Without warning

This part of town was relatively quiet, but sirens still reached them from across the metro area, and from the banlieue, she imagined, the outer suburbs where generations of North African and Middle Eastern migrants had created their own pinched and grim little fiefs in the tenements and public housing projects of Paris. Caitlin was as familiar with them, with the slums and dangerous, gunned-up sharia towns like Clichy-sous-Bois, as she was with the global Paris of Montmartre, the Louvre and Avenue Montaigne.

‘Do you think everything will be all right?’ Monique asked in small, mousy voice.

Caitlin stopped dead in her tracks. They were halfway across the darkened park, two figures who stood out from the handful of wandering, self-obsessed lovers by the tension evident in their every exchange. Stiff limbs, jerky movements, voices pitched too high and sharp-edged like broken glass in the night.

‘No, Monique. Everything is not going to be all right.’ She faced her captive companion square on, hands on hips, jaw jutting out as her teeth ground together. Pain like a cold knife welled up from nowhere behind one eyeball. ‘Start. Paying. Attention, sweetheart. Someone is trying to roll me up, and you with me. Hundreds of millions of people disappeared today. Important people, too. The guarantors of life as you know it. Even if they all get beamed back down tomorrow morning with nothing to show for it but a sore ass from the alien butt-probing they got, the world will still never be the same. Your city is falling apart. The whole fucking world is falling apart. What do you think will happen – that you’ll all suck down a few celebratory bottles of Lafite now the left bank is the centre of the world again? That everyone will wake up tomorrow and go, “Hey, isn’t this cool, we don’t have to worry about big ol’ fat-assed America ruining everything with her shitty fucking movies, and fast food and violence”? Is that what you think? Huh?’

Her delivery grew more intense and unbalanced with each question, until by the end of her little speech, Caitlin knew she was ranting but couldn’t stop. Monique withered away under the lashing, shrinking into herself and dropping her eyes until she looked like a small child being shouted at by the scariest grown-up they’d ever met. Caitlin regretted her loss of control immediately. It was stupid and unprofessional – not at all the sort of thing she’d normally do, especially out in the field with hostiles on her case. She saw a couple of teenaged boys on pushbikes pointing at them, but there was no aggressive intent to the gesture. They merely seemed to be amused by the crazy woman speaking in English, and had probably picked up on her American accent.

‘Look, I’m sorry,’ she said, running a hand through lank, greasy hair. ‘It’s been a helluva day, and it ain’t getting any better.’

‘I am sorry too,’ Monique replied in small, but surprisingly strong voice. ‘You have lost everything, non? You had family?’

Caitlin nodded, a dark blue wave of sadness breaking over her at the thought of her family, now gone.

‘What will you do… Caitlin?’ She was still unsure of that name and pronounced it with extra care. ‘You cannot go home and cannot stay here. You are a spy, yes? A killer? I suppose you know how to disappear?’

They resumed walking through the park, heading north-west, back towards the old centre of Paris, but still away from the hospital and the fighting they had happened across before.

Caitlin smiled sadly. ‘I’m better at making people disappear than doing it myself. I have… well, let’s not go there. You shouldn’t even know any of this. It’s only that things have changed so much, and… well… I’m sorta swinging out here on my own now.’

They passed a homeless man, making himself a bed on a wooden bench, balling up a copy of Le Figaro for a pillow. He smiled at them, a wide toothless grin, and doffed his filthy cloth cap as they passed. Monique stopped and handed him a couple of crumpled banknotes.

‘Merci, mademoiselle, merci.’

‘You know,’ said Caitlin a minute later as they neared the edge of the Parc de Choisy, ‘that guy back there doesn’t know it, but he has a bunch of skill sets that are about to put him back at the top of the food chain.’

‘Why?’ asked Monique.

‘He’s a survivor.’

* * * *

‘I need to rest and eat,’ Caitlin announced half an hour later, as they left behind the unattractive, modernist high-rise district of the Centre Commercial Italie on Rue Vandrezanne.