Paris Twilight (36 page)

“I can see he isn't well,” she declared as I pulled up the counterpane and tucked it around her shoulders, and that's the phrase I was pondering as I came back through the vestibule and stumbled on the commotion and encountered, as though I'd dropped through a hole in the earth, the disaster that would both end and initiate my evening. Out on the stoop, people were arguing. One of the voices reminded me of a voice I knew, though vaguely. I stepped through the foyer and out the door into the cold night. All I saw at first was the uniformed back of the doorman, his coat's blue bulk obscuring his antagonist, someone below him on the steps whom he refused to let past into the party. The gatecrasher must have attempted a lateral move because the doorman's back jerked adeptly to counter it, and then she emerged from below him in her Cossack boots and tattersall coat. Céleste. No wonder I'd only half recognized her voice—I'd heard her angry, and I'd heard her sorrowful, but I'd never heard her so out of control. Her face blazed with an abject frenzy bludgeoned by desperation; her eyes were those of a madwoman. Then her eyes found me.

I thought she would climb the doorman like a tree. She threw herself through and over and around him, her arms outstretched, barking my name in a hoarse quaver and holding out in one shaking hand the engraved invitation with my name on it.
“S'il vous plaît, madame, s'il vous plaît, s'il vous plaît”
—her dervish whine accompanied by slobberous weeping—and she yelled that the child was about to do something,
“quelque chose terrible!”

A calm warmth edged up close behind me, and Emil's breath was quiet in my ear. “The Little One?” he asked.

And I answered, “It seems.”

T
HE CAR SLIPPED GENTLY
between the cordon poles, and as soon as we were inside, the waters closed behind us and the soldier hooked the chain again. Drôlet angled us into a space that wasn't any designated space but seemed at least sufficiently out of the way, and Emil stepped out and closed the car door behind him and strode toward a knot of men wearing uniforms and loitering in the lot. They spoke. He walked on somewhere I couldn't see. He seemed quietly purposeful, a toreador departing for the chute.

After Céleste's arrival at his house, Emil had ushered her into the kitchen and soothed her with a snifter of Côte de Something and a shawl around her shoulders until she'd settled her nerves enough to deliver a coherent alarm. Her composure collapsed again as her explanation tumbled out. It tumbled out in confessional form, her confession to a petty trespass leading to a petty theft. She'd let herself into Landers's apartment, she said, snooping for signs of Corie. Fear brought her in; she'd known full well what my question about Corie had implied. She found her corroboration crumpled in a corner of the study. The note was doubly terrifying for inducing a fifty-year-old déjà vu. As with the last such message she'd found, the farewell in Aranese from Carlos Landers addressed to his lost Alba, this one was indecipherable except for those few words where its language overlapped with Céleste's:
necessity, sacrifice
. In a panic she ran for a translator—me—the page clutched in her fist.

She found my door ajar and no one home. She went in (clearly not for the first time) and noticed immediately two things amiss: something added, and some other items gone. The added part was the party invitation, which I'd left on the table. The missing items scared her so terribly that she'd caught a taxi straightaway to the address engraved on the card.

As Céleste slurped, and spewed her confession, we ironed out the note with our palms on a kitchen counter and flipped the dial on the tiny kitchen television until we found a relevant news report and then we stood around viewing helicopter footage of a protest gathering near the Bastille and surging down the boulevards a hundred thousand strong. It was heading toward the Élysée Palace and the American embassy, though security forces were positioning to stop it short of that goal. Police and protesters had already suffered injuries, the television claimed, from thrown rocks and the glass of shattered windows. Hospitals were readying for an onslaught. Emil made a phone call, and another, and now here we were, the three of us—Emil, Drôlet, and I—on the margin of the accumulating storm. Absent Céleste, whom we'd left at the house submitting to the forced sedation of a plate of party food, after which she would hurry back to rue Nin on the chance that Corie might reappear there.

Emil was preternaturally calm on our ride, lodged in a distant place. It was a place I couldn't read: Was he resentful? He had reason, certainly, being crowbarred out of his party. At the same time, his mood seemed like some familiar home place, a country in itself that Emil could inhabit comfortably at will. He stared out the window at the passing slate of Paris, his every muscle entirely relaxed, and occasionally asked me a question. What exactly had happened with Corie at the apartment the night she disappeared? I told him about the telegram, the death of Corie's role model. “And this apartment is exactly next to yours, really?” Had she said anything unusual before her departure? The note she'd left, did it sound like her? The note was a hopeful sign, Emil said. Those most intent on suicide often leave nothing, no word at all of their plans. Who else was involved? he asked. No one, I told him, and he absorbed my answer almost osmotically, facing me immobile as though waiting for my voice to diffuse into his skin. Then he turned to stare out the window, placid.

The emergency had swept away his melancholy. “So much to say,” he'd told me as we danced, but whatever he'd intended to discuss, he wasn't discussing it now. And he wasn't the only one with news—oh, no! And what I had to relate would thrill him as greatly as it had me. I'd cheer him up, by God! That, too, would have to wait, though: This wasn't the time. It wasn't the point of our mission. Anyway, I didn't want to squander the wondrous chronicle of my miraculous inheritance by relating it during Corie's wretched crisis. On the far side of mission, our private dawn awaited.

“So what's your choice, ultimately,” he asked, focusing on our business, “among the probabilities?” His question swept me back to our night in Reims, and to my broken promise not to get involved with Corie—did his words contain a reproof? Whatever, they also posed a genuine question. He wanted my diplomatic counsel.

“Not school,” I answered, and, with reluctance, “and maybe not the war. Love, maybe. Maybe fear.”

“Of?”

“Past, future . . .” I said. “I don't know . . . Emil, I'm sorry.”

He looked at me directly then. His wan smile held on valiantly.

I said, “What a mess I've caused.”

His forehead wilted into my shoulder, and he reached to clasp my hand to stop my explaining further. And then he righted back into his reserve and his vigil. We'd neared the scene of the
manifestation
—you could tell by the angry clots of traffic and the security forces controlling the intersections—and Emil said to Drôlet, “Over there,” and I could see the stockade, in a parking lot, under the icicle glare of generator lights, off in the velvet distance. He said to me, “In a way, you've made things easier.”

“What do you mean?” I asked him after giving him time to amplify. Then, guessing, “Emil, where did you go these past days?”

He nodded. The question was right. “Not far,” he confessed, and not for diplomacy. As it turns out, he said, “Some things are beyond negotiation.” He'd needed confirmation of something, though he'd been sure of it already, he said. “Something I've known for a while.”

“Confirmation of what,” I said, beginning to go numb.

When he answered, it was as though he were changing the subject. “Remember your Stamps and Buses? What did you say you call it when something is both behind you and ahead?”

“Medically?” I said, the numbness cascading. “I said that, as a doctor, I called it remission.”

“Drôlet,” he commanded, “here we are. Turn through right here.”

We slipped through the cordon and Drôlet stopped the car, and as soon as it was parked, Emil emerged from his thought and from the car door in a single and unitary glide of outward motion. The door swung shut and he strode off across the lot.

 

A few minutes later he was back, tapping on Drôlet's window. “I'm to be let through,” he told the chauffeur. “Alone,” he said. He might not be returning to this depot after events played out, so we shouldn't wait. Also, as such things went, it might take till morning to resolve matters, statements to be given and so forth; best we head toward home. And then he began to walk off again, just like that, in his patent leather shoes, pulling the lapels of his dinner jacket up around his ears. I yelled after him, “Emil!,” and jumped from the car to arrest his flight.

Thankfully, he wheeled around and returned to me and heard my request. “You can't seriously think that's a good idea,” he answered, putting a hand on the roof of the idling limousine.

“I do think! I think it's necessary,” I told him. I was obstinate about the one thing, Corie, because I was obsessing about the other. Perhaps I thought that if I could contest Emil on something, everything would be contestable. Mostly, I just wanted to go with him. “I'm the person she needs to hear from,” I said. “It's me she's upset with.”

“Precisely,” he said. We were standing in the crotch of the open door. “Do you know how instantaneous this would be?” he said. “A flinch could be fatal. It's no different than a jumper. And if they managed to save her, it might be even worse, believe me.”

“You're afraid I'll set her off,” I said. “I see. But I won't! Please. I have to help her.”

“Anyway,” he said, “that's not the problem.”

“I know it's not!” I almost shouted. I could feel the sob rising like a bubble inside me. “I know it's not the problem! Emil, you said it was one hundred percent. That you'd dodged the bullet. What are you telling me now? Why did you lie?”

But he wouldn't be pulled off the topic. “The problem,” he continued, “is that you'll be arrested before you get ten yards.” He motioned with his head across the parking lot. “The boys over there aren't happy about this. Not a bit, and they told me about it. They feel this whole episode could have been avoided if their search for this person had succeeded. And it nearly did. Until their investigator got thrown off the trail by a mysterious, charming, foreign-born aristocrat on rue Nin. Nin, I'm trying to remember, isn't that close to your duplex?”

I searched his face for recrimination, those limpid eyes, and was surprised to find only amusement. He looked proud. “Anyway,” he said, “it was just last night, and now it appears she may be an accomplice, this woman. May be the same individual who sprang our would-be martyr from protective custody on a past occasion, which is why this woman is now the subject of a warrant.”

“A warrant,” I said. “Me?” And he laughed despite himself. “That all depends,” he said. “You wouldn't be Madame Magdalena Landers, by any chance?”

“Emil, I can—” I began, and he silenced me with his fingers against my lips. Then he closed his eyes as if hit with an ache, and his hand dropped. “I didn't lie to you,” he said. “I answered your question. You asked if my lymphoma was cured, and it is. The lymphoma. It's just”—he paused—“that you didn't ask the doctor's question, where the lymphoma came from, and I was glad you didn't, Doctor. You asked if it was over. You asked the lover's question.”

And I wanted to ask him a hundred newer things, lover's questions all, and to tell him we would get through this, that I knew what he was talking about, how cancers sometimes arise from other cancers, and the one they'd fixed was a sign of deeper illness, but I'd help him. We'd turn this around together, whatever it was. But he cut me off.

“Miss Landers,” he said, “I have to ask if you've made the acquaintance of a certain Capitaine Cassell.”

“Cassell!” I said.

Emil nodded. “Yes, Cassell. Because here comes the good captain now.”

I made to turn and he yanked my wrist. “I wouldn't,” he said, and he drew a breath. “Listen,” he said, and his firmness had a bitter, incontestable finality to it. “I will get your Corie out of this. I promise you. And you must promise me something in return, and promise it solemnly, this time. That you will attend to my sister.” And he impressed upon me, urgently, that I must let nothing stop me in that, must not put helping anyone else ahead of helping Odile, and that I must take care of myself “before the surgery, and afterward,” for as long as she needed me, which meant not getting arrested, obviously, and not getting involved in bizarre capers, and also meant “giving me a very visible embrace and getting back into the car now.”

His hug was as brief as it was encompassing, and crushingly tight. “Promise,” he breathed, as he held me. The voice was as burdened with needing to know as any I'd ever heard.

“I do,” I told him. “I promise.” He released me, and as he more or less shoved me through the open door and as I more or less crumpled into it, I heard—or imagined I heard, at least—him whisper, “Don't forget.” Or was it “I won't forget you,” as I came to wonder later? The door slammed, and I slid into the shadows in the center of the seat as footsteps approached and a voice I knew said, “Ready, Mr. Sahran?”

“Never more,” Emil answered. His demeanor had made its immediate return trip to jaunty.

“And you're convinced you can help us in this . . .”

“This unfortunate situation, yes, Monsieur le Capitaine, I'm sure, but—”

“But you needed to see me alone.”

“I do. There's a matter.”

“About this girl.”

“I've never met the girl,” Emil said. “I'll do my best to return her, and you can do with her as you like. Maybe that will help ease some . . . embarrassment, if you will, Capitaine. For the department, I mean. If you want to say you called me in, that's fine.” The two men were almost leaning against the car; all I could see were torsos and elbows, a cigarette in a rising hand. “No, I must request your consideration with someone else,” Emil said. “It's this Landers person.”