Vengeance. Mystery Writers of America Presents B00A25NLU4

could nod my head toward that prey.
    She came to my stand late that day as I was breaking down the equipment. Business had been good, she said. For me too. My pockets dragged with change, from yellow fifty-centime pieces to two-euro coins. I even had a few bills. As we sometimes did, we dragged my drum case and horn bags around the corner and sat on one of the concrete benches overlooking the Seine.
    We often ended the day like that when the weather was good and the cops didn’t chase us away. The setting sun shone pinkly on the cream-colored stone buildings across the river: the Beaux Arts rail-station structure of the Musée d’Orsay; next to it the squat headquarters of the Légion d’honneur. To the left, upriver, were the towers of Notre-Dame; to the right, the glass-paned cavernous roof of the Grand Palais, French flag flying atop.
    The river itself was a sight to see. At this time of year, the Seine was fed by runoff from the mountains. A deep and viscous brown, the water was almost level with the cobbled walkway along the banks. The current slurped against the bridge’s pilings and pushed against the prows of the Bateaux-Mouches as they slid up and down the waterway with their cargoes of tourists.
    “Look at this,” Tatiana said, lifting her skirt and taking her earnings out of a pocket sewn inside. “There was a guy waving a ten-euro bill around and when he put it in his pocket he left a corner hanging out. He never even saw me.”
    I clapped her on the back.

    T HE M OTHER , THE man — I’d named him Romeo — and the little girl came by on their way to the gardens often in the month that followed. They — at least the child and her mother — probably lived in the Seventh Arrondissement, on the other side of the footbridge, in one of those apartments with ten-foot ceilings. People in those apartments wore cashmere coats and dressed their little girls in clothing from Tartine et Chocolat, the fancy children’s store on the boulevard Saint-Germain.
    Romeo must have learned his lesson, because he never again tried to bring the girl to the beret. She let him hold her hand across the bridge, the Mother alongside. Then she always walked up to me alone. I’d play the polka and do my bobbing routine. It got to be a game: She’d smile at me and I’d respond with a couple of little dance steps and a trombone wail. More steps toward me and I’d twirl around. The girl would laugh and put a coin in. I felt like laughing myself, for the first time in years. Unlike my older fans, who seemed almost ashamed to be giving money to a beggar, albeit a musical one, the child looked straight into my face. Her expression, a kind of puckery smile with a flash of her blue eyes, made me imagine that she knew how much those coins meant to me.
    On a gray day in April, I was just finishing a set with “La Vie en Rose” when I saw that the child was there, standing a bit in front of the usual bunch of tourists. Next to her was Romeo. No sign of the Mother. His hair was slicked back from his forehead in an expensive cut. My audience was with me; they had clapped to the theme from
Can-Can
and laughed when I swayed during the refrain of “I Love Paris.” I’d lose them if I played the polka. Instead, I just winked at the child, and she smiled at me. She seemed unperturbed that her mother wasn’t there. One hand held on to the hand of the man, who looked down at her as if he couldn’t believe he’d won her over. Her other hand fiddled with a heart-shaped locket I’d never seen before and that I could tell was gold.
    The girl gave me a bill this time, another ten-euro note from Romeo’s wallet, and then they walked up the stairs and into the gardens. As they moved out of view, the man picked her up and whispered something in her ear.
    The money flowed in that day. No sooner had one group left after a set than another would form around me, sometimes even before I’d started playing again. By late afternoon, I must have had forty people watching. I treated them to a jazz improv on the trombone, with only the cymbal tracking. I didn’t try that often, but the crowd was with me.
    Suddenly, sirens wailed from the gardens. A voice thundered from the public-address system; I couldn’t make out the words. The
pah-paw
of police cars and fire trucks could be heard in the distance, then on the road above the tunnel. Two uniformed cops raced in from the bridge and rushed up the tunnel stairs, taking them two at a time as the