Confessions: The Paris Mysteries (2 page)

I was flushed and even trembling
as James and I crossed the worn Persian carpets in the hotel’s charming, velvet-lined lobby and stepped into a metal cage of an elevator. James slid the gate closed.

When he looked at me, I was sure he knew what I was feeling. We were in uncharted territory, James and I. Maybe he was scared, too.

All my life, my demanding parents had trained me to suppress all emotions, believing they were unnecessary distractions. But to be robbed of this intensity would have robbed me of my humanity. I was
made
to feel this way, to love James and to be loved by him.

He put an arm around me and pressed the button for
3eme étage
. The creaky lift rose and stopped on the third floor with a jolt. As we walked down the hallway toward his room, James whispered, “My father can’t find us now, Tandy.”

We stopped at a door near the end of the hall. James pushed the key into the lock. He wiggled it. It rattled and then, finally, the door opened. I stepped into a room that was shabby but clean, smelling faintly of cigarettes.

There was a narrow bed against the wall to my right, a chair with claw feet beside it, and a tall carved armoire across from the bed that called up images of an earlier time. The one small window looked out onto Boulevard Voltaire, and enough moonlight and streetlight came through it to see by.

James hung his jacket on a hook behind the door and turned to face me. I could hardly look at him. My skin was hot, and my heart was skipping, thudding, banging against my rib cage, acting like a child on a sugar high.

I knew what James would see on my face when he looked at me: that I was
his
, only for
him
. He held my face with both hands and kissed me. It was real and tender and full of desire. He loved me. He wanted me. And I wanted him. I had never done this with anyone before, but I wasn’t afraid. It felt completely right.

Fierce heat flashed through my body. He unbuttoned his shirt, and it whispered to the floor. Then he unbuttoned mine.

I’m not the kind of girl to tell others what was deeply, personally
ours
. But I can say this.

When I woke up in his bed many hours later and reached for him, I was alone.

James was gone.

I doubted my senses. Was I dreaming? I screamed out for him inside the tiny room, and then I looked in the bathroom down the hall. Back in the room, I turned on my phone and waited for it to ring. And I imagined terrible things: that James had been abducted while we slept. That he had been caged. That he was being tortured.

Then I saw the note that must have slipped from the bed and was lying on the floor. The small square of paper shook in my hand as I turned on the light. This was James’s handwriting, for sure.

Dearest Tandy,
he wrote,
I’ve been lying awake for hours watching you sleep. You are my true angel, and because I love you so much, I have to protect you. My family situation is worse than I’ve told you, worse than you can imagine, and I can’t give my father any more reasons to hurt you or your family.

I know this note won’t be enough for you. I know you will be furious with me. But please believe this, there is no other way.

Something I read yesterday:
L’amour fait les plus grandes douceurs et les plus sensibles infortunes de la vie.
Love creates the sweetest pleasures and the worst misfortunes in life.

Don’t ever doubt that I love you. And always will.

James

Alone, I left the Grand Hôtel Voltaire
feeling as though I’d been slammed across the back of my head with a shovel, then hurled headfirst into a Dumpster.

I didn’t get it. Any of it. And I was
seething
.

Why hadn’t James woken me up to talk? Why didn’t he trust me with what he knew and felt? Was there any truth in that note? Had he ever loved me? How could he leave me alone to figure out what had happened to us on what had been the best and worst day of my life?

Yesterday, I had thought no one could crush me.

I was wrong.

As I walked away from the hotel, I couldn’t help but remember how happy I was on this same street last night
with James… whoever he was, whoever I had thought he was. I hurt so much that I cried like a little kid as I navigated the streets of Paris at dawn. My family had checked out of the Hotel George V yesterday and moved into the house that had once belonged to my late grandmother, which I found with little effort.

Once “home,” I went upstairs to the second-floor bathroom. I filled the bathtub and sat in the warm water for about a half hour without even moving. After that, I changed into clothes that hadn’t been touched, fondled, or unbuttoned by James Rampling. I went downstairs and poured a cup of coffee, plugged in my phone to charge, and then huddled in a big leather sofa in the parlor.

Later, I heard the sounds of my family moving around the huge house, but I didn’t call out. I sat on that sofa as still and as unblinking as a corpse until my little brother, Hugo, ran past with his arms outspread.

He was giving himself landing instructions—“Control tower to Hugo One, runway six is cleared for you now”—and making truly annoying engine noises. He saw me in the parlor, made a U-turn, and flung himself across my lap.

“Where were you last night?” he asked me.

“You think I have to tell
you
?”

“Jacob thought you were about to blow off the most important meeting ever. He’s pretty mad.”

“I was right here,” I said, shoving Hugo onto the floor.

“That’s a lie,” he said. “Oh, I took the bedroom facing the street. Me and Matty. There’s a smart TV in that room, and I can get like ninety thousand stations and post my blog.”

Matty was our twenty-four-year-old big brother, Matthew Angel, cornerback for the New York Giants. Fierce, strong, as handsome as a movie star, and most of all, Hugo’s hero.

At that moment, Matthew was looking out the windows into the front garden and speaking on his phone in a very animated way. In the kitchen to my right, my twin brother, Harry, was reading the back of a cracker box.

He said to me, “You’re in big trouble, you know?”

Just then, our uncle Jacob stalked into the room and stood until we gave him our attention.

Shortly after our parents’ sudden and gruesome deaths, just weeks before our home and all our possessions were sold to settle their debts and we were
this close
to becoming
homeless
, Jacob Perlman had appeared.

Jacob was an Israeli ex-commando and our father’s long-lost oldest brother. And now he was our guardian. He was the one who had brought us to Paris to live in Gram Hilda’s house and had told us about the inheritance she intended for us.

He stood in the center of this fantastic, modern-style room until our eyes were fixed on his. Then he said, “Tandy, I’ve told you.
Never
turn off your phone.”

“Uncle Jake, believe me, I had a good reason.”

“There’s no exception to ‘never.’ We’ll discuss it later.”

Jacob took his wallet out of the back pocket of his khakis.

“Harry, please go out and bring back lunch for all of us. Hurry. The bankers and lawyers will be here shortly—and, kids, please trust me when I tell you to bring your A-game.

“Especially you, Tandoori. Snap out of it—whatever ‘it’ is. Good or bad, the results of this meeting will determine how comfortably you live the rest of your lives.”

At half past one, nine of
the seats around the mirror-polished steel table in Gram Hilda’s dramatic, black-lacquered dining room were taken. We kids lined up along one side, Jacob took his seat at the head, and four gray-suited, middle-aged lawyers and bankers sat stiffly across from us.

The suits were all humorless, well pressed, and rather full of themselves. And the one who looked least likely to eat Popsicles in his underwear or sing and walk on his hands at the same time was the senior man, Monsieur François Delavergne.

Monsieur Delavergne was fat and bald, with hair shooting out of his cuffs and sprouting like weeds on his
knuckles. “Pleasure to meet you,” he said grimly, shaking hands with each of us.

“Don’t be so sure,” Hugo said.

Matty grabbed our bad boy by the shoulder. “That was rude, Hugo. Apologize.”

“Just being honest,” Hugo said. “Matty, are you afraid of this dude?”

Matty shook his head and said, “Sorry, Monsieur Delavergne. Hugo comes uncensored.”

“Real, you mean,” Hugo said. “Straight shooter, you mean.”

He then bet our visitors that he could lift any of them over his head, but got no takers. Once the nonsense stopped and the presentations were under way, I turned my scattered thoughts to my beautiful, brilliant, and somewhat capricious late grandmother, Hilda Angel.

Although she died before any of us were born, we’d heard stories about her wild summer on a kibbutz when she was seventeen, her intrepid trips abroad on tramp steamers, and her high-flying life in New York and Paris.

But what we first learned about her came in the form of a scandalous handwritten codicil to her last will and testament that read, “I am leaving Malcolm and Maud $100, because I feel that is all that they deserve.”

Our father had framed and hung that Big Chop—what our family not-so-affectionately calls our parents’ punishments—in the stairwell near the master bedroom, where we all saw it several times a day.

Why had Gram Hilda disowned Malcolm? Maud, our very own tiger mom, had said that Hilda hadn’t approved of the marriage. That must have meant Hilda hadn’t approved of
her
. Maybe that was true. But I often wondered what else we hadn’t been told.

I tuned back in to the men in gray as they itemized Gram Hilda’s holdings, projected receipts, calculated interest rates, and translated international rates of exchange.

I followed the back-and-forth up to a point. I asked questions. I made notes, but honestly, the numbers were dense and dizzying, and although I’m a bit of a math whiz, this was a deluge of black ink and fine print with no apparent bottom line. Plus, the millions of questions and doubts about James kept slipping into my thoughts like evil weeds. I tried, but I couldn’t read a single face across the table.

Were we bankrupt or not? Why were there so many papers for us to sign? Finally, I’d had enough.

“Excuse me, Monsieur Delavergne,” I said. “Will you summarize, please? Uncle Jacob will explain the details to us later.”

“Of course, Mademoiselle Angel,” Delavergne sniffed. “Whatever you say. Whatever you want or need.”

He took out a pen and a notepad from his briefcase. He said, “The grandchildren’s trusts are equal. You four will each inherit”—scratching of pen on paper—“this amount.”

He held up the pad so we could all see.

We four kids sucked up all the air on our side of the table. I had hoped there would be enough money in Gram Hilda’s bank account to pay for our food and housing and maybe college tuition for me, Harry, and Hugo.

My most extreme wish hadn’t even been close.

Delavergne went on, “But your grandmother was a careful woman. You won’t get this money all at once. In fact, your inheritance will be divided into monthly payments and distributed to each of you over the next, uhh, forty-two years. Your uncle will be your executor until you each reach your majority.”

“Wait,” I said. “You’re saying I’ll get a monthly allowance until I’m fifty-eight years old?”

“Exactly,” said Gram Hilda’s most trusted senior attorney,
“unless you disgrace the family name.”
He tapped the stack of papers the four of us had to sign.

“The degree of ‘disgrace’ will be determined by the five of us: Messieurs Portsmith, Simone, and Bourgogne; your uncle Jacob; and me, of course.”

Really? I would be responsible to four strangers and Jacob for the next forty-two
years
?

By the way, our family was not exactly famous for following rules. So what, exactly, was their definition of
disgrace
?

“Your inheritance represents both a gift and a challenge,” Delavergne continued, brightening for the first time in three hours. “That was your grandmother’s guiding principle, and we expect it will become yours as well.”

Once again, thoughts of James seeped into my unwilling mind. What we had was a gift and a challenge from the very beginning. And I was never one to back down from a challenge.