Detective Élodie Michel closed a thick manila folder, took off her glasses, rubbed her nose in exasperation, and leaned back in a creaky government chair. She was sitting across from me at an ordinary table in an ordinary room in the most extraordinary of buildings—36 quai des Orfèvres, the former headquarters of Paris’s criminal investigation teams—no longer being used by any law enforcement department except for one specific unit.
“This is the report you wish to file?” she said.
BRI. Her unit.
“This is it,” I said.
She worked with the Organized Crime division. They’d had me incarcerated for six days and six hours, which felt like two and half lifetimes. Bizarre thoughts visit your mind when you’re in a jail cell—everything from self-loathing to self-slaughter to self-aggrandizing to self-improvement—yet one thing became clear to me over that span. I wasn’t the revolutionary here. I was the messenger. I was the scribe.
I’d yielded to a strange sense of serenity this week, having witnessed what I witnessed. The volume gets turned down on the minutia in life—that’s the good part. The minutia still governs the world around you—that’s the sting. My first contact with Jennifer K. Graham, my first indication that she was okay—breathing, alive, that she had, y’know, a pulse—involved the pile of papers now stacked on the table in front of me in that thick folder. Jenn had kept possession of the USB drive, managing to retain it despite being taken into custody by Paris police—that indeed was her fate back in the eighteenth arrondissement. She’d gotten arrested and, days later—thankfully cleared—having collated, organized, annotated, then printed out this massive clump of pages, she handed me my opus.
The detective picked up the top sheet and read it aloud one last time. “I, Adam L. Macias, hereby submit the following receipts, messages, and worksheets as evidence that Euro Mutual Bank, in collaboration with Western Finance Bank in collaboration with Deutsche-Zurich in collaboration with an individual named Morgan da Vinci, also known as Morgan Voltaire, also known as Archimedes, also known as the Eastern Minister, was complicit in illegal prostitution, human trafficking, and possibly extortion.”
Numerous people were named with varying degrees of culpability, including Evan Goldman, Gerald Merck, Jordi Carreras, and Hans Schering, none of whom would get splashed across the headlines the way I’d wanted but it was a crack in the dam. Even Trevor’s name appeared in my report several times. Nikos never participated, bless his heart—actually having no idea how he “overslept” and missed the party, calling me on the phone several times to apologize for it. Jenn argued with me for hours last night for the right to sign her name on this introductory letter. I’d refused—unwilling to implicate her in my legal whirlpool. She argued. I argued. Her return to my life was all that mattered to me now. Fortunately, her side of the equation was simple enough and she was in and out of jail in a matter of days. For me, it’d take weeks for us to find the right loopholes to extricate me from the charges and, at long last, finally, earn the right to go home.
“As of now you would be free to go,” said the detective.
I of course decided to throw a monkey wrench in this.
“I understand,” I said. I leaned forward to push the folder an inch closer to her. A small gesture. Symbolic.
“You do realize what giving me something like this will lead to?” She knew it was coming. “You would be officially on your way home but in submitting this you’re incriminating yourself.”
“I understand.”
“And that’s not the worst part.”
With the European economic stimulus package finalized, the amount of people who’d would upset by this had multiplied by a hundred.
“You’re about to poke a stick at some very powerful people,” she said.
“Those are the best ones to poke, right?”
“They’re good at making the world focus on the wrong person.”
“We’ll see.”
She tried one more time to talk me out of it but she was up against the inertia of a man who believed he had a debt to repay. She exhaled like a disappointed aunt, then closed the folder and looked at her watch. “Okay . . . at 14:12 . . . I hereby state that you, Adam Macias, are required to remain in the legal custody of the sovereign nation of France under Article 225-4-9 of the French Penal Code.” We stood up and shook hands. She told me the next step was for me to return to jail within twenty-four hours, which was going to be nice timing because I had a chance to do the one thing I really needed to do.
Take Jenn to the airport.
That’s how this would go down. Jenn and I agreed that she’d wait for me at the railing of the Saint-Michel bridge.
“Well . . .?” she’d say upon seeing me.
And I’d smile. And I’d stay quiet.
“Well . . .?!” she’d say again, dying to receive the update. “Did you do it?”
I’d keep smiling.
“Wow,” she’d say. “You just . . . You . . . Wow.”
That’s how I imagined it and that’s mostly how it went. To whatever degree she’d secretly hoped I’d change my mind, she appreciated why I didn’t.
“I made phone calls,” she said. “A lot. So I have two top international lawyers from DC involved. Greg’s one of them. He’s the one who’s visiting you Wednesday. We talked about that. His fee is astronomical but, again, I keep saying it, I keep hoping you’ll change your mind and say yes: Nikos wants to cover it. He likes you. He’d like to be part of this.” She stopped walking. “I don’t want to leave.”
“Jenn.”
“I don’t want to leave France.”
She was facing me directly at this point and there was a lot going on in the silence between us. She looked at her watch as we started walking again. “Although . . . Although . . . I mean, I could just let myself be late for the first boarding call so we could stroll the Seine for an hour then . . . y’know . . . accidentally catch a train to Versailles where you buy me lunch . . . and go down on one knee . . . and pull out a five-karat rock and tell me how you’ve been in love with me for years and years and propose in front of the local staff, who start to applaud but immediately stop when they see me hesitate but immediately re-applaud after I tell you I require a year of mature behavior from you to earn a yes from me, and to celebrate this display of my strength I let you lead us to the far end of the Versailles garden where you take me behind a bush and fuck me senseless. I could just do that.”
She didn’t want to leave today. She didn’t want to leave at all.
“Five karats?” I said.
“I’m a hundred percent kidding. Calm down. About all of that. I can’t stay with you today. I get too stressed out if I’m even a split second late for a boarding call. So . . . yeah.”
I stopped walking. I looked at her.
“Relax,” she said. “Seriously. I was, like, ninety-nine percent kidding.”
She hugged me. For a very long time. Behind her was Notre Dame, towering across the river from the Hôtel de Ville just down the street from Place de la République, where The Swan had stood, where local women both young and old had begun to lay flowers for a rumor of the legend of what had happened.
“You mean more to me than you know.”
“Seriously, relax,” she said. “Don’t be all weird. I was like seventy percent kidding.”
“Can I tell you something?”
“About?”
I kept smiling.
“About what?” she said. “Why are you looking at me like that? About what? About us?”
“Maybe.”
“You’re asking me if you can tell me?”
“I’m . . .”
“Instead of just telling me?!”
“I mean . . .”
“Why don’t you actually tell me what you have to tell me and after you tell me, I’ll tell you if you should’ve told me?”
“Okay.”
“That’s my minimum, Adam Macias who is sometimes aggravating but always sincere. You take ownership.”
“Okay.”
“Deal?”
“Deal.” I cleared my throat.
“Okay, then . . . say what you have to say.”
“Okay.”
“And be very convincing.”
THE END