“Of course,” he says. “Bienvenue en France.”
An electric door slides open, dumping passengers out of the customs area and into the reception room of the terminal. Eager families and bored limo drivers holding up signs scan the emerging travelers for recognition. A French soldier in uniform, young and trim and gorgeous, bolts past me and into the arms of his mother, whose makeup is running down her cheeks in tears. A dad in a slept-in suit picks up a toddler and kisses him, then glares at his wife, who glares back. But mostly the passengers push past the crowd on their way to the Metro or taxi line. I throw myself into the middle of them, hoping to disappear.
In my peripheral vision, I see a woman in a leather jacket with an orange silk scarf tied loosely around her neck. She’s somewhere in her late thirties, I guess, very pretty, with a riot of black hair pinned up on top of her head. She’s scanning the crowd, walking quickly along its edge, smiling expectantly as if the person she’s looking for is somewhere among us. I look up toward the signs, trying to find my way to the subway, but when I look back again, her eyes are locked onto me.
So it’s a case of mistaken identity, I tell myself. So I look like someone she knows. No big deal. Keep walking. Then her hand is on my shoulder, turning me forcefully to face her. Instead of shock and an apology that I’m not who she thought I was, she beams and gives me two quick kisses on the cheeks before pulling me into a close hug.
Underneath her elegant leather jacket and trim body, I feel plenty of muscle. She holds me tightly, and I smell a hint of very expensive, very French perfume. Her mouth two inches from my ear, she whispers in English, “I’m a friend of Bela Atzmon, understand?”
She pushes me away as if to look me over but still holds me firmly by the shoulders. “Comme tu as grandi! Je n’en reviens pas! Tu es presque une adulte!” she says, loudly enough for those around us to hear. She pulls me close again and resumes whispering in English. “There are two men by the newspaper stand; they’re police detectives. Don’t look. Just smile like I do, like we’re relatives who haven’t seen each other in ages.”
“Are they here for me?” I whisper back.
“Let’s not find out,” she says.
We begin walking, and she holds my arm tightly just as if she really were a long-lost aunt. “No bags?” she says quietly.
“No, I just ran with whatever I had.”
“Then let’s go.”
She guides me along, steering me with her grip, out the door and across the passenger pickup area to a parking garage. The morning sun is giving way to thick, rolling rain clouds. But to my sleep-deprived eyes, it’s still way too bright, and I have to squint as I study her. What is this, and why am I getting into a car with her?
The garage is packed, rows and rows of small Citro?ns and Fiats, but there are few people around. “How did you know who I was?” I ask.
“The red hair is a little obvious.” She stops to unlock the passenger door of a battered old Volkswagen hatchback. “Get in,” she says. “Quickly now.”
“Wait,” I say. “I don’t—I don’t even know your name.”
“I’m called Yael,” she says, and climbs into the driver’s seat.
The wording is careful: called Yael. Not I am Yael. Not My name is Yael. I climb into the passenger seat anyway, despite my better judgment. She reaches for the ignition with a key, but I interrupt her. “Just a second. Can we, you know, talk a minute?”
She retracts her arm and eyes me coldly. “What do you want to know?”
“To start with—who you are?” I say.
“Yael. I told you.”
“Then what are you? A private investigator? A spy?”
Her eyes dance over my face, deciding what to say. “I am someone who is asked to do favors from time to time.”
“That’s a very vague way of putting it.”
“Yes,” she says. “It is.”
“Yael is—an Israeli name?”
“Will that be a problem?”
“No,” I say. “Of course not.”
The woman called Yael starts the car, and we wind through the parking garage to the roadway. She drives quickly but precisely, speeding up to the tail of a big eighteen-wheeler loaded down with fat metal pipes, then downshifting as she circles around it, quick as a rabbit.
I notice her eyes flicking back and forth from the road ahead to the rearview mirror. It’s not a nervous gesture, but something she’s been trained to do, something I remember my dad doing. Beneath the chic Paris clothes and the flawless Parisian French lurks something hard, something that comes from years spent in the streets of cities crueler than this. There’s too much cold control, too much skill, for someone who is sometimes, as she put it, “asked to do favors.” The woman who calls herself Yael is no errand runner. Somewhere in her jacket, I feel reasonably sure, is a pistol.
“So—why are you doing this?” I say. “I mean, why does Israel give a damn what happens to an American?”
Yael’s quiet for so long I wonder if she’s ignoring the question. Just as I’m about to repeat it, she answers. “This man, your father—his agency and mine worked together now and then. He has knowledge that we’d rather he not share. He is, for my government, more of a priority than he apparently is for yours.”
It’s very clear now, and very unsentimental. This has nothing to do with paying back Bela the debts he’s owed. “Just business, then,” I say.
“Always is.”
She makes another turn, and I see we’ve entered the suburbs of Paris that don’t appear in any tourist guide. It’s all concrete apartment blocks here, public housing. The buildings loom up on either side of us like canyon walls.
“You’ll need to tell me everything,” Yael says. “Then my service will go to work. Data mining, mostly—matching a puzzle piece here to a puzzle piece there. In the meantime, I teach you how not to get killed.”
“The data mining, how long will it take?”
“Could be a month, or tomorrow.”
“A month—Yael, that’s too long,” I say. “We can’t just wait around.”
“Waiting is ninety percent of what we do in my profession.”
“So what’s the other ten?” I ask.
Yael eyes me and smirks. “Pure terror.”
*
The car slows to a crawl in dense late-morning traffic, inching along a side street, barely moving at all. Yael slams the heel of her hand into the horn and curses. This commercial side street isn’t the Paris people dream about, the Paris of accordion players and copper roofs turned green with age. This is the Paris of grocery stores and cheap sushi joints and dry cleaners. Daytime Paris. Sensible-shoes Paris. The sidewalks are crowded with businessmen and mothers pushing strollers. Yael finally finds a parking spot, and I follow her on foot for another block before she stops beneath a green awning marked STUDIO MARIE, ACADEMIE DE DANSE.
“Who’s Marie?”
“I suppose I am,” Yael says.
“You’re a dance teacher?”