“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.