“Good evening, ladies,” came a smooth baritone voice.
My eyes tried to refocus from their goal—the stairway—onto the person keeping me from getting there. “Let go,” I managed to sputter in my fear, and he immediately dropped his hold. Stepping back, I found myself inches away from another familiar face. His hair was hidden beneath a tightly fitted black cap, but I would have recognized him anywhere. It was the muscular friend of the boy who had just dived into the Seine.
“You shouldn’t be down here by yourselves this late at night,” he said.
“There’s something going on back there,” Georgia gasped. “A fight.”
“Police procedure,” he said, turning, and applied light force to our backs, steering us rapidly toward the stairway.
“Police procedure with swords?” I asked, incredulous, as we jogged up to street level.
“Gang activity,” he said briefly, already turning to head back down the stairway. “I would get as far away from here as you can,” he called over his shoulder as he took the stairs a few at a time. He sprinted toward the tunnel just as two heads surfaced from the river near the bank. I felt a surge of relief when I saw them alive.
The guy who had steered us away arrived just as they reached land and pulled the jumper up to safety.
A howl of pain shattered the night air, and Georgia grabbed my arm. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Wait.” I hesitated. “Shouldn’t we do something?”
“Like what?”
“Like call the police?”
“They are the police,” she said uncertainly.
“Yeah, right. They sure don’t look like police. I could swear I recognized those two guys from our neighborhood.” We stood looking helplessly at each other for a second, trying to make sense out of what we had just seen.
“Well, maybe our neighborhood’s under the surveillance of a special undercover SWAT team,” Georgia said. “You know, Catherine Deneuve lives right down the street.”
“Yeah, right, like Catherine Deneuve has her own hot-guy SWAT team trolling the neighborhood for celebrity stalkers with swords.”
Unable to contain ourselves, we burst out laughing.
“We should not be laughing. This is serious!” Georgia giggled, wiping a stray tear from her cheek.
“I know,” I sniffed, composing myself.
Down by the river the girl and her savior had vanished, and the fighting sounded farther away. “See, it’s over anyway,” Georgia said. “It’s too late to do anything even if we wanted to.”
We turned toward the crosswalk just as two figures sprinted up the stairs behind us. Out of my peripheral vision, I saw them approaching at full-speed and grabbed Georgia’s arm to pull her out of the way. They ran past, missing us by mere inches—two huge men dressed in dark clothes with caps pulled down low around their faces. A glint of metal flashed from beneath one of their long dusters. Leaping into a car, they started the engine with a roar. But before they drove off, they pulled up beside my sister and me and slowed to a snail’s pace. I could feel them staring at us through the darkened windows.
“Whatcha looking at?” Georgia yelled, and they peeled off down the road. We stood there for a moment, stunned. The crosswalk light turned green, and Georgia hooked her arm through mine as we stepped out into the street.
“Weird night,” she said finally, breaking our silence.
“Understatement of the year,” I replied. “Should we tell Mamie and Papy about it?”
“What?” Georgia laughed. “And spoil Papy’s ‘Paris is safe’ delusion? They’d never let us out of the house again.”
Chapter Four
WHEN I STEPPED OUTSIDE INTO THE COMFORTING security of daylight the next morning, the events of the previous night seemed unreal. There had been nothing about what we had seen on the news. But Georgia and I couldn’t let it go that easily.
We discussed it more than a few times, although we got no closer to understanding what had taken place. Our theories ran from things as mundane as Dungeons & Dragons fanatics playacting outdoors to the more dramatic (and laugh-inducing) scenario of time-traveling damsels and knights.
Although I continued to do all my reading at the Café Sainte-Lucie, I hadn’t seen the mysterious group of gorgeous guys again. After a couple of weeks, I knew all the waiters as well as the owners, and many of the regular clients became familiar faces: Little old ladies with their teacup Yorkshire terriers, which they carried around in their handbags and fed from their plates. Businessmen with expensive-looking suits talking endlessly on cell phones and ogling every pretty girl who walked by. Couples of all ages holding hands under the tables.