Babayaga

“Every knife is good for fighting. Even a butter knife can kill a man, if you know where to shove it.” Will remembered how all his uncles had laughed at that.
    He had worshiped his grandfather, a sly-eyed wily French-Canadian who had worked the shipping lanes up in Sault Ste. Marie before moving south to open a boatyard on the shores of Lake St. Clair. He taught Will dozens of knots and was always pulling exotic gifts from his coat pockets: tortoise-patterned Petoskey stones, banded agates, and Sauk Indian arrowheads that he had found while sailing the Great Lakes. But the knife was the gift Will treasured most. He could remember playing alone with it in his backyard as a boy, opening and closing it repeatedly, mesmerized by its sharp, hungry mechanical snap. He would dance around in the shadow of the trees; in his childish fantasies he had moved with the grace of Errol Flynn or Douglas Fairbanks as he stabbed at the air in his imaginary swashbuckling battles, his knife the most potent point of realism in his whimsical adventures. As he grew, he had always kept that gift close, on the shelf at his bedside as a child and tucked into his desk drawer in college before bringing it along with him to Paris. Now here he was, out on a real misadventure, fumbling along and banging his hand with it. He remembered that Errol Flynn had died only the week before, he’d read it in the paper, and Fairbanks had died years ago. His grandfather was gone as well for almost two decades now. All the cavalier and capable adventurers were vanishing, and there were only awkward oafs like him left stumbling on the earth. Will wondered why Oliver had even wanted him to bring the knife in the first place. It didn’t matter, he told himself, it was none of his business now. But he had a hard time putting the evening’s events behind him.
    As he stood beneath the white-tiled arch of the metro platform waiting for the train, his anxiety nagged at him. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” he kept trying to calm himself: after all, nothing of importance had been revealed, the secrets were still safe. It was even sort of funny. How could you confuse the cloak-and-dagger world of the Central Intelligence Agency with a bunch of guys writing snappy jingles for laxatives and breakfast cereals? It was ridiculous. By the time the metro pulled in and he found a seat in the train car, he had finally begun to relax. It had been a simple misunderstanding, that was all. He could clear it all up. When he handed the Bayer file over on Monday he would tell Brandon all about it, if only to stay on the safe side. Maybe he could make an amusing story out of it, that’s what his grandfather would have done, with a chuckle and some spit.
    He changed to the Line 1 at Châtelet, boarding a train that was nearly empty. The only other passenger in his car was a solitary woman sitting on the bench halfway down. She smiled politely at him. As he found his seat, she said something to him he could not quite hear over the train’s rattle. He had never seen strangers speak on the train except to complain or argue. It was one of the things he liked about Paris, people generally left you alone. But she was pretty so he moved closer.
    “ Pardonnez-moi? ” he asked.
    “ La nuit, c’est belle ,” she repeated. She spoke with an accent of some kind. Polish? Russian?
    “Yes, it’s a very nice night, if you like rain,” he answered in French. He grinned and she smiled back. They did not speak as the stations passed. He looked at his feet and then looked up to read the signs posted in the car, but his eyes kept wandering back to her. She wore a red sweater, yellow scarf, and a simple beret that her long black hair spilled out, falling down around her shoulders. Her cheekbones were high, framing a pair of strong, clear blue irises that managed to find his gaze whenever it wandered back to her face. Then they would both turn away with a blush and a smile. A small dark bruise below her right eye made him feel instinctively protective. Had she been hit? Who would hit a woman?
    Finally, as they approached the George V station, she said, “I’m sorry, have we met before?”
    “No, maybe, I don’t know, I think I would remember if we had.” He fumbled his words, embarrassed and awkward. The train screeched to its stop and he rose to leave. He thought about asking for her number, but it felt too awkward, too sudden. Still, that gaze.
    “Well then,” she said, rising to go,