“You can’t beat a rigged game, no matter how much you cry about it.” This was what he said to me on my eighth birthday. My dad. He had me standing next to his armchair, standing there trembling, after he’d just knocked two of my teeth loose. “You have to understand who you are and what . . . what . . . what your limits are.” With a sixth or seventh beer in hand, his lectures rarely didn’t wander onto the topic of society as a whole. “False hope from your dumbass mother is only gonna make you think you can be somebody big . . . when the reality is you can’t win a rigged game.” He was talking about my violating an elementary school lunch policy but it was a warning that’d infect my self-confidence for years, the best part being just how many times as a professional adult I touted the value of a debt investment to a client who’d remain oblivious to the fact that my words of wisdom originated from a perpetually drunk, biweekly-abusive dad. And for the first time in my life, here, now, Paris, on this bike, I was doubting him. I’d achieved it intellectually in the past years, but I’d never felt it. I never felt he was wrong. That’s the strange cure that a 60 km/h trip through a blocked Parisian intersection will provide. I saw the fissure lines in his grip on my neck and it flooded me with conviction. I drove that motorcycle full speed through a gap narrower than five feet between three oncoming bumpers, and we fucking cleared it—cleared both tires—with the back treads evading contact by a matter of inches—slicing through the intersection diagonally back into the opposite lane. So we covered the expanse of the nastiest gridlock in Paris in under nine seconds while the men directly behind us—the first two biker cops—got absolutely walled in by the cross traffic. Gone. Everyone in my rearview mirror—gone. Allowing me to veer toward the final stretch of road between us and Gare du Nord. I was now just two blocks south of our final destination.
Which put me in front of a very problematic individual.
Up ahead, one last mafia member had managed to cut off our path. It wasn’t the cop in the car who’d outdone me, it was one of the da Vinci guys, doing so out of sheer malice. I could see his determination from two hundred meters away. He must’ve crisscrossed the opposite route, the north-south street, and found a hairpin turn to get himself lined up with me. I’d already softened down to 25 mph having eased off the gas, still in second gear, still facing the possibility of eluding him on the wide sidewalk.
I didn’t do that, though.
I didn’t veer away from him. I gunned it, accelerating to 5000 RPM toward him, the tach popping instantly, the speedometer climbing. 25 mph. 28 mph. 32 mph. You wanna come at me, you dead bastard?! He gunned his bike and screeched forward to head down the tiny street toward me—the two of us going head-to-head. An urban joust. I didn’t just accelerate, I lined up with him; when his bike went slightly right-center of the lane, I swerved slightly right-center of the lane; when his bike inched back to center-center, my bike inched back to center-center. You wanna play? I leaned forward, leaning into his approach. YOU WANNA PLAY?! With his third attempt to swerve, getting back to his original course, I swerved too, thereby signing our contract in blood, communicating to him with scant distance left between us that I didn’t want us to pass each other, I didn’t want the happy ending; I wanted the collision.
This was how I stole their game.
Be first. Her words. I could see it register in him—realizing I was a hundred percent willing to end it all. From a hundred yards away, I saw him see it. Hyperawareness. 38 mph, 40 mph, my speed climbing, I’d hunched low enough to get half my face below the handlebars so he was seeing nothing but dilated pupils. Fifty-five yards apart, forty-five, thirty-five—at catastrophic net impact velocity.
And he quit. With twenty yards of gap left, the span of less than three-hundredths of a second, he screeched and ducked to the side. He didn’t test me. He knew his only chance of remaining alive was to brake and bail, skidding, going horizontal, tumbling toward the sidewalk as I sped past his wreck, a stranger even to myself, having undergone the brief but permanent baptism of the streets. I knew only one thing for certain—I was no longer bowing down to the rigged system my father swore I’d bow to. I eased off the throttle, finally, steering us around the last two turns to get us to the entrance of the train station. Katarina couldn’t have been aware of all that had just happened. Her fingers remained fully dug into me.
“Gare du Nord,” I announced to her.
“At the side,” she said. “Park at the far side on the right.”
We pulled up next to several other bikes and I led her by the hand as we walked in through the side doors and pushed our way through the crowd. Train stations in Europe are slammed in the summer—acres of people in every shape, size, and color, heading in different directions. The large clock on the wall read 7:27 a.m., meaning we were two minutes late for the final boarding call. Her face was a flood of tears, still stinging from the mace, which was a key factor she was about to exploit.
She turned to me to give me the instructions. “This has to be exact,” she said. “Don’t question what I’m about to tell you. Just do what I say, is that clear?”
She nodded toward the row of high-speed trains we were queuing up for. Massive. Sleek. Built like bullets.
“I go through the gate first,” she said. “You wait sixty seconds. When I get to the last car, you then go directly to the gate staff and you say that your girlfriend has both of the tickets. You point at me all the way down the platform. You need to cry. Can you cry? You point and you are crying and you say, ‘She has both of the tickets.’ Is that clear?”
She headed for the train.
I didn’t say yes. I didn’t say anything. My fingers were shaking. I had slurred speech. I was amped up—my body having soaked itself in adrenaline. I turned around as instructed to end up facing the giant station clock where I was to watch the second hand tick through a complete circle. Sixty seconds, she said. It hadn’t occurred to me to ask how she herself would get through the gate. I kept my eyes fixed in the opposite direction as told, which meant I was now catching sight of several of the gang members entering the front of the central station area.
“No,” I said to myself.
They had to know there was a strong chance we were going to Amsterdam—that we’d be heading for an Amsterdam-bound train. They were walking toward the TGV lines. They were walking toward me. Halfway through my one minute, I’d lost track of the second hand on the clock, too inept to remember if I’d started my count at twenty after or forty after, too wired with adrenaline to track even sixty stupid seconds. That’s how busted my brain was. The mob guys were coming, yet it felt too soon for me to initiate the role she’d laid out—because she might not have her end of the ploy in place.
I spun around. Maybe too soon. I faced the direction she went. “Attends!” I bellowed out to the staff of that train. “Attends! Hey!” I couldn’t risk waiting any longer. I hurried to the gate. “Hold on!” Hustling over to the guard just as he let the last passengers through. “Wait! Hold the train! Hold the . . . !” I pointed to the far end of the platform. “She’s got both of them!”
“S’il vous plaît, Monsieur!” said the guard for the third time. “Stop!”
“She’s got both our tickets. Up there!” I pointed to Katarina. I called out to her. “Hey!”
Way down the track but not yet all the way down the track, Katarina was heading toward the last open car. I’d come too soon. She hadn’t gone far enough to be realistically out of my reach. She could theoretically be summoned back if they took a good look. I glanced behind me. Da Vinci’s men had temporarily disappeared from view. They could be anywhere. I didn’t see them by the gates. I didn’t see them in the crowd of people checking the info board. Were they talking to security? Raising my voice one more time would mean attracting attention from everyone around. “Sir,” the guard said to me, “you need to—”
“YOU HAVE BOTH TICKETS!” I yelled as loud as I could.