“Make a right here, Saj.” She hoped they hadn’t made a wasted trip.
He turned into Villa d’Alésia, a tree-lined lane lit by old-fashioned lampposts. Suddenly, a white van lurched in front of them. Saj honked the horn and downshifted. The van shot ahead, its hanging muffler scraping the cobbles, and turned out of sight.
Aimée scanned the house numbers for number fourteen. From the corner of her eye she caught a figure flashing in front of the Citro?n’s grill. A man’s blue jean jacket shone in the headlights’ yellow beam.
“Look out, Saj!” she shouted.
Horrified, her right arm shot out against the dashboard, while out of instinct she threw her other arm protectively across Saj’s chest.
Saj punched the brakes. Squeals and then a horrible thump as the man hit the windshield. For a second the man’s pale face pressed against the glass, his half-lidded eyes vacant, his palms splayed.
The man crumpled off the side of the car as Saj veered to the side. Too late. The Citro?n jolted, hitting an old parked Mercedes. The metal screeched as it accordioned; the car shuddered. Cold air tinged by burning rubber poured over her face.
The impact set off the alarms of parked cars, a shrill honking cacophony. A hiss of steam escaped the Citro?n’s crushed radiator.
Her bag had fallen from the dashboard—mascara, keys, and encryption manuals spilling on the floor. Saj’s body hung over the steering wheel. Good God, he’d taken off his seat belt.
“Saj, can you hear me?”
He stirred, rubbed his head.
“The mec came out of nowhere,” he said. And before she could struggle out of her seat belt, Saj pushed open the dented door. He staggered in shock, his pale dreadlocks hanging in the yellow slants of the headlights. “Mon Dieu, I killed him.”
Aimée’s door jammed against the Mercedes. She climbed out of the driver’s seat, then realized her phone was somewhere on the car floor. Stunned, she tried to take in the dark, wet lane, the body lying beside the car. Saj limping and clutching his neck.
A woman down the street, gripping a gym bag, ran toward them. Green surgical scrubs showed under her short brown jacket.
“Call for help,” Aimée shouted. “Ambulance!”
“Quelle catastrophe,” said the woman. She pulled out her cell phone. “And I just finished my shift at the hospital.”
The nurse knelt down beside the steaming car, the hem of her green scrubs trailing on the oil-slicked cobbles. With the nurse attending to the victim, Aimée hurried toward Saj. “What hurts? Can you move your neck?”
“Where did he come from? I didn’t see him until he.…”
Dazed, Saj touched his temple. Grimaced in pain. She realized he was in shock, and guided him to a low stone wall.
“Stay here, Saj,” she said.
“Help’s coming,” the nurse was saying to the motionless man. Apart from the cuts on his face, the man could have been asleep. “The hospital’s two blocks away. Can you hear me?”
Not even a groan.
It had happened so fast, one minute she and Saj were talking and then … Aimée realized she might be in shock herself. She struggled to focus, became aware of the nurse’s thrusts to the man’s chest. The whining echo of a siren. Approaching red flashes splashed the walls. Lights went on in the windows of the adjoining alley.
Suppressing a shudder, Aimée watched the nurse put her index and middle finger on the man’s carotid artery.
“No pulse,” she said.
Aimée gasped. She looked closer at the man’s pallor, his fresh facial cuts and scratches. “But he’s not bleeding anywhere.”
The shifting of the fire truck’s gears swallowed the nurse’s reply. The red lights reflected on the water pooled between the cobble cracks and on the roof tiles of the two-story ateliers.
Saj shivered in his thin muslin shirt, his sandalwood prayer beads tangled with his dreads. He had a glassy look as he spoke to the first response team. As if in a nightmare, Aimée watched the helmeted sapeurs-pompiers confer with the nurse beside René’s Citro?n. The arriving medic tried for vitals and shook his head.
They lifted the body onto the stretcher. The man’s torn jeans were oil-spattered; his lifeless, pale arm fell limp, exposing the blue tattoos peeking from beneath the rolled-up sleeve of his Levi’s jacket. Cyrillic letters intertwined in an elaborate figure of a wolf.
Haa Bepa
“He’s Russian?” she said to the medic who was putting a blood pressure cuff on Saj’s arm.
“Worse,” said the medic, a thin-mustached twenty-something. “A Serb.”
Shivering, Aimée stared closer at the tattoo. “How can you tell?”
“Believe me, as the son of a Ukrainian dissident, I’m supposed to hate both Russians and Serbs.” He pointed to the script. “See there? Serbian uses Cyrillic and Latin script. The Serb mafia tattoo themselves like that in prison.”
Her blood ran cold. Serb mafia?
The medic clipped a Styrofoam brace around Saj’s neck, then draped a blanket across his shivering shoulders. Then he took Aimée aside. “You look pale. We’ll bring you in for observation.”
“I’m fine.” Aimée was loath to share how shaken she felt. How her stomach churned at the image of the man’s white face, his half-lidded eyes reminding her of the fish on ice in the market. His palms splayed on the windshield. His tattoo.
“If we hadn’t driven up this street to find.…” Her words left her. It spun in her mind that a man she didn’t know who knew her mother had sent her an envelope of cash.
“Fate. Accidents happen, terrible,” the medic said. He took her vitals. “Your blood pressure’s a bit high.” He put a stethoscope to her chest.
“But we ran him over,” she said, hesitating. “There’s something wrong—”
“You feel guilty, that’s natural,” he interrupted. “But if it happened as you say, it’s not your fault.”