The New York traffic was full of sirens, as usual, pulsing and frenetic. People crossing the road, buying flowers from corner shops, couples arguing on the sidewalk, people walking their dogs. Saturday night, New York—a city that never sleeps.
I jumped into a cab and tried to make the driver understand where I was going. He’d been in New York for only two days and hardly spoke English. He was from Pakistan. Normally, I would have given him an interview on the spot, asked him a million questions about his country’s state of affairs from his bird’s eye view, his religion, and what was really going on out there—things we didn’t hear about on the news. But I didn’t want him remembering me, remembering my face and my destination. Just in case. Who knew what awaited me, and what shit I was going to have to clean up, courtesy of Elodie. What I did know was that trouble was on the horizon—I just hadn’t added blood and guts into the equation.
I got the driver to drop me off a block away and I dashed into an all-night shop to buy a hoodie. There were none for sale so I grabbed a plastic rain poncho and a baseball cap. I put them on, once I was out of the store. With me being on the news for the last twenty-four hours, I couldn’t be too careful. I imagined Mr. Square-Jaw probably had a state-of-the-art surveillance system surrounding his property.
As I climbed the steps to the brownstone, I kept my head down. What a fuck-up. I suppose I wasn’t really thinking straight: I just wanted to get Elodie out of there. She came to the door. Heels off. No make-up and wearing a floaty silk dress. She looked like an angel. Except, she had bright green washing-up gloves on. Had she been watching too much CSI? She opened the door gingerly and I stepped into a very monochrome, but chic, bachelor pad hallway. The lights were off, save a faint glow coming from upstairs.
“Who’s seen you here?” I whispered with urgency.
“Nobody.” She looked me, and my mad attire, up and down. “His cameras are switched off, don’t worry.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he always disables them when he’s, you know—”
“No, I don’t know, Elodie. What the fuck’s going on?”
She looked down, ashamed.
“Where is he?”
“Follow me. He’s up here.”
She led me upstairs to a bedroom. It was huge. Dark red walls, sleek, antique Asian furniture. The blinds were all drawn, but a small light in one corner cast a beam across the room. My eyes scanned the bedroom. Prokovich was not lying in a bath, at all, nor was there any blood. He was on his bed, spread out. Naked, except for two bound silk scarves noosed about his neck, hooked up to bedposts either side. There were burgundy-colored blotches about his neck; he’d been strangulated by the scarves. He had globs of dried cum around his hand and genitals. He’d been masturbating, obviously. I turned my eyes away from his private parts, but bent down to take his pulse, just to double-check. He wasn’t breathing. Dead. I looked up and stared at my niece.
“I told you there was blood because I thought it was the only thing that would make you come here,” she told me sheepishly. “It sounded more urgent.”
“Of course I would have come, silly—you didn’t have to make that up.”
“I’m sorry, I—”
“And the bath?” I asked, wondering what insane part of her imagination conjured up that particular image of him, lying bleeding in a bath.
“I thought you’d be relieved. No mess.”
I had to remind myself that Elodie was still a teenager. I tried to stay levelheaded, not lose my cool. I drew in a lungful of air. “Let’s begin at the beginning, shall we?” I sounded like one of those nursery-rhyme readers on the radio that I listened to when I was a child. Let’s begin at the beginning.
Elodie bit her lip and said nothing.
“I need to make a decision, goddamn it, Elodie. There’s a dead man here and I have to know what the fuck’s going on! Did you do this?”
“He did it to himself.”
“He rigged all this up, himself?”
She flushed and looked down at the floor. “I helped him. He wanted it tighter.”
“So you planned all this?”
She raised her eyes and looked me in the eye, defiantly. “It was the only way I knew to get him out of my life for good.”
“So you played along, pretending you were up for it?” She nodded. I knew what had happened. Apparently, cutting the oxygen supply off to the brain during orgasm causes heightened pleasure, a sort of hallucinatory ecstasy. I had read somewhere that between five hundred and a thousand deaths occur each year in the US, alone, from autoerotic asphyxiation gone wrong. So this was the shit Prokovich was into and had Elodie running from him.
Her mouth twisted in disgust. “I hated his sick games. But then, I was also hooked in. Is that wrong? All I wanted was to get away from him. But he kept luring me back. I thought if he was dead, he’d leave me alone, once and for all. Stop stalking me. Leave me in peace.”
“So you did do this? Was this your idea?”
Tears were falling silently down her milk-white cheeks. She nodded.
Clever girl, I wanted to say, A+ for imagination. “And he was up for it?” I asked.
“He thought it was the best idea he’d ever heard.”
“Where did you learn to tie that sailor’s knot?”
“Remember when we went sailing once with Laura?”
“But that was years ago.”
Elodie closed her lids and shook her head. “I never forgot that knot she taught me.”
“And then what happened, after you helped him tie himself up?”
“I put some music on. Turned down the lights, lit a scented candle, got him in the mood. Got him going, you know, till he was really into it. Played along; did a striptease. Then I left just as….you know. I went downstairs and poured myself a glass of wine. I did some washing-up to distract myself. When I came back…I didn’t expect that it would have actually worked. I thought he’d stop, that he’d…”
I inspected the tight sailor’s knot and the whole crazy set-up, but making sure I didn’t touch anything. It was obvious that the guy had had an accomplice, or someone who’d helped get him into that position. The last thing I wanted was Elodie implicated in this dirty scandal and one of his Russian aides swooping down on her in revenge. Or, worse, some psycho ex girlfriend, or current girlfriend—the guy fucked around—plotting retribution.
“Did any neighbors hear anything? Did he make a noise?”
“They’re all away for the weekend in The Hamptons.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he told me. He said he loved staying in New York when everyone else was out of town because it was quieter.”
I dialed Joe Pesci’s doppelganger. He’d need to make it look as if the Russian had done all this alone; an accidental, autoerotic ‘suicide.’ He’d need to wipe the whole place down for prints, hairs, anything incriminating. I spoke quietly into my cell, giving him instructions and the address, telling him I’d leave the front door off the latch, not that that would have been a problem; the guy could pick any lock. I pressed end.
“Pin your hair back, Elodie. Get a hat or a scarf out of his closet and hide your hair. Here, use this,” I said, fishing a silk handkerchief out of my jacket. “Don’t put anymore washing-up glove fingerprints anywhere. You’ll need a hat to hide your face. We’re going to walk out of here with our heads down and hope to hell that nobody saw you come in. What time did you arrive?”
“A few hours ago.”
“So when did he….pass out, exactly?”
“I killed him, didn’t I?” she said, her lips twitching with remorse.
“No, Elodie, you did not.” I held her by the shoulders. “Get this into your head: You. Are. Not. Responsible. For this son of a bitch’s downfall. He had it fucking coming to him. Is that clear?”
“But I helped, it was my—”
“No buts. All you did was speed up the inevitable. Help him do to himself what Karma had planned for hi
m all along. This bastard was responsible for millions of innocent citizens’ deaths all over the world. You did the world a favor by helping him reach Hell a little faster.”
“Please don’t tell anyone. Don’t tell Maman.”
“Come on, let’s get out of here.” I peeled the rubber gloves off her delicate hands, rolled them into a ball and put them inside my jacket pocket. I held her hands. “Elodie, you and I are peas in a pod. We both have a darkness that lives inside us. And that’s okay. I’ve been responsible for a few deaths, myself. I’m here for you. Always and forever. I understand you. What you did had to be done. This is our secret, no one else’s. I swear, I won’t tell a soul. Not even Pearl—who’ll be delighted, by the way, when she reads in the papers that this bastard has snuffed it.” I drew my niece to me, my arms tight about her tiny frame, and let her sob against my chest.
18
Elodie left the country two days later. Our choice of destination was South America. She’d been clamoring to go backpacking for ages and this was her chance. Art school could wait. We needed for her to lie low for a good six months.
The news was full of Prokovich. Just as I suspected, one of his girlfriends discovered his body the following day. Luckily, nobody mentioned Elodie. Not seriously, anyway. One reporter did call, asking why they were chatting together at the Stone Trooper premiere and I said she’d met him once with her mother. I was worried I’d be a suspect in people’s eyes after our skirmish on the red carpet, but my man had done such a thorough job in Prokovich’s brownstone, that forensics had unequivocal ‘suicide’ as the cause of death. Sophie had a contact at the NYPD who filled her in. We were free and clear. Elodie was safe. Still, I didn’t want her in New York, just in case she let something slip. I encouraged her go backpacking like a hippy. She’d be far, far away from a world of red carpets, bondage and billionaires. She could go surfing along the coast of Peru and Ecuador, eat ceviche and study The Lonely Planet. Maybe find herself a nice, simple surfer boyfriend who cared about waves and a nice cold beer at the end of the day, not some fucked up control freak, world-playing megalomaniac who’d once strangled animals to death and had no respect for human life. Elodie needed a salt-of-the-earth type. Armed with a Smartphone, she’d be fine. And I realized now that she didn’t need looking after. Not one bit.
She was an enigma. Dark like me. Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita. They recruited women like Elodie—she had what it took to be a mercenary. She had a ruthless streak. Intelligent. Savvy. She was a schemer, a planner, a loner by nature. She’d be alright, I decided.
Life went on uneventfully, except that Pearl was working very hard with HookedUp Enterprises and Rex got married to a stunning black Labrador who gave birth to six glorious, silky black pups. We took a house for the month of February in The Bahamas, and Pearl managed to do business from her laptop on the beach. The Smartphone was used minimally—why? Because she was pregnant again! Five months and counting. I hadn’t even imagined we’d be blessed again with another pregnancy.
We were lying on the beach, the waves lapping gently—a pale turquoise water shimmering and glittering us with its welcome. The sand was almost white and squeaked beneath our feet. Pearl lay under an umbrella, and Louis and Madeleine were happily playing. A new nanny (Sally had her hands full with all the dogs, who were in New York—too hot here for them) had come with us so we didn’t have to worry about having eyes in the back of our heads.
“What are you laughing at?” I asked Pearl. She was stretched out on her towel, reading Vanity Fair. HookedUp Enterprises had just bought the magazine.
“This interview they did with you in Paris. You’re such a liar!”
I narrowed my eyes. “Which bit are you reading?”
“You told them we were living in a tree-house in Thailand.”
“I like my anonymity, you know that. Let them send their paparazzi out to Thailand and leave us alone peacefully here. What else does it say?” I asked, looking up at a cloudless blue sky.
“I’ll read it out loud and you can hear for yourself what a bull-shitter you are.”
“Go on then, I’m all ears.”
“INTERVIEW WITH ALEXANDRE CHEVALIER FOR VANITY FAIR. By Stacey Black,” Pearl began.
‘It’s 4pm and I’m waiting nervously in the lobby of the George V in Paris to meet one of the top five richest men in the world. That, in itself, is impressive enough, especially considering this man is a renowned philanthropist and gives a percentage of his income to charity. But the fact that he is only twenty-six years old and looks like a movie star makes most people quiver at the knees, including myself. His name? None other than Alexandre Chevalier, CEO of the billion-dollar Internet phenomenon, HookedUp, bigger than Twitter and Facebook and with an offer on the table from Google, poised for a historical buyout that is bigger than most nations’ national yearly budgets.’
“Sounds like this Stacey Black has a major crush on you, darling,” Pearl teased.
I grinned. I couldn’t deny I liked keeping Pearl on her toes. “Read on, this is interesting.”
‘Finally, Monsieur Chevalier saunters into the lobby. He is wearing dark glasses – very Hollywood. My stomach flips. I shouldn’t be so in awe. But I am. This man is power personified. He is dressed in a sharp, obviously hand-tailored, charcoal-gray suit, contrary to how he is usually described; favoring T-shirt and jeans, even for business meetings. I stand up and he smiles at me. Sadly, the smile is kept in check. This is a married man, after all. A man famously in love with his wife. He shakes my hand in a professional manner and takes off his shades. Two searing green eyes greet me. Alexandre Chevalier is devastatingly handsome. But enough of that…I’m here to do an interview.’
“Yes, she definitely had the hots for you, Alexandre.”
“Read on, chérie.”
‘A.C. Sorry I’m late. I got held up.
V.F. It’s so great to meet you and thank you for doing this exclusive interview.
A.C. You’re welcome. Shall we go through to the restaurant or bar? We can have some tea or something. I lived in London for a while so I picked up a few British habits. Nothing like an afternoon cup of tea to get the brain back on track.
Brain back on track? I doubt it. As well as being an astute businessman, Alexandre Chevalier is known for his brilliance. Self-educated, he started HookedUp with his sister, Sophie Dumas, with no more than 15,000 Euros—a loan from their stepfather. It wasn’t long before this French sibling team took the social media world by storm.
We sit down and are presented with a menu. I ask him to choose. My French is not up to much. Besides, hearing him speak his native language is a treat indeed. A waiter comes up to our table and hovers there reverently. Everybody knows who Alexandre Chevalier is, it seems. He orders us Lapsang Souchong tea and some petits fours. I start with my questions.
V.F. Is it true, Mr. Chevalier, that you’re retiring?
A.C. (He laughs.) Probably for a nanosecond, and then I’ll stick my fingers into some other pie. I am selling HookedUp. Rather, my sister and I are selling. By the way, call me Alexandre—I hate formalities.
V.F. Is it true that you have been offered ten billion dollars for your company?
A.C. I never discuss money unless it’s with my accountant or lawyer. (He narrows his eyes at me.)
V.F. Okay, well, there is something else that people are dying to know. Rex, your dog, has become a household name since you and your family were all photographed in Central Park together by the paparazzi. Is it true that your dog has become a father?
A.C. Yes, his wife/girlfriend, whatever, has just given birth. I’m glad to say that she’s had six very healthy puppies. (A trace of a smile makes it evident that he is amused by my question.)
V.F. And is it also true that Rex gave his lady-dog a diamond collar that is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars?
A.C. (He laughs.) Never believe what you read.
Pearl stopped reading and burst out laughing. “Sally bought that for Bonnie. It w
as a cheapie thing from one of those accessory stores. So funny. Sorry, I’ll continue.”
‘V.F Sorry, I couldn’t resist. May I ask you why you have agreed to do this interview with us? This is a first, isn’t it?
A.C I think you know the answer to that question.
V.F. (I look blank.) Err…actually…no.
A.C. My wife has bought your magazine.
V.F. She reads Vanity Fair?
A.C. I mean, literally. She has bought you. Out. She owns you now. Well, not you personally…(he laughs). The deal was sealed this morning. My wife, CEO of HookedUp Enterprises, is now your boss. She owns Vanity Fair.
V.F. So HookedUp Enterprises is not part of the Google buy-out?
A.C. No, its not, it’s a separate entity. But you’d have to ask my wife the details. She’s the businessperson now. I’m just her dogs-body. You know…around to make her a coffee if need be, hand out a bit of advice if she asks me. I’m going to be a kept man from now on. (The curve of his lips makes me know he is being ironic.)
V.F. Somehow I doubt that very much! So what will you do with all your spare time?
A.C. We’ve had a beautiful tree house built for us in a jungle in Thailand. It’s hidden away in complete privacy on a private island. The jungle’s surrounded by the ocean. I like to cook, you know, simple stuff like fresh fish I’ve caught that day, and Pearl reads novels. Meanwhile the twins putter about collecting seashells.
V.F. That sounds extremely romantic.
A.C. Romance is what gets me out of bed every day. Romance is what makes the world go round. Without romance one might as well not breathe.
V.F. So you and your wife are very in love?
A.C. I speak for myself when I say yes, absolutely. Now what’s going on in that pretty head of Pearl’s is anybody’s guess.’
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