Paris

Every place has a feeling. Rocks, trees, roads and buildings don't have any aura in themselves, but when humans visit these places they fill them with emotion and some of it rubs off. It's sort of like an odor -- a few molecules of feeling left behind on the surface of a place. It persists over time and is strongest where the original feelings were most intense.

It was this faint residue that Theo could detect and follow, sort of like a bloodhound tracking a scent. She wasn't especially good with addresses or directions, and latitude/longitude coordinates meant nothing to her unless she looked them up, but she knew the feeling of places, and this was enough to get her where she wanted to go.

The easiest places to visit were those she had been to before. She already knew the unique signature of the place. These were her own feelings she was tracking, so she just had to reproduce them in her head, reach for that place and pull it in. Voila! She was there! There couldn't be anyone watching her at either end, but if the conditions were right, it was really easy to make the leap.

Visiting places she had never been to was more of a challenge. The best targets were tourist destinations visited by a lot of people, all of whom had left similar emotional impressions. Or it could be a special place that made powerful impressions on just a few people. Sometimes, the feelings of just one person were enough to give her a target fix, but only if she was in tune with that person already or the feelings were so overwhelming that they blasted through the background noise.

Frankly, there were many places she just didn't want to visit because the vibe was so bad. Sometimes she encountered these places in person and sometimes just in her mind. A certain urban alley or a clearing in the jungle could give her the shivers, while a seemingly identical place somewhere else gave her nothing. She surmised that terrible things happened at those places, but she didn't know what and didn't care to know. They just weren't happy destinations, so she built walls around them and declined to go.

The Eiffel Tower wasn't one of these places. Millions of people had been there, leaving strong but benign emotional traces. Like Disney World, Times Square or the Las Vegas Strip, la Tour Eiffel was a big, bland beacon in the emotional universe, almost impossible to avoid even if she hadn't been there before.

At around noon, Paris Time, she found herself the top-most deck -- le troisième étage. She just appeared in the open, in a corner of the main deck where no one happened to be looking. Several tourists could have seen her if they had looked in her direction, but they didn't. It was funny how that worked. It was relatively easy to get into a crowded place: You just kept trying until it worked. Getting away was the challenge. After people were already aware of your presence, it was harder to find the privacy for escape.

As usual, she was dressed discreetly. Her dad called it "costuming". You always wanted to clothe yourself in a way that didn't stand out in the local environment. She wore jeans, sneakers, a nondescript blouse and button-up sweater. No logos or brand marks. Her hair was tied back in a bun that was neither attractive or unattractive. The idea was to give people nothing to fix on, just a generic tourist in an ordinary place for tourists. At least until she knew the environment, she was, deliberately, an invisible woman.

Her dad taught her that the first thing you always do when you arrive is start moving. You should act like you're in the middle of doing something and complete that action. Avoid eye contact or any other kind of interaction with the people nearby. Take a quick tour of your surroundings, assess the situation and identify any potential dangers. Only after you fully understand your situation can you relax and take on a normal tourist role.

From the center of the platform, near the elevator, Theo moved quickly to the viewing area along the perimeter, pretending to look out on Paris. It was a stunning view, but she had seen it before. Her main concern was the platform itself: who was there and who might have deduced her strange entry. She walked the full loop along the perimeter, and when she got back to her starting point, her dad was waiting for her.

"Bonjour, Mademoiselle!" he said.

"Bonjour, Monsieur!" she replied.

"As-tu faimes?" he said. Are you hungry?

"Un peu."

"Chez McDonalds?"

"Non, merci."

"Chez Burger King? Chez Kentucky Fried Chicken?"

She laughed. "How about something French?"

"Well, this is Paris, they ought to have French food somewhere?

"French fries don't count!" she said.

They got off la Tour Eiffel the old fashioned way, by waiting in line for an elevator down to the 2nd level and another to the ground. Then they found a sidewalk cafe near the Seine, one they had visited before. Instead of fast food, they ordered slow food: coffee followed by a series of small courses to be spread out over an hour or so. Theo did the ordering for them because already her French was better than his.

"How are you dealing with your loss?" said Dad.

"Okay, I guess. At least I'm sleeping the whole night now. It was so senseless. You know, there was someone standing in the middle of the road. Jerry had to swerve to avoid him and that's what caused the accident.

"I thought it was alcohol," said Dad.

"Well, that too. Everyone's alcohol level was through the roof, including Derek, that dummy! But Amber said there was a guy standing in the road and Jerry overreacted."

"Was the guy okay?"

"They never found him. He must have ran into the woods. I bet he was drunk, too. Anyway, I'm dealing with it. I know Derek and I probably would have broken up anyway. We were heading to different colleges, and it would have been hard to maintain the relationship, but I never would have wanted it to happen like this."

"Life is full of these traumas," said Dad. "This won't be the last one in your life. When things are out of your hands like that, you just have to think about what you can get out of the experience. It's got to somehow make you a better person."

"I guess. It just seems stupid now. Totally meaningless."

"It won't always seem that way. Someday, you'll look back and say, 'That's the way it was meant to be.'"

She shrugged. "I suppose."

"At least now you're free. No encumbrances. Your life is a blank slate."

"And you think you know what I should do with that blank slate."

"I have some ideas."

The first course arrived, a petite salade for her and a seafood bisque for him. She thanked the waiter and even engaged in some small talk about the beautiful June weather. For someone who had taken only two years of French in high school, she was remarkably proficient, but that's because she cheated. When other students were struggling with their homework, she slipped away to the south of France and actually practiced it.

"So tell me about this business of yours," she said. "How exactly do you make money? You always seem to have enough of it, but where does it come from?"

"That's simple: I steal it."

"Why does that not surprise me? I thought you said you didn't steal."

"It's honorable stealing, you understand. I only steal money from dishonest people who have already stolen it from others. And I only steal under circumstances where I won't get caught and where no one would know it's missing."

"I see," she said. "That must make it okay. I see what's happening here: My father is a master thief, and he wants me to join his business."

"Well, stealing isn't exactly my business. I just steal what I need to survive. It takes me maybe 15 minutes a month. I could steal a lot more if I wanted."

"Can you give me an example of one of your heists?"

"Hmmm." He thought about it for a minute. "Okay, here's one: A shipping container is seized in the Port of Los Angeles filled with millions of dollars in illicit drug money. It is reported in the newspapers, but there is a window of a couple of days between the time the container is seized and when the money is officially counted. They have to get all the proper warrants and authorizations, etc. Until then, the authorities simply seal the container and guard it from the outside. Now, I'm talking hypothetically, of course...."

"Of course, hypothetically."

He smiled. "Hypothetically, if one could get inside that container, one could help oneself to the cash therein, subject only to the physical limitations of getting it out."

"And what are those limitations?"

"Drug money comes in hundred dollar bills. I can safely carry maybe fifty bills at a time, depending on the clothes I'm wearing, so that's $5000 at a shot. If I take multiple trips, I can bring back more."

"I see," she said, not hiding her sarcasm. "Aren't you the clever one -- hypothetically."

"Indeed I hypothetically am!" he said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a fold of bills, maybe 20 of them. They were mostly US hundreds but also a few high-value euro notes. He pulled out one of the hundreds and showed it to her. "You gotta admire old Ben Franklin," he said. "He's portable. He's accepted almost everywhere. No one asks any questions about where he came from. No I.D. required for use. It's the perfect form of currency."

"Drug money," she said, trying to process it. "You live off drug money."

He shrugged. "Same as any other money."

"So drug money is buying our lunch."

"Does it taste any different?"

The main course arrived then. Theo looked down at her plate, with its daintily arranged foodstuffs. It was more art than food, and it almost seemed a shame to eat it. And now, of course, it would taste like drugs.

"Let me get this straight," she said. "You live off drug money. Drug money paid your child support and for all our trips together. Drug money helped raise me."

"It wasn't all drug money. There were a number of other sources.

"You mean other crimes."

"The important thing is, no one suffered for this money, or at least no one was hurt by my taking it. I am a principled thief. I wouldn't want to steal directly from a drug lord, because they know exactly how much money they have, and someone would suffer if any of it came up missing. If the drug lord has already lost the money, however, then no one will be punished any more than they already are."

"Aren't you stealing from the government then? Doesn't the government own the money once they seize it?"

"The government," he scoffed. "What is government anyway? I steal the money before the government knows what it has, so again no one gets blamed.

"That's not the issue. Unlike a drug lord, the government is supposed to be working for good. Aren't you stealing money from the American people, from good causes like fighting drug abuse and feeding children? How is that any different than cheating on your taxes?"

"Taxes? Who pays taxes? Only the little people pay taxes."

"Figures."

"I haven't paid taxes since... since when? Since the divorce. Of course, I have no income either."

"No, drug dealers don't pay taxes."

"I am not a drug dealer. I don't feel that I am tainted by any of the criminal enterprises that I skim off of. I'm just trying to keep a low profile. There are other ways to make money. As you mentioned once, I could spy on people. I could use my skills to obtain information other people don't have, then look for ways to exploit it to my benefit. But that's morally murky itself, much more so than just swiping a little cash from someplace where no one will notice it missing."

"Or, dear Father, you could get a job! You could make an honest living doing something productive for people and earning money the traditional way. Then you wouldn't have to steal."

"A job?" he said, feigning cluelessness. "Oh, yeah, I had one of those once, back when I was married to your mother. I tried to play the role of a normal family man. I worked 9-to-5, Monday through Friday, for six years. In an office of all places! Can you imagine? An office!

"People do it all the time."

For me, it didn't work. The whole thing blew up in a horrible way. When the dust cleared, I realized I could do better. I had special skills and wasn't using them. I was denying who I was. Raising a family is noble, and I admire your mother for it. I also admire old What's-his-Name, too, for stepping in and sticking with it...."

"Howard."

"Howard is a good man. He was the father to you that I could never be. It just wasn't a role I could play.

"You are you, and Howard is Howard. I don't blame you for it. I just wish you had been more consistant during the year. You don't know how many times I packed up for your weekend visit and you didn't show. It got to the point where the only time I knew I would see you was June and I didn't even bother thinking about it the rest of the year."

"I'm sorry. I followed my calling, and it took me places you can't imagine. It was way more than I bargained for. It was hard enough to block off those two weeks every year. I essentially had to put the world on hold, just like I'm doing now."

Theo put down her fork and gave up trying to eat.

"Okay," she said, "this is confusing to me. What exactly do you do?"

"I'm a freelancer," he replied.

"A freelance what?" she asked, expecting another circular answer.

"For lack of a better word, a freelance god. I intervene in places where I am needed. I try to make the world a better place."

"Oh," said Theo. "A god with drug money."

"I thought we established that it was the government's money. I justify stealing from the government by saying that governments are very inefficient. They are hobbled by regulations, bureaucracy and the need to please the most hysterical people first. For the relatively small amount of money I steal, I can do far more good. I am not crippled by politics. I can cut directly to the heart of a problem and solve it definitively."

"And how do you solve these problems?"

"Using skills a lot like yours. I can go places no one else can. I take things away. I can leave things behind. I can rearrange the state of things when I get there. They are only little things, of course, but sometimes just a single molecule moved from one place to another is enough to bring down a fortress. You just got to know which molecule, and that's the hard part."

"Oh," said Theo, pushing her plate away. She had had enough: both enough food and enough input.

"We should check into our hotel," he said, noticing her fatigue. "Would you like to stay here in Paris or at the Seaside Inn?"

"At the Inn," she said. "I'm tired right now. I just want to watch television."

"Okay, would you like the room to yourself tonight?"

She thought about it a moment. "Yeah," she said, "That would be nice. I think I'd like to veg for a while, try to absorb all this. You could come by in the morning."

"Okay. You're 18 now, so you can check in on your own. The reservation is in your name."

He picked up his fold of bills from the table and peeled off three hundreds. "Will this get you by 'til morning?" he asked.

She hesitated. "Drug money," she said.

"You can smell the cocaine," he said, holding the bills up to his nose.

"Well, seeing as they have already been stolen, there doesn't seem much harm in it."

"Sure, and why not have a couple more?" He peeled off two more hundreds, $500 in all, and held them out for her. "Don't worry, I'll make more."

"I'm not sure about this," she said, still not taking the money. "If I accept this money, am I an accessory to your criminal enterprise?"

"Maybe, but you've been an accessory all along, so what's the difference?"

"This does not imply that I agree with your lifestyle or that I want to be part of your plan.

"Of course not, no. It's just money for the motel."

"The motel costs $90 at most."

"And a little extra for your expenses."

"My father, the master thief."

"That's me. Dashing and debonaire."

"Not exactly. You could use a shave -- and a shower!"

"I'll work on that overnight. Right now, though, you need money for expenses. Is $500 not enough? Would you like more?"

"No," she said, "that's enough."

Then she took the money.

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