LAST TANGO IN PARIS
Chapter Two

There was no funeral, not as such.

Hermione wasn't sure what she'd expected. In the fourteen years she’d spent in the wizarding world, she’d never been close enough to anyone who’d died to worry about what happened to the body.

It made sense that the Christian tradition - that flower-swagged, oak-casketed sendoff they'd given her grandfather Granger at All Saints, for example: incense in choking clouds, a black-cassocked priest carving a cross in the air and muttering Ashes to ashes, the organist playing Bach’s St. Anne organ prelude, at Gram's request, because Grandad had loved it so - wouldn’t quite fit. And it was true, too, that she’d never heard of a wizarding cemetery - maybe some of the old families had crypts, and maybe they didn’t, but on the other hand even Harry, the beloved child of heroic martyrs, had never been shown the Potters’ graves.

So wizards didn’t bury their dead, at least not publicly. She could live with that.

But she’d expected something - a twenty-one-wand salute, maybe, or a blazing funeral pyre. A sober white-draped barge set down the Nile by moonlight. Incantations and eulogies, at the very least. Something.

Something more than this.

She didn't know what had become of the body. That didn't bother her as much as she would have thought; the charred, blackened collection of carbonized bits and pieces, oh-so-carefully assembled and presented for her identification at the British Consulate medical examiner’s office, bore such little resemblance to the laughing man who'd winked over his shoulder at her on his way out of the bedroom earlier that morning, that at first sight of it she'd felt herself go blank and shut down.

This isn't my husband. I don't know this man.

Denial -- the cushion of ignorance between What Should Be and What Is, the psychic semicolon at the end of the clause. Knowing what she knew now, she wished that she'd been able to hold onto it.

But there had been the tattered remains of his robe, carefully peeled from the mutilated body by some faceless EMT -- stained and soot-blackened, yes, but still white terrycloth under all the dirt and blood and viscera. And the other clues -- tiny, heartbreaking bits of incontrovertible evidence that made Hermione's hands shake, made her throat swell: the wreckage of the wristwatch she’d given him last Christmas; one lock of silky Irish-setter-russet hair, still bright and mysteriously untouched.

His wedding ring.

"I'm sorry you have to do this," the young man with the public-school accent and the clipboard had said, apologetic. "There aren't any dental records ..."

Of course not, Hermione thought, and had almost laughed with the terrible dark poetry of it all. Who needs orthodontia, after all, when you've got a magic wand?

Ironic that she, the child of dentists, should have lived to mourn the pureblood wizard. She fingered her own wand, slim and cylindrical in the deep pocket of her robes, and felt a betraying clutch in her throat.

The worst thing about magic was that it couldn't fix everything. Couldn't fix this.

Hold on, she told herself fiercely, and gritted her teeth until her jaw ached. Not yet. Don’t lose it yet.

The techie -- or was he an intern? A rookie cop? Hermione couldn't tell -- shifted uneasily from foot to foot. "I don't mean to hurry you," he said uncertainly. "But if you could just give me a 'yes' or a 'no', so I can get the paperwork started ..."

"Oh," Hermione said blankly, and took a last look down at the mutilated corpse on the gurney in front of her.

"Yes," she said, turning away tight-voiced, teeth dug so hard into her lower lip that she tasted blood. “Yes, it’s him ..." and inside her head, felt her subconscious screaming at her: you’re wrong, you’re wrong, it can’t be, you’re wrong!

Can’t be him. Just can’t be.

It was almost a relief when the two Ministry wizards showed up, and said they needed to talk to her.

**

The Muggle policemen had already been and gone by this time, a matched set of world-weary, overworked Interpol gendarmes with French-accented English who had arrived on the scene just after the Cairo police and the medical team, wrapped her shaking body in a woolen police blanket and hurried her away from the troops of news reporters stationed on the front lawn, shouting questions and hoping for scandal - if one of the region's extremist groups claimed the crime, it would probably make CNN, and after all business was business at the end of the day, Hermione thought bitterly; just because she was about to fall apart didn’t mean the rest of the world felt her pain.

They had shepherded her through the coroner’s office and into a quiet room with a rickety table and some unmatched chairs (clearly never meant to see the Public’s Eye - but still, quiet), and the younger of the two had brought her unsweetened tea in a chipped mug.

What is your husband's work? the older policeman kept asking her. Did you know anyone who held a grudge against him? Who might have wished him harm? … and gravely wrote down her answers in a tiny notebook as she shook her head: no, Bill had worked in a bank, as a collections officer. No, he’d been well-liked. No - no one, no one who’d ever met him (and here, her composure came hard-won), would ever, ever, have wished him any harm.

How long have you been together?

Six years - two dating, four married.

And you have both lived in Cairo all that time?

Yes.

Ah. I see.

"And you, madame," the policeman had continued politely. "What is your work? Does it have political significance?"

Hermione shook her head.

"No," she said dully. "I'm a medical researcher. I work in an office at the University of Cairo."

“An office,” the older man said, and exchanged a quick speculative glance with the younger. He was already shuffling files. “This office, perhaps?”

Hermione eyed the manila folder he pushed across the table toward her as if it was a striking snake. “Why …” Her voice cracked. She dug her fingernails into her palms under the table. “Why would you have a file on my office building?”

Another quick exchange of glances, hooded cop-eyes whose message Hermione read plain as day: we’d rather be out there with the blood and guts, than in here with her. “Earlier this morning,” the younger of the two said finally, not looking at her. “Another accident - very similar - thought there might be some correlation - would be very helpful …”

Hermione wasn’t listening. She’d already torn open the folder.

“The other people who work here,” she said, wildly. Pictures of ashes, one more terrible and desolate than the next. Pictures of smoke and rubble and broken glass. She thought of her office, her serene quiet office on the top floor with the window seat and the yellow walls and the honey-thick panels of afternoon sunshine, and wanted to scream.

“Areli Ben-Nadir - she’s my boss. And Friedrich - he’s been writing around the clock - and the archeaology team always comes in early.” Her lips trembled. “Was anyone … anyone else …?”

“No casualties. The building was empty.”

The older detective leaned over and shut the folder, tugged it out of Hermione’s nerveless hands.

“Mrs. Weasley,” he said. “I’m very sorry to have to ask you this question … but do you know of anyone who might be trying to kill you?”

Hermione closed her eyes.

“No,” she said. “No, I’ve no idea.”

But it was a lie.

What she’d been suspecting since the moment of the explosion was true.

This - all of this - was all her fault.

**

She’d thought nothing could get worse than that.

Then she’d seen the body.

And then there’d been a commotion behind her, a wild rush of red hair and large knitted handbag - my son; let me see my son - and Hermione had turned to see Molly Weasley, white of face and terrible of eye, three paces ahead of Arthur.

“Hermione,” she’d said. “My God. We thought it was both of you - the Ministry just told us; they got it wrong - oh, thank God - “ and that desperate embrace had almost been her undoing; she could handle her own grief, but not her mother-in-law’s too.

“Bill,” Molly said. “Where’s Bill?”-and Hermione wanted to say, don’t look, oh, don’t look.

But it was too late.

Looking at that jumbled, charred heap of blood and bone had been hard enough through her own eyes. Seeing it through Molly’s was almost more than she could bear.

Hermione’s hands had knotted at that first glimpse, had tensed and fisted and flown to her mouth - but Molly’s opened like starfish, and went straight to her abdomen. It was an unspoken scream: my baby, my baby, as if the bloodied corpse, the grown man, had never existed … as if, more than thirty years after he’d walked and talked and taken his first broomstick ride, she still felt his death inside her body, there in the dark secret place where he’d first taken root and grown.

The worst four words in the English language: my child is dead.

Hermione looked away, aching and helpless, and found her eyes caught in Arthur Weasley’s. Pale and disheveled, he looked - for such a tall man - oddly stooped and insubstantial, and for the first time Hermione could see what she’d failed to notice before: he’s getting old.

“He had your eyes,” she said, unable to keep the words from bubbling up and out, and nearly howled with the lance of pain that hit her at her unconscious use of the past tense.

He had your eyes.

He liked marmalade on his toast. And late mornings in bed.

He loved me. I killed him.

Her face crumpled, and she let Arthur Weasley hold her.

**