A Twist of Orchids (25 page)

He is still lying on the floor when the storm hits. Rain slashes against the windows. The wind rattles the shutters. He flinches, and the house, as if in sympathy, seems to recoil as well. Somehow, the sounds galvanize him, and miraculously he is able to move again. He pushes himself to his hands and knees, uses the table to haul himself up. Then, with tremendous effort and by bracing his shoulder against the wall, he cants the table forward until he has righted it. He rests a moment, trying to dominate the wild inner choreography of his body, and then, step by step, he resumes his journey, pushing the table, wheels complaining, down the hall.

He is almost to the end of the hall when he remembers there is a second door to negotiate. He must repeat the whole terrible, exhausting process of tipping and angling and righting to get the table into the bedroom, where he will make his stand against the monster of the storm. And then it happens to him again. His feet freeze in place, leaving him wedged helplessly between the table and the wall. Long minutes pass. The wind is roaming like a beast of prey outside the house, and still his legs remain locked. He knows now that he won’t make it. He has been beaten. An ocean of despair floods his chest, fills his eyes. And for the first time since Amélie’s death, Joseph is able to shed tears, not only for the wife who left him but for the helpless thing he has become.

Time was when he could have picked up and tossed aside something like a table with ease. A young Hercules, people round about had called him. It was what Amélie had liked about him. “You’re the back,” she had often said. “I’m the head. A strong back doesn’t need a good brain.” He had left the thinking to her.

Now he must think for himself. His thoughts drift out on a dark tide. What was it he had to do? And how was he to do it? Yet even as he stands there stranded, five hundred years of peasant stubbornness, bred in the marrow, come to his aid. With great effort, he remembers one of the kick-starting techniques that Jacqueline has taught him, slapping his leg. It is a feeble motion, as if he is brushing at a drowsy fly, but it is enough to get him moving again. With a broken sob of relief he finds that he is able to force his will once more to the task he must accomplish before the monster comes. For it will arrive with the darkness. It will come in the door, and down the hall, making the floorboards squeal. And if he cannot secure himself against it, it will bend over him. Then it will push his face into the pillow and hold him fast until the brain that Amélie had always said he did not need goes dark.

•

The road before them was a dancing sheet of water. Their headlights and wipers were totally ineffectual in the downpour. Rain hammered loudly on the roof of the van. Julian drove slowly, hunched forward over the steering wheel in a misery of wordlessness that was more deafening than the rain.

“Julian!” Mara had to yell to be heard. “You can’t go on blaming yourself. Drugs are a violent business. What happened to Kazim and Osman may have had nothing to do with you.”

“It has everything to do with me.” He slammed his hand against the steering wheel. “If I hadn’t been nosing around after Kazim, Luca wouldn’t have killed him. He wouldn’t be threatening Osman. You heard what Betul said. Luca thinks I’m an undercover cop.”

“But the Ismets asked you to find their son.”

Julian made no reply.

Mara cried out in exasperation, “For heaven’s sake, you might as well say none of this would have happened in the first place if
you hadn’t tried to do a deal with Osman about salep to save your damned orchids!” In the semi-darkness, she saw him stiffen immediately, and she regretted the words even as they came out of her mouth.

“That was a low blow.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. But isn’t it true? Doesn’t it always somehow boil down to orchids with you?”

“If that’s what you think, you really don’t understand me.”

“Then tell me.” Mara braced herself against the dashboard as the van lurched over unseen potholes. “What is it I don’t get?”

He just shook his head and concentrated on steering.

Mara threw up her hands. “I despair of you. Of us. Why do you always close down on me? How do you think it makes me feel? How can we make any headway in our relationship if you won’t talk to me?”

“Why do you always have to bring our relationship into it? And where the bloody hell are we supposed to be going?”

“Nowhere,” she shouted, “if you constantly shut me out. That’s my whole point!”

“For pity’s sake,” he exploded, “what is it you want? A dissection of my feelings? Okay. I confess. I’m not good at talking about the things you want to talk about. I’ve got a thing about orchids. I’m not—what’s the word you like to use? Proactive. I go with the flow. I let things slide. In fact, if you want me to lay it out for you, I’ve a bloody lifetime behind me of things left undone or done too late that somehow add up to one dead nineteen-year-old kid. Is that good enough for you? And now, if you don’t mind, I think I’ve had enough soul-searching, and I’d like to concentrate on getting us out of this.”

He fell into a deafening silence.

“All right,” Mara said, more quietly. “It’s all your fault, if that’s how you want it. So what do you plan to do about it?”

Julian stared bleakly through the frantic rise and fall of the windshield wipers. “The only thing I
can
do. If Osman won’t go to the police, I’ll have to do it for him.”

“And what if Ton-and-a-Half decides to make good on his threat?”

“It’ll be up to the gendarmes to give the Ismets protection.”

“I assumed that. I was talking about you.”

“Luca and his boys may know I was asking around after Kazim, but they don’t know who I am.”

“I think they do. You said you gave Nadia your card. If Kazim called you, it probably means she gave it to him. If Serge killed Kazim, he probably took your card off Kazim’s body. Commissaire Boutot said nothing about finding your business card among Kazim’s effects, did he?”

“Er—” said Julian, “no.” He had to swing wide suddenly to avoid a torrent rushing off a hillside that brought with it a wash of mud and stones.

“Julian,” Mara shouted, “we can’t drive through this! Pull over.”

“Pull over where? I can’t see a thing. We’ll end up in a ditch.”

A few hundred meters later they had no choice but to stop. A whole section of road had washed away. Mara saw the crater, like a mini Niagara Falls, just in time and screamed. Julian slammed on the brakes. The van slithered to a halt.

“That was bloody close,” said Julian. “We’ll have to go back.” He craned his head around and began reversing. After a minute or two, he gave up. “It’s no good. We’ll have to stay put until it stops raining. Or until daylight.”

“We can’t just sit in the middle of the road,” Mara objected. “Someone will come along and smash into us. At least put your flashers on.”

“They won’t be able to
see
our flashers. Besides, who in their right mind would be out on a night like this?”

“People like us, trying to get home.”

His eye caught the glow of Mara’s cellphone.

“If you’re calling out for pizza, I don’t think they’ll deliver.”

“Very funny. I can’t get a signal. I’m trying to get Joseph. I’m worried about him.”

“Joseph? For pity’s sake, Mara, you ought to be worried about
us.
”

She put the phone away. Then she cried out, “Oh no! It’s Friday night. We completely forgot about Loulou.”

“Christ,” Julian muttered. “I doubt he bothered.”

Above the din of the rain, they heard a tearing, crashing sound. A discharge of lightning gave them the awesome vision of a tree in the process of sliding from the steep hillside on their left down into the crater. It seemed to make its descent in slow motion, like a gargantuan grande dame going into a seismic faint. It came to rest on the road not far in front of them, bringing with it a huge amount of debris.

“Hell’s bells,” said Julian, shaken.

Mara was clutching the edge of her seat, too overawed to speak.

Another flash of lightning gave them a brief glimpse of their position. They were awash in an inland sea. The tree, a massive pine, would have crushed them if Julian had not moved the van just moments before. The lightning was followed by a bone-cracking crash of thunder.

A hair-raising wail coming out of the darkness behind them made both of them nearly scream with fright.

“What the hell was that?” Julian choked out.

“I think,” said Mara once she had recovered herself, “it was your dog.”

They spent a cold, uncomfortable night in the back of the van with two bags of potting soil as pillows and each other and the dogs for warmth. Mara thought she must have slept, because she was suddenly aware of pale light and an eerie stillness. She sat up and crawled over Julian’s legs to look out the back window.

The roadbed was visible, but it was covered in detritus, and the ditches ran high with water. The field on one side of them was flooded. The trees at its margin had the appearance of floating on a lake. On the high embankment on the other side of them, more pines had been toppled. They lay criss-crossed and seemed to cling to the hillside by sheer inertia. Fortunately, none had slid down on them, and none blocked their rear. It was ten past seven. Mara got out her cellphone. This time she got a signal. She tried calling Joseph’s land line, and when there was no answer, his cellphone. It was not switched on.

Julian stirred.

“I’m sure he’s all right,” he said once he was awake enough to realize what she was doing. “At any rate, he’s a bloody sight better off than we are. God, what a night.”

He sat up, worked his way to the back door of the van, and pushed it open. The dogs jumped out, and so did he. It took him a moment to get his bearings. They were no more than three kilometers from home.

Nevertheless, it took them more than an hour to reach Ecoute-la-Pluie. They could have walked there in less time. By
then, the sun was shining brilliantly and road workers with noisy, heavy equipment were everywhere, sawing downed trees, feeding the sections into chippers, or shifting them from the roads. France Telecom and electricity repair crews would soon follow. If it had been later in the year and warmer, mushroom gatherers would have been out in force as well. Morels loved nothing so much as a good rain.

The
castine
road leading through the hamlet had been nearly washed away. They bumped down it, avoiding as much as possible the deep channels that had been gouged out by the escaping water. They pulled up in front of Joseph’s house. The first thing they saw was that a large branch of the Gaillards’ hornbeam had come down. Fortunately, it had fallen away from the house.

They let themselves in the back door with Mara’s key.

“Joseph?” Mara called. She noticed with a sharp stab of alarm that his dinner sat untouched in the covered dishes on the counter. The table was missing, giving the kitchen an empty look.

“Joseph?”

The house was silent.

They went down the hallway to the bedroom. The door was closed. It resisted when Julian pushed it. As worried as Mara now, he backed off and ran at it. The door gave suddenly as whatever had been jamming it on the other side gave way. He was propelled into the room by his own momentum and immediately struck forcefully on the back of the head. Hard, heavy objects rained down on him. He gave a yell of shock and pain and stumbled forward onto the missing kitchen table, which shot away, leaving him sprawling on the floor.

Joseph was sitting upright in his bed, arms jerking with excitement, taking in the spectacle with glee.

“
Et tak!
” he crowed hoarsely, his normally rigid face split by a rictus grin of triumph. “Got you!”

•

He had rigged up an ingenious system using a hook that he had somehow managed to screw into an exposed beam just over the doorway and a feedsack filled with logs that he had hung by a rope from the hook. He had attached one end of another piece of rope to the bottom of the bag and the other end to a leg of the table. When Julian had pushed the table forward, the bag had tipped, spilling its load of logs on him.

Julian sat on the floor nursing a cut lip from his collision with the table’s edge and a very sore head from the falling logs. It did not help matters that Mara was laughing hysterically.

“That’s it,” he said, rising with as much dignity as he could muster. “I’ve had it. I’ve been threatened by a gangster, I’ve come close to being crushed by a tree, I’ve spent an absolutely filthy night in a storm, and now I’ve just been sandbagged by a hallucinating maniac. If someone is terrorizing this man, Mara, I’d say they’re welcome to him. He’s perfectly capable of looking after himself. Now if you don’t mind, I’m going home, and by home I mean my own house in Grissac, to have a shower, some breakfast, and a little bit of peace and quiet, in that order.”

It took Julian another hour to drive the few kilometers to Grissac over flooded roads. He stopped off at Chez Nous and persuaded Paul to power down his saw—he was clearing fallen branches from the front of the bistro—long enough to sell him some groceries. When he reached his cottage, the first things he did were to switch on the water heater and throw open the doors and windows—the air outside was warm, but inside the house was cold and damp, with a moldy smell of old stone. Then he checked for storm damage (more fallen branches, one or two smashed tiles). He had a shower and a shave. The water was only lukewarm, but he emerged feeling better. He was home.

He was now in his kitchen making a three-egg-and-bacon fry-up. Unlike Mara’s kitchen, his was not color-coordinated. His refrigerator gurgled, and his stove was an old, hybrid cooker. Two of its burners ran off butane, for when the electricity kicked out; a third ran on electricity, for when he ran out of butane. A fourth did not work at all. He turned the eggs and threw in some bread slices to fry in the bacon fat.

As he sat down to eat his breakfast—on a sturdy chair that took his weight—he thought about the fight he and Mara had had in the van.