The Bullet

by Mary Louise Kelly

  • • •

  YOU COULD SMELL and hear the Marché Dejean before you saw it. The unofficial heart of Paris’s African community was hopping on a Sunday morning. The stink of meat assaulted you even as you climbed the steps from the metro, wafting over from Boucherie Amar Frères, a halal butcher. Around the corner, pretty housewives from Senegal haggled over the price of yams; street traders hawked fake Louis Vuitton bags; children begging for sticky, honeyed pastries spilled out the door of an Algerian bakery.

  I stopped outside a Tunisian restaurant to get my bearings. Surely there was an Arab hairdresser around here. I was gambling that barbers in this neighborhood might be less likely to abide by the rhythms of a nominally Catholic country, where on a Sunday morning everyone was supposed to be either asleep or in church. Judging by the throngs of people squeezing past me, I had guessed right on that front. I was also gambling that someone used to styling women of color might have experience in rescuing brunettes from bad home dye jobs.

  A beautiful black woman with platinum-blond hair swept past me on the sidewalk. I caught up with her, paid a compliment, asked directions. She said a name and pointed. It took several wrong turns and another request for directions before I arrived at a brightly tiled establishment fitted with two vinyl barber chairs. The proprietor looked surprised when I walked in. Even more surprised when I peeled off my hat and revealed the mess he had to work with. He held up a finger, signaling me to wait, and disappeared into the back. A minute later he returned with a woman in tow, a baby on her hip and a girl of four or five trailing behind. The two of them consulted in a language I couldn’t understand. Hindi, possibly, or Urdu. They were not African.

  Then she stepped forward with a surprisingly sympathetic smile. “You did on your own?” She pointed at my scalp.

  I nodded sheepishly.

  “One hundred euros. I fix for you. Will take some hours.”

  I handed over the money, plus a generous advance tip. When someone is about to attack your head with bleach and a pair of scissors, it’s in your interest for the person to feel warmly toward you.

  I was led to one of the vinyl chairs. The girl shyly offered me tea, then sugar cubes, which she dropped into my cup with tiny silver tongs and a look of such endearing seriousness that I accepted three. She disappeared while her mother stood behind me, whipping bleach into a paste in a steel bowl.

  “Where is your family from?” I asked the woman, by way of conversation.

  “Pakistan. Lahore. And you?”

  “Lyons.” France’s third-largest city. I knew it reasonably well, should she ask questions. But she merely nodded. The girl reappeared, carrying a stack of comic books. She held one up to me, smiling. I smiled back. She held up another one, pointed at the cover and giggled.

  Her mother spoke sharply to her, asking a question in their language. Then the mother began to laugh as well. “She says you look like Tintin.”

  I stared. The Belgian boy adventurer on the cover of her books styled his orange hair in a cowlicky cross between a pompadour and a Mohawk. I made to protest, but what was the use? The girl had nailed it. She crawled into my lap and demanded that I read aloud to her the adventures of Tintin and his dog, Snowy, while her mother rubbed a white paste that smelled of lemons into my hair.

  • • •

  I EMERGED INTO the strong sunlight of early afternoon looking less like Tintin and more like a youngish Mia Farrow. The Pakistani woman had done me right. My hair was dark, golden blond, shaped into a modern pixie cut, spiky on top, with a flirty flip in the back. The hair just covered my scar. She had deftly avoided touching it, had asked no questions.

  I walked to a nearby café and ordered more tea. The remaining German phone was in my pocket. It was time, I reckoned. I had not checked the news for three days. I prepared myself to read about the manhunt that must now be under way for me. The press must be hounding my family in Washington; my heart ached at the scandal and shame I had brought on the Cashion name.

  On the Journal-Constitution mobile site the murder had ascended to the lead story. Ethan Sinclare was now identified by name. His family was described as shocked and grief-stricken. The Atlanta Bar Association was planning a tribute dinner. There was a more detailed account of the wounds that had killed him, two bullet shots to the stomach, fired from close range. Police were still seeking to question a person in connection with the incident. Anyone with relevant information was urged to make an anonymous call to the Crime Stoppers Atlanta tip line, or to text the tip to C-R-I-M-E-S.

  There was no mention of my name. Nothing hinting at a motive for the killing. I did not understand it. I sat until my tea went cold, then removed the chip from the phone and crushed it beneath the heel of my boot.

  The Marché Dejean had finished for the day, but at the top of the stairs leading back down into the metro, a lone vendor remained. He had a dirty, green sheet spread across the sidewalk, loaded with car air-fresheners, lighters, knockoff designer sunglasses, and a handful of preloaded cell phones.

  “Combien?” I asked, gesturing at the phones. How much?

  He shrugged. “Trente-cinq.” Thirty-five.

  I scoffed and turned to go. But his necklace caught my eye. Rather, not a necklace but a small, leather pouch, hanging from a suede strap.

  “Et pour ça?”

  “Ça? Non. C’est la dent de mon fils.” That’s my son’s baby tooth.

  Not the tooth, silly. Just the pouch.

  He looked dubious.

  “Cinquante.” I held out a fifty-euro note. “For both.”

  He shook a small, brown tooth from the pouch into his fingers. Unknotted the suede strap and handed it, along with a phone, over to me.

  “Code for the SIM card is taped to the back,” he mumbled.

  Once I’d settled into the plastic bucket seat of the train, I unwrapped the bullet from its tissue-paper sheath inside my purse. Dropped it into the pouch and tied the strap tight around my neck. The leather was still warm from his skin.

  • • •

  THAT NIGHT I became aware of a man watching me.

  Back in Hélène’s apartment I had found myself restless. The evening was unseasonably warm. The neighborhood cafés would be packed. My cans of tomato soup were unappealing. I paced the parquet floors, weighing the risks, knowing I should stay inside with the curtains drawn and my nose in a book. But I seemed unable to channel my old risk-averse, introverted self. She bored me. Just after dark I exited the building by a back service door, slipping into the soft air and walking east, crossing the Seine, hugging back streets and then the banks of the river itself.

  There is an Italian wine bar near the Odéon that stays open late. On a night like tonight it would be busy, knots of people sipping Sangiovese on the sidewalk, waiting for seats at the bar or at one of the red Formica tables. I scanned the wine list and ordered the house Vermentino, a dry white from the hills between Liguria and Tuscany. Then I plunked down on the curb to wait. The crowd was mostly young, mostly locals in expensive denim and leather jackets, lighting each other’s cigarettes and chattering in French. I was wearing my sensible boots with black leggings. No makeup, no jewelry, no ornamentation of any kind. My newly blond, cropped hair lay flat against my head. I felt invisible.

  From inside the restaurant, though, a man kept glancing at me. He was at a table for two in the window, speaking to another man whose back was to me. I could not see his features clearly in the candlelight, just the flash of his dark eyes. They did not look away when I stared back. Suddenly he was making his way to the bar, speaking to the bartender, pointing outside toward me. My blood froze. I scrambled to my feet, ready to run.

  But when he appeared at the door he was holding two glasses. “Je me suis demandé si vous aimeriez un autre.” I thought you might like a refill. He nodded in the direction of the bar. “He said you liked the Vermentino.”

 
I stepped back. Scanned our surroundings for signs of a trap. A squad of armed Interpol agents might be lurking behind him, preparing to storm us from the restaurant kitchen. He took in my tense posture with a raised eyebrow. “You’re not going to run away, are you? Je ne mords pas.” I don’t bite.

  I could have been mistaken, but his black eyes were not watching me like those of a cop closing in on his quarry. They were watching me the way a man watches a woman he wants, outside a bar on a velvety night in Paris, when the evening is still young enough that anything could happen.

  I took the wine.

  “Comment vous appelez-vous?” What’s your name?

  “Simone.” It was the first time I’d said it out loud. “Je m’appelle Simone Guerin. Et vous?” And you?

  “François.” He smiled and produced a pack of cigarettes, shook out one for each of us. I opened my mouth to tell him I don’t smoke, then reconsidered. Caroline didn’t smoke, never had. Simone, on the other hand, was still making up her mind about such things.

  “Alors, Simone. Parlez-moi de vous.” Tell me about yourself.

  “Je suis écrivaine.” I am a writer. That had a crumb of truth. I thought of the book I’d been so excited to write, not three weeks ago, the one my brother Tony had teased me about in my Georgetown kitchen. The politics of divorce in working-class, post-Napoleonic France. It was as though the idea had sprung from the mind of a completely different person. The topic now failed to interest me in the slightest. I began to talk instead about travel memoirs and fat war histories, slim volumes of poetry and novels with bleak endings that drove you to despair. About all the books I loved to read, and all the ones I wanted to write, and some of what I said was real and some of it I made up as I went along. His black eyes never left mine.

  Shall I describe him for you? François was pale with thick, dark hair that matched his eyes. Tall but delicately boned. He wore a black cashmere turtleneck and skinny jeans. But you already guessed that. He leaned down to kiss me and I let him. Smoke curled up from the cigarettes we held against our hips. He was so precisely my type that his lips felt already familiar. I had kissed a dozen boys just like him, on a hundred velvety Paris nights. Paris is a veritable ocean, wrote Balzac, but it is also, he conceded, a moral sewer. Un égout moral. This can be a good or a bad thing, depending on how remorseful one is prepared to feel the morning after.

  If they ever called my name for a seat inside, I missed it. At midnight the candles on the tables had burned low. Every chair was still occupied. The hum of conversation, of easy laughter and whispered seductions, floated out to the sidewalk. The bartender eventually passed us the Vermentino bottle through the window, and we stood there, kissing and talking and smoking, until it was finished.

  When he whispered that his apartment was close by, though, I broke away. I’ve had my share of lovers, but I’ve never picked up a stranger in a bar and slept with him. I’m no prude about such things. I simply think a man should have to work a bit harder than that. So much of the pleasure lies in the chase.

  I kissed him, on the cheek this time, and said good-night.

  “Attends,” he said. Wait. On a scrap of paper he wrote his name and a telephone number. I folded it, discovered I had no pockets, tucked it into the leather pouch at my neck.

  Mist was rising off the Seine as I threaded my way home. I stopped every few hundred yards, listening from darkened doorways, making sure that neither François nor anyone else had followed.

  Fifty-six

  * * *

  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2013

  You don’t tend to know when you’re about to have a momentous day.

  Morning dawns like any other morning. You stretch, put the kettle on, feed the cat, pad around in blissful ignorance. Only later, when you unfold the fateful letter, or the knock sounds at the door, do you realize that the trajectory of your life has irrevocably been altered.

  In my case, the messenger was a news website.

  I bolted upright in bed shortly after 8:00 a.m., startled from sleep by the blaring horn of a city bus. On the past two days traffic had been light, but today Paris was roaring to life in full weekday-morning, rush-hour splendor. Madame Aubuchon lived in an elegant building with leafy views across the Bois de Boulogne. Half a block away, though, thrummed a major artery. You could almost feel the pent-up commuter frustration rising from the streets up to her balcony.

  I padded to the kitchen and put the kettle on for tea. Toasted the last of the baguette and spread it with the dreaded raspberry jam. As I chewed, I scolded myself for being careless last night. I should know better. No more nights out snogging strange men. From this moment forward, my raciest evening encounters would be with a mug of herbal tea and one of Hélène’s dog-eared Jack Reacher paperbacks.

  I had matters to attend to, now that I was rested. I needed to get a fake ID. I needed fresh clothes, the drabber the better. Most pressingly, I should find a new accommodation. Even if Madame Aubuchon did not crack under police pressure, this place was insecure. Staying here was tempting fate. I wanted rooms with no connection to the woman once known as Caroline Cashion.

  In the shower I pumped out my usual shampoo dose, to find it was five times as much as my new pixie hair required. I made a mental note to add a razor to my shopping list. At this rate, I would soon have more hair on my legs than on my head. After toweling off I reached for the prepaid phone that I’d bought yesterday from the street vendor. I would check the headlines, crush the chip again, purchase yet another new phone while I ran errands today.

  I began to read. At the first paragraph I went pale. By the third, I had crashed down on the side of the bathtub, my eyes twitching, breathing hard.

  • • •

  BETSY SINCLARE HAD given an exclusive interview to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She was pictured looking frail and wearing widow’s weeds. Above the article ran a banner headline: “Bereaved Widow Shares Saga of Terror, Tragedy.” The story that followed, written by a reporter whose name I did not recognize, bore no resemblance to events as I knew them to have unfolded.

  Mr. and Mrs. Sinclare had been about to sit down to lunch together at their upscale Buckhead home, the newspaper reported, when their lives were shattered. Earlier that morning Mr. Sinclare had driven to Henri’s Bakery, where he was a regular customer, to buy his wife’s favorite sandwich.

  “We love their pastrami,” said Mrs. Sinclare, her voice catching. “Ethan always goes out of his way to bring it home for me. And because he’d been out of town on business, he made a special effort. I came sailing in from my tennis match and found he’d set the table with our wedding china and crystal. Forty years of marriage, and he could still be such a sweetheart.”

  Before the couple could enjoy their romantic meal, however, an armed man burst into the room, according to Mrs. Sinclare.

  My mind reeled. I plowed on.

  “He came out of nowhere,” she said. “He was wearing gloves and a ski mask, like you wear in Aspen, but you could see his eyes were bloodshot. He was yelling for money and he was waving a gun around and Ethan tried to stop him. They were wrestling, and then there was a noise like a clap of thunder.”

  That noise was the sound of two bullets being pumped into Ethan Sinclare’s stomach. He is believed to have died almost instantly, said Atlanta police lieutenant Jeff Packard.

  Mrs. Sinclare tried to escape, but the intruder overpowered her, bound her wrists and ankles, and locked her in a laundry room adjacent to the kitchen, she said. She was discovered by the family’s longtime housekeeper the following morning. Based on Betsy Sinclare’s description, Lieutenant Packard said, police are searching for a man last seen wearing a red-and-black coat and gray pants.

  I checked and checked again. Nowhere in the article did my name appear.

  What the holy hell was this? There was no room for misinterpretation. No shades of gray. Betsy Sinclare had lied. Outright
lied both to the newspaper and, by the sound of it, to the detectives investigating her husband’s murder.

  The question was, why?

  • • •

  THE STORY MUST have been a plant.

  They must have been trying to trick me into thinking I was safe, trying to tempt me from my hiding place. Admittedly, this theory had flaws. The police would blow all credibility if they got caught fabricating a story and shopping it to reporters. The newspaper would blow all credibility if it got caught wittingly printing a fake story. Neither institution would be cavalier about such risks.

  Still. What other explanation could there be?

  I threw down the prepaid phone in frustration. It was already blinking low on credit, and I’d only been online ten minutes. I borrowed a coat from the hall closet (a fur-trimmed cape this time, not the rain jacket, no point in being predictable) and set off for the Renaissance Hotel. I’d passed it on avenue Poincaré on my way home last night, had noticed the taxi rank and two bellhops in top hats idling outside the entrance. At times in life nothing feels so comforting as the high-end anonymity of a big American hotel. Usually these times occur when I’m in an unfamiliar city and in desperate need of a ladies’ room. Today I required a different amenity: the business center.

  It was in the basement. As the computer whirred to life, I stole sideways glances at the room’s other occupants. Had the woman at the workstation closest to the door—the one wearing a malevolently striped suit and terry-cloth room slippers—had she stared at me longer than necessary? And why had the man beside her jumped up to leave so suddenly? I squeezed my head between my palms, a futile effort to quell the paranoia, and started typing.

  The CNN.com story included a few details absent from the Journal-­Constitution account. A neighbor said she had seen a purple minivan screeching away from the Sinclares’ house on the morning of the shooting. The man whom police were searching for was described as African-­American, with a stocky build, around five feet ten inches to six feet tall. Ethan’s funeral was to be held at the Episcopal Cathedral of St. Philip, this coming Wednesday.