He was going so fast that he was practically running. The rain came down in sheets, in torrents. He watched the droplets sailing through the streetlights out of a low, rushing sky. He realized that he was running because he was scared. How must it feel to be eaten alive that way? They were parasites. Big, filthy suckerfish.

How the fuck had she eluded them? You don’t sneak past customs when they have you caught. You can’t! But she had.

Intelligence, of course. She was brilliant, obviously. So what did that mean? How many steps ahead was she? Ten? Fifty? A thousand? “Goddamnit!”

Then he thought, what if she knows about me? He couldn’t see how, but he didn’t have any two hundred and fifty IQ, either. She could be three feet away right now and he would have no way of knowing.

He found a little shop where they had some wine stuck in the window along with the displays of Orange Crush and Evian water. There was what looked like it might be a nice muscatel for about nine bucks. He shelled out and took it home under his arm.

Back in the hotel, he realized that he had no corkscrew. So he busted the neck and lay back on the bed drinking out of the jagged hole and staring up at the office building. All those dark windows and not a single human figure anywhere.

It wasn’t muscatel, not by a long shot, but the wine did him okay, especially on top of the vodka. Maybe toward dawn he slept, and maybe not.

He awoke to gray, sad light and music coming up from the street—some kind of wild Arabic tune. The office building towered like a monster ghost above his skylight. He got up, wanted a cigarette, and went through the goddamn motions with the goddamn gum. He chewed it brutally, stuffed in another piece, and bore down until his jaws hummed.

He’d been rough on the kids last night. But that was nothing new. They’d gotten their frogs’ legs anyway. Thing was, he loved his kids. He wanted them to get their fucking frogs’ legs whenever they could.

The phone went brrt-brrt brrt-brrt. Neat sound, he thought.

“Yeah?”

“We got three places, boss. Three arrondissements.”

“Beck?”

“Yeah, boss.”

“Where are you?”

“Prefecture of Police Department of Records.”

“Am I wrong, or is it six-fifteen in the morning?”

“Shit, they’re gonna be opening this place up in an hour. We gotta get moving.”

“But how the hell did you get in there? That’s what I want to know.”

“They got a lotta skylights in this town.”

SIX: Martin Soule

SIX

Martin Soule