt mirror. “As usual?” he asked, pushing a few strands back from her forehead.

Her face stared back at her, his face hovering just above hers and, beyond their two faces, the street. She felt as though she were looking at gradations of animation: her face pale, her hair pale, her expression as calm as usual, betraying none of the turmoil she’d been feeling; his face also serious and pale but his hair a brilliant reddish-black, and his eyes enflamed and searching; the world outside awash with the buoyant passage of pedestrians, the colors of spring.

Tall plane trees, vibrant with shimmering chartreuse leaves, lined the traffic island in the middle of the avenue.

She clutched the edge of her chair. The profile of a man’s body. The way he moved, just as she remembered. Lean and economic. Unpredictable. His body had never enveloped hers; instead, it had carried hers along. They’d been the same height standing face-to-face, the same length lying side by side. She turned her head to look directly through the windowpane. But there was no one on the traffic island, not even a body on which to pin a mistaken identity. She stared again at her own image in the mirror. She saw her face, her eyes, her hair. She closed her eyes, reopened them. She was still looking at her own pallid image. Everything as it should be, and yet, she’d had two sightings of Niall now, in one day, both of them so convincing. This shouldn’t still be happening to her. In the first years, decades even, she’d catch her breath and swallow her heart, sure she was catching a glimpse of him, and then the man she was looking at might turn his head and she’d see someone much older, or someone much younger, or maybe even a woman. Increasingly, however, the vision would move from her sight without her getting to view a face clearly, and she’d find herself left with the feeling that what she’d seen really had been him, even when there was no chance it could be.

She didn’t want to think about what his face would look like now, deep in the ground, inside its casket. A dry skull, maybe some dark strands of hair. All that was left when all the bark and clamor had ended. Death knew no glamour.

“As usual,” she said.

She clasped her two hands in front of her, pressing the smock down against her thighs. If she kept seeing someone who was dead, and feeling almost one hundred percent certain about it, maybe she had also dreamt up her encounter with the Turkish wrestler. Maybe she was actually hallucinating. She’d read of stranger things happening to people. A chemical imbalance. Or guilt rising up from the past to pervert her brain, like Macbeth thinking he saw Banquo, or Lady Macbeth seeing bloodstains on her clean fingers. What was insanity, anyhow? Perfectly rational people imagined enemies in their neighbors; maybe cool and collected women could start imagining encounters with murderers. Or, at the very least, dream up their resemblance to someone with whom they’d had an unsettling recent encounter. After all, bad skin and a cheap leather jacket—that could describe a good portion of the world’s population. Could she have conjured this whole connection up, just as she seemed to be conjuring up the figure of Niall on every street corner? Was the man she saw on television even the same person as the wrestler?

“Perfect,” Marco said. “Shall we wash your hair, then?”

She was glad she hadn’t bothered Edward. Really glad she hadn’t gone down to a police station. She lifted her hands and watched the bottom of the smock slither towards her calves, as she stood. Marco’s assistant led her to a washbasin, and she allowed her head to be tilted back, her neck to be slotted into cool porcelain. Water began to pour over her skull, filling her ears with warm, soft liquid.

There were many dark-complected heavyset men with skin ruined by steroid consumption. Why shouldn’t there even be more than one with a droopy eyelid? How carefully had she really looked at him? She’d avoided his eyes at first and then they’d walked down the street side by side. It’s not as though they’d sat at a table across from each other. Just imagine if she’d gone in to defend the guy, they brought him for questioning anyhow, and it wasn’t even the same person. Not only would she have jeopardized tonight’s dinner for nothing, people would laugh at her. And then they might start saying she was crazy. Or had lied on purpose because she sympathized with the assassin’s cause. This was how it was nowadays—disagreeing with the authoritative majority was tantamount to being subversive, especially when related in any way to terrorism. When Jamie had bought a T-shirt condemning the war in Iraq, Edward had asked him not to wear it. “Not to school, at least,” Edward had said. “I know you do not mean it this way, and I completely agree with your right to disagree. But there are some people out there who will say it means you are supporting Al Qaeda.”

Of course Jamie had worn the shirt anyway. From the youngest age, Jamie had bucked against anything he perceived as unjust. In kindergarten already, he’d come home with a bite on his arm for defending his snack against a bully. When President Bush had threatened to invade Iraq, he’d insisted on joining the throngs of protestors in the streets of Paris. He’d even begun interrogating a dinner guest from the American embassy one evening, until Edward had intervened.
That
had been embarrassing. But Jamie was young. Younger people were more quickly forgiven their opinions and the actions they took based upon them—until they came back to haunt them. The police had said the man in the photo belonged to an extremist organization, but they hadn’t said when. Maybe he was just a poor devil who had gotten himself caught up in more than he intended when still a kid—signed a petition written by an old school friend, attended a meeting or two run by a neighbor, and ended up with his name on a mailing list for the wrong organization, all back when he was an ardent innocent college student. Or a young man trying out his first job. Maybe he was just an ordinary fellow who’d made one very big mistake that would now follow him around forever, at the urging of a friend, or family member, or a lover. If he was apprehended and his case went to trial, this one mistake from his past would be his undoing.

But, still. Even if he hadn’t been involved in the assassination, he couldn’t be considered entirely guiltless, could he? He did once make that choice, regardless of his age at the time. And if he had been involved in the assassination, even remotely? The thought left her dizzy. And she’d been standing on the street corner with him, chatting about yogurt and the eating habits of French women! He might have had the blood on his hands of civilian children and women, the invisible wing tips of their souls brushing his broad shoulders.

There would be huge political pressure to solve this case, and quickly, to keep fear from growing amongst the populace. People were ready to believe anything about anyone once the word “terrorism” was mentioned. Terrorism was too frightening, too inhuman. The utter breakdown of civilization.

Clare started up, causing water to cascade down her neck and into her collar.

“Ça va, Madame?”

“Oui, oui, excusez-moi.”

She lowered her head back down, leaving her neck lifted slightly so the assistant could wipe off the back of it.

Other than Niall, whose wake had been attended by family and friends, whose body had been checked by a coroner—so why
did
she continue to believe she saw him?—no one should have known about her trip to Dublin, or any of the rest of it.
You never saw me,
the man in the hotel had warned her—and she’d understood that idea to be mutual. Just as promised by Niall, the desk clerk hadn’t requested her passport. She’d paid in cash. No one who knew her had ever seen her alone with Niall, including her family. No one knew they’d become more than polite if somewhat distant housemates for two months of one summer. Even when she’d driven him up and down the Eastern corridor, she’d always stayed in the car, stayed on the beach, stayed in the motel room, stayed away from being seen with him. She could count the number of people who would have seen them alone together—a luncheonette waitress, a motel cleaning lady, a tollbooth collector. People who wouldn’t remember her or Niall more than two decades later. She and Niall had been two amongst the thousands of holiday-making lovers they’d poured coffee to, straightened the sheets of, accepted dimes from. Even if they said they could remember her, they couldn’t be considered credible witnesses. Twenty-plus years later? But
she
knew.