Generation of Liars (3 page)

“Yes. I use them for saving papers
I write for my university classes.”

“Good, that means you will know how
to identify what we’re looking for.”

“Just an ordinary thumb drive?” I
managed to say it without dropping the cigarette from my amateur lips. I was
impressed with myself.

His thumb flicked across the gear
on the lighter and a hot, wavy flame sprang up. “I prefer to call it the
dynamite stick.”

I coughed at my first inhale,
curling my chest forward to squelch the burning in my lungs. A ticket taker
stopped in the aisle beside our seats. She had boring features and square hair
and her coat looked stale. “Excuse me, sir, I’m going have to ask both of you
to extinguish those cigarettes. There is simply no smoking permitted inside the
train cars.”

Motley didn’t lift his eyes. His
hand slithered into his pocket to slide out his wallet. When he unfurled it I
saw that it was fat with hundred dollar bills, and it was then that I noticed
the glistening gold watch latched to his wrist. He discretely pushed a handful
of money into the ticket taker’s hand. Her hand tightened around the money and
disappeared into the pocket on her stale coat. I didn’t see her again for the
rest of the trip. The light caught the glitter on Motley’s wrist watch a few
more times and I began understanding that I was sitting beside a very wealthy
man. My hands had stopped shaking by now. I was starting to feel more
comfortable. Maybe this might be fun, like a game.

Motley pivoted inward towards me.
His hand brushed my cheek. “I like your hair like this, the red really suits
you,” he told me. “I think you are going to be very good at this game, and an
excellent liar.”

I pulled the cigarette from my lips
and inspected the aurora-like tip. “I’m not so sure I’m good at lying.”

“Of course you are. You’re human.
Alice, in any of those college classes you take, did they ever teach you about
the human brain?”

“A little, sure, in psych class.”

“Did they ever tell you, Alice, any
of those fancy college professors, I mean, did they ever tell you that every
human essentially runs off of two separate brains? Monkey and reptile. The
reptile part, well, that’s our ancient gray matter. It harbors our deepest,
most ferocious primal instincts. Greed. Murder. Lust. The monkey brain is
newer, it helps us to relate to the group, form emotional bonds, live in gated
communities and dress up in Prada
suits. Do you know what that makes us
all, Alice?”

I shook my head side to side. “I’m
not sure.”

“Dangerous psychopaths. Every last
one of us. Humans are the only creature on the planet cunning and deceitful
enough to cultivate civilization, all while never shedding our evolutionary
predator instinct. We are born liars.”

“So,” I began, suddenly conscious
of the importance of trying to harden my callow voice, “where do we start
looking for the dynamite stick?”

“This won’t be easy, Alice. I’m not
the only one looking for the dynamite stick, and the types of people who want
to get their hands on it aren’t exactly Mother Teresa.”

“You don’t think Mother Teresa had
a reptile brain?”

He smiled at me like I was his
muse. “These people will stop at nothing. I’m talking about blackhat criminals.
Bedeviling cutthroats. True snakes.”

I nodded along to what he was
saying, though back then I never could have understood the miscreants he was
referring to. I didn’t know the first thing about this lion of a man with a
snake’s soul, or about the dark, sticky cobweb he was draping over me masked as
silk. I told myself it was a game. My fingers gamboled the lining of his breast
pocket to help myself to another cigarette. “And then there’s the United States
Government looking for it too,” I said.

“That’s who I was just talking about,
my dear Alice.”

Three Years Later

Chapter One: The Eiffel Tower Incident

R
IGHT
NOW I’M in a lot of trouble.

The trouble began on top of the
Eiffel Tower. It was a night with a mirror ball moon. I was dressed in a black
mini skirt and Technicolor stockings. I had showed up for what I thought was an
appointment to meet an anonymous contact who had a leak on the location of the
dynamite stick. The plan was to hand off a briefcase that Motley had packed with
a half-million dollars in exchange for the information.

The plan took a turn for the worse
when someone from my past showed up instead. Someone I never expected. It was
my first love, a boy from flashbacks of homecoming dances and photo booth
kisses. The boy I thought I’d marry. Now he was dressed in a black trench coat
and he glared at me with his glowing, starburst irises just before he aimed his
gun at me.
What the hell was he doing there?
By the time it was over,
the gun had gone off, and fate, or whatever force ordains our muddling
existence, brought me to a Parisian hospital. Had I actually hailed a taxi to
the hospital? I must have. The driver practically pushed me out the backseat in
front of the ER doors. It was like I was watching everything happen through
adrenaline goggles.

I sat waiting despondently for the
doctor on a cot that smelled like fetid mothballs while my arm brewed blood
from a hole in my shoulder. My eyes were struggling to stay open against the
room’s gloomy lighting and the hypnotizing drone of water dripping from buried
pipes in the wall. I saw a man enter through my dizzy, kaleidoscope vision. The
worst part came when he spoke and I realized that he was American.

“You’ve been shot?” He peeked up
from behind his clipboard. “Am I seeing this right? The admittance paperwork
you filled out with the receptionist says it happened on top of the Eiffel
Tower.”

“Drop the masquerade and go get me
a real doctor,” I said.

“I am a real doctor,” he replied.
His eyes shot to my right arm, where velvety beads of lush red blood rolled
down my anemically pale skin. “And that is a very real bullet wound in your
shoulder.”

I glanced down at the pink-lava
discharge on my shoulder. “It’s just a grazing.” My eyes trailed back to him.
“You expect me to believe that you’re really a doctor?”

He simply smirked and then pulled
out the cigarette filter mashed into my hair with cherry red lipstick on it.
“Are you feeling steady or should I put an IV in you?”

“I was steady enough to get myself
here and sign myself in. But I don’t think you’re really a doctor.”

He moved around the room rummaging
for items like a thermometer and a stethoscope. He set his supplies down on the
cot. When he stepped under the radiant overhead lamp, my nerves had calmed just
enough for me to notice that he had a handsome face shaped by a set of
expansive brown eyes, which glistened like mirrored lakes. His brown, wavy hair
was a thicket of silk that was hard for my trembling fingers to resist the urge
to tussle. “Of course I’m really a doctor,” he said, scrunching his eyebrows.
“Why don’t you believe me?”

“I never trust a man with an
American accent.”

“Oh?” He sounded enticed, amused
even. He was scribbling notes onto the clipboard he had been clutching since he
walked in. I wondered what he was writing down.

Why the hell had I come here?
Not like I was gonna die from a bullet scrape.

“You probably just thought your
bogus medical degree would pass more easily with the French language barrier. Let
me guess?”

“Guess away.” He fixed the
clipboard to a peg on the wall and wrestled into a white lab coat.

“My guess is that your credentials
say you’re a graduate of Harvard Med School, with a 3.8 GPA, just because a 4.0
is too perfect, and thus, suspicious.”

His body leaned over mine to press
a cold stethoscope to my skin. “Actually, I went to the University of Illinois
and I couldn’t break a 3.6.”

“Very creative.”

“Shhh.” He cupped one of his hands
over his ear to spy on my heart beat. “Heart rate is normal. Good sign.”

I shook my head as if trying to
erase all the steps that had led me to this point, to this scene of a handsome
doctor with his ear to my chest inside a sterile room. “I’m probably fine. It
was a mistake for me to come here.”

“Let me ask you something.” He
lifted a tiny tube flashlight from his pocket and scanned my left pupil. “How
did a beautiful young woman end up with a bullet wound?”
He d

“Beautiful? Flattery will get you
nowhere.”

“Then I guess my strategy of
commenting on your lovely green eyes is hopelessly futile?”

“Can I smoke in here?” I asked. A
cigarette was bitten between my teeth and glowing red before he could even
answer.

“A
real
doctor would
strongly advise you against it, but since I’m an unrighteous fraud who obviously
enjoys making a circus of the medical profession, I say go right ahead and
light up.”

“I appreciate it,” I said.

He snapped on a pair of rubber
gloves. The overhead light casting over me had an interrogating feel. “Now that
you’re nice and relaxed and enjoying that coffin nail of a cigarette between
your lips, I will ask you again, why was someone shooting at you?”

“If you must know, I got shot out
of the Eiffel Tower, and it was over a business deal.”

“Let me get this straight.” His
fingers rubbed at his chin. “Someone shot you off the tallest building in Paris
and all you have are some bruises and a grazing on your shoulder?”

“It wasn’t from the top. It was
from the first level, where the skating rink is. It’s not even two-hundred
feet.”

A stoic nod. His eyes voyaged from
the blood on my shoulder, down the length of my too-skinny arms, to my hands.
“What are these burns on your hands?” he asked, taking command of my hands and
flipping them palm up as my cigarette smoldered between my fingers. We both focused
on the deep red welts, shaped like lightning bolts, which etched my palms.
“They look painful.”

“They look worse than they are.
They’re no worse than a proper rope burn.”

“Are these injuries on your hands
old or did you receive them during the shooting incident?”

“I got them climbing down from the
Eiffel Tower to escape. I guess I was holding on tighter than I thought.”

He let my hands drop from his.
“You’re still trying to convince me that you climbed down the Eiffel Tower?
This will all be easier if you’re honest with me.”

“I didn’t say I climbed from the
top.”

“Oh, right, it was only part of the
way. Makes total sense.” He rolled his eyes. His handsome, jewel-glimmering
eyes, which I found myself desperately wanting a look of approval from.

“I could do without the theatrics,”
I told him. I stooped over and tapped the ashes from my cigarette into a pail
beneath the examination cot.

“So could I,” he shot back. His
hands were fidgeting inside the droopy pockets of his white coat. “Let me get a
better look at the wound on your shoulder. It’s a grazing from the bullet,
correct?”

I sucked a drag from my cigarette,
letting my lungs warm up before fluting my lips to exhale loops of smoke that
coiled like dragon tails. “Yeah, but it’s no big deal. I could probably just
use alcohol and gauze at home. Honestly, doc, I wouldn’t be surprised if I have
more experience with bullet holes than you.” I crossed my legs beneath my
much-too-tight skirt. “But since my body is a lucrative part of my life, I
wanted to make sure nothing turned green and rotted off.”

“You were smart to seek medical
attention.” He was behind me now, steadying my shoulders with his hands as he
glimpsed the wound. “This could get nasty if it wasn’t cleaned properly.”

“If I knew I was going to get a
phony doctor, I wouldn’t have bothered.”

“Really, I must know what makes you
so confident I’m a phony.” He was in the process of peeling down what remained
of my tattered shirt sleeve and snipping my bra strap with a pair of surgical
scissors.

“You’re American.”

“You mean because of the November
Hit? That’s an exaggerated stereotype. Everybody knows only criminals and
losers took advantage of the situation, the same people that would have been
scammers even if there hadn’t been a hit.”

“Spare me the lecture. Liars are
everywhere.” It seemed the perfect moment for making a dramatic exit, but pain
shredded through my shoulder when I attempted a slide from the cot.
“Son-of-a-bitch. Ouch.”

“Please. Let me clean you up. I am
a real doctor.” He inhaled deeply, which I translated as a threat that he would
hold his breath until I obliged, so I slid back onto the cot.

“Fine. But only because I don’t
feel like doing it myself, like I said before.”

He blotted my shoulder with cotton
balls that had been soaked in antiseptic. My spine bucked against the sting of
the bitter liquid seeping into my raw skin. He whistled along to himself like
it was all very routine for him. “So, are you ready to tell me why someone was
really shooting at you?”

“It was a business deal,” I
replied. “I was meeting someone on the Eiffel Tower to exchange money for
information that is very valuable to my boss.”

“People don’t usually get shot over
business deals.”

“What transpired up there was part
business deal, part lover’s quarrel. You know something, I don’t get why people
are so hung up on Paris being a romantic city. It’s pretty love-cursed if you
ask me.”

“Working in the emergency room,
I’ve learned that Paris can be a very dangerous city.” He squeezed a bubble of
ointment onto my palms and began rubbing the welts.

 “Dangerous,” I husked, “is
letting some phony play doctor on me.” I told myself that I was only flirting
with him to kill time and avoid making a phone call to Motley that I was
dreading. But the truth was that there was something very addictive about this
man. “My name is Alice Fix, by the way.”