Just One Day(80)

Nick gives her that one.
“You should see this place. It’s bloody enormous. They sell watches from all over; some of them cost a hundred thousand euros. Imagine spending that on a watch,” Kelly goes on, but I’ve stopped listening because I’m suddenly thinking of Céline. About what she said. About how I could get another watch. Another. Like she knew I lost my last one.
The Metro is pulling into a station, “I’m sorry,” I tell Kelly and the gang. “I’ve gotta go.”
_ _ _
“Where’s my watch? And where’s Willem?”
I find Céline in the club’s office, surrounded by stacks of paperwork, wearing a thick pair of eyeglasses that somehow makes her both more and less intimidating.
She looks up from her papers, all sleepy-eyed and, maddeningly, unsurprised.
“You said I could get another watch, which means you knew Willem had my watch,” I continue.
I expect her to deny it, to shoot me down. Instead, she gives me a dismissive little shrug. “Why would you do that? Give him such an expensive watch after one day? It is a little desperate, no?”
“As desperate as lying to me?”
She shrugs again, lazily taps on her computer. “I did not lie. You asked if I knew where to find him. I do not.”
“But you didn’t tell me everything, either. You saw him, after . . . after he, he left me.”
She does this thing, neither a nod nor a shake of the head, somewhere in between. A perfect expression of ambiguity. A diamond-encrusted stonewall.
And at just that moment, another one of Nathaniel’s French lessons comes back to me: “T’es toujours aussi salope?” I ask her.
One eyebrow goes up, but her cigarette goes into the ashtray. “You speak French now?” she asks, in French.
“Un petit peu.” A little bit.
She shuffles the paperwork, stubs out the smoldering cigarette. “Il faut mieux être salope que lache,” she says.
I have no idea what she said. I do my best to keep a straight face as I try to find keywords to unlock the sentence like Madame taught us, salope, bitch; mieux, better. Lache. Milk? No, that’s lait. But then I remember Madame’s refrain about venturing into the unknown being an act of bravery and her teaching us, as always, the opposite of courageux: lache.
Did Céline just call me a coward? I feel the indignation travel from the back of my neck up to my ears to the top of my head. “You can’t call me that,” I sputter in English. “You don’t get to call me that. You don’t even know me!”
“I know enough,” she replies in English. “I know that you forfeited.” Forfeit. I see myself waving a white flag.
“Forfeit? How did I forfeit?”
“You ran away.”
“What did the note say?” I am practically screaming now.
But the more excited I become, the more aloof she becomes. “I don’t know anything about it.”
“But you know something.”
She lights another cigarette and blows smoke on me. I wave it away. “Please, Céline, for a whole year, I’ve assumed the worst, and now I’m wondering if I assumed the wrong worst.”
More silence. Then “He had the, how do you say it, sue-tours.”
“Sue-tours?”
“Like with sewing on skin.” She points to her cheek.
“Sutures? Stitches? He had stitches?”
“Yes, and his face was very swollen, and his eye black.”
“What happened?”
“He would not tell me.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this yesterday?”
“You did not ask me this yesterday.”
I want to be furious with her. Not just for this, but for being such a bitch that first day in Paris, for accusing me of cowardice. But I finally get that none of this is about Céline; it never was. I’m the one who told Willem I was in love with him. I’m the one who said that I’d take care of him. I’m the one who bailed.
I look up at Céline, who is watching me with the cagey expression of a cat eyeing a sleeping dog. “Je suis désolée,” I apologize. And then I pull the macaron out of my bag and give it to her. It’s raspberry, and I was saving it as a reward for confronting Céline. It is cheating Babs’s rule to give it to someone else, but somehow, I feel she’d approve.
She eyes it suspiciously, then takes it, pinching it between her fingers as though it were contagious. She gingerly lays it on a stack of CD cases.
“So, what happened?” I ask. “He came back here all banged up?”
She nods, barely.
“Why?”
She frowns. “He would not say.”
Silence. She looks down, then quickly glances at me. “He looked through your suitcase.”
What was in there? A packing list. Clothes. Souvenirs. Unwritten postcards. My luggage tag? No, that snapped off in the Tube station back in London. My diary? Which I now have. I grab it out of my bag, leaf through a few entries. There’s something about Rome and feral cats. Vienna and the Sch?nbrunn Palace. The opera in Prague. But there is nothing, nothing of me. Not my name. My address. My email address. Not the addresses of any of the people I met on the tour. We didn’t even bother with the pretense of keeping in touch. I shove the diary back in my bag. Céline is peering through narrowed eyes, watching while pretending not to.
“Did he take anything from my bag? Find anything?”
“No. He only smelled. . . .” She stops, as if in pain.
“He smelled what?”
“He smelled terrible,” she says solemnly. “He took your watch. I told him to leave it. My uncle is a jeweler, so I know it was expensive. But he refused.”