A World I Never Made (22 page)

“Doro,” Catherine said, “do you know a man named François Duval? A gypsy?”

“Yes, he is of my
vitsas,
my tribe. Megan stayed with his father in Paris for several months. What of him?”

“He is dead. We found his body last night, just as you were calling. It was the Arabs again:”

“Dead?”

“Yes, beheaded:”

“Beheaded ... And his wife and children?”

“We don’t know.”

“How did you find François?”

“We were given his name in Lisieux, at the convent. Megan had written his name and address on a prayer card and left it with the child.”

“Did you find the child?”

“The child is dead:”

Doro looked at Pat. “Ah ... I am sorry, Monsieur:”

“Thank you:”

“Did François tell you where your daughter is?”

“No, we were too late:”

Pat had been listening to Catherine and Doro, but also scanning the park, his right hand gripping his Beretta in the pocket of his leather jacket, the same weatherbeaten bomber jacket he had worn since his arrival in Paris. He gripped the gun as much as a defense against Doro as against Islamic fanatics charging at them across the park. The population of people in the world he trusted had dwindled to one: Catherine.

“His father agreed to help Megan;” Pat continued, ”to lead me to her. He must have left information with his son.“

“So now the barbarians know where Megan is:”

“Probably.”

“That is good.”

“Good? Why?”

“Because I also know where she is. We will go there and we will kill them:”

“Where is she?” Pat and Catherine said simultaneously.

Doro did not answer. He too had his right hand in his jacket pocket, and he too now scanned the park.

“The Nazis killed a million gypsies, Monsieur Nolan,” Doro said, completing his scan and returning his gaze to Pat. “Did you know that?”

Pat took a breath and looked from Doro’s darkly handsome eyes to the trail of smoke he was exhaling through his flared nostrils.
The Nazis?
he thought.
Where’s Megan?
But he bit his tongue. The boy, probably not yet twenty, was his last chance of finding his daughter.

“Yes,” he replied. “I knew that.”

“You may think one or two more are of little significance:”

“I don’t think that:”

“There is no holocaust museum for us, no homeland.”

“No.”

“But that is as we want it. We are gypsies. Do you understand, Monsieur Nolan? We do not want a museum, we do not want a homeland. We want no records kept of who we are and where we go and what we do. We do not assimilate. We have our ways and we have each other, and that is all:”

“I understand:”

“I don’t think you do:”

Pat did not reply. He glanced at Catherine, but she was quietly scrutinizing the young man sitting between them and he could not read her eyes.

“Where is Megan?” Pat said finally.

“She is with my uncle Corozzo in the Czech Republic:”

“Will you take us to her?”

“Yes, but we must use her to draw the barbarians to us. If you cannot agree to this, then I cannot help you:”

“I understand, but Megan may have something to say about that:”

“You will talk to her. Tell her of Annabella and the others:”

“I will try. That’s all I can do. You have my word I will try.”

“Good. That is enough. We are agreed:”

“We must hurry,” said Catherine. “The Arabs have a ten-hour head start:”

“No
gadgo
can approach Corozzo’s camp without him knowing it,” Doro said.“If they arrive in force, he will run and we will catch up with him. We will meet in Waldsassen, in Germany, and from there cross into the Czech Republic. Corozzo and his people, and your daughter, are in an abandoned mining camp in the forest near Kolin, a small city of no importance:”

“Where in Waldsassen?” Catherine asked.

“Do you know Waldsassen?”

“No.”

“It is near the Czech border. Outside the town there is a small amusement park, on the banks of the river Ohře. It will be closed for the winter. Go to the carousel at six tonight. If I am not there, come back at midnight. I will call you if there is a problem:”

“What kind of problem?”

“I have to find a place to cross the border. It should be easy, but sometimes there are patrols. We may have to wait one, maybe two nights:”

Doro began to rise from the bench, but Pat took hold of his arm and stopped him. As he did this, the two men in overcoats carrying newspapers that Pat had seen earlier veered sharply toward the bench. Both Pat and Catherine drew their guns. Doro, using his free arm, held his hand up, palm forward, to the two men, who stopped about twenty yards away. Both had their hands in their pockets, ready to draw weapons. They were not, Pat realized, Parisian businessmen, not men at all, but the two teenage boys who had been with Doro at the house in Rambouillet three days ago.

“Yes, Monsieur Nolan?” said Doro.

“What about
your
word, Doro? Is it any good?”

“Monsieur Nolan, I could have killed you in Rambouillet three days ago. I could have had the police here when you arrived. I am going to kill the men who killed my grandmother, with or without you. I am bringing you to your daughter because Annabella would have wished me to. Not all gypsies are liars and cheats. Most, but not all. I will see you tonight in Waldsassen.”

On the way out of the park, Catherine and Pat were passing the kiosk when Catherine stopped suddenly to stare at the neat stacks of newspapers lining the top of its tiered counter. Reaching down, she picked up a copy of
Figaro
and began rapidly reading a front-page story. Over her shoulder Pat could see the headline,
Diplomat Slain on Paris Street.
Below it were two black-and-white pictures side by side. On the left was an effetely handsome, well-dressed man in his late thirties behind a desk, smiling as he talked on the phone. On the right was the same man lying face up on a sidewalk, his legs twisted under him, blood staining the front of his stylish camel hair overcoat. The caption read:
Charles Raimondi in bis office in 2002 and as found yesterday near his apartment on Boulevard Capucine.

~21~

MOROCCO, MAY 14-15, 2003

“When do you think ensoulment takes place, Megan?”

“Ensoulment?”

“Yes. You have heard the word before, have you not?”

“I haven’t, actually.”

“But you know what it means:”

“Of course:”

By late April Megan knew she was pregnant. Not only had she missed her second period, due April 20th, but the telltale signs were there. The slight heaviness in her breasts, the backache, the morning sickness of a month ago, which she had refused to acknowledge at the time. She had experienced these symptoms before. Selfish of her pleasure, her good health, her freedom from the hassles of prophylactic measures, she had used abortion as her surefire method of birth control. With Lahani, she had insisted on condoms, a first for her. In Morocco, abortion was illegal unless the mother’s life was in danger. But obviously something had gone wrong. And now this question from Abdullah, who was sitting silently across from her at the chess table, waiting for her answer.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“As a Christian, I believe it takes place at conception;” said Abdullah. “Any other moment would be arbitrary, established by man for his convenience.”

“I didn’t say I was having an abortion:”

“You asked for a remedy.”

“I asked if there
was
a remedy.”

Megan rose and went to the front door; she could see through its bead curtain to the street. A portion of pavement had buckled in front of the shop, opening a fissure several feet wide and a foot or two deep. It had filled with water from a morning downpour. Three children, two gangly girls and a small boy, were jumping back and forth over the water, laughing and pushing each other whenever there was hesitation. Steam was lifting around them as the noon sun did its work.

“I can return to France,” Megan said, her back to the pharmacist. This, of course, was what she was trying to avoid, at first telling herself that she did not want to lose the foothold, however tenuous, she had established in the Carrières Thomas neighborhood, then admitting that the idea of another
procedure,
another stainless steel
scraping
of her uterine wall, had become, suddenly, quite repulsive. Hence the request, illusory she knew, of Abdullah for a
remedy,
the dream of every woman with an unwanted pregnancy on her hands, a vial of liquid or a powder that would make it, magically, go away.

“If you have this child, Megan, I will raise it:”

Megan turned abruptly and looked hard at Abdullah, as if seeing him for the first time. His dark eyes shone brightly above his hawkish nose, his thick brows knitted together.
For this man, a stranger, to fight for a child’s life like this. Amazing.

“Are you married, Abdullah?” she said. “I’ve never asked:”

“And I’ve never volunteered,” Abdullah replied. “I’m not, but I was. My wife was killed. In Cairo, where I was teaching. And my three daughters. Their throats slit by Islamic fanatics. I was at a conference in Beirut, otherwise I would have been killed as well:”

“What did you do? I mean, why did this happen?”

“I spoke my mind. I named evil for evil. I said that the Islamic fundamentalists had turned their backs on God. That the fanatics among them used the Kuran, used Muhammad’s life, to justify beheadings and the slaughter of innocents. That the average Muslim, the nonfanatic, did not seem to mind all this bloodshed in the name of his God. In my classroom I said these things. The word must have spread. It is not far from the university, from anywhere in Egypt, or the Middle East for that matter, to the places where Satan dwells. Not far at all:”

Megan took a deep breath and remained silent. She could hear the children playing outside and the voice of the shopkeeper next door trying to shoo them away. The women’s clinic she went to to confirm her pregnancy had been on the same street as her hotel, the wide and tree-lined Avenue des Forces Armées Royales. She had walked the two miles back to the Farah, breathing air refreshed by the unexpected shower, and thinking of the unreal possibility of keeping the child. Of finishing her work here in the next month or two and then flying home to Connecticut. Of the look on her father’s face when she told him he would soon be a grandfather. Then she remembered her first pregnancy at age seventeen: the abortion that quickly followed; the surprising joy of keeping it secret from her father; the long, windswept, melodramatic walks she took, the hood of her sweatshirt blocking out the world, planning to the last detail the scene where she would drop the abortion bomb on Paddy, as she often in those days condescendingly referred to her father in her thoughts, just before she left for Europe. The scene never played out. How would it go now? Dad, I’m giving you
a grandson; the others I killed.

By the time she walked through the hotel’s glass-and-steel front doors, she had cast these thoughts away—good and bad, bitter and sweet—had managed to harden her heart once again, in the old Megan style, against the idea—with all of its insistent, primeval pull—of home and family. But now the look on old Abdullah’s face, more defiant than sad, devoid of self-pity, brought them back in force.

“Abdullah ... ,” she said.

“There is nothing you can say, child. What is done is done. But I would be putting my own soul in jeopardy if I did not try to prevent the killing of this innocent babe. It is a terrible and tragic destiny to be killed by your own mother before you are born. To be so unloved.”

Megan did not speak. When RU-47, the so-called “morning-after pill;” had become available over the counter in France in 2001 while she was seeing Alain Tillinac, she had taken it without hesitation. Which meant she might have aborted a few dozen or so more “innocent babes.” Unloved innocent babes. Suddenly she was crying, thinking of what she had done and why, images of herself as a child—lonely, abandoned—and the hardened, cynical adult that child had grown up to be side by side in her mind.
Child,
Abdullah had called her, without a trace of irony or bitterness, indeed with a tenderness that had pierced her heart.