Seen and Not Heard (16 page)

The apartment smelled slightly musty, and the scent of long-dead roses lingered in the air. She shut the door behind her, wishing it were warm enough to open the windows. She hated the smell of this apartment in the rain.

Dumping her wet raincoat in the hall, she slipped off her high heels and headed back toward the kitchen and a much needed cup of coffee. She should be feeling depressed, she thought, filling the kettle and reaching in the freezer for the coffee beans. She should be making feverish plans to escape. Instead she was humming under her breath, dreaming of a shaggy giant of a man with an endearingly clumsy body and deft hands. She was a hundred times a fool.

Madame Langlois, for all her dire warnings, hadn’t been very helpful about Nicole’s future. She’d made it quite clear she couldn’t take her granddaughter in, and that she expected Claire to be responsible for her. But what possible good could Claire be against the superior legal and moral rights of a stepfather?

But Harriette Langlois had been curiously adamant on that issue. And until Claire figured out what to do with the child, she couldn’t leave Paris.

Well, to be perfectly honest, right now she didn’t want to leave Paris. She didn’t want to leave Thomas Jefferson Parkhurst. Fool that she was, she was doing exactly what she had sworn she wouldn’t, falling in love with a new man before the old one was gone. When would she ever learn from her mistakes?

But it was hard to believe that trusting Tom was a mistake, that any kind of involvement with him should be avoided. He was worth ten of Marc, worth twenty of Brian. Maybe she’d finally developed some taste in her old age. Even if the timing was all wrong, the smartest thing she could do was accept it, rather than jeopardize the best chance she’d had.

It was quarter past four. Nicole would be back in less than an hour, and Claire had better pull herself together, not sit around mooning like a love-struck teenager. She’d change into something more comfortable, rummage in the freezer
for something to eat, and put up with an evening of incomprehensible French television.

She headed for the sink, setting her empty mug down. And then she stopped, a cold, bitter bile settling in her stomach. Six hours ago, when she and Nicole had left the rambling apartment for Madame Langlois’s house, the shattered remains of a Limoges tea cup sat in the sink. Now every trace was gone.

Once more she searched the apartment, every room, every closet, searching for a sign, a trace, for Marc himself. Nothing. The now spotless confines of the old apartment yielded not even the faintest clue. For all anyone could tell, Marc hadn’t been near the place in more than two weeks.

But who else could it be? Claire thought, shivering in the dimming afternoon light. She pulled off her rumpled silk dress and threw it on the floor of her closet, instinctively reaching for another formal dress. And then she stopped herself, grabbing her jeans and heavy sweater, frowning in disgust. She wasn’t going to play these games anymore. If it was Marc he could show himself. For all Madame Langlois’s dire warnings, she knew he wasn’t dangerous. If he didn’t trust her, didn’t like the way she kept the apartment or herself, he could come back and tell her.

But even the heavy cotton sweater couldn’t keep the chill away from her body. She moved over to the window, staring down into the street below, and for a moment she thought she could smell the faint trace of cologne Marc favored, the bitter almond scent that seemed part of his skin. Leaning forward, she saw the place where Tom had held and kissed her. And she began to shiver.

Rocco stopped long enough to have his big black boots shined. His large, dirty hands were trembling slightly as he lit a Gitane, and he stared at them in surprise. He simply couldn’t remember ever being nervous in his life. Not since he was thirteen years old and living in the Marie-le-Croix orphanage.

It had been so long since he’d seen him, since he’d seen any of them. It had been part of their pact, that they’d never
be in touch. That they would read in the papers, and know, and that would suffice.

Of course, he’d seen his photograph in magazines. He’d stared at the grainy images for long minutes, looking for traces of the boy he once knew beneath the full-grown man and the passage of twenty years, stared until that nosy Giselle had questioned him. It was hard to see anything beneath the whiteface.

And then there was that idiot, Yvon. The picture of his corpse, spread-eagled against the garbage cans, hadn’t given anything away. Even in childhood he’d never been able to do anything right—it was no wonder he bungled it with the old woman. Messy, Rocco thought, tossing the cigarette out and reaching for his gold toothpick. Very, very messy.

He headed down the street, his black leather jacket shedding some but not all of the rain. It had probably been a waste of time having his boots shined when they had to wade through this slop, but he didn’t regret it. As long as he had a shine on his shoes he could face Marc Bonnard with his bravado intact.

It hadn’t taken Hubert long at all to arrange a meeting, but then, Hubert knew everything there was to know in Paris, or knew someone else who had the information wanted. In an hour it had been set. Rocco had to admire the choice of meeting places. The small park where the old people congregated was a wonderfully ironic spot for the two of them.

He wanted to be late, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He found he was hurrying through the streets, shoving people out of his way in his haste to make it to the park on time. He only hoped they wouldn’t be too noticeable on a stormy day like this one.

But Marc must have taken that into account. Marc always took every possibility into account, and just as he had twenty years ago, Rocco would follow blindly.

The notices were still up at the entrance of the park, warning the old people to be on their guard. Against him, Rocco thought cheerfully. The rain had slowed to a steady mist, and while a few damp pedestrians were taking a
shortcut through the park, the benches were deserted. All except one.

Rocco recognized the set of his head, the line of his jaw, the elegant nose. He always was a handsome fucker, he thought, even as a child. It had helped him get what he wanted back then, when the others had been hard pressed to protect themselves. He would always remember that summer morning, with Marc sitting on
Grand-mère
Estelle’s desk, his high, well-bred little voice calmly outlining his plan.

Not that he’d been any better born than the rest of them, Rocco thought, sneering and staring at him. He’d just been an excellent mimic, picking up the accent and manners of his betters, using them to charm and infuriate
Grand-mère
Estelle and Georges, the gardener, using them to charm and intimidate the others.

He must have felt Rocco’s inimical gaze on him. He turned his head, his dark, fathomless eyes meeting Rocco’s across the rain-swept park, and his beautiful mouth curved up in a smile. And Rocco, fearless Rocco, a man who could cut the throat of a nun without flinching, shivered in the cold spring rain.

Nicole was asleep on the damask sofa, her dark eyes closed, purple shadows lurking underneath, staining her sallow skin. Claire sat there, watching her, ignoring the babbling of the television set with its dubbed sit-com. Nicole would usually disappear into her room at nine o’clock and reappear the next morning at seven. During those long hours the lights were off and no sounds issued forth, but it was clear by the shadows beneath her solemn brown eyes that she wasn’t sleeping soundly.

Who could blame her? Madame Langlois probably fed her fears, turning the tension between stepfather and stepdaughter into something more sinister. Damn the woman with her paranoia! Claire could no more entrust Nicole to her than she could to Jack the Ripper, even if Harriette had been willing to take her.

The television blared at her, the light and darkness shifting over the room. Marc would never have approved of its arrival, but Claire had ignored that during her defiant stage. Now she wished she hadn’t. The constant noise drove her crazy, as American television never had, but Nicole was entranced by it, preferring to keep it on all evening rather than suffer the silent apartment and Claire’s nervous chatter.

Claire sighed, leaning back and stretching her feet out in front of her. At least the dubbed French drowned out the sound of the rain outside. If only the apartment would warm up. But she knew from icy experience that there was no way to warm up the old barn of a place. She and Marc would usually just retire to bed, filling the long hours with pleasuring each other.

No, that wasn’t true. He would pleasure her, torment her, excite and arouse her. She was given very little chance to participate. He usually kept her so busy, so overwrought, that she had little to do but lie there and react.

Brian had been the other way around, expecting to be serviced when the mood struck him. Claire sat there, an expression of distaste marring her face. Surely there was something in between the two extremes? Surely sex should be give-and-take, a sharing of pleasure.

Her thoughts started to drift toward what it would be like to share, who would be likely to do so, and she pulled them back. The last thing she should do was sit there having erotic fantasies with Marc’s stepdaughter asleep at her feet. She had to make plans, for her and for Nicole, for the self-possessed child who wouldn’t let her in, but for the life of her she couldn’t think what.

Claire heard the phone ring, but she didn’t move. It wouldn’t be anyone she wanted to talk to. She would let it ring, try to make sense out of the sit-com on TV, try to make sense out of her life.

Nicole stirred, opening her eyes and blinking up at Claire. “Aren’t you going to answer the phone?” she inquired sleepily.

Claire sighed. It was easier getting up than explaining her reservations. With a weary sigh she pulled herself from the sofa, hoping the ringing would stop before she reached it.

The large, old-fashioned black phone in the hallway kept up its shrill, incessant tone. She picked it up, steeling herself for the spate of French that would greet her cautious “Hello.”

Silence. The same, absolute silence that had greeted her the night before. She’d almost forgotten about those calls, but now the memory came flooding back. No heavy breathing, no muttered obscenities, no background noise. Just complete, utter silence.

The vision came unbidden, eerie, sudden, unavoidable. Marc was on the other end of the line, in whiteface, miming desperately, communicating with her in breathless silence.

She slammed the phone down, her hands trembling. She stood there for a long moment, trying to compose herself before facing Nicole’s too-observant eyes, when the phone began to ring once more.

Without thinking she yanked the phone from the wall, the long black cord snaking free. In the distance she could hear the extensions still ringing, in the kitchen, in the bedroom. And in the doorway stood Nicole, watching her.

“Was it Marc?” she questioned calmly.

“Of course not.” Claire marveled at her own self-possession. “A wrong number.”

“Then why did you rip the phone out of the wall?”

Damn the child. “All right, it wasn’t a wrong number. It was a crank call.”

Nicole’s face whitened in the dim light. Suddenly she was no longer a distant, precocious stranger, she was a frightened child. “Did someone talk to you, Claire? Or was it silent?”

Claire could feel her own blood drain away from her skin. “Silent. How did you know? Have you had the same thing happen?”

Nicole shook her head slowly, painfully. “No,” she said. “Just before my mother died she began receiving phone calls like that. When Marc said he was out of town.”

Claire just stared at her, fighting the nausea that was rising from the pit of her stomach. And for the first time she wondered if Madame Langlois was a bitter, paranoid old woman, or wise even beyond her years.

For a large, graceless man Gilles Sahut could move silently enough. He walked down the street, his heavy boots quiet on the pavement, heading toward Belleville. The rain was coming down heavily now, pouring over his bare head and running down his face. His hair was cut so short one could see the skull beneath it, and the short stubbly growth did nothing to slow the descent of the rain. He shook his head to clear the water from his eyes, like a large, evil dog, and continued on, single-minded in his purpose.

He’d had a few bad moments tonight. He’d been inside the apartment of the old one, moving through the clutter of furniture, when he realized the rain had stopped. He’d halted, motionless, not even daring to breathe, as he listened for the sound of rain against the window of the apartment. Nothing.

She’d been asleep. She was a plump one, her black stockings rolled down below her knees, crumbs and food dribbled on her massive bosom, an impressive mustache above her pursed and wrinkled mouth. She wore a wig, an elaborate, blue white affair, and it had slipped to one side, revealing the thin strands of yellow gray beneath it.

She was snoring, her head drooping, her plump hands resting in her capacious lap. The rooms smelled of cabbage and roses, and he remembered the roses in the garden at the orphanage, Georges’s pride. He remembered the thorns, and how they’d been embedded in his young boy’s flesh.

He could turn and go. He couldn’t touch her when the sky was clear—he’d sooner kill himself. But he could wait. It wouldn’t stay clear for long. Sooner or later the rain would return, and he’d be ready for it.

Without a sound he moved closer, dropping his massive bulk into the chair opposite the old lady. She stirred for a moment, then began snoring more loudly, as Gilles had settled down to wait.

In the end it had happened fast, too fast. A loud rumble of thunder, a renewed downpour, and the old one had woken up, her rheumy eyes opening to view her killer just as he plunged the knife into her chest.

It was always too fast. He felt cheated, frustrated, and he knew what he was going to do about it. Edgar lived alone on the top floor of one of the mean little houses on this narrow, dirty little alleyway. The only other occupant was a drug dealer who minded his own business. He wouldn’t interfere if there was a struggle. It was time Edgar learned his place.