A Legitimate Businessman

by Dale Nelson

  The lobby swelled with midday elegance. Women who were all leg strutted about in thousand-dollar swimsuits that would never see a drop of water. As often as not, professional Gentlemen of Leisure, whose attire was not that dissimilar from Jack’s own, escorted the women through the lobby. He only saw one sheikh, which disappointed him, because the internal odds had been at three. He did spot an actor, the British guy with the raspy voice and granite stare who had a habit of making the same movie over and over and just swapped out the titles.

  Jack didn’t begrudge him though. He could appreciate steady work.

  Gabrielle and her guide reappeared approximately twenty minutes later, conversing casually as they walked. Jack could tell from the body language and the interaction that Gabrielle was affecting a businesslike air. She asked short, pointed questions and nodded at the answers, as if making mental notes. The man escorted her down the columned walkway to the center of the lobby where they exchanged pleasantries for a moment. Jack lip-read a “thank you.” Interesting that the conversation was in English rather than French. There was a final handshake, and Gabrielle made for the street. Jack committed Gabrielle’s companion to memory. He might need to make a play on this guy himself. He suspected that might be Ehud Arshavin, one of Hassar’s most trusted number twos and was the director of the exhibition. Jack filled the hours between San Francisco and London by researching Hassar’s inner circle. The man’s appearance fit the profile. Eastern European, middle-aged but took care of himself, jet-black hair close cut and parted the same way every day. His suit was Seville Row, gray, white shirt with a light blue tie that had a very slight pattern. Jack would recognize that tailoring anywhere.

  Jack paused a moment and followed, timing his pursuit so that they wouldn’t be in the carport at the same time. He paused inside the door, pretending to respond to an all-important message on his phone, while the doorman held the door for him. Jack looked up and saw Gabrielle get into a cab. He apologized to the doorman in the perfunctory way an asshole would, saying the words because that’s what was expected in this situation and stepped into the summer heat. He asked for a cab, and one appeared immediately from that alternate universe accessible only by the luxury hotels of the world designed specifically so that their guests did not have to wait for a ride. Jack palmed the doorman a ten Euro note and stepped into the cab. He directed the driver to follow the cab in front of them, offering the unnecessary explanation that straight world people always did to justify doing something a little out of the ordinary. In this instance, his friend was in that other cab, and that Jack had just missed her. They were going to the same place, blah blah blah. The driver shrugged and did as his fare asked. It was all money to him.

  The trip was about a mile.

  Jack noted that she didn’t just have Ozren drive her, but they were probably trying to minimize exposure and not have multiple crewmembers spotted together on hotel surveillance cameras. He took a certain pride in seeing them avoid making the avoidable mistakes that were so often the downfall of people in their profession. Reginald always said that there were only two things that you could control that would land you in jail—rookie mistakes and girlfriends.

  Gabrielle’s cab exited a traffic circle onto Avenue Isole Belle and stopped. Jack’s driver’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror, awaiting instructions. Jack nodded and said, “Here’s good.”

  The driver pulled over just outside the traffic circle saying only, “Twelve Euro.” Jack handed him two notes, a ten and five, not wanting to take the time to dig for correct change. Creating a coin to represent the two most common denominations given as change instead of a note was emblematic of the foolish decision making, bureaucratic inefficiency, and national groupthink that plagued the European Union. However, that same mindset was also one of the things that made crime in this part of the world so easy. They fought crime the same way they governed—by committee.

  Jack nodded and got out.

  Jack stood on the corner of Avenue Isola Bella at the top of a small hill where the avenue dropped slightly with the traffic circle on one side and Rue du Lys on the other heading back toward the Mediterranean. This was a quiet, residential neighborhood composed of villas and low apartment buildings, both sequestered behind fences and walls of varying styles. It was nearly impossible to see many of the buildings from the street because of the dense coverage of cypress and palm trees with thick green bushes and smaller trees occupying seemingly every possible space.

  Gabrielle moved gracefully through a waist-high metal gate and into a four-story apartment building. Jack crossed the street and watched her enter the building. Now, he just had to figure out which one they were in.

  Jack lost Gabrielle as she entered the apartment building. Because of the walls separating the properties from the street on either side, there was no good place to stake out and watch the building. The rolling shutters on most of the windows were down anyway. Jack quickly crossed the street to the apartment side and walked around to the back finding a large patio and garden area. He decided that it was too risky to poke around there in broad daylight, figuring they would probably have the shutters up. A man creeping about in the afternoon wearing a suit and carrying a leather folio may look just a touch out of place. Not to mention, Gabrielle may have seen him from afar and not made the connection, but even triggering the recognition would place him at both locations, and that would certainly clue them in that someone was following. Jack turned around and walked back to the traffic circle to pick up a cab. Still, he knew approximately where their safe house was, and that alone was something useful.

  The cab that took him back to the Carlton reeked of stale cigarette smoke and staler sweat. Jack paid the driver when they pulled through the hotel’s circular carport and stepped out into the warm, Mediterranean air. Jack barely had time to consider the cab’s putrid diesel cough as it accelerated out of the Carlton’s roundabout. A soft breeze coming off the sea lapped at the palm trees, rustling their fronds and whisking away the scent of the cab. With Gabrielle back at the team’s safe house, Jack knew he had a few precious hours to himself in the hotel and needed to make the most of them. He turned about and quickly walked inside. The doorman welcomed him back.

  Jack stood in the lobby for a moment, planning his next move when he spotted the man Gabrielle met with earlier walking toward the bar. He allowed Hassar’s man a few of the hurried, purposeful steps that were the sole provenance of the functionaries of the world and followed. Arshavin sat and regarded the woman already at the small round table. A waitress appeared immediately, and Arshavin pointed two fingers at his companion’s champagne flute. The waitress smiled, spun on her heel, and flitted back to the bar. Arshavin—he was sure of it now—accepted a black leather folio from the woman, opened it, and began reviewing the contents. Arshavin’s left hand balanced on the side of his face with his index finger extended and the others gently cupping his chin.

  Jack reached the bar, deftly weaving in between the chairs, occupied and not, now swelling with the afternoon crowd. Women who could be models, if it didn’t require so much bloody effort, relaxed uncomfortably in the Belle Époque chairs. Jack slowed his pace and drifted past Arshavin’s table, casting a downward eye at the pages in the folio. Jack’s Italian was good. He could hold an interesting conversation with most adults who weren’t physicists, and he could read at an eighth-grade level. He could function in Germany, though they rarely worked there because German police didn’t recognize civil-rights violations in the course of law enforcement. But for some reason, the French language eluded him, and despite two passes with Rosetta Stone, Jack still spoke like a tourist, and an ignorant one at that. Even the word most used to describe him was French—panache—yet he struggled with the language that birthed it.

  But at least he knew this much, the word at the top of that page, Programme meant, “schedule.”

  Jack walked up to the bar, ordered a Campari and soda and then found a table next to them. He opened his own fol
io and appeared to busy himself with the papers inside while he eavesdropped on Arshavin’s conversation. Naturally, this was in French. Either they were talking about the set-up activities or what to put on baguette, Jack couldn’t be certain. The waitress arrived with his drink. He paid her and stirred the drink exactly three times before discarding the black swizzle stick and drank.

  Arshavin went through each page in the folio once—there appeared to Jack to be about twenty—and drained his champagne cocktail. The conversation had moved on from the exhibition and was now clearly in social territory. Jack didn’t need to third pass through Rosetta Stone to know Arshavin was clearly hitting on her. Bad flirting was the universal language of men worldwide. He was anxiously trying to get the waitress’s attention, but she was both notionally preoccupied with other customers and a frenchwoman, which meant she’d get to it on her own time. After two minutes of this, Arshavin began to get exasperated. Jack knew the type instantly. Arshavin’s boss was notoriously impatient, seemingly at the molecular level, and that translated to Hassar’s cronies because the transitive properties of slack were an immutable law of organizational physics. If they weren’t getting any, they sure as hell weren’t giving it.

  Jack leaned over in his chair, saying conspiratorially in English, “My friend, I had the same problem yesterday afternoon. It took so long to get a cocktail, my companion even left me for another man.” He emphasized, “left” with mock indignation. “Best that you order at the bar and not keep your lady waiting.” He winked at Arshavin’s companion, who smiled back coyly.

  “Yes,” Arshavin replied sourly, annoyed that someone had solved the problem for him and further irritated that there was still a problem to be solved. He excused himself and walked up to the bar. Jack killed his drink, stood, and turned to face the woman.

  “I’m sorry to hear your companion left you for another man,” she said. She smiled at their shared, private joke.

  “Well, he had a bigger yacht.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Perhaps you should try more discerning women.”

  “Do you know any?”

  “I might.”

  “I wouldn’t want to appear rude to your friend because I think he fancies you, but perhaps I could call you.”

  The woman waved a dismissive hand. “He’s from the Middle East. He’d sleep with anyone. They’re not particular. Do you have a pen?”

  Jack set his folio down on top Arshavin’s still open one, flipped to an open page and handed the lady a pen. She elegantly drew out the nuclear-launch-code-length European mobile number and playfully pushed the folio an inch toward Jack, signaling that she was done with it. He reached under his and scooped as many of Arshavin’s papers as he could. It felt like better than half and pressed them against the bottom of his own folio to keep them concealed.

  “Bon après-midi, mademoiselle,” Jack said with a wink and a smile and he left as Arshavin was returning to the table with a pair of Champagne cocktails.

  Jack made the front door fast.

  Eight

  Jack reached for the bottle of white burgundy in the carafe sitting on the table next to his patio chair and refilled his glass. Beads of condensation threaded their way down the terra-cotta cylinder in tiny rivulets. Half-melted ice chunks softly crashed together when he lifted the bottle out and again when he replaced it. He tasted the wine, savoring first the light citrus and grass flavors and then, amazingly, strong honey as he swallowed. It was getting a little dark to read, but then, he’d already all but memorized the fifteen pages he’d lifted from Arshavin this afternoon.

  The patio was designed in the fashion of a Roman garden. Tall cypress and palm trees dominated the background, surrounded by nearly impenetrable thickets of smaller trees, bushes, and ferns. The back wall was hidden by a reasonably manicured hedge about fifteen feet tall. Hanging plants with yellow-green leaves draped over the side of the stone wall that surrounded the pool, expertly placed to appear slightly overgrown. The pool itself was green, though that was more a reflection of the plant life surrounding it rather than an indication of the owner’s attitude toward upkeep.

  A gentle burst of wind pushed through the patio and rustled the small sheaf of papers on the table. The stolen documents were a veritable gold mine. From these, Jack had learned that the cases would be loaded in the low hours on Sunday morning, presumably because they believed that to be the least risky time. The cases had to be ready by eight. This was circled twice and underlined twice in pen, because Ari Hassar would be doing his own walk-through around lunchtime. There would be two guards watching the entire thing between the end of loading and Hassar’s walk through.

  Jack marveled at how poor the security was. An actual fortune sitting behind casual centimeters of impact-resistant glass and two unarmed security guards who could, at best, yell for help and make ungentlemanly suggestions about Jack’s parentage. It could be that Hassar planned this himself and telling him it was a bad idea went against the hard wiring of the yes-men he surrounded himself with. Or, Hassar knew that his reputation preceded him and knew no one would be dumb enough to steal from him.

  Jack took another sip of wine. The plan was beginning to come together now.

  Jack would go Sunday morning, just after eight. The streets of Cannes would be relatively clear—probably the quietest they’d be all week. He’d use a motorcycle, which Rusty could arrange quickly enough. That could be parked out of sight in a nearby alley, and given the time of day, Jack would be able to get out of town very quickly. It would also help him elude the police, should it come to that.

  Now, he just needed to figure out how Enzo and Gaston were going to play this.

  He thought again of his friend. Nothing was so dangerous as a troubled man with just the company of his thoughts. And wine, Jack mused.

  What agonized Jack was not so much that he was working against the Watchmaker, he rationalized that already as a survival mechanism. Instead, it was that his friend of nearly twenty years never contacted him. Reginald would have told Enzo, Gaston, Gabrielle, and even Ozren that Jack passed on the Carlton job or given a stunning argument as to why it hadn’t been offered to him. Regardless, there would have to be a damn good reason Jack wasn’t there or they wouldn’t have trusted Reginald enough to work without Jack.

  Would they?

  This was a sum of money that brooked no loyalty.

  Jack sipped the wine and forced his thoughts back to California and his own winery. The dark paths of revenge would do nothing good for him tonight. The job, the crew, and reverse engineering their plans would keep until tomorrow. He’d looked over the purloined documents, his notes, the layout, everything he had to work with until his eyes threatened to roll back in his skull. Preparation was important, but so was a rested mind.

  Jack closed his eyes and focused on nothing but the wine and the wind.

  Jack enjoyed the complexity and the sophistication of French wine. It was truly a craft. The climate and terroir of France was so unlike that of California wine country that even the same varietal, in this case chardonnay, would have a radically different taste on the palate. Well, that and for the last decade or so the trend among California chardonnay producers was to infuse as much oak as was chemically possible without floating wood chips in the glass so that drinking it tasted like sucking on a stick of butter. Though Megan came from the Italian school, she still maintained a very old-world approach to wine making, and the oak craze infuriated her to no end. Kingfisher made the obligatory white, a chard they called “Goshawk,” but it was done very much in the French style with minimal oak.

  Jack absorbed her passions by osmosis. Megan’s personality was so strong she practically radiated this kind of psychic energy that gradually eroded your own opinions about things until eventually you agreed with her. Also, she had an Irish temper and had been known to throw things on occasion to make a point, up to and including shovels.

  Jack smiled, remembering the moment. It was funny...now.

&nb
sp; They were building something special. That’s what Megan told him about Kingfisher before he left, and she was right. Jack bought the winery because he was looking for a way to establish a legitimate identity that he could settle into after his career was finished. He didn’t want to be like Reginald, running jobs until he got caught and then fixing jobs until he died to make up the difference. Jack’s original plan was to be an almost silent partner in his own winery, pump his money into it and turn it over to smarter people, but he found that he truly loved it. Making wine spoke to him in a way that nothing else had. It gave him purpose and something to strive for.

  The idea first came to him about ten years ago. He was reading the in-flight magazine during one of his transcontinental hops and came across an article about how all of these Silicon Valley millionaires were buying wineries, looking for something to do with their newfound fortunes.

  The idea was so perfect, he practically shouted on the plane. Jack discovered a love of wine when he and Enzo were running and gunning in Torino and had found himself vacationing in wine country more and more when he was in the low months between jobs. He found peace among the solitude and serenity of the vineyards and mottled mountains. It also had a frontier feel to it. No one cared where you were from or what you did as long as you were passionate about the wine. What better way?

  And Frank Fischer was born.

  Originally, that was in Switzerland, but the United States government’s relentless pursuit of terrorists and the sources of their funding eventually wore down the Swiss, and those transactions were now no longer secure—at least not for American citizens. Most of his assets were now in Vanuatu, whose rules were less strictly observed.