The Day After Tomorrow

2

MICHELE KANARACK looked across the table, then extended her hand. Her eyes were filled with love and affection. Henri Kanarack took her hand in his and looked at her. This was his fifty-second birthday; she was thirty-four. They’d been married for nearly eight years and today she’d told him she was pregnant with their first child.

“Tonight is very special,” she said.

“Yes. Very special.” Kissing her hand gently, he let it go and poured from a bottle of red Bordeaux.

“This is the last,” she said. “Until the baby. No more drinking while I’m pregnant.”

“Then the same for me.” Henri smiled.

Outside the rain beat down in torrents. The wind rattled the roof and windows. Their apartment was on the top floor of a five-story building on the avenue Verdier in the Montrouge section of Paris. Henri Kanarack was a baker who left every morning at five and didn’t return until nearly six thirty at night. He had an hour commute each way to the bakery near the Gare du Nord on the north side of Paris. It was a long day. But he was happy with it. As he was with his life and the idea of becoming a father for the first time at the age of fifty-two. At least he had been until tonight, when the stranger had attacked him in the brasserie and then chased after him into the Métro. He’d looked American. Thirty-five or so. Well built and strong. Dressed in an expensive sport coat and jeans, like a businessman on vacation.

Who the hell was he? Why had he done that?

“Are you all right?” Michele was staring at him. What was Paris coming to when a baker could be attacked in a brasserie by a total stranger? She wanted him to call the police. Then find a lawyer and sue the brasserie’s owner.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m all right.” He wanted neither to call the police nor sue the brasserie, though his left eye was all but swollen shut and his lip was puffed up and red/blue where the wild man’s blow had driven an upper tooth through it.

“Hey, I’m going to be a father,” he said, trying to get off it. “No long faces around here. Not tonight.” Michele got up from the table, came around behind him and put her arms around his neck.

“Let’s make love in celebration of life. A great life between young Michele, old Henri and new baby.”

Henri turned around and looked into her eyes, then smiled. How could he not. He loved her.

Later, as he lay in the dark and listened to her breathing, he tried to blank the vision of the dark-haired man from his mind. But it would not go. It revived a deep, almost primal, fear—that no matter what he did, or how far he ran, one day he would be found out.