Persona

by Genevieve Valentine

  There was pressure on his shoulder as she pushed off the bed, and her hand shook, but she said, strained, “I’ll make it.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  She pulled back. “No. I can go alone.”

  She couldn’t disappear on him again. “Tonight I’m working on retainer,” he said, just shy of flirting. “I’ll show you right to your door. Whatever door.”

  She looked at him. Her eyes got hard at the edges sometimes. “Can we stop pretending that you’re not working for someone?”

  His face stung hot, like she’d slapped him.

  “I’m grateful for the help,” she said. Her voice sounded different; honesty, maybe. “But this isn’t your problem, and it isn’t your business. Don’t get involved where you don’t have to.”

  It was sound advice—from her face it seemed she meant it, and he knew she’d lost people—but it grated.

  “I didn’t just impersonate IA Ops for laughs, you know. I came to make sure you were all right after the gunfire I pulled you out of.” He put some weight on the last words—he wasn’t above guilting her.

  “Get out while it’s an option. Cut your losses.”

  She was right, if he were a normal person. But there was still a story here, and it wasn’t as though she was rich in friends at the moment. She needed him. He could kill two birds with one stone; he’d keep his conscience out of it until later.

  “Too late,” he said, shrugging. It wasn’t quite true, but it wasn’t a whole lie. And he wasn’t out to kill her, which was more than some could say. He just wanted to know how all this shook out. Any snap would.

  She thought something over, frowned. “Onca?”

  “Pardon?”

  She shook her head, coughed. “Sorry. Sometimes when I’m tired, my first language—you know how it is.”

  He did. He’d been so exhausted a week ago that he’d fallen into Korean with the busboy at the hotel and gone a full sentence before he corrected.

  “Who knows you’re here?”

  “Just the receptionist, who thinks I’m one of your handlers. Police are coming, though.”

  “You might regret the first one,” she said, buttoning the last button on her too-big shirt. “I have to get to a restaurant. Café de Troyes.”

  “All right,” he said. He knew better than to ask why. She wasn’t in the habit of overinforming.

  She looked much better for a couple of hours’ rest and some painkillers, and she limped out of the room under her own power. He fell in behind her.

  The buzzer sounded at the end of the hallway as the doors opened.

  “Let’s go,” she said, glanced over her shoulder. (To see if he was there, he thought, and tried not to be pleasantly surprised.)

  He started to make a joke—of course he was still here, who was he, Samuelsson?—but something about that wasn’t very funny.

  As they neared the doors, she said, “People might recognize me now that my picture’s been on the news. I might need your coat.”

  “Forget it,” he said. “You get one coat a night. That’s it.”

  As they turned onto the street, he could have sworn that, just for a second, she’d smiled. It felt better than it should have; the pang of guilt felt worse.

  6

  Suyana’s wallet and diplomatic ID were gone.

  It was a problem—diplomatic IDs were valuable to the wrong people, and at the very least it left a trail at the hospital. But it was a worry for later. It went into a drawer in the cabinet Hakan made her imagine, where nothing touched. It was how you kept from going mad when your life was a series of careful lies.

  Her first worry, her necessary worry, was how quickly she could get to Café de Troyes. Her second and third worries were what would happen when she got there, and what to do with Daniel.

  But she figured anyone as adept at stealing as Daniel would have cash, and when she said, “Cab?” he only said, “Unless you want to hug me all the way there,” before he held out his arm for a taxi.

  She bit back an answer, because there was no future in it. If he was half as clever as he thought he was, he’d abandon the gallantry before he had to start explaining himself, and she had a meeting to think about.

  Diplomats couldn’t afford to be careless. That was how countries crumbled. She’d come close enough to that before; she was in no hurry to repeat it. If anything went wrong for the UARC, she’d be the first one who disappeared.

  Maybe Magnus already had a replacement waiting. Maybe when he had looked her up and down outside the hotel it had been circumspection, and a hope that the next girl would make a better first impression than Suyana did.

  As the cab squeezed into traffic, she looked over and caught Daniel watching her. He must have been feeling guilty about something; his smile didn’t hold.

  Good. Let him worry about himself. She had a part to play. There would be another part to play if she got out of this in one piece and went home. There would be another after that, for the cameras, and one for the Americans to save face, and another and another and another, trading out of the vast catalog for the rest of her life, masks that never touched.

  The first time Hakan had explained it to her she’d nearly cried. But the longer you did it, the easier it was; you didn’t feel like much of a person, after a while, but that was a problem for later too.

  “Who are you working for?”

  His face froze, and a passing streetlight illuminated him as he tried to decide which lie to tell her. After a moment he smiled, brief and thin. “Nobody yet.”

  It looked like the truth; that was a surprise.

  “Am I worth more dead or alive?”

  He sucked in a breath, said, “Alive,” in a tone like she’d offended him by asking.

  He had to be kidding. Whoever he was, he knew enough about the IA to guess how things turned out for Faces who were unlucky.

  “You sure?” she pressed, voice low and measured, the voice she used when she was just short of a threat. Daniel had to lean in to hear her. “All of us have enemies. Somebody knows how much it’s worth if my body shows up in a plausible accident.”

  He took that in for a second, gnawing on the inside of his cheek. “How many of them would try to shoot you?”

  Armchair detective, too. Wonderful. Still, she fought back a smile. This felt almost like a real conversation. “That list is longer.”

  “I’ll bet,” he said, grinned. “But I’m not on it.”

  She parroted his smile. “Not yet.”

  He winced, laughed. Then he shook his head and sat back against the seat. “I remember that scandal. About Chordata trying to blow up the American post, and the guy who went missing and everything. I thought you were doing better these days.”

  The guy. Hakan. “The guy” was the highest-ranking diplomat the UARC had ever reached in the IA, and Daniel didn’t know a goddamn thing.

  But she had to focus. She forced tension off her face. “Hard to say. You don’t really know until your TV minutes are high enough, or you’re allowed to chair a committee, or you’re seeing someone and they poll the other country to see how you’re going over.”

  “Poor Ethan,” Daniel said, with a smile that might even have been genuine.

  That was a name she’d never mentioned; Daniel already knew who she’d been there to see.

  Her fingertips were cold. She counted two breaths, in and out. (Figure out who he’s working for. You know he’s a thief. He’s lying, he’s looking for money, he’s not out to kill you, he’s still here. Who is he?)

  He slid his hands in the pockets of his jeans—hiding something, such an obvious sign that she usually used it as a double blind. There was no way he was diplomatically trained. Wherever he was from, he’d never seen a day in the IA.

  He said, “I’m beginning to get very curious about who you’re meeting.”

  “I bet.”

  He pulled a face, and the flirty voice vanished when he said, “You were nicer when you were bleeding.”
/>   She couldn’t help smiling. “I bet.”

  In the reflection from the window, he glanced out the opposite way, peevish. She wondered if this was how it usually was with people, where you could be exactly what you were feeling and not care.

  “Faces aren’t meant to be honest,” she said. “Bad for morale.”

  He was reaching for his billfold, trying not to look at her and not doing a very good job. “So I was getting the act, before?”

  The cab pulled over. She rested one hand on the door handle; then she glanced over at Daniel through her lashes, licked just the center of her lips the way Martine did when she was on TV and trying to win the boys over. He dropped his eyes to her mouth, back up.

  “Daniel,” she said, the lowest, sweetest voice she had. “You’re still getting it.”

  She was on the pavement before he could pull his face together, and the cab actually moved forward (her stomach dropped) before it shuddered to a stop and he jumped out. He looked like something from a movie—some careless glamour that struck her, all at once.

  (Who would break you out of a hospital unless they had something to lose?)

  “This way,” she said, put the river at her back, and started walking.

  Couples wove in and out on the narrow pavement, and she slid her hands into her pockets and limped beside Daniel, glancing at the faces that passed. Was one of them the person she was looking for? What if they hadn’t heard the news, hadn’t sent someone to the regroup point? What if they’d decided to get rid of her?

  What about Daniel?

  (Not your problem, she thought. He can deal with the consequences. That’s a worry that doesn’t touch your other worries.)

  A familiar awning came into sight—the street felt strange in three dimensions, but there it was, just like the postcard. She felt a weight off her shoulders. Daniel was looking at it with all the disgust someone who stole designer peacoats could muster in the face of a tourist trap.

  “Can we just go pick up a holographic Eiffel Tower for you to take home? There would be more dignity in it.”

  Touristy was the point. It took no notice of strangers.

  “This is your last chance,” she said, looked him in the eye. “Keep walking, and you don’t have to worry about any of this.”

  Please, she thought. Be smart enough to run.

  He dragged his bottom lip through his teeth and looked at the restaurant sidelong.

  “There’s nothing in there for you. This is handling a hazard of the trade, that’s all.”

  Something flickered over his face—fear, doubt.

  “I’ll watch your back on the way in,” he said finally, straightened his shoulders, and glanced behind him.

  She felt a pang, just for a second, looking at him. (If he meant that, if his lie was a small one, if she could trust him at all, that might be a fine thing.)

  Then she moved past him and stepped inside Café de Troyes.

  “At least we can eat,” Daniel said behind her.

  “You can. I’m vegetarian.”

  “Of course,” he said, gave her a face.

  But she hardly noticed. The riot of decor and voices faded as her focus narrowed to the small table in the back corner where a couple was sitting. The woman was facing the door; on her white sweater was a brooch shaped like a jaguar. And as soon as Suyana walked through the door, the woman was watching her.

  Suyana’s heart pounded, but she put on her best blank face, met the woman’s eye only for a moment before she asked the host for a table.

  He frowned at his bookings. “I’m sorry, but we have no tables, unless you’d care to wait?”

  “No, thank you,” she said. “We’ll try again.”

  She turned to go a moment before Daniel could react, and she lifted her bad arm out of habit before she could remember.

  Before the pain could really hit her he was holding the door; he followed her into the little courtyard beside the restaurant and hovered beside her when she sagged against a wall, safely out of sight of the street.

  “I’m sorry,” he started.

  She shook her head. Sometimes she wished she smoked. Hakan had decreed that was something for later, when she’d aged out of being a Face and moved into handling. (“Too easy to give yourself away if you get nervous,” he’d said. “Use them when you really know how to use them.”)

  She put her palms to the wall behind her back, where she couldn’t fidget.

  “Any plans to tell me what just happened?”

  She looked up, said as discouragingly as she could, “No.”

  He shrugged, turned to face the far door of the courtyard. Whatever he was doing all this for, she hoped it was worth it.

  She tried to guess how long she had to wait. Two minutes felt like ages when you were waiting for this, your legs shaking and no watch to go by.

  “Someone’s coming,” Daniel said, a moment after she saw movement from the corner of her eye.

  Her lungs went tight. “Stand back,” she said, and to her surprise, he slid a few feet into the shadows without argument.

  “Who is this?” he asked, voice tight and low. The last word shook.

  She said, “Don’t talk unless I talk to you.”

  It was the last thing she had time for before the woman reached them.

  [ID 29907, Frame 104: Suyana Sapaki standing beside Daniel Park in courtyard beside Café de Troyes (no relevant street address). Unidentified woman entering frame, facing away from camera. Sapaki is looking toward unidentified woman; Park is looking at Sapaki.]

  Suyana’s regular contact in Paris was code-named Zenaida. They met when Suyana was in session at the IA. Suyana would arrange a spa day (even Magnus was loath to follow), or vanish into Printemps; Zenaida would appear, and Suyana would try to ignore the thrill of being waited for. Zenaida was in her forties, shorter and slighter than Suyana, and it made sense they’d named her after the family of doves. She had a quickness and a kindness that made Suyana feel she would have confided in Zenaida even if she wasn’t meant to.

  They’d gone over what should happen if Suyana ever hit real trouble. Zenaida had never mentioned what happened after. Did they have to start over? Would she ever even see Zenaida again, now?

  How many people would she have to lose, just to stay above water?

  A shiver went through her; Daniel started to reach out. She ignored him, closed her eyes, imagined opening the drawer she needed, and let everything else fall away.

  This woman was tall and slender, with light-brown skin and dark hair pulled back into a bun, and her black coat hung so long it made her look a little sepulchral. “I’m lost,” she said.

  “You should turn left at the river,” Suyana said.

  “But how do you know where I’m going?”

  “There’s only one rue Onca in Paris,” Suyana said.

  The woman nodded, and Suyana felt like someone had loosened a vise around her lungs.

  “We’ve been waiting,” Onca said. “Glad you made it.”

  Onca’s face hardened as she looked at Daniel, and Suyana saw she was already thinking the worst, that any second Onca’s unseen colleague would show up and make Daniel disappear.

  Suyana had no strategy—she didn’t even look over her shoulder, there was no time. She just held out her good arm toward him, palm facing him, as if warding off evil.

  “He’s with me,” she said.

  Then his hand slid into her hand. His skin was warm and dry, and there was the press of his palm, his fingers brushing her fingers; she tensed, and then he was slipping away and her hand was empty.

  It was just enough to suggest something—to suggest anything the woman needed to see.

  “I was told you would come alone,” Onca said.

  Suyana raised her eyebrows. “Circumstances changed. Help was necessary. You’ve seen the news.”

  She sighed. “You’ve been compromised. It’s . . . worrying.”

  “So was getting shot,” said Suyana.

  Da
niel smothered a nervous cough in his sleeve.

  The woman looked at Suyana a moment longer. Then she smiled a little, said, “This way. There’s a car near the bridge.”

  As they moved to follow, Daniel scanned the sidewalk in both directions, and walked close enough to Suyana that she felt as though he expected to prop her up. Under his breath, he asked, “So, how are things going?”

  There were a couple of answers to that, but his presence had shifted the frame of everything (circumstances had changed), and the worst thing about politics was how often your worst-case scenarios were true.

  “If anything happens,” she said, “run for it.”

  He didn’t say another word, and all the way across the bridge, she carefully didn’t look at him; she could practically hear him regretting it all.

  × × × × × × ×

  The nondescript building had no elevator. Suyana leaned hard on the banister as they climbed, but she never once looked at Daniel for help. When she appeared at their door, she had to be standing under her own power. Still, he stayed beside her all the way up, hovering.

  The place was a well-curtained nothing, with a little couch facing a few shabby armchairs and a television on an old coffee table. There were two desks against the walls, computer equipment and books piled high. Their cover must be students.

  One man was at a computer. Another was sitting on the couch too casually, and she could only guess what weapon he was holding half-hidden behind his right leg. She hoped it was a knife. They frowned on guns, Zenaida said. But Suyana had never been in the field, and who knew how principles like that held up when you were in the mud.

  She’d made some decisions today she never would have made in theory. Circumstances dictate, sometimes.

  “Weren’t expecting company,” the man on the couch said.

  Onca said, “Couldn’t be helped. She couldn’t get out alone.”

  “The stitches might have come out,” Suyana said. “You have a medic?”

  The man at the computer raised his hand without looking up.

  The point man gestured at the TV. “They’re talking about you. It’s not good.”

  “Stories change,” Suyana said. “When can I talk to Zenaida?”