Vincent and I lock eyes, and I tip my head left. Toward home. He understands and we walk to the end of the block, turning eastward toward La Maison. It’s not like we can read each other’s minds. But when you’re best friends with someone for over half a century, you start to recognize their every gesture. We’re like an old couple. Words are almost unnecessary.
We walk for a while in silence, keeping an eye out for anything amiss. Ambrose doesn’t spot any activity at all in the neighborhood and is singing a Louis Armstrong song directly into my brain, probably to piss me off. “Who is the lucky lady tonight?” Vincent asks as he taps the code into our security panel. The gate swings slowly open.
“Quintana,” I respond.
“From?”
“New York, upstate somewhere. Over here doing an art degree.”
“Blond?” he asks.
“Negative,” I respond. “Dark hair with blue tips. Alternative chic.”
“Sounds like your type,” he jokes. We both know I don’t have a type. “Female” is my type.
Like I said. We’re an old couple—we need few words. But we couldn’t be more different. Vincent stopped dating decades ago, not that he had been much into it before. “What’s the point?” he had said. This was around 1980, and that year’s bouquet of Parisiennes was breathtaking.
“What’s the point?” I exclaimed. “They’re beautiful. And soft. And they smell good. What do you mean, ‘what’s the point’?”
“We can only go so far, and then we have to disappear from their lives. It’s not worth it if we can’t even get close,” he sighed.
“Excuse me, but I make a regular habit of ‘getting close’!”
“I don’t mean like that,” he responded. “I’m talking emotional intimacy. And why risk exposure of our entire kindred for a girl you’re only going to spend a few nights with?” His expression was flat. Uncaring. But I knew there was an ocean of pain bottled inside him.
“Man, no one will ever compare to Hélène. It’s been seventy years since you saw her murdered by those Nazis and you’re still hanging on. You’ve just got to accept that your first love is your greatest, and everything else is going to be second-best. But second-best is better than nothing at all.”
My arguments fall on deaf ears with Vincent. If he won’t amuse himself with humans, the only other choice is to go revenant. And we know pretty much all of the female members of our kindred in France. They’re like sisters to us. Revenants do occasionally fall for one another. It happens. But it just hasn’t happened to Vincent or me. And until the next global convocation, we probably won’t meet any new bardia beauties.
Which is A-OK with me. Why settle for one girl if you can have a lot? It’s a good motto, I find. Works for drinks, friends, and women. Not so much for enemies. But our situation in France is stable. Similar number of numa and bardia. The balance of good and evil has reached an equilibrium in the past few years.
Which means I’ve got time to play.
TWO
“SAD GIRL AT TWO O’CLOCK.”
I look in the direction Ambrose nods, and see the girl sitting on the bench, hugging her knees and watching the water.
“How many times does that make this week?” I ask.
“Well, we saw her last Wednesday when you and Vin were acting like babies about the cold spell. Two nights later she was back. Nothing for a day, then three days in a row. This is the sixth time we’ve seen her in two weeks,” Ambrose calculates.
“And we’ve never seen her in the ’hood before. At her age, she’s either visiting relatives, or has moved here. She’s definitely not a tourist . . . not with that catastrophic look on her face and the fact that she visits the same boring place every day instead of going to the Eiffel Tower,” I say.
We fall silent as we reach her bench and pass without her noticing. The girl never sees us. She never sees anything. She’s like a ghost flitting through the earth without leaving a trace.
“No one’s here,” Ambrose says as we duck under the bridge. It’s less frigid than last week, but even so, the number of poor souls daring to sleep in the rough has dwindled. Ambrose cracks his knuckles and windmills his arms around before falling into his boxing routine . . . bouncing up and down from side to side and throwing punches at an invisible foe.
I start to speak, and then stop myself.
“What?” Ambrose asks, executing a powerful inside hook.
I sigh. “It’s about Sad Girl. Doesn’t it seem like Vincent . . .”
“Yep, Vin’s stalking her,” Ambrose finishes for me.
I didn’t mean to be that direct. I just wondered if Ambrose noticed the change in Vincent too. But I know he’s right. Our surveillance walks seem to lead past rue du Bac more and more often, and each time we spot Sad Girl, Vincent insists on waiting until we “see her safely home.”
“We’re not Boy Scouts,” I reminded him the third time. “We’re not here on earth to help little old ladies across the street. No one’s threatening to harm her, and she’s not going to commit suicide.”
“I know,” he replied. “But something’s different about her. Something’s wrong.”