CHAPTER 1 CONTINUED
... Dominique planned for emergencies by posting photos of the family in the schoolyard waiting shelter. She labeled each one with a name and address. Daniel’s picture, the largest, dominated the collection with the Fontaine family’s home and business address in large print. It came to mind that her ten-year-old brother might be inside the schoolhouse if the schoolmarm was still there.
Nevertheless, she raced through the icy rain to perform her Au Pair responsibility so that Mâma and Pâpa could tend to their flower shop. Pâpa would slap her face in an instant if he saw her new school-dress splattered with mud, as he did when she was a toddler covered with mud pie ingredients. She picked her way over the slippery cobbled streets of Grasse, avoiding the cupped ones that could cause her to trip. They reminded her of childhood mud pies waiting for her imaginary oven. If Daniel were outside, he’d be alone, the only fifth grader that needed an escort home. Today was the first time ever she had to go for Daniel other than at 3:00 PM. Dominique rounded the corner twenty feet from Place Aux Aires, the daily and fastest afternoon route to her brother’s school. The shelter was a short block away.
A policeman stopped her from entering the narrow street of shops and bistros open only to deliveries from 5:00 to 10:00 AM. The thought of waiting more than ten minutes made her sick to her stomach like eating her first mud pie. She had one choice, to take an alternate street long used by medieval villagers to push their carts of commerce. Centuries of use had worn away the rounded cobblestones into hundreds of shallow bowls. Today, rain-bullets fired into the bowls, and like in a war zone where the enemy was more cunning than its attacker, the mixture of pristine rain and a pleasant village’s grime seemed transformed into opaque brown missiles that ricocheted off the stones firing back in defense. Every zig and zag led her through the crossfire. Her dress was on its way to incite a strong slap or two from Pâpa. Dominique continued her fast paced jogging. At the next corner, she looked up and saw the school. From this direction, a cluster of plane trees hid all but the backside of the shelter. She slouched while keeping her sparkling emerald eyes fixed on the target and looking for feet behind the raised opening when she tripped on a discarded beer bottle. Dominique landed face down in a cobblestone mud-bowl. The shattered bottle cut into her knee down to the bone. The bottom of her camouflaged dress resembled a butcher’s smock at day’s end.
A bakery shopkeeper ran out into the relentless rain, grabbed Dominique's long golden hair and pulled her face out from the mud. He untied his apron and wrapped it around her shoulders.
“Wipe your face with this. Come inside I will tend to your knee.”
“No,” she cried out, “I need to get to Daniel's school before he forgets. You know him. You know of his illness. Let me go. I can't be late.”
She pushed her fists into his overindulged midsection.
“You told me about the pictures; your brilliant plan, you said he’ll never forget.”
“I haven’t used it yet.”
The shopkeeper carried her inside and made her sit on a baker’s handcart while he cleaned the cut and bandaged it with ten feet of gauze.
“Stop, let me go.”
“You need to keep the rain from washing the blood away. It has to scab.”
The aroma of her favorite sugar-dusted chocolate filled donuts wafted through the shop, but a million free ones couldn’t make her wait for him to find tape to hold the bandage in place. The instant he turned his back, Dominique tucked the gauze’s end into the last wrap and leapt toward the door like a Gazelle, this one not noted for its grace and gentleness. On the way out, she knocked two customers against the glass display case toppling the treats into powder-covered rubble.
The freezing rain continued to fire on the cobbled streets. Dominique singled out the shallow stones for safer footing to escape the ticking clock and get to the front line without an encore of falling down. She reached the last barrier, the iron-gated entrance to Daniel’s schoolyard, threw it open and ran in leaping over the dirt path’s crisscrossed ruts. With each pounding footfall, the gauze unraveled. It fell off laying down a scribble of Z’s. The shelter was deserted. The photomontage was gone. Sledgehammers pounded inside her chest.
She shouted “Daniel” in concert with each heartbeat; a two instrument overture, louder each time until her throat felt like she swallowed sand. Sucking in the dank air was a futile prescription to ease the pain.
“It’s me, Dominique.”
Her cries were now distant echoes masked by the wind and pounding rain.
“Where are you?”
About fifteen minutes ago, he would have forgotten his name. Her face and voice were now as meaningless as the last ten years of his existence. His memory erased forever. Nevertheless, she repeated calling his name until her shouts turned into raspy whispers. Dominique walked up the schoolhouse steps with hope that Daniel was inside and maybe the schoolmarm took the photos to make it easier to keep him in today’s life, a constant reminder, rather than having to tell and show him who he and his family was every fifteen minutes. A rust crusted replica of Napoleon’s crest hung on its last nail above the weather worn and splintered wooden door. Beneath it, a rusty iron bar hung across it—padlocked at both ends.
An unreasoning hysterical fear spread into every nerve in her body. She pounded on the door until her knuckles and hand bled. Daniel’s big sister, charged by her parents with his wellbeing, kicked the door until her toes were as tormented as her throat and hands . The primitive voice of her Id, the right shoulder demon, Pierre, spoke.
“You are too late.”
She slithered down the door and squatted on the sill. Dominique reached for her left shoulder angel, Marie, and wept like a lost child as she knocked her head against the door.
Minutes mimicked hours and then a woman’s voice called out from inside.
“Who is there?”
“Daniel’s sister,” she whimpered.
The peeking door opened and the schoolmarm pushed the padlock keys through.
Dominique struggled to her feet. In seconds, she removed the locks and dropped the bar on the sill. The door opened.
“Come inside, you are soaking wet.”
Dominique grabbed the petite woman by the shoulders and shook her as if she were a rag doll.
The schoolmarm’s eyeglasses flew off her face, out of reach and into a puddle of water. The room smelled like a pack of wet dogs had taken refuge from the storm in it.
“Where's my brother? Where’s Daniel?”
With tear-blurred eyes, she searched the room piercing every corner, looking under every desk and at every craft bin.
That’s it; storms terrified him, he always hid in his toy chest.
She pushed the rag doll aside and furiously lifted craft bin covers tossing headless Barbie dolls, wooden blocks and Tonka trucks in all directions.
“Why isn't he here? Where is he?”
The marm pushed her hair back off her face, and with a puzzled look, reached into her pocket. She held a piece of paper as far out as her arm stretched and tilted her head looking at it from the corner of one eye.
“An elderly couple handed this to me and said that they were sent here to take him to his doctor. You signed it. See.”
Dominique unfolded the soggy piece of paper, a patchwork of smeared ink.
“They took Daniel and left,” the marm said.
“Why didn’t you follow?”
“I thought about it, but by then the custodian came around and locked the bar.”
“You of all the villagers should know better. You let them take Daniel. You let them take him. Why?”
“The note said—.”
“I didn’t write a note. What did they look like?”
“They stood too close for my far-sightedness to see. You should have passed them on the way here. I saw them driving away with Daniel toward Place Aux Aires.”
Dominique darted out through the open door. She wailed out as long and loud as her tightened throat was able, like a banshee on a porch.
“Daaaaniellllll.”
Startled birds took flight from under the shelter of the eaves and sought refuge in the empty waiting shelter. One note rushed her here from school into an empty shelter, and another rushed her brother from a place of safety into the lair of kidnappers.
The next day, a police officer came to Dominique's house and told the family that the Prefect had an alert memo from The Ministry of the Interior. It warned of kidnappers working in Provence who preyed on unattended children and sold their bounty to infertile couples in foreign countries, or as slaves.
“Your backup plan,” he said, “in case you were late, didn’t work. The kidnappers took your photographs; we found the torn shreds tangled in a mess of bloody gauze in a muddy ditch near the school’s entrance gate. Forensics was unable to retrieve fingerprints and the blood was too contaminated to produce any DNA.”
For the next two days, an officer assigned to explore the surrounding area reported often to the Fontaine’s that no one answered the calls when he yelled Daniel’s name on every hilltop, street, alley and de-serted building.
Dominique confronted him with no regard for deflating his ego.
“You know he is afflicted with short term memory loss and would have no idea he was being summoned. That was wasteful and stupid on your part not to consider that and search other trails like suspicious strangers and autos. This is a small village and such an approach could’ve led you to … my brother.”
Three days later, the Prefect himself came and announced his decision that it would be extremely difficult and would burden the depart-ment to search any further for a ten-year-old boy who doesn’t know his own name. He said the search ended yesterday.
Daniel’s big sister tolerated that unconscionable decision for zero seconds, raced out and ran on the cobblestones. This time, with each footfall, she pounded out the steps to plan “B”. Daily, without mercy, she tormented the policeman and the supervisor of the Missing Children Department. She interrupted three of the Prefect’s meetings, stormed into the conference room each time and demanded that he reopen the case. He refused and barred her from entering the building. She moved forward climbing up the chain of command to the Police Nationale and the Ministry of the interior one-step from the top. With no results, plan “C” gestated in nine seconds. She placed her left hand on her strong ego, the left shoulder angel, and the right index finger in the chain of command’s last link, O on the telephone dial. Operator connected her to Chateau Rambouillet. President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing accepted the call based on a story she fabricated about hearing of a plot to kidnap him. He thanked her and asked how he could show his gratitude. She implored him to erase time limits for missing-persons cases and to bring the FBI into Daniel’s case, a probable international crime. He agreed to look into it. She sensed it as nothing more than a politician’s shallow promise. When that unforgettable week ended, a flame ignited and heated her devil’s pitchfork. Pierre took his pitchfork off the flaming coals and branded GUILT deep into her psyche.
The high school yearbook committee named Dominique the cleverest and the sweetest. As valedictorian, she talked of perseverance as the greatest asset for the class to take with them and apply to their future goals for achievement. She included a personal declaration, as an example for all to follow; hers was to solve the equation of Daniel’s disappearance with the same voracity she used to solve the complex equations in her math class.
Whatever and whoever she faced, no matter how much time it took, she vowed to pave a path to her brother.
From that day on, everyone in Grasse considered her clever, sweet—and dedicated.
Dominique’s destiny was as clear to her as a cloudless sky.
Part Two
19 Years Later
Conflict of Interests
CHAPTER 3
Paris, France
Palais de Justice, Office of the Assistant Prefect
Wednesday 20 May 1998
4:30 PM
In 1979, Dominique Fontaine had graduated from high school. Everyone in the village of Grasse had thought of her as clever and sweet. After ten days had passed, and the bureaucracy had inflicted its pain, her brother still missing, everyone had considered her clever, sweet—and dedicated. She had entered University of Aix-en-Provence and carried with her a destiny as clear as a cloudless sky.
Dominique Fontaine, thirty-seven years old, Paris’s youngest Assistant Prefect of Police, and the first female to climb to that position, sat in a high-back brown leather executive chair behind an antique baroque desk sipping the last drops of cinnamon-laced coffee. Her emerald green eyes darted back and forth between the vacant storyboards and the three lonesome objects on her uncluttered desktop.
She attributed the lack of hostage cases on the storyboard of her Strategic Abduction Response Team, SART, to the fears of kidnappers worldwide. Perpetrators of that heinous crime inflicted on wealthy and high-ranking individuals learned if they had to face-off with her, they’d add defeat to their chronicles. Dominique credited the sparse display of objects on the desk to her goal, to free the hostage in every case she negotiated. Her kidnapped brother’s name adorned the coffee cup in her hand. When empty, it sat on her mother’s Limoges coaster as Daniel had sat on his big sister’s lap falling asleep knowing his name. The third and only other item allowed on the desktop was Daniel’s computer generated age dated picture, the 19th in the yearly series.
The director of SART stood up and walked over to the window in her sixth floor office. The glass mirrored her flaxen hair stroking her shoulders as she turned to look outside. In the distance, the Basilique Du Sacré Coeur’s white dome reflected sunlight, while the Montmartre hill it stood on was gray from an approaching storm. The Pl. Louis Lepine flower market below her window bustled with people smelling and caressing the fresh spring roses. She did the same to three blood-red Ingrid Bergman roses in a vase on the timeworn oak windowsill. She purchased her favorite flower this morning and every workday. Dominique inhaled the persuasive sweet fragrance, and with gentle circular motion, she felt the velvet texture of the petals as they kissed her fingertips.
Another glance at her desk, and the place for the only other item allowed on it, in critical emergencies, was vacant. The folder with a 6-inch tall flaming red M-1, the highest-ranking hostage case, vibrating against its bright blue background, rested somewhere else, like the wealthy and high-level citizens rested at home, not tied to chairs or bedposts in cobwebbed dusty attics, deserted warehouses or dank basements.
She strolled past the far walls and smelled the cork covering har-vested from Mediterranean oak trees. The fragrance had dominated her office since she paved the oak wainscoting three years ago. Her office was the only one in the Palais that had the artistry of skilled carpenters covered in the name of dedication, to display each morsel of evidence, to serve as the storyboards for solving her equations. Across the top, rows of emerald green pushpins waited. A battalion of soldiers stood ready to impale evidence and clues, defeated enemies, to make the right side of the equations equal freedom for hostages.
Her precision Tag Heuer wristwatch chimed. Dominique switched from high heels to Nike Walkers and put the heels in her oversize handbag. She pressed a button below the edge of the desktop and walked toward the power-assisted door. Outside, she wiped her morning fingerprints off the engraved brass plaque with a soft handkerchief.
DOMINIQUE FONTAINE
ASSISTANT PREFECT
DIRECTOR OF SART - 1995
A proud smile and she skipped down six flights exiting through the courtyard onto Boulevard du Palais, headed for her Wednesday 5:00 PM ritual, an appointment with her psychotherapist, Leonelle Bouvier. Dominique retraced her daily jogging route, turned left and fast-walked the long block to Quai de L’Horloge. She paused a moment to inhale fragrances from the abundant spring flowers in Pl. L. Lepine. The sweet smells of roses and rare spicy plumeria swirled around as they rode by on a gentle breeze and presented her with a mystical necklace. It reminded her of Mâma and Pâpa’s flower shop in Grasse.
She turned left toward Rue du Pont Neuf and prepared for the daily replay of an emotional recipe: anger, happiness, and sadness. The ingredients filled the next five minutes. Anger was the recipe’s fluid; she turned on the flame when the quagmire of media with all their incredible tools for chaos merchandising appeared from behind the monument of Henri IV and followed her like a pack of hungry wolves attacking a stray raccoon. Anger boiled fast when the poorly parented reporters thrust their tape-recorders and nicotine breath questions in her face. Dominique sifted in the next ingredient, happiness, and turned the flame into a fast simmer by snaring a recorder from a whimpering reporter’s hand with her teeth and flung it in the path of a moving bus.
“My case load is as quiet as that recorder,” she said pointing to a flattened object that resembled a foil candy wrapper. “That is why you have not heard from me in a while,” she responded to their question about last month’s standoff in Afghanistan. Her hopes were that they would’ve honored the victims and simply asked how she dealt with the FBI’s poor judgment; reported the facts without twisting their slanted editorials into over baked pretzels. Dominique knew those hopes had less of a chance than her socializing with any one of them. How did they know she leaves early on Wednesdays? Who else knows? The rumble of their questions in the format of sensational statements diminished to a hum and eventual silence as one by one the famished wolves spread out in search of a weaker prey.
Daniel Fontaine’s big sister had a clear view toward the west. It flowed with the river toward Place Concord where the Seine disappeared around the bend. She added the last daily ingredient, her sad-ness. Thirty-six bridges span the Seine along its eight-mile journey through Paris. She stood at the oldest, Pont Neuf. Vagrants slept below them, lovers stood entwined on them, suicides threw themselves off and poets wrote about them. Dominique chose Pont Neuf for inspirational reasons: daily, she prayed for Daniel’s return just as the boats that disappear around the bend in the river return. Guilt flowed inside her heart, a topic for her therapy session; the secret she shared only with her resident shoulder psyches, angel Marie and devil Pierre, and Leonelle Bouvier, the sadness-healer.
The remainder of her journey along Rue Dauphine and Boulevard Saint Germain was uneventful. Close to Bouvier’s building, she crossed the street and back to the other side to avoid walking near the stairs that led down into the dungeon-like Solferino Metro Station. Dominique planted her feet on the sidewalk in front of 59 Bis Boulevard Saint Germain and turned to glance at the Metro’s stairs descending into darkness behind an aged police barrier. Two minutes remained for her to arrive on time at the office.
The beautiful hostage negotiator slipped into her dress shoes. She carried the Nikes in the handbag—and her guilt in her heart.