Fidelity Files

by Jessica Brody

  "Sleep," he responded immediately.

  I slugged him with the back side of my hand. "No! You can't sleep. You'll never catch up to Paris time if you sleep now." I looked at my watch. "It's only eleven in the morning. You have to wait until at least eight before you can sleep."

  He looked at me, unconvinced.

  "It's a rule," I assured him.

  "According to who?"

  "Me."

  "And who are you?"

  I crossed my arms smugly. "As if you don't know."

  Jamie smiled and played along. "I don't."

  "Excusez-moi, monsieur," I said toward the front of the car.

  "Oui, mademoiselle," the driver replied.

  "Est-ce que vous pouvez me dire exactement qui je suis, s'il vous plaît?"

  The driver looked at me in the rearview mirror, puzzled. These Americans were quite the conundrum.

  "So I guess that answers the question of whether or not you speak French," Jamie said to me.

  I nodded.

  "Qui vous êtes?" the driver confirmed, quite certain that he had either misunderstood me or my effort to speak French was flawed.

  "Oui," I confirmed. "S'il vous plaît." Then I turned to Jamie. "I asked him who I was. Since you seemed to have forgotten."

  Jamie was completely entertained by the exchange. He turned his head toward the front seat and waited for the answer.

  "Vous êtes Mademoiselle Jennifer H.," the driver responded with hesitation, seemingly concerned that a failure to solve the mystery of this dynamic duo might cost him his job.

  "Merci beaucoup," I said to him, and then turned back to Jamie with a satisfied grin. "See, there you have it. Jennifer H., expert in international jet-lag saving tactics. Even he knows who I am."

  Jamie laughed. "Fine, fine. We'll stay awake. We'll do whatever you want to do. But you better keep me entertained, otherwise I might fall asleep in a fountain or on the steps of a church somewhere."

  I smiled. "Don't worry. I know just the place."

  "To keep me entertained? Or with comfortable steps?"

  29

  Guarding the Prisoner

  AFTER A quick Parisian lunch consisting of salads and ham sandwiches by the Seine, Jamie and I spent the afternoon touring one of my favorite overlooked monuments in Paris.

  "I think I might be the reincarnation of Marie Antoinette," I explained as we walked through the Conciergerie, the old French prison.

  "This is really where she was held prisoner before she died?" Jamie asked, running his hands against the cold stone walls of the main corridor.

  "Before she was executed," I corrected.

  Jamie looked up at the dark, low-beamed ceilings. "Not a very happy place."

  I nodded. "Not at all. Especially compared to the châteaux I was used to."

  "And why do you think you're her reincarnation?"

  I shrugged and continued down the corridor. "I don't know. Every time I've read anything about her, I've always felt a strange connection. An undeniable fascination with her life."

  "Maybe you just like cake."

  I laughed. "Ah, look who knows a little bit about the revolution française."

  Jamie tried to appear blasé. "I paid attention in history class."

  "You mean you paid attention during the History of the World Part I ?"

  He waved off my comment. "The novel," he replied defensively.

  "Did that have Mel Brooks in it, too?"

  He sneered.

  "Well," I continued, happy to play tour guide to the amateur American tourist. "Marie Antoinette was captured and brought here to await her trial. Which I think is a complete joke. Like they were actually going to give her a fair trial. She was charged with treason just because she was royalty."

  Jamie approached me stealthily and placed his finger against his lips. "Shhh. I don't think your monarchist convictions are going to be well received here." He pointed toward a wax figurine of a revolutionary guard who was positioned to watch over the entrance into the queen's cell.

  I rolled my eyes. "Hey, it's a free country."

  Jamie considered my comment. "Is it?"

  I smiled and shook my head at him. "It is, actually."

  He took my hand and pulled me close to him so that our bodies were touching. I could feel my heartbeat getting faster and I wondered if he felt it as well. "So should I call you Marie from now on?" he asked.

  I swallowed and tried to force a smile. "Actually," I began softly, "most of her friends and family just called her Antoine."

  Jamie leaned in closer to me. His lips were inches from mine. "Okay... Antoine." And then he kissed me. In the middle of the dark and dingy revolutionary prison, our lips met and our eyes closed. My body became warm and I tried to counteract the heat by filling my mind with cold, enraging images of Jamie's wife. But it was no use. Her face would disappear as soon as it entered my mind. I couldn't keep my focus on one negative thought to save my life.

  So I pulled away. "Come here, I want to show you her cell," I said, reaching down for Jamie's hand and leading him past the motionless "guard."

  Jamie mimed a tip of his hat as we walked by. "Monsieur," he saluted politely.

  "As you can see," I said, laughing and motioning to the small stone room around us, "compared to the other prisoners' cells that we saw before, this was like a room at the Plaza."

  The cell was about half the size of a typical motel room, with a small bed in the corner, low to the ground, and a modest wooden table sitting next to it. Behind a short, fabric-covered folding screen stood another wax figure of a guard, watching the room intently, as if at any minute the queen might pull out some kung fu fighting move and attempt to escape.

  "What's his problem?" Jamie motioned toward the guard.

  I looked up. "He's making sure she doesn't flee. She and the king tried it once before, you know."

  Jamie eyed the statue incredulously. "No way. I don't buy that for a second. He's not waiting for her to try to escape. He's waiting for her to take her clothes off so he can get a glimpse at the queen's boobies."

  I let out a stunned gasp. "He is not!"

  Jamie nodded regretfully. "I'll bet this was the most coveted shift. All the guards would sit around and play cards or dice just to try to win the position of the queen's 'guard.' And the night shift? Forget about it! That was reserved for the warden himself."

  The truth of the matter was, it wasn't just Marie Antoinette who fascinated me. All the kings and queens of the old French monarchy did. Their lives intrigued me. All the sex, the scandal, the drama. It amazed me how you can look back at the interwoven story lines of their relationships and clearly see that nothing has really changed since then. If you compare a basic plot line of an episode of The O.C. with a real-life story of a French aristocrat, his family, and all of his personal "dealings," you'd see it's basically the same story. People's obsession with drama and gossip is nothing new.

  Back then people also gossiped about the rich and famous. Adulterous sex could also captivate an audience. And dishonesty was practically a spectator sport. The only difference between then and now is that these days the adulterers make more of an effort to keep their mistresses well hidden. Or so they'd like to think.

  I watched Jamie as he examined some of the old relics of the French Revolution protected behind thick sheets of unbreakable glass casing, and I suddenly heard myself saying, "You know, the king, Louis XVI, had a mistress."

  He turned his attention to me and my random comment, which seemed to come out of nowhere, and I quickly tried to cover it up with more arbitrary facts. "Actually, most of the kings had mistresses. At least one. Sometimes more than one. Sometimes like seven... one for every day of the week." I tried to force a chuckle.

  I was rambling. There was no doubt about that. But Jamie simply nodded responsively, without any signs of remorse or discomfort. As if he were attentively listening to an interesting lecture but felt no connection with the subject matter whatsoever.

&
nbsp; His silence pressured me to keep talking. "In fact," I pressed on shamefully, "I wouldn't be surprised if Marie Antoinette kept a little lover on the side herself. You know, like a midnight snack. A box of Pop-Tarts, perhaps. I mean, nobody was faithful back then. It was practically out of style."

  I was hoping that something would strike a chord, touch a nerve, evoke some type of reaction. I just had to keep searching until I found the right word, the right way to say it.

  But all he did was laugh politely and say, "Well, you know how it was back then. Marriage was just a political arrangement. Particularly for kings and queens. They didn't marry for love."

  I watched him intently as he spoke, searching for signs of hidden meaning. Hidden agendas. Subliminal messages trying to convert me to adulterer worship and trust in his evil cheating ways. But there were none. He simply knew his political history. And quite well, for that matter.

  "You married the person who made the most sense," he continued. "Socially, economically, and politically. And then you fell in love with the person who made you the most happy."

  I almost felt tears well up in my eyes right then. I wanted to run over to him, wrap myself in his arms, and tell him that I wanted to be the one who made him most happy. That the rest of it didn't matter. We could run away. Start over. Forget everything that had happened before this moment. But I could feel my feet getting heavy, gluing me to the spot I was in.

  And against all my better judgment as an experienced fidelity inspector, trained to go nowhere near the topic of unfaithfulness while on an assignment, I couldn't stop myself from asking, "Do you think that still happens today?"

  He walked over to me and rested his hand on the wooden railing that divided the tourists from the replica of the queen's cell. "You mean politically arranged marriages?" he asked incredulously, as if to say, "Have you been living under a rock or were you just hit over the head with one?"

  "That," I said cautiously, "and mistresses." I pronounced the word carefully and watched for a reaction. None came. So I continued, "Do you think people still have them? Stashed away in places."

  He laughed. "Like in Swiss bank accounts?"

  I tried to laugh back, but I felt myself getting extremely irritated. Why was he joking about this? Why wasn't he taking my questions seriously? He damn well should! He'd been keeping me stashed away this entire time and I didn't see how that was so fucking funny.

  "I'm serious," I insisted gently.

  He cleared the smile from his face and looked me straight in the eye. "Yes, of course people still have mistresses. Where there are promises, there are broken promises. It's just the nature of being human."

  I blinked in disbelief. What the hell did that mean? Rules are made to be broken, so we might as well just deal with it? What a load of bullshit!

  But as we walked back over to the glass case and continued to study its various contents, like Marie Antoinette's water jug and a signed paper documenting her imprisonment, I wondered if maybe Jamie was making a statement about marriage itself. That maybe it's just a principle. A piece of paper, backed by the government. Endorsed by society rather than human behavior. Therefore, almost asking to be desecrated.

  He looked up at me and smiled, completely unaware of the thoughts running rampant in my head.

  No, I told myself. That's not what's important here. It's not about a piece of paper or a societal behavior. It's about honesty. One of the few aspects of humanity that can't be controlled by a society of rules and behavioral suggestions. He lied to me. And he lied to his wife. And that made him just as guilty as a French king with a bedroom full of forbidden lovers.

  I took a deep breath and looked at my surroundings. And suddenly I was reminded, once again, that I had come here with a purpose. A job to do.

  Maybe Jamie wasn't about to get a fair trial either, but if the French revolutionaries had taught us anything it was that, when you're fighting for a cause, there's no room for feelings. There's no space for doubt.

  Treason is treason.

  I stood in the old French prison and wondered if history was destined to repeat itself. More than two hundred years later, as the possible reincarnated Marie Antoinette, was I still just another prisoner of my own making?

  But then I wondered if I was really the one being held captive here. This whole trip felt like one gigantic trap. And from the outside, I'm sure it appeared as though Jamie was the one about to walk right into it. But from the inside I knew that I was just as doomed as he was.

  WHEN DINNERTIME rolled around, Jamie and I sat down at a romantic outdoor bistro on the Avenue de L'Opera near our hotel. I looked out at the bustling street, and despite the reasons that had brought me here, I still felt a twinge of excitement. After all, it was Paris. The lights, the noise, even the smell brought back so many memories of my last visit.

  I had come here on an assignment more than a year earlier. It was for a woman who had married a French native (one of those Paris summer romances turned serious) and relocated him to the United States. He was going back to France to visit family, and she was worried that those instinctive French womanizing tendencies might resurface once he was back in his homeland.

  "Did you know that most French men don't even believe in monogamy?" she had said to me during our initial meeting.

  And she was right. To Pierre LeFavre, monogamy was a word that didn't quite translate.

  I was supposed to be a well-educated American businesswoman who was traveling to France to close an important transaction. My French was to be "passable." And my taste in wine and fine cuisine, impeccable.

  The French I had studied in school wasn't quite going to cut it. I took three weeks of intensive French lessons to prepare for that assignment. And after it was finished, I didn't come home for another two weeks. I fell in love. Not in Paris, but with Paris. That's when my obsession with French history began.

  And now, more than a year later, I was delighted to see that my French was still...well, passable.

  "When do you have to start working?" I asked, folding my menu and placing it on the table next to my plate.

  Jamie closed his as well and replied solemnly, "We have our first meeting tomorrow morning. So I'm afraid I'll have to leave you on your own for the day."

  I smiled. "That's okay. I'll be fine."

  "Do you really think you can handle this city by yourself?"

  "I'm honestly more worried about you," I said with a tender smile.

  Jamie bowed his head in shame. "Yeah, that makes two of us."

  The waiter came and I ordered for both of us. Jamie's French was somewhere between pathetic and just plain embarrassing. His face seemed to reflect a mixture of relief and arousal as he watched the language of love float from my lips into the brisk Paris night air.

  "Do you realize that we wouldn't be here if it weren't for our cars?" Jamie said after the waiter disappeared.

  "What?"

  "If you didn't drive a Range Rover and I didn't drive a Jag-yoo-ar, we wouldn't be here. I doubt you would have ever called me. So bumping into you at the dealer that day is essentially the reason we're in Paris together. It's funny how fate works like that, isn't it?"

  I squirmed in my seat. Goddamn, useless, meddling fate! Look how well that turned out! "Yeah, it is kind of funny," I managed to mumble.

  He lifted his wineglass in the air. "To gas-guzzling SUVs?"

  I smiled and lifted mine as well. Why didn't I just get that freaking hybrid? "Yes," I said, clinking my glass against his. "To the cars. That brought us together in Paris for the next five days."

  As I took a sip of my Bordeaux, I noticed Jamie fidgeting awkwardly in his seat. I watched him intently as he suddenly appeared extremely uncomfortable.

  "Is everything all right?" I asked.

  "I need to tell you something," Jamie replied immediately, as if he hadn't even heard my question.

  I could feel my breathing get very shallow. The seriousness in his voice alarmed me. Actually, it scared the shit
out of me.

  "What's that?"

  Jamie fidgeted again, shifting his weight around as if he were trying to get comfortable before the start of a three-hour Lord of the Rings installment.

  "I've debated telling you for a while."

  I swallowed hard. "Why's that?"

  "Because I think it might upset you."

  "Okay," I replied softly, preparing myself for what I already knew he was going to say. I knew it immediately. He was coming clean. He was going to tell me the truth. No more lies. No more deceit. No more pretending that he didn't have a wife back home. This was it. The one thing you wouldn't find in the story of a famous French king and his mistress... honesty.

  But the question that spun through my mind at nearly a mile a minute was: Did I want to hear it?

  At this point, would telling the truth really set him free? Could he be forgiven? Would it make everything all right?

  Or was it already too late for that?

  It would certainly destroy the assignment.

  But then again, on any other assignment, when the subject stops the course of action to admit that he has a wife, and then politely excuses himself, it's considered a pass. It's a reason to rip up his failed inspection card. Frankly, that's only happened a few times. Most of them admit they have a wife, and then upon seeing the look on my face that says "Yeah... so?" they proceed, anyway.

  But like I said before, I couldn't compare Jamie to any of the others. He wasn't like any of them. And I certainly wasn't the same girl I had been with any of them.

  Ashlyn had been invited along on this trip because I had so desperately wanted her to help me through it, but she had barely made an appearance. She just didn't seem to fit into the equation.

  Jamie took a deep breath and then scratched the side of his face. His mind was searching for words. I could tell.

  He finally looked me straight in the eye and said, "There's a chance I might have to cut the trip short."

  I stared at him blankly. What did he just say? I didn't hear any mention of a wife in that sentence. Maybe the wife part was coming next. As in, "I have to cut the trip short because my wife is expecting me." Or "Because my wife needs me to go to some dinner party with her." Maybe even "Because my wife asked me to pick up some stuff at the dry cleaner and I forgot."