The Accident Man (12 page)

“What did you get?” she asked him when he got back into the cab. “A little protection, maybe? In case you get lucky tonight?”

“Protection, yeah, for you.” He showed her his purchases in their paper bag. “You can be anything you like, but not blond.”

He said it like a man who expected an argument. But Alix didn’t fuss. “Okay. I’m not the same woman I was an hour ago. I’m not wearing the same clothes. Why should I have the same hair?”

They got to the destination Carver had negotiated with the cabbie, a club just off Sebastopol. There was no name visible anywhere, but the entrance was underneath a high arch. Two golden statues of women in classical robes held up lanterns on either side of the door. A throng of people pressed up against the gold-tipped black railings in front of the club, begging to get in. From the looks on their faces, most of them were begging in vain.

“Damn!” muttered Carver. “Should’ve thought of that.”

Alix said nothing. She seemed completely unperturbed. She just got out of the cab, smoothed down her dress, tossed back her hair, and walked straight through the crowd to the entrance.

There was a bouncer at the door: 250 pounds of West African muscle in a silver gray suit. He took one look at Alix and unhooked the rope that was keeping the masses at bay. She swept in like a movie star. Carver tried to follow her.

The bouncer stopped him. Carver leaned forward and said a few words in French. Then he tucked something into the breast pocket of the bouncer’s jacket. The man paused a moment, letting Carver sweat, then waved him in too.

“What were you saying?” asked Alix.

“I told him I was your bodyguard. Then I slipped him a hundred bucks.”

“Hey! It was me who saved your life, remember?”

“Sorry. That bit of the story slipped my mind. Come on, let’s eat.”

Within seconds of walking into the club, Carver had noted three possible exit routes. He’d spotted two groups of men who might be threats. And he’d discovered there was some kind of restaurant upstairs. Another hundred-dollar bill for the maître d’ bought them a corner table with clear sightlines. If anybody came for them, Carver would get plenty of warning. He handed Alix the scissors and dye.

“Go and do, you know, whatever it takes.”

“I could be a while.”

“That’s okay. I’m not going anywhere.”

Carver watched Alix disappear toward the ladies’ room. Then he summoned a waitress and ordered a double Johnnie Walker Blue Label, no ice. He didn’t know how many more drinks he’d get to have. He might as well stick to good ones.

The ladies’ room looked like the last days of Rome. A couple was screwing in one of the cubicles. Two girls were kissing passionately up against a wall. Another cubicle was being used as a market stall for a scrawny North African guy in an Iron Maiden T-shirt, who was selling speed, cocaine, and smack.

Women were chopping powder into lines on the edge of the sink basins, snorting it, then using their fingers to dab stray dustings of snow from their nostrils onto their tongues. A few more conventional types were peeing, checking their makeup, and gossiping about the men they’d left behind in the club.

Alix found a spare basin. She looked at her reflection for a second in the mirror that ran along the wall. Then she started cutting. A few women looked at her. One of them started talking in French. Alix looked at her and mimed incomprehension.

“You crazy?” the woman repeated in English. “You cut that beautiful hair, your man, he won’t recognize you.”

“Exactly,” said Alix, and smiled.

The woman laughed. “But
chérie
, there must be an easier way of escaping from him, no?”

“Maybe it’s not him I want to escape.”

“Okay, a woman of mystery!”

Alix went back to her cutting. She stopped once her hair had been reduced to a neat blond bob that fell halfway down her neck. She ran her hands through her new cut, tossing her head from side to side to feel how it moved and fell. “No,” she muttered to herself. “Too boring.” She picked up the scissors again.

A few minutes later, she was left with a short, almost boyish crop. She looked at the mirror again, happier this time. Then she picked up each box of hair color in turn, holding it by her face before coming to a decision.

She filled her basin with warm water, bent down, and dunked her head. Then she shampooed in the black dye. Now came the boring part: She had to wait twenty minutes for the dye to work properly. So she sat on the edge of her basin, smoked a Marlboro, and watched the world go by.

The couple who’d had sex emerged from their cubicle. The woman dashed to the mirror to check her face and hair, while the man scowled at her impatiently. Neither of them seemed too interested in romance. Alix wondered if it had been a professional transaction. She decided probably not. A decent hooker would at least have pretended she’d enjoyed it. That way the John might pay for a second helping.

The dealer’s trade slackened off for a few minutes. He tried to persuade Alix to buy, then settled for a broken English conversation about the difficulties of doing business with clients who were, by definition, screwups. Alix sounded like she knew what she was talking about. The dealer was impressed.

“You sell powders too?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Something else.”

A pair of blonds walked in, teetering on four-inch stilettos, and for a second the ladies’-room babble fell silent. The two newcomers were identical, but eerily, unnaturally so in their doll-like perfection. They had wide turquoise eyes, perfect little noses, and puffy, pouty lips. They looked around with blank indifference, as if long since bored by the effect their looks had on the world around them. Either that, thought Alix, or their faces had simply been stuffed with so much Botox they were no longer capable of any expression at all.

The dolls stood next to Alix in front of the mirror, bitching about the man they were with. Bitching in Russian. One of them glanced at Alix in the mirror and attempted a puzzled frown.

“Ya znayo vas?”

She was asking, “Do I know you?” but now it was Alix’s turn to look wide-eyed and clueless. “Sorry,” she said, making her accent as all-American as she could manage. “I don’t understand what you said. But I sure love that twin thing you’ve got going.”

The two dolls turned back to their own reflections and swapped a few catty observations about dumb Yankees. They fixed their hair, smoothed down their microscopic frocks, and headed back out to the club. As the door swung shut behind them, Alix let out a little laugh, a mix of amusement and sheer relief.

“They were quite a pair, huh?”

Alix looked up to see a fresh-faced, smiling girl, barely out of her teens, wearing jeans and a cropped top. She had clear blue eyes and a dusting of freckles across her lightly tanned face.

“You American?” Alix asked.

“No, Canadian. I come from Winnipeg. My name’s Tiffany.”

“Hi, Tiffany, I’m Alexandra. Look, could you do me a little favor? Could you just look outside the door to see if the guy at the corner table is still there?”

“Sure.” Tiffany walked to the door and looked out. “You mean the cute dark-haired one, with, like, a white shirt and a gray jacket?”

Alix smiled.
Cute
wasn’t a word she’d thought of applying to Carver. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s the one.”

“Hang on, be right back.” Tiffany disappeared through the door. Twenty seconds later she returned. “You know what? He really is cute. Kinda rough around the edges, but I like that. He’s a lot cuter than my date, that’s for sure. Anyway, so I asked if he wanted some company. He said he was waiting for someone. I think he really likes you.”

At last, the time was up. Alix rinsed out the dye, then crouched down beneath the hand dryer and blasted her head with hot air. It only took seconds. That was one big advantage to going so short. She just needed one last touch.

She checked out the other women standing next to her. There was a punky looking rock chick a couple of basins down with a tub of clear styling gel. That would do. Alix leaned toward her and pointed at the gel. “Please?” she said. The girl nodded.

Alix scooped her right hand into the gel, rubbed her hands together, then started scrubbing her fingers back and forth through her hair to make it look fuller, choppier. Then she stepped back from the mirror and turned her head from side to side to scrutinize every angle before leaving the room.

“That was worth the wait,” said Carver, when she got back to the table. “You look amazing.”

“You think so?” asked Alix. “It feels kind of strange to me, like there’s nothing there anymore. Still, if you like it, we should drink to my new style….” She summoned a waiter. “A bottle of Cristal, please.”

A minute later there were two full champagne glasses on their table and a pale, clear bottle sitting beside them in an ice bucket.

“
Na zdorovye
!” Alix said, raising her glass.

For a second she looked at the golden, bubbling liquid, felt the icy chill of the glass against her fingers, and caught the sharp scent of the drink in her nostrils. She realized she had never felt more alive, more keenly in tune with her senses. The realization of what she had done that night still horrified her, but the truth remained: She had looked death in the face and survived. She felt possessed by an intense awareness of the fragility of existence. She wanted to squeeze every drop of life she could from every moment that was left to her. And she was going to start right now.

Carver looked at the woman sitting opposite him. The black hair made her seem stronger, more complex. Her blue eyes shone even more brightly against that dark frame and her bone structure was revealed in all its elegant perfection. He wondered what might have happened if they’d met in anything like normal circumstances. Then he chuckled to himself. A girl like that? She wouldn’t have given him a second glance.

He tried to keep things low-key. “So, you want to eat?”

Alix drained her glass. “Eat? No way! I want to dance. Come on!”

She got up from her chair and tugged at Carver’s arm.

He frowned, nervously. “Did you say ‘dance’?” The possibility hadn’t occurred to him. So far as he was concerned, the club was just a place to avoid pursuit.

Alix laughed. “Of course I’m going to dance. And if you won’t dance with me, Mr. Shy Englishman, I’ll find someone who will. And he’ll take me in his arms. Our bodies will rub together. We’ll…”

“I get the picture,” Carver said. He looked at the dance floor. It was heaving with bodies. If anything, they’d be less conspicuous among the crowd than sitting to one side at an open table. “Okay. Let’s dance.”

The manhole cover budged an inch, just enough to shift it out of its housing. For a few seconds, nothing happened. Then it moved again, right out of the hole, and came clattering to a rest on the sidewalk.

Grigori Kursk winced as the pain shot through his cracked ribs. He breathed heavily. That hurt too. Then he hauled himself out of the manhole and back onto the streets of Paris.

He spat on the sidewalk, trying to get the taste of muck out of his mouth. He’d swallowed half the Paris sewer system. He’d need shots for cholera, dysentery, tetanus — anything the doc could find.

What else? His hearing was gone: The explosion had temporarily deafened him and left his eardrums ringing in angry, shrieking protest. He’d been wearing lightweight body armor, but the blast had still hammered his rib cage and battered his skull. He hadn’t had a headache like this since the last days in Kabul, drinking away the shame of defeat with homemade potato vodka. He felt nauseous, dizzy, spaced-out, concussed. Well, screw that. Kursk had been hurt a lot worse than this and kept fighting. He’d probably smelled as bad too. But it was one thing stinking when you were sitting in a foxhole at the ass end of Afghanistan and everyone else stank just as bad. In the middle of Paris, it wasn’t so smart.

Kursk looked around. He was standing on a wide avenue. Up ahead he could see ramps leading up onto a freeway, but there was barely any traffic. Behind him there were some rail yards, half lit in orange and gray. A few railway workers were wandering between the freight trucks. No one seemed to be doing too much work.

Kursk knew what he had to do. He slumped to the ground, leaning back against a lamppost by a bus shelter. Then he waited.

People came by. Three railway workers at the end of their shift, glad to be on their way home, shouted at him, told him to get a job and have a bath. One of them was about to aim a kick in his direction when his pal held him back. “Hey, Paco, you crazy? You’ll never get the smell off your boot!” The men walked off laughing.

Kursk waited.

It took about twenty minutes before he got what he wanted, one guy by himself, about Kursk’s size but flabby. He wouldn’t know how to defend himself. Kursk could tell just by looking at him.

As the man walked by, Kursk got up and walked toward him, just another drunken bum begging for a few coins. The man’s eyes widened in alarm. He tried to act tough. “Piss off, tramp!” Kursk grinned and came a few steps closer. The man turned and walked away fast, trying to maintain his dignity, not wanting to run. Kursk caught him in a few steps, grabbed the man’s head, and twisted it, snapping his neck, then caught him as he fell.

Kursk felt another stab of pain slice through his upper body. It settled into a relentless, grinding ache as he dragged the man’s body to the side of the road and dumped it by the rail yard fence.

It hurt Kursk when he pulled off the man’s jacket, pants, and shirt. It hurt when he got out of his own sodden, stinking, shredded clothes. It hurt when he got dressed again. Everything he did hurt.

He went through the man’s wallet and pockets: thirty-five francs in notes and another nine or ten in small change. That was plenty.

Kursk left the man slumped against the fence in his old, sewer-drenched clothes. It would be a while before anyone realized he was dead. No one was going to go too close to a guy like that.