Black Notice

32

I turned toward Marino, my back against the wall as if I didn't have the strength to stand on my own two feet.

"Man, you see how much whiskey costs over here?" Marino commented as he closed the door to the minibar.

"I don't care."

"Interpol's probably paying, anyway," he decided.

"And I need a cigarette," I added.

He lit a Marlboro for me and the first hit punched my lungs. He presented me with a tumbler of straight single malt on the rocks in one hand, a Beck's beer in the other.

"What I'm trying to say," Marino resumed, "is if Interpol can do all this secret shit with electronic tickets and ritzy hotels and Concordes, and no one ever meets a soul who's ever talked to whoever these people are, then what makes you think they couldn't have faked everything else?"

"They couldn't have faked his being murdered by a psychopath;" I replied.

"Yes, they could have. Maybe that was the perfect timing." He blew out smoke and gulped down beer. "Point is, Doc, I think anything can be faked, if you think about it."

"DNA identified…"

I couldn't finish the statement. It brought images before me I had suppressed for so long.

"You can't say the reports were true."

"Enough!"

But the beer had crumbled what walls he had, and he would not stop his increasingly fantastic theories and deductions and wishful thoughts. His voice went on and on and began to sound far away and unreal. A shiver crept over me. A splinter of light glinted in that dark, devastated part of me. I desperately wanted to believe that what he was suggesting was true.

When 5:00 A.M. came around, I was still dressed- and asleep on the couch. I had a hammering headache. My mouth tasted like stale cigarettes and my breath was alcohol. I showered and stared for a long time at the phone by my bed. The anticipation of what I had decided to do electrified me with panic. I was so confused.

In Philadelphia, it was almost midnight, and I left a message for Dr. Vance Harston, the chief medical examiner. I gave him the number to the fax machine in my room and left the do not disturb sign on the door. Marino met me in the hall, and I said nothing to him but an inaudible good morning.

Downstairs, dishes clattered as the buffet was set up and a man cleaned glass doors with a brush and a cloth. There was no coffee this early, and the only other guest awake was a woman with a mink coat draped over a chair. In front of the hotel, another Mercedes taxi awaited us.

Our driver this day was sullen and in a hurry. I rubbed my temples as motorcycles sped past in lanes of their imagination, weaving between cars and roaring through many narrow tunnels. I was depressed by reminders of the car crash that killed Princess Diana.I remembered waking up and hearing about it on the news, and my first thought was we tended to disbelieve that mundane, random deaths can happen to our gods.There is no glory or nobility in being killed by a drunk driver. Death is the great equalizer. It doesn't give a damn who you are.The sky was dusky blue. Sidewalks were wet from washing and green garbage cans had been set out along the streets. We bumped over cobblestones at the Place de la Concorde and drove along the Seine, which we could not see most of the time because of a wall. A digital clock outside the Gare de Lyon let us know it was seven-twenty, and inside feet shuffled and people hurried into Relais Hachette to buy papers. I waited behind a woman with a poodle at the ticket counter, and a sharp-featured, well-dressed man with silver hair jolted me. He looked like Benton from a distance. I could not help but scan the crowd as if I might find him, my heart throbbing as if it couldn't survive much more of this.

"Coffee," I told Marino.

We sat at a counter inside L'Embarcadйre and were served espresso in tiny brown cups.

"What the hell is this?" Marino grumbled. "I just wanted regular coffee. How 'bout handing me some sugar," he said to the woman behind the counter.

She dropped several packs on the counter.

"I think he'd rather have a cafй crйme," I told her.

She nodded. He drank four of them and ate two ham baguettes and smoked three cigarettes in less than twenty minutes.

"You know," I said to him as we boarded a train б grande vitesse, or TGV, "I really don't want you to kill yourself."

"Hey, not to worry," he replied, taking a seat across from me. "If I tried to clean up my act, the stress would do me in."

Our car was barely a third full, and those passengers seemed interested only in their newspapers. The silence prompted Marino and me to speak in very low voices, and the bullet train made no sound as it suddenly lurched forward. We glided out of the station, then blue sky and trees were flying by. I felt flushed and very thirsty. I tried to sleep, sunlight flashing over my shut eyes.

I came to when an Englishwoman two rows back began talking on a portable phone. An old man across the aisle was working a crossword puzzle, his mechanical pencil clicking. Air buffeted our car as another train sped by, and near Lyon, the sky turned milky and it began to snow.

Marino's mood was getting increasingly curdled as he stared out the window, and he was rude when we disembarked in the Lyon Part-Dieu. He had nothing to say during our taxi ride, and I got angrier with him as I replayed the words he had recklessly thrown at me last night.

We neared the old part of the city where the Rh8ne and SaOne rivers joined, and apartments and ancient walls built into the hillside reminded me of Rome. I felt awful. My soul was bruised. I felt as alone as I'd ever felt in my life, as if I didn't exist, as if I were part of another person's bad dream.

"I don't hope nothing," Marino finally spoke apropos of nothing. "I might say what if, but I don't hope. There's no point. My wife left me a long time ago and I've still never found anybody that fits. Now I'm suspended and thinking about working for you. I did that? You wouldn't respect me anymore."

"Of course I would."

"Bullshit. Working for someone changes everything and you know it."

He looked dejected and exhausted, his face and slumped posture showing the strain of the life he'd lived. He'd spilled coffee on his rumpled denim shirt, and his khakis were ridiculously baggy. I'd noticed that the bigger he got, the larger the size of the pants he bought, as if he fooled himself or anyone else.

"You know, Marino, it's not very nice to imply that working for me would be the worst thing that ever happened to you."

"Maybe it wouldn't be the worst thing. But pretty close," he said.