They led me to the far side of the lobby with Jenn following alongside. I could feel the back of my neck getting warm. I could feel the people behind me staring—watching a guy get pulled out of line. Oh, they’re pulling someone out. Watching me get escorted away. Oh, it was him. Making various comments about skin tone without mentioning skin tone. I knew it’d be him. The main cop leaned over to his colleagues and murmured some unintelligible French. “Dites aux autres que la porte est dans l’angle mort,” he said.
I couldn’t take my eyes of the automatic weapons. French police carry very serious machine guns.
The main cop turned to me. “Uh . . . It’s okay for you we are talking for a moment?”
I fired a regular gun once. It was at a gun range and scared the hell out of me. The first shot was the real shock—felt like the thing was gonna fly out of my hands—and that was just a pistol.
“Sure,” I said.
“Uh, Mr. . . . Is it Macias?” said the sergeant. “This is Spanish, no?”
“He’s American,” said Jenn. “With an American passport.”
“Can I ask you to tell me your recent activity, Mr. Macias?”
“Activity?”
“Why?” said Jenn.
“We need him to tell us what he was doing for the time prior to now. Mr. Macias, did you scan the service elevator? With your badge?”
“My badge?”
The officer pointed toward the back area of the hotel. “The east door. It, uh . . . It connect you this. You are using this badge for this?”
“Yes . . . uh . . . I think . . . Yes.”
“You are in France for business?” he said to me.
“Yes. The conference.”
“You are not here for other business?”
“Sorry?”
“You are not here for other business? This is, uh, not an official question.”
“Then he doesn’t have to answer it,” said Jenn.
“It’s fine,” I told him, hardly interested in whatever legal rights I wasn’t being afforded by whatever constitution this guy wasn’t following. “I’m not here for anything other than business.”
“You activate service elevator?”
“Yes.”
“Why you are doing this?”
“For a young woman.”
“Who?”
“Who? I don’t know.”
“This woman . . . She is asking you . . . to use it?”
“Yes.”
“She is who?”
“I don’t know. She seemed to be a guest.”
“What is she . . . uh . . . How? You are describing her for me.”
“She’s tall. Maybe five-ten. She’s, um, European. But maybe Eastern bloc. Blue eyes. Short blond-ish hair. She looks . . . uh . . . good. Y’know?”
“No.”
“Like a model. Like, I mean, like, she’s not the kind of girl you see often.” Jenn was right next to me, hearing all this. “She had an accent. And a mark. A mark around her neck.”
“Of where?”
“Sorry?”
“Where? Where this is?”
They had me show them where. They actually had me lead them all the way across the lobby, out of the main area, over to the service elevator. You can imagine how cooperative I’m trying to be, not letting myself make any fast moves, still preoccupied with the machine guns. I led our little group across the main atrium of the hotel with the entire crowd staring. I swear, if I’d pointed at, like, a chandelier, everyone would look up and cower from it.
“This was a sexual type of conversation?” asked the cop. We’d arrived at the rather secluded area where I met her. “You are acquainted to this girl before this moment?”
“No.”
“And she stands where exactly?”
“Roughly . . . uh . . .” I put myself in the spot in question, a patch of carpet near the stairwell door, using my hands to position an imaginary version of her by her imaginary hips.
The main cop looked around, then stared at one particular corner of the hallway. “This is a position where the camera would not to see her, no?” He wasn’t just asking me. He was asking the general posse around him—his assistant, the hotel manager, the other machine-gun guys.
“Oui, inspecteur,” said the manager, rattling off no words I could understand. “L’autre coin a une caméra mais l’un d’eux serait trop obstruée.”
“This girl,” the detective said to me, “she, uh, tells to you things. How it was? You show us.” He motioned to the ground. “Show me your step. Position. Step. What she is doing in front of you?”
“She did, uh, nothing at first. And then she became . . . uh . . .” I had to think of it and think of it fast. I had to figure out how to tell them what happened but alter it slightly so that I wasn’t actually lying. Because you can’t lie. These guys would know a lie. But you also can’t, you absolutely can’t, under any circumstances, tell the truth. Not about this. Not with this firm. Not with our shit. “She stood . . .” I started to say, “uh . . . there . . . and she did . . . uh . . . she did exactly what girls like her do . . . She, yeah . . . She did exactly what girls like her do . . .”