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Page 15.

6. Hannah on the Run

In her purse, Hannah had a hundred Euros, which Wan had thrown on the carpeted floor for her, in a Vienna mansion owned by an Arab prince whose cousin had raped her months earlier.

Now free and in Paris, Hannah walked briskly. She felt empty and scared, but free. In her purse she also kept the red drive with Wan's industrial magic in it.

As she strode through random crowds in the night, she felt the loss of her mom, the loss of trust, the loss of everything. She let soft colors along wet streets bathe her in a drizzle of light. Green, blue, red, orange was neon, plus the dry white blaze of headlights and the red afterglow of taillights. She walked as if in a dream—free but empty. Scared but defiant. For the first time, she could see how much her life had been shattered, and how it would take a long time to rebuild.

She stopped at a kiosk to buy a crêpe wrapped in wax paper, sprinkled with powdered sugar and a splash of sweet, tart, red framboise. She ate hungrily, not enjoying it as much as she had expected. At another stand, she bought a short flute bread with ham, cheese, and butter. That she devoured, and felt a bit nourished.

She sat on a park bench, keeping in plain view of the sidewalk and the rushing traffic so nobody would bother her. Plenty of passing men eyeballed her—balled her with their eyes—and she turned away to display an offended cheekbone, a pouty mouth, violently angry eyes.

Eventually, as the night wore on, she pawed around in her purse and found the slip of paper her Luxemburgish friend Mélusine had given her in Shanghai. This pretty brunette from Luxembourg, who was in Shanghai on a legitimate work contract for Wan Industries, had saved her from those horrible, abusive men, and hidden her for a whole day. They had talked a great deal, with Hannah often in tears—and sometimes the European woman in tears of sympathy. Eventually, Mélusine had given her some phone numbers to call if she made it to this city or that. Some were numbers for the Progressive Alliance for Peace (PAX). Others were people who got things done with local political parties in various countries. All were working to restore democracy and laws that kept the big, beautiful dogs called corporations on the same leash of justice and order that private citizens had to observe. Now, Hannah found the name of one such person—a fixer of sorts named Mr. Fincoff, a lawyer with a ratty office in one part of town, and a ratty apartment in another arrondissement.

She called Fincoff and they agreed to meet. She took the metro to his apartment, and they talked for a bit. He did not seem to be interested in her for sex, which was a welcome change. He was older, and repulsive, with chalky white spittle stuck in the corners of his mouth, and wrinkles on his face. He seemed to have been born in that cheap brown suit that hugged his emaciated frame. She thought he smelled a bit of mothballs. But he was all business. Yes, he would talk to PAX about the data she had stolen from Wan. That was the moment when she realized there was a mission for her in Europe before she figured out how to get back to California and forget all this as if it had never happened.

Fincoff's apartment smelled of old man—of mothballs, of rotting apples in a basket near a window, of spoiled milk in a drain, of stale clothing piled on a bedroom chair.

Hannah waited around while he sat in a small office and talked endlessly on the phone.

Meanwhile, Hannah did her own research, studying notes Mélusine had given her, scribbled in pencil on torn pages from a small journal. She'd given Hannah directions on how to find her home in the Luxembourg City section of Belair. That sounded so romantic and pretty, almost wistful—Beautiful Air, Pretty Air, Nice Air. As if people could lose themselves in a place like that on the horizon of wishes and dreams, where bad things did not happen and your parents did not die but stayed to love you and care for you, maybe guide you a little better than you could figure things out for yourself. Mélusine drew a map for Hannah in that same blurry pencil. Names like Gare, Avenue de la Liberté, Pont Adolphe lay scrawled across a net of hastily drawn lines. And then, written beneath in capitals and underlined three times was the name of a Professor Hilaire Sander, Ph. D., and a note that he taught Economics and Political Science at the Uni Lux or University of Luxembourg. In parentheses after his name were three letters, also underlined with force: PAX—Progressive Alliance for Peace, from the initials P and A, and the X sort of rounded it off to the Latin word pax, meaning peace.

Fincoff reassured her that he had made contact with the right people—PAX, in Paris—and they would come to receive the materials she had taken from Wan. It was all in the cause of peace, he said, and she believed him. He stood before her in his brown suit, with a yellowing white shirt and blue tie whose stripes made it look more like a nylon sock than a necktie. He shook her hand with his smooth, clay skin and strangely cold eyes. He told her to wait at the apartment while he went to Bagnolet to meet with some contacts from the democracy movement.

After Fincoff left, she noted some information he had scribbled on a pad beside the phone. It was phantom information, a palimpsest, because he had taken the scrap of note paper with him. But he had written so firmly that the pen made a ghost image on the next sheet. She was able to decipher: Bar-39, Bagnolet, on the line 3 of the etro past Père Lachaise Cemetery toward the Galieni Station. She'd been in Paris with Wan several times, and had played tourist with two pretty young Hungarian brunettes who served Wan at his villas in Shanghai, Honolulu, and San Francisco. Hannah had carried with her a paper place mat from an ice cream parlor in the Quartier Latin, on which was printed a sort of fun, cartoonish map of the city's highlights. From there she'd invested in a metro map, and together the two documents had given her a sense of how to get around the city. Each metro line was designated by its two end points. She lost Fincoff in the crowd as the afternoon aged toward evening, but she understood that she must take line 3 past Gambetta, past the Porte de Bagnolet, under the peripheral highway, and get off at the Gallieni terminus. There, off the Rue de Lenin, on a side street, he was to meet these PAX people to negotiate the turning over of the stolen data.

Something in his eyes had not rung true, which made her wonder about Mélusine—the kind girl on Song Lu in Shanghai. She wondered all the more about this shifty old man, though. He'd tried to get her to turn over the McGuffin, but she'd been crafty enough to refuse. It was hidden first in a stairwell in his building. Then, after he'd left, she'd hidden it on top of the water tank under the ceiling in his toilet. Now she wanted to get a glimpse for herself, secretively, of these PAX freedom fighters and democrats he was supposed to meet. Before she turned it over, she must be absolutely sure it was not going to fall into the wrong hands. If someone in the underworld got that experimental data record of the IFS, it would end up getting sold to Wan. That was the last thing she wanted.

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