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The doors opened on my name. WHIT, in black capitals, up high on a card in the hands of a man who had just taken a picture of the train I was standing in.

“Mr Whit.” He came forward through the people getting off like they weren’t there, gray polo, collar up, a phone in his back pocket. “Welcome to Paris. I am Bastien.”

WHIT is the name I model under. Jace Whitfield, out of Durham, North Carolina, by way of New York, twenty-six, with a right shoulder sitting lower than my left and a dressing on my left palm gone gray at the edges, both of them souvenirs of the city I’d just left.

“Hey.” It came out lighter than I felt. “You got my name big enough?”

“So you see it.” He looked past me at Rui on the step with both our cases, one in each fist, and his smile didn’t move. “Mr Ferreira. There is room in the car for you also.”

Rui looked at me. I hadn’t told anybody in Paris his name would be on this train, and from his face, neither had he.

“I have a taxi,” Rui told him, pleasant, the voice he uses on landlords. “But thank you.”

“Of course.” Bastien held out his hand for a case. “Which is for Mr Whit?”

“The black one,” I said.

Rui didn’t let go of it straight away. He stood on the platform with my case hanging off his right hand and his market case off his left, and gave Bastien’s gray polo the look he gives a man in bad trousers. Then he handed it over.

“He can’t carry,” Rui informed him. “Not with that arm and not with that hand. You lift it, you put it in, you take it out. He doesn’t touch it.”

“I understand.”

“Good.” Rui turned to me and lowered his voice, which on Rui only means he aims it. “I’m taking the thief. You’re taking your free car. When you get to the hotel, send me the lobby. I want to see what money looks like when it sits down.”

“Send Célia the receipt.”

“I’ll send Célia the receipt and a picture of his face.” He looked at Bastien once more, at the phone in his pocket, then back at me. “Jace. You said no driver in Milan.”

“It’s a ride to a hotel.”

“Okay.” He drew the word out long, like a man signing for a parcel he didn’t order. “Then go ride.”

He went off toward the taxis with his case knocking his leg, and looked back once from the barrier, and I lifted my left hand so he’d stop looking.

I owed somebody a face. Khalil, my man, who takes pictures for a living in New York, had asked for it before I left Milan: not the station, Jace, your face. So I held the phone up in my fingertips, careful of the dressing on my left palm, and took one with the train behind me and Bastien a few steps off, waiting, my case standing beside him like a dog on a lead.

“Landed,” I typed. “Face as ordered.”

He came back with a heart, and then, “There he is. Call me when you’re lying down.”

✦

The van was the van from the picture Bastien had sent me on the train. Gray, clean, Corsa Servizi down the side, Paris under it in smaller letters. In Milan that name had been on the gray van Stefano drove, and Stefano was the man who came up our stairs with a knife. Alistair Venn, who owns Veyre, had told me himself there’d be no further work for Stefano or for Corsa Servizi. When I asked why the Paris pack still said Corsa, he’d written back, Different team. Separate contract. I’ll look into it.

I had let that be the end of it. Here was the rest.

Bastien put my case in the back like it was empty and slid the side door open. I got in with my right arm tight to my ribs and my small bag across my body, and took the seat behind him on the far side, by the other door. The inside smelled of lemon air freshener and of a car that waits a lot.

“Hotel first,” I reminded him, when he got in. “You said of course.”

“Yes, Mr Whit.”

His phone went before we were out of the station road. He put it on his knee on speaker, so low I only got the shape of a man’s voice, and Bastien said oui, and oui, and Monsieur Derval, and something with la maison in it. I don’t speak French. I know about nine words of it, and two of them are thank you.

I had the hotel address in the welcome pack, so I opened the map. The blue dot was me. The hotel was a red pin, off to the left and behind us. The blue dot was going right.

I let it go right for two streets, because part of me wanted to be wrong.

“This isn’t the way to the hotel.”

“A short welcome.” He looked at me in the mirror. Polite eyes. “He is very close.”

“Hotel first, you said.”

“Mr Derval asks only five minutes. Then the hotel.”

“I said no to that on the train. You said he’d understand.”

“He understands.” He signaled. He turned right again. “Five minutes.”

My right arm had gone tight against my side all on its own. The traffic was buses and scooters and a man on a bicycle with a loaf across his handlebars like a lance, and none of it was going my way.

I opened my notes. I didn’t mean to. My thumb went to it like a tongue goes to a sore tooth.

Baby. There’s something I didn’t tell you. Veyre paid me five hundred euros for introducing Rui. It came before anybody finished checking it. Haven’t touched it. And the driver they’re sending for me in Paris is from Corsa Servizi. The same company Stefano drove for.

It ran on. Didn’t tell you. Didn’t tell Ada. Didn’t tell Rui. And it stopped where I’d stopped it on the train, on because.

I held it down until the screen offered me Copy. I opened Khalil’s thread, his heart sitting there under my face, and I could already hear him. Get out of that car. Why are you telling me from inside the car.

I closed it.

The van stopped at a red light on a wide one-way street, three lanes all going the same direction, us in the left one with the pavement right there outside my window, a café with its chairs facing out like a jury. Bastien was saying oui into his knee again.

I pulled the handle. The door didn’t want to come, and I had no right hand for it, so I put the heel of my left palm flat against the frame and shoved, and the dressing took it and the hurt went up my wrist like a struck match. The door slid. I got one foot down on the curb, then the other, and stood up on the pavement with my small bag and my breath stuck somewhere under my collarbone.

Bastien twisted round in his seat.

“Mr Whit.” Still polite. That was the worst part. “Your bag, Mr Whit.”

“Take it to the hotel.”

“Mr Whit, please, get in, it is only…”

The light changed. The car behind honked, long, French, and another one joined in, and Bastien looked at me a beat longer through the open door with the case sitting in the back behind him. Then he pressed something on the dash, the door slid shut by itself, and the van pulled away with the traffic.

My case went with it. Every piece of clothing I owned, and Paolo’s print in its stiff sleeve between taped boards, flat against the back of the case where I’d put it in Milan. A photograph of hands in a dark window that I’d bought because I couldn’t stand anybody else owning it.

I stood there holding my left wrist in my right hand like it was somebody else’s. A waiter came out of the café and looked at me, then at the street where the van wasn’t.

“Ça va?”

“I don’t know,” I told him, which was the most honest thing I’d said since Milan, and he nodded like that was a normal order and went back inside.

✦

My phone rang before I’d got my breath back. A French number. Not Bastien’s.

“WHIT.” A man’s voice, warm, careful English, the kind that’s been to good schools on purpose. “Lucien Derval. I’m so sorry. I’m told there’s been a misunderstanding about a welcome.”

“Your driver wouldn’t take me to the hotel.”

“No. I know. That’s mine, not his. I asked to say hello before you went to your room, and Bastien heard an instruction where I meant a hope.” He laughed, small, at himself. “Bastien is very literal. He’s very good and very literal. Are you hurt?”

“I’m on a sidewalk.”

“Which sidewalk? I’ll send…”

“Don’t send anything.”

He let that sit. Behind him a door closed and the room changed, bigger, stone.

“Of course,” he agreed. “Your case is safe. It’s here at the house with my coordinator. Come and collect it whenever you like, or Bastien will bring it to the hotel. Whichever you prefer.”

“The hotel.”

“Then the hotel.” I heard a pen on his end. “Alistair will be horrified. I’m horrified. This isn’t how I wanted you to meet Paris.”

“It’s how I met it.”

“Yes.” He didn’t argue with that either. “Let me pay for your taxi, at least.”

“No.”

“Then I owe you a coffee. And an apology made with my face, not my telephone.” The warmth went up a notch, the way a good host turns a lamp on before anybody notices it’s dark. “Rest. We’ll fix the rest.”

He hung up first. Polite men do that. It leaves the other man holding the quiet.

✦

I paid for my own taxi and put the receipt in my shirt pocket, like Marianne had told me to on Ada’s screen in Milan. The driver had a rosary on the mirror and didn’t say one word to me, which in Paris I was starting to think was a form of love.

The hotel looked exactly like its picture. In a hotel that’s nice. In a man it’s a warning.

“Monsieur Whit.” The woman at the desk found me in the computer like she’d been waiting. “Welcome. It’s all arranged. And your luggage?”

“It’s coming.”

“We’ll bring it up the moment it arrives.”

Up in the room there was a bed the size of my mama’s porch and a box of chocolates on the desk with a card. Welcome to Paris, WHIT. With warm regards from all at Veyre. I put the card face down and ate a chocolate anyway, because I’m not a fool.

In my small bag I had a charger, my wallet, my passport, the clinic’s spare dressings and a hospital leaflet from Milan with the neighbors’ names in my writing and Paolo’s underneath in his own capitals. That was my whole Paris.

I called down to the desk.

“Still nothing, monsieur. We are so sorry, monsieur.”

I called again, with the chocolate box open.

“Nothing yet, monsieur. The moment it comes.”

Rui texted while I was sitting on the edge of the bed with the chocolate box on my knee.

A photo of a room the width of a closet. Half of it was a single bed. The other half was a sewing machine and a bicycle hanging off the wall by its front wheel.

“Across the river,” he wrote. “Half a room. The other half belongs to the bicycle. The bicycle pays more than me.”

“The thief was very polite,” he added. “He charged me for each case and once more for being Portuguese. Receipt to Célia. Célia is crying.”

Then: “Did your free car take you somewhere with a pillow?”

I looked at that with my thumb over the keys.

“Hotel,” I wrote. “Lots of pillows. Lobby looks like its picture.”

“Send me the lobby.”

I sent him the one from the welcome pack. He sent back a crying face. “I knew it. Money sitting very still. Sleep. Don’t carry anything.”

✦

I hooked the desk chair over with my foot, stood the phone on its seat against Veyre’s chocolates, and lay down slow, the way the clinic in Miami taught me, with the right arm out on a pillow where it couldn’t argue. My left hand throbbed on my stomach like a hot coin.

Khalil picked up on the first ring. He was standing at his kitchen counter in New York in an old work shirt with the sleeves pushed up, light all over him, the mail still in its pile by the coffee maker where it lives.

“Face,” he greeted me. “Then the rest.”

“You got my face on the platform.”

“That was your face for the public. Give me the one for me.”

So I lay there and let him look. He put his thumb to the gap in his front teeth and held it there, which he does when the light’s doing something he likes.

“You look like the train ran over you instead of under you,” he observed.

“Rui carried everything.”

“That’s not what I said.” He leaned in on his elbows. “Why are you still in the travel shirt? You hate the travel shirt. You take it off in the cab.”

The collar was crooked in the little square of me in the corner. Every other shirt I owned was in a van.

“Couldn’t be bothered to unpack,” I lied, and the lie went down easy, which scared me more than the van had.

“Then take it off for me.” His voice went to the place it goes, lower, slower. “Can I watch?”

“Ask me right.”

“Can I watch you get out of that shirt with one bad arm and one nasty hand, and complain the whole way through it?”

I laughed, and it caught in the shoulder, and I didn’t care.

I started on the buttons with my left hand and he stopped me before the second one.

“Not like that. Fingertips. Keep the heel of that hand off everything.” He was watching my hand, not my chest. “That’s the rule tonight. No grip. No fist. You’re not putting that hand round anything.”

“Then what am I supposed to do with it?”

“Whatever I tell you to.”

That landed low and stayed. I did the buttons with my fingertips, clumsy as a kid in church clothes, and he talked me down them like he talks a client through the end of a shoot, nice, there, slower, look at me not your hands. Left sleeve first. The right one I let slide down the arm without lifting it, and the shirt fell off the pillow onto the carpet, and I lay there with my chest bare in a hotel room Veyre was paying for.

“Turn your shoulder to me,” he murmured.

I tipped it. He looked at it close, the way he looks at a contact sheet.

“It’s lower,” he told the screen. “It’s lower than it was in Milan.”

“It’s the same.”

“I photograph shoulders for money, Jace. It’s lower.” He let out a breath. Then the corner of his mouth went. “It’s still mine, though. Drawers.”

“Ask me right.”

“Can I see you hard for me in some rich man’s bed?”

“It’s not his bed.”

“Whose bed is it?”

“Nobody I’m staying with long,” I told him, and he looked at me funny before he let it go.

I got the waistband down with my fingertips and my forearm, and the bed didn’t creak, because it was the kind of bed that keeps its mouth shut for money. I was already most of the way there. I’d been most of the way there since he said whatever I tell you to.

Khalil’s whole face changed. He looked over his shoulder at the kitchen window and the blinds he hadn’t closed, and then he undid his jeans one-handed right there at the counter and didn’t close anything.

“Baby, your blinds.”

“Let them look. Let somebody in Brooklyn have a nice afternoon.” He took himself out and held himself loose, not moving, just letting me see. “Two fingers. Under the head. That’s all you get.”

I put two fingers under the head of my dick and it jumped like it had been called on in class. He made a noise. I made a worse one.

“Slow,” he told me. “Up and down, just the fingers. Like you don’t have anywhere to be.”

“I don’t have anywhere to be.”

“Then act like it.”

I did it slow. It was terrible. It was the best thing that had happened to me since the border. Two fingers and no grip was almost nothing, and almost nothing with Khalil watching was worse than a whole hand by a mile, and he stood there stroking himself in long easy pulls, looking at me like he was memorizing where I was.

“Tell me the room,” he asked, rough. “I need to know where everything is.”

“Big bed. Too many pillows. A chair. A gold mirror over the desk like somebody’s grandmama.”

“Where am I gonna put you?”

“Not here.”

“Then where?”

“Anywhere they’re not paying for.”

He laughed, and it came out wrecked. “Okay. Anywhere. I’m gonna get there and I’m gonna put you on your left side with that arm on a pillow, just like that, and I’m gonna take so long getting inside you that you start begging me in English and French.”

“I only got nine words of French.”

“Then you’ll beg me nine different ways.”

My hips came up off the bed on their own. I wanted more than two fingers. I wanted his hand, his mouth, his weight, and I couldn’t have any of it, and my left hand forgot the rule and closed round me. The palm lit up under the dressing like I’d grabbed a stove. I hissed through my teeth.

“What did I say?” He’d gone still, his hand stopped on himself. “What did I say, Jace?”

“I know.”

“Let go.”

I let go. My whole body was shaking with wanting to finish and he made me lie there with my hand open on my stomach, breathing, just looking at him.

“Now,” he said, softer. “Fingers. Like I told you. And don’t you dare come till I say.”

I went back to two fingers with my eyes stinging, the palm or him, I didn’t know which. He talked me back up, low and filthy and patient, about my mouth and the noise I make when he gets his tongue right, and I heard myself say his name like I was asking for something, and he said it.

“Now. Go on. Now, baby.”

I came over my own fingertips and my stomach with my heels pushed into that rich silent bed and my right arm still flat on its pillow like a good patient, and it went on longer than it had any right to off two fingers. He watched every bit of it. Then he followed me, bent over his own counter with one hand braced on the mail and his eyes open on the screen, the gap showing.

For a while neither of us said anything at all.

“There,” he managed, when he could. “Now you’ve been to Paris.”

“I been to Paris before.”

“Not like that you haven’t.” He tucked himself away and wiped his hand on a dish towel, which I was going to bring up whenever he next complained about my towels. “How’d you get from the station?”

“A man with a sign. My name on it, big.”

“Look at you. Paris knows your name.” He smiled, tired, pleased. “I talked to the book people. They want to see the series in person. I’m working on it. I’m coming.”

“When?”

“When they say. Soon as they say.” He picked his phone up off the counter and brought my face close. “Get some sleep. Call your mama.”

“Yes sir.”

“Love you.”

“Love you.”

The screen went dark, and there I was, naked on Veyre’s bed with my stomach a mess and my hand burning, having told the man I love about a sign with my name on it and not about the man holding it.

I texted my mama, “Here safe. Call you when I’ve slept,” and she sent back hearts and praying hands, which in her language is a full conversation.

Then the phone lit up again on the chair seat, against the chocolates, with a number I’d just saved.

“Your case is here. Come tomorrow and let me apologise properly. The house is lovely in the morning. L.”

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