“Come, have a seat with us,” he said very easily. “I really wish you would relax.”
Derek stiffened, but what was he to do? He had intended to confront them all along; if he could just shake off his surprise, he could reduce their advantage to nothing. He would come out on top of this with a few surprises of his own. He thought of how he had already sicced Huon on them, and smiled.
“Ah, that’s better! What would you like to drink? Capuccino? Let me get you something. I had an excellent macchiato.”
Derek avoided sliding into the booth, as Etienne seemed to be urging him, and dropped into a chair beside the table. Nina came sauntering back, leaving the journalist staring in at them through the window with vague disappointment; she gestured him away, and he went. She sat down in the booth and smiled sharply at Derek.
“I think Mr. Crowe would like just coffee, Etienne. Am I right?”
Derek nodded, beginning to enjoy this. He lived for these battles, didn’t he? He had never realized until lately just how much he enjoyed them: the sparring, the manipulation, the deceptions just beneath the surface. He almost broke out laughing, and Nina seemed to read his mood with uncanny accuracy, for she smirked and rolled her eyes as if to say Me too. They were all three sharing a nasty little secret.
“You’re all right with us, you know,” she said. “I mean… you’re right to be protective, and it’s good you keep the secrets… but you’re truly among your kind now. Do you understand?”
“Oh, I understand,” Derek said, and indulged himself in an open laugh.
Etienne set a cup before him and slid into the booth beside Nina. They stared at him for a few moments, then glanced at each other.
“Well,” Etienne said, “where do we begin?”
“How about this,” Derek said. “You tell me how you got ahold of the manuscript.”
Now they really gaped at each other. He had been right all along! Someone at Veritas had slipped it to them, sold it probably; he would love to get names, but he doubted they would betray their source. Still, the confirmation of his suspicions was enough.
“You are very well informed!” Etienne said. “I admit, I am impressed.”
“Amazing,” Nina agreed.
“But if you know so much, do you really need to be told that? Does our agent’s name matter? He was dispensable; he did as we directed, and we had nothing further to do with him.”
“You paid him, I suppose.”
“Paid him?” Nina suppressed a gleeful laugh. “We cut him loose, that was his reward.”
Etienne was snorting with mirth. “Yes, completely loose. I don’t think he got very far after that. Not so far from home.”
“That would have been a long walk, I think!” Nina said.
Derek had to backpedal up a bit. They had lost him somewhere, or else he wasn’t catching the full implications of what they were saying.
“And the mines,” Etienne said. “Do you realize how many millions of mines were sown in Kampuchea? How many years it would take to disarm them? Each one costs money, and Cambodia is a very, very poor country.”
“Wait a minute,” Derek said. “Cambodia.”
“Of course, that’s where the manuscript was kept. It was written in Tuol Sleng, and that’s where it stayed.”
Tuol Sleng again? Derek thought. Now he was truly lost—and his fear once again running rampant. It wasn’t just the possibility of blackmail that frightened him; the idea occurred to him that a larger danger was brewing, one that involved him and Huon and these two, and who knew who else besides?
“We got a very good copy though. We found someone with legitimate access and borrowed him for a while.”
“You’re going to have to do better than that,” he said. “My lawyer is on the verge of sending you a cease-and-desist letter. It doesn’t take long to get a temporary restraining order, you know. I could shut down your club before it opens.”
Etienne looked hurt. “Mr. Crowe, please… what is the issue?”
“The issue is your infringement of my property.”
“Oh, now that is novel,” said Nina. “Infringement? What can you possibly mean?”
“It’s my obligation to defend the mandalas or lose my right to them.”
“Yes, defend them, by all means! We all are defenders, aren’t we? But at the same time… we want them to get around, now, don’t we?” Etienne leaned close, his breath wretched from coffee, like a blast from a cat box. “You’ve seen our posters, our flyers?”
“Your computer viruses, yes. But don’t tell me you didn’t pull them all, steal them from my book.”
“Oh, my,” Nina said, sitting upright, quite serious and startled now. “Etienne, I think we have misjudged Mr. Crowe.”
Etienne looked naively surprised. “Yes, dear, I think so too.” He lit a cigarette, offering the pack to Derek, who declined. “Mr. Crowe… where did you get the designs?”
Derek blinked, uncertain how to answer. “It—it’s in my book,” he said.
“Very good. And it doesn’t suggest to you that the mandalas might speak to more than just your Ms. A?”
“I suppose… in theory.” And this was just what he had told Huon the night before. But he hadn’t believed it himself; nor did he now.
“My dear, perhaps we should show Mr. Crowe the manuscript.”
A conspiratorial look.
“He is one of us, whether he knows it or not. I suppose he ought to see.”
Etienne opened a small leather valise that lay on the seat beside him and took out a velobound folder with black vinyl covers. It looked like a business report, some shareholder’s document, until he riffled the pages and Derek saw they were photocopies of lined notebook paper, covered with handwriting and diagrams. The script was in characters unfamiliar to him, but it came as no surprise to see mandalas scattered throughout. His mandalas.
“I assume you recognize these,” said Etienne.
“What does this prove, except that you copied them?”
“Look at the dates,” Nina said, pointing to the bottom of one page, where Derek saw a thumbprint and small notations in Arabic: 15-10-78. Which, since there was no fifteenth month, must have indicated October 15, 1978.
“We can authenticate them, if you persist in doubting,” said Nina. “But why should you?”
Derek sagged, caught off guard once more. How far could he reasonably pursue his threats of a lawsuit? What would his own story sound like in court? Who would appear the greater idiot before a jury? Assuming they could prove their claims that these mandalas had been drawn a dozen years before he’d even seen Elias Mooney’s collection, what did that tell him, except that the skin and the notebooks and these pages all shared a common origin? He had given enough lip service to reality; he might as well bow to it. Here was the real author of the mandalas.
“The writing is my father’s,” said Etienne. “I assume you do not read Khmer?”
“No,” Derek growled.
“He was not Cambodian, but he was a fluent student of the culture. Many young Cambodian intellectuals and activists came to Paris for an education and ended up studying communism. My father was an anthropologist, but more, he was a Cambodian junkie; he emulated, I think, everything about his exotic friends—even embraced the Communist revolution in Cambodia, which had nothing to do with him. When I was very young, he moved there altogether, leaving me with my mother in Paris; there was no place for a child in what he was doing.”
“Poor boy,” Nina said, patting Etienne’s forearm. “Abandoned at a tender age.”