KISSING her father’s cheek when a shift in the quality of the light made her glance out the large library window. While the sunlight in the south of France was always alluring, this light had an unusual tint of red in it. “Butterscotch,” she said out loud. To get closer to that rich light before it transformed, she began crossing the room to the window. “We should go to Tanzania,” she said to her father over her shoulder. The exotic quality of the light stimulated a longing for adventure. “See the lions and the big animals sometime.”
“If you like,” Pierre Saad answered nonchalantly. Sometime soon Arielle’s frenzy to create art would be tempered by her desire to find a mate. Their life together would modulate into another key. But he liked the key of father and daughter, and he would prolong it to the degree he could. Since his daughter wanted to go there, Africa—the gigantic bulbous root of Egypt—suddenly seemed appealing. Before the light shifted, she had announced that she would call a cab, go to Lyon, and from there fly back to her studio in Paris.
Pierre took a deep breath and released it. Lucy Bergmann had been missing for nearly nine months.
“Father, don’t sigh.” Arielle smiled as she glanced back at him.
“The human chest is a rudimentary pipe organ,” he said. “No doubt one could breathe very deeply on the African plains.” He took in an enormous breath of air.
“Father, there’s a taxi approaching. From Lyon, its advertisement says.”
“My Sufi father said the rhythmic act of breathing mimicked creation when one breathed in and annihilation when one breathed out.”
“A taxi!”
“To know the divine, we must become nothing.”
“It’s a long drive for a taxi,” she answered. “I might bargain with him for my ride to Lyon, since I’m packed.”
The taxi stopped. From the backseat, a woman popped out, not waiting for the driver’s assistance. Arielle observed she was dressed in beige linen, with caramel-colored high heels and a cocky little hat, with a long pheasant feather jutting out behind—a throwback to the time of Princess Diana. The woman carried a valise, lavishly trimmed on the flap with flat autumnal feathers, but no purse. Her body moved not gracefully but crisply, as though she were stronger and more decisive in every gesture than she needed to be. Before Arielle could decide if this visitor looked familiar, from the far side of the taxi, the head of a man emerged over its roof. He was tall, with blue-black hair.
When he came around the back of the taxi, Arielle noticed that his slacks and jacket were a vanilla color, the complement of the woman’s outfit, but they fit the form of his body with amazing exactness. No one should be so good-looking, Arielle thought.
“Shall I tell the driver to wait for you?” Pierre asked, rising from his desk.
“No,” she answered. “I won’t be going quite so soon, after all.”
That being the case, Pierre took his time in joining her at the window. So Arielle had changed her mind. Restless. Why not savor their moment together in the south of France instead of rushing here and there?
He enjoyed the plushness of the Persian carpet under his feet as he moved. A rug dealer had once told him that in Persia the adage was that you could judge a man’s wealth by the thinness of his carpet, but the idea of symbolizing munificence with thinness made no sense to Pierre. For his library, he had bought a carpet that felt like a sponge through the thin leather soles of his fine French shoes.
His daughter stood at the window as though arrested, with one hand raised—but not as though to wave. Of course she looked like her mother in that moment. The explosion that had killed his wife had been so powerful that the largest piece of her found intact had been her little finger. Pierre joined his daughter at the window and placed his hand protectively on her shoulder.
But Arielle stepped forward eagerly.
Pierre looked out and saw the black French horn case, and a young man with matching black hair in a vanilla suit, and the woman.
“It’s Lucy Bergmann!” he said. “She made it.”
Yes, that must be the French horn case and the codex! His joy was only slightly diluted by incredulity. “And it appears they took time to go shopping in Paris.” He wanted to sound offhand, shrewd, and knowing, but his heart was sputtering like a skyrocket.
“Not Parisian fashion—Rome,” his daughter answered.