Keep the Baby, Faith Read online

  Apparently, Faith was the only one who could see her, or the only one who cared. Faith began to use her arms and elbows like a Roller Derby queen. She put most of the rest of the crowd to shame. She fought her way to the little girl, and bent to scoop her up in her arms.

  Someone beat her to it. The child rose from Faith’s field of vision like a lady in a magic trick. A Christmas miracle. Then Faith saw that the child had been swept up into the arms of a tall man in a tan trench coat. In the next few moments, she got to know the trench coat very well, since she planted her nose in the middle of the back of it, and followed it into the church.

  There was more room inside the church. Now the shovers became sprinters. The man in the trench coat carried the child (with Faith following) to the lee of a broad stone pillar and stopped. The little girl still called occasionally for maman, but the worst of the terror had passed, and she clung to the man for dear life.

  “A close call,” he said.

  Faith nodded. There was still madness around them, but it was the kind of madness she was used to, the madness of Grand Central Terminal at rush hour. Faith took a breath, and looked at the man.

  He looked—nice. In his thirties, maybe even early thirties. The receding hairline made him look a little older, but there was a twinkle of youth in his eyes. He didn’t look handsome, but strong. Secure, kind. The kind of man who would, for instance, risk his life to save a kid from a mob.

  He smiled at her, then did a strange thing. He held the baby out to her and said, “Here.”

  It took Faith a long second before she realized he thought it was her child. “Oh,” she said, when the dawn broke. “No. I was just worried—”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I saw you fighting these animals to save the kid, and I figured you must be her mother.”

  “No. But we have to find her…”

  That problem was solved immediately. A woman in hysterics ran up to them, and the child leaned toward her, making noises and calling mother. The man handed her the little girl. The woman began to thank God, thank the child’s rescuer, express an opinion of Christians who could act that way, and apologize for the inconvenience, all in French, all at once. They told her Joyeux Noël, she wished them the same, and, still thanking them over her shoulder, waded back into the crowd to fight them for a seat.

  “Well,” Faith said. “I guess that’s it.”

  “Yes. I’m glad we didn’t have to adopt her.”

  Faith gave a nervous laugh. “She is cute.”

  “Yes. She is.” There was a pause. The cathedral rumbled around them. “Ahh… Do you want to look for a couple of seats?”

  Yes! Faith thought. “No,” she said. “Sorry. I have to find my friend.”

  “Oh,” the man said. Faith was puzzled—he was acting like a high school kid. “How long are you in Paris?”

  “I live here.”

  “Me too. At least for now. Maybe—”

  The maybe didn’t get finished. Bess came by and dragged her off like a flic making an arrest. Faith tried to say something to the man, but the crowds came between them again and blocked them off.

  Faith went through the vigil and the mass in a rage. The service itself was beautiful, but many of the people who had risked their lives and those of others to get in left less than halfway through. The game was over, time to go home. And Bess, after having dragged her away from the man in the trench coat, spent the whole service flirting with some Brazilian boy.

  After the mass was over, Bess deserted her. It really wasn’t right to be away from home on Christmas Eve, she had decided, do come tomorrow, you still have the address, don’t you? And off she went into the cold, warmed somewhat, Faith could see, by the arm of the Brazilian boy.

  And that’s what I get, Faith thought, for taking up with Americans my own age. It was going to be a drag getting home. She knew that with thousands and thousands of people still pouring out of the cathedral, she could never hope to get a taxi (which was what she usually did, late at night), so she set out for the Métro stop, muttering all the way.

  Which was closed. She looked at her watch—twenty after one. And the Métro closed at one o’clock. That was on weeknights. On holidays, they probably shut down even earlier.

  Faith wasted a few minutes cursing out the French for not making allowances for the holidays, Bess for getting her into this, and herself for not realizing this would happen. She wanted to cry, but that would use energy. She had a nine-mile (fifteen-kilometer) walk through freezing cold and darkness ahead of her. She needed all the energy she could get.

  She’d stop at the first cafe she came to, she decided. Get some hot chocolate to fortify herself before they all closed. She gathered her resolve, and faced the necessity of fighting the traffic, pedestrian and vehicular, to get off the Ile de la Cité.

  A big car pulled up in front of her, and the door sprang open. Faith was startled, and she jumped. A voice from the inside said, “Miss?” It was familiar. She looked inside, and saw the man in the trench coat.

  “Can I give you a lift home?” he asked. “I saw you come out of the Métro.”

  Faith hesitated. God knew she wanted a lift, but Woman Of The World or not, she was still the little girl who’d been told a million times Never To Accept Rides From Strangers.

  Of course, he wasn’t exactly a stranger. And there was somebody else in the car, a thin, aristocratic-looking old woman. He must, Faith decided, be the chauffeur. He must have risked his job talking his employer into letting him do this. It would be ungrateful to refuse.

  She got in the car. “Thanks,” she said.

  “Don’t mention it,” he said, beaming at her. Traffic inched forward. “By the way, my name is Paul.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “AND SO YOU MARRIED him,” I said. I worked hard to keep the skepticism out of my voice. I would have plenty of time for skepticism tomorrow—later this morning, actually—when I checked this all out.

  “Well, no,” Faith said. “Not just like that. There was a lot of stuff that happened first. There was Christmas—in the car, taking me back to Montparnasse, he invited me to the château his family had taken for Christmas. Of course, I found out he wasn’t the chauffeur. He didn’t have one—he liked to drive, and since he wasn’t really spending much time on his business—”

  I reminded myself to find out why Paul Letron would spend less time on his business. As long as I was finding things out.

  “—he had the time to drive people where they wanted to go. If they didn’t want to drive themselves. Or they took cabs. They took a lot of cabs.”

  Faith shook her head. “I’m getting ahead of myself. I didn’t find out anything about the rest of the family until later. That week, I got to know Paul. You wouldn’t think you could learn a lot about a person in a week, but you can. We went everywhere—he took me anywhere I asked. I nearly froze him to death on the Eiffel Tower; it was so cold when we went there they wouldn’t let us go all the way up, but even from the second level, Paris was so beautiful I didn’t want to go back down. When we finally went inside, Paul was practically white. He told me—he told me he was a little anemic.”

  Faith made eye contact with me, letting me know that what came next was very important. “The thing is, the whole time, he was always a perfect gentleman. He was considerate. He was generous, but he never got lavish and embarrassing. We shook hands when he took me home. What my father used to call a ‘Methodist handshake.’ He said he got it from Ann Landers. I kept expecting him to make a pass. To tell you the truth, I kept hoping he would make a pass. You already know about your sister and me, we were the last of the good girls in high school. A little necking and that was it. We used to talk about it, the two of us. We decided it made sense.”

  I told her I remembered.

  “So you know I’m not cheap or easy or anything. But I liked this man; he was older, and he was attractive, and he was nice. He was like the hero of one of those dumb romance novels Mrs. Gold used to hide ar
ound the house so no one would know she was reading them, and I was just a dumb kid six months out of high school. I wasn’t beautiful, or successful at some career, or anything, but he seemed to be attracted to me. If he wanted to make a pass, I was ready. Where was I?”

  Faith rested a hand on her stomach and made a face while she remembered where she was. I wasn’t so sure this wasn’t a dumb romance, composed on the spot for my benefit, but at the moment, I didn’t care. I had to hear how this turned out.

  “Oh,” Faith said. “On New Year’s Eve we gathered at the Eiffel Tower. Not in the tower itself, in the plaza below. It was a lot warmer that night, but it was damp, and I didn’t want Paul to risk it if he was anemic, but he insisted.

  “I’m glad we went. It was marvelous. When the clock struck twelve, they set off fireworks, and all the people started singing. Some French song. Not ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ Paul kissed me then for the first time. I was thinking, how silly, of course it wouldn’t be ‘Auld Lang Syne,’ it would be some French song, and all of a sudden, he was kissing me, and I was kissing him, and I thought, how cute, real fireworks. And I was feeling kind of smug, you know, at last he’s made his move.

  “And that was when he asked me to marry him.”

  Faith went into a whole lot of romance novel stuff here; Paul Letron, multimillionaire, telling her how lonely he’d been, wrapped up in his work, never stopping to smell the roses, how he knew they’d only known each other a week, but that he’d never felt so sure of anything in his life, etc. It made sense, I told myself. I was trying to be fair. After all, falling in love with a woman was a fairly common emotion, I’d done it a few times myself, and there were only so many ways to get the information across. Bound to be some repetition from time to time.

  “But I didn’t say yes right away,” Faith said.

  I said, “Oh.” It was as though I’d been caught by an unforeseen plot development.

  “He wouldn’t let me. It’s a good thing, too, because I wouldn’t have known what to say. I mean, it sounded like a great idea to me, but I was suspicious of myself for feeling that way so quickly, so I probably would have asked for more time to think things over, anyway.”

  “But you said yes,” I said. “Eventually.”

  “Of course I did.” She patted her stomach. I thought I saw the hint of smile on her face. “But not for another week.”

  “Another week,” I said. That made a great big difference, I thought.

  Now it was definitely a smile. She was grinning because she could read my mind. “I know it doesn’t sound much different, but I learned a lot in that week.”

  “Like,” I suggested, “you learned who Paul Letron is.”

  “Exactly!” Faith was talking with real enthusiasm now. The deeper she got into happy memories of Paul Letron, the less she seemed like the terrified fugitive who’d stumbled into my apartment a few hours before. “I mean, I knew he was well off, I saw the car. I saw the house. The clothes, you know what I mean. But I had no idea he had so much money. Lucille—Paul’s half sister-in-law—left me in a room with a copy of Forbes magazine, and I saw that Paul had over a hundred million dollars!”

  “How did you react to that?” While I waited for a reply, I wondered how I’d react to the news that a hundred million dollars had just asked me to marry it.

  “I hated it. I wanted to run away. I wanted to die.”

  “What kept you around?” I asked.

  “Paul did. He came in and saw me holding the magazine, and he practically fainted. He was going to tell me, he said, but he was afraid to.”

  Faith told me how Paul had cursed the money, offered to give the money away to charity, anything. It was the work he enjoyed; since he wasn’t really doing the work anymore, the money didn’t really mean that much to him. (And why isn’t he doing the work? I thought.) How Faith said she didn’t believe him, and he’d told her just to say the word, and he’d pick up the phone and do it right away.

  “Melodramatic,” I said.

  “I know how it sounds,” Faith said. “It’s so frustrating. At the time, it all sounded natural. Inevitable, almost.”

  You had to be there, I thought, but I kept it to myself.

  “Anyway,” Faith went on, “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t tell him to throw all his money away. I mean, he earned it. We left it that we’d work something out.”

  A good reporter pounces on any hint of a Financial Arrangement. Financial Arrangements have a tendency to go awry. “Did you?” I demanded.

  “Did I what?”

  “Come to an agreement?”

  Faith’s expression said, what difference could it possibly make, but she answered the question anyway. “Yes, we did. Just before we got married. A prenuptial agreement. He settled money on me—a trust fund. I get the interest. I get an income from it. A big one. Too much, really. I mean, it’s pennies compared to how much there is, but of course it’s more than I could ever dream of spending.”

  “You said you found out a couple of things in the week before you decided to accept Paul’s proposal. You mentioned the money. What else?”

  “Oh,” Faith said. “I’m sorry. It’s been so long since I could just talk to people, I’ve forgotten how to do it.”

  She tightened her lips. “The family. I met his family.”

  “You wanted to marry him because of his family? From what I’ve heard so far, I wouldn’t rush to have them as in-laws.”

  “I wanted to marry him because his family was so awful. Paul inherited a small business from his father, and he built it up into—well, you know what he built it into. And he was stuck with this terrible woman—I used to call her his wicked stepmother—and these awful half brothers. Well, some of them are worse than others, I guess.

  “But they acted like he was a buffoon, like he had this freak talent for making money, which was convenient, because it enabled these superior creatures to devote themselves to Higher Things. Am I making any sense?”

  “Hank Rearden,” I said.

  Faith said, “What?”

  I told her never mind. “A character in a book who had the same kind of family.” Faith had obviously never read Ayn Rand.

  Faith let it go at that. “Not a book I need to read,” she said. “I lived it.”

  She opened her hands, appealing to reason. “I couldn’t leave Paul alone with that sort of crew. He was—well, he was almost twice my age, but in some ways, he was a lot younger than I was. He needed somebody to accept him and care about him and make him happy. And I did that in the time I had.” She said it with pride. “I really did make him happy.”

  “The time you had?” I said.

  Faith nodded. “About nineteen months. I figured it out once. Five hundred and seventy-three days.”

  “Wait a minute.” I’m not especially good at math, but you didn’t need a Ph.D. to work this one out. “You said this happened about three years ago.”

  “Almost exactly three years ago.”

  “What happened to the other seventeen months? Paul Letron isn’t dead—I work for a newspaper, I would have heard about it. You can’t cover up the death of someone as important as that.”

  “He’s not dead,” Faith said. “He’s dying. That was the last thing I found out, you see. Paul was dying of cancer. He’s been in the hospital for seventeen months, a sanitarium, actually, outside Paris. About a year ago, he slipped into a coma. He’s been on the edge of death for months. He could go any second.”

  “Wait a minute.” I was up out of my chair, looming over her. This was, at last, too much. “Wait just a damn minute. What are you trying to pull?”

  Faith looked hurt.

  “I can add. If your husband’s been in a coma for a year, what are you doing eight months pregnant?”

  I had to admit the question had a less devastating effect on her than I would have expected.

  “That’s the point, Harry,” she said.

  I swallowed hard and forced myself to be calm. “What is the point, Fait
h?”

  “The baby. The pregnancy. Paul and I wanted children. I wanted to have one right away, but Paul still had hopes of a miracle cure or something. He wanted to wait so he could be a whole father. That’s what he used to say. He watched his own father dying, and he didn’t want to put a child of his through that.”

  “But that doesn’t—”

  “I arranged for artificial insemination.”

  “You what?”

  “I didn’t want to lose Paul before I’d given him a baby, and he didn’t want his child to remember his father, if at all, as an invalid. So Paul had some of his sperm frozen and told me that if he ever got so sick it looked as if he were never coming out of the hospital, that I should use it. If I wanted to.

  “If I wanted to, for God’s sake! As if I ever wanted anything else.

  “But that’s why they’re after me, you see.”

  “The family,” I said.

  “Exactly. I waited too long, but for months, I hoped against hope Paul would come out of the coma.”

  I took a breath. “And they didn’t know—”

  “No,” Faith said, and her voice was acid. “They’d had three months, after Paul lapsed into a coma, to get used to the idea of being his heirs. They’re his only relatives, after all. I don’t count—the money Paul arranged for me is beyond their reach, and it’s negligible to them, anyway.”

  “But with a child…” I felt very wise. Look out for those Financial Arrangements.

  “My child will inherit what his father intended him—or her—to have. It’s most of the estate. Not all of it. His will provides for his family handsomely. More money than any sane person could want.

  “But they’re not sane people. They hate me for showing Paul how much better he was—is—than they are. They want all his money, all of it they can get their hands on.

  “They tried to give me poison just before I left Paris. They followed me to New York. They’re spending Paul’s money on a huge suite at the Westbrook. Since they’ve arrived, I’ve been nearly pushed off a subway platform. Tonight, I was nearly run over by a car.

  “Because if I die, my baby will die. And they’re convinced they can’t afford to let my baby live!”