“So you’ve seen him around?” Aimee said. “What about today in line at the poste?”
“I’m still thirsty.”
Aimee nodded to the barman to give her another.
“He came early.”
She pushed the holder with boiled eggs toward the woman.
“Try one, tastes good with a
The woman cracked the egg. With effort, she peeled the eggshell. Bits of white shell sprinkled on the floor. She took small bites and chewed slowly, each bite measured.
Aimee had a sinking feeling that this was the woman’s meal for the day. A loud ringing sounded in the woman’s pocket. She pulled out an alarm clock, white and oblong, with large numerals on it.
“Time for my scrub,” she said. “Wonderful hot showers at the municipal pool.”
“So where does Gassot play cards?”
“He cheats, you know.”
Aimee hid her smile. “
“I’ve seen him in the square,” she said, shrugging.
“What does he look like?”
She pointed to an older man leaning against the counter, drinking a
Aimee figured the old woman was hungry and needed a drink, that’s all. But Aimee didn’t begrudge her the food. She put some francs on the counter, stood, and hitched her bag onto her shoulder.
“But Gassot’s peg-leg gave him trouble today,” the woman told her.
At last! Aimee paused and leaned closer to the old woman, hoping gentle prodding would elicit more information.
“You mean he has an artifical limb?”
“He limped more than usual,” she said. “Might get a new one, since he cashed his pension today.”
“An injury from the Indochinese war?” she asked.
“Wouldn’t surprise me.”
“He was an engineer, wasn’t he?”
She raised her eyebrows. “Talked about oil drilling. How he couldn’t do that anymore with his pegleg. Worked with drawings.”
“
“Madame Lorette,” she said. Her eyes changed. “Sorry, I haven’t helped you much.”
Did she notice the pity in Aimee’s gaze?
“Look at my hands. You wouldn’t know it, but once I was a concert pianist. Schubert was my forte. I even played at the Chatelet concert hall.”
Did this woman have someone to help her? “Do you have family?”
“I wasn’t a very good mother,” she said. “Some women shouldn’t have children. And my daughter knew that.”
“Maybe so, Madame Lorette,” Aimee said. “But children eventually get on with their life.”
Aimee felt a pang of sorrow. Had her own mother felt that way? For a moment she wished her mother was sitting in some faraway cafe thinking about her, knowing guilt like this woman. Whenever she’d asked her
And in an odd way, she did understand, had no choice but to accept it. But deep down, a part of her waited for the mother who’d left one day without explanation. A woman who’d gone to fight revolutions and change the world, but left a little part of it incomplete.
After finding that old letter from her mother in the Sentier district, Aimee had known it was time to move on.
“You know my mother left us,” she said. “Like you, I guess she did better without children. It doesn’t mean she didn’t love me or that you didn’t love your daughter in your own way.”
She slipped Madame Lorette fifty francs and hoped it wouldn’t be spent all at once. But she’d found something out from the old woman. Now she knew where to search for Gassot.
AIMEE DISCOVERED six
The last, near Clichy, didn’t pick up the phone. But her father’s words rang in her ears: “Check each lead or you’ll regret it later when it smacks you in the face.” So she bundled her shearling coat around her and trudged down rue Legendre to the last address.
The Centre Orthopedique was a small taffy-colored storefront nestled in an ancient building. Wooden legs and old corsets filled the shop window. She pulled a pair of heavy brown-framed glasses from her bag. A sleepy-faced middle-aged man answered Aimee’s knock.
“No more appointments this morning, sorry,” he said.
“Pardon, I’ll get to the point. Did Monsieur Gassot have a fitting this morning?” she said. “Or was it later this afternoon?”
“What’s it to you?” His eyes narrowed and he scratched his chin.
She rooted through her bag and opened her cryptography notebook. She took a moment, pretending to consult it. “We’re doing you a service,” she said smiling. “Our social worker teams now visit in the field. We coordinate directly with the service providers, such as yourself, to expedite the clients’ prosthesis delivery and make less paperwork for you.”
She thought he’d like the last part.
“They never did this before. Sounds new to me.”
“But it is!” she said, eager to keep talking and throw him off balance. “You know we may have made a mistake. Perhaps Monsieur Gassot’s obtaining his prosthesis from someone else, but I’ve checked with all the concerns like yours in this arrondissement, so I assumed he dealt with you.”
A wonderful scent of rosemary came from inside the shop. The man’s eyes darted away.
“Look, I don’t want to hold up your lunch,” she said. “Can you just tell me if he’s getting a new prosthesis today?”
The man shook his head. “No new prosthesis appointments today.”
A dead end.
“
She had a bad feeling. Was Gassot so scared that he had run away with his
“But the old goat came for an adjustment,” he said. “Won’t get a new leg, always tells me he likes this one, but today he admitted he’s considering a modern one.”
What did that mean? She kept her excitement in check. “I’ll have to look into our coverage,” she said.
“He’s been too cheap to admit he needs a new one. Maybe some relative died and he got a windfall.”
A windfall? Or the jade?
Or was the
“
“Doesn’t have a phone. Doesn’t like them, he says.”
Whose number had she been given?
“Well, Monsieur, you’ve nailed the problem for us. Now we know why we haven’t been able to reach him. I suppose he’s still at the same address.” She flipped through her cryptography notebook. “I must have left that on my desk, can you give me his address?”
“No clue.”
Did Gassot move around, stay with friends? “Do you treat others from the Sixth Battalion?”
