Sarah's Key Read Free

books lining the library shelves, the grand piano draped with lush red velvet. The sunny living room gave onto a peaceful inner courtyard with a thick thatch of ivy spreading out on the opposite wall. It was right here that I had met her for the first time, that I had held out my hand to her, awkwardly, not yet at ease with what my sister Charla dubbed “that kissy French thing.”
    You didn’t shake a Parisian woman’s hand, even if you were meeting her for the first time. You kissed her once on each cheek.
    But I hadn’t known that, yet.

 
     
    T
    HE MAN WITH THE beige raincoat looked at his list again.
    “Wait,” he said, “there’s a child missing. A boy.”
    He pronounced the boy’s name.
    The girl’s heart skipped a beat. The mother glanced toward her daughter. The girl put a swift finger to her lips. A movement the men did not catch.
    “Where is the boy?” demanded the man.
    The girl stepped forward, wringing her hands.
    “My brother is not here, Monsieur,” she said with her perfect French, the French of a native. “He left at the beginning of the month with some friends. To the country.”
    The man in the raincoat looked at her thoughtfully. Then he made a quick gesture with his chin to the policeman.
    “Search the place. Fast. Maybe the father is hiding, too.”
    The policeman lumbered through the rooms, clumsily opening doors, looking under beds, into cupboards.
    While he made his noisy way through the apartment, the other man paced the room. When he had his back to them, the girl quickly showed her mother the key. Papa will come up and get him, Papa will come later, she mouthed. Her mother nodded. All right, she seemed to say, I understand where the boy is. But her mother started to frown, to make a key gesture with her hand as if to ask, where will you leave the key for Papa, how will he know where it is? The man turned around swiftly and watched them. The mother froze. The girl trembled with fear.
    He stared at them for a while. Then he abruptly closed the window.
    “Please,” the mother said, “it’s so hot in here.”
    The man smiled. The girl thought she had never seen an uglier smile.
    “We keep it closed, Madame,” he said. “Earlier this morning, a lady threw her child out of the window, then jumped. We wouldn’t want that to happen again.”
    The mother said nothing, numb with horror. The girl glared at the man, hating him, hating every inch of him. She loathed his florid face, his glistening mouth. The cold, dead look in his eyes. The way he stood there, his legs spread, his felt hat tilted forward, his fat hands locked behind his back.
    She hated him with all her might, like she had never hated anyone in her life, more than she hated that awful boy at school, Daniel, who had whispered horrible things to her under his breath, horrible things about her mother’s accent, her father’s accent.
    She listened to the policeman continuing his clumsy search. He would not find the boy. The cupboard was too cleverly hidden. The boy would be safe. They would never find him. Never.
    The policeman came back. He shrugged, shook his head.
    “There is no one here,” he said.
    The man in the raincoat pushed the mother toward the door. He asked for the keys to the apartment. She handed them over, silently. They filed down the stairs, their progress slowed by the bags and bundles the mother carried. The girl was thinking fast, how could she get the key to her father? Where could she leave it? With the concierge? Would she be awake at this hour?
    Strangely, the concierge was already awake and waiting behind her door. The girl noticed she had an odd, gloating expression on her face. Why did she look like that, the girl wondered, why did she not glance at her mother, or at her, but only at the men, as if she did not want to see her or her mother, as if she had never seen them. And yet her mother had always been kind to this woman. She had looked after the concierge’s baby from time to time,