The Paris Diversion

by Chris Pavone

  “I’m trying to reach the public-relations department.”

  “Hold one minute, please.” But Kate has to wait only seconds before someone new comes on the line. “Bonjour! This is Schuyler Franks in community engagement?”

  Kate’s fingers fly, typing in Schuyler Franks and 4Syte and Paris, and the young woman’s photo pops up, her contact info, hits for a LinkedIn profile, Facebook, a college young-alumni association and a volleyball team and a high-school graduating class, an article in a local newspaper about where the graduates will attend college. There’s so much information about everyone, so available, requiring so little effort.

  “Hi Schuyler. I’m looking for Hunter Forsyth.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Forsyth isn’t available? What’s this regarding?”

  “Is he in the office?”

  “I’m sorry, may I ask who’s calling?”

  “Is Hunter Forsyth on your premises at this moment?”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, but that information isn’t something I can just, y’know, give out to anyone? But if you help me understand why you’re asking? That would be super-helpful?”

  So: the staff are still in their offices, not evacuated; these women both sound calm, business as normal. Which means the Paris office is not under attack, no violent threat has been made against 4Syte’s European headquarters. At least not yet. Or not in the same way.

  * * *

  Hayden had been right: after a few weeks, Kate was summoned to a meet. For the only time since the Paris Substation was established.

  She spotted her contact right away, limping his way through the park, sidestepping the children darting about, smiling indulgently at the little ones flinging sand, their mothers gossiping on benches. This man was clearly a father himself, accustomed to the constant disarray, always prepared for crisis.

  The place des Vosges was a well-chosen venue, large enough to be anonymous but small enough that from the right vantage you can see nearly everyone scattered around the park’s well-groomed foliage, the square-cut trees, the conical shrubs.

  The man collapsed onto one of those uncomfortable-looking high-backed wooden benches near a fountain. He didn’t seem old enough to be so exhausted, so tottering. Injury, Kate guessed, maybe he’d blown out his knee in the weekly pickup game with guys from law school. He looked like he could’ve been from New York, as Hayden suspected. But then again he could’ve been from Washington, or Langley, or Moscow via an intensive English-language immersion program in New Hampshire. He could’ve been from anywhere. If someone makes a concerted, professional effort, it’s impossible to tell.

  Clusters of teenagers were nearby, sitting cross-legged, smoking cigarettes. A grade-school girl was doing a tumbling routine on one patch of grass, while on another a couple of boys were kicking a ball. Neither field was quite big enough for its activity, but the kids were making do. City kids, city life.

  The American man unfolded a newspaper, crossed his legs gingerly. He lit a cigarette. After just a single drag, he tossed the butt, ground it out on the dirt path littered with leaves, with twigs, but with surprisingly few cigarette butts.

  Despite appearances, those high-backed benches are surprisingly comfortable. Kate rose from hers, and made her approach.

  * * *

  “Bonjour?” Dexter answers tentatively. He doesn’t recognize the number; Kate has placed this call on a Travelers’ secure line.

  “Hi Dex.”

  “Hello my wife. This is a lot of phone calls for us, isn’t it?”

  “Listen: where’d you get your information about 4Syte?”

  “My information?”

  “You know what I’m asking.”

  He pauses, then admits: “Luc.”

  “And where’d he get it?”

  “We shouldn’t be talking about this on the phone, should we?”

  “Why not?”

  He doesn’t answer, which is all the answer she needs. Then he says, “An investor named Reinhard Jeckelmann. I think you met him, at Luc’s party?”

  A louche affair with an ill-conceived guest list, an embarrassing imbalance of single women, free radicals floating around the party, gravitating toward the men, many of them married. Kate remembers Jeckelmann as a disagreeable German, angular eyeglasses and poor manners, a general brusqueness.

  “And where did Jeckelmann get his info?”

  “Someone inside 4Syte, but I don’t know who exactly. Jeckelmann didn’t tell Luc, or Luc didn’t tell me, and I didn’t feel like I could press him. Or should.”

  “Why’d this person come forward to Jeckelmann with this leak?”

  “They knew each other somehow. Earlier in life.”

  “But you don’t know how?”

  “That’s not something anyone would share. To protect everyone else.”

  That makes sense. But that doesn’t make it true. “And you just accepted this?”

  “No, I didn’t just accept this. I did exhaustive due diligence. I made dozens of calls, full days of research.”

  She sighs loudly enough for him to hear, on purpose.

  “This information is not slam-dunk true, Kate, but I’ve executed far more speculative trades based on far less convincing intel, successfully. Profitably.”

  Profitability is no longer Kate’s primary concern. But she doesn’t want to share her suspicions with Dexter, at least not yet. She doesn’t want him to flip out. “Has anyone ever given you info like this before?”

  “Sure. Some people have shared tips with me. And vice versa.”

  “Anything illegal, Dex?”

  A second of silence, two. “It’s not always black-and-white.”

  * * *

  Kate had been in command of the Paris Substation, temporarily, until Hayden returned; but he never did. So Kate was in command until a replacement was found; but a replacement was never found. So this man had come to Paris to tell Kate that she was now in command, full stop.

  “This substation is yours,” he said. “Are you ready for it?”

  “I am,” Kate answered quickly, trying to manufacture self-confidence by projecting it. She had no idea if she was really ready. But she definitely wanted it.

  “I guess we’ll find out,” he said, pushing himself up with a wince and a low groan.

  When she was young, Kate imagined that these moves happened by careful design, with exhaustive interviews and committee meetings and long training periods. But she’d come to understand that life doesn’t work that way. So much is haphazard, one short-term problem solved after another, with scarcely a sideways glance at any big picture.

  That’s how someone like her can be thrust from a part-time position to full-time, from freelancer to manager of a secret substation that’s subject to no chain of command, no oversight. Which unfortunately also meant no access to Agency resources, assets, networks, files, personnel. Nothing except a tenuous connection to this other clandestine bureau, managed by a Frenchwoman, hiding above a high-end travel bureau.

  This isn’t the way anyone would deliberately design anything, but here it was, here Kate was, suddenly abuzz, more excited than she would’ve expected. She’d come to the place des Vosges fully prepared to be fired, she was already considering options on how to console herself. But instead she was leaving with a giant promotion bestowed by this man from New York, who despite the creaky limbs was sexy, and the thought of him flickered in her brain, a fleeting fantasy, or maybe it wasn’t exactly her brain that generated this idea that propelled her homeward as fast as possible, pedaling across the Île St-Louis and then along the actual bank of the Left Bank, ditching the bike, rushing upstairs.

  “Hey?” Dexter said, turning away from his computer, surprised to see his wife in the middle of the afternoon. “What are you doing here?”

  “Let’s make this quick.” Kate unfurled her pan
ties, dropped them to the floor. She was planning to keep everything else on, even her boots. Especially her boots. “I need to get back to work.”

  * * *

  She stands at the mirror in the Travelers’ small bathroom. She unzips an interior pocket of her handbag, removes a nylon packet. She extracts a couple of hairpins, and secures her hair tightly to her scalp. Then she pulls out a blond wig, a messy mop of coif, a distraction of a hairstyle. She tugs here, pushes there, good enough. She adds a set of thick-framed eyeglasses.

  “Okay,” she says to Inez. “Let’s go. I’ll explain on the way.”

  34

  PARIS. 12:01 P.M.

  “…and stocks are down across the board due to massive uncertainty regarding the ongoing terror attack in Paris, which is about to enter the third hour of a standoff between an apparent suicide bomber at the Louvre and the authorities.”

  Dexter looks out the dormer window, past the shutters that hang on hinges topped with finials that are little cast-bronze statuettes of men, tiny servants whose job it is to preside over hinges.

  “We also have unconfirmed reports—and let me stress, these reports have been neither confirmed nor denied by any officials—of other threats against high-visibility targets in Paris, beyond the Louvre and the Gare de Lyon. And we just learned, only moments ago, that there might be a threat in Mumbai, and that’s where we go now, to our…”

  Dexter listens to the Indian reporter for only a minute before he understands that she doesn’t know anything. This is the sort of report that didn’t exist until the advent of twenty-four-hour so-called news stations that need to fill every moment of every day with something, preferably alarming, to prevent viewers from changing the channel.

  He lowers the volume of this report in one of the windows on his large screen, the one he uses to monitor the international broadcast-news stations to which he pays varying degrees of attention, plus the home-pages of a few media outlets that continue to be known as newspapers, despite the increasing irrelevancy of the actual paper.

  Otherwise, Dexter’s vision is filled with numbers, almost entirely red. Over the past hour, the share price of nearly everything to do with Europe has dropped, at least incrementally, and some of it dramatically. It’s not a general panic, but it’s getting close. And if the Louvre situation doesn’t get resolved soon, who the hell knows.

  This is both good and bad. Dexter obviously wants one particular stock to tank, but he’s extremely motivated for some others to turn it around. Just thinking about it makes his chest tighten. He stands, stretches, takes a few purposeful breaths…

  That’s not enough; he needs a real break.

  Some days Dexter doesn’t even emerge from the apartment for lunch. He keeps the refrigerator stocked with yogurt, little glass jars of different combinations of fruits and spices and sweeteners. The nearby supérette’s largest section is yogurt, everyone in Paris seems to eat it with every meal. Yogurt or Nutella, sometimes both.

  Something is tugging vaguely at his consciousness, pulling his concentration into some murky corner where he can’t recognize what it is that his mind’s eye is trying to look at.

  Is it something he just learned, or should have? Or…?

  * * *

  Dexter showers, dresses himself like a grown-up Frenchman. He’s still a nerd, and will be forevermore, but he can no longer be identified as one as quickly, from as far away. Dexter is of that generation who embraced nerdiness as a badge of so-called authenticity, contriving to be uncool by exaggerating their awkwardness, shuffling their feet and slouching their shoulders and stammering, wearing shirts that didn’t fit in colors that didn’t flatter, a uniform of antifashion.

  Then he turned forty-five, and realized he looked like an idiot. He stopped wearing sneakers except for exercise. Started wearing jackets—actually, jacket in the singular, the same navy canvas every day. Button-down shirts in a finite assortment of light blue or white, no more T-shirts. He has forsaken the geeky rimless Bill Gates look for tortoiseshell eyeglasses, and every six weeks he endures a proper haircut from a stylist, a concession to his wife, who had grown tired of looking at his walk-in-barbershop hatchet jobs.

  He has even begun to clasp his hands behind his back, like any other middle-aged-plus Frenchman walking down the boulevard. Trying it out.

  It wasn’t just the bad haircuts that Kate had grown tired of. And she’d grown tired of keeping it all to herself. They’d had a tumultuous few years. It would be a mistake to pretend that the rough patch was over. Maybe it never would be. Maybe that’s not how marriage works.

  * * *

  When the realization makes a sneak-attack on his consciousness, Dexter runs back down the hall wearing only one shoe, rushing toward his computer, trying to figure out what this could mean…

  He’d been taken advantage of before, exploited, while he’d been utterly convinced that he was being the genius, that he’d anticipated every possible problem. Afterward, he told himself: never again.

  So now he sits at his terminal, staring at the news reporter, a stand-up shot in a busy city on another continent, trying to figure out if there can be any connection among terror threats here in Paris, and terror threats there in Mumbai, and himself.

  Yes.

  * * *

  For such a long time, Dexter and Kate had lived so responsibly, and he’d disdained the rampant profligacy he saw everywhere in America, consumerism amok, all the fossil-fueled toys—the SUVs and ATVs, the speedboats and Jet Skis—and the double-height foyers and picture-windowed great rooms and slate-surrounded swimming pools, every house twice as big as anyone needed, wall-mounted plasma TVs everywhere.

  Even as Dexter scorned all this acquisitiveness, he also envied these people. Not their stuff, but the freedom they enjoyed to be so irresponsible.

  Then his own money started to flow in. His trades were predominantly positive, and his confidence grew each week as he tallied the results on his obsessively maintained spreadsheet of realized gains and losses, of current valuations against purchase prices. So one decision at a time, they took on this increasingly expensive life: Paris, the international school, the apartment, matching luggage and Michelin stars, an incremental accumulation of comfort, restaurants three or four nights a week, Tuesday-night family suppers of nothing special—roast chicken, wood-oven pizzas—whose bill comes to a hundred euros.

  Dexter had allowed himself to fall victim to the excess of confidence that can come with an insufficiency of experience. Something he’d been quick to notice in other people, but was awfully slow to recognize in himself. This isn’t so hard, you tell yourself. That nincompoop over there can do it, so can I.

  So perhaps this is what he has coming to him, like any other overextended entitled American who thought he deserved everything.

  There are so many awful aspects. The constant sense of dread, the nightmares, the panic attacks. The shame and embarrassment of having been so wrong; not only of being such a rank amateur, but of being unwilling to acknowledge it, even to himself. The intense loneliness, unable to share his problems with anyone, especially with his wife, who’s not only the single person who’d care the most, the one person most affected, but also the only person with whom he’d want to discuss it.

  He’s reminded of Hemingway’s line from The Sun Also Rises, Mike explaining how he went bankrupt: “Gradually, then suddenly.” Dexter used to think it was funny.

  He knows there have to be many commonalities between Mumbai and Paris, but at the moment he can think of only the one, and only one reason for it.

  35

  PARIS. 12:19 P.M.

  Kate examines another of those huge doors that are everywhere in Paris, big enough for horse and carriage, doors that open up to schools, to courtyards, to private mews, to that surprisingly large segment of the city that isn’t visible to the public. This set is wide open, and the broad archway between is
barricaded with magnetic-card turnstiles, and a small hut where a guard sits, looking bored. It’s an unusual level of security for a Paris office building, but Kate isn’t surprised. Inside is an American tech company, and almost no one is more paranoid, except absolutely everyone in Kate’s line of work.

  Inez pulls up on her own Vespa, parks a few meters beyond Kate’s.

  A small crowd of young people is clustered on the sidewalk for their pause clope, each wearing an ID badge hanging from a lanyard, or clipped to a lapel. Everybody under thirty in Paris seems to smoke. It’s like America a hundred years ago.

  “Do you have any credentials?” Kate asks as Inez stows her helmet.

  “Credentials?”

  Kate cuts her eyes across the street.

  “Ah,” Inez says, seeing the security guard, understanding. “Non.”

  Kate herself doesn’t have any authority here, no reason for anyone to let her in anywhere, to provide her with any information about anything. “Can you make a distraction?”

  Inez cocks her head, running through the imaginary interaction, her line of dialogue, his. “Yes.” She glances down at herself, her blouse. Unclasps a button. “I will have the guard open his door. It will be three, four seconds after, that is when you should be at the gate. Ça marche?”

  “Yes.”

  “The mark will be when I sneeze. Then sixty seconds precisely. D’accord?”

  Kate nods. She glances around, searching for any apparent problem, any reason not to do this right now—

  Oh my God, look at that.

  “One moment,” Kate says. “I’ll be right back.”

  * * *

  Kate was the one who’d done everything. The research, the specialists, the pharmacies, the follow-ups, every medical assessment of her shirtless little boy, his bony shoulders and hollowed-out chest, he looked so fragile, so vulnerable, so quiet, so scared. This was the boy who used to laugh so easily, not just at the joke in front of him in the book or the movie, but at all the jokes in the world, the joke of life itself. Now he went entire days without even smiling.