by Kiera Zane
Harrison pulled out a new cell phone and handed it to her. “Special line, international calls are all paid for. One call and I’ll put you on the next plane out, or I’ll be on the next plane in. ‘Kay?”
“Dad, really,” Caitlyn said, rolling her eyes. “I’ll... we’ll be fine.”
“Okay then.” Harrison turned to Jennifer and said, “Have a wonderful time, Jennifer. You two look out for each other.”
Jennifer nodded. “Will do, Mr. H.”
“You girls need me to come in, help check these bags?”
“Dad!” If you do that, you’ll see that we’re checking into different airlines to different destinations! “You’re embarrassing me,” she said instead.
“Okay, okay, I understand. You’re adults, you can take care of these things yourselves.”
“Exactly.” Whatever, as long as you drive away without insisting on walking us to the gates and blowing my whole trip.
Harrison smiled at her, gave Caitlyn one last hug, and climbed back into his Lexus sedan to drive away. Caitlyn and Jennifer turned to one another with a shared relieved sigh and turned to enter the Tom Bradley International Terminal.
Once inside, Jennifer said, “You sure you don’t want to come to Cancun? Everybody’s gonna be there.”
“Yeah, I’m sure,” Caitlyn said. “But thanks for asking, I really do appreciate it. You’re a good friend, Jennifer. Thanks for helping me out.”
“Oh, well, y’know, the money’ll come in handy, right?”
“Right, almost forgot about that...” Caitlyn said, pulling her wallet out of her purse and handing Jennifer a crisp new one-hundred dollar bill. “Thanks again.” You’re a real pal.
Jennifer took the bill with a hungry little smile, her face pinching like a squirrel’s. “Have fun!” she said, turning to roll her tote case across the terminal.
Caitlyn turned and entered the line to check in; the first few steps on an adventure that would change her life forever, in ways she couldn’t have imagined.
Have fun? Caitlyn repeated silently. I’m hoping for a lot more than that!
Chapter Two: Bonjour, Paris!
Paris opened up before Caitlyn like some great, ancient flower that had waited thousands of years for her arrival. The bustling streets were so unlike those of her native Los Angeles, wide and straight and crowded. Theses streets were narrow and winding and crowded. But the centuries-old buildings, bridges and statues rose up like a garden of stone, resplendent even on a mere cab ride from the airport.
Caitlyn had booked a week in a vacation rental condo in the heart of Paris, the area called St. Michel, off the Seine where the cathedral of Notre-Dame stood; iconic even in this mecca of icons. The jostling cab ride was the only familiar aspect of the trip, otherwise it was as if she’d stepped into another world. The blur of the flight, the bad meals and the awful movies disappeared as she looked around and found herself literally half-a-world away from anything she knew, including the native language.
Paris, she thought to herself. Where the greatest artists of all time came for inspiration and did some of their finest work. Paris, where underground resistance spies did battle with German aggressors from both World Wars. Paris, where writers captured a time that will never return, so close to her that is was almost within reach; Hemingway, Fitzgerald.
Paris.
But as the taxi jostled forward and the cabbie muttered some question Caitlyn could in no way understand, she began to feel the weight of the journey. No longer a mere blur, she was beginning to feel every inch of that five-thousand-mile trip. She was glad to be dropped off at the condo, drag her rolling luggage in and lock the door behind her.
The place wasn’t new, but it was very clean, a splash of modern life behind the facade of 18th century architecture. The floors had been redone, the furniture was in the post-modern style of the 1950s, including a free-standing bar with matching tall stools. It was like bridging time itself, from the modern life of Los Angeles to the ancient grandeur of Paris and then back again, to a miniature Frank Lloyd Wright showplace. Time seemed to collapse upon itself, but Caitlyn was more than ready to chalk that up to jet lag.
The big bed was fitted with clean sheets, the little light glowing against the purple glow of the Parisian dusk. Outside the bedroom window, the fabled lights of Paris began to come to life, colored specks rising out of the deepening darkness as new life sprang from the ashes of the day.
But there would be more nights in Paris, and as soon as the spinning Earth could bring them. But they weren’t going to do Caitlyn any good until she got some rest. Her limbs were slow to respond, her bag heavier as she pulled out her toiletries and some comfy PJs, a little bit of home.
She sank as quickly into sleep as she did into her pillow.
It was several hours before she noticed the man standing in her room, still and silent in the shadows behind the shaft of moonlight streaming in through the window. Caitlyn looked up from the bed, her heart beating faster. Yet there was a certain calm that came over her, in spite of the danger, the shock. For some reason she could neither understand nor quite believe, she wasn’t afraid.
“Who are you? Dad?”
The voice was low, grainy, unfamiliar, steeped in a French accent. “No. I am he whom you have come to find.”
Caitlyn shook her head, squinting in the darkness, unable to pierce the confusion of her half-conscious mind. “I don’t -- Prof. Daniels?”
After a tense silence, he answered, “No.”
“Then who?” The darkness offered no reply. “Don’t play these games with me.”
“It’s you who is playing the game, playing with your very life.” Caitlyn’s heart found the terror that had eluded its inspiration, and now it beat at twice the rate, blood pulsing through her veins like an unending bullet train. “And in these games, child, Paris never loses.”
“I’m not anybody’s child,” Caitlyn shouted, the clang of her own voice cutting through the silent darkness and bringing greater clarity, louder sounds, a crisper cut to the chill in the room, her dewy skin speckled with goosebumps.
Caitlyn looked around the quiet, dark room, alone in the panting aftermath of a shattered nightmare. No man stood before her, no threats to linger at this tender, birthing moment of her new adventure.
Nothing to worry about. All of Dad’s talk of kidnappers and white slavers, too much travel and not enough sleep. Honestly!
Caitlyn dropped her head back down into the pillow, let out a deep sigh, and let her exhausted body and mind drink up as much sleep as they could.
It was going to be one hell of a week.
* * *
The next day began with a whirlwind of sights, beginning with the amazing L’arc de Triomphe, dominating the Avenue of the Champs-Elysées. The monument rose up from multicolored star built in the pavement of the roundabout under it, the Place de l'étoile. The arc stood high, adorned with stone reliefs of the battles of the French first Republic and Empire periods and guarded the tomb of France’s Unknown Soldier, the World War I martyr entombed there. Caitlyn climbed to the top, where the Louvre, Concorde Square and Grand Arch of Defense was superb. Caitlyn looked around, the bustle of Paris spread out around her in every direction, waves of history peaking up out of the industrial cityscape.
Time collapsing upon itself again and again, at every turn; the past, the present and the future rising up and falling back like waves of a great stone sea, churning with the seasons, cresting and dipping with the ebb and flow of history.
She lingered around the shops and cafes of the Champs-Elysées, called by the locals, La plus belle avenue du monde, or the most beautiful avenue in the world. Accordion music wafted amid the creak and clop of horse-drawn carriages on cobblestone streets. Fine chocolates in fantastic sculptures of swans and flowers adorned the glass windows of what were sure some of the oldest and finest chocolatiers in the business.
Glass figurines glimmered behind other display windows, fabulous Faberge eggs sparklin
g like remnants of an era when everything was encrusted with the finest jewels and gems for the amusement of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful people.
Caitlyn decided to avoid the touristy eateries along the avenue, named after Elysian Fields, the traditional burial place of the blessed dead in Greek mythology. Instead, she found a little place on rue Pierre Charron called La Victoria, a very traditional bistro with round globe lights and painted Victorian decorations.
The duck magret was crisp and tender and succulent, perfectly prepared with a sauce that was flavorful without being overbearing; a sweet, thick sauce that disguised a garlic tang which lingered on Caitlyn’s tongue. The creme brûlée was the best she’d ever had, the dollop of whipped heavy cream a delightful contrast to the crisp, crackling coating of the caramelized sugar crust over the supple, creamy custard below.
The day slid by without before Caitlyn realized, the cloak of night once more giving birth to the spectacle of lights across the city, particularly on the Champs-Elysées. Cars roared past the sidewalks, thick with loud pedestrians laughing through their evenings, kissing each other and staggering in the glistening cobblestone gutters that once saw the drunken stumbling of history’s greatest artists and writers.
But even this glaring, glamorous cavalcade of bacchanalia echoed with a kind of sadness for Caitlyn that she didn’t expect. Where are the Hemingways or Van Goghs of today? she had to ask herself. Has our kind reached the zenith of our potential? Is there nothing more for us than looking back into an ever-receding past, at the works of dead geniuses?
Has genius died, leaving us with the tourist shell of its lingering tomb, the Unknown Soldier of the arts? Will that be my life, tending to the multitude of corpses left behind by those previous generations, a caretaker for the beautiful dead?
While the days of greatness may have passed Paris by, Paris remained great.
Alive with possibilities.
And while Caitlyn was there, she was determined to suss those possibilities out, whatever they were hiding, even if she had to reach back through the ages to find them. She hadn’t necessarily mastered the what and the how of her life’s mysteries, but the where and the when seemed more than obvious.
Here and now.
* * *
The next day was the first of two Caitlyn had scheduled to spend at the Louvre. Four centuries of building went into the compound which was then (and remains to this day) one of the largest palaces in the world. Renaissance chateaux surround the modern glass-and-metal I. M. Pei pyramid. As Caitlyn walked up the steps to the massive courtyard, she understood exactly why her father told her to give the place at least two days.
Maybe a week is more like it, Caitlyn thought to herself as she took her place in line.
But the magnificent exterior of the museum was nothing compared to the treasures that lay within. Departments were dedicated to every era of human artistic achievement, from every corner of the globe: Oriental antiquities; Egyptian; Greek and Roman; sculpture from the Middle Ages to modern times; furniture and objets d'art; and paintings representing all the European schools. A section of the museum is devoted to Islamic art. Universally famous works like an original stele with Hammurabi’s code, the Venus de Milo, Veronese’s Wedding at Cana, Watteau’s Embarkation for Cythera.
But nothing in the Louvre was or will ever be more famous than Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. The line to gaze upon that fabled smile was an hour long, but Caitlyn knew she had to take her place and wait. No other face in the history of art was more famous or more revered; not any single portrait of Jesus Christ himself held such a vaulted place in history as does this enigmatic painting of the mysterious beauty whose identity remained and will continue to remain an impenetrable secret.
Caitlyn was standing quietly, taking in all the stately beauty and old-world grandeur that the Louvre offers even when standing in line.
“C'est votre première fois de voir Mona Lisa?”
Caitlyn turned to see the two men standing behind next to her, but not in line. They were somewhere in their twenties, earlier rather than later, Caitlyn surmised by their stooped posture, greasy complexions and eager grins. Their ripped jeans didn’t give them the air of any added sophistication.
“I’m sorry,” Caitlyn said, having turned down young men even better-looking than these two. “I don’t speak French. Je ne parle pas français.”
The other said to her, “Pourquoi le pensez-vous est-vous conversation que nous sommes intéressés dedans?”
Caitlyn couldn’t understand exactly what he’d said, but certain words did register: Intéressés must mean interesting or interested, Caitlyn reasoned, the meaning of conversation seems pretty obvious.
The two young Frenchman chuckled, one glaring at Caitlyn with increasing interest and receding civility, his eyes round and cold like a wolf’s eyes. “Regardez-la, en essayant de continuer. Doit être américain.”
The other said, “Je ne me soucie guère d'où elle est, mais où elle va -- directement à la lune sur le bout de ma fusée de coq!”
They laughed, too loud and too long, lingering next to her as their brackish cackle echoed around them all. Most of what they’d said escaped her, but the manner of their speech, and of their ensuing laughter, told her everything she needed to know about what they said, and about who they were, and about what they wanted.
“Pourquoi ne font pas que vous des porcs obtiennent perdus ? C'est le Louvre, pas le zoo.”
Caitlyn and the two Frenchman looked over to see a third man standing with them. He seemed to have arrived from out of nowhere, suddenly dominating the quartet with his quiet intensity. He was older than the other two; by about ten years, Caitlyn guessed by his slightly more weathered features, his sharp chin and cheeks carved by years of experience and, Caitlyn was ready to guess, achievement.
One of the younger men said, “Disparaissent la baise vous-même, vieil homme, elle vient à la maison avec nous.”
The older man held back in a tiny moment of tense silence, a near smile almost breaking over his strong chin. Then the stillness was shattered by his left arm, springing outward in a blur; the silence was burst open by the crack of flesh against flesh as the older man’s flat palm struck the younger’s cheek, sending his body cramping to the right. The young man rebounded quickly and pulled his right arm back, fist clenched behind his ear; locked and loaded.
But the older man had already grabbed the other young man’s wrist and bent it at what looked like an impossible angle; thumb splayed out and almost touching the soft underside of his arm. The second young man groaned in pain and collapsed at the will of the older man, calmly clutching the younger’s twisted wrist. The one young man fell upon the other just as the first threw his punch. It struck the second young man squarely in the back of the head. The hollow thunk of one man’s skull was underscored by the crackle of the other man’s finger bones and knuckle joints, each of them yelling in pain and clutching their new injuries.
By then security guards were upon them, grabbing Caitlyn and the older Frenchman as well as the other two. “Hey, we weren’t doing anything wrong,” Caitlyn said, yanking her arms free. “This guy was doing your jobs, getting these jerks to leave me alone. Where the hell were you?”
The security guards around Caitlyn look at each other and then at the older Frenchman. Their expressions immediately changed, brows high over their round eyes, mouths small and stammering as they step away from Caitlyn.
One of the guards said, “Nos excuses, M. Cherierre. Naturellement nous devrions avoir réalisé qu'elle était avec vous.”
“Obtenez juste ces rats dégoûtants hors de ce musée, vous?” the Frenchman said, sneering at the younger two as other guards surrounded them and dragged them to their feet.
One guard said, “Oui monsieur, naturellement. Celui que vous disiez, M. Cherierre.”
While the exact meaning of most of their conversation escaped Caitlyn’s understanding, she was able to ascertain certain bits of inform
ation; that this man was known by the security guards, that by his elegant but afternoon-casual suit that he probably didn’t work at the museum, and that his last name was Cherierre.
“Merci, M. Cherierre,” she said to him, her smile a natural reaction to his name upon her lips.
He smiled. “Ainsi, vous parlez français après tout. Naturellement, je devrais avoir réalisé que vous essayiez simplement d'éviter ces avances non désirées du crétin.”
Caitlyn could only break out in a slightly embarrassed chuckle. “I’m sorry, that’s about all the French I know: Bonjour, Merci. My name is Caitlyn. Thanks for the help anyway.”
He took her hand, gently raising it for a light kiss, during which his eyes never left hers. “My name is Julien,” he said, his voice low and rumbly; a subtle, sexy swagger in his furrowed brow. “I’m sorry you had to be exposed to such inhospitality.”
Caitlyn looked him over; tall, lean at the waist and broad at the shoulders, almost too handsome. “And on my first trip to your fine city, no less.”
“Your first trip to Paris? Then you shall see it in style!” Julien looked around the long line stretching out to each side. He took Caitlyn’s hand and eased her out of line. “Come with me.”
Moments later he was leading her up to the guard standing in front of the great portrait itself, encased in bullet-proof glass. A few muttered words in French led to another hurried, acquiescent nod as the guard stepped back and made room for Julien and Caitlyn; a path that led directly to the painting, an unencumbered view.
“How did you...?” Caitlyn asked. “Do you work here?”
Julien said, “In a way.” He looked up at the painting, heavy with the weight of hundreds of years of lore and glory; the Mona Lisa. “Isn’t she lovely?”
And she was, to Caitlyn’s eyes in a way she’d never been before. Caitlyn had heard much about the beautiful maiden in the portrait, and seen prints of it countless times, of course. But she’d never seemed all that good-looking to Caitlyn, who usually chalked it up to a difference in tastes which evolve over the years. There was a time when very pudgy women were considered attractive, for example, as in the famous paintings of Flemish master Sir Peter Paul Rubens. Even in the modern era, chubby women are called Rubenesque.
