Lina glanced around to make sure no one else in line could overhear them and shook her head. Lina had a cousin who was the despair of their mutual grandparents, a weaselly jerk who had grown more and more weaselly through high school—at seventeen, he’d once grabbed sixteen-year-old Vi’s breasts in the stairwell of Lina’s building and tried to trap her against the wall, and she’d kneed him and shoved him down the stairs—and who had ended up in gangs, then fallen under the sway of some weirdo imam and started spouting pseudo-religious nonsense that sure as hell didn’t correspond to anything Lina or her parents believed, and then run off to Syria and come back fairly soon after, with his tail between his legs.
Everybody in the family worried about him, and Lina personally hated him, but the police did nothing at all. So apparently he was just a misogynist jerk who liked to fantasize about killing people.
Right.
Vi gave her shoulders a flick as if to rid herself of uncleanness just thinking about him and focused on the shrinking line. She would really like to be in a dark theater with a very funny comedian making her laugh, already.
Lina’s weaselly wannabe cousin is the very last person who would actually know if something was going down right now. Something big enough that American special ops would be involved, inside France.
She couldn’t even imagine anything big enough that the French would allow Americans a hand in it, on their soil. The guy responsible for the Christmas flight, maybe. Al-Mofti. She really had no idea whatsoever how countries cooperated on this kind of thing, but she could see them wanting that to be a joint operation. Maybe the Americans would say, We’ve got some information, but we want to be in on the kill.
A vision of Chase, big and easy and grinning and doing his puppy eyes, flashed through her, and all the hair on her arms lifted. She shivered, rubbing her arms.
The wounds of the last attacks in Paris had been immediate. She’d seen with her own eyes the blood on the street only a couple of blocks away, the bullet holes in the walls, she’d laid flowers in memorial. She’d opened her doors to people stranded, fed them in her restaurant for free that night, gone out the next night when so many people were huddling inside, and, along with Célie and Lina and her team and Célie’s boyfriend Joss and her boss Dom and his wife and just so many, many people, been part of those Parisians who surged onto the terraces again, saying, Fuck you. We might be afraid, and we might be wounded, but we won’t hide and we won’t give in. We’re still Paris.
So she knew plenty of people fighting terrorists emotionally, by refusing to give in to discrimination or by going out into the streets and celebrating life and being together.
But she had never known anyone fighting terrorists with bullets. Well, she knew some police officers, but more everyday riot police and traffic cops. Not RAID.
Not…she pushed her hand through her hair…not American black ops. Not outside of movies.
And a hundred scenes from Hollywood of men in black or camouflage with guns raised, going in, rose in her brain, and she tried to put Chase in the place of one of those men, and…
“You okay?” Célie said.
“Need a jacket?” Joss asked.
“I’m okay,” Vi lied. And, as the line shifted forward, “Oh, thank God, we finally get to go in. This guy had better be hilarious.”
He was, but not enough to take Vi’s mind off the utter bizarreness of receiving a call from the health inspectors right at intermission. It was nine o’clock at night. “We just wanted to inform you as early as possible that the test results came back negative, and the salmonella in your clients was traced to spinach they purchased at the grocery store. Your restaurant is cleared, and you can return to operations.”
Vi hung up and went back to her seat, staring at the comedian as he came back out on stage. She needed to call her publicist and try to get the vindication of Au-dessus and Violette Lenoir out as far and wide as possible, even if it would never have the same reach as the story that she had poisoned the president. She needed to call the U.S. embassy and see if the president would still come on his visit the day after tomorrow. She needed to get up early for the market tomorrow and figure out a menu that would absolutely knock everyone’s socks off.
But she couldn’t shake the conviction that her restaurant had been caught up in the throes of something she knew nothing about, that Chase was at the center of it…and that something might have happened that very day and she had no idea what.
The comedian might have been funny, his second half. But she didn’t hear anything he said at all.
Chapter 16
Chase bounced into the kitchens of Au-dessus like he was about to bounce right through the ceiling. He felt like one of those men on the moon—if he wasn’t careful, he’d bounce himself into space.