Mrs. John Doe

Chapter 10

The old man in the terminal of Gare du Nord was holding up a sign that read HUGS. Nora passed by him twice before she realized that he was probably there for her. She stopped in front of him, pointed to herself, and said, “Hughes.” He grinned and nodded vigorously.

Now that she saw him up close, he wasn’t that old, probably in his mid-sixties. He was small and slight, his shaggy thatch of hair was a deep steel-gray color, and he had the weathered, lined face of a sailor or a farmer. His chauffeur’s uniform had definitely seen better days, and it had clearly been issued when he’d weighed thirty pounds more than he did now. His cap was in the hand that wasn’t holding the handwritten sign, and now he quickly slipped it on his head and bobbed a sketchy bow.

“Bonjour, Mademoiselle Hugs,” he said in a raspy voice. Two packs a day at least, Nora thought. “Je m’appelle Jacques Lanier. I talk good the English, so I do that now, yes? Welcome to Paris!”

“Thank you, Monsieur Lanier,” she said.

“Oh no, mademoiselle, you are to call me Jacques, oui? Oui! Forgive my old uniform, please; the new one is in the shop for the cleaning. Your reserving was very late last night, and I was not expecting to work today. But I am delighted to serve you. Do you have any of the luckages?”

“Um, no, no luggage,” she said. “I’m only here for the day. I must be at Musée National Auguste Rodin at noon. À midi. Comprenez-vous?”

“Yes, I understand. Noon. Come, we go.” With another huge grin and a twinkle of his deep brown eyes, the little man turned and forged through the crowded main concourse of the station, toward the exit. Nora clamped her arm firmly over her shoulder bag and followed close behind him.

No one seemed to be paying the slightest attention to her in this cavernous, busy place, certainly not the line of smartly dressed chauffeurs who waited near where Jacques had been standing, holding up placards that were similar to his. The other passengers from her train were just now arriving from the platform, and there were loud greetings and laughter and dramatic embraces all around her. Everyone else in the station seemed to be walking purposefully one way or another, many of them laden with bags and suitcases. Still, she continued to sweep her gaze around the bustling terminal, just to be sure.

It wasn’t exactly a limousine, more like the French version of a Lincoln Town Car, shiny and spanking clean. He’d stopped it just outside the station, in a row of similar black cars. He threw open the back door and bowed again. She smiled as she allowed him to hand her inside, and he jumped in front and started the engine.

“We have a beautiful day, yes?” he said over his shoulder. “Yesterday was la pluie, the rain, but today it is the sun. I have you at Musée Rodin in no flat time, and I wait there for you. You may possess me for the whole of the day if you wish; I am at your dispensal. When you have been to the musée, I take you anywhere in Paris-anywhere in France!-and then back to the trains, yes? Your wish is my commode.”

“Thank you, Jacques,” she said. She looked around at the well-remembered streets of the beautiful city as the car wended its way south through the press of traffic. He drove fast, but he was remarkably adept, moving effortlessly from lane to lane and always checking the activity in the rearview mirror and the little side mirror outside his door. He watched everything like a hawk. After just a few blocks, she decided that he was an excellent driver.

Down Rue La Fayette he drove, bobbing in and out of snarls, passing slower cars like the old pro he obviously was. When they arrived in the Place de la Concorde, Nora caught fleeting glimpses of Cleopatra’s Needle and the Champs-Élysées, then a snatch of the Louvre on her left and, after they crossed the Seine on the Pont de la Concorde, the Eiffel Tower in the far distance on her right, grimly acknowledging that this would probably be the full extent of her sightseeing today. The car flew along Rue de Bourgogne to Rue de Varenne, and here it was. Jacques pulled the car to a stop before the impressive former hotel that was now a museum, jumped out, and ran around to open her door.

“Et voilà!” he announced. “Le musée, avec quinze minutes-eh, fifteen? Yes, fifteen minutes in the spare!”

Nora smiled and glanced at her watch: 11:45. “Merci, Jacques. Vous attendez-moi ici?”

“Yes, mademoiselle, I put the car there.” He pointed toward Boulevard des Invalides a few yards away. “I park and wait, yes? You find me here.”

“I shouldn’t be long,” she said. “Trente minutes.”

“Oui, half an hour!” He grinned, delighted at his mastery of English. She laughed and went up the walk to the entrance.

Because it was a weekday morning, the line for tickets was fairly short, and she was soon inside. Her good spirits were immediately replaced by a sense of deep anxiety. Avoiding the crowds and roving groups of guided tours, she looked around the big downstairs rooms, then went upstairs to scan more galleries, barely glancing at the paintings, drawings, and sculptures. She was looking at the people, T-shirted tourists and well-dressed natives-she could easily tell who was and was not French around here-searching for anyone who might be showing an interest in her. The groups clustered around some of the works made her decide to take her husband’s instructions literally. He’s thinking. She went outside, to the gardens.

There was no need to ask where the biggest attraction in the collection was; all one had to do was follow the steady stream of pilgrims. Along with the David in Florence and the Winged Victory of Samothrace and Venus de Milo in the Louvre just over a mile from here, Le Penseur was one of the world’s most famous sculptures. And there it was, in front of a wall at the end of an avenue in the hedged, rose-bedecked grounds. The fan club at the moment was fairly modest, perhaps a dozen people in a semicircle before the massive figure.

Nora stopped on the path before she got too close to the crowd, studying the faces she could see and the backs of the others. No one looked familiar, and they were all focused on the statue. People came and went, passing by her on their way to or from the building behind her. A guard stood nearby, watching for idiots who tried to approach and touch or take forbidden photos with forbidden cellphones.

She closed her eyes and made a wish. Since the moment in the hotel dining room last night, when the blond girl had slipped her the note, Nora had been hoping against hope. She had no reason to expect her rosy conclusion, but she wished for it just the same. It couldn’t hurt to wish, could it?

She was an artist of the theater, the most superstitious of all professions. No whistling in dressing rooms, no peacock feathers onstage, no uttering aloud the title of Shakespeare’s Scottish play inside any playhouse, and absolutely never wish for good luck, anywhere. The Immigration agent on the train had been correct: The accepted phrase for actors was Break a leg, on the theory that asking for good fortune was an insult to Dionysus, patron god of the stage, and the muses of comedy and tragedy, Thalia and Melpomene. One had to fool them; if she said what she wanted aloud, they would give her the opposite, but if she said the opposite aloud…

Nora became aware that someone was standing on the path just behind her. There was a presence, breathing softly, and she had an acute sensation of being watched. More than watched: studied. She heard a crunching footstep and felt the warmth of a breath on her neck. Please, she thought. Please…

“Pardonnez-moi, madame, vos gants,” a thick male voice said.

“Quoi?” She turned around. A man stood there-big, heavyset, unshaven, about her age. He was almost comically unattractive, with thick, greasy black hair and bushy eyebrows, and he wore an ill-fitting brown jacket and a dull blue shirt, both of which were none too clean. He regarded her intently through small black eyes that all but vanished in the folds of his florid, veined face. As she watched, he bent slowly down to pick something up from the ground at her feet. He was holding out a pair of white cotton gloves.

Her French escaped her, but she was a New Yorker; she knew a street con when she saw it. It was an old hustle-he’d expect her to give him money for the pretty pair of stolen gloves. She wondered how he’d managed to get into the museum, but she had to get rid of him before her contact arrived. She glared down at the delicate items in the big, stained fingers and said, “No, those aren’t mine, someone else must have-”

“Ah, but they are,” the man insisted in English with a thick French accent. He was standing too close to her, his gravelly whisper bringing with it the mingled odors of garlic and cigarettes, and he was keeping his voice low. She had to strain to hear him. “You dropped them here. They are for you.” He said this slowly, with emphasis on each word. Now he leaned even closer and whispered, “Take them, Mrs. Baron.”

Nora blinked. Then she got it. “Oh! Oh yes, thank you! Merci, monsieur!” she sang in a loud stage voice. She smiled as he handed her the gloves. He grinned, revealing crooked brown teeth, gave a little nod, and walked quickly away from her, toward the crowd by the statue. He didn’t look back.

She watched him go, unable to move. She couldn’t even think for a moment, so great was her disappointment. She looked blankly down at the gloves in her hand and then dropped them into her shoulder bag. So, this was it, this was all that was going to happen here, now, today. A pair of gloves delivered to her by a strange courier, an ugly man who smelled of garlic. She shouldn’t have even thought her wish; she might as well have shouted the name of the Thane of Cawdor. The gods had denied her.

She wanted to linger in this beautiful setting, gazing at her favorite artworks, surrounded by art lovers. This museum was so peaceful, so civilized. She was all alone on a foreign continent, unable to contact the few people she knew here, not even sure how to call her daughter in New York without her cellphone. She felt detached, isolated, as though she were the only person in the world. The smiling faces around her were carefree; no one could possibly suspect that the woman there in the garden was as close to despair as she had ever been in her pleasant, sheltered life. She didn’t know what to do.

Then she thought, There’s no time for this. I have to keep going. I have to get out of here.

With a wistful glance at her favorite statue in the distance and a troubled glance at the big man who now stood with the tourists inspecting it, Nora turned around and retraced her steps. She moved quickly through the rooms to the entrance and down the walk to the street. The little driver, Jacques, was waiting for her, grinning and waving.