Babayaga

latticework of the Eiffel Tower. He soared out, up along Haussmann’s grand boulevards all the way to Montparnasse. There the spinning wind’s pressure changed and took him swooping down so that he found himself dancing along only meters above the black and gray hats of a small crowd of people. The breeze sped up again, and as he sailed over the street he caught a glimpse of a pretty blond girl selling newspapers, followed by a man pushing a movie camera in a baby carriage. What a marvelous city, he thought, captivating and mesmerizing even in its most pedestrian moments, those scenes composed of singular beauty that were almost camouflaged and lost amid its myriad wonders.
    The gusting wind now shifted direction as it shot him up once more, blowing him back hundreds of meters above the Champ de Mars to where a lonely red balloon floated by. The sight reminded him of those first heroes of flight, his countrymen, who, long before the airplane, rose from crowded and cheering Parisian courtyards in their gilded and satin hot-air palaces. Filled with delight, and flying now back over the river, he passed the Tuileries. He tossed and turned in the cool breeze. He was beginning to think he could happily spend days up above Paris, riding high and repeatedly crisscrossing the Seine, a tiny observing angel keeping a keen, watchful eye on his fair city and its sweet and sinful inhabitants, when suddenly, as he was passing over the courtyard of the grand Hôtel de Crillon, the capricious winds absolutely died and Vidot found himself falling once again, straight down until he landed smack in the middle of an overflowing garbage can.
    Stunned, quite happy to be alive, and, as far as he could tell, miraculously uninjured, Vidot rousted himself up from the piled debris and hopped out onto the base of a nearby drainpipe. He had barely time to catch his breath before he saw a large, lumbering shadow passing by, and, without any hesitation, he leapt onto it, wholly intent on resuming the journey to the station he had been pursuing before he was waylaid by Billy and Dottie.
    Quickly determining that he was riding the rear end of a common rat, Vidot scurried below to the safety of the belly. There, the warmth of the rodent’s flesh struck another intuitive nerve. Vidot realized that, amid all the drama, he had not eaten in a couple of days. Without pause, he sank his teeth in and sucked deeply, filling his abdomen with warm blood, which caused him to slip into the familiar rich ecstasy of semiconsciousness that often accompanied his more gluttonous meals. In his daze, he failed to notice that his rat was not, in fact, carrying him down the streets but instead had ducked through a sewer grate and crawled up though a small hidden hole that led directly into the side of the building. Slipping behind plaster walls and climbing up the frame of the service-elevator shaft, the rat made its way steadily along the narrow warrens, finally emerging from behind a radiator inside a sumptuous hotel suite.
    Coming out of his dazed stupor, Vidot was entirely shocked to hear a familiar voice in the room, one he had never expected he would ever hear again. “Ah, there you are,” said Elga. “Been out playing in the gutters, eh? You are such the little man, Max, you go out for your evening stroll and you come home smelling funny.”
    III

    Guizot was weeping, his head down on the conference room desk, banging his fist against its polished surface. Will tried to offer him his handkerchief, but Guizot ignored the gesture. It was fine with Will, he was happy to wait. At that moment, Brandon was on his way over to Will’s office from the embassy, and so Will was happy to kill time listening to Guizot’s hysterical theatrics, knowing that this meeting was going to be better than the next one.
    “I am the destroyer, Will, the destroyer!” Guizot wept.
    “I honestly think you’re being a little dramatic,” Will said.
    When Will had left his apartment, hours before, Zoya had still been sleeping. After showering, shaving, and putting on his gray suit, he had left a short note on the bedside asking her to call him when she woke. He drew a heart on the note and then kissed her cheek before grabbing his hat and heading out the door. The minute he reached the street, he had regretted leaving her side.
    It wasn’t only the physical intimacy he had enjoyed, though they had fit together like perfect puzzle pieces and the passion had charged and thrilled him