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Rose has always told stories. The world is chaotic and venal, probably irredeemably so, but stories provide order. They may contain chaos and corruption, but they are intricate, exquisite, deliberately so.
Were things otherwise, she would have become yet another aloof, pretentious belles-lettriste. Her stories would limn better worlds, condemn our own, tease and taunt the reader.
This world, however, is especially chaotic. For whatever reason, she is at the center of this particular story.
It is being written in action as well as words. She stars in a featured role.
She allows herself one pat of the pins in her hair, a single tug on her wool skirt. The seam in her stockings is perfect; her ankles are crossed demurely. She wears sensible, low-heeled lace-up oxfords, supple oxblood leather that reminds her of Communion wine. She stills her hands and steadies her gaze. She would like to fidget, but she will not.
She would like to do a lot of things, but that is neither here nor there.
She sips her wine and opens her leather-bound notebook. This cafe is relatively quiet, a remarkable quality for any part of Paris. She runs her finger down the page.
She is not reading, but pretending that she is not, in fact, waiting.
The line between disguise and costume, hiding and performing, is as thin and slippery as her silk slip, strong as the girdle she struggled into for the first time this morning.
She hides in plain sight.
They missed their meeting in Santa Fe. Too many people milled around the Loretto Chapel, so Jade doubled back. She left Rose waiting until the moon rose and the streetlights blanched out the trunks of the trees.
In Munich, they saw each other across the street, but a Crockercorp agent slowed his Mercedes to a stop in front of Rose and stared at her until she moved on. (The dead eyes of the agents, through which the Empress peers, remain forever unnerving.)
If all goes well, they might succeed in meeting today.
Hope, however, is another luxury Rose rarely permits herself.
*
Three glasses of wine and the better part of a cheese board later, Jade appears at the entrance. Wearing a slim dark suit over an open-necked white shirt, her silver hair standing out from her skull, she resembles her famous brother. She is clean-shaven, though, a little slighter, composed of finer lines.
She looks like Gregory Peck in the later years, Cary Grant gone to seed, louche and handsome, Bogart leaning against Sam's piano. Nothing like the hero Rose knows her to be.
Sunglasses cover her eyes, the sun lights her hair mercury. She might be looking anywhere.
When Jade lifts her hand in greeting and crosses the small room, Rose's heart bangs in her throat. She maintains her apparent calm, thinking of all the people who have done this before her, all the dangers they faced, all the desperate causes they died for.
Jade passes Rose's table without slowing. The sound of her voice, boisterous in greeting someone else, is abruptly cut off when the door swings shut behind her.
A faint trail of scent, lemongrass and ambergris, is all that remains.
Rose lets her eyes close as she wills her pulse to slow. Her hands want to tremble. There is a sudden band of sweat at her hairline, across the nape of her neck.
When she asks for the bill, the waiter leaves a slip of a receipt. This has never happened to her in Paris. The ink is old, pale purple, hard to make out. Where the total would otherwise be, there is a street address on the Left Bank.
Though she would like to run all the way there, Rose takes her time: she stops for a coffee that does nothing to sober her, browses in a tchotchke-laden tourist trap for agonizing minutes, and circles around her destination several times before wandering up to the door of a small bookstore. She has to slide in sideways between towering, overloaded shelves.
Once inside, she inhales deeply. That distinct scent of old paper and glue makes her head swim; she has to work not to grin. She always feels safest, happiest, among books.
As with everything else, Jade knows that.
Rose finds her far in the back, in the warren of room's last tiny alcove. She has the sunglasses pushed up onto her head as she examines an oversized volume. Edging closer, Rose makes out what the book is: an auction catalogue for shotguns, pistols, and blunderbusses.
"Could do some damage with one of those," Rose says quietly.
Jade grins but doesn't look up from the page. "So pretty. Want one of each."
Rose takes down a paperback; it isn't in French or English, but she pages through it anyway. Her back to Jade, she says quietly, "How's the matinee idol?"
"Amazing! Growing like a weed, making every kind of mess imaginable!" Jade closes her catalogue with a dull thud and presses against Rose's back, reaching under her arm to retrieve another book. She lowers her voice and adds, "He astonishes me every single day."
Rose nods. Her throat tight, she presses her lips together and keeps nodding.
Their codes are simple sequences of elaboration: meteors-->shooting stars-->stars-->celebrities. Despite three-quarters of a century spent among humans, the Empress cannot fully grasp figurative language. Metaphors and similes, references and poetic flights, all elude her. This sort of aloofness from the what of things, this refuge in language, comes naturally to Rose, and, in a different manner, to Dave as well. Jade struggles with it, however. She is not brutishly literal, like the Empress, but she is honest and frank to a fault.
Only two celebrities are accounted for, and the Empress sank her talons into one. But the other is in Jade's care.
There ought to have been two more, according to Jade. Rose would never have met Jade otherwise. She was nineteen, in her second year at Wellesley, and suddenly a gorgeous older woman was taking her into Boston for tea at L’Espalier and informing her that an alien empress was taking over Earth. That someday soon, a meteor was going to land with a baby who'd help stop that, a baby she needed to raise.
That day has yet to come, and probably never will, not the way things are going. But Rose still believes Jade, more fervently than ever.
"What's this?" Jade touches the hair rolled at Rose's nape, strokes the flat of her palm down her hip. "Who are we today?"
Rose bites her lip. "Guess."
"Give me a hint."
Jade has her trapped, both arms extended and gripping the bookcase, elbows digging into Rose's hips. Rose twists around, backing up against the bookcase. "We'll always have Paris."
Jade's smile is huge, toothy, radiant.
She hooks her thumbs into the waistband of Rose's skirt and pulls herself close, up along Rose's body, until all Rose sees is silvery hair and dark skin, until all she smells is books and Jade, all she hears is her own pulse.
"I want to be Laszlo." Jade nips at Rose's neck, nudging aside her collar, pressing her face into the curve of shoulder.
"You are. You're both," Rose says, and wonders if this is what melting feels like, this slow heavy shift throughout her body, twining around Jade's lean strength, opening and parting and clutching.
"Tell me everything you know," Jade says, pinching Rose's nipple, chuckling low in her throat. "Ve haff vays of making you talk."
Her skin flashes cold for an agonizing moment before Rose snaps back into the moment and the flush returns.
They pass information, suggest new contacts, debate Dave's commitment, all in code, all with hitched breath, all as Jade works a knee between Rose's, then a hand up her thigh.
She tugs at the girdle irritatedly, then beams when Rose cants her hips and lets Jade's hand slip past, over her panties. Jade cups her there, thrusting fast, Rose riding the hard twist of bone.
Her talent for narrative, for absenting herself into omniscience, vanishes. She's gasping, pushing against Jade's fingers, heat and oxygen and muscles stuttering raggedly toward orgasm. Rose splinters, clutches for Jade, sags back to herself.
"Should've told me," Jade says a little later, kissing the sweat off Rose's hair. She guides Rose's hand to her gabardine trousers, helps her tug down the zipper. "I could've dressed appropriately."
Rose shakes her head, dazed, and spreads her fingers, curling them upward against Jade's slick center. "This is good. This is just right."
Jade shudders against her, breath coming harsh and shallow against Rose's mouth. Rose works her hand faster, twisting and reaching until she aches,
"Ilsa, Ilsa, Ilsa..." Jade pushes against her, each book and shelf imprinting itself against her back and legs, "you're breaking my heart --"
Rose sinks down to her knees, mouth open and tongue reaching, bangs her nose on Jade's pelvic bone before tilting her head just right. She's blind down here, lost all over again and swamped by scent and slick and snugly folded skin. Jade shoves her hands into Rose's perfect hair, holds her there and rubs against tongue and teeth, her clit and labia swelling, soaking, sticking.
When she comes, her shriek is delighted, that pure joy that only Jade can achieve.
Rising, Rose catches her around the waist and holds her up, just long enough for Jade to catch her breath. She is flushed and damp-skinned, teeth white in the gloom.
"Good work," Jade tells her when they've straightened their clothes and smoothed back their hair (an operation far easier for Jade than Rose, who lost at least six bobby pins). "The gossip I mentioned should be hitting the stands next week."
Rose translates the code, tucking it away in her memory, and squeezes Jade's hand. She is suddenly weak, a coward. She doesn't want to let go.
Jade pecks her cheek, taking back her hand and tipping her sunglasses down over her eyes. She gives Rose a jaunty, satirical salute. "Aux armes, citoyens, formez vos bataillons. Marchons, marchons!"
Rose turns away. When she looks over her shoulder, Jade is gone, and she is alone again.
It isn't 1941, she isn't Ilsa Lund or any real-life counterpart. It is 1999, and the world is more dangerous than ever.
Yet she feels lighter, safer, than she has in months.