Overfall (13 page)

“Those are my terms.”

“How hard can it be to kill some sailor?”

“You want to kill him, you go ahead. I do it as part of this package and it’s a million dollars U.S. Period. Any other incidental kills are covered by the five percent; plus you get one unrelated noncelebrity kill.”

“Fine. Fine. Maybe Anna will buy off the yachtie to protect her brother. Or charm him. Or something.”

“I have a feeling about this. It isn’t a good feeling. But I will take care of it. Tell Roberto and all your men that they will be contacted by Trotsky for instructions.”

“We’ll tell them.”

“I will need men this time. Many of them. How many do you have over there?”

“Five or six. More on the way.”

“Trotsky will coordinate your men. Now they are my men.”

“Okay.”

Gaudet rose and didn’t shake hands or say goodbye, but simply turned and walked out.

On the street he called his right-hand man, Trotsky, on his cell phone.

“You have to get me guns in the States and in Canada. Mac Tens. At least six. Some sniper stuff. Three of those. I’ll need three good Frenchmen with passports and no history.”

“Expensive.”

“When was that a problem? Then I need information and fast. Everything you can get on Anna Wade—the actress. You got a notepad? I’m gonna tell you about a guy who calls himself Sam.”

The minute Gaudet left, Benoit began kissing Chellis.

“There is just enough time before brunch,” she said.

He hesitated, remembering that he and Marie always took a “nap” after brunch.

“Don’t worry. She is on her period.”

He broke away. “How do you know that?”

“Sisters know these things. I’m surprised you have to ask.”

Benoit’s hands on his body felt good.

“She must never know. About us.”

“Oh, of course not. No one will ever know.”

The phone rang. For a moment she slid down the couch and glanced at the screen. He was impatient to resume.

“Data processing.”

“Answer it.”

She listened for a moment.

“You better tell him yourself.”

Chellis clicked on the speaker.

“There’s a problem with the BC backup.”

“What about the backup?”

“Jason’s automated backup program has been re-programmed. It shows it’s backing up when it’s not. We have what looks like a bunch of old formulas. Jason left an encoded message. It says, ‘DuShane is hiding on the back roads, in the rivers of my memory, never gentle, but always on my mind.’ ”

“How could this happen? You’re supposed to be checking!”

“We do check—”

“You don’t,” he shouted. “If you did you would have known the minute it happened.”

“Nobody can follow Jason’s stuff. We wouldn’t know if it was the real—”

“Don’t give me that line ... you just told me it was phony ... old, you said ... so you knew. Don’t make up stupid excuses for your moronic breach of your duty.”

“There is one more thing. A worse thing. He took a backup file of Jacques Boudreaux. A Kuching file.”

“When?”

“Recently.”

“What was on it?”

“We’re not sure.”

“You are an idiot. I want a full report.”

Chellis slammed down the phone and began to fasten his pants until Benoit stopped him.

“Relax,” she said, pushing him back down.

“If Jason gave a CD to Anna it may have had Kuching files on it.”

“There is nothing for us to do now but attend to each other.”

After brunch with Marie, after he had given her flowers and yet another diamond pin, they were back in the apartment and Marie held his head in her lap and stroked his temples the way he liked.

“Those bankers have worn you out.” She smiled a knowing smile and for just a second it pissed him off.

Gaudet proceeded immediately to Benoit’s apartment and removed the beard while he waited, transforming himself into the clean-shaven man who was Dahrr Moujed, his given name at birth.

Gaudet in his natural state was not a bad-looking man, but primarily it was the confidence in the eyes that made the passable appearance. He was just shy of six feet, had small even teeth, relatively thin lips, a very flat pursed expression in natural repose, a small aquiline nose, and the darkest of brown eyes. His hair was very short and very black and pointed up in all sorts of odd directions as if he wanted to be a punk rocker. In reality, the plastics and wigs made long hair or orderly hair a near impossibility.

Benoit’s apartment had panache. Simple straightforward designs, with yellows, creamy browns, and a few soft accents. She liked glass and brass, nothing frilly, very clean lines, nearly antiseptic in places, but there was an original Picasso on the wall, one of the lopsided-faced ladies, that DuShane had given her, and works by several other lesser but noteworthy painters, all contemporary, but no abstract work. Benoit said she liked to have a rough idea, at least, of what the artist might have been thinking.

As to the lady portrayed, she might have shared a similar soul to Benoit’s. Even Benoit admitted that, what with all the fracturing and displacement in the lines.

If she wanted to know only what an artist was feeling, Benoit was fond of saying, she’d read a poem.

When at last Benoit came home, she wore her disapproval rather plainly.

“I’m sorry,” Gaudet said without emotion. “I can’t resist baiting your boss. He’s so easy, so American.”

“He is a French citizen.”

“In his head he’s an American capitalist, born a farmer and come to the wicked city.”

“You were being crazy, talking like that, accusing DuShane Chellis and me of having an affair.”

Gaudet grabbed her and pulled her to him.

“Give me just a minute,” she said, and went into the bathroom.

From his pocket he removed an exquisite knife with a pearl handle and a carbide blade that would slice silk in midair.

When she came through the door of the bathroom, she wore a short leather skirt and a red sweater that left one shoulder bare. Her legs were tan, bare. She wore patent leather pumps with high heels. She wet her lips with her tongue and looked long at him, saying nothing. Slowly she walked toward him as he played with the blade on his finger. With meticulous ease he cut the sweater off her and freed her breasts, enjoying their shape, like wineskins, slightly pointed and with a sensuous droop. It was a special image and it excited him as few other images could. They had violent sex according to his addiction. Without exception she professed to like it, but he never believed her, nor did he care whether she was lying.

They said nothing until it was over, then watched TV for twenty minutes. When she returned from a trip to the bathroom, she brought a second condom and wore a second set of panties that he could shred.

After he had exhausted himself again, he showered and dressed, returning to find Benoit nude in the bed, with covers to her waist. Gaudet was dressed and ready to leave. Still, it was hard to take his eyes from her.

“I want you with me, and I’ve never wanted that of a woman,” he said.

That’s almost touching coming from you. Now tell me, what do you know about this Sam? I saw something in your face when Roberto talked about him.”

“I think I have encountered him before—on a job a year or so ago. At first I dismissed the idea—some coincidences are simply impossible. But I keep thinking about it. The Sam I knew about—I never actually saw him—liked sailboats, lived in LA. He had a big staff and conducted investigations. He worked for wealth. Royalty. Celebrities. Governments. Big money for big problems. If he just happened by, it’s an incredible coincidence. And as I told Chellis, it’s the coincidences that kill you. I think he was hired to be there. Their rendezvous must have misfired. Perhaps she fell in on the way to meeting him in the yacht.”

Benoit lay back, looking as if she was intrigued at the notion.

“You think she hired him before she came?”

“He’s exactly the guy a big celebrity would hire.”

Once more he went to her and kissed her deeply. If it were not for the departure of his plane, he would have entered her bed a third time and asked her about the science involved—Jacques’s science.

“What is love to you?” she asked him suddenly.

“When a man says he loves, he is apologizing for his lust. It means I want to use your body but I’m sorry for it—a form of contrition.”

“And what if a woman says it?”

“She realizes that she’s being taken by a cold bastard and she begs for security. When a woman says ‘I love you’ it means: ‘Don’t leave me for someone more beautiful.’ ”

“Why do you like me?” she asked.

“Sex with you is the closest I will ever get to religion.”

“You flatter me. I think you could forget me in a day.”

He smiled despite himself. “It would take more than a day.”

He turned to the mirror to check his disguise. When he dressed he had put on a mustache and plastic, but not the beard. Traveling to America or Canada with a beard increased the likelihood that he would be detained, even though he traveled as a citizen of France.

Gaudet didn’t like leaving his island these days. The inconvenience and danger of travel kept him home more than it ever had before. Gaudet owned a portion of a small island in French Polynesia where he had constructed a burre on stilts with a thatched roof laid over copper that had turned green from the salt air. Inside it was modern, with a polished stone floor and teak and rock for the walls and Honduran mahogany for the bookcases. A German client, a corporation, had constructed the house in its own name and then quietly sold it to Gaudet’s Cayman Island corporation. The transaction was booked as an exchange of services.

He was still thinking of the place while he waited for the cab to the airport. He was not particularly fond of any city, but Paris had many beautiful women. If he didn’t consider the presence of attractive women, there were only a few places in the world he liked, and he liked his burre the best. Soon his burre might be graced with visits from Benoit, which would give his island all that he required. It troubled him that she had not agreed to visit him yet. He supposed she imagined that she would be left out of things with her sister remaining in Paris at the Grace offices. Already he had decided that if Benoit would not come to his island, he would for the most part remain in Paris and endure the company of men. But he would never sell the burre because women, like life itself, were transitory.

Gaudet had been born in Oman, the son of a merchant who had moved himself and his non-Muslim family to a suburb north of Paris shortly after his birth. On his third birthday they moved to Paris proper, and when he was twelve they shipped him to a Catholic boarding school in a village about an hour’s drive away. After that he saw little of them. Just before his thirteenth birthday they died in a taxi accident, and thereafter Gaudet largely fended for himself. It was made easier by the fact that he had never felt close to either of his parents. But then he never really felt close to anyone. He was able to remain at the boarding school and pay tuition by working during school and during the summer, with additional small contributions from an uncle in Oman.

As a young man he was ambitious and flirted briefly with drug smuggling, then went to work for a man named Jean Lacour who operated a walk-in laundry. It was a rough business, and sometimes turf wars were settled with fists. It was the violence at which he excelled, and soon he hired himself out as a collector to loan sharks as a sideline. He did so well at roughing up deadbeats that he soon left the laundry except for occasional jobs protecting territory with fists and threats.

At the age of seventeen he made his first foray into killing when a man at a neighborhood party picked a fight. He easily won the fight because he discovered in the first few seconds that he had no fear. After he beat the man with a chair and then his fists, the fight ended when some older men broke it up. Devan invited the other fellow to finish the fight down the street, but the man declined. It was then the consensus that Devan was the clear winner. It was no appeasement. When the man was on his way home in the quiet of the night, Devan jumped him with a pipe, crushed his shoulder, and then his head. He left him in the street but because of the earlier fight, was nearly arrested for murder.

It was because of this experience that Gaudet swore off direct methods of killing, which he found wanting when compared to more creative techniques. It worked much better to leave his targets dead and everyone, including the police, wondering how it came to pass.

He was only eighteen when he killed his second man, an elderly fellow named Dubroc who fed the pigeons in the park. The man had put in a laundry a block from his client’s business, and his client was willing to pay to make the new arrival disappear. Unfortunately the old man had a large family, including many sons, so picking fights and general harassment was not a solution.

By studying poisons, Gaudet learned about belladonna. The English knew it as nightshade, and although the sweet berry of the plant had resulted in the deaths of many French and English children, it was the root that yielded atropine, a deadly but medicinally useful alkaloid. While it worked well in dilution for dilating the eyes, one-hundredth of a grain of pure atropine ingested would kill a grown man in short order.

Devan was deliberate in everything, and that came to include the preparation of his poisons. What he lacked in experience he made up for in study and contemplation. After watching the old graybeard Dubroc for days, it became obvious that the man liked his pint of whiskey every afternoon, which by evening left him drunk. When Dubroc went home at night, he usually meandered down the sidewalk swaying and jolly, occasionally finding support on lampposts or in doorways. It also became apparent that the man had a sweet tooth, a love of tarts from the local bakery. It took two weeks of careful work for Gaudet to learn to bake such a tart. Even young he had been patient. It was a simple matter to grind the belladonna root fine and to fill a cherry confection with enough to kill a large dog. He doubled that amount.

To avoid any suspicion whatsoever, he baked a tart at the home of a vacationing acquaintance thirty miles distant on a day he knew that the old man would appear at his office above the Dubroc laundry. While the old man was tottering about his chores in the late afternoon, Gaudet slipped into his office and put the tart on the desk atop a piece of bakery tissue. Fascinated, Gaudet remained in the area but heard nothing. A couple of days later Gaudet read the press account. The man was out in front of his laundry unable to speak, reeling about, clutching and unclutching his hands as if kneading unseen bread. When someone grabbed him and called an ambulance, the old fellow was bending at the waist, doubled over, and turning very red at the ears.