Generation of Liars Read online

  Thing is, Rabbit is a bona fide genius, especially with computers and technology. Up until three years ago he had been the kind of guy who never had to lie about who he was his whole life. Rich parents, private schools, and a perfect GPA to boot. Then Lenny Rabitz got caught running a high-stakes poker racket out of his Yale dorm room. After being expelled by his school and disowned by his parents on the same day, you better believe it was this ex-golden child’s best day of his life when the November Hit happened. Motley found the kid looking forlorn at a bus stop on Crown Street in New Haven with a laptop case on his shoulder and he offered him a job and a chance to start over.

  “Alice!” Rabbit managed to twist my name out of his exacerbated throat.

  “Damn it, Rabbit.” I was practically howling. “Did you see what happened up there?”

  “I’m sorry, Alice.”

  “You’re sorry? Sorry? You watched some guy pull a gun on me on the Eiffel Tower and all you can say is sorry?”

  “Correction, Alice, I watched a guy pull a gun on you from three-hundred yards away. Plus it was dark.”

  “Where the hell were you when I got to the bottom? I had to drag my bleeding ass to the hospital all by myself.”

  “I panicked. I was calling for help.”

  “Help? Let me guess. You were already busy on the phone telling Motley that I screwed up the job.”

  “I alerted him to the situation, yes.”

  “Oh geez, Rabbit, you are such a brownnoser.”

  “Well, clearly you haven’t died from the altercation, so where are you now, Alice?”

  “I’m outside Vincent de Paul Hospital. I just got patched up by some dude who was probably a bogus doctor.”

  “You always think the worst of everyone. Where is de Paul? On Rochereau?”

  I squinted to see the words written on the sign at the cross street. “I think so.”

  “Come to my apartment so we can regroup. Don’t walk here. Those trigger-happy guys from the Eiffel Tower might be looking for you. Hop on the metro at the Denfert-Rochereau stop, it should be right in front of you if you’re on Rochereau. I will give my doorman a heads up that you’re coming.”

  I was already ducking inside the stairwell leading down to the metro station as he suggested it. My eyes scanned the concrete walls for any trace of the man who had shot me an hour earlier. The big yellow adverts for microwavable au poulet lining the tracks, meshed with the plastic blue bucket seats lining the walls, overwhelmed my eyes and dizzied my senses. The white pills hadn’t really worn off like I told the doctor. The incoming train rumbled with a thunderclap and I braced for the gust that was about to surge the tunnel on the heel of the train’s brakes. It blew my skirt up and ironed my tattered shirt to my chest. I glimpsed a blurry study of myself in the reflective doors of the train car. Trestles of my hair grew down from my scalp like knots, inorganic shades of tangerine and sienna. I was missing one of my dangly earrings. My slashed t-shirt revealed the thinness of my shoulder and laid bare a frontier of sallow, bony skin, leading the eye to my clavicle, which protruded hauntingly from my skin-and-bones frame. I was a fool to have thought that doctor was looking at me like I was beautiful.

  The reflection of my own eyes caught my attention. Haunted was the way to describe them. The eyes were green and an artificial rim of melted black eyeliner gave them an appearance that was animalistic, or extraterrestrial, or perhaps just that of a twenty-one-year-old girl who had seen too much.

  The train doors parted, splitting my reflection in two.

  “You realize I am going to have to cut my hair over this, right?” my lips spouted into the phone. I stepped onboard, one hand patting inside my bag in search of my metro pass. “I’m too damn recognizable with this red mop. I really freaking liked my hair too. Do you have any idea how pissed this makes me?”

  A homeless guy sleeping inside the train car gave me a censuring look as though my yelling was funking up the feng shui around his cardboard pillow. From his spit-glossed lips he muttered something in French I couldn’t understand. I had lived in the city for three years, and I could still barely order a croissant in the native tongue. I had been busy with other things.

  “We’ll take care of it when you get here,” Rabbit assured me. He let off a big sigh to passive-aggressively signal to me that he thought I was overreacting, as usual.

  “Give your doorman a heads-up because I am not waiting on the curb for you. You know the protocol. Have a box of hair dye and a sharp pair of scissors waiting for me when I get there.”

  * * *

  I launched my bag down on the marble countertop that formed a border around Rabbit’s shiny bathroom sink, and noted with satisfaction that he did, in fact, have both items I requested waiting for me. We had certainly done this ritual enough times.

  I glided the golden scissors into my hair and began snipping. I went for a short and sleek look, letting the pointed ends fall as daggers at my chin. To balance it out, I snipped a line of short bangs that fell high above my too-thin eyebrows. The black dye that Rabbit had left for me on the counter was already soaking my hair the color of gunpowder.

  “Where did you get this hair dye so quickly?” I called into the next room, where Rabbit was sprawled out on his four-poster bed.

  “I know you well enough by now to keep a stash. I mean this is what, your third hair change this month?”

  “Variety is the spice of life,” I hollered back.

  “A life you came very close to losing tonight.”

  “Don’t be so dramatic. If I wanted a parental lecture I would just get on a flight back to America and show up on my parent’s doorstep.”

  “You can’t do that, Alice. Your parents think you’re dead.”

  “They don’t know I’m dead, they just know I’m missing.” I pulled a tube of red lipstick from my bag and carefully drew it over my mouth. It ripened my lips to something that resembled cherries dripping in syrup. Anything to distract myself. Thinking about my parents was a too jagged a knife in my heart. I didn’t let myself go there, ever.

  “You look a little too vampish to be the girl on the milk carton,” Rabbit said, pushing his head through the bathroom door. An annoying asthmatic breath was pushing from his nostrils. “Your hair looks good. How’s the wound on your arm doing?”

  I looked down and saw that the bandage was tinctured with pinkish blood. “I think I’ll live,” I answered. “Do you really think my hair looks good?” I pushed my plastic-shine hair behind my ears.

  “You don’t look like the same girl that got shot on the Eiffel Tower and that’s what’s important. Especially if the guy who shot you comes lurking around. Who the hell was that guy anyways?”

  My cell phone rang. “Great,” I said, lifting it to my ear, “it’s probably Motley, and you know he’s going to be pissed. Hello.”

  “Alice.” It was Motley. Rabbit backed up a step.

  “It’s me, in the flesh,” I rallied some fake pep in my voice, “and with a flesh wound.” I hoped acting cute would help the situation, but Motley was a hard guy to push a laugh out of.

  “I heard about the flesh wound already, Alice. I also heard that the deal didn’t go as planned.” I knew I would need a cigarette to endure the phone call so I grabbed one from my bag and blew pale smoke at the mirror. Motley finished his thought, “Rumor has it you fell out of the Eiffel Tower.”

  “Don’t be crazy, Motley,” I crooned, followed by a pause for a nervous laugh to twist its way out of my throat. “I did not fall out of the Eiffel Tower.” I switched the phone to my other ear and tapped my cigarette ash into the sink. “I was shot out of the Eiffel Tower.”

  “That wasn’t part of the plan, now was it, Alice?”

  “Screw the plan,” I said. “The plan went horribly. The plan went worse than horribly. The plan was an apocalypse.”

  “You know how much I hate it when we experience a failure.”

  “There is one success that came out of all this. I’m alive and I’m a
brunette now. I know how much you like brunettes.” And redheads and blondes and every type in between. I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed my voice wasn’t shaking.

  “Alice,” Motley said coldly, “I don’t want to deal with your antics at the moment. You messed up a very big job for me. That makes you a liability right now.”

  Everything about Motley was numbers and dollar signs, and being in Motley’s liability column was not safe. That was the column with the big red X’s. I was pacing the bathroom now. “Motley, you know I would never intentionally screw something up for you.”

  “If that’s true, I can only wonder if you’re slipping, Alice.”

  I dropped the lid down over the toilet and curled into a ball on the seat. Rabbit was watching me, so I leapt up and shut the door on his nose. “Motley, I have to tell you something.”

  “What is it, Alice?”

  “I know the person who shot me.”

  “What do you mean you know him? Have we done business with him in the past?”

  “No, it’s not like that. I know him from my old life. His name is Pressley Connard.”

  “Who is Pressley Connard, and of what relation is he to you?”

  “He was my boyfriend back home, and when I ran away three years ago I didn’t tell him why I was running or where I was going. It seems like pure coincidence that he showed up here in Paris.”

  “Alice, the fact that you have a personal past with this man poses a big conflict of interest for you.”

  “No conflict. I swear.”

  “You know how it works in this business, Alice. The reason we cut off all the people from our past is because emotions can fog our judgment. We are meant to be free agents.”

  I swung the bathroom door open and zipped by Rabbit on my way to his liquor stash. I poured a drink from Rabbit’s mini bar, gulped it entirely too fast, and fell backwards onto the bed. “I’m fine. Trust me. I don’t have any feelings for this guy, and any feelings that might have lingered evaporated when he aimed a gun at me and pulled the trigger.”

  “Did you at least get any of the information I sent you up there to get before this ex-boyfriend of yours pulled the gun?”

  I rubbed my shoulder. The soreness of the bullet wound was breeding down my arm now. “No. I doubt there was any real information to get. I think it was some kind of setup.”

  "That won’t help lead us to the dynamite stick, now will it, Alice?"

  “Probably not.”

  “And now I have to worry about some person out there in the real world being able to positively identify someone who is employed by me. Can you see how much of a headache this is for me?”

  The liquor wasn’t calming me. I rolled onto my stomach and lit another cigarette over the edge of the bed and dangled it between my fingers. Rabbit shot me a dirty look for stinking up his sheets with smoke. I rolled my eyes at Rabbit and pleaded into the phone, “Motley, please, let’s just think rationally. There’s a chance he didn’t even recognize me.”

  “I think it would be smart if we got you out of Paris immediately.” The tone was nonnegotiable. “I am going to investigate the motive of this ex-boyfriend of yours. I want to know who he is working for and if we were set up by somebody. In the meantime, I have a more low profile job for you to carry out.”

  “What does the job entail?”

  “Nebraska.”

  “Nebraska?” I bellowed. “I know I messed up, but sending me to Nebraska is cruel and unusual punishment.”

  “No, Alice, as in Benny Nebraska.”

  “Benny Nebraska?”

  “Benny is a hacker who works out of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He supports himself by hacking Hollywood bank accounts from South America.”

  “Oh. Thank God I don’t really have to go to Nebraska. I’m not built for snow piles and strip malls,” I said. “So why am I visiting this Benny guy in Rio? Does he have information on the dynamite stick?”

  “Mr. Nebraska claims to have been able to track the last computer the disk was plugged into and he might be willing to shop it around to the highest bidder.”

  “How soon does my plane take off?” I asked, well versed with the quickness with which Motley made arrangements. No doubt my flight would be first class since Motley seemed to have limitless financial resources at his disposal. The unspoken rule was that we never asked where his fortune came from.

  “Thirty minutes. I will have a ticket waiting for you at de Gaulle airport.”

  “Once I’m in Rio, where should I go?”

  “I will send an address to your phone while you’re in flight.” Motley hung up without saying goodbye and I agitatedly bounced my phone down on the mattress.

  Rabbit rolled next to me on the bed and propped a pillow under his chin. He waved my cigarette smoke away from his nose. “How pissed did he sound?”

  “It was hard to tell.”

  “Well, was it as pissed as he gets when you drink the last diet Pepsi out of his fridge, or as pissed as when he talks about his ex-wife?”

  “Thankfully not as angry as when he talks about her.” I shuddered involuntarily. “I don’t think I could have survived a conversation with that level of malevolence.”

  “Speaking of exes,” Rabbit segued, “when you were in the bathroom, did I hear you tell Motley that the guy who shot you tonight was your ex-boyfriend?”

  “I can’t believe you were eavesdropping on my conversation.”

  “The walls are paper thin in this place.”

  “Does Motley know that? Since he’s the one paying your rent, he might want to know the shortcomings of his investment.”

  “Oh stop, Alice. So, was it really your ex-boyfriend that shot you?”

  “Yeah. My boyfriend from home. I was dating him when the November Hit happened and I ran away without telling him why.”

  “He can join the club, since you never told any of us why you ran away.”

  “Rabbit, I’m really getting tired of you constantly drilling me for details about my secret. My reasons for leaving home have nothing to do with my ability to do my job. What happened before I met you and Motley is in the past, and it’s staying there.”

  “So if this ex-boyfriend of yours doesn’t know your secret, and he doesn’t know that you’re here, what is he doing in Paris?”

  I gritted my teeth. “I have no clue, and that’s what worries me.”

  “Do you think he recognized you?”

  “I was his first love. Do you really think he would forget my face?”

  “Not likely,” Rabbit replied. “Plus, he shot you, and you seem to have that effect on people who know you well. So chances are good that he recognized you.”

  “Hey,” I said, tossing a pillow at him, “I resent that.”

  “Speaking of your natural inclination to piss people off,” he shielded his face from the pillow, “if you don’t want to risk pissing Motley off more than you already have tonight, you better rush on catching that flight to Rio.”

  “You’re right.” I rolled off the bed and walked to the bathroom to get my bag. I stood in the doorway with my fingers smoothing my hair. “Do you really think my hair looks good like this?”

  “Alice, please don’t miss your flight.”

  “What about you? Aren’t you coming to Rio?”

  “I haven’t gotten orders yet.”

  “Oh baloney, you’re going to wait until I leave and then you’re going to board a privately-chartered plane to get down there. I know it.”

  “Alice, stop.”

  “Because that’s how it always is. Motley plays favorites. I am so sick of these games.”

  “Alice, I think I am beginning to fully understand why your first love felt compelled to shoot you.”

  Chapter Three: Kitto Katsu

  BENEATH THE AIRPLANE’s wing, Paris looked like a hamlet of tiny twinkling dollhouses as I shot away from the tarmac at Charles de Gaulle Airport. The Eiffel Tower appeared as a small, gray triangle fading from view. I closed my eyes and nested into
my seat, consoling myself with the thought that getting on the other side of the world was just what I needed to alleviate the fear of seeing my ex-boyfriend, Pressley Connard, in Paris. Just thinking about him finding me after all this time made the airplane feel like a Tilt-A-Whirl; but I couldn’t even use my sick bag since that’s where I was hiding my cigarettes from the flight attendant. This flight was going to be brutal. My legs were shaking like motors. From behind a pair of oversized face-hiding sunglasses, my eyes were scanning the length of the airplane aisle, scoping out any potential dangers. I was constantly on the lookout for people I had made an enemy of. Motley had gotten me tangled in some tricky situations in the past three years. I had screwed a lot of people in order to collect bits on the dynamite stick. I had pretended to be dozens of people, and I had schemed and stolen my way to some pretty important information. These blackhat criminals I had tangled with travelled a lot too, and you never know who you might bump into in first class. But there was something else. Something I feared more. The itch in my shoe. I feared being discovered by anyone from my past, by anyone who knew me before that fateful night in November, the story of which unravels on the words written on the confession inside my shoe.

  I jumped out of my seat, wobbled down the thin airplane aisle, and crashed into the bathroom. This is where I proceeded to wretch out the contents of two shakers worth of that cheap, awful alcohol from Rabbit’s mini bar into the efficient airplane toilet. I lifted my head from inside the toilet and stumbled to my feet to face the mirror. I surveyed my reflection, which resembled a blurry Impressionist painting of a girl. I was something Andy Warhol would paint on a bad day. The skin on my face was a ghastly shade of porcelain, framed by wings of dark hair matted to the side of my cheek by a glistening slick of sweat. Green eyes, made large and crooked from messy black eyeliner, were leaking mascara spiders down my cheeks. My lips were full like a poison lotus flower. The acid-dissolved white pills that had come up with the vomit tasted like poison in my mouth. Damn it, I was tired. I wanted that dynamite stick in my hands and I wanted to crush it with the force of Hercules. I straightened myself up and stumbled back to my seat and passed out until we landed in Rio.