Paris in the Dark by Robert Olen Butler

Author:Robert Olen Butler [Olen Butler, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802146465
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2018-12-07T16:00:00+00:00

17

I had to think through what was next. Opportunity does not prove guilt. Even in coming to actionable conclusions while operating outside the law, as Trask and I and all our secret service cohorts and enemies were readily doing.

The momentum of the caution induced by the Staub mess persisted in me. All this could be more illusion. Or coincidence.

But the coincidence cut both ways. That I should have been sent on a wild-goose chase for the bomber of Paris and end up sitting next to him in an ambulance bound for the front line; or that this innocent man sitting beside me should have all these indicators of terrorist guilt.

But hell. Life is full of coincidence. Especially in war. Every battle I have covered was heaped with dead bodies rendered that way by coincidence. You coincidentally take a step this way instead of that and you’re dead.

For now, though, I tried to convince myself that I didn’t have to jump to any final conclusions on this venture to the battlefront. If the worst was true of Cyrus Parsons, he wasn’t going to throw a bomb at the front line of the Great War. No one would notice. He was playing his other role now. Ambulance driver. As was I. Reporter. I could do all that I needed to do back in Paris by following the man in his off-hours.

So I considered accepting this caution, in full, as a present plan.

But that made me instantly, actively uneasy. To shadow a suspect is often an uncertain art. And ahead of us, for Cyrus and me, there were hours together on the road. For a man with a reporter’s soul, this was a chance to dig. I had this guy sitting next to me who was redolent of dynamite.

But if I dug too much, pushed too hard, how deep would his suspicion run? Surely I would still only be a newsman to him. As long as my seeming foreknowledge, my lines of questioning, were no more than might come to a newsman, then there would be nothing to make him realize I am what I am. I suspected his two selves. He had no reason to suspect mine.

The point was to stop the killing of civilians.

Which meant I had to know if it might become necessary for me to kill him.

And with that thought I stopped thinking.

I listened to the agitated mutter and slap of the Ford engine, its pistons and its belts, felt the rush of the air around us.

I had no choice but to see what I could learn.

I’d go a little easy with the questions at first, but not from excessive caution. From the instincts of a reporter on a loose deadline dealing with a source potentially full of secrets he dare not divulge. Easy as if, for all that he would know, I was simply gathering information for the ambulance story.

The convoy began to slow and shift as far left on the highway as possible, into the oncoming lane.

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