Until I Die

soldier?”
“There aren’t any abstracts in becoming a revenant,” Jules replied. “Just fighting in a war doesn’t count. If it did, there’d probably be a lot more of us.”
“So who did you save?”
“A friend of mine. I mean, not exactly a friend, but another artist whose group I hung out with in Paris before the war. Name was Fernand Léger.”
“ The Fernand Léger?” I gasped.
“Oh, you’ve heard of him?” There was no hint of sarcasm in his voice.
“Come on, Jules. You know I love art.”
“Well, he wasn’t as famous as the others in his group: Picasso, Braque, Gris.”
“He’s famous enough for me to know him. And wasn’t it his gallery at the Museum of Modern Art that I saw you hanging out in last summer? You know … when you pretended you were someone else because I recognized you from the subway crash?”
Jules grinned at the memory. It was his postmortem appearance that had sent me running back to Jean-Baptiste’s house to apologize to Vincent, only to find him dead on his bed. Which led me to my discovery of what he was. A historic day in the life of Kate Mercier, to be sure.
“Yeah, he’s got an unrecognizable portrait of me hanging in there. Not very flattering. I look like a robot. Actually more like a robot-skeleton. Which is understandable, I guess, since I was dead by the time he painted it.”
“Are you talking about The Card Players ?” I asked in awe.
“Yeah. There was a lot of downtime in between fighting. We played a lot of cards. After the war, when I was volant this one time, I overheard him telling someone that the soldier on the right was the one who saved him. But I still can’t see a resemblance for the life of me.” Jules cracked a smile at his own joke.
“How did it happen? I mean the saving bit?”
“Gave him my respirator during a German mustard-gas attack. Once I was down, the enemy came through and shot all of us who were on the ground.”
What an awful way to die , I thought. Although I was horrified, I tried to make my voice sound matter-of-fact so that he would keep on talking. “Why did you do it?”
“I was young and he was an older, established artist. I respected him. Worshipped him, in a way.”
“Even so, how many starstruck kids would give up their life for their hero?”
Jules shrugged. “I’ve talked about it with other revenants. We all feel like in our human life there was something inside us that was almost suicidally philanthropic. It’s the only characteristic we all have in common.”
He was silent after that, leaving me to wonder if I would have what it took to give my life for someone else. I suppose it was something I wouldn’t know until I was there, on the spot—looking death in the face.
Twenty minutes later, we pulled into a parking lot a few blocks away from Le Corbeau.
“Are you going to tell me what this is about?” Jules asked for the fortieth time.
“Nope,” I said as we got out of the car. Spying a tiny café nearby, I gestured to it and said, “But you can wait for me there.”
“The answer to that command is ‘ Non , madame la capitaine .’ Not on your life am I letting you go on some unknown errand—one you obviously don’t want Vincent to know about—on your own. You guilt-tripped me into bringing you here by appealing to my sense of duty in guarding you. Now you’ve got to live with what you asked for.”
We stared each other down for a few seconds. But when I saw he wasn’t going to budge, I nodded, and we began walking in the direction of the shop. It was actually nice to have him along, because I was starting to feel nervous—unsure of how I would handle things when I got there.
From a block away I could see that the lights were on, and my heart started pounding like crazy. The carved raven atop the sign seemed to regard us menacingly as we neared. We came to a stop outside the door, and Jules turned to me with the most incredulous look on his face. “You dragged me halfway across Paris to buy a”—he peered at the window display, and then back at me—“a plaster Virgin Mary?”
“No.”
“Then what?” He glanced back. “A Pope John Paul night-light? Kate, what the hell are we doing here?”
“The question is, ‘What am I doing here?’ and the answer is, ‘It’s none of your business, Jules.’ I’m sorry for dragging you along, but there’s something I need to do. And I would rather you wait out here.”
“What?” Jules shouted.
“I have to talk to the owner about