Smuggler of First Smiles

By the time Cormac found the building, the rain had settled into a steady whisper on the cobblestones, soft as someone sharing secrets they didn’t expect to be believed.

Rue Chimay ran narrow between old stone walls, the kind holding centuries of damp. The bakery on the corner—Boulangerie du Marché—had already drawn in its café chairs, though the smell of butter and coffee still leaked through the seam of the door. Above it, a row of leaded windows glowed yellow — her apartment.

He climbed the worn steps with the crate strap digging into his shoulder. Rainwater threaded down beside him, each step cupping its own private puddle. The hallway smelled of wet wool, yeast, and old varnish.

He knocked. The door opened as far as the chain would allow. One gray eye examined him, red-rimmed and exhausted.

“Oui?”

“Madame Holtz?” he said. “Cormac Dunne. The panels.”

The chain withdrew. “You are late.”

“I’m here,” he said. An answer that had gotten him through harder doors.

Inside was smaller than he expected. One room, wooden floor blackened by age, a narrow iron bed against the wall, and a table near the window. The far corner sloped down, sagging from years of wet winters.

On the table lay three shapes under linen.

“They were my grandfather’s,” she said in soft German. “Or his father’s. The story is less precise than the Germans prefer.”

Cormac’s German was soldier-simple, more barracks than Goethe. He stayed in it. English carried too much air.

He eased the crate to the floor. At the table, he saw her hands: dishwater cracks, sunken nail-beds, the pale crescent scars at the base of each thumb.

He didn’t ask about them. Asking rarely helped.

“You will not unwrap them here,” she said. “You promised.”

He had agreed. Cash on the table. Panels kept sealed until he crossed out of Luxembourg. He didn’t argue. People selling art needed to believe they hadn’t fully let go.

“May I see the corners?”

She hesitated, then peeled one edge back. The smell of old oil paint and dust escaped like breath from a sealed cupboard.

Honey-dark oak. Tight grain. A fraction of painted windowpane. The ghost of a cheek turned toward something he couldn’t yet name.

“Three panels,” he said, neutrally. “Yes?”

“Three.” She folded the linen. “They are a sequence. Departure. Passing. Arrival.” A dry smile at the marketplace joke. “They tell no one anything fashionable.”

He laid out the euros. She didn’t touch them.

“My grandmother said that when they were first hung in our house in Differdange, people came to stare. Some laughed. Some cried.” Her shoulders rose in a small shrug. “She said it was because the painter remembered them. When they did not know yet what they had lost.”

Cormac nodded, the way a man nods to a myth from someone he respects enough not to argue with.

Rain thickened, flattening against the glass. Down in Place d’Armes, tires hissed through puddles. Someone shouted Bonsoir. A dog barked once, offended at the weather.

She wrapped each panel like dressing a child in winter: linen, then paper, then string. Each knot precise, pulled tight enough to bite. Cormac noticed the way her thumb brushed the wood before the final fold—a gesture of brief parting only she could hear.

When she finished, she nudged the bundle toward him. Her hands lingered.

“Do not hang them where people hurry,” she said quietly. “If they are not looking, there is no…effect.”

“Effect?” he repeated.

Her eyes skimmed over his face, and whatever she hoped to find there wasn’t present.

“You do not believe,” she said. “It does not matter.” The euros vanished into her pocket. “Go. The rain will grow worse.”

He lifted the crate. The weight settled like memory across his collar.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Bonne route, Monsieur Dunne.”

***

Tennessee rain carried a different grammar—less whisper, more percussion. It hammered the corrugated roof of his rented warehouse outside Bristol, muddied the gravel, and left the air smelling of diesel and river fog.

He backed the truck to the loading bay. The Holston River steamed in the distance like something caught between seasons.

J.R.—the mechanic from two bays over—wandered over with a rag in hand.

“You bring back anything good this time?”

“Just some unfashionable Europeans.”

“Thought that was all of ’em.” J.R. laughed, but it faltered when they slid the crate to the table.

Cormac cut straps. Foam hushed against panel edges. Paper gave way with a dry sigh.

The first panel: an interior of a stagecoach. A traveler near the window, hat in his lap, coat creased across his knees. Outside, countryside blurred into motion. The man’s mouth lifted at the corner—not a grin, just the moment before one.

“Well, hell.” J.R. leaned in. “My boy used to look like that. From the backseat on Sundays coming home from his mama’s. Thought I didn’t see.”

To Cormac it looked like good brushwork.

“I’ll holler if I need the engine hoist,” he said.

J.R. blinked, one small shine of salt at the rim of his eye, then left.

When the door closed, he unwrapped the next two alone.

A woman lifting a child on a train platform. Light pouring down from an opening in the roof. The child open-mouthed with some new private joy. The mother’s lips parted—not fully smiling, just letting the future in.

The third: a brick wall close enough to feel its grit. A hand pressed against it, fingers splayed. Above the wall, silhouettes of roofs and a church spire. An arrival. A traveler deciding this was real.

He stared until his neck stiffened.

On the pegboard above his desk was a red-ringed date:

Frankfurt. Winter. Don’t forget.

As if forgetting had ever been an option.

***

January, five years back. Snow melting black in the gutters along Kaiserstraße. The chapel on post had poor heat and a wind that knew every crack in the door.

The coffin looked small for Sergeant Macias. A man who’d taken up more room than most could be contained by no box. Pneumonia had stolen what war hadn’t.

The chaplain listed deployments, ribbons, operations. Words soldiers carry like stones: heavy, interchangeable.

Cormac’s boots stood in line with the others. He did not think about Kunar nights or Macias’s laugh or how the man’s grin could puncture bad days like sun through storm clouds.

Outside afterward, breath and cigarette smoke mingled with flurries. A German boy tossed bread at pigeons, the birds jittering like bits of ash remembering flight. Every throw earned a quick involuntary smile across the kid’s face—pure, unguarded delight.

“You used to smile like that,” said a voice beside him. Sergeant Klein. “Back when the chow hall got real eggs.”

“You’re thinking of someone else.”

“No, Dunne. You grinned like you’d tricked God.”

“Maybe He got wise.”

He walked away. The wind cut between the buildings, lifting flags. His jaw locked hard enough to ache.

He didn’t decide to stop smiling. He just never saw the reason again.

***

The buyer in Mexico called through a number that showed no city.

“We specialize in pieces carrying stories,” the man said. “Three panels. Travelers. A sequence. Departure, passing, arrival. We pay well. But you must deliver them yourself. No freight. Too many eyes.”

Cormac agreed. He knew routes. He knew borders. He knew how to move fragile things without losing them.

He took I-81 down the spine of Appalachia, the ridges rising and falling like tired cattle. Knoxville to I-40 west, past billboards promising fireworks, salvation, cheap tires. The crate rode behind him, strapped and padded like precious cargo.

At a truck stop outside Little Rock, he filled his mug with burned coffee. A girl in pink sneakers hovered by his tailgate while her mother apologized.

“She just likes trucks,” she said, tugging the child away.

The girl turned, glanced through the glass at the crate, and her mouth tugged upward—small, private, the kind of smile children give strangers they haven’t learned to fear.

Cormac watched them walk away. He shook it off. People smiled all the time. It meant nothing.

***

The World Trade Bridge rose out of heat haze and concrete. Customs smelled of exhaust, wet asphalt, and apprehension—the particular odor of people who didn’t know yet which side of the line they’d land on.

A young officer walked slow circles around his truck, light rain spotting her uniform.

“What’s your cargo, sir?”

“Art panels,” he said. “Declared. All paperwork’s clean.”

She reviewed it with care. Her cologne was sharp and antiseptic, fighting the bitter coffee scent drifting from the office door.

“Open the back, please.”

He lifted the shell. The crate sat ready, straps intact.

A second officer arrived—older, sun-scoured, the creases around his eyes burned pale.

“Let’s take a look.”

They cut the straps, raised the lid. The smell of dried oil and wood grain unrolled into the humid air.

Panel one: the coach.

Panel two: the woman and child.

Panel three: the hand on the wall.

The older officer stared too long.

“Any red-list issues?” the younger murmured.

“Not our region.” He tapped the third panel. “What’s happening here?”

“Arrival,” Cormac said. “First moment someone knows they’ve made it.”

The officer’s jaw worked. His voice dropped.

“My cousin came through here in ’95. Not this bridge, but the river’s the same. First thing he did was lay his hand on the concrete. Said he smiled even though he thought they’d turn him around. Warm from the sun. He remembered that part.”

The younger officer’s eyes flicked to the train panel. The corner of her mouth twitched upward—relief disguised as recognition.

“That one,” she whispered. “My mom held me like that when we came off the bus in San Antonio. I don’t remember it. Just the story.”

The older officer returned with the stamped papers.

“You’re clear. Sign here.”

They rewrapped the panels with surprising gentleness.

Cormac drove south toward the bridge, the smell of coffee and varnish clinging to his jacket.

***

San Miguel de Allende rose out of the high desert like a European town someone forgot to return. Steep cobbled streets. Houses painted in colors English didn’t have proper names for: mango, dusted red, the green of saints’ robes.

Galería La Travesía waited on a corner off Calle Umarán, its walls the shade of faded yolk. Inside, stone held the night’s cool in its bones.

The buyer greeted him in linen and polite calculation.

“You made good time.”

“Road was clear.”

They unpacked the panels in a carriage-room studio: high beams, filtered daylight, an orange tree in the courtyard, stubbornly clinging to fruit.

At the stagecoach, the buyer inhaled softly.

“People love travel. They imagine bravery without leaving their chairs.”

At the train platform, he nodded.

“Mother and child. We’ll frame it ornate. Make people think of their abuelas.”

At the hand on brick, he tilted his head.

“More difficult. Abstract. For the sophisticated buyer.”

“It’s the last one,” Cormac said. “The arrival.”

“Or the barrier,” the man replied. “Art is a mirror.”

He named a generous figure. It would have erased Cormac’s debts, funded another year of cross-continent buys.

Cormac didn’t answer.

“You hesitate,” the buyer said. “You drove across a nation. We offer real money. You carried them here to release them, not keep them locked away.”

“I’ve traveled farther.”

The buyer raised his hands. “Sentiment is charming. Briefly. But business—”

“They’re not telling people how to feel,” Cormac said. “They’re remembering something. Together.”

The buyer blinked at the choice of pronoun. They.

“We will keep them together,” he said, indulging him. “If no one buys, we separate. This is how the world works.”

“No,” Cormac said. “Not selling.”

Silence folded around the room.

The buyer’s smile hardened. “As you wish. But cultures are not saved by caution. They are scattered when the men who carry them lose their nerve.”

Cormac wrapped the panels. His hands were steady.

***

Outside, sunlight spilled into the street like heat made liquid. Church bells from the Parroquia tolled over the low roofs, a sound like iron remembering fire.

He carried the crate to his truck. The tailgate shut with the decisive thunk of a door closed on an old life.

Across the street, a bakery had propped its door open to bleed off heat. The window held a guitar-shaped cake. The smell of sugar and yeast cut through desert dust and diesel.

Cormac approached the glass—some instinct, half hunger, half habit.

The reflection waiting there was a tired man in sun-bleached shirt and road-worn boots. Silver threading his beard. Lines etched deep at the eyes. Behind him: the street, the orange tree’s shadow, a sliver of impossibly blue sky.

And his mouth—his mouth had betrayed him.

Not a grin. Not even relief.

Just the involuntary, quiet lift of someone who has just arrived somewhere they didn’t mean to.

He hadn’t felt it forming. No burst of joy. No joke. Just a body remembering it could.

He held the moment. The bells stopped. Someone inside laughed. The scent of pastry and caramelized sugar washed over him.

Cormac watched the reflection: mouth tilted, barely there, but undeniably real.

He let it stay.