Paris Twilight (28 page)

“And do you know where they brought me to be repatriated into my beloved France?” Rouchard asked, and then he answered himself: to the Allies' relocation authority, “in the Hôtel Lutetia!”

It pleased him very much, I could tell, how things changed and changed and changed again, reversing valence at the drop of a hat, since they'd changed at last for the best. “But Saxe,” he said, getting back to the subject. “I'd assumed Byron perished. I'm sure all his family were murdered. I did hear he'd taken a journey, that he'd tried to escape and was captured. I thought that was it. Kaput. Then, last month, he summons me to his bedside. I was astonished to see him, I can assure you.”

Astonished and moved. Rouchard was still coming to grips with the sorrow of it all, this ghost so firmly lodged in the past that it haunted still the same old unchanged room. “You noticed the peephole, I imagine,” he said. There was so much to untangle, and he was making good progress with the estate, still had some of Saxe's instructions to fulfill, leads to run down. Among them the name of a lawyer in Geneva who might have some key to the title search, a tangled affair, as any legal history that coincided with the war years tended to be; incredibly tangled.

A word leaped at me from across the city, off an envelope of blue with a Geneva address. “Barayón?” I said, the name of Alba and Carlos's Swiss intermediary. I was getting a bit too good with the crazy toss.

“Yes! Well!” Rouchard answered. I think it was the first time I'd surprised him. “Well, Corail Barayón's no longer alive, but his firm exists, and it seems they have a file.”

“Worth a trip?” I asked, a Socratic nudge.

“Booked!” he said, triumphant at being half a step ahead. “Leave tonight. Back Thursday. We should talk before the weekend, do you agree?”

He studied the photograph again before handing it back to me, stroking its borders, lost in a reverie of touch. “They were lovely people, you see,” he said. “The loveliest couple of a lovely moment. Not a long moment,
malheureusement
, and it was a shame it had to end.”

He caught my astonishment. “You didn't know?” he said. “Why, yes, that's her. That's me, there, and that's Carlos with his cigar, he was being terribly
méchant
, I remember the day. And there's Alba, dear, intense, brilliant, passionate Alba. How she glowed!

“I thought you knew.”

I
WAS DETERMINED TO
make the following day a restorative one. I deserved it, was the thing. If for no other reason than because of what I'd exposed myself to on my way to see Rouchard and show him the photograph: I'd had another rendezvous with Willem. Our confrontation unsettled me. From that and much else, I wished the time to rejuvenate. I thought I'd revive the formula I'd envisioned when I'd imagined myself in Paris: one part anesthesiologist to nine parts tourist. The one part was an appointment I'd set up to visit Odile in the
banlieue
, to perform my pre-op courtesy call, check for last-minute problems and anxieties, dispense advice, that sort of thing. Not everyone does it, even in the hospital. It's more to calm my own nerves than those of anyone else and to keep my profession a human, not merely technical, one. Willem had told me to be prepared, that a possible donor was anticipated (I imagined someone on a ventilator awaiting an order to withdraw life support) and that unless things changed (as they frequently do) or fell through (ditto), the operation could very well be next week.

We'd met again in Le Faux Henry, Willem and I. If he'd picked the place to reinstate our vanished camaraderie—hadn't we argued more civilly here than anywhere since?—the ambiance let him down. What a difference the weeks had made! The yard chairs were folded away, and the patio, absent its sun worshippers, had the cracked desolation of an abandoned swimming pool. Willem was waiting for me in the curtained vestibule, his eyes wary and his expression bruised behind the smile. His welcome was efficient, a quick hug before we marched off to our table, a perfunctory patting of shoulders. His cheer blew through me like a desert wind.

“Well, I hear you've been having fun,” he said, a tiding so oddly accusatory I felt a “Yes” would be a confession and didn't respond at all. He ordered a bottle of sparkling water and told me to go ahead and get whatever lunch I wished, that he'd had a late breakfast. “Thought we should touch base one last time,” he said, “before the surgery.” Was there anything I needed to talk over?

“Such as?” I asked.

“You've expressed some concerns,” he said, dryly. “At times.”

“I think we've got them ironed out,” I assured him, adding, dryly, “It helped to find out who the patient was.”

“The matter was delicate,” Willem stated.

“Meaning you didn't want to tell me I was putting a heart into a blind woman in a wheelchair. I agree. She's not the most obvious candidate, Odile. On paper.”

He said, “It was decided it would be better if you met her first in person.”

“Precisely what I asked for, as I recall.” I felt my exasperation rising, all this insipid thrust and parry, padded and masked with courtesy. “And by chance,” I said, “it's precisely what happened.”

Willem, vehemently: “Nothing in
his
world happens by chance!” The venom in the words was more than a taint, was enough to choke the speaker. He sputtered before continuing, “Well, Emil's not easy, is the thing, Tilde. That's all.”

“He's a perfectly nice man,” I said.

“He can be,” Willem said. “He can. And he can also be very determined. Overwhelming, in fact, I'd say. And don't think for a moment he'll let what he loves stand in the way of what he wants.”

If I sensed a warning, I had no idea what he was warning me of or what he was trying to imply. I knew only that I didn't wish to hear any more about it. I cut him off with a not-so-secret secret smile. “Will,” I said. “You've known Emil a long time, but I may know some things you don't.”

“I'm quite sure that you do!” he snapped. We were moving to a place beyond the courtesies, at least, and the first thing I saw there astonished me. Despite my lifetime of Willem experience and all my years of Willem analysis, it hadn't occurred to me where Willem's jealousy resided, that he might be desirous not of my esteem and my affection, but of Emil's. Now I saw it clearly for what it was, and saw myself as he perceived me: the home wrecker stealing Emil's (lucrative) attentions, stepping between longtime partners. Little wonder he'd like to pry us apart.

“Just remember who's leading this team,” Willem finished, and I saw I'd sideswiped his professional preeminence too. “And remember who we're here for. The patient. That's all. No one else.”

The bitterness of the conversation lingered in my mind the following morning as I headed to the
banlieue
to see no one else but Odile.

Drôlet and I had arranged to meet at Portbou. I wanted to stop in and return Passim's photograph. I'd spent much of the night looking at it, looking at Carlos and Alba, imagining their brilliant lives by my dim lamplight, but now I wanted them back among their comrades, in their rightful place on their rightful wall, and so I arrived at the café a few minutes early with my absurdly burdened bag burdened all the more. In with all the usual kit, the passport and ibuprofen and hand cream and wallet and powder and brush, et cetera ad absurdum, was a stethoscope and a blood pressure cuff, an extra pair of light shoes so I could ditch my boots in the car—and a wood-and-glass-framed eight-by-ten photograph still a bit dusty with café dust and aromatic of fry grease and cigarette smoke and smeared with the fingerprints of recent adulation. I didn't think to ask (as if there were time) if that's how the courier identified me, by the morbid obesity of my handbag.

“Madame Anselm?” he asked. He was a young man, and he stepped across the sidewalk to intercept me before I could gain the sanctuary of Portbou's steps. “Are you Madame Anselm?”

“Yes.” (Imagination fails me at crucial moments.)

He had a message, he said. Could I come immediately? “You must help her,” he blurted, back-dancing in front of me, and he handed me a folded scrap of paper.

Drôlet was already waiting, of course, had stepped out of the Mercedes to receive me and he rushed to the curb to intercede, but the boy took off at a brisk clip. We watched him glance back at the end of the block and resume a casual gait and round the corner. “Do you know where this is?” I asked. The name on the note was not that of a court or jail, but a hospital. Drôlet's eyes were elsewhere, on the other item the boy had handed me, by way of credential, obviously, and I deemed it to be a nice touch, though Drôlet was clearly dubious: the brown bandanna.

And that's how it came to pass that when I arrived at the lycée my opening question for Odile was not about her health, as I'd intended, but the welfare of somebody else. Frankly, I was thankful that Odile couldn't see the stranger I introduced her to, for the girl who arrived on Drôlet's arm was a pitiful, beaten, waifish mess, her tresses straying upward in tense red spirals like the feathers of some exotic sea coral, my overcoat covering her hospital slip, her feet afloat in my gum boots.

“She rescued me,” Corie exulted sullenly to Odile, her voice a rasping, drugged whisper, but I wasn't sure, I wasn't sure. The line between savior and impostor, by that time, had grown too impossibly thin.

 

The hospital was mid-city, a gritty old relic of a charity ward that seemed to me, on entering, closer to my notion of a French colonial prison than to anyone's idea of a modern medical facility. The receptionist at the
guichet
was harried and overwhelmed, the admitting nurse outnumbered. She guarded the cosmic boundary between order and chaos, but before her, chaos was all she surveyed.

“I'm here to see a patient,” I said when the approximation of a queue had nudged me to its fore, and she flipped through her ledger to locate the name.

“No visitors,” she said with finality, that French finality that is more quintessentially French than anything else could ever be. “Security,” she said, and held her finger at the ledger line for me to relish. When she was satisfied she'd rubbed it in sufficiently, she slammed the book closed. I deemed that a nice touch too, and I reminded myself: When there's nothing left to do, there's no risk in a chance.

“I'm not a visitor,” I told her, with a little New York persistence. I fished in my purse and found my laminated hospital ID on its neck chain, the one that Mahlev had given me. “I'm a visiting doctor.” And to get past the public issue and negotiate with the private one (I couldn't quell the childish thought that Sahran would be proud of me), I held the ID up a little too close to her nose, so that she had to lean back to focus. “Consulting.”

“With . . .”

“Dr. Ulmann,” I said. She should never have rubbed my nose in that ledger entry.

I watched her warring impulses: Her imperious desire to inspect my credentials tussled with her proud refusal to be in any way subservient to my imperious demand that she inspect my credentials. She was a pro; she played it down the middle. Maybe she took in
anesthésiste
and the name of the unknown hospital, or maybe just photo and filigree; whatever, I could hear the pace of decision—challenge or not?—and it lasted as long as the silence lasts between snowfall and downpour when you're standing beside a cathedral at night in Reims, and then the verdict arrived and she said, “Orthopedics, third floor,” and handed me a visitor's sticker.

So far, so good
, I thought as I walked toward the elevators. I didn't usually do things like this, was the truth. If I'd planned it, I could never have pulled it off. The forethought would have registered on my face. Receptionists at public hospitals are the reigning facial code breakers. They have to be. A stranger walks up to say that he's stubbed his tibia or misplaced his sick mother, and the nurse has a third of an eyeblink to diagnose his character and motives and condition: Stroke? Shock? Deranged? Hostile, and if so, to a particular patient or to doctors in general? Munchausen? By proxy? Out-and-out kook? Or just needs a restroom? So I was certain she'd see right through me. And what she had seen was a harried and borderline-irritated physician who'd had other and nicer plans for her day before an unexpected duty call added a troublesome patient to her rounds. What she'd seen was a hundred percent correct, and the correct answer to what she'd seen was “Orthopedics, third floor,” and I thought,
So far, so good
, and then, as I got into the elevator, I thought,
Now comes the rest
.

And as I pressed the button:
Pray it's a whirlpool
.

I took the elevator not to the third floor but the seventh, which didn't have an orthopedics office but seemed like it might hold the room whose number had been listed on the ledger page: 7134. The doors opened onto a corridor, not a ward with a reception desk—that was handy—and I followed the arrows around a corner to another corner and then caught sight of my goal.

It was the right place, all right. A policeman sat in a chair at the end of the hall, engrossed in a newspaper, and I didn't turn down the corridor but kept on going straight. A few corners later I found what I was looking for, another bank of elevators. I wanted the one that didn't stop in the lobby, the one marked
Accès Professionnel
. I pulled off my visitor sticker and hung the ID Mahlev had given me around my neck and then reached into my bag and pulled out the badge for my teaching hospital and hung that around my neck also, and to be sure I was adequately lei'd and garlanded, I threw on my stethoscope too. In for a dime.

There were several people in the lift, and we ascended
ensemble
, stopping at floors to take on or disgorge. It was one of those padded garage-sized elevators with stainless-steel doors back and front, and when we got to the top I let everyone else get off and stayed on for the descent. I had to ride up and down twice before I got what I hoped for. The doors opened and two orderlies steered in a gurney with an elderly woman on it, her gray head swiveling on the pillow, tubes in her hand, hooked up for her pre-op.