And waking, once again, face smudged into Andrea’s couch, the red quilt humped around her shoulders, smelling coffee, while Andrea hummed some Tokyo pop song to herself in the next room, dressing. in a gray morning of Paris rain.
“No,~’ she told Paco, “I’ll go myself. I prefer it.” “That is a great deal of money.” He looked down at the Italian bag on the cafu table between them. “It’s dangerous, you understand?’~ “There’s no one to know I’m carrying it, is there? Only Alain. Alain and your friends. And I didn’t say I’d go alone, only that I don’t feel like company.’ “Is something wrong?” The serious deep lines at the cor- ners of his mouth “You are upset?” “I only mean that I wish to be by myself. You and the others, whoever they are, are welcome to follow, to follow and observe. If you should lose me, which I think unlikely, I’m sure you have the address.” “That is true,” he said. “But for you to carry several million New Yen, alone, through Paris He shrugged. “And if I were to lose it? Would Sefior register the loss? Or would there be another bag, another four million?” She reached for the shoulder strap and stood. “There would be another bag, certainly, although it re- quires some effort on our part to assemble that amount of cash. And, no, Se,’ior would not `register’ its loss, in the sense you mean, but I would be disciplined even for the pointless loss of a lesser sum. The very rich have the common characteristic of taking care with their money, you will find “Nonetheless. I go by myself. Not alone, but leave me with my thoughts.” “Your intuition “Yes.”
If they followed, and she was sure they did, they were invisible as ever. For that matter, it seemed most likely that they would leave Alain unobserved. Certainly the address he had given her that morning would aWeady be a focus of their attention, whether he were there or not She felt a new strength today She had stood up to Paco It had had something to do with her abrupt suspicion, the night before, that Paco might be there, in part, for her, with his humor and his manliness and his endearing ignorance of art. She remembered Virek saying that they knew more about her life than she herself did. What easier way, then, for them to pencil in those last few blanks in the grid that was Marly Krushkhova? Paco Estevez. A perfect stranger Too perfect. She smiled at herself in a wall of blue mirror as the escalator carried her down into the metro, pleased with the cut of her dark hair and the stylishly austere titanium frames of the black Porsche glasses she’d bought that morning. Good lips, she thought, really not bad lips at all, and a thin boy in a white shirt and dark leather jacket smiled at her from the up escalator, a huge black portfolio case beneath his arm I’m in Paris, she thought. For the first time in a very long time, that alone seemed reason to smile. And today I will give my disgusting fool of a former lover four million New Yen, and he will give me something in return A name, or an address, perhaps a phone number. She bought a first-class ticket; the car would be less crowded, and she could pass the time guessing which of her fellow passengers belonged to Virek. * * * The address Alain had given her, in a grim northern sub- urb. was one of twenty concrete towers rising from a plain of the same material, speculative real estate from the middle of the previous century. The rain was falling steadily now, but she felt as though she were somehow in collusion with it; it lent the day something conspiratorial, and beaded on the chic rubber bag stuffed with Alain’s fortune. How queer to stroll through this hideous landscape with millions beneath her arm, on her way to reward her utterly faithless former lover with these bales of New Yen. There was no answer when she buzzed the apartment’s numbered speaker button. Beyond smudged sheet glass, a darkened foyer, entirely bare. The sort of place where you turned the lights on as you entered; they turned themselves off again, automatically, invariably before your elevator had ar- rived, leaving you to wait thei’e in the smell of disinfectant and tired air. She buzzed again. “Alain?” Nothing. She tried the door. It wasn’t locked. There was no one in the foyer. The dead eye of a derelict video camera regarded her through a film of dust. The afternoon’s watery light seeped in from the concrete plain behind her. Bootheels clicking on brown tile, she crossed to the bank of elevators and pressed button 22. There was a hollow thump, a metallic groan, and one of the elevators began to descend. The plastic indicators above the doors remained unlit. The car arrived with a sigh and a high-pitched, fading whine. “Cher Alain, you have come down in the world. This place is the shits, truly ” As the doors slid open on the darkness of the car, she fumbled beneath the Italian bag for the flap of her Brussels purse She found the flat little green tin flashlight she’d carried since her first walk in Paris, with the lion-headed Pile Wonder trademark embossed on its front, and pulled it out. In the elevators of Paris, you could step into many things: the arms of a mugger, a steaming pile of fresh dog shit . And the weak beam picking out the silver cables, oiled and shining, swaying gently in the vacant shaft, the toe of her right boot already centimeters past the scuffed steel edge of the tile she stood on; her hand automatically jerking the beam down in terror, down to the dusty, littered roof of the car, two levels below She took in an extraordinary amount of detail in the seconds her flash wavered on the elevator. She thought of a tiny submarine diving the cliffs of some deep seamount, the frail beam wavering on a patch of silt undisturbed for cen- turies: the soft bed of ancient furry soot, a dried gray thing that was a used condom, the bright reflected eyes of crumpled bits of tinfoil, the frail gray barrel and white plunger of a diabetic syringe . . . She held the edge of the door so tightly that her knuckle joints ached. Very slowly, she shifted her weight backward, away from the pit. Another step and she clicked off her light. “Damn you,” she said. “0 Jesus.” She found the door to the stairwell. Clicking the little flash back on, she began to climb. Eight floors up, the numbness began to fade, and she was shaking, tears ruining her makeup.