“Jamie,” she said, breathless, “there are two of them and at least one has a knife.”
“I know,” he said and then suddenly stopped at the back door of a small building. “I’m going in here for a minute. If they get any closer just scream.”
She watched, nerves jumping in her hands and feet as he jimmied the window of the little dark building with his handy pocket knife and was in before even a minute had passed. He emerged two minutes later, his coat lumpen and positively clanking. He dug in one pocket and pulled out two spherical objects. He handed them to her. “Take them, I have four more.”
She looked down into her hands to find a ball in each. They were the hard wooden ones used to play boules.
“Weaponry,” he said, before she could ask.
The snow had lit the night so that the street ahead was visible. It was cold enough to see their breath in white ribbons which curled off and dissolved into the greater air around. Small lozenges of light lay on the snow here and there—lamps in apartments and cafés, candles lit in windows on a cold winter’s night, small beacons by which they flitted from point to point.
She looked back as they flew along and saw that the men were gaining on them. Her fault, no doubt, Jamie could move like the wind when he needed to.
“Come on, up the stairs,” he said, and she followed up the narrow staircase set between two tall white apartments, each one with a tiny wrought iron balcony, frosted with snow like elaborate wedding cakes. Halfway up, he halted.
“That way,” he whispered and pointed to one of the balconies. The window that looked over it was dark and Pamela prayed the owners were not home at present because she knew exactly what he intended.
He swung himself up over the railing and onto the balcony. She scrambled up the wall, finding a toe-hold and a belated gratitude for the sensible shoes. Jamie reached down and pulled her up once she was within his grasp. She hopped nimbly down from the railing and in beside him just as the men came around the corner.
The men clearly didn’t know where they’d gone, though they would see their tracks in the snow soon enough and put it together.
Beside her, Jamie stood slowly and then fired off the balls with deadly accuracy. The kerchiefed man went up off his feet like something in an old Hollywood movie, one of the Three Stooges playing slapstick physical comedy for laughs. He let out a furious howl as he landed, whether it was of pain or outrage, Pamela could not tell. The man with the scar did a jig worthy of a vaudeville tap-dancer, the balls raining around his feet though one made contact with his stomach and doubled him over. Not enough to stop him from calling them some very colorful and unflattering names in French, though.
“This way,” Jamie said, and she realized he’d opened the window to the apartment at some point, and had already slipped in. He offered his hand and she took it and stepped in beside him. The apartment was quiet around them. Perhaps they’d caught a bit of luck, and the owners were out for the evening or away. It soon became clear that whoever lived here liked to live in rather crowded quarters. Chairs, a chaise, tall vases, plants everywhere—one with truly impressive and vicious thorns—and what she thought was a spinning wheel, which Jamie just saved her from falling over in the dark. There were numerous ornaments, too, which she discovered by accidentally brushing up against a few and sending them over in a dominoing cascade. In the quiet it sounded as loud as a crash of cymbals and they both froze, not even daring to breathe.
A light clicked on partway down the narrow hall which was their only route out of the apartment. She could see the door leading out and it seemed several miles away, though in reality it was about twenty feet. She clutched Jamie’s hand, fearing that some enormous man would emerge in the lit bedroom doorway with a bat in hand.
“We’ll have to make a dash for it,” Jamie hissed, and pulled her along behind him. Pamela hazarded a look into the room as they passed the glowing doorway. A woman with lavender-rinsed curls sat up in her bed, her wrinkled face incandescent with outrage. She was eighty if she was a day but, despite her dentures being in a glass on the bedside table, she had a look of righteous fury which might have put a Valkyrie to shame.
“Touts mes excuses,madame,” Jamie shouted over his shoulder, moving Pamela around in front of him and hustling her down the narrow hall and toward the door. The woman, much swifter on her feet than one might have credited given her lack of teeth and venerable age, emerged from her bedroom to thwack him over the head with an umbrella. Pamela tripped and Jamie swore as the umbrella made contact.
“Tiens, prends ça voleur!” The old woman shouted with some satisfaction. Jamie sustained two more hits as Pamela scrabbled with the locks on the door, of which there were three. They fell out into the narrow hall and half-stumbled down the stairs bursting out into the night with the old woman halfway down the stairs behind them still shaking the umbrella at them and swearing vociferously. French, Pamela thought, was a most descriptive language.
It was then she realized she had lost a shoe in the old woman’s apartment. There was, however, no going back for it. For at the top of the snowy street was the man with the scar, upright and no doubt far more incensed than he’d been before Jamie had hit him with the ball.
“Two down, one to go,” Jamie said and they fled through the small courtyard of the apartment, which was ankle deep with snow and featured a fountain with a naked satyr in its midst. Then it was up yet another steep staircase and down a winding street, skidding sideways and then swooping off to the right and up a narrow space between a bakery and a cabaret—jazz music poured out in notes of liquid silver and the snow was lit here and there with lights both golden and red, casting rectangular shadows. Shutters opened overhead and someone shouted, and a dog barked angrily behind them.
From a doorway Jamie grabbed something and then he turned and waited for the man to come around the last corner they’d rounded. He hurled the items with his usual precision. One made contact with the man’s head and exploded in a shower of clay and dirt and the other hit his shin causing him to go down like a felled tree.
“What was that?”
“A flower pot from the house back there and the little grape-munching cherub I took from the old woman’s apartment,” he said. “I think the cherub cracked his shin—it weighed a good bit, probably worth a good amount, too. He won’t be permanently injured but he won’t be able to walk for a few days.”
They ran on a little further until Jamie stopped and looked about to get his bearings. Neither of them needed a map to realize where they were, though, as it became clear with one look down the street. They’d crossed into the Pigalle. Ahead of them stretched all the vices and delights of France’s most famous red light district. They slowed to a walk, for despite the snow and the cold the district was busy and there were several people out on the streets.
They passed two women shivering outside a night club door who were wearing such insubstantial clothing as to make their occupation quite clear even to the untutored eye. One was tall and dark-haired with a generous quantity of navy blue eyeshadow above her dark eyes, and the other was a small curvy redhead, with big blue eyes and breasts that were close to spilling out of her sequined top.
“Monsieur, you ought to buy your woman some shoes,” the tall one said and both of the women laughed. The redhead then made a suggestion which Pamela thought was only just physically possible.
Jamie inquired as to how much such an act cost and Pamela gave him a sharp poke in the back.
“Both of you for half the price we usually charge. I like the look of you and my friend here likes your lady.”
Jamie appeared to give it some thought and Pamela poked him harder this time.
“How much for your boots?” he asked the tall one.
The woman looked him over with the glint of a practiced grifter in her eyes and then named an exorbitant price which was more, Pamela thought, than the aforementioned act would have cost. Jamie pulled a wad of franc notes from his pocket and handed t
hem over. The woman tucked the money into her bra and bent down to unlace her boots, which rose well above the knee and were made of red patent leather. They were not boots for walking or even, Pamela thought lacing one on after the woman handed it over, standing upright.
“Merci mes chère dames, je suis désolé que nous ne puissions nous attarder, plus longuement!” Jamie said in parting and then bent over each of their hands and kissed them.
Then they were off, she tottering a little on the heels, which were also not made for snow. Thankfully they found a cab a block further down. Pamela collapsed gratefully into it, the night’s adventures suddenly taking their toll.
It was a relief to return to the house. The morning seemed weeks ago, instead of the hours it had been. Jamie made her sit down in the kitchen where it was gorgeously warm and unlaced the boots for her. He’d put a pan of hot water down for her to soak her feet. Before she put her abused appendages into the much-needed warmth, she checked Jamie’s head over. There was a small cut where the tip of the umbrella had made contact but not anything that should require stitches. She did, however, insist on cleaning it out with a bit of brandy.
“That brandy is rather expensive for a head wound,” he said, wincing and blinking as a few drops of the liquid rolled down his forehead. When she sat down to soak her feet, which felt rather like pinched blocks of ice, Jamie made hot toddies with lemons and sugar and a very generous pour of Calvados into each mug. She eyed him over the steam of her cup and found him looking back. They both burst into laughter at the same time.
“I had a wonderful time today,” she said through her laughter.
“The bar is rather high with you, isn’t it? I won’t be able to conjure up scurrilous gangs of men intent on killing us and prostitutes with such gloriously vivid imaginations all the time, you know.”
“You?” she smiled. “This was probably a low key day for you.”
“No day with you is low key,” Jamie said, his eyes meeting hers. He set his toddy, unfinished, to the side and then took hers and set it beside his. And then he put out his hand to her as he had all day and, indeed, as he had for the last two years. She took it and stood up, stepping daintily out of the water. Then without either of them speaking, they went upstairs. The silence between them felt both comfortable and necessary. In the bedroom, everything was forgotten, the day’s fears and adventures and the resultant cuts and bruises banished by the beautiful madness that lit her blood and nerve endings as soon as he touched her.
He brushed his lips against her brow and then kissed the line of her cheekbones, her chin and neck and then her mouth, which yielded to his immediately. His hands on her skin drifted feather-light and yet the demand, the desire in them was clear and echoed through her own blood, her bones, yielding her up to him without hesitation.
The words were soft, but said with ease, because what was true between them this night had been true for countless nights. “I love you.”
It was within this place that they moved, sought lips and skin and curve and hardness, sought breath and blood. This love, this love that came from they knew not where, because there was no knowing where something seemingly without limit had its genesis. Because there did not seem to be a time before now, before each had loved the other, before their lives had become as two threads, one gold, one dark, twined round each other until the colors were blended in the harmony of light and dark, of day and night, of friends and family, of lovers.
It arrived all too soon, that high sweet aching place from which there seemed no release, no want for release and yet release was all, was the finite, burning point of this universe of limb and breath, of linens and the soft, enfolding darkness.
It wasn’t like the night before; it wasn’t like anything either of them had ever known.
And still, and always, “I love you.”
“Did they mean to kill us, do you think?” she asked, the mad dash through Montmartre seeming very distant now that they were tucked up in bed, warm and safe.
“I don’t think they wanted to take tea with us,” Jamie said. “Someone has been following me since Vienna. It’s been a bit of a relay with the faces changing, but I’m sure they’ve all been hired by the same source.”
“Does this happen to you often?” she asked, only half joking. “Strange and sinister men following you around foreign cities? And just how did you know the scarred one was a policeman?”
He laughed. “More often than you might think. I’ve gotten pretty good at evading pursuit over the years though. As to your other question, I’ve had troubles in Paris before and I’ve come to know certain faces. His is one.”
“I thought you were leaving the spy business,” she said. He never talked about it, but somehow she’d thought he’d left it behind and that his time in Russia had played a large part in his decision.
“I’m trying; it’s proving to be a somewhat more difficult task than I’d hoped.” He didn’t say anything more than that and judging by the line of his jaw it was a subject best left alone.
“Have you seen Julian lately?”
He propped himself up on one elbow and looked down at her. “What is this, Pamela—twenty uncomfortable questions? I feel like all we’re missing are the hot lights and the electrodes to apply to my skin.” He smiled as he said it though, taking any sting from the words.
She merely looked at him. He sighed, interpreting the look correctly.
“I don’t know what to do about Julian. It’s a strange thing to be presented with a fully-grown child at this point in my life. He vehemently denied having anything to do with hiring the extra groom. Strangely, I was somewhat inclined to believe him. It could have been anyone speaking to the man as the whole deal was conducted by phone. I just have the sense that he is more puppet than master, though I’m not fool enough to let down my guard with him.”
“I wish it was different for the two of you. I wish he was more like you.”
“That would be a very mixed sort of blessing. I wouldn’t wish my rather unstable mind on anyone, not even,” he said wryly, “Julian.”
“I wouldn’t change a thing about you—I would only change the things that hurt you.”
He looked down at her, the green eyes tender. He stroked the side of her face from temple to chin as though he were intent on fixing this moment forever in his mind. “You look happy,” he said.
“So do you,” she replied.
“That’s because I am.”
“May I ask one more question?”
Jamie raised one eyebrow, a golden glimmer in the low light of the lamp. “Has my saying no ever stopped you before?”
It was her turn to arch an eyebrow at him.
He bowed his head in mock capitulation. “I’m at your mercy, madam, ask away.”
“Is it hard for you to be here? I wondered about that when Madame Felicie told me about Adele.”
His expression changed in the way that light moving over water changes water but leaves it the same as well. “No, because I still feel her here in many ways. She had a butterfly soul and when it emerged fully from the chrysalis it was time for her to go. Something of her always lingers with me. I only wish I’d known about her sooner so we might have had more time.”
“Madame Felicie told me you and your grandfather had an epic fight over it. I believe her expression was ‘anvil and tongs’.”
Jamie laughed. “That’s one way of putting it. I’ve rarely been that angry in my life. I took off and lived in the streets of Paris for a few days. I had about five sou in my pocket and I was pretty hungry, as you might imagine, by the third day. My grandfather was wise and just waited me out. I showed up at a little café where we knew the owner. You met her tonight, and gave her your boots. I knew she would feed me even if I couldn’t pay. My grandfather was waiting there for me when I walked in. He said, “Jamie, you need a bath, you’re going to have to come home. And that made me laugh, and you know once you laugh the battle is done. Then he said, ‘Come home and meet your
sister, Jamie.’ And that was that.”
“I wish I could have met her,” she said, softly. “Just because she’s part of you.”
His eyes rested upon her and she put her hands to his face. His stubble rasped pleasantly against her palms.
“There’s a line of poetry,” he said, softly, “from Wendell Berry which always makes me think of Adele. I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. That was how she was, at rest in the grace of the world and therefore free. I felt peaceful around her in a way I can hardly describe. I guess we had a strange bond being twins despite not even knowing about one another for so many years.”
“Have you ever felt that sort of peace again?” she asked. She knew what his life had been and how much the burdens of others weighed upon him, her own not being the least of them.
He leaned down so that his mouth was next to hers and his breath became hers as she felt their respective pulses beat together. He tasted warmly of apple brandy. And then when they paused for breath, he answered, “Yes, here and now with you, I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”
They had arrived at their last day. Pamela was returning home the following morning and Jamie was going on to business in Berlin. He’d promised to be home by the following weekend. She missed Conor and Isabelle and would be happy to return to them, but she was going to miss Jamie even for such a short time. They had come to a place with one another in these last days she would not have imagined possible even a week ago.
She was in the kitchen making coffee with the scent of pastry tickling her nose. She hoped Jamie finished dressing quickly as he’d promised to take her somewhere perfectly wonderful for lunch. He’d also promised her a bottle of Sauterne which tasted, he swore, like angels’ tears. It was more likely to be dinner by the time they were both ready though. They’d slept until noon, both exhausted from the previous night’s adventures. Jamie had woken her just as the sun rose and made love to her slowly, both of them silent, the sun gilding him in morning fire above her. They had gone straight back to sleep without exchanging a single word and she had slept more deeply and soundly than at any time since Casey had disappeared.
In the Country of Shadows (Exit Unicorns Series Book 4) Page 82