Rake

by Scott Phillips

  •••

  The gun was in a safe in the office, and he put on a pair of latex gloves before he took it out. He handed me a pair and advised me to put them on.

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t have any prints on this gun and neither should you. Last guy who handled this gun is an asshole, and if anything funny happens we don’t want it traced to us, do we?”

  “I just want it for protection.”

  “I don’t give a shit why you want it. I’m just offering you some advice. Wear the gloves when you handle the gun and I promise you’ll be happy about it later.”

  MERCREDI, DIX-HUIT MAI

  2:00 AM.

  I was at home in a very deep and contented sleep when I was awakened by an indignant Esmée.

  “What are you doing asleep?” she asked.

  “It’s been a pretty big day, actually.” I didn’t mention the fistfight with the cross dresser or the strenuous sex with said tranny’s estranged wife, as this wasn’t the kind of information that would soothe Esmée, but I did allow as how I’d purchased a gun for self-defense.

  “Excellent,” she said. “It’s going to be a big night, too. Come on, get dressed.”

  I was hoping the big night wasn’t going to involve more than one ejaculation, since I’d already done that twice and was approaching my limit. “Can whatever it is wait until morning?”

  “Tonight’s the night. Claude’s last.”

  Shit. Despite the purchase of the gun I hadn’t thought about its eventual use all night, really, which was sort of a blessing. My ability to compartmentalize has been a boon to me as an actor; no matter what turmoil is affecting my personal life, I’m always in the moment onstage or on set. “You know, I’m pretty beat. Could we do it tomorrow?”

  “Get out of bed. It’s tonight.”

  I got out of bed and got dressed without showering, presuming that she wouldn’t be too keen on my taking the time for it. In the kitchen I ate an apple to make me alert (better than coffee, at least in my case), and I let her leave first in case we were spotted.

  Ten minutes later I left the building myself and, as luck would have it, hanging around outside the nightclub next door was the guy I’d beaten up the week previous. He looked just as drunk as he had that night, and he stared at me with a look of intense but befuddled concentration while his buddies laughed at him.

  I turned the corner in a hurry and caught up with Esmée’s mint-condition ’67 Karmann Ghia a few hundred meters up the Boulevard St. Germain. With her at the wheel we raced down the near-empty boulevard over to the Cluny and then up the Boulevard St. Michel while she lectured me about taking things more seriously. Then she admitted that my ability to face such a situation with aplomb, even boredom, was one of the things that drove her mad with desire. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that my attitude wasn’t insouciance or indifference or anything of the sort; it was just sexual exhaustion, ascribable to one of her rivals.

  We drove well past the dormitory, all the way up to the Boulevard du Port-Royal, where she parked on the sidewalk and we walked down a side street to where a baker’s truck sat. She pulled out a set of keys and we drove it in silence to the rue de l’Abbé de l’Épée.

  •••

  The mood in the basement was dismal, funereal even. Annick and Fred had been drinking wine and were both telling sad tales of love gone wrong, and before we got started with the main business of the night, Esmée joined in.

  “Wait until you’re older,” Esmée said. “Believe me, whatever heartbreaks you’ve had you’ll have worse before you’re through.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Seems to me the main thing is not to take these things so seriously and just try and have fun.”

  All three of them looked at me as though I were an idiot or a bastard, but I was the only one of the four of us not whining about long-gone, unfaithful lovers. Hadn’t I ever had my heart broken? Sure I had; the difference was that after a brief period of sadness I stopped giving a shit. And that’s why, romantically speaking, I am one of the happiest sons of bitches you will ever encounter.

  After five minutes of listening to them I realized that Esmée was no longer in command, that in the presence of the others she was deferring to my authority. So I told them to knock it off. It was time to transport Claude. When we opened the door to the meat locker and turned on the light he squealed through the gag at the sight of Esmée, or more precisely at her predatory expression, and when he saw that steamer trunk we were going to put him in he panicked and began struggling for real. Weak though he was from nearly a week in restraints, the fear of death stimulated his adrenal glands and I thought he was going to bust that chair into pieces.

  “For God’s sake, be a man,” Esmée said. That was a bit harsh given the circumstance, but I didn’t want to have to fight him into the trunk. So I went into another part of the old kitchen carrying a flashlight and grabbed a big cast-iron skillet off the wall.

  When I came back he was still thrashing, wide-eyed, and the chair had fallen over on its side. I knocked him unconscious with a single blow and then with some revulsion stuffed his nearly nude, barely breathing body into the trunk and locked it. It was harder this time, perhaps because of the smell of him, and in any case a great deal more difficult than the movie I mentioned earlier would have suggested.

  The mood in the bread truck was oddly jolly, as though the four of us were on our way to the Bois de Boulogne for a picnic or a day at Longchamp instead of a murder and a body dump. Esmée and Annick were telling stories about their respective adolescent forays into sexual experimentation, and Fred took advantage of a conversational tangent in the direction of zoophilia to describe one of the many subplots of the novel he’d interrupted in order to work on the movie.

  “This guy’s in love with a dog,” he said, and he got a little incensed when the girls laughed. “No, it’s a serious examination of the emotion. What does it mean when a man loves, fully and completely, his neighbor’s German shepherd?”

  More gales of raucous laughter, followed by more rationalizing, followed by more laughter, until finally Fred himself joined in.

  “Maybe you could have the dog fall in love with a cat,” Annick said. “A triangle is always interesting.”

  I looked in the back where she and Fred were seated and I couldn’t help noticing that she was sitting closer to him than the limitations of space necessarily dictated, and I felt good for both of them. Fred needed a woman, and a young and beautiful one would turn his morbid attention away from his ex-wife; in addition it was difficult to see how Annick could stay in a relationship with Bruno now that she was a giggling accomplice in his father’s murder.

  We drove the bread truck some distance into the park, past vast empty spaces and patches crowded with whores and johns, past Longchamp racetrack until finally, having driven such a circuitous, labyrinthine route that I wasn’t sure I could have found my way out alone, we stopped. There was no one in sight, and the four of us unloaded the trunk and carried it into the woods.

  Someone had dumped a load of old television sets there in the middle of the Bois. I shone my flashlight around and counted more than thirty of them, their round, green glass picture tubes shattered. They all looked to date back to the 1970s at least, and I thought it would make an interesting publicity shot, me standing before all those derelict televisions in the Bois at night, but before Fred could snap a picture with my little Canon Annick reminded us quite rightly that we didn’t want to be connected to the spot, in terms of evidence.

  I unlocked the trunk and dumped Claude on the ground. He was starting to come around, and the subject came up for the first time of who was to commit the crime itself, and in what manner.

  Esmée wanted to tie a noose around his neck and attach it to his feet so that he would slowly strangle himself, but I pointed out that this might take a while and we didn’t have the time to stick around and make sure he was dead before some passerby noticed him. She poute
d but admitted that I was right, to the obvious relief of Annick and Fred, neither of whom was entirely sanguine about the prospect of having to watch such a death. I have to admit I didn’t like the idea much either, even taking into account Claude’s crimes against humanity. So I extracted from my inside jacket pocket the very pair of latex gloves Gégé had given me, and then I grabbed the gun and placed it against Claude’s temple and fired.

  The others stood there in stunned silence, and I ran to the pile of televisions and threw up inside the chassis of an old Thomson, through its shattered glass screen.

  After a minute or so Fred spoke up. “Maybe we should leave in case someone heard the shot.”

  “Shots go off here all the time,” Esmée said, but she was moving in the direction of the bread truck. Fred and I took the trunk and followed.

  •••

  We drove in silence through Boulogne-Billancourt and I told Esmée to stop on the Pont de St. Cloud. I got out and, still wearing my blood-spattered latex gloves, tossed the gun into the Seine. I had spent the exorbitant sum of five hundred euros on it, double what it was probably really worth, and it seemed a shame to be letting it go after only a few short hours of ownership and a single shot fired, but that was the way it was.

  •••

  The first order of business was to drop Esmée off at her Karmann Ghia so she could be at home when the police called. Fred took the wheel and we left the bread truck where Esmée had picked it up, and I tossed the bloody latex gloves into a storm drain. Then we repaired on foot to the basement of the dormitory where we spent a good deal of time removing any traces of Claude’s captivity there. In the meantime Annick was kind enough to take my bloodied shirt upstairs and wash it in the laundry room. By the time it was clean and dried, Fred and I had done a pretty good job on the meat locker, to which only the faintest odor still clung. He and I left on foot via the rear entryway while Annick went upstairs to sleep.

  It was almost five in the morning, but neither Fred nor I was sleepy. We walked down to the river and crossed the bridge onto the Île de la Cité and proceeded to walk its periphery twice before heading over to the Île St. Louis for more mindless circular wandering. We’d been at it for more than half an hour before Fred finally spoke.

  “Is that the first time you ever killed someone?” he asked.

  “It was, but it wasn’t the first time I ever tried.”

  He let that one lie, and we made another half-orbit of the island before he spoke again. “It didn’t bother me as much as I thought it would.”

  “Does that worry you?”

  “Not especially.”

  “You know, I think Annick’s developed a soft spot for you.”

  “Annick?” He sounded pleased but disbelieving. “She’s beautiful. And twenty-three. What does she want with a guy like me?”

  “Don’t sell yourself short. You’re a writer, and on the verge of being a very successful one. And I think she saw qualities in you this last week that she admired. She saw you nurturing, taking care of another human being, and becoming emotionally connected to that person despite the circumstances.”

  “You really think she’s interested?”

  “Fred, there are lots of subjects where you can safely ignore anything I have to say. But where women are concerned, you can take it to the bank.”

  He didn’t answer, or look back at me, but spent the rest of our walk lost in happy reverie.

  •••

  Fred and I went our separate ways shortly after the sun rose—his mood having markedly improved to the point that he was almost giddy—and upon my return to the apartment I showered and quickly thereafter fell into a deep, refreshing sleep that was not interrupted until well past noon by the doorbell. I threw on a clean pair of pants and shirt and opened the door to a lugubrious Inspector Bonnot, who entered the apartment unbidden.

  “Can I offer you some coffee?” I asked him.

  “Unnecessary,” he said. “Did you hear from Mme. Guiteau yesterday?”

  Which day was yesterday? My sleep schedule was so far out of joint that I wasn’t sure, but assuming that the answer was supposed to be yes, I said I had. Then it struck me that I didn’t know whether she was supposed to have confided in me or not about the kidnapping. Pretending I didn’t know about the affair seemed more dangerous than frank curiosity, though, and I acted accordingly. “She was distraught about her husband’s abduction. If there’s anything I can do to help, Inspector—”

  “Claude Guiteau is dead. Executed.”

  Once again, feigning shock is one of those things that separate the real actor from the hammy amateur. The latter will let his jaw fall open, ask when, my God, how? it’s so unfair, et cetera. He’ll look away, maybe at the ground, maybe into the distance, shake his head, all kinds of histrionic crap. I just stared the inspector in the eye.

  “Holy shit,” I said. “You’re fucking kidding.”

  “Not in the slightest. I assume Mme. Guiteau also told you that his kidnappers used the name Krysmopompas in their communications with the press.”

  “She said something like that. I thought she must have had it wrong.”

  “What was the nature of your business with M. Guiteau?”

  “I was trying to get him to invest in a film. His wife is an actress.”

  “Yes,” Bonnot said in a tone that suggested he wasn’t entirely convinced of the legitimacy of Mme. Guiteau’s acting career. “So she says as well.”

  “She was in a Dutch film last year that got good notices,” I said.

  He grunted and shrugged. “And M. Guiteau, did he seem favorably disposed toward financing this film of yours?”

  “It was hard for me to say. Esmée—Mme. Guiteau—kept telling me he was all for it, but I only met him once, and since then he’s been out of the country.”

  “Not quite. He reentered Europe via Lisbon over a week ago, and according to his business associates he wasn’t heard from after that. You know what he did for a living, I presume.”

  “I know he had his fingers in a lot of pies, but mostly he was an arms dealer, according to Esmée.”

  “You’re also acquainted with his son Bruno.”

  “I met him once or twice.”

  He looked up from his file. “Kid says you beat the shit out of him in his father’s nightclub. Is that right?”

  “He attacked me and I defended myself.”

  “He attacked you. Any particular reason?”

  Again a dilemma: to cop to the fact that I was fucking Bruno’s girl or risk getting caught in a lie. “He found out I was screwing his girlfriend.”

  Bonnot nodded. “I wasn’t sure it was true, but that’s what he told me. So that’s how you got mixed up with all these people?”

  “More or less.”

  “He’s also quite jealous of his stepmother. Claims they had a two-year affair he’s never quite gotten over.”

  “Really?” I didn’t have to pretend to be surprised. Somehow I’d assumed that Esmée had been cockteasing the boy all along, but the idea of her actually taking her husband’s son to bed was off-putting to say the least.

  “And he’s not the only one jealous of Mme. Guiteau. His father was convinced that she was screwing someone, and Bruno thinks it was you.”

  “Inspector, I’m nothing if not a careerist. I’ll fuck just about any attractive woman between the ages of sixteen and seventy, but when it stands in the way of getting a movie made I go home, as you say, la bite sous le bras. Anyway, I’m involved with a couple of other women at the moment and they keep me busy.”

  “So I understand. I looked at your girlfriend’s website.”

  “Ginny. Yeah, she’s quite a number.”

  “So she is. The night man at her hotel had an interesting story, incidentally, about you chasing an intruder out of her suite last night.”

  My God, was that just last night? “Some fellow got the key by claiming to be her ex-husband. Did you talk to her?”

  “She says she
didn’t get upstairs until you’d already chased him away.”

  “That’s right. Presumably a deranged fan,” I said.

  “Presumably,” he said, looking down at his notes. “One more thing before I go. Would it be too much to ask for a signed photograph?”

  “For the wife of the divisionnaire? Certainly.” I rose to get one and he spoke again.

  “Actually, I’d like three, if you don’t mind. My wife and daughter, you see. . . .” He shrugged and, for the first time in my presence, smiled.

  In my briefcase I carry a stack of different glossies—in costume as Dr. Crandall dressed for surgery, another dressed for the doctor’s hobby, polo, and a head shot wearing a tuxedo and a smoky, jaded look. I signed all three, personalized them for each lady in question, and bade the inspector goodbye.

  •••

  The murder was all over the news, and now that Claude was dead, that photograph Fred had taken was on every paper’s front page and website. Esmée called me to inform me that in addition to the official funeral, which would be attended in the hundreds and heavily covered by the media, a private memorial would be held the next night for close friends and family at the Hanoi Hilton, and she hoped I’d attend. Perhaps I’d like to bring my friend the porn star, she suggested without the least hint of malice in her voice, which clued me in to the fact that she thought the phone might be bugged.

  “I’ll bring her if she’s available,” I said.

  •••

  While I ate my lunch—a green salad with a macédoine and some smoked salmon—Marie-Laure called, distraught at the news.

  “What does this mean for the film?” she asked.

  “I haven’t really thought it through,” I said. “I suppose it’ll be up to Esmée. Of course I don’t know how much money he really had, or what shape the estate will be in once it’s settled. And widowhood may dampen Esmée’s burning desire for stardom.”

  That was bullshit, of course. Nothing, least of all the death of Claude, was going to diminish Esmée’s ambitions.