Unintended Consequences (4 page)

•   •   •

S
tone pulled back into duBois’s driveway and stopped before the gathered guests. He got out and called to the crowd. “You won’t believe this!” he said to the group.

DuBois assisted Helga from the car, and Stone took her arm. His driver from earlier in the evening appeared.

“Mr. Barrington, I will drive you back to your hotel whenever you wish,” he said.

“Thank you. Helga, may I give you a lift?”

“Yes, thank you, but I’d like to visit the powder room first.”

“I’ll be waiting.” She went back into the house.

Rick LaRose approached. “I’ve brought your name up a few times, and all that I could learn is that duBois considers you a very special guest.”

“He just sold me one of his cars,” Stone said.

“Then you are a very special guest indeed,” Rick replied, “because he has declined even to take orders for the car before it reaches showrooms. Billionaires all over the world will be clamoring for it. Tell me, have you recollected anything of the past few days?”

“Not a thing,” Stone replied, “and I’m wondering what I could possibly have done for Marcel duBois to make him so grateful to me.”

7

S
tone and Helga stepped into the Maybach, the doors were closed by footmen, and the car moved away, its only noise being the crunch of gravel under the tires.

“Where would you like to go?” Stone asked.

“The Plaza Athénée Hotel, please,” she replied. “I have an apartment there.”

“What a coincidence,” Stone said, wondering if it actually was.

“You are at the hotel, too?”

“I am.”

“How convenient,” she said, placing a hand on his thigh.

Stone could not but agree. “How long have you known Marcel?”

“Since my divorce—about two years.”

“Was this evening typical of his style of entertaining?”

“Except for the presence of the Blaise, yes, entirely typical. Marcel once told me that as a young man starting out, he always desired the best he could afford, and now that he can afford anything he likes, the results are remarkable. Can you afford whatever you like?”

Stone laughed. “Yes, but my desires are more achievable than Marcel’s.”

“That is probably wise. One should not try to compete with Marcel—not in any way.”

“That’s good advice.”

“I was astonished that Marcel offered you the car this evening, and flabbergasted that he gave you that price. That can only mean that he places a very high value on your acquaintance. Why is that, do you suppose?”

“Helga,” Stone said, “I have been trying to figure that out all evening. I don’t even know why I was at the dinner.”

She looked at him oddly. “Have you and Marcel known each other long?”

“For less than a week,” Stone replied.

“I am surprised that Marcel went out of his way to put us together,” she said. “He indicated to me that he had a very high opinion of you, and that impressed me.”

The car came to a halt in front of their hotel.

“He has a high opinion of you, too,” Stone replied. “And if he wants so much for us to be together, it would be churlish of us to disappoint him.”

“Come with me,” Helga said, alighting from the car. She led him to an elevator he had not seen, one with only one button, which she pressed. The doors opened not into a hallway, but directly into a private vestibule, furnished with only an antique table and a very large floral display. She led him into a handsome drawing room, furnished with pieces clearly not from the hotel’s inventory, then into a bedroom, also beautifully decorated.

She stopped, turned to him, and touched her lips to his.

It was the first time, he reflected, that a woman had ever had to bend down to kiss him. As if reading his mind, she reached down and shed her shoes. That brought them exactly nose to nose. “There, is that better?” she asked.

“It’s perfect,” Stone said, kissing her again. She pushed his jacket off his shoulders; he caught it and tossed it onto a chair, then she pulled his bow tie loose and unbuttoned his collar.

“Do you think you can finish doing this while I step out for a moment?” she asked.

“I think I remember how,” Stone replied, working on his buttons. He watched her walk from the room, reaching behind her for a zipper, while he draped his dinner suit carefully over the chair and stood, waiting for her.

The lights dimmed, but not too much, and she came back into the room naked. Nothing like her since Anita Ekberg, Stone thought. They kissed again, and while he rubbed her nipples with the backs of his fingers, she reached down and took him in her hand.

“Ah, so you are glad to see me?” she said.

“It would appear so,” he replied.

They fell into bed, and the next hour would count among Stone’s fondest memories. Whatever two people could do, they did, holding nothing back.

•   •   •

S
tone awoke alone in bed, completely disoriented. Not until she came into the room did it flood back. She was wearing a beautiful dressing gown, and she tossed a terry robe onto the bed for him. “Let’s not shock the room service waiter,” she said, leaning over and kissing him. “He’ll be here in a moment.”

Stone repaired to the bathroom for a quick shower and the use of a hotel toothbrush. He brushed his wet hair back and got into the robe, and when he arrived back in the bedroom, the waiter had come and gone, leaving a large tray table laden with breakfast. He sat down, and Helga served him eggs Benedict and champagne, a Krug ’90. He couldn’t bring himself to mix it with his orange juice.

“What does your day hold?” Helga asked.

“I have a dinner engagement,” he replied. “And I hope to get some work done.”

“How long will you be in Paris?”

“I don’t know, but probably not more than a few days.”

“Will you have dinner with me tomorrow evening?”

“Of course.”

“Tour d’Argent at eight o’clock?”

“Perfect.”

They finished breakfast, then returned to bed for another hour. Finally, Stone got into his tuxedo, kissed her, and returned to his suite.

It was after ten, and when he opened the door he found another envelope, addressed in the same calligraphy as before. It contained a brief note from Marcel:

Stone, it was a great pleasure to have you as my guest last evening. Enclosed are the pertinent documents for your car. My customs agent in New York will clear the car at JFK airport and deliver it to your home. It is my hope that you will enjoy it for many years to come.

Stone found an invoice among the papers. He wrote a check for $225,000, then e-mailed Joan to move the cash to his checking account. Then he wrote a note of thanks to Marcel for his hospitality and for the privilege of buying the car. He phoned down for a bellman and sealed the check in an envelope addressed to Marcel’s offices, as per the invoice. “Please have this delivered by messenger,” he said to the man, slipping him twenty euros along with the envelope.

Stone shaved and dressed in a tweed jacket and open-collared shirt, then left the hotel and walked for a while. It was a crisp autumn day with clear skies, a perfect time to be in Paris. The trees along the sidewalks were beginning to change their colors.

A car pulled up beside him, and a window rolled down. “Good morning,” Rick LaRose said. “Hop in.”

Stone got into the car. “Good morning.”

“I trust your evening continued to go well after the dinner,” LaRose said.

“It did indeed.”

“I have an appointment at Charvet. Will you come with me? I’ll need advice.”

“Sure,” Stone said. “Then I’ll buy you lunch.”

8

L
aRose was being measured by the tailor while Stone flipped through fabric swatches. At Rick’s insistence, he chose six suit patterns, two tweeds for jackets, cavalry twills for odd trousers, cashmere for a blue blazer, and a lightweight Italian worsted for a tuxedo. Then he turned to shirt swatches, picking Sea Island cotton for the whites, and Egyptian cotton for the stripes and checks. A dozen neckties, then, their business done at Charvet, they stopped into Berluti for shoes, then went back to Rick’s car.

“Saint-Germain-des-Prés,” Stone said. “Do you know it?”

“Yes, I think,” Rick replied, slipping the car into gear.

“How long have you been in Paris, Rick?” Stone asked.

“Not quite a month.”

“And before that?”

“Postings in Africa and the Middle East.”

“That would explain your need for better apparel.”

“It would, and I managed to combine the clothing allowances for three postings with some poker winnings, just managing to cover the Charvet bill. The shoes came out of my pay.”

“The clothes should last you for many years, if you don’t wear them for black bag jobs.”

“What do you know about black bag jobs?” Rick asked. “You’re a corporate lawyer.”

“Surely you read my file more closely than that.”

“All right, you were a cop, but you didn’t do black bag jobs, did you?”

“No, I caught people who did.”

“Sometimes I think I’d rather hold that end of the stick,” Rick said.

“There, grab that parking spot,” Stone said, pointing.

Rick swung into it, then they got out and walked fifty yards down the boulevard to Brasserie Lipp.

“What is this place?” Rick asked.

“Alsatian food and a slick clientele,” Stone replied. He was surprised that the headwaiter recognized him after a three-year absence and gave them a favored table on the ground floor instead of sending them upstairs with the tourists. Stone introduced Rick to the headwaiter, explaining that he was an American diplomat. The man gave Rick his card, and they sat down, Stone with his back to the wall at Rick’s insistence.

“For many years I hung out at a restaurant called Elaine’s in New York.”

“I’ve heard of it.”

“Lipp is the closest thing Paris has to Elaine’s. You’ll want to try the choucroute, and beer is good with it.”

“Order for me,” Rick said.

“Is ‘commercial attaché’ your usual handle when you’re out and about?” Stone asked.

“It is if I’m to be with businesspeople. If I’m with the artsier types, then I’m the cultural attaché. Whatever works.”

“That could be the Agency’s motto,” Stone observed.

“And a good one at that.” Rick’s eyes flicked to the mirror above Stone’s head. He was sitting with his back to the room.

“See someone you know?”

“Someone I’d like not to see me. The man in the pin-striped suit.”

Stone glanced across the room. “Who is he?”

“Opposition.”

Stone offered his sunglasses. “Will these help?”

“Thanks,” Rick said, slipping them on. “You don’t want him to see me with you—that might cause unwanted attention to be paid to you.”

“You’ve been here less than a month, and already you know the opposition and they know you?”

“I read the files on all of them as soon as I hit Paris,” Rick said, “and I expect they’ve had a look at my file, too. It’s par for the course. It’s also interesting that that guy is frequenting this particular place—the headwaiter seemed to know him. I’ll put that in my report.”

“You write a lot of reports, do you?”

“It’s a big part of what I do.”

“Try and keep me out of them, will you?”

“Are you kidding? You float in over our transom in a drug-induced coma, and you don’t want anybody to notice?”

Stone shrugged. “I guess that was naive of me.”

“It was.”

The choucroutes arrived—a bed of sauerkraut covered with slices of pork and veal.

“Very, very good,” Rick said after a couple of bites.

“Don’t eat it all, you’ll sleep through the afternoon.”

“Good advice.”

“Rick, can you run a name through your computers for me?”

“Does it relate to this trip?”

“Yes. The name is Amanda Hurley.”

“Who is she?”

“I’ve no idea. She called the hotel and said we met on the airplane and invited me to dinner. I can’t even give you a description, except of her accent, which was mid-Atlantic.”

Rick produced a smartphone and typed for thirty seconds, then put it away. “Soon,” he said.

“How’d you get into this racket?” Stone asked.

“I had a misspent youth,” Rick said. “I left home at sixteen and got into all sorts of trouble, did a little local time, nothing felonious. A guy came to see me, said his name was Jim. I got the impression that a detective who had busted me a couple of times had said something to him about me. He asked me if I spoke Spanish—asked me in Spanish—so I conversed with him in that language. He knew that I’d just barely gotten through high school and asked where I’d picked up the tongue. I told him on the street, and he seemed impressed.”

“He was Agency?”

“He must have bailed me out, because when I hit the street he was waiting for me. He bought me some clothes—even then I dressed unsuitably—and took me to dinner at a big-time steak house, where the conversation ranged over everything I had ever done—crimes, sports, hobbies, whatever—then it turned to what I was going to do with my life.”

“How old were you at the time?”

“Nineteen, going on forty-five.”

“Did he make you an offer?”

“He asked me if I’d give him a few weeks of my time, and I didn’t have anything better to do, so I said sure. I figured I owed him. He asked me if there was anything in my rented room that I couldn’t walk away from, and I thought about it and told him no.”

“What happened then?”

“When we left the restaurant there was a car and driver waiting for us. We were driven to JFK, and Jim gave me some cash and a ticket, said I’d be met at the other end. Next morning I found myself in Monterey, California, at a language school, learning Russian. I aced that, and after a couple of weeks they tried me with Arabic. Turns out I had a gift. I was there for fourteen months and left conversant in half a dozen languages, including Swedish and French.

“During my time there, people came to see me, people with only first names. I filled out a lot of forms, wrote my biography, and was given three polygraph exams. On my last day, when I had no idea where I’d go next, I was offered a trainee’s position with the Agency. I flew to D.C., where somebody met me and delivered me to Fort Peary, Virginia.”