By 11 p.m. Helen was seated in a café near the Gare de Lyon with a Michelin map spread on the table and a Fodor’s guidebook in her lap. In her purse was a box of hair dye that she’d bought at a drugstore. She couldn’t wait to ditch the wig.
A young man sidled up to flirt and Helen shooed him away by telling him she was Canadian, as if that was supposed to make her totally undesirable. She traced a forefinger down the streets on the map, marveling at the names she’d been hearing since she was a girl. A line from an old storybook popped into her head: In an old house in Paris that was covered in vines, lived twelve little girls in two straight lines. Perhaps she would bump into Madeline.
A waiter brusquely cleared away her cup and saucer and cleared his throat, eager to close, so Helen got down to business with her map. First she found the location of the department store where she would meet Claire. Then she scanned the neighborhoods just across the Seine from where she sat now for a likely place to hole up. She settled on the Latin Quarter, partly because she’d heard of it, partly because its bohemian reputation made her feel more like a writer or artist than a disgraced spy. She also liked the look of its streets on the map—crooked and squeezed together, offering the illusion of a maze where she’d be harder to find. Plus, the guidebook said it was a good place for finding rooms after hours. She noted the location for a small hotel that the guidebook included in its “Rock Bottom” section, saying that it offered “snug rooms for the young in legs and spirit (no elevator).” Then she folded up the map, paid the waiter—who responded with a disdainful flip of his towel, no Lehmann for sure—and was on her way.
She caught the Metro and promptly nodded off, missing her stop and having to double back after awakening with a start. At first she thought someone had stolen her suitcase, but it had only slid forward from the motion of the train. Her purse lay on the seat next to her, where it easily could have been snatched, and she thought of how idiotic it would have been to be foiled by a common thief.
The sullen innkeeper refused to speak a word of English even though she seemed to understand everything Helen said. Helen took a key heavy enough to weight her to the bottom of the ocean and climbed to the fourth floor. Gloomy. A window shade the color of stretched skin filtered the light from the streets, and the bed smelled like an ashtray.
She took a lukewarm shower, and then made herself spend the next hour dyeing her hair blond at the tiny sink. Then she covered her head with a plastic bathing cap and rolled into the valley in the middle of the sagging mattress, where she immediately sank into a dreamless sleep.
In the middle of the night she awakened suddenly and inexplicably, and sat up in bed. A couple of jolly young drunks were passing in the street below, chattering loudly. The room was stuffy. She considered opening the window, but was reluctant to raise the shade lest someone spot her silhouette and drop her with a single shot. Voices rumbled from the room next door—a man and a woman who seemed to have just returned. There was laughter, the woman’s like a bell and the man’s husky with mischief. The headboard of their bed banged the thin wall as one of them collapsed onto the mattress, and then a second time as the other one followed. For the next few minutes they talked, the sound of confidences being shared. Fortunately they were soon silent. Helen found herself missing their company and hoping they were merely asleep, and not dead. A silly idea, but there it was.
Maybe she should give up. Not by turning herself in, but by flying away. Travel back across the Atlantic. Become a Canadian. Live a tranquil life in the ’burbs of Toronto. Marry a bland businessman who drank Molson and followed the Maple Leafs.
Then she imagined Claire, alone at a table at La Grand Épicerie, checking her watch as she worried on Helen’s behalf. Duty called, and Helen could not afford to be a no-show when Claire was risking so much for their cause. For Anneliese’s cause, too. It was this thought that finally emboldened her to climb out of bed, raise the shade, and throw open the sash.
Cool air, the sound of distant music. The two drunks were still talking loudly but were nearly a block away. For a moment it almost felt like freedom. Then she saw the glow of a cigarette in a doorway across the street. Probably nothing, or they would have come roaring up the stairs by now. The figure was in shadow, but it had a man’s size and posture. Why would anyone keeping an eye on her make himself so easy to spot?
The cigarette glowed again. Helen lowered the shade and returned to bed just as the headboard in the next room again banged the wall, followed by a cry of pleasure and a succession of further thumps, which soon fell into a rhythm as frantic as that of a screen door banging in a gale.
So this was Paris by night. Noisy lovers and silent men in the shadows, biding their time.
Sometime later Helen fell back to sleep. By then the room next door was quiet and the fellow with the cigarette was gone from the doorway across the street.
A bright morning, a croissant and a coffee, and there she was on a Paris sidewalk, rejuvenated, a girl from Wixville strolling the Boulevard Saint-Michel. Even for someone more recently from Berlin it was impressive. On the corner just ahead, two North Africans, as thin as pipe cleaners, were selling plastic windup birds, releasing them into the breeze to attract the attention of tourists. The fluttery mechanical wing beats were as annoying as those of the pigeons. She smelled baking bread, the exhaust of a moped, the rainwater freshness of hosed-down cobbles. A feast for the senses.
Then there were the women. It wasn’t what they wore, but how they wore it. She could have assembled exactly the same wardrobe and would have still stood out as the pretender. Maybe it was how they carried themselves, plus that bored look on their faces that said, Of course I’m marvelous, but so what?
Helen’s dye job had been surprisingly successful, and she had dumped the wig in a trash can along Boulevard Saint-Germain, observed only by a boy in shorts on a bicycle who’d laughed aloud.
A gust of cigarette smoke caught her unawares—Gitanes, like Baucom’s, and she briefly wished he were here, more for advice than for comfort. Then she drew a deep breath as exhilaration swelled behind her breastbone. I can do this, she thought. Win or lose, I can do this for a few days more.
From overhead came a popping noise, and she glanced up to see a woman shaking a bedsheet from a high window. It startled her just enough to jolt her confidence, and she thought of all the people who must be looking for her by now. She nearly tripped on a crack in the sidewalk, and something like panic rose in her throat. Seeking shelter, she ducked into a small grocery to look out through the window, scanning the sidewalk crowds above rows of apples and oranges for possible surveillance. It took a moment for her to collect herself and head back out, and even then she paused a block later to remove her compact from her purse so she could check behind her while pretending to powder her nose.
It reminded her that, back at the Farm, when she’d finished at the top of her class in spotting surveillance, her male classmates had groused about this technique—Hey, we can’t stop to powder our noses! But her skills had gone deeper than that. As their training officer had said, “She notices shit that you guys miss.” Like socks and shoes, for example, or other small giveaways that male operatives tended to pay scant attention to when assembling their own wardrobes.
Beyond that, she’d developed a sort of sixth sense that had allowed her to spot anomalies in crowds and in movements. But that was during training, when she had relished the role of underdog, and many of her pursuers had also been trainees, lacking in finesse. Besides, she was out of practice. Would she again be able to function with the same easy sharpness?
She glanced at a reflection on a shopwindow and kept moving toward her rendezvous.