Fortune's Deadly Descent, page 1
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2012 Audrey Braun
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN-13: 9781935597667
ISBN-10: 1935597663
For A.R.
One may smile, and smile, and be a villain.
—Shakespeare
Once a change of direction has begun, even though it’s the wrong one, it still tends to clothe itself as thoroughly in the appurtenances of rightness as if it had been a natural all along.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
CONTENTS
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
PART TWO
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
PART THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
PART FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PART ONE
Benny turns five today. Waffles with summer berries and whipped cream. After that a short sail around the lake. Sometime in between will come the phone call. Benny understands, as well as can be understood at his age, that he has a birth mother named Isabel. But he has always called me Mutti and I have always referred to him as my son. Deep inside this is who he is, who we are, together. In the end Isabel got what she wanted, at least for her son. Benny will have a better life. I see to it every day.
From A SMALL FORTUNE
CHAPTER ONE
I close my eyes. “Tell me everything,” she says. Louise Lawrence is a hypnotist with Interpol, and her goal is to make me relive the details of what happened on the train four days ago. “Whatever comes to you,” she says. “Don’t filter. You’re safe with me, Celia.” She’s English, late fifties, her steely curls gathered into a bun atop her white neck. Her voice is glassy, reassuring. I try to let it lull me back to the train, to Benny and me on our way to Aix-en-Provence...but even as my rational mind knows I might retrieve some small fact that could lead us to Benny, still I resist.
“Celia…”
“Yes, I’m sorry.” I close my eyes again. We’re in my home office in Zurich. A CD plays trickling streams in the background, rain on leaves, birdsong, flutes. Really? I think at first. New Age crackpots are Interpol’s secret to finding Benny? But now, strangely, I find myself letting go, being carried by her voice, and then, once more, I’m on the train.
Benny and I are in our compartment, midway between Lyon and Aix-en-Provence, when the air-conditioning malfunctions. With nowhere to go, the balmy, cagey feel reminds me of being kidnapped myself, years before, a time I don’t want to think about, especially not with Benny beside me. And yet, I remember scenes so unthinkable it’s as if they’ve been borrowed from someone else’s grisly imagination.
I fasten my hair into a twist at the crown. The thin, corkscrew curls along my hairline are sticky with sweat, my legs glued to the upholstery. One by one I peel them loose, and then instinctively reach below my skirt to touch the silver-dollar-sized wrinkle in my calf, a souvenir left behind by Isabel’s bullet. Yes, it’s still there, and always will be, as pink and chewed as a wad of gum.
Benny and I fan ourselves with old copies of Der Spiegel and Paris Match from the magazine rack beneath the window. My fingers blacken with the ink of scandals. I consider leaving the train and hiring a driver, but we’re on an express, not scheduled to stop. Besides, Benny has been looking forward to the train for so long. It’s an early birthday present. He’ll be eight years old in five days. I can’t bear to disappoint him.
Acres of lavender whirl into a smudge past the window, and I force myself to think happier thoughts—Benny’s birthday, going to Paris in a few days and meeting up with Benicio. Still, in the rising heat, I see visions of my ex-husband’s Swiss Army knife—hear the sucking sound of punctured flesh, feel a burn in the white, razor-thin scars between my ribs. I remind myself that Jonathon is in a Zurich prison where he’ll remain for decades. Breathe, Celia, I think. Just breathe.
“Ich habe Hunger,” Benny says.
I glance down at his dark shiny hair, the exact color of Benicio’s, his “papa,” though no one would ever guess they are, biologically, uncle and nephew. I nod toward the picnic basket on the floor. “Grab whatever you like,” I say.
Any minute we’ll be hit with a puff of cool air. Surely. Any minute someone will know what to do.
Outside, a stone farmhouse, a scatter of goats, an abandoned, half-timbered barn mottled, oddly, with graffiti. In the distance, red-rooftop villages stack against the hills. Miles of rolling vineyards fill the space between the train and the French villagers inside their cool stone homes on a hot summer day. The light is beginning to shift. Hills become arid mountains, and a thin purple glow filters the sunlight. No wonder so many masters painted here.
A castle and its crumbling Roman wall appear in the craggy mountainside. “Look,” I say. “Another one.”
Benny nods.
“How is it that a country this size has castles every few miles?” I say. “Who were these people?” I admit I know too little of French history. Napoleon, Marie Antoinette, the gift of the Statue of Liberty.
Benny devours sliced oranges with nutmeg, then grapples with a block of homemade salted butter caramel enrobed in dark chocolate. He licks his fingers, sighs, and slumps with fatigue. I shove the compartment door open its final inch in a feeble attempt to get some relief.
Ten minutes later, it’s even hotter, stuffier. Benny hasn’t said a word. I glance down. “Good god,” I say, and Benny laughs.
He holds his sticky brown fingers out into the shape of a tiny rib cage. Crystals of salt shine through the muck on his cheeks. “I need a napkin,” he says, the whites of his upturned eyes made whiter by the chocolate underneath.
“What you need is a bath,” I say. “You need hosing down.” I rifle through the picnic basket…apparently in our hurry to catch the train we forgot to pack napkins.
“Im Café,” Benny says, then switches, as he often does, to English. “I saw them next to the bottled water.”
His limbs are a deep olive from swimming with his cousins in Zurichhorn Park. Strands of his hair have lightened into streaks so uniform it’s as if they’ve been singled out and bleached. He peers up at me with an expression so much like Benicio’s that I ache with longing. Benicio is in Paris doing research for a script. We’ve been apart for days.
I rise from my seat. “Sit tight,” I say. “Don’t touch anything. I’ll be back in a flash.” I tousle Benny’s hair, it too, identical to Benicio’s.
As I walk down the aisle, it occurs to me that I never indulged my older son, Oliver, now grown and living in New York City. But indulging Benny has been so easy. He’s such an even-tempered, affectionate child, and what’s more, he’s a marvel, a kind of food prodigy who creates recipes with poetic names like Yellow Tuesday Chiffon and Evening Marinade. His favorite blend, herbes de Provence (rosemary, French thyme, tarragon, cracked fennel, and lavender), finds its way into sweet and savory alike. Last year I wrote an article for Food and Wine magazine about Benny’s fascination with salt, his favorite Himalayan salt block, and all the recipes he’s created for it—everything from peppercorn scallops to Madagascar chocolate infused with ground crystals of Haleakala Ruby salt.
It seems worth the price of sweating on this sweltering train to give Benny this adventure, this birthday gift topped off with a flight to Paris in two days and then dinner at Jardin Bleu. I can’t wait to tell Benicio that the chef offered to show Benny his kitchen.
Most passengers have thrown open their compartment doors; they and their belongings are strewn about the floor and seats as if blasted by a hot, powerful wind. Première classe gives way to économie, which finally gives way to the café, a chamber of odors so thick it’s like moving through a cloud of warm Brie, salty cold cuts, a locker room of perspiration. Passengers cram in line for bottled water. The refrigerated case is now empty.
As I reach for the napkins, I sense the train slowing. Pressure, a sudden gravity. I assume they must finally be fixing the air-conditioning.
“It’s all right,” Louise says. I realize I’ve gone silent and begun to cry. “Just breathe for a bit,” she says.
After a moment she continues. “Tell me what you saw then, what you felt.”
So I tell her about Benny’s face. How everyone I’ve ever loved is wrapped into this child. There’s Oliver’s smile, inherited from Jonathon, but no matter, it’s Oliver I think of when I see it. I don’t like to remember that Benny is Jonathon’s son too, conceived with Isabel, Benicio’s sister, while Jonathon was still married to me. I like to imagine that I discovered Benny’s existence in a happier way, not by hearing his cries from his crib while his mother held a gun to my head.
But there is Benicio in his face too, his dense lashes—and all his charm. It used to bother me that Benny has Jonathon’s chin and cloudy green eyes, but that was years ago, when Benicio first brought him home. Now, as I steady myself at the counter, I picture Benny’s little chin shifting, and I worry for him as the train slows without me there at his side.
We finally wrench to a stop in a village so remote it appears unreachable except by train. A sign reads “Saint-Corbenay” above a vacant concrete platform. Half-timbered houses line a twisty, cobbled street. The village continues down a hill, obscured from the train. I see no cars, only a red tractor alone in a vineyard. Several Dutch bikes, all black, lean against a house made of charcoal-colored stones. The depth of a Prussian blue sky is like a painting. I’m pretty sure Cézanne, van Gogh, and Picasso all once lived nearby, and I think, for a split second, that the light is so extraordinary it appears as if the sky and trees are portraits of the real thing.
One by one, the passengers in line give up, set their bottled water back in the cooler, and head toward their seats. I follow with a fistful of napkins as people cram into the aisle, chattering madly, craning to see out both sides of the train. I know very few words in French, but it’s clear everyone wants to know if we should get off.
Down the aisle I rehearse what I do know—pardonnez-moi, pardonnez-moi—and am met with a dozen kinds of sneer. The heat has made us all ill tempered. It doesn’t help that I can’t explain my reason for pushing past. Merci, I add for good measure. Seven years of living in Zurich hasn’t erased my American urge to smile big and long at strangers.
Warm air begins to circulate. The doors in économie have opened. A crowd clots in front of me. A slightly older woman seems to have fainted. Two men carry her out to the platform, while her husband and several others fan her body with newspapers and hats. They unfurl a travel-size blanket into the air like a makeshift wall to block the sun. They look Southeastern European, their eyes and cheekbones dark and wide, the women pear-shaped with dark, peppered gray hair. The way the men wave off assistance makes me think they speak even less French than I do.
Had we flown, we’d have already finished lunch, and by now be poking around the outdoor food markets. Instead, there’s this miserable afternoon. Yet Benny hasn’t once complained.
“Pardonnez-moi,” I say again, without much effect.
“I’m trying to reach my son,” I finally blurt in English. “Can you please move?”
Arms and legs begin to fold and turn. I retrieve my smile, my merci with a few beaucoups, and push through.
I finally reach our compartment and look inside. I check the number, look again. My purse lies next to the open Paris Match. Benny’s backpack is gone. The picnic basket’s contents are strewn on the seat opposite. There is no sign of Benny.
I dip my head into the aisle and search both ways. “Benny?” On tiptoes, I peer over the patchwork of heads, then crouch and squint through a thicket of legs.
I’m not yet above worrying about coming off as a fool, a hysterical American. “Benny!” I call more insistently, and then with a tinge of anger. Why would he think it’s OK to wander off like this? I wipe my neck and forehead with the wad of napkins, drop them on the seat, then shove my way into the crowd. What’s the word for boy? My boy. Mon garcon? I yell in English, “My son! Has anyone seen my son?”
The rumble of voices settles, tired faces turn toward me. “Who speaks English? Someone?” Nothing. I try, “Hat jemand hier Deutsch sprechen?” and the faces turn away. I thread my way to the washroom, yank open the tinny door, and am met with the stink of hot urine mixed with a sweet, flowery perfume. The faucet is running in the sink, but no one is there. Instinctively, I shut it off.
I slam the door. Panic squeezes my throat. Goosebumps flurry across my sweaty skin.
My rational mind tells me he can’t have gone far. Through the window, I see that the only passengers who’ve gotten off are the old woman who’s fainted and several others helping her. I reach the open door and lean out. The air seems scorched, fetid with manure. A string of cyclists pedal a distant road on the horizon. On the platform, the old woman has recovered and she is laughing, dazed, while her husband shakes his head.
Where is Benny?
I turn back and push my way into the next car. He must’ve gone this way; otherwise, he’d have passed me returning from the café.
“Has anyone seen a little boy? A lost boy?” I squeeze through more fatigued gawkers at the windows. “Please. I can’t find my son!”
The train feels vast—there are only two directions to go, but there may as well be hundreds. Why did he take his backpack? Did he think we were getting off? He never would have picked up his beloved backpack with chocolate-covered hands. Someone else must have carried it.
A finger pecks my shoulder. I gasp and spin, expecting to see Benny’s frightened eyes, but instead I’m face-to-face with a tall man whose choppy brown hair obscures half an eye. “Can I help you find him?” he asks, his accent heavy French, his teeth bright white against his deeply tanned skin. He looks like a young Picasso, round faced, the same wry stare.
“What’s his name, your son?” this man asks, tossing the hair from his eye. “Give me a rundown of what he was wearing.”
Rundown. The word immediately sounds wrong, as if out of an old detective movie.
I freeze. I can’t remember Benny’s clothes, nor can I call up the words to describe him—at that moment he’s more feeling than flesh, a hole gutting me, the fleeting scent of chocolate and oranges, small arms tugging at my neck. I blink away the sweat stinging my eyes. Which shorts does he have on? Which shoes? Oh god. Something. Anything.
“Chocolate,” I say, my eyes welling with tears. “He has chocolate all over his face and hands.” A dark realization unfolds behind my eyes. A sick glimpse into the future. I’m not going to Paris with Benny. We won’t be eating at Jardin Bleu or touring the kitchen afterward. We won’t be riding the train home with Benicio, playing board games in an air-conditioned compartment. We’ll never again be the family we’ve become. The only thing left of Benny will be his chocolate fingerprints, somewhere on this train.
“We will find him,” the stranger says to me. And then he takes charge, shouting down the aisle in French.
CHAPTER TWO
My mouth fills with a salty, metallic taste. “I bit my tongue,” I say, aware of a shriek lingering in the dark. “Did I scream?”
Benicio sits up and peels the hair from my face. “Let me get you some water.”
I reach for his hand but he’s already gone. In his place, our old dog, Pinto, rises from the floor and licks my fingers.
It’s been five days. A fresh dose of anguish fills my limbs. Today, of all days, is Benny’s eighth birthday. I can’t face the still air in the kitchen, Benny’s phantom shape on his stepstool, his little boy hands orchestrating sugar, salt, herbs. “Try this, Mutti—”
Benicio returns, reaches for the bedside lamp.
“No,” I say. “Go back to sleep.”
He lowers himself onto the bed, hands me the water, and says, “I wasn’t asleep.”
