City of Secrets (21 page)

There weren’t very many other women in the café. Those who were there glanced furtively at her, except for one, sitting by herself. Maddie recognized the expression on the woman’s face and wondered how she had got away from home, and if her husband would beat her if his supper wasn’t ready when he got back. But then a man sat down with her and took her hand. Not her husband, Maddie decided. Not a beater, either. Perhaps this woman had found an escape.

“What are you looking at?” Devin asked. Maddie turned to find her coffee in front of her. She picked up the cup, smiled, and tried not to look at the woman again.

“Those two look as if they’ve been here all day,” she said, indicating a pair of elderly gentlemen who never spoke to each other, but who had a pile of newspapers in front of them that they were working their way through.

“They probably have,” Devin said. “There are very few social clubs here, as there are in London, so men like that spend their days in their café instead. Everyone has a favorite, and they are as devoted to them as any Englishman to White’s or the Reform Club.”

“Is this your favorite? That waiter knew you.”

“I haven’t been here for a long time, but it was one of my haunts once. I was at the Sorbonne for a year, back when Paris was still new and exciting and foreign.”

“It still is to me,” she said, and when he raised his eyebrows, she added, “foreign, I mean.”

He laughed, but she said, “I don’t think you’re bored with it yet, however familiar it may be.”

“No.” He frowned and was silent for a moment as he looked around him instead of at her. One of the old gentlemen got up to leave, taking one of the newspapers with him. The waiter wiped off his place at the table with a cloth and pocketed the change left on the top saucer. There was a parcel left on the window ledge next to the table, and the waiter gestured to the second old man as if to ask if it belonged to his friend. The old man shook his head.

Maddie said, “But it’s not the same as it was?”

He looked at her and smiled. “Nothing ever is. I still loved it last year. Now I’m afraid something will happen—not to the city, but to my memories of it. Memories should live longer than places, even people, and if they die prematurely, it’s as if someone you loved died before you could tell your love.”

“I know.”

She did know and wished she could tell him about it, but it was not time yet to confide everything to him. She studied his face for a moment and felt a little pang at seeing the tiredness in the dark eyes. She wished she could ease that a little for him, but did not know how. She realized, too, that she knew very little else about him, either. What memories did he have of Paris? Of anything? What did he do when he was not with her? It was like trying to imagine the dark side of the moon.

“Do you have a valet?”

He laughed, surprised by the question. “No, why?”

“I was just trying to imagine your everyday life. Don’t all English gentlemen have manservants?”

“I’m not what society considers a gentleman. I don’t have much of a daily routine, either. No servant would stay for long.”

“You must have a cook.”

“Yes, a cook and a housekeeper. I manage to bathe and dress myself.”

“You’re laughing at me, but I’m fascinated. Do you live in a house?”

“Not in London. I have rooms there, in the Albany.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Now, Mr. Grant, even an ignorant Yankee knows what an exclusive address that is. You must be a man of some influence—”

She stopped, realizing what she’d said, and laughed at herself. “Well, that
was
ignorant of me!”

He smiled. “I’m pleased that you admire me for myself and not for my friends in high places.”

She widened her eyes innocently. “Did I say that?”

“Lots of girls would take advantage of it.”

“I’m not a girl,” she said.

She could see that he hadn’t missed the point, but he said only,
“Nice
girls don’t display such vulgar curiosity about a gentleman’s living arrangements.”

“Maybe nice girls have no curiosity of any kind.”

He laughed, and she was glad to see his expression relax a little after all; she wondered how much more vulgarly curious she could afford to be without offending him. But she was never able to decide on what to say next, because just then something caught his attention. The second old man scraped back his chair and got up to leave. Devin looked around, and all at once Maddie felt him go rigid. She looked in the same direction, but except for the now empty table next to the window, everything looked exactly the same to her as before.

He turned back to her and said quietly, “Maddie, listen to what I say and do exactly what I tell you.”

There was an implacability in his voice that stopped her from asking why.

“What?”

“Get up and walk out the door in back of you into the garden. Go as far as you can on the path and you’ll find a gate leading to the next street. Go through it and wait for me there.”

She hesitated only an instant, without saying anything else, before she did as he asked. As she reached the door, she caught a glimpse of him reflected in the mirror over the bar. He had got up, quickly but not hurrying, and was reaching for the unclaimed parcel left on the window sill.

Maddie found the back door and went out. She was halfway down the garden before she heard the explosion.

She stopped abruptly, paralyzed with shock for a moment. From the front of the café a woman screamed and, turning, Maddie saw smoke rising from the street.

“Devin!”

Panic seized her. She had a sudden mental picture of the anarchist Emile Henry sitting all morning in the café he blew up, waiting for more people to arrive so that he could kill more. Forgetting what Devin had told her to do in her fear that he had been hurt, she ran back into the café and was almost knocked down by one of the waiters who was trying to prop up a fallen awning. Inside was mass confusion, but no one seemed to have been hurt. Devin wasn’t there.

The bomb had exploded in the boulevard Saint-Michel. People were converging on the spot from all directions, shouting and gesturing wildly. She ran out onto the pavement and looked for Devin over their bobbing heads.

For an instant, she was afraid he was lying on the cobblestones, somewhere in the midst of that stampeding throng. But then she saw him.

He was bleeding from his forehead and bending over someone on the ground. But when Maddie pushed her way toward him, she found him calmly helping a woman pick up the packages she had dropped. The second old man, still clutching his newspaper, was sitting on the edge of the road looking stunned, and a cabdriver was cursing as he tried to quiet his horse, but no one else appeared to be hurt.

“Devin! Are you all right?”

He looked up, frowning. “I told you—”

“I know. I did, but when I heard the explosion, I was afraid you’d been hurt. You’re bleeding.”

He put his hand to his head and wiped off the blood. “It’s nothing. A piece of something that flew off the street.”

It was then that Maddie saw the hole in the ground that the bomb had gouged out. She looked around to see if any other damage had been done, and suddenly, out of the corner of her eye, she saw someone she recognized. Watching the commotion from behind a tree, as if calculating the extent of the damage, was the mysterious young man from Florence’s salon.

“Devin, look over there!” she said, pointing. The young man saw her point and turned to run.

“He did it!” she said. “Go after him!”

Devin watched as the young man disappeared down a side street but made no move to follow him.

“Why don’t you go after him?” Maddie shouted above the noise of two women arguing about whose basket of bread had fallen into the gutter. He still didn’t move, so she turned to run after the boy herself, but he caught her before she had gone more than a few steps and held her by the arms from behind her as she struggled to get free.

“Maddie, stop it! It’s all right.”

She could feel him relax a little and tensed her body, as if waiting for a chance to break loose again.

“I’m all right,” he whispered into her ear.

She took a deep breath, shocked back into sobriety by his perception. She hadn’t known herself that it was sheer terror for him that made her act as she did, but the extent of that terror frightened her, too. She pretended not to have heard what he said.

“You’re supposed to be looking for anarchists, aren’t you? You’ve just let one get away!”

“How do you know he’s an anarchist?”

That stopped her. “Well, I don’t. I think he is.”

He turned her around, finally releasing his grip to look disbelievingly at her. Calming a little, she told him briefly about seeing the boy at Florence’s salon.

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

It was his turn to be angry now, and he barely held it in check, but Maddie thought he had no business being indignant at her.

“You haven’t been around to tell! I told Oliver, but you haven’t spoken to him much lately, either!”

He unclenched his fist and, putting his hand on her shoulder instead, guided her up the street, past the scene of the confusion, to where they could hear themselves think. She had to walk quickly to keep up with his long, still angry stride. At the corner of the boulevard Saint-Germain he hailed a fiacre and, opening the door for her, pushed her inside.

“Hotel Ritz,” he told the driver, but Maddie held the door open for a moment longer.

“What are you going to do?”

He looked at her for a moment, and she saw that the anger had gone again, as quickly as it had flared. He squeezed her hand, then closed the door on her.

“I’ll tell you tomorrow,” he said through the window.

He didn’t leave her any choice but to trust him. As long as she could look back and see him, he stood in the same spot in the street, so she wouldn’t know which way he went.

Running into Paul Bertaude was his first real bit of luck, Oliver Drummond thought, and it came none too soon. He did not want to see Mrs. Malcolm interfere in this business any more than Devin Grant did; but unlike Grant, Oliver understood just how capable she was of getting involved, and very likely doing a good job of it. She could be foolhardy at times, but she was no coward, and it was difficult to keep her from knowing how concerned he was for her safety. Oliver was too precise in his habits to be accused of anything approaching recklessness himself, but his opinion of Madeleine Malcolm had little to do with the kind of logic and orderliness he applied to his work. He would, if the circumstances demanded, take any risk to keep her out of danger.

It wasn’t just the way she had treated Louise that commanded his loyalty. She had been kind to Louise, not only respecting her opinions and taking her advice, but helping to build up those last reserves of love that Louise still had inside her and fanning the embers until the flame was no longer in danger of going out.

But there was something else about Madeleine Malcolm that brought out the knight errant in a man. It probably had something to do with her willingness—eagerness, even—to give of herself to anyone she loved, even when she knew she would be hurt by it. Devin Grant had probably discovered that by now too, and although there were reasons that Grant couldn’t yet be open with her, Oliver was certain now that he would be as careful as he could not to hurt her. And if they hadn’t become lovers yet, that couldn’t come too soon, either.

She deserved someone like Grant, someone at least as strong as she was and infinitely more generous than Edward Malcolm could ever have been. Oliver didn’t suppose she had ever fully realized how selfish Malcolm really was. Louise had, but was wise enough to confide her observations only to her husband. Oliver himself had made that judgment when he accidentally heard the end of a quarrel between the Malcolms. It must have been only the last in a long line of rows about her devotion to the women’s residency, because after it, she never went there again, and she gave up everything else but the directorship of the trust she had set up to keep the residency running. She could manage that from her home, and Oliver was glad to see that she hadn’t let her husband defeat her entirely.

Oliver doubted that Malcolm even knew what she had given up. She hadn’t flung her sacrifice in his face or tried to make a martyr of herself, the way another woman might have done. Of course he may have known and kept quiet about it, realizing that he’d pushed her too far. She was at home all day again, and he had no further reason to accuse her of neglecting him. Not that he’d ever said that outright. He’d had no modesty about what he said in anyone’s hearing, and Oliver had heard the kind of blandishments he practiced all too frequently.

“Of course it’s important work, sweetheart,” he’d said, when his wife came in late, discouraged, and in need of a little cuddle. “It’s just that, well, I wish I could see a little more of you, that’s all.”

And she had believed that. Even Louise conceded Teddy Malcolm’s charm, but she couldn’t expect Oliver to see him quite the same way.

“I brag about you to all the fellows,” he’d had the cheek to tell Maddie. “They say they wish they could get their wives out of the house occasionally, but they can’t love them the way I love you.”

Oliver, in fact, considered that Edward Malcolm’s charm was simply a more insidious kind of cruelty than that inflicted by their brutal mates on the women whose bruised bodies Mrs. Malcolm’s care patched up. Malcolm’s claiming all her attention at the same time that he relegated her to an insignificant corner of his own life must have been torment for her. She really wanted nothing more than something wholly her own.

Oliver guessed that it was Devin Grant’s job that had kept him and Madeleine apart this long, and not because he suspected her of some complicity in whatever her husband had been up to with those anarchists. He must have given up that idea by now. It was more likely that he couldn’t give as much of himself to her as he wanted because the job consumed too much of him. Or at least, this case did.