The Paris Mysteries (Confessions #3)(4)

“Where were you last night?” he asked me.

“You think I have to tell you?”

“Jacob thought you were about to blow off the most important meeting ever. He’s pretty mad.”

“I was right here,” I said, shoving Hugo onto the floor.

“That’s a lie,” he said. “Oh, I took the bedroom facing the street. Me and Matty. There’s a smart TV in that room, and I can get like ninety thousand stations and post my blog.”

Matty was our twenty-four-year-old big brother, Matthew Angel, cornerback for the New York Giants. Fierce, strong, as handsome as a movie star, and most of all, Hugo’s hero.

At that moment, Matthew was looking out the windows into the front garden and speaking on his phone in a very animated way. In the kitchen to my right, my twin brother, Harry, was reading the back of a cracker box.

He said to me, “You’re in big trouble, you know?”

Just then, our uncle Jacob stalked into the room and stood until we gave him our attention.

Shortly after our parents’ sudden and gruesome deaths, just weeks before our home and all our possessions were sold to settle their debts and we were this close to becoming homeless, Jacob Perlman had appeared.

Jacob was an Israeli ex-commando and our father’s long-lost oldest brother. And now he was our guardian. He was the one who had brought us to Paris to live in Gram Hilda’s house and had told us about the inheritance she intended for us.

He stood in the center of this fantastic, modern-style room until our eyes were fixed on his. Then he said, “Tandy, I’ve told you. Never turn off your phone.”

“Uncle Jake, believe me, I had a good reason.”

“There’s no exception to ‘never.’ We’ll discuss it later.”

Jacob took his wallet out of the back pocket of his khakis.

“Harry, please go out and bring back lunch for all of us. Hurry. The bankers and lawyers will be here shortly—and, kids, please trust me when I tell you to bring your A-game.

“Especially you, Tandoori. Snap out of it—whatever ‘it’ is. Good or bad, the results of this meeting will determine how comfortably you live the rest of your lives.”





At half past one, nine of the seats around the mirror-polished steel table in Gram Hilda’s dramatic, black-lacquered dining room were taken. We kids lined up along one side, Jacob took his seat at the head, and four gray-suited, middle-aged lawyers and bankers sat stiffly across from us.

The suits were all humorless, well pressed, and rather full of themselves. And the one who looked least likely to eat Popsicles in his underwear or sing and walk on his hands at the same time was the senior man, Monsieur Fran?ois Delavergne.

Monsieur Delavergne was fat and bald, with hair shooting out of his cuffs and sprouting like weeds on his knuckles. “Pleasure to meet you,” he said grimly, shaking hands with each of us.

“Don’t be so sure,” Hugo said.

Matty grabbed our bad boy by the shoulder. “That was rude, Hugo. Apologize.”

“Just being honest,” Hugo said. “Matty, are you afraid of this dude?”

Matty shook his head and said, “Sorry, Monsieur Delavergne. Hugo comes uncensored.”

“Real, you mean,” Hugo said. “Straight shooter, you mean.”

He then bet our visitors that he could lift any of them over his head, but got no takers. Once the nonsense stopped and the presentations were under way, I turned my scattered thoughts to my beautiful, brilliant, and somewhat capricious late grandmother, Hilda Angel.

Although she died before any of us were born, we’d heard stories about her wild summer on a kibbutz when she was seventeen, her intrepid trips abroad on tramp steamers, and her high-flying life in New York and Paris.

But what we first learned about her came in the form of a scandalous handwritten codicil to her last will and testament that read, “I am leaving Malcolm and Maud $100, because I feel that is all that they deserve.”

Our father had framed and hung that Big Chop—what our family not-so-affectionately calls our parents’ punishments—in the stairwell near the master bedroom, where we all saw it several times a day.

Why had Gram Hilda disowned Malcolm? Maud, our very own tiger mom, had said that Hilda hadn’t approved of the marriage. That must have meant Hilda hadn’t approved of her. Maybe that was true. But I often wondered what else we hadn’t been told.

I tuned back in to the men in gray as they itemized Gram Hilda’s holdings, projected receipts, calculated interest rates, and translated international rates of exchange.

I followed the back-and-forth up to a point. I asked questions. I made notes, but honestly, the numbers were dense and dizzying, and although I’m a bit of a math whiz, this was a deluge of black ink and fine print with no apparent bottom line. Plus, the millions of questions and doubts about James kept slipping into my thoughts like evil weeds. I tried, but I couldn’t read a single face across the table.

Were we bankrupt or not? Why were there so many papers for us to sign? Finally, I’d had enough.

“Excuse me, Monsieur Delavergne,” I said. “Will you summarize, please? Uncle Jacob will explain the details to us later.”

“Of course, Mademoiselle Angel,” Delavergne sniffed. “Whatever you say. Whatever you want or need.”