The Last Time I Saw Paris (3 page)

“Mrs. Stone.”

The voice stopped her in her tracks. Davis leaned against the counter, a glass of scotch in his hand. He took in the red traveling suit, hat and sable, the hatbox and leather-bound train case clenched in her hands.

“Best of luck to you, Claire.”

Claire grinned and let out a breath. “Thank you. Same to you, Davis.”

S
unrise gilded the East River as Claire descended from the airport terminal onto the metal gangway. The docked Yankee Clipper floated like an immense metal seabird at the end of the passage below. Bullet-shaped engines rumbled from beneath the massive wingspan. Whirling propellers buffeted the line of passengers advancing into the airship’s belly. Claire welcomed the cool bite of the prop’s wash against her face.

A young officer stepped up to her side, his white Clipper uniform glinting in the morning light. “She’s something to see, isn’t she?” He meant the Clipper, but his eyes were on Claire and her suit, cut to show an hourglass figure.

She offered him a smile but her thoughts focused on the throbbing in her chest. It had been so long since she felt this mix of freedom and—no, not regret. Never that. Today the scents were a cocktail of gasoline and the river’s briny flotsam. Not choking dust or death’s cloying musk.

“Ready to fly over the ocean?” Pride resonated in his voice.

She made a last searching look back at the early morning crowd inside the round terminal building. Russell didn’t know she’d gone. Not yet. Her smile brightened as she slipped her arm through the officer’s and adjusted the sable that threatened to blow off her shoulders. “You have no idea how ready I am, flyboy.”

“Yes, ma’am.” A blush darkened his tan as he reached for the hatbox at her feet.

Claire gripped the silver handle of her train case and sauntered down the gangway. Her gloved hand slid along the Clipper’s cool metal hide. Inside, she chose an empty seat next to the window and set her case on the floor beneath her feet. A breathy kiss brushed the officer’s cheek as she retrieved her hatbox and then settled into silk cushions.

The plane was occupied mostly with State Department types. Dark wool suits, long coats, briefcases tucked discreetly beneath their seats. Except for a few military officers in dress uniforms, they were a sea of charcoal. She could feel their stares as she shrugged off her sable. She was used to the looks, but today, the only woman on board, it felt like a bull’s-eye was painted on her back.

She adjusted her hat and smoothed the skirt against her legs. Andrew, darling Andrew, shook his head this morning when he met her in front of the marine terminal with her papers, but the red Schiaparelli suit was the most conservative thing she owned.

As close to a friend as she’d met in New York, Andrew and Claire made good sport of the city’s nightlife the first year after she left Bernard. She taught the buttoned-up college boy the finer points of speakeasies. He spoke five languages and taught her one. Upper-crust American English. When she phoned him last night after seven years, he refused to help at first.
The risk is too great,
he told her.
The risk to you, you mean,
she replied. Then she wondered aloud what the State Department’s Chief of Protocol ambassador would say to the kinks his son-in-law enjoyed in bed. The ones his wife didn’t have the stomach for. The phone line went quiet for a moment then Andrew came up with a plan.

He met her at sunrise and handed her a thick envelope.
Your ticket, a passport validated for Europe by the State Department, and Portuguese and French tourist visas,
he said,
made out to Claire Harris. But, you realize that after you land in Lisbon, you are on your own. This is not an official operation. These are only papers with stamps. If something goes wrong, not only have I never heard of you, Claire, no one else will have either.

The roar of the engine and churning propellers filled the compartment as the plane skimmed across the water’s surface, then, with a lurch, took to the sky. Claire pressed back in her seat as she watched the airport then the skyline drop away. The last time she’d run, the very day Mama died, there had been a broken-down farmhouse behind her. She swore she’d never end up like that, worn down with nothing left but despair. Staring down at the Atlantic, Claire could still feel the packed dirt road beneath her bare feet.

The plane straightened out and the noise dimmed to a roar. Claire pulled the diamond wedding ring off her finger and squeezed it in her palm. The bite of the stone against her skin didn’t diminish the ache growing in her diaphragm.

It wasn’t the end of her marriage that hurt, she realized, but the waste of effort, of years. She slipped the band on the ring finger of her right hand and smiled grimly. It was the first diamond she’d been given as Claire Harris Stone. Too conventional for her taste and not the biggest rock, by far, but damn well paid for. Her marriage, after all, had always been one of convenience. Convenient for him to own a pretty, high-society wife he could cheat on; convenient for her to have the wealth and position she needed. She breathed in and welcomed the throbbing in her chest. It meant she was still alive. It meant another chance.

She flipped open her new passport. A blurry photograph of a dark blonde, eyes shadowed, expression formal, passable for Claire caught on a rough morning. The adjacent page was filled with official looking stamps permitting travel to Europe. She looked out the window as the plane shifted its flight. Twenty-six hours to Lisbon. There she would drop off the end of the world. A train to Paris. Then Laurent and a new life.

She’d met Laurent Olivier last summer at a gallery in Manhattan. Half-drunk and bored as hell, she was wasting the afternoon with a friend looking at photos of Paris: Old men with gnarled faces leaned against worn brick buildings in narrow streets. Children smoked cigarettes on street corners. Lovers kissed in shadowed doorways. Darkly romantic, yes, but not something to hang over the mantel. She beelined for the alcohol.

Three cocktails later, Claire lost her friend to a married Texas oilman and found a quiet corner. She was about to hail a cab home when she saw it. All by itself, a small photo in a thick black frame.

“This one is so different, it doesn’t fit with the others.” A delicious accent, the words formed deep in the mouth.

She was so absorbed by the picture, it was a moment before she turned. Still, her body flushed when she saw him. Tall and lean; his lips, directly in front of her gaze, were full and brought to mind how they might feel on her skin. His features were angular, an artist’s sharp stroke for a cheekbone, a jaw, the nose. A half-empty glass was gripped in one hand, a burning Gauloises in the other. He squinted through the curling smoke.

“You like it, no?” His warm brown eyes stared intently into hers. “Then I am glad I brought it. I am Laurent Olivier. This is my show.”

She forgot the taxi.

In the summer that followed, Claire hadn’t learned a lick of French, but she knew the bitter tar smell of a Gauloises and why her society friends had insisted for years she take a lover on the side. More importantly, she was reminded that, after five cold years of being another of her husband’s acquisitions, there was a living, feeling woman underneath all that polish. Of course, her friends hadn’t meant for Claire to chase off after anyone, no matter how talented he was in the sheets.

Neither had Claire.

 

 

C
laire shifted in her seat as she remembered her last afternoon with Laurent. A hotel room like countless others in Greenwich Village. The furniture a little more sophisticated, the art a bit more deco, maybe, for Washington Square. Leather-bound trunks were pushed up against the wall, lids open. He’d been packing when she’d interrupted him.

A long afternoon was spent gorged on stolen pleasure, and they lay cupped together in his small bed. They faced the dim room’s one small window, drowsy bodies tangled, his leg flung over her rounded hip. Half-asleep, he traced a pattern on her bare shoulder. She rolled onto her hip at the edge of the bed; the cotton sheets slipped down below her thighs. She felt Laurent stir next to her, heard the flick of a lighter as he lit a cigarette.

“I am leaving on the ship tonight,
ma chérie
. To Paris,” he said.

His few unsold photographs were piled up against an open trunk, frames leaning front to back, ready to be packed. She slipped off the bed and pulled out the smallest photo, cradling in it with one hand. A faint stream of light filtering through the curtains illuminated the picture, enhancing the quiet dreaminess of the scene.

“So soon?” She devoured the image with her eyes to fight the emptiness rising in her belly.

“Oui.”
He snuffed out his cigarette as he climbed from the bed. “Why do you always look at that one, Claire? It is so naive, no? Done on a lark, for a friend. I don’t know why I even brought it.” He wrapped his arms around her.

His naked warmth softened her back as she studied the photo. She shook her head. A simple garden scene. Worth less than the price of the silk slip he’d torn from her shoulders. It was impossible to describe what made this small image so arresting. It drew her in, that’s all.

He tapped the photo’s glass and spoke into her hair. “I can take you to this place. I will undress you in the grass and—”

“What color are the roses?”

Laurent tossed the photo onto the floor. He turned her to face him; his gaze consumed her. “This beauty deserves Paris. Come with me.”

“Laurent—”

“I don’t have riches, Claire, but I know people. I live like a king. Dinner at the Ritz, parties at Le Meurice. Champagne, fashion, art. The beauty of it all. You are unhappy here, but in Paris you would shine. My muse.”

She allowed herself to be tempted until the long breath was gone. She led him toward the bed. “No.”

He pushed her back onto the sheets. He kissed her knees and began moving his way toward her waist. “No? Why?” Because, she could have said, I am Claire Harris Stone and I worked too damn hard for this life to just walk away. Instead, she opened her legs and pulled him to her.

 

 

T
he Clipper’s engines droned. Claire allowed herself one more glance down at the wisp of continent disappearing like a mirage. And this morning, nine months later, that glittering life was gone. And she wasn’t just walking, she was flying away.

T
he Yankee Clipper touched down in the waters of the Tagus River in the early afternoon and glided to Lisbon’s marine terminal gangplank. Claire handed her papers to the official waiting inside the terminal building, her attention drawn to the eerily quiet crowd of travelers that pressed toward the plane. Picking up her luggage, she pushed past somber faces toward the door and the lot outside.

Outside the terminal, a woman sobbed into a lacy white kerchief next to a mound of luggage piled on the sidewalk. Her sweating taxi driver battled with a steamer case wedged in the car’s open trunk.

“Could you direct me to the train station?” Claire said.

The woman only shook her head, face buried in her kerchief.

“What is it? What’s happening?” Claire asked.

A loud crack and the case gave, thudding onto the street. The woman wailed.

Grimacing, the driver straightened. “The Nazis. They attack.”

Claire caught her breath. “Attacked who?”

“The north. Far north. Not here.” He shrugged then motioned Claire toward his open taxi door. “I take you to the train. Estação de Santa Apolónia.”

T
he Sud Express rolled through the countryside, steel wheels stroking a rhythm against the track. Her second endless day on the train, Claire dozed as the sun sank behind the dense shadowed forest outside her window, her case gripped against her stomach.

“Vive la France,”
the man across from her muttered. She opened her eyes to a view of the darkening Atlantic. The train slowed as they descended into a small harbor town. Hendaye. A change of trains at this French border town, then Paris by morning.

She pressed her hands against the glass, letting the evening chill seep into her palms as she gazed out. A mass of people crowded the platform and surged toward the train as it rolled into the station. A man in a dusty suit shouted and shoved at a French policeman who struggled to hold him back. Claire’s skin prickled as she exited the train and followed the line of passengers crossing over to the platform to the next waiting train.

An official sat behind a table at the head of the line, his jacket unbuttoned, shirt collar loose. “Passport.” He stamped it without a glance. “Visa.” He paled as shouts grew behind her. He scribbled her name on the form, took her fingerprint, smudged, too fast, then waved her on.
“Allez, Madame, allez!”

Claire hurried onboard. She found a window seat in a crowded compartment and watched, mesmerized, as the police pushed the frantic crowd off the platform. The train jerked forward and accelerated away from the station. Shivering, Claire pulled her case close and flipped open the latch. Her fingers slid over a soft silk bundle to the cool celluloid of a photograph. She held the image up to the moonlight pouring through her window.

A marble statue of a woman stood in razor-sharp focus. Covered in a patina of centuries, her serene stone face looked down at the threads of ivy that swathed her legs. An unseen sun traced sparkling patterns of light through heavy branches onto her stone skin and danced on the grass at her feet. Trellised roses tumbled down a stone wall behind her. The roses captured in film were light shades of grey but, but in her mind, Claire painted them palest pink. The curved arm of a stone bench in the edge of the photo invited rest.