No one stepped in to intervene at the electronic passport gate, or when we swiped the QR codes on our tickets. We were air born without a single human interaction. Which I knew from experience meant we hadn’t tripped any no-fly lists, or we’d have had a member of security staff swoop down on us.
I got Elizabeth a magazine when I went to Smiths to get a bottle of water, and she looked at me with some disdain when I handed over a copy of Vogue.
“Are you kidding me? I’ve never read that in my life.”
I laughed, full of admiration for the amazing woman who was going to be my wife.
“You’re a rich society heiress now. Remember. You need to take out your own Swiss bank account. You’re going to need to go shopping at some of the designer stores before you waltz in. You need to know what handbag you want. It’ll be in there somewhere.”
Elizabeth narrowed her eyes slightly, and took it off me, flipping petulantly through it. “Is this what you do? Go shopping?”
I leaned back in the seat next to her, scanning our fellow passengers, mostly on their laptops, or tapping away composing emails on work phones or iPads. Not the look-alikes, the real thing. A few of the younger looking ones were watching films with their headphones in. All of them were power dressers, the highly strung people in finance and law tended to be. Groomed to within an inch of their highly polished lives. I was used to dressing to blend in. The suit I’d chosen matched with any one of theirs. I had on the kind of watch that vibrated when I was supposed to do more steps and monitored my heart rate, just like all of them.
“Only if I don’t have the right props. You need the right props. It’s a shortcut to blending in. People watching is the other way.” I nodded to the assembling group. “These are the kind of people our target is. They are who you’re going to have to convince you’re worthy of one of those photoshoots in that magazine yourself.”
Elizabeth looked around us, and then back to her magazine. “You don’t think the Chanel suit’s enough?”
“I think it’s a start. They deal with the mega rich on a daily basis. I think you know exactly what you need to do to convince them you’re one of them. I think you were born to do this, but you need to stop thinking the only thing you’re good at is beating people up in the ring.”
I saw her jaw jut and she picked up the magazine again. “Fuck you Max. I thought you loved me.”
“Elizabeth. My darling, I worship the ground you walk on. Please, listen to me. We want Valentin’s buy in on you joining the team properly. You’ve got to blow this out of the water and impress them all the way you’ve impressed me.”
She crossed her legs and her foot bounced in midair. “That’s exactly what I’m going to do. You just watch me.”
Elizabeth
The town was right on the waterfront and we could see the jets of the famous fountain, the Jet d’Eau, shooting up from the water of the lake at the mid point of the curved entrance of the bay. It jetted up in an impossibly straight column, striking up into the blue sky.
I took Maxim’s hand and he smiled at me and shifted his grip on the suitcase he’d packed our things in. It still thrilled me that he’d bundled us off onto a flight with so little notice. That hours ago, we’d been up in cable car over the river Thames and he’d asked me to be his wife.
“When we’re married, is this what our life is going to be like?” I loved the thought of jetting off at the drop of a hat, going wherever we were needed. Doing whatever it took to get the job done. There was a dreamy smile on my face and I didn’t think I was going to be able to shake it any time soon.
“I hope so.”
“Me too. How many different places have you been to?”
Maxim turned to me and shook his head, eyes glinting with his smile. “Far too many to count, love. But I have no doubt you’ll come to all of them with me again, one way or another.”
I looped my arm into his, enjoying the way he tensed his bicep as I clung onto him, navigating the cobbles in my heels as he lifted the suitcase up, one handed.
“How does it work, when you have to make someone disappear?”
Old buildings mixed seamlessly with new, pale stone houses with little shuttered windows like a freeze frame of everything I associated with provincial France. But these had a slicker feel to them. There was no grime of Paris. There was far too much money swilling about in the little bistros and around the cathedral steps for any of that.