Anne Korkeakivi - An Unexpected Guest

A terrorist.

Thank God she hadn’t said anything about the children. Thank God she hadn’t given her name either, or told him her nationality. She’d left him nothing to trace her by; all he had on her was where she shopped for flowers. Used to shop for flowers — she wouldn’t patronize the Rue Chomel flower shop anymore. Or if she did, she would call in her orders. And Le Bon Marché? She’d waited until he’d disappeared from sight before heading into the food hall. If he was about to execute a murder, he wouldn’t have bothered to double back to see where she was going. Would he have?

She had to be rational. This man hated the French, not the British or Americans. He was no threat to her or her family. He’d had other things on his mind; maybe the address he’d shown her hadn’t even been for a doctor. Maybe he’d just told her that. Maybe that’s where he’d gone to pick up his weapon.

The police. Could she remember the address where he was going?

She closed her eyes, tried to visualize the map he’d handed her. Rue de Vaugirard…but that street was long. She couldn’t begin to remember the number.

She lowered the sound on the television and replaced the remote on top of it. She returned to the window, shut it, sat back down behind the desk, and picked up the landline.

No. She set the handset back down. She wouldn’t call Edward right now. Edward didn’t need to be interrupted by this. She stared at the phone. She wouldn’t call the police either. She wouldn’t call anyone. What would she have to say? A man looking like the man the police were seeking had asked her for directions to an address that she couldn’t remember, before any crime had been committed. Calling about this would be like bragging she’d been in the Twin Towers the day before they were atomized. It would be self-aggrandizing. Petty. She hadn’t seen the man commit any crime, he hadn’t been anything but pleasant to her, and they already had a witness to the murder, someone who’d given his description to the police and had even picked out his photo.

This was a weird anecdote she would share with Edward over a weekend, over a private dinner. As for the police, she had nothing to offer them.

She heard the soft thud of a door. She cradled the phone back up into her hand and tiptoed towards the doorway, keeping to one side, out of view, and listened. A few moments later, the pad of slipper-shod feet in the dining room.

Amélie returning from lunch. Clare shook her head at her own absurdity. If anyone had reason to be worried, the eyewitness should be. Returning to the desk, she set the phone firmly back down again. She picked up her pen. Three place cards were still waiting to be finished. It was a crazy coincidence, the type that happened only in novels, but that was all. She didn’t need to get involved. She wasn’t involved.

Amélie knocked on the half-open door before stepping into the study. “I fineesh the dining room, Madame?”

She smiled and nodded, setting down the fountain pen, as though she’d been in the middle of writing. “Yes, Amélie, please. You can get out the vases also. We will need four large ones for side tables and two small ones for the dinner table. The flowers will arrive at four.” She checked her watch again, out of habit. “The flowers will be delivered in about two hours.”

“Yes, Madame.” Amélie dipped her chin. “All is good?”

“Yes, everything is good.”

“Yes, Madame.” Amélie shut the door behind her, making a soft clicking sound.

In movies, jail cells clanked. They didn’t click.

Clare looked again at the TV screen; the regular programming was back on.

There was nothing on the screen, no sign of there having been a news flash, or of political turmoil. On 9/11 four years ago, and last summer on 7/7, the coverage had been inescapable — the hunted, haunted faces of people wandering Wall Street or emerging from the London Underground by Russell Square. But, here, on the screen, she was looking at three men and one woman, all dressed in either gray or black, as they sat around a table discussing something, a book one of them had recently published, as though nothing beyond the norm had happened to anyone.

Of course, it was just one individual, not a mass slaughter. Still, it had been a parliamentarian. Maybe she’d imagined the whole thing, or at least, maybe, in the same way as she kept thinking she saw Niall, dead these two decades, she hadn’t really brushed shoulders this morning with a political assassin. Maybe their contact was equally illusory. Maybe she was cracking up already, even without having moved to Dublin.

The map.

She reached into her sweater pocket and pulled out the piece of paper the Turk had thrust at her. There were the dim street names, faded from being photocopied. There, at top, was the address of the health clinic. There was the phone number.

A part of her wanted to throw it out right then and there, and in doing so wash her hands of the whole encounter. The dinner, Jamie. Dublin. She couldn’t cope with a murder. But something stopped her, a sense of justice bigger than herself. She folded the paper back up, doubling the sheet once and then twice and then a third time, and returned it to her pocket.

She got up and shut off the TV, came back to sit down behind the desk.

Enough.

She looked at her watch. 2:25 p.m. Five more hours.

She took out her to-do list and checked off everything she’d accomplished. She read the newly shortened list through and replaced it in the pocket that did not have the map in it. She extracted a sheet of paper from the desk drawer, drew a large rectangle and, on top, wrote, “Seating for Dinner.” At one end, she wrote Edward’s name. At the other, she wrote her own.

She set her pen back down. She picked up the phone and dialed. Three rings, and he answered.

“Edward?”

“Hold on, just one moment, I just need to—” There was the sound of shuffling papers, the scratching of a pen. “Yes, what is it?”

“Edward…” She tapped the paper on the desk before her. He sounded so preoccupied. This day meant everything to him. This appointment.

She looked around the room. She smoothed her pants legs. “I meant to ask. The green-and-white silk?”

“For dinner?”

“You know, with the wraparound waist. The background is green, the white is flowers.”

“Not green. Just wear your emerald.”

The emerald, of course. She would have to clean it. “That beige suit, then?”

“Clare, darling. I’m awfully busy. Did Mathilde make a fuss about the strawberries?”

How did he know she’d dipped into the strawberries? “I don’t think she’s back yet.”

“Cover for me, will you? We don’t need the wrath of Mathilde tonight. Shouldn’t she be back from lunch by now?”

“You stole from her strawberries?” Clare tugged on a loose strand of hair. She touched her pocket. “Edward, you know what you were telling me? You know that man?”

“A strawberry man?”

“At Versailles.”

There was a silence, then a sigh. “Oh, yes. Versailles.”

“They think they know who did it.”

“Yes, I heard. Wait, hold on a sec—”

She could hear the sound of his secretary’s clipped tones in the background. “Edward,” she said into the receiver, “are you still there?”

“Yes.”

“The man. At Versailles.”

“Yes. Bruno Molyneux. No, no, that’s all right,” he finished by saying, but not to her. She again heard the distant voice of his secretary.

She stared at her hands. A wisp of blond hair was caught under a nail. She disengaged the strand and let it flutter from her fingers into the wastepaper basket. Once she told someone about her encounter, that strange episode would become reality. Until then, their meeting was a truth only to her and her Turk. If one of them denied they had ever crossed paths, it might as well have never happened.