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.”

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 and battered his skull. He hadn’t had a headache like this since the last days in Kabul, drinking away the shame of defeat with homemade potato vodka. He felt nauseous, dizzy, spaced-out, concussed. Well, screw that. Kursk had been hurt a lot worse than this and kept fighting. He’d probably smelled as bad too. But it was one thing stinking when you were sitting in a foxhole at the ass end of Afghanistan and everyone else stank just as bad. In the middle of Paris, it wasn’t so smart.

Kursk looked around. He was standing on a wide avenue. Up ahead he could see ramps leading up onto a freeway, but there was barely any traffic. Behind him there were some rail yards, half lit in orange and gray. A few railway workers were wandering between the freight trucks. No one seemed to be doing too much work.

Kursk knew what he had to do. He slumped to the ground, leaning back against a lamppost by a bus shelter. Then he waited.

People came by. Three railway workers at the end of their shift, glad to be on their way home, shouted at him, told him to get a job and have a bath. One of them was about to aim a kick in his direction when his pal held him back. “Hey, Paco, you crazy? You’ll never get the smell off your boot!” The men walked off laughing.

Kursk waited.

It took about twenty minutes before he got what he wanted, one guy by himself, about Kursk’s size but flabby. He wouldn’t know how to defend himself. Kursk could tell just by looking at him.

As the man walked by, Kursk got up and walked toward him, just another drunken bum begging for a few coins. The man’s eyes widened in alarm. He tried to act tough. “Piss off, tramp!” Kursk grinned and came a few steps closer. The man turned and walked away fast, trying to maintain his dignity, not wanting to run. Kursk caught him in a few steps, grabbed the man’s head, and twisted it, snapping his neck, then caught him as he fell.

Kursk felt another stab of pain slice through his upper body. It settled into a relentless, grinding ache as he dragged the man’s body to the side of the road and dumped it by the rail yard fence.

It hurt Kursk when he pulled off the man’s jacket, pants, and shirt. It hurt when he got out of his own sodden, stinking, shredded clothes. It hurt when he got dressed again. Everything he did hurt.

He went through the man’s wallet and pockets: thirty-five francs in notes and another nine or ten in small change. That was plenty.

Kursk left the man slumped against the fence in his old, sewer-drenched clothes. It would be a while before anyone realized he was dead. No one was going to go too close to a guy like that.