A World I Never Made (10 page)

“Here are your prints;” said Daniel without preface. ”The first set matches to Ahmed bin-Shalib, twenty-five, Pakistani, wanted on a terrorist warrant issued by the US.”

“Anything else on him?”

“They are associating him with the death of the American journalist in Karachi, the beheading:”

“Michael Cohen.”

“Yes.”

The two paused to assimilate this information. Catherine could hear her uncle breathing softly through her phone’s high tech receiver.

Daniel was the first to speak. “Where is he now, Catherine?” “Somewhere in Paris. And the other?”

“No match. Where is be?”

“Probably in a morgue:”

“Is that a good thing?”

“Yes.”

“You do not sound—how shall I say it-elated:”

“Bin-Shalib got a good look at me, and I him.”

“I see. Why don’t you take a ride up to see me? We can talk. It is lonely up here at the end of the world:”

“I will, Uncle, and maybe sooner than you think:”

“Don’t fret,
ma petite,
I will make it all well:”

“Yes, just like Papa:”

“Just like Papa:”

~9~

PARIS / COURBEVOIE, JANUARY 4, 2004

The next morning, while Pat was still sleeping, Catherine went out to pick up a copy of Le
Monde,
which she skimmed through quickly at an outdoor table of a patisserie. She found no mention of a shooting in Volney Park or the discovery of a dead Arab anywhere in Montmartre, or Paris for that matter. She bought croissants and, once at home, placed them on a white china plate that she covered with a fresh cotton napkin and placed on the center of her small kitchen table. Outside, the early sunlight was fading as storm clouds gathered. She turned up the heat in the apartment and, while putting on a pot of coffee, heard the comforting hiss of her steam radiators responding. Pat still slept. In her study she made a series of calls. The first was to the police precinct in Montmartre, the last to Charles Raimondi. When she was done, she returned to the kitchen to find Pat splashing water onto his face and running it through his thick wavy hair with his hands. She took a dish towel from a drawer and handed it to him as he finished. It looked more like a handkerchief in his hands as he dried his face and used it to try to pacify his unruly black mane. He was still wearing the clothes he had slept in. He had even put on and laced up his sturdy and severely unfashionable American walking shoes.

“How did you sleep?” she asked.

“Well. Thank you:”

“And the arm?”

“It’s fine. A little sore:”

“Are you hungry? I have bought croissants:”

“I’m very hungry

“Moi aussi.
Sit:”

In a few minutes the half dozen pastries were gone and they were each sipping their second cup of Catherine’s strong African coffee.

“This coffee is good,” said Pat.

“It’s the last of my husband’s:”

“Oh ... where is he now?”

“He is dead. He was killed in a terrorist bombing in Casablanca last May. He was a consultant to importers and exporters. Coffee was one of his specialties:”

“What was his name?”

“Jacques.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yes, I am too ...”

As she was finishing this sentence, the phone rang in Catherine’s study. She rose quickly to get it.

“I am going out to meet a colleague,” Catherine said, reappearing in the kitchen five minutes later. She had put on lipstick and was standing before Pat in a stylish black overcoat with a dark green, yellow-bordered silk scarf around her neck.

“You look beautiful,” Pat said.

Catherine frowned, and her heart sank a little, though she wasn’t sure why. Many men had told her she was beautiful. Charles Raimondi, for example, whom she was meeting for coffee in fifteen minutes. Could there, however, be two men more opposite than Charles Raimondi and Pat Nolan? This thought raised her spirits, though again she wasn’t sure why. Unless she was attracted to Nolan. It had been so long, she had forgotten how it happened, real attraction to a man. Confused, she did not reply, only nodded and turned to leave.

“We need to talk,” Pat said.

“If you are here when I return, we will talk,” Catherine answered, turning back to face Pat.

“Where would I go?”

“I don’t know To continue your search for your daughter.”

“It’s a matter for the police now, isn’t it?”

“That’s what I”m trying to find out:”

“I don’t understand:”

“The dead man was not found in the park. According to the police in Montmartre there was no shooting, no dead body.”

Yes, Patrick,
Catherine thought.
You beard me correctly. The police may not be the good guys in this case. In which event you, your daugbter and I are in a lot of trouble.

“I’ll be here,” Pat said.

“Good. I won’t be long:”

“I have found Megan Nolan.”

“Excellent.”

Catherine had come almost immediately to the point, as, she noted, had Charles Raimondi. They were seated at a window table at a small café just around the corner from Catherine’s apartment. She had arrived early and watched as Raimondi pulled up in front, parking his diplomat-tagged black Citroën in a clearly marked no-parking/loading zone. As he stepped out of the car, his black hair perfectly groomed, his movements graceful and erect, in a cashmere overcoat and soft wool Burberry scarf, he seemed as elegant—and haughty—as a swan. Watching him coolly survey the street before entering the café, she was reminded of their last meeting, when she had been repelled as much by his unselfconscious arrogance as by the transparency of his motives in attempting to befriend her.

“How did you know she wasn’t dead?” she asked. “Inspector LeGrand said something about faked suicide as a terrorist MO, but that seemed too vague to me. Was it something in the autopsy report?”

Raimondi was lifting his espresso cup to his lips as Catherine asked this question. His arm paused in midair for a fraction of a second before he completed the movement—sipping and gently replacing the cup on its small saucer. He remained silent, assessing Catherine Laurence perhaps for the first time as a detective.

“You were copied on it;” Catherine said. One of her calls earlier that morning had been to the pathologist who performed the postmortem and dictated the report. He recalled that the etc. at the bottom of the last page was meant to indicate that a copy had been sent to the Foreign Office, to a Florence Natale, whom another call revealed was Raimondi’s administrative assistant, French-speak for secretary. The pathologist had been requested to leave no trace of the Foreign Office on the report, but his cover-your-ass bureaucratic instincts had insisted on some record of the transaction.

“I did get the autopsy,” said Raimondi, like any good poker player knowing when to fold and on which issues, “but it was the Moroccans” idea—the possibility of a faked suicide. I just passed it along. Where is she? Nolan:”

“In a house in Courbevoie:”

“Have you told LeGrand?”

“No.”

“Why not? This is highly unusual:”

“I wanted an excuse to see you again. I feel I behaved badly the last time we spoke.” This statement fell more easily from Catherine’s lips than she thought it would. She had been prepared, for one thing, and for another she was beginning to look at Charles Raimondi with professional suspicion. Her instincts as a detective overrode all personal qualms. Raimondi could easily have faxed a copy of the autopsy to his counterpart at the Moroccan Foreign Office, someone who knew that the real Megan Nolan had been pregnant. How else to explain the two Arabs following Pat Nolan? She had no doubt that Raimondi would take the bait, his sex appeal and charisma, in his own mind, too much for any healthy young woman to resist for very long.

“Well,” Raimondi replied, a slight smile crossing his lips,“in that case I will square it with Inspector LeGrand:”

“Thank you:”

“Is Nolan alone?”

“I believe so:”

“Have you told anyone else?”

“No, I came right to you. What about Europol? Shall I notify them?”

“No. I will take care of it:”

Catherine glanced out the window to see if Raimondi had brought along his bodyguard or any kind of backup. It seemed almost certain that he had not. His black sedan sat silently at the curb, empty. No plainclothes police or Foreign Office security types were to be seen within a hundred meters of the café’s entrance. One of Catherine’s calls this morning had been to Pierre Torrance, a colleague from her police academy days, now assigned to Europol’s antiterrorist unit in the Hague. He had assured her that no investigation involving a terrorist named Rahman al-Zahra was underway in France, as by law his task force was required to be notified if it were.

“I am beginning to wonder, Charles,” she said, “are you DST yourself? Is the Foreign Office your cover?”

“My dear Catherine,” Raimondi replied, affecting an innocent smile and raising his eyebrows in mock astonishment, “you are too smart for your own good, but I am afraid I must disappoint you. I am a liaison, that is all. Now tell me, how did you find our Megan Nolan?”

“The father led me there:”

“I see. Is he still at Le Tourville?”

“As far as I know.”

“Tell me about the house and the neighborhood:”

“It looks shuttered, possibly abandoned. The neighborhood is quiet, working class:”

“Is she there now?”

“I saw her go in this morning carrying groceries. She was walking:”

“No car?”

“No, I believe not:”

“The address?”

“121 Avenue des Ormes. Shall I pick her up myself, or shall I coordinate with DST? I will need help in any event:”

“I will take care of it:”

Catherine feigned confusion, hesitating a second before speaking. “What will be my role?”

“None, I’m afraid:”

“But Charles, I found her. It would be good for my career.” These words did not come so easily to Catherine. They smacked of begging, of prostration before the superior male. But she needed to be convincing, to dull Raimondi’s already dull senses.

“You will get credit internally, my dear. I will see to that. But this is from on high. When it is done, I will buy you dinner. Perhaps we can get away.”

“Oh, Charles ...”

“Tut, I must go.”

Catherine, confident that her
Oh, Charles
had conveyed the right mix of disappointment, sycophancy, and sexual coyness, watched as Raimondi pulled his cell phone from his coat pocket before even getting into his car. He spoke hurriedly into it, then got in, started up the engine, and drove away.

Twenty minutes later, Catherine and Pat Nolan were sitting in Catherine’s unmarked Peugeot, parked diagonally across the street from 121 Avenue des Ormes, in a neighborhood that was neither quiet nor quite working class. Bounded on one end by a small public housing complex and the other by an electrical transfer station, it had an air of hopelessness about it. Even the old elm trees that lined it, their branches bare under an increasingly lowering sky, seemed resigned to the litter swirling on the street and the dead-end poverty of the housing project. A group of boys kicked a soccer ball around in a chain-link-fenced enclosure while three older men watched and smoked.

Catherine had hurried Pat out of the apartment and into her car, making the five-mile trip through morning traffic to Courbevoie in fifteen minutes. On the way, she had remained silent, except to tell Pat that they would soon find out whether or not the investigation into the whereabouts of his daughter was as straightforward a matter as Inspector LeGrand said it was. She had last visited the house she had selected for the DST to raid right after her husband’s death in May. Her first real boyfriend had lived in it while waiting tables and writing a novel. She had lost her virginity in its loft bedroom and thought at the time that life—and the future—were full of romance. When Jacques was killed, it was the loss of her girlhood that struck her out of the blue, like a sharp blow. His death, sad enough on its own no matter how she felt about him, echoed all of her losses—of her parents, especially her father, and of innocent love in her life. Her grief had brought her to 121 Avenue des Ormes, which she stared at for a long moment, sobbing at the sight of its boarded windows, peeling paint, and tiny lawn of knee-high weeds.