Night Watch

THIRTY-EIGHT

“What do you need a lawyer for, Luc? What have you done?”

“I haven’t done anything.”

“Then what do you need a lawyer for?” My heart was pounding now, matching the rhythm of the hammer that was beating against my tired brain.

“Mike thinks I ought to get one,” he said, sitting down at the table again, pouring himself another glass of wine. “The detectives in Brooklyn tell me I’m crazy not to have one.”

“They’re just cops, Luc. I’m a lawyer and I’m telling you that if you didn’t do anything, you don’t need to hire one.”

“Mike and Mercer are the sharpest guys you know. You’re always telling me that. Now you’re saying they’re ‘just cops’? They think you’re blind to the situation, too close to me to see what’s best. There’s too much going on around me that I just don’t understand.”

I sat down opposite Luc.

“I’ve got to go home, Alex. I’ve got to see my sons.”

“I understand that,” I said, almost in a whisper. I knew it was true.

“But I need someone to handle my interests here, someone to deal with the investigation, to stand up for me.”

I took a deep breath. “Okay, Luc. We’ll take care of that in the morning. Are the detectives okay with your going back to France?”

“They seem to be fine with it,” Luc said, relieved that I accepted the idea of his leaving town, and finding him good counsel. “You know who I want to represent me, Alex? That man you introduced me to on the Vineyard last summer. I don’t care what it costs. The guy you said was the smartest lawyer you’d ever known. You remember him? You know who I mean?”

I looked at Luc and nodded. “I know exactly who you mean. Justin Feldman.”

“Yes, Alex, that’s who I want at my back. He’s wise and brilliant and strong. Will you call him for me?” Luc said, looking more optimistic than he had all week.

“I wish I could, Luc. But he died, darling. I’ve never known a better lawyer than Justin-he was truly a giant-but he died last fall. He can’t help you with this.”

Luc had every reason to be thinking of himself right now, but for me, the mention of my dear friend’s name-and his sudden loss-added a profound layer of sorrow to the tension of this moment.

“Désolé,” Luc said. Three short syllables, but one of the most powerful words in the French language. “Vraiment désolé.”

I was totally disconsolate, too. I bit my lip to fight back tears.

“What will I do?”

“Let me think about it tonight, Luc. I’ll have a name for you in the morning.”

“I want to tell you something.”

“Better to save it. Better I don’t know anything else.” I helped myself to a glass of wine.

“It’s about Brigitte, Alex. You’ve got to know it.”

“I think I’ve known it all along, Luc. You still love her-there are photos everywhere,” I said, thinking of the one in the bedside table in Mougins. “There’s no room for me in your life right now, and I’m beginning to accept that.”

“You’re wrong, Alex. Mike’s right about how stubborn you are, how thick-headed. You’ve never believed me when I’ve told you that I’m way over Brigitte.”

“What is it, then?”

“You want to know why she left me? You want to know why our marriage broke apart?” Luc asked, as full of anger as I was full of tristesse. “We split because she’s an addict. She has been for all of her adult life, and it’s unlikely now that will ever change. We broke up over that.”

“But you never told me.”

“What’s to tell? I thought she had beaten it again by the time we’d met. She’s been addicted to cocaine since she was a kid at university. She tried to stop for me-I’ve had her in the best rehabs in Europe-in Switzerland, in England, in Belgium,” Luc said. “At best she’s sober for a few months, then she relapses. It’s going to kill her before too long if no one can get her to stop.”

I tried to think of all the times we had talked about Brigitte, and whether there were hints of her addiction in the conversation.

“Why do you think I’ve fought so hard to be with my sons, Alex? Why do you think it has meant everything to me to be near them? To make sure to see them as often as I could? To try to keep them safe?”

“Didn’t the subject come up when you divorced? It should have been easy for you to get custody, with Brigitte’s drug history.”

“Right after we split, Brigitte spent six months in a rehab facility in Zurich. The kids stayed with me, and Brigitte’s mother moved down to help me. I thought she was heaven-sent. The boys were in their home, going to their own school, cared for by me and their grandmother, two people who loved them more than life itself. Then-boom!-it all backfired.”

“How?”

“The hearing before the judge was set right after Brigitte’s release. She was perfectly sober, of course. She was the model of a repentant ex-addict. As you Americans like to say, for three months she walked the walk. The judge was charmed and thoroughly convinced that Brigitte had kicked the habit. Maybe the judge was just ignorant about addiction-didn’t realize it’s a fight that goes on every day of a person’s life.”

“What backfired then?”

“The last straw was that Brigitte’s mother testified against me.”

“Against you? How is that possible?”

“Like coming to praise Caesar, not to bury him…but bury me she did. What a good father I wanted to be-tried to be. But it was all about the lifestyle and how much my work kept me away from the house. And that my business required me to be in the restaurant from five or six in the afternoon-when the boys got home from school with their homework-till one or two in the morning.”

“But, Luc, all anyone has to do is see you together with those boys. You live for them. You spend the rest of every waking moment with them. They adore you, they want to be you. I’ve seen them follow you to the restaurant and pretend to be your helpers,” I said, laughing at the sweet memory. “Little Mini-Mes.”

“That was another strike that grandmamma threw in. There’s liquor at the restaurant, as she reminded the judge. The wine flows like water and the boys are even allowed to sip it from time to time.”

“Quelle horreur!” I said in mock surprise. “French kids start sipping wine when they breast-feed. How dare she?”

“All I can say is that it worked like a charm. Brigitte was at her very best-her million-megawatt smile on display and totally pulled together for the judge. I was the dad who was working his ass off so hard to keep the boys that I wasn’t responsible enough to be in charge.”

“And the fight with Lisette several years ago,” I said, starting to put a more complete picture together. “Did Brigitte really catch the girl stealing money?”

Luc looked me straight in the eye. “Money was the least of it. It was Lisette who was supplying the coke to Brigitte, delivering it to her anyway. When I learned about that, I cut off Lisette’s access to the cash in the office, where she’d been working for me. That cash drawer was the fund that fed both their habits. Lisette threw a tantrum and broke into our house to steal money-from me personally.”

“So when Brigitte found out, there really was a catfight, wasn’t there?”

“A major one.”

“And when Captain Belgarde asked why you’d never filed a police report about the theft,” I said, “it wasn’t because you were afraid of being investigated by the tax authorities.”

“Not at all. If I called attention to Lisette’s drug habits by going to the police, I’d be dragging Brigitte into the very same mess. We cut the girl loose instead, and off Brigitte went for another round in rehab,” Luc said. “It was shortly after her return from that trip that we split up.”

I was trying to put the time line together, and more importantly trying to fathom how someone measures the love of a parent for a child.

“You’ve got to go home, Luc. The rest of it will fall into place,” I said. “You’ve got to know that your boys are protected in the midst of everything that’s going on.”

He stood up again and came around the table to me. I also stood, and put my arms around his neck.

“You understand then, if I leave this weekend?”

“Completely,” I said, thinking of the 24/7 demands I still faced on the Gil-Darsin case, as new information seemed to be unfolding every day. “And do you understand that I can’t go with you?”

“I don’t want you to come, Alex.”

“But-?”

“I think it’s too dangerous for you to be there right now.”

“What is it I don’t know, Luc? Is this part of why you want a lawyer?”

Our bodies were against each other. I could feel Luc’s heart pounding as strongly as the beats of my own were coming. “I put you in harm’s way, Alexandra.”

“Not intentionally, Luc. You’re as helpless as I am with all this coming down on your head.”

He unlocked my hands from behind his neck and stepped back. “But I know more than you do.”

“Then tell me about it, please.”

Luc wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “Last Sunday, when we left the beach in Cannes,” he said, choosing his words carefully.

“The men on motorcycles who were chasing you,” I said. “The two men with guns.”

“They could have killed you, Alex. They were trying to get to me, but they could have killed you.”

“You know who they were? Let’s tell Belgarde about them.”

“Jacques Belgarde’s a joke. It’s not a case for him.”

“Who were they, Luc?”

“I don’t know their names. And their names don’t matter for a minute, because when they’re gone, there’ll be two more goons to replace them.”

“But Luc-”

“It’s about drugs, Alex. Do you get that? Don’t you remember The French Connection, or was that just a piece of movie trivia to you and Mike?”

“Of course I remember it, and I’m well aware that it was real,” I said. Marseille, just down the coast from Cannes on the Mediterranean, had been the intersection where Turkish poppies were sent to French labs to be converted to heroin for sales in America-and the export of the deadly finished product.

“You know what that so-called ‘connection’ is today?”

“No, Luc. No, I don’t.”

“There’s a new source for cocaine that’s flooding the south of France. You Americans have finally made a dent in the Colombian cartels, so now there’s a different place that excels at exporting the raw material. What used to be called Africa’s Gold Coast is known as the Coke Coast.”

I thought of Papa Mo, the deposed Ivorian leader who had stolen millions of dollars from the rich cocoa crop of his war-torn republic.

“West Africa is the world’s new narco-state, Alex. It thrives in dirt poor countries like Guinea-Bissau and Mauritania,” Luc said, completely wound up in his description of the drug trade. “Two weeks ago, five women pretending to be pregnant were stopped on the Mali border. They had concealed several dozen kilos of cocaine on their bodies.”

“And the Republic of the Ivory Coast?” I asked.

“Of course, Alex. That country, too. All those isolated corners of the politically unstable African coast, with its hundreds of miles of unpatrolled shoreline. The cocaine is concealed in caravans that cross the Sahara, and in small planes that fly over the sea and land on small strips along the French border.”

I needed to slow Luc down. Why was he so on top of the drug trade in his part of the world? “And you know all this because-?”

“Because of Brigitte, of course,” he said, snapping at me. And then he lowered his voice. “Because I’m due back in court next week to lay this out before the judge who made the custody decision. My lawyer has done all the research to make his point, and I’ve spent more time studying the subject than I’ve done with my business plans. I need to get my sons out of her life. I won’t stop at anything this time.”

I turned and looked around the room for no good reason, as though an answer to my problems might be hidden behind an exposed beam or an unfinished wall unit. “But no one-neither she nor the court will let you leave the country-leave France-with your children. That will never happen, Luc. You aren’t even established over here yet. You’re staying in a hotel.”

“Don’t you think I’m aware of all this? Don’t you know it’s tearing my gut apart, Alex?” he said, the despair soaking through every word he said. “Here we are, standing inside the bricks-and-mortar foundation of what my dreams have been, professionally, for most of my life. In three or four months, the apartment on the third floor will be ready for the boys to live in-just the way I grew up, which was quite wonderful, actually.”

Luc slowed down his delivery. “On top of that, I somehow found you, and I’m having trouble making sense of how to hang on to that slice of good fortune as well.”

“Go back to the men on motorcycles, Luc,” I said. This wasn’t the moment to tell him that if that’s what he considered his good fortune, it might be about to change. “Why were they after you? The day it happened-just last Sunday-you swore to me you had no idea what it was about.”

“I didn’t put it together at the time, darling. Now it’s pretty clear they were after me, and maybe after you, too.”

“Me? That’s insane.”

“Look at what happened. Lisette came up to Mougins the night before, with a supply of cocaine. But she didn’t return. Not with the drugs, nor with money, if she was supposed to sell them for the dealer. She disappeared, at least in the minds of whoever gave her the drugs to deliver.”

“She disappeared with the coke.”

“She was dressed in white, so maybe she had told her friends-her suppliers-that Luigi had promised to get her into the party,” Luc said. “Perhaps she even bragged about getting to me directly, told them my wife used to be one of her best clients.”

“But your wife is gone.”

“So was Lisette, for three or four years. Maybe she didn’t know about Brigitte. Or maybe she just figured that there was a good chance someone at the party would be up for a little blow.”

“And when she didn’t return on Sunday morning, these guys figured that you had it, Luc. That you took it from Lisette, and they wanted it back-or they wanted to get paid for it. But me?”

“Hey, you’re just the girl hanging on to me on the back of my Ducati. Motorcycle gear and helmet on, it’s not exactly like you had ‘district attorney’ stamped on the back of your outfit.”

I could understand what Luc was thinking. “That’s why you were so anxious to leave me at the house after the chase and rush away to make sure your sons were okay.”

Luc exhaled. “That proverbial rock and a hard place. Scylla and Charybdis. It was a terrible thing I did, Alex, leaving you alone while I raced to make sure the boys were safe. Because of Brigitte’s drug habit, they’ve always been so vulnerable.”

“The guys on the motorcycle were coming after you, Luc, for the coke or the cash.”

“But it was you, Alex, it was your back that they had in their sights,” Luc said, “because I had never told you the truth about Brigitte, and that could have gotten you killed.”