she started cutting. A few women looked at her. One of them started talking in French. Alix looked at her and mimed incomprehension.
'You crazy?' the woman repeated in English. 'You cut that beautiful hair, your man, he won't recognize you.'
'Exactly,' said Alix, and smiled.
The woman laughed. 'But cherie, there must be an easier way of escaping from him, no?'
'Maybe it's not him I want to escape.'
'Okay, a woman of mystery!'
Alix went back to her cutting. She stopped once her hair had been reduced to a neat blond bob that fell halfway down her neck. She ran her hands through her new cut, tossing her head from side to side to feel how it moved and fell. 'No,' she muttered to herself. 'Too boring.' She picked up the scissors again.
A few minutes later, she was left with a short, almost boyish crop. She looked at the mirror again, happier this time. Then she picked up each box of hair color in turn, holding it by her face before coming to a decision.
She filled her basin with warm water, bent down, and dunked her head. Then she shampooed in the black dye. Now came the boring part: She had to wait twenty minutes for the dye to work properly. So she sat on the edge of her basin, smoked a Marlboro, and watched the world go by.
The couple who'd had sex emerged from their cubicle. The woman dashed to the mirror to check her face and hair, while the man scowled at her impatiently. Neither of them seemed too interested in romance. Alix wondered if it had been a professional transaction. She decided probably not. A decent hooker would at least have pretended she'd enjoyed it. That way the John might pay for a second helping.
The dealer's trade slackened off for a few minutes. He tried to persuade Alix to buy, then settled for a broken English conversation about the difficulties of doing business with clients who were, by definition, screwups. Alix sounded like she knew what she was talking about. The dealer was impressed.
'You sell powders too?' he asked.
'No,' she said. 'Something else.'
A pair of blonds walked in, teetering on four-inch stilettos, and for a second the ladies'-room babble fell silent. The two newcomers were identical, but eerily, unnaturally so in their doll-like perfection. They had wide turquoise eyes, perfect little noses, and puffy, pouty lips. They looked around with blank indifference, as if long since bored by the effect their looks had on the world around them. Either that, thought Alix, or their faces had simply been stuffed with so much Botox they were no longer capable of any expression at all.
The dolls stood next to Alix in front of the mirror, bitching about the man they were with. Bitching in Russian. One of them glanced at Alix in the mirror and attempted a puzzled frown.
'Ya znayo vas?'
She was asking, 'Do I know you?' but now it was Alix's turn to look wide-eyed and clueless. 'Sorry,' she said, making her accent as all-American as she could manage. 'I don't understand what you said. But I sure love that twin thing you've got going.'
The two dolls turned back to their own reflections and swapped a few catty observations about dumb Yankees. They fixed their hair, smoothed down their microscopic frocks, and headed back out to the club. As the door swung shut behind them, Alix let out a little laugh, a mix of amusement and sheer relief.
'They were quite a pair, huh?'
Alix looked up to see a fresh-faced, smiling girl, barely out of her teens, wearing jeans and a cropped top. She had clear blue eyes and a dusting of freckles across her lightly tanned face.
'You American?' Alix asked.
'No, Canadian. I come from Winnipeg. My name's Tiffany.'
'Hi, Tiffany, I'm Alexandra. Look, could you do me a little favor? Could you just look outside the door to see if the guy at the corner table is still there?'
'Sure.' Tiffany walked to the door and looked out. 'You mean the cute dark-haired one, with, like, a white shirt and a gray jacket?'
Alix smiled. Cute wasn't a word she'd thought of applying to Carver. 'Yeah,' she said. 'That's the one.'
'Hang on, be right back.' Tiffany disappeared through the door. Twenty seconds later she returned. 'You know what? He really is cute. Kinda rough around the edges, but I like that. He's a lot cuter than my date, that's for sure. Anyway, so I asked if he wanted some company. He said he was waiting for someone. I think he really likes you.'
At last, the time was up. Alix rinsed out the dye, then crouched down beneath the hand dryer and blasted her head with hot air. It only took seconds. That was one big advantage to going so short. She just needed one last touch.
She checked out the other women standing next to her. There was a punky looking rock chick a couple of basins down with a tub of clear styling gel. That would do. Alix leaned toward her and pointed at the gel. 'Please?' she said. The girl nodded.
Alix scooped her right hand into the gel, rubbed her hands together, then started scrubbing her fingers back and forth through her hair to make it look fuller, choppier. Then she stepped back from the mirror and turned her head from side to side to scrutinize every angle before leaving the room.
'That was worth the wait,' said Carver, when she got back to the table. 'You look amazing.'
'You think so?' asked Alix. 'It feels kind of strange to me, like there's nothing there anymore. Still, if you like it, we should drink to my new style…' She summoned a waiter. 'A bottle of Cristal, please.'
A minute later there were two full champagne glasses on their table and a pale, clear bottle sitting beside them in an ice bucket.
'Na zdorovye!' Alix said, raising her glass.
For a second she looked at the golden, bubbling liquid, felt the icy chill of the glass against her fingers, and caught the sharp scent of the drink in her nostrils. She realized she had never felt more alive, more keenly in tune with her senses. The realization of what she had done that night still horrified her, but the truth remained: She had looked death in the face and survived. She felt possessed by an intense awareness of the fragility of existence. She wanted to squeeze every drop of life she could from every moment that was left to her. And she was going to start right now. Carver looked at the woman sitting opposite him. The black hair made her seem stronger, more complex. Her blue eyes shone even more brightly against that dark frame and her bone structure was revealed in all its elegant perfection. He wondered what might have happened if they'd met in anything like normal circumstances. Then he chuckled to himself. A girl like that? She wouldn't have given him a second glance.
He tried to keep things low-key. 'So, you want to eat?'
Alix drained her glass. 'Eat? No way! I want to dance. Come on!'
She got up from her chair and tugged at Carver's arm.
He frowned, nervously. 'Did you say 'dance'?' The possibility hadn't occurred to him. So far as he was concerned, the club was just a place to avoid pursuit. Alix laughed. 'Of course I'm going to dance. And if you won't dance with me, Mr. Shy Englishman, I'll find someone who will. And he'll take me in his arms. Our bodies will rub together. We'll…'
'I get the picture,' Carver said. He looked at the dance floor. It was heaving with bodies. If anything, they'd be less conspicuous among the crowd than sitting to one side at an open table. 'Okay. Let's dance.'
18
The manhole cover budged an inch, just enough to shift it out of its housing. For a few seconds, nothing happened. Then it moved again, right out of the hole, and came clattering to a rest on the sidewalk.
Grigori Kursk winced as the pain shot through his cracked ribs. He breathed heavily. That hurt too. Then he hauled himself out of the manhole and back onto the streets of Paris.
He spat on the sidewalk, trying to get the taste of muck out of his mouth. He'd swallowed half the Paris sewer system. He'd need shots for cholera, dysentery, tetanus-anything the doc could find.
What else? His hearing was gone: The explosion had temporarily deafened him and left his eardrums ringing in angry, shrieking protest. He'd been wearing lightweight body armor, but the blast had still hammered his rib cage
