by Mike Bond
“You could’ve given me a hint, something I could go on.”
“Piss off. You have Husseini, now let me go.”
“No we don’t.”
Jack shook his head. The pain was horrible. “You don’t?”
“He got away. You spooked him.”
“Merde!” Jack dropped his face in his hands. “Merde merde merde!”
“I’ll drive you home. You should take a shower – you smell like shit.”
In Ricard’s Citroën Jack clasped his head trying to soften the bumps. “I couldn’t tell you, you know that –”
“I know that.”
“So I tried to kill him on my own.”
“How does that help us, you idiot? We need to talk to him. Then we kill him.”
“I’m quitting. Going back to the States, find a real job.”
“A shame.”
“Yeah.” Jack looked out at Notre Dame, the gleaming Seine and the turrets of the Concièrgerie. “I love it here.”
“Never fear,” Ricard said. “She’ll come to love you.”
“Who?”
“Your little doctor.”
“She’s taller than you, you devious Frenchman. Hey, how do you know –”
Driving one-handed Ricard lit a Gauloise. “What you need to worry about is, is there anything I don’t know?”
“Bastard, you’ve been following me.”
“We were waiting for you to bring us to Husseini.”
“It’s finished, Ricard. I don’t talk to you anymore.”
“I have a solution to your problem –”
Jack gripped his head as the car thundered over the cobbles. “Christ, which one?”
“Your pretty doctor. Why don’t you tell her you’re working for us?”
“What you want in return?”
Ricard turned up rue St. Jacques toward the Panthéon. “For the moment, nothing.”
“I won’t lie to her.” But I do.
“You lied to me.”
“I don’t have the hots for you.”
Ricard waved away smoke. “I do have that effect on people.”
“WHAT HAPPENED to your face?” Leo said.
Jack crouched beside him on the sidewalk. “Got in a fight.”
“You lose?”
“Sort of.” Jack glanced down the Avenue, at the teacher standing over the children. “When’s your Mom coming?”
“Any time. She has a green Renault.”
“I need your help.”
Leo cocked his head. “What for?”
“Your Mom’s mad because I won’t tell her what I do. I can’t – it’s a secret.”
Leo nodded. “Your face looks terrible.”
“You like ice cream?”
“Mom doesn’t let me have much.”
“Want some now?”
Leo glanced down the Avenue, at the teacher. “Mademoiselle LaCaille won’t let me go with anyone but Mom.”
“We’ll tell her I’m your Mom’s friend, that we’re going across the street there, to that café, and she’s to tell your Mom when she comes –”
“What kind of ice cream?”
“What kind you like?”
“They have chocolate raspberry?”
“If they don’t I’ll make them get some.”
SOPHIE LOOKED FOR LEO next to Mademoiselle LaCaille but he wasn’t there. She parked at the bus stop and hopped out. “Where is he?”
“Right there,” Mademoiselle LaCaille pointed. “In the café with your friend. They said for you to come over when you got here.”
“Friend? What friend?”
“That gorgeous guy with the American accent –”
Sophie stared furiously at the café. “I’ll kill him.”
Mademoiselle LaCaille watched her charge toward the café. “If you don’t want him,” she called, “I’ll take him!”
Sophie’s hand itched for a weapon. She would hit him with a chair. A table. Who was he, taking over her son? He could’ve been a child molester and that silly woman let him walk off with Leo.
A car screeched to a stop as she ran across the street against the light. “Idiot woman!” the driver yelled; she gave him the finger.
Leo looked up at her, glanced at Jack. “Hi Mom!”
She fought the urge to yank him by the hair. “Come with me!”
“I’m not done with my ice cream –”
“Calm down,” Jack said. “Leo and I have been practicing Russian.” He slid his chair around the table, making room for her. “Sit down.”
“Leo come with me.”
“Mom!”
Jack stood, again that fast sinuous motion. “You’re making a fool of yourself. Sit down and have a beer. Or go away and don’t come back till we’re done with our ice cream.”
How could he talk like this? The waiter pulled over a chair for her. “Madame desires?” She felt the world sliding away, sat down.
“You should try this chocolate raspberry, Mom,” Leo said. “It’s fantastic!”
Sea of Souls
IT’S JUST LUST, she told herself, her body welded perfectly to his, feeling him all up and down inside her, it’s just our bodies trying to make new ones before we die... It’s only biology you damned fool stop loving it.
I’ll stop after this. Just this one time then he’ll go away –
The world exploded, spread out forever. Her body was slick with sweat, damp and full, all up and down inside her a joyous pleasure. It’s the most important thing we do, she realized. What keeps us alive. And I’d forgotten...
They lay panting in each other’s arms like children. Light spread across the bed like milk. He kissed down her belly, down between her thighs. She came again, a hot tidal wave up the back of her neck washing her in a sea of aching lustful peace.
Finally she lay curled in his arms, her back to his, as in the warm protection of a stone wall. How have I lived without this? Who is he?
She woke after midnight as he came into her again, her back against his chest, his hands strong and hard clasping her hips, and for a long time they lay together like this, barely moving, and though the feel of him inside her was new it became familiar, something she’d always needed.
At first light she wanted to wake him just to talk, to have him pay attention to her, a feeling both jealous and maternal. He woke and threw an arm across her breasts, feeling her nipples. “These scars on your shoulder,” she said, “don’t look like my work –”
“American doctors redid them. It was prettier before...”
Gently she touched them. “You have to go soon. Before Leo wakes.”
“Can I see you tonight?”
Oh God no. This wasn’t supposed to keep going. She imagined the evening alone. “I’m getting off late –”
“I’ll call you.”
From the window she saw him cross the streets where the lights were flickering out, and in an instant he’d vanished in the shadows.
SHE HAD NEVER KNOWN anything like this, wanting him terribly and being so terribly afraid. She’d gone to work expecting to be exhausted by a night without sleep but instead felt powerful and enlivened all day, as if her strength was far deeper than she’d ever known. He’d come the next night with wine and more roses and a book about Indians for Leo. Walking to the Champs de Mars he’d swung Leo up on his shoulders. Leo had ridden there happily, and she’d noted a gleam of victory in his eyes – no longer was he a boy without a man to care for him.
They’d made love again all night and the next night and the one after, and it’s like a drug, she thought, I’m becoming obsessed. It has to stop. But it didn’t stop and she didn’t want it to.
When she thought of Leo’s father now it was with total love but a growing distance, as if he’d stayed near her until she found someone, and now that she no longer needed him he was drifting away into the sea of souls. She wasn’t remembering him, she realized, but rather the short episodes of her brief life with him that she’d seen over and over in her
memory so that they, and not he, had become her memory of him.
Jack had asked her once or twice about him and she’d said I don’t want to talk about it, but sooner or later wouldn’t he want to know? Someday maybe she could tell him.
That weekend they drove the green Renault to Normandy and left Leo with her parents in Le Petit Andely. They wandered up and down the Brittany coast, eating coquilles St. Jacques with Muscadet sur Lie in St. Malo, the surf pounding on the beach all night outside the hotel room where hour after hour they came together and slept and woke and came together again.
This is more than I can understand, she thought. What if it ends?
16:40 IN PARIS was 10:40 in DC. Jack should have called Timothy over an hour ago. Should have called yesterday, last Friday. But he didn’t want to think of Timothy, DC, Home Office, any of that.
In an hour he had to pick up Leo. What he wanted to do now was sit in a café with a Kronenbourg and read the Herald Trib.
The greatest joy in life, Genghis Khan said, is killing your enemies then screwing their women. How untrue, he thought – violence just leads to more violence, pain to more pain. All you need to be happy is love someone who loves you.
Slowly he was letting her into his past... had told her please never come up behind me. Never touch me on the back if I don’t know you’re there. Don’t ever wake me... But those horrors were fading too.
Someday maybe he’d be whole again.
He turned off Avenue Bosquet into his favorite café, nodded to the barman and went downstairs to the telephone. Call the bastard and get it over with.
Timothy was in a meeting, his secretary said. “I’ll call again tomorrow,” Jack said.
“He’ll be out in twenty minutes. He’s been waiting to hear from you. Call then.”
He drank his Kronenbourg and scanned the paper. High school kids were playing We Will Rock You on the jukebox and drinking beer, the boys and girls kissing. He frowned at them, then laughed at himself. He was already becoming an old fart.
“Where’ve you been?” Timothy said when Jack called back. “The rule is you call nine a.m. Monday, Wednesday, Friday.”
“I’ve been in the field, hunting people who aren’t there. Sometimes there’s no phone.” He told Timothy about Sartrouville Mosque, Husseini.
“What the bloody Hell you chase him for?”
“I couldn’t tell Ricard, so I had to kill Husseini. Before he killed anybody else.”
“I told you, France is a denied location! Where’s your brain?”
“Ricard’s guys thought I was Husseini. They beat me up and put me in jail. Ricard got me out.”
“He should have left you there. Damn. So now he knows?”
“So now he knows.”
“Bloody Hell!” The scrambler buzzed as Timothy cogitated. “So we have to admit it about Husseini. We’ll have to discover it, going through the files –”
“Too late for that. Anyway a couple of days later they grabbed three other guys who were with him, talked to them till one said Husseini’s gone back to Algeria, someplace called Knetra in the Sahara. They killed those guys and dumped them in the Med.”
“You’ve really screwed up –”
“Lying always leads to screwups.”
“I’m going to pull you out, send you to Guatemala, Rhodesia, some dreadful place.”
“I’m staying here.”
“You work for me. You go where, and when, I want.”
“I worked for Home Office. But I’m quitting.” Jack checked the time. 17:50. “Got to run!” He hung up, feeling lightheaded and nervous, as if he’d cut some inviolate link.
He picked Leo up and they went shopping for dinner. “Not spaghetti again,” Leo said.
“Okay, buddy, fish then.”
He set brown rice on to boil, soaked the fresh bonito in lime and garlic, made a salad of spinach leaves and onions, and set the table on the terrace. When Sophie got home at 19:30 he kissed her, wanting to make love right there against the door but Leo was in the next room watching cartoons. So he held her gently and kneaded her neck till it loosened and she went into the bedroom and changed and came out and poured the Tavel.
“I’m so tired of people hurting themselves,” she said. “And each other.”
“Maybe you need a change?”
She laughed. “I should be a vet. Animals, at least, are innocent.”
He thought of Barb, Cole’s fiancée, if now she was a vet somewhere, if she’d married. He won’t be like Cole. He pushed the memory away.
Sophie rested her head on his shoulder. “And you, my brave warrior, what did you do today?”
“I dropped your son off at school and picked him up. That’s the best part.”
“He loves that. Every morning he asks if you’re going to take him –”
“He goes to school too much. Tomorrow why don’t I take him to the zoo? Or over to Rue St. Denis to check out the hookers?”
“You do that.” She kissed his neck. “And see where it gets you.”
When the rice was nearly done he put the bonito on the grill and they ate the salad while the fish was cooking. They read Leo a story and put him to bed and sat on the twilit terrace with a bottle of Sancerre, the peak of the Eiffel Tower gleaming over the rooftops. “They made that Tower just to be beautiful,” she said. “To celebrate what humans can do.”
He reached for the bottle. “The two in New York are better.”
She pinched him. “Why does everything American always have to be better?”
A jet went over twinkling against the sable sky. He imagined the passengers inside gathering their things, readying to land. “And how ingeniously beautiful that plane is... to think that in just a few thousand years we’ve traveled all the way from Paleolithic caves to the moon –”
She ran her stockinged toes along the inside of his thigh. “This weekend we could travel all the way from Paris to Normandy again... I told my folks we might come.”
He sat forward. “That’s why they hate us so much –”
“My parents? They hardly know you.”
“No, the Muslims. Stamping out joy and choking their world on Sharia. Like American Christians stamping out sex and evolution. We create beauty and life, and they hate music, sex, art, freedom, everything but their forlorn imaginary God...”
“We’re not thinking about all that. We’re thinking about us, remember?”
“You can give up the past?”
“I’m trying –”
He was diving into a deep quarry, he realized, with no way out. “I wish I’d known Leo’s father.”
“You do, in a way. You know Leo. But already he’s a little like you.”
“In high school I had a girlfriend whose father’d died in Vietnam. Her mother remarried, some guy she’d refused long before. I always wondered how he felt, knowing he wasn’t her first choice.”
“This is now. You are my first choice. I’m crazy about you.”
“To us, then. To giving up the past.”
“And living just for us.”
“And Leo.”
“And Leo. Is he asleep?”
“I think so.”
“Let’s go to bed.”
“And leave the wine?”
She cradled the bottle between her breasts. “It’s coming with us.”
TWO WEEKS LATER TIMOTHY called on Sophie’s home phone. “How’d you find this number?” Jack said.
“Your pal Reecard –”
“He’s not my pal.”
“I have a solution to your problem.”
“I don’t have a problem.”
“You’re down to your last centime.”
“You have no idea what I’ve got.”
“Please, listen to my little story: After the oil embargo in seventy-three, we realized we had to counterbalance OPEC. To keep an eye on crude reserves, production, refining, shipping, that kind of thing... You listening?”
“This’s your money –”
“So we and some of our oil-consuming allies created the International Energy Agency, as part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.”
“Timothy, I don’t give a shit about oil. Goodbye.”
The phone rang again. “You’re making me feel like a whore here.”
“You said it –”
“Jack, there’s a knife at our throats. Without oil, we wouldn’t have given a damn about Iran in seventy-nine, or what the Soviets did in Afghanistan... These days all wars are about oil.” His voice softened. “Your Dad died because we thought there was a lot of oil in the South China Sea.”
Jack’s eyes stung. “Fuck you.”
“We need you back Inside. There’s a job at IEA. They’re located right there in Paris. With your Arabic and Russian... Pashto’s close to Persian, I’m told.”
“Sort of.” Jack felt himself being drawn in, tried to stop. “What of it?”
There was a moment’s silence, just the clicking and buzzing of the scrambler. “We need you, Jack. Your country needs you.” Timothy paused. “You can make good money. And stay right there in Paris.”
Payback
FIVE MORNINGS a week at 08:10 he walked Leo to school then continued down Avenue La Bourdonnais past the Eiffel Tower, crossed the Iéna Bridge over the Seine, took Rue de Passy uphill through the Sixteenth and reached his office at IEA before nine.
His office had wide oak floors and tall windows with a view of tall trees and wide lawns. He hung the camelhair coat Sophie had bought him behind the door, went down the hall to the espresso machine saying good morning and shaking hands, and made a double. He started to put in sugar but stopped. Amazing how he was putting on weight.
By noon he’d read all the newspapers and business journals in French or Arabic, had clipped anything of relevance to U.S. energy policy or operations, or having any potential effect on U.S. oil companies, had written a translation and commentary and faxed it to HO.
Lunch was usually with an executive of one of the French oil companies, Elf or Total, or with an under-minister across the Seine, or sometimes a Saudi or Kuwaiti prince who had come to Paris to buy sex with Chanel models and pretend he was working in the oil business.
Afternoons were for crude and product analyses, meetings on world oil policy, what OPEC’s next move might be and how to deflect it. At six he put on the camelhair coat and departed, just another French businessman going home.