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There was no sign of forced entry, no blood. Her clothes were left behind, but his coat was missing, and someone had gone through his wardrobe. If they’d come to get her they wouldn’t have bothered dressing her. They wouldn’t have bothered taking her—she’d be lying dead in his bed if they’d found her.
Which meant she’d left of her own accord, and she was no longer his responsibility. He’d warned her, for some crazy, quixotic reason he’d tried to save her life. Even compromised his own cover for her, whether he wanted to admit it or not.
And she’d ignored his orders and disappeared. Good riddance.
She’d searched the place pretty thoroughly, which surprised him. What could she have expected to find here? Maybe she’d managed to fool him after all, maybe she wasn’t the innocent she’d convinced him she was. And then he remembered the look in
her eyes when he’d made her come, and he knew she hadn’t held anything back. Harry Thomason was right about that much. No one could keep the truth from him, not if he was determined to find it.
She’d found the drugs, though she hadn’t touched them. He kept them as insurance—a marketable commodity for some informants who didn’t need money. He pocketed them, just in case, then went through the room with quiet thoroughness, wiping down every surface. It wouldn’t stop a DNA expert, but there would be no reason to go to such lengths. There were no dead bodies, no signs of a crime. Just a mysterious tenant who disappeared, leaving his clothes and toiletries behind, and not a single fingerprint.
If he’d needed to be thorough he could have torched the place. His rooms were on the top floor—most people would escape unscathed. But a fire might call too much attention. Better to just walk away, from the anonymous apartment, from the annoying memory of Chloe Underwood and her well-deserved fate.
He walked out into the damp, chilly night, pulling his jacket around him, cursing his unwanted guest who’d not only disobeyed him, but taken his coat as well. He walked, head down, leaving the car behind as well. Too many people had seen it, and there were no records that would lead back to his real life, or the Committee.
It was almost midnight when he walked into the smoky bar near Rue de Rosiers. It was the third place he’d stopped—he’d had dinner near the Opera, gambled a bit at one of the small clubs his current alter ego frequented, and now he found himself in a dingy little place in the Marais, a holdout from the gentrification that had been going on for the past few decades.
“Étienne!” the bartender greeted him as he made his way through the crowded room. “What brings you here? We haven’t seen you in…how long is it? Two years? I thought you were dead.”
“I’m hard to kill,” he said, automatically switching into Étienne’s guttural Marseilles accent. “How have you been, Fernand?”
Fernand shrugged. “It’s a living. What can I get you? You still like that Russian vodka?”
In fact, Bastien had never been that fond of vodka, but he nodded amiably, taking a seat at the bar and pulling out his Gitanes.
“You’ve changed your brand, I see.” Fernand nodded toward his cigarettes. “I thought you only smoked American cigarettes.”
That was the kind of careless mistake that could get a man killed, Bastien thought with a faint frisson of something that could almost be called anticipation. He was getting sloppy. “I switch around,” he said. “I’m not a man with strong allegiances.”
“I remember.” Fernand poured him a shot of vodka, and Bastien tossed it back quickly, then held it out for another hit. “You look the same. How has life been treating you?”
“Like shit, as always,” he said easily. In fact, he looked very different from the Étienne he had once been. Étienne had been working class, dressed in leather and jeans, his hair had been streaked and much shorter, and he always had a couple days’ stubble. It was all a matter of how he carried himself, Bastien had found. He could become Étienne, or Jean-Marc, or Frankie, or Sven, or any number of people simply by changing the way he spoke and moved, and few ever saw through it.
“You still haven’t told me why you’re here,” Fernand persisted. “What can I get for you?”
In the past Fernand had been a purveyor of drugs, information and laundered money, but he had nothing Bastien needed.
“Can’t a man come in for a drink with an old friend?” he answered easily enough.
“Not a man like you.”
Bastien glanced at the street outside. The snow was still drifting down in lazy flakes, and the streets were almost empty. Those who were still awake were someplace warm on such a cold, deadly night. And he realized with real amusement what he was doing in the seedy part of the Marais at midnight when he had better things to do.
“A woman, Fernand,” Bastien said with a self-deprecating smile. “I was in the area to see a woman, and I thought I’d warm myself up a bit before I face her wrath.”
“Ah.” Fernand nodded, immediately satisfied. “She lives around here, then? Maybe I know her?”
“Maybe. She’s Italian,” he said, making it up on the spot. “Short and plump and fiery, my Marcella is. Maybe you can tell me if you’ve seen her in here. I want to know if she’s been playing around. She swears she hasn’t been, but who can trust women?”
“Who indeed? She doesn’t sound familiar. Where does she live?”
Chloe shared a tiny apartment with an English girl two streets away—he’d found that out within hours of her arrival at the château. The others would know as well, but even she would have the brains to keep her distance from the first place they’d look for her. Wouldn’t she?
And she was no longer his problem. Except that he’d ended up in a bar two streets away from her, for no earthly reason. And he might as well stop fighting it, go and see if she was there.
If she wasn’t, he could forget about her. He should have already, but such things were easier in theory than in practice. He liked answers, and Chloe’s disappearance left too much unsettled.
Fernand was looking at him with far too much curiosity. Then again, information was one of his most valuable commodities, he’d be wanting to get everything he could from Bastien for future use.
