Read A World I Never Made for Free Online Page B

worn the day before. This one was a charcoal gray. Under it she wore a pleated tuxedo-style blouse with a black string tie and a silver choker at her neck. Underneath she had on the simple, barely-there black bra and panties that had driven her husband wild when they first met. Her half-heels were not stylish, but she walked a lot in her job and, at her height—close to five-ten—she really didn’t need to accentuate legs that, though men clearly noticed and seemed to like, she felt were much too long. On bad days she felt like a giraffe, or a newborn colt.
     
    The knot that she had felt in her stomach yesterday when she met Nolan had surprised and pleased her. Surprised because she had felt nothing like it for several years, and pleased because she could savor it without having to even think about an entanglement with Nolan, whom she had assumed until an hour ago she would never see again. It was likely the protection afforded by this thought that emboldened her to don her sexy underwear that morning, to go forth as a sexual being once again. She had pictured the tall and handsome American on an airplane, not sitting across from her at dinner in her apartment in Marais.
     
    Catherine, her legs crossed, her black trench coat on her lap, listened idly to the band while reviewing the strange case now solely, it seemed, in her hands. She had been a policewoman long enough to know that she could believe anything of anybody. But the years had also taught her to trust her intuition, and her intuition told her that Pat Nolan was no aider and abettor of terrorism. There were, however, missing pieces to the Pat Nolan puzzle. Why the rush to cremation? Why the reaching and touching of his daughter”s left hand through the hospital sheet? And, most intriguing, why the sharp look, fleeting but discernible, in Pat Nolan’s eyes when the sheet was pulled down to reveal Megan’s face? A look that spoke not of anguish or of relief, but of something closer to surprise and possibly confusion. Nolan, who had been told to expect the worst, did not look like a man who would be surprised or confused by much.
     
    It was also in Catherine Laurence’s intuitive nature to question authority. Her periodic performance reviews made consistent reference to her “difficulty in adapting to situations,” which in French politically correct newspeak meant she refused to follow orders to a T, to bow without dissent to the dictates of all superiors. Why, Catherine asked herself now, was the antiterrorism division of the Judicial Police not involved in the Nolan matter, a case with grave national security implications? Why the DST on its own? Why were the Moroccans not interested in pursuing a man who had killed thirty of their citizens? And why was LeGrand taking orders from Charles Raimondi? Perhaps he really was DST, but Catherine would have bet her pension—the sacred cow of all French statists—that he was not. Underneath that facade of glamour and smugness he was a coward, and no coward could last long in the DST, with its roots in la Resistance and its line of unsung but true heroes from then until the present.
     
    With the band between songs, Catherine stopped her analysis, and in the last of the day’s light, made her second careful sweep of the park, taking in the entrance at the corner of Avenue de la Mottes Picquets, where a middle-aged man in a tan trench coat was buying a bag of roasted chestnuts from a street vendor; the people walking on either side of a low wrought iron fence; the bandstand with a small group of jazz lovers standing nearby waiting for the next selection, and those sitting on benches situated, like hers, on the edge of a manicured lawn. On one of these were two young Arab men in jeans, athletic shoes, and down jackets, unzipped in the mild weather. When she first spotted these two, on entering the park, she thought she saw, briefly, a patch of dark brown leather tucked under the rib cage of the one nearest her.