Generation of Liars (9 page)

“It’s okay, Alice. All part of the
daily grind, I get it. I mean if I could leave this stank neighborhood, I would
be out of here so fast all that would be left is the dust from my powder
compact.”

“I’m afraid unless I straighten
things out quick, there might not be anything left of me but dust powder
either.”

“Well there’s nothing I can do to
help stop you from getting turned into puppy chow. But I know one thing that
always cheers you up.”

 “What?” I asked.

“A rose from Queenie,” Sara
replied. She nodded to acknowledge something behind my shoulder. I spun my body
around to see the infamous Queenie Reds rolling her flower cart towards us.

Queenie was a fixture in Pigalle,
and twenty years ago she probably had a figure like Jessica Rabbit. These days,
she was a little more Miss Piggy. Not that she looked bad crammed into a red
leather bustier, since I like to think we live in the kind of world that could
embrace the muffin top. Really, what wrecked it was the orange dayglo lip liner
that was drawn way off the mark. She also had ten-gallon hair and she smelled
like baby powder. She had an exaggerated cockney accent that I always suspected
was fake. I found it unlikely that she had sprung from a working class family
in Croydon or Birmingham, or some other black-smoke industrial town outside of
London. I always thought Queenie Reds belonged in New Orleans, at the helm of a
Mardi Gras float, but I knew the rule, the unspoken rule around Pigalle. It was
impolite to ask a woman how she arrived on the boulevard.

“Hey, Sugar,” Queenie called out to
me. The hang of her chubby arms gyrated as she waved excitedly. “Here comes
Miss Alice Fix. Good thing, too, because I need my sugar fix. Come on over and
let me take a bite.”

I gave her a hug and she plopped a
big orangey, wet smooch on my cheek, the remnants of which probably looked like
a Cheetos stain.

“Hey, Miss Queenie.” I recovered
from her hug by smudging the lipstick off my cheek.

“What’s wrong, Alice?” she asked.
“You look like you forgot your sparkle on someone’s toilet seat the last time
you took a piss.”

I tapped the ashes from my
cigarette against the building’s brick facade, learning long ago not to try and
make sense of Queenie’s scattered adages. “Just having some man trouble,” I
told her.

“Ain’t it funny? It’s usually Ms.
Cinnamon here with the man troubles, but never you, Alice.”

“It’s a little different than
anything Sara’s been tangled up with. Someone from my past is here in Paris,
and I can’t tell if he came here looking for me or if it’s just a coincidence.”

“If you’re so scared, why don’t you
go and see Wally so he can hook you up with one of those fake identifications
you’re always using? Maybe you can hide that way.”

Queenie did a wave towards the
alley across from us. There was a man shaded by the brick overhangs, dressed in
an odd conglomeration of striped harlequin pants and a plaid Scottish cap. He
held a briefcase and there was an accordion folder tucked under one of his thin
arms. “Hey, ladies,” Wally called out. When he smiled, the reflection of the
moonlight seemed to crystalize against his silver front tooth.

“Hey, Wally,” the three of us
managed to harmonize.

Wally was a lanky Nigerian man, and
his profession was what we on the streets referred to as an
identity broker
,
which was a refined way of saying that he sold fake identifications and
credentials on the black market. His clients were almost exclusively American.
They ranged from blackhat criminals to housewives who just wanted a weekend
escape. Before he became an identity broker following the November Hit, he made
a living running email scams out of a cramped apartment in Johannesburg under
the name King Chanson Abdul.

I glanced away from Wally, back
towards Queenie, and said, “Shhh, the police might be around and Wally doesn’t
need any advertising.”

“Oh, right,” Queenie said.

“Besides, this is a little above
the scope of anything Wally can provide. My ex-boyfriend has already seen me.
No fake ID in the world could make him forget my face, trust me. To make
matters worse, my boss knows about him, and he knows that whatever reason he’s
in Paris, it’s not good for our business.”

“Can’t you just have your boss take
care of him for you?” Sara asked.

“The damage has already been done.
I know I have never actually told you guys what I do for a living, but trust me
when I say that in my line of work, we need to remain anonymous. My boss is
pissed to know that someone out there in the real world knows my true identity.
It might make me a liability.”

“Oh, gotcha, you’re all into that
undercover stuff,” Sara said. “You should just become a dancer like me. The
work is less complicated.”

“Tell me about it.” I let my eyes
lazily wander down the sidewalk, where a man, obviously a tourist, since the
black strapped camera around his neck was a dead giveaway, was accepting a
flyer from a club promoter beneath the Moulin Rouge. “So, some old lady really
moved into my apartment already?”

Sara picked at the skin around her
fake fingernails and nodded a yes.

“Darn,” I snapped, “I was hoping to
get some of my old clothes.”

“You might as well have a drink
while you’re in the neighborhood,” Queenie said. Her hand unfolded out towards
me to present one of her red roses.

*   
*    *

I stepped into Le Colimacon, a
favorite bar among the Pigalle locals. I placed my rose down on the bar and
ordered an absinthe with an extra sugar cube. “Keep them coming,” I told the
guy behind the bar as he pulled down an empty glass.

“Sure thing, Alice,” the bartender
replied. His name was Marcel. He had a helmet of slick black hair and his face
was sculpted by thin, French features. Most importantly, he was too young to be
cynical of Pigalle just yet.

“Marcel?” I placed my elbows up on
the counter to watch him mix my drink. “Has anyone been in here looking for me
recently?”

Marcel looked up from wiping his
hands on his apron and his lips parted like he was about to answer, but then
his eyes looked past my face and froze on something behind me.

“
Well
?” I prompted. I was
sucking what was left of a very short cigarette and my hands were shaking. But
Marcel could only give me a remorseful look.

I felt a hand clutch my shoulder.

“Alice Fix?” a caustic voice
rumbled into my ear. “Is that what you let people call you these days?”

I didn’t turn my head to see whose
hand it was that was practically crushing my shoulder. I could never forget
that voice. I threw my head back and took a long, draining sip of absinthe. I
could already feel the absinthe overtaking my blood. I slammed the glass down
on the bar top. “You shot me out of the Eiffel Tower, jerk,” I thundered out.

The man at my ear brushed up
against the side of my body and my eyes moved sideways to explore him. I
followed the buttons on his black trench coat up to his sharp chin, shaded with
a day’s worth of black stubble, and finally up to his eyes, burning dark like
oil fields.

Pressley hopped up onto the stool
next to me. “Alice.” My fake name was spinning awkwardly from the tip of his
tongue. “You know I had to do it. My partner was about to shoot you in the
face. Shooting you first, in a non-lethal spot, was the only way I could save
you.”

“I could have plunged to my death,”
I said, demurely pressing my nose into the scarlet rose from Queenie.

“But you didn’t, and I knew you
wouldn’t.”

“How can you be so confident?” I
was crossing my bare legs beneath my trench coat and tapping away the ash from
my cigarette.

“Come on, you are the famous
Margaux Fix, captain of Wesleyan’s gymnastics team, and co-captain of the swim
team. I knew you could handle those bars.” His reply caused me to bristle,
since it had seemed forevermore since I had kept company with anyone who had
cerebral access to my past. The fact that he had just called me by my real name
was inducing hives on my neck.

“How did you get involved in this?”
I asked. “Are you really some kind of agent for the U.S. Government?”

“I’m on a restoration task force
for the Central Intelligence Agency,” he announced. “My job is to retrieve the
thumb drive created by a man named Enoch Sprites that potentially contains the
official identification of all United States citizens prior to the November
Hit. I guess you guys on the street call it the dynamite stick.”

“A boy scout for the CIA? Nice to
see you’re still a patriotic do-gooder.”

“You used to be one too, what
changed that?”

“I’m still a do-gooder. I just do
what’s good for myself now. So, it’s your assigned initiative to get the
dynamite stick for the CIA?”

“The project is called Operation:
Boom.”

“Operation: Boom?”

“It’s our job to make the dynamite
stick go
boom
.”

I twisted the butt of my cigarette
into my now-empty glass and pulled out another. “How did you even recognize me
last night with the red hair?” I delicately ignited the cigarette bitten
between my lips.

“I would recognize those eyes
anywhere.” He leaned in and forced his eyes onto mine in a way that felt like
he was taking something from me. “I remember the last time I saw you.”

“Oh, do you?”

“I think you remember it too,” he
said, taking a strand of my hair and rubbing it between his fingers. “You were
lying in the grass with your blond hair all around your face.” He set an elbow
up on the bar and leaned into me, so that his lips dusted the ridge of my ear.
“You had on that red polka dot dress you always used to wear. The one you used
to complain made you look like a 1950s
housewife. You were fiddling with
the buttons on your collar like you were nervous about something. You said you
had something to tell me.”

“That was a really ugly dress,” I
said.

“What were you going to tell me
that day? The day you disappeared.”

“Let’s not reminisce about the
past, especially since we’re clearly enemies now.”

“Enemies?”

“You work for the government and
you were sent here to retrieve the dynamite stick, and my sole purpose in life
is to destroy the very same dynamite stick. That’s a conflict of interest if
ever there was one.”

Looking at Pressley, I couldn’t
help but inventory all the things about him that were different since when I
knew him; like the fact that his hair wasn’t shaggy like it used to be, and his
face was thinner now, more severe. As far as I could observe, the irresistible
puppy-dog eyes that hooked me in when I was eighteen were still strongly in
effect.

His teeth got close enough to my
face to munch my nose off and he asked, “What is it
exactly
that you do
then?”

“I make the world safe for lying.”

“You work for that guy, Motley,
don’t you?” He pounded a fist on the bar top. “That guy is bad news. I’ve been
investigating him for months. What are you doing getting involved with a
scumbag like him?”

“What I do with my career is none
of your business.”

“Career?” Rage brewed in his eyes,
changing them to gray, like the color of clouds that bring thunderclaps. “Did
you really hate being yourself so bad? Are you so self-loathing that you have
dress up and play with guns just to feel good about yourself?”

“What about you?” I thundered back.
“Why did you get a job as some sort of government cowboy? Do you get a kick out
of wagging your big gun at poor, defenseless girls on the Eiffel Tower? Didn’t
they train you at boy scout camp that Paris is not a city that takes kindly to
Americans barging in all gangbusters?”

“Actually, I was training as a
clandestine agent with the CIA when I caught wind of a special recruitment for
a high-level task force. I wanted to change the scenery, clear my head from the
three-year prolonged agony of my girlfriend going missing, so I signed
onboard.”

“I thought you were a history
major.”

“Just my luck, the CIA was looking
for history majors.”

“So? What? You signed up for some
alphabet agency and then they sent you Paris to do their grime work? I didn’t
realize attacking innocent girls was part of the United States’ security
protocol.”

“Margaux,” he said, his eyes were
gliding up my bare legs, following the tight curves of fabric towards the
low-cut slice of my collar, “you look anything but innocent.”

“I guess you got more than you
bargained for when you signed up. And the name is Alice, by the way.”

“The suits at the CIA told me to
get my passport ready and my barrel loaded because there was a lead on an
underground network trying to obtain the dynamite stick. But nothing could have
prepared me for the moment I saw you up there holding that briefcase.”

“If I had known it was a dirty
rotten sting, I never would have showed up last night. I was under the
impression that you had information regarding the location of the dynamite
stick.”

“I didn’t have information. I was
sent up there to retrieve information from you. It was a sting. And you nearly
got yourself killed mouthing off to my partner like you did, threatening him
with your little water pistol of a revolver.”

“I guess we both don’t have a
clue.”

”What the hell are you even doing
in Paris? Why are you making people call you Alice? What happened to being
Margaux? Why did you run away from home like you did?”

I thumbed my cigarette box and
realized it was empty, so I nervously chewed the red straw that had been in my
drink. “How I live my life is none of your business.”

“My God, your family has been
worried sick. You vanished without a trace. We all thought you were dead. Or
kidnapped and sold to some kingpin in the Cayman Islands. You don’t want to
know what we thought.” Pressley shook his head and blinked back three years’
worth of mournful tears. “But looking at you now, I’m afraid it’s worse than
anything we thought.”