Spotless (15 page)

—Aurelia Nichols & Jillie Bean,
101 Tips to Lose Your Virginity after 25

The enchanted interlude ended roughly five seconds after we passed the building’s entrance. March turned to me, creepy poker smile etched on his features, and once again, I felt like I had in that glade: ready to bolt. He led us to a gray Mercedes that had likely been provided by Ilan and opened the passenger door for me. As soon as I heard the powerful hum of the engine, I fastened my seat belt in a hurry: I knew March enforced road safety rules strictly, and his thinly veiled threats had made a lasting impression on me. Better not end up in the trunk over something as trivial as failure to buckle up.

He nodded his agreement as the seat belt alarm went off, and the car started moving. We passed the Esplanade des Invalides with its church’s extravagant golden dome, slowing down for a bunch of female
joggers to cross the rue de l’Université, and as we drove along the Seine, a wave of corny nostalgia washed over me.

Paris runs in the blood, I think, and my mom had never been able to stay away for long. We moved all the time, but every three months or so she would find a good reason to come back here, if only for a few days. The bond wasn’t social in nature: her acquaintances were scattered all around the globe, and she had no family left in Paris that I knew of. It was, I believe, the same type of visceral attachment that I felt as soon as I stepped on Parisian soil too—the need to stroll down deserted avenues early in the morning or inhale the delicious smell of roasted coffee and crack a hard-boiled egg on the counter of a noisy
bistrot
. It had been nearly four years since my last trip to France. Though I tried my best not to think about all these little things, and fit into my “normal” life in the US, being back in Paris shattered that intimate balance all over again.

I missed her . . . I missed her so much.

We paused at a red light, side by side with an old white BX whose driver’s window was open, and inside the car I could hear the radio blaring Mort Schuman’s “Allô Papa Tango Charlie.”

His slow, depressed voice fit my current mood perfectly. I closed my eyes, mouthing the lyrics. “J’ai perdu celle que j’aimais, je ne la retrouverai jamais. Je vais noyer ma solitude dans le triangle des Bermudes.”
I’ve lost the one I loved. I’ll never see her again. I’ll go drown my loneliness in the Bermuda triangle.

Whether because he noticed I was crumbling and wanted to depress me further, or simply out of boredom, March shattered my reverie with a seemingly innocuous remark that felt like a kick in the shin. “I trust you had a pleasant time with Kalahari?”

My dream plane came crashing down in flames, and I felt my ears heat up to an unbelievable temperature. Had he overheard the conversation about Kalahari’s Barefoot Contessa thing? Never in my life had a question tortured my mind more. I could feel it on the tip of my tongue, forcing its way out. I chickened out, though, like every time something
touched me intimately, and I chose to divert our conversation to safer grounds. “Yes . . . I guess it was kind of them to welcome us into their apartment. It’s a nice place.”

“Yes, very typical of the French postwar architecture: bright and spacious.”

Wow. March was a master of making small talk. I bet he had a complete set of premade conversation starters encompassing a broad range of fascinating subjects such as the weather, the price of bullets these days, or how to clean your windows with newspaper to get a perfect finish . . .

Tangled in a web of confusion and frustration, I curled up in my seat and looked away, staring at the ballet of cars driving through the Place de la Concorde. “T’es vraiment un mec horrible.”
You’re really a horrible guy.

He laughed. “Thank you. Why are you no longer talking to me in English?”

I went on, still in French. “Because you understand French, and I felt like it. How long did you live here anyway?”

“What makes you think I lived here?” March asked, a touch a suspicion in his voice. It was the first time I was hearing him speak French. His English accent was unmistakable, but, as I had suspected, his grasp of the language was excellent.

“Kalahari told me things . . . about you.”

His driving became more aggressive. He actually sped up when he had room to do so. “I’ve been here often, but I’ve never lived in France.”

The blocks clipped together in my brain, and the answer escaped my lips at the same time. “No, you lived in Africa.”

I couldn’t be 100 percent sure I was right, but I thought it made sense. The scarification on his back, Kalahari’s claim that she had arrived in Paris after their breakup, the fact that he understood and spoke French but claimed to have never lived in France.

“Please mind your own business in the future,” he snapped back.

Africa it was.

The car took a sharp turn along the Seine, on the Quai d’Orsay, and March deemed it necessary to complete his warning. “Listen, Island, I won’t ask what Kalahari told you while you were alone with her. I will, however, tell you this: it doesn’t change
anything
. I have a job to do, and I will do it.”

Before I could ask what didn’t change anything, a monstrous shock shook the car. March hadn’t seen it coming—likely because he had allowed our conversation to distract him—and I obviously hadn’t either. Needless to say I couldn’t have imagined that the second car accident of my life would happen with him. Statistically, it should have occurred in my father’s car, doing ninety miles per hour on I-84, not in March’s Mercedes, waiting at a red light like decent road users.

The vehicle came from a small one-way street on the right, crashing into our side and blocking the car. I have this memory of a huge noise and my entire body being projected to the right, with my head slamming violently against the side air bag I hadn’t even seen burst out. There was talcum powder everywhere, in my eyes and on my burning cheek, but also a dull pain in my abdomen. The seat belt had locked itself during the impact and was squeezing me tight. March’s hand pushed my head down so hard I thought he was going to break my neck. I was in a complete daze: my ears were buzzing, and when my nose crashed into my own lap I was still wondering what had just happened.

Well, what had happened is what I believe to be called an ambush—though it didn’t fully dawn on me until I heard the first gunshots. I kept my head down and shrank to the size of a lawn gnome while March tried to maneuver us out of this mess. A choir of panicked screams and wails rose in the street: around us, drivers and passengers had started scrambling out of their cars. Soon the Mercedes was surrounded by empty vehicles encasing ours in a trap.

Still dizzy, I felt March undo my seat belt and pull me toward him while he unlocked the driver’s door. A projectile slammed into the
windshield with a loud noise; it would have ended its course in March’s head had it not been blocked by bulletproof glass. I glanced up at the crystal-like star now decorating the glass. God. He wasn’t seriously thinking of getting out while people were shooting at us, right?

I felt him shift next to me and peeked up again. He was removing his jacket, under which a black holster circled his shoulders. Was it the best time for stripping? I felt the navy-blue garment fall on me, strangely heavy and smelling of his clean scent and Kalahari’s perfume. Frightened, confused, I stared as he pulled out that black gun with the long suppressor and unlocked his door.

Then I heard it.

A voice, a yell in the midst of chaos, echoing between gunfire, terrified shrieks, and the distant sounds of French police sirens approaching.

“Mademoiselle Chaptal! DCRI, on vient vous aider!”
Miss Chaptal! Homeland Intelligence, we’re here to rescue you!

My heart exploded in my chest as if I had scratched a goddamn winning lottery ticket. I jackknifed up, shrugging off the oversized jacket, and looked through my window to see a blue minivan and a guy standing in front of it, wearing the bright orange armband identifying a French police officer. March’s determined blue eyes met mine, and he certainly read my distrust, a reminder that he wasn’t the good guy here. He was the bad guy, and I was being given one single chance to escape him and that Board organization.

“Island, don’t! Stay here!”

A large hand clasped around my wrist, cutting the blood flow there, and I struggled against his grip, kicking him, pulling desperately at my arm. I cried out in pain as his fingers tightened, bruising the translucent skin protecting my veins, and he let go. My free hand flew to my door handle and tugged frantically. Damn thing wouldn’t open! I remembered that there was a button near the wheel commanding the door locks. Panting, I batted his hands away with all I had. At some point I dug my nails into his skin until he bled and managed to hit that damn button.
When a dull sound indicated that my door was unlocked, I tried the handle again. The door opened, and I tumbled into the street, my legs reflexively kicking in response to March’s forceful attempt to grab them.

The gunfire had ceased, perhaps because the cops were waiting for their announcement to produce some sort of effect. The sirens seemed to grow closer, and I was progressively being filled by a sense of incredible hope. Later, it took me several sleepless nights of replaying the scene in my mind to understand how and why I was able to exit that car: March had hesitated. He could have stopped me in a hundred different and equally painful ways, grabbed one of my ankles again and simply broken it to incapacitate me, but the couple of seconds he spent trying to make that decision proved to be too long.

I finally managed to crawl away from the wrecked Mercedes, and I registered a flash of panic in his eyes. I didn’t give a shit; I couldn’t hear anything but the sirens calling, and at the time I assumed he was mad because of losing his paycheck and ending up caught by the police.

I saw the cops shooting at our windshield again to stop March from going after me. I think he managed to get out anyway. I heard more gunshots and a scream behind me. My eyes darted to the left; the driver of the car that had rammed into ours had since come out and tried to fire at March as well. I barely had the time to see the shooter collapse, a stain of deep red blood rapidly spreading on his chest.

“Couvrez la!”
Cover her!

It was that bald guy near the Citroën minivan who had shouted, shielding himself behind the vehicle to avoid ending up like his unfortunate colleague. A second black-haired cop wearing the same orange armband stepped out of the minivan and fired at March with what looked like a powerful automatic rifle, successfully stopping his progress toward me. I looked back to see March plunge to the ground and shield himself behind an open car door.

The strangest thing happened then. All the adrenaline pumping in my blood was still propelling my feet forward, and I didn’t stop running
toward the cops, but part of me wanted to look back again to see if March was okay. Thank God I was a rational person, the type who steals toilet paper but doesn’t let inappropriate feelings for her kidnapper stand in the way of her freedom.

I blocked that thought and ran toward the voice, my arms flailing, snot running all over my nose and mouth. This had been no dream. There, standing behind the minivan and already opening the sliding door while his colleague fired again and again into the car shielding March, was the man who had called my name. A tall young man with a neatly shaven skull, a black parka, and that flashy, goddamn-beautiful orange armband.

The time it took me to cover the distance between us felt way too long, but really, the whole thing—car crash included—had probably taken less than a few minutes. Soon I was collapsing in his arms and sobbing with relief. He helped me inside the vehicle, and within seconds it was all over. We were driving fast along the Seine’s right bank, and my bizarre adventure was reaching its conclusion. No one would ever search my things again, or even threaten to tenderize me.

“Complètement conne, ma parole . . .”
I swear, she’s completely retarded . . .

My head shot up.

I looked at my savior in surprise. He was sneering at his colleague’s statement, and a surge of panic washed over me, making my skin prickle.

Turned out I had been right: it was over, and quickly so. The bald man grabbed my neck, pressed my carotid, and I blacked out.

I know it was a little late for that, and maybe I deserved what I got anyway, but my last conscious thought was of March.

FOURTEEN

The Table

“Ramirez tore Rica’s red blouse open, revealing the sumptuous globes of her breasts. ‘You are mine, Rica! Love is the sentence, and my shaft is the needle!”

—Kerry-Lee Storm,
The Cost of Rica

Have you seen that movie—
Being John Malkovich
? The one where everyone had John Malkovich’s face? My dream was kind of like that, except everybody had March’s face, and it was terribly creepy. I had sometimes dreamed of the months my mom and I had spent in Tokyo or of my stay in the hospital, but never of the accident itself. Those few minutes and the two weeks that had ensued remained a complete black hole.