I shook my head.
“Are you physically incapable of speech or do you choose not to speak?”
I shrugged.
“I have to tell you, Monsieur . . . Baptiste, this is a very serious matter.”
I put my arm to my side, palm out flat.
“Yes, it’s about the child. Did you ever see her with Madame Plevneliev?”
Enthusiastic shake no. It was true. There was nothing in children’s pockets to pick. Tatiana would have focused only on Romeo.
“When did you last see her?”
When was it? Had she come by yesterday morning? I shrugged and jerked my thumb over my shoulder in a a-while-ago gesture.
“Monsieur Baptiste, you must search your memory. We know she was in the park yesterday. We want to know if she came this way.”
Bassin was standing motionless, looking straight at me as the sergeant took notes. I wondered what you wrote down if the person being interrogated didn’t speak.
Raising both hands, I shook my head again. Yesterday was filled with the child. I had no recollection of anything else. All I could see in my mind’s eye was the white-coated figure in the arms of the man as he carried her into the park.
“Have you ever seen the Gypsy with children?”
Children? My heart turned cold. I could see where he was heading, and it was very bad. No, I hadn’t. I tried to shake my head as definitively as I could.
But I had a question. I clasped one hand in the other, one elbow high, the other low, then made a gesture straight back from my forehead as if slicking back my hair. Bassin looked puzzled for a second, then the sergeant whispered again.
“It’s not something you need to know,” Bassin told me. “But yes, Monsieur de Marigny says he saw her near the child.” That wasn’t quite what I was asking. But it sounded like the police had found Monsieur Romeo de Marigny to be a very helpful witness.
Bassin left without a look behind him, entourage trailing along.
It was another two days before a park cop told me what had happened. The child had been strangled, and her body had been found in one of the service closets dug into the high walls enclosing the Tuileries. Romeo had alerted the park police that she had vanished when his attention was briefly distracted by a Gypsy. The girl’s gold locket was gone. And when the cops searched every Gypsy in the park, which was of course the first thing they did, they found the necklace. In the pocket that Tatiana had sewn on the inside of her skirt. Which Tatiana was wearing.
I DIDN’T VISIT her in prison, even though I was sure she was innocent. Gypsies lied, scammed, cheated, robbed, maybe even roughed people up a bit. I had known dozens during my years by the river. They didn’t kill.
But even had I been able to tear myself off the tracks that marked my life — home, river, home — to make the one-hour trip to her holding center in Fontainebleau, there was nothing I could do. Tatiana had no more chance of escaping this charge than she had of growing new teeth. No antidiscrimination group would speak up for her, no well-meaning citizen would collect signatures on a petition for her, no politician would stand up in the parliament building across the river and rail against the false charges. When Tatiana told her questioners about finding the necklace on one of the park’s pathways, even she probably knew that they wouldn’t believe her.
I could imagine her in her pretrial appearances before the judges, looking nowhere but at the floor, twisting her skirt in her hands. Had they given her clean clothes to wear? Did she try to speak? Did her lawyer even make an effort? The front pages of the crumpled newspapers that the wind blew up on the embankment showed her photo more days than not: climbing into a police van, surrounded by hard-faced policewomen who seemed to be shoving a little too hard.
Until one day the front-page photo was of only her face, and what the article said was that she had died.
A brain aneurysm in the middle of the night. The authorities said she had gotten the best of care. The authorities said the case was now closed. I put the newspaper into the yellow recycling can on the other side of the tunnel and walked back to my stand and played something or other on my trumpet for the rest of the day.
It wasn’t long after that that I saw the Mother — the Woman now, I guess. She was standing on the bridge, looking east toward Notre-Dame. She was alone, and silent, and thin. Spring had come and gone; it was July. The sun glittered on the river; it was one of those rare days when the water looked almost blue. The faint chatter of the tourists wafted down to me from the bridge. She paid no attention.
I picked up the trombone and began the “Bayrische Polka,” looking straight up at her in the distance, ignoring the crowd of camera-pointing Chinese and sounding the notes as loud as I could. At first, it seemed as if the music didn’t reach her. Then she slowly turned her head toward me and stared motionless for a long time. It was not until the last chorus that she lifted her hand and gave me a gentle wave.
Romeo turned up too, a week or so after that. I didn’t see him at first. He was hanging back in the crowd a bit, as if he were trying to stay out of sight. As I played, I could feel, rather than see, him circling around the watching tourists, coming to rest behind a family of what must have been Americans. A smile was forming on his lips. They had two children, an elementary-school-age boy and a smaller girl. She had blond curly hair and looked like she might have been in kindergarten.
That was enough.
Right in the middle of “Les Rues de Paris,” I put down the trumpet and rose from my stool. I walked through the ranks of astonished tourists, parting them with my hands and breaking through to the back of the crowd. I stood in front of him.
He tried to push by me, but I moved sideways and he stopped, the river on his other side.
I opened my mouth. Breathed in. Made a little cough; breathed again.
“M . . . M . . . Monsieur.” My voice rasped. “I . . . I have some information that I think you need to hear about the little g-girl in the white coat.”
If I had had any doubt, his expression dispelled it.
“I don’t know what you mean.” The tourists were staring at us as intently as if I were playing my trombone from the bell end. I said nothing. Stared at him. He shifted on his feet. “The suspect died in prison. The case is closed.”
I lowered my voice.
“Monsieur, I think it would be better if you heard what I have to say. Better that I tell it to you than . . .”
“All right, what do you want?” No smile now. His arms were folded, his head cocked, but his body was rigid with tension.
“Return tonight, at midnight. I will be here.”
HE CAME NOT across the bridge but from the quay, skulking past the long line of moored houseboats, one behind another, the tables and flowerpots on their decks ghostly in the moonlight. I stood with my back to my instruments.
“I’ve seen men like you before,” I said. “I know what you did.”
“Is it money you want?”
“I want to know the truth.”
“Truth? I don’t know what that is. I loved her. Maybe a little too much — is that what you’re asking? I only wanted to touch her for a second. Nothing bad. But if she’d told her mother . . . Anyway, what will it take for you not to squeal?”
He put his hand into the pocket of the loose jacket he was wearing. As he looked down, I made my move, even before I saw that he was pulling out a knife, not money.
And if someday a body surfaces far downriver from where I still ply my trade, or if the police drag the river for some poor drowned child or missing teenager and turn up the corpse of a young man instead, I hope they notice that the victim is not just another casualty of the muddy waters.
I hope they see on the left side of his head, just above his ear, a deep, slanted wound made with a blow of
