I hesitated. “Be careful, whatever it is that you’re doing.”
“Promise,” I said, throwing her an air-kiss and lowering myself into the passenger seat.
“What’s up, Kates?” Jules said unsurely, fiddling with the radio dial.
“A day trip,” I said.
That got his full attention. “Where to?”
“To Saint-Ouen.”
“You’re skipping school to go to the flea market? Does Vincent know you’re doing this? Wait . . . don’t tell me. Of course he doesn’t or you’d wait till he got back to go.”
“Did Vincent ask you to guard me today?” I asked. Jules nodded. “Well, I’m going to Saint-Ouen. So you can either drop me off at the Métro station or take me there yourself. Whatever your guard-sense feels is right.”
Jules’s lips formed an amused smile. “Kates, has anyone ever told you that you are one persuasive girl? Are you on the debate team at school?” I shook my head.
“Pity,” he said as he put the car in gear. Swinging it around to face Paris, he gunned the motor and we were off.
“Jules?”
“Um . . . hmm?”
“How did you die?”
We had been stuck in traffic on the Périphérique for a half hour. Up to now our conversation had consisted of small talk—which meant in the revenants’ case things like how Ambrose and Jules had recently saved people in a tourist bus that drove into the Seine. But I had been wondering this for a while, and sitting in gridlock felt like the perfect time to ask.
“I mean, you told me you died in World War One,” I continued, “but did you die saving one particular person, or was it more the abstract fact that you were defending your countrymen as a 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 lléger.”
“The Fernand lléger?” 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 gall ery 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