Fortune's Deadly Descent
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2012 Audrey Braun
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN-13: 9781935597667
ISBN-10: 1935597663
For A.R.
One may smile, and smile, and be a villain
.
—Shakespeare
Once a change of direction has begun, even though it’s the wrong one, it still tends to clothe itself as thoroughly in the appurtenances of rightness as if it had been a natural all along
.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
PART ONE
Benny turns five today. Waffles with summer berries and whipped cream. After that a short sail around the lake. Sometime in between will come the phone call. Benny understands, as well as can be understood at his age, that he has a birth mother named Isabel. But he has always called me Mutti and I have always referred to him as my son. Deep inside this is who he is, who we are, together. In the end Isabel got what she wanted, at least for her son. Benny will have a better life. I see to it every day
.
From
A SMALL FORTUNE
I close my eyes. “Tell me everything,” she says. Louise Lawrence is a hypnotist with Interpol, and her goal is to make me relive the details of what happened on the train four days ago. “Whatever comes to you,” she says. “Don’t filter. You’re safe with me, Celia.” She’s English, late fifties, her steely curls gathered into a bun atop her white neck. Her voice is glassy, reassuring. I try to let it lull me back to the train, to Benny and me on our way to Aix-en-Provence...but even as my rational mind knows I might retrieve some small fact that could lead us to Benny, still I resist.
“Celia…”
“Yes, I’m sorry.” I close my eyes again. We’re in my home office in Zurich. A CD plays trickling streams in the background, rain on leaves, birdsong, flutes.
Really?
I think at first. New Age crackpots are Interpol’s secret to finding Benny? But now, strangely, I find myself letting go, being carried by her voice, and then, once more, I’m on the train.
Benny and I are in our compartment, midway between Lyon and Aix-en-Provence, when the air-conditioning malfunctions. With nowhere to go, the balmy, cagey feel reminds me of being kidnapped myself, years before, a time I don’t want to think
about, especially not with Benny beside me. And yet, I remember scenes so unthinkable it’s as if they’ve been borrowed from someone else’s grisly imagination.
I fasten my hair into a twist at the crown. The thin, corkscrew curls along my hairline are sticky with sweat, my legs glued to the upholstery. One by one I peel them loose, and then instinctively reach below my skirt to touch the silver-dollar-sized wrinkle in my calf, a souvenir left behind by Isabel’s bullet. Yes, it’s still there, and always will be, as pink and chewed as a wad of gum.
Benny and I fan ourselves with old copies of
Der Spiegel
and
Paris Match
from the magazine rack beneath the window. My fingers blacken with the ink of scandals. I consider leaving the train and hiring a driver, but we’re on an express, not scheduled to stop. Besides, Benny has been looking forward to the train for so long. It’s an early birthday present. He’ll be eight years old in five days. I can’t bear to disappoint him.
Acres of lavender whirl into a smudge past the window, and I force myself to think happier thoughts—Benny’s birthday, going to Paris in a few days and meeting up with Benicio. Still, in the rising heat, I see visions of my ex-husband’s Swiss Army knife—hear the sucking sound of punctured flesh, feel a burn in the white, razor-thin scars between my ribs. I remind myself that Jonathon is in a Zurich prison where he’ll remain for decades.
Breathe, Celia
, I think.
Just breathe
.
“
Ich habe Hunger
,” Benny says.
I glance down at his dark shiny hair, the exact color of Benicio’s, his “papa,” though no one would ever guess they are, biologically, uncle and nephew. I nod toward the picnic basket on the floor. “Grab whatever you like,” I say.
Any minute we’ll be hit with a puff of cool air. Surely. Any minute someone will know what to do.
Outside, a stone farmhouse, a scatter of goats, an abandoned, half-timbered barn mottled, oddly, with graffiti. In the distance, red-rooftop villages stack against the hills. Miles of rolling vineyards fill the space between the train and the French villagers inside their cool stone homes on a hot summer day. The light is beginning to shift. Hills become arid mountains, and a thin purple glow filters the sunlight. No wonder so many masters painted here.
A castle and its crumbling Roman wall appear in the craggy mountainside. “Look,” I say. “Another one.”
Benny nods.
“How is it that a country this size has castles every few miles?” I say. “Who
were
these people?” I admit I know too little of French history. Napoleon, Marie Antoinette, the gift of the Statue of Liberty.
Benny devours sliced oranges with nutmeg, then grapples with a block of homemade salted butter caramel enrobed in dark chocolate. He licks his fingers, sighs, and slumps with fatigue. I shove the compartment door open its final inch in a feeble attempt to get some relief.
Ten minutes later, it’s even hotter, stuffier. Benny hasn’t said a word. I glance down. “Good god,” I say, and Benny laughs.
He holds his sticky brown fingers out into the shape of a tiny rib cage. Crystals of salt shine through the muck on his cheeks. “I need a napkin,” he says, the whites of his upturned eyes made whiter by the chocolate underneath.
“What you need is a bath,” I say. “You need hosing down.” I rifle through the picnic basket…apparently in our hurry to catch the train we forgot to pack napkins.
“
Im Café
,” Benny says, then switches, as he often does, to English. “I saw them next to the bottled water.”
His limbs are a deep olive from swimming with his cousins in Zurichhorn Park. Strands of his hair have lightened into streaks so uniform it’s as if they’ve been singled out and bleached. He peers up at me with an expression so much like Benicio’s that I ache with longing. Benicio is in Paris doing research for a script. We’ve been apart for days.
I rise from my seat. “Sit tight,” I say. “Don’t touch anything. I’ll be back in a flash.” I tousle Benny’s hair, it too, identical to Benicio’s.
As I walk down the aisle, it occurs to me that I never indulged my older son, Oliver, now grown and living in New York City. But indulging Benny has been so easy. He’s such an even-tempered, affectionate child, and what’s more, he’s a marvel, a kind of
food prodigy
who creates recipes with poetic names like Yellow Tuesday Chiffon and Evening Marinade. His favorite blend,
herbes de Provence
(rosemary, French thyme, tarragon, cracked fennel, and lavender), finds its way into sweet and savory alike. Last year I wrote an article for
Food and Wine
magazine about Benny’s fascination with salt, his favorite Himalayan salt block, and all the recipes he’s created for it—everything from peppercorn scallops to Madagascar chocolate infused with ground crystals of Haleakala Ruby salt.
It seems worth the price of sweating on this sweltering train to give Benny this adventure, this birthday gift topped off with a flight to Paris in two days and then dinner at Jardin Bleu. I can’t wait to tell Benicio that the chef offered to show Benny his kitchen.
Most passengers have thrown open their compartment doors; they and their belongings are strewn about the floor and seats as if blasted by a hot, powerful wind.
Première classe
gives way to
économie
, which finally gives way to the café, a chamber of odors
so thick it’s like moving through a cloud of warm Brie, salty cold cuts, a locker room of perspiration. Passengers cram in line for bottled water. The refrigerated case is now empty.
As I reach for the napkins, I sense the train slowing. Pressure, a sudden gravity. I assume they must finally be fixing the air-conditioning.
I grip the counter to steady myself, thinking of Benny alone in his seat. White cattle graze in the field outside. We aren’t in Aix, but it can’t be far. The train shudders as it brakes, and I stumble to the side. I imagine Benny pitching forward, smearing chocolate across the seat and compartment window, down his favorite white shirt with the illustration of apple pies hanging like fruit from a tree.
“It’s all right,” Louise says. I realize I’ve gone silent and begun to cry. “Just breathe for a bit,” she says.
After a moment she continues. “Tell me what you saw then, what you felt.”
So I tell her about Benny’s face. How everyone I’ve ever loved is wrapped into this child. There’s Oliver’s smile, inherited from Jonathon, but no matter, it’s Oliver I think of when I see it. I don’t like to remember that Benny is Jonathon’s son too, conceived with Isabel, Benicio’s sister, while Jonathon was still married to me. I like to imagine that I discovered Benny’s existence in a happier way, not by hearing his cries from his crib while his mother held a gun to my head.
But there is Benicio in his face too, his dense lashes—and all his charm. It used to bother me that Benny has Jonathon’s chin and cloudy green eyes, but that was years ago, when Benicio first brought him home. Now, as I steady myself at the counter, I picture Benny’s little chin shifting, and I worry for him as the train slows without me there at his side.