Page 10 of Under Her Protection

"That last one she always says,” Leo raised an eyebrow.

"She said it with her eyes this time."

Leo looked at her sister over the roof of the car. The streetlight caught the sharp quiet lines of Avery's face, younger than her by two years and steadier than her by ten, and not for the first time Leo considered the small specific gratitude of having been given this particular person to share a last name with.

"I will be fine," she said.

"I know you will."

"Then why the face."

"I am not making a face."

"You are."

Avery got in the car.

Leo stood a second longer, folder under her arm, breathing the cold, and tried to see the woman in the photograph as an assignment and nothing more. She could not yet. Tomorrow she would go to the house. Tomorrow the woman in the photograph would become a room, a schedule, a voice, a manner of looking at Leo and deciding whether Leo was going to be allowed to do her job.

She was aware, as she stood there, of a small additional fact she had not volunteered inside the office. She had recognized the photograph. Not from a magazine, not exactly. She had attended an event three years ago at which Vivienne Strauss had been in the room for forty minutes. Leo had noticed her because Leo's job was to notice. And Vivienne was very much the kind of woman you notice. What she had filed was a professional observation: the woman's stillness when a noise went off near the entrance, one hand lifting to her collar, a plain signet ring turning once on her finger. Leo had not thought of it since. Vivienne had approached her, once and asked for her name in case she ever needed protection and Leo had handed over her card. Tonight, opening the folder, she had remembered the ring before she had remembered the name.

That was an inconvenient thing to remember. She set it down somewhere harder to reach and got into the car.

Avery pulled into traffic.

Leo cracked the folder back open and skimmed the associates page again under the passing orange streetlight. The redactions stared up at her. Circle names. Some of them she could guess at. Most she would not. She made herself look at Strauss's photograph one more time, long enough to quit treating it like a new object. Grey-blue eyes. A mouth that was not going to be easy. Dark shiny hair she was willing to bet had not been down in public in twenty years. A woman, Leo thought, who was going to take one look at her tomorrow and decide inside four seconds whether Leo was going to be tolerated or fought.

Leo already knew her own answer to that. Vivienne Strauss did not yet know hers. That was the whole of tomorrow in a sentence.

"What are you thinking?" Avery said.

"I am thinking," Leo said, "that this is going to be hard work."

"It is always hard work."

"Not this kind."

Avery glanced at her. "Which kind?”

"The kind where the client is her own worst problem."

Avery made a sound that was almost a laugh. "You have met yourself, yes?"

"Shut up."

"I am only saying."

"Drive."

Avery drove. The wet streets rolled past. The folder on Leo's lap weighed more than it should have, and Leo, after a moment, moved it off her lap and onto the seat between them, where it sat as quiet and matte and red-tagged as any other job she had ever taken.

Tomorrow would do.

3

By seven the next morning Vivienne had been in her office for eleven hours. She had not slept. She had also not yawned, which was the point.

The office occupied the top floor of a discreet stone building in the eighth, a building that, like most of the serious buildings in Paris, announced nothing about itself. Her windows faced the Tuileries. She had chosen the suite for the view, twenty-two years ago, because she had understood that a view like that would tell every man who walked into the room what he was dealing with before he opened his mouth.