The Bullet

by Mary Louise Kelly

  I found my seat. Clicked my seat belt tight. Closed my eyes.

  Nine hours and four minutes to Zurich.

  PART SEVEN

  Europe

  Fifty-two

  * * *

  THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2013

  As the plane circled Zurich, I felt myself begin to sweat. Dark crescents soaked under the sleeves of the HOTLANTA sweatshirt. Does it go without saying that I had not slept? That I had passed the entire overnight flight worrying? Of the many images that tormented me, the worst was imagining how Mom and Dad would react when they learned what I had done. I hated knowing I would cause such pain. Hated knowing that I couldn’t call to comfort them, or to explain myself. In my life, I’ve never gone more than a day without speaking to my parents. Now I might be forced to go months, or years, or forever.

  We were scheduled to land just after noon in Switzerland. Just after 6:00 a.m. in Atlanta. I had no idea what might have happened in the nine hours we had been in the air. Unless she was an abnormally early riser, the Sinclares’ housekeeper would not have entered their house yet. But Betsy might have thrashed herself free, or a friend could have dropped by the house and found the body, or any number of other scenarios could have transpired. It seemed more likely than not that Swiss police would be waiting to drag me off in chains, the moment we touched down.

  I had weighed whether to change into my new clothes on the plane, or after landing. I went with the latter. I was stuck with being Caroline Cashion up until the moment I crossed the Swiss border; I needed to match my passport photo. After the border, all bets were off.

  The plane bumped down onto the runway. Taxied to the gate. All seemed normal. I stepped off the plane, head down, avoiding eye contact. The throng of passengers shuffled toward passport control. I joined a long line. Around me slumped bleary-eyed, jet-lagged travelers, sneaking glances at their e-mail despite signs banning cell phone use in this section of the airport. I envied their insouciance. Wanted felons such as myself couldn’t risk pissing off the guards.

  My heart pounded when at last my turn came. I had been hoping for the grandmotherly officer in Lane 7. Instead I was waved toward Lane 5, presided over by a blond man with piggy eyes and multiple chins. He flipped through my passport unhurriedly.

  “Purpose of your visit?”

  “Tourist.” This was always the right answer, no matter what actually brought you to a country. Otherwise there would inevitably be some problem with your visa, some work permit you had failed to obtain, some form you’d forgotten to get stamped.

  “How long are you staying in Switzerland?”

  “Just transiting en route to Italy,” I lied.

  He scanned the bar code in my passport. I held my breath. Now he was scrutinizing the main page, the one showing my photo and personal data. Slowly he raised his eyes to mine. “Alles Gute zum Geburtstag,” he said sternly.

  I am a linguist, as you know. I speak French couramment, my accent indistinguishable from a native’s. I speak Italian and Spanish well. For reasons that now elude me, I had studied Mandarin for a year in college, and I can still direct a taxi or order the Peking duck in Beijing without resorting to sign language. But German? Nein. Barely a word. I’m not even sure I can count to ten.

  I spread my hands in a gesture of incomprehension and gave him a shaky smile.

  He did not return it. “Alles Gute zum Geburtstag!” he said, more agitated this time. The passport officer in Lane 6 stopped what she was doing to peer over.

  Was this it? Was he onto me? Had the bar-code scan triggered an alert?

  “Sie sprechen kein Deutsch? I saying, happy birthday. Soon you are turning . . . achtunddreißig. In English, how you say? Thirty-eight.”

  He raised his hand and brought it down to crunch a rectangular, red stamp into my passport.

  My knees had gone so weak I had to concentrate to walk away.

  • • •

  IN THE LADIES’ room of the airport bus terminal I dropped my skirt to the floor. Off next came the rhinestone HOTLANTA hoodie. Hallelujah.

  For this next act I had to screw up my courage. I hadn’t managed to find proper scissors for sale in the Arrivals Hall, but I did stumble upon a vending machine that stocked travel necessities, from disposable socks to plastic rain ponchos to mini–sewing kits. Inside this last item was a teensy pair of scissors for snipping thread.

  I pulled my hair down over my eyes. I should have had a mirror to do this, but I couldn’t bear to watch. A hank of glossy, dark hair came off in my hand. I held it for a moment, remembering how Will had wrapped his fingers around these same strands, outside another airport, in what felt like another lifetime. I shook my head to dispel the thought and let the hair drop on top of my discarded clothes. Snip snip snip. The scissors were nowhere near big enough for the job; it took ages to work my way around, sawing off my curls to within an inch of my scalp.

  When I was finished, I felt naked in a way that had nothing to do with my standing in the stall of a bus station bathroom wearing only my underwear. I bundled up my old clothes, my old hair. Exited the bathroom without permitting myself to check my reflection in the mirror above the sinks.

  Ten minutes later, a mousy-looking woman wearing sensible boots and a beige sweater boarded a bus for Freiburg, Germany.

  • • •

  I NEEDED TO make my way west and north across Europe. But it seemed unwise to chart too straight a line. I had booked my flight into Zurich for this very reason: to create a record of me entering a different city, in a different country, than the one to which I was actually headed.

  Thus, now, the detour through Germany.

  Freiburg is supposed to be a lovely city, with a medieval university and lively market squares and a winding road that leads deep into the Black Forest. I saw none of these. I clambered off the bus, deliberately walked two blocks in the wrong direction and ducked down a smelly alley lined with Dumpsters, before zigzagging back to the Hauptbahnhof, the main train station. I had no idea whether this was the right way to go about disguising my tracks. I’m trained as a scholar of French literature, not as some wizard of antisurveillance tradecraft. But I’ve watched the same Bourne movies as everyone else, and Matt Damon’s character seems to embrace a pretty basic philosophy: if you’re being chased, either find yourself a hell of a good hiding place, or else keep moving.

  Inside the train station I purchased a cheap black wool hat and a ticket to Frankfurt. I toyed with riding farther north, continuing all the way up to Antwerp, the Belgian port city that is headquarters to the world’s diamond trade. I had visited Antwerp before, had marveled at the diamond district, the Orthodox Jewish traders mingling with Brazilians and Russians, Lebanese and Indians, tens of billions of dollars changing hands every year. Once I identified the right man to approach, I could sell off my stones one by one. If they were worth anything close to what I had paid in Atlanta, the money would last me years.

  Antwerp could wait, though. Frankfurt already marked yet another detour. But it is a transport hub, and from there, I could catch a direct train to my final destination.

  • • •

  TWO HOURS AND twelve minutes later, as the train pulled into Frankfurt’s main station, I arrived at a decision. I needed to find an Internet connection and check the headlines. Perhaps I should have done this the moment I cleared customs back in Zurich. But given the choice between dawdling at an Internet café and racing to put as many miles as possible between me and my pursuers, I’d chosen to run. I also felt uneasy about unwittingly creating an electronic trail. Police would easily follow me to Zurich; they would be no more than a few hours behind. Common sense dictated that they would use every cybertool at their disposal. From this point forward, I was determined to leave no traces.

  Still.

  Separate from the question of whether Ethan’s body had been discovered was the matter of his wife. By n
ow twenty-four hours had lapsed since I had tied her up in the laundry room. She had spat at me, she had called Sadie Rawson a whore, and she would do everything in her power to deliver me to prison. But I couldn’t just leave her there forever. I needed to confirm that she had been found.

  From a kiosk across the street from the station I paid cash for two prepaid phones. I tucked one in my pocket. On the other I launched a browser and searched for Ethan Sinclare. The bio from his law firm’s website pulled up first, followed by an article about a speech he’d delivered in Miami, and a squib about a fund-raiser he and Betsy had chaired for the Atlanta Botanical Garden. Nothing more recent.

  Puzzled, I checked the Journal-Constitution home page. I nearly skimmed right past it. It was the seventh item, only a couple of paragraphs. A body had been found in a private residence on Tuxedo Road. Police stated that the body had gunshot wounds, it had been found on Thursday morning, and they were investigating the death as a homicide. Detectives were seeking to question a person of interest in connection with the incident. The victim’s name was being withheld, pending notification of family members. No suspect had been named at this time.

  I walked a clockwise loop around the station, stuffing the black hat into a garbage can and donning a pair of forest-green earmuffs that someone had forgotten on the previous train. I reentered the station by a side entrance. At the ticket machines, the woman ahead of me purchased a one-way, first-class trip to Munich. As she turned away, I dropped the prepaid phone I had used into her shopping bag. A nice touch, I thought. On the off chance that my ten minutes online had provided any clues as to my whereabouts, that phone would lead investigators straight to Bavaria.

  • • •

  I FELT A palpable sense of relief as the train crossed the border into France. I spoke the language. I knew the customs. I could blend in. My fingers closed around the keys to Madame Aubuchon’s apartment. When I had groped around for them at the bottom of my handbag yesterday, I had known this was where I would run. Hélène had urged me, had practically ordered me, to go to Paris. To heal, and to hide. Her exact words. Of course, she hadn’t known that I would be wanted for murder by the time I got here. The police would question her—interviewing a suspect’s employer must be part of the drill—and she might reveal I had borrowed her Paris house keys.

  But I had a feeling she wouldn’t. I couldn’t tell you why, other than that she seemed a deeply private person, who would view what she chose to do with her house keys as a private matter. She was also deeply intelligent. She would read between the lines of the press coverage. She would realize it must have been Ethan Sinclare who had killed my family; she would grasp what I had done, and why. Madame Aubuchon had her own history with a violent man. I thought—I hoped—she would not give up another woman in crisis.

  The train from Frankfurt did not rumble into the Gare de l’Est until midnight. It would be pushing one in the morning by the time the Paris metro deposited me outside Hélène’s building. I took a man’s navy scarf from my bag—another item appropriated from the train’s overhead bins—and wound it around my head and shoulders. I was cold, and the beige sweater had by now been captured by closed-circuit cameras in transit hubs across Europe. I took a deep breath and steeled myself for what I hoped would be the final leg of this journey. I was nearing a state of such exhaustion that if sirens and police vans were indeed waiting for me outside Madame Aubuchon’s flat, I was no longer sure I cared.

  Fifty-three

  * * *

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2013

  Paris est un véritable océan, wrote Balzac in 1834. “Paris is a veritable ocean. Sound it: you will never know its depth.”

  Yes, there are bigger cities. Some 2 million people live in Paris proper; it is nothing to today’s megacities of Mumbai or Mexico City, São Paolo or Shanghai. But I didn’t have the keys to an apartment in those cities, did I? And Paris is big enough. I know some streets here like the back of my hand. The rue Jeanne d’Arc, for example, in the thirteenth arrondissement, home to my favorite butcher shop. The seedy street in the Marais, where I had lived for two years while researching and writing my PhD dissertation. There were whole neighborhoods, though, where I had never walked. Countless streets where I would not be recognized, where I could prowl undetected. Less a woman than a shadow, a silhouette against the sky.

  You can scour Paris, Balzac wrote, but there will always be another wilderness. His actual phrase was un lieu vierge. A blank or virgin place. A place with no history, at least none of your own, a place where you might assume a different identity altogether.

  Few of us ever get the chance to reinvent ourselves. I mean, genuinely reinvent ourselves: new name, new city, new life. I had already done so once. I had been Caroline Smith, and then, with the stroke of a pen, I became Caroline Cashion. That time I had been a child; my new home and new identity had not been of my choosing. This time, though, I had control. Whom would I become, now that I could no longer publicly move through the world as Caroline Cashion? Now that the woman who had used that name for thirty-four years must—for official purposes—cease to exist?

  I have always loved the name Simone. Simone Moreau has a nice ring to it. Or Simone Guerin, perhaps. Dubois? Durand? It would need to sound commonplace. An unremarkable name, a name you might forget. I didn’t know how one might go about acquiring false identity papers. Presumably such things could be accomplished, if tackled with the right combination of determination, cunning, and cash.

  That was a task for tomorrow. Next week, even. Today I slept until late afternoon, and when I woke up, I was ravenous. Madame Aubuchon’s pantry was bare. I found a jar of raspberry jam and smeared it onto shards of melba toast so old they were turning to dust. Eventually I gave up and gobbled the jam directly from the spoon. There were tea bags but no milk, tinned tuna but no bread. A strange meal.

  Afterward I lay back in bed and watched the stars prick the sky, one by one.

  Paris is a veritable ocean. You can scour it, Balzac wrote, but there will always be another wilderness, always “a hidden den, flowers, pearls, monsters.” Indeed. The monsters were a certainty. My adversaries would be waiting for me, ready to pounce the moment I was careless, the second I let down my guard. As for hidden dens, as for flowers and pearls . . . Well. We would have to wait and see.

  Fifty-four

  * * *

  SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2013

  I did not have Madame Aubuchon’s stamina. In her own hour of need, Hélène had holed up inside this apartment for seven weeks. I didn’t last two days.

  I forced myself to wait until twilight before venturing out. Under normal circumstances, this would not have been a challenge. The flat was spacious and tasteful, the furnishings more minimalist than I would have predicted for a woman in her seventies. Perhaps this was the boy-toy husband’s influence on display. The walls were lined with books, mostly in French. On the upper shelves were smaller but still sizable collections in English, Italian, and Russian. The literary canon was well represented, but there was also a suspicious number of mysteries and thrillers. I would have chalked these up to Jean-Pierre, except that Madame Aubuchon appeared to follow a strict labeling system with her personal library. Penciled inside every front cover, in what I recognized as her handwriting, was her full name and a year. Presumably the year she had read the book. Madame Aubuchon had devoured everything ­­P. D. James and Ian Rankin had ever written, along with Lee Child’s entire Jack Reacher series. God, it was too good. The prim head of Georgetown’s French Department—a leading authority on the seventeenth-­century playwrights Molière and Racine—was secretly addicted to page-turners about a testosterone-drenched, ex-army cop. I would have given quite a lot for the chance to drop that into casual conversation in the faculty lounge.

  What drove me outdoors wasn’t the lack of diversions, but the lack of food. I couldn’t face the raspberry jam again. And while I couldn’t lay eyes on the source,
all afternoon the smell of freshly baked bread had wafted up from the street to torment me. There must be a boulangerie on the corner, just out of sight. When the sky at last grew purple, I borrowed a raincoat and hat from the hall closet and let myself out. The coat stretched tight across my chest and hips; the woman was a sparrow.

  The bakery was already locked tight for the night, but a corner shop on the next block had everything I desired. A wedge of cheese, the dry French sausage known as saucisson sec, half a dozen apples, cans of tomato soup, a liter of milk, a bottle of wine. In a dusty basket near the front I found baguettes. They had gone stale, but I tucked two under my arm, breaking off a heel to nibble as the clerk rang up my purchases.

  Ten minutes later I was back in the apartment. I stashed the cheese and the milk in the fridge and chewed a slice of the saucisson as I contemplated the nonfood items I had acquired: a toothbrush, a bar of soap, and a box of L’Oréal Prodigy #10, Blond Très Très Clair.

  Fifty-five

  * * *

  SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2013

  The L’Oréal #10 was a disaster.

  It turns out you can’t go from naturally dark brown hair to Blond Très Très Clair, at least not without making an intermediate stop at ghastly orange. The woman who stared back at me from Madame Aubuchon’s bathroom mirror was crowned with what could only be described as a carroty mullet, complete with crooked layers in front and a ratty tail at the back, where I’d left the hair longer to hide my still-vivid scar.

  I would have to seek professional help. Vanity aside, I was trying to keep a low profile, and this look would cause young children to run screaming.

  On boulevard Saint-Michel was a salon I liked. But they might remember me, and it was unlikely to be open on a Sunday. Instead I borrowed the rain jacket and hat again, lowered my sunglasses, and caught the metro to the Château Rouge stop, in the eighteenth arrondissement.