2 The Dante Connection (3 page)

I stared at him. For a long time. Eventually he sat back on his heels and waited. I stared some more.

“All this time and you’ve been living right next to me?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did you buy the apartment next to mine? It wasn’t for sale.”

“I made Monsieur Blier an offer he didn’t want to refuse.” He sighed. “I wanted to be close enough to keep an eye on you and make sure you were safe.”

“Safe from whom? These people who had tortured you? And how did you plan to protect me if you were so badly injured?”

“Vinnie has also been living there.”

I closed my eyes and wrote a few more bars of the string quartet. I was experiencing so many emotions, I didn’t know which to allow dominance. I went with the safest emotion. “I am truly angry with you right now, Colin. You had no right to make these decisions on my behalf. You didn’t make the right choice. You kept a lot of important information from me. I’ve changed my mind. I’m not ready to accept your apology.”

“Jenny, don’t be mad at me.”

Colin’s plea was interrupted by soft groans coming from Francine’s bed. We jumped up and walked across the Persian rug to her side. Even though my anger was replaced by concern for Francine, I was not going to forget about this topic.

“Oh God, where am I?” Francine reached up and gingerly touched her face.

“You’re in the hospital,” I said.

Her good eye widened slightly. “How did I get here?”

“Don’t you remember?” Colin asked and leaned towards her. Worry tightened his features.

“You’re here too?” She looked surprised to see Colin standing next to me. It was difficult for me to ascertain what was going on in her head. I cursed the swelling on her face. Only one eye was open enough to see the pupil, but it was by no means enough to tell anything. It was also ghastly looking into an eye that was so bloodshot.

“Maybe we should get the doctor.” Colin straightened and turned to the door.

“No.” Francine’s outburst stopped him. “I’m just disoriented, Colin. Give me a moment to get myself together.”

Colin caught my eye, lifted his eyebrows and nodded his chin towards Francine in some nonverbal message. I had no idea what he was trying to communicate. Francine tried to push herself higher against the pillows, but fell back with a groan. “This really hurts.”

“The doctor said that he could give you more painkillers if you woke up and needed it,” I said, ignoring Colin’s pointed looks.

“I don’t want anything that will make me feel dull.” Francine slowly inhaled and on the exhale pushed herself up to lean higher against the pillows. The pain must have been significant because her natural colour was replaced by a sickly gray pallor. She breathed slowly a few times with a clenched jaw. “God, this really, really hurts. What did the doctors say?”

“That you are badly beaten up and badly bruised. Nothing is broken, but they say that it will be a few days before you should get out of bed and at least a week before you’ll move again with some level of comfort.”

“Great,” she said with forced joy. “So I can go home now?”

“You should stay here for at least another day,” Colin answered.

As they started disagreeing about this, the ringing of my smartphone came from my handbag. I walked away from the growing argument and picked my bag off the floor. My phone was in its usual pocket inside the bag, ringing and vibrating. I took it out and frowned at the screen. Why did people not pay attention to what I said?

The purpose of having a smartphone was for me to use the camera and recording functions, unobtrusively stealing moments from people in cafés in order to study their body language at a later time. It was not for people to phone me. Apparently this did not matter to the people who considered themselves part of my life.

I swiped the screen to answer the call. “Wait.” I placed the phone against my chest and turned to Francine’s bed only to see her and Colin staring at me. “I’m going to take this call outside.”

I left the room in search of a private corner. It was ten o’clock in the morning and the hospital was a hub of activity. After two minutes walking along the hall, I returned to Francine’s room. She was still arguing with Colin, but stopped mid-sentence.

“There is no quiet place in this hospital,” I said with disgust, my smartphone still clutched against my chest.

“Use the bathroom,” Colin said.

Francine’s upscale private hospital room came complete with its own, fully equipped bathroom. Only when I closed the door behind me did I wonder if I should’ve thanked Colin for his idea. I shrugged it off and brought the phone to my ear.

“Yes?” I spoke quietly, hoping my conversation could not be heard in the other room.

“Genevieve, you might want to be more polite when you answer your phone.” Phillip Rousseau, my boss and mentor of six years, was speaking in his patient voice. Never a good sign.

“I don’t like phones,” I said and waited. When Phillip didn’t say anything, I started thinking. He had been the first person in my life to treat me with any kind of respect. The least I could do was return that. I did, after all, hold him in very high esteem. “Good morning, Phillip. How are you today?”

“Good morning, Genevieve.” There was a smile in his voice. He knew he had won this round. “I’m a little worried. Where are you?”

“I’m at a hospital.”

“A what?” The smile disappeared from his tone. “Why are you at a hospital? Are you okay? What happened? You never go to hospitals.”

Not only was Phillip my highly respected boss, but he had in some way taken on a paternal role in my life. He had also taken on worrying about me. Something I had difficulty growing accustomed to.

“I’m fine. It’s not me. It’s–” The bathroom door burst open. Colin walked towards me shaking his head. I asked him, “What now?”

“Who are you talking to, Genevieve?” Phillip asked in my ear.

“To C–”

Quicker than I could think to react, Colin snatched my smartphone out of my grip. Thief. He held the phone against his chest. “Who’s this?”

“Phillip.” Colin had met my boss during that first case. We had all had a common goal, so there hadn’t been time for my boss, the head of an exclusive insurance company, to take exception to Colin, an art thief. I held out my hand. “Give me my phone.”

“Not yet.” He paused until I raised my eyes to his face. He looked worried. “Jenny, this thing with Francine is serious. Don’t tell Phillip who you’re with. At least not until you’ve heard what Francine has to say.”

“I will not lie to Phillip.”

“You don’t have to lie,” he said with a groan. “Just don’t tell him the whole truth.”

I considered myself to be a rational person, not driven by emotion. Not at all. But this had been a trying morning. And at the utterance of his ridiculous request, I was furious. Again. I schooled my face while considering my next step. On my nod, Colin handed me my phone.

“Sorry about that, Phillip.” Something in my tone must have alerted Colin because he tilted his head to one side and looked apprehensive. “I am at a health facility with a person of dubious repute that I met a few months ago. We helped a mutual friend, a person with unparalleled technological skills and fashion sense. This person had a similar unfortunate experience as I did that same few months ago.”

By the time I finished, Colin was scowling, anger pulling the corners of his mouth down.

“What?” Phillip’s voice
tightened with concern. “You’re at the hospital with Colin and Francine was attacked? Is she okay?”

“I knew you’d get it!” I smiled triumphantly. Colin’s lips compressed with annoyance and he left the bathroom. This petty action gave me unadulterated pleasure. “Francine is badly bruised, but she’ll be okay. She’s arguing with Colin at the moment, because she wants to go home and he insists she stays longer in the hospital.”

“How did you get involved in this?”

I gave him the quick version of this morning’s events. Including the part where Francine confessed to murdering two men. I did leave out the part where Colin had been tortured and spent months recuperating.

“Why have you not phoned the police?”

I knew this question would lead to other questions. Ones that I didn’t want asked. Not until I had more answers from Colin and was less angry. “Why did you phone me on my phone that I never use for speaking to people?”

“I was worried. You’re always in your office by eight o’clock. When you didn’t come, I wanted to know why.”

“Now you know.”

“Will you be coming in today?”

“If it’s not necessary, I won’t. I would prefer to go home and rest. Unless there is something urgent for me to work on.”

“There is a new case I would like for you to look at, but it can wait until tomorrow.”

“What new case?” My mood lifted. I loved a new challenge. It would also take my mind off my new neighbours.

“Nothing urgent. A string of robberies over a period of time. It can wait until tomorrow. Take the rest of the day and go to the cinema, go shopping, go for a massage. Enjoy your day off.” Phillip was always trying to get me to go to recreational places other people frequented.

“You know I won’t go to those places. Studies have shown the bacteria present on a cinema seat range from E.coli to faecal matter.”

“Oh, for the love of God, stop.” He sighed. “I don’t know why I’m still trying. At least attempt to enjoy the time off.”

I finished the call and went back into Francine’s room. Colin was standing next to the bed, his arms folded, and his tongue appeared very briefly between his lips. He was smug. Francine looked resigned. It appeared as if the two friends had come to some compromise. They stopped their whispered conversation as soon as they noticed me.

“She’s going to stay in my apartment until we can sort this out,” Colin announced.

“The apartment next to mine?” My throat hurt as I pushed the words past my lips.

“Yes. It would be safer for everyone.” Colin looked less smug now. Even though I saw constant flashes of remorse on his face, I couldn’t stop being angry. “Vinnie will look after her.”

“And you?” I asked, dreading the answer.

“Oh, I’ll be staying with you, in my old room.” His smile was charming. I hated it when he tried to be charming. “It will be just like old times.”

“No, no, no, no, no.” I didn’t care that I sounded like a panicked stuck record. “There are three bedrooms in your apartment. You will stay there. I’m still angry with you. I don’t want you in my apartment. And it took me four days of cleaning to have my place back to normal after the last time you stayed with me.”

Colin’s eyebrows lifted in surprise. “I left your place in perfect order.”

“There were dust particles under your bed.” I grunted and gave in to the urge to clarify. “Not your bed. The bed you had used. There was a smudge on the left-hand corner of the windowsill, bits of fluff from your clothes on the shelves in the wardrobe and a scuff mark on the floor under the desk.”

Francine’s laughter, causing her to groan in pain, stopped me. The list of dirt left behind by the thief was much longer and I truly wanted to recite it.

“Oh Genevieve, you’re priceless,” Francine said past another groan. She sobered and looked at me with an intensity that warned me something significant was about to be said. “Thank you for being here. I can remember asking you to stay, but also remember thinking you wouldn’t.”

Shame briefly touched my awareness. I blinked it away. “That’s what friends do for each other.”

Not even the swelling in her face could disguise the relaxation of her facial features and the genuine smile pulling at her swollen lips.

“You’re my friend,” she said as if announcing it. “I’m glad that I have you as my friend.”

Surprise stole my speech. Here I had been thinking that they had all deserted me because I was socially unacceptable. Now I was faced with a declaration of this magnitude. I reached for a suitable riposte, but came up empty.

“You don’t have to say anything,” Francine said. Because her voice was still scratchy, I couldn’t tell if it was hurt, annoyance or pain I detected in her tone. “I understand. And I trust you. Why else would I have asked for you to stay with me?”

“I don’t know.” I took two steps towards the door. I had thought that Francine had insisted on those lunches with me from a need to speak to someone unbiased. She had shared with me her life philosophies and loved that I never ridiculed her. When I hadn’t agreed with her, I had told her so and presented my counter-arguments to her flawed reasoning, sometimes resulting in a fun intellectual debate.

Now she told me that she trusted me. What was I supposed to do with her trust? Phillip trusted me to do my job, but until six months ago I had never had anyone trust me with their emotions or personal well-being. How did normal people deal with this on a daily basis? From my raised heart rate and shaky breathing, I knew that I was challenged with more than I could handle.

I grabbed my handbag and walked to the door. “I have to go.”

“Why?” Colin asked.

“Because I have to go. I can’t stay here.”