This is the initial scratching of an idea I had while travelling recently through Paris. I have in mind a thriller or spy genre. It was written on my phone while I was on the Paris Metro.
*****
Paris Thriller Draft
I rushed down the stairs to the metro at Charles de Gaulle Étoile, two to a stride. Behind me the police were yelling confused instructions. Their voices hit the subterranean tunnels with me and echoed about in the enclosed space. People were turning and looking for the source of the cries. It did not take them long to identify me: I was too hurried and energetic to be one of them. The commuters on the escalators to either side of me eddied turned their heads with interest, not yet certain enough to act, but curious, and growing more so. The time for subtlety was lost, I needed pace.
I leapt the last four steps and landed on the concrete floor with a slap that reverberated around me. The commuters travelling up to the surface would have a vague description of me, nothing that would help my pursuers or the investigators that might later question them. I needed to get ahead of those travelling, like me, deeper into the earth.
The police reached the top of the stairs as I turned the corner into the tunnels. I spared them a brief glance over my shoulder as they stood uniformed and official above me and I disappeared from their view. I heard them follow, bellowing instructions and orders, some to me and others to any citizenry blocking their path. I dropped my pace to a less conspicuous hurry.
Their voices, their unmistakable tone of self-important authority, swept ahead of me to where a swarthy youth was selling umbrellas from a large bag. He recognized the tone instinctively. The umbrellas disappeared back into the bag and he began to step silently into the stream of commuters that passed him.
He wasn’t expecting me, may not even have noticed me. The bag wasn’t yet on his shoulder when my hand lashed out, whip-like. My knuckles were weighted barbs that stung him across the wrist and numbed his fingers. The bag fell, umbrellas scattered. The boy stopped, shocked.
Around me the human currents shifted and I was still a moment amidst them. Rips pulled, under-currents towed, eddies whirled, and a gap opened. I inserted myself into it; became another confused face in the crowd.
The umbrella boy stared about at the chaos of his wares. His eyes were wide like a panicked prey animal. The police predators appeared in the tunnel, framed by the weak spill of daylight and the corona of empty space around them in the otherwise crowded space.
The boy’s flight-or-flight response sent him racing away, toward the 2 line. The police, presented with the comfortably familiar scenario of chasing a street vendor, obediently gave chase. They were past me and away in a matter of seconds.
I picked up one of the stray umbrellas with a nonchalant dip at the waist. Stood. Hunched my shoulders higher around my ears, not so much to be too obvious, just a mannerism against the wind. I moved through the crowd like a virus in the bloodstream, slipped myself silent and unseen aboard the last carriage of the train to Dupleix, and disappeared.
*****
So,
Worth working on? Rate or comment.
