Fortune's Deadly Descent (23 page)

I hang up.

I don’t know why they picked Saint-Corbenay in particular, but I’m guessing they chose the train, and France, to throw everyone off. As Isak said, the train had hundreds of people, many of them foreign nationals. It complicated the investigation, and it bought the kidnappers hours, days, a whole week. Had Benny been taken in Zurich, the investigation would have drawn on a tighter circle, fewer people to consider, the connections more obvious.

I can’t put it off any longer. It’s time to come completely clean with Moreau.

Ten in the morning. Today’s the day. We give them the money, we get Benny in return. The call instructing where and how Oliver should deliver the money could come at any moment. I still have no intention of allowing Oliver to go through with it, but Isak has Oliver’s phone number and I worry he might talk him into something without my knowledge. All Isak ever says is that they have things under control. He refuses to elaborate. It exhausts and relieves me at once, as if I’ve fallen into a safety net, only to be caught in the webbing, unable to work my way to the ground.

I’m making every effort to stifle my anxiety. Having Moreau here in my room is a help.

He smokes in the chair across from me near the open window. The giant gilded mirror on the wall opposite catches our reflection—anemic bodies drawn into themselves, eyes sinking into heads, a jumble of bones in rumpled clothes. We appear made for each other, a set of old, broken marionettes.

“You’re going to lose your job over this, aren’t you?” I say.

He laughs and takes a long, serious pull on his cigarette. He releases the smoke through the window as if he’s studying something outside. And then he shakes his head at me, and I know it
isn’t an answer to my question but instead a recognition of his suffering, an agony not to be believed.

I open a fresh bottle of pastis. “Care for some?”

“If you please.”

I mix two glasses and offer Moreau his.

“I have something to confess,” he says.

“Just
one
thing?” I ask.

He grins. “I shall start with one.”

I swallow the pastis—funny, I’d pass on a stick of licorice, but this taste is my new friend.

“I spoke with Isak yesterday evening,” Moreau says. “Briefly. Because it happened here, he was forced to tell me: I’m afraid they lost track of Isabel.”

I bang my glass onto the table. “You’ve
got
to be kidding me. How can that happen?”

Moreau’s face says,
Interpol
.

He looks down, trying to decide which device for putting off the inevitable he’d prefer. A Gauloise, a slow sip of pastis? He picks neither, simply runs a hand over the bottom half of his face and says, “From what I understand, she is here, in Saint-Corbenay.”

No shit, Sherlock!
I think, as if I’m twelve years old. “Did I not
say
this would happen?”

Moreau shakes his head, clearly a judgment of Isak himself.

“
How
?” I ask.

“In the chaos of Benicio’s shooting.”

“She was
there
?”

“This is my understanding. Before then, she had made no…evasions. She seemed unaware that she was
en filature
. But then she disappeared among the emergency vehicles, skillfully, with design—”

“Son of bitch.” I throw up my hands. “I don’t even know what to say.” I knock back a long swallow, too much at once—I have to wait for the burn to ease, and already feel my skull filling with a soft yellow cumulus cloud, despite which I say, “And that’s not even everything you have to tell me.”

“I’m sorry. This has not been our…finest hour.”

“I should’ve followed my instincts from the beginning and stayed here. Why did you send me home?”

“It was before I knew your story. What happened in Mexico. And then Switzerland. After reading the report, I came to get you. More or less.”

“For your own purposes.”

Moreau pauses, smokes. “It’s true, when I read your file I thought you might be an asset to finding out the fate of my brother,” he says, his smoke blue in the shifting sun at the window. “I must admit I’ve lost a good piece of my mind over the years.” He taps his temple. “I realize now the cost.”

“Tell me you haven’t focused on your brother at the expense of finding Benny.”

“Finding my brother has forced me to search harder for your son.”

I take another drink.

“I was confident you would take charge,” Moreau says. “And your thinking, how you turn things around and around, the process, is different than our own.”

“You mean as a mother whose child is missing?”

“No. Well, yes, of course. But often that gets in the way. You are on the outside, without training, free of
protocole
…or expectations. If one has
l’esprit vif
, an empty mind can be the best place to start. Madame Moreau taught me this. A painter may
find a solution to feeding the hungry faster than an agricultural engineer.”

I nod.

“And with your history of taking matters into your own hands, and your—I’m sure you will agree—fearlessness, I trusted you, I wanted to see what you would find. But I was selfish to put you in so much danger. I must apologize for this.”

“There’s no need. I may have ruined the investigation by coming here. And poor Benicio—”

“
Non
,” Moreau says firmly. “You have not.”

“I thought I saw her, you know. Isabel. At the hospital. It turned out to be someone else. But this is why I…borrowed your gun.”

“You planned to shoot her?”

“Yes.”

Moreau stares a beat too long before drinking his pastis in an even greedier fashion than me. He coughs into his fist. “And now? Where do we go from here?”

“This is the hole into which everything has fallen, Inspector.”

His smile is the warmest I’ve seen from him. “The Roma my wife told you about. Ransom isn’t their game. Not like this.”

“Yes, I thought that too. But you still believe they’re the ones—”

“Indeed I do.”

“Why?”

“Johan’s son, Pieter Donders, isn’t the only criminal who spent time with your ex-husband. A man whose father is known by Interpol for having been involved in this form of child trafficking was there as well. Gunari Beeri. It’s possible he learned a great deal from his father. Gunari became quite close to Pieter, according to the guards. He may have taught Pieter the family business.”

“Was Pieter on the train when Benny was taken?”

“No. I don’t believe so. But I never did believe that the person who took Benny was actually
on
the train. I always suspected it was someone waiting on the platform, or hiding nearby.”

I nod again, all of it making perfect, and now obvious, sense. Helena took him and passed him off to Pieter, who was waiting outside, behind the blanket at the front of the train.

“Who cut the wiring to the air-conditioning?”

“I can’t prove it but I would bet my wife’s finest painting it was one of the men helping that
fainting
woman on the platform.”

“I see.”

“Gunari was released a year before Pieter Donders. I understand he had a private conversation with Pieter’s girlfriend, the one responsible for him being in prison.”

“Which is why she took back her testimony.”

“Most likely. Isak tells me little. You’d think we were on different sides. He’s very stingy with information.”

Moreau smokes and exhales. The slow unfolding of this little ritual somehow calms me.

“I can’t stop thinking about those children,” I say.

“Nor can I, of course. The problem is, wherever they are, they don’t even know they’re missing. If they’ve been told of their adoption, it’s with the understanding that they’ve been
rescued
.”

“It’s the perfect crime. Babies can’t talk, have no memories, and cling to whoever has them.”

“In the orphanages, these children have been kept separate from the others, given special rooms, attention, nutrition. There is that to be grateful for. They are the first to go and at a very high price.”

“Like Thoroughbreds or greyhounds,” I say. “Or truffle-sniffing pigs.”

“Precisely,” Moreau answers, nodding, acknowledgment that we’re both addicted to finding the funny part of black moments.

Then he says, “But
this
, asking for ransom, shooting Benicio. This is something else.”

“It’s Jonathon, isn’t it?
He’s
the
something else
.”

“This has been my thought from the beginning.”

“Nothing like waiting until the last minute to tell me.”

“Again, I apologize. But there have been many confusions about this case.”

“How do you think he convinced these others to act for him?”

Moreau snubs out the Gauloise and leans forward with his elbows on his knees. “He knows your weakness, or at least what he considers to be your weakness.”

“What?”

“Your love of your family.”

“He wants to punish me,” I say.

“He wants to
torture
you.”

I finger the scar on my leg, realize I’m doing it, and let go. “And these people, they get my money in return?”

“Exactly.”

“While Jonathon gets revenge.”

“It would appear so.”

“This is why they need Oliver to deliver the money.”

“Isak will not put him in danger. I promise you this. I know him well enough to know he is up to something. He has at least
that
part figured out.”

“But you still don’t know what they’ve done with Benny?”

“No,” Moreau says plainly, meeting my eye.

I lean back into my chair. “Thank you for not lying.” I start to take another drink and see that my glass is empty and set it down again.

“And Isabel?” I say. “What’s her part in it?”

“This answer is too obvious for my liking,” Moreau says. “I think there’s something more.”

“Which is…?”

“I can’t say until it becomes more clear.”

“And your brother? You must believe he’s still alive.”

“On the good days.”

“Let’s stick with them, then. You must have ideas about where he is.”

Moreau shifts, visibly uncomfortable.

“I understand he was three when he was taken,” I say. “That’s old enough to have some memories of your family, of
you
.”

“My hope is that in spite of being told those memories were dreams, an orphan’s fantasies, that they remained, and when he was older he came to believe they were too…
solid
to be dreams.”

“Would you tell me about that day? How you got away?”

I know he won’t refuse me. He rubs his thumb on his lips, back and forth, as if preparing for the words about to pass over them. “I did everything I could,” he begins. “I screamed. I punched. I kicked. It was a single man. He had Rémy by the hair. Rémy was shrieking too, saying it hurt. So I stopped yelling, I went limp. It confused him, and when he tried to change his grip, I jerked away, and ran.”

Anguish lodges in my chest—all I can say is “I’m so sorry.”

“I hope, if he sees me in those buried images, he understands I was running for help.”

We look back and forth, momentarily beyond words.

“You believe he may have ended up in America?”

“I do.”

“Where do you think he is now?”

Moreau’s head tilts sideways slightly, a tiny smirk appears on his lips. It’s a look that means,
What are you, some kind of idiot?

And then, slowly, I understand.

I lean forward and take his hand, lean farther still and wrap my arms around him. I see everything at once: The man on the train. His brown eyes, the shape of his mouth. I’d never seen him before the day on the train, and yet the second time, when he warned me to stay away, he’d looked so familiar. It was his brother, I knew. I’d been that close. I had touched the man Moreau has spent his entire life in search of.

My first question is, of course, “How can you be so sure it’s him?”

Moreau explains about the day Rémy approached Arabelle near their house, how he shook the hand of a doll in her arms. “Perhaps he realized he’d frightened her and reached for the doll’s hand instead of hers,” Moreau says, and I have to stop myself from saying, “Or he was just softening her up, about to snatch her before she had the sense to run.”

He explains that fingerprints on the doll matched those on toys his mother had boxed up decades ago, untouched until recently. Not even Moreau’s wife knew of the toys or the fingerprints.

“Another drink?” I ask him.

“If you please,” Moreau says again.

I fill his glass. “I hate to say this, but might this not be a case of the abused perpetuating the abuse on to the next generation?”

“What exactly do you mean?”

Why is he making me say it? “Your brother was stolen as a child, so he grew up to steal children—”

“There is no evidence that my brother—”

“Excuse me. I understand how emotional this is for you, but he pinned me against a rock wall and ordered me to stay away.
And
he knew where Benny was.”

Before Moreau can open his mouth, the phone rings.

It’s Oliver, his voice panicky. I set the phone to speaker so Moreau can hear too.

“The man from the market,” Oliver says. “Who did the portrait of Benny…” He seems to be catching his breath. “Seraphina had to pick up her aunt’s prescription. She saw him at the pharmacy. He told her he’d seen her with me, the
American teacher
, in the square when Benicio was shot.”

“Yes…?”

“Then he said he’d seen the boy from the sketch with his grandmother!”

My mouth falls open, and in this momentary vacuum, Moreau says, “Saw him where?”

“It must have been Helena Donders.”

“
Where
, Oliver?”

“That’s the thing. Right across the street from where he lives, the artist. He said some of the houses were bought up and renovated in the past year. He doesn’t know who owns them. He’d noticed the old woman coming and going weeks ago, but it wasn’t until last night that he saw the boy in an upstairs window and then saw the woman moving him away.”