The Little Burgundy: A Jeanne Dark Adventure

by Bill Jones Jr.

  Once out of the service, despite Gar’s admonitions that I settle down, I hopped from one bad relationship to the next, seemingly attracting women who were, let’s say, emotionally embellished. I attracted crazies like body heat draws mosquitoes—a gift I fondly call my crazy magnet. Failing at settling down, I opted for a career, figuring if you’re going to be unhappy, you may as well be miserable with a wad of cash. Maybe money can’t buy you happiness, but it can buy you a scenic view of your unhappy surroundings, and poverty can’t buy you shit. I finally finished my bachelor’s degree, and I had a skill courtesy of Uncle Sam plus a knack for dealing with people. Identifying emotionally unbalanced people was my specialty, especially those who passed muster on psychological profiles. My Army days provided quite a bit of background in psychology, but I also had the crazy magnet. It may have wreaked havoc with my personal life, but it proved invaluable at work. The military assumed my ability to identify human threats was due to their fantastic training regimen, and it suited me to let them think so. I’ve written numerous tomes for the military regarding my processes for identifying unstable, dangerous targets. The books are mostly psychobabble. In fact, as much as anything, the targets were drawn to me. Perhaps there is something in my psyche that attracts them, a thought that has kept me up many nights.

  I eventually turned my dubious talents into a lucrative career as a professional Security Consultant based in Washington, D.C. on the infamous K Street corridor. There, the U.S. government and its contractors paid me upwards of $200 an hour to root out bad guys. Even better, I didn’t have to enter war zones. Instead, I was a SME, which is government speak for Subject Matter Expert, and pronounced smee. I earned my keep in the luxurious confines of CIA and military prisons, helping them detect deception or plain old fanaticism in detainees. I was good at the work even though it wasn’t always pleasant. Hell, it was damned unpleasant. But on good days, the bitter morning aftertaste of humans’ being psychologically tormented for information could be washed away by the foretaste of hefty contract dollars and several glasses of bootleg whiskey. In any event, I’d struggled to reach that level of success, spending years doing reams of Is my new girlfriend crazy? jobs before the government work became steady, and my motivation not to go back to the nightmare of personal relationship investigations dulled the pain of too much screaming and too many prison-morning hangovers.

  Later, I began lecturing based on my experiences in deception detection and even managed to publish an actual, non-military book before the government could claim what was in my head was classified. Perhaps the writing stemmed from a deep-seated need to feel I was doing something meaningful instead of just being paid embarrassing sums to exploit the emotionally disturbed, or maybe I just didn’t want to end up an alcoholic war hawk like Dad. Gar claimed it was all a scam so I could meet smart, sexy women—an accusation I couldn’t entirely dismiss. Whichever, it was within that framework that I met Jeanne Dark on a cloudy September day.

  I’d fought the morning rush-hour traffic for a ten-thirty meeting at a coffee shop in Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. I was to meet a SME who I was told was a highflier the Department of Homeland Security wanted to hire. I suspected DHS was fronting for the CIA, which was rare to unheard of, so I knew whatever was going on was heavy. All I’d been told was that the SME’s name was Jeanne Camille d’Arc, that she spelled her last name Dark and not to pronounce her first name Gene. I felt like a fool on the Metro mumbling “Zhahn” to myself, but most people probably figured I was talking into my phone. One of the mixed blessings of technology is that everyone looks crazy using it. It makes my set of skills even more in demand.

  I did my own little investigation on Dr. Dark, figuring that was part of the job. My government contacts never hesitated to throw little tests my way to see how diligent I was regarding investigations. While I do rely somewhat on instinct when it comes to reading people, my customers pay me for old-fashioned, nuts and bolts investigation. At the end of the day, it comes down to facts, figures, and being organized enough to put them all together. Admittedly, I’m not the best analyst in the world, but the government has enough of those guys already. You can only analyze facts if you remember them. I do.

  I learned Dark had passed the U.S. government’s highest clearance—Top Secret with Special Compartmented Information—TS/SCI in Gov-speak, strictly need-to-know stuff. I knew she was a foreign national, not a U.S. citizen, with family still overseas, and I learned she absolutely refused to renounce her French citizenship, which is a requirement for gaining both a U.S citizenship and a TS/SCI clearance. That gave me two important bits of insight: one, she was stubborn to a fault, as are most brilliant or successful people, and two, whatever her skill set, the U.S. government was willing to break its own security protocols to obtain her services, or at least keep them away from its enemies. I presented my assessment to my Government contact, Kevin Hardesty, who grunted an affirmation and added that Dark was being considered for some work, which I wasn’t cleared to know, involving people who were none of my business. However, it wasn’t difficult to figure it involved covert ops in the Intel sector. For them to bring me in meant they were targeting her for a very risky operation—one that required a steady hand—and they needed to know if she was stable.

  It was almost unheard of to hold a meeting on a TS/SCI job in a non-secure facility, but the Gov wanted an assessment in a hurry. They also needed to know how she reacted during uncontrolled situations. I picked a busy Starbucks even though I’m generally allergic to coffee shops. The Dupont Circle shop was busy pretty much any time of day, and though well behaved, it was definitely an unpredictable crowd. The idea was to see how Dark handled a stressful interview amid managed chaos. I’d learned she was physically impaired from being struck by a car when she was eleven. I was also curious to see how that affected her, if at all.

  At 10:47, Dark made her appearance. She was seventeen minutes late, and I was sixteen minutes annoyed. At first, all I saw was Hardesty. He was an obsessively punctual, squat little man about five foot eight and just as wide, with an extra roll of neck fat that always seemed to be leaking over his constricted collar. He was particularly dapper on this day, sporting a black suit coat, brown pants, a nightmarish tie that I guessed was supposed to pull the coat and pants together, along with tan Oxfords in need of a good polishing followed by throwing them the hell in the trash. His attire told me Dark was a high roller as SMEs go, since he never wore a suit coat unless he was with someone he needed to impress. He’d have impressed people more by sending one of his direct reports in his place. The man was a proven imbecile, but he was my COR—that’s the Contracting Officer’s Rep, the guy in charge of saying I did my job well enough to get paid.

  Hardesty was frowning as he walked in the coffee shop. He blessed me with a brief nod of his snow-capped, scarlet-faced head and skated straight over to order a jumbo-extra-latte-mochaccino cup of the brown, sugary bilge water these places serve and, most likely, his third Danish of the morning. I was drinking decaf, black, in whatever the hell hipsters called a twelve-ounce cup.

  As Hardesty zoomed through the shop—he was pretty nimble for a guy his size—I saw this pale beauty come in. She didn’t look sickly, but I could still imagine she was allergic to the sun, given how little of it seemed to color her skin. The bit of sunlight that dared touch her through the window made her skin shine as if she were made of rose-tinged porcelain. The weather was still nice in D.C. in late September, so she was wearing a loose-fitting white top and green capris. Not exactly business attire, but not casual either. Stylish. Pricey. As she worked her way through the crowd, I finally got a good look at her face. It was pretty, what I could see of it. I reckoned she was about thirty or thirty-one. She sported a triangular face, prominent cheek bones, nice lips covered with burgundy gloss, and Hugo Boss sunglasses that hid half her face. She was slender, only about an ounce or two above skinny. Like I said, Audrey Hepburn, or maybe Jackie Kennedy. That’s how she struck me when I fi
rst laid eyes on her—like she’d stumbled fresh off the cover of LOOK Magazine from the 1960s.

  By her attire and her graceful demeanor, I wasn’t sure this was Dark. She certainly didn’t fit the mental image of the hard-nosed alpha female I’d drawn in my head. But then I saw the cane. Ms. Sunglasses was definitely Jeanne Dark. She wasn’t limping, not really, but you could tell the cane was bearing some of the weight of her right hip. It was an elegant appendage, as these things go, made of lacquered ebony with a sterling silver collar in the middle and a matching silver handle carved into an elaborate swan’s head. My first instinct was to rush over to help her, under the guise of introducing myself, as she was walking so slowly it was painful to watch. Something told me to hold back, however. This was a business meeting, and implying that your new client is helpless is a good way not to get paid. Besides, there was something about her demeanor—like she was creeping along on purpose. I decided I didn’t mind, as it gave me a valid reason to stare at her.

  On closer examination, her movements weren’t so much slow as they were deliberate, as if she were taking photographs with an invisible camera. I shrugged off that idea for the more rational one that she couldn’t find Hardesty or me in those dark glasses. After she looked in my direction a few times without approaching, I stood, since I’m not too hard to miss, standing. I go about six-four, and I’m built like a linebacker. She looked right at me, nodded, and then kept walking in her measured, let’s-scan-the-whole-room manner. After about sixty seconds, she made it from the front door to my table.

  “Hello, I am Jeanne Dark.” Her voice was soft, and I almost lost the words simmering in that French accent. I tried not to be charmed by it. She added, “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” in French, and I gave up resisting. I may as well have tried not to be tall. “Purple,” she said, before I could even open my mouth.

  “Excuse me?” Now I’m the color of cocoa, but not of midnight, so I assumed she wasn’t talking about my skin. I double-checked my tie, confirming I’d worn the grey one that matched my suit. I tried to read her eyes through those dark shades and could see just enough to tell she wasn’t really looking at me. It was more as if she was looking around me.

  “I’ve never seen purple before,” she said. “It’s very pretty.”

  By then, I had her pegged as at least eccentric. I offered my hand. “Foster Cain, Dr. Dark.”

  “It is a pleasure, Foss.” Right until that moment, I’d hated it when anyone had shortened my name. It was my grandmother’s family name, and I wore it proudly. But when Jeanne Dark smiled and took my hand, switching the cane to her left so deftly that I didn’t even notice her doing it, all my prior prejudices with respect to my name faded into meaninglessness. She could have called me Dumbass and I would have heard it as Dumas. Her handshake was delicate and ladylike, enough so that it made me want to genuflect. She made no move to take off those glasses. They were so dark I couldn’t really see her eyes, much less determine their color, or whether they were bugging out like a psycho-zombie slasher. “My eyes are green,” she said, all the while looking toward Hardesty who was approaching with two enormous cups of coffee and a Danish.

  “Excuse me?” I said for the second time. I heard her. It just caught me off-guard, her reading me like that. I was the reader; she was the readee.

  She turned toward me and for the first time looked me flush in the face. She smiled. I liked it. “You were wondering what color my eyes are. They are green.”

  I returned the smile. “And how did you know that?”

  “Because, you are a man. Men always wonder about whatever part of a woman they cannot see.” She looked at my suit and tie. “Plus, you are a gentleman, judging by your $850 suit and $80 tie, and so I know you would not wonder about any other parts.”

  I’d either gotten put in my place, flirted with, or both. I wanted to ask how she knew the exact price of my clothes, but I wasn’t about to admit to being vain enough to pay that much. If I weren’t melanin-enriched, she could have seen that I was blushing like a schoolgirl. Plus, I was now wondering about those other parts.

  “Ah, I see you two have met,” Hardesty said, ending a constant string of cheery whistling that usually made me want to crush his skull. “Cain will be conducting the remainder of the interview, Dr. Dark.”

  That set my system on alert. I couldn’t remember a time Hardesty called anyone by their honorific, except the people he worked for. That told me he considered Dark to be akin to one of his superiors.

  “Now the parameters of this are simple,” he said, pausing to slurp on his coffee. I peeked at Dark, and she looked like she was surfing a sudden wave of nausea. “No discussion regarding the particulars of the assignment. Other than that, anything is open.” He dipped a chunk of his Danish in the coffee, jabbed it in his mouth like a tropical fish swallowing worm flakes, and kept talking. It sounded a bit like he said, “When you two get to London,” but it was hard to tell with his mouth stuffed with a future coronary.

  Dark had adverted her eyes to the ceiling. Hardesty glanced at her, but didn’t respond, as if he was used to seeing her look everywhere but at whoever’s talking. My take was she was just trying to avoid watching him eat, in case he accidently bit off his hand. I was only watching because it was damned fascinating, like viewing one of those nature shows where a snake swallows a horse whole. Hardesty took that poor Danish’s life in three bites.

  “You said London?” I asked.

  Hardesty nodded while licking the epidermis from his fingers. I made a mental note to sneeze into my hands if he looked like he was going for the exit handshake. “Right. Assuming everything goes as expected, you will both be heading out next month. Details to follow, but don’t make any other plans.”

  With that, he stood up, corralled his coffee and not my hand, nodded to Dark, and squealed out of Starbucks like a fat Ferrari with bad brakes. I couldn’t help but smile.

  Dark said, “He is quite agile for his size. On the walk from the car, I told him to go ahead and order, and I would catch up. He seemed quite stressed by my slow pace.”

  I deduced she was offering to talk about her accident. I took her up on it. “Are you in much pain?” I asked.

  “Not so much,” she said, sipping her enormous coffee. “I have an implant that tamps down the pain when it gets bad. So you needn’t worry about my having an addiction to medication … unless you count coffee as medicine, in which case, I am a … what is the word? Junkie?” She smiled and stole a peek over her glasses. I saw her eyes were a rich olive that she quickly squinted closed. The expression on her face made me curious about the specifics of her misfortune. I knew that look—I saw it plenty in my years of service. That was pain.

  “Does the light hurt your eyes?” I asked.

  “Oui,” she says. It came out sounding like “way.” Her answer was more of a yeah than a yes. That told me she was probably from Paris, or thereabouts. It also suggested she was already more comfortable with me than I was with her. “It is one of the more unfortunate consequences of my accident. My eyes were left permanently sensitive to light. But there were benefits as well. We play the hand we are dealt, no?”

  She was being stoic, eking out info a bit at a time—I couldn’t help feeling on purpose—and I got the distinct impression that this interview was a two-way process. It would not be out of character for that snake Hardesty to have me be the one on the hot seat, while telling me it’s the other way around. I decided to shake up my normal routine, which was to get the subject talking about herself. Instead, I switched to what I call asymmetrical interviewing, which involves asking seemingly random questions geared to keeping the subject off kilter. Give a non-linear target a rambling conversation and constant positive reinforcement, and you would be surprised what comes out. In my head, I’d begun referring to her as the target because that damned accent and the smile below those glasses were a distraction I couldn’t afford.

  Dark was looking at me again, sipping her coffee and smiling.


  “You take your coffee black?” I ask.

  “Yes. I don’t like the colors when you add sugar and cream.” She made a face.

  Alarms started ringing in my head. “Colors?” I asked.

  She smiled. “Oui.”

  I actually waited ten seconds, giving her enough time to get uncomfortable and begin filling in the blanks. She did neither. “You going to explain what you mean about colors?” I asked. Point one to her.

  “It is difficult to explain in words. Each thing has a distinct color, texture … feeling that it is associated to. In some cases memories, in others, I am not certain the cause of the association.”

  “I see,” I said. I was lying.

  “For instance, sugar is bright yellow in my head, like the sun. And like the sun, it causes me to feel pain. Whether it is real or not doesn’t matter. I still feel it. Cream has a texture that is uncomfortable and—well, imagine rotten eggs in your coffee. It is orange in my head.”

  “And you don’t like orange.”

  “Not at the moment. Things change with mood. At some point, I will probably like it again.” She unfrowned her face and took another sip. “You add sugar and cream to a strong French roast, and I am in pain, I see a muddy, orange mess that feels like eggs, and I want to vomit. I don’t like to vomit. Do you?”

  I agreed that I do not. We paused for another fifteen seconds while I waited for her to explain the previous explanation. Point two to her. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. You mean the color of the coffee bothers you?”

  She looked serious this time, shaking her head. “No, I am a … how you say, a synesthete.”

  It took a few seconds for the word to register; then I understood. “You see colors,” I shook my head. That was too simplistic an explanation. “I mean, your senses combine.” I had heard of it, but had never met a synesthete before. That alone would explain why a conservative government agency would be a little anxious about hiring her.