Fortune's Deadly Descent (14 page)

A gang of Roma Gypsies. This is madness. An ugly stereotype. Gypsies stealing children.

I pat Oliver’s shoulder to comfort myself as much as him.

Do I take Madame Moreau’s story at face value? It seems like something out of Ceausescu’s Romania, or an even era much deeper in time. How much is
légende
? Could Benny truly have been snatched up by Gypsies? Is it absurd? Is it
not
absurd?

The gate clangs shut behind us. The tip of Mount St. Victoire rises in the distance, and I realize, for the first time, it’s the mountain Cézanne painted again and again—all different angles, seasons, times of day, all with the telltale limestone jutting into the sky like a crude stone tool. How often I’ve seen it on postcards spinning in wire racks. But this is the thing itself. I can’t say why exactly, but the sight makes me feel minuscule, a tiny human speck, helpless. I haven’t often felt this way in recent years, overmatched and clueless, I realize—understanding, too, that if I give in to this mood I’ll never get back what I’ve lost.

“Do you think Moreau meant to tell you about his brother when he came to Zurich,” Oliver says, “but changed his mind?”

“Maybe he took one look at the state I was in—”

“Or maybe having Isak there?”

“There does seem to be tension between them…at first I thought it was about who was in charge, but maybe it’s more than that. Moreau might blame Interpol for not locating his brother…or because they stopped looking.”

Oliver steps around to the passenger side.

“I need air,” I say, studying him over the hood. “Do you mind if I walk back?”

“Of course I mind.”

“I need to think.”

“Mom. You passed out up there. Get in.”

“I haven’t been alone in a week, Oliver. I’m used to being alone. It’s how I work.”

“OK, but it’s not a good idea at the moment. It seems dangerous.”

“In this lovely neighborhood in the middle of the day? It’s a fifteen-minute walk. If that.”

Oliver scans the street, the questionable sky. “It’s going to rain,” he says.

“Not in the next fifteen minutes, it’s not.” I toss him the car keys.

“If you’re not back by then I’m calling Isak, Benicio, the local gendarmes, and the international press.”

We stare back and forth.

“You think I’m kidding.”

“No, I believe you.”

He grips the keys tighter in his palm and comes around to the driver’s side, opens the door but doesn’t get in.

“C’mon, Oliver,” I say.

“No, it’s something else. I need to ask you something.”

I don’t like the shift in his tone.

He glances down the street, stalling.

“Ask if you’re going to ask,” I say.

“Who’s Emily?”

“Ah,” I say. I’m surprised it’s taken him this long. Just the sound of her name opens up a gusher of images, glitz and flimsy dresses, furtive texts, calls, kisses in dark hallways. But my psyche immediately counters with a stark picture of an empty train compartment, empty in the horrible reverberating way a place can be vacant in a dream, as if it’s the true consequence of that one word,
Emily
.

“You already know who she is,” I say. “Emily Sandstrom. She played the comic store clerk in
In the Company of Harold’s Daughter
.”

“Wait.
That’s
Emily?”

“Yes. And apparently she’s still in love with Benicio.”

“Whoa.”

“What do you mean,
whoa
?”

“She’s just—”

“Famous? Gorgeous? A woman who doesn’t age?”

“I didn’t mean it like that. She’s just very different from you. She seems so, I don’t know, sassy, young.” It takes him a second to hear what he’s said, then he hastens to add, “I mean, she doesn’t seem like Benicio’s type.”

I give him a look. “Don’t
delude
yourself.”

After a moment, Oliver says, “But what do you really know about her? Aside from what anyone can read in the tabloids?”

I’m about to say,
Almost nothing
, then I realize I do possess one major detail. “She’s the reason Benicio got involved with your
father. Long story, but Benicio was trying to find a way back into the States. To Emily. To the life he had with her.”

Oliver looks stunned. “I had no idea,” he says.

“You were too young, it wasn’t information you needed to know. To be honest, I don’t think it’s information you need now, but you’re a grown man, and you asked.”

He nods, still figuring out what to make of this.

“It doesn’t matter, Oliver. People do things when their back’s against a wall. Let’s just focus on Benny, OK?”

“It seems bizarre, but maybe you shouldn’t rule her out, Mom.”

“Of
this
?”

“I mean, don’t you think it’s funny how she’s come back into Benicio’s life just at this moment? After so long?”

“I admit it’s strange, but look, what Madame Moreau was telling us, think how strange
that
is, yet it seems far more likely, somehow.”

“Taking Benny could be some crime of passion,” Oliver says. “A way of getting back at a man she wants but can’t have. People do crazy things for love.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“And revenge.”

I feel the mocking smile melt from my face. “Revenge like that’s reserved for someone like your father.” I look up into his eyes. “I’m sorry,” I say, “but it’s true.”

“I know,” he says.

“And as for Emily, she’d have to be extraordinarily clever, Oliver. Think of the logistics, think of the connections she’d need to have.”

“No, I know,” he says. “It’s just maybe we shouldn’t…dismiss her so fast. If this isn’t about money, or about the Romanian gene
pool or whatever, then it has to be about something else. We have to start considering—”

“The ridiculously far-fetched?”

“I’m just saying.”

“You can follow the thread if you want, but all you’re going to find is someone wanting attention and chasing after a man who belongs to someone else.” Or
did
belong, I think.

He shakes his head. After a moment, he asks me if I’m sure I’ll be all right walking back to the pension on my own.

I can’t help rolling my eyes at him the same melodramatic way he used to at me when he was sixteen.

He squeezes me, and then holds me at arm’s length. “We need to ask Moreau about the Romani.”

“I know. We’re in over our heads with that, Oliver. I don’t even know where to begin.”

He hugs me and gets in the Rover and drives away.

The last person I want to think about now is
Emily
, but I admit it’s better than feeling helpless at the thought of Benny being funneled through the well-oiled cogs of an organization whose sole purpose is to disappear children permanently.

So I consider her at every roundabout, fountain, and linden tree. I see her head thrown back, fingers on Benicio’s arm, laughing like a scene from one of her inane movies. What does she want with him? Years ago, I realized how much I’d been thinking about a lost love of my own—Seth Reilly—a man who ended up helping me when I most needed it. He’s married now, happy, and I’m actually friends with his wife, Julia. My life with Seth is nearly erased from my senses, overlaid with memories of Benicio. But not everyone moves on, I know that. Not everyone has someone to make her forget the past.

I look up from the sidewalk and glance both ways. The street is too steep, the trees too large and green. It seems I’ve taken a wrong turn. A man and woman follow along behind me, chatting in a language other than French. Italian? I stop at a newsstand and let them pass. A small panic rises to my chest. I have no phone.

But I can’t be lost, I haven’t gone that far. I orientate myself to Mount St. Victoire, study the sky, which is more than ready to let loose a soaking rain. Sounds of the market square drift in from the west, so I head straight, two more blocks, and my chest finally eases with relief: there’s the rooftop of our pension, just beyond a structure that looks like a small water treatment plant. I simply went a block too far in one direction, then several more in another. I cut across a small alleyway behind the plant, practically running now, as I’m sure the fifteen minutes Oliver granted me is about up. And, of course, I’m chiding myself for squandering my time to think on Emily, and I still have no plan.

I’m about to round a corner that will bring me onto our street, when I hear hard boot steps, coming up behind me. I turn just as a hand grips my shoulder.

Before I can speak, my backbone grazes a stone in the wall, and then a forearm, like a baseball bat, restrains me by the throat.

“Do
not
make a sound,” the man says.

Please let it be my purse
, I think.

I try to lift it toward him, to say it’s full of more cash than he’s probably ever seen in one place, but I can’t speak, and his arm pinning my throat is only part of the reason.

He’s the man from the train. What’s more, English has replaced the French he spoke. And not just any English.
My
English. The man from the train is
American
.

I gag and he eases off, slightly. I stare at the shape of his closed mouth, the only thing I’d seen on the man who’d strolled by in the hat, the man who broke into my car and stole my backpack and computer. It was
him
, walking right by us in the middle of the day.

“Why are you doing this?” I croak.

He presses his arm back into me and sets off a chain of choking. “You need to stop,” he says through his teeth. “You need to go home and wait.”

I choke so fiercely I can’t hear anything else. He drops his arm and grips my hair. I think to claw his eyes, and I could, I could just reach up and jam my nails right into his face, but I need to know who he is, what he wants, what he knows about Benny.

“Where is he?” I ask.

He shows the tiniest glint of something like pity, but it’s gone in an instant. He says, “You have no idea what you’re up against.”

“Please,” I say. “Tell me where he is. Is it money? I’ll give you whatever you ask.”

He yanks my hair and I yelp without meaning to.

“I said shut up.” He checks behind him quickly.

We could pass as lovers backed against the wall, his shoulder obscuring my face. “This is bigger than you and all of your family’s money,” he says through his teeth.

“I’m not leaving here without my son.”

He stares at me, hard. “We both know he isn’t your son.”

“Who told you that?” I ask, my voice fracturing. His grip on my jaw is so tight I feel his nails on the bone. “You should have stayed out of the way,” he says.

“Is that what
you’d
do, if it was your child? Stay home and wait for a call?”

He lets go, abruptly, steps back just far enough so that if he wanted he could backhand me, and he looks as if he’s considering exactly this.

“Please,” I say, feeling my heart thud through my jacket. “I can’t bear it. I’m his
mother
—you must understand that. I’m all he’s ever known. I couldn’t love him more if I’d given birth to him myself.”

Again, his eyes give something away. An old misery yet to be fully wrung out. If I can just say the right thing fast enough, I know I can break through to him.

“You need to do what I said,” he says, not viciously. “Go home before it’s too late.”

“I understand you don’t want me here. I’m interfering with whatever this is. I get that. But he’s just a boy. Tell me he’s all right, tell me someone’s taking care of him.”

He seems on the verge of answering me, of saying more. I glance at his stained fingernails. His watch. “What is it?” I say. “Tell me.”

The humane expression flees, another rushes in. Stony, practiced, annoyed. “He’s alive,” he says. “That’s all I’m going to say.”

He turns to walk away and I start after him. “No! Don’t leave. I’ll go to the police.”

He stops. “Go to the police and I promise you he’ll vanish and you’ll never know anything. You’ll spend the rest of your life looking at faces and never,
ever
see his.”

I drop my shaky hand, take a step back, feel for the wall, and get my bearings.

Again, he turns to leave.

“What did you want with Moreau’s daughter last winter?”

His body stiffens.

“Who told you that?”

“What does it matter?”

He marches toward me and grabs my jacket collar. “
Who
?”

“He did. Moreau. He knows it was you. They think I know you. They have a photo from when we were getting on the train.”

He slams the side of his fist against the wall, says, “
Merde
,” in what sounds like perfect French. And then, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

He takes off running in the opposite direction from the pension. I remain, numb, dumbstruck. Yet I believe what he said about Benny being alive. Strangely, my hopes are buoyed.

The sky finally releases its downpour, soaking me to the skin. I race to the pension with the man’s words roiling in my head.
No idea what you’re up against. Before it’s too late
. Just like before when he said,
What’s the rundown on this guy?

I bang on Oliver’s door.

“Twenty-five minutes,” he says, angry at first, pulling me in, then shutting the door. “What happened? You’re drenched.” He grabs a towel from the bathroom and puts it around my shoulders. “God, you’re
shaking
.”

I peel off my jacket and make my way to the desk chair, and try to dry my hair, but I can’t stop shivering. I rub a corner of the towel around my eyes and the streaked mascara blackens it. There’s a pressure in my neck and throat as if what the man from the train crushed hasn’t sprung back open yet.

“The man who broke into the car…found me.”

“
What
?” Oliver snatches up a box of tissues from the bedside and hands them to me.

I blow my nose. “You won’t believe it. He was the man from the train. The
Frenchman
trying to help me find Benny.”

Oliver’s eyes widen. He backs onto the bed. “You could have gotten
killed
.”

“Listen, Oliver, he was
American
. Not French.”