Holly was staring at him agape. “Did you really just do that?”
“You know, when I inherited Arrington’s fortune, I was very uncomfortable with the idea of spending any of it.”
“But you got over it,” Holly pointed out.
“The great thing about being filthy rich is that you can make snap judgments and write a check. Speaking of that, excuse me.” He called home.
“The Barrington Practice,” Joan said.
“You’re supposed to say, ‘Woodman & Weld,’” Stone pointed out.
“I forgot. You okay?”
“Never better. Listen, I just bought a little mews house in Paris.”
“Ooh! Can I come for a visit?”
“Later. Call Herbie Fisher and have him find an attorney at W&W’s Paris office and have him write a sales contract and do whatever they do in France, like a title search. The seller is the same foundation that sold me the Maine house.” He gave her the street address of the mews house. “When he’s drawn it, have him FedEx it to Lance Cabot at the CIA, and you send him a cashier’s check for a million, six hundred thousand euros, in dollars. I’d like Lance to have it all the day after tomorrow. They can e-mail the contract to you, and you can send it all together.”
“Consider it done,” Joan said.
“I miss you terribly,” he replied, and hung up before she could reply. “There,” he said to Holly.
“That was breathtaking,” she said, draining her martini glass. “Now, how are your fingers feeling?” she asked.
“Rejuvenated.”
“Then come with me,” she said, taking his hand.
48
Stone lay with his head cradled in Holly’s breasts. “That was wonderful,” he said.
“I’m impressed with the current condition of your fingers,” she said. “Maybe you don’t need to play the piano after all. How on earth could you just stop doing that?”
“I played in a jazz group in college, but I had to quit when I started law school—there just wasn’t time. Then years passed without a piano, and when I finally got one for the New York house, I was too busy to play.”
“Okay, I’ll buy that. Now it’s time for us to get out of here.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Stone said. “This house is now my home in Paris, and I’m not moving out to avoid Yevgeny Majorov. In fact, I don’t want to avoid Yevgeny Majorov, I want to kill him.”
“I’m entirely in sympathy with that desire, nevertheless, we have to think about your safety, as well as his demise. Leave that to Rick and his boys.”
“Look, we have no reason to believe that Yevgeny knows where I am.”
“You might have been spotted when you went furniture shopping today.”
“Or I might not have been spotted, or they would be here by now. Anyway, if I leave here again, that increases the chances of his people spotting me.”
“Well, there is a kind of logic in that,” she admitted.
Stone’s cell phone rang, and he reached for it on the bedside table. “Hello?”
“It’s Rick. Why are you still there?”
“I live here, and I’m not going anywhere.”
“Nobody lives in a safe house—you stay as long as you’re safe, then you move to another safe house.”
“This is no longer a safe house.”
“That’s my point.”
“No, I mean it’s my house—I bought it from Lance.”
A short silence. “Lance doesn’t own it.”
“The foundation owns it, and Lance is the head of the foundation’s board of trustees and has the authority to sell it. In fact, it will be the second house the foundation has sold me. A contract is being drawn as we speak.”
“I’m sorry,” Rick said, “I’m getting dizzy.”
“Focus on a fixed object, like my presence in this house.”
“It’s dangerous for you there.”
“Why?”
“Because we’ve spotted some of Majorov’s people cruising the seventh arrondissement, looking for you.”
“They haven’t found me yet, but if I leave here, that gives them another shot.”
Rick sighed. “All right, then I’ll send some firepower over there.”
“I just started refurnishing the place, and I don’t want it shot up.”
“Then I’ll place them on nearby roofs.”
“You’ve already got two of your boys on me—three, with Holly.”
“Thanks a lot,” Holly said. “I thought you knew the difference between boys and girls.”
Stone bit her on a nipple.
“Ow!”
“You loved that.”
“I loved what?” Rick asked.
“Never mind. May I suggest that you stop concentrating on defense and switch to offense. It’s time to stop screwing with this guy and put him permanently out of business.”
“There are more where he came from.”
“If they keep losing management, they’ll eventually get discouraged and look for somebody else’s hotels to steal.”
“I don’t know about that, they’ve been remarkably persistent.”
“Tell me about it—that’s why I want it ended, and I don’t care if the gutters of Paris run red with their blood.”
“I also have to keep your blood out of the gutters. Going to war with these people won’t fix it.”
“Cutting the head off the snake might.”
Rick made a strangled noise. “I’ll talk to Lance.”
“You do that. Bye.” Stone hung up.
“I guess we’re hunkering down here,” Holly said.
He kissed a nipple. “And we hunker so well, don’t we?”
His phone rang again. “Hello?”
“It’s Herb Fisher.”
“Hey, Herb, how are you?”
“I’m just fine, thanks. What’s this about your moving to Paris?”
“Nobody said anything about moving here—I just found a place I liked, so I bought it.”
“I spoke to an Yves Carrier in our Paris office, and he’s on it. He’s doubtful about as quick a transaction as you want.”
“I just want to get Lance Cabot’s signature on a suitable document and to pay him before he has second thoughts.”
“We can do that, but there may be other formalities that will have to be dealt with before you’ll own it in the eyes of the French. They have a large bureaucracy there, and they have to give them work to do.”
“Tell M’sieur Carrier to take as long as it takes for that stuff—just the transaction done in the eyes of the CIA. Joan’s already getting a cashier’s check that will be on his desk when he gets the e-mailed document. All he has to do is print it and sign it, then deposit the check, and we’re done, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Are you still at l’Arrington?”
“No, I’m in the house, but keep that to yourself. I had to leave l’Arrington because people were looking for me there, so tell M’sieur Carrier to keep his lip buttoned.”
“Okay. When are you coming back?”
“Later this week, after the grand opening of the hotel.”
“See you then.”
They both hung up.
“What are we doing about dinner?” Stone asked.
“I stopped by Fauchon on the way here and got us some prepared dishes. All we have to do is nuke them.”
Stone got a leg over. “First, I have to nuke you.”
49
Ann Keaton called the unruly meeting to order. “Hey! Shut up!” Reluctantly, they did. “And cut those phones off and put them away!” Resentfully, they did.
“We’ve got a new poll, and Tom Alpert is here to explain it.” There was a collective groan.
Tom Alpert was a skinny man in a black suit; he looked like an undertaker. “I’ve been told I look like an undertaker,” he said. “That may be appropriate for this meeting.”
Now everybody was really, really quiet and attentive.
“I want to stress that this wasn’t done on the fly. We have a sample of twelve thousand independent, likely voters in seventeen swing states, and here’s how it breaks down: if the election were held today, fifty-four percent of them would vote for Honk, excuse me, Henry Carson. Forty-four percent would vote for Kate Lee, with two percent undecided. That is a very small number of undecideds at this stage. If Kate won all of them, we could lose the election by as much as eight points.”