Fortune's Deadly Descent (25 page)

“You found it?” Moreau asks.

“Answer me!”

“I’m not who you think I am,” he says, finally.

I laugh. “No. You’re not who
you
think you are. And that’s beside the point. Answer my questions.”

Moreau lowers his gun. “Celia.”

“What are you
doing
?” I say.

“Let me take him to the station and question him. We have the wrong house. As far as his…involvement, I can figure that out at the station with my colleagues.”

“No. I don’t care who he is. He
knows
where Benny is. He
threatened
me. There are laws against that alone. You’re not thinking straight.”

The man of the house has his face in his hands. Is he weeping?

“What about the photograph Gaston found of Benny just blocks from here?”

“This is a small town, Celia. We know Benny was taken off the train here, and someone here must have been waiting, but—”

I raise my gun to Adam’s face and click off the safety. “Indeed, someone was. Why are you here, Adam? Particularly, why
here
, now, on this street?”

“Put the gun down!” Moreau yells. “Or I will take you to the station as well.”

Adam glances at Moreau and then me.

“Where the hell is my son?”

Moreau pulls out his cell and prepares to hit speed dial.

“Wait!” I say. “Give me a goddamn
second
.”

The man of the house reaches for something on the side table, and I jump, aiming my gun at him. He plucks a tissue from a box and blows his nose.

This ordinary gesture somehow brings everything to a halt. Everyone appears stunned, unable to figure out what our next move should be. If the boy upstairs wasn’t Benny, then perhaps all that is left to imagine is that Benny is in Zurich, pushing a pram full of explosives. And whatever Isak has planned, a decoy, perhaps, made to look like Oliver, could easily fail.

“Celia. Look at me,” Moreau says. “Do you understand? Gaston was mistaken.”

His brother leans forward and studies Moreau. The man in the chair is indeed
weeping
, and as I stare at his shaking shoulders I feel on the verge of tears myself. I slowly lower my gun. But the thought that Benny could have been
right upstairs
, looking out the window, looking for
me…
I can’t just let it go. Moreau, on the other hand, is done. He got what he wanted. Benny means nothing to him now.

“But he’s my
son
,” I say, choking on the words. I suck in my bottom lip to stop the quivering.

“Isak said he would call right back. We have to trust—”

“Suddenly you think trusting Isak is the answer? You’re not fooling anyone, Moreau. Is this the kind of reasoning you had when your ex-partner was wounded on the job?”

Moreau’s face turns stony. “Shut up,” he says.

“Are you going to shoot me?”

Moreau brandishes the cell. “No. But I will arrest you if you don’t put the gun on the floor this minute.”

The gun dangles in my hand at my side.

“I’m going to take a quick look around upstairs,” I say.

Moreau tilts his head and sighs. Moments drag on as if we’re engaged in a glaring contest. Finally, Moreau gestures his
head toward the stairs. “Go. Two minutes. But leave the gun with me.”

I laugh. “Sorry. No.”

I turn toward the kitchen, and it is then that the room behind me, and everyone it, radiates the strangest, heaviest silence I’ve ever felt. Something is
wrong
. It’s as if I’m being watched, scrutinized by evil, by someone or something preparing to attack me. But who? I glance back and the weeping man’s eyes lock onto mine before he quickly looks away.

Every ounce of sense in me says get the hell out.
Do not wait. Do not look back
. But how do I manage it without going through the living room?

I peek into the kitchen for a back door, and that’s when it hits me.

“Hold it,” I tell Moreau, and pull up my e-mail on Benicio’s phone, point the photo of Benny sent to me by
Mine
, line it up near the corner of the kitchen table, and it’s as if the photo were one puzzle piece, and the view of the kitchen from where I stand, the other. They match perfectly. The lampshade, the electric socket on the wall behind.

First I shoot the man of the house. He crashes to the floor as Rémy scrambles out of the way. I fire again, and Rémy never makes it to the door.

As far as I can tell, Moreau has rushed to help his brother, who is now shrieking and scurrying wildly across the floor.

I’ve retreated to a corner of the kitchen, briefly worried that Moreau will kill me. There is indeed a back door, but I’ll be damned if I’m leaving now. When I hear what sounds like Moreau calling for help on his phone, I bolt to the stairs and take them two at a time. The hallway at the top is so dark I can’t believe it’s midday. My breathing is loud enough to hear above the howling, above Moreau crying Rémy’s name over and over and over.

Every window is covered, every door closed. I grab the first knob, twist it silently, crack the door a couple of inches, and sunlight slashes into the hallway. I thrust the door the rest of the way open and look in, gun raised. Empty, floor to ceiling, bare wires where a light fixture should be.

Sirens have begun in the distance.

I hold still and try to orientate myself to the outside, to the window where Gaston says he saw Benny. It’s got to be the door at the end of the hall.

The handle turns an inch. I kneel and try to gauge the sturdiness of the wood and the lock mechanism, then decide there’s no
time. All I can do is scream out, “Benny!” with all the anguish welled up in me, back against the wall opposite, then rush forward shoulder first, do it again, then again, then turn sideways and start kicking with my heel until at last the jamb splinters and the door whangs open.

The room is so dark I can barely make out a human shape slumped in a folding metal chair directly before me. I snap my gun up. The hem of a dress comes into view, a thick calf, a woman’s shoe. Whoever she is, she’s not moving.

“Hands on your head,” I say, but she doesn’t so much as twitch. I grope my free hand along the wall near the door until I feel a switch. When light floods the room, I assume the woman I’m looking at is Helena Donders. She’s older, late sixties probably. I don’t know if she’s dead or just knocked out. I kick her foot and it rolls to the side.

I call out Benny’s name again, listen, but all I hear is the rising, staccato pitch of the sirens. I’m in a young child’s room, I realize—it’s full of babyish toys, stuffed animals. And I realize, too, that it’s L-shaped, and that the rest is out of view around a corner. The window blind is crudely sealed to the frame with duct tape. On a child-sized wooden desk beneath it sits Benny’s backpack.

One keening siren suddenly stops, two more coming in its wake.

“
Ben-ny
!” I yell again. I slide along the wall, just far enough to sneak a look around the corner. “
Benny
? It’s
Mutti
.”

A foot. A woman’s, cast sideways onto the floor as if she’s leaning off the edge of a bed. It stirs.

I step out and point the gun. No, I’m not surprised to see her here. Exactly as I said from the very first day: Isabel. But Benny is draped across her lap, his head tilted back, like some god-awful painting, mother and child, in tragedy, in death.

Isabel doesn’t even look up. She rocks him, her sobbing drowned out by the next wave of sirens.

“Get away from him!” I yell.

She won’t look at me.

I step forward and place the gun directly on her skull. “Now.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispers.

I grab a fistful of hair and yank her to the floor. Benny tumbles off the bed with her. She reaches for him and I stick the gun in her face, press hard into her cheek. Our days in Mexico gush back like a putrid taste on my tongue. “Touch him again and you’re dead.”

A commotion has broken out downstairs. Police? Ambulance? It sounds as if ten people have burst into the front room, shoving furniture across the floor, yelling over one another.

Oh god
. I jostle Benny’s arm and it flops like a rag doll’s. For an instant, I wonder if he’s
real
. I grope at his wrist for a pulse but can’t locate it. His skin is warm, so I feel my way toward his carotid.

“What did you
do
to him?” I hiss.

Before Isabel can answer, I stroke his cheek, saying, “I’m here, sweetheart. Wake
up
.
Please
.”

Cops are stampeding up the staircase, pounding across the hardwood floors.

“What’s
wrong
with him?” I cry.

Isabel shakes her head at Benny, her tears so pathetic, so reprehensible I leap up and slam the butt of the pistol against her head. It fails to explode into a million glittering shards. She simply falls to the side without a sound. For half a second, I regard her with the detachment of a passing angel…then I reenter my body, and bring the pistol down again in the same spot, raise up and do it again, and again, each time harder, my sickening grunts like the residue of my darkest dream.

Six years ago, after being stationed in Böblingen, Germany, with his first-generation American-born Hungarian wife, Rémy, a US marine, began having visions of a boy he recognized as his brother, though according to his adoption record, he’d been an only child. The visions infiltrated his sleep, came during the days in drowsy unguarded moments: a big man was slinging this
brother
of his across the ground, dragging him, slapping his face. Another boy was present too, and all three tried to free themselves from the man’s massive fist. Then, suddenly, the other boys were gone, and the man had Rémy by the back of the neck, lifting his feet off the ground as if he were no weightier than a kitten.

At first, the visions stopped there.

But the longer he lived in Europe, the more memories surfaced: Being taken to a strange, stark house, understanding nothing, not where he was, or where he’d come from, or who was putting him through this, and always, at some point, he would begin to wail through long cold nights. The memories went from unsettling to profoundly disruptive; he had panic attacks, and he had periods of debilitating weakness that rendered him motionless, gasping for breath, sweat soaked, this soldier who’d grown up
with loving and gentle parents in a small New Hampshire town, who’d never seen battle.

He was eventually given an honorable discharge but refused to return to the States. For the next few years, he and Mariska were vagabonds, taking short-term jobs in one town after another, alert to the possibility that Rémy would come upon something to tie his visions to the real world. It wasn’t until they met a group of Romani one night, in a bar on the outskirts of Dijon, that he got the first glimmer. He’d never known any Romani, but he felt a weird affinity at once, and the more he got into their good graces—helping them diagnose the electrical problem with their ancient truck, offering aspirin to a young woman with cramps, even stitching up the lacerated scalp of one of their elders—the more convinced he was that he had a history with these people, that the village he was searching for was here somewhere in the South of France. He remembered a small white dog named Bisou, a woman calling to it across a yard,
Bisou, Bisou, Bisou
.
Kiss, kiss, kiss
. The woman calling after the dog was French, he was sure of it—sometimes he heard the same voice speak endearments, to
him
.
Mon chou, mon coco, bonhomme
. He remembered lavender and thyme on a hillside, the bare rocky jut of a mountain in the distance. He remembered a fountain in the yard, and its concrete seal, spouting water from a broken nose. And then, one day, according to this story, Rémy happened upon Moreau’s house. He was struck by the wafting scent of lavender and thyme. He stopped and peered through Moreau’s gate and knew.

This is all fine from Moreau’s perspective, his way of assuring me that Rémy was a good soul from the start. But it wasn’t until Moreau told me how his brother was connected to Benny that I began to feel the full weight of remorse for having shot him in
the shoulder, followed by immense gratitude that I’d been such a poor aim.

It’s been nine months since the day I found Benny. Nine months since I learned how much Rémy risked to find the truth about himself, and in turn, to try to stop another boy he didn’t even know from losing his past too.

Rémy had overheard Pascal, one of the Romani men he’d befriended, talking about being approached by Gunari, a man Pascal had only half-known growing up, offering a lot of money for help with a
poaching
job. Pascal had laughed off the idea, but Rémy went behind his back and offered up his own services. Rémy was, after all, a former marine, with expertise they could use. He spoke French fluently and knew the area well.

Pieter Donders didn’t fully trust Rémy at first, and Jonathon didn’t trust him at all, especially after he’d lost the photograph of Benny in Saint-Corbenay—the only actual slipup Rémy made, and which caused a brief fistfight between them, Rémy and Pieter Donders. In the end Jonathon
used
Rémy, making him believe he was part of the plan, then flipping that plan on its head, making Rémy the scapegoat. Jonathon even planted the idea in Moreau’s ear during his visit: a man he’d heard about from the train, describing Rémy, who had himself been told by Pieter, days before the kidnapping, that the whole thing was called off. Rémy never bought it, and Pieter knew he wouldn’t, acting purposely suspicious when he delivered the news. Rémy removed his wedding band before boarding the train in Zurich that day, a small, symbolic gesture to remove Mariska from whatever might happen to him. These people were dangerous. Rémy quickly caught on to Pieter’s plan after Benny went missing and the passengers had piled out of the train, when he spotted Helena Watson describing
his own clothes and hands to the police. How easy would it have been to pin a kidnapping, or worse, on a man with a mentally unstable past? She gave a detailed and practiced description of Rémy, exactly as her son, Pieter, had instructed. And the photo of Benny that was e-mailed to me? A joke that Pieter thought hilarious.