by Chris Pavone
Mahmoud cannot tell which direction the van is headed in, cannot keep track of the turns. Even the passing of time has become difficult to gauge. He does not know the exact destination, but he does know it will be in central Paris. All the same to him. He has lived here only a few years, but that has been long enough to learn to hate the whole beautiful place.
* * *
The van swings around a turn, too fast, and Mahmoud slides on his seat.
He tries to adjust his tight rubberized underwear. A very uncomfortable garment, but he understands the necessity. In fact he asked for it.
Mahmoud catches a glimpse of something through the windshield, a tall wide column, nothing on either side of it, just the bright blue sky pierced by this verdigris bronze. He recognizes this structure, it is…he knows this…?
There are so many monuments here, statues, obelisks, fountains, the French are keen on memorializing events, celebrating themselves. What is this one called…?
Mahmoud visited many of these sights back when they first moved here, dutifully trekking to one tourist attraction after another. He noticed the looks he received, he observed the security guards, many of them just like him, North Africans, Middle Easterns, dark-skinned men issued uniforms and badges and walkie-talkies, told to keep an eye on anyone who looked like themselves. Jobs to pay the rent, to feed their families, to purchase the things you need, maybe sometimes a few you simply want.
The driver shifts into PARK, hops out, then seconds later jumps back in.
Mahmoud wondered if these security guards lost sleep, wracked with guilt about how they earn their livings, about the types of men they had become, men who themselves were subjected to the same injustices and sleights and distrustful looks, all reliable constants, like the gray skies. It was only their absence that surprised—a sunny day, how glorious.
Today is a sunny day.
Ah! He remembers the name of this place, that square with the column in the middle, perimeter lined with the most expensive of jewelers, the fanciest of hotels: the place Vendôme.
It is a relief that he has not completely lost his memory. But then, what does it matter?
It was not Mahmoud who had wanted to move to France. That had been Neela’s desire, her dream. He had been swayed by her passion, her conviction. For the children, she said. For me.
And then look what happened. What they did to her.
3
PARIS. 8:54 A.M.
Hunter Forsyth doesn’t register the sound of the siren.
Later, when he’s second-guessing his decisions, he’ll understand that he did hear this first-wave siren but failed to acknowledge it, standing on the balcony off the formal dining room, which during the year that he has owned this apartment has never, not once, been used for formal dining. He’s ignoring the spectacular view of the Eiffel Tower in favor of the ordinary little screen in his palm, index finger swiping, and swiping, reading this message, dismissing that one, deleting, deleting, responding with single-syllable answers, yes, no, trying to project not only his general level of importance but also his extra-impatience with matters that are below his purview, decisions people should make without consulting him, problems they should solve on their own.
Today, of all days, nibbled to death by minnows. It’s important to retaliate. Controlled rudeness can be an effective tool.
Hunter hears a car ignition turn over, and sees the police cruiser pull out of its customary space. The car’s lights start to flash as it accelerates, then the sedan tears around the corner.
This penthouse is a spectacular apartment—high ceilings and tall windows, herringbone floors and marble fireplaces, the romantic ideal of a Parisian home. On the other hand, it’s just off the Champs-E´lysées, with the attendant riffraff crowd, and who the hell wants that? Not Hunter. But when he was looking to buy, he discovered that at any given moment there are only a handful of quality apartments available for people like himself—American businessmen with no titles of nobility or royalty, no above-the-title film credits.
Compromises were necessary. This place is just a few minutes from the downtown office, which is the European headquarters of Hunter’s multinational conglomerate. There’s another Paris office with far more employees, way out in La Défense, which he visits much less frequently. He doesn’t like it out there.
With all his long-haul travel, Hunter tries to minimize his commutes. For the on-and-off month per year that he spends here, he’d much rather be somewhere else, maybe out in Passy amid all the Art Nouveau and ossified old ladies, or the Left Bank, not so artsy-fartsy anymore, perhaps now even welcoming to people like him, the kinds of people who can arrange for the local police to serve as private security.
So why did the cop car just leave?
* * *
“Colette?”
Hunter’s efficient, officious assistant hurries from the kitchen, heels clickity-clacking. Colette wears monstrously tall heels that make her legs—her entire figure—look spectacular. The shoes seem impossible to walk in, but she does it with aplomb, as everything. Colette is the most competent human Hunter has ever met. That’s one of the reasons—one of many—that he is utterly, helplessly in love with her.
“Oui Monsieur?” Phone in hand, ready to answer his every question, cater to his every whim, solve his every problem, those big hazel eyes gazing at him expectantly. It wasn’t until last year when he realized just how beautiful Colette is, and since then he hasn’t stopped kicking himself for how long it took.
“Do you know why our police just left?”
“I will find out” is what she says, what she always says, and what she always does.
In all other aspects of his life, Hunter is supremely confident. But with Colette he feels like a scrawny sophomore with a crush on the prom queen: flustered, hopeless. The more he becomes convinced of her perfection, the more he envisages all that could go wrong. Beginning with his wife finding out, prematurely. Or Colette’s husband.
She hits a button on her phone, which connects her to the woman out in La Défense whose job it is to find answers for other people.
Hunter steps back out to the balcony, just in time to see a new car pull up, a strobing blue light on the roof. Both front doors open, and a couple of uniformed policemen climb out of the unmarked car, looking around.
“Colette?”
“Oui Monsieur?”
Of all the mistakes he’ll make today, this one is perhaps the stupidest, for the most irresponsible reason: he doesn’t want Colette to go to the bother of calling the office, then dialing the police station, then connecting to the operator, then a supervisor, then whoever arranges for Hunter’s not-exactly-legal security detail….He wants to save her these half-dozen conversations. Why? Because he can’t stop thinking of her as his true love, instead of one of his five assistants. He’s putting Colette’s interests ahead of his own, the inverse of their professional relationship.
“Forget it,” he says. “A new police car just arrived.”
“Parfait.”
She types into her device—fingers flying, greasing the various wheels of her boss’s life—while walking back to her perch at the kitchen counter.
Then he hears her gasp.
* * *
The small television on the counter shows police cars amassed in front of a train station, MENACE À LA GARE in big red letters across the screen.
“A bomb,” Colette explains. “At the Gare de Lyon.”
His mind jumps to how this will impact him, his today, his tomorrow, when he’ll be flying to Hong Kong. A bomb in a train station on the other side of Paris is not his problem. Not with the police stationed out front, and his bodyguard in the hall, in a neighborhood teeming with military, police, the presidential palace, the US Embassy. He’s safe.
Tomorrow’s flight will be brutal. What Hunter needs—it’s so obvious—is hi
s own plane. Not some chic little Gulfstream for short hops to vacation spots, but a big jet that could get him from anywhere on the planet to anywhere else.
After today, he’ll be able to buy one of those planes. After today, he’ll be able to buy anything. Have anything. Maybe even Colette.
4
PARIS. 8:58 A.M.
Kate watches another pair of police cars zoom through the intersection, breaking the peace of the rue du Cherche-Midi still in the process of waking up for business, doors unlocking, signs being turned over to OUVERT.
It’s easy to become uneasy these days, there’s a general foreboding in the air, plus an extra dread that’s special to Kate: the specter of her career imploding. She keeps hoping that she’ll be able to relegate it to the background, stop seeing it in the stark foreground at four A.M.
Flashes flood her consciousness, all her worst visions parading through. The life going out of Santibanez’s eyes, slumped against the tree trunk in the dark park in Oaxaca. The surprise of a woman’s pleading face in New York, her blood blooming into the carpet. The hateful, determined look on Julia’s face, drenched in the pounding rain atop the medieval wall of Luxembourg, the muzzle of her gun just inches from Kate’s forehead.
That seems so long ago, when they were still new to Europe.
Until she moved to Luxembourg, Kate didn’t have any experience with this variety of high-street retail, the same clerks working the same schedule for years, for lifetimes, closing up for lunch hours, for a whole month during les fermetures annuelles; half the people are gone in August, the other half in July. Back in DC, Kate did her shopping in supermarkets and big-box stores, a hazy blur on Saturday mornings, driving from this parking lot to that in the rain, waiting with other sensible cars in left-turn lanes, the household chores a halfhearted afterthought to distracted parenting and autopilot marriage and faltering career, one that had once been rewarding, exciting, and invigorating but recently had become frustrating, terrifying, and ultimately untenable.
One night, Dexter came home from another dispiriting DC day and asked, “What would you think of living in Luxembourg?”
Just like that: a whole different life. Expats.
There’s even a name for those traditionalists who take their holidays in August, and another for the upstarts who prefer July. Aoûitiens versus juilletistes.
Around the corner from home is a squeaky-clean, brightly lit new supermarket, but Kate prefers to shop the traditional way, beginning at the farmer’s market on a boulevard’s shady meridian, the fish guy and the fresh-fruit guy, the onion stall, the potatoes, the olives, the rotisserie meats, the butcher’s yellow chickens and quartered rabbits. Kate is buying a fistful of flowers when everyone pauses to watch a tight caravan of gendarmerie people-movers tear past, big blue vans with red-and-white-zebra-striped accents, blue sirens, ten flics ready to leap out of each, with riot gear and assault rifles over their shoulders plus automatic pistols in their holsters, a lot of armor, a lot of firepower.
Her phone chimes with an alert, an explanation for all this activity: a bomb threat reported at the Gare de Lyon.
Another day, another threat.
She continues her rounds of the commercial street, everything anyone needs, pharmacist and housewares, fromagerie and boucherie, a veritable explosion of health-food stores, bio this and nature that and fresh-pressed juices that all incorporate ginger or echinacea. With the bike-shares and smoking ban and electric-car chargers, the place is becoming California, there’s even a rash of burger joints, the type of fad that Kate thinks of as an American phenomenon, outsize passions for pit barbecue, for craft beer, for stuffing ducks into turkeys into cauldrons of deep-frying oil.
The longer she lives away from America—has it really been five years?—the less she identifies with her increasingly foreign homeland. The less she can imagine working her entire career for the American government. It was different when she had supreme confidence in the system, in its mechanisms for sorting leaders, for choosing the people entrusted with the privilege—the responsibility—of making decisions. But recent events suggest an institutional failure of epic proportions.
Yet still she remains over here, following orders from back there. And still she doesn’t know who, ultimately, is giving her the orders. That makes her increasingly uncomfortable.
What Kate does know is that her position is growing more precarious by the day, as her past failures are not offset by new successes. As Hayden continues to be disappeared. Peter too. As every day it becomes more possible that her career is over, it’s just that no one has yet bothered to inform her.
She takes her place on line among the women in the boulangerie, catches sight of her reflection in the store’s window. She’s a well-put-together woman on the early end of middle-aged, a working mom who hasn’t yet succumbed to the inevitable short haircut that French women all seem to adopt somewhere in their forties. That haircut isn’t something she’s willing to admit about herself, not yet.
Kate wants to look to other people the way she sees herself. She wonders if anyone, ever, has attained that goal.
Maybe tomorrow she’ll find something new to do for a living. Maybe tomorrow she’ll need to.
* * *
Kate’s work begins first thing every morning by checking on a handful of persons of interest scattered across Europe, their homes under surveillance, their devices hacked, wifi networks penetrated. She scans these updates before even getting out of bed.
Then she breakfasts her kids, clothes them, escorts them to school. Kate’s end-of-day professional hours are unpredictable: meetings with assets, with sources who want to be bought a drink, with snitches in need of cash. These obligations tend to arise beginning late afternoon; nobody stumbles across valuable intel when they’re asleep.
So her mornings are for householding, for making the rounds of her bonnes addresses, for meeting her husband at the café, an important component of her marriage-rehabilitation program. After Dexter’s betrayals, and her own behavior, Kate realized that she couldn’t continue to be a passive participant in her marriage. She couldn’t assume that everything would work out, as if marriage were a perfectly engineered rocket hurtling through the infinite expanse of outer space, with no friction, no resistance, no reason to slow down or veer off-course, to crash and burn.
There’s ample friction. Also plenty of foreign bodies that exert their own gravitational forces, magnetic attractions, repulsions.
Somebody needs to be active about keeping this marriage moving forward, on-course. Kate has lived with Dexter long enough to know that he isn’t going to be the pilot. So she instituted these semi-regular morning dates, eased into their schedules subtly, one proffered invitation after another, until it became a habit.
Kate is the pilot.
* * *
She glances at her watch, a guilt-induced anniversary present from Dexter. Are all men so transparent? Or just her own feckless husband?
The workday ahead of her will probably be uneventful—futile, even. But her dinner party tonight won’t. There’s a point to these relationships, working at them. It has been Kate’s turn to host for a while, a responsibility dodged too long. The guests will be school couples: the inevitable Hashtag Mom and her Hashtag Husband; the charming Dutch couple who look like siblings; the quiet Norwegian banker whose garrulous wife once drunkenly shared that he has a colossal penis—she held up her hands, staggeringly wide—and this subject now comes up every few months, during that portion of a girls’ night when someone invariably admits to some level of dalliance, an innocent crush on the math teacher, a not-so-innocent tryst with a bartender, backroom blowjobs and a brief pregnancy scare—though never Kate’s indiscretion, that never comes up, not to anyone, not ever—and sooner or later someone will ask, straight-faced, “So has anyone seen Olaf’s cock lately?” and they’ll all crack up, double over, trying desperately not to l
augh wine-bar pinot noir through their nostrils.
It’s not a bad life.
5
PARIS. 9:01 A.M.
Dexter Moore hears sirens, somewhere in the distance.
He glances at his wristwatch: just past the dot of nine o’clock. He looks over his shoulder: once again, no one is waiting. Throngs used to queue up for these half-dozen tennis courts, everyone wearing whites, sipping coffee, leafing through newspapers, chattering away.
Not today.
Dexter has played badly this morning, distracted, his mind wandering unproductively around unpleasant subjects, building up his anxiety, degrading his play, a vicious cycle.
He suspects that the reason these courts have become unpopular is their proximity to the Sénat. Nobody wants to be playing tennis here if a bomb goes off at the legislature, possibly lethal and—worse—deeply shameful, to be killed that way, your Lacoste’d body found under an umpire chair, a sweatband around your wrist. Insupportable.
“Bon match,” he says to Luc, in what he knows is a poor accent. Dexter has lived in French-speaking countries for a half-decade now, and he really did try his best—private lessons, vocabulary memorization, verb-conjugation exercises—but with limited success. Which is another way of saying: failure.
“You sure you don’t want to come tonight?”
Luc looks up from unwrapping his knee brace. “It will be four married couples?”
“That’s right.”
Perhaps nothing seems like a bigger waste of a night to a guy like Luc, a divorcé constantly on the make, always hyper-aware of every woman within striking distance, who isn’t wearing a ring, who’s most attractive, who’s most likely to sleep with him. Luc never stops collecting phone numbers and drinks dates and notches on his belt, morning-after regrets and disappointments and exes. He sees his kids only on Sundays, after kicking out Saturday night’s date, burying the condom wrappers deep in the bin where the children won’t see them when they’re tossing away the wrappers of the chocolate bribes, ticking off every divorced-dad cliché in one fell swoop.