Anne Korkeakivi - An Unexpected Guest

“I shall drive you,” the detective said.

“No, that’s all right, thank you. Perhaps you could call me a taxi.”

He and the commandant nodded. There would be enough excitement surrounding her in the upcoming days without her now emerging from an unmarked car in the wee hours of the morning in front of the Residence. The concierges would have something to gossip about after all.

“Merci, Madame Moorhouse,” the commandant said, extending a hand to be shaken.

“Merci, Monsieur le Commandant,” she replied, accepting his hand.

The detective led her out. They trod across the cobblestones, the weakening moon still bright enough to show their way towards the entrance. He dragged open the heavy metal doors to the street with a creak and followed her out onto the sidewalk to wait for the taxi.

“What will happen to him now?” she asked.

“The prisoner?” he said.

She nodded.

He shrugged. “We will hold him until we speak with this doctor. You understand this is not that we do not believe you, Madame. It is how things are done. If the doctor can also identify him and we determine that this is entirely a case of mistaken identity, as he has no carte de séjour and does have a significant history, we will turn him over to the Turkish government. France will have no more interest in him. Maybe les Turcs will, maybe not. That’s a question for them. It will have nothing to do with this case and nothing more to do with la France. ”

She nodded again. The Turk would be deported. His own government would scour his life for signs of unsavory connections and activity. Probably he hasn’t been active in this organization for years, maybe decades. But they would try to find something. Meanwhile, he would be photographed and interviewed, would possibly bring forth a complaint against the French police for their treatment. If the Turkish government did manage to find something they could hold against him, he’d go to prison there. If they found nothing against him, or maybe even if they did, outrage would be stirred up at the French government’s rash response to the crisis, their speed to mistake one Turk for another. Either way, a photo of her, dug up from some cocktail party or charity event or official gathering or another, would be produced beside his. Guilt by association, even with the nonguilty — the Internet was especially brilliant for innuendo.

“Excuse me,” she said to the officer.

She had one last thing to do before the sun rose.

She turned from him to press the familiar button on her phone.

“Edward,” she said when his sleepy voice answered. “I’m outside the Ministry of the Interior.”

She could feel his immediate transition to wakefulness. She’d witnessed his ability to do this before, from the depths of her own milky haze, in the middle of the night when he’d received sudden word of some crisis.

Now she was the tinny bearer of bad news on the other side of the receiver.

“You’re where? Are you all right?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “I am all right. I am fine. Wait.”

She cupped her hand over the speaker and turned back to the detective. “I am free to come and go from France?” she said. “You won’t need me on hand to bear further witness?”

“You plan to leave when?”

She considered. “This morning. Midmorning. I can be back by evening, or tomorrow.”

“Of course, Madame,” he said, his eyes with their multiple folds of tired skin blinking slowly at her. “We will need you only if we cannot find this doctor.”

She nodded and turned back to her phone again. “Yes, I’m fine. I will explain everything. But first I want to tell you: I’m going to go back to Barrow with Jamie as soon as he wakes up. To settle with the headmaster. And make plans for next year.”

“Clare—”

“I’ll try to set things up so he can finish out the school year without additional trouble. Maybe I’ll have to stay in London myself. But we can’t leave Jamie behind, alone, without support. Even if I hadn’t just spoken up about the assassination. This isn’t mollycoddling — trust me, Edward, I know something about this. He needs help. He needs us around him.”

Moonlight played on the paving stones, splashed across the metal gates, the car, her feet, her hands. The sun would be rising soon. She could imagine Edward sitting up on their bed, the room lit only by his phone’s screen. He would sit there like that for an hour if necessary, waiting for her to be ready to explain. He had been doing this already, after all, for the twenty years they’d been together.

“I’ve been in to give a statement to the French police,” she said. “I saw the man they picked up for murdering the parliamentarian today. I was with him at the time of the shooting. Just on the street; we crossed paths. I’ve borne witness to his innocence.”

“You were with him at the time of the shooting?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m sure of it. I happened to check my watch. I have the flower-shop receipt. I didn’t tell you right away because of the dinner.”

She could hear Edward breathe on the other end of the phone line. He was seeing it all in his head, all she’d seen herself: the photos of her with the captions, the phone calls both from the media and the embassy, the hate mail and threats that would arrive from people convinced she was part of a conspiracy against France, a defender of terrorists, of terrorism. He was seeing the permanent under-secretary considering whether or not her actions, and subsequent infamy, would make them unsuitable for the ambassador’s post in Dublin, or anywhere.

“Well, then,” Edward said, “you did a very good thing. You can’t let an innocent man go to prison.”

She reentered the courtyard of the Residence as the first hint of dawn lightened the facade of the building. She didn’t bother to press the hated elevator button but headed directly for the stairs. She opened the front door to the Residence, stopped to view the marine landscape by Turner, and stowed her purse inside the Regency console, mindful to settle her keys within the inlaid box from Croatia. She took a moment to breathe in the scent of the lilies and bells of Ireland.

She withdrew her feet from her shoes, leaving them by the door, and reached out to switch off the light. But she caught sight of her right hand and stopped. It was unadorned now, no emerald ring, nothing but the whorls of time to decorate it. But it was still graceful and tapering, her nails still smooth and rose-hued. Was that a new freckle by the wrist? She rubbed it gingerly. The spot did not budge.

She turned around to face the Turner. The painting was an early work, a minor watercolor, which Edward had bought from a great-aunt’s estate on the occasion of his and Clare’s first wedding anniversary, because Clare said she found it so beautiful. A funnel of yellow broke open over a mystery of pinks, then, below it, grays and violets and blues. White crests skipped across the bottom, where waves broke against a shore. Dawn.

These were the colors she had seen the morning that she and Niall had stood side by side along the Atlantic seaboard, the sand running over their toes and through Niall’s fingers, and dreamt that somehow they might have met in a different way or that somehow they might end up in some other way than they were destined. Nothing would stop this rising sun’s radiance, so delicate but determined. What joy the painting gave her every day as she entered and left the Residence, whatever residence she and Edward might be calling home. A quick feeling in her heart, a recollection of anticipation. And yet she never stopped, like she was right now, to really look at it. She traced the paint with a finger, allowing herself to touch its surface. She examined how strokes of white infused the yellow, giving it dimension. The blues and grays melted into each other, a smoky haze under the dazzle of the yellow.