Icon

by Genevieve Valentine

  Oona handed her the books and reached to affix the veil, but Suyana whispered, “Leave it,” and gave Oona a conspiratorial look.

  The veil would fall, and she’d catch it in her hands and turn to Ethan and grin at him. He’d laugh, and he’d curl her hand over and across his knuckles, and maybe if she could keep close enough, he’d lean in to kiss her temple and make the only photo of them that would matter—the one that Margot would be unable to decode, whenever she was deciding whether Ethan was still a willing soldier.

  “Look at these,” she said, held up one of the books. “Thomas Hardy, A Manual for Secretaries, and a book about how to sail. What exactly am I studying for?”

  Ethan raised his eyebrows, smiled just enough not to ruin the line of his jaw. “Just don’t go sailing if you’re sad. You know how that ends for everyone in Hardy novels.”

  “I do now,” she said, and when the breeze picked up and tugged her veil out of the slip of her hair, she pressed the novel flat to his chest and caught the veil with both hands, and as Ethan clutched the novel and looked over the wall at the fallen books and Suyana angled her arms to pull away the veil without blocking her face, one of the photographers started his shutter.

  × × × × × × ×

  They did an indoor shoot in formal dress four days later, when no inconvenient breezes could ruin what the Americans had in mind.

  They’d rented out a wing of the Louvre so she and Ethan could stand under enormous paintings of royalty and mythical garden parties and look both diminished and everlasting. Some were so big that a single whorl in the gilded frame was the size of Suyana’s head, and the photographer was forced to remove to the adjacent gallery just trying to get it all in the frame.

  “Not facing each other yet, please,” the photographer called. She saw Magnus’s lips form Too marital, but was too far away to know if he’d actually spoken.

  Suyana hadn’t been aware they were facing each other, but they were, that forty-five-degree angle they’d been practicing for a year.

  Ethan rolled his eyes and plucked at the edges of his collar to make sure they were tipped outward—he’d gotten a round of instructions before the stylists would let him tend himself between shots. Suyana envied him. Her dress was so complicated she wasn’t allowed to touch it; Oona had to reach under the bell she made and confirm structural stability and correct drape of fifteen layers before Suyana was allowed to do anything more than shift her weight.

  “Side by side, straight and tall, please,” the photographer ordered, and they stood an arm’s length apart and looked straight ahead. Suyana felt like the first time she’d ever had her picture taken, waist-deep in the river in front of a forest she’d never seen, young and already tired and refusing to look as inviting as she was meant to.

  “All right, take hands,” called the photographer, and they reached out at the same time without looking. Something else they had worked on.

  “No, I mean step closer,” the photographer said, but Magnus was looking up at them on the verge of moving for the camera, and saying “No, don’t, hold it,” with an urgency Suyana hadn’t expected. But he was a handler, and for a few heartbeats everybody listened. The photographer’s camera went off three times automatically before he could make himself disobey, or before Ethan could recover from the outburst and step closer.

  That was the frame she and Magnus insisted go out in the press package, despite American objections that it looked awkward among all the handclasps and the single chaste kiss on the cheek Ethan was giving her in one of the frames, her eyes closed in polite bliss.

  “It’s our only request, and if it’s so awkward, then none of the magazines will use it and you’ve won your point,” Magnus pointed out finally, after which it was difficult for them to argue.

  Four magazines used it. Two made it the cover. Suyana’s random-sample image recognition went up by seventeen points in the weekly polls.

  In the UARC’s cramped flat, which had no adornments, Suyana pinned both covers side by side on the wall across from their bedroom doors—the candid cover closer to her door, the formal cover closer to his. His insistence on that pose had felt like loyalty. Strategy, she told herself every time she opened her bedroom door and saw them.

  Suyana and Ethan stood an arm’s length apart, hands connected by the stiff V of their arms. Ethan was just beginning to frown, which made him look troubled in an intriguing way, and Suyana’s face was set as grim as the queen above her head, her dress taking on some majesty that went beyond meeting him at the altar; two statues made of stone, dwarfed at the foot of a painting that would outlive them both.

  17

  For the first week Suyana was in Paris, everyone at Bonnaire avoided saying anything to Daniel about the engagement.

  Suyana and Ethan were running around outside posing for pictures before he even got there, which meant handlers everywhere, news outlets desperate for orchestrated behind-the-scenes kissing, and black-market IA types desperate for any unnatural collusion between representatives of the state. Notices went out over the wire at all hours.

  But no one ever asked him what he thought Suyana would do if there were four parties and she and Ethan could only make it to two each but would attend at least one together, and he never offered because it wasn’t his business anymore. For a week he followed Grace to burger joints and the Diplomatic Corps building and clocked when her light went out and never had to think about anything he didn’t want to.

  But by the time Daniel landed in Paris—two days after the first round of engagement photos—Bo had spent three twenty-hour days in a row following Ethan and Suyana around and trying to track which of them went home when from what party. He’d put in a call for late-night cover that Li Zhao hadn’t granted, and Daniel thought it was only good business to swing by Bonnaire straight from the airport just in case.

  “Good morning, Daniel, absolutely not,” Li Zhao called from her office as soon as he was at the top of the stairs. The echo of a laugh floated faintly up from the elevator shaft, which meant Kate was on duty.

  “I’m here as a motivated member of a crucial team that monitors international relationships with the public,” he said, crossing his arms. She was working; the screen gave a blue cast to her red lipstick and reflected in her glasses, and it erased any truth in her expression.

  “I never talk like that about the work.”

  His tongue was heavy behind his teeth, his throat a little dry. Long flight.

  “No,” he said, more quietly than he’d meant to, “you just make us sound like hand-selected martyrs whenever you’re signing us up.”

  After a moment, she looked up over the rim of her glasses. “You flatter me.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “Grace lands in thirteen hours,” Li Zhao said. “Kate has the address for your flat and for hers. Take a shower, get some sleep, do your job.”

  And he did. Grace ate a sandwich at a café packed with students and met with Colin for dessert crepes on the street like father and daughter, their conversation drowned out by the crowd. Grace stopped by Martine’s apartment, which faced a courtyard except for a corner living room, but by now Martine knew better than to turn on the light and let them be seen, which meant Daniel spent an hour reading the newspaper in the square across the way. Grace was home in bed by eleven.

  Daniel walked north and sat for a while near the stairs in the shadow of Sacré-Coeur. After a while Dev came over the comm and said, “Time check, two a.m.,” like it was something Daniel had requested, and absently he answered, “Thanks. Is Bo covered?” as if there had been a reason for him to be out so late, waiting for something that wasn’t coming.

  “Yep, uh, they’re all set.” Dev never said her name, but there were holes where it should be, which was worse than Kate’s laughing somehow.

  So Daniel stood up and went home before anyone could think to ask why he’d been at the bottom of a staircase in the middle of the night, on a bench five streets away from an
apartment he’d never dare look for, where some people who might help her had been living, a long time ago.

  × × × × × × ×

  Bo got three engagement photos into Closer, and nearly thirty seconds of footage onto the New York nightly news. It was incredible money—so much that Li Zhao called in the usual suspects to watch the broadcast, and Kate and Dev and a few faces Daniel vaguely recognized gathered around the velvet couch to watch their salaries being made.

  But any candids of an event this big were going to be valuable, and the mood of the room was the general understanding that Bo was good and had just lucked into the right shots at the right time. Not even Kate said anything cutting to Daniel about it, which was about the time he suspected that he was being deliberately handled when it came to Suyana.

  The footage was in four-second bursts of Ethan laughing and Suyana taking back books from someone on the other side of the river wall and them kissing for the cameras as they grinned chastely against each other’s lips; they were played between talking-head debates as analysts looked at their body language and decided how in love these two really were. Verdict: Very. Daniel ignored the commentary. Rules of the game; he’d been doing his homework, and these things were easy to rig. Those same experts had also decided Grace was Very in love with the guy from the Hong Kong Territories when she’d dated him for three months a few years back. She’d fallen out of love with him shortly after Hong Kong had given the UK preferential trading rights and a stronger promise of mutual aid than it did to mainland China. She and he were still friendly—once a year they went out to dinner at some restaurant with big windows. Magazines occasionally name-checked them in articles about IA relationships, as an example of a best-case breakup.

  Afterward, everyone who had a late-night follow filed out for the evening shift. Bo hadn’t even been there; his shift had started at dawn and wasn’t going to be over until Suyana got home from the Deneuve Theatre Awards after-party, close to two in the morning.

  “Daniel,” Li Zhao called.

  He stepped inside, kept his hands in his pockets.

  “How are you liking Grace?”

  “I sleep more. Works out for me.”

  “You still try to see her?”

  “You know I don’t.”

  She took off her glasses and set them on the desk (not held in one hand like when she was making a point, and Daniel didn’t know what point she was making now).

  “I’d like to make the assignment permanent. There are going to be some changes this session. Grace is in line to get a committee position in Humanitarian Aid. And Suyana’s out of the question—you know you can never go back.”

  He didn’t bother answering. Some things were clear. Any shot at Margot? he almost asked—big game, and though Daniel was a monster, he was a monster who made plans—but the glasses on the desk distracted him, and he only nodded. (It meant something; she was considering something she couldn’t quite bring herself to ask.)

  In the main room, Kate’s chair was pulled up to the dining table, and she was picking at some flaw in the carving along the edge. For Kate, it was practically vandalism. He slowed down.

  “What’s the matter?”

  She looked up. “What? Nothing.”

  “All right. Good night, Kate.”

  “Has Margot landed yet?”

  He sank his weight on his back foot, like her question had nailed him right through his boot. “I have no idea.”

  Kate was watching him. The tips of her hair were bleached-out aqua now, and made her look like she was still sitting in front of a glowing computer in a dark room. Every time she picked at the table, a little silver star earring on her right ear shivered.

  “You should keep an eye out for her,” Kate said. “You’d be surprised. Bo always knew where she was. He was excellent at it.”

  “That was Bo’s assignment.”

  A flake broke away from the table under her fingers. “She wanders if you’re not careful—you’ve seen it.”

  That felt like a bigger vote of confidence than he deserved—he’d only seen Margot once, when she’d gone to a museum and met up with a hired gun and he’d risked his life to get Bo to follow.

  Then Daniel understood, and his knees went heavy.

  From the open door to Li Zhao’s office, Daniel could hear typing. He could hear Kate’s nails scraping the finish off the table in places Li Zhao would never see.

  “I’d love to,” he said, “but sadly my camera makes it hard to pursue outside interests.”

  “Cameras malfunction,” Kate said, with her hair falling in front of her face. The silver star in her ear had gone perfectly still.

  Cold slid down his spine. Whatever Kate was suggesting, if she was willing to help him, it was bad news. “I thought you were loyal.”

  “I am,” Kate said. “I’m loyal even when she isn’t.”

  He nodded, once, slow enough that the camera wouldn’t quite register it. “I’d better go,” he said carefully after a second. “I feel pretty tired.”

  “You look it. Sweet dreams. Take rue Palmatier home; you’ll avoid the traffic.”

  Kate texted him a number and a name from her personal cell before he had rounded the corner. He’d halfway decided to ignore her warning about Margot and go home, but the name changed his mind. He was a sucker for a good story.

  So he walked half a mile out of his way and sat in the café across the street from the unassuming building on rue Palmatier until Margot left.

  It was another half hour’s walk to the small art nouveau building she disappeared into. And whatever happened inside must have been engrossing, because by the time he gave up and turned for home, the light had been on for an hour, illuminating the room right through the filmy curtains.

  He wished he could narrow his guesses; he wished he could look into the future and understand it like Suyana did, or be Bo and disappear. But it turned out all he could do was stand casually across the street and dread the dark as Kipa and Margot sat across from each other like a pair of shadow puppets waiting for their cue.

  × × × × × × ×

  Global ran one of Bo’s candids in a feature the week after it ran a cover with America’s official photos from the fucking Louvre, with Suyana in a gray dress she couldn’t sit down in and Ethan in a tux that made him look like the president of something. Bo’s snap was the polar opposite—practically a new story—but it only enhanced the party line and made them look more earnestly in love than the stately photo had.

  The candid drove the engagement story right back up the ladder, but it was just long enough after the official parties had had their say that no one from the American team felt scooped enough to start demanding the magazine’s sources. A smart play.

  It was a smart photo, too. Suyana’s veil had slid from her hair (she looked markedly less surprised about it than Ethan did, which markedly did not surprise Daniel), and she was reaching for it with her free hand and grinning sidelong at Ethan, who was too busy staring love-slack at her and leaning in to help to notice yet that she was pushing her book against his chest for him to hold, held fast against him by the wide spread of her hand.

  It looked truly candid. The veil puffed out just at the edges like a ghost, and the pearl-covered comb had vanished in the crunch of Suyana’s hand and left just the clean line of the net against the stones of the river wall, and the book was almost out of frame against Ethan’s body, like something you weren’t supposed to see.

  “Good shot,” he admitted once, during one of the brief moments he and Bo both occupied the flat and were conscious. “Really good shot.”

  “Yeah,” said Bo, shrugging on a jacket of no particular color. “You’d almost think she didn’t know I was there.”

  Daniel tacked it up on the wall in their living room, to remind them to be frightened.

  × × × × × × ×

  Grace didn’t like late dinners. The small places got crowded deep in the evenings, and even among the chic sort, getting a gli
mpse of one of the Big Nine was a thrill. To avoid pictures and autographs, she had to be seated by six, out by eight. (“I hate you,” Bo said as they passed in the apartment hall, the last time Daniel had seen him.)

  When she was going out with Martine, the evening started at ten, and the bodyguards showed up half an hour ahead of time and opened the service doors in the building lobby and stood in the bottom of the stairwell as she took the elevator down.

  Grace came out in heels and a dress that looked carved from granite, which meant a nightclub with dancing—when dancing was involved, Grace planned for dresses that stayed where she put them.

  Daniel feared they were headed for Terrain (he didn’t have a quarter-million-dollar necklace in his pocket this time, and that sort of entrance only worked once), until they pulled up in front of somewhere dark and low that had a bouncer reassuringly open to bribes. Daniel barely lost sight of them on the way inside.

  He was preparing his lie for the VIP area when he realized they’d taken a booth off the dance floor instead. That alone was a concern. There was no way Martine didn’t go for the most exclusive possible seating; she liked a pointed remove.

  “—in the goddamn Central Committee,” Martine was saying as he slid into the nearest booth.

  Grace laughed. “That’s terrible. Since when do you want Committee work?”

  “That’s what worries me,” Martine said. She sounded nearly like she had outside Sessrúmnir in Norway, as haunted as anyone since Suyana, and for reasons he didn’t understand.

  (If Margot had her eye on Martine, Daniel could only wonder that Martine was so calm. Maybe she had yet to turn Margot down and realize the price of Margot’s disappointment. He thought about the shadow of a small hotel and the sound of gunfire, and wondered—slipping, he was distracted, he worked hard not to think about it—where Suyana was now.)