She swings the door open. “Sometimes.”
Inside, the place smells pleasantly of sweat and effort, like a gym. Floor-to-ceiling mirrors and ballet barres line the walls. I wander through the room, tap middle C on a beat-up piano in the corner.
“Leave the piano alone,” she says.
Yael moves to the back of the room, where she opens another door. There’s a sort of graceful power in her walk, like a cat’s. “Follow me.”
We head up a narrow staircase to the floor above. It’s a large room the same size and shape as the studio below us, but with a higher ceiling and windows covered by blinds. Yael pushes back a folding curtain that cuts the room in two, revealing an area where thick mats cover the floor and a fearsome rubber training dummy—crudely made face locked in a teeth-baring growl—stands in the corner.
“What is this?” I ask.
“My home,” she says. “And for now, yours.”
“No, that part. It’s like a martial arts studio.”
Yael takes a bottle of water from one of the metal cabinets lining the wall and opens it. “The other thing I teach. Krav Maga. Heard of it?”
I shake my head.
“In Hebrew, it means ‘hand combat.’ You’ll be learning from the best teacher in Paris.”
“You—you’re going to teach me to fight?”
“I’m going to try.” Yael sips the water slowly, her eyes scouring me as if evaluating what I’m capable of. “Bela told his contact you’re a gymnast.”
“Well—it’s just a hobby.”
“Even so. It means you have balance, strength. You know your body and what it can do.”
“Look, I’m sorry. I don’t know what anyone told you. But I’m not a fighter. When Bela said someone would help me…”
“You thought he meant someone would do everything for you?” Yael says angrily. “I’m the only ground support you get, and this isn’t a solo operation. We do this together.”
“But finding my father is a priority. That’s what you said.”
“Yes. And such an important one that they assigned a dance teacher to the case.” She shakes her head. “Someone in my government said to someone else, ‘Why are we paying this Yael up in Paris?’ So here we are.”
*
On a cot in the corner of a tiny and otherwise bare room, I try to sleep. And maybe I do, but the waking kind, the in-and-out kind, where you’re never quite sure what’s real and what isn’t. I hear New York outside the window, no, I hear Paris—little engines, high-low sirens. Beyond the door of my room, I hear Georgina on the phone, speaking French.
My eyes snap open. Gwendolyn Bloom, you heartless, selfish girl, what have you done?
I’d turned my phone off when I got on the plane, buried it under wet paper towels in the bathroom trash just after takeoff. How many voice mails from Georgina are waiting for me, each one progressively more panicked? She’s talking to the police now. Blaming herself. If only she’d let me stay a few days longer. If only she’d shared just a little more of herself. Poor Georgina. I rewarded her love by killing her. My little war has claimed its first victim.
I shove the thoughts of her aside and banish the self-doubt and self-loathing to some dusty corner of my mind. I will be hard, I decide. I will be fearless. I force myself to stand. Force myself to walk out into the studio.
Yael has, inexplicably, laid out a large plastic sheet on the floor and placed a chair in the middle of it.
“How long was I out?” I ask.
“Ninety minutes,” she says.
“What’s this?”
She nods toward the chair. “Sit.”
It reminds me of an interrogation scene from a movie. “What’s with the plastic? So you don’t get blood on the floor?”
“Your hair. You can’t go out looking like that.”
“I’ll go out looking however I please.”
“How many people will remember the girl with bright red hair they saw on the train, or sitting in the café, or asking strange questions about her father?” She slides her hands into a pair of rubber gloves. “The answer is all of them. Now sit.”
I obey, and Yael goes to work. She dips a brush into a plastic bowl at her side and slowly attacks my hair, section by section. Her fingers push and pull and twist my head into whatever position she needs. I hear her whisper something in Hebrew that sounds like a long complicated curse.
“Have you done this before?” I ask.
“For three months, I was undercover in a Beirut salon.”
I try to picture Yael chatting amiably with the wife of some Hezbollah cell leader while she snips away at her hair, fishing for gossip about her husband’s friends visiting from Damascus. Remind me where you live again?
“Still, maybe we should see a professional,” I say. “You know, someone who’s done this longer.”
“And when the cops come around? ‘Done any work on a girl with bright red hair lately?’ We’d have to shoot her,” Yael says, slamming my head forward to reach the hair at the base of my skull.
“Shoot who?”
“The stylist.”
“You’re joking.”
The silence lasts just a second too long. “Of course,” Yael says.
An old-fashioned kitchen timer ticks away the minutes. I can smell the dye and feel it burning my scalp. I ask Yael if she’s sure she did it right. She tells me she has no idea and to shut up and wait. When the timer finally rings, she rinses my head in the kitchen sink. It turns out, though, that Yael’s not done yet. She steers me back to the chair and starts in with the scissors. I see lengths of my hair dropping to the floor. It’s deep brown now, with a touch of auburn, too.
Yael rinses me again, and I’m finally allowed into the bathroom to inspect her work in the mirror. At first, the sight of it shocks me. My hair is shorter, stylish, more grown-up, Parisienne. Damn, Yael’s not bad.
It’s the sight of my face, though, that shocks me most. With this haircut, I see it in a new frame, as a stranger would. My God, what have the last weeks done to me? Is it possible for a seventeen-year-old to look old? My face is thinner than I remember, sallow and drawn. Worn out. Substituting terror for food does strange things to the human body.
Outside, Yael directs me to stand against an unadorned white wall. She holds up a digital camera and aims it at me.
“You’ll be getting a new identity,” she says. “Don’t smile, just look at the lens.”
The flash goes off once, twice, and then a third time for good measure. She sets down the camera and starts fiddling with a computer on a desk. I see the images of me flash across the screen like mug shots.
“I’m told you know several languages. Which one is your strongest?”
“English,” I say.
“Obviously.”
“Then Spanish and Russian,” I say.
“Are you fluent? Can you pass as native?”
“So I’m told.”
“Be sure. Your life may depend on it.”
“I’m sure,” I say, though I’m not sure at all.
*