by Stuart Woods
“A station chief once owned it. The Agency bought it from him, furnished, when he departed for Afghanistan. What with the mews and the big doors, it makes a good safe house.”
“How many bedrooms?”
“Four—three of them are on the top two floors. There’s a little staff flat on the other side of the garage.”
“And the master?”
“Takes up the whole second floor. There’s a nice study, too, that you haven’t seen, yet.”
“I want to live here.”
“Make Lance an offer.”
Stone sighed. “I’m dreaming. I’m an American, and I live very well in New York. And anyway, you’re in New York.”
“No, I’m in Agency purdah. I can’t think of anything else but work when I’m in New York. That’s why it’s so much fun being in Paris: I’m free!” She sighed. “Except for the phone.”
“Turn it off,” Stone said.
“I daren’t. If I don’t answer, people come looking for me.”
“You’re a slave to the CIA.”
“I know it, and they know it.”
“Why do you go on like this?”
“Because what I do matters—bad people die and good people live. I make the world a better place.”
“Really?”
She gave a rueful shrug. “Well, sometimes, and sometimes is good enough for me.”
“I can’t argue with that,” Stone said. “Nothing I can offer you is as good.”
“If we were together all the time, it wouldn’t be as good as it is right now: it’s the desert that makes the oasis so attractive.”
“I think I’ve soaked enough, outside and in,” he said. “Now I want to dry you with a big, soft towel and take you to bed. I want to sleep, because I can’t stay awake any longer. When I awaken, I’ll make it all up to you.”
“I’ll hold you to that,” Holly said, standing up in the tub, the water streaming from her body.
Stone stood up, too, and went to work with the towel.
—
STONE WOKE early the next morning—at least, it seemed early. There was light coming through the space between the curtains. He got up and pulled the cord, and cloudy daylight filled every corner of the room. There was the canopied bed and the sofa before the fireplace, now cold. There were a couple of comfortable chairs, with reading lamps beside them, bookcases on either side of the fireplace, bare of books.
There was a note on the bedside table. I had to run and I was loath to wake you—you were sleeping like a small boy. There’s breakfast in the kitchen fridge. All you have to do is switch on the coffeepot and warm the croissants. Lunch is there, too. For God’s sake, don’t leave the house, not until we’ve cleared the Paris air. I’ll be back in time for dinner.
Stone got into a robe and slippers, went down to the kitchen, and made breakfast, then he went into the living room. He found it the least attractive room in the house; the furnishings had been overused and underrepaired. He walked into the adjacent study; he liked that a lot better.
He had plans to make; he had to turn anger into revenge; he had to end this. He had no idea how, but it would come to him. In the meantime, he had some shopping to do.
46
Stone walked out of the cottage and down the mews to the big doors. There was a small door inside one of them, and he let himself out. His two guards were surprised.
“Mr. Barrington,” one of them said, “you’re not supposed to go out.”
“Not true,” Stone replied. “I’m not supposed to go out without you two. Follow me, but don’t crowd me.” He started down the Boulevard Saint-Germain, window-shopping along the way. He had previously noted the home-furnishing shops in the street, and he stopped before an unusual one. Instead of the latest in modern design, this one was filled with older, more interesting things. He walked in.
A tall, gray-haired woman got up from a rocking chair and put her book down. She regarded him, up and down, for a moment, then, in American English, she said, “What can I do for you?”
“Ah, you speak my mother tongue,” Stone said. He guessed she was in her seventies.
“That’s because I’m from your mother country,” she replied. “New York. How about you?”
“You’re from my mother city, too,” he said. “How long in Paris?”
“Fifty years, next month,” she said. “I’m Chey Stefan.”
“I’m Stone Barrington.” They shook hands. “All those years in this shop?”
“I was an actress. I grew older while the roles grew younger, so I morphed into the stylist business.”
“Stylist business?”
“There are two kinds of stylists,” she said, “one for clothes and the other for rooms. I style rooms.”
“How does that work?”
“Suppose a director shoots some scenes in a house. It’s a nice house, but not nice enough. I make it nicer, then I rent them the furnishings by the day.”
“Do you also sell the furnishings?”
“That’s what this shop is for,” she said. “What do you need?”
“I need to turn a nice room into a great one,” Stone said, “and I need to have it done by five o’clock today. Can you manage that?”
“I’m probably the only person in the arrondissement who can,” she said. “See anything you like?”
Stone walked around a well-used but very handsome leather sofa and sat down. “I like this,” he said. “And that chair.” He pointed, then walked over and sat in it. It was covered in what looked like a Shetland tweed.
“It’s one of a pair.”
“I’ll have them both,” he said. “And those two end tables and those lamps over there. I need a brass reading lamp, too.”
She walked to the back of the room and stood next to one. “Like this?”
“Exactly like that.”
“You’re easy. What else do you need?”
“A good rug, about twelve by eighteen.”
“Feet or meters?”
“Feet.”
“Follow me.” She led him into a back room and to a large rack that held rugs, hung up like towels in a bathroom.
Stone walked over to a rug. “Size?”
She consulted a tag. “Fourteen by twenty-two.”
“That will do.” He turned and saw that the wall behind him was covered by a huge bookcase, filled with leather-bound and good cloth volumes. “And books,” he said.
“I sell them by the yard, in French or English. There are more a couple of rooms back.”
“I’ll take twenty yards of English, a mix of leather and cloth, whatever is beautiful.”
She made notes on a pad.
Another wall was covered in pictures: landscapes, still lifes, nudes, and portraits. Stone began pointing while she took more notes.
“I like the table there, too.”
More notes.
“And I need a grand piano. I don’t suppose you can do that.”
“Right this way,” she said, and led him to yet another room. Three grand pianos stood, covered by sheets. She whisked them away. “Do you play?”
“Some, but not for a long time.”
There was a monstrously French gilt instrument, another black-lacquered, and one of walnut. “The Bechstein has the nicest tone,” she said, indicating the walnut instrument.
Stone sat down and played a few chords, then struck individual keys high and low. “Very nice. Needs a tuning.”
“That can be done immediately.”
They walked back into the first room, and Stone picked a few objets d’art and a pair of mahogany wastebaskets.
“I think that will do,” Stone said. “I’ll need your eye to style the room, too, and I’ll need you to take away what’s there. You can sell it or junk it.”
“Whe
re is all this going?”
“Couple of hundred yards down the street, there are a pair of oak doors guarding a mews. In the mews house, please.”
He looked at his watch. He gave her the street number. “How long?”
“By four o’clock,” she said.
“How much for everything?” he asked.
She sat down at a desk and began flicking through her notes, tapping numbers into a computer. “I’ll give you a bulk discount,” she said, and named a number.
“Done,” he said.
“Shall I call the piano tuner?”
“Please.” He gave her his business card and wrote down his cell number. “I’ll be waiting,” he said.
“Not for long,” she replied, accepting his AmEx card.
47
Stone stood in the mews and shook Chey Stefan’s hand. “I want to thank you for doing such a beautiful job, and for doing it so quickly.”
“It was my pleasure,” Chey said, “and I thank you for your business.” She got into the moving van containing the former living room furnishings and drove away. The guards closed the big doors behind her.
Stone walked into his new living room and looked around. The furniture, the pictures, the books, and the fresh flowers Chey had brought as a gift made the place feel as if he had always lived there. He sat down at the newly tuned Bechstein grand and began to play an old Irving Berlin song, “All Alone,” that he particularly loved.
“Freeze,” someone behind him said.
He froze. Someone had got past the guards.
“Who are you,” she asked, “and what have you done with Stone Barrington?”
Stone turned slowly to find Holly in a firing stance, a handgun held in front of her with both hands. “Welcome home,” he said.
Holly lowered the gun slowly. “What the hell is going on here? This place is completely different from the one I left this morning.”
“Nicer, isn’t it?”
She looked around. “Well, yes, it’s a lot nicer.”
“I just rearranged the furniture.”
“You did a lot more than that. There wasn’t a grand piano in this room when I left.”
“By rearranged, I meant that I moved the old furniture out and the new furniture in.”
Holly came and sat next to him on the piano bench. “Another thing,” she said, “how did you learn to play the piano in a single day?”
“I told you, I’ve always played,” he said, “just not for a long time. I got out of the habit.”
“Well, it’s a very nice habit.”
“It’s your fault that I bought the piano. You said I should play to keep my fingers in shape for other work.”
She laughed. “I did say that, didn’t I?”
Stone flexed his fingers. “Ready for duty.”
“I want a drink first,” she said. “I’ll fix one for you, too.”
She went to the wet bar, made a martini, and brought it back with a bourbon for Stone. “Play,” she said.
Stone played “The Way You Look Tonight.”
“That’s my favorite song,” she said. “How’d you know?”
“I just knew.”
They sipped their drinks and Stone played some more. The tunes kept flooding back.
“That was lovely,” she said, when he paused. “But stop for a minute while I ruin the mood.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Rick has had word that Majorov’s people think you may still be alive and are scouring the city for you. He wants me to move you to the country right now. I have a car waiting.”
“Just a minute,” Stone said. He produced his new iPhone and looked for Lance Cabot’s number, then dialed it.”
“What strange person is calling on one of my phones?” Lance asked.
“It’s Stone. My old phone died.”
“It must have drowned, from what I hear.”
“Your information is good.”
“Why have you honored me with this call, Stone? I have people in my office.”
“I’ll be brief: You know the little mews house I’m sequestered in?”
“I do, and it’s not so little.”
“I want to buy it from you.”
“What?”
“Come on, Lance, how much do you want for it?”
“It’s owned by the same Agency foundation that sold you your cousin Dick Stone’s house.”
“And you are the chairman of its board, authorized to act for it, as I recall. You did that when I bought the Maine house.”
“That’s true, I suppose.”
“Come on, Lance, I’ll let you make a small profit on the place, so you’ll look good for the board. How much did you pay?”
“It was some time ago: a million four, I think. Euros.”
“I’ll give you a million five, and I’ll bet it was dollars.”
“No, it was euros, I’m sure. A million six, and it’s yours. Euros.”
“Oh, all right, done, but fully furnished.”
“Anything that’s there. There’s a car, too, in the garage.”
“So that’s what’s under the sheet.”
“It’s an old Mercedes, I believe. The Paris station keeps it running.”
“I’ll have my office send you a check made out to the foundation and a sales contract, probably tomorrow or the next day.”
“Done, then. It’s yours from this moment on.”
“Nice doing business with you, Lance.” Stone hung up.
Holly was staring at him agape. “Did you really just do that?”
“You know, when I inherited Arrington’s fortune, I was very uncomfortable with the idea of spending any of it.”
“But you got over it,” Holly pointed out.
“The great thing about being filthy rich is that you can make snap judgments and write a check. Speaking of that, excuse me.” He called home.
“The Barrington Practice,” Joan said.
“You’re supposed to say, ‘Woodman & Weld,’” Stone pointed out.
“I forgot. You okay?”
“Never better. Listen, I just bought a little mews house in Paris.”
“Ooh! Can I come for a visit?”
“Later. Call Herbie Fisher and have him find an attorney at W&W’s Paris office and have him write a sales contract and do whatever they do in France, like a title search. The seller is the same foundation that sold me the Maine house.” He gave her the street address of the mews house. “When he’s drawn it, have him FedEx it to Lance Cabot at the CIA, and you send him a cashier’s check for a million, six hundred thousand euros, in dollars. I’d like Lance to have it all the day after tomorrow. They can e-mail the contract to you, and you can send it all together.”
“Consider it done,” Joan said.
“I miss you terribly,” he replied, and hung up before she could reply. “There,” he said to Holly.
“That was breathtaking,” she said, draining her martini glass. “Now, how are your fingers feeling?” she asked.
“Rejuvenated.”
“Then come with me,” she said, taking his hand.
48
Stone lay with his head cradled in Holly’s breasts. “That was wonderful,” he said.
“I’m impressed with the current condition of your fingers,” she said. “Maybe you don’t need to play the piano after all. How on earth could you just stop doing that?”
“I played in a jazz group in college, but I had to quit when I started law school—there just wasn’t time. Then years passed without a piano, and when I finally got one for the New York house, I was too busy to play.”
“Okay, I’ll buy that. Now it’s time for us to get out of here.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Stone said. “This house is now my home in Pari
s, and I’m not moving out to avoid Yevgeny Majorov. In fact, I don’t want to avoid Yevgeny Majorov, I want to kill him.”
“I’m entirely in sympathy with that desire, nevertheless, we have to think about your safety, as well as his demise. Leave that to Rick and his boys.”
“Look, we have no reason to believe that Yevgeny knows where I am.”
“You might have been spotted when you went furniture shopping today.”
“Or I might not have been spotted, or they would be here by now. Anyway, if I leave here again, that increases the chances of his people spotting me.”
“Well, there is a kind of logic in that,” she admitted.
Stone’s cell phone rang, and he reached for it on the bedside table. “Hello?”
“It’s Rick. Why are you still there?”
“I live here, and I’m not going anywhere.”
“Nobody lives in a safe house—you stay as long as you’re safe, then you move to another safe house.”
“This is no longer a safe house.”
“That’s my point.”
“No, I mean it’s my house—I bought it from Lance.”
A short silence. “Lance doesn’t own it.”
“The foundation owns it, and Lance is the head of the foundation’s board of trustees and has the authority to sell it. In fact, it will be the second house the foundation has sold me. A contract is being drawn as we speak.”
“I’m sorry,” Rick said, “I’m getting dizzy.”
“Focus on a fixed object, like my presence in this house.”
“It’s dangerous for you there.”
“Why?”
“Because we’ve spotted some of Majorov’s people cruising the seventh arrondissement, looking for you.”
“They haven’t found me yet, but if I leave here, that gives them another shot.”
Rick sighed. “All right, then I’ll send some firepower over there.”
“I just started refurnishing the place, and I don’t want it shot up.”
“Then I’ll place them on nearby roofs.”
“You’ve already got two of your boys on me—three, with Holly.”
“Thanks a lot,” Holly said. “I thought you knew the difference between boys and girls.”