Generation of Liars (46 page)

The nose of a gun was crammed at
the base of my neck. Ben and Ophelia pushed me down each step. I could hear the
ghost sounds of Christmas songs coming from the apartments of other tenants,
seeping through the economical doors.

We passed through the final stretch
of desolate corroders of Ben’s apartment building and exited out the
maintenance doors in the back of the building, which led to a row of dumpsters.

There was a black car parked.

The temptation to scream for help
was stifled by the fact that I had a bomb strapped to my chest and a gun jabbed
into the soft spot at the base of my skull. They pushed me into the backseat of
the car and Ophelia got behind the wheel and Ben slid in the passenger seat
next to her. The sound of car locks being triggered sounded like metal chains
clasping shut. I was being chauffeured to my certain death.

Ophelia’s gloved hands guided the
wheel as the car navigated the mostly abandoned streets of Paris. The weight of
the bomb felt crushing against my chest. The dynamite stick was stuck to the
bomb with a silver lock. I leaned my head against the cold window, watching as
the city pulsed by. As we crossed into the city’s 7
^th
arrondissement, the blaze of Christmas lights casted over the windshield like
vibrant constellations. Ophelia put the car in park beside the curb on the road
that separated the Eiffel Tower and the plush outstretch of greenery that was
the Champ de Mars. She gave Ben a slippery kiss before swinging her door open
and climbing out of the car.

“What is she doing?” I timidly
asked.

“Ophelia is just going to scope out
the area, get friendly with any of the guards on night duty so that they give
her permission to be on the tower, and if any of them should object, that’s
what the carbine hidden inside her red trench coat is for.” The moonlight was
hitting the windshield so that it bathed Ben in blue light that made his eyes
glisten like he was a projection from a cosmically noir film. I was reminded of
how attracted I had been to him during these months. My face contorted into
messy sobs. “Oh, Alice, contain yourself,” he said.

“Ben?” I sobbed out, clearing my
nostrils with an unpolished snort.

“What is it now, Alice?”

“I need something from you. Before
I die tonight, I have to know something. Did you ever really love me at all?”

Ben swiveled to face me in the
backseat. “No, Alice. Never. You’re intolerable. You left dirty dishes in my
sink. You let the toilet mellow and you ate my leftover pizza once without
asking.”

“Gosh, Ben, I had no idea you hated
me so much. This just proves that I am a total failure. I mean, my first
boyfriend shot me out of the Eiffel Tower and now my second boyfriend is about
to blow me up on the top of it.”

“That night we first met at the
hospital, I remember that you told me you thought Paris was love-cursed. You
were right.”

Tears dripped down my face. “It’s
not Paris that’s love-cursed, it’s me.”

“Would you please quit crying?” Ben
was looking out the window as if to ask an invisible deity what was taking
Ophelia so long. “If it makes you feel better, I thought the turkey you made at
Thanksgiving was actually pretty delicious. The cranberry too. Those rolls were
crap though.”

“Ben, I would really like a
cigarette now, and I need you to tell me something else. So just have pity on a
dying girl, and answer it for me. Please?”

“What question do you need me to
answer for you, Alice?”

 ”What’s it like to really be
in love? I mean like you and Ophelia?”
         

“You want to know about love?” Ben
reached into his breast pocket and pulled out two cigarettes from his fancy
case. He shoved one under my lip, held a lighter under my nose, and struck it.
I smirked, balancing the cigarette between my teeth, thinking that probably you
couldn’t take out life insurance on yourself smoking with a bomb strapped to
your chest; but I had always been in the high risk pool, hadn’t I?

“Before I die, I want to know what
it’s like to really be in love.”

Ben savored his first taste of his
cigarette. “What’s it like to be in love?” he repeated the question. “It’s
like, having a best friend, but more than that, because they’re your family,
too. But unlike your real family, you get to pick them, and you would never
give them up. Not for anything.” He shook his head, and I could tell that what
he knew about love was something so magnificent that he couldn’t find the words
to express it. “I don’t know how else to explain it, Alice, you find someone to
love and they love you back and that person is home to you. I’m sorry that you
never got to find that during your time on Earth.”

“Home? I think I did find it, Ben.”

Ben rolled his eyes to heaven. “I
told you already, all that stuff that happened between us was fake.”

“No, not with you. With my
ex-boyfriend. His name is Presley. But I ruined it by breaking his heart. You
machete a guy’s heart like that and you will never find home with him. You’ll
be renting hearts in a dingy cockroach motel in the red windmill district the
rest of your life.”

“That’s a creative analogy, Alice,
but you only have maybe five minutes, tops, left of your pathetic little life,
so you might as well make peace with it.”

Ophelia got back to the car. She
tapped the hood with her fist and announced, “Coast is clear.” She flattened
the tip of her nose against my window. “I hope you like heights, you little
bitch.”

She flung the door open and forced
me onto the pavement. On the road next to us, lights pulsed from the
painted-horse carousal that sat across from the tower.  The red rainbow
glow reminded me of the red windmill of Pigalle as it casted bulbs over our
skin. A soft, feathery snow was falling all around us. There was a holiday
wreath of planetary scope set on the trunk of the Eiffel Tower. I rationalized with
myself that if I was going to have one last vision to see before I died, at
least this was a beautiful one.

Ben guided me forward with his fist
and Ophelia walked in front of us with her gun pointed from her coat. “I get
why you’re blowing me up,” I said. “But why blow up the Eiffel Tower?”

“Alice, four years ago I was
stripped of my Olympic gold medal following an investigation by the French
committee. They probed my personal life and exposed my steroid use for all to
see. I vowed that I would embarrass the French Government as badly as they
embarrassed me.”

The area surrounding the tower was
still and quiet, but not totally devoid of people on this picturesque,
sable-sky Christmas Eve. There was a young couple, looking like a pair of
love-struck fawns, elegantly laying beneath a blanket laid over the grass as
snowflakes cascaded down over them. In my peripheral, I could see other people,
tourists perhaps, enamored with the nocturnal sight of the glowing tower, and
snapping photographs.

“How are we going to get up there?”
I asked. “The tower is closed off to visitors after a certain time.”

“I was able to sweet-talk one of
the guards,” Ophelia bragged to us. “I used my celebrity Olympian status and
told him we were doing a photo shoot for tabloid. I told him it is a grand
exposé
on my shameful steroid scandal, and that we didn’t want
to be hounded by crowds so we picked a low key time to do the shoot.”

When we stood beneath the Eiffel
Tower, I looked up into the undercarriage of the tower, into the depths of the
rickety lattice structure that seemed to poke upward into heaven. We climbed
the steps to the first level, which was occupied with an ice skating rink.

“This was as far as the guard said
I could go,” Ophelia informed us. The conditions were windy and the blast from
the cold air was like a bitter slap to the skin on my face. They hoisted me up
so that I teetered on the ledge and Ben pulled the roll of duct tape from his
pocket and began tethering my body to the beams, spinning the tape over my shoulders.
Ophelia disinterestedly stroked her carbine.

“Ben?” I cried out. “Are you really
going to do this?”

“Alice, just make peace with it.
Nothing lasts forever. Even the Eiffel Tower here was only intended to last for
twenty years. Put up to dazzle during the World’s Fair, it was the resident
eyesore of the city. It was all set to be torn down, but the locals took a
shine to it at the last minute, and well, here we stand. You won’t be as
lucky.”

The snow began falling chunkier,
like miniature artic icebergs. I looked down at the stomach-turning distance to
the ground, and out at the view over Paris. The glitz of all the buildings in
the distance was surreal and the silver moon casted a glow which made the
distant barges on the Seine look like blue velvet oil paintings. The snow came
down like asteroids and my life flickered through my brain, visions of Sara
Cinnamon, Queenie Reds, Skip Hask, and the pale skin on Jean Etienne’s eyelids
after I knocked his unconscious inside his yacht. Finally I saw the memory of
Heather Gilmore’s blond hair tangled in the bushes. Then the sight of Heather,
alive, healthy, with a family. I started to think of my family, but I stopped
myself. I couldn’t let myself go there, not now. I pictured Motley and
Cleopatra, cuffed and carted like zoo animals in the back of a State Department
van, being hauled off for interrogation at that very same moment, somewhere out
there in Paris. I hadn’t had a chance to finish my plan, so it was possible
that they might die and rot inside the wine cellar instead. I had to set my
eyes down to avoid the sting of the icy snow. But when I put my eyes on the
floor, I noticed something odd.

Something very odd.

There was a series of small shoe
tracks in the snow on the tower that weren’t from any of the three of us. They
were the distinctive hoof prints of a pair of stiletto high heels. I looked
over at Ophelia and noted she had on a pair of sporty cross trainers.

The marks in the snow were
distinctively that of four-inch spiky stilettos. I knew those stilettos. They
were the same tracks I had seen dragging blood away from Motley’s wine cellar
after we trapped him in the hole.

I had a realization.

Ting was on the Tower.

I couldn’t for the life of me
imagine how and why Vivienne Ting be would up on the Eiffel Tower in the middle
of the night on Christmas Eve, but I was certain of it.

Ben tied off the ends of the duct
tape and Ophelia finally lowered her gun. “This little enterprise has been fun,
Alice. But like all good things, it must end. Ophelia and I are going to go
wait on Champ de Mars and detonate the bomb from a safe distance.” At Ben’s
words, Ophelia slid a small black detonator from her pocket as demurely as if
she were slipping out a tube of lipstick. If Vivienne didn’t show up fast and
do whatever it was she was planning on doing, it would be too late. Ting needed
good timing. I saw a pair of shadows move down below, weaving in and out of the
shrubbery that populated the base of the tower’s massive leg. The shadows were
obscured by a haze of snow drift and the blue moonlight gave them the glow of
ghostly apparitions. That’s when I heard a loud bang and saw a flash of light
that seemed to ricochet off the tower mere inches from my face.  

Before I registered what had
happened, I was falling.

I thought I had been zapped by a
lightning bolt. A wild sword of nature. But there was nothing natural about
this. I knew that as soon as I saw
his
face. He was peering up from the
snow-strewn grass below, his features so clear in the moonlight. The bastard
was smiling.

Chapter Forty-nine: Second Time’s A Charm

M
Y
ARMS FLAILED against the freeness of space. Slashes of light swirled at the
corners of my eyes. A figure in a black trench coat. There was that face again,
chin stubble black like tar, grinning sharp white teeth. Pressley Connard had
shot me out of the Eiffel Tower for the second time.

Okay, he didn’t really shoot me.
But his aim was good enough to blast right through the
duct
tape and bust me loose, which sent me rushing backwards over the rail. As I flew
down, my instincts kicked in and my arms latched onto one of the spindles of
the tower and I swung back and forth to recover my balance. I held on swinging
with my hands over my head. I looked down. Pressley was gone. I looked up. Ben
and Ophelia were looking down over the ledge. Their eyes were hungry to find
me. My hands were throbbing and I wasn’t sure I could hold my grip. I closed my
eyes, and from somewhere in the sound of the wind brushing into my ear, I could
hear the memory of David Xad’s voice. I remembered our training on the Tokyo
Sky Tree and how in Rio he had reminded me that our real adversaries are not
pillar and steel. Our only real obstacle is ourselves.

I pushed myself up with a grunt. My
foot was tapping for the next lowest level. I twisted my arms over themselves
to steady myself as I dropped down one plank. I grappled the plank and then
proceeded to climb my way down until I was near enough to the ground to jump
into one of the thick shrubs that lined the base of the tower’s trunks. The
shrub caught me like a nest of scratchy needles and the pliable branches
collapsed under the weight of my body so that my head slammed onto the
ice-coated concrete. It felt like my brain shattered. 

I saw the outlines of a man and
woman. They were pulling through the icy brambles of the shrubs to get to me.
The sky spun overhead, bleak swirls of clouds and icy stars. Then it all went
black. Something like the fuzz of a television without reception scarred the
interior of my eyelids.

I was conscious of a pair of
lubberly hands waving over my face. “Alice? Alice? Are you still with us?”

My eyes flew open.

Rabbit was there.  I assumed
he was a hallucination, but he didn’t vanish when the stars around my eyes did.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.