“It’s okay, Alice. All part of the daily grind, I get it. I mean if I could leave this stank neighborhood, I would be out of here so fast all that would be left is the dust from my powder compact.”
“I’m afraid unless I straighten things out quick, there might not be anything left of me but dust powder either.”
“Well there’s nothing I can do to help stop you from getting turned into puppy chow. But I know one thing that always cheers you up.”
“What?” I asked.
“A rose from Queenie,” Sara replied. She nodded to acknowledge something behind my shoulder. I spun my body around to see the infamous Queenie Reds rolling her flower cart towards us.
Queenie was a fixture in Pigalle, and twenty years ago she probably had a figure like Jessica Rabbit. These days, she was a little more Miss Piggy. Not that she looked bad crammed into a red leather bustier, since I like to think we live in the kind of world that could embrace the muffin top. Really, what wrecked it was the orange dayglo lip liner that was drawn way off the mark. She also had ten-gallon hair and she smelled like baby powder. She had an exaggerated cockney accent that I always suspected was fake. I found it unlikely that she had sprung from a working class family in Croydon or Birmingham, or some other black-smoke industrial town outside of London. I always thought Queenie Reds belonged in New Orleans, at the helm of a Mardi Gras float, but I knew the rule, the unspoken rule around Pigalle. It was impolite to ask a woman how she arrived on the boulevard.
“Hey, Sugar,” Queenie called out to me. The hang of her chubby arms gyrated as she waved excitedly. “Here comes Miss Alice Fix. Good thing, too, because I need my sugar fix. Come on over and let me take a bite.”
I gave her a hug and she plopped a big orangey, wet smooch on my cheek, the remnants of which probably looked like a Cheetos stain.
“Hey, Miss Queenie.” I recovered from her hug by smudging the lipstick off my cheek.
“What’s wrong, Alice?” she asked. “You look like you forgot your sparkle on someone’s toilet seat the last time you took a piss.”
I tapped the ashes from my cigarette against the building’s brick facade, learning long ago not to try and make sense of Queenie’s scattered adages. “Just having some man trouble,” I told her.
“Ain’t it funny? It’s usually Ms. Cinnamon here with the man troubles, but never you, Alice.”
“It’s a little different than anything Sara’s been tangled up with. Someone from my past is here in Paris, and I can’t tell if he came here looking for me or if it’s just a coincidence.”
“If you’re so scared, why don’t you go and see Wally so he can hook you up with one of those fake identifications you’re always using? Maybe you can hide that way.”
Queenie did a wave towards the alley across from us. There was a man shaded by the brick overhangs, dressed in an odd conglomeration of striped harlequin pants and a plaid Scottish cap. He held a briefcase and there was an accordion folder tucked under one of his thin arms. “Hey, ladies,” Wally called out. When he smiled, the reflection of the moonlight seemed to crystalize against his silver front tooth.
“Hey, Wally,” the three of us managed to harmonize.
Wally was a lanky Nigerian man, and his profession was what we on the streets referred to as an identity broker, which was a refined way of saying that he sold fake identifications and credentials on the black market. His clients were almost exclusively American. They ranged from blackhat criminals to housewives who just wanted a weekend escape. Before he became an identity broker following the November Hit, he made a living running email scams out of a cramped apartment in Johannesburg under the name King Chanson Abdul.
I glanced away from Wally, back towards Queenie, and said, “Shhh, the police might be around and Wally doesn’t need any advertising.”
“Oh, right,” Queenie said.
“Besides, this is a little above the scope of anything Wally can provide. My ex-boyfriend has already seen me. No fake ID in the world could make him forget my face, trust me. To make matters worse, my boss knows about him, and he knows that whatever reason he’s in Paris, it’s not good for our business.”
“Can’t you just have your boss take care of him for you?” Sara asked.
“The damage has already been done. I know I have never actually told you guys what I do for a living, but trust me when I say that in my line of work, we need to remain anonymous. My boss is pissed to know that someone out there in the real world knows my true identity. It might make me a liability.”
“Oh, gotcha, you’re all into that undercover stuff,” Sara said. “You should just become a dancer like me. The work is less complicated.”
“Tell me about it.” I let my eyes lazily wander down the sidewalk, where a man, obviously a tourist, since the black strapped camera around his neck was a dead giveaway, was accepting a flyer from a club promoter beneath the Moulin Rouge. “So, some old lady really moved into my apartment already?”
Sara picked at the skin around her fake fingernails and nodded a yes.
“Darn,” I snapped, “I was hoping to get some of my old clothes.”
“You might as well have a drink while you’re in the neighborhood,” Queenie said. Her hand unfolded out towards me to present one of her red roses.
* * *
I stepped into Le Colimacon, a favorite bar among the Pigalle locals. I placed my rose down on the bar and ordered an absinthe with an extra sugar cube. “Keep them coming,” I told the guy behind the bar as he pulled down an empty glass.
“Sure thing, Alice,” the bartender replied. His name was Marcel. He had a helmet of slick black hair and his face was sculpted by thin, French features. Most importantly, he was too young to be cynical of Pigalle just yet.
“Marcel?” I placed my elbows up on the counter to watch him mix my drink. “Has anyone been in here looking for me recently?”
Marcel looked up from wiping his hands on his apron and his lips parted like he was about to answer, but then his eyes looked past my face and froze on something behind me.
“Well?” I prompted. I was sucking what was left of a very short cigarette and my hands were shaking. But Marcel could only give me a remorseful look.
I felt a hand clutch my shoulder.
“Alice Fix?” a caustic voice rumbled into my ear. “Is that what you let people call you these days?”
I didn’t turn my head to see whose hand it was that was practically crushing my shoulder. I could never forget that voice. I threw my head back and took a long, draining sip of absinthe. I could already feel the absinthe overtaking my blood. I slammed the glass down on the bar top. “You shot me out of the Eiffel Tower, jerk,” I thundered out.
The man at my ear brushed up against the side of my body and my eyes moved sideways to explore him. I followed the buttons on his black trench coat up to his sharp chin, shaded with a day’s worth of black stubble, and finally up to his eyes, burning dark like oil fields.
Pressley hopped up onto the stool next to me. “Alice.” My fake name was spinning awkwardly from the tip of his tongue. “You know I had to do it. My partner was about to shoot you in the face. Shooting you first, in a non-lethal spot, was the only way I could save you.”
“I could have plunged to my death,” I said, demurely pressing my nose into the scarlet rose from Queenie.
“But you didn’t, and I knew you wouldn’t.”
“How can you be so confident?” I was crossing my bare legs beneath my trench coat and tapping away the ash from my cigarette.
“Come on, you are the famous Margaux Fix, captain of Wesleyan’s gymnastics team, and co-captain of the swim team. I knew you could handle those bars.” His reply caused me to bristle, since it had seemed forevermore since I had kept company with anyone who had cerebral access to my past. The fact that he had just called me by my real name was inducing hives on my neck.
“How did you get involved in this?” I asked. “Are you really some kind of agent for the U.S. Government?”
“I’m on a restoration task force for the Central Intelligence Agency,” he announced. “My job is to retrieve the thumb drive created by a man named Enoch Sprites that potentially contains the official identification of all United States citizens prior to the November Hit. I guess you guys on the street call it the dynamite stick.”
“A boy scout for the CIA? Nice to see you’re still a patriotic do-gooder.”
“You used to be one too, what changed that?”
“I’m still a do-gooder. I just do what’s good for myself now. So, it’s your assigned initiative to get the dynamite stick for the CIA?”
“The project is called Operation: Boom.”
“Operation: Boom?”
“It’s our job to make the dynamite stick go boom.”
I twisted the butt of my cigarette into my now-empty glass and pulled out another. “How did you even recognize me last night with the red hair?” I delicately ignited the cigarette bitten between my lips.
“I would recognize those eyes anywhere.” He leaned in and forced his eyes onto mine in a way that felt like he was taking something from me. “I remember the last time I saw you.”
“Oh, do you?”
“I think you remember it too,” he said, taking a strand of my hair and rubbing it between his fingers. “You were lying in the grass with your blond hair all around your face.” He set an elbow up on the bar and leaned into me, so that his lips dusted the ridge of my ear. “You had on that red polka dot dress you always used to wear. The one you used to complain made you look like a 1950s housewife. You were fiddling with the buttons on your collar like you were nervous about something. You said you had something to tell me.”
“That was a really ugly dress,” I said.
“What were you going to tell me that day? The day you disappeared.”
“Let’s not reminisce about the past, especially since we’re clearly enemies now.”
“Enemies?”
“You work for the government and you were sent here to retrieve the dynamite stick, and my sole purpose in life is to destroy the very same dynamite stick. That’s a conflict of interest if ever there was one.”
Looking at Pressley, I couldn’t help but inventory all the things about him that were different since when I knew him; like the fact that his hair wasn’t shaggy like it used to be, and his face was thinner now, more severe. As far as I could observe, the irresistible puppy-dog eyes that hooked me in when I was eighteen were still strongly in effect.
His teeth got close enough to my face to munch my nose off and he asked, “What is it exactly that you do then?”
“I make the world safe for lying.”
“You work for that guy, Motley, don’t you?” He pounded a fist on the bar top. “That guy is bad news. I’ve been investigating him for months. What are you doing getting involved with a scumbag like him?”
“What I do with my career is none of your business.”
“Career?” Rage brewed in his eyes, changing them to gray, like the color of clouds that bring thunderclaps. “Did you really hate being yourself so bad? Are you so self-loathing that you have dress up and play with guns just to feel good about yourself?”
“What about you?” I thundered back. “Why did you get a job as some sort of government cowboy? Do you get a kick out of wagging your big gun at poor, defenseless girls on the Eiffel Tower? Didn’t they train you at boy scout camp that Paris is not a city that takes kindly to Americans barging in all gangbusters?”
“Actually, I was training as a clandestine agent with the CIA when I caught wind of a special recruitment for a high-level task force. I wanted to change the scenery, clear my head from the three-year prolonged agony of my girlfriend going missing, so I signed onboard.”
“I thought you were a history major.”
“Just my luck, the CIA was looking for history majors.”
“So? What? You signed up for some alphabet agency and then they sent you Paris to do their grime work? I didn’t realize attacking innocent girls was part of the United States’ security protocol.”
“Margaux,” he said, his eyes were gliding up my bare legs, following the tight curves of fabric towards the low-cut slice of my collar, “you look anything but innocent.”
“I guess you got more than you bargained for when you signed up. And the name is Alice, by the way.”
“The suits at the CIA told me to get my passport ready and my barrel loaded because there was a lead on an underground network trying to obtain the dynamite stick. But nothing could have prepared me for the moment I saw you up there holding that briefcase.”
“If I had known it was a dirty rotten sting, I never would have showed up last night. I was under the impression that you had information regarding the location of the dynamite stick.”
“I didn’t have information. I was sent up there to retrieve information from you. It was a sting. And you nearly got yourself killed mouthing off to my partner like you did, threatening him with your little water pistol of a revolver.”
“I guess we both don’t have a clue.”
”What the hell are you even doing in Paris? Why are you making people call you Alice? What happened to being Margaux? Why did you run away from home like you did?”
I thumbed my cigarette box and realized it was empty, so I nervously chewed the red straw that had been in my drink. “How I live my life is none of your business.”
“My God, your family has been worried sick. You vanished without a trace. We all thought you were dead. Or kidnapped and sold to some kingpin in the Cayman Islands. You don’t want to know what we thought.” Pressley shook his head and blinked back three years’ worth of mournful tears. “But looking at you now, I’m afraid it’s worse than anything we thought.”
I pushed my barstool back so that the legs made a keen scrape across the floor and I popped to my feet. “I’m not going back to my old life.”
Pressley grabbed my collar and arrested me into his embrace. “I wondered what happened to you for three years, damn it, I wondered every single day.”
“Well, you found me,” I declared, my fluttering eyes pacing up and down the length of his face, from his chromatic eyes to the sooty stubble on his chin, “now what the hell are you going to do about it?”
His hands slid down to my waist, the thrust of his fingers pulled me into his body, and he ran his lips over mine. I could taste the sugar from my absinthe on the tip of my own tongue. “I’m going to hold on to you this time.”
I pulled away and told him, “You won’t find the location of the dynamite stick on my lips.”
“And you won’t find the dynamite stick inside my pockets, but you’re welcome to search me.”
I gave him a loathsome look and made a demonstration of turning my head and walking away. “Don’t follow me,” I barked.
“Margaux,” Pressley called to me, “aren’t you even the least bit curious about how your family is?”
I felt the sting of tears wash over my eyes and I blinked back the urge to cry. I slowly turned my head back towards him; the dim lighting of the bar traced his face like a halo’s trim. “You talk to them?” I asked.
“All the time. They miss you.”
“How are they? How are my parents? And Maribeth?”
“Your parents are fine, but they’ve been devastated ever since you disappeared. They think their oldest daughter is dead. And your sister, she graduated from high school this year. Top of her class, and she took a scholarship to Wesleyan so she could stay close to your parents. They have a pervasive fear about losing the only daughter they have left.”
“She’s going to Wesleyan?” I asked.
“Yeah, just like you did. She said she wanted to follow in her big sister’s footsteps.”
“Pressley, listen to me, you cannot tell them that you found me, okay?”
“They are worried sick. Do you have any idea how happy it would make them to know that you aren’t dead?”
“Pressley, I can n
ever go back home. I don’t want them looking for me. It could land me in a lot of trouble.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. Why won’t you tell me why you ran away?”
I ran my hand over my scalp, raking my hair in a tortured motion. “I can’t. It’s complicated, and I can never tell anyone. Please, just don’t tell my family, or anyone else for that matter, that you saw me here in Paris. And never speak my real name. Ever.”
“I can’t call you Margaux?”
My eyes slipped side to side. “No.”
“Listen, I am going to get to the bottom of this. I have been assigned the task of retrieving the dynamite stick for the government and I won’t rest until I have it in my hands. I also won’t rest until I’ve figured out why you ran away from home, or what you’re doing here in Paris tangled up with that gangster, Motley.” He walked past me and a whiff of the sweet musk of his Proraso aftershave trapped inside my nose. The same as he used to wear.
“You can’t leave,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because,” I declared, one hand planting firmly on my hip, “I was leaving first.”
A smirk curled its way onto Pressley’s lips. “Face it, Alice. You’re not over me.”
I began fidgeting with the belt on my trench coat. “Pressley, I’m serious, stay away from me, or it could land both of us in a lot of trouble.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
I watched Pressley walk out the door and then I torpedoed to the bar and asked Marcel, the bartender, for a refill on my absinthe.
His hand twisted a cloth inside the glass he was rubbing dry. “What was that about?” he asked.
“My secrets are catching up with me.”
“Everyone’s secrets are safe in Pigalle,” Marcel assured me as he fixed my drink.
“Not mine,” I told him.
Chapter Five: Masquerade & Absinthe
MY CHEEKS WERE hot from the buzz of my absinthe, so when I got outside to the sidewalk I fanned out the collar of my trench coat and let the cold air knock onto my chest. As I strolled back towards the metro station, I waved to Sara Cinnamon, who was leaning out her window, coquetting to a man in a business suit. That’s when I felt my phone buzz inside the pocket of my trench coat.
Generation of Liars Page 7
