The Paris Diversion

by Chris Pavone

  Julia doesn’t obey. “This doesn’t change anything, Kate. I still own Dexter’s freedom. And your livelihood.”

  The traffic noise grows more insistent, the buzzing of an engine.

  “Unless you’re going to kill us all? In cold blood?” Julia doesn’t seem to be worried about that possibility, not at all. “Is that what you’re going to do, Kate?”

  This engine buzz is different, on a different aural plane. Kate realizes what it is.

  “Murder us all?”

  “You!” Kate yells at the guy called Richie, who has moved a few steps away from the boat. “Very, very carefully, toss your gun into the water.”

  She can see him pretending to consider his options. Maybe he’s the type of guy who’s never willing to admit defeat, not without making a show of something.

  “Understand that I will not hesitate to shoot,” Kate says. “And there is absolutely no chance I’ll miss.”

  He begins to comply, reaches into his waistband, then Kate senses movement on the boat, she cuts her eyes over there but keeps the gun trained on the man, and—damn, yes—it’s definitely another person—

  “No!”

  —and Kate hears Julia’s scream but doesn’t know who her scream is directed at, or why, and she rotates her arms in a rapid arc toward the boat, to find this new target, to neutralize—

  Shit.

  It’s a young woman. She’s holding a baby to her chest. Another unexpected young woman. Another unexpected baby.

  Shots begin to explode.

  79

  PARIS. 7:50 P.M.

  Ibrahim Abid exited the préfecture headquarters through the public doors on the place Louis Lépine, around the corner from where the media was camped, waiting for formal comment, which would be edited down into a seven-second sound bite and spliced into a ninety-second package, leading the hour before moving on to whatever is the latest crisis in the Middle East, and the worst of today’s sub-equatorial natural disasters, and the inevitable Johnny Hallyday retrospective.

  What they would have loved, these reporters, was to talk to him. The shooter.

  They would never imagine it, this dark-skinned man wearing baggy jeans and a hoodie. The media were more likely to imagine that such a man was a relative of the bomber, or a friend from madrassa, just now being released after an hour of questioning, cell phone confiscated, ordered not to leave town.

  Ibrahim’s debrief had taken an hour. There will be more tomorrow, plus psychological evaluations, and trauma specialists, and solicitous meetings with upper echelons, pats on the back, firm handshakes. Sooner or later, someone will present him with a medal, a private ceremony. But no press release. No public acknowledgment.

  He bypassed the Métro entrance. Without making a purposeful decision not to take the subway, he started to walk in the direction of home. Through the flower market, where on Sundays street vendors sell birds, which makes the place seem more like Africa, or Asia. He took the pont Notre-Dame, walked past the Hôtel de Ville, from whose roof someone was at that moment looking down on him, another sniper up there, wondering who was that man, what did he want. Ibrahim did not look up. Past Beaubourg, all that self-referential intellectual-architecture exoskeleton; he does not go to museums, not since primary-school class trips.

  Ibrahim took a zigzag through the Marais, the sidewalk cafés full of men, tight jeans and tight tees and tightly cropped facial hair. Then the Jewish street, which had become a shopping street plus falafel, hundreds of people standing in queues for sandwiches, dozens more simply standing, taking pictures of their overstuffed pitas, shopping bags at their feet.

  Up through Oberkampf, young people spilling out of loud bars, tattoos, cigarettes. Graffiti here and there, dilettante stuff, token resistance. Like the tattoos.

  One Paris after another, none his own.

  Little by little, the grandeur gave way to concrete apartment blocks with laundry hanging from twine lines, radar dishes, pinned-up bedsheets as curtains. Jackhammering, a torn-up street, a crumbling building behind rusted-out fences, covered with graffiti that was more political, more convincing.

  As Ibrahim climbed the hill, store signs began to appear in Eastern alphabets. The languages he heard were no longer English and German and Japanese; what was not French was Arabic, Chinese, Farsi. There were Turc kebabs, Moyen-Orient grocers, the traiteur chinois, the smell of five-spice everywhere.

  He was exhausted. He had awoken before dawn, was at the museum by eight, worked a full and horrible day, and now had walked for an hour into the night.

  After taxes, his net salary today was 120 euros. Some days, his job is an easy way to earn that money, enough for a new pair of shoes, or a few days’ meals for the family; his household responsibility is the midweek supermarché run, bags of rice and dried beans and the dark-meat parts of chickens, the sinewy segments of lamb, the less expensive everything.

  Today was definitely not one of the easy days.

  Some people earned a lot of money today, sitting around, pushing buttons on a keyboard. Not Ibrahim. He worked hard, for not much.

  His feet are sore, his body aches from the tension of the day, his brain is tired, he is not thinking clearly. So when he sees the police lights flashing, it does not occur to him that he should turn the other way.

  * * *

  It is dark here, the nearest streetlight is not functioning, but even in the darkness and from a distance of hundred meters, Ibrahim can see that it is Samir who is being hassled, frisked. A handful of people are watching with passive interest, but no one is surprised, Samir is a small-time neighborhood operator, no stranger to the police. But Ibrahim has known Samir since crèche; this guy is no terrorist.

  The two patrolmen do not look familiar to Ibrahim. But it is dark. Maybe when he gets closer, he will recognize them.

  Samir says something that must be really inadvisable, because one of the flics kicks Samir’s legs out from under him, and Ibrahim’s childhood friend face-plants into the concrete, starts screaming in pain.

  It all happens so fast.

  Samir spins on the ground and lashes out, kicking upward in anger, catching the arm of one of the flics, who responds with his nightstick, one quick shot to the ribs, one to the face. It is a disproportionate reaction, brutal.

  “Hey!” Ibrahim yells. He takes a couple of quick steps, then yells “Hey!” again, this time louder, and breaks into a jog. “You are hurting him!”

  The flic who is not beating on Samir spins, his gun already drawn.

  Fifty meters away.

  It is so obvious, to Ibrahim, that he himself is one of the good guys.

  “I am police!” he yells, continuing to jog toward the confrontation. Today of all days, it does not occur to him that he could look like anything else. But it is dark, he is wearing civilian clothes, a beard, it is a tense scene, he understands that misunderstandings are possible, of course he does, so he knows he needs to clear things up, which is why he reaches his right hand into his sweatshirt’s pocket, for his badge.

  Crack.

  He hears the sound, but he does not understand where it came from, who is shooting at whom, another overreaction, he certainly hopes no one is taking potshots at cops, the whole neighborhood could end up in flames.

  Then he feels it, and understands.

  He stops running.

  Most people see it coming from a distance, from the clear vantage of hours or days, from months or even years or decades, they can see the rapid organ failure or the slow general decline, the inexorable march, the inevitable end.

  But other people do not, especially young people, people who are on the cusp of the prime of their lives, people who have never given any real thought to it, nothing more than a few fleeting seconds, now and then, in a completely abstract way, nothing like this:

  Ibrahim Abid staggers, and stumbles, and
falls to one knee, then the other, and is kneeling there in the middle of the street, holding his badge in his palm, never even realizing that he is already dead.

  80

  PARIS. 7:59 P.M.

  Kate drops to the ground, her ears ringing from the booming reports bouncing off all the surfaces under this bridge, the stone, the iron, the water.

  She might have been shot, but she can’t feel it yet, she doesn’t seem able to feel anything, she’s rolling to free her right arm, her shooting hand, bringing the weapon up, sweeping left, and right—

  Where the hell is Julia?

  It’s all very dark, then suddenly it’s not: the moped’s headlight ignites, and now she can see Bill lying there, unmoving, and the man who threw a shot at her, he’s kneeling near the wall, and Kate is about to squeeze the trigger when another shot explodes in bright fiery light, and the man crumples. Hit by Inez.

  But where the hell is Julia?

  This has been Kate’s main question for years, her primary mission, the target of her professional resources. Kate recruited policemen, she recruited hospital administrators, shopkeepers, she eventually had dozens on her payroll, in Sicily and then in Venice, to track this woman who never went anywhere recently except a couple of nights alone at a hotel in the Lido, but otherwise stayed put in Santa Croce with her baby, it must be the same baby who’s in the boat right now, but Kate can’t see—

  No.

  That’s not possible. Is it? No. It’s impossible that she shot a baby.

  No, no, NO, she did not shoot the woman holding the baby, she did not shoot anyone.

  Did she?

  How long has it been? One second? Five? Fifty? She can’t tell. Shouldn’t the baby be crying? Why would a baby not be crying from all this noise, this yelling, this gunfire? Why?

  Kate feels like she’s falling, down, down through the paving stones, the packed-earth of the embankment, the bedrock beneath, down through the earth’s crust to its core, to the molten burning pit of a hell that until this moment she didn’t believe in.

  * * *

  What is the very worst thing you can do? What if you do it? How do you live with yourself?

  She just did it.

  Kate lies in the dark, frozen with fear, with horror, with self-loathing.

  She just killed a baby.

  Kate should show herself, that’s what she should do. She should stand up, present herself in the harsh light of judgment. She should leave her gun lying on the ground, she should leave her hands at her sides, she should wait for her penance, her punishment.

  Yes. That’s what she deserves. She shifts her weight, pulls in her arm, starts to—

  Another startling burst of light, this one in the distance, it’s the Eiffel Tower’s light show commencing, and—there!—there’s a backlit Julia, who in turn sees Kate in this sudden illumination, and raises her arm—

  * * *

  So this is it, Kate thinks. This is how I die.

  Time stands still.

  I did all right, I guess. The children I made are wonderful, they will go out into the world and be good people, lead fantastic lives. What else does any of us leave behind? Kate Moore is not Baron Haussmann, she is not fashioning a world capital out of her imagination, not creating lasting art, curing disease, leading nations, peace among men. Whatever second act Kate may have conjured would have been smaller, not larger, than her modest first. She has led one insignificant life, and it will have continued to shrink until she became nothing but an unremarkable ex-spook, hoping her children phone on Sunday night.

  What had she wanted? It’s hard to remember, exactly. She’d tried to do no harm, but she did plenty of it, didn’t she? That’s disappointing. And it’s a failure if you can’t tell your husband, your children, what it is you’ve done with your life, if you have to be ashamed. That’s obvious.

  What should she have done instead? Should she have had more fun? More sex with her husband? With someone else? Torrid affairs, scuba diving, hang gliding, Antarctica? Should she have played more, kissed more, tried more? Done more?

  You don’t get any medal, at the end. There’s no ceremony, congratulations, you’ve been a paragon of goodness, we are pleased to present you with this fine gold watch. And she already has the gold watch anyway. Her husband gave it to her.

  She watches Julia, flickering in the tower’s light show, turning toward Kate, toward Kate’s end, both arms up, swinging in her direction.

  This is it.

  * * *

  With all this light, all this sound, all these bullets and adrenaline and fear, Kate has not realized that when Inez fired her gun just a few feet from Kate’s right side, the loud close explosion deafened Kate’s right ear, the same ear that’s facing the river, facing the boat, and this deafness is what’s preventing Kate from hearing the loud noise that’s emanating from the boat: the sound of a terrified baby crying at the top of his lungs.

  * * *

  Nothing happens.

  Then: still, nothing happens.

  Then Kate begins to hear something, a high-pitched sound, yes, it’s the baby, and Kate opens her eyes, and what she sees is that Julia’s arm is raised, and what she’s holding is not her gun, it’s her baby.

  * * *

  Bill is dead.

  The other man too, whoever he is.

  The woman who’d been holding the baby has run into the night, sobbing.

  Inez has also fled, and advised Kate to do the same. The police will be here very soon, and there will be a lot of them.

  Julia, unarmed, is holding her baby, staring at Kate, who is holding her gun.

  In that final instant before death, this is what Kate realized was the thing she’d done wrong with her life: she should have been better. She should have been nicer, more frequently, to more people.

  That’s what she regretted. That’s what had led her to tonight’s mortal crisis: she’d chosen to be mean.

  That’s what she will do differently. Beginning right now.

  “Here,” she says, and thrusts something into the other woman’s hand.

  Julia looks down, confused. It’s Kate’s business card—phone number, e-mail address, affiliation with an ersatz consulting enterprise. Kate turns over the card to where she has just written a long string of digits.

  Julia turns her eyes back up to Kate. “Why?”

  Kate doesn’t have the time to explain everything, all the people she has wronged, and killed, all the lives she has ruined, all the times she has deceived her husband, screamed at her children, all the things she has done that she absolutely knew were wrong.

  She can see police lights flashing, the cars are coming over another bridge, they’ll be here in a minute.

  “Because I’m sorry. And I want this to end.” Kate pulls off her wig, tosses her gun into the Seine. “But if you ever come near me or my family again?”

  Julia nods, she understands.

  “Please try,” Kate says, “to do something good.”

  Then she turns away. Her bag is still slung over her shoulder, but a few items spilled out when she dropped to the ground. The case for her reading glasses, that unofficial credential of middle age, like a badge you have to carry everywhere, all the time, if you hope to be able to do anything. The old hardcover from the bookshop, Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair. And the box of Lego, a bit crushed, trampled upon, but all the contents are still inside. Not perfect, but it’ll do.

  A moment will come when the boys are finished with Lego, it will happen without warning and sooner than expected, and it will be months later before anyone notices that the Lego has gone untouched, the kids don’t play with it anymore, they’ve moved on to video games, to board games, to sports, to girls, to alcohol, and from that future vantage Lego will look so innocent, Kate will long for the past, for that period in life when she did this ted
ious thing every single day, this top-line job description: she bends over to pick up Lego.

  Then she sprints up the stairs. At the landing she can see that Julia is pulling the boat away from the riverbank, throttle in one hand and baby in the other, speeding away from the police.

  Kate never did pull her trigger tonight. It wasn’t Kate who shot anyone on the quay. And she never will again.

  Her bicycle is lying on the sidewalk. She looks over her shoulder, sees the police closing in. She pedals away with all the energy that her exhausted middle-aged body can muster, which as it happens is not inconsiderable; she can still be mistaken for a mademoiselle, after all. She bikes at breakneck speed back toward the park, back toward the twinkling tower, back toward her kids. Back to her life.

  * * *

  After weeks of rain and gray and increasingly hostile chill, today was an autumnal jewel, a reprieve that everyone knows will be brief, and the warm weather has drawn out not only throngs of tourists but also flocks of locals, it looks like everyone in Paris has arrived in a good mood at a surprise party, Kate cycles by young and old and everyone between, the cafés are all full, people packed onto the terraces, making conversation with strangers and neighbors, making out in corners, holding hands across tables filled with glasses of wine and bottles of beer, bowls of peanuts and ashtrays overflowing and half-eaten slices of tarte tatin, it’s still early enough that children are everywhere, playing on sidewalks and in the park, running and jumping and joyous noise, chasing balls and dogs and that final bit of fun before the unseen clock expires, and suddenly you’re called to come here, to go home, to go to bed, kids know this better than anyone, that you have to do it all right now, everything, because this can always happen without any warning whatsoever: you’re out of time.