Final impact

He gave the man a couple of coins.

“There you are, mademoiselle. However, you should be careful,” he said. “Gaston, here, he makes a heady brew. I doubt an American woman would be able to stand up after drinking even half a cup of it.”

The small crowd burst into laughter, not all of it good-natured.

Julia took the drink and said nothing, cocking an eyebrow at the French officer, a captain, before draining the cup in one long swallow. The young women gasped, and one of the Rangers hooted with laughter.

“Ha! Give ’em hell, lady!”

She handed the empty mug back to Gaston and smiled, waiting for the hubbub to die down before nodding and smiling politely to the Frenchman. “La rйalitй et toi, vous ne vous entendez pas, n’est-ce pas?” Reality and you don’t get on, do they?

This time the laughter came as a roar, and she felt a meaty hand slap her on the shoulder as she made her way toward the front door of the makeshift bistro. She knew, however, that on an empty stomach the wine would go right to her head if she didn’t get something solid inside her in the next few minutes.

As she stepped into the street she heard her name mentioned in an American accent, but ignored it. It wasn’t like someone was calling after her.

But the French captain suddenly appeared beside her again. “Please,” he said. “Let me buy you dinner. That was a stupid jest, and you showed me up for a fool. I should not have tried to embarrass you. It was-”

“Okay,” Julia said in French that was as good as his English. “Look, whatever. I’m tired and hungry, and I’m only carrying greenbacks. I’d probably end up paying fifty bucks for some fucking prewar pickled escargot. So yes, Captain…?”

“Ronsard,” he answered.

“Okay, Captain Ronsard, you may buy me dinner. Or rather you may order, and I will pay, and that way there shall be no misunderstanding about copping an easy fuck from the future.”

“But of course!” Ronsard protested, in English again. “The very idea of it!”

“Yeah,” Julia replied. “Quoi que.”

“Whatever?”

“No. Whatever. Get the inflection right, mon capitaine.”

She woke up next to him in a narrow bed, in the loft of a two-story cottage a few minutes’ walk from the square. Light was streaming in through the shattered windows, and for a moment she had the unsettling experience of not knowing where she was, or when she was.

She’d spent a year studying in France as a postgrad, and stayed on for two more freelancing for a couple of magazines in Paris. The first Intifada hadn’t been enough to drive her away. Indeed, that simply meant more work, as she began to file copy for a couple of the metro dailies and the blog portals back stateside. But after the bomb went off in Marseilles, Julia decided enough was enough. She’d joined thousands of other expatriates streaming out of Continental Europe, which was looking increasingly medieval with each new atrocity in the war.

She’d missed it, though, for a long time thereafter. She’d dated a young editor at Vogue for a while, and his family owned a cottage in the Pas de Calais, near Oignies, at the other end of the province. Waking next to Ronsard, she’d experienced a state of free fall, dropping through the years and thinking she had fallen back into the life she’d lived in her midtwenties. It was a delicious sensation, in a way, like half waking from a dream of immense wealth, but it dissolved as she blinked away the sleep and saw the bullet holes and scorch marks in the ceiling.

Her boyfriend had been young and thin and blond. A nonthreatening, floppy-haired romantic. Ronsard was shorter, more powerfully built, and coarsened-most likely by a much harder life. He’d been a better fuck, though. No question of that.

He’d screwed her insensible and she’d fallen into a deep, dreamless sleep from which she had not woken, not even once. He was only now stirring beside her. She regarded him dispassionately. However ardent their lovemaking had been-and it was pretty fucking ardent-she awoke as always these days, disconnected and keen to be elsewhere. It had been that way with every man since Dan. A small pang penetrated the scar tissue she’d built up around his memory and, to her own surprise, tears began to well.

She slipped out of bed, naked, and hurriedly pulled on her pants and filthy gray T-shirt. Ronsard yawned and rolled over.

“Julia? Would you like to make some coffee?” he mumbled. “I have a sachet somewhere.”

“De quoi est mort votre derniиre esclave?” she asked as lightly as she could manage. What did your last slave die of?