Babayaga

find.
    She went back to the bed and lay down, waiting.
    Her plans for Oliver could not have gone better, he was so smug with his lofty attitude, so ready to go through all the motions of seduction. It never occurred to him that he might be the prey. She enjoyed this sort of man wherever she found him; more than once she had seen empires undone by the ignorance that pooled around such grand, unflappable confidence. Where would the world be, she wondered, without all these blind and greedy men?
    Two nights ago, she had sat on the bench with her small, enchanted mirror, bouncing and bending the thin light from Will’s apartment. She watched as the tall man and his two accomplices had bullied Will. She had seen him tied up and gagged, she saw a knife flash. She could not hear anything, but it did not matter. Eventually things seemed to settle down. Will was untied. The tall man talked to him at length, clearly trying to make a point, while a short woman sat at the desk, taking pictures. Worried that she might be observed by some curious passerby, Zoya finally tucked her mirror away. She knew enough. Her path usually brought her into contact with the small, garden-variety deceptions people habitually dabbled in—hidden mistresses, larcenous accounts, or rude domestic violence. This was notably different. Will was like a rabbit she had been carefully stalking and tracking through the woods, only to have it stolen out from under her nose by another pack of predators right before she could pounce. This was interesting. She sat and waited.
    When the tall man and his friends had finally emerged from the apartment building, Zoya fell in behind. When the three grabbed a taxi, she jumped in another. “ Suivez le taxi là ,” she told the driver.
    They drove out of the 8th, down the Champs-Élysées, and crossed the river. Driving up the Left Bank, she watched the short woman emerge at one corner and the large oaf of a man crawl out at another. Finally the cab stopped in front of a café and she watched the tall thin man pay the cabbie and head in. This would not be too difficult, she thought. For starters, he was alone. Also, he was handsome enough, lean, and sharp looking. She’d done her fair share of work with ugly ones in the past, men with faces so pimpled and flabby her stomach turned merely at the memory of them.
    She found Oliver sitting at the bar, hunched like a thirsty crane over a Pernod. She sat down in the manner of an old friend, and with, six words, whispered backward, had him convinced that they actually had met before. Three drinks later, a few double entendres, and a hand on a knee had him convinced he would be seeing much more of her.
    She had asked very little, but as he smoked and drank through the night, Oliver told her quite a lot. He was a writer and a publisher, he said. He had rowed crew in college, his parents had hoped for him to study law, following the family tradition (a grandfather on his mother’s side had been a Supreme Court justice). Zoya had listened, smiled, and nodded along, though it all meant very little. He said he had fallen in love with Paris after the war and had lived here off and on, ever since then, now over in the 5th arrondissement.
    “Decades of lessons and tutorials plus years spent here, and the locals still say my French is only fairly good,” he said.
    “You understand my French,” she said. “That’s good enough, oui ?”
    He smiled warmly at her. Testing the spell of familiarity, she had said that he seemed happier than he’d been the last time she saw him, but at this, Oliver shook his head in dismay. “Glad to hear I’m putting on an optimistic front, but no, the thunderheads are looming, I’m afraid, and nothing’s panning out. My humble little magazine’s about to go under, we’ve lost our biggest benefactor, you see, and if I don’t come up with some grand stroke of genius, well, I’ll have to pack it in and go home.”
    “Perhaps your writing will be successful.”
    “What writing?”
    “You’re an author, no? Did you not say—”
    “Oh, yes, I did, didn’t I?” This had made him erupt with a burst of drunken laughter, a startling sound that reminded her of a mule’s braying, but then his face grew somber again. “Well, I was a real writer for a stretch, banging away at the typewriter every morning, big ideas billowing like thick cumulus clouds across the horizons of my mind, and all that bunk. Hemingway says the best writing is when