The Kill Artist

away the wrapping paper like a child and opened the leather case. Inside was a bracelet of pearls, diamonds, and emeralds. It must have cost him a small fortune. "René, my God! It's gorgeous!"
    "Let me help you put it on."
    She put out her arm and pulled up the sleeve of her coat. René slipped the bracelet around her wrist and closed the clasp. Emily held it up in the lamplight. Then she turned around, leaned her back against his chest, and gazed at the river. "I want to die just like this."
    But René was no longer listening. His face was expressionless, brown eyes fixed on the Musée d'Orsay.
    The waiter with the platter of tandoori chicken had been assigned to watch the ambassador. He removed the cellular phone from the pocket of his tunic and pressed a button that dialed a stored number. Two rings, a man's voice, the drone of Parisian traffic in the background. "Oui."
    "He's leaving."
    Click.
    Ambassador Eliyahu took Hannah by the hand and led her through the crowd, pausing occasionally to bid good night to one of the other guests. At the entrance of the museum, a pair of bodyguards joined them. They looked like mere boys, but Eliyahu took comfort in the fact that they were trained killers who would do anything to protect his life.
    They stepped into the cold night air. The limousine was waiting, engine running. One bodyguard sat in front with the driver; the second joined the ambassador and his wife in back. The car pulled away, turned onto the rue de Bellechasse, then sped along the bank of the Seine.
    Eliyahu leaned back and closed his eyes. "Wake me when we get home, Hannah."
    "Who was that, René?"
    "No one. Wrong number."
    Emily closed her eyes again, but a moment later came another sound: two cars colliding on the bridge. A minivan had smashed into the rear end of a Peugeot sedan, the asphalt littered with shattered glass, traffic at a standstill. The drivers jumped out and began screaming at each other in rapid French. Emily could tell they weren't French-Arabs, North Africans perhaps. René snatched up his backpack and walked into the roadway, picking his way through the motionless cars.
    "René! What are you doing?"
    But he acted as though he hadn't heard her. He kept walking, not toward the wrecked cars but toward a long black limousine caught in the traffic jam. Along the way he unzipped the bag and pulled something out of it: a small sub-machine gun.
    Emily couldn't believe what she was seeing. René, her lover, the man who had slipped into her life and stolen her heart, walking across the Pont Alexandre III with a machine gun in his hand. Then the pieces began falling into place. The nagging suspicion that René was keeping something from her. The long, unexplained absences. The dark-haired stranger at the bistro that afternoon. Leila?
    The rest of it she saw as slow-moving half images, as though it were taking place beneath murky water. René running across the bridge. René tossing his backpack beneath the limousine. A flash of blinding light, a gust of fiercely hot air. Gunfire, screams. Someone on a motorbike. Black ski mask, two pools of black staring coldly through the eyeholes, damp lips glistening behind the slit for the mouth. A gloved hand nervously revving the throttle. But it was the eyes that captured Emily's attention. They were the most beautiful eyes she had ever seen.
    Finally, in the distance, she could hear the two-note song of a Paris police siren. She looked away from the motorcyclist and saw René advancing slowly toward her through the carnage. He expelled the spent magazine from his weapon, casually inserted another, pulled the slide.
    Emily backpedaled until she was pressed against the parapet. She turned and looked down at the black river gliding slowly beneath her.
    "You're a monster!" she screamed in English, because in her panic her French had abandoned her. "You're a fucking monster! Who the fuck are you?"
    "Don't try to get away from me," he said in the same language. "It will only make things worse."
    Then he raised his gun and fired several shots into her heart. The force of the bullets drove her over the edge of the parapet. She felt herself falling toward the river. Her hands reached out, and she saw the bracelet on her wrist. The bracelet René, her lover, had given her just moments before. Such a beautiful bracelet. Such a terrible shame.
    She collided with the river and slipped below the surface. She opened her mouth, and her lungs filled with frigid water.