Ring Game (22 page)

“Just tell me one thing.”

Hy lowered his eyes to a focal point in the vicinity of Crow’s forehead.

“What did you do that got the Amaranthines so upset they’d want to hurt you? I mean, really.”

Hyatt considered for a moment, then said, “I don’t like to see innocent people ripped off.”

“Meaning yourself?”

“Meaning the Pilgrims.”

“What does it cost to become immortal these days?”

“That depends on how much you’ve got.” He winked, spun on one heel, and walked back down the sidewalk, striped pants fluttering, huaraches slapping his soles.

Every man has two countries, his own and France.

—Henri de Bornier

L
AURA DEBROWSKI HUNG UP
the phone and walked out onto the shallow balcony. She had been counting on hearing Crow’s voice. She lit a cigarette and leaned out over the railing. On the sidewalk below a man with a green plastic broom was sweeping. A woman in high heels walking a toy poodle picked up her pace to walk quickly past the sweeping man. He said something as she passed, and the woman made a face that may have been a smile. Observing such uneventful encounters had occupied much of Debrowski’s time during her first weeks alone in Paris, but lately the street life had come to seem pedestrian. The fact that the people here spoke French could no longer camouflage the fact that their daily lives were as trivial and mundane as those of people elsewhere.

She would wait a few more minutes, then try Crow again.

The afternoon session at SuperSon had not gone well. René Missett, the vocalist and leader of
Les Hommes Magnifiques
, had shown up at the studio forty minutes late with an ugly hangover. He said he was too sick to make any decisions, he was tired of being the leader, and they should all fuck off and die. He deposited himself on a plastic bench and fell into a fitful sleep.

“He’ll be okay in an hour or so,” Debrowski said to the engineer. She’d seen René in this condition before. “Maybe we can get some work done before he wakes up.”

The other members of the band laughed uncomfortably. In the absence of René’s guiding hand, Bobo, Vincent, and Antoine were lost.

Vincent and Bobo wanted to do a song Bobo had written called “American Friend.” Antoine, the drummer, maintained that the song was too “Paris.” He was unable to explain what he meant by that, but refused to be swayed. He tried to wake René for support, but René simply glared at him, looking as if he might throw up at any moment.

Debrowski, still hoping that they might get some work done, suggested that they run through Bobo’s song once, just to see how it sounded. Vincent, Bobo, and Antoine all looked at René, who roused himself enough to sit up and say, “I’ve got a better idea for the title. We call it ‘The American Cunt.’ How do you like that, eh?”

Debrowski quickly said, “I like it.” She didn’t care any more, as long as they got something on tape. Her relationship with
Les Hommes
had been increasingly difficult lately. When they’d first started working together, the band had treated her like a goddess. She was the producer from America, their ticket to the big time. She would deliver them to the promised land of concert halls and rivers of cash and groupies by the bedful. For a few weeks, they had devoted several hours of every day to writing and rehearsing, trying to come up with enough songs to fill a disc. Debrowski’s suggestions had been taken as gospel.

“You only need one great tune and two okay ones to make
Billboard
,” she told them. “The rest of the CD can suck.”
Les Hommes
had started out with a unique, hard-core sound and one great tune—a three-minute tour de force called “
Ça me fait shier
,” which would translate on the American disc as “It Makes Me Shit.” They’d laid down that track in their first afternoon at SuperSon. The rest of the album had not gone so smoothly. As the band members, and René in particular, had become more familiar with Debrowski, her pedestal sank slowly into the earth.

One week ago as they all stood in the Metro waiting for the Mairie D’Ivry train, René had felt familiar enough to give Debrowski’s ass a rather aggressive squeeze, to which she had responded by bringing her boot heel down on his instep. Vincent, Bobo, and Antoine had derived great merriment from watching René hopping about on one foot, cursing wildly.

That might have been the end of it, but René’s character was such that he chose to regard Debrowski’s foot-stomping as a form of flirtation. The next night, his inhibitions eclipsed by several glasses of marc, he had shown up at her hotel saying he wanted to go over some new song ideas, but as soon as he got inside her room he’d made it clear that his ideas were of another sort. Debrowski gave him fair warning, and when that didn’t work she clubbed him between the legs with a one-litre bottle of Perrier.

Thereafter, René had discontinued his physical advances, but he was unable to restrain himself from taking frequent verbal shots at her femininity, at what he perceived as her dubious sexual orientation, and at her American origins. Debrowski tried to ignore him and focus on completing the album. The other band members seemed embarrassed by René’s behavior at times, but because René was male, French, and their leader, they let it go.

“Okay then,” René stood up and shuffled over to the microphone. “Hey Jules!” he shouted at the man in the sound booth. “You ready for us, Jules? We’re gonna lay this one down the first try.”

Jules, who had been patiently waiting at 140 francs per hour, gave the thumbs up.

Going into this supposedly final session they had, in addition to “
Ça me fait shier
,” a half dozen mediocre tunes, one that was marginally good, and three stinkers that needed serious remixing, at the least.
Les Hommes Magnifiques’
debut album would not be what Debrowski had hoped, but if they could come up with one decent B-side rocker, it might play in the States. She’d heard them do “American Friend” live. It had potential.
Les Hommes
, for all their problems, had their moments of creative brilliance.

Despite Antoine’s objections to the tune, he laid down a powerful backbeat, and René launched into an entirely new and apparently ad-libbed set of lyrics, which described, Debrowski quickly realized, the rape, beating, murder, mutilation, and dismemberment of an American woman in Paris. His bloodshot eyes never left her face as he screamed into the microphone.

Laura Debrowski had once believed herself to be un-shockable. She had thought she had heard, seen, or done just about everything. But she had never heard anything like this, at this volume, aimed with such malice directly at her. It was a tremendous performance,
Les Hommes
at their rocking best. She knew she was hearing
Les Hommes’
first hit single, and it frightened and disgusted her beyond anything she had ever heard in a recording studio—or anywhere else. She looked back at Jules in the sound booth, but instead of finding shocked indignance on his face, found herself facing a delighted leer. Wooden-faced, Debrowski left the studio. She walked for four kilometers back to her hotel, feeling utterly alone for the first time since she had arrived in Paris. She forced her mind away from
Les Hommes
and imagined herself in her room with the phone in her hand and Joe Crow on the other end.

Now she was here and the son-of-a-bitch wasn’t home.

She picked up the phone and dialed again. His answering machine picked up, again. She said, “You bastard! Where the hell are you?”

She heard a click. “I’m here,” Crow said, sounding breathless.

Debrowski began to cry.

Crow’s mind had become so cluttered with the morning’s events that he’d forgotten about Debrowski’s promised phone call. It hadn’t hit him until the phone started ringing, just as he entered his apartment. He tossed the foil-wrapped shotgun on his sofa and picked up the phone.

“Men are scum,” Debrowski said. Her voice sounded wrong. Was she crying? Impossible.

“I completely agree with you,” he said, playing a safety.

“Why haven’t you called me?”

Crow thought quickly. He hadn’t called her, of course, because he didn’t know how to reach her. But this was not the time to make that argument.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Where are you?”

“I’m in France! Where the hell do you think I am?”

“I mean, are you at your hotel?”

For a moment, Crow thought he’d lost the connection, then he heard her say, “Yes, I’m in my room.”

“Are you sitting?”

“I’m standing at the window.”

“How’s the weather?”

“It’s warm. The sun is setting.”

“How are you?”

“Not great.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing.” She cleared her throat. “Nothing I can’t handle.”

Crow did not doubt that. Laura Debrowski always
handled
things. He said, “You sure?”

“I’m sure.” Her voice was stronger now. Sometimes Crow wished she was less capable. Sometimes he wanted to be able to open pickle jars and kill spiders and slay dragons for her. But most of the time he liked Laura Debrowski straight up.

“How’s the recording coming?”

“I don’t want to talk about it. How’s Milo?”

“He’s fine.”

“How are you?”

“I’m okay.” Crow looked at the foil-wrapped shotgun he’d thrown on his sofa and reconsidered his answer. “I mean, I got shot at this morning,” he said. “But they missed.”

The telephone was ringing when Hyatt emerged from the shower. He walked out into the living room, screwing the corner of a towel into his ear. Carmen sat on the sofa, inert, staring at the television.

“You gonna answer that?” he asked.

“Why? It’s probably Sophie.”

Hyatt frowned, draped the towel over his shoulder, and picked up the phone. “Hello?”

“It’s me.”

“Oh. Hi, Chip.”

“This is
Eduardo
!”

“Oh. Sorry,
Eduardo
, I forgot.”

“Those men you shot at could have been hurt. It was not strategic.”

“Yeah, well it was either that or wait for you guys to do whatever it was you were going to do.”

“Polly said to break your foot.”

“Yes.” Hyatt shuddered. “Break my foot.” He was sure that Chip would have gone through with it despite their special relationship. Chip took his job very seriously.

“Just one. Our strategy would not have been affected. It was not necessary to shoot.”

“Yeah? Well I don’t plan to walk down the aisle on crutches,
Eduardo
.”

“Chip was doing his job. We agreed that he could continue to do his job.”

Hyatt looked down at his bare feet, still pink from the hot shower, whole and unbroken. “You could have at least warned me.”

“I was under surveillance not to. My cover might have been broken.”

“You—what? Never mind. Look, are you—are
they
going to try again?”

“Polly has issued no further instructions respective to the matter of the subject.”

“But you’ll let me know?”

“Unknown. Circumstances might endeavor alternate strategies.”

“Let me rephrase that,
Eduardo
. It is essential and
strategic
that you keep me informed as to any and all plans, proposals, or efforts to damage my immortal ass. This is absolutely essential and highly strategic. Understood?”

There were a few seconds of silence, during which Hyatt imagined Chip’s cranial pressure increasing. He half expected to hear a pop.

“I understand,” Chip said.

“Good. Are Polly and Rupe still planning their sabbatical?”

“They will be leaving for Stonecrop on the eighth, as per my earlier intelligence to you.”

“Good. Report to me if anything changes.” Hyatt hung up. “You subhuman Nazi,” he added.

Carmen asked, “Who was that?”

“That was Chip the troglodyte.”

“Who’s Eduardo?”

“Same troglodyte.” The phone rang again; Hyatt answered. A shriek of anxious chatter hurtled from the receiver, causing him to jerk the phone away from his ear. He waited for it to subside, then cautiously brought the phone closer to his mouth. “Sophie? That you?” He frowned, listening, then handed the phone to Carmen. “It’s for you.”

“Thanks a hell of a lot.” She took the phone. “Hi Mom.”

Hyatt worked on drying the nooks and crannies of his lanky body as he watched Carmen. She was not a good phone talker. She muttered, let her sentences trail off, and often neglected to speak into the mouthpiece. Instead of saying “yes” or “no,” she would nod or shake her head. Hyatt could hear Sophie’s voice more clearly than he could Carmen’s. She was screaming about somebody named “Conita.” Whoever Conita was, and whatever she’d done, she had Sophie ready to pop a vessel.

After listening to Crow describe his day, and the events that had led up to it, Debrowski said, “Forget about it, Crow. Walk away from those people. Play it the way you’d play a bad poker hand.”

“It’s easier with cards,” Crow said. “But this is a family thing.” His hand was cramping from gripping the phone, and his ear was getting sore. He switched sides.

“Family? My god, Crow, you’ve said yourself you aren’t one hundred percent sure that Sam is really your father. And we’re not even talking about Sam. We’re talking a friend of his that has a girlfriend with an idiot daughter who happens to be getting married. That’s not exactly what you’d call ‘family.’”

“You take what you can get.” Crow was surprised to hear Debrowski telling him to back off. He thought of her as more the act-first-regret-later type. He said, “Besides, Hyatt Hilton has me sort of curious. I can’t figure out what he’s up to.”

“Do me a favor, Crow. Forget about it. I don’t want to come home and find you full of buckshot.”

“It was birdshot. And by the way, when
are
you coming home?”

“Listen, you did what Axel asked. Just tell him what happened and let him sort it out.”

“I’m not sure I even want to mention it to him at this point. I was thinking I might pay a visit to that church, see what the immortal nuts have to say about him. Just to bring some closure.”

“Closure? Why? For who? Axel? You know that every time you try to do somebody a favor you get screwed. They taught us that in AA, remember? You can’t fix other people. All you can do is fix yourself.”