Generation of Liars (12 page)

Cleopatra called out to me from the
water, “Alice! Hop on!” Her hair was turbulently whipping against the wind and
the moon was making her silhouette appear three dimensional. She was already
rounding away from Etienne’s boat so that Pressley could never make it fast
enough to follow me. I tottered on the rim of the yacht and leapt onto the
speeding motorboat as it zipped past. I crashed onboard with a painful thud and
rolled to Rabbit’s feet.

Rabbit looked down at my chin resting
over his foot. “Did you get it?”

I pulled my mask up onto my
forehead. “Yeah, I freaking got it. No thanks to you standing around and
hitting on girls in geisha masks while I risk my life.”

“Hey,” Rabbit defended, “I was
collecting potentially useful information from one of Etienne’s employees, I’ll
have you know.”

“Do you think it’s really the
dynamite stick?” Cleopatra inquired. She wrested a maneuver that twisted the
boat around in the water and sped us in the opposite direction from Etienne’s
estate.

I looked down at the thin, silver
thumb drive cupped inside my hand. From appearances it was a mundane disk, with
no unusual markings aside from the manufacturer’s label of Cibix and the
company’s small tornado-swirl logo beside it. It was an identical copy to
millions of other disks in the world. “We have no way of knowing until we pop
this bad boy in,” I answered. I turned to look back into the distance at
Etienne’s yacht, where I could make out Presley’s obscure outline in the
moonlight, dissolving like fog with every inch we moved away.

“Who was that guy on the boat with
you?” Rabbit asked. “It didn’t look like Jean Etienne from here.”

I hesitated for a moment, not
wanting to admit that Pressley Connard was still in Paris and that I had been
outsmarted by him again. “It was nobody. Just one of Etienne’s hired goons.”

*   
*    *

“Does anyone realize that mannequin
is naked?” Rabbit questioned as we passed by the storefront at the bottom of my
apartment building. Moments earlier, Cleopatra had dropped us off at the pier
near my apartment.

“I’m not sure,” I told him. “Not
like the Parisians flinch at a little plastic skin.”

When we got inside I booted up the
laptop sitting on my kitchen table. I slapped the disk into Rabbit’s open hand.
“You do the honors.”

He inserted the disk into the drive
and rubbed his hands together in anticipation as the files loaded. “That’s
odd.”

“What’s odd?”

“It didn’t even prompt me for a
password before accessing the files.”

“Is that a bad sign?”

“This is too easy,” Rabbit said,
nervously running his hand through his fleecy hair. “It feels like a setup.”

An image flickered on the screen. I
hunched behind Rabbit to get a look. The glare of the computer screen caught us
under ultramarine light. “That looks like Etienne’s yacht,” I commented.

“So does that one,” Rabbit said, as
another image populated the screen.

“What the heck is this?” I asked.
“Is it some kind of set up? A virus?”

“I wish,” Rabbit whined. “It looks
like a catalog for yachts.”

“Crap. You’re right.” I traced my
finger down a little column of prices alongside the photos.

Rabbit shook his head in disbelief.
He slammed the keys with his trigger finger, opening all the files one by one.
A frustrated growl spun from his throat each time a glossy picture of a yacht
popped up. “All that’s on this disk are pictures of these stupid fancy little
yachts, just hundreds of pictures of yachts with listing prices.” Rabbit’s
fists slammed the table top. “Etienne wasn’t smuggling the dynamite stick. He
was just shopping for a new yacht.”

“That was a waste of time,” I said.
“Now I feel like an idiot for knocking him unconscious.” The pocket of my
trench coat vibrated, alerting me to an incoming call. I pulled my phone out.
“Oh great, and that’s Motley, right on cue. This is going to be fun.”

“See if he wants to buy a yacht,”
Rabbit said, rolling his eyes.

“Motley,” I answered, “do you want
the good news first or the bad news?” I didn’t pause for him to supply an
answer to my rhetorical, avoidant question. “Because the good news is you can
now purchase a brand new Japanese-made captain’s yacht for under a million yen.
The bad news is that what we thought was the dynamite stick was more like a sparkler.”

“What do you mean, Alice?” Motley
asked.

“The big import from Japan was
really just a digital catalog for boats. Etienne was about to make a purchase,
it seems.”

Motley’s end went quiet, until he
delivered a long, drawn-out sigh of disapproval and hung up. I threw my phone
down on the table and sighed at Rabbit. “That went well,” I grumbled.

 “What should we do now?”
Rabbit asked.

“I have chocolate ice cream in my
freezer,” I announced.

He followed me as I grabbed the
pint from the freezer and pulled two spoons from the drawer. We both stood
leaning over the counter, digging into the container of ice cream as though it
had some medicinal purpose to ease our failure. As I watched him tunnel a huge
heap of melting chocolate ice cream into his mouth, and his lubberly tongue lap
up the drippings, I remembered why I didn’t usually like hanging out with
Rabbit.

“I can’t believe that disk had
nothing but dumb boats on it,” Rabbit said.

“Please, Rabbit, no more talking
about this epic fail. Talk about anything else.”

Rabbit looked around uncomfortably,
as though a topic would appear out of thin air. The two of us didn’t really
have anything in common besides our job. “How do you like it here? In your new
apartment, I mean.”

I gave my spoon a thorough licking.
“Not as much as I liked my old apartment.”

“Oh?” Rabbit asked. “But this place
is super ritzy. Your old place was a dump.”

“You know, I find it ironic that
Motley chose to punish me by putting me up in a glamorous penthouse.”

“You think moving you in here was
his way of punishing you? Alice, seriously, have you looked around this place?
It’s amazing. Your old apartment was surrounded by rats and strippers.”

“They aren’t strippers, Rabbit.
They are dancers.”

“Alice, a dancer connotes an
affiliation with the Russian ballet company. The only thing these girls have an
affiliation with is a bad weave and plastic fingernails. But I digress, so you
still think Motley moved you in here to punish you?”

“You know everything Motley does to
me is one big mind screw. There’s no way he would let me mess up the Eiffel
Tower job and not make me live to regret it. Look at it this way, he put me in
here to remind me of who’s in charge. I mean, my old apartment was manageable.
I could sustain it on my own if I had to. If Motley kicks me out of here and
leaves me on my own, that’s a big fall from grace.”

“I guess I see your point,” he
said, with his spongy tongue lapping up dripping chocolate. “So aside from
that, how do you like living here?”

“I’m getting used to it. It’s not
like I don’t like change. I thrive on change. I heat the house, gas up the car,
and flame up the grill on change. It’s just that I sort of miss how cozy it was
at the old place. Plus, the water pressure in the shower at my old apartment
was better.” I pulled a strand of hair between my fingers as an example. “Look
how limp my hair is.”

“Alice, your hair looks like that
because you’re constantly dyeing it weird colors. You’re killing it probably.”

“You can’t kill hair you idiot. But
I can kill a
hare
, and if you don’t shut up, I will kill you, Rabbit.”

“I was only kidding, Alice. Your
hair looks nice. It always does. You know you’re hot, so I was just joshing
you.”

Rabbit was wrong. I didn’t know I
was hot. I just knew that I had a way. A certain way that made guys fall in
love fast and hard. But I never stuck around long enough to see if it had a
shelf life. I used it to my advantage often in my line of work. Rabbit didn’t
understand because he had his geek mojo and computer savvy to get him through
life. I had to rely on the hotness.

I clattered my spoon into the sink.
“I don’t need you joshing me, okay?”

“You can still take a joke, can’t
you?”

“Of course I can take a joke.
What’s that supposed to mean?”  

“It’s just that you’ve been
different lately. Ever since that ex-boyfriend of yours shot you off the Eiffel
Tower. You keep getting that faraway look in your eyes, and you’re testy as
heck. Do you still have feelings for him or something?”

“No!” I snapped. “I do not have
feelings
for him.” I snatched the ice cream out from under his chin and tossed it back
into the freezer. “And I can take a joke just fine. Maybe you’re not being
funny is the problem.”

“Maybe it’s not him that you still
have the feelings for, maybe seeing someone from your past just made you
homesick.”

“Homesick?” I repeated the word
like having it on my tongue gave it a disgusting flavor. That was the phrase we
didn’t use around here. There was no homesick. There was no home. We were nomads,
mentally, emotionally, and physically. Home wasn’t an option. Home was a
liability. The liability column was dangerous. “Rabbit, who turned you into Dr.
Phil all of the sudden? My feelings are none of your business, especially since
you’re probably just looking for dirt on me so you can piss at Motleys feet
with it.”

“Alice, that’s not true. We’re a
team. I would never snitch on you.”

“A team? You mean like how I had to
drag myself to the hospital after getting shot on the Eiffel Tower? Or how
about how I got stuck with the task of cozying up to Etienne?”

“I’m sorry Alice, you’re right, I
should have reacted quicker after you were shot at. But it’s not like I was in
a position to seduce Etienne for you.” Rabbit dumped his spoon in the sink.
“I’m gonna call it a night. We can regroup tomorrow.”

“Forget it, I’m taking tomorrow
off. I’m entitled.”

“Okay, Alice.” Rabbit’s eyelids
fell as his hand tightened over the door handle. “I guess I’ll see you around.”

“Don’t do that,” I whined.

“Do what?”

“Act like I’ve hurt your feelings
just because I don’t want to be buddies with you.”

“Alice, I just don’t get why you
always act like I’m a nuisance. You’ve always acted like you hate me, ever
since that first day Motley introduced us on the train.”

“Rabbit, I was terrified that day.
I was just shy. I didn’t hate you.”

“What were you so terrified of that
day, anyways? You never told us what made you run away from home. You only said
you did something really bad.”

“Rabbit, it’s none of your business
what I was running from that day. Since when you are opposed to keeping
secrets? Let’s face it, secrets are the linchpin that holds our little
organization together.”

“Well I don’t see why you need to
be so stealth about it is all. I mean, I told you why I ran away from home.”

“Trust me when I tell you that
getting caught gambling on poker games in your dorm room and getting expelled
from Yale is lightweight in comparison to what I did.”

“Well, maybe if you finally just
came out and said whatever you did out loud, you could get over it and move on.
The secret seems to be sucking the life out of you. And if you don’t mind my
saying, it has turned you into something of a bitch.”

“The only thing that is going to
fix my secret is finding the dynamite stick and making sure my true identity
can never come back to haunt me.”

“So, if you acted uptight when we
met because you were just shy and terrified, why do you act like such a bitch
to me now that you know me?”

“Because,” I huffed, “you’re
Motley’s
favorite
. You act like some spoiled teacher’s pet, and frankly,
I don’t trust you.”

“Alice, Motley didn’t make me his
favorite. He just trusts me more. You act hasty and impulsive all the time and
it makes him nervous to trust you.”

“I get the job done, don’t I?”

“Not tonight. Tonight you brought
home a disk full of boats.” In the flittering light of the hall lamp, I noticed
that he still had a crust of glitter on his cheek from where he had cuddled the
girl in the geisha mask at Etienne’s party.

“Screw you, Rabbit. Tonight’s
failure was not my fault. I followed protocol and I delivered the item I was
instructed to retrieve. We failed because of a bad lead.”

“Motley won’t care
why
we
failed, only that we did.”

“Whose tip were we following
anyway, Rabbit? Where did the information about Etienne having the disk come
from? Who was this private source I wasn’t allowed to know the identity of?”

“It’s not important.” His splayed
fingers turned the door knob.

I cuffed my hand down over his.
“Where did you get this bogus intelligence from? Did someone play you?”

“Alice, drop it.”

“You’re not going to tell me?”

“It’s not important.” Rabbit
wiggled his hand out from under mine and took a step backwards into the
hallway.

“Why is it that when I screw up, I
get condemned to a chicken coop in a hellish house in Rio and a patronizing
lesson by David Xad, but you don’t get anything?”

“I’m not arguing with you like
this. Goodnight.”

Rabbit turned and walked away, and
I saw that my neighbor’s door was open and she was studying me. In place of the
ermine coat, which she wore during our initial meeting, was a set of jade
silken pajamas and concubine slippers.

“Man troubles?” she asked.

“He’s not that kind of man,” I told
her.

“They’re all
that
kind of
man.” She glided behind the door and shut it, leaving me in a darkened hallway
of deserted doors.

I crept back into my apartment,
where I tried to sleep but I tossed and turned until finally I sat up with my
neck against the headboard. I thought of Etienne, and wondered if he had come
awake yet from his nasty encounter with the absinthe bottle. Then I thought of
Pressley, and I wondered what he thought of me, all tarted
up in makeup
and flashing my revolver like some kind of blackhat vixen.