Anne Korkeakivi - An Unexpected Guest

She shook her head.

“I would have come back, you know. I would have.”

“Niall—”

“There’s a church next to the Centre Pompidou.”

He paused. When she didn’t say anything further, he squeezed her hand and stepped back. “Tomorrow I’m gone. That’s how you want it, you’ll ne’er lay eyes on me again.”

He walked away, disappearing amidst the sharp-edged trees.

She heard the lock-release click of the Residence’s downstairs foyer and leaned her weight against the heavy oak front door. Before stepping in, she took one last look around the courtyard. The day was fading. The blue of the sky was thinning. Niall was somewhere out there.

“Bonjour, Madame.” The door swung open behind her to reveal the concierge’s husband.

She caught the jamb to keep from tumbling. “Bonjour, Monsieur.” She regained her balance as he held the door open for her and, stepping inside, nodded. “Merci.”

He cradled a lightbulb in one hand. “Il fait très beau aujourd’hui.”

“Oui, il fait beau.”

“Le Ministre va bien?”

“Oui, merci.”

“Et les enfants?”

“Oui, merci.”

“Ah, bien. Alors, tout va bien.” He climbed up onto his step stool under the entryway light fixture.

She pressed the elevator button. When she didn’t hear the cage begin its noisy descent, she pressed the button again. She could sense the concierge’s husband look up at the sound. In the Residence, there was still the same dinner to put on, still the same problem with Jamie. But a different woman would be handling them. She could even go to Dublin now. A new, limitless world expanded before her.

Niall hadn’t betrayed her. And together they hadn’t done anything.

“Will you help?” he’d said, and unzipped a corner of the duffel.

The euphoria she’d felt evened out. Yes, she could go to Dublin now with impunity. Yes, she hadn’t provided money that was then used to buy guns or explosives. But she had still agreed to bring it over. The intention had been there. Plus, she’d rented that camper. She’d made that trip to the Eastern Shore. Niall, at least, had considered himself a soldier. And she? Just a pliable schoolgirl.

Her phone hummed to signal a text message. She extracted it from her pocket.

Where are you??? E

Edward using multiple question marks? She checked her watch: 6:10 p.m. He would be clearing off his desk, readying to head over to the cocktail reception being held at the embassy before the P.U.S.’s more intimate dinner.

Home, she typed back.

But her phone showed three missed calls. She quickly switched to the voice mail, skipping over Edward’s to get to the other two.

Jamie had called but had left no message.

She rapid-dialed his number.

His voice-mail message pounded her ear: “‘Don’t want to be an American idiot….’ This is James. Leave a message. Or don’t. Like I care.”

She clicked off. If she didn’t find him at home now, she was going to call the house of every single friend he had in Paris until she tracked him down. Enough was enough.

She could hear the elevator clanking its way down, but it still had not descended to the foyer. She drew her sweater close. The air was getting crisper as day walked into evening, in the treacherous way a warm spring day had; a cool shock that creeps up and, before noticed, has already invaded the body. Like aging: the world seemed so warm, and then suddenly was chill.

The past twenty-five years felt like a dream. “Did you hear Niall’s disappeared?” her cousin Kevin had said, stopping by her room in Cambridge a couple months after she’d returned from Dublin. “Dad thinks he went home and picked right back up with what he’d been doing. You know. With them. And, sure enough, something went wrong.” She’d gone straight to the library after he’d left and checked every newspaper Harvard subscribed to, hoping in vain to find some additional information. Failing there, she’d been forced to get it out of her aunt and uncle. “Thank you again for last summer,” she’d said, making a special trip to see them, a Sunday before Christmas. “We all had such a nice time here. Do you think Niall will be coming back next summer?” And her aunt had buried her face in her hands, and her uncle had shaken his head and explained why that was never going to happen: Niall’s people had wound in a sheet what was left of his corpse after the fish and tides had got to it, and closed it up in a coffin. And so, over the years, she’d seen his face in the crowds and had thought she was seeing the memory of what she herself had been. But she had seen him. Just this morning, even, at Le Bon Marché, peering at her over the canned goods from Britain and the cheese from Ireland. Without doubt, also many other times. He’d been following her. She was not crazy. She mixed numbers up but not faces.

The Turk. He, too, was still out there.

The elevator clunked to a stop in front of her. She stepped in, rattled the door to the cage shut, pressed the button for their floor.

She hoped there really had been a doctor and that he would come forward. Punto. She wouldn’t give another thought to the Turk today.

But she couldn’t ignore Niall. He would be waiting for her.

The elevator began slowly to rise. Upstairs were Amélie, Amélie’s cousin, Mathilde, this evening’s waiter. Maybe, if she was lucky, Jamie. They would all be expecting something from her. There was the rest of everything else waiting for her as well, the rituals — birthday celebrations, anniversaries, weddings, the baptism of grandchildren — and the attendant smaller routines, like straightening Edward’s ties in the morning. All the things that kept daily life in order and outlined her existence like the penciled edges of a still life, giving constant definition to what otherwise would seem like an endless tunnel, would feel like the same vacuum that had sucked her into the vortex of the Dublin airport two decades earlier and now was pulling her at every moment one minute closer to life’s inevitable conclusion. I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. How wise she and her classmates had felt back in college when they’d studied T. S. Eliot. They’d torn J. Alfred Prufrock to pieces until they’d unveiled every nuance — without having understood a thing. “Can you read aloud and then translate Eliot’s epigraph from Dante’s Inferno for us?” the professor had asked her, she that class’s resident Romance language major, and she’d picked through Dante’s Italian like it was something she could defeat: “Ma perchiocce giammi de questo fondo/Non torno vivo alcun, s’I’odo il vero/Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.”

And then she’d repeated, in English, “But since never from this abyss has anyone returned alive, I’ll answer you without fearing infamy.”

She would walk through the front door of the Residence as she had a thousand times before. A marine landscape by Turner that greeted her every time she entered the apartment, hanging over the dark rosewood Regency console in which she would store her purse. The elegant silver bowl they’d received as a wedding gift from Edward’s scull mate at Oxford, now a powerful barrister in London, and which — like the Turner — they carried from apartment to apartment, where she would place her keys, then remove them, knowing Edward would worry they would scratch the silver. The small inlaid box acquired during a holiday in Croatia, hidden from sight within the console, where she would deposit her keys instead.