Beautiful horse-chestnut trees grew everywhere. The end opposite the Arc de Triomphe was full of history and beauty, the Place de la Concorde being the largest public square in Paris.
We were on one side of the River Seine or the other for the entire ride. It looked lovely by night, but for a fleeting moment the river made me think of Holly and Susan, wondering which one of them had died a watery death, and whether they’d had some help getting there. Caroline must have sensed what I was thinking, or perhaps she was also thinking about it, because she squeezed my hand. The moment passed.
The Eiffel Tower is less romantic up close, I think, because you realize it’s just a monument, steel girders muffling the enchantment. It took from its magic for me, and I was sorry I’d seen it. We rode almost close enough to touch her, and as we looked up at her stretching toward the night sky so brightly lit, the magic returned, and she was as romantic as she’d ever been.
A light cooling breeze began to blow, causing Caroline’s hair to move in a gentle, feminine puff when a swirl crossed our path. We saw high-end shops and sidewalk cafés along the Champs-Élysées. We kissed romantically and noticed that Sonny and Katarina were doing the same. We got a sense of Paris and her uniqueness over the next hour. There existed a romance about her you could feel, but also, at least for me, a mystery. Perhaps it had to do with the real mystery I needed to uncover here, of who had died, Holly or Susan. But I couldn’t help feeling as Caroline nuzzled her head against my shoulder and I played with her hair, that the mystery of Paris was more than that. Why did you feel more romantic in Paris than in any other city?
Near the Opera House, Katarina poked Sonny and said, “Let’s walk the rest of the way. A lovers’ stroll.” Sonny looked down the long stretch of boulevard. “That’s a long way to walk!”
She smiled. “It’ll be romantic. And there’s a park near the hotel.”
“A park?” She looked at him and he got it. “Oh, a park.”
Alisha stopped the carriage and let them out. “Have a romantic rest of the evening,” she said. And with a flick of her wrist the carriage began moving down the boulevard toward the hotel.
“Well, it looks like it’s just you and me, kid,” I said.
She whispered in my ear, so that Alisha couldn’t hear, “Did you feel how soft that bed was, Seth?”
I kissed her and whispered something about trying it out when we got back. We did.
Twenty-Six
There is something about being in an unfamiliar environment that makes it difficult to sleep that first night, even if that environment is Paris. Perhaps especially if that environment is Paris. My body and mind hadn’t yet got into the rhythm of the City of Lights. Caroline managed to find sleep quickly after we made love, but I was more alert than ever.
Our balcony overlooked the boulevard below. I had left the sliding doors open for fresh air, and slipped outside to enjoy the sights of Paris at night as well as the sounds I’d been listening to as I lay next to Caroline. Katarina apparently couldn’t sleep, either. She was wearing sexy blue lace nightwear made sexier because she was wearing it. She was leaning against the railing with her rear jutted out, causing the already scant shorts to rise even higher, revealing a beauty that made Paris seem ordinary by comparison.
She heard me and when she turned her head to look, her expression was very serious. She couldn’t quite shake that delicious sex kitten thing, but there was someone real underneath, and that’s what I was seeing now.
I walked over next to her and leaned across the balcony railing with her. We gazed together at the headlights moving down the boulevard toward the Opera House, or away from the Opera House towards us, and the hotel. A park down the street filled with cherry trees in bloom was lighted. Couples were strolling along, and as we watched without talking, one by one they drifted toward the shadows where they could embrace. Katarina finally broke the silence, in a whisper.
“I’m sorry.”
“About what?” I asked, just as quietly.
“I have to break up with Sonny, and I don’t know how.”
I hadn’t seen that coming. “Why?”
“Because I love him, and we don’t belong together.”
“I’m not sure he’d agree. I haven’t seen him this happy since Maria was alive.”
“I know. That’s why I have to let him go.”
“What brought this on?” I asked sadly, knowing how Sonny felt about her. I had got the impression that she felt the same way.
“Tonight, I guess, with Caroline.” She sighed. “Fussing around with jewelry like a normal woman, giggling like a little girl. Finding it so…pleasurable.” She was quiet a moment. A little breeze blew across us and it felt good to be alive.
“I guess it started at the birthday party. That’s when I first felt it.”
I was beginning to get an inkling of the problem.
“Like an outsider, like you didn’t belong there because of all the things you’ve done?”
Her head whipped around, hard. Her pretty eyes were penetrating, searching. I let out a short laugh, a weary laugh. I suddenly realized I didn’t really know much about Katarina, but that I perhaps knew more about her than Sonny.
“Welcome to the club, darling. Every time I make love to that wonderful girl in there,” I said, pointing behind us, “or see her laughing and smiling at something, I have the same feeling. I think about all the scum like Vargas and Escobar, and I think of blood and the lives I’ve taken. Not all of them were in the line of duty.” I saw in her face that Sonny had told her about Escobar, just as I’d told Caroline. It meant he’d told her about Maria, too, maybe things he hadn’t even told me. I knew what that meant from Sonny’s end.
“Working with Vlad you have to have a little blood on your hands too,” I said, “even if you do operate on a lower, less brutal level.”
She took a moment before she replied. “Two. I’ve had to kill twice. Once, with a knife. He had a gun. He felt I’d betrayed him. I had, I’d slept with him first.”
I frowned. “That’s the worst way, the up close stuff. Especially if it’s someone you’ve had to fool. Undercover work is like that. You can get lost sometimes. You get to a point where you can’t even remember who you are, anymore.”
She nodded and closed her eyes for a long moment. I added, “Those guys who drop bombs from planes a mile high, they’re only able to live with it because they don’t have to see the results up close. It’s something abstract until you see the life draining from someone’s eyes, watch them go still.” I took a deep breath. When I spoke again, my voice was hoarse. “That’s when you realize you took that from them. You ended it all for them.”
We watched all the living going on in Paris for a long time. I’m not sure how long. Traffic was becoming more infrequent and fewer couples were out walking about in the park. The lights of the Opera House were bright, but those on each side of the boulevard were darkening, one by one. The restaurant where we’d dined was closed.
“Sonny’s so sweet. I’ve never met anyone like him.”
“Don’t kid yourself, Sonny has an aversion to guns, and the rough stuff, but he’ll go the whole nine yards for someone he cares about.”
When I saw the look on her face I knew then that that was exactly what this was all about. Not the fear that he wouldn’t, but that he would.
“Don’t you think I know that?” she shouted in a whisper. “And it will be my fault if he becomes…someone else because of me.”
She thought he’d hate her for changing him if that happened, and knew she’d hate herself for making him become someone other than who he was now. Sonny hadn’t told her everything.
Without meaning to, I murmured, “That ship’s sailed.”
“What do you mean?”
I couldn’t tell her without betraying Sonny. It wasn’t the kind of thing I could tell her, it had to be Sonny. But I could point her in the right direction.
“Has Sonny ever mentioned why he doesn’t like gun
s?”
She shook her head, quick on the uptake because of the kind of work she did. She knew I was giving her a clue, telling her something important.
I said softly, “Ask Sonny about his mom.” Then I leaned over and kissed her cheek. I whispered, “Sonny loves you. If you love him, and I believe you do, then don’t leave him until you talk to him.”
I turned and walked back inside our half of the suite, shutting the sliding door behind me.
My mind filled with an image from many years ago. Sonny had been drinking when he told me. We’d been in a cantina in a largely Cuban section of Miami. I rarely drank but he’d somehow talked me into trying some Mexican beer he liked. I told him it tasted like piss in a can, just like every other beer I’d ever tasted, and switched to Coke. All I’d done was ask him while we ate and drank why he hated guns so much, considering his chosen profession. I hadn’t expected an answer, we were just talking.
He’d become quiet, almost sullen, and then he told me. His mom had been a hooker, and a junkie on and off, but he hadn’t known. She usually plied her trade in cars, driving into back alleys to give blow jobs. If they wanted more, she had an arrangement with the clerk at some flea bag motel in the neighborhood; he’d give her an hour in a room, no charge, and he’d get a suck and swallow after the john was gone. The clerk lost his job and his replacement had a yen for black girls, so she lost her arrangement. It was all stuff Sonny found out later, when he was much older, and got to poking around.
One night his mom had brought a john back to their apartment. It was just the two of them living there because Sonny’s dad had run off when he was born, or at least that’s what he’d been told. After everything went down, he came to the conclusion that his father had probably been some john.
Sonny was used to being alone at night, and it was a school night, so he had fallen asleep. Noise woke him up. The door to his mom’s bedroom was closed, but he could hear her screaming. He heard the groaning and whimpers, the “Oh, Gods” and cries for Jesus, and thought someone was killing her. He’d been nine at the time. He knew his mom kept a gun stashed behind the TV and ran to get it.
The lock on his mom’s bedroom door had been broken for a long time. It wasn’t the kind of place where you called the super to fix stuff. When things broke or stopped working, they were just broke. Sonny walked in and saw them. The man was giving it to her in the behind, which is probably what he’d paid for. He had his back to Sonny and his mom was bent over at the foot of the bed. The man standing at the end of the bed getting his money’s worth raised his hand to give Sonny’s mom’s butt another good slap when Sonny raised the big gun in both hands, closed his eyes and fired.
The kick sent him sprawling through the doorway and separated his shoulder. When he opened his eyes, his mom was screaming. She was trying to crawl out from under the man draped over her. He had a big red spot on his back. He was dead.
Sonny told me he still remembered the look in her eyes as she saw him there on the floor, in shock and pain. He thought she’d come rushing over to hold him, to thank him for saving her. Instead she had just stared at him. Then angrily, she’d hollered, “Look what you’ve done!”
Those were her last words to him before the cops came and took him away. They got it all straightened out, and took him away from her. He ended up in the system, landing in foster care once shrinks evaluated him and decided he wasn’t some child sociopath, but just a kid too young to understand, trying to protect his mother. He’d run away from one home after another, trying to find her. They’d find him and stick him somewhere else. Finally he became of legal age, and found himself running contraband.
He’d seen her years later, he told me. About five years back from the time he was telling me about it. She was on the street but she wasn’t hooking as far as he could tell. Sonny stopped his car and got out to say Hello, maybe let her know he was okay. She’d looked right at him, then asked what he was staring at. She wasn’t giving him the brush-off — she hadn’t even recognized him.
What happened on the balcony only gave me more to ponder, and less chance of sleeping. I was still awake an hour later. Caroline was lightly snoring beside me. I reached over and touched her hair resting on the pillow. And then I heard muffled sound of sobbing through the wall, followed by a feminine voice, tender, soothing. I relaxed, knowing Katarina would never leave Sonny now, because she had all of him. I finally fell asleep, thinking about various kinds of brokenness.
Twenty-Seven
Caroline awoke earlier than I did, which meant I didn’t get to sleep in after being up late into the night. But she was warm and soft beneath the covers, and she made it up to me in the most wonderful way a wife can. As she slipped from the bed smiling to take a shower, I grabbed her again and she sat in my lap while I kissed her. She didn’t seem to mind at all.
I heard the shower running and went to open the sliding doors of the balcony. Paris was just waking, too. The smell of fresh bread baking filled the air. Cafés and bakeries were getting ready for Parisians on their way to work and tourists on vacation; both would need coffee and some sort of flaky pastry to get their day started. It smelled so good I wondered if I should eat something before we met Athea later in the morning.
The sun was up, but a hint of orange glow to the sky suggested it hadn’t been up a great length of time. Across the street just to the left of the restaurant a short man was setting up a flower cart. To his left, a small bakery had a few people standing in line for coffee, already. Well, not coffee, not really, according to friends and acquaintances. I didn’t drink the stuff for the same reason I didn’t drink beer — I thought it tasted awful — but knew if you did, it had just about been foo-foo’d out of existence by the same millennials constantly falling all over themselves to be offended by everything, and force everyone else to be offended by it, too. If you resisted, you just weren’t as enlightened as they were.
A trucker couldn’t get a cup of joe anymore, neither could a dock worker or a newspaperman. Nor could a farmer or the King of England, if there’d been one. It was cappuccinos, espressos, lattes, and mochas. You could have blonde roast, light, medium and dark roasts. You could have it milked down and decaf, and covered with a whisper of cinnamon. You could have it flavored with orange or hibiscus, hazelnut or vanilla, and spruced up with pumpkin spice or caramel. You could get it from Italy or Sumatra, Guatemala or West Java, Brazil or Pango Pango, or just good old France. You could get it with full cream, light cream, or no cream. You could get it organically grown with only bear droppings used as fertilizer, presumably. What you couldn’t get any longer was a plain black cup of joe.
I was with a black detective when he ordered a Kenyan blend with no cream, some time ago. He threw it out, telling me it might have been what they called black coffee, but the crap left a worse taste in his mouth than voting for Barack Obama the first time had. He’d been too smart to be fooled again by Obama, or the coffee. He voted straight Republican after that, like most cops, and had his wife make him a thermos full of joe every morning.
I threw on some fresh clothes and popped my head into the bathroom for a moment. I hollered, “I’ll be back in a few minutes.” Caroline hollered back, “Okay,” and in a couple of minutes I was outside the hotel.
A tall, leggy French girl on her way to work was looking at her phone and almost walked into me as I crossed the street. I dodged her just in time and she glanced back to give me a dirty look. How dare I not realize the importance of her early morning text message. I wondered how humanity managed to work and accomplish things before our time in history; the invention of electricity, the radio and the light bulb; creating the combustion engine and then building roads for people to travel on; creating aircraft so mankind could travel faster between great cities they planned and built; the industrial revolution; NASA landing a man on the moon; the invention of the microwave so single guys could make TV dinners and not starve. How had mankind managed it all without texting each other every five minute
s? Or had they been able to accomplish all these things because they didn’t have this frivolous distraction disconnecting them from dreaming and inventing, and human interaction?
The short little man who owned the flower cart spoke both English and French.
“Two flower arrangements, please. One for my wife, one for my buddy’s girl.”
He smiled knowingly. His accent was very thick. Then again, he probably thought mine was, too. “Does your friend know you are giving his lady friend the flowers?”
I laughed. “It’s not like that. I’m just doing him a favor.”
“Oui, Monsieur. I have the perfect arrangements.”
They were very nice and I held onto them while I ordered a half-dozen croissants and another half dozen flaky confections at the bakery next to him. I decided the girls would like the pastries, but doubted they would eat them all. There was a method to my extravagance, though; I couldn’t be scolded for getting too much because the pastries were ostensibly for the girls. Sonny and I could clean up when they couldn’t finish them off.
The young teenage blonde girl who waited on me spoke English and French, and offered to put everything in a little box. I took her up on the offer. She was in the middle of organizing it when I happened to glance down the boulevard and saw two men exiting a black Volvo. One of the men was tall and slim and had shoulder-length hair. The other was portly and bald. Both wore long overcoats that didn’t match the weather, which was already warm. I watched them striding down the block and then they turned to go into the hotel.
I wheeled and asked the girl placing my pastries in the box if she had a phone. She frowned and nodded.
The Long Gray Goodbye: A Seth Halliday Novel Page 17