“Melissa…”
I rose sharply, and he rose too. “No. This life you have is beautiful. It is clean, warm, dull and beautiful. You’ve built something from nothing, and what you want now would destroy it. No, that’s not the point–it would destroy you. You become like me, and not only will you lose the what, you’ll lose the who you have. Every means you have of self-definition, from the mole under your arm to the friends who pick you up when you’re too drunk to drive, the memories you own and the stories you tell, the clothes you wear and the people you love, none of it will exist any more. They will belong to someone else. Someone else’s stories. And all you are will be… an audience… to a life you cannot live. I will not help you. I cannot, and I will not.”
I made to move–where, I wasn’t quite sure, the bathroom perhaps, the door maybe–and Will lunged forward and grabbed me by the arm, “Melissa—”
I jumped.
Instinctive panic, the jolt of skin. I jumped, and a woman stood before me, blinking, dazed and confused. With a curse I caught her arm and jumped back before she could begin to scream, and in that second of uncertainty Will’s hand fell from my arm and I turned and walked away, my heels snap-snapping on the garden stones as I headed for the door.
I was in the street by the time he caught up with me. “Melissa!”
He stood, wretched, behind me, shoulders down and back bent.
“I can’t help. I don’t know how.”
“Please,” he whispered, tears stinging the rims of his eyes. “Please.”
“All men want to be someone else. It’s what makes them do greater things with their lives. With the lives they can live.”
I began to walk away, and he shuffled limply after, a few steps, no more. “And what about you?” he asked. “What do you do?”
“Nothing,” I replied. “Nothing.”
I left him there, walking until my walk became a run.
I am very good at running.
Chapter 62
Paris.
Monsieur Petrain, lawyer by day, tight-arsed Adonis by night. The moment I saw him from across the street, I knew he was Janus’ type. Beneath his cotton shirt was a body that gleamed with taut energy ready to go. His arms were almost too buffed to fit in his sleeves, his jaw was square, his eyes were weak, and he seemed every bit the manifestation of clichéd vanity that I recalled from my dealings with Janus.
Nor was he alone.
Ghosts like company, and when newly inhabiting a body find it easy to buy the companionship that others earn.
Today Janus was buying company with Côtes-du-Rhône, served by a tight-lipped waiter to a table of four. The party sat at the back of a bistro whose speciality was duck and lychee cassoulet served on a bed of chard soaked in hand-picked Sicilian plums. The price was so high they didn’t have the decency to put it on the menu, and if you had to ask, you probably couldn’t pay.
As the sun set over Paris I sat in a dignified woman with antique pince-nez on the end of my nose, a smartphone in my bag and small alp of diamond on my fingers, ate mussels served in lemon cream with garlic mushrooms, and watched Janus hold court, a beautiful wealthy man who wasn’t shy about being the centre of attention.
I was not the only one who watched.
While Paris is a hub of modern fashion, a hazmat suit would stand out. The Aquarius agents therefore dressed more suitably for the environment: long-sleeved shirts, trousers, gloves, high polo collars, hats pulled tight and low and, just peeping out here or there, full-body Lycra suits. The overall result, besides giving the impression of Inuit prepped for a harsh winter, was to leave an area of exposed skin no greater than the distance from the bottom of their furrowed eyebrows to the top of their snuggled-up chins. In winter they could just about pull off the look. How they hunted in summer I could not speculate.
Two of their number, perhaps bolder than their colleagues, were sitting in the window of the restaurant. They ate a starter (hopefully on expenses) of warm goats’ cheese, roast nuts and butter-soaked prawns, only a hint of Lycra suits and shoulder holsters showing beneath their long-sleeved shirts.
To all of which Janus was, naturally, oblivious.
Why look for that which you do not suspect?
A roar of laughter from Janus’ table declared that a particularly witty anecdote had just been delivered, along with an especially droll bottle of red burgundy, whose sweet bite and extreme price tag served only to enhance wit, ease appreciation. I slipped twenty euros on to the table, gathered my walking stick and handbag, and waddled out of the restaurant. Some time in its recent past this body had undergone an operation on its right hip, and now the weight of my spine created a constant sine curve of irritation and discomfort.
Outside the restaurant I took note of the blue van parked–illegally–on the other side of the street, clocked the man with the long sleeves and tight-fitting hat having his third cigarette of the twilight as he leaned against a lamp post, and finally noted the two men nestled against the high stone balustrade of a rooftop, their arms wrapped up tight against the cold, their shapes visible as two patches of blackness against the settling evening light.
I hobbled a few hundred yards before stumbling and catching the arm of the passing businessman with the briefcase into whom I jumped, turning at once to catch the respectable lady by my side before she could fall and murmuring, “Are you all right, Madame?”
Chivalry isn’t dead.
In a rather more comfortable frame I circled the block twice, passing by the restaurant both times to check on Janus’ entrenched circumstance, before I found who I was looking for. The traffic warden was in her early thirties, looked like she might have come from Cambodia or Laos, and her scowl was embedded in the curled downward corners of her lips.
I am Doris Tu, traffic enforcement officer.
I have an an iffy right shoulder and am in urgent need of glasses, but the odds of finding another traffic warden any time soon seemed remote, even on Parisian streets, so I stuck with what I could get.
Squinting against my own questionable eyesight, I half-fumbled my way back to the restaurant where Janus was on to the crème brûlée, one hand up the skirt of his nearest companion.
I crossed to the blue van opposite, its windows tinted, its lights off, and rapped on the glass.
A moment in which I fancied I heard half-mumbled exclamations of obscenity. The window wound down. A face peered at me from the shadows, hair ruffled from having just pulled off the balaclava that otherwise would have completely covered his features. Long-fingered gloves, the sleeves tucked in, trousers tucked into socks, and the gun left, for lack of a better choice, in his jacket pocket, he was Aquarius through and through. Whatever his martial prowess, his parking skills left a lot to be desired.
“You can’t park here,” I snapped in my sharpest, fastest French. “No stopping Monday to Friday 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.!”
“We’re on a delivery,” he mumbled as the floor creaked in the cabin behind him and the assembled assassins tried not to breathe.
“No stopping!” I snapped. “I’m going to have to give you a ticket. Licence, please!”
His mouth dropped.
I am Doris Tu, a woman determined to do her job.
I tried not to laugh.
“Driving licence!” I repeated, snapping my fingers beneath his nose.
And at the end of the day what is a covert agent to do?
Shoot the traffic warden?
He handed over his driving licence.
I pulled out a biro from my pocket and wrote the entirely fraudulent details down in Doris Tu’s notebook, angling the docket away from the van so he couldn’t see the glaring difference between my handwriting and the writing already in the book. “Hundred and twenty euros,” I barked, passing him the ticket through the open window. “Eighty if you pay within fourteen days.”