by Xavier Mayne
“So, what do we do now?”
Sandler slowed and put a hand on Donnelly’s shoulder. “What you should be doing is enjoying the voyage, getting a massage, or relaxing in the whirlpool. This is your pre-wedding celebration, remember?”
Donnelly shook his head. “I’d much rather keep busy than lay about thinking how I’m not with Ethan and wondering how he’s doing. This whole spy-versus-spy thing you’ve got going is a great distraction. So what’s next?”
“You’re the best,” Sandler replied. “All right, then, the first step is to find out who else in Her Majesty’s government besides the attaché is on board. Someone knows what happened to that pouch.”
“It’s going to be a challenge to pick out the embassy staff from the rest of the people on board—seems like everyone’s got a proper British accent.”
“That’s why we’re going to pay a visit to the protocol officer. He’ll have a complete list, both of the Brits and everyone else.”
“So, I was going to ask you earlier. Aren’t protocol officers responsible for which fork goes where?”
“Actually, they’re responsible for who sits where, which is a much bigger deal. In any diplomatic situation, you have to know the rank of everyone in the room so that the introductions are made in the right order and to be sure you don’t seat an ambassador next to a second assistant undersecretary.”
“That matters?”
Sandler grimaced. “In the world these folks inhabit, it sometimes seems like nothing matters more. Now, in crisis mode like this, where all of the missions are kind of in a jumble, the protocol officers are going to keep pretty close tabs on everyone just in case they need to defuse a conflict or, you know, arrange a tea.”
“Protocol it is,” Donnelly said. “Let’s roll.”
“MR. MAGUIRE, I’d like you to meet Gabriel Donnelly,” Sandler said, bowing slightly as if presenting Donnelly at court. “Gabriel, this is Bates Maguire, protocol officer for the British mission in the United States.”
“Pleased to meet you, sir.” Donnelly extended his hand to the severe gentleman who, out of all of the suited and serious men aboard the ship, struck him as the most serious.
“Delighted,” answered Maguire, his tone indicating him to be anything but. He released Donnelly’s hand after a brisk, firm shake. “And how may I be of assistance today?” It was less a question than an obvious formality; he looked back down at his portfolio without waiting for a response.
“It’s about the pouch.” Sandler said simply, as if he knew those few words would carry an outsize impact.
Maguire closed his eyes and opened them just as slowly, though now his eyes were trained on Sandler with a feline intensity. Feline in the sense of a jaguar spying a slow-moving baboon. “Have you found it?” he asked, an eyebrow raised critically.
“Not yet,” Sandler replied coolly. “I was wondering if you might be willing to provide me with a list of embassy staff on board. Someone may have information that could prove useful.”
“And this supposed person with their supposedly useful information,” Maguire said slowly, scornfully, “they have not as yet come forward because…?”
“Because they may not realize the information they have is useful.”
“But in your… capable hands”—Maguire’s glance flicked disdainfully down to Sandler’s tightly balled fists—“it will suddenly become so?”
Sandler took a deep breath, as if struggling not to strangle the sarcasm right out of Maguire. “Have I mentioned that Gabriel here is a police officer?”
“You hadn’t.” Maguire looked Donnelly up and down and, from his expression, found little to impress.
“If I can simply be allowed to review the list and ask some questions, with Gabriel’s help I may be able to piece together what happened. And I think we can agree that it would be to our mutual advantage not to have this unfortunate situation go on any longer.”
Maguire shifted in his seat and stared impassively at the wall above Sandler’s head for a long moment. “I think we can agree that our mutual interest would have been better served had the ambassador’s staff not trusted you with the pouch in the first place. Then I would be getting my work done, and you would be delivering ice creams to schoolchildren, as befits our respective abilities.”
Donnelly glanced at Sandler and could all but see him counting to ten silently while he breathed with deliberate calm.
“As much as I would enjoy standing here trading witty barbs with you, I’m clearly overmatched. Perhaps if we could get started on that list, you’ll sooner be at peace with your paperwork and I with my ice cream cart.”
This sideward compliment seemed to placate Maguire, and he harrumphed resignedly. “Very well.” He reached into a red box that sat on the desk next to him, retrieved a single sheet of paper, and held it out to Sandler. “This is the British delegation present on the ship.” He snatched the paper back out of Sandler’s reach. “As you pursue this folly of an ‘investigation,’ you shall not so much as ruffle a feather among the top three people on this list. Am I understood?”
“The top three shall remain unruffled. Got it.”
“If any one of them mentions to me that they were annoyed—”
“You’ll have me keelhauled.” Sandler’s calm was nearing the breaking point. “And the rest of the people on the list?”
“Oh, they don’t matter,” Maguire said casually as he handed the list to Sandler. “Numbers four through nine are functionaries, and the rest are civil service. Do what you will.”
Sandler took a quick glance at the list, then looked brightly up at Maguire as if they’d just been having a pleasant chat over tea. “Thank you, sir. I appreciate your help. We will get this cleared up.”
Maguire gave a courtly nod, but his voice laid bare the emptiness of the gesture. “That would bring a fitting end to your service to the Crown.”
Sandler winced but swallowed any response he might have wanted to make to this brusque dismissal. He nodded submissively and backed out of the room, Donnelly by his side.
“That was horrible,” Donnelly remarked once they were well out of hearing.
Sandler grinned. “Actually, that went really well. Maguire’s a right bastard, that’s for certain, but he gave us what we came for, and in terms of tongue-lashings, I’ve seen him give much worse over far less.”
“So where do we start?” Donnelly asked as he followed Sandler back out to the promenade deck. Whipped by the wind, the paper struggled mightily to free itself from Sandler’s grip, but he held tight.
“Maguire’s warning about the top three people on the list doesn’t really make a difference,” Sandler said as they walked. “They wouldn’t be any help to us anyway—they’re too close to the ambassador.”
“Aren’t those the kind of people who might know something about the pouch?” Donnelly asked.
“Maybe I’ve spent too much time at the back door of embassies, but I always find the people with the best information are the ones who are high enough to know things, but low enough to be willing to get their hands dirty—or at least remember what it’s like to be the guy at the bottom, trying to make things work. Now, here,” he said, holding the paper up to Donnelly. He had folded the paper into a tidy rectangle, showing the names beginning with number four. “This one won’t tell me anything, even if I wrote the questions on gold bullion and threw in a lap dance. He’s super old-school—like Eton old—and to him my very employment besmirches the Crown.”
“Besmirches? Really?”
“His word,” Sandler replied with a roll of his eyes. “Like I said, I don’t think he’s going to be very helpful. But this one”—he pointed to number six—“has proven quite amenable in the past.”
Donnelly raised an eyebrow. “Amenable’s an interesting word. Someone you know well?”
Sandler grinned. “Someone to whom I may have neglected to mention my sexual orientation.”
Donnelly raised his eyebrow even higher.
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Sandler burst out laughing. “I may, in fact, have intimated that I was not only straight but ardently attracted to her.”
“For shame,” Donnelly scolded with all the mock seriousness he could muster.
“The courier business demands certain compromises,” Sandler said in the strenuously dignified manner of a Boy Scout caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
“Well, I for one am quite eager to witness your star turn as a lovestruck Lothario. Where do we find the object of your lust for the fairer sex?”
“Unless I miss my guess, we will find her where there is easy access to both alcohol and men in various stages of undress.”
“Pool deck?”
“Either that or lurking near the men’s locker room, flask in hand. Let’s hope it’s the pool.”
ONCE THEY’D reached the bow of the ship, they walked up several flights of stairs to the pool. Enclosed by a glass roof, it was the only pool in use during the transatlantic crossing, even in summer. Every elderly, leathery sun-worshiper on board seemed to be here, reclining under the sun’s rather feeble rays or swimming languorous laps. Here and there a younger woman clutched a book with expensively manicured fingers, though whether anyone was actually reading was a mystery obscured by huge, stylish sunglasses. Clustered in one of the whirlpools was a group of fit young men who seemed determined to create a party atmosphere all their own despite the astronomically high average age of the population on the pool deck.
“Well, they liven the place up a bit,” Sandler murmured. He cast a long look at their tanned, muscled forms.
“If your tongue rolls out of your mouth like a cartoon wolf seeing a flock of sheep, I’m going to tell Ankur.”
“Tell him, tell him,” Sandler replied. “Wolves hunt in packs, you know.” He winked roguishly.
Donnelly laughed. “I don’t think those pool boys would make elusive prey. Not one of them has as much as glanced at the woman on the lounger not ten feet away who just about fell out of her bikini top when she turned over to brown her back side. They’re sitting awfully close together in that whirlpool. And when was the last time you saw a straight man in a Speedo?”
“Last summer, St. Tropez.” Sandler shivered. “Looked like a Russian mafia family reunion. Bleached whales with hairy bellies that almost obscured their budgie-smugglers.” He shivered again, as if shaking off a bad memory. “Almost.”
“Eww. Thanks for that image.”
“Feel free to cleanse it from your mind by looking at that,” Sandler replied, tipping his head in the direction of the muscle-packed whirlpool. One of the men was leaning over the edge to take a drink from a waiter, hot water cascading down the round globes of his barely covered ass.
Donnelly wondered if the hot flash of embarrassment he felt when looking at an attractive man would ever fade. But he wasn’t going to let that keep him from appreciating the beauty before him. It was liberating.
“Now, where we find muscle, we will find our quarry.” Sandler scanned the pool deck. “Ah, there she is,” he said.
“I can go wait over there if you’d rather work your charms solo.”
“Hell no. I’m bringing you as extra bait. Just remember, we’re straight.”
Donnelly cast one more look at the whirlpool crew, then closed his eyes for a long blink. “Straight. Right.”
Sandler led the way over to a table at the side of the pool deck, where a sixty-something woman sat with a cocktail glass in her hand. She was thin in the intentional, old-money way; her skin was tan and deeply lined, but with a glow of health and an aristocratic aura. Her blue eyes were sharp and bright, and—as Sandler had predicted—they were trained with predatory interest upon the whirlpool full of Speedos. She absentmindedly swirled the remains of her martini as she followed the splash and tussle. She didn’t lose a drop.
“Madame Maillard?” Sandler managed to freight his voice with both masculine resonance and smitten submission, which Donnelly considered quite a neat trick.
With a blink she dropped the antics in the whirlpool and brought her imperious gaze to bear on Sandler. She smiled brilliantly, the lines on her face instantly doubling. “Dear boy,” she said, her voice nearly as deep as Sandler’s. She sounded like Vanessa Redgrave if she’d spent more time smoking unfiltered cigarettes and tossing back martinis before lunch. “Don’t make me scold you, Sandy. Call me Fabienne.” She extended a hand and turned her cheek toward him.
He took her hand and bent down to kiss the hollow below her prominent cheekbone.
“And you’ve brought me a present,” Fabienne said, looking at Donnelly as if he were her next martini.
“Fabienne Maillard, I present Gabriel Donnelly.”
She extended her hand and smiled. “Delighted,” she purred, lifting her cheek slightly to Donnelly as she had to Sandler.
Donnelly bent forward and did his duty. She smelled like expensive gin and even more expensive perfume. “Pleased to meet you, Madame,” he said, in what he hoped was his straightest voice. He gave her a peck on the cheek.
“You must call me Fabienne as well, of course.” Her voice was dry and aristocratic, her accent difficult to place. It sounded like money and Europe, but beyond that Donnelly had no clue. “Now please, join me. But don’t block my view of the local wildlife.” She glanced at the whirlpool as if pointing out an exotic bird’s nest she’d been diligently watching for signs of hatching.
Sandler took the seat closest to the grand dame, and Donnelly settled with relief into a chair on the opposite side. He studied Fabienne’s reaction to Sandler’s appearance. She regarded him like a farmer’s daughter watching a lamb gamboling in the meadow: her enchantment with the adorable thing before her would not keep her from eating it up with relish later. Her eyes sparkled with delight as he pulled his chair close to hers.
“Now, Fabienne, why are you wasting your time on those mere boys?” Sandler chided suavely. “They may be entertaining for an evening, but can they hold up their end of the conversation?”
Fabienne’s laughter was worldly and practiced, but her expression was one of sheer joy. “As long as they hold up my end for an evening, I don’t care about conversation.” She turned back to Sandler. “But given the strapping new options before me—” Her eyes flicked over to Donnelly and back again, quick as a whip. “—I have little need for them, have I?”
Sandler smiled broadly. “What need have you of any one man when you have your choice of all on board? And any of us would be fortunate to have the favor of your company.”
Fabienne held a perfectly manicured hand to her throat as if Sandler’s flattery had touched her to the core. “Sandy, darling, you’ve never been more full of shit than you are at this very moment.” She cackled gleefully, and as she did so waved to the waiter who had been hovering nearby. “Three more of these, you lovely thing.” The waiter nodded and dashed away while Fabienne laughed and daubed at her quite dry eyes.
“Fabienne, the things you say,” Sandler admonished, though Donnelly detected a hesitation in his voice that hadn’t been there before. This clearly wasn’t going as planned.
“Oh stop, Sandy,” Fabienne scolded back playfully. “Over the years I’ve been delighted with our flirtation, and I am touched by your persistence in keeping it up. But a woman of a certain age must face facts, and the facts are these: first, I am too old to attract the notice of a man of your age and beauty unless there is money involved. I am as glad that you are not the type to accept my money as I am happy to give it to those who will, like those scamps in the pool over there. Second, I am just as likely to sleep with a woman as you are. We may have tried it in our youth, but it turned out not to really be our thing, didn’t it?” Fabienne was smiling, but her eyes were gimlets.
“I don’t know what to say,” Sandler finally managed.
“Start by introducing me to your friend. Who I suspect is more than a friend, unless I really have become a pointless old woman.” She winked at Donnelly, who turned a panicked glance towar
d Sandler. Was he supposed to stick to the script?
Sandler laughed, shaking his head. “Fabienne, you are a wonder. You are right about me, and about Gabriel, though he’s about to be married to the love of his life, who also happens to be frightfully handsome. We are, alas,” he said, looking at Donnelly with a shrug, “just friends.”
“You have always had impeccable taste in friends,” Fabienne said approvingly before turning back to Sandler. “Now we have that all out of the way, we can get to—”
She was interrupted by the arrival of three large martinis.
“—our drinks.” She picked up hers and motioned for them to do the same. “To old friends and new truths,” she said.
“Not that old,” Sandler said as he lifted his glass to her.
She smiled graciously and accepted his adulation as both genuine and entirely her due. She knocked back fully half her martini with no apparent effort and set her cocktail glass down. “Now, tell me, darling, what brings you to me today?”
“An ardent desire to bask in the radiance of your beauty?”
“You’ve already charmed me, dear boy. Let’s move along to the reason you’re here.”
“It’s about the pouch I was carrying,” Sandler said, his voice conspiratorially low.
“Ah, so the tale of the purloined pouch is true,” she replied, eyebrows raised dramatically. She seemed to notice his reaction. “Please, dear, don’t pretend to be shocked. Gossip and gin are the only occupations left the older woman in our youth-obsessed culture.”
“I hoped that you might—”
“Be able to help you find it, or at least find out who purloined it?”
Sandler nodded, his cheeks reddening. It was clear to Donnelly that having to ask for help was taking its toll on him.