The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [55]
“My love.” She could still hear him say it, and it made her ill. The way she felt now she could kill them both without the slightest thought. Out the window the city faded to countryside. Another train roared past going to ward Paris. Michele Kanarack would never go to Paris again. Henri and everything about him was done. Finished, f Her sister would have to understand that and not try to talk her into going back.
What had he said? “Take back your family name.”
That she would do. Just as soon as she could get a job and afford a lawyer. Sitting back, she closed her eyes and listened to the sound of the train as it quickened down the track toward the south of France. Today was October 7. In exactly one month and two days she and Henri would ; have been married for eight years.
* * *
In Paris, Henri Kanarack was curled up fetally, asleep in an overstuffed chair in Agnes Demblon’s living room. At 4:45 he had driven Agnes to work and then returned to her apartment with the Citroën. His apartment at 175 avenue Verdier was empty. Anyone going there would find no one home, nor would they find any clue to where they had gone. The green plastic garbage bag containing his work clothes, underwear, shoes and socks had been tossed’ into the basement furnace and was vaporized in seconds Every last thing he’d been wearing during the murder of Jean Packard had, by now, filtered down through the night air and lay scattered microscopically across the landscape of Montrouge.
Ten miles away, across the Seine, Agnes Demblon sat at her desk on the second floor of the bakery billing the accounts receivable that always went out on the seventh of the month. Already she had alerted Monsieur Lebec and his employees that Henri Kanarack had been called out of town on a family matter and probably would not return to work for at least a week. By 6:30 she had posted handwritten notes over the telephone at the small switchboard and at the front counter directing any inquiries about M. Kanarack promptly to her.
At almost the same time, McVey was carefully walking the Pare Champ de Mars in front of the Eiffel Tower. A drizzly morning light revealed the same overturned rectangular garden he’d left the night before. Farther down, he could see more pathways turned over for landscaping. Beyond them were more pathways, not yet; turned over, that ran parallel to each other and crossed other pathways at about fifty-yard intervals. Walking the full length of the park on one side, he crossed over and came back down the other, studying the ground as he went. Nowhere did he see anything but the gray-black earth that again caked his shoes.
Stopping, he turned back to see if maybe he’d missed something. In doing so, he saw a groundskeeper coming toward him. The man spoke no English and McVey’s French was unpardonable. Still, he tried.
“Red dirt. You understand? Red dirt. Any around here?” McVey said, pointing at the ground.
“Reddert?” the man replied.
“No. Red! The color red. R-E-D.” McVey spelled it out.
“R-E-D,” the man repeated, then looked at him as if he were crazy.
It was too early in the morning for this. He’d get Lebrun, bring him here to ask the questions. “Pardon,” he said with the best accent he could and was about to leave when he saw a red handkerchief sticking out of the man’s back pocket. Pointing to it, he said, “Red.”
Realizing, the man jerked it out and offered it to McVey.
“No. No.” McVey waved him off. “The color.”
“Ah!” The man brightened. “La couleur!