by Seeley James
Alan returned Pia’s smile. “Once, after a match in Marseille. I think you were in high school.”
Pia examined the valley snuggled into the Alps. Most of the steep hillside was pasture. To one side, corn and wheat fields lay in post-harvest ruin, their lateral furrows covered with straw. Melons and squash ripened in another field near the house. A cow and chickens stayed close to the ancient barn. One wall leaned hard to the outside, propped up by angled oak beams.
All four levels of the house were built into the hill; only the top floor was free of the mountain. Everything had that classic European look: hand-hewn, pragmatic, and aged. The only thing that stood out was the living room’s floor-to-ceiling picture window. It looked as if a Phillip Johnson glass house had been grafted into the middle of a classic French farmhouse. Yet somehow it worked.
A grandmotherly woman came to greet them, wiping her hands on her apron. Camille, the housekeeper, introduced herself in an accent so thick they could barely understand her. They went inside to wait for the owner, Olivier Jallet. Camille begged off and left them in a living room with a magnificent view.
“Remember, let me do the talking,” Dad said.
Pia flinched at his unnecessary words and swallowed her rising resentment. The downside to their time together: reopening the ten-thousand paper cuts of family relationships. At what point is the child an independent adult capable of accomplishing anything in her father’s eyes? She bit the inside of her cheek.
“He was my counterpart in the EU,” Dad said. “We worked together on several—”
“You’ve mentioned that—many times,” she said through clenched teeth.
Pia watched her father turn to the window. She worried about him. Something more than Eleni’s death and Chuck Roche’s candidacy was bothering him. He was keeping a secret. Worse, she kept a secret of her own. She still hadn’t worked up the courage to tell him how she’d broken several laws by bugging President Hunter. She wanted to tell him they were plotting against her, but the bug would put him in legal jeopardy. She couldn’t risk his future. The issue left her with a better understanding of why he obscured his role in her parents’ murders for twenty years.
Alan faced her. “Anyway, Olivier can be direct. Don’t let him unnerve—”
“Thanks, Dad.”
A few feet away, Tania looked over the valley and threw her hands up. “Where’s the w-w-wine? I don’t see any vineyards or a-anything. Isn’t this supposed to be France?”
On cue, Camille entered with a bottle and glasses. She poured and served them. They sipped. She looked around nervously, shrugged and left.
“Olivier went through a lot of guilt about his involvement in the arms business.”
“Dad. Stop.”
“Believe it or not, Pia, I’ve learned a thing or two. Have you ever considered listening—”
“Alan!” Olivier, a trim, handsome man in his fifties strode in with his arms outstretched. “Mon ami.”
They embraced. Alan introduced Pia and Tania.
“Mademoiselle.” He never took his eyes off Pia’s as he took her hand. “You have become so much the beauty. The gods bless you beyond measure. Surely you are turning down the bachelors of Washington by the dozens.”
Pia appreciated his attempt to flatter her. Most men were intimidated by her stature and fitness. The few men who took an interest in her were more excited about her exotic car collection or riding on her jet than engaging with her. Oh. Pity the rich girl. She laughed at herself. Olivier was right, she was blessed and should remain grateful forever. She smiled.
The men began talking about old times, how Olivier launched his satellites from questionable Russian rockets while Alan had the luxury of American launches.
Pia’s attention turned to the meadow below the windows. Olivier’s two teenage boys played soccer on a sloped field while their younger sister played referee. The angled pitch produced a crazy game that made them laugh and run and push each other.
Pia wondered about Stefan Devoor, her maybe-boyfriend who had adopted two children. She’d followed their travels on Instagram from time to time. The little family looked good, but a short video and occasional picture didn’t tell much about their mental health. Stefan had been forced to kill his own father to save Pia. She couldn’t imagine the psychological damage from that decision. Stefan had handled his grief by giving all his wealth to charity, becoming a single dad, and taking off to see the world. It was a questionable therapy, but she had no reference point from which to judge.
Olivier’s teens frolicked on the grass, far removed from the violence of life. They were lucky. Pia had not been so lucky. Violence and death followed her every step.
She took a deep breath and derailed her thoughts before they dove into that dark well where the ugly memories lay. The memories of her natural parents and their brutal murders. They were negative thoughts too stressful to consider when visiting Dad’s old friends.
She heard her father behind her, bringing Olivier up to date. “So, we placed fake documents with a tracking chip in the remaining safe deposit boxes.”
“How did they find the locations?”
“It took a while,” Alan said, “but we realized Strangelove was following the company’s credit card payments for each box. Because we would arrive in Cyprus at night, I had asked Eleni to bring the contents home. That was my mistake.”
“Eleni was the wise woman.” Olivier squeezed Alan’s shoulder as he fell silent. “But Strangelove is her killer—not you.” He gestured to chairs, and they sat.
Alan said, “We can’t find a common thread in all the documents Pozdeeva left us. There are quite a few signed by someone named Olesya something. Does that ring a bell?”
Olivier shook his head. “You said the Russians were behind the airline disaster. You have found the proof?”
“Nothing concrete.”
A recurring memory of impending doom surfaced. Pia could never tell if it was a dream. She stood on a cliff, the ocean pounding against the rock below her. Thousands of gallons of water shot high into the air, then fell back to earth. The ebb carried the kinetic energy out to sea leaving a harmless and placid pool below her. She felt it calling to her. She could jump in and momentarily become one with Earth’s infinite seas. Peace. Serenity. She allowed herself to imagine the dive. The waves rushed back in, assaulting the precipice with such violence that it shocked her awake.
Pia shook her head and inhaled.
Olivier and Dad were looking at her.
“You have a wonderful farm.” Pia sipped her wine. “You don’t miss the satellite business?”
Olivier observed Pia for a moment before answering. “One day I listened to a man boast that his new suit cost more than the average car. During the time he spoke, the only thought in my mind was, the finest fashions in the world—and he is still the asshole. I didn’t want to be the asshole in nice clothes. I don’t want my children to grow up thinking human value comes from cloth woven in Bangladesh.”
He sipped his wine and looked at the view. “Business partners, subcontractors, employees come bearing gifts. They are piling them at your feet as if the offerings were for the Emperor of Rome. Day after day, everyone wants to get the few minutes of your time to propose the next big business venture. They pin their hopes and dreams for the future on your thumb turning up or down. What good did it do me?”
Pia stayed silent.
“What good is it to you, Pia?” Olivier faced her with a piercing stare. “Does it bring the parents back from the dead?”
His words stunned her. She shook her head and buried her face in her wine glass. No one spoke to her like that. Olivier had hit the raw nerve she had kept carefully bandaged every day for the last twenty-two years. The toys, the dolls, the cars, the horses, the autographed soccer balls, the art objects, the fashions piled high—all meant nothing to her. Yet people, Dad especially, brought them every day. As if one more gift could erase the tragedy. They did just the opposite; they remi
nded her and amplified her painful loss.
She felt Olivier staring at her, sensing her reaction. For some reason, he was forcing her down that dark well of memories. As much as she didn’t want to go there, she had to.
In her heart, she knew that people offer gifts to signal their desire to start a relationship. A small child will take a common object from a coffee table and offer it to a visiting adult as an overture to a relationship. When you take the offered object, you are obliged to speak to them, to recognize and interact with them. Gifts are offered with hope. But to Pia, they were offered as dressings for a wound. By their presentation, they became unintentional reminders of her agony. Cues that dredged up the image of her mother’s body dangling by the neck from Leroy Johnson’s outstretched hands. Reminders of her four-year-old hands stabbing Johnson over and over again with the vegetable knife from the kitchen counter. Reminders of the enraged voice in her young head telling her to strike harder and higher. Reminders of the fountain of blood her knife produced when it struck his femoral artery.
She put the wine glass on the coffee table, its deep red liquid suddenly repulsive.
“It was my wife, Bridgette.” Olivier’s voice drifted into her thoughts. His stare still lashed to her. “He tied us to chairs and—in front of the children and me—slit her throat.”
She gasped as she met his gaze. He was cold and gray. A color she could feel in her soul.
He said, “Viktor Popov.”
CHAPTER 19
Miguel grabbed the Russian’s arms, and I picked up his feet. We dragged his dead weight to the back of the SUV in the subterranean parking garage in Barcelona. Watson and the other Russian were sleeping off the effects of the Sabel Darts while crammed in the back of what would be a micro-SUV in America. Emily kept watch from the driver’s seat.
A limo squealed up from the depths below us, rounding the corner in too big a hurry. Our truck partially blocked the ramp. The limo slammed on the brakes and stopped.
Miguel dropped his end, and I dropped mine. We kicked the Russian under the rear bumper, drew our weapons, and took a glance around the side.
The back door of the limo opened, and a stream of Spanish curse words flew out in a man’s voice. A woman in a tight red cocktail dress, matching stiletto heels and clutch backed out of it, screaming a few choice words of her own in Spanish and slammed the door. The limo backed up, cutting a steep angle to get around our car, and body-slammed the woman. She landed on her butt. The stretch burned rubber up the ramp and out of sight.
I holstered my gun and pushed around Miguel.
The lady in red was sprawled like an upside-down turtle in a dress too tight to get her feet under her. She took my outstretched hand, and I pulled her up. She dusted off her designer rear end and rubbed at a spot of grease on her knee.
An angel face looked up at me: a button nose and rosy cheeks framed with auburn hair lit by pale blue eyes. A quick, engaging smile swept across her face. For a split-second, my heart stopped beating. She said, “Thank you.”
Perfect, unaccented English was not what I expected.
Her smile vanished. She brushed a stray hair from her face and turned toward the exit without a second glance.
I said, “Uh, could I … you wanna … do you need a lift?”
“Fuck you.” Also in perfect English. Without so much as a glance over her shoulder, she disappeared into the stairwell.
The driver’s window buzzed down. Emily stuck her head out. “You need a lift? Are you kidding me? That’s your best line? She’s so far above you, you can’t see the soles of her shoes.”
The window buzzed back up.
Miguel shrugged and tugged the Russian’s arms. I ran around, grabbed the feet. We tossed him on top of the other two. Miguel pulled the hatch down.
“What are you guys doing?” Again, perfect English.
I spun to face the beauty in red and noticed her lipstick also matched her ensemble. “Aaahhh. Well, um, drunk … friends.”
“And you were going to offer me a ride in that? With them?”
Tongue tied, I pointed at the back of the car, realized we couldn’t squeeze a kindergartner in there, then twisted to the front door, where Miguel was reaching for the handle, then flopped my arms by my side. “Can I call you a cab?”
“Yeah.” She opened her purse and took out a packet of gum. “They don’t have Uber in this New-York-Wannabe town.”
I looked back at Miguel. He rolled his eyes and got in the truck.
To call a cab in a foreign country, you need a clue where to start, not to mention a rudimentary grasp of the local language. Since I didn’t have either of those, I called the Sabel Security help desk. A cab was ordered in three seconds.
“I didn’t mean to be so rude earlier.” She pointed to where the limo decked her. “Not a good week. I’m volunteering at a fundraiser tomorrow in Monaco. I have to get there … somehow.”
She shrugged.
“No offense taken.” I grinned. “Cab should be outside in five.”
She smiled as if she were mildly impressed and unwrapped her gum. She held it in her fingers and placed it on her tongue and slid it back into her mouth where her lips closed around it and sucked it the rest of the way in with a definitive thup.
My heart rate rose, and my lungs expelled all their air.
“What’s your name?” she asked softly.
“Jacob.” I prayed I wasn’t drooling. “And yours?”
“Sylvia.” All three syllables rolled from her lips like liquid, long e’s ending with a drawn-out ah. SEAL-vee-yahh.
She chewed her gum with deliberate slowness. Grace and sensuality in food consumption is such a rarity that its discovery can bring the meaning of life into focus on a whole new plane of existence.
Sylvia gave me a tease of her electrifying smile and finger-waved. “See ya.”
She turned back up the stairwell and flexed every fiber of muscle in her amazing legs while disappearing up and away.
Emily blasted the horn. “We’re committing a crime here, Romeo—GET IN THE CAR.”
I squeezed in the backseat sideways since the two in front had raked their seats all the way back. Miguel because he was six-four, two-twenty, and Emily because she thought she was Lewis Hamilton in a Formula One car. She stomped on the gas, expecting the mini-SUV to burn rubber. The car’s acceleration, uphill and fully loaded, lacked enthusiasm. The little engine revved up as best it could with six people. Eventually, we made it up the ramp, found our way to the W Barcelona, and snuck our drugged friends through the service elevator to our suite.
Watson and the Russians would sleep for several hours. We propped them in chairs, duct-taped and cuffed them, and went to sit on the balcony. We sipped wine and watched the evening shadows stretch across the Balearic Sea.
Emily talked about her favorite subject: Emily. She’d left Bianca hanging. Miguel and I shook our heads in dismay. I always wonder how people as smart as Emily could make such dumb decisions about love.
I’ve never done that.
I got up while they talked and leaned my forearms on the railing. The view was spectacular. Far below, beachgoers called it a day, packed their bags, and came inside. Sailboats bobbed on low waves and seagulls swooped in for seafood. Inside, I had two Russians and a traitor waiting to be interrogated. Life was good.
Mercury floated down from above. Things were tough at the Dii Consentes review, homie. I had your life spared, but then you went and saved Sylvia. You guys were supposed to get nervous and shoot her by accident. So, it’s on you. You messed up, and it’s over. It’s been nice, bro. But. Now they’re down to arguing over whether you should die at sea, on land, or from the air. I guess technically that would be by land as well, seeing as how you don’t die while you’re falling. He did a double-take when he looked in the suite. What’s with the bondage thing? Are you going kinky? Cause we might reconsider your death scenario.
I said, What? That’s it? You guys are going to off me? I just fell
in love. Again.
Mercury patted my shoulder. Don’t worry, dawg, I’ll make it slow and painful.
But I wanted to get married, have a family, watch the kids grow up and go to jail.
That’s what they all say. Hey, brutha, relax. I’m the one who guides you across the river into the afterlife. He looked over the railing. Say, that’s a long way down. And you’d land on the rocks. This might be just what Juno ordered.
I said, Wait! I’ll build a shrine. I’ll show it to the Caesar-Sabels.
Too late for that. The wings on his helmet started flapping. He once told me that was how his intra-deity messages arrived. Hang on a second. I gotta take this.
Mercury rose thirty feet.
As I watched him, I leaned back against the balcony railing.
I heard a ka-thunk. Something halfway between metal and concrete. Or both.
In the next instant, the railing gave way.
The metal and glass partition on which my butt rested broke loose from one side and swung out over open space as if on a hinge. My weight had been counting on it and no longer had any support. I went backward over the chasm of nothingness below. All the wine in my glass flew out—but I maintained a firm, three-finger grip on the stemware because, in case of survival, a refill would be warranted. I flailed for purchase with my left hand. I flailed for purchase with my right pinkie. Nothing there. I continued to fall backward.
From deep in my brain, the ancient ape who once swung through trees took control. If my earliest ancestors could grip branches with their feet, so could I. My life depended on it. My toes curled to grip through the soles of my boots in a last-ditch effort to stay on the twentieth floor.
Apparently, a lot of water has passed under the bridge since we swung on trees. A lot of handy instincts were abandoned along the evolutionary river. My toes gripped nothing but sock.
I was falling to my death.
I hoped the gods were happy. One day they save you from an onslaught of a thousand Mujahedeen. The next day they save you from an angry husband with a loaded .44. And for what? So they can have a belly laugh watching you thrash two hundred feet.
