Rake (16 page)

Aha. There was the reason the story hadn’t broken yet; the cops were keeping it quiet. “A picture,” I repeated, an old trick for when you’ve forgotten your next line and want the other actors in the scene to subtly feed it to you.

“I recognized the baby-blue ball gag, you dumb shit. It’s mine—you got it out of the third drawer from the bottom in the armoire.”

Damn. She had me there. Still, one had to fight on. “What’s this about a ball gag?”

“Give it up. Anyway, even if the ball gag didn’t prove it, there you were on TV last night with that ‘Krysmopompas’ bullshit. I had to call the officer in charge of the case to ask if he’d watched, by the way, just to cover myself. He hadn’t, but he’s now in touch with the inspector investigating your case. You should be hearing from him today.”

“You see, what I was doing there was creating some plausible deniability. I really did get attacked, by the way.”

“Look, I’m not mad at you for locking him up, though I’ll admit I’m a little hazy on your motivations. What pisses me off is that you didn’t tell me right away.”

“Really?”

“I wish I’d thought of faking a kidnapping myself. So what’s the idea, roughly?” She had calmed down considerably.

I filled her in on Claude’s unacceptable behavior and the basics of his captivity, along with the various scenarios that Fred and I had worked out for his eventual release.

“You really didn’t think this out at all, did you?” she asked.

“Of course I did. I have multiple scenarios in play, I just haven’t settled definitively on any one of them yet.”

“The only one that works is this one: We kill him.”

“I’m not entirely comfortable with that outcome,” I said. This was something of a vast understatement.

“Tell me another that works.”

“We release him after a ransom is paid.”

“Ransoms are traceable. Besides, he’ll kill you.”

“He never saw me after he woke up.”

“Unless he’s brain damaged, he knows it’s you. And okay, let’s say he’s got amnesia, just like one of the characters in your soap opera.” (That remark stung a bit, with its implied disrespect aimed at my little corner of the television medium, but I let it pass.) “And let’s say he decides to go ahead and finance the movie. What happens when he gets a load of the screenwriter and realizes it’s his former jailer?”

A thought did flash into my mind. What if Fred was a look-alike for Claude’s captor, perhaps an identical twin? Then I remembered that that had been a plot twist on
Ventura County
. Anticipating her sneering (and absolutely correct) dismissal of the idea, I kept it to myself.

She sat down on the bed next to me, leaned in and kissed me. “If you’re worried about the moral aspect of the whole business, I can assure you that Claude is one evil son of a bitch.”

“I’m sure he is.”

“I’ve thought about it many times, but I’ve never really had an opportunity like this one. Think of it. Claude’s out of the
picture. All that money, mine to control without any interference. We’ll make our movie. We can be seen together in public without fear of Claude having one or both of us killed.”

It was all sounding pretty good to me. I have nothing against money, and though I wasn’t exactly lacking for it at the moment, I didn’t have Claude Guiteau’s kind of money, not by a long shot, and having a girlfriend with that kind of dough was the next best thing. And then she said something that made my blood run cold:

“After a decent interval we can get married.”

•
     
•
     
•

Even an unwanted marriage proposal seems to call for a celebratory fuck, and after we were finished we showered together and she left. Less than a half an hour later I answered the door to find Inspector Bonnot, of the Police Judiciaire, who was displeased that I’d revealed a piece of important evidence in a TV interview without having told him.

“This Krysmopompas fellow, you have any idea who he is?”

“No, and I’m sorry I didn’t mention it to you when you debriefed me, it was something I suddenly recalled yesterday afternoon. I meant to call you and fill you in, I really did.”

He grilled me for a while and I invented a few small details that seemed to please him.

“I’m surprised you have so much time to spend on a simple assault and battery,” I said.

“As I told you before, the divisionnaire’s wife is a big fan. And don’t assume that yours is an isolated case,” he said. “Was there any context to this Krysmopompas comment? Did he indicate whether Krysmopompas was a group, or perhaps just a
nom de crime
he’d dreamed up?”

“Nothing like that, sir,” I said, “just the word.”

“It’s a funny word. I’m surprised you remembered it, having only heard it once. Are you sure you got it right?” He was quite friendly in his interrogation, nothing insinuating about it. I was making little mental notes the whole time in case I ever got to play a cop.

“I’m an actor, Captain, accustomed to memorizing quickly and exactly. What’s it mean, anyway?”

“We’re working on that now,” he said.

•
     
•
     
•

Late in the day I smuggled Esmée down to see her husband, and Fred damn near swallowed his chewing gum at the sight of her.

“Let’s have a look,” she said.

“Are you sure you want him seeing you?”

“Who cares? He’s good as dead.”

This didn’t go over very well with Fred, who was still laboring under the misconception that somehow this was going to end with Claude free and bearing us no ill will. I was a bit ashamed at my capacity for self-delusion, which had allowed me to entertain that same absurd notion until disabused of it by Esmée’s coldhearted but absolutely logical and undeniable dissection of the situation. I suppose on some unconscious level I knew from the moment I brought the statue down on his head that at some point I was going to have to finish him off, and oddly enough the notion that I would have to serve as Claude’s executioner came as a relief, now that Esmée was in the loop.

As Fred sputtered an incomprehensible protest, I opened the massive door to the meat locker. The stench from within was eye-watering, but Esmée stood impassive in the doorway and stared at her husband with one eyebrow arched and one hand on her beautiful hip.

Still bound to his chair, stripped now to his boxer shorts and undershirt, hair disheveled and face black and blue (from a number of falls he’d taken while trying to sleep sitting up), dried spittle caked on his chin, he looked up at Esmée. At first his eyes showed confusion, then hope, and finally hatred and rage as he understood that she was not there for purposes of ransom or rescue. He snarled unintelligibly through the ball gag and strained ineffectively against the ropes, which I now saw that Fred had tightened too far; his hands were a dull shade of purple.

“I told you that fucking ball gag was too big,” she said to him. “Not too comfortable for long-term wear, is it?”

He was roaring so fiercely I began to fear he was going to choke on his own saliva, struggling so hard I thought he might break the solid old wooden chair.

“I’d kiss you,” she said, “but you smell like shit, dear.” She turned to me. “Better shut him in again. The sight of me is going to give him a heart attack, and the police are going to expect a proper execution-style slaying from the likes of Krysmopompas.”

That was when Claude first turned his attention to me. After a momentary escalation of his rage, he started laughing, at least as far as that was possible with an enormous blue rubber ball in his mouth.

“What were you thinking, Claude?” she asked. “Trying to kill him on Friday the thirteenth? Don’t you know that’s an unlucky day?” Then she pulled me to her and kissed me, and while I normally would have shown poor Claude some consideration by stopping there, there was something about Esmée that made me follow her lead, and pretty soon we were practically dry-humping right there in front of him. Then, laughing, she slammed the meat locker door shut.

“That was fun,” she said.

“I hadn’t realized before that you actually disliked him,” I said. “I thought you just had a wandering eye.”

“I’ve hated him since before we were married. I can’t wait to kill him.”

That was when I noticed that Fred was softly weeping at his keyboard. “I don’t want to kill him.”

“No choice now, old chum,” I said. “He knows us.”

“You don’t understand. I’ve taken care of him. Fed him. Cleaned up his messes. I’m a little bit attached to him.”

“For God’s sake, he’s not a baby bird you rescued,” Esmée said. “He’s an arms dealer, responsible for the deaths of a hundred thousand innocents.”

Fred nodded, eyes down. Poor guy was lonely, and here I’d provided him with someone to take care of, and suddenly I was yanking that person away to be shot, just like Old Yeller. I remembered now somewhat shamefacedly that I’d promised to get him laid and then ignored my duty as a friend.

“Say, Esmée, you don’t happen to know any attractive gals who might want to hook up with a talented young writer about to hit the big time?”

She looked him over and shrugged. “If a guy’s in show business, most girls will fuck anybody. Sure, I’ll set him up with somebody.”

Fred was looking a little better. “Actually, I’m thirty-two, not all that young.”

And then Annick stepped in out of the darkness of the old abandoned kitchen, shocked and, I think, a little angry at the sight of Esmée. “What the fuck is she doing here?”

“Didn’t expect to see me, did you, dear?” Esmée said with a smile that frightened me more than her suggestion of marriage had.

“Has he seen her?” Annick wanted to know.

“He has,” I said.

“Then he’s a dead man, isn’t he?”

“Looks that way from my perspective.”

Annick let out a long, deep breath, half of angry frustration and half of resignation. “This is going to open me up to all kinds of weird emotional shit with Bruno,” she said.

“So don’t tell him,” Esmée suggested with a shrug.

•
     
•
     
•

That night I brought Ginny out to dinner with Casselini, the director, and suggested he might want to cast her in the small but crucial role of Esmeralda, the peasant girl who helps my character hide the arms while he’s being chased by a neo-Nazi biker gang in the employ of the mad art collector. Casselini couldn’t stop staring at Ginny’s tits, provocatively displayed as they were in a combination of Miracle Bra and low-necked top. Professional that she was, his attentions bothered her not a whit.

“Like ’em?” she asked. “They’re real. If you want we could go into the bathroom and have a squeeze.”

“That’s probably not such a great idea,” I told her, though Casselini seemed quite keen on it.

“Why not?” she said. “You said you fucked that network lady in a restaurant crapper, and I bet that was a nicer place than this.”

I had to allow that both her points were well taken, and between courses she got up and went to the ladies’ room. After a decent interval Casselini did the same, and five minutes later they were both back at the table.

I listened to him rhapsodize about her beauty for the rest of the dinner, and we agreed that she was perfect for the role. She gave him the password for free entry and downloads on her site, as well as her cell number.

We walked back to her hotel again. I wasn’t normally that much into the long after-dinner promenades, but with Ginny it was just about the only way to have a conversation that wasn’t
postcoital, since the minute you entered a room alone with her was usually her signal that the fucking was to commence.

“Did you get a chance to look at the site?”

“I did. Very impressive. You’re making good coin?”

“You have no idea. Monthly memberships, day passes, automatic rebilling. Plus I’ve got three clip sites where guys who don’t want to join up can just pay for individual downloads.”

“Three clip sites?”

“One’s me with guys, one’s me with guys and gals, the other I’m a dominatrix.”

“You? Really?”

“Don’t sound so surprised. I’m a pretty good actress, you said so yourself.”

We were stopped by a pair of young men, autograph seekers, and to my surprise it wasn’t mine but hers they wanted.

“Please,” one of them said in perfect English. “Let your bush grow back.”

“Sorry,” she said. “It’s what the market demands at the moment.”

The other one agreed. “Bald pussy is for squares. And your bush is so perfect and blond.”

“Try an experiment,” the first one said. “Do a series wearing a merkin and see how sales go.”

“I just may do that. Thanks for the input, fellas.”

She kissed each of them on the cheek and they were on their way. “What’s a merkin?” I asked.

“Pubic wig. From back in the days when people’s body hair used to fall out from smallpox and they didn’t want their lovers to know they’d had it.”

We walked for a minute or two in silence, and then she asked me if something was bothering me.