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Story 06

6,460 words

Published by Plotter

Provenance
Rosecrans Baldwin

ONE
Garrett James arrived in France from Los Angeles with an old duffel bag, an even older backpack, and a brand new phone. He filmed himself in Charles de Gaulle ordering a café au lait. He filmed himself picking out his rental car, a green Renault. He posted a quick edit from the parking lot and within an hour it had been seen by 306 people, including his mother, two former colleagues, and a girl whose attention he had been trying to attract since high school, plus the 20,000 bots he purchased in July.

It was midday, mid-October. Garrett was 26. The trip was number three in his plan to become a travel influencer. In July, he took a road trip to Santa Fe. In August, another to Ensenada. France was by far the most expensive, one reason he was behind on rent. It also added to the debt he owed his credit union and Mastercard, around 14,000 dollars, not to mention his student loans. Still, Garrett wasn’t worried. He didn’t experience anxiety. He wasn’t sure he knew what anxiety was. Like he used to message his clients, there’s never a bad time to invest in yourself.

After a couple hours, the map pulled him off the highway, onto smaller roads, and the countryside closed in around him. Fog stood in little valleys. Pastures were walled with stones. He’d chosen the Jura mountains, the region around the French-Swiss border, because he hadn’t seen any influencers go there before. Also, it was supposed to be picturesque but dead at that time of year, ergo cheaper.

It was nightfall and raining when Garrett pulled into the driveway, exhausted from the jetlag. In his headlights, a house without neighbors stood against a hill of trees, under a roof of wooden shingles that came down to head-height. An updated farmhouse, authentique, hors du temps, the listing promised, only 500 Euros for the week.

Garrett let himself in with a number provided for the keypad. The kitchen was lit by a pink neon sign that spelled out cuisine. The tea kettle on the stove was warm. Must’ve been the cleaners, he thought, while a headache throbbed; headaches were also a recent thing, reoccurring since the summer. Until the second week of June, Garrett worked for a marketing firm in Hermosa Beach that helped influencers get bigger on social media, until the firm decided to make itself smaller.

No bad time to self-invest.

Get comfortable being uncomfortable.

Bro, you can accomplish anything.

Garrett dragged himself up an old staircase that complained with grunts and screeches. Across the landing was a crack of dusty light. His phone had no signal. He would figure out the wifi, swallow some ibuprofen, pass out. He opened the door and tossed his bag on the floor.

A girl sat up in bed and screamed.

* * *

Garrett reflexively burst into tears. He tried to choke back the sound, but his chest wouldn’t listen. He pressed his body into a corner of the hallway while the bedroom door slammed shut.

A voice yelled something in French. Garrett yelled something in English. He pressed his fingers against his temples, trying to swallow sobs, while his thoughts sped away in every direction.

Loud grinding sounds, like a piece of furniture being dragged across the floor, then more shouting in French.

Sorry, fuck! Garrett yelled. This is my—I rented this house!

A pause.

Get the fuck out! the voice squawked, now in English. I call the cops!

Garrett didn’t know what to do. Somehow he was in the wrong house. He’d broken into private property and would go to jail. He ran downstairs. In the front garden he tripped on something, tore his jeans. He drove through the rain to the nearest village, Chapelle-des-Bois, parked off a dark roundabout and locked the doors.

The rain was slowing. A quarter moon glowed through the clouds.

The situation had the shape of a terrible mistake.

Garrett checked his phone. The signal was better in the village, and the address in the email was right. Plus the door code had worked, so what the fuck? No influencer he ever worked with had dealt with a squatter.

He thought about filming but fell asleep.

* * *

Six a.m. An early sunrise. All the buildings on the roundabout were rinsed by the rain: bakery, pharmacy, café with faded posters. Garrett’s jeans were dirty, he wiped at them. He looked up to discover an ugly woman in the café staring through the glass. He went in and ordered coffee. Head pounding again, his face in the bar mirror puffy, eyes blown-out like he’d spent the night partying.

Okay, he said to himself pointlessly.

The house in daylight looked smaller. All around was black forest and a carpet of rotting leaves. Garrett cut the ignition. The girl appeared in the doorway before he even reached it, as if she’d been watching.

She explained in broken English she was the housecleaner, she misread the schedule, she finished late and missed her bus and decided to spend the night—extremely sorry, but it was so frightening, criminals sometimes break into rentals.

I’m not a criminal, Garrett said.

No, I am not saying, she said.

He couldn’t help but hear her tone: a little nervous, but mostly defiant. Also couldn’t help but notice how attractive she was. He’d never met a girl with gray eyes before. His age or a little younger, gray eyes and a long mouth and a way of standing very still.

I need this job, she said.

I get it, honest mistake, Garrett replied. Realizing he wanted to reassure her, and that he now felt, besides the headache, pretty good. I’m sorry I scared you, he added, a random guy just showing up like that.

She watched him. A moment later, through pursed-together lips, she blew out a puff of air. She saw the blood on his jeans, led him to the kitchen and cleaned him up, then showed him around the house and got him on the wifi. Her name was Sandrine.

The day was sunny, the air smelled of pine needles and wood smoke. Garrett went out to get supplies after Sandrine told him where to go, saying she wanted a couple hours to re-clean the house, to make up for the previous night by making it extra nice. He bought groceries for the week from a small épicerie, a new pair of jeans from a hardware store. He spent an hour driving around, capturing footage: a market square filled with old ladies, an old water mill tagged with anarchy signs.

Sandrine was just leaving when he got back, a canvas bag on her shoulder that looked heavy, full of cleaning equipment, Garrett guessed. He called for her to wait. He’d realized something in the car: he needed a guide to the area. And here she was, a local who knew the Jura inside-out.

The girl seemed to hesitate. Garrett said he’d double whatever she made cleaning.

I am not working, she said. Bank holidays.

You’d really be helping me out, he said. Please.

She stood still, considering him again, then stared over his shoulder.

You drive, she said cooly. I navigate.

Exactly, he said. That’s it.

* * *

The girl came back that afternoon while Garrett was trying to figure out the coffeemaker. They got in the Renault and she unfolded an old Michelin map across her knees, which he found charming.

She said without smiling, I do not know everything.

Sandrine routed him to the high plateau, insisting on little roads, off the autoroute, because the scenery was prettier. Garrett explained about the need to make content, so she took him to a butcher and told him which sausage to order (811 likes, seven comments). Two hours later, she took him to a fruitière, a cheesemaker on a dirt road, where Comté was made in copper vats (1,240 likes, 11 comments, including one from a prominent travel influencer).

All the while Sandrine persuaded different people, speaking French on his behalf, to appear on-camera, though she herself refused to be filmed; she didn’t want her employer to catch her in anything geo-tagged. That evening, after a dinner of bread and cheese and ham, the girl was preparing to leave when Garrett suggested she stay the night. A guest room off the kitchen. If she had time, another day of touring.

I’ll make you coffee in the morning, he said.

American coffee, she said, grimacing.

Garrett woke that night at two a.m., still jetlagged, another headache, and went down for a glass of water. The door to the guest bedroom was slightly open, a light inside. Sandrine was kneeling on the floor with her back to him. She hadn’t heard him. On the ground was her bag and she was wrapping something in cloth—Garrett saw only the cloth, her hands moving with speed but unhurried.

In the morning, when he came down, coffee was on the stovetop and there was a written-out plan: another picturesque village, a winemaker in the hills. Garrett decided whatever was in the bag was none of his business. It was the last accurate judgment he would make for some time.

* * *

Fourteen hours later, if Sandrine was upset that Garrett got completely drunk by accident, she channeled it into driving the Renault down tight switchbacks, before parking behind an alpine chalet with a wheelbarrow beside the door. The night was silent. They were two hours from the farmhouse.

Are we home? Garrett asked.

For tonight, she said.

Garrett had no idea where they were. In his limited experience, everything in France looked the same. Meanwhile, his field of vision had doubled—two houses, two wheelbarrows—and he was struggling to figure out which version to focus on. It really wasn’t his fault. The winemaker turned out to be both a ham and a practicing alcoholic, and he’d read Garrett’s follower-count to suggest this would be the perfect afternoon to give a lengthy tour of his property, then escort them to the cellar, open a dozen bottles and basically drink them all.

In the car, the gravel driveway, Garrett was slurring something about needing to upload content when Sandrine told him in an almost maternal voice to shut the fuck up. She got out and unlocked the front door. She had the codes and rental schedules for a number of properties around the Jura. The decor in this one was typically Conforama, cheap and white. A Top Gun: Maverick poster hung above the fireplace. Sandrine got Garrett up the stairs to the second floor’s timber bedroom, then brought him a glass of water, even found him a phone charger in the kitchen.

Garrett collapsed on the blanket. The wine closed his eyelids and he said to nobody, I’m drunk. He opened his eyes a moment later, maybe an hour later, and thankfully no longer saw double. Sandrine stood at the top of the stairs, holding an unlit cigarette. Garrett had seen her grasp one several times like that, like it was a pen, before returning it to a metal case. He realized he owed her a lot. Realized perhaps that he liked her. Your vibe attracts your tribe.

I’m drunk, he said again and closed his eyes.

You’re cute when you’re drunk, she said, like a child.

You’re the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me, he slurred and fell back asleep.

Splayed out on the bed, he looked quite relaxed. Sandrine had no respect for him at all.

* * *

On the afternoon of their third day, she showed him the valley where she grew up.

The road fell off the plateau in yet more hairpin turns, leading to a series of gorges carved by a river over millions of years. Spruce trees grew out of rock faces at crooked angles. Everything was green with moss or gray with stone. They pulled over at a rest stop. Three truckers were enjoying the sunshine. They’d set up a card table in the parking lot and were eating sandwiches, drinking wine, watching a rugby match on a monitor one of them had connected to a generator. Garrett was about to film it all when Sandrine dissuaded him, suggesting it might not be a safe idea.

Twenty minutes later, they stopped at a waterfall. While Garrett filmed, Sandrine said the cliffs were limestone, very difficult to climb.

I dated a rock climber once, Garrett offered.

I imagine she climbed all over you, Sandrine said.

She could definitely do more pull-ups than me.

This attracts you? French girls are not strong like this.

No, I didn’t mean, Garrett stammered, then he ran out of things to say.

By that point, their conversations had covered the climate crisis and family and music. It was funny: everything he was discovering about the region, that Instagram was loving, she despised. Sandrine hated the region, hated the people. She felt trapped and wanted to be anywhere else. They did have things in common, though. Both loved grunge music. Both were raised by single moms. Sandrine was adopted practically at birth by a woman named Hélène, who’d heard about a female baby left in a box at the local fire station, shown up and demanded to take it home.

Home was another mountain village, Mouthier-Haute-Pierre. All stone or whitewashed homes, shutters closed. In the hills were terraced orchards with brown-red leaves. No one was out except a man unloading plywood from a small pickup truck. He looked at the Renault, looked hard at Sandrine’s profile, then resumed his work.

The house where she grew up was one of the last before the orchards. A dozen-plus beehives stood out front in tall white crates. A woman in her seventies peered into one of them with a smoke can for protection. She wore cropped hair and a short-sleeved denim shirt, her arms bigger than a man’s. Garrett was about to make a rock-climbing joke, but Sandrine was already out of the car.

The woman looked at Sandrine and said something brief in French. Sandrine answered with one word and went inside.

Hélène served them kirsch in tiny glasses. Garrett walked around afterwards while the women stayed in the kitchen. He filmed the bees and the valley, the jagged mountains and the river. Meeting the locals, he captioned a video of the beehives, blessed and grateful (1,403 likes, 16 comments, several bee emojis).

Inside, Hélène said flatly in French, How much.

All of it, Sandrine said.

They don’t know.

I don’t know.

Hélène sat down. She had spent two decades, the 1970s and ’80s, moving cigarettes and then watches and more discreet items across the border on foot, in trucks, under the floors of trailers. Retired clean because she had been able to count.

And Luc, she inquired.

Luc backed out, Sandrine said. Too wasted.

Hélène looked at the American on her terrace talking to his phone, smiling at his reflection.

And that? she asked.

Transportation.

Does it know?

Sandrine shook her head.

The old woman was silent for a long moment. The problem is what you took is not money, she said. You can’t sell it, you know that. There are maybe three men. All three, you reach through the same door. This is not even the problem. You stole a promise. A promise made to people even worse.

She rotated her glass of kirsch on the table and didn’t drink it.

I’m not sorry, Sandrine insisted.

Hélène stood up and pulled down an old sewing kit from her cupboard—scissors and needles and thread rolled up in cloth—and gave it to her daughter. There is a man in Besançon called Verley, she said. A coin dealer. Behind the courthouse. He is careful and he is greedy, in that order.

Sandrine told Garrett to get in the car. At the door, her mother pinched her elbow and nodded to the east, the Swiss border.

We walked heavier loads than yours, she said. With nastier people after us.

Sandrine was about to ask something, but her mother had gone back to her bees.

* * *

It was twilight, returning to the farmhouse, when they were stopped by the police. Around a corner, between looming forests, two vans, a row of cones, and four officers in dark uniforms working a flying checkpoint.

The officer who leaned into the window was bald, maybe 50. He took in the rental sticker, the girl and map, the backpack and tripod and the canvas bag.

Vacances? he asked.

Vacation of a lifetime, Garrett said, smiling. Your country is unbelievable. I mean, the cheese alone.

The officer’s mouth moved a couple millimeters. He once took his daughter to San Francisco, he knew a California accent when he heard one. Thinking: At least they’re not Brits. He stood back and waved them on.

The whole event lasted 40 seconds. That was good, Sandrine said out of the side of her mouth and subtly grinned, as if from realization. Five kilometers later, she took out her cigarette and lit it this time, exhaling out the window. Hands completely steady, which Garrett should have noticed but did not.

TWO
The quivering tip of a cigarette located their intruder before Sandrine turned on the lights. Sitting at the dining table, a short man in his late 20s, wearing jeans and an expensive black leather jacket. Long hair, doglike face, skinny and twitchy everywhere. The man got up aggressively. Sandrine closed on him fast and he sat down. Barking anyway, his French through a sneer, hers calm but forceful, the two of them shouting for a minute.

Jesus, does this happen every time? Garrett joked nervously. It was his first night in France all over again.

The skinny guy pulled out his phone and pointed it at Garrett, saying to Sandrine in French, Twenty minutes, that’s how long it fucking took me.

Garrett, understanding nothing, said loudly, Dude, do you work for Airbnb?

Shut the fuck, the guy pronounced slowly in English, all hostility. Saying to Sandrine, Does he know? This guy you’re blowing?

She said, You spoke to Hélène.

He’s tagging everything! You might as well text my father.

Does he know?

You realize you didn’t rob him, yeah? Your mother tell you that?

They went at each other in French for a while longer. The man would sit, pace, sit again. Sandrine stood without moving, arms crossed. The guy seemed disgusted at one point, he picked up the coffee pot and threw it. Then pulled a plastic baggie from his jacket, cut up something on the table and snorted it up his nose.

It seemed to calm him down. He waved at Garrett and drew out a chair.

Please, he said in English, I have a gift.

Sandrine stood in the glare of a lamp.

Garrett sat down and learned a lot in little time. The guy’s name was Luc, son of a man named Castel. The Castels were known in the region for certain things; basically, his father and his uncle were not good guys. More recently, Luc’s girlfriend, his ex-girlfriend, a very dumb cunt, had stolen something from his family. Thinking what she stole was ordinary money, but it was not. It was very old, very valuable, very expensive money, illegal money, in fact: a cache of gold coins from a Gallic tribe, that sat quietly in the dirt for centuries until a farmer dug it up accidentally twenty years ago and asked Luc’s father to broker a deal. With somebody much less nice than his father, Luc said, a man named Brossard. On the condition his father hold the coins, let them remain quiet. Because who in France would have the nerve to steal from the Castels.

Sandrine blinked when the name Brossard was mentioned, though not from ignorance. You didn’t know this a week ago, she said.

Yeah I did, Luc said, fucking bitch.

No, you asked your cousin. You moron. You did and now he knows.

It was the first time Garrett had heard Sandrine’s voice slip, just a little. Look, he stammered, I’m sorry but I’m a tourist, I don’t know anything about this, I need to go to the police—

And say what? Luc burst out in a high pitch. You’ve been driving around with her for a week? My friend, you are the most documented, how do you say, accomplice, in French history.

Garrett looked at Sandrine. Her gray eyes were flat.

This all will be done very fast, she said to the room after a moment. We split three ways, we go in three directions. Nothing ever took place.

One third, she said to Garrett, is minimum two-hundred-thousand Euros.

I don’t want it, he said.

Your bitch boyfriend, Luc spat.

Sandrine ignored him. She said to Garrett, Think it through.

Some part of Garrett realized that she had done her homework. In four days, while he had been filming cheese, she’d figured out everything she needed. Luc got out his baggie, did another line, then nodded the dash that remained in Garrett’s direction. Garrett didn’t know what to do. He held back an urge to cry, took out his phone instead and photographed the neon sign above the stove. It received more than 2,000 likes by the next morning, the most of the trip so far.

* * *

Besançon was an actual city, a regional capital, the historical home of French watchmaking. They rode there with the windows closed; it was truly shitty weather, raining again and cold. Luc tethered his phone and put on Drake. One song later, Sandrine turned off the radio, and that was that.

The city was on the river Doubs, the old town was hemmed in by water, and the streets of the quarter were dark from rain. The coin dealer’s shop was on a narrow street, between a bank and a tabac. The front room smelled of machine oil. The coin dealer, Verley, wore a cardigan, sitting behind the counter on a purple cushion to ease his hemorrhoids. Sandrine rested her bag on the floor and mentioned her mother’s name. The man’s eyes did something before he got up, walked past them, and locked the door.

They followed him to a back room crammed with dusty equipment. He put on gloves, unrolled three of the coins and examined them closely for several minutes, like a man looking at something he’d heard about but never seen.

He set the coins down on a piece of green felt, clutched his back, and grimaced at the wall. He directed everything at Sandrine, in a measured tone: Madame, I will explain the situation, free of charge. One coin, with papers: perhaps 12,000 Euros. Without papers, there is no auction house in Europe that would not call the OCBC.

However, Sandrine interrupted.

He continued as if he hadn’t heard her: A fresh hoard with no provenance is not an object, it is an event. There are collectors who buy events. An event can be placed. Quietly, badly, at much less value.

Aren’t you a collector? Luc snapped.

Something shifted behind the man’s eyes again. He removed his gloves and said to Sandrine, I am a merchant, but I am also good at making telephone calls. Come back tomorrow morning, ten o’clock. We will see.

In the car, Garrett said, I think that went well?

After they’d gone, Verley closed the metal blind and clutched his back again. His ass hurt even worse. He stood in the back room, thinking for a moment, then unpacked a burner phone from a drawer beneath his scales. He was on the phone for less than a minute, mostly listening.

* * *

They got three rooms in a dingy, one-star hotel across a stone bridge from the old quarter. The rain had stopped and the sun came out, cold and white. They ate dinner at a brasserie with tablecloths, Luc’s selection. Sandrine ordered a pitcher of local white wine for the table but didn’t drink any. Garrett helped himself, too nervous to do otherwise. Luc drank four gins, ordering them in pairs, then stepped outside to smoke and make a phone call that lasted 15 minutes.

After dinner, Garrett walked across the bridge. The ancient city was mirrored in the river. The city’s fortress floated in its own reflection. Two women in trenchcoats stood at one end, deciding something. There were halos around the traffic lights, store windows dripping. It was maybe the prettiest thing he’d seen since he arrived in France and Garrett almost didn’t film it, almost didn’t post it. Then he posted all 19 seconds of video—the city had terrific public wifi—but didn’t add a caption, because he wasn’t sure if Sandrine would say it was the right thing or wrong thing to do.

Their rooms in the hotel were on different floors. Sandrine sat on her bed, the bedspread tossed into a corner, and counted the coins. There were supposed to be 280 total. She did the count for a second time: 279. She started a third round, the way her mother taught her when handling other people’s property, and her face showed exactly nothing.

At one in the morning, she met Garrett in the hallway, both wearing hoodies. She’d stepped out to smoke. He couldn’t sleep either. Every floor in the hotel smelled of mold.

Tomorrow this is over, he said.

It’s over, she confirmed.

The hall lights were on timers. The timer ran out, leaving them in the dark.

* * *

Brossard’s men reached Verley’s shop at 8:57. There were two of them, white guys in blue windbreakers who previously served as non-commissioned officers in the Troupes de Montagne. One skinny, one hefty. They parked their van out front, but went in through the back in no hurry. Verley, who’d been expecting them at the front, at 9:30, to act in a supervisory capacity, made his first error by trying not to seem surprised.

In his private safe lay the coin he’d palmed from Hélène’s daughter, prior to selling her out to Brossard. He unlocked the safe to show them. Before he could explain the coin’s existence, before he lost control of his natural functions, one of Brossard’s men shot him twice with a CZ 75 equipped with a suppressor, through the purple cushion just in case.

At 9:28, Garrett turned onto the street. Sandrine noticed the van, saw the front door opening and the hefty man coming out, and said continue in a voice Garrett hadn’t heard before. It had been her idea to arrive early and scout the neighborhood. Luc, who’d slept late, ducked down and started hissing things in French. Garrett had gotten less than an hour’s sleep. He felt like he was clutching the steering wheel through mittens. He drove past the shop and the man in the windbreaker regarded him and the license plate with professional curiosity.

They left the Renault in a parking structure next to the public market. Luc ran to the train station. Staring at the departures board, he popped several pills. Brossard’s men found him 15 minutes later standing in line to buy a coffee. When they invited him into the van, he did not decline. Their conversation was finished in nine minutes. He gave them Hélène. He gave them Sandrine. He gave them his own estimate of what Sandrine would do next. In exchange, he received his life, provisionally.

What about the American? one of the men asked, with pen and notepad instead of the gun, because Brossard required precision.

The American, Luc said, is the most useful fucking thing in France.

* * *

The bees were dying when they arrived at Hélène’s house. Nothing else had been done, nothing violent, nothing burned. Though, after everything was kicked over and wrecked, a cold front moved in and the bees had been unable to reform. Thousands of them crawled around the terrace, dying, making the sound of radio static. Hélène was on her knees among them, salvaging what she could.

Sandrine and Garrett had spent the afternoon inside an ugly multiplex above the market hall. They purchased tickets with cash, sat in an empty theater and watched a horror sequel in the dark. All because Sandrine hated going to the movies, and it was the last thing anyone would suspect of her. Less than halfway through the film, Garrett fell asleep.

Hélène righted boxes and made Garrett, whom she treated like a large domestic animal, hold things as she went. Give it back, she told Sandrine in French. All of it. And it needs to be with interest. The interest is the apology. Brossard needs the gold and a story. His clients need reassurance that he is not someone whom it is possible to rob. So, make it impossible.

Come with me, Sandrine said softly.

Hélène took one of the broken frames from Garrett’s arms and held it up to the sunlight, counting losses. You’ve always been your own person, she said. I taught you arithmetic. What you do is up to you.

They drove up out of the gorges at last light. Garrett talked for a while about embassies and lawyers, how things were different in the States. They passed several milk tankers on the climb. Eventually Garrett stopped talking. Sandrine was silent for seven kilometers after they came out of the tunnel. Another 10 kilometers, she’d completed her mother’s math.

Garrett asked if she was hungry and she said yes.

* * *

High as fuck, Luc showed up at the farmhouse while Garrett was doing the dishes. He had talked to people, he came in boasting, fixed a time for discussion. Brossard would receive the coins back, intact, and the matter would close.

Close on whom, Sandrine said. She was sitting at the dining table, peeling an apple. Long ago, her mother had taught her how to do it in a single ribbon, to persist with the knife until it was clean and done.

On Verley, Luc said excitedly, helping himself to wine from the refrigerator. Think for a second. He’s dead, he can’t argue. Oh and fuck, Verley skimmed, check it out: they found a coin on him, an actual coin, the fucking thief. He took it, he hid it, of course he’s dead.

A dead man’s good enough for the police, Sandrine said calmly. Brossard needs something more.

What do you mean?

Luc, she said, you grew up with this, fucking think for once.

At the same time, the ribbon came off the apple. Garrett saw it and wished he’d been filming. Luc was quiet, but in a different way from his druggie dum-dum, Sandrine thought. She also noticed he didn’t look at Garrett, which made things simpler.

An hour later, with Luc passed out, Sandrine went to Garrett’s room. She didn’t turn on the light. She explained what her mother told her. That Brossard wasn’t just a criminal, but a banker to criminals. The gold she took was part of his guarantee, the way banks guarantee loans. Yes, she had lied. No, she really was a house cleaner. She’d been hiding out for a day when he first arrived, planning her next steps. She curtly outlined how the next day would go: she would return the gold herself, alone, pin it on the coin dealer and let Luc’s family’s version stand or fall. The point was, Garrett wouldn’t be mentioned, he could catch his flight home. She was being serious, she was telling him the truth: All he’d done was drive a new friend around the Jura, that was it.

It’s messed up how you thought I was the criminal, he said in a serious voice, when I first got here.

I didn’t, Sandrine said. But I did read the schedule wrong.

She asked why, that first night, he’d burst into tears. Garrett explained when he was nine, he’d been home sick when a man broke into their apartment. His dad had left them a couple months earlier, his mom moved them to a rougher side of San Diego. He was lying on the couch, watching The Price Is Right, when a man suddenly burst through the screen door, grabbed the television and ran out. Almost instantly, Garrett started crying. It hadn’t happened before, it had happened only a couple times since.

Garrett went silent and the silence was like a fog. Sandrine didn’t disturb it. What happened next was also curt, also serious, and neither of them spoke about it during or afterwards. Garrett woke at four a.m. and Sandrine was asleep with her fist at her mouth like a child. In that moment, no matter how insane it sounded, he felt lucky that they had met.

THREE
The meeting took place in a single-story factory that used to make watch parts, until it closed in the 1970s. Since then it was an industrial carcass, bricks and glass, with a birch tree growing through the loading dock. Brossard told people he liked it for meetings because he was sentimental for the region’s heyday, but what he really liked were the sightlines and the fact it had no neighbors.

Sandrine arrived alone with her bag. One of Brossard’s men, the skinny one, walked her in with a flashlight. The machine floor was empty but for a table under a lamp. A gloomy man in his seventies with a bushy mustache sat wearing a parka, wool gloves, and Mephisto walking shoes. On the table was a digital scale, a notebook, a thermos, a cup of tea.

Luc was standing in a corner. Sandrine half-expected that. He kept his eyes down, and she didn’t glance at him again.

Brossard weighed and counted. Roll by roll, the coins went onto the scale, and the figures went into the notebook in a tight, upright hand. It took thirty minutes. The count came up short. Brossard looked at Sandrine over his reading glasses for a moment, then made a small subtraction in his books.

Sandrine gave him what he was looking for. The American’s arrival and subsequent journey, everything geotagged. The customs control they encountered in the woods. The fingerprints to be found, including at the coin dealer’s: she recounted watching Garrett lean against the counter. And she described where she’d consistently stored her bag in the Renault, if fibers were found. In total: a foreign thief who’d stumbled onto a hoard, approached a fence and killed him, prior to that documenting every step for an alibi, with a thoroughness an investigator would kill for.

Brossard listened with his hands around his tea. The girl had guts like her mother, though probably it was to mask her terror. Brossard sighed heavily and sucked his mustache. He asked her several questions, received several answers. Wondering at the same time if he should try smiling more, like his brother said. His brother was the first born, a politician, he had been the mayor of Dijon for 12 years—in other words, an asshole. At the same time, Brossard was weary of upsetting people. He often fantasized about retiring to New Mexico, living out his days in the American desert, writing crime novels. Though probably he’d find that depressing, too.

Brossard sighed again and Castel’s son, the drug addict, stepped forward, mistaking it for an invitation to speak. The kid paraphrased the girl’s plan, added dramatic flourishes. He seemed to be taking credit for the whole thing. Brossard sat back and closed his eyes. Sandrine jolted but didn’t turn her head at the gunshot. She’d had her suspicions; the Castels also needed to apologize. Brossard’s man cleaned the CZ with a towel and sealed it in a freezer bag before putting it in her hands.

Do it before seven, sleep is deepest before seven, Brossard said to Sandrine, as if to further her education. It was the best he could do.

* * *

Garrett woke at 7:04 to experience a strange sense of peace. There wasn’t any rain. A pair of boughs swayed outside his window. He filmed them and thought about posting the video, then remembered the one person he wanted to show it to most of all.

Garrett sat up in bed and called her name. No one answered.

All of Sandrine’s things were gone, as if the house had been edited. Garrett grabbed his backpack from the couch and noticed the odd weight. He found the seam that had been sewn closed, with several gold coins tucked inside. Found the gun at the bottom beneath his sweatshirt. Garrett sat on the couch and absentmindedly grabbed his phone, his thumb automatically clicking Instagram. He scrolled the week of posts. Realizing, after a moment, the phone’s camera hadn’t been his at all—that the gun and coins were props, but not of a film of his own making. Sensing, as sirens approached from a distance, how much he did not know.

He didn’t know a call to the gendarmerie had been made at 6:40 from a prepaid Nokia.

He didn’t know that a woman’s voice, in French, said something only twenty words long, or that by 6:46 the Nokia was in the river.

The sirens got louder. Garrett ran out the door, across the road, and clambered up a hillside of fir trees. The police found him twenty minutes later and took him without a fuss, two gendarmes above, two below. His hands were up before they asked; he’d been trying to find a signal.

One of the officers said in English that Garrett had the right to an interpreter. After the newspapers and TV programs broke the story, he gained 30,000 new followers within a week.

* * *

The following month, the 18th of November, 8:47 a.m., a woman waited for the number 12 tram at Plainpalais, in Geneva. Clouds were low and silver. People on the platform read newspapers or their phones. The woman did not read a phone or newspaper, there was nothing in either she didn’t already know.

She carried a canvas bag on her shoulder and wore a dress coat. The coat appeared to be expensive, though it tilted slightly to one side, the way coats do when approximately a hundred thousand Euros worth of gold is sewn into the lining. Gold to be sold to the right person, through the right door, in a year or two, but no hurry.

The tram came up the rails. The woman shifted the bag to the other shoulder—a small adjustment, the kind a body makes a hundred times a day—before she got on and found a seat by the window, and the tram took her across the river with all the other people going to work.

Images:
Google Street View/Plotter

ROSECRANS BALDWIN is the bestselling author of Everything Now, winner of the California Book Award. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. ROSECRANSBALDWIN.COM

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©2026 Rosecrans Baldwin

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