The Little Burgundy: A Jeanne Dark Adventure

by Bill Jones Jr.

  She shook her head. “Non, there was dislike, but he was also performing for our sake. Danni was protecting him, but conflicted.”

  “How so?”

  “By giving me direct hints as to where he might be, even while pretending he didn’t know.”

  I waited, but nothing happened. “You wanna fill in your partner?”

  “When I am sure, you will be the second to know.” Dark pulled her scarf tighter around her neck. “Take me someplace they serve tequila,” she said.

  “How about the hotel?”

  “Even better.”

  I eased the cigarette out of her hand, tamped it out with my shoe, and flagged down a cab. Dark kissed me on the cheek. I’m not sure whether it was raindrops or tears I spotted on hers.

  ***

  We were still in the hotel’s restaurant when ten o’clock rolled around, and Dark was on her fourth drink. I’d had a few beers, enough to take the sting out of the day’s events, but not enough to keep it from reminding me of a hundred similar memories. I drained the glass, wondering where the hell Agent J or Agent K were with that damned neuralyzer. I looked at Jeanne, who was sitting at about ten degrees west of upright, still holding her damned umbrella drink full of sunshine and alcohol.

  “If you’re gonna drink that much you really should eat something,” I said.

  “This drink has fruit in it.”

  “You didn’t eat the fruit.”

  “Even better.” She took another sip.

  I decided to change tacks. Until now, we mostly sat and drank with neither of us talking much. It was what she needed, and God knows I didn’t want to talk about all the images floating through my mind. Something told me, however, that Dark needed to get out of her own head. Leading her back to the interview seemed the right place to start. “You know, you did damned fine work back there.” She cut me a look. It was disconcerting seeing her glare at me without her sunglasses, but she’d all but refused to put them on. “I mean it, Dark, it was solid. She would have died with her secrets were it not for you.”

  “Thanks.” I waited for her to say more, but she didn’t.

  “You know, I had you pegged all wrong. When you disengaged from her, I was shocked.”

  “Oui, so was she. It was necessary.” I asked her why, but she ignored the question. Instead, she said, “I could still feel her, you know, here.” She pointed to her stomach, just above her navel. Saying nothing else, she pulled the straw from her drink, dropped it on the table, and downed the last of her Tequila Sunrise.

  I took her hand. “I think maybe we should get you to bed,” I said.

  She looked at me. “I lied to you.”

  I waited and then took the bait. “About what?”

  “About Rosie, about Danni.” Softer. “About me.”

  I let go of her hand and slid my chair around to her side. “What about Danni?”

  “What he felt was not love, but ownership. Rosie left her stepfather and found a partner just like him.” She picked up her glass, but it was empty. Tilting a piece of ice into her mouth, she continued speaking, her words partly garbled by the ice cube. “Danni didn’t kill Rao because he thought he raped Rosie, he did it because he thought Rao didn’t rape her.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I got that too. At the end, it was just one jealous lover killing another.”

  “Danni would have killed you too, at the flat. He was mad with jealousy, especially toward men. I think Rosie stopped him.” Dark spit what was left of the cube into her glass. “Rosie really likes you a lot, enough to have nearly gotten herself killed.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that you were right. Rosie was trying to enlist your help. She probably suspected Danni murdered her stepfather but was afraid to do anything. She thought maybe you could. When Danni texted her that he was almost home, Rosie improvised.”

  “And set me up.”

  “Oui, but for your own good. If Danni knew you were there at Rosie’s request, you’d both be dead. She probably told Danni you were getting too nosy and they tried to disappear.”

  “Wait, my visit wasn’t Rosie’s idea, it was mine.”

  “You don’t know women as well as you think. She knew you would come, as did I.”

  “And why would Rosie take the chance of protecting me? Danni killed at least two people, and Samuels has already linked his client list to at least two other suspicious deaths. All Rosie had to do was go to the cops.”

  “She did, you.” She spun around looking for the waitress, almost falling out of her chair in the process. “I need another drink.”

  “You’ve had enough. What’s Rosie’s game? What’s her role in all this?”

  “Her role I do not yet know. That is what we must find out. Her game, however, was simple. She wanted to sleep with you.”

  I was getting annoyed enough to be blunt with her. “Yeah, Rosie told me that. What I want to know is why she wanted me in bed.”

  Dark put on her shades for the first time that evening but otherwise did not react. I was about to get up and storm off to my room when she slid over to my seat and straddled me, facing me. She sat there, wobbly, staring into my face with those huge, bug-eyed sunglasses reflecting my confused look back at me. “For the same reason I always want to sleep with you, stupide. Come to bed and I will show you why.” Then she stood, groaning at her weakened hip, and staggered toward the bar’s exit. She stopped at the door and yelled across the quiet room. “Are you coming, or do I have to beg for sex?” I stood, hoping I didn’t look as embarrassed as I felt. “French women shouldn’t have to beg,” she yelled at me when I reached her. That’s when her legs gave out and I carried her into the lift. A few minutes later, I’d managed to lay her across her bed in her room. I turned off the light and walked down the hall to mine. It had been a rough day, and my partner was making it no easier.

  Sometime around two in the morning I heard a rap on my door. I was dressed only in skivvies and was still too groggy to put up much of a fight if it was trouble come a-calling. Still, stupidly, I opened the door without so much as a look through the peephole. It was indeed trouble, in the form of one Jeanne Dark, dressed solely in a long t-shirt and sunglasses. The bright red of her toenails shone like ten tiny beacons. She was weeping like a baby. I ushered her in, wondering why she hadn’t bothered to put on a robe or a pair of pants.

  “Jeanne, what’s wrong?”

  Her answer was to angrily push past me, walk to my bed and climb in. I sat on the bed with my eyes mostly closed, waiting for her to speak. She did. “Would you please turn off the light?”

  I did, then wondered why I had. “Dark, what the hell is going on? Why are you crying?” I wanted to ask her why she was at my room in the middle of the night, having interrupted the best dream I’d ever had, which consisted of two Rosies, a beach, and no Jeanne Dark.

  “I had a nightmare. Many people dying. I woke up, and I was alone. Why was I alone? I do not know.” She pulled the covers over her head. “I think I was channeling Danni too much before he died.” I sat there for a moment, when, to my own surprise, I began to laugh. “What’s so funny?” she asked from under the covers.

  “Do you really sleep in your sunglasses?”

  “Oh.” She handed them to me.

  I sat with her for a time, allowing her to feel secure and to settle. To my great consternation, I was beginning to understand this complex, brilliant, possibly insane woman. Right on cue, her head emerged from the covers. “Are you coming to bed?” she asked.

  “In a minute.” I touched her. “Disconnecting from Danni when she was in pain like that was hard for you, wasn’t it?”

  She began sniffling and nodded. “I could feel her fear and Rosie’s as well. But I knew we didn’t have time to treat her the way I would have liked.” She began to cry in earnest and I began softly stroking her hair.

  “I know, baby. You did what you had to do. Might have saved some lives in the process. We’ll find her brother, I’m sure of i
t.”

  “Try Scotland, if he hasn’t already left.”

  “So you did have a lead on Vasyl already.”

  “Oui. And with Danni’s new lead, I am confident we will track him down even if he’s fled.”

  “A pretty good piece of detective work.”

  “Merci.” She paused and then spoke softer. “Foss, please hold me tonight. I promise, it won’t happen again … just don’t make me leave.”

  I didn’t answer in words. Instead, I slipped under the covers. Dark slid over to me as if I were a magnet, buried her head in my neck, and wrapped her arms around me. I held her just as closely. We lay that way for a time, but there was one last thing preventing my falling asleep.

  “Someone let that man be killed, you know,” I said, referring to Rao.

  “How so?”

  “I get how Danni got inside the Institute to poison him with the monkshood. She had fake papers that said she was Rao’s daughter.”

  “Rosie had a stepsister, oui.”

  “Right. No one suspected Danni since no one but Rosie and her crew knew Danni was biologically a female. So, she dressed like a girl, put on one of her old wigs, and filled out all the right paperwork. Samuels even showed it to me. You can believe she’ll be raising hell over that.”

  “Okay, it was sloppy security, but how does that mean it was on purpose?”

  “I don’t believe for a second that a disguise, even one like Danni’s, would be enough to fool the kind of security they have in place at the Institute. It’s clear that she was a better actress than her porn career would have suggested, but she was no Meryl Streep.”

  “So what do you think it means?” Dark asked.

  “Samuels and Hardesty have been insisting there is a major terrorist cell behind this. I don’t think so, even with this 16 May group Danni told us about.”

  “You think this was an inside job?”

  “Yeah. The question is by whom and why.”

  Dark tilted her head up at me. Those are very good questions. How do you think we should proceed?”

  “I think we need to find the Weasel, and we need to get our hands on that client list.”

  “Oui.” Dark exhaled deeply and then grew quiet. “Foss?” she asked after a time, just as I was drifting to sleep. “Merci, pour tout.”

  “I didn’t really do anything.”

  I felt rustling in the dark as Jeanne pulled away from me. Seconds later, her arm rose above the covers and I heard something fall to the floor. She slid back to her previous position.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Getting comfortable.”

  I paused. “Are you—are you naked?”

  “Oui. Of course.”

  “Why?”

  She didn’t answer right away. Then, I heard in a soft, sleepy voice, “I am feeling very French tonight. Lucky for you, no?”

  I was feeling pretty goddamned French myself. Damn Hardesty and his Dark family history. There was no way I could act on my impulses knowing one, Dark was probably still drunk, and two, I had sworn I’d clear her name. If Hardesty ever got wind we’d had sex, he’d have discounted any information I discovered and Jeanne would be right back under suspicion. If I was going to get to the bottom of things, it had to be strictly hands off. Even in my own bed, I was on the clock.

  Lucky for me, no.

  13 - The Cain Mutiny

  We checked out of the hotel the next morning before the sun had even illuminated the fog that hung over the city’s busy West End. Fortunately for me, instead of feeling rejected, Dark was grateful that I’d allowed her into my bed without taking advantage. We were both nude when the alarm went off, and I still don’t know how my shorts got removed. However it happened, my phone’s alarm awoke us in the tangle of bodies, morning breath, and stiffness that I’d spent most of my bachelor days trying to avoid. Dark was soft and smelled of flowers. For five full minutes, I tried to create scenarios in my mind wherein I could say the hell with clearing her name, make stupid-long love to the woman and take her on a one-way flight to anywhere else. Jeanne opened her eyes just then and said, “You couldn’t live with that.” I didn’t bother to ask her what she meant. She’d moved permanently into my head just she had my home and my life. Two hours later, we hopped on a British Airways flight from Heathrow to Edinburgh, which I purposely kept pronouncing Edenburg just to get on her nerves.

  It wasn’t idle silliness. I was falling for the woman hard enough to fear there’d be no floor, and at that point would have done anything to create sufficient tension to keep us out of bed. After being the imperfect gentleman the night before, I almost made love to her twice that morning—first, in bed, when she’d refused to unscramble our human jigsaw puzzle, and then again in my shower to which she’d invited herself with a smile and a jazz tune on her lips. It was that she could sing like an angel that scrambled me the second time. We touched down at Edinburgh Airport at ten o’clock sharp and hadn’t even unstrapped our seat belts when I got a call from Hardesty. “Don’t bother to hire a cab,” he said. “Local police got a warrant to pick up Rudenko, but his housekeeper told us he’s already skipped. They have her in for questioning, but she seems to be clean of this.”

  I nodded at Dark who leaned in closely to listen. “So what’s the next move?” I asked.

  “How’s Dark’s German?” Hardesty asked.

  “Fluent. Better than my English, why?” she answered.

  “Because you two are on the next flight out to Vienna. Intel managed to trace Rudenko that far. We’re guessing he has some resources there. If we’re right and he gets to them he could go underground after that.”

  I asked, “So you want us to do what in Vienna? The U.S. doesn’t exactly have jurisdiction. This sounds like a job for Interpol.”

  “Stop whining, Cain. I’m sending you a contact name via secure channels. You can pick it up when you get Wi-Fi and VPN up and running. For now, just know that Rudenko had been putting feelers out to some pretty high-end people.”

  “Good guys?” I asked.

  “Some good, some very not good. He’s selling himself as ‘highly placed with foreign officials.’” I asked him if we believe that. “We’re not sure. All we are sure of is that we need him off the streets and this is too sensitive to be an official CIA move.”

  “So what do you want from us?” I asked.

  “Get an address. Call me. Do not apprehend. If you learn Rudenko’s left Austria, don’t follow. At that point, we’ll have to pull in the big dogs and I’m dragging you and Dark home.” There was a pause where I lost him as Dark and I deplaned and entered the terminal. It was long enough to get fat boy agitated. I put the phone back to my ear as Dark flagged down airport personnel who could help us book a flight to Vienna. I was serenaded by Hardesty’s basso profondo cement-mixer voice. “Cain, do you read me? If Rudenko heads towards the Middle East, like we think he will, pull back.”

  “I read you loud and clear.” I pulled a Dark and hung up without saying goodbye.

  “What did he say?”

  “He said we’re on a wild-goose chase to Vienna so that he can tell the higher-ups he actually did try to get Rudenko in hand. Then, when old Vasyl the Weasel slips out to Pakistan, or Yemen, or Iran, or wherever the hell he got hold of polonium, the CIA will send in a drone and execute him and his friends before we even make it back home.”

  “Morocco.” She ignored my quizzical look. “What good would that do? They won’t even learn how widespread is the so-called terrorist ring.”

  “This isn’t about solving the case, Dark. It’s about closing it.”

  She stared at me for ten uncomfortable seconds before speaking. “Your purple is fading into an ugly brown. Cynicism doesn’t look attractive on you.”

  “Hey, that’s what the man said. You just have to read between the lines.”

  We were interrupted by the BA check-in clerk handing us a pair of boarding passes and pointing us to their lounge to wait the three hours until our next
flight. I don’t know what strings Hardesty pulled to make that happen, but I was grateful. We got settled in the lounge and Dark went to work: first the phone, speaking almost entirely in German, then in French to what I deemed was a West African contact she had at Scotland Yard named Hakim, and finally, working feverishly on her laptop. An hour later, she looked up at me, cheerful beneath that cloche hat.

  “Et voilà.” She peeked over my shoulder to ensure no one was close enough to see what she’d been working on.

  I put down my phone so she couldn’t see I’d been working on a game of Bad Piggies. “What you got?” I asked.

  She leaned in and whispered in her adorable Jeanne Bond way. “It’s Danni’s client list. I had my old friend from college get it for me.”

  “Shit Jeanne, is that what you were working on?” I pushed her laptop closed. “That’s probably Top Secret info. You shouldn’t have that.”

  “It’s only Top Secret to the United States. I work for France and my friend works for the UK.”

  I gave her a hard stare. “Since when do you work for France?”

  She tilted her chin up at me and pursed her lips, which was one of her tells. She was getting her back up. It made me smile. “I work for France since my beloved partner told me we cannot trust the people inside the US or UK for whom we previously worked.” Her whispering had mutated into red-faced vitriol. “By the way, my friend Hakim confirmed that Rudenko is not in Scotland. He didn’t know anything about Vienna, however.”

  I raised my hands in surrender. “Okay, Okay.” I had to admit, she was right. Given we didn’t know whom to trust, deciding to trust no one was the best option. “What plan is going on in that lovely head of yours?”

  She stopped, tilted down her sunglasses, and batted her eyes at me. “Ah, you love me, no?” she asked. I erupted in a coughing fit that would have put Danni’s dying spasms to shame. “Huh, men,” she said, shaking her head at me. “Don’t worry, I was just kidding.” She reopened the laptop. “Here, here, here, and probably here. These people are all dead. Someone is killing the clients.” She looked up at me. “Don’t you think it’s suspicious that Hardesty didn’t want us to stay in England and find out who?”