“I am not!” Monique snapped back.
Eric gave her a warm winning boyish smile. “Relax,” he said, “I find it charming.”
Monique did not know what to say to that.
His smile was so innocent, pure, she would have had to say if he hadn’t so obviously come straight from a heavy horizontal wrestling match.
Why, after all, was she angry? Who Eric Esterhazy went to bed with, assuming they had gotten that far, was none of her business. What was more, he had made it abundantly clear almost every time they had met that she could enjoy his considerable physical charms whenever she chose to. And the main thing that had kept her from taking him up on it was that his own opinion of his animal allure was manifestly higher than even her own.
Was she jealous?
But of whom and why and of what?
Jealousy, after all, is not a rational logical reaction, she told herself. And you’re here on business. So get professional.
“I am not jealous,” she said very evenly. “But I am annoyed with you.”
Eric draped himself languidly over one of the chairs in front of the wall of computer screens like a fashion model, legs akimbo, so as to display, no doubt deliberately, the still-or-perhaps-once-more formidable bulge in his pants.
Which, considering the circumstances, Monique had to admit was a feat she could only consider impressive.
Or quite flattering.
And either way or both, therefore exciting.
Infuriatingly so.
“Why?” he said, teasingly, all-too-knowingly. “Because I didn’t save my virginity for you?”
“Because you were off playing hanky-panky with Stella Marenko while I needed you here for serious business,” Monique Calhoun told him.
Eric spread his arms, leaned back, manfully refrained from uttering the horrid cliché about how anger enhanced her attractiveness, which it didn’t.
But the way the images planted in her mind by false appearances aroused her lustful jealousy against her will, and his almost painful state of fiery unfulfilled arousal, certainly did.
“Well I’m here now,” he said instead, “and I’m all yours and open for business, serious or monkey.”
“You certainly have a high opinion of yourself, Eric Esterhazy!”
“My only flaw,” Eric said dryly, “is an unfortunate tendency to false modesty. But I am working on it.”
It amused him to see her choking back laughter. Eric was not accustomed to being left achingly horny by the sort of masterful cock-tease Stella Marenko had worked on him, though watching a woman making an ultimately futile attempt to pretend she found him physically resistible was something with which he was very familiar.
The combination of both at the same time was a unique pleasure and he found himself quite enjoying it.
Well all right, Prince Handsome, though lightweight, was charming, and the source of his charm was that he acknowledged his lack of seriousness without taking it seriously, which, Monique supposed, was what it took to make a successful gigolo or phony prince.
“Seriously, Eric—”
“Seriously? Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer a little monkey business?”
“Not now, maybe later,” Monique found herself blurting.
“Business before pleasure . . .” Eric said agreeably, but without changing his spread-legged posture or removing that inviting bedroom smile from his face. “On the other hand. . . ”
On the other hand, maybe we should just get it over with now was the clear implication. And Monique accepted that they were not going to leave this room without doing it.
After all, she reminded herself, that was what she had come here to do for tactical reasons in the first place, to literally screw the Marenko table talk recordings out of him.
Business before pleasure?
Here was one of those all too rare moments when they were going to coincide.
Eric Esterhazy was one attractive male animal. Prince Eric was also a famous lady-killer whose looks and attitude clearly indicated that his reputation was not unjustified. Eric could have his choice of hundreds of women and just had.
Yet this handsome male creature, who had apparently come straight from a session with a hungry amazon which should have left him limp as an overcooked cannelloni, was ready, willing, and eager to rip off her clothes this very minute and fuck her on the floor.
Perverse or not, it was the ultimate compliment.
And the ultimate turn-on.
But why not enjoy that sweet perverse tension a while longer and turn it to advantage in the pragmatic matter at hand. . . ?
“I want something from you,” Monique Calhoun told Eric. She still hadn’t taken the other seat in front of the monitors, which Eric found promising, yet hadn’t approached him any closer, which he found amusing in the manner of a cobra patiently awaiting the approach of a mesmerized bird.
“Who am I to thwart your desires?” he said.
Now she did approach his chair, standing over him, looking down, giving him a nicely complex smile back. “Who am I to thwart yours?” she said in an insinuating tone.
She reached down and ran a finger through the air about five centimeters from his fly. “But I want a quid before you get your pro quo. . . .”
“I’m all ears . . .” Eric said.
Monique Calhoun stared frankly down into his crotch. “Not from where I’m standing,” she said.
Eric laughed. So did she.
He sat up somewhat straighter, spread his legs even wider, moved his right hand toward his inner thigh. “Have a seat then,” he invited.
“Not so fast,” Monique said.
“Take it as slow as you want,” purred Prince Eric.
“Let’s just see how slow you can stand to take it,” Monique said, reaching down and undoing his fly. There was nothing particularly huge or unusual about what emerged eagerly from its restraints, but the way Eric simply maintained eye contact without moving, without showing surprise or impatience, as she slowly ran just a fingernail up its length, was something very special indeed.
“Now then,” Monique Calhoun said, hiking up her dress and pulling down her panties, “the matter of quid pro quo . . .”
She reached down again, and this time just flicked the head of Eric’s cock playfully. Eric suppressed a moan of agonized delight.
“Your wish is my command,” he said.
“Is it?” said Monique. She bent over, kissed him lightly on the lips with just a flick of tongue, but at the same time clutched him quite firmly down below.
“Try me,” said Eric.
Monique massaged him to within a tasty millimeter of causing him to lose it, which, under the prolonged circumstances, did not take very long, and then held him there, right on the edge.
“Find this . . . trying enough?” she said.
“You’ll have to try me a bit harder than that, Mata Hari,” Eric declared heroically.
“Ve haff our vays,” Monique said, moving forward to straddle Eric Esterhazy, positioning herself just short of impaling herself sweetly upon him. It was a difficult position to hold in more ways than one, but as with a less erotic gymnastic posture in a competition routine, the degree of difficulty perversely made it more enjoyable.
“So what do I have to do to . . . get you to reach the bottom line?” Eric said.
“I want copies of all the recordings you’ve automatically been making of the Marenkos’ table talk,” Monique said.
Now Eric almost did lose it.
What was that old American folktale about Brer Rabbit and the briar patch? The rabbit pleads with the fox to do anything but throw him into that nasty old briar patch, which, being his home and escape route, is of course precisely what he wants the fox to do.
And leaking those recordings to Monique and hopefully allowing her to wheedle him into assisting in her inquiries to see what she was after was likewise precisely what Eduardo wanted him to do!
Should he surrender at once?
Oh no, much more credible to play hard to get!
“Automatic recording . . . ?” he said innocently.
“Don’t tell me your . . . equipment can’t handle it!” Monique said, giving it a squeeze.
And ever so much more enjoyable.
“You’re about to discover just how much my equipment can handle. . . .”
“Not until you admit you’ve got what I want.”
“All right, all right,” Eric told her. “I’ve got what you want . . . I’ve got . . . everything that you want.”
“The recordings . . . ?”
“That too.”
Monique Calhoun smiled, seated herself upon him, then began a deliberate, languid rotation.
“Now then,” she purred, “the name of this game is you don’t get to come until you agree that I get what I came for.”
“Fair enough,” Eric told her. “But I should warn you, I’m a slow deliberate player. It might take some time to reach the endgame.”
“Getting there is half the fun. . . .”
“At least,” said Eric, and he relaxed into it, and sighed, and favored her with a low moan of pleasure.
And they sealed the bargain with a deep open-mouthed kiss.
How slowly could he stand to play this game?
Very slowly indeed.
MONIQUE CALHOUN HAD NEVER BEFORE HAD the dubious honor of being summoned to Avi Posner’s apartment, but Posner had insisted on vetting the material in a secure venue, not her suite at the Ritz, or the Bread & Circuses office.
The weather had turned strangely humid and hot not only for this time of the year but for any time of the year in Paris. New Orleans in August her grandparents had proclaimed; a steambath in a microwave oven according to others; a secondary sign of the onset of Condition Venus according to those with a vested interest in promoting it.
Whatever was producing this hot foggy overcast, the effect upon Parisian tempers had not been sweet. The cab ride from the Ritz to Rue Dominique had been a curse-punctuated zigzag through horn-blaring traffic, the Place de la Concorde a chaotic bumper-car ride at a not-so-fun fun fair, and by the time Monique reached the address Posner had given her, her nerves were as frayed as the pavement was fried.
The address in question turned out to be one of those perpetually graying apartment houses that all seemed to have been designed by the same architect and thrown up in the same month in the late nineteenth century, and had formed the backbone of the Parisian housing stock ever since.
There was the usual doorcode and the usual cramped twentieth-century retrofit elevator shoehorned into a wire cage in the center of the stairwell. The name on the mailbox and directory of the fourth-floor apartment, Israel Dupont, seemed like some kind of elusive Mossad joke.
Posner answered the door in a tan short-sleeved shirt and matching jungle shorts. All-too-characteristically of this vintage of Parisian apartment, built with living room windows in the form of doors that opened out onto a balcony, only the bedroom was air-conditioned, the main room making do with the open windows and an overhead fan-cum-water-device known for some arcane reason as a “swamp cooler.”
The “living room” didn’t look as if anyone really lived in it and Monique suspected that the bedroom would be more of the same, though she had no particular interest in finding out. The generic Scandinavian couch, chairs, lamps, and tables had probably been rented en suite. There were no plants, rugs, paintings, or bookcases.
The electronic equipment, however, was not standard. A multiscreen computer console with assorted decks and docking stations. Two video phones, four voice-onlys. A steel rack of stuff Monique didn’t recognize but which she doubted was a fanatic’s state-of-the-art music system. A stand-alone high-rez TV. Scanners. Printers. A portable sat-dish.
Obviously Mossad’s Paris spook shop, not Avi Posner’s cozy bachelor pad. Nor did he offer convivial hospitality.
“What’ve you got?” he said instead when Monique parked herself in one of the faux-Bauhaus sling chairs.
Monique extracted a handful of recording chips from her purse and proffered them to Posner.
“What’s this,” he said dubiously, “the raw recordings?”
“What else did you expect?”
Posner sank down onto the couch, holding up the chips and shaking them at her. “None of these is an edited summary?” he groaned.
“How am I supposed to prepare an edited summary if I don’t have the faintest idea of what I’m editing for?” Monique demanded.
“Amateurs,” Posner moaned, rolling his eyes toward the ceiling. “So this is an unedited mess of Marenko table talk?”
Monique nodded.
“You have at least reviewed this material?”
Monique nodded again.
“So perhaps you can at least provide a verbal description?”
“Climatech babble. Wine- and vodka-snob babble. White tornado babble. Condition Venus babble. Dirty joke babble. Basically a lot of drunken babble getting less and less coherent as everyone concerned gets more and more blotted.”
Posner seemed to be making an effort not to grind his teeth and not entirely succeeding. “You did say you reviewed this material?” he said. “Thoroughly? While actually conscious?”
“I’ve, uh, scanned through it.”
“You’ve . . . scanned . . . through . . . it. . . ?”
“It’s hours and hours of recordings!” Monique snapped irritably. “What was I supposed to do?”
“What were you supposed to do!” Posner shouted.
Then he abruptly calmed himself. “I’m sorry,” he said in quite another voice. “This weather must be getting to me. I forget that you are not a professional, nor do you have access to professional-level equipment.” He shrugged. “Not that you’d know what to do with it if you did.”
He got up, went to the computer, Monique trailing behind, sat down, and began loading the chip recordings into its memory.
“Not the latest generation hardware maybe,” Posner told her as they loaded, “but the software’s first-rate.”
By the time Monique had pulled up a chair, the loading process was just about finished.
“Word frequency, level one filter . . .” Posner told the computer.
The computer began muttering electronically to itself.
“What’s it doing?” Monique said.
“Ranking all the words spoken on the recordings by frequency, eliminating the hundred most common words in the language.”
A column of words followed by numbers began scrolling vertically down the screen.
“Stop,” said Posner.
The scrolling halted.
“Word frequency, level three filter.”
The scrolling began again, then stopped.
“Eliminates the five hundred most common,” Posner said. “Let’s see . . .” He thought for a moment. “Word frequency, level four filter, nouns only.”
More scrolling, shorter this time.
“Now we’re getting somewhere. . . . Word frequency, level four filter, proper nouns only . . .”
The list of words was much shorter this time, and all of them were capitalized.
“Word frequency, level four filter, proper nouns only, place-name filter, filter Paris, filter France, filter Siberia, option filter, filter Marenko, filter Ivan, filter Stella . . . top fifty only . . .”
The computer did its thing in less time that it took Posner to issue the command.
“Venus” was at the top of the list, followed by “UNACOCS,” “Larabee,” “Mohammed,” “Bendsten,” “Pereiro,” “Davinda,” “Wright,” “Lao” . . . on down to “Esterhazy,” way at the bottom.
Monique was somewhat piqued to see that she hadn’t made it.
For some reason, Avi Posner did not seem pleased either.
“Shit,” he observed, scowling at the screen, more in agitation than anger.
“Sequence and record. Chronological. Voice only. Follow Davinda. Follow Sri. Follow Sri Davinda.�
�
More computer noises, then a “sequence and record completed” message on the screen.
“Playback,” said Avi Posner.
“. . . Davinda’s crazy speech even in Zekograd,” said the voice of Stella Marenko.
“. . . Davinda was drunk at big ceremony,” said the voice of Ivan Marenko.
“. . . Davinda’s brilliant in his way . . .” said a male voice that sounded like Paolo Pereiro.
“. . . Davinda a few drinks . . .” said the voice of Ivan Marenko.
“. . . Sri Davinda’s not very sociable, hardly socialized these days . . .” said the male voice.
“. . . Sri Davinda!” boomed the voice of Ivan Marenko. “Anyone gives speech dead drunk I want to meet!”
“. . . Sri Davinda’s done reputable work, but gotten involved with some strange people in the past few years . . .” said a female voice Monique couldn’t place.
“. . . Davinda aboard . . .”
“. . . Davinda’s Hindu name, like Lao, da . . . ?”
“. . . Sri Davinda’s climate model on Sunday . . .”
“. . . Davinda sort of disappeared into the woods after that . . .”
“. . . Davinda and Lao, Lao and Davinda, is code, maybe . . .”
“. . . Davinda and those Third Force rumors . . .”
“. . . Davinda’s hardly first-rank, Mrs. Marenko . . .”
“. . . Davinda’s monk, or something, da, follower of gurus, Hubbard, Bodhidharma, Lao . . .”
“. . . Sri Davinda so interesting . . . ?”
“. . . Davinda’s a man I like to meet . . .”
“Stop,” said Avi Posner.
For some reason that Monique couldn’t fathom from listening to these seemingly meaningless recordings, Posner had grown more and more agitated as he listened. “What’s the—”
Avi Posner held up a peremptory hand for silence. “Word search, proper noun and/or acronym, multilingual, global, word Lao.”
After about thirty seconds, four entries appeared on the screen:
Greenhouse Summer Page 20