I motioned to the chair opposite mine. “Sit down.”
He shook his head, then smiled unconvincingly. “We should go,” he said. Fumbling in his pocket with his inky fingers, he pulled out money for my tea.
Something was wrong, I thought, glancing out the tearoom’s front window toward St.-Julien’s gray facade. My gut told me so, and so did the man’s hands, the way they shook when he laid the coins on the table.
“We should go,” he said again.
I nodded and started to get up.
Beyond the man’s elbow I saw the young student rise as well. He reached into his jacket as he came up, his body pivoting toward us, the nickel nose of an automatic sliding out from beneath his coat.
“Get down!” I yelled, diving for the floor, but my voice was drowned out by the crack of the first bullet.
The man in the brown overcoat spun around, his paper dropping to the floor, his head suddenly knocked backward as if by an unseen hand, a dark rose of blood staining the skin behind his ear. He fell sideways, taking one of the tea tables with him, hitting the floor in front of me in a hail of bullets and broken china.
The granny was up, too, her prim suit open to reveal a shoulder holster and, beneath her shirt, two firm young breasts that put her age closer to twenty than eighty.
I crawled backward, reaching for my Beretta as I went, taking advantage of the few seconds of chaos that followed the opening round of fire to find shelter beneath one of the tables. The rest of the patrons were on the floor, too, a jumbled mass of floss-white hair, lavender water, and fear. Toward the back of the room someone was crying, but everyone else was dead silent.
I took a breath and surveyed my options. My back was to the wall, literally. The first shooter, the man, stood directly between me and the front door. My best bet was the alley exit, but it was ten meters at least, across a minefield of upturned tables and huddled figures. I wouldn’t make it without help. I turned and glanced toward the front window again, praying Brian had heard the shots, hoping my choice to trust him this time hadn’t been a fatal one.
The fake granny took a step forward, her pumps crushing broken glass. One of the old ladies beneath the table next to mine lifted her head and blinked up at me. There was a smear of blood on her powdered cheek, a piece of clear glass, part of a bud vase, lodged in her skin. She put her index finger to her eye, then motioned to something behind me.
I followed her direction, my eyes moving once more to the front window. A shadow ducked beneath the frame, a head slipping from view. Brian, I thought, though I couldn’t be sure. When I looked back, the old woman nodded at me, and I nodded back. Yes, I’d seen it too. I smiled reassuringly, then mouthed the word Down in French. The woman lowered her head, laying her uninjured cheek against the floor.
Moving carefully, I dodged out from my cover, sighting for the woman with the gun, squeezing two rounds off. The first bullet went wide, but the second found her left shoulder. She flinched and spun sideways, her gun hand flying to her wound. Her partner fired in my direction, his rounds splintering the flimsy tabletop. Then both he and the woman hit the ground.
Someone else was firing now. I looked over to see the front window shatter and Brian’s face appear above the frame.
“Go!” he shouted, clearing what was left of the tattered pane with the barrel of his Browning.
I moved in a tight crouch, navigating my way from table to table, heading toward the back of the establishment while Brian occupied the two shooters in the front.
I wouldn’t use it unless I had to, I heard Brian say as I neared the alley door. Suddenly, had to had become an unfortunate reality. I glanced back one last time, and Brian waved me on with his gun. “Now!” he yelled, firing once more, then slipping from my view.
I rose up and hit the door with my shoulder, stumbling blindly out into the alley, slamming into the stone wall of the opposite building. The little passageway was barely the width of a footpath, not even a meter across, too narrow for me to outstretch my arms. It smelled of centuries of waste, both human and animal, and a perpetual lack of daylight. White scum streaked the walls.
Keeping a tight grip on the Beretta, I edged forward. Out the alley’s mouth I could see one of the quarter’s cramped side streets and a steady stream of foot traffic passing by. Somewhere in the distance a police siren let out its frantic wail, the noise growing louder and closer with each passing second.
I reached the street and slid the gun back into my jeans, hesitating a moment to get my bearings. There was no going back for Brian. He wouldn’t have done it for me, I told myself, merging into the crowd, heading west toward the Place St.-Michel. Besides, if anyone could take care of himself, Brian could. He’d be waiting for me in the metro. If not there, then back at the Hotel de l’Espérance. He’d be fine.
There was no sign of Brian on the crowded platform at the St.-Michel metro stop. I took the Porte d’Orléans line south to Montparnasse, then walked the rest of the way to the hotel. It was five-thirty when I got back to our room, and still Brian was nowhere to be found. We’d asked the maid not to come in, and it looked as if she’d heeded our request. The bed was unmade, the dirt streaks from her last visit untouched. Still, I made a quick check of my leather bag, reassuring myself the passports were still there. Satisfied, I sat down by the window to watch the street below.
The half dozen sex shops on the rue de la Gaîté did a booming afternoon business. The clientele was mostly male, white-collar commuters and manual laborers making a quick post-work stop, but there was the occasional single woman as well, the ubiquitous gaunt-faced urbanite in torturously high heels and a grim gray suit. The shop directly across from the hotel, a tiny storefront through whose open door blared the disco whine of Rai music, seemed the most popular of the establishments. A steady stream of customers filtered in and out, no doubt lured by the neat row of leather restraints that hung in the front window, the flaccid forms like roasted ducks in a Chinese butcher shop.
I watched the parade of neon-lit faces for a good hour. By six-thirty I was starting to worry. If one of us isn’t there by seven, the other one goes. We’d agreed to it a dozen times, and yet it hadn’t occurred to me that it might happen. I glanced at the SEAT keys on the bedside table, our meager possessions, my bag and Brian’s pack. I won’t wait for you, Brian had told me, and yet, if I left now, there was nowhere for me to go.
I went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face, then lay down on the bed’s dusty coverlet, tracing the cracks in the plaster ceiling. My watch clicked past six-forty-five, then six-fifty. I should get ready, I told myself, but I couldn’t bring myself to move. Six-fifty-five, and like a miracle, a key rattled in the lock.
TWENTY-SIX
“I took the train out to Bobigny,” Brian explained. “I wanted to make sure no one followed me back here.” He sat down on the bed and shrugged off his jacket. The right shoulder of his shirt was stiff with dried blood, the fabric plastered to his skin. “It’s just a scratch,” he said, fumbling with his shirt.
“It looks like more than a scratch to me,” I told him, pushing his hands aside, pulling his head and unhurt arm free of the shirt. The fabric around the wound was glued to his arm. “Don’t move,” I said. “I’m going to have to soak that off.”
There were no washcloths in the bathroom, but I found a clean hand towel and ran it under the hot tap.
“Was it a bullet or glass?” I asked, laying the warm towel on his shoulder.
“A bullet,” he said, wincing at the pressure of the cloth. “But it’s just a flesh wound.”