As if in answer to Randolph’s incredulous question, there was a load crash and a grunt, followed by the unmistakable squeal of woman’s passionate release.
“She has to be faking it,” Scarne said, looking at his watch.
“I don’t believe it,” Shields said.
“We should consider ourselves fortunate,” Blue said. “Simenon once told one of his assistants that she didn’t have to leave the room when his mistress interrupted their work. He merely unzipped and did the mistress right on the floor in front of the startled girl. Then he went back to dictation.”
With that, the door opened and Quimper walked over and sat down. Three sets of eyes went to his zipper, which was still at half mast. Then, Miss Perkins came out, smoothing both skirt and hair. Her face was flushed and her eyes were a bit unfocused.
“Will that be all, Mr. Quimper?” she said.
“Yes, Audrey. Have a nice trip.”
Blue looked at Scarne and silently mouthed, “Wasn’t faking.”
“There goes another novel,” Quimper said with a leer.
Scarne knew the famous Balzac quote, referencing the great French novelist’s belief that a writer’s creativity suffered after orgasm. Perhaps that was why the priapic Quimper needed surrogate writers. But, then, how did that explain the endless literary genius of Simenon?
“You were saying something before I left, Randolph,” Quimper continued.
Shields rallied. He dropped the phony praise.
“I said that, given the importance of the Killerfest convention, an extra layer of protection for you is not unreasonable. I’m sure nothing will happen, but Scarne stays. That’s not negotiable.”
Quimper looked startled.
“I don’t need him here,” he said, trying to regain some high ground. “If you want him to help out at the conference, I suppose that will be all right.”
Shields turned to Scarne, who shrugged.
“I’m sure his people can get him to and from the hotel in one piece.”
Shields looked relieved.
“Good. Then it’s settled. Jake will augment your security at the conference, Sebastian. An extra set of eyes and ears, so to speak. We can work out the details later, right Nigel?”
“Of course, Mr. Shields.”
Randolph reached for a pastry and then stopped.
“I thought I saw some cheese Danish,” he said, disappointed.
Scarne and Blue merely smiled at each other.
***
On the chopper ride back to Manhattan, Shields turned to Scarne and said, “Do you think you will have any trouble with Quimper’s security people?”
“It depends. If they are pros, they won’t need much help and they should be willing to take sound advice. So, if I see something they’ve missed, I won’t hesitate to point it out. If they are amateurs, I’ll let you and Quimper know and make sure nothing happens to him until you get good people in there. Quimper should appreciate that, because he’ll want top men guarding him at home and on the road. The guys who rode us in on the golf carts looked competent. Ex-military would be my guess. It should be OK.”
“Good. Anything you need, let me know. If you can’t reach me, Nigel will do whatever you ask. What did you think of Sebastian?”
“If something was to happen to him, you wouldn’t run out of suspects. Hell, I might be one of them.”
Shields laughed.
“Yeah. He’s a piece of work.”
“But a quite valuable piece of work.”
Shields flashed a cold smile.
“Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want anyone hurt by Muslim fanatics. But I particularly don’t want Sebastian hurt .”
At least until the merger papers are signed, Scarne thought uncharitably.
CHAPTER 5 – VILLA VENDELA
As she sat in her study at her computer checking her Swiss bank account underneath the massive Roka Fujimoto painting of a Japanese courtesan, Vendela Noss could hear pot and pan noises from her kitchen downstairs. Giusi Rinaldi and Angelina Casale were busily preparing the evening repast. Soon the house would fill with unbelievable aromas from the five-course meal they were arranging. At dinner, those aromas would mix with the floral perfume coming from her garden and adjacent fields, where borage, buttercups, clover and crocus were blooming.
While an accomplished amateur chef in her own right, this night Noss had delegated the cooking to Giusi and Angelina, two of her closest friends in Camucia. The two women supplemented the incomes of their husbands, both professors at the University of Alberta in Cortona, by preparing meals for the tourists who rented local Tuscan villas. They brought in the food and wine, took over the rustic kitchens, and turned out feasts so notable that they had been featured in the American magazine, Bon Appetite. Giusi and Angelina, cosmopolitan women who looked as if they should be starring in the Italian cinema, wanted to try out some new dishes and Noss was only too happy to turn her evening’s guests into, as she called them, laughing, “guinea pigs.”
Camucia is a small frazione, or village, that sits at the base of the mountain below the more famous city of Cortona in central Tuscany. Its railway station offers easy access to the rest of Italy. That was one of the major attractions the town held for Noss, who, while German, loved all things Italian, from the exquisite cuisine to the men she bedded to help burn off some of the calories. What vigorous sex did not accomplish in that regard, the verdant hills surrounding Camucia and Cortona did. A committed runner and bicyclist, she was a familiar sight on the roads. In a region that did not lack for beautiful women, Noss, with her short blond hair and fair skin, nevertheless stood out.
As a small child she had vacationed in Tuscany for many years with her parents and older brother. After the motor accident that killed them and left her in a coma for six weeks, Vendela had gone to live with her mother’s sister in Zwickau, in East Germany. It had been a wrenching change for a gentle young girl raised in Dortmund, West Germany. That city, in Westphalia, was surrounded by waterways and woodland, and contained beautiful parks such as Westfalenpark and the Rombergpark. Zwickau, on the other hand, was a dreary Saxon mining and coal city also infamously known for the Sachsenring Automobilwerke, the factory that produced the millions of clunky and noxious Trabant automobiles that became symbols of centralized-planning inefficiencies.
Her aunt Gretchen was a kindly woman but childless herself. Neither she or her husband knew much about raising a pre-teen. For his part, Walfrid Schlössinger, a colonel in the Ministerium für Staatsicherheit, or Ministry for State Security, the hated and feared East German secret police agency, thought it his duty to eliminate whatever liberal Western ideas his niece had picked up in the decadent West. All he succeeded in doing was to inculcate in Vendela a visceral disdain and hatred of authority in all forms. At 15, she started hanging out with some young thugs in the “Hammerskins,” one of the neo-Nazi street gangs that gave even the Stasi trouble. She eventually broke with the skinheads over their anti-Semitic philosophy, which she thought was nonsense, but not before she engaged in a series of robberies, one of which resulted in the death of her accomplice and an elderly shopkeeper. Only her uncle’s position saved her from a long prison sentence. But her career path had been established. For despite what she had told the authorities, she had not been an unwilling participant in the fatal robbery. She had actually killed the shopkeeper after the old fool, using an ancient and illegal shotgun hidden behind his counter, had blown a hole in her partner.
The year was 1990. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union and German reunification the next year, Vendela Noss moved to Brussels, armed with the names and locations of turncoats, traitors and other despicable types she copied from her uncle’s files before he burned them. Totally apolitical herself, she made a small fortune selling those names to people in the new Germany who wanted to settle various Cold War scores. She made even more money settling scores for people who didn’t want to do the dirty work themselves. It wasn’t hard. Her seductive beauty
lulled many of her otherwise cautious victims. It wasn’t long before she had accumulated enough money to buy her house in Italy. The first thing she placed in it, next to her bed, was a framed picture. In the photo, a five-year-old girl stood holding hands with a slightly older boy, their proud and smiling parents behind them with Tuscan hills in the background.
The two-story villa she purchased was now her pride and joy, with its a 200-square-foot wood-beamed central hall; five bedrooms; three baths, two fireplaces crafted from dark gray Cardoso stone; an old wine cellar and olive oil storeroom; a fully furnished kitchen with a wood-burning oven, and a laundry. Decorated with antique furniture and expensive art from some of the finest galleries in Europe, Villa Regina, as it is known, was built in 1804 and could only be reached along a narrow winding road that proved a challenge for visitors, particularly when leaving at night after drinking too much wine. Since Noss liked to entertain almost every weekend, her guest rooms were frequently occupied. It was a better solution than having to organize a drunken search with flashlights when someone called back to the house to say they had driven into a ravine. On more than one occasion she and her search companions had run into nervous neighbors, armed with shotguns, who heard all the yelling. Given the dangers of her real profession, getting blown away by a lupara-toting grape-grower would be a bit much. Her table, and hospitality, had entranced the locals, who now informally referred to her home as the Villa Vendela.
Tonight, the guests included not only Giusi and Angelina’s husbands, but also the mayor of Camucia, the head of a local museum, her Cortona solicitor and all their wives. As she was between lovers, Noss had also invited Monsignor Puccio to make an even dozen for dinner that because of the food, wine and political talk would run late into the night.
She liked the priest, who was also in her bicycle club and, although pushing 50, stayed in great shape. She often stopped by his church, where he helped her polish her Italian, which was nowhere as good as her French and English. But even though she was born a Catholic, Noss had to date resisted politely Puccio’s blandishments to return to the active Church fold.
She could just see herself in the confessional:
Bless me Father, for I have sinned. I frequently have impure thoughts, and recently I arranged the murder of an American author and then eliminated my hired assassin by burning him to death in a van with a phosphorous grenade while he stroked his penis.
You must avoid those impure thoughts, my child. Now, for your penance say three Hail Marys and recite a stanza from Deutschland Über Alles.
Noss smiled inwardly. No, the good Monsignor would have to be satisfied with generous donations to the church and the occasional meal. Not to mention a bed for the night. He loved his wine and usually never made it down the hill. Someday, she thought, I may test the strength of his vows. Now a bad-looking man, he had a sense of humor, as she found out when she teasingly asked him what the Italian word for fellatio was. Yes, he might be interested to know that some of my impure thoughts have been about him.
Vendela’s latest erotic rumination was interrupted by a shout from the bottom of the stairs.
“Della, do you want to see how we braise the rabbit?”
“I’ll be right there, Giusi,” Noss called down, as she closed the bank page, which bore a numbered account under a name other than Vendela Noss. That was the identity she went by in Italy, and it was on one of several passports she carried. “Noss” actually was a family name, from her mother’s side. “Vendela,” which means “unknown” in Old Norse, was just an inside joke.
She was about to shut off the computer entirely when she heard the familiar email ping. She opened her provider and saw the name on the email. It was her agent in Brussels, the man who eventually convinced her to join his select group of freelancers. Theirs was more than a professional relationship. They liked and trusted one another. But as usual, when discussing business on line, Gaetan Mendelsohn got right to the point.
Are you available?
I was hoping to take a holiday.
You are my first choice, as always. And you know the territory. Recently.
That meant the job was in the United States
Flattered, but is it that important?
Same client.
Risky, going back to the well so soon.
Mendelsohn sensed her hesitation. He typed:
We can add a zero to the end of our regular rate.
Good Lord! Noss typed back:
Can I meet you on Monday?
Of course. We have time. I’ll make a reservation at our favorite restaurant in Waterloo for 8 PM. Enjoy your weekend.
Vendela Noss turned off the laptop and went down the stairs to do just that.
CHAPTER 6 – TOUGH SCHEDULING
“Vendela, you look more beautiful every time I see you.”
Mendelsohn gave Noss a warm hug and kissed her on both cheeks. He always seemed genuinely thrilled to see her.
“I never know how to take a compliment from a gay man,” Noss said, laughing.
“In the spirit in which it is given, ma chéri. Beauty is beauty.” He turned to the man standing next to them. “Isn’t that right, Michel?”
“It certainly is, Mr. Mendelsohn,” the maître ‘d replied. He had been waiting patiently as the couple greeted each other. After all, Gaetan Mendelsohn was a frequent and valued guest at La Maison du Seigneur, one of Belgium’s premier restaurants on Chaussée de Tervuren in Waterloo about 11 miles from Brussels. “Madame is certainly very beautiful. Your regular table is ready. Please follow me.”
Heads, male and female, turned to look at Vendela as she glided through the dining room. Many of the men had the same thought when they saw Gaetan: Lucky devil. A debonair, sophisticated man of the world and his lovely, exciting younger mistress. A few who knew his sexual orientation had another thought: What a waste!
At their table, the maître ‘d snapped his fingers and the sommelier appeared. Mendelsohn ordered the wine and they capered away. Vendela always left the wine decisions up to him. She’d probably also defer to him when ordering her meal. His taste was exquisite. Several paintings and other objects d’art from his Brussels gallery graced her villa in Tuscany. It was he who had found the Fujimoto painting now in the study in her Tuscan villa.
They made small talk until the waiter brought their bottle, a Pascal Jolivet Sancerre. That meant oysters to start, Noss knew. Gaetan was expert, but somewhat predictable. Their main course would be some sort of game, with a bottle of good Bordeaux as an accompaniment. After the corking, sniffing and sipping, Mendelsohn told the waiter the Sancerre was acceptable.
“The wine rigmarole is wasted on a white,” Mendelsohn said as he and Noss clinked glasses, “but it makes the waiter happy, I think. Sancerre is Sancerre, but it is the only wine to drink with oysters.” He looked up at the waiter. “A dozen oysters each. Six Creuses and six Gravettes. To be followed by venison, rare but not bloody. Fresh vegetables, let the chef choose, and a bottle of 2005 Château Franc-Mallet.”
After the man left, Mendelsohn said, “And now to the business at hand.”
“Let me guess,” Noss said. “Quimper.”
Mendelsohn smiled. She was usually one step ahead.
“Yes, apparently the warning made no impression. The client doesn’t blame us. Arhaut’s demise was inspired. But the local authorities, probably influenced by Shields and Schuster House, kept a lid on the story. There was also a bit of bad luck, in that there was a mass shooting on the same day that took up much of the news coverage.”
“Trying to schedule around gun violence in America is almost impossible,” Noss said.
“So, instead of fading away,” Mendelsohn said, “Mr. Quimper will be the star attraction at some sort of writers’ conference in Manhattan. Our principal thinks that will be the perfect occasion to get his point across, once and for all. He doesn’t want Quimper to survive the conference.”
“Have you been able to identify our client?”
&
nbsp; “No. And his man made it very clear that I should not try. A real savage by the way. I do not think actual Muslim fanatics have anything on him.”
“I thought you liked savage men,” Vendela teased.
“I do, my dear. But I also like them to occasionally bathe. Something this particular brute apparently avoids.”
“How did he find you?”
“The usual way. He has contacts in the European underworld who called me. They weren’t very complimentary but they vouched for him. They fear more than respect him, but they said he was fastidious about payment, if not personal hygiene. He promised half the fee as an advance. Ah, the oysters!”
It is difficult to talk assassination shop while slurping oysters, so they chatted like the friends they had become.
Looking at a huge, glistening bivalve in his hand, Mendelsohn said, “The first man to eat an oyster must have been very brave.”
“Or very hungry,” Noss commented. “But we owe him a lot.” She picked up her wine glass and raised it. “To the first man.”
Mendelsohn raised his glass and said, with a mock leer, “To the next man.”
Noss laughed.
“You know Gaetan, these are delicious, but if it’s true about their aphrodisiac powers, given our respective sexual proclivities why waste them on me?”
After allowing the oyster to slide down his throat, Mendelsohn replied, “You should see how many I order when I am dining with one of my boyfriends.”
“I think it’s a myth, anyway,” Vendela said.
“Some Italian scientists have discovered in oysters two amino acids not found in the human body,” Mendelsohn said. “They have been shown to stimulate the production of testosterone in males and progesterone in females.”
“Italians could find a reason for more sex in ravioli,” Vendela replied. But, as usual, she was interested in everything her friend had to say. “Are all oysters the same in that regard?”
“Apparently, but the best time to eat them is in the spring, because it is their mating season.”
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