Greenhouse Summer (11 page)

Prince Eric Esterhazy styled his apartment on the Quai de La Tournelle his “little bachelor pied-à-terre” when inviting ladies up for the first time. This uncharacteristic touch of princely modesty was a cunning piece of seductive reverse hype, and seldom failed to enhance the desired gasp.

For the said “little bachelor pad” was a penthouse atop the sixth floor overlooking Notre Dame across the Seine.

It had a fifty-meter living room the size of your average Parisian one-bedroom apartment decorated like an eighteenth-century nobleman’s salon.

It had a large terrace overlooking the river, landscaped into a fair simulacrum of a lost South Seas paradise: palm trees, palmettos, brilliant floral exotics, a small saltwater pool with an ersatz coral reef and a precarious population of tropical fish.

It had a state-of-the-art robocuisine in which one might prepare
a hands-on-gourmet dinner or, if one was as hopeless in the kitchen as Eric, leave it to the software to convince your guest that you had.

It had a bathroom featuring a small sauna and a giant marble bathtub with jacuzzi, leading directly, more often than not, into a bedroom equipped with bar, holowalls, polarizable picture window overlooking the cathedral, and, not at all incidentally, a large bed well equipped with electronic and mechanical enhancements.

It also had an office masquerading as a nineteenth-century Victorian English nobleman’s library—ridiculously functional fireplace with elaborate mantel, walnut bookshelves filled with leather-bound titles, overstuffed burgundy-leather chairs, heavy walnut breakfront. And while one wall of books was the real thing, the other was a flat that slid open to reveal a computer, an outsized vidphone screen, a safe, and a small armory of a dozen tools of Eric’s occasional alternate trade.

Right now, however, he was dealing with his main enterprise and unhappily refusing a large sum of money.

Their checkered paternal ethnic history in eastern Europe being what it had been, the Esterhazys had never been encumbered by a family religious tradition, but turning down major offers of money certainly violated it anyway.

“Look, we
are
willing to negotiate, so let’s cut the fencing act and get to the bottom line . . . Prince Esterhazy,” said the woman on the screen, expressing her willingness to up the offer a lot more facilely than she seemed willing to grant him the dignity of his title.

In fact
they
, whoever
they
were—the UNACOCS bureaucracy, the UN itself, Bread & Circuses, it was never quite clear—had been trying to rent
La Reine de la Seine
for the duration of their conference for over a week now.

Having failed thus far with unalloyed greed, they had now apparently decided to try upping the ante with a more alluring representative.

Alluring this Monique Calhoun was, or as alluring as any woman could be via vidphone without a glimpse of anything below the elegant neckline—that delicate yet somehow strong French nose and high cheekbones, that looser and easier anglophone-muscled mouth, those neat shell ears peeking out from a short bedroom tumble of black hair,
those weasel-keen bright blue eyes—but there was also something annoying about her, too certain that the weight of Bread & Circuses behind her gave her a puissance no mere phony prince could resist.

On the other hand, Eric was forced to observe, his phallic alter ego seemed to be displaying a certain independence, taking it as a challenge, and rising manfully to it.

“
You
may address me as simply Prince Eric, Ms. Calhoun,” he told her magnanimously.

“May Ah really?” she replied in an acid-tinged magnolia accent.

“Noblesse oblige, Ms. Calhoun.”

“I’ll bet you say that to all the girls . . .
Prince Eric
.”

“Only to the ones who meet my refined and sophisticated standards of beauty, Monique.”

“
You
may address me as Ms. Calhoun, Your Highness,” she said. “And you may also tell me what your real price is, because the chances are we are ready to meet it.”

Eric hesitated. Eric grew more deeply unhappy. Eric didn’t know quite what to say. Certainly the truth did not seem a palatable option.

Because the truth was that
La Reine
was not for rent to anyone at any price for any reason. And the truth was that this was Bad Boys policy set at levels to which he lacked even access, let alone the authority to overrule it. Nor was he permitted to violate the fiction that he was the lord and master of
La Reine de la Seine
by alluding to the syndic he fronted for. Thus the truth was something it would be both dangerous and galling to admit.

Doubly galling, somehow, to admit it to Ms. Monique Calhoun.

Although, perhaps, by arduous physical effort, she just might be able to extract an edited version from him. Or not. At least the poor girl should be given an opportunity to try.

“You are serious, Ms. Calhoun? I may simply set any price?”

“Within reason.”

“I thought so,” Eric said dryly. “Still, I suppose, I have nothing to lose by indulging you in a discussion of the nature of reason. A philosophical discussion, of course.”

“Right . . .”

“Say this evening around four-thirty . . . ? At my office?”

“Where’s that, on the boat?”

“Ashore, actually. On the Quai de La Tournelle. Attached to . . . my little pied-à-terre.”

MONIQUE HAD PREPPED HERSELF WITH A QUICK netsearch on Prince Eric Esterhazy, which had yielded hundreds of items, but little useful information. Most of them were gossip file stuff, and most of that seemed professionally planted to her educated eye. The name was apparently real, but the dubious title had been purchased from the Grimaldis at the usual cut-rate price, and the pedigree swiftly peetered backward and eastward into a long line of undistinguished Austro-Hungarian-Romanian con artists.

Esterhazy had apparently traded on his title to obtain employ as glorified doorman to a series of casinos and whorehouses leading up to his current position as an upscale version on
La Reine de la Seine
. The famous riverboat itself appeared to be the property of a syndic whose citizen-shareholders included the crew, the chef and his team, the band, a score or so of onshore support workers, Esterhazy, and, strangely enough, his mother, who appeared to have only a token position as “booking agent.”

Who had how many shares was not a matter of public record, but it did not appear that Esterhazy had a particularly dominant holding, or, given his previous employment record, could have been a serious financial contributor to the construction of
La Reine
.

A sleazy ersatz Eurotrash nobleman from nowhere in particular fronting the latest in a string of leisure palaces who had reached the top of his dubious profession.

But which turned out to seem to be a more lucrative one than Monique had supposed.

His apartment building, a six-floor eighteenth-century edifice last renovated in the twentieth by the look of it, seemed modest enough from the outside, though the Left Bank quaiside address was primo. The elevator was indeed the standard twentieth century Parisian retrofit, a tiny vertical coffin in a grillework cage squeezed into the central well of an ancient spiral staircase, and it deposited her in a small unprepossessing antechamber.

The door to Prince Eric Esterhazy’s demesne, however, looked like something taken from an old church—anciently gray carved wood bound in well-greened bronze, set in a gothic stone archway—and it seemed genuine. When she raised and let fall the gargoyle-faced knocker, it triggered a full orchestral version of the four signature notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

The man who opened the door a perfect sixty seconds later
was
handsome enough to be a prince. Eric Esterhazy was tall, well built, with high dramatic Slavic cheekbones, an aquiline nose, clear green eyes, and a lovely mane of long blond hair. Only the smirky set of his full lips rescued his face from the blandness of fashion-model perfection. He wore a black velvet pajama suit just tightly enough tailored to display the goods to the maximum effect without getting obvious about it.

“Welcome to my humble abode, Ms. Calhoun,” he said with only the slightest frisson of irony, and when he made with the Romanian hand-kissing act, he did it to four-star perfection, though Monique found herself counting her fingers afterward.

Esterhazy then turned with a flourish, and led her directly into a living room that fully matched hers at the Ritz for rococo glitz and was maybe twice the size. Bird’s-egg-blue walls, rose wall-to-wall carpeting under four antique Oriental rugs, crystal chandelier, carved green marble fireplace, a warehouse full of eighteenth-century furniture, none of it looking particularly sittable, massive landscape paintings
in ornate gilt frames, huge bouquets of flowers in porcelain Chinese vases.

The works.

Esterhazy gave her a carefully measured moment of goggle time.

“It’s a bit cozier out on the balcony,” he suggested.

The cozy “balcony” was a large fully landscaped terrace with a breathtaking view of the Seine, and Notre Dame, and the Right Bank beyond—the river traffic floating lazily through the green-encrusted stonework bayou, flocks of green and blue parakeets wheeling over the bronzed roof of the cathedral, the twin lines of tall palm trees marking the Champs-Élysées’ long march from the lush landscapes of the Tuileries to the Arc de Triomphe bridging the reflecting pond in the center of the Place de l’Etoile gardens—all the way to the ghostly white Moorish mirage of Sacré Coeur floating atop the jungled hilltop of Montmartre at the far limit of vision.

At this afternoon hour, the sun was just coming down past the Eiffel Tower, sending lengthening shadows over the chiaroscuroed cityscape, beginning to purple the sky at the zenith, gilding the inversion layer haze over Paris to a romantic glow.

It was heartstoppingly lovely. It was the Paris of her heart’s desire. It was so perfect that it would have been absolute kitsch had it not been real.

The
landscaping
of the terrace, on the other hand, was just the sort of disney that set Monique’s True Blue teeth on edge.

Some urban interior decorator had confected his fatuous notion of a South Seas island paradise. Potted palms and palmettos. A dozen species of waxy-flowered plants forced into riotous colorful bloom. A pond done up as a phony miniature coral reef, complete with brightly colored tropical fish extinct in the wild and worth their weight in caviar. Rattan tables and great woven peacock chairs than on second look turned out to be crafted from weatherproof synthetics. In a silver ice bucket sat some tropical punch, heavily laced, no doubt, with rum or gin and probably both. The only thing missing was the grass skirts and slaveys with palm-frond fans.

A South Seas island.

As reconstructed from old twentieth-century advertising videos by
someone who had never been there. Never seen the sere, desiccated scrub of what little remained above the waterline. Never broiled in the actinic sun. Never swum above the dead-white corpses of the reefs overrun with starveling starfish.

To Monique, who had seen and done these things in the grim line of duty, the landscaping of Prince Eric Esterhazy’s terrace had all the charm of that hideous virtuality re-creation of the legendary Great Barrier Reef, replete with singing tropical fish and dancing sharks, that she had once been dragged to in downtown Sydney.

Esterhazy steered her to chairs beside the table holding the ice bucket, and poured her a tall drink that was somehow both blue and brownish. It was sickeningly sweet and unsubtly powerful. It was called a “zombie.”

It somehow seemed perfect.

Monique sipped at it very gingerly indeed.

“Shall we get down to business . . . Prince Eric?” she said.

“That would be a waste of a lovely sunset, Ms. Calhoun,” Eric Esterhazy said. “However, I will offer you one deal right now—I get to drop the Ms. Calhoun, and you get to drop the Prince.” He gave her a smile that must’ve melted a thousand panties. “Have we got a quid pro quo . . .
Monique?
”

“It’s a beginning,
Eric
 . . . But as we say on the sunken sidewalks of New York, money talks, bullshit walks.”

Esterhazy smiled right through it.