Fortune's Deadly Descent (9 page)

“I suppose.”

Still, the absence of children seems odd.

“Besides that,” Oliver says, “the birthrate has been falling across Europe for decades. These villages are dying. Huge issue for pensioners.”

“This village doesn’t look like it’s dying, Oliver.”

“Well, maybe not this one. I’ve been thinking about that British woman, the witness on the train? I read in
The Times
how Brits are throwing money at ruined farmhouses down here, turning them into B&Bs. It’s actually
saving
some of these villages. Maybe that’s happening here.”

“Hmm,” I say. “Moreau was telling me the same thing.” I think of the Roma, or Gypsies, as they’re called, and of the stranger who spoke to Moreau’s daughter, who may have been the man from
the train. According to Moreau, he spoke French with some kind of accent. I wouldn’t have known the difference.

I draw in the umbrella as we duck and stroll beneath the awnings. I can feel Benny’s presence in the shades of green and orange, in the smell of soil and roots, the sharp ripening of fruit. I stop in front of a mound of chervil. The cool strings weave through my fingers as I bring them to my nose. It smells like Benny. It may as well be his clothes, his blanket, his hair between my fingers.

Oliver rubs my back. I press my bottom lip between my teeth.

“We’ll find him, Mom,” he whispers in my ear. “We will.”

I release the chervil, and we walk on. I picture Moreau here, sauntering between the vintners, farmers, housewives, neighbors he’d know by name. Has he
questioned
any of them—despite Interpol’s desire to keep the disappearance under wraps? If not, how could he possibly go about the search?

We pass a palette of freshly cut flowers—reds the color of Tabasco, pale yellows, blues, midnight to icy. I think of the unapologetic Madame Moreau—is she one of the women with string bags and gray raincoats, hair pinned at the nape of their necks? No one seems colorful enough. No one shines. I picture her painting nudes into cliffs. I see the love so clearly in Moreau’s eyes when he speaks of her, and without warning, I think of Benicio, his lazy finger skimming the base of my throat, drifting along the tender skin behind my ear where his hand cups my head, draws me to his kiss. He calls me “hot fondue.” I say, “That’s molten cheese to you,” and we laugh against each other’s teeth.

I lower myself to a bench in the open square. My body feels small and adrift, like a doll tossed out to sea. I cover my head with the umbrella.

“
Alles in ordnung?
” Oliver asks.

“I’m fine, sweetheart,” I say softly.

“So?”

“Nothing.”

He nods.

I nod back, then give a tiny head tilt toward the crowd. “Why don’t you go take more pictures. Scout around.”

“Should I pretend to be Swiss?” he asks.

“You
are
Swiss.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes.”

So Oliver sets off bareheaded along the perimeter of the market. His hair immediately frizzes. He’s tall, his jacket red, easy to spot in a crowd.

I dial Benicio’s cell.

He answers with a growling burst of air. “Please tell me you’re coming home,” he says.

“We just got here,” I say.

For a moment, there’s nothing but the mustard woman yelling, “
Moutarde!
”

“I’m going out of my mind without you,” he says.

“I just want to know if there’s any news.”

“Celia.”

“
Answer
me.”

“No. No news.”

I let it sink in. Could he be lying? But why would he?

“The last thing we needed was a distraction like this,” I say. “This Emily thing.”

“No kidding.”

I can’t help but laugh. “You act like it wasn’t your doing.”

“It’s complicated, Celia. I wanted to talk face-to-face, but you were being so—”

“Why don’t you just tell me you slept with her, and get it over with?”

“Because I
didn’t
sleep with her. I didn’t
begin
to sleep with her.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You have no reason not to.”

“Ha! How many times did you see her in LA?”

“
Moutarde délicieuse!
” the woman yells.

“Never mind,” I say. “I don’t want to know.”

But he goes on anyway, “A producer’s interested in one of my scripts, and he wanted to see if Emily was good for a part. OK? It wasn’t my idea—I had
nothing
to do with setting it up.”

“So, what, you met her at his office?”

“It was a party, actually.”

“How nice,” I say. “For you both.”

A ridiculously long silence follows.

“You have to come home,” he says at last.

“You’ve been texting each other for months, Benicio. How could you not tell me? This isn’t like you. Or maybe it
is
. What do I know? You obviously had some reason for doing it on the sly.”

“It wasn’t to hurt you,” he says. “I didn’t want to involve you, that’s all. You’ve been busy with the book—”

“I know your voice, Benicio. There’s more you’re not telling me. You’re a bad liar.”

“I wish you wouldn’t do this.”

Me
, I think.

“You know what, Benicio,” I say after a few moments. “When I do come back, I’m pretty sure I don’t want you to be there.”

“This is nuts. We obviously can’t do this over the phone. I’d come and get you, but I can’t leave. In case—”

“I shouldn’t have called,” I say. “I should’ve known better.”

“Goddamn it, Celia. OK, look, maybe I can—”

“You’re
not
coming here. And I’m not coming back without Benny.”

He doesn’t respond for a while. Then he says, “Just remember what Isak said. If you start asking questions, everyone’s going to know the whole story. He could be right, you know, Isak. You could be making things way worse.”

It occurs to me that Isak is probably listening in—why didn’t I realize that earlier? Benicio could very well be playing along.

I shake my head. This call has exhausted me. I consider just hanging up.

Then, across the way, an old woman catches my eye as she stows leeks and cabbage in her bike basket. Her stockings sag at the ankles. The laces in her black leather shoes are much too long, leaving stringy, oversize loops dragging on the ground. She turns, and unexpectedly smiles at me. If my mother were still alive, she’d be about her age. My mother would have loved it here. Loved my home in Zurich. Loved Benicio, in fact, and so I cannot help but smile strangely, achingly, at this woman as she hops on her bike with tremendous grace and raises her hand into a wave but never looks back. I have the urge to follow wherever she’s going.

Benicio says, “Isak told us it could be at least a week before we heard something. It hasn’t been quite that long.”

“Benicio—” I say.

But a hand suddenly jerks my arm from behind, and the phone leaps from my grasp, tumbles through the air, and smashes against the hard cobblestone.

“
Scheisse!
” I yell.

“You need to come, fast,” Oliver says, cupping my elbow, pulling me to my feet.

His stiff, damp face resembles beeswax.

I leap off the bench and snatch up the phone before Oliver pulls me away. Wet slivers of glass crumble in my palm. “
Was ist los?
”

I’m scrambling to keep pace with Oliver’s long legs, running while trying to appear as if I’m not. “You’re drawing
attention
to us,” I hiss in English. “Slow down. Tell me what’s going on.”

“There’s something you need to see,” he says, his face growing paler still.

When I was ten, my parents took me to the Rose Festival along Portland’s waterfront. They weren’t big on fairs—in fact, we’d never been. I could see my father’s patience wearing after walking around in the rain, forking out dimes for games he couldn’t win, picking cotton candy out of my hair, enduring an endless Ferris wheel ride with me while the wind shook our rickety metal cage. But leaving the grounds, his face grew fascinated as we stopped to watch a man sketching charcoal portraits. The Rat Pack was displayed behind him—Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra, along with Marilyn Monroe, Tom Selleck, and Don Johnson. But it was the one the man was sketching right then that impressed my father. The likeness of the moon-faced woman, streaks of gray at her temples, posing stiff-backed in the chair, was uncanny. More than that, something deeper shone through. Her nature? Except, maybe a
better
her—at least that’s what my mother said when they decided to have the man draw me.

Not only did the portrait look like me, but he’d sketched my hair slightly longer than it was, making it the length I was dying for it to reach. My folks hung it in the front hallway—it was the first thing you saw walking in. Within a few months, my hair had
caught up with the girl’s in the picture; even my eyes had matured into hers. This is what I remember as Oliver pulls me beneath the awning, where a man’s sketching a woman of seventy or so in a floppy blue chapeau. But then I think,
Oliver’s never seen the picture from the Rose Festival, what’s he trying to tell me?

Instead of the Rat Pack, French celebrities adorn the easels behind him. I recognize Catherine Deneuve, a Roman fountain spraying behind her swooped-up hair. Others, with the French tricolor waving in the background, I take to be politicians. Each sketch is protected by a clear plastic sleeve.

I’ve dropped the broken phone into my pocket but am still trying to brush the glass from my hand.

The artist jokes with his subject, makes her laugh, then seems to tell her with a shake of his head and finger,
Non
, she must stop laughing, which makes her laugh all the more. Meanwhile, I study the sketches behind him, then turn to Oliver, and mouth, “
What?
”

He throws a quick look over his shoulder to see if anyone’s paying attention to us, then guides me to one side of the barrel-shaped friend or sister of the woman being sketched, who’s been blocking my view. Now I see a series of children’s portraits on small easels—one appears to be three siblings, their heads arranged in a triangle. Beautiful children with large black irises and wavy hair.

“So there
are
kids,” I whisper in German.

He shakes his head no.

No,
what
?

I hear Oliver’s phone buzzing in his jacket pocket, see the screen glowing through the fabric.

He ignores it.

I follow his line of sight once again until I finally see what’s excited him.

A stack of portraits lies on the ground beneath the easels. The one on top is of a young boy. It’s
Benny
.

I dig my nails into Oliver’s arm, embedding glass slivers in the fleshy part of my fingers, leaving little jots of blood on the sleeve of his hoodie.

He turns us away from the crowd.

“Where the hell did it come from?” I whisper.

Leaning in, he says, “I’m going to ask if it’s for sale. Play it cool.”

“What if he’s the man who
took
him?” I say through my teeth. Instantly, I realize how idiotic this is, and shoot Oliver a look,
Sorry, it’s my paranoia talking
. But then I say, “Oh, what if it’s
not
him?”

“
Mom
.”

“Just a boy who looks like him?”

“In this tiny town. What are the chances?”

“What should we do?”

The phone buzzes again in his pocket.

“Here, give me that.”

Oliver hands it over, forces a smile, pivots, nonchalants his way into the booth, and watches the man work, even chuckles at his jokes (which, of course, he doesn’t understand).

“
Excusez-moi
,” Oliver finally says.

“Yes?”

“Oh. You speak English.”

“Indeed, I do,” the man says. “Would you like a portrait?”

Oliver looks at me. So much for speaking German.

The old woman in the chair and her companion drop their smiles and stare at my son.

“Actually, I was wondering about some of those behind you,” Oliver says.

“You’re a fan of Chirac?”

“It’s just so well done.”

“
Merci
.”

“Are those for sale as well?” Oliver points to the portraits of children.

“
Oui
. If you like. I draw also from photographs. The children cannot sit so well as…” He nods at the woman in the chair.

“May I look through them?” he asks, pointing.

“
Mais oui
.” The man lifts the whole pile onto the table for him. “You like these, the children?”

“I’m a teacher,” Oliver says. “They’d look great in my classroom back in the States. It’s nice for our kids to see others from around the world.”

I’m struck again by the competent liars in my family.

“Please,” the man says. “Take your time.”

As he wipes his hands on an already blackened towel, I get my first good look at them, the black-rimmed nails. A shot of dread whooshes through me: Helena Watson, the British witness, had described the stranger’s fingernails as chewed or chipped, with dark stains beneath them.

The artist meets my eyes and nods hello. “A portrait for madame?” His hair is dusky black, straight and in need of a trim. A fine white scar shows through the charcoal stubble on his chin, the kind one gets from falling against a table edge as a child. He must be in his late fifties. He looks nothing like the man on the train.

“No,” I say. “Thank you.
Merci
.”

The two old women turn to look at me like dogs sniffing the air. I slip my bloody hand into my pocket as they fidget, agitated by all the interruption.

“How about this one?” Oliver holds up the portrait of Benny, and there’s no question that it’s him. The streaks in his hair, the
immense lashes. Down to the shape of his teeth. In fact, the pose, the cant of his head—a gesture so familiar to me I can’t bear to look at it.

Oliver lowers the portrait to the pile with a shaky hand. I pretend interest in the next table’s steamy smell of egg, crepes sizzling on a hot metal drum.

I don’t know if it’s the smart thing to do. Maybe seeing Benny’s face has softened me, or my nerves have made me desperate—whichever, I text Benicio from Oliver’s phone.
It’s Celia. My phone broke
. I get the feeling he might need to know this at some point for reasons I can’t yet imagine.