Paris is a Bitch (2 page)

Delilah said, “I know it’s difficult for you. I can imagine what it’s like. And I’m sorry.”

I looked at her. “Yeah? What do you imagine?”

There was a pause. She said, “You wonder what the new assignment is, and whether that means I have to go to bed with someone.”

High-value-target honey trap operations were Delilah’s métier, and if she hadn’t been so effective in the role, the Mossad would have cut her loose ages earlier because she wouldn’t take any of the shit their bureaucracy tried to serve her.

“That’s not what makes it difficult,” I said, although the sentiment was less than solid.

“What, then?”

“You know what. It’s not what you do in the life—I know that, and I get it. It’s you in the life, period. It’s making me feel like I have one foot in and one foot out, and I can’t find my balance.”

Stubble Boy said, “Fuck that! You tell him if he wants the higher coupon payments, he takes the higher risk. That’s—”

“Excuse me,” Delilah said, switching to Parisian-accented English, her voice suddenly projecting. “It might just be the acoustics in here, but your phone conversation seems awfully loud. Why don’t you take it outside? Or, better yet, for the sake of your date, wait until you’re alone?”

Stubble Boy looked briefly incredulous, and I half-expected him to stammer something born of baseless entitlement such as,
Do you have any idea who I am?
Instead, he held the phone away from his head and said dismissively, “Look, there’s plenty of noise in here. I don’t know what the problem is.”

He turned as though to resume his conversation. I knew Delilah wasn’t going to let it go, so I leaned across to his table and took hold of his free wrist. He looked at me, shocked, and tried to yank free. Eccentric hand and forearm strength is one of the consequences of a lifetime of near daily judo, and I do additional exercises to augment my grip—enough so that I can crush an apple in one hand if I want to. This time, fortunately for Stubble Boy, I didn’t want to. But I let him know I could.

“Put the phone away,” I said quietly. “And lower your voice.”

He looked like he was going to protest, but a little more effortless pressure on his wrist and the flat look in my eyes made him think better of it. “Jesus, you don’t have to get so huffy,” he said. I looked at him for a moment longer, then released his wrist and turned back to Delilah. I heard him say into the phone, extra loudly to try to restore some of his damaged pride, “Hey Bob, I’ll call you back. Couple of rude Parisians here.”

Delilah smiled and said to me in French, “Well, that was diverting.”

I shrugged, having already largely forgotten the idiot. “Anyway. This whole situation would be a lot more tolerable for me if there were at least an endpoint to look forward to. Six months, six years, if I just knew there was a time when…”

I let the thought trail off. On the sidewalk outside the restaurant, a swarthy young man of what looked like Arabic, maybe Algerian, descent was scrutinizing the menu in the window. He had a narrow, ferret-like face, and his eyes darted around in a way that suggested he felt jumpy. Nothing alarming in itself, necessarily, but this was the second time I’d seen him in the last ten minutes. Both times he had examined the menu, but had also spent a fair amount of time scoping the inside of the restaurant. Again, in itself nothing out of the ordinary. People read menus and look inside restaurants, sometimes repeatedly, while they try to decide where to eat. But the behavior is more common in a pair or a group than it is in a singleton. Also, there was something purposeful, rather than inquiring, in the way he was looking around inside.

“What?” Delilah said.

“There’s a guy outside. Second time I’ve seen him and I don’t like his vibe.”

“Shall I look?”

“No. If it’s anything, I don’t want him to know he’s made. Wait, he’s coming inside.”

I slid my chair back so if necessary I could clear the table instantly, then picked up the glass of house Bordeaux I was drinking. Most people have trouble recovering from a glass of wine in the eyes, especially if it’s followed by an immediate barrage of much worse. Delilah’s hand dipped discreetly below the table, no doubt accessing the FS Hideaway knife—basically a steel talon on a double finger ring—she typically wore on her inner thigh.

“Hands are empty,” I said quietly, looking at Delilah and keeping the guy in my peripheral vision. He strode to the end of the restaurant, just past where I could see him. My scalp prickled with the discomfort of letting him get behind me, but Delilah was watching him now and I knew her expression would tell me instantly whether action was required. I heard him ask the waitress what time they closed, and then he was heading back out. I watched him go, and again something in my gut told me he was trouble.

“What do you make of that?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Could be just what it looked like. He’s trying to decide where to eat, maybe because he’s meeting friends later.”

“Come on. Did that guy feel like Île Saint-Louis to you? He didn’t even feel like the Quartier Latin. More like la Goutte.” La Goutte d’Or was a rough part of the city in the 18
^th
arrondissement, populated largely by Arabs and Africans, and known for its drugs, crime, and presence of illegals from the Maghreb.

“Are you trying to make a point?”

The question irritated me. What kind of point would I be trying to make?

Stubble Boy and his girlfriend stood to go. “Have a great night,” he said, his tone sarcastic and his voice overly loud. Delilah rolled her eyes but other than that didn’t engage him.

When they were gone, I said, “Did he look at you when he turned to leave the restaurant?”

She shrugged. “Men always look at me.” She said it without self-pleasure, just as a simple statement of fact.

“But how did he look at you? Did it feel sexual? Appreciative? Or like something else?”

“Why are you pushing this?”

“Why are you resisting?”

“Because I think you’re trying to make a point. Trying to show me how my being in the life is putting you on edge, keeping you off-balance, something like that.”

I tamped down my irritation. “Delilah. You know me. Have I ever played games with this shit? Tried to make a point by pretending there was a problem when I didn’t really think there was one?”

There was a pause. She said, “No.”

“That’s right, no. So let me tell you what I think just happened. Ferret Boy scoped the restaurant from the outside ten minutes ago and saw the back of your blonde head. He reported back to whoever that you were in here. Whoever, who’s more senior and seasoned than Ferret Boy, asked him how he’d determined that. When Ferret Boy admitted he’d only seen you from behind, Whoever told him to get his ass inside the restaurant on some pretext and get a positive ID of your face. Which he just did.”

“How do you know he wasn’t scoping for you?”

“You know the answer to that. With where I’m sitting, he could see my face from outside the restaurant. Besides, my enemies aren’t from that part of the world. Yours are.”

“Isn’t that profiling?”

“It is if you’re doing it right.”

“Or it could be about someone else in the restaurant. Or it could be just a coincidence.”

She was smarter than that and her resistance was really beginning to agitate me. “Look, maybe I’m wrong, I’ve been wrong plenty of times before. But only on the side of caution. You really want to bet your life on ‘maybe it’s a coincidence’? You want to bet your life to prove a point in a stupid argument with me?”

She looked at me for a long moment, then nodded, her expression suddenly sober. “What are you thinking? A hit?”

I was glad to see she was finally taking this seriously. “Maybe, but I’d guess no. If it were a hit, they could have waited to make the positive ID outside. If it wasn’t you, they just walk away. Hell, they wouldn’t even need to wait outside. The hitter could just walk into the restaurant in light disguise, march up to the table, get the ID, bam, two shots in the head, then back outside beating feet before witnesses even have a chance to process what just happened.”

“You know why I’m so attached to you?”

“No.”

“Because most people wouldn’t consider something like that fit dinner conversation.”

I smiled tightly, liking that even though she was taking the situation seriously now, she was still cool under pressure. “But if it’s something other than a hit, and they need to set up carefully, they’d want to know it was you before committing. The only thing is, that guy didn’t feel like a pro to me. And anyone who really knows you wouldn’t send an amateur to do the job.”

“Well, it could be someone who doesn’t really know me.”

“Why would anyone who doesn’t really know you want to kill you?”

She smiled, a little sadly. “Remember the kind of work I do. The target wouldn’t have to know of my professional affiliations to develop a grudge. What he thought was personal would be enough.”

That was a good point. I said, “Well, whatever it is or isn’t, I’d rather not find out. But there’s no rear entrance to this restaurant. They take deliveries straight through the front door.”

She didn’t have to ask. She knew I never went into a room I didn’t know every way out of.

“How do you want to handle it?” she said.

I considered. “Ask the waitress if you can bum a cigarette. Woman-to-woman, she’ll be more likely to want to help out.”

“You’re going to have a smoke?”

“Just outside the door. Like any well-mannered Parisian.” Paris had gone no-smoking, thank God, forcing smokers to head outdoors to indulge.

“I don’t like it. You don’t know what’s out there.”

“That’s why I want to have a look. They’re not after me, remember? Anyway, if I see something I really don’t like, I’ll head back in and we’ll reconsider.”

Delilah told the waitress that
Zut!
, she really needed a smoke but had forgotten her cigarettes; could she hit the waitress up and thank her in the tip? The waitress smiled understandingly and produced a Gauloise Blonde. Delilah requested a lighter, and that was forthcoming, too. I put four twenty-Euro notes on the table, which would cover the meal if we had to bug out, nodded to Delilah, and went to see whether there was anything to my suspicions.

I kept as far left as possible as I headed out of the restaurant, maximizing my view of the street to the right, then cut the other way just before I got to the door, widening my view left. I saw nothing, but any reasonably competent surveillance would have accounted for a maneuver like mine before taking a position.

At the threshold of the door, I could see there were no immediate problems to my left, so I immediately swept right. Twenty meters down the street, on the opposite side, I saw Ferret Boy, leaning with his back against the dark stone façade of the École de Garçons, bathed in shadows.

Houston, we have a problem.

This was the quiet end of Rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Île, far from the gravitational force of Notre Dame. There were few stores down here, just some galleries, all of them closed and almost all of them dark, and the opposite side of the street was occupied entirely by the lightless monolith of the École. The only illumination came from a few widely spaced yellowish streetlights affixed to the façades of the old buildings on one side of the narrow street and the École on the other. The nearest cross street was Rue Poulletier, sixty meters to the left. When we departed, we wouldn’t just be walking out into the dark. We might as well be entering a tunnel.

Well, that’s the thing about the dark and tunnels. They work both ways.

I noticed another guy walking toward Ferret Boy. They did nothing to acknowledge each other, but they both looked the same to me: young, Arabic, somehow jumpy. I fired up the cigarette and gave no sign that I had particularly noticed them or particularly cared.

To my left, ten meters down on the opposite side of the street, was a panel truck. Could have been a coincidence, but I didn’t like it. I couldn’t see on the other side of it, but I had a feeling someone else was leaning against a stone wall in the dark there.

I tracked a few degrees further left. All the way down at the corner of Rue Poulletier was another guy. I didn’t think it was a hit before, but now I was nearly sure it wasn’t. No one needed this kind of manpower for a hit. And with that panel van parked where it was, I was starting to think it might be a snatch. Overall, compared to a hit, I rated a snatch as a positive. More people to deal with, true, but they would be constrained in their actions.

Also, as I’d told Delilah about Ferret Boy initially, these guys didn’t feel like pros to me. In which case, Delilah must have been right. Whoever had hired them didn’t know who she really was, or what she was capable of. They’d be assuming they were here to grab a helpless woman, maybe after knocking down her feeble dinner date.

Dinner for two at Auberge de la Reine Blanche? Eighty Euros. Being underestimated by the punks outside? Priceless.

I puffed on the cigarette for a few minutes without inhaling. I hadn’t smoked since I was a teenager, and a coughing fit would have been bad for my cover. When I judged I’d been there long enough, I pinched off the filter, which had my DNA on it, and shredded the rest of it on the sidewalk with the sole of my shoe. Then I went nonchalantly back inside. I handed the waitress her lighter. If she was annoyed that I had smoked the cigarette Delilah had asked for, she gave no sign of it.

I sat down and said to Delilah, “It’s not a hit. I’m guessing a snatch.” I told her about the panel truck and the disposition of forces.

She listened quietly. When I was done, she said, “It doesn’t make sense. How could they have found me? No one followed me here. I’m certain of that.”

I glanced at the python shoulder bag slung over her chair back. “Your cell phone?”

“But you said they look like amateurs. How could they have tracked my cell phone?”

“Maybe they’re working for someone a little more sophisticated than they are. Someone who provided your whereabouts and turned the risky part over to them. What I don’t get is, why would someone want to snatch you? I mean, if they want to take you, it’s because they know who you are. If they know who you are, they don’t outsource it to a handful of punks from La Goutte. They bring in professionals.”