Rake

by Scott Phillips

With some trepidation I returned his call, only to find that he’d fucked Annick three times the night before. He was beside himself with joy, and I returned to the apartment rather pleased with my efforts as a matchmaker. I’d been friends with Fred for only a few weeks now, but his life as a depressive shut-in was a thing of the past.

  I had dinner with Ginny at a seafood restaurant at the Place de l’Odéon. She was mad that the hotel had quashed her efforts to get the story of her ex-husband and stalker into the papers.

  “Do you know what that kind of shit is worth in terms of Internet traffic?” she asked me between bites of sole meunière. “Never mind the fact that there was a cross-dresser aspect to it, which just makes it kinkier. But no, the hotel’s precious reputation is at stake, so they keep it quiet. And when I pointed out to them that I stood to lose money on the proposition, you know what they had the balls to do?”

  “Offer you a settlement?” I guessed.

  “Damn right!”

  “I hope you took it.”

  “Damn right I did. Shit, though, I got to get some publicity out of this stalking business.”

  “So you think he broke in to steal your underwear?”

  “No, that’s just an occasional thing when he gets high. Mostly he’s into all kinds of kinky shit, all over the place: nipple torture, electric shocks, breath play, adult diapers, you name it. And when I met him he was kind of a missionary-position type of guy, you know? I mean, I understand why he’s upset about us breaking up. I ruined him for regular women.”

  “I can certainly understand that.”

  “I fucking wish we could get him to do it again, just away from that tight-assed fucking hotel this time.”

  I thought it over. “How would you like to attend a memorial service with me tomorrow?”

  She almost had a bite of sole in her mouth, and she held it there suspended before her lips in a tentative state of delighted disbelief. “Babe, am I to understand that you are asking me out on a date to somebody’s funeral?”

  “If you want to call it that, yes.”

  She put the forkful of fish down and fell back laughing. “You are a class act.”

  “So I guess that’s a yes?”

  “Fuck, yeah. There going to be food?”

  “Yeah, it’s kind of a wake. Just one thing,” I said. “If you wanted to let David know about it, how would you do that?”

  “Ooohhh.” She nodded. “I can think of ways.”

  “Good. Because the press is going to be there, and I can pretty much guarantee there’ll be cops as well.”

  VENDREDI, VINGT MAI

  FRED SHOWED UP FOR THE MEMORIAL AT THE Hanoi Hilton stag, since Annick hadn’t given Bruno the news yet; even if she had, they reasoned, it would have been poor form to rub his nose in it at his father’s memorial. Marie-Laure was there with her husband, and I was there with Ginny, who wore a form-fitting minidress through which her nipples protruded like gumdrops. The mood was festive, with a giant photograph of Claude printed on a banner hanging across one wall, the cage hanging over the dance floor minus its usual scantily clad occupant, like the riderless horse in a funeral cortege. The music was the standard horrible mélange of disco, classic rock, and techno-dance, and though Esmée was seated at a table dressed in a very sexy black outfit and playing the devastated widow very convincingly, she got up every few minutes to dance and managed never to lose her look of brooding grief, not even for the most frenetic numbers, not for a second.

  A great many members of the press were there by invitation. It was commonly known that shortly before his death Claude had become passionate about the film he intended to produce for his wife to star in, and so making his memorial a media event seemed a fitting tribute to a man who had previously shunned the spotlight.

  I was having trouble keeping my eyes on Ginny’s face while we danced, largely because of the effect of those lovely nipples. Which is funny, since I’d spent considerable time suckling them the night before and had spent half of our limo ride over playing with them. She was in her element, being watched by most of the men in the room and not a few of the ladies. Every time a flash went off she winked at me.

  “I owe you big time, if this all gets onto Gawker or E! or Entertainment Tonight,” she said.

  “It’s nothing. You get a message to David?”

  “Called his brother in Oklahoma. Told him I wanted to see David, said I’d cooked up some real kinky shit he wasn’t going to believe.”

  “Won’t he think that’s suspicious, your calling him up like that?”

  “No,” she said. “I do shit like that all the time just to torture him. He’s in love with me, the poor dumb fuck.”

  “Are you sure he’ll tell David?”

  “Course he will. He tells David everything. He told David he’d fucked me, for example, which was one of the reasons David and I started having problems. Big fucking deal, right? I mean, they’re brothers.”

  I saw Marie-Laure dancing with her husband on the other side of the dance floor. They were dancing a little less energetically than the rest of the crowd, and I wondered what he made of his wife’s life. He looked pretty miserable, but upon consideration so did she.

  Soon Ginny was dancing with Fred, who looked the very picture of masculine self-confidence. As I stood at the bar I saw Annick at a corner table by herself trying hard not to watch him, and a somewhat familiar-looking young man approached me and shook my hand.

  “I just wanted to say I’m sorry about jumping you,” he said, and even with that rather obvious clue to his identity I was drawing a blank. Whoever he was, though, he was offering an apology, so I accepted it.

  “The thing is, I’m kind of going crazy at the moment, and a lot of things just came crashing down around me at the same time. Like Annick cheating on me, Esmée cutting me off.”

  Aha. So this was Bruno, without his dreads now, and looking rather natty. “I understand.”

  “Do you? Sometimes I think if anything else goes wrong I’ll go crazy. Still, I know that attacking you was wrong. I’m planning on seeing a psychiatrist soon.”

  “Your demeanor is very different than the last time we met,” I said.

  “I’m heavily medicated at the moment, sir.”

  I told him a truncated version of my army career and my discovery of acting as a form of therapy. He listened with interest, and then I clasped his shoulder.

  “You’re a good-looking young fellow. Articulate. You have a decent voice. How’d you like to be in a movie?”

  •••

  I had prepared two notes. Both of them read WISHING SHE WAS YOU. When I went over to present my official condolences to Esmée, I slipped her one, and brushing past Marie-Laure a few minutes later, I left the other clasped in her palm. But of course I was leaving with Ginny, and as we made our way past the members of the press both inside and out I said to several of them words to the effect that this Krysmopompas fellow was a chickenshit who lacked the balls to come after me, and that I didn’t expect to hear from him again.

  SAMEDI, VINGT-ET-UN MAI

  WE MADE A GREAT SHOW OF MOVING Ginny into a small but elegant boutique hotel off the Boulevard St. Germain, where her suite was smaller than its predecessor but filled with objets d’art and so many flowers my eyes began itching the moment we walked through the door. I made certain the press knew we’d be there, and sure enough when we stepped out of the limo there’d been a line of photographers and television cameras to publicize the event.

  “You sure he’ll show?” I asked her.

  “Unless he smells a trap, which I don’t think he will. Not when he thinks he’s going to help me make a snuff video.”

  We looked around for the best place for me to hide and decided it was the walk-in closet. Ginny figured she’d have him thoroughly engaged in the sack before he wanted a proper tour of the suite around the room, and the slats in the door gave me a reasonably good idea of what was happening in the room outside.

  But first she wanted
to christen that big bed. The thing about Ginny was, she really was horny just about all the time. And what the hell, she’d left word for David to join her at five in the evening, and it was only two-thirty now.

  We had left word at the desk that if M. Steinke appeared, he was to be let up immediately. Members of the press would again be waiting outside the hotel and strategically placed in the corridors outside the room to record whatever transpired, and they all knew to be in place by four-thirty just to be on the safe side.

  So we all got caught with our pants down, in my case and Ginny’s literally so, when the lunatic son of a bitch burst into the room at three-fifteen and found me balls-deep in his estranged wife. Ginny screamed at the sight of him, and he came at me with a butcher knife, bellowing a cuckold’s pain and an avenger’s joy as I rolled off the bed and onto the floor.

  I had foreseen any number of scenarios I might have to deal with today, but fighting a knife-wielding assailant while I was naked wasn’t among them. He was an unskilled knife-fighter, but he was high on adrenaline and who knows what else and therefore unpredictable. I grabbed for his wrist, but he sliced my forearm and I retreated. I was a little bit ashamed, to tell you the truth, at allowing a civilian to slash me like that, and I vowed it was the last time.

  He was laughing like an idiot, his eyes red and wide, and I had a bad feeling he’d scored some meth or, even worse, some angel dust. “This is a snuff film, baby, and you’re the star,” he said.

  To my dismay I saw that Ginny was actually operating a video camera from the bed. “Damn it, give me a hand here,” I yelled.

  “Fight, you fucking pussies,” she yelled back, and I had the sinking sensation that I’d been had. This was indeed a snuff film she was making, whether it was her ex or me that died, and I vowed that if I survived I’d see to it that she never worked outside of porn again.

  I was backing away from him when he lunged suddenly, knocking me into a side table laden with a large pitcher full of flowers. His teeth bared, he lunged at me and I rolled to the side just in time to avoid being cut by a large sliver of broken crystal.

  From my prone position I kicked him in the face and felt the cartilage in his nose crunch. He dropped the knife, and I plunged it into his throat. He made a truly horrible noise as the air from his lungs escaped through it, and his carotid artery spurted bright red onto the creamy white carpet as Ginny filmed. The blood began leaking rather than pumping from the wound in his neck, and his eyes lost focus.

  “Turn off that fucking camera,” I said.

  •••

  It didn’t take long for the photographers to arrive, and the police followed shortly. By that time I’d planted enough incriminating evidence on the corpse to establish definitively his identity as Krysmopompas: a page referring to Kamikaze 1989, torn from a book in Fred’s bookstore on German New Wave cinema, and a typewritten letter ostensibly from David Steinke explaining his need to kill me, Claude Guiteau, and anyone else who might facilitate Ginny’s reentry into legit show business, thereby hurting his chances of getting her back.

  “It’s a good job you managed to overpower him,” Inspector Bonnot said. “Myself, I’d hate to be naked and face-to-face with a knife-wielding homicidal maniac.”

  “It’s no picnic, Inspector,” I agreed, and when he’d wrapped up his duties and the body had been shipped off to the Institut Médico-Légal, we repaired to the headquarters of the Police Judiciaire, where I had the rare honor of a visit from the divisionnaire himself, who was kind enough to have sandwiches and beer sent up from the café on the Place Dauphine to thank me for the autographed picture, which had delighted his wife. After I’d made my official statement, Inspector Bonnot joined me for an apéritif at that same café.

  •••

  “It’s funny,” he said, after one of the inevitable interruptions, this time by an elderly couple who wanted, as usual, to know why I sounded so different in person than on the TV. “You’re very good-natured about the whole thing. That old bitch interrupted you in midsentence.”

  “How can I be mean when they’re so happy to meet me? It’s thanks to people like her that I don’t have to wait tables or drive a truck.”

  “True. Nonetheless, she was out of line.”

  “Maybe. People get flustered when they meet someone famous.”

  “So what are your plans now? Staying in France?”

  “I certainly hope so. I just gave up a good TV role to stay here and push to get this movie made.”

  “Ah, that’s right, your movie. The one the late M. Guiteau was going to finance.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I suppose you’re out of luck there, now that he’s dead.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. If the estate’s settled quickly enough, I’m sure Esmée will step in for her husband as financial backer.”

  “I suppose that makes sense. Of course the whole film business is quite oblique to me.”

  “It’s oblique to people who’ve spent their lives in it. Every film gets set up differently, and every television show. There’s only one rule that never changes.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Every man for himself.”

  •••

  We shook hands outside the café with an invitation on my part for him to visit the set once the filming was under way and walked off in opposite directions as the sun began to set. Everything had gone as planned, and it was hard to argue that the world was any the worse off without either of the men I’d killed. The movie would get made, and all involved would get what they wanted. In the distance, the lights of the Eiffel Tower sputtered on, and I felt as though Paris had been my home forever.

  VENDREDI, TREIZE—

  QUELQUES MOIS PLUS TARD

  AFILM SET IS A SEEMINGLY CHAOTIC PLACE, if you don’t know what’s going on. If you do, you see that everyone is going about his business quickly and in such a way as to avoid disturbing anyone else’s. First-time visitors rarely perceive this, however, and can usually be recognized by their timorous resemblance to small children crossing a busy intersection.

  During our second week of production, Inspector Bonnot made, as I had invited him to, such a visit. We were on location near Paris, shooting a scene in a warehouse full of supposedly stolen artworks (Esmée had put Fred in touch with one of her late husband’s contacts, a high-end art fence, who had supplied him with a wealth of useful information). I introduced Bonnot to the production assistants, to the director and cinematographer, to some of the actors he hadn’t already met. He greeted Esmée solicitously and Ginny warmly (yes, I’d forgiven her for her willingness to see me killed on camera—one night with her and you’d understand why) and sat with us for lunch, after which he asked for a moment of my time, alone.

  As luck would have it the scene being shot after lunch was one of the few I wasn’t in. We walked along the banks of the Seine in silence for a while, and then he cleared his throat to speak.

  “You know, you could have been more careful.”

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  “You left the rubber ball in his mouth, for one thing. Your prints were on the strap. So were Mme. Guiteau’s. So were those of M. LaForge. And those of an unidentified fourth person, as well as those of M. Guiteau himself. His prints are explained by a second dental imprint on the ball itself—those of Mme. Guiteau.”

  “How did you come to get our prints?”

  “There are various means of getting those, if you’re not worried about it holding up in court. In your case, I swiped a drinking glass from the Guiteaus’ apartment.”

  “I see.”

  “In addition, you bought a gun for five hundred euros from a certain Gégé, who likes to stay on good terms with the police. When he heard that you were involved in the Krysmopompas case he came to me.”

  “I did no such thing.”

  “You should have had your friend LaForge buy the gun. Your attempt at discretion left a good deal to be desired, my friend. Because Gégé identifie
d the gun’s previous owner, we have its ballistics, and they match those of the bullet that killed Guiteau.”

  We both slowed down at the sight of something in the water. I saw a thin ribcage floating in the weeds, and for a horrifying moment I thought it was a child.

  “Look at that,” Bonnot said. “A dead swan.”

  And then I saw the white feathers and the remains of the webbed feet. “So it is,” I said, and we continued on our way.

  “Finally, there’s that name. Krysmopompas. There’s the film, Kamikaze 1989, of course, and I found a rock group that had taken its name from the film. But you know what my first hit was when I plugged the word into Google? The New York Times crossword puzzle.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Which runs every day in the International Herald Tribune. The word appeared as an answer therein the very day you were attacked. If, indeed, you were attacked. On several occasions I’ve noticed you working on the puzzle in your spare time.”

  The funny thing at that moment was, I’d always wondered why he hadn’t picked up on those things. All of them had occurred to me as possible keys to my downfall, and I honestly never underestimated the man. I was almost relieved to find that he was as sharp as I’d thought.

  “So why bring this up now, now that there’s a film in production and people counting on me to make a living? Surely you knew all these things months ago.”

  “That’s true. I suppose I wanted to come up and see a film being made. I’ve never been on a movie set.”

  “Are you going to arrest me now?”

  He laughed. “If I were going to arrest you, I’d have done it before Guiteau was in the ground. He was a pig. Shall we start back?”

  We turned around and walked in silence until we reached the carcass of the swan. “Seeing it like that, you realize what a large animal a swan really is,” he said.

  “That’s true. Whereas the skeleton of a lion or a bear, stripped of flesh and fur, seems quite small by comparison to its living form.”

  “You’re a philosopher,” he said.