“Don’t take me for a fool,” he barked. He forcefully shoved the crown of my head against the leg of the coffee table, shaking the table so that the bottle of absinthe thundered to the floor an inch away from my head.
I felt something warm trickle down from my hairline and I couldn’t tell if it was sweat, blood, or absinthe. The muscles in each of our bodies were clenched so tight, each of our grips so unrelenting, that we were tied in place by the other’s tangling limbs.
“Irresistible force meets immovable object,” I grunted out.
“I’m about to move your immovable ass right into the bottom of the Seine.” I could tell by the shortness of breath he demonstrated when he said it that he was beginning to tire out. I jerked a hand out from under his clawed grasp and frantically patted the floor around me, feeling for the bottle of absinthe. Finally, my hand made contact with the blockish contours of the bottle. I wrapped my fist around the neck and raised it to the side of Etienne’s head.
I saw his eyes bulge in the split second before his reflexes could register the impending blow, and I crashed the bottle down against his cheek. The weight of his body suddenly fell down limply on top of me. I let the bottle sputter from my hand and I slid out from under Etienne. I dusted the front of my coat with my hands and bent down to pick up my revolver, stepping over his body on my way to the bedroom.
Looking down at Etienne, his eyes shut tight, his cheeks rosy like a seraphim, and a rhythmic wheezing coming from his lips, he almost looked peaceful. I knew he would regain consciousness in a matter of minutes, with anything but peace on his mind. I had to be quick.
Chapter Six: The Goons Face
IT TURNED OUT that the disk was onboard the yacht like Rabbit suspected. I found it in the master suite, lying in plain sight on the dresser. It was the size of a stick of gum. I grabbed it, and was in the process of shoving it inside the pocket of my trench coat when I felt the presence of someone else in the room. I looked up into the mirror above the dresser and saw the reflection of one of Etienne’s masked goons standing behind me. He was blocking the door.
I hurdled myself onto the bed, and with an energetic jump, I used the springs of the mattress to catapult myself into the air and deliver a violent kick into the goon’s stomach. I noticed he was much skinnier than the other goons inside the party.
The goon doubled over, staggering to stay on his feet. I rushed to the glass French doors that led outside. They shuddered against the violent breeze as I ran to the yacht’s ledge. I peered into the dark waters below and the smell of rotted fish from the Seine cut my nose. I could either jump into the water or risk facing the goon again. I realized that diving into the water would destroy the thumb drive and I could never confirm if it was truly the dynamite stick.
The doors to the deck crashed open behind me and the goon staggered towards me. I knew I would never be fast enough to run away from him, so I ran straight towards him, clawing and kicking, with one hand reaching inside my pocket for my revolver. With my exposed hand, I strode my fingers across his face and struck the corner of his mask. The mask flew off his face and spun into the air before being fetched by an upsweep of wind and disappearing into the dark waters that surrounded us.
“You?” I gasped at the now bare-faced assailant.
“Surprised?” he asked.
“I can’t believe you followed me here, you jerk.” I dropped the gun back into my pocket.
“Better get used to it,” he said. “I’m going to be a step behind you until we work this thing out.”
“Get over yourself, Pressley.”
“Give me the disk in your pocket. I am confiscating it under the authority of the United States Government.”
“I don’t believe you were on the guest list for this party.”
“Well, we could ask the host, except that you left him unconscious on the floor of his yacht, lying next to a drained absinthe bottle.”
A spray of blinding light sliced onto the deck from somewhere out on the water. I shielded my hand over my eyes and saw something driving towards us in the water.
“What the hell is that?” Pressley asked.
“I’m not sure,” I answered.
As the light grew closer, it dissipated over the water, and I was able to identify it as the fog light fixed to the helm of an approaching motorboat. I saw Cleopatra’s unmistakable red hair flapping against the wind as she commanded the vehicle. I could make out the sight of Rabbit leaning over the edge of the boat, waving for my attention.
“Looks like my ride is here.” I ran over to the edge of the yacht and hoisted a leg onto the ledge. “Sorry, but I’ve got to blow this shindig early. I was never much for masquerade balls. I like showing my face when I lie.”
Cleopatra called out to me from the water, “Alice! Hop on!” Her hair was turbulently whipping against the wind and the moon was making her silhouette appear three dimensional. She was already rounding away from Etienne’s boat so that Pressley could never make it fast enough to follow me. I tottered on the rim of the yacht and leapt onto the speeding motorboat as it zipped past. I crashed onboard with a painful thud and rolled to Rabbit’s feet.
Rabbit looked down at my chin resting over his foot. “Did you get it?”
I pulled my mask up onto my forehead. “Yeah, I freaking got it. No thanks to you standing around and hitting on girls in geisha masks while I risk my life.”
“Hey,” Rabbit defended, “I was collecting potentially useful information from one of Etienne’s employees, I’ll have you know.”
“Do you think it’s really the dynamite stick?” Cleopatra inquired. She wrested a maneuver that twisted the boat around in the water and sped us in the opposite direction from Etienne’s estate.
I looked down at the thin, silver thumb drive cupped inside my hand. From appearances it was a mundane disk, with no unusual markings aside from the manufacturer’s label of Cibix and the company’s small tornado-swirl logo beside it. It was an identical copy to millions of other disks in the world. “We have no way of knowing until we pop this bad boy in,” I answered. I turned to look back into the distance at Etienne’s yacht, where I could make out Presley’s obscure outline in the moonlight, dissolving like fog with every inch we moved away.
“Who was that guy on the boat with you?” Rabbit asked. “It didn’t look like Jean Etienne from here.”
I hesitated for a moment, not wanting to admit that Pressley Connard was still in Paris and that I had been outsmarted by him again. “It was nobody. Just one of Etienne’s hired goons.”
* * *
“Does anyone realize that mannequin is naked?” Rabbit questioned as we passed by the storefront at the bottom of my apartment building. Moments earlier, Cleopatra had dropped us off at the pier near my apartment.
“I’m not sure,” I told him. “Not like the Parisians flinch at a little plastic skin.”
When we got inside I booted up the laptop sitting on my kitchen table. I slapped the disk into Rabbit’s open hand. “You do the honors.”
He inserted the disk into the drive and rubbed his hands together in anticipation as the files loaded. “That’s odd.”
“What’s odd?”
“It didn’t even prompt me for a password before accessing the files.”
“Is that a bad sign?”
“This is too easy,” Rabbit said, nervously running his hand through his fleecy hair. “It feels like a setup.”
An image flickered on the screen. I hunched behind Rabbit to get a look. The glare of the computer screen caught us under ultramarine light. “That looks like Etienne’s yacht,” I commented.
“So does that one,” Rabbit said, as another image populated the screen.
“What the heck is this?” I asked. “Is it some kind of set up? A virus?”
“I wish,” Rabbit whined. “It looks like a catalog for yachts.”
“Crap. You’re right.” I traced my finger down a little column of prices alongside the photos.
Rabbit shook his h
ead in disbelief. He slammed the keys with his trigger finger, opening all the files one by one. A frustrated growl spun from his throat each time a glossy picture of a yacht popped up. “All that’s on this disk are pictures of these stupid fancy little yachts, just hundreds of pictures of yachts with listing prices.” Rabbit’s fists slammed the table top. “Etienne wasn’t smuggling the dynamite stick. He was just shopping for a new yacht.”
“That was a waste of time,” I said. “Now I feel like an idiot for knocking him unconscious.” The pocket of my trench coat vibrated, alerting me to an incoming call. I pulled my phone out. “Oh great, and that’s Motley, right on cue. This is going to be fun.”
“See if he wants to buy a yacht,” Rabbit said, rolling his eyes.
“Motley,” I answered, “do you want the good news first or the bad news?” I didn’t pause for him to supply an answer to my rhetorical, avoidant question. “Because the good news is you can now purchase a brand new Japanese-made captain’s yacht for under a million yen. The bad news is that what we thought was the dynamite stick was more like a sparkler.”
“What do you mean, Alice?” Motley asked.
“The big import from Japan was really just a digital catalog for boats. Etienne was about to make a purchase, it seems.”
Motley’s end went quiet, until he delivered a long, drawn-out sigh of disapproval and hung up. I threw my phone down on the table and sighed at Rabbit. “That went well,” I grumbled.
“What should we do now?” Rabbit asked.
“I have chocolate ice cream in my freezer,” I announced.
He followed me as I grabbed the pint from the freezer and pulled two spoons from the drawer. We both stood leaning over the counter, digging into the container of ice cream as though it had some medicinal purpose to ease our failure. As I watched him tunnel a huge heap of melting chocolate ice cream into his mouth, and his lubberly tongue lap up the drippings, I remembered why I didn’t usually like hanging out with Rabbit.
“I can’t believe that disk had nothing but dumb boats on it,” Rabbit said.
“Please, Rabbit, no more talking about this epic fail. Talk about anything else.”
Rabbit looked around uncomfortably, as though a topic would appear out of thin air. The two of us didn’t really have anything in common besides our job. “How do you like it here? In your new apartment, I mean.”
I gave my spoon a thorough licking. “Not as much as I liked my old apartment.”
“Oh?” Rabbit asked. “But this place is super ritzy. Your old place was a dump.”
“You know, I find it ironic that Motley chose to punish me by putting me up in a glamorous penthouse.”
“You think moving you in here was his way of punishing you? Alice, seriously, have you looked around this place? It’s amazing. Your old apartment was surrounded by rats and strippers.”
“They aren’t strippers, Rabbit. They are dancers.”
“Alice, a dancer connotes an affiliation with the Russian ballet company. The only thing these girls have an affiliation with is a bad weave and plastic fingernails. But I digress, so you still think Motley moved you in here to punish you?”
“You know everything Motley does to me is one big mind screw. There’s no way he would let me mess up the Eiffel Tower job and not make me live to regret it. Look at it this way, he put me in here to remind me of who’s in charge. I mean, my old apartment was manageable. I could sustain it on my own if I had to. If Motley kicks me out of here and leaves me on my own, that’s a big fall from grace.”
“I guess I see your point,” he said, with his spongy tongue lapping up dripping chocolate. “So aside from that, how do you like living here?”
“I’m getting used to it. It’s not like I don’t like change. I thrive on change. I heat the house, gas up the car, and flame up the grill on change. It’s just that I sort of miss how cozy it was at the old place. Plus, the water pressure in the shower at my old apartment was better.” I pulled a strand of hair between my fingers as an example. “Look how limp my hair is.”
“Alice, your hair looks like that because you’re constantly dyeing it weird colors. You’re killing it probably.”
“You can’t kill hair you idiot. But I can kill a hare, and if you don’t shut up, I will kill you, Rabbit.”
“I was only kidding, Alice. Your hair looks nice. It always does. You know you’re hot, so I was just joshing you.”
Rabbit was wrong. I didn’t know I was hot. I just knew that I had a way. A certain way that made guys fall in love fast and hard. But I never stuck around long enough to see if it had a shelf life. I used it to my advantage often in my line of work. Rabbit didn’t understand because he had his geek mojo and computer savvy to get him through life. I had to rely on the hotness.
I clattered my spoon into the sink. “I don’t need you joshing me, okay?”
“You can still take a joke, can’t you?”
“Of course I can take a joke. What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s just that you’ve been different lately. Ever since that ex-boyfriend of yours shot you off the Eiffel Tower. You keep getting that faraway look in your eyes, and you’re testy as heck. Do you still have feelings for him or something?”
“No!” I snapped. “I do not have feelings for him.” I snatched the ice cream out from under his chin and tossed it back into the freezer. “And I can take a joke just fine. Maybe you’re not being funny is the problem.”
“Maybe it’s not him that you still have the feelings for, maybe seeing someone from your past just made you homesick.”
“Homesick?” I repeated the word like having it on my tongue gave it a disgusting flavor. That was the phrase we didn’t use around here. There was no homesick. There was no home. We were nomads, mentally, emotionally, and physically. Home wasn’t an option. Home was a liability. The liability column was dangerous. “Rabbit, who turned you into Dr. Phil all of the sudden? My feelings are none of your business, especially since you’re probably just looking for dirt on me so you can piss at Motleys feet with it.”
“Alice, that’s not true. We’re a team. I would never snitch on you.”
“A team? You mean like how I had to drag myself to the hospital after getting shot on the Eiffel Tower? Or how about how I got stuck with the task of cozying up to Etienne?”
“I’m sorry Alice, you’re right, I should have reacted quicker after you were shot at. But it’s not like I was in a position to seduce Etienne for you.” Rabbit dumped his spoon in the sink. “I’m gonna call it a night. We can regroup tomorrow.”
“Forget it, I’m taking tomorrow off. I’m entitled.”
“Okay, Alice.” Rabbit’s eyelids fell as his hand tightened over the door handle. “I guess I’ll see you around.”
“Don’t do that,” I whined.
“Do what?”
“Act like I’ve hurt your feelings just because I don’t want to be buddies with you.”
“Alice, I just don’t get why you always act like I’m a nuisance. You’ve always acted like you hate me, ever since that first day Motley introduced us on the train.”
“Rabbit, I was terrified that day. I was just shy. I didn’t hate you.”
“What were you so terrified of that day, anyways? You never told us what made you run away from home. You only said you did something really bad.”
“Rabbit, it’s none of your business what I was running from that day. Since when you are opposed to keeping secrets? Let’s face it, secrets are the linchpin that holds our little organization together.”
“Well I don’t see why you need to be so stealth about it is all. I mean, I told you why I ran away from home.”
“Trust me when I tell you that getting caught gambling on poker games in your dorm room and getting expelled from Yale is lightweight in comparison to what I did.”
“Well, maybe if you finally just came out and said whatever you did out loud, you could get over it and move on. The secret seems to be sucking
the life out of you. And if you don’t mind my saying, it has turned you into something of a bitch.”
“The only thing that is going to fix my secret is finding the dynamite stick and making sure my true identity can never come back to haunt me.”
“So, if you acted uptight when we met because you were just shy and terrified, why do you act like such a bitch to me now that you know me?”
“Because,” I huffed, “you’re Motley’s favorite. You act like some spoiled teacher’s pet, and frankly, I don’t trust you.”
“Alice, Motley didn’t make me his favorite. He just trusts me more. You act hasty and impulsive all the time and it makes him nervous to trust you.”
“I get the job done, don’t I?”
“Not tonight. Tonight you brought home a disk full of boats.” In the flittering light of the hall lamp, I noticed that he still had a crust of glitter on his cheek from where he had cuddled the girl in the geisha mask at Etienne’s party.
“Screw you, Rabbit. Tonight’s failure was not my fault. I followed protocol and I delivered the item I was instructed to retrieve. We failed because of a bad lead.”
“Motley won’t care why we failed, only that we did.”
“Whose tip were we following anyway, Rabbit? Where did the information about Etienne having the disk come from? Who was this private source I wasn’t allowed to know the identity of?”
“It’s not important.” His splayed fingers turned the door knob.
I cuffed my hand down over his. “Where did you get this bogus intelligence from? Did someone play you?”
“Alice, drop it.”
“You’re not going to tell me?”
“It’s not important.” Rabbit wiggled his hand out from under mine and took a step backwards into the hallway.
“Why is it that when I screw up, I get condemned to a chicken coop in a hellish house in Rio and a patronizing lesson by David Xad, but you don’t get anything?”
“I’m not arguing with you like this. Goodnight.”
Rabbit turned and walked away, and I saw that my neighbor’s door was open and she was studying me. In place of the ermine coat, which she wore during our initial meeting, was a set of jade silken pajamas and concubine slippers.
Generation of Liars Page 9
