Cold War - Jerome Preisler [18]
The rest was distraught babble, and a free-flowing tirade of slurs and accusations against the deceased Mr. Mackay.
Now Gorrie clicked the tip back into his pen and glanced out the bedside window. A newly arrived trio of official vehicles had joined the line of police cars that had preceded them into the front drive. A patrol cruiser led the pack. It was followed by a forensics van, and an ambulance. None of them had its flasher or siren on. The damage was done, they were in no hurry, why stir up the entire neighborhood?
Gorrie watched the patrol car’s driver and passenger doors swing open to break the horizontal orange stripes painted across both sides. Watched Robertson and a female social worker exit the car and start toward the house. Then he shifted his eyes to the ambulance at the rear, and watched the emergency medical technicians leave their vehicle for what was no longer an emergency at all, but rather a nasty cleanup job.
Gorrie frowned again. The evidence would be collected and examined, the bodies taken to the morgue for autopsy, and the child passed on to relatives or foster care, depending on who was or wasn’t out there in the world for him. Gorrie and his constables would conduct their follow-up inquiries of family, friends, and acquaintances. And when the case report was filed, his instincts told him it would be written up as an explosive domestic incident, the tale of a marriage gone as bad as they got, its last act an eternal mystery to everyone but the two who’d played it out here in the cold, violated intimacy of its setting.
Better they’d gone their separate ways indeed.
Feeling the sudden need for a breath of fresh air, Gorrie turned from the bed and went outside the house onto the lawn.
FOUR
PARIS, FRANCE MARCH 2, 2002
MARC ELATA FOLDED HIS ARMS SO THAT HE HELD HIS elbows in the palms of each hand. He stood still before the statue as the American couple and their four-year-old brat—a four-year-old, at the Louvre!—staggered past him on the steps. Elata held his breath, willing himself past the moment, past their babble: “Do you think the Mona Lisa will smile for us?” said the father, as if the portrait were a carnival trick. The four-year-old whined about wanting more French fries, and when were they going to see a train?
A tour group swelled up on the landing behind him, chattering in Swedish or something Nordic; Elata pushed himself to move on, following the Americans in their quest for the undying smile. If it weren’t for the fact that he wanted to see several paintings—several master-pieces —displayed in the same room as the Mona Lisa, he might have pointed them in the proper direction as they continued up the stairs. This way he would have known where they were, making them easy to avoid.
A thick knot formed in front of da Vinci’s most famous painting; the crowd was a permanent feature of the room. Elata walked past it, glancing at the equally beautiful though far less famous da Vincis alongside, but not wanting to go near the rabble to admire them. He had Ucello and Pierro in mind; he had not thought about the Renaissance masters lately, and wanted to consider their problems of shade and perspective as an antidote to Picasso, whom he’d had so much of over the past seven days.
An exceedingly fat French woman brushed against him as he walked. Elata stopped, gave her a nasty look—but she was oblivious, chattering to her almost equally rotund companion about the uselessness—inutile—of art. Elata spoke little French, and that word specifically might be interpreted as edging toward “vanity” rather than uselessness, but he had an ear for such conversations. He had heard them all his life, beginning at his own dinner table when he’d expressed his desire at age eight to become an artist.
Which,