Generation of Liars

by Marks, Camilla

  We passed through the final stretch of desolate corroders of Ben’s apartment building and exited out the maintenance doors in the back of the building, which led to a row of dumpsters.

  There was a black car parked.

  The temptation to scream for help was stifled by the fact that I had a bomb strapped to my chest and a gun jabbed into the soft spot at the base of my skull. They pushed me into the backseat of the car and Ophelia got behind the wheel and Ben slid in the passenger seat next to her. The sound of car locks being triggered sounded like metal chains clasping shut. I was being chauffeured to my certain death.

  Ophelia’s gloved hands guided the wheel as the car navigated the mostly abandoned streets of Paris. The weight of the bomb felt crushing against my chest. The dynamite stick was stuck to the bomb with a silver lock. I leaned my head against the cold window, watching as the city pulsed by. As we crossed into the city’s 7th arrondissement, the blaze of Christmas lights casted over the windshield like vibrant constellations. Ophelia put the car in park beside the curb on the road that separated the Eiffel Tower and the plush outstretch of greenery that was the Champ de Mars. She gave Ben a slippery kiss before swinging her door open and climbing out of the car.

  “What is she doing?” I timidly asked.

  “Ophelia is just going to scope out the area, get friendly with any of the guards on night duty so that they give her permission to be on the tower, and if any of them should object, that’s what the carbine hidden inside her red trench coat is for.” The moonlight was hitting the windshield so that it bathed Ben in blue light that made his eyes glisten like he was a projection from a cosmically noir film. I was reminded of how attracted I had been to him during these months. My face contorted into messy sobs. “Oh, Alice, contain yourself,” he said.

  “Ben?” I sobbed out, clearing my nostrils with an unpolished snort.

  “What is it now, Alice?”

  “I need something from you. Before I die tonight, I have to know something. Did you ever really love me at all?”

  Ben swiveled to face me in the backseat. “No, Alice. Never. You’re intolerable. You left dirty dishes in my sink. You let the toilet mellow and you ate my leftover pizza once without asking.”

  “Gosh, Ben, I had no idea you hated me so much. This just proves that I am a total failure. I mean, my first boyfriend shot me out of the Eiffel Tower and now my second boyfriend is about to blow me up on the top of it.”

  “That night we first met at the hospital, I remember that you told me you thought Paris was love-cursed. You were right.”

  Tears dripped down my face. “It’s not Paris that’s love-cursed, it’s me.”

  “Would you please quit crying?” Ben was looking out the window as if to ask an invisible deity what was taking Ophelia so long. “If it makes you feel better, I thought the turkey you made at Thanksgiving was actually pretty delicious. The cranberry too. Those rolls were crap though.”

  “Ben, I would really like a cigarette now, and I need you to tell me something else. So just have pity on a dying girl, and answer it for me. Please?”

  “What question do you need me to answer for you, Alice?”

  ”What’s it like to really be in love? I mean like you and Ophelia?”

  “You want to know about love?” Ben reached into his breast pocket and pulled out two cigarettes from his fancy case. He shoved one under my lip, held a lighter under my nose, and struck it. I smirked, balancing the cigarette between my teeth, thinking that probably you couldn’t take out life insurance on yourself smoking with a bomb strapped to your chest; but I had always been in the high risk pool, hadn’t I?

  “Before I die, I want to know what it’s like to really be in love.”

  Ben savored his first taste of his cigarette. “What’s it like to be in love?” he repeated the question. “It’s like, having a best friend, but more than that, because they’re your family, too. But unlike your real family, you get to pick them, and you would never give them up. Not for anything.” He shook his head, and I could tell that what he knew about love was something so magnificent that he couldn’t find the words to express it. “I don’t know how else to explain it, Alice, you find someone to love and they love you back and that person is home to you. I’m sorry that you never got to find that during your time on Earth.”

  “Home? I think I did find it, Ben.”

  Ben rolled his eyes to heaven. “I told you already, all that stuff that happened between us was fake.”

  “No, not with you. With my ex-boyfriend. His name is Presley. But I ruined it by breaking his heart. You machete a guy’s heart like that and you will never find home with him. You’ll be renting hearts in a dingy cockroach motel in the red windmill district the rest of your life.”

  “That’s a creative analogy, Alice, but you only have maybe five minutes, tops, left of your pathetic little life, so you might as well make peace with it.”

  Ophelia got back to the car. She tapped the hood with her fist and announced, “Coast is clear.” She flattened the tip of her nose against my window. “I hope you like heights, you little bitch.”

  She flung the door open and forced me onto the pavement. On the road next to us, lights pulsed from the painted-horse carousal that sat across from the tower. The red rainbow glow reminded me of the red windmill of Pigalle as it casted bulbs over our skin. A soft, feathery snow was falling all around us. There was a holiday wreath of planetary scope set on the trunk of the Eiffel Tower. I rationalized with myself that if I was going to have one last vision to see before I died, at least this was a beautiful one.

  Ben guided me forward with his fist and Ophelia walked in front of us with her gun pointed from her coat. “I get why you’re blowing me up,” I said. “But why blow up the Eiffel Tower?”

  “Alice, four years ago I was stripped of my Olympic gold medal following an investigation by the French committee. They probed my personal life and exposed my steroid use for all to see. I vowed that I would embarrass the French Government as badly as they embarrassed me.”

  The area surrounding the tower was still and quiet, but not totally devoid of people on this picturesque, sable-sky Christmas Eve. There was a young couple, looking like a pair of love-struck fawns, elegantly laying beneath a blanket laid over the grass as snowflakes cascaded down over them. In my peripheral, I could see other people, tourists perhaps, enamored with the nocturnal sight of the glowing tower, and snapping photographs.

  “How are we going to get up there?” I asked. “The tower is closed off to visitors after a certain time.”

  “I was able to sweet-talk one of the guards,” Ophelia bragged to us. “I used my celebrity Olympian status and told him we were doing a photo shoot for tabloid. I told him it is a grand exposé on my shameful steroid scandal, and that we didn’t want to be hounded by crowds so we picked a low key time to do the shoot.”

  When we stood beneath the Eiffel Tower, I looked up into the undercarriage of the tower, into the depths of the rickety lattice structure that seemed to poke upward into heaven. We climbed the steps to the first level, which was occupied with an ice skating rink.

  “This was as far as the guard said I could go,” Ophelia informed us. The conditions were windy and the blast from the cold air was like a bitter slap to the skin on my face. They hoisted me up so that I teetered on the ledge and Ben pulled the roll of duct tape from his pocket and began tethering my body to the beams, spinning the tape over my shoulders. Ophelia disinterestedly stroked her carbine.

  “Ben?” I cried out. “Are you really going to do this?”

  “Alice, just make peace with it. Nothing lasts forever. Even the Eiffel Tower here was only intended to last for twenty years. Put up to dazzle during the World’s Fair, it was the resident eyesore of the city. It was all set to be torn down, but the locals took a shine to it at the last minute, and well, here we stand. You won’t be as lucky.”

  The snow began falling chunkier, like miniature artic icebergs. I looked
down at the stomach-turning distance to the ground, and out at the view over Paris. The glitz of all the buildings in the distance was surreal and the silver moon casted a glow which made the distant barges on the Seine look like blue velvet oil paintings. The snow came down like asteroids and my life flickered through my brain, visions of Sara Cinnamon, Queenie Reds, Skip Hask, and the pale skin on Jean Etienne’s eyelids after I knocked his unconscious inside his yacht. Finally I saw the memory of Heather Gilmore’s blond hair tangled in the bushes. Then the sight of Heather, alive, healthy, with a family. I started to think of my family, but I stopped myself. I couldn’t let myself go there, not now. I pictured Motley and Cleopatra, cuffed and carted like zoo animals in the back of a State Department van, being hauled off for interrogation at that very same moment, somewhere out there in Paris. I hadn’t had a chance to finish my plan, so it was possible that they might die and rot inside the wine cellar instead. I had to set my eyes down to avoid the sting of the icy snow. But when I put my eyes on the floor, I noticed something odd.

  Something very odd.

  There was a series of small shoe tracks in the snow on the tower that weren’t from any of the three of us. They were the distinctive hoof prints of a pair of stiletto high heels. I looked over at Ophelia and noted she had on a pair of sporty cross trainers.

  The marks in the snow were distinctively that of four-inch spiky stilettos. I knew those stilettos. They were the same tracks I had seen dragging blood away from Motley’s wine cellar after we trapped him in the hole.

  I had a realization.

  Ting was on the Tower.

  I couldn’t for the life of me imagine how and why Vivienne Ting be would up on the Eiffel Tower in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve, but I was certain of it.

  Ben tied off the ends of the duct tape and Ophelia finally lowered her gun. “This little enterprise has been fun, Alice. But like all good things, it must end. Ophelia and I are going to go wait on Champ de Mars and detonate the bomb from a safe distance.” At Ben’s words, Ophelia slid a small black detonator from her pocket as demurely as if she were slipping out a tube of lipstick. If Vivienne didn’t show up fast and do whatever it was she was planning on doing, it would be too late. Ting needed good timing. I saw a pair of shadows move down below, weaving in and out of the shrubbery that populated the base of the tower’s massive leg. The shadows were obscured by a haze of snow drift and the blue moonlight gave them the glow of ghostly apparitions. That’s when I heard a loud bang and saw a flash of light that seemed to ricochet off the tower mere inches from my face.

  Before I registered what had happened, I was falling.

  I thought I had been zapped by a lightning bolt. A wild sword of nature. But there was nothing natural about this. I knew that as soon as I saw his face. He was peering up from the snow-strewn grass below, his features so clear in the moonlight. The bastard was smiling.

  Chapter Forty-nine: Second Time’s A Charm

  MY ARMS FLAILED against the freeness of space. Slashes of light swirled at the corners of my eyes. A figure in a black trench coat. There was that face again, chin stubble black like tar, grinning sharp white teeth. Pressley Connard had shot me out of the Eiffel Tower for the second time.

  Okay, he didn’t really shoot me. But his aim was good enough to blast right through the duct tape and bust me loose, which sent me rushing backwards over the rail. As I flew down, my instincts kicked in and my arms latched onto one of the spindles of the tower and I swung back and forth to recover my balance. I held on swinging with my hands over my head. I looked down. Pressley was gone. I looked up. Ben and Ophelia were looking down over the ledge. Their eyes were hungry to find me. My hands were throbbing and I wasn’t sure I could hold my grip. I closed my eyes, and from somewhere in the sound of the wind brushing into my ear, I could hear the memory of David Xad’s voice. I remembered our training on the Tokyo Sky Tree and how in Rio he had reminded me that our real adversaries are not pillar and steel. Our only real obstacle is ourselves.

  I pushed myself up with a grunt. My foot was tapping for the next lowest level. I twisted my arms over themselves to steady myself as I dropped down one plank. I grappled the plank and then proceeded to climb my way down until I was near enough to the ground to jump into one of the thick shrubs that lined the base of the tower’s trunks. The shrub caught me like a nest of scratchy needles and the pliable branches collapsed under the weight of my body so that my head slammed onto the ice-coated concrete. It felt like my brain shattered.

  I saw the outlines of a man and woman. They were pulling through the icy brambles of the shrubs to get to me. The sky spun overhead, bleak swirls of clouds and icy stars. Then it all went black. Something like the fuzz of a television without reception scarred the interior of my eyelids.

  I was conscious of a pair of lubberly hands waving over my face. “Alice? Alice? Are you still with us?”

  My eyes flew open.

  Rabbit was there. I assumed he was a hallucination, but he didn’t vanish when the stars around my eyes did. “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “Flights to Tahiti were booked until after Christmas, so Vivienne and I stuck around Paris. I thought it would be romantic to propose to her on the Eiffel Tower on Christmas Eve. She said yes, by the way.”

  Vivienne stroked the hair from my eyes. “Then we saw those two manhandling you and we knew something was up.”

  “Man, Alice” Rabbit said, “you got shot by one boyfriend and the next one attempted to blow you up. You sure know how to piss people off, huh?”

  “Now is not the time to antagonize me, Rabbit.” I looked at the shiny diamond on Vivienne’s finger. “You proposed to Vivienne on the tower? So that’s why I saw her heel marks up there in the snow.” My eyes went back up to the Eiffel Tower. Pressley was traversing the steps. “He is so stupid,” I growled.

  “Why?” Rabbit asked. “I thought shooting you down off the tower was pretty smart.”

  “Rabbit, there is a bomb on my chest and Ophelia is up there holding the detonator.”

  “How does she always manage to get the vantage point on you, Alice?”

  “Now is not the time to antagonize me,” I reminded him. “I have got to get back up there.”

  “Alice, don’t go up there. It’s not safe,” Rabbit said. “Stay down here until the police arrive. Connard phoned this in to the authorities. I heard him do it.”

  “It’s not safe down here. I’m wearing a bomb. Ophelia is holding the detonator and I need to be close enough to her that she won’t press the button and blow herself up too.” I slung myself free from the tendrils of the shrubbery and bolted up the clanging steps of the tower. Everything was so cold, the snow stung my eyes, and there was a vine of pain blossoming from my shoulder down the side of my arm where the bullet had hotly breezed by my skin. When I got there, Pressley, Ben, and Ophelia were all shouting over each other. “Pressley,” I called out over their voices. It was enough to shut them up. “If you showed up looking for the dynamite stick, they don’t have it.” I pointed to the bomb strapped to my chest. “But I do.”

  His face fell. “Geez, Alice, what they hell are you doing wearing a bomb? Are you crazy?”

  “This pair was planning to blow me up, along with the dynamite stick, on top of the Eiffel Tower.” Ophelia gave me a loathsome look as my lips revealed their gruesome plot. “The detonator is in the blonde’s hand.”

  Ophelia scrambled to run but Pressley grabbed her and yanked the detonator from her. Ben wailed his fist at Pressley’s cheek. Pressley quickly recovered and staggered towards Ben, fists flailing, and decked him in the center of his face.

  “You got handcuffs, Mr. CIA?” I was addressing Pressley over the raucous. He nodded yes. “Okay, grab the blonde and cuff her”

  “What?” he asked. His alertness lagged just enough for Ben to slug him in the jaw another time.

  “Just do it, Pressley!”

  He grabbed Ophelia by the waist and held her steady like a fl
ailing hog as he clumsily tried to snap the cuff over one of her wrists. Ben railroaded into him and planted several knuckle-rich punches to his nose, but Pressley didn’t lose his grip. Ophelia’s wide, clownish mouth was biting into Pressley’s forearm trying to get free. The moon shined off the silver cuffs. He managed to lock her wrist.

  I ran over and held my arm out to Pressley. “Cuff the other end of to my wrist.”

  “Are you sure?” husked Pressley.

  “Trust me.”

  Pressley snapped it into place and Ophelia and I were cuffed together. I had a smug grin cascading over my lips.

  “What the hell was the point of that?” Ben asked. He was looking at Ophelia and I yoked together.

  “Pressley,” I said, “go ahead and give Ben the detonator if you want. He won’t activate the bomb on my chest as long as Ophelia is strapped to me. She’s home to him. You don’t blow up home.”

  Ben kicked the rail. “You stupid little bitch. You never just freaking stop. You’re always scheming. Can’t you ever just shut up and die like a normal person wearing a bomb would do?”

  “Looks like you broke the wrong girl’s heart, Ben,” I scowled.

  Pressley smirked. He was enjoying this. “This guy broke your heart, Alice? That’s crazy.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because it implies you have a heart. Which we both know isn’t true.”

  “They teach you how to be a smart mouth at your CIA training?” I asked.

  “Careful, Alice.” Pressley’s calm, nearly callous, demeanor was making me uneasy. “You’re handcuffed and there’s a bomb strapped to your chest. The blonde here might be home to your heartbreaker boy toy here, but she’s dirt to me, and there’s nothing stopping me from pressing the detonator and blowing up both of you.”

  Ben threw a shove at Pressley. “Like hell you are.” He sounded every bit the protective husband. “I’m sorry if your ego is a little busted because that little Miss Huss-in-boots here doesn’t want you, and that she more than enjoyed her romantic stay at my apartment, but that doesn’t give you an excuse to go blowing up other people’s wives.”