The Day After Tomorrow

8

THE POLICE artist’s sketch of the severed head made the London tabloids on Tuesday morning. It was presented as the face of a missing man, and the caption asked anyone with any information to please inform the Metropolitan Police immediately. A phone number was given along with a notation saying all callers could remain anonymous if they so chose. All the police were interested in was information on his whereabouts for a grievously concerned family. No mention was made that the face belonged to a head that had no accompanying body.

By nightfall not a single call had come in.

In Paris, a different sketch had more luck. For a simple hundred-franc bribe, Jean Packard had been able to shake the memory of one of the waiters who had pulled Paul Osborn from the throat of Henri Kanarack while they struggled on the floor of Brasserie Stella.

The waiter, a small man, with slight, effeminate hands and a like manner, had seen Kanarack a month earlier when he had been employed in another brasserie that had closed shortly afterward because of a fire. As he had at Brasserie Stella, Kanarack had come in alone, ordered espresso, then opened a newspaper and smoked a cigarette. The time of day had been about the same, a little after five in the afternoon. The brasserie was called Le Bois on boulevard de Magenta, halfway between the Gare de l’Est and Place de la Republique. A straight line drawn between Le Bois and Brasserie Stella would show a preponderance of Métro stations within the area. And since the stranger did not have the appearance of a man who took taxis, it was reasonably safe to assume he’d either come to each by car or on foot. Parking a car near either café at evening rush hour to linger alone over an espresso was not a likely happenstance either. Simple logic would suggest he’d come by foot.

Both Osborn and the waiter had described the man as having a stubble beard or “five o’clock shadow.” That, coinciding with his working-class manner and appearance, made it reasonably safe to presume that the man had been on his way home from work and, since he had done so at least twice, that he seemed to be in the habit of stopping for a respite along the way.

All Packard had to do now was make the rounds of other cafés within the area between the two brasseries. Failing that, he would triangulate out from each, until he found still another café where someone would recognize the man from Paul Osborn’s sketch. Each time he would show his identification, explain that the man was missing, and that he had been hired by the family to find him.

On only his fourth try, Packard found a woman who recognized the crude drawing. She was a cashier at a bistro on rue Lucien, just off boulevard de Magenta. The man in the sketch had been stopping there, off and on, for the past two or three years.

“Do you know his name, madame?”

At this the woman looked up sharply. “You said you were investigating for the man’s family, but you do not know his name?”

“What he calls himself one day is quite often not the same as the next.”

“He is a criminal?”

“He is ill. . . .”

“I’m sorry. But no, I do not know his name.”

“Do you know where he works?”

“No. Except to say that he usually has some kind of fine dust or perhaps powder on his jacket. I remember that because he was always trying to brush it away. Like a nervous habit.”

“Construction firms have been eliminated because construction workers do not, in general, wear sport jackets to and from work. And certainly not while they are working.” It was just after seven that night when Jean Packard sat down with Paul Osborn in a darkened corner of the hotel bar. Packard had promised to contact him within two days. He was delivering in less.

“Our man seems to work in an area that collects powdery residue where he hangs his jacket during business hours. Scrutinizing the firms within a one-mile radius from the three cafés, more than a normal walking distance from a work day, we have been able to reasonably narrow his profession to cosmetics, dry chemicals, or baking materials.”

Jean Packard spoke quietly. His information was brief and explicit. But Osborn was hearing him as if in a dream. A week earlier he had been in Geneva, nervously preoccupied with the paper he would deliver to the World Congress of Surgery. Seven days later he was in a darkened bar in Paris listening to a stranger confirm that his father’s murderer was alive. That he walked the streets of Paris. Lived there, worked there, breathed there. That the face he had seen was real. The skin he had touched, the life he had felt under his fingers even as he tried to strangle it, was real.

“By this time tomorrow, I will have for you a name and an address,” Packard finished.

“Good,” Osborn heard himself say. “Very good.”

Jean Packard stared at him for a moment before he a got up. It was no business of his what Osborn would do with the information once he had it. But the look in Osborn’s eyes he’d seen in other men. Distant, turbulent and resolute. There was no doubt in his mind whatsoever that the man he would soon deliver to the American seated across from him would, very shortly thereafter, be dead.

Back in his room, Osborn stripped and took his second shower of the day. What he was trying to do was not think about tomorrow. Once he had the man’s name, knew who he was, where he lived, then he could think about the rest. How to question him and then how to kill him. To think about it now was too difficult and too painful. It brought back everything dark and terrible in his life. Loss, anger, guilt, rage, isolation and loneliness. Fear of love because of the dread that it would be taken away.

Shaving cream covered half his face and he was wiping steam from the mirror when the phone rang.

“Yes,” he said directly, expecting Jean Packard with a forgotten detail. It wasn’t Jean Packard. Vera was downstairs in the lobby. Was it permissible for her to come to his room? Or was he with someone else, or had he other plans? She was like that. Polite, considerate, almost innocent. The first time they’d made love she’d even asked permission before touching his penis. She had come, she said, to say goodbye.

He wore only a towel when he opened the door and saw her there in the hallway, trembling, with tears in her eyes. She came in and he closed the door, and then he kissed her and she kissed him back and then they were in each other’s arms. Her clothes were everywhere. His lips were on her breasts, his hand in the darkness between her legs. And then she spread her legs and he came joyously into her and everything was laughter and tears and unthinkable desire.

Nobody said goodbye like this. Ever had, ever would.

Nobody.