drag, losing his grip on his sense of humor, while someone nearby coughed loudly.
“Don’t let that get in the way.”
Milo suppressed the urge to shout a reply. Instead, he hung up as, a few seats away, a young man started a coughing fit into his hand, glaring at him.
Milo suddenly realized why. Round eyes watched him tap ash into his plastic cup, and he waited for the hammer to fall. It was swift—the cashier, having noticed the crime in action, called over a stock boy who had been crouched by the canned coffee mixtures, and he followed her pointed finger to Milo’s corner. The boy, eighteen or so, wiped his hands on his orange apron as he weaved expertly between tables toward him. “Monsieur, ici vous ne pouvez pas fumer.”
Milo considered standing his ground, then noticed the big sign with the symbol for no smoking on the wall, a few feet from him. He raised his hands, smiling, took one last drag, and dropped the cigarette into the plastic cup. He poured in some of the wretched wine to extinguish it. The stock boy, behind a bashful grin, was relieved not to have to throw this man out.
Grainger had booked him into the Hotel Bradford Elysées, one of those classical, overpriced monstrosities along the Rue Saint-Philippe du Roule that, were anyone to ever audit the books of the Department of Tourism, would be the first thing to go. He asked the front desk for a wake-up call at eleven thirty—about four hours from then—and picked up a Herald Tribune. In the ornate Bradford Elysées elevator, he read headlines. They weren’t pretty.
More car bombs in Iraq, killing eight U.S. and Canadian soldiers, and more riots in Khartoum, Sudan: a photo of a full square of angry men—thousands—waving placard photographs of the dead Mullah Salih Ahmad, a white-bearded holy man with a white taqiyah covering his bald scalp. Other signs in Arabic, the caption told him, called for the head of President Omar al-Bashir. On page eight, he found a single-paragraph story saying that Homeland Security had apprehended a suspected political assassin, whom they refused to name.
Yet the most important news was unwritten: Milo Weaver had arrived in Paris to set up one of his oldest friends.
Mawkishly, he remembered when both of them were young field agents in London. Lots of codes and clandestine meetings in out-of-the-way pubs and arguments with British intelligence about the mess their countries were just starting to make of the postcommunist world. Angela was smart and stable—a near-contradiction in their business—and she had a sense of humor. In intelligence, those three things together are so rare that when you find them, you don’t let go. Given the amount of time they spent together, everyone assumed they were a couple. This served them both. It kept her homosexuality out of conversations, and saved Milo from diplomats’ wives setting him up with their nieces.
For two months after the Venice fiasco, Angela couldn’t speak to him—that’s how much killing her boss, Frank Dawdle, had disturbed her. But the next year, when Milo became simultaneously a husband and a dad to a baby girl, Angela came to the wedding in Texas and showered happy praise on Tina. They had remained in touch, and when Angela came to town Tina always insisted they take her out to dinner.
He lay on the hotel bed without undressing and considered calling Tom. What to say? He’d already argued Angela’s innocence. Should he report that James Einner was a dunce, unequipped to handle the operation? Tom didn’t care what Milo thought of Einner.
The truth—and for a moment it disturbed him—was that, six years ago, as a Tourist, he never would have questioned any of this. The job would have been simple and clean. But he wasn’t a Tourist anymore, and for that he had no regrets.
The American embassy was separated from the Champs-Elysées by the long, rigorous Jardin des Champs-Elysées. He parked along Avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt and walked the length of the park, passing old Parisians on benches with bags of bread crumbs dangling between their knees, luring pigeons, while the midday sun burned hot and moist.
Paris in July is a bleak place to be. The locals have started to flee on their welfare-state vacations, and in their place Japanese, Dutch, Americans, Germans, and Brits stand in lines leading to ticket counters, their necks craned, waving brochures at perspiring cheeks, shouting at errant children. The elderly tourists move in packs, clutching walkers or fooling with wheelchairs, while the young stop periodically to bitch about the hard sidewalks and whisper, surprised, about how many black people there are in Paris.
Most of them, just before leaving home, watched Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron dance through white-bread streets and are shocked by today’s rues and avenues. Instead of fat old men with mustaches offering slices of cheese with aperitifs, they’re faced with white boys in dirty dreadlocks playing movie sound tracks on beat-up guitars, suspiciously pushy Africans selling miniature Eiffel Towers and models of the Louvre pyramid, and hordes of tourists like themselves, guided by stern elderly French women waving colored flags to keep them on track.
Of course, there was plenty of beauty in Paris, but, given his reason for being there, Milo could hardly see it.
He found a bench at the Place de la Concorde end of the park, facing tree-lined Avenue Gabriel and the embassy at number 2. He gave a smile to the old woman beside him on the bench, surrounded by pigeons. She returned his smile and tossed crumbs at the birds. It was only twelve ten, so he searched his pockets for cigarettes before guilt overwhelmed him and he let them be. He crossed his arms over his chest and stared at the white wedding-cake building with three uniformed marines in its yard wearing automatic rifles.
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