But it got me through, and so I climbed out of the ultimate box and made my way to the Hôtel Lutetia, leaving my Coleman lamp behind, and I found Trask sitting alone at a table at the hotel’s street-side bistro. He was, no doubt, busy saving our country’s reputation. He looked me over, knew something was up, rose and put his hand on my shoulder, and he said, “Tell me.” I told him where the bodies were and, incidentally, that I had just saved his life.
“Thank you,” he said. An intense whisper. Which was about the bodies, and about Sam.
Then I turned and walked away.
I went straight to the Rue Perronet.
Louise answered the door, and as I saw her go a little bit wide-eyed at the look of me, I recalled that I was still dank and dirty from my morning’s work. But she regularly saw worse, so she drew me into the room at once and closed the door and readily initiated our embrace.
Which I was reluctant to end.
But we had not spoken.
We needed to.
I pulled back a little, and we embraced for a few moments more with our eyes.
Before I could speak, she said, “Let me bathe you.”
And she spread out towels on her bed and she laid me down and she removed my clothes and she bathed me with a sponge. As if I’d been carried from a train car at La Chapelle and put into a bed at the American Hospital, wounded by the war. And she found my wounds, the bruises and abrasions. Of my feet, of my knees and elbows, of my shoulders and chest. She found the places that hurt that I did not realize hurt until she found them, and she cleaned them and dressed them.
And when this was done, Louise removed her own clothes and lay down beside me, and we talked. She found the other wounds in me. I told her the ending of the story I’d begun in this bed night before last. I told her how wrong I’d been, over and over, all along, until finally I was right. How it had ended with Americans. Only Americans. Trying to kill each other in the dark.
She listened staunchly. Like a nurse who’d become accustomed to seeing the wreckage of men. And when I’d done, she took me in her arms, and we simply held each other close.
We lay like that for a long while, even as the late-autumn day faded into night.
And just before we slept, she asked, “What will you do now?”
I did not know.
So I answered her with a kiss.
Paris in the Dark Page 23
