Sarah's Key Read Free Page A

little Suzanne, who often fretted because of stomach pains, and her mother had been so patient, had sung to Suzanne in her native tongue, endlessly, and the baby had loved it, had fallen asleep peacefully.
    “Do you know where the father and the son are?” asked the policeman. He gave her the keys to the apartment.
    The concierge shrugged. She still did not look at the girl, at her mother. She pocketed the keys with a swift, hungry movement the girl didn’t like.
    “No,” she said to the policeman. “I haven’t seen much of the husband lately. Maybe he’s gone into hiding with the boy. You could look through the cellars or the service rooms on the top floor. I can show you.”
    The baby in the small loge began to whimper. The concierge looked back over her shoulder.
    “We don’t have time,” said the man wearing the raincoat. “We need to move on. We’ll come back later if we have to.”
    The concierge went to get the wailing baby and held it to her chest. She said she knew there were other families in the building next door. She pronounced their names with an expression of distaste, thought the girl, as if she was saying a swearword, one of those dirty words you were never supposed to utter.

 
     
    B
    ERTRAND POCKETED HIS PHONE at last and turned his attention to me. He gave me one of his irresistible grins. Why did I have such an impossibly attractive husband? I wondered for the umpteenth time. When I first met him all those years ago, skiing at Courchevel in the French Alps, he had been the slim, boyish type. Now, at forty-seven, heavier, stronger, he exuded manliness, “Frenchiness,” and class. He was like good wine, maturing with grace and power, whereas I felt certain I had lost my youth somewhere between the Charles River and the Seine and was certainly not blossoming in middle age. If silver hair and wrinkles seemed to highlight Bertrand’s beauty, I felt sure they diminished mine.
    “Well?” he said, cupping my ass with a careless, possessive hand, despite his associate and our daughter looking on. “Well, isn’t this great?”
    “Great,” echoed Zoë. “Antoine has just told us everything needs to be redone, which means we probably won’t move in for another year.”
    Bertrand laughed. An amazingly infectious laugh, a cross between a hyena and a saxophone. That was the problem with my husband. Intoxicating charm. And he loved turning it on full blast. I wondered whom he had inherited it from. His parents, Colette and Edouard? Wildly intelligent, refined, knowledgeable. But not charming. His sisters, Cécile and Laure? Well-bred, brilliant, perfect manners. But they only laughed when they felt they were obliged to. I guessed he probably got it from Mamé. Rebellious, belligerent Mamé.
    “Antoine is such a pessimist,” laughed Bertrand. “We’ll be here soon enough. It will be a lot of work, but we’ll get the best teams on it.”
    We followed him down the long corridor with creaking floorboards, visiting the bedrooms that gave onto the street.
    “This wall needs to go,” Bertrand declared, pointing, and Antoine nodded. “We need to bring the kitchen closer. Otherwise Miss Jarmond here wouldn’t find it ‘practical.’ ”
    He said the word in English, looking at me with a naughty wink and drawing little quotation marks with his fingers in the air.
    “It’s quite a big apartment,” remarked Antoine. “Rather grand.”
    “Now, yes. But it was a lot smaller in the old days, a lot humbler,” said Bertrand. “Times were hard for my grandparents. My grandfather didn’t make good money till the sixties. Then he bought the apartment across the hall and joined the two together.”
    “So when Grand-père was a kid, he lived in this small part?” Zoë asked.
    “That’s right,” said Bertrand. “This part through here. That was his parents’ room, and he slept here. It was a lot smaller.”
    Antoine tapped on the walls thoughtfully.
    “Yes, I know what you’re thinking.”