Generation of Liars (5 page)

The number of my partner, Rabbit.

Well, Rabbit is just what we call
him. His real name is Lenny Rabitz. Based solely on appearances, he is nobody
you would take seriously. He has light-brownish hair that would be a curly mop
if he didn’t shear it. He is gawky, rail thin, and incurably awkward with
girls. He has a craft for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time and a
penchant for pissing me off royally.

Thing is, Rabbit is a bona fide
genius, especially with computers and technology. Up until three years ago he
had been the kind of guy who never had to lie about who he was his whole life.
Rich parents, private schools, and a perfect GPA to boot. Then Lenny Rabitz got
caught running a high-stakes poker racket out of his Yale dorm room. After
being expelled by his school and disowned by his parents on the same day, you
better believe it was this ex-golden child’s best day of his life when the
November Hit happened. Motley found the kid looking forlorn at a bus stop on
Crown Street in New Haven with a laptop case on his shoulder and he offered him
a job and a chance to start over.

“Alice!” Rabbit managed to twist my
name out of his exacerbated throat.

“Damn it, Rabbit.” I was
practically howling. “Did you see what happened up there?”

“I’m sorry, Alice.”

“You’re sorry? Sorry? You watched
some guy pull a gun on me on the Eiffel Tower and all you can say is
sorry
?”

“Correction, Alice, I watched a guy
pull a gun on you from three-hundred yards away. Plus it was dark.”

“Where the hell were you when I got
to the bottom? I had to drag my bleeding ass to the hospital all by myself.”

“I panicked. I was calling for
help.”

“Help? Let me guess. You were
already busy on the phone telling Motley that I screwed up the job.”

“I alerted him to the situation,
yes.”

“Oh geez, Rabbit, you are such a
brownnoser.”

“Well, clearly you haven’t died
from the altercation, so where are you now, Alice?”

“I’m outside Vincent de Paul
Hospital. I just got patched up by some dude who was probably a bogus doctor.”

“You always think the worst of
everyone. Where is de Paul? On Rochereau?”

I squinted to see the words written
on the sign at the cross street.  “I think so.”

“Come to my apartment so we can
regroup. Don’t walk here. Those trigger-happy guys from the Eiffel Tower might
be looking for you. Hop on the metro at the Denfert-Rochereau stop, it should
be right in front of you if you’re on Rochereau. I will give my doorman a heads
up that you’re coming.”

I was already ducking inside the
stairwell leading down to the metro station as he suggested it. My eyes scanned
the concrete walls for any trace of the man who had shot me an hour earlier.
The big yellow adverts for microwavable
au poulet
lining the tracks,
meshed with the plastic blue bucket seats lining the walls, overwhelmed my eyes
and dizzied my senses. The white pills hadn’t really worn off like I told the
doctor. The incoming train rumbled with a thunderclap and I braced for the gust
that was about to surge the tunnel on the heel of the train’s brakes. It blew
my skirt up and ironed my tattered shirt to my chest. I glimpsed a blurry study
of myself in the reflective doors of the train car. Trestles of my hair grew
down from my scalp like knots, inorganic shades of tangerine and sienna. I was
missing one of my dangly earrings. My slashed t-shirt revealed the thinness of
my shoulder and laid bare a frontier of sallow, bony skin, leading the eye to
my clavicle, which protruded hauntingly from my skin-and-bones frame. I was a
fool to have thought that doctor was looking at me like I was beautiful.

The reflection of my own eyes
caught my attention. Haunted was the way to describe them. The eyes were green
and an artificial rim of melted black eyeliner gave them an appearance that was
animalistic, or extraterrestrial, or perhaps just that of a twenty-one-year-old
girl who had seen too much.

The train doors parted, splitting
my reflection in two.        

“You realize I am going to have to
cut my hair over this, right?” my lips spouted into the phone. I stepped
onboard, one hand patting inside my bag in search of my metro pass. “I’m too
damn recognizable with this red mop. I really freaking liked my hair too. Do
you have any idea how pissed this makes me?”

A homeless guy sleeping inside the
train car gave me a censuring look as though my yelling was funking up the
feng
shui
around his cardboard pillow. From his spit-glossed lips he muttered
something in French I couldn’t understand. I had lived in the city for three
years, and I could still barely order a croissant in the native tongue. I had
been busy with other things.

“We’ll take care of it when you get
here,” Rabbit assured me. He let off a big sigh to passive-aggressively signal
to me that he thought I was overreacting, as usual.

“Give your doorman a heads-up
because I am not waiting on the curb for you. You know the protocol. Have a box
of hair dye and a sharp pair of scissors waiting for me when I get there.”

*   
*    *

I launched my bag down on the
marble countertop that formed a border around Rabbit’s shiny bathroom sink, and
noted with satisfaction that he did, in fact, have both items I requested
waiting for me. We had certainly done this ritual enough times.

I glided the golden scissors into
my hair and began snipping. I went for a short and sleek look, letting the
pointed ends fall as daggers at my chin. To balance it out, I snipped a line of
short bangs that fell high above my too-thin eyebrows. The black dye that
Rabbit had left for me on the counter was already soaking my hair the color of
gunpowder. 

“Where did you get this hair dye so
quickly?” I called into the next room, where Rabbit was sprawled out on his
four-poster bed.

“I know you well enough by now to
keep a stash. I mean this is what, your third hair change this month?”

“Variety is the spice of life,” I
hollered back.

“A life you came very close to
losing tonight.”

“Don’t be so dramatic. If I wanted
a parental lecture I would just get on a flight back to America and show up on
my parent’s doorstep.”

“You can’t do that, Alice. Your
parents think you’re dead.”

“They don’t know I’m dead, they
just know I’m missing.” I pulled a tube of red lipstick from my bag and
carefully drew it over my mouth. It ripened my lips to something that resembled
cherries dripping in syrup. Anything to distract myself. Thinking about my
parents was a too jagged a knife in my heart. I didn’t let myself go there,
ever.

“You look a little too vampish to
be the girl on the milk carton,” Rabbit said, pushing his head through the
bathroom door. An annoying asthmatic breath was pushing from his nostrils.
“Your hair looks good. How’s the wound on your arm doing?”

I looked down and saw that the
bandage was tinctured with pinkish blood. “I think I’ll live,” I answered. “Do
you really think my hair looks good?” I pushed my plastic-shine hair behind my
ears.

“You don’t look like the same girl
that got shot on the Eiffel Tower and that’s what’s important. Especially if
the guy who shot you comes lurking around. Who the hell was that guy anyways?”

My cell phone rang. “Great,” I
said, lifting it to my ear, “it’s probably Motley, and you know he’s going to
be pissed. Hello.”

“Alice.” It was Motley. Rabbit
backed up a step.

“It’s me, in the flesh,” I rallied
some fake pep in my voice, “and with a flesh wound.” I hoped acting cute would
help the situation, but Motley was a hard guy to push a laugh out of.

“I heard about the flesh wound
already, Alice. I also heard that the deal didn’t go as planned.” I knew I
would need a cigarette to endure the phone call so I grabbed one from my bag
and blew pale smoke at the mirror. Motley finished his thought, “Rumor has it
you fell out of the Eiffel Tower.”

“Don’t be crazy, Motley,” I
crooned, followed by a pause for a nervous laugh to twist its way out of my
throat. “I did not fall out of the Eiffel Tower.” I switched the phone to my
other ear and tapped my cigarette ash into the sink. “I was
shot
out of
the Eiffel Tower.”

“That wasn’t part of the plan, now
was it, Alice?”

“Screw the plan,” I said. “The plan
went horribly. The plan went worse than horribly. The plan was an apocalypse.”

“You know how much I hate it when
we experience a failure.”

“There is one success that came out
of all this. I’m alive and I’m a brunette now. I know how much you like
brunettes.”
And redheads and blondes and every type in between
. I
squeezed my eyes shut and prayed my voice wasn’t shaking.

“Alice,” Motley said coldly, “I
don’t want to deal with your antics at the moment. You messed up a very big job
for me. That makes you a liability right now.”

Everything about Motley was numbers
and dollar signs, and being in Motley’s liability column was not safe. That was
the column with the big red X’s. I was pacing the bathroom now. “Motley, you
know I would never intentionally screw something up for you.”

“If that’s true, I can only wonder
if you’re slipping, Alice.”

I dropped the lid down over the
toilet and curled into a ball on the seat. Rabbit was watching me, so I leapt
up and shut the door on his nose. “Motley, I have to tell you something.”

“What is it, Alice?”

“I know the person who shot me.”

“What do you mean you know him?
Have we done business with him in the past?”

“No, it’s not like that. I know him
from my old life. His name is Pressley Connard.”

“Who is Pressley Connard, and of
what relation is he to you?”

“He was my boyfriend back home, and
when I ran away three years ago I didn’t tell him why I was running or where I
was going. It seems like pure coincidence that he showed up here in Paris.”

“Alice, the fact that you have a
personal past with this man poses a big conflict of interest for you.”

“No conflict. I swear.”

“You know how it works in this business,
Alice. The reason we cut off all the people from our past is because emotions
can fog our judgment. We are meant to be free agents.”

I swung the bathroom door open and
zipped by Rabbit on my way to his liquor stash. I poured a drink from Rabbit’s
mini bar, gulped it entirely too fast, and fell backwards onto the bed. “I’m
fine. Trust me. I don’t have any feelings for this guy, and any feelings that
might have lingered evaporated when he aimed a gun at me and pulled the trigger.”

“Did you at least get any of the
information I sent you up there to get before this ex-boyfriend of yours pulled
the gun?”

I rubbed my shoulder. The soreness
of the bullet wound was breeding down my arm now. “No. I doubt there was any
real information to get. I think it was some kind of setup.”

"That won’t help lead us to
the dynamite stick, now will it, Alice?"

“Probably not.”

“And now I have to worry about some
person out there in the real world being able to positively identify someone
who is employed by me. Can you see how much of a headache this is for me?”

The liquor wasn’t calming me. I
rolled onto my stomach and lit another cigarette over the edge of the bed and
dangled it between my fingers. Rabbit shot me a dirty look for stinking up his
sheets with smoke. I rolled my eyes at Rabbit and pleaded into the phone,
“Motley, please, let’s just think rationally. There’s a chance he didn’t even
recognize me.”

“I think it would be smart if we
got you out of Paris immediately.” The tone was nonnegotiable. “I am going to
investigate the motive of this ex-boyfriend of yours. I want to know who he is
working for and if we were set up by somebody. In the meantime, I have a more
low profile job for you to carry out.”

“What does the job entail?”

“Nebraska.”

“Nebraska?” I bellowed. “I know I
messed up, but sending me to Nebraska is cruel and unusual punishment.”

“No, Alice, as in Benny Nebraska.”

“Benny Nebraska?”

“Benny is a hacker who works out of
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He supports himself by hacking Hollywood bank accounts
from South America.”

“Oh. Thank God I don’t really have
to go to Nebraska. I’m not built for snow piles and strip malls,” I said. “So
why am I visiting this Benny guy in Rio? Does he have information on the
dynamite stick?”

“Mr. Nebraska claims to have been
able to track the last computer the disk was plugged into and he might be
willing to shop it around to the highest bidder.”

“How soon does my plane take off?”
I asked, well versed with the quickness with which Motley made arrangements. No
doubt my flight would be first class since Motley seemed to have limitless
financial resources at his disposal. The unspoken rule was that we never asked
where his fortune came from.

“Thirty minutes. I will have a ticket
waiting for you at de Gaulle
airport.”

“Once I’m in Rio, where should I
go?”

“I will send an address to your
phone while you’re in flight.” Motley hung up without saying goodbye and I
agitatedly bounced my phone down on the mattress.

Rabbit rolled next to me on the bed
and propped a pillow under his chin. He waved my cigarette smoke away from his
nose. “How pissed did he sound?”

“It was hard to tell.”

“Well, was it as pissed as he gets
when you drink the last diet Pepsi out of his fridge, or as pissed as when he
talks about his ex-wife?”

“Thankfully not as angry as when he
talks about
her
.” I shuddered involuntarily. “I don’t think I could have
survived a conversation with that level of malevolence.”

“Speaking of exes,” Rabbit segued,
“when you were in the bathroom, did I hear you tell Motley that the guy who
shot you tonight was your ex-boyfriend?”