Death by Denim Page 2

  She reached for my hand like I was a little kid. “Come, now. The last train to Paris leaves at ten so we’ll have to hurry.”

  Hand in hand we sprinted for the station, arriving out of breath just moments before the train was supposed to leave. The ticket windows were closed so we had to buy our tickets from the machines. It felt like forever that Mom was feeding coins into the slot and another eternity for the machine to print and spit out our tickets. We grabbed them and raced through the turnstile, reaching the train car just as the warning chimes sounded, signaling that the doors were about to close.

  The train had already started to move by the time we settled into our seats. I leaned back against the upholstery, silently saying my good-byes to Lyon. Then I noticed Mom’s grip on the armrest tighten and I followed her gaze out the window.

  Marlboro Man was running onto the platform. Late. Too late. I smiled at his failure … until it hit me. My ticket. I flipped it over and my heart dropped. Ours was an express train. No stops between Lyon and Paris. He may have missed us, but he would know exactly where we were headed. And when we would get there.

  One glance at Mom and I knew she was thinking the same thing.

  We were in trouble.

  CHAPTER 2

  I hugged my arms, eyes darting around the train car like an animal trapped in a moving cage. No, I didn’t know for sure that the Marlboro guy worked for The Mole, but it was a pretty safe bet. No one else was looking for my mom and me. No one that I knew about, anyway. So if Marlboro found us, The Mole had found us. The very thought made my insides curdle.

  I leaned close to Mom. “Do you think that guy has connections in Paris?” I whispered.

  “I don’t know.”

  “But he could.”

  She looked at me, the expression completely dissolving from her face. “Yes, he could.”

  I sank back in my seat. That’s what I was afraid of. Now that he knew where we were headed, if Marlboro Man had colleagues in Paris, all it would take was a phone call and they could have the station surrounded by the time we got there. Or he could be waiting for us himself. Either scenario made me feel faint.

  “Maybe he didn’t see us get on the train,” I said. But I knew he had; I could tell by the look I’d seen on his face that he knew we’d slipped through his fingers.

  Mom didn’t answer, but stared straight ahead, tapping her fingers on the armrest. Trying to figure out how we were going to get off the train undetected, I imagined. I hoped she would be able to come up with something, and quickly.

  Me, I couldn’t think of a thing, which worried me because I was usually pretty good about thinking on my feet. But then again, I hadn’t clued in to being followed by the Marlboro guy, had I? It’s like when I left my name behind, I lost the thinking part of me as well. I didn’t know how to be me, but someone else. I was having an identity crisis, and I’d been running for only seven months. I couldn’t imagine how the people who were forever uprooted by the Witness Protection Program maintained their sanity.

  As soon as that thought came into my head I tried to push it out again. Because I knew what would follow, and thinking about him hurt too much. “Him” would be Seth Mulo. Seth’s family was also on the run from The Mole. The difference was that Seth had been running most of his life.

  When he was very young, Seth’s parents defected from The Mole’s sleeper organization and turned to the U.S. government for asylum. Eventually, the CIA assigned my mom to protect them. She sent Seth and his parents to hide at my dad’s island resort where she thought they would be safe. She was wrong. The Mole sent an assassin to kill Seth’s parents and naturally, I got caught up in the drama. Together, Seth and I spoiled The Mole’s party—which was one of the reasons he wanted us dead.

  I stared out at the French countryside, rolling the word us around and around in my head. Sadly, with Seth and I, there was no more us. We were too dangerous to each other to stay together. The Mole had used me to find Seth in Seattle and I wasn’t willing to take the chance again. No, the only solution was for Seth and I to stay far away from each other. That wouldn’t stop me from longing for him, though.

  Too soon the two-hour ride had passed. I felt the momentum of the train slowing and I had to pull my thoughts from Seth. Lights dotted the landscape, increasing in number as we rolled into the city. We were almost there. I could feel the panic rising like an ice-cold blush.

  I tried to act cool, but I’m sure Mom could see the way I was trembling as I turned to her and whispered. “What do we do now?”

  She looked at me for a long moment and simply said, “It will be all right.” But the corner of her mouth twitched when she said it—and she wasn’t even smiling.

  The train pulled up to the platform, creaking and groaning to a stop. My stomach twisted. How were we going to get out of the station without getting caught? There weren’t many people on the train, so it’s not likely we could blend with the crowd. Plus it was after midnight by then, so the station itself wasn’t all that crowded. I thought about sneaking out the wrong side of the train and hiding along the tracks, but I was afraid those tracks could be electrified.

  “What do we do?” I asked again.

  She raised her eyes to meet mine. “I’m going to be sick.”

  “What?”

  She pulled me close and lowered her voice to a whisper. “I’m going to pretend to be sick. Get up and walk toward the exit. I’ll be right behind you. Before we get off the train, I’m going to faint. If we’re lucky, they’ll take us into the station office to make sure I’m all right.”

  “But …” One of the cardinal rules of being on the run was to not draw attention to yourself. Fainting on the train was sure to attract attention. On the other hand, there weren’t many people around, so our exposure would be limited. And really? What alternative did we have?

  We stood.

  “Oh, and one more thing,” Mom whispered. “We’re French.”

  At once I understood why she would be the one fainting; Mom and I could both speak French fluently, but my accent was better. When I was just a kid, she had enrolled me in all sorts of language classes because—according to her—I had a gift with languages. She said if you teach a kid a foreign language when they’re young enough, they can learn to speak without an accent. The result was that I could speak several languages like a native and a lot more at least conversationally. French was one of the native languages. So I was going to be the mouthpiece. I hoped I was up to it. I straightened. “Oui, Maman,” I murmured.

  I strolled down the aisle as she said, trying not to look tense as I waited to hear the thud of her dropping to the ground behind me.

  I was almost to the door when it happened—only when she fell, it was more like a crash than a thud. Even though I had been expecting her to faint, the noise truly startled me. Which I suppose was good, because when I whirled around to see if she was okay, my reaction was genuine.

  “Maman!” I cried. “Maman!” She lay sprawled between the seats, her face completely slack. I bent over her and tugged on her hand—as if that would have done any good had she truly fainted. She moaned and rolled her head to the side. I dropped her hand, eyes widening in shock. Something dark and wet matted her hair to the side of her skull. Blood?

  The conductor appeared out of nowhere, asking if everything was all right. I turned my eyes to him numbly, not sure what to say. We were supposed to be acting, but the blood was most definitely real. “Ma mère est blessée,” I said. It was the truth. My mother was hurt.

  He whipped a walkie-talkie from his belt to call for assistance and then turned his attention back to me. “Qu’est-ce qui s’est passé?” he asked. What happened?

  Again, I could truthfully say I didn’t know. I could guess; she’d probably hit her head when she fell. Beyond that, I wasn’t sure. Had she planned it to make her faint seem more convincing?

  Another man in a train uniform arrived, carrying a first aid kit. He set it on one of the seats and helped th
e conductor sit Mom up. She moaned again and blinked her eyes, but held her head fairly steady. I sighed with relief.

  “Vous allez bien?” the second guy asked her. Are you all right?

  She nodded weakly and allowed him to dab at her head to clean it up. Either she was a really good actress or she was a little dazed to see the amount of blood on the gauze when he pulled it away. I thought she might faint again, for real this time.

  Another official-looking person crowded into the aisle behind us. She wore a pinched expression and held a clipboard in her hands. Bingo. Damage control. She would be the one responsible to make sure that the station had no liability for mom’s injury.

  The gauze guy finished cleaning up the wound, which turned out to be rather small, even though it had bled a lot. He offered to bandage it, but Mom declined. She’d do just as well just holding a compress to her head until it stopped bleeding, she said.

  I turned to the clipboard lady and asked if there was someplace my mother could rest.

  She was only too willing to comply. “Absolument,” she said. Absolutely.

  Clipboard Lady showed us into a windowless office crowded with a desk and a couple of chairs. She said that Mom could rest there as long as she needed.

  “Merci.” I lowered Mom onto one of the chairs. Still holding the gauze pad to her head, she drooped forward until her head rested on the desk.

  The lady hovered for a moment. Could she call someone for us? A doctor, perhaps? Did we need anything to eat? To drink? I politely told her no to everything. Mom just needed to rest. Finally, satisfied she had done her duty, the clipboard lady left the room, closing the door behind her.

  Mom immediately sat up. “Is she gone?”

  I folded my arms. “You scared me half to death.”

  “Yes, well.” She dabbed gingerly at her head. “I didn’t quite intend to split my head open, but it was effective, don’t you think?”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “I’ve had worse. At least the drama gave us a place to hole up for a few hours.”

  “Hours? When do we meet with whatshisname?”

  She threw her bloodied gauze into the trash can. “We won’t see him until the café opens at six.”

  “What café?”

  But she was through answering questions. She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. “Let’s just take advantage of the room while we have it. Get some rest.”

  Was she kidding? “I’m not tired.”

  She opened one eye to look at me. “Sleep when you can—” she began, but I finished the mantra for her.

  “Because you never know when you might sleep next. I know. But I’m really not tired.”

  “Suit yourself.” She closed her eye again. Soon her breathing fell into a gentle rhythm.

  I dropped onto the chair opposite the desk and watched her. It amazed me how she could switch gears like that. Plus, we had no idea if Marlboro or his friends were waiting for us outside the office. How could she be so relaxed? But then again, it was late. The more I fought it, the heavier my eyelids became.

  The next thing I knew, Mom was shaking my shoulder and whispering my name. “Aphra.”

  My name, and not the fake one I had been using for the past seven months. For half a heartbeat, I thought I was home and the whole undercover thing had been one long, very bad dream. But then I realized I was still in the station office and reality came flooding back. I shook the sleep from my head. “Time to go?”

  She tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “I’m afraid so.”

  A quick glance at the clock on the wall told me it was past four. Two more hours until we met Lévêque. I stood. “Let’s go.”

  We hiked to the Metro and rode the night trains all over the city until dawn. I’m afraid I was too tired to get much out of our Paris tour, but I didn’t fall asleep again; the Metro wasn’t quite as comfortable—or secure—as the office had been. We kept a careful watch out, in case we were being followed, but we never saw anything to make us suspicious. Still, I wasn’t convinced that the Marlboro guy would give up so easily.

  Finally, just past five-thirty, we got off the Metro at the Louvre-Rivoli station. Even though I knew from the name of the station that we would be next to the Louvre, I wasn’t prepared for the wonder I felt as we emerged from the underground to find the museum right in front of us. The sun was about to make its morning debut so the sky was just lightening from purple to mauve, a blushing backdrop for the architecture. The early morning glow reflected softly off the glass pyramid in the courtyard. The effect was quite literally breathtaking.

  I forgot all about Marlboro and gawked like a tourist as we walked past the courtyard, beyond the museum and to Tuileries Park, which stretched out behind the Louvre. I had never seen anything like it in my life. I was used to the wild beauty of the island, but the Tuileries was formal, structured, symmetrical. “It’s beautiful,” I breathed.

  “Wait until you see the gardens,” Mom said. From the pride in her voice, you’d think she landscaped the place herself. She took me by the hand and led me down the wide paths to the gardens in the center of the park. Standing in the midst of flowers and statues and sculpted shrubberies, I almost believed that we were just sightsee ing, until Mom took me by the shoulders and pointed me toward one end of the park.

  “Take a moment to orient yourself,” she said. “If we get separated, I want you to know where you are.”

  I nodded, quickly sobered by the thought.

  “You see down there?” she continued, pointing. “That is the Obelisk on the Place de la Concorde down the Champs Élysées. At the end of the boulevard there is the Arc de Triomphe. And this way”—she turned me to face in the opposite direction—“is the Carousel. It’s like a mini Arc de Triomphe.”

  “Why do they call it a carousel?”

  “Aphra, pay attention. You need to understand the layout of the city in case—”

  “We won’t get separated,” I said. She had given me a similar spiel in Lyon, but we’d never been separated there.

  “Where we are standing,” she continued pointedly, “is the geographic center of the city. There are twenty districts, all laid out in a sort of clockwise spiral from here. We are in district one. If we are ever separated—”

  “But we won’t—”

  She held up her hand to stop me. “If we are, I need you to go to Saint-Lazare Station. It’s in the eighth district. There is a glass dome in front of the station, and an enclosed phone booth under the dome. That is our meeting place, do you understand?”

  I nodded.

  “Good.” She smiled cheerily. “Now, shall we go get some breakfast?”

  I couldn’t believe she could think about food after all that talk about being separated, but then I quickly remembered. We were meeting Monsieur Lévêque at a café. “Oui,” I said quickly. “That sounds good.”

  I was happy to find that the café in question was a little outdoor restaurant situated right there in the park. We sat at one of the corner tables, facing outward. Always sit with your back to the wall.

  We had barely settled into our chairs when a tall, elegantly dressed gentleman with a newspaper tucked under his arm took the table right next to ours. He reminded me of the cultured Frenchman in the old South Pacific movie Mom and I used to watch back when she lived with my dad and me. He laid his newspaper on the table and summoned the waiter.

  “Bonjour monsieur,” the waiter greeted him. “Vous désirez?”

  “Un café serré, s’il vous plait.” He ordered his coffee in a very nice baritone voice, and the waiter scurried off.

  As the man waited, he unfurled the paper and began to read. That is, he unfurled most of the paper. One section he laid carefully on the table, just at his elbow. His coffee arrived, he sipped delicately for a few moments, then stood and walked briskly away, leaving his newspaper folded neatly on the table.

  I was about to comment on the fact when my mom stood abruptly as well. “Bon. Allons-y,” she
said. Let’s go. As she passed the man’s table, she swept up the newspaper and tucked it under her arm. Smooth. Natural.

  A drop! I couldn’t help a flush of pleasure to realize that the cultured Frenchman must be our contact, Lévêque. It was about all I could do to contain myself as Mom and I strolled back through the park toward the Louvre. I was dying to know what was in that newspaper. Our new identities? Money? Instructions?

  Finally, Mom motioned to an empty park bench and we sat. She laid the newspaper on the bench beside her. My hands itched with a longing to grab it, open it.

  “Aphra,” Mom said at length, “how badly do you want to see what’s inside that newspaper?”

  “Um, very badly?”

  “I’m aware of that. Do you know how I know?”

  I shook my head.

  “The agitation is written all over your face, your body language. If you’d have had the chance, you would have opened the paper long before now, am I correct?”

  “I suppose.”

  “And what do you suppose would have happened if the paper contained sensitive information? What if someone were watching?”

  I stared at her like she was speaking a foreign language… . One I hadn’t learned.

  “You do recall that we were being followed in Lyon, yes? Control is very important, honey. Never let your emotions dictate your actions.”

  “I understand,” I mumbled, feeling about two feet tall.

  “Now,” she reached for the paper, calmly, slowly. “Let’s see what the news has in store for us today.”

  CHAPTER 3

  I was disappointed when we found no secret messages folded into the paper. No money, no maps. Nothing I would have expected. But if Mom was similarly let down, she didn’t show it. She scanned the print on the front page, as composed as ever. Almost in afterthought, or so it appeared, she handed me the other section of the paper. “Here, why don’t you read this one?”