“He is ill. . . .”
“I’m sorry. But no, I do not know his name.”
“Do you know where he works?”
“No. Except to say that he usually has some kind of fine dust or perhaps powder on his jacket. I remember that because he was always trying to brush it away. Like a nervous habit.”
“Construction firms have been eliminated because construction workers do not, in general, wear sport jackets to and from work. And certainly not while they are working.” It was just after seven that night when Jean Packard sat down with Paul Osborn in a darkened corner of the hotel bar. Packard had promised to contact him within two days. He was delivering in less.
“Our man seems to work in an area that collects powdery residue where he hangs his jacket during business hours. Scrutinizing the firms within a one-mile radius from the three cafes, more than a normal walking distance from a work day, we have been able to reasonably narrow his profession to cosmetics, dry chemicals, or baking materials.”
Jean Packard spoke quietly. His information was brief and explicit. But Osborn was hearing him as if in a dream. A week earlier he had been in Geneva, nervously preoccupied with the paper he would deliver to the World Congress of Surgery. Seven days later he was in a darkened bar in Paris listening to a stranger confirm that his father’s murderer was alive. That he walked the streets of Paris. Lived there, worked there, breathed there. That the face he had seen was real. The skin he had touched, the life he had felt under his fingers even as he tried to strangle it, was real.
“By this time tomorrow, I will have for you a name and an address,” Packard finished.
“Good,” Osborn heard himself say. “Very good.”
Jean Packard stared at him for a moment before he a got up. It was no business of his what Osborn would do with the information once he had it. But the look in Osborn’s eyes he’d seen in other men. Distant, turbulent and resolute. There was no doubt in his mind whatsoever that the man he would soon deliver to the American seated across from him would, very shortly thereafter, be dead.
Back in his room, Osborn stripped and took his second shower of the day. What he was trying to do was not think about tomorrow. Once he had the man’s name, knew who he was, where he lived, then he could think about the rest. How to question him and then how to kill him. To think about it now was too difficult and too painful. It brought back everything dark and terrible in his life. Loss, anger, guilt, rage, isolation and loneliness. Fear of love because of the dread that it would be taken away.
Shaving cream covered half his face and he was wiping steam from the mirror when the phone rang.
“Yes,” he said directly, expecting Jean Packard with a forgotten detail. It wasn’t Jean Packard. Vera was downstairs in the lobby. Was it permissible for her to come to his room? Or was he with someone else, or had he other plans? She was like that. Polite, considerate, almost innocent. The first time they’d made love she’d even asked permission before touching his penis. She had come, she said, to say goodbye.
He wore only a towel when he opened the door and saw her there in the hallway, trembling, with tears in her eyes. She came in and he closed the door, and then he kissed her and she kissed him back and then they were in each other’s arms. Her clothes were everywhere. His lips were on her breasts, his hand in the darkness between her legs. And then she spread her legs and he came joyously into her and everything was laughter and tears and unthinkable desire.
Nobody said goodbye like this. Ever had, ever would.
Nobody.
9
HER NAME was Vera Monneray. He’d met her in Geneva when she’d come up to him shortly after he’d presented his paper and introduced herself. She was a graduate of Montpellier medical school and in her first year of residency at the Centre Hospitalier Ste.-Anne in Paris, she’d told him. She was alone and celebrating her twenty- sixth birthday. She hadn’t known why she was being so forward, except that he’d caught her attention the moment his speech began. There was something about him that made her want to meet him. To find out who he was. To be with him for a little while. At the time she’d had no idea if he was married or not. She didn’t care. If he’d said he was married and with his wife, or if he’d simply said he was busy, she would have shaken his hand, told him she admired his paper and left. And that would have been that.
But he hadn’t.
They’d gone outside and crossed the footbridge over the Rhone to the old city. Vera was bright and filled with life. Her long hair was almost jet black, and she swept it to one side and tucked it behind her ear in a way that no matter how animated she became, it stayed where it was without coming loose. Her eyes were nearly as dark as her hair and were young and eager for the long life still ahead of her.
No more than twenty minutes after they’d met, they were holding hands. That night they had dinner together in a quiet Italian restaurant just off the red-light district. It was curious to think of Geneva as having a row for prostitutes. Its reputation for chocolate and watches and its aura of sobriety as an international finance center somehow didn’t play against the skintight, thigh-slit skirts of street hookers, but there they were anyway, populating the few odd blocks allotted them. Vera watched Osborn carefully as they walked past them. Was he embarrassed or silently shopping or letting life be what it was? All, she thought. All.
And dinner, like most of the afternoon, was more of that same kind of thing, a tender, silent exploration by a man and woman instinctively attracted to one another. A holding of hands, an exchange of glances and, finally, the long, searching stare into the other’s eyes. More than once Paul had felt himself become aroused. The first time it happened they were browsing through baked goods in a large department store. The area was crowded with shoppers and he was certain every eye was on his groin area. Quickly picking up a large bread, he discreetly held it in front of himself while pretending to look around. Vera saw him and laughed. It was as if they’d been lovers for a very long time and shared a secretive thrill playing it out in public.
After dinner they walked down the rue des Alpes and watched the moon rise over Lake Geneva. Behind them was the Beau-Rivage, Paul’s hotel. He’d planned dinner, the walk, the evening, to end there in his room, but suddenly, now that it was at hand, he wasn’t quite as sure of himself as he thought. He’d been divorced less than four months, hardly time enough to get back the confidence of being an attractive bachelor, and a doctor at that. In the old days, he tried to remember, how did he do it? Get a woman to his room? His mind went blank, he couldn’t remember a thing. He didn’t have to; Vera was way ahead of him.
“Paul,” she said and smiled, tucking her arm in his, pulling him close against the chill of the air coming across the lake, “the thing to always remember about a woman is that you only get her in bed if the decision is hers.”
“Is that a fact?” he deadpanned.
“Absolute truth.”
Reaching in his pocket he took out a key and held it up. “To my hotel room,” he said.
“I have a train. The ten o’clock TGV to Paris,” she said matter-of-factly, as if it was something he should have known.
“I don’t understand.” His heart sank. She’d never mentioned a train, or that she was leaving Geneva that night.
“Paul, this is Friday. I have things to do in Paris over the weekend, and Monday at noon I must be in Calais. It’s, my grandmother’s eighty-first birthday.”
“What do you have to do in Paris this weekend that can’t wait?”
Vera just looked at him.
“Well, what?” he said.
“What if I told you I had a boyfriend?”
“Do beautiful residents with boyfriends sneak out of town to pick up new lovers? Is that the medical world in Paris?”
“I didn’t ‘pick you up’!” Vera stood back, indignant. Trouble was, a little smile escaped from the corner of her
