Paris
The flat was on Rue des Rosiers, fourth floor, no elevator. The stairs were narrow and the railing was loose on the second landing and the hallway smelled like someone else's cooking at all hours. A counter with a hotplate for a kitchen. A shower that produced two temperatures, scalding and off. A mattress on a frame that complained when he rolled over. The window faced east and the light came in early and he didn't mind because he was usually already up.
Madame Villiers lived on the first floor and managed the building the way a small country managed its borders. She was seventy, maybe, with reading glasses she wore around her neck and never on her face, and she had a dog named Gérard who was the size of a large rat and had feelings about everyone in the building. Gérard hated him specifically. Every time he passed the first floor, Gérard would appear at the gap under the door and growl with a conviction that exceeded his body weight by a factor of about forty.
"He is a good judge of character," Madame Villiers said. She said it every time, and every time she meant it.
Four months in Paris. He'd arrived in October with Alfred's trunk and the phone with the Paris number and a French vocabulary that was textbook-perfect and street-useless. That got fixed fast. By November he could argue with the woman at the Monoprix about the price of eggs in French that sounded like French and not like a translation. By December he could navigate the Marais at night without a map and pick locks in the cold without his hands shaking. January was surveillance theory from books Ducard hadn't assigned yet, practiced on tourists who would never know they'd been followed for six blocks by a kid in a jacket that didn't fit right.
The routine was: up at five, run along the canal, bodyweight work in the flat until the downstairs neighbor banged his ceiling with a broom, shower at the gym on Rue Vieille du Temple because the flat's shower was an act of war, language study, fieldwork or reading until dark. Most nights he ate bread and cheese and whatever fruit was cheap and sat at the window and watched the street. Some nights he ate nothing because he forgot.
He'd spent three months finding Ducard. Finding him was the first test.
Henri Ducard didn't advertise. No card, no office. He existed in the gaps between intelligence services. People who needed to find him found him through other people who didn't confirm they knew him. He'd worked backwards from a name Alfred had given him, through three intermediaries, a retired DGSE officer who ran a bookshop in the fifth arrondissement, and a woman at a Left Bank café who looked at him and then wrote an address on a napkin and said "Tuesday. Seven. Don't be interesting."
Ducard was at the back table. Sixty. Silver hair, cropped close, military once, now just efficient. His face had been handsome before someone rearranged it. The nose had been broken at least twice and the jaw sat slightly off-center. He had his back to the wall and a glass of red wine he hadn't touched and he watched the boy come in and sit down and he didn't say anything.
Then he said, "You're younger than I was told."
"That happens."
Ducard looked at him. Grey eyes, steady. He picked up the wine glass. Didn't drink. Put it down.
"Tomorrow. Six in the morning. Café Marly. There will be a man in a gray coat reading Le Monde. Follow him. Six hours. Report to me what you see."
He did. Six hours on foot, three Metro transfers, two cafés where he sat close enough to hear and far enough to be nobody. The man in the gray coat bought a newspaper at 6:15 and walked to a bench near the Tuileries and read for forty minutes and then took the Metro to Bastille and met a woman at a bakery and they exchanged envelopes with the practiced disinterest of people who'd done it before. The man favored his right leg. The woman's shoes were scuffed on the inner heel, the pattern of someone who stood on hard floors for long hours. The envelope the man received was thicker than the one he gave. The bakery had a camera over the counter pointed at the register, not the door.
He reported all of this in Ducard's apartment the next evening. Ducard listened without writing anything down. When he finished, Ducard turned over the photograph he'd been given.
On the back, in Ducard's handwriting: Test subject. Retired. No real intel value.
"The man is my neighbor," Ducard said. "He trades stamps with the woman's husband. The envelopes are catalogs."
He waited for the lesson.
"You watch like someone who already knows where to look," Ducard said. He pulled a new photograph from a drawer. A woman this time, dark-haired, standing on a platform at Gare du Nord. "This one is not my neighbor."
No praise. No explanation of what he'd done right or wrong. Just the next target. The wine glass was still full.
He was starting to like Ducard.
Julia Pennyworth arrived on a Thursday.
Two knocks. Sharp, spaced, from the wrist. He was at the counter wrapping his hands for the afternoon session. Training tape, left hand first, the pattern Reyes had taught him, tight between the knuckles. He'd been expecting her. Alfred's letter had said Thursday. Alfred's letters always said exactly what would happen and exactly when and then something dry about the weather that meant he missed his son.
He opened the door.
She was taller than he'd expected. Nineteen and built like someone who used her body for work, not exercise. Athletic through the shoulders and arms, the kind of muscle that came from pulling yourself over things. Wool coat, dark, buttoned to the top. Her hair was black and cut to her shoulders and pulled back tight in a way that kept it off her face and out of reach. Angular face. Grey-green eyes that went to his wrapped hands first and then his face and then past him into the flat, checking the layout.
She was holding Alfred's letter between two fingers. Pinched, like she might drop it.
"Bruce Wayne," she said. It wasn't a question.
"Yeah."
"Julia Pennyworth." She said the last name like a word in a language she didn't like speaking. Cool. Clipped.
She'd expected a rich kid. It was there in the half-second where her eyes went back to his hands, the tape, the training clothes, the flat behind him that was small and bare and didn't have Wayne money anywhere in it. Whatever picture she'd built on the flight over, the boy in the doorway wasn't matching it.
"Come in," he said. "How was the flight?"
"Fine." She stepped inside. Her eyes did the room. Exits. Angles. The coat stayed on.
"The silver Renault down the block," he said. "Surveillance or parking?"
She stopped. Her chin came up.
"Surveillance van," he said. "Tinted rear window, no livery, two Orangina bottles on the passenger floor. Been there since Monday. Probably DGSE training rotation, they run them out of an office on Rue de Turenne, but it could be private. You walked past it on the way in."
Her mouth opened. Closed. Her jaw worked once. Then her eyes narrowed and she looked at him again, a second look, the real one, the one that came after the assessment she'd built got torn up.
"You noticed the bottles on the floor."
"The passenger window was down two inches. The bottles were visible from the sidewalk if you were looking."
"I wasn't looking."
"I know."
She was recalculating. Paulie had done it. Reyes had done it. Someone good at reading people realizing they'd started on the wrong page.
She put out her hand. "Julia. Not Miss Pennyworth."
He took it. Her grip was firm and dry and practiced. Her hand was calloused in the right places for someone who'd spent time on ropes and firearms. He shook it once and his thumb crossed the inside of her wrist below the watch band and he felt the scar. Thin. Old. A line across the wrist that wasn't self-inflicted. The geometry was wrong. Someone had held her wrist. She'd pulled free.
He didn't look at it. Didn't adjust his grip. Just shook and let go.
Her eyes held his a beat past the handshake. Grey-green. Direct.
She broke first. He noticed.
"Bruce," he said. "Not Mr. Wayne."
"Right." She looked at the flat again. The hotplate. The mattress. The hand tape on the counter. "Alfred said you'd be comfortable."
"Alfred's definition of comfortable involves thread counts."
The corner of her mouth moved. The start of a smile that she decided against. She sat down at the kitchen table. Small, square, two chairs that didn't match, and she put Alfred's letter on the surface between them and left it there.
The check-in was supposed to be thirty minutes. It ran two hours. She asked about the training schedule and he told her. She asked about Ducard and he told her what Ducard would have been comfortable with him telling, which was the surveillance work and the analytical method but not the contact network. She asked about the flat and the neighborhood and whether he was eating and the questions were professional and structured and the structure started to loosen around the forty-minute mark when she mentioned the bookshop in the fifth and he said he'd been there and she said "the cat behind the counter" and he said "the cat that bit me" and she laughed, once, short, and the laugh was different from the rest of her. Less armor.
Her coat never came off.
At the door she paused. Turned back. "Alfred asked me to check on you. I'm doing that. This isn't-" She stopped. Started again. "I report to him. What I observe. That's the arrangement."
"Okay."
"Okay." She looked at his hands. The tape. Back to his face. "Same time next week?"
"Thursday works."
She left. Her steps on the stairs were even and quick and Gérard barked at her on the first-floor landing and she said "oh, piss off" at a volume that carried up four flights and Madame Villiers' door opened and closed.
He stood in the flat. The chair she'd sat in was pushed back from the table at an angle. Alfred's letter was still on the surface. The light from the east window was going orange.
He opened the leather journal. Turned past the first pages of Alfred's notes to the next blank page. Picked up the pen.
Year One. Month four.
Outside, the Renault was still there. The Orangina bottles hadn't moved.