by Joseph Flynn
Alexandru looked away, his complexion darkening. Ana didn’t realize what she was seeing for a moment; she had never seen her husband blush before. Once she understood he was embarrassed, though, she pulled him close.
“What?” she demanded. “What did you see?”
In a quiet voice, he said, “I could not help but see. Her shirt was torn, hanging very low.”
Ana took but a second to form the picture in her mind.
“Her breasts? What about them?”
“She was not born with them; she did not grow into them. She—”
“Bought them?”
Alexandru nodded.
“Big?” Ana asked. She was waiting, praying, for her own development.
“Yes, big,” Alexandru said. And ashamed now that he would have noticed such a detail, he added, “With the right one sitting just a bit higher than the left.”
Rue de Rivoli, Paris
21
Arno Durand, the sports reporter McGill had recruited, joined McGill and Gabbi at a table in a café just up the street from the Louvre. McGill had asked Gabbi to place a call to Durand through the embassy. Durand brought a small black leather portfolio with him. He made no move to open it as a waiter approached. The reporter ordered a glass of red wine. Service was prompt and when the waiter departed Durand put all three of his audio recorders on the table.
Gabbi stared at the reporter and told him, “I’m going to be very disappointed if you try to play any tricks on us.”
The Frenchman looked back at her, trying for indignation, but saying nothing.
“I’m going outside,” Gabbi told McGill. “See if I gave him any ideas last time about bringing some help along.” Turning to Durand, she continued, “And don’t tell me you don’t have the money. You’d find it.”
As Gabbi got up to go, the reporter sighed and took out his mobile. He tapped a button.
“Pierre, faites signe de la main à mes amis.” Wave to my friends.
A scruffy young guy on a motorbike across the street waved his hand. With a nod, Durand sent him on his way. He stuck his phone back in his pocket.
Gabbi put both hands on the table and leaned in close to the Frenchman.
“Too obvious,” she said. Looking at Jim, she added, “Be careful what you say.”
Both men watched her go. Durand sighed.
“I am trying to decide if one such as her would be worth the trouble,” he said.
McGill told him, “My guess is she’s already known a journalist.”
“That would explain a great deal.” He shrugged and opened his portfolio, spinning it around so McGill could see. “These are the women Thierry Duchamp has been linked to by the media in the past twelve months. Each of them is either an actress in European cinema or a model for a fashion house here in Paris or in Milan.”
“He didn’t care for goalkeepers on women’s football teams?” McGill asked.
The Frenchman laughed. “No, m’sieur, that was not his style.”
“Would you mind turning the pages?” the president’s henchman asked.
He didn’t have to say he wasn’t going to leave his fingerprints on the portfolio.
“Of course,” Durand said, and McGill studied the faces of eight beautiful young women who’d achieved public notice on Thierry Duchamp’s arm in the past year.
McGill looked up and told Durand, “I don’t see her, the one who bears a resemblance to my suspicious friend.”
“Nor did I,” Durand said.
“All of these women, they’d all acquired a measure of fame on their own by the time they’d met Thierry?”
“Yes. The publicity they received from his company added to their appeal, but as you Americans would say, they were already on their way.”
“What about unknowns? Was there anyone he liked to spend time with outside of the spotlight’s glare?”
Durand smiled in genuine appreciation. “You are very intuitive, m’sieur. I am told Thierry Duchamp liked an occasional woman he didn’t have to treat with…sensitivity.”
“He liked it rough,” McGill said.
“At least some of the time.”
“And a tough girl, she might give Thierry a hard time in public, say, under a bridge.”
“You must have been quite the flic in your day, m’sieur.”
“I had my moments,” McGill admitted. “So there were nights when Thierry liked it rough, but he’d still want a looker.”
The reporter needed a beat to understand the idiom. Then he smiled and nodded, “Oui, a looker.”
“An office girl or a sales clerk,” McGill speculated. Uneasily, he added, “A female cop?”
Durand shook his head. “My information is he liked a stripper or two when he wasn’t with someone whose face he dared not bruise.”
McGill nodded. The guy sounded like a real jerk. A girl who pole-danced for a living, she could be bought off fairly cheap if she got roughed up. The president’s henchman felt better about helping Glen Kinnard. Felt less judgmental about Kinnard beating the life out of the guy.
“You’ve eliminated the possibility we’re looking for a transvestite or a transsexual?” he asked.
The reporter nodded. “I’ve turned up no source to say Thierry was drawn to anyone but women.”
Durand told McGill where he would go looking for the blonde woman now.
“Let me ask you something else that might figure into this,” McGill said. “Does France allow mixed martial arts fighting?”
He was following up on Gabbi’s notion that a thug hired to break Thierry Duchamp’s leg would have to be as good as he was. Which implied a wide range of skills.
The reporter nodded. “This is a quite recent export from your country. Of course, being French, we had to civilize the barbarism a little.”
“How’s that?” McGill asked.
“Here, matches must take place in a ring, not a cage. When one man is on the mat, the other must not kick, knee, or elbow-strike his head.”
“But you can go after the body?” McGill asked.
“Oui. If that were outlawed, what would the appeal be?”
“Might as well watch golf,” McGill replied.
Durand laughed again, and asked, “What is your interest here, m’sieur?”
McGill wanted to keep the reporter interested, but he didn’t want to give everything away. He said, “I’m just considering possibilities. Who’s the national champion, heavyweight class?”
“Henri Bonard, a very fierce fellow.” Durand studied McGill’s face; the reporter was also an intuitive fellow. He saw something lurking in McGill’s eyes. A secret, perhaps the center of this whole affair. “There is one man who is said to be even more fearsome than Bonard.”
“Who’s that?”
“His real name he keeps secret. He simply calls himself L’Entrepreneur.”
“The businessman?” McGill asked, not sure he had it right.
Durand said, “His full title would be l’entrepreneur de pompes funèbres: the businessman of funerary affairs. Colloquially, The Undertaker. I have not seen him fight, but he is said to be like your American boxer, Tyson. Only less restrained.”
McGill blinked and asked, “Mike Tyson?”
“Oui,” the reporter said. “The Undertaker will not be bound by any rules. The sports authorities will not have him.”
“They’re afraid he’ll kill someone?”
Arno Durand nodded. “Exactement.”
The reporter was actually frightening himself a little now, that he and a creature such as The Undertaker should both be involved in the same drama, but he was more certain than ever this was going to be the biggest story of his career.
McGill was thinking: Less restrained than Mike Tyson? The guy who’d bitten off a chunk of Evander Holyfield’s ear during a championship fight.
Gabbi returned and saw the two men sitting at the table lost in thought.
“What’d I miss?” she asked.
Rive Gauche, Paris
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22
On the way back to The Hideaway for the night, McGill told Gabbi of his conversation with Arno Durand.
She said, “If this Undertaker creep pops up, I hope you’d shoot him.”
“I thought that was the last thing you wanted,” McGill said.
“The last thing I want is for you to die. Joined at the hip to that is for me to die.”
“Reasonable.”
McGill looked out the window. They were driving along the Seine. He liked the way central Paris was organized around the river. He hadn’t read a history of the city, but he’d bet that the body of water was what drew the original settlers. Just like Lake Michigan was Chicago’s reason for being. They rolled past the outdoor periodical vendors stationed along the riverfront. He decided he’d have to check out their stalls before he left town. A cosmopolitan place like Paris, some of the vendors were bound to offer a few English language publications.
Gabbi interrupted his reverie. “What I was getting at, you wouldn’t feel obliged to fight such an opponent barehanded?”
“I try not fight at all. If it’s inevitable, my only obligation is to come out on top. Using any means necessary.”
“No rules for you either?”
“Only the one I just mentioned.”
She nodded. “You think this creep is like you then? In that way, I mean.”
McGill smiled inwardly. Gabbi was starting to sound a bit like Sweetie. Less like a diplomat. Made him feel good.
“Sounds like he is. Might be even more extreme.”
“How could that be?”
“Well, let’s say he’s strong and skilled and ruthless. But maybe he’s also one of those brutes who likes his stew seasoned with steroids, amphetamines and PCP. My uncle, the guy who taught me how to fight, warned me you have to be on the lookout for all sorts of crazies.”
Gabbi glanced at him. “Yeah, what did your uncle say you should do with crazy people?”
“Shoot them if you have to. Cut them if you can. Drop rocks on their heads. If no other alternative presents itself, outrun them until they double-up in exhaustion, and then go back and finish them off.”
“Interesting guy, your uncle.”
“He was a government employee, too: U.S. Navy.”
Gabbi looked at McGill and when he smiled at her she smiled back.
“My compliments to the president,” Gabbi said.
“On what?” McGill asked.
Gabbi pulled up in front of The Hideaway.
“Her choice of henchmen,” she said.
The Hideaway, Paris
23
“Jim?” the president asked, a note of uncertainty in her voice.
McGill had answered his cell phone, in the apartment above the Irish pub, with his mouth filled with corned beef, spicy mustard, and rye bread. When Gabbi had dropped him off he’d stopped for a few words with Harbin. He’d assured McGill that he’d yet to meet a troublemaker who could make trouble for him. Even an angel-duster? Harbin pulled his jacket open. McGill’s first thought was Harbin was going to show him a gun. Instead, he saw two cylindrical sticks, a half-inch in diameter, maybe twenty inches long: escrima sticks. Filipino martial art tools. Bone breakers. Even King Kong in high dudgeon would settle down once he got his skull busted. McGill didn’t insult Harbin by asking if he was any good with the sticks. He only requested that the kitchen send up a corned beef sandwich and a bottle of Harp Lager. McGill swallowed the bite of sandwich in his mouth, helped it along with a swig of beer, and tried answering his wife’s call once more.
“Hello, Madam President,” McGill said. “Pardon me for talking while I was eating.”
“Is that what it was? I thought you were all choked up to hear from me.”
“I would be, if you were calling from downstairs and on your way up.”
“I have your address now,” Patti said. “Do you?”
McGill didn’t. But he couldn’t let his wife think he was a complete rube. “I bet I could find my way here from the airport by now.”
It did his heart good to hear he’d made the president laugh.
“You feel safe in your new digs, Jim?” Patti asked.
“There’s a guy with sticks guarding the door.”
“I’ll sleep better knowing that,” the president said.
Each of them knew and accepted that the other was engaged in dangerous work. The president of the United States, upon the tallying of 270 or more electoral votes, automatically became a target for an unknowable number of enemies and loons. The Secret Service had agents whose only jobs were to read, evaluate, archive, and investigate threats made against the president. As for McGill, the nature of his work dictated that he poke his nose into places where it might meet ballistic resistance: the range of possibilities including a fist, a bat, or a bullet.
If the awareness of those realities wasn’t enough, they shared still painful memories of the death of Patti’s first husband. McGill had tried and failed to protect Andy Grant from militant antiabortionists. Andy had died in the master bedroom of his lakefront mansion, the means of his demise being a rocket-propelled grenade fired from a boat on Lake Michigan.
McGill had caught the perpetrators the very next day, but the underlying truth of the tragedy remained vivid. If a rich man, living in a walled estate, wasn’t safe in his own bedroom, who was safe anywhere?
Even so, McGill told Patti, “I intend to keep our date to meet the queen.”
“Safe and sound? Looking as much like Rory Calhoun as ever?”
“I might change my look a little.”
That took his wife by surprise. “To what?”
“I was thinking Belmondo.”
“The father or the son?” Patti asked.
“Belmondo had a father?” McGill asked.
“Paul Belmondo was a famous sculptor; his son Jean-Paul is a famous actor.”
“The actor,” McGill said. “Have to keep my motif intact.”
Patti laughed again and asked, “You know what Jean-Paul Belmondo was famous for?”
“A winning smile?”
“Good guess, but my point was, he did all his own stunts.”
“Me, too.”
“As well I know.” Then the president said. “Jim, there’s something I have to tell you.”
“I already know, and I don’t believe a word of it.”
Following a beat of silence, Patti said, “The French media have picked up the story, of course.”
“Yeah.” McGill told her the story of the soccer hooligans and the tabloid they had with them. What Patti picked up on, though, was when her husband mentioned the name Pembroke.
“Pembroke is the name of the man behind the leak of my new defense.”
McGill said, “The no-good bleep.”
Patti told him, “It’s okay if you swear with me, if the context justifies.”
“I don’t want to come off lowbrow when Galia’s tapes are transcribed.”
It was a running joke between the two of them. McGill had once suspected that Patti’s chief of staff had bugged the offices of McGill Investigations, Inc. He didn’t actually think Galia would bug the president’s communications, but it didn’t hurt to keep Patti on her toes.
“Meanwhile,” Patti said, “about Mr. Pembroke…”
“You mean, whom do we know who’d use a Brit bookie to both embarrass you and deliver a good thumping to me? The answer is obvious.”
“Senator Roger Michaelson.”
“The Brit hooligans wanted to take me out drinking to celebrate the demise of Thierry Duchamp. Just a guess: Doing that in Paris might lead to strong differences of opinion with the local fandom.”
“But you were too smooth for them.”
“More than that,” McGill said. “I’ve already set Celsus to tracking down a link between Michaelson and the Old World. Your full-service henchman at work.”
“You are a marvel,” Patti said, but the compliment was followed by a sigh.
A cue any
married man in the world might pick up on. “What?”
“Nothing … a president shouldn’t whine.”
McGill said, “I’m the only one who will know, and I won’t tell. So go ahead.”
“Right now,” his wife told him, “feeling you hold me would do me more good than anything else. The fate of the free world might depend on it.”
McGill asked, “Want me to abandon Glen Kinnard to his fate?”
“You wouldn’t.”
“For you and the kids, anything,” he said.
“Okay, you shouldn’t, but you are very sweet.”
Although on a scale infinitesimal by comparison, and of a vastly simpler nature, McGill actually had more executive experience than his wife: five years as the chief of police of the Village of Winnetka, Illinois. This inclined him every so often to push her in a direction of his choosing.
“Sweet but occasionally demanding,” McGill told her. “After you’re done in London, I want two, no, three days with you here in Paris. It would be crazy for us not to see it together when we’re right in the neighborhood.”
There was a moment of silence, but McGill could imagine the thoughts racing through his wife’s mind: How many demands on her time would she have to forsake to enjoy an impromptu respite with him? What might the substantive consequences be? What might the political cost be?
Whatever the considerations, McGill’s heart was warmed by Patti’s response.
“Valiant henchman, I shall be at your disposal for three days.”
McGill cleared his throat. “Now, I’m all choked up.”
Chequers, Buckinghamshire, England
24
The President of the United States sat sideways on a sofa in her suite at Chequers, her knees drawn up, a legal pad resting against her legs, a pen in her hand. She was doing a rewrite. A former actress in feature films, she was well acquainted with scripts being rewritten up to the very moment the camera rolled. If done for a good reason by a gifted, unflappable writer, the result was an improved, more memorable scene. Possibly a moment indispensable to the fabric of the story.