The Seven Turns of the Snail's Shell: A Novel (9 page)

She heard him groan, then clear his throat.

“Anna, I want you to go with me.” His tone was suddenly serious. “We can stop in Paris, if you like, at the end of the trip. I’ve already made the reservation—for two, if you agree.”

Wait. What was he saying?

“And I called our neighbor Tillie,” he rushed on. “She’s up to watching Paris while we’re gone—that is, ah, if you agree.” He hesitated, waiting for some sort of reaction from her, then continued. “Instead of Vegas, over Thanksgiving we’ll be completely out of the country. It’ll be great! What do you say?”

She was speechless. Strasbourg? And the reservation already made? Wasn’t he pushing this just a bit too fast?

“Well, what do you say?” Mark repeated his question.

“It’s just…” She tried to collect her thoughts. “It’s ah, just, that it’s…” she stammered.

“Look, I have to go, and I want you to go with me, Anna.”

What should she do? She couldn’t explain what she was thinking to him over the phone. “I…I don’t…this is so sudden, Mark.”

“Okay, Anna. If I’m rushing you, I’m sorry. Let’s just sleep on it. I’m tired. I’ll call you in the morning, and we can discuss it further. Bye, gorgeous.”

In New York, Mark hung up the phone and poured himself a cognac. “Damn.”

In Laguna Beach, Anna poured herself a glass of Chardonnay and sat down on the large Persian rug next to her dog. She thought about how much she had liked being in Mark’s arms the night before he had left for New York. The way he had held her. How warm he had felt. The scent of musk. Still, it seemed fast. But she had liked it. Liked him. Wanted more of him. What should she do?

It wasn’t just his offer that was bothering her. It was the coincidence. In the previous few days, as she had sorted through her grandparents’ belongings, she had run across some old, yellowed letters her grandfather had kept in a long-forgotten keepsake box. Among them were two or three perfume-scented love letters her grandmother had sent to him while he was serving in Europe during the war. In another bundle, there were two pieces of correspondence, postmarked from Corsica, from the man he had called Diamanté, one of which was sent in 1960 announcing that his son would be coming to California for military training and another sent in 1962 with the horrifying news that the son had been killed in the Algerian War. She had had a hard time reading those letters, knowing now that the son was her father. There was also an old French Christmas card in the box—a curious card signed “
Joyeux Noël
,
Guy de Noailles et Nathalie
”—postmarked from Strasbourg, France, in 1950, five years after the war had ended. She had wondered why her grandfather had kept that card and whether it had some connection to the Résistance fighters her grandfather had known during the war. Now, Mark was wanting her to accompany him to, of all places, Strasbourg. Her mind was spinning. Was this Guy de Noailles even still alive? He would have to be very old. If so, what was his connection to her grandfather? Might he even have known Diamanté?

It had been her plan that evening to go through some old photo albums her grandmother had kept. She picked up her grandparents’ wedding album, then another devoted to her mother, Lily, as a girl. Finally she picked up her own, which was the thickest, mostly because of her grandfather’s growing interest in photography as she was growing up. With a sigh, she went back to the second, her mother’s. As Anna carefully turned the brittle, yellowed pages, she wondered what it was about Lily that had made her take up drugs. Was she really that heartbroken that the father of her baby wasn’t coming back? When Anna was born, she had been very young and was apparently unable to cope with the changes that a child would bring about in her life. Anna felt such resentment. What right did Lily have to think about only herself and not her child? Why had she just taken off? Anna would never know the answer. Besides, she told herself, it would probably be painful to learn the truth. As she flipped through the pages of the child growing from girl to young woman, she saw lots of black-and-white photos of Lily with boys… on dates, with groups of friends, surfing, boating, in skirted bathing suits on the beach. Then, there was one photo that caught her eye. The photo was shot, probably by her grandfather, on the oceanfront lawn in front of her grandparents’ home. Her mother looked to be about the age of seventeen. The young man standing beside her was very European-looking. Dark features, heavy eyebrows, curly black hair, a neck scarf tied loosely in his open shirt, a cigarette hanging from his lips. He was leaning into her, holding her around the waist. She was smiling. Anna stared at the photo for a long time. She carefully removed it from its flimsy, black paper corners and looked at it closely. No writing on the back. No name, date, occasion. She hated it when people didn’t write anything to identify the subject on the back of photos. The young man’s features resembled Anna’s, especially around the nose and chin. She was suddenly certain that this was her father—Diamanté
fils
—the young Corsican who had won her mother’s heart, seduced her, and left her with child. Did he love Lily Ellis? It was hard to tell from the photo. But Anna knew she had to find out more. The answer just might be in Strasbourg. She looked at her watch as she picked up the phone. It was one minute to midnight.

Mark’s cell phone woke him from a deep sleep. He panicked when he saw who was calling. “Anna? What’s wrong? Are you okay? Christ, it’s the middle of the night.”

“I’ll go to Strasbourg with you…on one condition…that I pay my own way. Now go back to sleep. I’ll explain in the morning.” She hung up.

“It is morning…” he said, smiling into the dead phone. Somewhere along the hallways of the New York Marriott in Times Square, there was heard a loud “WAH HOOOO!” about three in the morning.

CHAPTER 15

Near London, England

“D
r. Gérard?”

“
Oui
,” he said softly.

“You are free to go now. Are you ready?”

The doctor nodded.

“Follow me, then.”

Charles-Christian Gérard closed his medical kit and followed the British armed guard from the room. At the end of the long, empty, whitewashed corridor, a scarf was placed over his eyes, and he was escorted a short distance and helped into a vehicle. After what he guessed to be an hour’s drive, he was transferred, still blindfolded, to what sounded like whirling blades of the rotor of a helicopter ready for takeoff. The noise was deafening, and a person was holding onto him, forcefully keeping him upright and guiding him so he wouldn’t fall in the wind. The air smelled of dampness and diesel fuel.

“You are going home, Doc,” the pilot explained to him, once they were in the air. “You can take off that bloody blindfold now.”

Charles-Christian removed the scarf and blinked his eyes. He recognized the pilot. He was the same man who had flown them out of Le Havre over three months ago.

“Name’s Geoffrey.” The pilot leaned over and shook the doctor’s hand. “How is she, Doc?”

Charles-Christian looked at him. “I am not at liberty to divulge,” he said above the noise and vibrations of the helicopter.

“Understand. Guess that means she’s still alive.” The pilot smiled as he guided the heavy military chopper over the foggy Normandy coast. “You have done well. Now sit back, Doc. We are going into the Paris basin.”

“Do you know what happened to the other two men who were with us? The old
mecs
?”

“Fraid bloody not.” The pilot shook his head.

There was no more conversation. Charles-Christian was lost in his thoughts as he watched the brown, lifeless winter landscape of France move swiftly by below them.

He was forty years old, unmarried, and devoted to his work. He was not a tall man, not heavy and thick-boned like his father, but fine-boned like his mother. Slim and graceful with erect posture, he exuded competence and confidence. Soft-spoken and a man of few words, he often came off as curt. He had his mother’s unmistakable gray eyes: light and transparent in happier moments, they turned to a stormy, smoky charcoal in times of turmoil. He had attended Paris Université VI, the medical school. His father, Jacques, had funded his education. He had grown up working in the restaurant on the rue du Gros-Horloge in Rouen and living in his parents’ apartment above it. Nathalie, his mother, was the hostess, and as he got older he occasionally performed the duties of the sommelier. He was an only child and very indulged, especially by his mother, who adored him. Thus Charles-Christian had grown up to be a self-centered man, focused on his own world. A man with no personal life.

He raked his slightly graying hair as he thought now about his life and the people he had known. He had always been serious, responsible, focused on his profession, but prone to quick decision (not always the right one, his inner voice now told him), and he had pushed people out of his life, shut them out, especially the one woman he had loved. His lips became tight, and his upper lip thinned. Anna. She too was gone from his life.

As the helicopter put down on the helipad at Orly Airport, driving sleet hit the windshield. Charles-Christian wondered where he would go from here in his life. It was not even certain whether he still had a position at the hospital.

“Watch yourself, Doc,” Geoffrey told him as they shook hands good-bye.

Charles-Christian nodded and climbed out, wondering what the man had meant by that.

He would soon find out.

CHAPTER 16

T
he pilot announced their descent into Strasbourg Airport.

“
Mesdames et Messieurs. Nous commençons notre descente pour l’aéroport de
Strasbourg.”

Anna looked out the window. It was eight o’clock in the evening, dark. Light rain mixed with snow was pelting the outside pane. The plane bounced around in the turbulence caused by the Vosges mountains she knew they were flying over. Inside the dimly lit cabin, passengers shifted nervously in the narrow seats. A child across the aisle was crying, and his mother bounced him up and down, trying to get him to calm down. An elderly woman in the seat ahead tried to tell the mother that it was because the baby’s ears were closed in the descent, but the mother ignored her. A young man with a small dog stuffed in his backpack sat in the seat next to the elderly woman, and she would periodically lean over to pet the dog and coo, “Oooh,
mon petit bebéee
!”

All of this irritated Anna. After so many hours traveling, the seat felt uncomfortable, and her head ached. The air was stuffy. All she wanted was a bed.

Mark was asleep in the seat next to her. His long legs barely fit against the seat, and his blue jeans, navy blue CAL sweatshirt, and flashy Nike jogging shoes made him look more like a college kid than an attorney on his way to meetings at the seat of the European Union. For a man who selected his weekend wardrobe in Los Angeles as carefully as he selected his business attire, this look clearly was out of character. She smiled. He looked so sexy in his sleep. What did sexy mean, anyway? She had pondered that word in her writings, used it indiscriminately, too. She could never decide whether it was an individual interpretation or a cliché, but it was definitely a word that was overused in romantic fiction. Whatever, Mark looked sexy to her tonight. She had hardly seen him in the past couple of weeks. He had been on the East Coast for several days and had been working long hours since arriving home. They had hurriedly packed and headed to Los Angeles International for their direct flight to Paris via Air France.

“I have some good news,” she had told him over champagne and dinner as the huge 747 soared over North America. “My agent, Harry, arranged for my last novel,
An Unexpected Turn
, to be translated into several languages. The French version is ready for distribution. I’ll finally be able to do a book signing in Paris, if he can schedule it while we’re over here. He’ll call me if he’s successful.”

Harry had not been happy with the news of a delay in her latest book,
Pas de Deux
, when they met at Spago in L.A. for lunch on Friday two weeks before. A rotund man with a bulbous red nose, he had worn a pin-striped suit with a garish, bright green tie and looked more like he was a clown auditioning in Hollywood than a literary agent. He had the personality of a joker, too, but he was in reality a serious agent who was known in literary circles, and he had done well by her as her representative. This latest coup, as he had called it, would bring in a sizable sum for them both, and it would fetch her international recognition.

“So, you are going to be famous everywhere.” Mark had beamed at her.

After the eleven-hour flight, they had arrived at terminal C at Charles de Gaulle. Four hours later, they had been through customs, exchanged their dollars, had a bite to eat, taken the airport shuttle to terminal D, and were aboard the one hour France Inter flight to Strasbourg.

Mark woke as the plane tires hit the runway and roared to a stop. The airport was deserted, except for a few people having a cocktail at the bar. In no time at all, they were in a black Mercedes taxi, speeding through freezing rain into the center of the old city.

“I found a very
romantique
hotel for us,” he had told her. She hadn’t known how to react to that comment. In fact, he had finally reassured her, his travel agent had recommended it, and he had no guarantees as to the romantic promise. It was owned by a German-based chain known as Romantik hotels all over Europe and had recently been renovated. What was important to him, he had said, was that the location was near the center of the city so he could easily take a taxi or walk, weather permitting, to his meetings and they would have easy access to restaurants, his other priority.