Last to Know: A Novel(54)

“It’s okay,” he said gently. “It’ll be okay now, you’ll see. I’ll make sure Rossetti gets everything right, he’ll take care of it for you.”

“But what about you?” She stared, panicked, at him. “Why don’t you take care of everything? After all, it was you who started it.”

Harry sat for a moment, on the footstool, looking up at the lovely distraught woman who needed his help, whose husband needed his help, whose very lives had been touched by evil. Of course he was the man who should be taking care of her. Of them all.

“Trust me,” he said to Rose. “I want to. But I’m leaving tomorrow—today that is, for Paris. It’s something I can’t put off.”

He got to his feet, and so did she. He took the empty glass from her hand, wrapped her orange shawl around her, smoothed the fringes over the edges. It was soft under his touch, cashmere, he knew. Soft as the woman in front of him, whose arms now came and wrapped around him. He held her close, breathing in that fresh-air scent of her, loving her gently.

“It’ll be okay,” he whispered in her ear. “You’ll see, everything will be okay. I know it.”

She moved away, looked at him. “Promise?” she asked.

“I promise,” Harry said.

Then he called a taxi to take Rose home. Next he called the airline to confirm his flight to Paris the following—or rather that afternoon. Then he called Rossetti.

“I want you to speak to Wally’s attorneys,” he said. “He’s not our man, I’m sure of it.”

“I know, I already spoke to the captain,” Rossetti said. “Anyway, why the f*ck aren’t you on the flight?”

“I am,” Harry said. “I just need to shower, pack a bag, and I’m off.”

“You sure you’re off to Paris?”

Harry smiled at the skepticism in his colleague’s voice.

“This time I’m sure,” he said. “You are gonna work it all out, Rossetti. All by yourself.”





41


When she met Harry at Charles de Gaulle Airport, Mal thought he looked just the same as always: same unruly dark hair; same keen gray eyes searching her out in the crowd; same loping stride, like “a panther on the loose,” as she had once told him, only half joking. Lean, lithe, and sexy, that was her Harry. And also, she could see as he came closer, a very tired Harry.

He felt her eyes on him, spotted her, smiled, and then they were in each other’s arms, his face in her hair, his hands firm against her back, pulling her closer.

“You don’t know how good it is to see you,” he murmured.

Smiling, she said, “I’ve always tried to get you to Paris.”

“And now you’ve succeeded. And I’m glad to be here.”

“You’ll be even gladder,” she said, inserting herself closer to him, not caring what the rest of the world hurrying by burdened with hand baggage and fatigue thought about them. They were lovers. So what? This was Paris.

She glanced searchingly over his shoulder. “I’m looking for the dog,” she explained, glad when she made Harry laugh.

All he carried was his old duffel in which Mal would bet would be one clean pair of Jockeys; maybe a pair of socks if he was wearing socks right now, most often he did not; one clean white shirt, an old cashmere jacket he sometimes wore when they were going somewhere “posh,” as he termed a good restaurant, which meant to him anything other than Ruby’s; definitely no tie, he never wore one. There would be the old leather bag with his toothbrush, etc, and a copy of War and Peace. Harry always took War and Peace on his travels. He never finished it; said he always had to start again, at the beginning, because he couldn’t remember who was who, the names had him so confused. “Good training for a detective,” he told Mal when she laughed. Harry was definitely not a Kindle man; he still wanted that old book, the feel of paper in his hand, pages he could turn, the end he could read first to catch up. Harry always needed to know the ending first, and now, with this Havnel case and the death of the young woman, Mal realized he did not know the ending and that it grieved him.

She had, naturally, parked her car on a red line. There was another parking ticket and an irate warden who, when she tried a few tears and in garbled French explained that her passenger was Homicide Detective Harry Jordan, famous in the USA, let her off with a warning.

“You haven’t changed one bit,” Harry said, folding himself into the Fiat. “You get away with murder.”

Under the circumstances, Mal thought it an unfortunate choice of words. “Wanna go to my place first? Or would you like to go all Parisian, and sip a glass of wine, in a particular sidewalk café I like?”

“Definitely the wine.” Harry put his hand on her knee and gave it a squeeze. “And the sidewalk café you like so much. I need to know where you’ve been spending your time, alone in Paris.”

Mal thought it was better not to mention the young man in the tweed jacket with whom she had shared champagne the previous night. After all, she had been crying over Harry, which was the reason they had met.

She drove rapidly and confidently through the rush-hour traffic, through the unending grim suburbs and into what Mal termed “the light,” when the famous skyline, marked by the Eiffel Tower, appeared.