Free A World I Never Made by James Lepore Page B

available?”
     
    “No, but the thing is, we know it’s a fake. I just want to know who else might know.”
     
    “Ah, someone who has read the autopsy for example:”
     
    “Yes.”
     
    “All autopsies on women will note certain conditions regarding pregnancies and childbirth. For example, nulligravida means never pregnant’; nulliparous means ‘never given birth; and so on:”
     
    “It’s that simple?”
     
    “Yes.”
     
    “Call me on my cell when you have the prints results, and use yours:”
     
    “Catherine, I am worried, of course:”
     
    “Yes, I know.”
     
    “In France, the world’s greatest and most arrogant bureaucracy, it is anathema to go around the system:”
     
    “Yes, I know.”
     
    “And you will not tell me more?”
     
    “No.”
     
    “On the other hand, there is something in your voice. Have you returned to us? Is there a man involved?”
     
    “There’s a man sleeping on my couch right now, but it’s not what you think:”
     
    “I see. Promise me something:”
     
    “Yes.”
     
    “Whatever is happening, don’t try to do it alone. Call on me. I am old and tired of feeling useless. Your word, ma petite.”
     
    “Yes, you have my word, Uncle:”
     
    Catherine hung up the phone and leaned back in her chair. She removed the towel from her wet hair and let it fall to the floor. In the pocket of her thick terrycloth robe was a pack of Galloises and a disposable lighter. Before Jacques died, she had struggled unsuccessfully to quit smoking, making of it unconsciously a metaphor for what she saw as her cowardly inability to end her marriage. After his death she lost her taste for cigarettes—except for when it returned at moments she least expected—while bathing, for example, or while standing on one of Paris’s bridges watching a barge emerge like a sea monster from the morning mist on the Seine. She was free now, free to smoke and free to live, but her conscious mind would not let her assimilate this fact. She lit a Gallois and stepped to the large mullioned door that led to a balcony overlooking Rue St. Paul. Across the street a young man—no more than twenty or twenty-one, with beautiful long black hair—was standing under the cone of light of a street lamp, also lighting a cigarette. Catherine stepped back into a deep shadow and watched as the man smoked for a second or two and then moved slowly on without looking up. She smiled as she remembered that both her father and Uncle Daniel had reminded her often that paranoia was a good detective’s radar. The blips on its screen should always be tracked.
     
    Both nulligravida and nulliparous were noted on the Megan Nolan autopsy report. Whoever knew that the real Megan Nolan was pregnant and had seen the autopsy report would know irrefutably that she was alive and had gone to great trouble to fake her suicide. Five people—not counting Catherine—knew about the “suicide” of Megan Nolan: Patrick Nolan, his brother, Inspector LeGrand, Charles Raimondi, and an unknown person in the Moroccan diplomatic service in Rabat. An Arab. And then two Arab men, professionals on one side or the other of the law, or perhaps both, appear in Paris to abduct Nolan père at gunpoint. How did they know how to pick up his trail? Catherine finished her cigarette, sucking in the last drag like the narcotic it was. As she was stubbing it out in a thick glass art deco ashtray on her desk, her cell phone rang.
     
    “Here are your prints;” said Daniel without preface. ”The first set matches to Ahmed bin-Shalib, twenty-five, Pakistani, wanted on a terrorist warrant issued by the US.”
     
    “Anything else on him?”
     
    “They are associating him with the death of the American journalist in Karachi, the beheading:”
     
    “Michael Cohen.”
     
    “Yes.”
     
    The two paused to assimilate this information. Catherine could hear her uncle breathing softly through her phone’s high tech receiver.
     
    Daniel was the first to