Die for Me (5 page)

I AWOKE TO THE SMELL OF STRONG COFFEE AND
lifted my head from between my bent knees. I was outside, sitting on the sidewalk, with my back against the wall of a building. Vincent crouched in front of me, holding a tiny steaming cup of espresso a few inches away from my face, waving it around like smelling salts.

“Vincent,” I said, without thinking. His name felt natural coming from my mouth, like I had been saying it all my life.

“So you followed me,” he said, looking grim.

My head began to spin as a throbbing headache materialized just above the nape of my neck. “Ow,” I groaned, reaching back and massaging it with my hand.

“Drink this, then put your head back between your knees,” Vincent instructed. He placed the cup to my lips, and I threw it back in one gulp.

“That's better. I'm just taking this cup back to the café next door. Don't move, I'll be right back,” he said as I closed my eyes.

I couldn't have moved if I had wanted to. I couldn't even feel my legs.
What happened? How did I get here?
And then the memory came back to me, crushing me with its horror.

“Do you feel strong enough to take a taxi?” Vincent was back, squatting down to bring his face level with mine. “You've had quite a shock.”

“But . . . your friend! Jules!” I said, incredulous.

“Yes, I know.” He furrowed his brows. “But we can't do anything about that now. We need to get you away from here.” He stood up and signaled a taxi. Lifting me to my feet and supporting me with a strong arm across my shoulders, he picked up my bag and walked me to the waiting car.

Vincent helped me inside, and scooting in beside me, he gave the driver an address on a street not far from my own.

“Where are we going?” I asked, suddenly concerned. My rational mind tapped me on the shoulder to remind me that I was in a car with someone who had not only just watched his friend die in front of a speeding train, but looked as calm as if it happened every day.

“I could take you to your house, but I'd rather take you to mine until you calm down. It's just a few streets away.”

I can probably “calm down” better at my own house than at yours.
My thought was interrupted as the meaning of his words clicked in. “You know where I live?” I gasped.

“I've already confessed to following around our neighborhood's new American imports. Remember?” He flashed me a disarming smile. “Besides, who followed who into the Métro today?”

I blushed as I wondered how many times he had seen me as I wandered, oblivious that I was being watched.

And then the memory of Jules in the Métro returned and a tremor shook me. “Just don't think. Don't think,” Vincent whispered. At that moment, my emotions felt tugged in two opposite directions. I was frightened and confused by Vincent's indifference to Jules's death, but I desperately wanted him to comfort me.

His hand lay casually on his knee, and I had the strongest desire to grab it and press it to my cold face. To hold on to him and avoid slipping deeper under the wave of fear that threatened to engulf me. Jules's fate echoed too loudly of my own parents' accident. I felt like death had followed me across the Atlantic. It was trailing along in my wake, threatening to take everyone I knew.

And as if Vincent had heard my thoughts, his hand slid across the seat and pulled my fingers from where they were wedged between my knees. As he folded my hand inside his own, I was instantly enveloped in a feeling of safety. I leaned my head back against the headrest and closed my eyes for the rest of the drive.

The taxi came to a stop in front of a ten-foot-high stone wall set with massive iron gates. Their bars were fitted from behind with black metal sheets that tastefully blocked any view of what was inside. Thick wisteria vines draped over the edges of the wall, and a couple of stately trees were visible behind the barrier.

Vincent paid the taxi driver, then came around to my side and opened the door for me. He walked me up to a column embedded with a high-tech audiovisual security system.

The lock clicked after he typed the security code into a keypad. He pressed the gate open with one hand and pulled me gently behind him with the other. I gasped as I took in our surroundings.

I was standing in the cobblestone courtyard of a
hôtel particulier
, one of those in-town castles that wealthy Parisians built as their city dwellings in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This one was built of massive honey-colored stones and peaked with a black slate roof with dormer windows spaced evenly along its length. The only time I had actually seen one of these buildings up close was when Mom and Mamie took me with them on a guided tour.

In the middle of the courtyard stood a circular fountain carved in granite, its dark gray basin big enough to swim a few strokes across. Over the splashing water stood a life-size stone figure of an angel carrying a sleeping woman in his arms. Her body was visible through the fabric of her dress, which was worked so finely by the sculptor that the heavy stone was transformed into the finest gauze. The woman's fragile loveliness was offset by the strength of the male angel carrying her, his massive wings curving protectively over the two figures. It was a symbol combining beauty and danger, and it cast a sinister aura across the courtyard.

“You live here?”

“I don't own the house, but yes, I live here,” Vincent said, walking me across the courtyard to the front door. “Let's get you inside.”

Remembering the reason we were there, the sound of Jules's body being crushed by a ton of metal resonated in my ears. The tears I had been holding back began to flow.

Vincent opened the ornately carved door and led me into an enormous entrance hall with a double staircase winding up either wall to a balcony overlooking the room. A crystal chandelier the size of a Volkswagen Beetle hung over our heads, and Persian rugs littered a marble floor inlaid with stone flowers and vines.
What is this place?
I thought.

I followed him through another door into a small, high-ceilinged room that looked like it hadn't been touched since the seventeenth century, and sat down on an ancient stiff-backed couch. Holding my head in my hands, I leaned forward and closed my eyes. “I'll be right back,” Vincent said, and I heard the door close as he left the room.

After a few minutes I felt stronger. Resting my head against the couch, I studied the imposing room. Heavy drapes at the window blocked the daylight. A delicate chandelier, which looked like it had originally been set with candles instead of the flame-shaped electric bulbs it now held, threw out just enough light to illuminate walls that were crowded with paintings. A dozen faces of bad-tempered, centuries-old French aristocrats frowned down at me.

A servants' door hidden in the back wall swung open, and Vincent walked through. He set a massive porcelain teapot in the shape of a dragon and a matching cup onto the table in front of me next to a plate of paper-thin cookies. The fragrance of strong tea and almonds wafted up from the silver tray.

“Sugar and caffeine. Best medicine in the world,” Vincent said as he sat down in an upholstered armchair a few feet away.

I tried to pick up the heavy teapot, but my hands were shaking so hard I only succeeded in making it clatter against the cup. “Here, let me do that,” he said as he leaned over and poured. “Jeanne, our housekeeper, makes the best tea. Or so I've heard. I'm more a coffee man myself.”

I blanched at his small talk. “Okay, stop. Just stop right there.” My teeth were chattering: I couldn't tell if it was my shattered nerves or the dawning fear that something was very wrong. “Vincent . . . whoever you are.”
I'm in his house and I don't even know his last name,
I realized in a flash before continuing. “Your friend just died a little while ago, and you are talking to me about”—my voice broke—“about coffee?”

A defensive expression registered on his face, but he remained silent.

“Oh my God,” I said softly, and began crying again. “What is wrong with you?”

The room was silent. I could hear the seconds ticking away on an enormous grandfather clock in the corner. My breathing calmed, and I wiped my eyes, attempting to compose myself.

“It's true. I'm not very good at showing my emotions,” Vincent conceded finally.

“Not showing your emotions is one thing. But running off after your friend is demolished by a subway train?”

In a low, carefully measured tone he said, “If we had stayed, we would have had to talk to the police. They would have questioned both of us, as they must have done with the witnesses who stayed. I wanted to avoid that”—he paused—“at all costs.”

Vincent's cold shell was back, or else I had just begun noticing it again. Numbness spread up my arms and throughout my body as I realized what he was saying. “So you're”—I choked—“you're what? A criminal?”

His dark, brooding eyes were drawing me toward him while my mind was telling me to run away. Far away.

“What are you? Wanted? Wanted for what? Did you steal all the paintings in this room?” I realized I was yelling and lowered my voice. “Or is it something worse?”

Vincent cleared his throat to buy time. “Let's just say that I'm not the kind of guy your mother would want you hanging around with.”

“My mom's dead. My dad, too.” The words escaped my lips before I could stop them.

Vincent closed his eyes and pressed his hands to his forehead as if he were in pain. “Recently?”

“Yes.”

He nodded solemnly, as if it all made sense.

“I'm sorry, Kate.”

However bad a person he is, he cares about me.
The thought crossed my mind so abruptly that I couldn't stop it from triggering a reaction. My eyes filled with tears. I picked up the cup of tea and raised it to my lips.

The hot liquid slid from my throat to my stomach, and its calming effect was immediate. My thoughts felt clearer. And weirdly enough, I felt more in control of the situation.
He knows who I am now, even if I don't know the first thing about him.

My revelation seemed to have shaken him.
Vincent's either struggling to hold himself together
, I thought,
or to hold something back
. I decided to take advantage of this apparent moment of weakness to figure something out. “Vincent, if you're in such a . . . dangerous situation, why in the world would you try to be friends with me?”

“I told you, Kate, I had seen you around the neighborhood”—he weighed his words carefully—“and you seemed like someone I would want to know. It was probably a bad idea. But I obviously wasn't thinking.”

As he spoke, his voice turned from warm to icicle cold. I couldn't tell if he was angry with himself for getting me involved in whatever mess he was in—or with me for bringing it up. It didn't matter. The effect of his sudden frostiness was the same: I shuddered, feeling like someone had walked over my grave. “I'm ready to go,” I said, standing suddenly.

He rose to his feet and nodded. “Yes, I'll take you home.”

“No, that's okay. I know the way. I'd . . . rather you not.” The words came from the rational part of me. The part that was urging me to get out of the house as fast as possible. But another part of me regretted it as soon as I spoke them.

“As you wish,” he said, and leading me back through the grand entrance hall, he opened the door to the courtyard.

“Are you sure you'll be all right?” he insisted as he blocked the doorway, waiting for an answer before he would let me leave. I ducked under his arm to squeeze by, passing inches from his skin.

My mistake was inhaling as I did. He smelled like oak and grass and wood fires. He smelled like memories. Like years and years of memories.

“You look weak again.” His hard shell cracked open just enough to show a glimpse of concern.

“I'm fine,” I replied, attempting to sound sure of myself, and then seeing him standing there, calm and composed, I rephrased my answer. “I'm fine, but you shouldn't be. You just lost a friend in a horrible accident and you're standing there like nothing happened. I don't care who you are or what you've done to make you run away like that. But for it not to affect you . . . you've got to be seriously messed up.”

A surge of emotion crossed Vincent's dark face. He looked upset. Well, good.

“I don't understand you. And I don't want to.” My eyes narrowed in disgust. “I hope I never see you again,” I said, and began walking toward the gate.

I felt a strong hand grip my arm, and whipped my head around to see that Vincent stood inches behind me. He leaned over until his mouth was next to my ear. “Things aren't always as they appear, Kate,” he whispered, and carefully released my arm.

I ran toward the front gate, which was already swinging open to let me through. Once I was outside, it began to close. A loud crash that sounded like porcelain being smashed against marble came from somewhere inside the house.

I stood motionless, looking back at the massive metal gates. My intuition told me that I had done something wrong. That I had misjudged Vincent's character. But all signs pointed to the fact that he was some sort of criminal. And from the smashing sounds still emanating from the house, maybe even a violent one. I shook my head, wondering how I could have lost my capacity for reason just because of a handsome face.

OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS, I COULDN'T STOP
replaying the events of that day in my mind, over and over again like a broken record. From the outside I must have looked the same. I got up, did my reading at an alternate café, went to the occasional movie, and attempted to join Georgia's and my grandparents' dinner-table conversations. Even so, they seemed to know that I was troubled. But they had no reason to attribute my dark mood to anything new.

Every time Vincent pushed his way into my mind I tried to push him back out. How could I have been so mistaken? The fact that he was a part of some sort of criminal network made more sense now that I thought back to that night at the river. There must have been some kind of underworld gang war going on.
Even if he's a bad guy, at least he saved that girl's life,
my conscience nagged.

But whatever his past contained, I couldn't justify his cold detachment after Jules was hit by the train. How could anyone leave the scene of a friend's death to insure his own safety from the law? The whole thing chilled me to the bone. Especially knowing that I had already started to feel something for him.

The flirty way he had teased me at the Picasso Museum. His intense expression as he grasped my hand in Jules's courtyard. The comfort I'd felt when he placed his hand over mine in the taxi. These instants kept flashing up in my memory, reminding me of why I had liked him. I shoved them aside again and again, disgusted with myself for having been so naive.

Finally Georgia cornered me one night in my room. “What is wrong with you?” she asked with her usual tact. She threw herself onto my rug and leaned roughly back against a priceless Empire dresser that I never used because I was afraid I would break the handles.

“What do you mean?” I responded, avoiding her eyes.

“I mean, what the hell is wrong with you? I'm your sister. I know when there's something wrong.”

I had been yearning to talk to Georgia but couldn't even imagine where to start. How could I tell her the guy that we saw leap off the bridge was actually a criminal I had been hanging out with—that is, until I saw him walk away from his friend's death without shedding a tear?

“Okay, if you don't want to talk I can just start guessing, but I
will
get it out of you. Are you worried about starting a new school?”

“No.”

“Is it about friends?”

“What friends?”

“Exactly!”

“No.”

“Boys?”

Something on my face must have given me away, because she immediately leaned toward me, crossing her legs in a tell-me-more pose. “Kate, why didn't you tell me about . . . whoever he is . . . before it got to this?”

“You don't talk to me about your boyfriends.”

“That's because there are too many of them.” She laughed and then, remembering my low spirits, added, “Plus, none of them are serious enough to mention.
Yet
.” She waited.

There was no way I was getting off the hook. “Okay, there's this guy who lives in the neighborhood, and we kind of hung out a few times until I found out he was bad news.”

“Like how bad is the bad news? Married?”

I couldn't help but laugh. “No!”

“Druggie?”

“No. I mean, I don't think so. It's more like . . .” I watched for Georgia's reaction. “It's more like he's in trouble with the law. Like a criminal or something.”

“Yeah. I'd say that's bad news,” she admitted pensively. “Sounds more like someone I'd go for, actually.”

“Georgia!” I yelled, throwing a pillow at her.

“Sorry, sorry. I shouldn't joke about it. You're right. He doesn't sound like good boyfriend material, Katie-Bean. So why don't you just pat yourself on the back for not getting in too deep before you found out, and be on your merry way back to Guyland?”

“I just can't believe that I was so mistaken about him. He seemed so perfect. And so interesting. And—”

“Handsome?” my sister interrupted.

I fell back on my bed and stared at the ceiling. “Oh, Georgia. Not handsome. Gorgeous. Like heart-stoppingly amazing. Not that it matters now.”

Georgia stood and looked down at me. “I'm sorry it didn't work. It would have been nice seeing you out and about enjoying yourself with some hot Frenchman. I won't keep bugging you about it, but as soon as you're ready to start living again, let me know. There are parties nearly every night.”

“Thanks, Georgia,” I said, reaching out to touch her hand.

“Anything for my little sister.”

And then, without me even noticing, summer was officially over and it was time to start school.

Georgia and I speak French fluently. Dad always spoke it with us, and we spent so much time in Paris during our vacations that French comes as easily for us as English. So we could have gone to a French high school. But the French system is so different from the American that we would have had to make up all sorts of missing credits to graduate.

The American School of Paris is one of those strange places in foreign cities where expatriates huddle together in a defensive circle and try to pretend they're still back at home. I saw it as a place for lost souls. My sister saw it as an opportunity to make more international friends who she could visit in their native countries during school breaks. Georgia treats friends like outfits, happily trading one for another when it's convenient—not in a mean way, but she just doesn't get too attached.

As for me, being a junior, I knew I had two short years with these people, some of whom would be leaving to go back to their home country before the school year was even out.

So after walking through the massive front doors on the first day of school, I headed directly to the office to get my schedule and Georgia walked straight up to a group of intimidating-looking girls and began chatting away like she had known them all her life. Our social dice were cast within our first five minutes.

I hadn't been to a museum since I had seen Vincent at the Musée Picasso, so it was with a sense of trepidation that I approached the Centre Pompidou one afternoon after school. My history teacher had assigned us projects on twentieth-century events happening in Paris, and I had chosen the riots of 1968.

Say “May '68” and any French person will immediately think of the countrywide general strike that brought France's economy to a halt. I was focusing on the weeks-long violent fighting between the police and university students at the Sorbonne. We were supposed to write our papers in the first person, as if we had experienced the events ourselves. So instead of looking through history books, I decided to search contemporary newspapers to find personal accounts.

The materials I needed were in the large library located on the Centre Pompidou's second and third floors. But, since the other floors housed Paris's National Museum of Modern Art, I planned on following my schoolwork with some well-deserved art gazing.

Once settled in at one of the library's viewing booths, I flipped through microfilm spools from the riots' most eventful days. Having read that May 10 was a day of heated fighting between police and students, I scanned that day's front page, took some notes, and then flipped past the headlines to read the editorials. It was hard to imagine that kind of violence happening just across the river in the Latin Quarter, a fifteen-minute walk from where I was sitting.

I ejected the spool and replaced it with another. The riots had flared back up on July 14, France's Independence Day. Many students, as well as tourists visiting Paris for the festivities, were taken to nearby hospitals. I took notes from the first few pages, and then flipped back to the two-page spread of obituaries and their accompanying black-and-white photos. And there he was.

Halfway down the first page. It was Vincent. He had longer hair, but he looked exactly like he had a month ago. My body turned to ice as I read the text.

Firefighter Jacques Dupont, nineteen years old, born in La Baule, Pays de la Loire, was killed in duty last night in a building fire believed to have been sparked by a Molotov cocktail thrown by student rioters. The residential building at 18 rue Champollion was in flames when Dupont and his colleague, Thierry Simon (obit., section S), rushed into the building and began pulling out its inhabitants, who had taken cover from the fighting at the adjacent Sorbonne. Trapped under burning timbers, Dupont expired before he could be evacuated to the hospital, and his body was received by the morgue. Twelve citizens, including four children, owe their lives to these local heroes.

It can't be him,
I thought.
Unless he is the spitting image of his dad, who happened to sire a son before he died at
 . . . (I glanced back at the obituary)
nineteen. Which
isn't
impossible
 . . .

As my reasoning foundered, I forwarded to the next page and scanned the
S
s for “Simon.” There he was: Thierry Simon. The muscle-bound guy who had turned Georgia and me away from the fight at the river. Thierry had a voluminous Afro in the photo but wore the same confident grin that he had flashed me with that day across the café terrace. It was definitely the same guy. But more than forty years ago.

I closed my eyes in disbelief, and then opened them again to read the paragraph under Thierry's head shot. It read the same as Jacques's, except it gave his age as twenty-two and place of birth as Paris.

“I don't get it,” I whispered, as I numbly pressed a button on the machine to print both pages. After returning the microfilm spools to the front desk, I left the library in a daze and hesitated before stepping on the escalator going to the next floor. I would sit in the museum until I figured out what to do next.

My thoughts were being yanked around in ten different directions as I drifted through the turnstile and into an enormous high-ceilinged gallery with benches positioned in the middle of the room. Sitting down, I put my head in my hands as I tried to clear my mind.

Finally I looked up. I was in the room dedicated to the art of Fernand Léger, one of my favorite early- to mid-twentieth-century French painters. I studied the two-dimensional surfaces filled with bright primary colors and geometric shapes and felt a sense of normalcy return. I glanced over to the corner where my favorite Léger painting hung: one with robotic-looking World War I soldiers sitting around a table, smoking pipes and playing cards.

A young man stood in front of it, his back to me as he leaned in closer to inspect something in the composition. He was of medium height with short-cropped brown hair and messy clothes.
Where have I seen him before?
I thought, wondering if it was someone from school.

And then he turned, and my mouth dropped open in disbelief. The man standing across the gallery from me was Jules.