Chapter 6
REMINGTON
Iwas wheels up within the hour.
Not because Kane told me three days. Because there was a dead man in a side street in Deira who'd be found by morning, and the trail between his body and a penthouse registered to Graves (not that there was one) was a trail I preferred to sever before sunrise.
The concierge arranged the jet—one call, no questions, a car at the service entrance. I left through the garage. The staff pretended it was normal because that was what they were paid for.
Seven hours in the air. I spent most of it awake. Sleep and I had a complicated arrangement—it arrived uninvited, left without warning, and punished pursuit. I sat with my pen in my pocket and Kane's email open on the secure phone, reading it for the third time.
An address in the seventh arrondissement. No name. No context. One line: You know what to say.
Paris.
I'd been more times than I could count—one of the minor luxuries of money that turned geography into a menu.
I had a relationship with the city the way I had relationships with most things: honest enough to function, complicated enough to keep me interested, built on appreciation undercut by irritation.
I respected the place. The weight of it. History pressing through the surface of every block like bones through skin—you couldn't walk fifty yards without stepping over something that had bled or burned or launched a revolution somebody still had feelings about.
The architecture had conviction. The food had standards it would rather die than compromise. The women carried themselves with a self-possession I found more interesting than beauty, though they generally delivered both without being asked.
The French, however, were insufferable.
Not universally. But enough of them, and in the positions that mattered—waiters, hotel clerks, the woman at the patisserie on the Rue de Rivoli who'd once regarded my pronunciation the way you'd regard a stain on linen—that the collective effect was undeniable.
And it wasn't reserved for Americans. The British caught it. The Germans. Other French people from the wrong side of the périphérique. The entire country ran on a low-grade Napoleonic charge, a shared certainty that they had invented civilization and the rest of us were tenants behind on rent.
Still. Of all the cities I passed through—wearing a different version of myself in each—Paris was where something in me settled. Not relaxed. I didn't relax. But settled, the way a compass needle finds north and stops searching.
The scale of the place, the density of its beauty and indifference, made the weight of being Remington Graves fractionally lighter.
We landed at Le Bourget before dawn. Another car. Another silent driver. Paris arrived through the windshield in that grey, pre-morning light that made everything look like a photograph that hadn't finished developing.
I didn't go to the address.
Kane said three days. The body in Deira had moved up my departure, but it hadn't changed my relationship with being told where to go.
I'd spent my adult life taking orders willingly—BUD/S, deployment, the whole rigid architecture of military hierarchy.
But this wasn't an order. This was a request wrapped in mystery, and I wanted one night as Remington Graves in Paris before walking through a door I suspected didn't open both ways.
The hotel was on the Avenue Montaigne. I won't name it—discretion matters even inside my own head—but it was the kind of place where the lobby smelled like money that had been money for centuries.
Not the sharp, chemical scent of new wealth.
Something deeper. Aged wood. White flowers.
The faint suggestion that someone was playing Chopin and had been since before the war.
I chose it for a specific reason.
Modelling agencies kept suites here, rotating talent through Paris the way teams rotated players through spring training.
I'd had a taste of the Australian in Dubai, and the part of my brain that ran on appetite rather than reflection had already done the maths: pleasant day in one city, pleasant day in another, right hotel, minimal effort.
Checked in. Dropped the bag. Tipped the bellman with the kind of generosity that was less gratuity and more opening negotiation.
"Any models in residence this week?"
He was professional. The slight hesitation was his only tell.
"I'm afraid not, Monsieur Graves. The agencies cleared out last week." He leaned in. "Unless you'd care for some dried-up prunes who used to be French models in the eighties? I believe there's a reunion dinner on the third floor."
He grinned. The hundred-euro note vanished into his pocket with the practised ease of a man who'd been making money disappear his entire career.
Right.
My usual Paris ran like a well-oiled machine.
Breakfast at a café near the Concorde where the staff brought what I wanted without asking.
A fitting at the tailor on Rue Francois where the old man called me Monsieur Rem and complained about my shoulders with the fondness of someone who'd been reshaping wealthy men for forty years.
Afternoons at whatever gallery or opening offered the best ratio of interesting women to acceptable champagne. Dinner somewhere with a wait list that didn't apply to me. A bar. A woman. A taxi or a walk depending on her shoes. The suite. Morning. Again.
Good machinery. Smooth. Calibrated to produce maximum enjoyment with minimum vulnerability.
A life that asked nothing of me except showing up and being charming, which was the one skill I'd never had to develop because it had been bred into me the way speed is bred into certain horses—not earned, just there.
Today, I wasn't feeling any of it.
Maybe it was the body in Deira, still cooling somewhere in my peripheral awareness.
Maybe it was Kane's face under that streetlight, older than I expected, carrying something a grin couldn't fully mask.
Maybe it was the five words on my phone that had shifted something behind my ribs and left it sitting wrong.
I did something I hadn't done since my mother brought me here as a boy.
I walked.
Not the walk of a man going somewhere. The aimless kind. Letting the city happen instead of imposing myself on it—a mode I had almost no practice with, which was exactly why it felt necessary.
Daytime Paris had a different texture than the version I usually inhabited.
The tourist layer was already deployed along the main arteries—couples with guidebooks, families negotiating in six languages about which museum to argue in, a Japanese tour group moving with collective precision past a man selling miniature Eiffel Towers off a blanket.
The local layer threaded through the gaps.
A woman with a baguette under her arm walking at a pace designed to shame anyone moving slower.
A man smoking outside a tabac with the settled permanence of someone who'd been smoking outside that tabac since the Mitterrand administration and saw no reason to stop.
I crossed the river toward Notre-Dame.
They'd rebuilt it. The cranes were gone but scaffolding lingered in patches, like a patient discharged but still coming back for check-ups. The cathedral looked good—sharper than I remembered, stone scrubbed to a pale gold it probably hadn't worn since the twelfth century.
The fire had given them permission to fix what centuries had quietly been ruining, and the result was a building that looked both ancient and startled. Something woken from a long sleep, not yet certain of the year.
I stood and looked at it longer than I'd looked at anything recently that wasn't a threat or a woman.
My mother had brought me here when I was eleven. Before St. Paul's. Before any of it. She'd stood in this spot—or near enough—and told me the thing about the great buildings was that they'd been built by people who knew they'd never see them finished.
Generations of hands. Centuries of faith in something you'd never live to verify.
She said it quietly, the way she said everything that mattered, and I'd been a kid and hadn't understood but nodded anyway, because understanding things made her smile.
I understood now. Standing here with a dead man behind me and a mystery ahead, I understood what she meant about building something you couldn't see the end of. I didn't enjoy the understanding. It meant I'd lived long enough to need it.
I walked on. Through the Marais, where the streets narrowed and the cafés cultivated a nonchalance that must've required tremendous effort to maintain.
Past clusters of African vendors on corners, knock-off bags and sunglasses arranged on sheets that could be bundled and gone in seconds at the first sign of police.
An entire economy built on the ability to disappear, which I respected professionally, even if the Louis Vuitton was spelled wrong.
Lunch standing up at a counter because sitting down felt like commitment. A croque monsieur that had no business being as good as it was.
And then—without deciding to, or without admitting I had—I walked past the address.
Kane's address. A street in the seventh that looked like every other street in the seventh.
Pale stone, iron balconies, the composed restraint of a neighborhood with money and manners and no need to prove either.
Not too upscale. Not too modest. The kind of street you'd pass without a second glance, which was the point.
I kept walking. Circled the block. Came past again, some habits more useful than therapy.
The building was unremarkable. Heavy door, dark wood, brass hardware polished without obsession. No sign. No nameplate. It sat on the street with the neutrality of something that had chosen to be forgettable.
But on the second pass, I felt it.
The prickle. Not the hostile attention of Deira—something cooler, more professional. Eyes behind glass. Someone watching the street with the patient discipline of a person who considered it a vocation.