Authors: Scott Phillips
“And I understand you have the lovely Mlle. DeHoving as leading lady.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Esmée,” Marie-Laure said. “That’s her professional name.”
“Ah. Yes.” For obvious reasons I actually preferred to think of her as Mlle. DeHoving rather than as Mme. Guiteau, especially at present.
“And what’s her role, precisely?” Roberto asked.
“Sort of a femme fatale,” I said, and as I said it I was suddenly aware of how meaningless that phrase was.
Because really, aren’t they all?
I
REALLY SHOULD HAVE HEADED DOWN TO THE dormitory and relieved poor Frédéric, but Marie-Laure had mentioned before our arrival that her husband was out of town, casually adding how exciting she always found extramarital sex in the marital bed. It excited me, too, to be honest, and so around 2:00
AM
we got into the company car and the driver, whose name I had finally learned was Balthazar, took us to her apartment in Neuilly.
“I’m right by the American Hospital, in case you hurt yourself,” she said, and I told her the story of how I’d once gone to its emergency room as a young student with a case of food poisoning. “It was the fifteenth of August, my regular doctor was out of town, and his summer replacement wouldn’t see me on a holiday. Violently ill as I was, I wanted something familiar and comforting, so I took a taxi to the American Hospital.
“There was a British doctor on call—he might have been a Scot. He told me I’d eaten something bad and told me to fast until I had a solid bowel movement.”
“Did you?”
“I didn’t eat for four days. I was starving, so naturally I wasn’t shitting at all, solid or otherwise. So I went back. Irish doctor this time. He asks what’s the matter, I tell him. He says no, you can’t eat until you’ve had a solid stool. ‘But I’m hungry,’ I tell him. ‘What do you want me to do, cook you a meal?’ he says, the glib son of a bitch. So I go back to my tiny studio and I don’t eat for another week. Finally I thought, fuck it, I’m eating, and I started eating some white rice, and within a day or two I was fine. When my regular doctor got back and heard about it he was furious, said they never should have told me to fast at all, certainly not for ten days. Told me never to go to the American Hospital again under any circumstances.”
We stopped in front of one of those massive stone buildings from the turn of the twentieth century. An apartment in there must cost a fortune, I thought, and, vulgar, money-obsessed American that I am, I wondered whether Marie-Laure’s husband earned as much as she did.
“Good night, Balthazar,” she said as we got out of the car and the driver pulled away. She pressed her code into the keypad on the door and I pushed the door open. The elevator was tiny, and once inside with the doors closed, we made out like teenagers. I was as aroused and happy as though it were our first time, and sticking my hand inside her skirt and past the elastic of her panties, I started massaging her.
I pushed the
ARRÉT
button and we hung there, suspended, clawing at one another. “Let’s do it right here,” I whispered into her ear.
Her voice was throaty and hoarse. “Oh, God,” she said, trembling. “I’d love that, but I make too much noise.”
She started the cage moving again, straightening herself up as our upward progress resumed, and by the time the door opened with a metallic clunk she looked like any other
haute bourgeoise
in Neuilly sharing an aloof, awkward, silent elevator ride with a stranger.
Once inside the apartment she was a savage again, breathing obscenities. I shoved her onto a couch in the living room, lifted her skirt, and started pulling my cock out.
“Not here,” she said. “On the bed.”
Fine with me. I slung her over my shoulder, carried her into the bedroom, and tossed her onto the bed.
“Caveman,” she said. “Primitive.” She pressed her face down to the bedcover and lifted her ass into the air, pulling down her panties to her knees. “Go ahead. I won’t fight.”
•
•
•
Half an hour later we lay under her covers and I was wondering to myself why exactly I’d felt so compelled to fuck Esmée, knowing the trouble it might cause, when I had this stunning and imaginatively randy creature at my disposal. She was going on at some length about a way to structure the deal with another TV network, a film studio, and a private investor, and I wasn’t paying very close attention until she mentioned Claude.
“Of course he’d be the key to the whole thing, since he’ll be putting up first. What’s your take on him? Is he in?”
“I think he is,” I said. “I think above all he wants Esmée happy, and that’s what it’s going to take.”
“I should tell you I’ve heard some pretty unsavory stories about him.”
“Is that right?”
“You know how he makes his living?”
“Import-export, something in that line.”
She snorted. “Something. He’s an arms dealer, one of the big ones. He started out brokering American weaponry and branched out. Now he sells to anybody who can pay, and according to
a friend in the Ministry of Defense, the government thinks he deals in smuggled fissionable materials as well as finished nukes.”
“Wow,” I said, feigning surprise.
“So how do you feel about that? About taking that kind of money?”
The truth—that I just wanted to get my movie made—wasn’t a very satisfactory answer, so I came up with something a bit more uplifting. “I guess one way to look at it is we’re leading him toward a better way.”
She was silent for a moment, and then she started giggling. I wasn’t quite sure how to take it, so I chuckled, which sent her into further paroxysms of laughter. It took her two or three minutes to catch her breath enough to speak.
“My God,” she said. “I’m really going to watch myself. I could just about fall in love with you, you know that?”
The thought fascinated and terrified me, because I realized as she said it that the reverse was true. If there was an ideal woman in the world for me, it was her. I took advantage of the lull in conversation to dress, then I kissed her goodnight and called a taxi.
•
•
•
I had the cab drop me off at Odéon, and as I walked I phoned Fred, who was not at all happy to speak to me. “I had to get him a bucket,” he said.
“A bucket? What for?”
“For a fucking toilet. I can’t exactly let him take the elevator upstairs to the shitter, can I?”
“I guess not.”
“And guess who has the privilege of wiping the prisoner’s ass and dumping the bucket in the toilet?”
“Listen, I promise we’ll get this dealt with in a day or two. You get any work done on the script?”
He was quiet for a second, and I braced for an explosion. “I got about fifteen pages.”
“That’s great. What’s the total now?”
“Twenty-five.”
“There you go! Can’t wait to read ’em.”
“Are you coming tomorrow?”
“Sure. I don’t suppose you’ve made any progress in putting together a plan of action.”
“For Guiteau? No.”
Typical writer, head in the clouds, bitching and moaning about having to wipe someone’s ass but not putting any thought into how to get out of the situation. “All right,” I said. “I’ll come up with something. I promise, no more than a day or two more of toilet duty.”
•
•
•
I got up ten-ish and went downstairs for a walk. It was time to give some serious thought to making my stay here permanent. If the film went over well, I might have a real starring career here. Look at Terence Fisher and Bud Spencer. Look at Eddie Constantine. All right, so they weren’t really Americans, but from the start they were sold as Americans, and that was the image they projected, even when the audience knew they weren’t. I could fill that niche now.
I got to Les Halles without being importuned by any fans, for which I was grateful. I was also grateful, though, for the fact that people were making friendly eye contact and jostling one another to point out my presence among them. I stopped in at a café with a view of the Fontaine des Innocents, and as I drank my coffee I tried to imagine the place a couple of hundred years ago when it was still part of the old cemetery but already part of the food market, with prostitutes plying their
trade amidst the open burial pits. What an amazing combination of basic human needs to be met in one insalubrious locale, and what a city this must have been in those days. I think I would have loved it even more back then.
W
HEN THE DAWN BROKE ON SUNDAY I WAS seated at the massive oak desk in the apartment, trying to think my way out of the mess I’d created. I’d awakened at five-thirty, suddenly and gravely troubled by the whole business of Claude and the question of what to do with him, and at seven on the dot my cell rang. It was Esmée.
“I think I may be in some trouble,” she said. “I had a call from one of Claude’s business associates, and he’s not where he’s supposed to be.”
“Where’s that?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “They won’t tell me that. But they did tell me they thought he was in Paris a few days ago, just an overnighter. If he was, he didn’t let me know he was here. I’m worried.”
“What do you suppose happened?”
“I don’t know. But we’d better cool it for a while. I have a funny feeling he may have dropped out of sight just to track us and catch us at something.”
“Understood.” On the one hand, I was frustrated at the thought of avoiding Esmée for what I knew was an unnecessary fear. On the other, though, this left me with only three women to juggle instead of four, and with all I had on my plate at the moment that was probably an advantage. “Call me if there are any developments.”
•
•
•
I went down to the café and sat on the terrace drinking my usual double espresso and considering my options. This time when my cell rang it was Annick. I almost didn’t answer—it couldn’t really be good news, after all—but she’d gamely allowed me to put her into a difficult and possibly dangerous situation, and I owed her a response. Besides, I might want to pay her a visit later in the day.
“How much longer is he going to be here?” she asked as soon as I said hello.
“And a sunny good morning to you, miss.”
“I’m not kidding. Your writer friend is creeping me out, and I’m scared we’re going to get found out.”
“Everything’s going to be fine, just give it a day or two more to play itself out.”
“Play itself out? Jesus, you really didn’t come into this with any kind of plan at all, did you? Just kidnap one of the richest and most dangerous men in Europe and dump him in a meat locker . . .”
“Whoa, hold on there, missy. There was no kidnapping involved. He broke in and tried to kill me. I knocked him out and had to stash him someplace until I figured out what to do.”
“That’s an admirably nuanced appraisal. I still need you to make something happen, pronto.”
“Understood. Listen, I was thinking I might come over this afternoon.”
“Good. Your friend could use some relief.”
“I don’t mean that, I mean I’d like to see you, is all.”
She laughed. “You’ve got to be shitting me. You’re not laying a hand on me until this whole business is dealt with, understand?”
Then she hung up on me. I was a little miffed at the whole situation, particularly the suggestion that I’d kidnapped Claude, as though I were doing it for personal gain and not self-preservation.
And then I began to consider the possibilities. How many groups around the world—right-wing, left-wing, fundamentalist, nationalist—had grudges against Claude Guiteau? How credible would it seem if one of these groups made some demands in the press?
•
•
•
I went to a news kiosk on the Champs-Élysée and picked up my usual assortment of papers, plus one in Arabic and one in Hebrew. Just to keep things politically murky, I also picked up
l’Humanité
and
Présent
.
Then I stopped into Monoprix and bought a couple of balaclavas from a very pretty blond shopgirl who looked like she was going to wet her pants at the sight of me. “I’m thinking about taking a little ski trip,” I said. She was really quite an attractive girl, it seemed to me, and I got her cell number, thinking that when this was all over and done with I might actually go on such a trip, and I might take this excitable young thing with me.
Next I stopped into the FNAC and bought an inexpensive digital pocket camera, one I wouldn’t feel bad about throwing away if it became necessary once the photos I needed had been taken and uploaded. I signed an autograph for the mother of the clerk who sold it to me, and, using his own camera phone, one of his
colleagues snapped a picture of us arm in arm, like the greatest of pals.
•
•
•
In the taxi I worked on the
Herald Tribune
’s crossword and found myself stymied by several clues in the middle of the grid, though just as we arrived at the entry to the Luxembourg Gardens (couldn’t have a record of me being dropped off too near the building), I scored what I thought was a coup: “ramphorhyncus,” for “Winged Jurassic piscivore.” I crossed the boulevard a good distance from the dorm and skulked along the back streets with my dark glasses and cap on, still going over that damned crossword in my head.