and I left for Chicago, and she gave me this locket.”
“How old were you?”
“Twelve, I think. And that was the last time I ever saw her. Because I didn’t come back to New Orleans until a few years ago. My father was killed in Chicago. An old man named Clarence Valentine saw the whole thing. He was like a grandfather to me, and afterwards he was afraid for my life. He was a jazz pianist, and he was on his way to Paris, to play in a club in Montmartre. So he smuggled me out of the city and took me with him.”
“How was your father killed, or don’t you want to talk about it?”
“There was a riot, black against white. He was gunned down. I got a good look at the face of the man who did it. And Clarence was afraid that because I had, the man might come after me, too. So we left the country, and I started a new life.”
“Clarence Valentine. That’s where the Valentine comes from.”
“What did Phillip tell you about my father?”
Dawn was silent, as if she would rather not say what conclusions she’d drawn.
“Did he tell you that after everything, after my father had ruined Aurore’s family and taken me from her arms, and even after she had married Henry Gerritsen, they still couldn’t forget each other?”
“Raphael and my grandmother?”
“Not Raphael. He called himself Rafe by then. That’s how I remember him. Phillip says that years later Aurore discovered why my father had done the things he had. She found the letters that you read last night, and she figured out the truth. And when she confronted my father, he told her everything. For the first time, she understood it all. And she understood something even more frightening. Despite their years apart, despite everything they had done to hurt each other, he still loved her, and she still loved him.”
Nicky looked up. “Both of them knew how impossible it was. Everything in the world stood between them. But they loved each other anyway. Against all the odds. And that’s why my father took me and left the city. Be cause their love would have doomed them both.”
“I don’t even know what to say,” Dawn said at last.
“Phillip tells me that Aurore believed I died in the riot, along with my father. She was told that I had, and all her investigations seemed to prove that I hadn’t survived. By then I was in Paris, but she didn’t know.”
Nicky stopped. She wondered why she was telling this to Dawn. She turned, not knowing what she would see on Dawn’s face. Dawn lifted her hand and tentatively covered Nicky’s. “I can’t believe that she didn’t love you, Nicky. I knew her, as well as anyone in the world did. And I know that she wouldn’t ever have for gotten her own child or stopped loving you. Maybe she thought she didn’t have any choice, but she must have felt so guilty. The things she did must have stayed with her until the day she died. That’s why she couldn’t tell you herself.”
“No. I know why she couldn’t tell me.”
Dawn was silent. Nicky knew she expected her to go on, but she couldn’t. There were some words too terrible to be spoken out loud. “Thank you,” Nicky said at last. “I needed someone with answers.”
Dawn hesitated, as if she weren’t sure what to do. Then she leaned forward and kissed Nicky’s cheek.
Nicky went to the window again after Dawn left and rested her cheek against the window frame. She was a woman who looked toward the future and rarely considered her past. The future beckoned, but the past had always been a weight around her heart. And still, as hard as she had tried to forget where she had come from and who she had been, it was with her still.
Her hand went to the locket; it was warm against her skin. “I know why you didn’t tell me, Aurore,” she whispered. “How could you have told me, after everything that happened next?”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Paris, 1927
Chez les Américains might as well have been plunked down in the center of the New World, considering how little of its ambience it owed to the Old. Shuttered windows erased all the distinctive qualities of the City of Light, most particularly light itself. Years ago someone had painted the brick interior of the rue Pigalle night club black and stained the soft wood floor. The newest owner, hoping to benefit from wealthy Americans spending cheaply purchased francs, had covered the walls with framed photographs of Valentino and Pick ford and pastoral scenes of western mountains and Indian braves. Illuminated by harsh spotlights, smoke-filled and noisy, Chez les Américains had little to offer the expatriates it so coveted.
But still, they came.
“Sure they come and keep comin’, Nickel girl,” Clarence said, chomping on the end of a huge cigar he wouldn’t light. “They comin’ to hear the best jazz in Paris. Hot jazz, not that pisspot stuff served up ‘round the corner.”
Nicky leaned on the top of the piano and watched as guests wandered from table to table. Clarence wasn’t boasting. Clarence Valentine and his band were the best in town.
Nicky adored Clarence, and had since the first time she heard him play, when she was still a young child. Since then, of course, her life had changed dramatically. She had gone from the child Nicolette Cantrelle to the woman Nicky Valentine, from Chicago to Paris, from a life with her beloved father to a very different one with Clarence. She had left everything behind when she and Clarence were forced to flee Chicago, everything except Clarence himself and her love of music.
And memories of her father’s death that still surfaced sometimes as nightmares.
“What’s you thinkin’ about, Nickel? Your face so long,” Clarence said.
She smiled fondly at him. “Is not!”
His face lit up in a grin. Clarence had made his living hauling bales of cotton on the New Orleans river front in the days before he could get jobs with his music, and he was a large man, although the years had begun to whittle away at him. He had little education, none of it in music, but he had taught himself to play the piano by listening to the music of others. His ear was so fine that he could play any song he heard, and usually a more thrilling version, at that.
Tonight he wore a shiny black suit with a scarlet vest and his signature diamond stickpin in his tie. In the harsh glare of the spotlight, his shirt was white enough to blind her.
“You gonna get to it?” she asked. “Or you gonna flex those old fingers all night?”
“We’ll get goin’ when we need to. Things’ll heat up soon enough.”
Nothing really got started at the Montmartre night clubs until well after midnight. The Americans and British had come to Paris to escape schedules and rules. In the process, they had established a new set.
Their days were predictable, and so were their nights. After dinner at cherished little restaurants, the serious drinkers among them went on to small, intimate bars like the Dingo or Parnasse, where they were on a first-name basis with the barman. But the others drifted to Montmartre for dancing and music. Those who came to Les Américains stayed until well after the sun was up, because as the clock ticked off the hours, the music got hotter and sweeter. The tips got more extravagant, too, and the praise more abandoned, which was why Nicky was preparing to ask Clarence if she could perform at the end of the night, instead of the beginning.
“Speaking of things heating up,” Nicky said, glad that he had given her an opening, “I can sing hot. You just don’t give me a chance, Clarence.”
“What you talkin’ about? You sing every single blessed night. You get everybody in the mood to stay here and listen. Weren’t for you, they wouldn’t come ‘tall.”
“They sure don’t come to hear me.” Nicky picked at a nail.
Clarence ran his fingers down the keyboard and started to play in earnest. She recognized the beginning of a bluesy medley, songs Clarence