The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [152]
A little after ten forty-five, almost four hours after the derailment, a tall, slim, very attractive reporter with press credentials from the newspaper Le Mond parked her car along the single-lane road with the other media vehicles, and joined the swarm of journalists already on the scene.
French Garde Nationale troops had joined Meaux police and firefighters in the rescue effort that, so far, counted thirteen dead, including the train’s driver. Thirty six more were hospitalized, twenty in serious condition, and fifteen more had been treated for minor abrasions and released. The rest were still buried in the wreckage, and grim estimates ranged from hours to days before the accounting would be complete.
“Is there a list of names and nationalities?” she said, entering a large media tent set up fifty feet back from the tracks. Pierre André, a graying medical adjutant in charge of victim identification for the Garde Nationale, glanced up from a worktable to the LeMond press pass around her neck, then looked at her and smiled, perhaps his only smile of the day. Avril Rocard was indeed a handsome piece.
“Oui, madame—” Immediately he turned to a subordinate. “Lieutenant, a casualty accounting for madame, s’il vous plaît.”
Selecting a sheet from inside one of several manila folders in front of him, the officer stood smartly and handed it to her.
“Merci,” she said.
“I must warn you, madame, that it is far from complete. Nor is it for publication until the next of kin have been informed,” Pierre André said, this time without the smile.
“Of course.”
Avril Rocard was a Parisian detective, assigned to the French government as a counterfeit specialist. But her presence here, playing a correspondent for Le Mond, was not at the request of the French government or of the Paris Prefecture of Police. She was here because of Cadoux. For a decade they had been lovers, and she was the one person in France he could trust as he could trust himself.
Walking off, she looked at the list. Most of the identified passengers had been French nationals. There were, however, two Germans, a Swiss, a South African, two Irish and an Australian. No Americans.
Leaving the scene, she went to her car, unlocked the door and got in. Picking up the cellular phone, she dialed a number in Paris and waited while it rang through to Lyon.
“Oui?” Cadoux’s voice was clear.
“So far nothing. No Americans at all on the list.”
“What’s it look like?”
“It looks like hell. What should I do?”
“Has anyone questioned your credentials?”
“No.”
“Then stay there until all the victims have been accounted for—”
Avril Rocard clicked off the phone and slowly set the receiver back in its cradle. She was thirty-three years old. By now she should have had a home and a baby. She should have at least had a husband. What the hell was she doing this for?
77
* * *
IT WAS eight in the morning and Benny Grossman had just come home from work. He’d met Matt and David, his teenage sons, just as they were leaving for school. A quick “Hi, Dad, ‘bye, Dad” and they were gone. And now his wife, Estelle, was leaving for her stylist’s job at a Queens hair salon.
“Holy shit,” she heard Benny say from the bedroom. He was in his jockey shorts, a beer in one hand and a sandwich in the other, standing in front of the television. He’d been in the precinct Records & Information Division all night working the phones and computers and enlisting the aid of some very experienced computer hackers to get into private databases, trying to fill McVey’s request on the people killed in 1966.
“What’s the matter?” Estelle said, coming into the room. “What’s the holy shit about?”
“Shhh!” he said.
Estelle turned to see what he was looking at. CNN coverage of a train derailment outside Paris.
“That’s terrible,” she said, watching as firemen struggled to carry a blood-covered woman up an embankment