happened to her, that’s all.”
Finally the barman spoke. “You English?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Been in the hospital lately?”
Carver unfolded the photograph and showed him the other half.
“Okay,” said the barman. “I heard about you. But I don’t know where Alix went. One night she was here, the next… poof!”
He shrugged and lifted up his hands to emphasize his bafflement, then pulled out a cloth from behind the bar and started wiping the countertop in front of Carver.
“But maybe Trudi can help you. She was a friend of Alix’s.”
The barman gestured at one of the waitresses-the one Carver had met at the door.
“Hey, Trudi! He wants to buy you a drink.”
The waitress made a show of looking Carver up and down.
“Do I get another hundred dollars?” she asked and sauntered over.
The balding man in the corner, attracted by the sound of conversation, watched her as she walked toward the bar. Carver saw him and just for a second thought he caught something in the man’s eye, a way of looking that suggested intense concentration, a kind of professional curiosity. But then Trudi was standing next to him, cheerful, busty, the classic barmaid-her costume laced extra-tight to make her cleavage all the deeper-and the thought vanished.
“So, are you going to get me that drink?” she said.
“Sure,” said Carver. “What are you having?”
“Double vodka and tonic.”
The drink appeared. Trudi downed half of it in one gulp and gave a contented sigh.
“I needed that. So, what can I do for you?”
“It’s Alix. I’m trying to find her.”
Trudi looked at him for a moment, then a sly smile crossed her face.
“So you’re her mystery man, huh? She talked about you a few times. Not often, though-it upset her to say too much. I thought you were sick in the hospital.”
“I was. Now I’m not. What happened to Alix?”
“I don’t know-she just… well, she just vanished.”
“When? The last time she came to visit me was around the middle of February.”
Trudi considered for a moment. “Yes, that sounds right. She walked out just before our big Valentine’s Day party. I was cross with her, leaving the rest of us to fill in. It never occurred to me she wasn’t coming back.”
“Had she been worried about anything?”
“Sure,” said Trudi. “Paying your hospital bills. She really loved you.”
“Tell me about the bills. What did she say about them?”
“Just that she didn’t know where she was going to find twenty thousand francs. It was really on her mind.”
“And the last time you saw her, the night you say she walked out: Do you remember what happened?”
Trudi took another sip of her drink.
“Okay, I remember. I’d been working a couple of hours before Alix arrived, and I was waiting for her to start work, so that I could take a break. I saw her come out from the dressing room, just over there…”
Trudi pointed toward a door set into the wall not far from where they were talking. There was a sign on it forbidding entry to customers.
“Then what happened?” asked Carver. “How did Alix seem to you?”
Trudi gave a quizzical little pout. “I don’t know, normal, I suppose-at first, anyway. But then suddenly she stopped completely still, right in the middle of the floor. She was staring at one of the tables, like she’d seen a ghost, you know? Then she turned and walked really fast, right out of the bar, toward our dressing room. I thought it was kind of odd, but I didn’t have time to think about it because I was serving customers. There was a problem because two men got up and left without paying and Pierre, the barman, was giving me shit for letting them do that, but in the end it didn’t matter because a woman paid their bill. Weird, huh?”
“Yeah, maybe,” said Carver impatiently. “But concentrate on Alix. When did you know she’d left the building?”
“About ten minutes later. She hadn’t come back and I still hadn’t had my break and I just thought she was being a selfish cow, so I went to look for her. But when I got to the dressing room, she wasn’t there, and her bag and coat were both gone. And that was the last time I saw her.”
“Go back to when you last saw Alix. She came out of the door. She saw something. What did she see?”
Trudi thought for a moment. Then she got up and said, “Come with me.”
She led Carver across the room till they were standing in front of the door from which Alix had emerged. Behind them, the man in the cheap suit had come to the bar and was settling his account with Pierre. From time to time,
