I followed Edwards out of the room. When Renee called out sharply that she had more to say to me, I said, “In a minute,” over my shoulder. “You and I need to talk before the day is over.”

Edwards tried to brush me off me off, but I forced him to face me. He scowled, started to protest, then realized he’d better make the best of the situation. He agreed to meet me in my office at four.

CHAPTER 38

Conversation Between Hardheads

When I returned to her room, Renee had moved to the deep leather armchair behind her desk. I helped myself to water from a pitcher on the trolley and looked at the prints on the wall. Most were cover art from notable books published by Bayard Publishing. A Tale of Two Countries held pride of place above Renee’s desk, with an inscription “To the Boy Genius” from “the weary old man, Armand Pelletier” I guess it was supposed to be a joke-Pelletier was only a dozen years older than Calvin Bayard himself when Calvin took on the press’s first nonreligious novel.

“I’d rather speak to your face than your back,” Renee said.

I pulled up a chair to face her. “When we first met last Wednesday, I mentioned to you that I worked for the Bayard Foundation during law school because of my admiration for your husband’s work. When did your son start holding such very different views?”

“It was one of those things,” she said. “It started as an adolescent rebellion that hardened into adult intransigence.”

I made a sour face. “You are at least as agile as I at dancing away from questions you don’t want to answer.”

“I’m not subtle-I’d quell you when you asked intrusive questions, not dance around you, if I didn’t want your cooperation. You wouldn’t have betrayed a confidence with Edwards in the room, since it’s obvious that he supports the attorney general’s efforts to round up every Arab in the country for questioning. But now that we’re alone, you can tell me where this Arab boy is. I feel certain that you know.”

I was startled. “You’re wrong, Ms. Bayard: I don’t know where Benjamin Sadawi is. If he is in league with a terrorist group, I hope the law soon catches up with him, but if he’s just a scared runaway kid-I hope he finds another friend as good as your granddaughter.”

She looked at me through narrowed eyes. “I don’t know how to persuade you to tell me. Because I don’t believe you don’t know.”

“Why does it matter so much to you? I should think you’d be glad to have h~m out of Catherine’s life.”

She stopped for a moment to choose her words. “I am. And the surest way for her to continue to be infatuated with him, or the romance of his situation, as you put it, is for her to think of him as being on the run. If she could see him for what he is-an immigrant dishwasher caught up in events out of his control-she’d stop imagining herself as a romantic heroine in his novel.”