The Paris Diversion

by Chris Pavone

  “Yeah. About that.”

  “Oh dear. Is something wrong?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  Kate promises herself this: you will never, ever again use that nickname, not even in your head. If this woman does this enormous favor for you, forevermore you must call her by her real name, even in—especially in—your mind.

  This will be hard.

  For a split-second it escapes Kate, she uses it so infrequently, but then she remembers Hashtag Mom’s real name: “Hailie, could I ask for a huge favor?”

  * * *

  Kate looks around this small room, exactly how a place like this should look, a refuge for visiting writers above a Left Bank bookshop. How long will Dexter hide out in here? Where will he go next? And will Kate—will the kids—go with him?

  “I’m going to leave you,” she says.

  Dexter’s jaw drops open, devastated. Misunderstanding.

  “Not permanently,” Kate clarifies. “But I have to go.”

  She arranged for Hailie to pick up the kids, and to call around to the other families to cancel dinner.

  “So, what?” Dexter asks. “I’m just supposed to hide here? Above a bookstore?”

  “We can’t risk you being seen by any police. We’ll need to get you new clothes, a shave, a haircut, a new everything. Did you give the cops your name?”

  “Fake name, address, phone number. But they do know that I keep a car in the garage.”

  It won’t be hard for the police to find Dexter, if they try. Will they? That depends on what else the investigators find in the coming hours, and what clues or evidence or anonymous tips are provided to help them. But if the police are hunting for an American in connection to terrorism, this bookstore refuge will last only so long. Dexter would be in custody within a day, and he might never be released. Who knows what would happen to a man like him, in a French jail, facing the sorts of charges that could be trumped up against him.

  Kate will need help getting the police called off, intervention from a legitimate authority. That will have to come from America; that will have to be part of the cleanup. Tomorrow. The day after.

  But maybe that won’t be necessary. Maybe there’s another solution, one built into the problem itself. Kate thinks she knows what it is, but not how to find it. And she’s running out of time.

  62

  PARIS. 3:39 P.M.

  He pushes himself up from his right side, his uninjured side, but it’s not as if the right is unconnected to the left, and the pain is immense, it’s overwhelming, and his arm buckles, and the pavement rushes up—

  * * *

  How long was he unconscious? It couldn’t have been for more than a few seconds, a minute, the light seems the same, the noise beyond the entrance to the tunnel, everything. No one has yet joined him here in the darkness. He’s still alone. Still shot. Still bleeding.

  He has to get up, get out of here. He braces himself for the pain, he knows it’s going to be horrible, he doesn’t want to be caught by surprise again, that was his mistake the first time.

  Use your lower body, he tells himself. He twists onto his stomach, and pain explodes from his shoulder. He pushes his weight into his knees and from there into the ground, and rolls onto his toes, and with every movement the pain continues to mount, it’s getting worse, and worse—

  Don’t pass out…Don’t…

  He pushes, and pushes, and—

  He’s standing. He did it. He’s dizzy, he’s out of breath. He can feel the blood trickling down his chest and stomach, warm and sticky, his shirt is already soaked, cool against his skin.

  He starts to walk. Stumbles past Wyatt’s corpse, it seems like a lifetime ago when he shot the guy.

  The gun slips from his grasp, clatters to the pavement. Damn. He starts to bend but realizes that’s a mistake, blood will rush into his wound and to his head, he’ll lose his balance, he’ll pitch over, crack his head—

  Instead he squats. Reaches for his weapon, manages to retrieve it without losing consciousness.

  He can hear the voices gathering out on the street, he can’t go out there, a crowd will be amassing. He walks in the other direction, toward the far end of the tunnel where it merges with the parallel street.

  The voices behind him grow louder. He walks faster.

  * * *

  Open daylight, blinding bright. He raises his hand to shield his eyes, surveys this very long block, maybe a quarter-mile to the next intersection. There are a couple of people near the far end walking in his way, but they don’t seem to be in any rush, they’re not investigating gunshots, they’re not coming for him.

  A car turns the distant corner, also heading his way.

  He takes a quick glance down at his shoulder. It’s pretty clear there’s a bullet hole in his jacket, but there’s no blood visible, or at least very little blood, it’s hard to say because the whole front of his clothing is soaking wet from lying in that pool of urine, and now that he’s giving himself the once-over he sees that he’s a complete fucking mess. He can’t stumble around the streets looking like this.

  The car is fifty yards away, decelerating as it approaches the split with the tunnel. As it approaches him.

  He sidesteps off the sidewalk, into the gutter, and takes another step and another, he’s in the middle of the roadway, it’s a narrow street with no room for parking on either side, no room for this car to swerve around him.

  Through the windshield he can see that the driver looks confused, then angry, then worried as he gets near enough to clearly see the state of this man who’s blocking the street. The driver seems to debate his options, whether to get out and help, or to roll down the window and inquire, or to throw the thing in reverse and get the hell out of there.

  Chris staggers sideways toward the car, keeping his right side shielded from the driver’s view, the uninjured side of his body, the side whose pocket holds the gun, which he slowly draws until he arrives at the window, places the muzzle directly against the glass, just inches from the guy’s face—

  “Sortez!” Chris screams. “Get the fuck out! Maintenant!”

  The guy’s hands are raised, as if he’s being held up, eager to show that he isn’t armed, please take my wallet, there’s no reason to shoot. He slowly lowers his left hand to the door handle.

  Chris takes a half-step backward, away from the door, in case the driver grows bold and tries to fling it open as an attack. The car is a beat-up old Renault the color of rust, like it came from the factory pre-shitty. The owner of a car like this shouldn’t take heroic measures to prevent its theft. Better off with the insurance settlement. But you never know, maybe there’s a bag of cash in the trunk.

  The door opens. One foot emerges, a running shoe, planted on the pavement. Then the other. The driver hoists himself up, then returns his hands to the please-don’t-shoot pose.

  Chris uses the gun to motion the guy away from his car, to the sidewalk. “Asseyez-vous!”

  The man obeys, sits at the curb.

  Chris tumbles into the seat. He realizes, a split-second too late, that it’s going to hurt like a motherfucker when he attempts to close the door with his left hand, and he screams out in pain, squeezes his eyes shut, shakes his head back and forth…

  The driver looks worried. “Monsieur? Si vous voulez…” He mimes pushing. Is this guy actually volunteering to help someone steal his car? Maybe what’s in the trunk is a dead body.

  Chris nods, then warns, “Attention.”

  “Bien sûr.” The driver approaches tentatively, shuts the door gently, backs away.

  “Merci.” Chris shifts into gear—it’s an automatic, thank God—and executes a jagged six-point U-turn while the driver watches, getting a better and better look at him, this guy will be able to help the police draw a sketch, he’ll be able to identify a photo, he’ll be able to provide a
positive ID if he’s confronted with something to compare…

  But who he’ll be able to identify is an American with a mountain-man beard and unruly hair and eyeglasses and a long scar on the side of his face. A version of a person that has only ever existed here, in this city, over the last few months. There is no long-term past tense of this person, no match to be made.

  Unfortunately, this wound suggests there won’t be a future tense either.

  Chris wishes it were true that he’s too young to die, that he doesn’t deserve it. But he knows that neither is true.

  * * *

  Excruciating pain shoots through him, and he barely manages to extend his arm to the machine, to pull the ticket out of the slot. The parking garage’s barrier raises, and he rolls the car slowly down the ramp, finds an empty space in a quiet corner. He’s panting, shaking, his vision blurry.

  He needs to think. And he needs to attend to his wound. He needs to think about attending to his wound.

  The trunk. Maybe there’s a first-aid kit in the trunk.

  No such luck. What does he find back there? A neon nylon emergency vest, a warning triangle, the things you’re legally required to keep in the trunk to pass safety inspection. Also a soccer ball and a pair of cleats, a plastic jug of motor oil, a half-full bottle of cheap vodka, an old sweatshirt, a roll of duct tape.

  A plan forms.

  With no small amount of effort and pain, he removes his shirt. He uses a window as a mirror to examine his wound: the bullet passed through. That’s the good news. The bad news is that these gunshot holes are seeping a lot of blood, and have been exposed to a surfeit of bacteria. He needs to disinfect.

  This is definitely going to hurt something fierce, maybe too much to stay conscious. He doesn’t want to soak the driver’s seat in vodka, in case he needs to drive again, so he walks to the passenger side, opens the door.

  He rips a few long strips of musty fleece from the sweatshirt. Tears lengths of duct tape, hangs them from the car’s roof.

  He sits. If he passes out, he wants to already be in a sitting position, no way to fall and crack his skull open.

  Okay, now there’s nothing left to do but to do it.

  Okay.

  He really doesn’t want to do this. But he has to. Now.

  Now.

  Now—

  He splashes vodka on his front entry wound, and it hurts so immediately and so much that his vision goes dark, and his whole body seizes. He feels a fresh wound appear on his lower lip, where his top teeth have dug into his flesh.

  The pain recedes, barely, from the brink of unbearable. He sits there, panting.

  That was bad. But he made it.

  The back will be worse, but fuck it, this time he doesn’t delay, doesn’t indulge in any pep talk, just throws a splash over his shoulder, which lands in the wrong spot—no pain—so he does it again, and then again, alcohol streaming down his back until—oh, God—there it is, and this time it’s the same sensations as with the front wound but doubled, trebled, it’s too much, it’s—

  * * *

  He comes to with a start.

  The vodka bottle has fallen from his hand. The glass remained intact, but most of the liquid spilled out.

  He wraps a few strips of sweatshirt around his shoulder, looping under his armpit, then secures the cloth with duct tape. He adds more strips at a different angle, more duct tape…

  Is this going to make any difference? Is this going to keep him alive? Maybe not. But it’s all he can do right now.

  He and his wife had discussed a wide variety of foreseeable problems, including this one. He knows what he’s supposed to do next.

  If only she’d listened to him—if he could’ve convinced her—then he wouldn’t be sitting here in this stolen Renault, shot, dying. He’d tried. But there was never any convincing her of anything.

  * * *

  It had taken him a while to come around to the big-picture viability of the scheme. At first it seemed so utterly outlandish, so completely unfeasible. Then she explained one element at a time, gambit after gambit, how the whole thing would coalesce. At the end, there was only one facet he still wasn’t sold on: framing Dexter.

  “It’s an unnecessary level of complexity,” he said. “It’ll make it that much harder to pull off, it adds challenges to every other component. We’ll need to choose our primary operative based on his looks, which is obviously not the best determinant for finding talent. We’ll need to research Dexter’s wardrobe, eyeglasses, sunglasses, everything, then we’ll need to buy all that, which will leave a trail—”

  “Not if we’re careful.”

  “Yes, even if we’re careful. The trail may be faint, but it will be there. And we’ll need to steal that ridiculous hat? Then replace it?”

  “The hat is the nail in the coffin.”

  “We’ll need to disable the security camera in the Métro station so our asset can change wardrobes. We’ll need to run the risks of the guy actually doing that.”

  “Please, it doesn’t even matter if someone—”

  “Yes, I know, I know: you can dismiss any one of these as quibbles. But as a whole, framing Dexter will add a lot of unnecessary risks to what’s already a very long list of necessary ones. You can’t deny it.”

  She didn’t, so he pressed his advantage. “Plus it’s an irrational choice. You know this, Susanna: the scheme is not stronger by framing Dexter. It’s weaker.”

  She shook her head, closed her eyes, trying to be patient. “If we don’t frame Dexter, we can’t get the fifty million.”

  “So what? So we make only five million euros? Ten?”

  She snorted, as if ten million were chump change, not worth getting out of bed.

  “It’s a good scheme,” he continued. “No: it’s brilliant. We can get rich and play it safe. If we leave Kate and Dexter out of it.”

  She shook her head again.

  “For fuck’s sake, why not?”

  “Because they’re the whole reason. Don’t you see that, Chris?”

  They hadn’t used their real names in years. Back when they were living in Luxembourg, they’d played characters called Bill and Julia MacLean. When they were forced by Kate to run, to hide, they adopted new names, variations on the names given to them by their parents: Craig Malloy and Susan Pognowski. He became Chris; she, Susanna. These were the only names they’d used for the past two years. That’s how new identities become real.

  “I worked so hard,” she said. “I planned for so long. Then she made a fool of me.”

  “A fool? No, that’s not what happened.”

  “They sat around, the two of them, and discussed how to screw me out of my fortune. I was going to be rich! And now look.”

  “Yes, exactly, now look: is this really so bad?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “No? Then what is the point?”

  “That she took it all from me.”

  “But she didn’t. All she took was the money.”

  “Don’t give me that shit.” Gritted teeth. “You know it wasn’t only the money.”

  Susanna was right. Kate Moore had taken much more than the money.

  “Just because we managed to get some things back, that doesn’t mean she didn’t take everything. Plus, we won’t be hurting anyone who doesn’t deserve to be hurt.”

  “Deserve to be hurt? What does that mean?”

  “You know exactly what that means. Our primary investor is a lifelong criminal, a rat, an informer. Our driver is a psychopathic murderer. A random douchebag amoral trader-bro in Hong—”

  “Is this really what you want?” he asked. “To put Dexter in jail? He didn’t do anything to you. Not really.”

  She snorted. “Dexter will never go anywhere near jail.”

  “Then why the hell do you want to
do all this?”

  “Because I want her to fear for her freedom, for her life, her home, her precious kids. It’s that terror I want Kate to feel. To live with.”

  This wasn’t surprising. His wife was charming; she was intelligent; she was clever, witty, sexy; she was beautiful. But she was not nice.

  “She didn’t need to ruin my life, Chris. She chose to do that.”

  He’d known this all along, well before they became a couple, he’d known this back when they were casual colleagues at the Bureau, sitting in the same meetings in the same conference rooms, everyone was impressed with her, but also at least a little bit scared.

  “So now I’m going to make her pay. Force her to make a horrible choice.”

  His eyes had been wide open, no one else to blame. Life is compromises.

  “Give me the fifty million euros, or I’ll ruin her fucking life.”

  * * *

  He has to put distance between himself and this car, which the police could be tracking this instant, surrounding the block, weapons drawn.

  Chris staggers up the ramp.

  He can’t type this out in a text-message, or an e-mail. It needs to be a conversation. And it needs to happen right now, before he gets caught. Or dies.

  She answers after one ring. “Hi.”

  “Hi.” He’s approaching the street, nervous about exiting, what could be out there. He stops, peeks around a wall: looks normal. He continues walking, and talking. “Things have…um…deteriorated.”

  She doesn’t respond.

  “I’m injured.” This type of voice communication—it’s not exactly a phone call—is supposed to be secure, but who knows anymore. “It’s bad.”

  Pause. “I’m very sorry to hear that.”

  “I can’t travel the way I planned. Not sure I can travel at all.” The pain is making him dizzy. “I need medical attention.”