Prologue
Nice, France
What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings
in disguise.
—Oscar Wilde
At Nice’s Côte d’Azur Airport, the pretty woman coming
down the jetway looked like every other bleary-eyed traveler. Rumpled T-shirt
over jeans with an indeterminate stain on the right thigh, hair shoved into a
messy ponytail mussed from the headrest. A backpack was slung over her right
shoulder, weighed down with items that weren’t technically hers but looked like
they could be. She’d sorted through them on the seven-hour flight, just long
enough to make the contents feel familiar.
“Don’t lose it,” the Turkish man said when he hung it
on her arm, and she hadn’t.
The jetway dumped her into the terminal, and she
trailed behind a family of five, past gates stretched out like spider legs,
along the wall of windows offering a blinding view of the sparkling
Mediterranean, a turquoise so bright it burned her eyes. The backpack bounced
against her shoulder bone, and her heart gave a quiet, little jingle.
She made it through passport control without issue,
thanks to her careful selection of the agent behind the glass. A man, first and
foremost. Not too old or too young, not too handsome. A five to her solid
eight—or so she’d been told by more than one man. This one must have agreed
because he stamped her passport with an appreciative nod. French men were like
that. One smile from a woman out of their league, and they melted like a
cream-filled bonbon.
She thanked him and slid her passport into her pocket.
In it were stamps to every country in Europe and the
Americas, from her crisscrosses over every continent including Antarctica,
from her detours to bask on the famous beaches of Asia, Australia, the South
Seas. More than once, she’d had to renew the booklet long before it expired
because she’d run out of empty spots for customs agents to stamp. She was
particularly proud of that, and of how she could look any way you wanted her to
look, be anyone you needed her to be. Today she was playing the role of American
Tourist On A Budget.
At baggage claim, she slid the backpack down an aching
shoulder and checked the time on her cell. Just under six hours for this little
errand, plenty of time assuming she didn’t hit any unexpected roadblocks. If
she didn’t get held up at customs, if the taxi line wasn’t too long, if traffic
on the A8 wasn’t too awful, which it would be because getting in and out of
Monte Carlo was always a nightmare at this time of year. If if if. If she
missed the flight to London, she was screwed.
A buzzer sounded, and the baggage carousel rumbled to
a slow spin.
At least she didn’t look any more miserable than the
people milling around her, their faces long with jet lag. She caught snippets
of conversation in foreign tongues, German, Italian, Arabic, French, and she
didn’t need a translator to know they were bitching about the wait. The French
were never in a hurry, and they were always striking about something. She
wondered what it could be this time.
Thirty-eight eternal minutes later, the carousel spit
out her suitcase. She hauled it from the band with a grunt, plopped the heavy
backpack on top and followed the stream of tourists to the exit.
Walk with purpose. Look the customs agent in the eye.
Smile, the fleeting kind with your lips closed, not too big or too cocky. Act
breezy like you’ve got nothing to prove or to hide. By now she knew all the
tricks.
The customs agent she was paired with was much too
young for her liking, his limbs still lanky with the leftovers of puberty,
which meant he had something to prove to the cluster of more senior agents
lingering behind him. She ignored their watchful gazes, taking in his shiny
forehead, the way it was dotted with pimples, and dammit, he was going to be a
problem.
He held up a hand, the universal sign for halt.
“Avez-vous quelque chose à déclarer?”
Her fingers curled around the suitcase handle,
clamping down. She gave him an apologetic smile. “Sorry, but I don’t speak
French.”
That part was the truth, at least. She didn’t speak
it, at least not well and not unless she absolutely had to. And her
rudimentary French wasn’t necessary just yet.
But she understood him well enough, and she definitely
knew that last word. He was asking if she had something to declare.
The agent gestured to her suitcase. “Please, may I
take a look in your luggage?” His English was heavy with accent, his lips slick
with spit, but at least he was polite about it.
She gave a pointed look at the exit a few feet away.
On the other side of the motion-activated doors, a line of people leaned
against a glass-and-steel railing, fists full of balloons and colorful
bouquets. With her free hand, she wriggled her fingers in a wave, even though
she didn’t know a single one of them.
She looked back at the agent with another smile. “Is
that really necessary? My flight was delayed, and I’m kind of in a hurry. My
friends out there have been waiting for hours.”
Calm. Reasonable. Not breaking the slightest sweat.
The skin of his forehead creased in a frown. “This
means you have nothing to declare?”
“Only that a saleslady lied to my face about a dress I
bought being wrinkle resistant.”
She laughed, but the agent’s face remained as stony as
ever.
He beckoned her toward an area behind him, a short
hallway lined with metal tables. “S’il vous plait. The second table.”
Still, she didn’t move. The doors slid open, and she
flung another glance at the people lined up outside. So close yet so far.
As if he could read her mind, the agent took a
calculated step to his left, standing between her and the exit. He swept an
insistent arm through the air, giving her little choice. The cluster of agents
were paying more attention now.
She huffed a sigh. Straightened her shoulders and gave
her bag a hard tug. “Okay, but fair warning. I’m on the tail end of a
three-week vacation here, which means everything in my suitcase is basically a
giant pile of dirty laundry.”
Again, the truth. Miami to Atlanta to LA to Tokyo to
Dubai to Nice, a blur of endless hours with crummy movies and soggy airplane
food, of loud, smelly men who drank vodka for breakfast, of kids marching up
and down the aisles while everybody else was trying to sleep. What she was
wearing was the cleanest thing she had left, and she was still thousands of
miles from home.
She let go of the handle, and the suitcase spun and
wobbled, whacking the metal leg of the table with a hard clang. Let him lug the
heavy thing onto the inspection table himself.
She stood with crossed arms and watched him spread her
suitcase open on the table. She wasn’t lying about the laundry or that stupid
dress, which currently looked like a crumpled paper bag. He picked through her
dirty jeans and rumpled T-shirts, rifled through blouses and skirts. When he
got to the wad of dirty underwear, he clapped the suitcase shut.
“See?” she said. “Just a bunch of dirty clothes.”
“And your other bag?”
The backpack dangling from her shoulder, an ugly Tumi
knockoff. Her stomach dropped, but she made sure to hold his gaze.
“Nothing in here, either. No meat, no cheese, no
forgotten fruit. I promise.”
She’d done that once, let an old apple sink to the
bottom of her bag for a hyped-up beagle to sniff out, and she paid for it with
a forty-five minute wait at a scorching Chilean airport. It was a mistake she
wouldn’t make again.
“Madame, please. Do not make me ask you again.”
The little shit really said it. He really called her
madame. This kid who was barely out of high school was making her feel old and
decrepit, while in the same breath speaking to her like she was a child. His
words were as infuriating as they were alarming. She hooked a thumb under the
backpack’s strap, but she didn’t let it go.
And yet what choice did she have? She couldn’t run,
not with those senior agents watching. Not with this pubescent kid and his
long, grasshopper limbs. He’d catch her in a hot second.
She told herself there was nothing to find. That’s
what the Turkish man had promised her with a wink and a smile, that nobody
would ever know. He swore she’d cruise right on through customs. And she had,
many, many times.
As she slid the backpack from her arm with another
dramatic sigh, she hoped like hell he wasn’t lying. “Please hurry.”
The agent took the bag from her fingers and emptied it
out on the table. He took out the paperback and crinkled magazines, the
half-eaten bag of nuts with the Japanese label, the wallet and the zippered
pouch stuffed with well-used cosmetics that had never once touched her face.
He lined the items up, one after the other, until the contents formed a long,
neat row on the shiny metal surface. The backpack hung in his hand, deflated
and empty.
She lifted a brow: See?
But then he did something she wasn’t expecting. He
turned the backpack upside down, just…upended the thing in the air. Crumbs
rained onto the table. A faded receipt fluttered to the ground.
And there it was, a dull but discernible scraping
sound, a sudden weight tugging at the muscles in his arm, like something
inside the backpack shifted.
But nothing else fell out. There were no internal
pockets.
“What was that?”
“What was what?” With a clanging heart, she pointed to
the stuff on the table. “Can I put that back now? I really have to go.”
The agent stared at her through a long, weighted
silence, like a held breath.
Hers.
He slapped the backpack to the table, and she cringed
when he shoved a hand in deep, all the way up to his elbow. He felt around the
sides and the bottom, sweeping his fingers around the cheap polyester lining.
She saw when he made contact with the source of the noise by the way his face
changed.
The muscles in her stomach tightened. “Excuse me, this
is ridiculous. Give it back.”
The agent didn’t let go of the backpack. He reached in
his other hand, and now there was another terrifying sound—of fabric, being
ripped apart at the seams.
“Hey,” she said, lunging for the backpack.
He twisted, blocking her with his body.
A few breathless seconds later he pulled it out, a
small, flat object that had been sewn into the backpack lining. Small enough to
fit in the palm of his hand. Almost like he’d been looking for it.
“What is this?” he said, holding it in the air between
them.
“That’s a book.” It was the only thing she could think
of to say, and it wasn’t just any book. It was a gold-illuminated manuscript
by a revered fourteenth-century Persian poet, one of the earliest copies from
the estate of an Islamic art collector who died in Germany last year. Like most
of the items in his collection, this one did not technically belong to him.
“I can see it’s a book. Where did you get it?”
Her face went hot, and she had to steady herself on
the metal table—the same one he was settling the book gently on top of. He
turned the gold-leafed paper with careful fingers, and her mind whirled.
Should she plead jet lag? Cry or pretend to faint?
“I’ve never seen it before in my life.”
This, finally, was the truth. Today was the first time
she’d seen the book with her own eyes.
The agent looked up from the Arabic symbols on the
page, and she didn’t miss the gotcha gleam in his eyes. The way his shiny
forehead had gone even shinier now, a million new pinpricks of satisfied
sweat. His gaze flitted over her shoulder, and she understood the gesture
perfectly.
He was summoning backup.
She was wondering about French prison conditions.
His smile was like ice water on her skin. “Madame, I
must insist you come with me.”
Excerpted from THE PARIS WIDOW by Kimberly Belle.
Copyright © 2024 by Kimberly Belle. Published by Park Row Books, an imprint of
HarperCollins.
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