Greenhouse Summer (12 page)

“Then I will not risk the latter by pretending that your last offer was a whisper in the wind,” he said. “One million eight hundred and fifty thousand wu for ten days’ rental speaks loud and clear. However . . .”

However, Monique thought, an arms dealer or a rug merchant or a camel trader never takes an offer, no matter how foolishly magnanimous it might be, until the customer is about to stomp out the door in outraged frustration.

And 185,000 work units a day, they both knew damn well, was more than a princely offer.
La Reine de la Seine
’s cash flow might not be public record, but its capacity was, and so were the prices on its menu and at the bar, nor was the little casino a serious high-roller operation, and a simple spreadsheet program easily enough revealed
that 100,000 wu a day would probably be stretching it.

Posner hadn’t told her to bargain hard or given her a limit, but this was already approaching the ridiculous and her own professional pride would not let her be taken for more than two million tops by the likes of Prince Smarming.

“However, not being a mathematician or computer-literate, you would find a somewhat rounder number easier to calculate?” Monique suggested. “Like one million nine?”

Esterhazy gave her a look that, like the zombie cocktail, seemed a clash of incongruous elements—one part suppressed amazement, one part greed, one part some kind of wistful regret—and hence entirely unreadable.

“Two million would be even rounder,” he said larcenously, but sounding as if his heart wasn’t in it.

“
Ten
million is a one followed by seven zeros,” Monique snapped. “It doesn’t get any rounder than that!”

“
You’re serious?
”

“Are you?”

He flashed her a brilliant golden boy smile. “I was seriously interested in meeting you, Monique,” he said.

“To do what? Pour me full of rum and gin and then carry me into your bedroom and make mad passionate love to me?”

Eric Esterhazy kept the smile, lidded his eyes to half-mast as he stared into hers. “If you were persistent enough,” he said dryly, “I suppose in the end I could be persuaded. . . .”

“Are we talking about beds or boats here?”

Esterhazy shrugged, shoulders only, the smile fixed, the boudoir eyes inviting. “As I’ve already told you, my
boat
is unavailable,” he said, then paused dramatically. “
However
 . . .” he added, and let it dangle invitingly.

Monique was not amused. But she
was
confused. What was going on here? Was this character trying to use sexual repartee to up an already ridiculously overpriced 1,900,000 wu to two million? Or was he serious about
La Reine de la Seine
being unavailable at any price and sincerely interested only in getting her panties off? But if so, why in the world would he not snap up an offer that would double his enterprise’s gross?

Then the only possible answer dawned on her.

The guy’s employment record had been as a glorified maître d’. There was no evidence that he had ever really managed the business end of those whorehouses and casinos. Why assume that
La Reine de la Seine
was anything different?

“Are you . . . seriously considering my offer?” Esterhazy purred.

“Are you seriously considering mine . . . ?” Monique purred back.

Of course you are, she thought. Who wouldn’t be? But you just don’t have the authority to take it.

“
La Reine
is not for rent to outside parties,” Esterhazy said with a great and entirely unconvincing show of aristocratic snottiness. “Not for royal weddings, not for papal coronations, not for the Second Coming of Jesus or Elvis, and not even for you, ma chérie.”

Right, thought Monique, and just maybe you have the authority to change the color of the toilet paper.

But of course he couldn’t admit it.

Nor would it be wise to force the issue.

Much better to give him a graceful way out.

“I
think
I can get the client to swallow two million wu, Eric, so let’s leave it on the table overnight,” she said, and then held up her hand to silence his reply, giving him her own version of the boudoir stare. “Let’s not decide until we’ve . . . slept on it.”

Prince Esterhazy gave her the full force of his bedroom charisma right back. “Well now,” he oozed, “there’s an offer that a gentleman can hardly refuse. It would be hard to deny that this conversation might go better over a champagne breakfast.”

Monique was tempted. It wouldn’t be the first time she had allowed herself a tactical fuck, and this one would no doubt be entirely enjoyable. For while Eric Esterhazy did not exactly have her idea of a great personality, he certainly was one beautiful male animal, and given his own obvious high opinion of himself as a seducer and the nature of his profession, it would be quite a surprise if he turned out to be less than a master cocksman.

Monique sighed inwardly, for no, it would be a highly counterproductive tactic. The whole point of letting him “sleep on it” was to let him have a private chat with whoever made the money decisions, who would surely accept the two million, and allow him the face-saving
pretense that he had simply changed his mind. Which would not be possible if she stayed the night.

“Let’s make it lunch instead,” she said.

Eric smiled. “You intend to keep me up that late?” he said.

Monique found herself wondering if she could. Or if
he
could. But this was not the time to find out.

“Perchance in your dreams this night, sweet prince,” she said dryly, rising. “Business before . . .
pleasure
,” she said cockteasingly. “New York girls never do it the other way around.”

After his tantalizing and frustrating tête-à-tête with the sweet-and-sour Monique Calhoun, Eric Esterhazy was in no mood for an alternative romantic rendezvous and had an urgent desire to kick her insanely generous offer upstairs, so he called his mother and met her for a quick drink at an anonymous little café on his way to the boat.

“
Two million
, Mom!” he groaned. “Can you imagine what it felt like to say no to
two million wu
?”

“Can’t say I’ve had the pleasure, Eric,” Mom drawled.

“Some pleasure! About as pleasant as . . . as . . .”

Mom eyed him knowingly.

“A case of the blue balls?” she suggested.

“The
what
 . . . ?”

“Nuts in a vise, kiddo, non-coitus mucho interruptus.”

Mom had become a devotee of these obscure American gangsterisms after Dad died, many of which had probably become obsolete a century or so before she was born. Freed from any need to conceal her previous identity and forced by necessity to come out of retirement and reactivate her citizen-shareholder status in Bad Boys, she amused herself by overplaying the out-of-date “gun moll.”

Her present costume was typical. A black leather dress suit with an antique mannish white shirt and tie, a gray felt fedora cocked jauntily off center on her rather closely cropped iron-gray curls, and swept-back mirrored sunglasses hiding the wrinkles around her hard blue eyes.

“Foxy grandpa, your father never was,” she liked to say with a lubricious wink, “but foxy grandma, that’s me.”

And indeed she seemed to be in the eyes of gentlemen of a certain
age, and for sure in the La Fontainian sense. Eric was under no illusion that he would’ve gotten where he now was without what she called her “backdoor street smarts,” and he needed them now.

“What’s the problem, Eric?”

“I not only felt like an idiot turning her down, it made me feel, well . . .
impotent
. As if I were only some sort of . . . of . . .”

“Doorman in a fancy monkey suit?” Mom suggested.

Eric flushed. “I’m sure that’s how I must’ve seemed to her.”

“So whaddya want me to do, tell her you’re really a tough guy who’s made his bones?”

“I want you to call Eduardo. I want you to do it now.”

Eduardo Ramirez was Eric’s official non-official conduit to the Bad Boys board and Eric could just as well have called him himself. But Eduardo was also one of Mom’s lovers and dealing with him through her gave her son a certain twisted leverage.

“And tell him what?”

“About Monique Calhoun’s offer.”

“Why?”

“
Why
? So he can authorize me to accept it.”

“You’ve gotta be thinking with your dick, Eric, because your brain’s gotta know it ain’t gonna happen.
La Reine
is not for rent period, and you know why. An extra mil over ten days would be nice, but not worth the risk of compromising the real operation.”

“Call Eduardo, Mom. Tell him the story. Sweet-talk him.”

“I’ll humor you as far as making the call, Eric,” Mom told him. “But if and when and how I sweet-talk Eduardo is between him and me.”

She pulled her mobile out of her purse, got up from the outdoor table, and walked a discreet distance away down the street before she used it.

Eric sat there drumming his fingers on the table for a good five minutes as he watched Mom talking to Eduardo Ramirez. When she finally finished, she turned, took off her sunglasses in a kind of a thoughtful gesture, and sauntered slowly back to the table with a bemused expression.

“Well?” Eric demanded.

“Well, Eduardo will meet us on the boat,” Mom told him, shaking
her head slightly. “He’s very interested. He wants to have a serious talk about it.”

Eric regarded her slyly. “Come on, Mom, how did you do it?” he wheedled. “What did you tell him to make it happen?”

Mom shrugged.

“Just the facts, ma’am,” she said in a strange flat voice, no doubt another of her obscure gangster pix references.

Eric didn’t get it.

And from the look on her face, it seemed that Mom didn’t either.

La Reine de la Seine
provided food, music, drink, drugs, sex, and gambling for her guests above deck, but not any prospect of privacy for Prince Eric Esterhazy, who spent two hours doing the usual—greeting guests as they came aboard, chatting at the bar and the baccarat and poker tables, pressing the flesh and massaging the ego—before he had a chance to slip below deck to more discreet environs.

Below the waterline, in addition to the engine room and the galley, were the boudoirs of assignation, Eric’s dressing room, and a secure room keyed to his retina-print which housed the receiving end of the surveillance equipment.

The boudoirs were all occupied by paying guests, and Eric didn’t want to hold a meeting with Eduardo Ramirez and his mother in what amounted to a clothes closet with a bed in it, so the computer room it was.

This was the heart of the real onboard business, and it was all business, no Lost Louisianne decor here. Plain gray bulkheads. A wall of video screens. A computer rig whose mundane appearance concealed powerful ten-rat meatware supporting a top-of-the-line AI program. Recording devices. Boxes of spare memory chips and cards. And only two swivel chairs, leaving Eric standing as Mom and Eduardo took them.

They made an odd couple sitting side by side, Mom in her black suit and Bogie fedora, Eduardo casually elegant as usual in blue-and-white seersucker slacks and a fawn-colored jacket sewn from the skin of a real fawn. About the only thing they appeared to have in common was how well they had aged, Mom still trim enough not to look ridiculous in her outfit, Eduardo, with his perfectly coiffed hair still
black, his white ascot, and his affectation of gold-rimmed glasses, looking like an eminently successful director of cinema or theater or opera.

“So Eric, it is your considered opinion that we should make an exception to policy and rent out the boat?” Eduardo Ramirez said.

“An extra million wu for ten days’ rental of
La Reine
? Why not? Fools and their money.”

“Bread & Circuses is your idea of a ship of fools?” Mom drawled.

“The UN is and it’s
their
money.”

“Or so you assume,” said Eduardo.

“Or so I assume?”

“The United Nations has been indigent to the point of chronic mendicancy for decades. Aren’t you curious as to the source of their sudden major budget enhancement?”

“Loot first and ask questions later, as Mom would say. Who cares where it came from as long as we know it’s coming to us?”

Eduardo affected the sinister leer of some godfather out of one of Mom’s old gangster pix. This was hardly his style, but around Mom, he occasionally put it on to please her.

“I care,” he said. “Because we know.”

“Know what?”

“Where the money’s coming from. It could be interesting to know why.”

“And your little Miss Calhoun?” Mom chimed in. “Looks like her Bread & Circuses VIP services job may be a cover.”

“Cover for
what
?”

“
That
is another question it might be in our interest to have answered,” said Eduardo. “Which is why you are right about renting her
La Reine
after a fashion, if not for the right reason.”