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Page 20.
10. A Paris Post Office
 A drizzly, gray morning dawned over the narrow streets of a suburb on the northern edge of Paris. The air was already heavy with smells of African and Middle Eastern cooking. Laughter and conversation in a dozen languages other than French floated in the air. The streets were crowded with women in face veils and men talking animatedly together while kneading prayer beads.
From a chipped wooden doorway emerged a young blonde woman who looked too preoccupied to care about the stares, whistles, and rude comments from immigrant men.
The young California woman named Hannah Smith wore her vanilla-golden hair wrapped in a chignon at the back of her head, and a silken, pretty kerchief in citron and absinthe shades draped over that to fit in better with the largely Muslim neighborhood, and to hide her blondeness better. She carried a small, clay-blue leather purse. Her clothing included a kind of blue work coat like those worn by airport workers or baggage handlers at rail stations, plus wrinkled wheat-colored, silken pants that had seen better days, and soft shoes resembling those of a ballet dancer. She kept both hands tightly on a rectangular object inside a torn, white plastic grocery sack that had been meant to be used once and thrown away.
The young woman spoke halting French as she asked directions to the nearest post office. With some effort—ignoring general rudeness, especially feral grins and hateful looks from jobless, aimless young men who looked down on non-Muslim women as whores—she found the small postal station on a shady, quaint little side street from another age.
She pushed open the heavy wooden door and entered, smelling familiar aromas of paper, ink, and rubber as befitted any post office in the world. For an instant, it was like being home—but achingly not, as she remembered just as quickly. Soon, though; soon she would be home in California, back to normalcy, where she understood the rules and knew the daily game of living. She was a free woman at last, though still in great danger. But she was in charge of her destiny now. Just not to blow it, that was the challenge. She had been around the world, courtesy Wan, and had come to trust her instincts
The small lobby was shady and empty at this hour. Her business at the wooden counter with its antique metal grill took just a few minutes. The heavyset, dark-skinned woman in postal uniform behind the bars was efficient and pleasant. She helped Hannah wrap her package in the appropriate postal envelope for express delivery to an address in Luxembourg-ville, Luxembourg. The package should arrive within a day or two.
That done, the blonde woman clutched her receipt and hurried back outside. Her path took her the way she had come, to the apartment of the man whose murder she had witnessed not far from the Gallieni station in Bagnolet in the hours of darkness not long ago. Tucking the receipt into the small, strapless purse, Hannah made her way back to Fincoff's apartment—and some intriguing, unfinished business awaiting her there.
She stopped along the way to buy two ham and cheese baguettes wrapped in wax paper, along with a glass bottle of mineral water with an ornate label.
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Thank you for reading the first half (free, what I call the Bookstore Metaphor). If you love it, you can (easily and safely at Amazon) buy the whole e-book for the painless price of a cup of coffee—also known as Read-a-Latte (hours of reading enjoyment; the coffee is gone in minutes, but the book stays with you forever). You can also get those many hours of happy reading from the print edition for the price of a sandwich (no, I don't have a metaphor for that, like a 'sandwich metaphor?'). To help the author, please recommend this book your friends, and also post a favorable (five star!) review at Amazon, Good Reads, and similar online reader resources. Thank you (JTC).
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