“Are you all right?” Michele was staring at him. What was Paris coming to when a baker could be attacked in a brasserie by a total stranger? She wanted him to call the police. Then find a lawyer and sue the brasserie’s owner.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m all right.” He wanted neither to call the police nor sue the brasserie, though his left eye was all but swollen shut and his lip was puffed up and red/blue where the wild man’s blow had driven an upper tooth through it.
“Hey, I’m going to be a father,” he said, trying to get off it. “No long faces around here. Not tonight.” Michele got up from the table, came around behind him and put her arms around his neck.
“Let’s make love in celebration of life. A great life between young Michele, old Henri and new baby.”
Henri turned around and looked into her eyes, then smiled. How could he not. He loved her.
Later, as he lay in the dark and listened to her breathing, he tried to blank the vision of the dark-haired man from his mind. But it would not go. It revived a deep, almost primal, fear—that no matter what he did, or how far he ran, one day he would be found out.
3
OSBORN COULD see them talking in the corridor. He assumed it was about him but he couldn’t be sure. Then the short one walked off and the other came back in through the glass door, a cigarette in one hand, a manila folder in the other.
“Would you like some coffee, Doctor Osborn?” Young and confident, Inspector Maitrot was soft-spoken and polite. He was also blond and tall, unusual for a Frenchman.
“I’d like to know how much longer you intend to hold me.” Osborn had been arrested by the Police Urbaine for violating a city ordinance after vaulting the Metro turnstile. When questioned, he’d lied, saying the man he had been chasing had earlier roughed him up and tried to steal his wallet. It was a total coincidence that only a short while later he’d seen him in the brasserie. That was when they’d connected him to the citywide call from the Paris police and brought him to central jail for interrogation.
“You are a doctor.” Maitrot was reading from a sheet stapled to the inside cover of the folder. “An American orthopedic surgeon visiting Paris after attending a medical convention in Geneva. Your home is Los Angeles.”
“Yes,” Osborn said flatly. He’d already told the story to the police at the Metro station, to a uniformed cop in a booking cage somewhere in another part of the building and to a plainclothes officer-of some kind who led him through a series of fingerprintings, mug photos and a preliminary interview. Now, in this tiny glassed-in cell of an interrogation room, Maitrot was going through everything all over again. Particular by particular.
“You don’t look like a doctor.”
“You don’t look like a policeman,” Osborn said lightly, trying to take the edge off.
Maitrot didn’t react. Maybe he didn’t get it because English was obviously a struggle, but he was right— Osborn didn’t look like a doctor. Six feet tall, dark haired and brown eyed, at a hundred and ninety pounds he had the boyish looks, muscular structure and build of a college athlete.
“What was the name of the convention you attended?”
“I didn’t ‘attend’ it. I presented a paper there. To the World Congress of Surgery.” Osborn wanted to say, “How many times do I have to keep telling you this; don’t you guys talk to each other?” He should have been frightened, and maybe he was, but he was still too pumped up to realize it. His man might have gotten away, but the vital thing was that he’d been found! He was here, in Paris. And with any luck, he would still be here, at home or in a bar someplace, nursing his wounds and wondering what had happened.
“On what was your paper? What subject?”
Osborn closed his eyes and counted slowly to five. “I already told you.”
“You didn’t tell
“My paper was on the anterior cruciate ligament injury. It has to do with the knee.” Osborn’s mouth was dry. He asked for a glass of water. Maitrot either didn’t understand or ignored him.
“You are how old?”
“You already know that.”
Maitrot looked up.
“Thirty-eight.”
“Married?”
“No.”
“Homosexual?”
“Inspector, I’m divorced. Is that all right with you?”
“How long have you been a surgeon?”
Osborn said nothing. Maitrot repeated the question, his cigarette smoke trailing off toward a ventilator in the ceiling.
“Six years.”
“Do you think you are a particularly good surgeon?”
“I don’t understand why you’re asking me these questions. They have nothing to do with what you arrested me for. You may call my office to verify anything I’ve said.” Osborn was exhausted and starting to lose it. But at the same time he knew that if he wanted to get out of there, he’d better watch what he said.
“Look,” he said, as calmly and respectfully as he could. “I’ve cooperated with you. I’ve done everything you asked. Fingerprints, photographs, answered questions, everything. Now, please, I would like to either be released or see the American consul.”
“You assaulted a French citizen.”
“How do you know he was a French citizen?” Osborn said without thinking.
Maitrot ignored his emotion. “Why did you do it?”
“Why?” Osborn stared at him incredulously. There wasn’t a day when, at some point, he didn’t still hear the sound as the butcher knife struck his father’s stomach. Didn’t hear the awful surprise of his gasp. Didn’t see the horror in his eyes as he looked up as if to ask, What happened?, yet knowing exactly what had. Didn’t see his knees buckle under him as he slowly collapsed onto the sidewalk. Didn’t hear the terrible shriek of a stranger’s scream. Didn’t see his father roll and try to reach up, knowing he was dying, asking his son without speaking to take hold of his hand so he wouldn’t be so afraid. Telling him without speaking that he loved him forever.
“Yes.” Maitrot leaned over and twisted his cigarette into an ashtray on the table between them. “Why did you do it?”
Osborn sat up straight and told the lie again. “I came into Charles de Gaulle Airport from London.” He had to be careful and not make any changes from what he’d said to his previous interrogators. “The man roughed me up in the men’s room and tried to steal my wallet.”
“You look fit. Was he a big man?”
“Not particularly. He just wanted my wallet.”
“Did he get it?”
“No. He ran away.”
“Did you report it to airport authorities?”
“NO.”
“Why?”
“He didn’t steal anything and I don’t speak French very well, as you can tell.”
Maitrot lit another cigarette and flipped the spent match into the ashtray. “And then later, by sheer coincidence, you saw him in the same brasserie where you had stopped for a drink?”
“Yes.”
“What were you going to do, hold him for the police?”
“To tell you the truth, Inspector, I don’t know what the hell I was going to do. I just did it. I got mad. I lost my head.”
