Vengeance(40)

Around midday, a hard, thin man with steel-gray hair stepped up to where I was playing. He wore an impeccably pressed navy suit with a tiny square of yellow silk handkerchief poking from the jacket pocket. With him were a chubby sergeant in uniform and a thuggish lieutenant in a leather jacket. The small crowd around me dissipated as soon as they approached.

“I am Commander Bassin,” the suited man said. “Are you acquainted with a Tatiana Plevneliev?” He pronounced the name as if his lips had never had to speak such horrible syllables before.

I had assumed the police would question me about the child. But why were they asking about Tatiana?

He got a nod of the head. It was tempting to deny our acquaintance, but the park cops had seen us together too many times.

“How does she make her living?”

I held out my hand, palm upward.

Bassin raised an eyebrow. The sergeant murmured something in his ear.

“They say you don’t speak.”

I shook my head.

“Are you physically incapable of speech or do you choose not to speak?”

I shrugged.

“I have to tell you, Monsieur . . . Baptiste, this is a very serious matter.”

I put my arm to my side, palm out flat.

“Yes, it’s about the child. Did you ever see her with Madame Plevneliev?”

Enthusiastic shake no. It was true. There was nothing in children’s pockets to pick. Tatiana would have focused only on Romeo.

“When did you last see her?”

When was it? Had she come by yesterday morning? I shrugged and jerked my thumb over my shoulder in a a-while-ago gesture.

“Monsieur Baptiste, you must search your memory. We know she was in the park yesterday. We want to know if she came this way.”

Bassin was standing motionless, looking straight at me as the sergeant took notes. I wondered what you wrote down if the person being interrogated didn’t speak.

Raising both hands, I shook my head again. Yesterday was filled with the child. I had no recollection of anything else. All I could see in my mind’s eye was the white-coated figure in the arms of the man as he carried her into the park.

“Have you ever seen the Gypsy with children?”

Children? My heart turned cold. I could see where he was heading, and it was very bad. No, I hadn’t. I tried to shake my head as definitively as I could.

But I had a question. I clasped one hand in the other, one elbow high, the other low, then made a gesture straight back from my forehead as if slicking back my hair. Bassin looked puzzled for a second, then the sergeant whispered again.

“It’s not something you need to know,” Bassin told me. “But yes, Monsieur de Marigny says he saw her near the child.” That wasn’t quite what I was asking. But it sounded like the police had found Monsieur Romeo de Marigny to be a very helpful witness.

Bassin left without a look behind him, entourage trailing along.

It was another two days before a park cop told me what had happened. The child had been strangled, and her body had been found in one of the service closets dug into the high walls enclosing the Tuileries. Romeo had alerted the park police that she had vanished when his attention was briefly distracted by a Gypsy. The girl’s gold locket was gone. And when the cops searched every Gypsy in the park, which was of course the first thing they did, they found the necklace. In the pocket that Tatiana had sewn on the inside of her skirt. Which Tatiana was wearing.



I DIDN’T VISIT her in prison, even though I was sure she was innocent. Gypsies lied, scammed, cheated, robbed, maybe even roughed people up a bit. I had known dozens during my years by the river. They didn’t kill.

But even had I been able to tear myself off the tracks that marked my life — home, river, home — to make the one-hour trip to her holding center in Fontainebleau, there was nothing I could do. Tatiana had no more chance of escaping this charge than she had of growing new teeth. No antidiscrimination group would speak up for her, no well-meaning citizen would collect signatures on a petition for her, no politician would stand up in the parliament building across the river and rail against the false charges. When Tatiana told her questioners about finding the necklace on one of the park’s pathways, even she probably knew that they wouldn’t believe her.

I could imagine her in her pretrial appearances before the judges, looking nowhere but at the floor, twisting her skirt in her hands. Had they given her clean clothes to wear? Did she try to speak? Did her lawyer even make an effort? The front pages of the crumpled newspapers that the wind blew up on the embankment showed her photo more days than not: climbing into a police van, surrounded by hard-faced policewomen who seemed to be shoving a little too hard.