BooksBarbecue
Back The Double Save as PDF
Chapters (63)
  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54
  55. 55
  56. 56
  57. 57
  58. 58
  59. 59
  60. 60
  61. 61
  62. 62
  63. Acknowledgements

If he wanted to get anywhere, he would have to do some more sleuthing into Vidor’s past on his own. The next obvious place was Paris. Vidor’s home after the flight from Budapest, and though decades had passed since he moved away, if Gessen were lucky, he might find someone who’d known Vidor as a child.

Gessen hated being away from the clinic, even under the best of circumstances. It didn’t help that he was currently at loggerheads with Ismail. Someone needed to rein the boy in before he did anything stupid. And only yesterday, his Munchausen’s patient had managed to land herself in the infirmary. Though her personal attendant swore she watched Babette like a hawk, she’d somehow found time to swallow a handful of gravel, necessitating an emergency endoscopy. A crude form of self-harm, at best, but it got her the thing she craved most: a great deal of fuss, and the staff attending to her every need. Before Gessen went anywhere, he would have to scold Hélène, once again, about yanking Vidor’s chain. While it might seem amusing, she was making a difficult situation worse.

Ursula would have to handle all this, and more, during the few days he would be away. At least she’d agreed, if reluctantly, to his latest plan to get Vidor to talk. Hopefully, upon his return, he’d have something to work with. Heavy snows were forecast in the coming days. He studied the darkening sky, beset with misgivings, and hoping the trip to Paris wouldn’t turn out to be another dead end.

20

When had he last been in Paris? Years ago, it must be now, when he was invited to give the keynote lecture at a conference at the Palais des Congrès. Late spring it was, with the horse chestnut trees flaunting their pink and cream blossoms in a frothy mass along the Seine, as the city hummed with the portent of summer. Now, in late November, the trees’ blossoms were long gone, and an amber light shone on the dying leaves as he trod along a gravel path in the Jardin du Luxembourg.

He exited the park at the Odéon gate and checked his watch, pleased to see there was enough time to pass through the gardens of the Cluny Museum, though not enough to duck inside to view the tapestries. During his first year at the Sorbonne, in thrall to the city’s delights, he liked to sit in a quiet corner of the garden, amongst the flowers and bees, with a book open on his lap. Forty years later, the thrill Paris once gave him flickered to life.