Caitlin had to stop for a moment and lean against the wall as her head reeled. Whether from the illness, her injuries or an adrenalin backwash, she couldn’t tell. She stood still, closed her eyes and sucked in a long draught of air. It was unpleasantly cold now, but the alleyway still reeked of garbage and dog shit – the signature smell of Paris behind the coffee and pain au chocolat.
‘Are you all right?’ Monique asked grudgingly.
‘I’ll be fine. Just give me a second.’
And the dizzy spell did pass quickly. She felt a little lightheaded as they stepped off towards the street again, but nothing too crippling. Monique supported Caitlin at the elbow anyway, a gesture she was happy to accept.
‘You didn’t answer my question,’ the Frenchwoman said, a little petulantly. ‘What did you mean before, about protecting us?’
‘You wouldn’t believe me, not yet.’
‘Try me.’
‘No. If we’re still alive in a few days, I’ll tell you – and you will believe me, every word I say. But for now, no. Come with me, or make your own way home, where they’ll be waiting for you. It’s all the same to me.’
They stopped at the intersection, where bright lights and heavy foot traffic created an effect a little like stepping back into the real world from some underground realm. A bus rumbled by, coughing thick gouts of acrid smoke into the air. Shoes scuffed and clicked on wet, grey flagstones, and around them roared hundreds of voices, all discussing the same thing: ‘la Disparition’. The Disappearance.
Caitlin’s heart sank. She had been hoping, irrationally, that the apparent normality of the street scene implied there was some sort of disorder within her, some malady of the brain caused by her illness, and that it had manifested itself as a perverse hallucination of cataclysm. But no, the Parisians were agog with the news. And further confirmation for her that it was real was the sound of so many voices raised in good cheer and even merriment. That is what the three jerks who’d abused them before were drinking to: a world without America.
Fucking assholes.
‘Excuse-moi!’ Monique had stopped in her tracks, affronted enough to revert to her native tongue.
‘Sorry. Didn’t think I was speaking aloud,’ said Caitlin. ‘It’s nothing. We’ve got to get moving. Let’s go.’
They set off again, heading uphill. Caitlin’s eyes swept the road and the footpath ahead of them on both sides of the street for any sign of hostile action, but all she could see was heavy traffic and throngs of boulevardiers, many of them seemingly toasting the day. Not all, admittedly. Here and there, arguments raged in that Gallic way, all sound and fury without any real danger of violent contention.
‘… It is a disaster, I tell you, a world-ending disaster.’
‘No. A second chance is what it is, gifted by the gods.’
‘So, you are a believer now, eh?’
‘… This will mean horror, horror on an unimaginable scale…’
‘… I shall be leaving for my farm this very night. Mark my words, leave the city now or you will have – ‘
‘All I will have is another glass of Billecart…’
Caitlin set her mouth in a grim, thin line and pushed on with her head down. Monique fell silent beside her. After a few minutes it became obvious that for each individual who saw the Disappearance as a malign catastrophe, another two or three thought it a fine thing. From the snatches of conversation she picked up as they hurried along, it seemed that in this part of the world at least, a rough consensus had settled on a conspiracy theory about the Americans having destroyed themselves when testing some super-weapon for use in Iraq. Nobody seemed to imagine that any such fate might befall them here in Paris. But then, if they did, they’d hardly be out scarfing down dinner and aperitifs, would they? Perhaps the freeways out of the city were jammed with more people like the man she’d heard planning to leave for his farm later that night. (Although, why he thought he’d be safe there from something that gobbled whole continents was a mystery.)
‘I am sorry.’
Caitlin almost didn’t hear her. Monique’s voice was small and timid and nearly lost in the roar of the busy street. ‘What?’
‘I am sorry, Cathy – Caitlin. I can hear what they are saying as well as you. It is disgraceful. Drinking to a tragedy. Saying your people deserved it.’
‘Oh, fuck that,’ replied Caitlin in pitch-perfect French. She really didn’t want to get tagged as an American at the moment. ‘This is one street, Monique. One little neighbourhood where people of like minds will gather all the time. It’s just human nature. If some Algerian madman set off a nuke in Paris, I could take you straight to a food court in any city in the US and it’d take me all of three seconds to find some fat, doughnut-sucking slob who said you deserved it. People everywhere are fucked, that’s all.’
‘No. Not everyone… Caitlin. Some people are led by the better angels.’
At that moment they passed a cafй outside which stood a small, elderly gentleman in a black jacket and red beret. Both of his hands were holding the crook of a walking stick, which he was banging into the ground for emphasis while arguing with a couple of men who looked to be a fraction of his age. ‘I was with the Americans at Carentan. I saw them shed their blood for France. You dishonour them and you dishonour France with this rubbish talk…’
Caitlin gifted the old man with a sad smile and a wink as she passed by. A siren brought her head up slowly, lest she draw attention to herself, but it was a fire engine a block over. She caught a glimpse of it muscling through traffic as they crossed an intersection.
‘Down here,’ she said, veering off towards a line of parked cars in a street of private houses and apartments. Only one shop, a liquor store, was open.
‘Are you going to steal another car?’ Monique asked warily.
No, thought Caitlin. I’m going to buy a couple of magnums of champagne and pass them around the surrender monkeys back there, to help celebrate the cosmic cornholing of the great Satan. Aloud she simply went: ‘You got it.’
Three minutes later they were cutting back across town in a grey Volvo station wagon, a late-model V40. A suction cap held a black plastic cradle to the windscreen just below the rear-view mirror. Caitlin leaned across Monique as they came to a red light, popping the glove box open.
‘Sweet,’ she said as she pulled out a small Magellan Meridian GPS receiver. ‘Is there a power cord in there? Look for a sort of flexi cord and an adaptor to plug into the cigarette lighter.’
Monique couldn’t find one, but the little yellow and black unit had three-quarters of a charge on it anyway. Caitlin powered it up as the lights changed and waited for the chime that would tell them it had linked to enough satellites to fix their position.