Daughters of Babylon (4 page)

Tita swung her arms and continued to walk.
Slap, slap, slap, slap…

Rue des Martyrs de le Siège
Toulouse, France
LATE SPRING, PRESENT DAY

Blinking neon tubes of blue and white and amber flashed through drizzle, every drop of rain reflecting headlights of a Friday night traffic crawl. Silvina Kestral stood at the window of her second-storey flat, filling in a spreadsheet on her BlackBerry.

Y172, Y266, B172, O172, O272, V172…

Yellow, Blue, Orange, Violet…

The final row of data read:
top tier, max teaching, 432 hours, new rate, fully booked,
ending with a sum in Canadian dollars in high six figures. Silvie’s thumb hovered over the currency icon, struggling over which would give the report its brightest sheen. She knew Blythe Pendaris was waiting. The CEO and founder of Tri-Partite Academy would be sitting at her 300-year-old mahogany roll-top desk, a gift from the king of Sweden, while Skyping with a shareholder. Or she might be crossing Bay Street, checking messages on her handheld, hoping for good news from Toulouse. It was only 5:00 p.m. in Toronto. Silvie’s boss had hours of workday ahead of her.

Oh, what the heck—euros, dollars, they were still good numbers!
Silvie selected Canadian dollars, hit save, send, looked up from her BlackBerry, and cried out, “Jesus!” She spun around and pressed herself against the wall.

Several feet away, Alphonse Térac continued to arrange documents in cascading rows on the coffee table. “Were you expecting Him?”

She slapped a hand across her forehead. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to be profane.”

Old-fashioned radiator coils gurgled and hissed to the left of her, while bass notes from a Georges Moustaki remix thumped through the soles of her four-inch Monolo Blahniks. Erotic whiffs of Gauloises made her wish she were still a smoker.

“Church and sex,” Alphonse said, “eternal fallbacks for the disarticulated. Now, what genius said that?”

“You did.” Silvie peered around the window frame. “It’s been a long week. I’m not always disarticulated… I think you made up that word.” The neon reflection was still there, still blinking—on, off, on, off—though what she’d seen emerging from the reflection was not. She glanced at the BlackBerry’s idle screen. “I hope the report went through.”

“Why shouldn’t it?”

“I haven’t heard from Blythe yet.”

“It’s only been ninety seconds.”

“But Full Spectrum is her baby. First venture into Europe, it’s a big deal.”

Her assistant peered over half-spectacles. “FST is your program, Silvie, you developed it. Tri-Partite is merely your backer, and it’s been global for years. Perhaps you are nervous about tomorrow, about
Reine du Ciel
.”

At sixty-four, Alphonse was old enough to be Silvie’s father. The Franco-Algerian was a former bank president, retired advisor to the International Monetary Fund, and to the World Economic Forum. There were still moments when it astonished Silvie that he was now the Executive Coordinator of Full Spectrum Training—and a friend.

“Maybe I’m a little nervous—okay, a lot.” She leaned over to coax off the heels she’d been wearing fourteen hours straight. Her arches buckled and spasmed. Silently, she mouthed,
Ow, ow, ow!
“I’d been looking forward to seeing Viv since the day I arrived. We were going to visit all the castles in Languedoc, do cycling tours and wine tastings… and now she’s gone. I was eighty miles away and couldn’t even go to the funeral.” Alphonse’s eyebrow rose, and she added quickly, “That’s not what I mean, sorry. You told me to go—but I just couldn’t.”

“Have the police closed their files yet on the investigation?”

“They have. It’s been ruled accidental. Blythe thinks it’s bull. People don’t fall down steps and accidentally die, she says, in the same way you don’t walk into doors and get a black eye. I don’t know what to think.”

Alphonse brushed nonexistent crumbs off the documents, unscrewed a Cross black resin fountain pen, and gently set it down. “What do you know about her fiancé?”

“Dr. Shirazi? I’ve only spoken to him a few times, seems very nice. They’d known each other for years. He’s the one who phoned me when they found her body.”

“This Dr. Shirazi, will he be meeting your train in Foix?”

“No, he’ll be at the house. There’s a shuttle van from the winery that comes to the station. I’ll be dropped off at Viv’s door.”

Alphonse placed both hands on his knees and rose with a popping sound from the stiffly upholstered faux velvet love seat. Silvie checked her BlackBerry again.

“Now, let us see what lurks in the shadows of Toulouse,” he said, and crossed the room to the window.

“It’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing. Whatever you saw made you curse, spin up against the wall, and now you look as though you wish to dive into your smartphone. Technology will not save you, I can tell you that right now.”

“Okay. I thought I saw a man bursting out of the bidet. He looked right up at me as if… I don’t know, as if he’d found me.”

“Bursting out of what?”

“Martini glass, is what I meant to say. Have you ever noticed,” she said, massaging her numb toes, “how Elke Füme looks like she’s sprawled in a… never mind.” She laughed. “I’ve been in this country eight months. I ought to be accustomed to French plumbing by now.”

Alphonse wiped a circle of condensation from the window with the elbow of his charcoal tweed jacket. “
Elle qui fume
, she who smokes. It is a clever wordplay, typical of the Languedoce. Myself, I prefer the Imuhagh humour of my homeland, it’s less riddlesome, more…” He punched a fist twice into his open palm and said something that might have been Berber. “So this man, you say he found you. How intriguing.”

“He probably looked up to see if it was still raining.”

They looked out the window together. Elke Füme was the name of the pub downstairs where undergrad students from the University of Toulouse drank, debated politics, and flirted across rickety wooden tables, making her feel old at thirty-seven, when she popped in sometimes for late-night nachos. But it was Elke’s strobing reflection in the print shop across the street that Silvina had grown accustomed to: a fantasy in neon, lolling naked in a martini glass, her shapely legs dangling, one arm thrust boldly upward. The cigarette holder she once brandished had broken off, giving the impression with what remained that Elke was giving the world the finger.

Beneath the halo of a streetlamp, a young couple were making out in a sinuous tangle of leather and black denim. Behind them, under the print shop awning, a man in a light-coloured fedora was scrolling his mobile with a large cardboard box propped on one leg, one glove pulled off. He put the phone to his ear, jammed the glove underneath the twine that held the parcel together, and tested its weight like a suitcase. He wore a dark jacket with the fur collar turned up and moved slowly along the sidewalk, looking around in the drizzle as if taking in every detail. He did not look up at the window above Elke Füme again.

“The guy who’s walking away, that’s him,” Silvie said. “I’ve never noticed that Elke’s reflection is centered on the print shop door. No one ever comes out after hours, so when he opened it…”

“His only exit was through her plumbing,” Alphonse said in perfect deadpan.

“Exactly.” She switched off her BlackBerry and headed toward the documents arranged on the coffee table. She sat in a faux velvet chair that let off a slightly higher popping sound than the matching loveseat. “Crikey, I will not miss this furniture. So what do we have here? Anything I should read on the train?”

“On the train, you should read nothing. You should eat beignets with fig jam and dream of unicorns.” He pointed to the first stack. “These are contracts for next term, followed by testimonials—initials only on the latter, please. Here we have expressions of interest for FST from Stockholm, Berne, Cologne, and Salamanca. It is as I told you, Silvie. Full Spectrum is awakening EU’s hopeful spirit.”

“That is nice to hear.”

“And lastly, the sublet papers in French legalese. I have reviewed them, they are in order. If you would be so kind as to sign at the Xs,
s’il vous plaît
.”

While Silvina scanned and signed, Alphonse retreated to the kitchenette. She picked up an email from the expressions of interest pile.

Esteemed members of Tri-Partite Academy: Attention has come to me by way of the French ambassador of a program you have initiated with great success called Full Spectrum Training. I am the owner of a small clock manufacturing firm and survivor of a terrorist bombing…

The second letter came from an IT specialist in Spain who’d been downsized with a severance large enough to seed a new business.
I look at my young children and do not wish to leave them a world that shames me. Your organization suggests to me there are better ways of doing business…

They’d been receiving messages like this for weeks. Silvie had even shared a few with Vivian, who’d been her first mentor. She was fighting the urge to check for new texts when Alphonse appeared with a tray bearing one snifter of cognac and a small unwrapped parcel.

“This should help you relax.” He slid the documents aside and set the tray in their place.

“Thank you. Aren’t you having any?”

“It’s airplane Courvoisier, I only had the one bottle in my pocket.” He handed her the parcel. “Claire-Elise insisted I should be present while you open this.” The parcel was wrapped in white, crochet-trimmed cotton that had been gathered at the center, so that the needlework created a frothy, ivory-coloured posy. “She sews the fabric giftwrap herself.”

“This is beautiful. I have clients in Toronto who would love this.”

“My bride prefers to keep her talents quiet, but I shall tell her what you said.”

Alphonse’s voice swelled with emotion whenever he spoke of “his bride”. He kept a photo on his desk of their wedding day some forty years ago and a collage on his wall of their travels; but there were no recent photos, for Claire-Elise suffered from acute agoraphobia and had not left her bedroom in the suburbs of Toulouse for over a decade. Alphonse, who’d survived two major heart attacks and a quadruple by-pass brought about by work stress, negotiated an early retirement package and sold their mansion in Switzerland weeks before the 2007 economic collapse. He was Silvina’s first graduate in Full Spectrum Training, and her first hire.

Inside the box was a 5x7 photo in a plain wooden frame. Two rows of young people hammed for the camera on a sloped field with a backdrop of stone ruins and bushel baskets of fruit in front of them. Bell-bottom jeans, Indian cotton skirts, and long hair placed the shot at early to mid-seventies.

“Who are these people?” Silvina asked.

“Can you distinguish no familiar faces?”

There were three men, four women, and sitting in the front row, a boy about six or seven. A woman with a round face and beaming apple cheeks had her arm around the boy. “Is this Claire-Elise?”

“It is, indeed.”

“She’s gorgeous.” Silvie peered more closely at the dark-haired child with hands folded in his lap. The Téracs, she knew, had four grown children. “One of your sons?”

“No, I did not know her then. She was scarcely twenty. He may have been one of the local boys, I did not think to inquire.”

Silvie felt a tightening of her ribcage. “This is
Reine du Ciel
?”

Alphonse smiled. “Where you will be in twelve hours.”

“Oh, my gosh.”

She had been hearing about
Reine du Ciel
for years, long before imagining that she would one day see it for herself. The Queen of Heaven, a place where apricots grew in unimaginable abundance, where walnut trees dropped nutmeats the size of baseballs, and opium poppies—God’s blood to the locals—erupted from the stony ground like divine, open wounds. According to the only two people she’d known who experienced
Reine du Ciel
, it was a place without boundaries, an amorphous patch of land steeped in violence and strange passions. “Blythe and I called ourselves Daughters of Babylon,” Viv said, “because of the abundance.”

“What about the guys?” Silvina asked. “Were they the Sons?”

“No. The guys never bothered with a name, but we were thick, closer than family.” She shook her head. “I’ve never known anything like it since.”

Vivian Lansdowne left Canada before Silvina knew enough to ask, what did you mean by thick? What kind of strange passions? When she asked Blythe a couple years later to explain where Queen of Heaven was, she was told the far edges of Aquitaine but further south, before you reach Navarre—“Not there, a little further north,” Blythe said, poring over an atlas. “…hmm, no, that doesn’t look right either”—as if the locale were meta-geographic, some mythic core of sovereignty crumpled in the high valleys between France and Spain. Silvina asked how large was the priory, and Blythe said its lands stretched across the Pyrenees to the meanders of St. James, over tribunals, past witchhunts through dynasties of generations of crumbling Cerabornes. Whatever all of that meant. Trouble was, Blythe only waxed freely on the topic midway through a second—sometimes third—bottle of Château Latour, and if she made it to Spanish coffee, exaggeration would give way to twitches and small choking sounds as if a fishbone had lodged in her throat.

Sober, Blythe Pendaris, President and CEO of Tri-partite Academy, 128th of
Fortune 500
’s most influential women, hardly mentioned Queen of Heaven and only then as “Q of H”—or as Silvie heard it for the first few years, “Cue Vaitch”. Unlike Viv, she never spoke of the Daughters at all.

Now that Silvie knew what she was seeing, both women became recognizable. Blythe sat beside the young boy with her legs outstretched and lips puckered, in a playful Betty Boop pose. Her orange cotton skirt was bunched at the knees to reveal long tanned calves. She was still a brunette then, with long wavy hair to her waist, and a low-cut peasant blouse that accentuated the majestic, braless globes of her breasts.

Vivian was freckled with a frothy ginger halo. She stood in the back row between two young men, holding a tambourine to her midriff and head thrown back, grinning at the young man to her left with such unabashed affection that it made Silvina’s eyes sting. The focus of Viv’s attention had one hand resting on the headstock of a guitar. With his other hand, he was making bunny ears behind her head. Silvie wondered if the guitarist had been her boyfriend. She wondered if he knew that Viv was dead.