Peter May - Freeze Frames

“Yes.”

“But how would he know? How would he ever have suspected?”

Enzo shook his head. “I have no idea. But your hair sample gave him the means by which he thought he could prove it. Do you have a photograph you can show me?”

“Yes, of course.” Cohen lifted his briefcase on to the table and took out a fat manila folder. Enzo watched as he thumbed through yellowing documents with official stamps, extracts from registers of birth and marriage, reports, correspondence, photographs. Dozens of photographs, including several old, blurred prints from his youth. A smiling young man giving no clue as to the monster within. Finally Cohen separated out an eight by ten black and white print and pushed it across the table toward Enzo. “That’s probably about the best, taken around 1945 we think.”

“What about the ones taken in Morocco?”

“Unfortunately the photographs taken in Agadir were lost with our operatives in the earthquake.”

Enzo took out his half-moon reading glasses and perched them on the end of his nose to peer at the print Cohen had given him. Fleischer stood grinning self-consciously for the camera. He was in uniform, but holding his cap in his hands. It had clearly been blown up from a smaller print and was grainy, but quite sharp. His face was thin and pale. He had a thick head of black hair and cautious eyes. Enzo stared at it for a very long time. There was something familiar about the face, although it was difficult to say what. Something, perhaps, in the set of the jaw or the line of the mouth. But this had been taken more than sixty years ago. If the man in the photograph were still alive, he would be in his nineties now. Virtually unrecognisable.

“And you, monsieur?”

Enzo looked up, eyebrows raised, to meet Cohen’s naked curiosity.

“Do you believe he found Erik Fleischer?”

“Yes, I do,” Enzo said. “And I also believe he is still alive.”

From the gallery beyond the living and working area, Enzo stood in the semidarkness looking down into the well of the building, where Charlotte conducted her patient consultations in the indoor garden. The rain, finally, had caught up with him, and he heard it battering now on the glass roof overhead, almost drowning out the musical tinkle of the artificial stream in the garden below.

From here he could also see into her bedroom, glass walls opening onto a view of the garden beneath it. A bedside lamp cast a warm glow around it, and he saw the rumpled sheets of her unmade bed. A bed he had shared with her many times, always aware of how exposed they were to the view of anyone standing where he stood now. It had always been an inhibiting factor.

But not for Charlotte. She had laughed at the idea of feeling watched and told him the story of the two Italian soldiers billeted during the war with the former owners of this one-time coal merchant’s in the thirteenth arrondissement. On the day of Liberation, the elderly couple had murdered the soldiers and buried them under the floor of the former coal store, an area now cemented over and providing the foundation for Charlotte’s indoor garden. They had told her this when selling her the property, and she had been amused by the idea that her home might be haunted by their ghosts. If anyone was watching them, she had once told Enzo, it would be her Italians. And who could deny them a little entertainment after their lives had been cut so brutally short?

“Will you stay for something to eat?”

He turned and saw her standing at the top of the short flight of steps leading up to her office. He had not heard her hang up the phone. “No, I won’t. I have to get out to Charles de Gaulle tonight. I’m booked into one of the airport hotels.”

“You could have stayed here,” she said. And when he didn’t respond, added, “You know I have a guest bedroom.”

He felt unaccountably disappointed. He might be the father of her child, but it seemed he was no longer welcome to share her bed. “The flight to Morocco leaves early. It made more sense to be at a hotel out there.”

“Then why are you here?” The light was behind her, and he couldn’t see her face. But her body was outlined in silhouette. Tall and willowy, dark curls falling abundantly over her shoulders. He felt the pain of their estrangement acutely.

“We have unfinished business.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You left Groix before we had the chance to talk.”

“There was nothing left to say.”

He drew a deep breath to calm himself. This meeting with her had been on his mind during all the long rail journey from Brittany. He had rehearsed so many things in his mind. What he would say, how he would say it. And now the spotlight was his, he seemed paralysed by stage fright. But perhaps it was only the outcome he feared.

“Was there some other reason for your visit?”

He hesitated. “You said, at Port Melite, that you thought Killian might have spent time in prison.”

“Ahh.” She came down the steps. “The ulterior motive. There’s always an ulterior motive with you, Enzo, isn’t there?”

He closed his eyes and exhaled slowly, cursing himself for his stupidity. He had given her the perfect opportunity to deflect his questions, to change the focus of their exchange. Now anything he might say would be construed as opportunistic and lacking sincerity. He decided to let the Killian question drop. “No. Our child is both my primary and my ulterior motive. Nothing else matters.”

“Oh, good. So I have your undivided attention, then.”

“Yes, you do.”

She turned away, sauntering along the gallery, trailing her fingers along the handrail, before turning back to face him. “Well, I suppose it’s only fair to tell you that I have made a decision.”

He felt the blood turn cold in his veins. If she had opted for termination, there was, in truth, almost nothing he could do about it. “And?”

“I’ve decided to go ahead and have the baby.”

His sense of relief was almost overwhelming. “Oh, Charlotte, I’m so glad.”

“But there’s a condition attached to it, Enzo.” She stared at him for a long time. “The child will be mine, not yours. You may be his biological father, but I really don’t believe that you are suitable to raise him. For all sorts of reasons, most of which we’ve already discussed.”

He opened his mouth to argue the point, but she cut him off. “For heaven’s sake, Enzo, for once in your life think about someone else for a change.”

Enzo bit back a retort.

“I’ll raise him on my own. And at my own expense. I’ll not take a cent from you. I don’t want you having any claim on him of any kind. He will be entirely my responsibility, and he will never know that you are his father.”

He stared back at her in disbelief. The cold lack of emotion in her words was unnerving.

“That’s the price of your son’s life, Enzo. Your choice. But if you can’t accept it, then I’ll go ahead with the termination.”

Agadir, Morocco, November 2009

The taxi bumped and rattled its way along the highway from the airport. Dust rose in the hot air all around, almost obscuring a desolate landscape of sand and scrub. After the cooling autumn temperatures in France, it seemed incongruous to be back in shirtsleeves and sandals. Enzo felt the sweat prickling across his forehead. There was no AC in the car, and the air blowing in the driver’s open window did little to cool him. It was close to thirty degrees centigrade, the African sun bright in the southern sky, and Enzo had been forced to dig out his sunglasses from their winter hibernation in the bottom of his bag.

During the nearly three-hour flight, he had stared blindly out into the endless blue, lost in a turmoil of thoughts about Charlotte and his unborn son. Thoughts that had kept him awake most of the night, listening to the flights coming and going, trying to reach some decision about a course of action. In the end, he had realised that he was powerless to do anything. At least until the child was born. Then, with the fear of termination no longer an issue, he could surely make some legal claim on the child. But he had been haunted, during all those waking hours, by the words that Charlotte had used to cut him open and lay him bare. For heaven’s sake, Enzo, for once in your life think about someone else for a change.