Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [63]
“We close in a few minutes,” she says briskly.
On the other side of the front desk, Yves Bonnard wheels his trolley into an elevator. The door whooshes shut behind him. One by one, the overhead lights start going out. I’m so angry at myself, I could scream. Tomorrow’s Friday. The library is closed over the weekend. I have one more day. Just one. How will I get it all done in just one day? At this rate, I’m going nowhere on Sunday.
I stuff the diary into my bag, and as I do, a thought grips me, a really weird one: Alex wants it that way.
“Yeah, right. Alex wants it that way,” I say to myself. “Alex, who’s been dead for over two hundred years. Now who’s crazy?”
The last light winks out. The reading room is empty.
There’s no one left to answer me.
31
Lili’s home.
I’m still two streets away from her and G’s house but I can already smell her cooking on the wind—butter, onions, warm bread. I pick up my pace, and five minutes later, I’m bounding up the stairs to the loft.
“Andi? Is that you?” she shouts from the kitchen as I open the door. “I’m so glad you are here! Turn on the TV, will you? Channel four. G just called. He and Lewis are about to be on Agenda. Lewis is in the Paris studio. G’s on a live feed from Brussels.”
“What’s Agenda?” I ask, hanging up my jacket and putting my bag down on the table. Dad does a lot of TV but I don’t think he’s ever done this program.
“It’s like Larry King,” she says.
I turn on the TV. The program’s already started. As I sit down on the sofa, the host, Jean-Paul Somebody, a hipster in a black turtleneck and emo glasses, is talking about the night’s rundown. Lili hurries over with two steaming bowls of soup on a tray. She sets the tray down on the coffee table and hands me a bowl.
“Thank you,” I tell her, taking it from her hands.
It’s onion soup—my favorite—with a big fatty of a crouton under a blanket of cheese. It smells so good. I attack the crouton, my eyes on the TV screen, waiting to see if Dad and G are introduced, but the first guest is Carla Bruni, talking about her latest album.
Lili hurries back to the kitchen for her glass of wine. Carla talks, she sings, and then it’s time for a commercial. When the show resumes, Jean-Paul is sitting across a table from my father. G’s face is on a screen behind them.
“Viewers at home, and here in the studio, I would like you to take a look at this image,” Jean-Paul says. The camera zooms in to show the black-and-white photo he’s holding. “You can see a glass urn. Look closer. Do see what the urn contains? It’s a heart. Yes. A human heart.” There are murmurs from the audience. A gasp or two. “My reaction exactly,” Jean-Paul says. “This heart, so small and delicate, symbolizes a great and enduring mystery—a mystery that began in Paris over two hundred years ago, in the final days of the Revolution, and will hopefully end in Paris in a few days’ time.”
The camera returns to Jean-Paul. “To whom did this tiny heart belong?” he says. “Some claim it is the heart of Louis XVII, the lost king of France. Others dispute that claim. Why was the heart removed from its body? How did it survive, intact, for over two hundred years? To help answer these questions, France’s Royal Trust has enlisted the help of the renowned American geneticist Dr. Lewis Alpers, winner of a Nobel Prize for his work on the human genome, and the eminent French historian Guillaume Lenôtre, author of Liberty, an acclaimed history of the French Revolution. Tonight we are privileged to have both men with us. Please welcome them.”
There’s applause, then Jean-Paul says, “Professor Lenôtre, let’s start with you. Give us the history of the heart. Why is the Royal Trust involved?”
“The Trust’s involvement started in the nineteen seventies, when descendents of Don Carlos de Bourbon, a former duke of Madrid and a distant relative of Louis XVI, gave the heart to the Trust,” he says. “They