It has been five days since I last had a drink, and I want one now.
Paris was far from being an alcoholic. If he had had a problem, Jim would know, and would not pick him for missions. If he had a problem Jim would be quietly reaching out through his apparently endless network and finding a place for him in some discreet treatment programme. Jim didn't like to lose agents, but he needed to be able to rely on them, and one couldn't rely on an addict in this business. Not even a danger addict.
It has been five days since I last had a drink, and I want to hold the glass in my hands, and let the alcohol burn my throat.
He did drink a lot. Off duty, that is. He wasn't averse to sitting down on his sofa in his New York apartment and emptying a whole bottle of spirits in a night. He didn't pour scotch into a pint glass; nothing that crass. He just sat with his legs stretched out on the cushions, alone, with an ashtray under one outstretched hand and a glass in the other. No one ever had a word to say about chain smoking, about empty pack after pack of cigarettes in the trash, but if they saw the bottles in his trash can they would probably start to have doubts.
Still, he wasn't an alcoholic. He could do without it. On a mission he drank only when necessary, whether as part of his cover or during those bonding moments when they all sat together to discuss, plan, ruminate over what had happened that day. He did not find himself waking up and reaching for a bottle. He never packed alcohol in his suitcase; something that couldn't be said for Jim, although Jim Phelps was as far from an alcoholic as icebergs were from the Caribbean.
Paris liked to get back to his apartment and sit with almost all the lights off, with a bottle of scotch or sometimes brandy on the side table, a small glass, a full pack of cigarettes. He liked to put music on the record player, something jazzy but up to the minute, and sit there in the semi-darkness watching the red glow of the end of his cigarette wax and wane as he drew in hot clouds of nicotine. He liked the liquid sound as he poured the drink and the way the light shone through and made it look like honey, and he liked the way that as each glassful slipped down his throat everything started to melt away. Sometimes there was a lot to melt.
This was one of the evenings where he could have happily finished an entire bottle alone; maybe even two. Sometimes missions were hard, and this had been one of the worst. Dana returning injured, with an abdominal wound that they had feared would kill her. Jim bitterly cursing himself, withdrawn and angry over the mistakes that he believed he had made that put his team in danger. Even Barney and Willie had been shaken up over this one, and after almost two years with the team Paris had started to believe that nothing could rock that pair's pragmatic attitude.
Paris had been the one to catch Dana when she fell. He had been the one cradling her in the back of the van, holding his hands over the wound that threatened to spill her insides out into the raw air, blood running slick through his fingers and soaking into his clothes. He could still smell the blood. He'd washed his hands a hundred times, showered six times in a day, sent the clothes to the incinerator, but he could still smell her blood, iron rich, slightly sweet.
Doug should have been there, but for some reason the powers that be had decided a doctor was an unnecessary expense unless directly indicated, and Jim had had to cut him from their teams. But then maybe Doug wouldn't have been able to do more than they had with the medical kits in the van. He couldn't have stitched her up, lying on a metal floor, bumping over pot-hole ridden South American roads. So he would have done what Paris and Barney did, packing cloth over the wound, making her lie still, trying to keep her blood pressure down so that she did not pump out her entire life force into the van.
Anyway, she had survived. He didn't know why he was still so hung up on it. She was in hospital, in one of the best hospitals in Manhattan, in a private room, with the best doctors money could buy. She had been stitched up, she had been given transfusions, and Jim had assured Paris that she was healing well.
Then why was he holed up here in his apartment alone fantasising about a drink that he didn't have? Why was Jim holed up in his own apartment, probably going through the same self-recriminations? Except, of course, Jim would have scotch. Jim always had scotch. Paris suspected he had it delivered, whereas he himself had run out on this last mission having neglected to restock the drinks cabinet and leaving only half a meatloaf and a packet of eggs in the refrigerator.
His decision was as quick as his famed sleight of hand. Sitting here he was eating himself alive. Paris unfolded himself from the sofa, shrugged his arms into a leather jacket, pushed wallet and cigarettes into his pocket, and left the apartment.
It wasn't as late as it had felt, and the streets were busy with guys taking their girls to shows or bars or clubs, with down-and-outs still pan-handling, huddled against the granite walls of expensive buildings, with businessmen returning late from work. Paris stepped down into the subway and for a while the clamour of people's voices and the trains clattering along the tracks helped to push thoughts out of his mind. On another night he might have just sat in one of the cars and let it snake him around beneath the city. He liked to do that sometimes, just to sit and observe. He'd spent a lot of time down here when he was younger, sometimes doing tricks for the coins people would flick into a top hat artfully placed in front of him.
Now he was in the business of impersonation he spent time here just watching people, watching how they moved and spoke, how they breathed even. He could have impersonated an overweight second-generation Hungarian immigrant or an up-tight Philadelphia businessman, a transvestite in heels and a wig, a bum down here just for the warmth. He'd seen them all, taken them in.
This time, though, he sat without looking at the other patrons of the fine New York City Subway. Instead, he let his eyes drift on the ever moving darkness outside the windows opposite, seeing straight through the reflections and into the nothing beyond. He let the stations form themselves from the darkness and then disappear again, until he was at the stop closest to Jim's, when he pushed himself up from the dirty seat and slipped back up above ground.
There was a bite in the air, and people were pulling their coat collars closer around them as they spilled out of the subway into the street. The night was pierced by lights and neon signs, by the headlights of cars and the tail lights glowing red as they pulled away. Paris closed his jacket and pushed his hands into his pocket, walking the final block to Jim's place as it started to rain.
The place had a doorman, but he was familiar enough with Jim's acquaintances, and Paris assumed he was discreet enough not to pry into why the same people gathered at Jim's apartment at all hours and in all weathers. The doorman called up, and then gave Paris the nod. A small measure of tension slipped away. Jim could easily have just said, 'No callers,' and Paris would have either had to turn away, or put his considerable skill at breaking and entering to use. Instead, he mounted the stairs, taking them two at a time for the exercise that would push some of the tension out of him. He hated elevators at times like this.
Jim welcomed him, scotch in hand, of course. His fire was imparting a warm flickering glow to the stylish room. There was something classical on the record player that made Paris's teeth itch, but when Jim crossed back to the other side of the room he lifted the arm and the music cut off.
'I've just got off the phone to the hospital,' Jim said before Paris could say anything. 'Dana's fine. They think she'll be sitting up tomorrow. Might be home by the end of the week. She won't be back on the job any time soon, of course.'
Paris slung himself onto the sofa without being asked. Jim handed him a tumbler of scotch and dropped his own long, solid body into an armchair, picking up his cigarette from where he'd left it on the edge of the ashtray. Paris downed half the glass in one swallow. He had come here to talk but now he found he had little to say.
Jim leant forward in his chair, looking for all the world like a psychologist about to gently counsel his patient.
'It wasn't your fault, Paris,' he said.
Paris was suddenly angry. His fingers tightened so hard on the tumbler that the knuckles grew white.
'You're damn right it wasn't my fault,' he said tightly, his voice only a hairsbreadth away from becoming a shout. 'It wasn't my fault, it wasn't Barney's fault, it wasn't Willie's fault – '
The emphasis that Jim had placed on your meant that he damn well knew whose fault it was. Jim Phelps was the mission leader, and all responsibility ultimately fell on him. God, Jim led them through hell and high water on these missions. It wasn't exactly conscription, but none of them were the type, once picked for a team, to politely decline. Paris wasn't sure Barney had missed a single mission in his whole history on the job. Had Barney ever felt able to say no? He, Paris, had certainly come close a couple of times. But there was one thing they all relied on, one thing they all trusted. Jim.
He was a meticulous planner with an incomparable mind. He had come through the Navy and into this strange, under the surface business with a reputation for always getting done what was needed. His casualties were low, his success rates high. Sure, there were always injuries. Jim himself had been injured numerous times, and no one could say he shied away from putting himself into the line of fire. But somehow, somehow, this was different.
'I shouldn't have sent her in,' Jim said, looking into his glass of scotch as if it were a crystal ball.
'She was almost raped,' Paris said. Even in these safe, warm surroundings that word sounded too harsh to use.
'I know,' Jim said.
Paris looked at him, saw the lines tight on his face, his lips pressed together. He knew Jim knew. And it wasn't any fairer to blame Jim than it was to blame himself. Dana was a good agent. Sure, she was young, but she had a good head on her. She knew how to defend herself. She knew to watch her drinks, to read that look some men got in their eyes.
This time it had come so close, though. There had been no drugged drink and no warning look, just the sudden, vicious anger of an enemy agent who wanted to take out his sense of betrayal on the woman who had taken him in. They had got there just in time, Dana lying there in the alley with her clothes ripped to shreds and her eyes wide with fear, the agent already aroused and almost in the process of penetration. It had not got quite that far, but far enough. Jim's hand on the back of the man's jacket had almost choked him, his fist had broken the guy's jaw. Paris wouldn't have cared if it had killed him. But somehow in all of that the enemy's gun had gone off, striking Dana obliquely across the abdomen in a wound reminiscent of a shrapnel injury of the First World War.
And Jim blamed himself. Somewhere, far back in the files, there was a small notation that the enemy agent had previously been flagged as a rapist. They weren't even files that Jim had had access to until after the mission was over, since getting their hands on this cache of info was the point of the mission. There was no way he could have known. But he blamed himself, and in some irrational part of himself, Paris blamed him too.
Paris finished the second half of his drink in another swallow. Jim poured more, the only sounds in the room the crackling of the fire and the clink of the bottle as it touched the glass. That made Paris look harder at Jim. It was unusual for his hand to be so unsteady.
'I'm sorry,' Paris said eventually.
The silence thickened.
'It wasn't your fault any more than it was hers,' Paris continued.
Jim was studying his glass as if it held the answer to the formation of the universe. Sometimes life boiled down to just the thoughts in one's head, and a glass of amber liquid. He took another mouthful as if that were an answer.
'I thought I was supposed to be the drinker here,' Paris said, and his laugh sounded strange in the silent room.
Jim snorted, and then laughed too, as sudden and spontaneous as a break in a dam. There wasn't much humour in that laugh; just a feeling of bitterness at the ridiculousness of the universe.
Jim rolled the edge of his tumbler against his lip, then took another draw of his cigarette instead of a mouthful of liquor.
'Paris, she told me she's thinking of quitting,' he said quietly.
That sharpened his attention. 'She's only been in the job two years,' he replied.
'Yeah, I know, but…' Jim looked up, fixed Paris with blue eyes that were bloodshot from drinking or lack of sleep. 'I told her I'd support her decision.'
'You want her to quit too?'
'I think I was wrong in taking her on,' Jim admitted, hunching forward, hands clasped on his knees. 'She's too young, too – '
'Too female?' Paris hazarded perspicaciously.
Jim grunted a kind of acknowledgement. 'Maybe…'
'Dana's always seemed more – childlike. More vulnerable,' Paris suggested, 'and this has confirmed it all.'
'Cinnamon wouldn't have let him get that close to her,' Jim said, talking about an agent Paris had never met. Then he shook his head as if angry with himself. 'I can't blame her. Mustn't blame her. But she is, Paris. She is vulnerable. She is childlike. People take advantage of that. Cinnamon would have broken his arm before he'd gotten close enough for anything else.'
'He had a gun, Jim,' Paris reminded him. 'She didn't.'
'Yeah,' Jim said slowly, looking into empty space.
Paris swung his legs up onto the cushions of the sofa and rested back against the arm. Too young, too female, too vulnerable… Sometimes Dana struck him as a doe caught in the woods, the hunter's gun pointing straight between her eyes. There was an innocence to her that persisted, even through her exposure to all of the darker sides of human nature in this job. He was never sure how much it was an act, how much it was real. Dana liked to believe in good. Maybe sometimes that did her more harm than it should.
He was on his third glass now, and god knows how many Jim had already downed. When Paris rolled his head sideways Jim looked suddenly older, leaning back now in his chair in that open collar shirt and soft grey sweater that he favoured when he needed to relax. The lines on his face were made sharper by the firelight. His hand looked old around the glass he held. Of course, smoking and drinking and stress would do that to you. Jim wasn't more than five years older than he was, but tonight it could have been ten.
There were very few more words to say, and Jim seemed to sense that. He wasn't one for labouring on a point. He felt to blame for Dana's injury, but talking about it wouldn't change that. Paris just sipped at his drink now and tried to mellow out that part of his thoughts that tried to blame Jim too. He was a free agent. They all were. They all had the choice to quit this ridiculous lifestyle, any time they wanted to. Paris had grown bored of the business of nightclub entertainment and small stage shows, and he had found himself recruited to Jim's agency just at the right time. But now things were changing again.
He wasn't bored this time. He wasn't sure one could one get bored of a business like this. No, this time it was the opposite. It was that the constant danger, the constant adrenaline highs, had worn him down. A guy couldn't do that forever. His heart wouldn't stand the strain. And he'd keep wanting those drinks when he got back from a mission, and he'd keep wanting that adrenalin high just to make him feel alive. Perhaps if he were working alone he could keep on going, but in this business the team was everything, and what hurt one part of the team hurt them all. It hurt Paris in particular. He had always had that fault running straight down the centre of his being, that weak spot where emotion seeped in and festered inside. He cared too much about some people. He cared about Dana.
So Dana thought it was time to quit – and he didn't blame her after this last mission. Maybe it was the right time to get the hell out of the business, before a slip meant he didn't come home. You couldn't go into these things unless your whole heart was in them. He had come out to see Jim not knowing what he was thinking, but he was getting more sure by the minute.
It was late when he left the apartment. Two a.m., three? He wasn't sure. They had slipped through the evening talking, not talking, talking again. Paris felt as if he had talked his entire soul out of his body, and Jim had talked back. There had been a lot of scotch consumed, but the talk had been earnest, serious. Life changing. Jim listened as seriously as he planned and executed missions, as if to him Paris were no less important than his own brother.
It wasn't raining any more, but the subway wasn't running when he reached the closest entrance. Paris walked the whole way home through the dead streets, warm with drink, his jacket slung over his shoulder. Sometimes he hummed, looking up at the sky, just catching glimpses of stars bright enough to shine through the city lights. He felt light, somehow. He felt changed.
Tomorrow he'd go see Dana and take his leave, wish her well. Maybe he'd drop Barney and Willie a line or put through a call, just to let them know goodbye. But he'd given Jim Phelps all his goodbyes on leaving, and didn't think he'd ever see that slick New York apartment again. He didn't know what he was going to do the day after tomorrow, but it didn't matter. He had money enough, and time. There were no life and death decisions to be made. Suddenly everything seemed easy.