Gallic shrug. “My hours, they are over at midnight. May I have the honor of a private word with you, Mademoiselle Schuyler?”
I glanced at Doctor Paul’s innocent expression, as he guarded the elevator doors. I turned back to Pierre-Auguste and his scheming French eyebrows. I threw up my hands. “If I wanted the Spanish damned Inquisition tracking me down at eleven o’clock at night, I’d have flown to Madrid instead.”
Pierre-Auguste grasped my hand and tugged me gently, as one might lead a recalcitrant child to his devoirs.
“Mademoiselle, I do not mean to interfere—”
“And yet. You are.”
“—but when Monsieur arrived an hour ago, in such a state, so, so desperate with love, I confess”—that damned shrug again, it should be outlawed, and now the hand on the throbbing chest, by God!—“my heart, he cooked.”
“Melted.”
“Melted, oui. Like the cheese in the fire.” He took a key from his pocket and pressed it into my palm. “I have moved your items to the Imperial suite, mademoiselle, which by the good grace of God and the hotel management is not occupied at present—”
“You’ve got a nerve.”
“—and taken the liberty of furnishing her with a few comforts. Please do not make the poor monsieur miserable, Mademoiselle Schuyler. He has traveled so far this day, on the jet airplane. He loves you so. Only look at him, mademoiselle.”
I looked.
Doctor Paul stood in place by the elevators, leaning against the wall now, hands shoved in pockets, oh, the picturesque despair of him. He gazed back at me from under his downtrodden brow.
Well. I wasn’t taking that lying down, so to speak. On the other hand, neither was I turning down the Imperial suite. I marched over and pointed my finger between the third and fourth buttons on Doctor Paul’s thick wool overcoat. “You have ten minutes, Doctor. Ten minutes to make your case. So hop, skip.”
He smiled a slow smile and stepped away from the wall, where he had been skillfully concealing the call buttons. With his thumb, he pressed the one on top. “I’m not here to make my case, Vivian. I’m just here to bask in your presence.”
We basked in silence all the way up to the fourteenth floor (really the thirteenth, that should have made me suspicious) and into the Imperial suite. The sight of the champagne in its bucket didn’t faze me, didn’t faze me at all. I tossed my gloves and pocketbook on the entry table. Before I could reach for my lapels, Doctor Paul was helping me out of my coat and hanging it in the closet, next to his own.
“Thank you,” I said.
He lit me a cigarette, then himself. He went to the liquor tray, the champagne bucket. “Drink?”
“Water.”
If that surprised him, he didn’t say. He added water and ice and handed it to me in silence, and then he made one for himself and leaned back against the wall and watched me drink, the old expression, a doctor observing his patient. “You are tired,” he said.
“Concur.”
“Are you all right?”
I jiggled my ice. Because yes, I did want to tell him. I wanted to kick off my pointy heels and tell him all about my evening, all about Violet and Henry and Lionel, how happy I was for her and yet how crushed with an odd and dislocating grief. I wanted to talk it out with him on the sofa, all curled up in our familiar Gordian knot, and hear what he had to say. And then make love and go to sleep, and wake up and make love again. Breakfast and lunch and dinner and breakfast once more. Bacon and coffee and a close-packed shower.
But.
Gogo. Lightfoot. The Vegas racket, such as it was. My sins, his sins. And everything else, the tug of guilt, the dread of further slings and arrows, the uncertain capacity of forgiveness. The quality of mercy. The strain of it all.
“I’m all right,” I said.
He turned on his side, holding up the gold-flecked wallpaper with his shoulder. “No. You’re not. You have that shocked look in your eyes. Your smile, it’s all stiff.”
“That’s what happens when your ex-lover turns up somewhere he’s not supposed to be.”
“Vivian.”
I looked into my glass. “I found Violet.”
“You what?” He started away from the wall.
“Found Violet. She’s been living in Paris all along, at the H?tel de Saint-Honoré, Jane’s divorce present, except they’ve renamed it the Mortimer Institute for Physical Chemistry. She’s there with Henry Mortimer. They married in 1918. They have four children. Well, three. The first one was Lionel’s, but he raised her as his own.”
“Good Lord.”
“Hiding in plain sight, you might say.” I finished my water and crossed the room to set it on the drinks tray with a clinky old crash of ice. I stubbed out my cigarette and stared at the champagne bottle. Bollinger.
“What about Lionel?”
“He gave himself up at the Swiss border, so the others could cross. Never saw him again. Violet thinks he tried to escape and was killed.” I dropped a bit of zing on the word thinks.