by A. C. Fuller
Warren stared into the luxurious lobby he’d been thrown out of, shaking his head. It wasn’t a race thing. It was a wealth thing, a power thing. He’d been thrown out because men like Kane have the power to have men like him thrown out of lobbies. Other than Cole’s article, there was little evidence Kane was involved. He wouldn’t be the first billionaire to get away with murder.
Warren reached for his phone. The pocket was empty. Cursing, he recalled that it had fallen out.
There was a pay phone at the end of the block, probably one of the last ones in Paris. He walked over, but it only took pre-paid cards. No coins, no credit cards.
He wandered down the block until he spotted a diamond-shaped sign for a TABAC. It was a small cafe that also sold newspapers, beer, and tobacco products. He stopped in front of the beer fridge, studying the labels. They had both French and American brands. He’d never been a big beer drinker, but the glistening brown and green bottles called to him in a way they hadn’t in years. His leg hurt where it attached to the prosthetic, his shoulder throbbed with pain, and he was both freezing cold and sweating profusely.
He turned on his heels and bought a twenty-Euro phone card.
Back at the phone, he dialed the hotel, which connected him to Cole. When she picked up, he didn’t wait for her to speak. “I’ll be back soon.”
“What happened?”
“I’ll tell you the long version sometime.” He heard the dejection in his own voice. “Short version: Kane is in Paris. His helicopter is on the roof of an apartment building. I assume he has a place there. Call the police again and see if they give a damn. My guess is, they don’t.”
“I tried the police and—”
He hung up before she could finish. What was the point?
Next he dialed Sarah. Eight in the evening in Paris meant it was two in the afternoon back home. He assumed she’d have the day off for Christmas Eve.
“Hello?” Her voice was questioning and delayed by a second or two.
“Sarah, it’s Rob. Merry Christmas.”
“Rob, I… Merry Christmas. Two calls in one day, huh? You must be feeling guilty. You’re in London still?”
“Paris.”
“People are saying you look like The Rock in that video.”
“How’s Marina?”
She avoided the question. “Why are you in Paris?”
“Hard to explain. How’s Marina?”
After a long pause, she said, “Marina is good. You know, she misses you. I was going to explain where you are, but then I realized I don’t know where you are. Or why you’re there. Rob, I’m tired of explaining. I got tired of explaining a long time ago.” She sighed. A quick, loud breath of air. He recognized that sigh. Not defeated, but decisive. A mix of exasperation and decision. “Rob,” she continued, “whenever you get back from your adventure, we need to talk. I’ve been offered a job in D.C. and I think I should take it.”
His hand went loose on the phone. He stepped back like he’d been pushed. He hadn’t planned on mentioning Bakari Smith, his one-time friend whom he’d learned was dating his wife. “D.C.?” was all he could think of to say.
“I want to talk about moving there, whether you’d come visit Marina. I don’t want to deny you, or her, that. But I need to—”
“How could you screw that guy?” It came out despite his best efforts to keep it in.
“What? Who?”
Warren said nothing.
“You know about me and Bakari?”
Warren’s cheeks grew hot. He was ready to explode, but not at Sarah. She’d done nothing wrong. His anger lacked a target. As calmly as possible, he said, “Yeah.”
“It just happened, and I don’t know where it’s gonna go… Look, that’s not why I want to move, but—”
“Can I talk to Marina, wish her a Merry Christmas?”
“She’s next door. Playing with Olivia.”
Warren sighed and closed his eyes. He wanted to make the world disappear. Instead, he saw a moving van, parked out front of his old apartment. Bakari Smith loading boxes of Sarah’s things. Marina’s things. Or even some of his old things. Like the desk he’d put together from Ikea for their home office, or the old baseball glove he’d planned to give Marina when she was old enough.
His body ached. His skin crawled. “Merry Christmas. I’ll try Marina tomorrow. Please tell her I love her.”
“Goodbye, Rob.”
He hung up, walked back to the Tabac, and bought two bottles of Stella Artois. He found an alley, popped the caps on the side of a dumpster, then froze.
What the hell was he doing?
He’d been sober fifty months. Once he’d committed, it hadn’t been too hard to stick with it. He knew people who struggled every day, but not him. He’d decided it, then done it. It hadn’t been easy, but it had been manageable. And he wasn’t the kind of person to slip up. Not anymore.
He thought of Marina, tried to picture what’s she’d look like at the neighbor’s house, playing with Olivia. An iPad game, perhaps. Or Legos. Maybe soccer in the tiny patch of grass in the backyard, but it was too cold in New York for that.
He heard the pulsating blade slap of a helicopter taking off. Looking up, he saw it. Its shiny black belly was illuminated by spotlights from the rooftop.
He chugged the first beer and tossed the empty bottle into the dumpster. He chugged the second and dropped the bottle on the ground. Returning to the Tabac, he bought two more beers, then hailed a taxi to take him to the hotel.
13
“Merry Christmas, Jane Cole.”
Matt had said her full name that night, something he only did when he wanted a moment to be special. In their everyday conversation he called her “Jane,” if he used any name at all. Usually his tone was enough to tell her he was talking to her. But when he’d led her into Central Park, blindfolded, to reveal the Monkey Tree strung with twinkling Christmas lights, he’d said her full name.
Three years ago.
She sipped her wine. She wasn’t a wine person, but the man behind the bar in the hotel lobby had said something about the Rhône Valley. That it was in Southern France was the extent of her knowledge. The wine was good. She couldn’t say why, but it was better than she was used to. She took another sip.
Three years ago she and Matt had been in Central Park. Soon after, he’d left for Afghanistan. Everything after that felt like an empty space.
She sipped her wine again. Then—in one dreadful moment that felt like a black hole opening up inside her—she realized something. This wouldn’t get better. She wouldn’t get better. Even after getting Lopez to admit the murder, nothing had changed.
She’d tried messaging him twice since coming down to the hotel bar. No response, and she didn’t expect one. He wasn’t smart, but probably knew enough to get a lawyer. She assumed that’s what he’d done the moment the call ended.
She tried swirling the wine in the glass like she’d seen on TV. She stopped after almost spilling it twice. Only three other people sat at the bar. An elderly man reading a newspaper—an actual newspaper—and a young couple, maybe late-twenties, leaning in and exchanging laughing whispers. The woman put a hand behind the man’s head and pulled him in like she was going to kiss him, but instead whispered something. His eyes lit up and he slid a hand to her thigh.
Cole finished her wine and the bartender appeared with the bottle. “Another?”
“Please.”
She checked her phone. It was nearly ten o’clock. She’d expected Warren by now. There was no message from him but, to her surprise, she had a new Facebook message.
Lopez: Ms. Beltaggio, or whoever this is. Julio killed himself. When I got home he was on his computer. He locked himself in the bathroom and shot himself. His Facebook was open to this chat. I will be turning it over to the local police, who just left with his body. If this is actually the FBI, I thought you should know. If this was a sick prank or something, now the police know.
Michael (Julio’s roommate)
Cole read the message three times, the panic rising with each word. Her mind danced between options. At first she believed it was Lopez himself, trying to throw her off. But he’d admitted to the whole plot and couldn’t possibly think she was stupid enough to believe a fake suicide. The more she read it, the more she believed it was real. The desperate loneliness he’d displayed in his Facebook posts, the guilt he likely felt about Matt, the thought of his former partner ratting him out to the FBI. Those were forces strong enough to make even the most stable person look for a way out. The more she thought about it, the surer she was he was dead.
And she was responsible for it.
Warren appeared beside her and touched her elbow, but his gaze was toward the hotel entrance. “Damn reporters. Hounding me out front like I’m Elvis. Should have taken the kitchen entrance.” He slid a stool out from the bar and sat.
Cole was tipsy. The memories of Matt and the night in Central Park had gotten hazier and further away, crowded out by the thought of Lopez shooting himself in an apartment bathroom in Houston. She wasn’t ready to tell Warren, though. Not about any of it. She tried to sound light, though her mind swirled with anxiety. “Reporters are the worst, right?”
The bartender appeared. “The lady is having a Château de Beaucastel Châteauneuf-du-Pape from the Rhône Valley. Shall I pour you a glass, sir?”
“He doesn’t drink,” Cole said. Her speech was loose and her words sounded far away.
“Yes,” Warren said. “We’ll have a bottle, actually.”
“I can’t drink a whole bottle.”
“It’s Paris,” he said firmly, “I can have a few glasses.”
As the man turned to get the bottle, Cole sat up, trying to clear her head. She locked in on him. He wouldn’t meet her eyes. “You’ve been drinking already, haven’t you?”
He pressed his hands into the wooden bar and looked up. “We’re prisoners in a posh Paris hotel, waiting to find out if we’re gonna get sent to China on trumped-up charges. I just chased a member of Kane’s gang through Paris before being unceremoniously escorted out into the night, where I realized that French police have my phone and my wife might be taking my daughter to D.C. to shack up with my former friend.” Warren sniffed a deep breath through his nose and frowned. “Been a rough day.” He flashed a mocking look of shock. “Oh yeah, and terrorists are murdering people around the world and we can’t do a damn thing about it.” He looked down at the bar, then back at her. “Just... lemme have this.”
His eyes were glassy. Any objection would likely do little. Already half drunk herself, she liked the idea of him joining her there. She didn’t like that she liked it, but she liked it.
“Sparkling water,” she said to the bartender as he set down the wine. “A large bottle to share. And can we order food at the bar?”
14
Two hours and two bottles of wine later, Cole took Warren’s hand and pulled him up from the stool. Their third plate of oysters lay decimated on the bar, next to a basket of bread and a half-eaten charcuterie platter. The bar had grown crowded, but she hadn’t noticed until standing.
She grabbed the third bottle and handed it to Warren. Pulling him from the bar area, she called over her shoulder, “Bill it to our room.”
They headed for the lobby, but Warren redirected their route to the elevators, where they followed the path he’d taken that morning. Into the basement and through the kitchen.
They staggered into the night, swaying drunkenly arm in arm, and passing the bottle between them.
Sometime later—Cole didn’t know how long they’d walked—they stopped on a side street. Their conversation had been like a dream, composed of scenes of bright color that jumped to others without rhyme or reason. Most of it was forgotten as soon as it ended.
“Talked to Lopez.” Cole leaned on a bench and stared off into space. Her feet hurt. “He admitted it.”
Warren leaned up against a streetlight poll and took a long pull from the bottle of wine. “Huh?”
“Killed himself right after. Where’d you get that wine?”
“What?”
She stumbled forward, turning into an alley that looked like an appealing place to rest. She sat, attempting to land on a wooden crate. She missed and landed in a shallow puddle. Laughing darkly, she scooched out of the puddle then lay on the ground, staring up at the few visible stars. “Think Ibo Kane is in the drug business? China? Afghanistan? The Marines?”
“Huh?” Warren sounded as out of it as she felt.
“Dubya Slim…”
Warren stared at her as she closed her eyes. He wasn’t sure what she’d been saying. Something about Lopez and George W. Bush. And where had this wine come from? They’d been walking—that much he knew. A few blocks at least. Maybe a few miles? He remembered the bar. Oysters. And he’d eaten a whole loaf of bread.
Had they stopped in a Tabac for the wine? It didn’t matter.
His head spun. The buildings rotated and closed in like a tornado moving toward him.
“Dubya Slim,” Cole said.
At the end of the alley, a large moving truck stopped. Ten or twenty people exited, all wearing bright yellow vests.
“Cole.” He nudged her. “Yellow vesters…”
He lay on the ground, his head turned at an awkward angle to watch them. They seemed to be doing something important—moving things, speaking French with urgency. He blinked. Their movements blurred together into a yellow fog.
“Yellow vesters are French protesters,” Warren said to no one in particular.
He sat up, head still spinning. His curiosity brought a little clarity. It was the middle of the night, Christmas Eve. The men and women in vests were setting up a barricade. “Stay here.” He wobbled to an uneasy stand, then crashed into the dumpster.
Cole heard Warren say something, but none of it made sense. Something about vests?
She just wanted to sleep. She remembered she was in an alley in Paris, but everything else was gone.
Staggering down the alley, Warren caught the eye of one of the yellow vesters, an old man with a thin white beard. “Whatya protesting?” Warren asked.
The man shrugged and left to set up a barricade. Maybe he didn’t speak English. The yellow vesters had been protesting for a couple years. They’d begun as a response to a new French gas tax and had morphed into a catchall protest, taking up issues of income inequality and the shrinking middle class. There was no exact equivalent in America, and no core philosophy, but different members espoused different beliefs that could be aligned with the far right or far left in American politics, others with the center.
A young woman approached him. “Are you here to help?”
“Why are you here?” He tried to speak clearly, but his words were slurred.
“Blockading the street for post-Christmas shopping. We’re going to shut down Paris one store at a time. You shouldn’t be drunk if you are here to help.”
“Okay. But why are you here.”
The woman was around twenty-five, with short brown hair framing a kind face. She took Warren by the arm. “Too much of the burden is falling on the working class. We will keep at it until that changes.”
Warren fell backwards, then lurched forward, trying to right himself. He nearly knocked her over.
“You shouldn’t be here drunk. This is serious.”
“Augustin Gustave Berge. Killed people.”
“We have nothing to do with that. With him. We are non-violent.”
“Macron.”
“We hate Macron. He’s a globalist and has sold out the people of France.”
“Berge’s words.”
Her face was a blur. It disappeared, then reappeared. “What would you have us do? When you have no food, you fight back.”
Warren turned away and stumbled down the alley toward Cole, who still lay in a puddle next to a wooden crate.
“Everyone thinks they have a good reason to commit crimes.” He said it to himself quietly, the
n shouted it down the alley toward the yellow vesters. “Everyone thinks they have a good reason to commit crimes.”
“Cole.”
“Cole!”
She opened her eyes. Warren stood over her, as tall as a giant.
He reached down to pull her up, but she pulled him down on top of her, laughing. He rolled to the side and lay on his back next to her.
The brief nap had helped. She felt clearer. “I was dreaming,” she said. “Weird dream. About my old boss.”
“Did you see the yellow vesters? Everyone thinks they have a good reason to commit crimes.”
She turned to him, resting on her elbows, and took his face in her hands. His cheeks were hot. “I don’t care about them.”
He smiled. “Me neither. What did you dream about?”
“No one has ever worked on a story like this. It’s never happened. But there was one that was in the same ballpark, and that’s why I was dreaming about my boss. The story was about a city councilman who had a stake in a shipping container scam. Red Hook Terminal. Underage girls. Russia, Ukraine. Reported on it for a month. Sick stuff. Matt was away. The time he never came back. By the end I was frazzled, afraid, burned out. Shit coming at me from every direction and I still didn’t have enough to publish. Boss pulled me into his office and said, ‘Jane, break the story before the story breaks you.’” She laughed and let go of Warren’s face. “This time, I broke the story and it broke me anyway.”
Cole weaved through the lobby and found the elevator, Warren right behind her. It took three attempts to press the button for the eighth floor.
Warren stumbled and ran into the brass railing at the back of the elevator. Cole laughed. “You’re hammered, Rob.”
He laughed. “I was a drunk for a long time, but never a fancy wine drunk. Beer, liquor, but never Château de Beaucastel Châteauneuf-du-Pape.”
“Nice pronunciation.” She leaned her head on his shoulder as the elevator beeped its way up.
