Fortune's Deadly Descent (18 page)

If not mine, whose?

Can there be any answer but
Isabel’s
?

So the ransom call, is it strictly a smoke screen? Am I completely off base about the grandmotherly Helena Watson, not to mention the swooning Gypsy on the platform?

Why would the address say
Mine
if it weren’t from Isabel?

I stare into Benny’s eyes.
Where are you, sweetheart? Give me a hint
.

I enlarge the photograph. Here’s the corner of something, a kitchen table, maybe…a small blurry box, a can the size of a Progresso soup can, a jar that looks an awful lot like the one mustard came in at the farmer’s market.

Please give him back to us
, I write.
We’re all the family he’s ever known. I will give you EVERYTHING you ask in return
.

I hit
send
and the e-mail immediately bounces back as undeliverable.

Outside, the damn sirens will
not
let up. I’m back to being mad at Oliver—he shouldn’t have left me alone, he should’ve run straight over and straight back. I’m about to dial his cell again when the phone rings beneath my hand.

“Where
are
you?” I shout, almost breathless.

“Brace yourself, my dear,” Moreau says. “This will not be easy.”

One night last winter, when Benny was sound asleep in his bed and the whole town was swaddled in new snow and the moon angled through our tall, frost-crystaled windows, Benicio and I were in the front room enjoying a late dinner alone. He unexpectedly got up and put on a CD by a French hip-hop artist I’d never heard of. He took my hand and pulled me to the floor. “For research,” he said to the thumping beat, the singsongy pulse of urban French poetry. “No, seriously,” he said.

He slipped off his shirt, tossed it to the sofa, and began strutting and hip-thrusting, two fingers jabbing the air. Then he was grabbing his crotch, going,
Yeh, yeh, yeh, yeh
. I fell sideways on the sofa laughing.

He pulled me up and out into the middle of the room and then I was shaking my own tail feathers, and both of us were laughing madly. “We’re too
old
for this,” I said. “What if Benny wakes up?”

Benicio didn’t care, he danced on, playing the role like he owned it. In truth, we hadn’t laughed like this in ages. I began to remember why the young found dirty dancing so appealing.

When I got my breath, I asked him what on earth he was researching this for.

“A romantic comedy set in Paris,” he said.

“About star-crossed gangsta love?” I asked. “Or whatever the Frenchies call it.”

“
Oui
, mothafucka,” he said, and then we were goners, totally at the mercy of our own hysterics. Benicio danced behind me, his arms wrapped about my chest, and I remembered when he’d held me like that for the first time. Moments before his sister and their cousin Leon had come into the room where they kept us, Benicio and I had lain on the narrow bunk and he’d drawn me back against him, his forearms flattening my breasts. His lips brushed my ear, he whispered,
There is something between us, Celia, you know it, don’t you?
Oh, I did. But then Isabel and Leon stormed in and Leon broke Benicio’s nose with a sickening
crack
I’ve never purged from my memory. It bled and bled. I thought he was going to die. And yet, even after they’d tied him to a chair and left him, his head tilted back as far as he could get it, he still joked about the mess we were in, still tried to make me laugh through the pain and blood and fear, wanted to protect me, even then. How could I not love this man? How could I ever love anyone else?

Seven years later, Benicio is still so funny, so beautiful, so intensely
pleasing
. That night in the living room, we danced long after our food got cold, danced until our clothes were sticky with sweat and we could no longer stand to keep them on, could no longer stand to not touch one another. We fell naked onto the sofa and he whispered in my ear, “Who gets to live like this? How the hell did we get so lucky?”

* * *

I’m crouched in the backseat of Moreau’s car, out of sight. His window is barely cracked; two feet above me is a slow-drifting
canopy of Gauloise smoke. Outside is a chaos of flares, emergency flashers, searing white spotlights on portable standards. Every few moments, we jerk to a stop, then crawl forward again.

“So sorry,” Moreau says. He takes an impatient, wispy-sounding drag, waits, slowly exhales, says, “People. Impossible to get around.” He seems worn down, as if he’s been awake since I last saw him in Zurich.

“
Les journalistes internationaux sont arrivés
,” he says then, apparently to himself. It’s close enough to English that I understand. He gazes left, right, taking it all in, his hands making little squeaks as he twists them on the wheel.

I force myself to stay down and not gape at the aftermath of what has taken place.

“How many times was he shot?” I ask, my voice so steady it seems not to be mine.

“I am unsure,” Moreau says.

“But you
are
sure Oliver is safe?”

“I promise you. He is waiting for you at the hospital.”

Moreau’s English is halting, more measured than usual.

“Tell me everything you know,” I say. “Leave nothing out. I need the truth.”

Moreau sighs. “As I said, his taxi was interrupted by a car. No. Not car, a
van
. Peugot. For deliveries.”

“What color?”

“Silver, I believe”

I have no doubt it’s the same one that drove past our pension while I was on the phone with Benicio.

“OK, give me the rest.”

“I can only tell what has been told to me. The facts often change later, you understand. But what seems to be true is someone from this car, this van, fired a gun into the taxi.”

“And you don’t know how many times?”

“We do not know. Not exactly.”

“How many?”

“Perhaps three.”

I know what it feels like when a bullet rips through flesh. I cup the scar on my calf, imagining the same searing burn happening all over Benicio’s body. I imagine his breath growing weak.
Why?
“We did nothing wrong. They haven’t even contacted us again.”

“We don’t understand it ourselves.”

“And why should we believe Benny is all right? Why should we believe they’re going to return him? These people are insane.”

The e-mailed photo of Benny flashes before my eyes.

“Is Benicio really alive? For the love of god, don’t lie to me.”

“When he was placed into the ambulance. Yes, he was. This is all I know.”

I see him doing his gangsta dance, wobbly with laughter. “Where was he hit?”

“They will explain at the hospital.”

His soft face above me as we make love on the floor.

“
You
tell me,” I say.

“His side. The ribs?” He pauses. “At least one in his head. This is what I was told, but as I said, these things—”

“I can take it,” I say, holding my head, imagining Benicio near me, the warmth of his skin, and then the heat of his blood, his pain.

“We will find who did this,” Moreau says.

“Benny is still out there waiting for you to find
him
.”

Moreau grows silent. And then, “This was—
audacieux
? An
audacieux
act?”

“Audacious? Bold?”

“Very bold. Sorry. When I’m tired, my English…I want to say it is unusual to try to kill someone this way. Why did they not wait until he arrived at your hotel? Why shoot him in the middle of,
mon Dieu
, the square?”

“Have you talked to Isak?”

“No. Isak will not include me at this point. I believe he now sees me as nothing more than your minder.”

I recall what Madame Moreau said about Moreau’s disdain toward Interpol for never finding his brother. “I assume your wife told you Oliver and I came to your house.”

“Indeed,” he says.

“I’m sorry about your brother.”

Moreau shifts in his seat, takes a last pull on his cigarette, and pitches the rest like a dart through the small window opening.

“I wanted to tell you I understand how you feel, if I may. The guilt. Like
un rocher
on the chest, is it not?”

I want to say, you were just a child. What could you have done? But
me
, I’m an
adult
, a
mother
, the one in charge. It is my
job
to protect my child…and I failed.

“These people knew I could never pull off what they were asking,” I say.

“We don’t have to discuss this now.”

“Better now than later. We might not get another chance.” This statement hangs in the air—I’m unsure what I meant by it. I pull my purse and Oliver’s computer case closer to me.

“It is possible they are
amateurs
,” Moreau says. “The train, this was
professional
.
Mais
, it is also possible they want attention.
Un syndrome d’Hollywood
. Possible, too, that something went wrong in the last minutes—”

“What do you believe happened?” I ask.

“What do
you
believe?”

It takes me a moment to form an answer. I’m still thinking aloud when I say, “I was going to say they saw his coming here as”—I take a chance and try—“
un provocation
.”

Moreau does me the honor of smiling sadly. “
Une provocation
,” he says.

“
Merci
. They may have thought we were disobeying the instruction, so they did what they said they would do. But I don’t believe that. I think they wanted Benicio dead from the beginning. Dead in a very dramatic way, to send an even larger message.”

“And why do you say this?”

“It’s just a feeling I have…that it doesn’t matter if I do exactly what they say or not.”

Moreau turns quiet and I know he agrees with me.

“I’m being punished,” I say.

“There is no one other than Jonathon or Isabel who might bear this kind of hatred for you?” Moreau asks.

“Their hatred isn’t enough? Do you have any idea how manipulative they are, how evil?”

What seemed obvious only minutes earlier, Helena Watson’s guilt, now feels crazily far-fetched. A little old lady with gardenia perfume involved in gunning people down in a public square? It’s starting to really scare me how defective my judgment has become.

Moreau clicks his tongue. “Not easy to make such things happen from so far. And from prison.”

“Only
Jonathon’s
still in prison,” I say. “Isak didn’t tell you the latest developments?”

“Isabel has been released, yes, I know this. And I know, also, this happened after your son was taken.”

I nod. “But she was allowed certain freedoms. Apparently, she’s built a reputation for good deeds, giving money to poor kids
in the town, and god knows what else—people see her as a hero of some kind, they’ve been rallying around her. That’s not the Isabel
I
know.”

“It would have been more
difficult
from prison—”

“So where is she?” I ask. “They’re supposed to have their eagle eyes on her.”

Moreau says he doesn’t know.

“I tried to tell Isak. He was so smug—” He and Benicio, I think, but my anger at Benicio is an exposed wire I can’t let myself touch. “He was so goddamn sure that looking at Isabel was
stupid
. Isabel and her perfect alibi. You know what?
Nothing’s
perfect.”

“And Jonathon,” I go on after a moment, “in his fancy prison, like a private boys’ school? Have you seen where they’re keeping him?”

Moreau nods yes.

I recall Moreau telling Benicio in our bedroom that his errand in Zurich would only take about twenty-four hours. Now I realize he must’ve gone to see Jonathon. Maybe this was the real reason he came all that way.

We drive on.

Benicio
, I think,
you are everywhere in me. How will I survive this?
But Benicio’s voice in my head orders me to stay here, to concentrate.

So I tell Moreau about the e-mail. “There was a photo of Benny.”

Moreau taps the brake, cranes his neck over the seat. “When? It said what?”

“It was sent yesterday, which…Well, they stole my computer, how did they think I was going to see an e-mail?”

“Is that not a computer in your bag?”

“It’s Oliver’s.”

“You said nothing about this computer when we talked before, here or in Zurich.”

“No, this was later—when the car was broken into, here in Saint-Corbenay. Petit didn’t tell you?”

After a long moment, Moreau says, “
Oui
, I do know about your car.”

“Good,” I say. “I thought Monsieur Petit was just making scribbles on his notepad.”

Moreau produces a faint smile. “Someday I will explain to you about Monsieur Petit,” he says. “He’s protective of me. A good friend.”

I nod. “Did he tell you we saw who did it? We told him but he acted like he couldn’t care less. We saw the man running off, only a glimpse, but Oliver and I had bumped into him earlier, leaving the farmer’s market—we recognized his coat. Since then I realized he’s also the man from the train.”

“
Attendez
. The man who stole your computer is the same one who offered to help when your son was first missing?”

“Yes.”

I see Moreau’s head shake. Does he disbelieve my conclusion, or is he just marveling at the strangeness of the knot he’s been told to untie?

But after a moment he surprises me by asking where I bought the stolen computer. I ask why it matters.

“Europe, or the United States?”

“Benicio gave it to me,” I say. “He bought it about six months ago in LA.”

I ask again why he needs to know this.

Again he gives me nothing.

“Well, here’s something,” I say. “The man from the train, who is also the one who stole the computer…he cornered me in an
alley on my way back to the pension from your house. He got me by the throat.”

At this, Moreau punches the brakes hard enough that I flop forward against the back of his seat. He grinds us to a halt on the shoulder. “What did he say? You must tell me
everything
.”