The Little Burgundy: A Jeanne Dark Adventure

by Bill Jones Jr.

  “Oui. But it is more than that and less than that. I have what is considered to be an extreme form. I do not precisely see the colors. Instead, as I sip the coffee, for instance, my brain reacts as though the colors are there.” She dipped her pinkie in the small vial of cream Hardesty left, and inserted it into her mouth. Part of me wanted to be her pinkie. “Even with my eyes closed, it tastes orange. Not very pleasant.”

  I decided it was time to rattle the cages. “Well, seeing colors with coffee and declaring people purple is pretty extreme, I must agree. Is that why the government is nervous about you?”

  Lines creased her forehead. “You are being rude on purpose. You are not very good at it.” Her face was unreadable. Without another word, she stood up.

  Now, this was a bit of a predicament. If she was upset enough to leave an interview of this type at the first bit of discord, she was certainly not stable enough for a sensitive operation. I would have to give Hardesty a strongly negative report, which was a shame, because for some reason, I liked her.

  She stopped about two paces from the table and looked back over her shoulder. She was smiling. “I like you too.” I sat there looking stupid and wondering if I’d offered my last thoughts aloud. “Are you coming?” she asked. It was not a question, but a command. Despite her gentle style, the woman was an alpha after all. She turned and headed toward the door. This time, her pace was brisk. I rose and followed her, like a good puppy.

  I opened the door and we stepped out into the sunlight. There were flowers hanging in baskets just outside. They were high enough that they were well over Dark’s head. There was no way she could have seen them.

  “Do you smell that?” she asked, smiling.

  I could smell nothing and said so.

  “Lilacs,” she said, inhaling deeply. “The smell suits you.”

  “Because I’m purple. You want to explain that?”

  For the first time, she looked uncomfortable. I decided not to press the point. We walked down Connecticut Avenue, the pace normal, not at all slow. Still, she leaned on the cane enough for me to notice. When she finally spoke, I was surprised, as I had almost forgotten the question. “If you do not mind, I would prefer not to answer. There are some things I need to keep to myself for the sake of my work.” She paused. “If you think not knowing jeopardizes our friendship … ”

  I held up my hands. “It’s okay, no explanation needed. Just curiosity.”

  The word friendship was reverberating in my head. She tilted her head at me and pursed her lips in a suppressed smile. “Merci.” We sat on one of the benches that surround the small, circular park. By this time, I’d begun to give up on the interview. Instead, we sat quietly while she finished her coffee and watched people walk by. When she spoke, she was back on the subject of my color. “If it means anything, purple is very good.”

  Here, in the deep shade of early autumn trees, under a partly cloudy sky, she looked at me and removed her glasses. It was a brief glimpse, as if she were taking a photograph. She raised her head, eyes closed, and then they opened, and flash, they grew wide, and she shut them again. The glasses were replaced, and now, Hardesty be damned, all I could think of is how much I needed to taste those olive eyes again. She may have been as crazy as a loon, but she was my kind of crazy. I wasn’t certain, because the light was dim, but I thought she seemed flushed. Maybe the walk was too much. I do walk quickly, unless people remember to slow me down.

  “How did you get into this kind of work?” she asked.

  “What kind of work is it that you think I do?”

  “I understand you are a security consultant, specializing in deception detection and behavior modeling.”

  I nodded. That was the company line.

  “I think; however, you want to know if I am insane and if you will have to babysit me if I am not.”

  I leaned back. I was positive that no one told her that. TS/SCI or not, those details were not on any official reports. Hardesty was the only government person I’d ever told about my crazy magnet. He would have his head handed to him if anyone knew he had spent taxpayer money on such a “fringe” activity.

  “What makes you think I’ve been hired to evaluate you?” I asked.

  “I am purely following my intuition. It’s never wrong.”

  “Intuition.” I hoped my skepticism didn’t show on my face. “In any case, I assume you’ve already gone through scrutiny.”

  “Mostly the normal procedure. I answer questions, they talk to neighbors and family, lie detector, and so on.”

  “If you had a history of mental illness, they would know it.”

  “They know about my history and the synesthesia. They just do not know what to make of it.” I paused, watching as she managed to convince a squirrel to eat a bit of cookie from her hand. “A biscuit from breakfast,” she said, her voice airy.

  I was smiling, although it wasn’t something I normally do on the job. I decided it was time to channel my best Tommy Lee Jones seriousness. I closed my eyes, fixed Agent K in my head, and spoke. “Dr. Dark,” I started. It got her attention right away—her smile evaporated. “I need to know where you learned about my role with the agency. It’s strictly need to know.”

  She crouched a little, and whispered, like we were suddenly in a spy movie. It was cute enough I started to smile again, despite myself. Tommy Lee would have been horrified. “I am sorry. I did not know it was a secret. I can—read people, you might say.” My expression must have changed because she looked at me and her face drew taut. “I do not know if it is the synesthesia, or the head injury, or the Universe, but what I see is not what the world sees. There are things that it is impossible for me to know.” She stopped and looked at me. “And yet, I know them.”

  “I’m listening,” I said, speaking softer.

  “Sometimes I see colors, as in your case. Most of the time it’s not well defined. I just have a sense of colors and I can associate them with different characteristics. For instance, if a person gives me the sense of yellows, I know they are out of kilter somehow.”

  “I see,” I said, and was beginning to. Yellow was pain, she already said. Perhaps her colors were just her subconscious speaking to her. With proper training and insight, an immediate response could well be possible, even if the conscious mind wasn’t aware of it.

  She continued. “It isn’t always colors, however. Everything gives me clues, as with Monsieur Hardesty. When he eats, for instance, the sound of his lips smacking makes me smell sour milk and I feel nauseous. His cologne reminds me of my grandfather, however, so I find myself liking him.”

  “Yeah, he’s the kind of guy you like, but can’t think of a single reason why.”

  “Oui, it is exactly that, but I trust my instincts, and so don’t question it.” Dark placed one soft hand on my arm and leaned in close. I didn’t know what perfume she wore, but she definitely didn’t smell like my grandma. I would have signed off on her clearance just because of the way she smelled. “Everything interacts in my head with everything else. Visuals are the strongest, but smells are almost as powerful. It is rare that I take off my glasses, because what I see and feel is so strong, it overwhelms me. It is like having severe schizophrenia, I suppose, except I have the horror of being sane.” She gave me a laugh that was devoid of any humor.

  I shook my head. I didn’t really know how to process this.

  “Imagine if you could see people for what they are, and not what they look like,” she said.

  “Like what, for instance? What do I look like?”

  She made a face I recognized as embarrassment.

  “I won’t get angry, I promise,” I said. By this point, any pretense of professionalism was gone. Compared to her, my crazy magnet was a corny parlor trick.

  She looked at me, and for a moment, I was certain her eyes were locked on mine. Don’t ask how I knew, I could just feel them. “I can feel you too, you know,” she said.

  “Do you read minds too?” I was being a sarcastic a
ss, because she was freaking me out.

  Her answer was a gentle, “Oui, if we are connected.”

  “Are we connected?” The thumping in my ears certainly made me feel like we were. She hadn’t released my arm and I could feel the heat from her hand as though it were a radiator. If she noticed, she was great at hiding it.

  Right on cue, she let go of my arm. “You asked me about your being purple.” I nodded and rubbed my arm. “You have an aura about you. It is bright and purple, like a star that gives off only violet and ultraviolet light. When I remove my glasses, it dances around you. Sometimes, when you speak softly, I cannot hear you over the crackling sound it makes.”

  “Crackling?”

  “Oui, you know, like electricity.”

  “Well, I have been feeling quite a bit of that over the previous hour.”

  “Of course you have. We’re best friends.”

  “Since when?”

  She shrugged. “Whenever it was we met.” An intensity crossed her face that had the emotional impact of a corona emerging during a full eclipse. I felt myself gasp, overwhelmed by her solar wind. Just as suddenly, it passed. Dark looked at me, and as the sun broke through the clouds above, I could see her eyes in there, darting just above my dome. She turned, following some imaginary trail, and her eyes fixed on an old lady in a wrinkled shirt, overcoat, and dirty blue skirt. From where I sat, I could just make out the woman’s face, her yellowed teeth gleaming against a sea of wrinkles. It was a local resident known as Shoeless Annie, a homeless, schizophrenic woman of around sixty-five who had the biggest crush on me in the world. Like I said, I am a crazy magnet.

  “Friend of yours?” Dark asked.

  I gave Annie a genuine smile and a wave. Crazy or no, she likes me, and one can never get too much of that in life. Annie waved back, lifted her skirt to flash me God only knows what, and walked off.

  “We’ve met,” I answered.

  “The energy I tell you about, it extended all the way to that unfortunate woman.” She pointed to the area near my solar plexus. “It comes from there. You were bathing her in it. The poor woman is amber without you.” She made a face that reminded me of smelling stinky cheese.

  “You saw a yellow aura?”

  “No, as I said, that is very rare. It is more of a feeling with her. Like how graphemes have their own colors, so it is with people. I can get a sense of who they are from the colors that are attached to them. Mostly, I feel them, but the colors help me sort through all the emotions.”

  I knew a little about synesthesia, so Dark’s explanation didn’t sound nutty to me. Synesthetes’ senses are interconnected, so something that triggers one sense can also trigger another, supposedly unrelated sense. For example, synesthetes often “see” colors in their mind when shown letters or numbers. The most common associations are linked to colors: letters, numbers, units of time, music, other sounds, even smells. Likewise, the sight of something can trigger a taste, the sense of touch, or a smell. Dark had a more rare, but not unheard of form; she could perceive people’s personalities as colors. Since she already formed good and bad associations among certain colors, her innate ability to discern others’ personality types registered in her head in brilliant Technicolor. I was purple, which was apparently a good thing. Poor Annie was yellow, which to Dark was about as pathetic a color as one could be.

  Nonetheless, I took her analysis as the first ever proof that I do, in fact, have a crazy magnet. Then I did something I never do. I told her all about it—the long, crazy, history. In the middle, the part where I detailed how I came home on leave and my fiancée killed herself while I napped downstairs, she was in tears, but by the end, through some miracle of fast friendship and immediate interconnectedness, we were both laughing hysterically. Then, as the clock rolled past noon, she started in on her story. She told me about the time when, at age eleven while walking along a narrow street from school, she was struck by a drunk driver. She told me how she awoke in the hospital, weeks later, her hips twisted and leg shattered, her skull fractured, and her memory largely gone. Dark talked about the months of recovery, relearning to see, to read, and to walk, and the years of therapy, relearning everything else. Mostly, however, she told me of waking up one frightening morning where sounds appeared where colors once were, where music had a flavor, words a hue, and where love actually hurt. Dark had always been a synesthete, but after the accident, it was as if someone had turned up the volume and broken off the knob. There were no points in her story where we were laughing. She told me three times it was okay to cry. By the second time, I started believing her. Somehow, even after all of that turmoil, Dark managed to finish school early and completed her PhD by the time she was twenty-four. This was after having lost two full years to her accident. When she was finished, I knew more about her than anyone ever has.

  Pretty damned good interview, if I say so myself.

  “So,” she said, standing up and wincing in pain. “How did I do?”

  “You did great.” It was an honest assessment.

  “Bravo! So you will take the job?”

  “The job?”

  It was Dark’s turn to act surprised. “Oui, this was a job interview. Did not M. Hardesty tell you?” I shook my head. “I need a partner for … for the thing I cannot discuss,” she said, watching as a crowd went past. “M. Hardesty recommended you, but insisted I interview you myself. He said to really probe you because you have a tendency to be evasive. I have not found this to be true.”

  I started to laugh. I explained to her that Hardesty had told me that she was the one being interviewed and that I’d worked for the man for years.

  She joined me in laughter. “So, this whole meeting was a ruse to see if we would … what, like each other?”

  “Exactly, but it explains the public meeting. He knew we’d both pass muster. He just wanted to give us a chance to sniff each other out.”

  “I feel like I’ve been set up on a date by ma grand-père.” Dark leaned closer. “For the record, the ‘sniff’ test came up chocolate.”

  I started grinning. “Because of my skin color.”

  Mostly, I was grinning because I liked the way she said “sho-co-lat.”

  “Oui, most likely. I am sorry.” She gave me a decidedly cute, embarrassed shrug of her narrow shoulders. “At least it is a pleasant smell. I imagine a lot of women would love to work with a man who smells of chocolate.”

  I was too busy laughing to answer.

  “I told you we were best friends,” she finally said, laughing in her silent way. This time, I agreed with her. We stood, and she arched her back and looked up at me. “You are very tall,” she said.

  “Is that a problem?”

  “Perhaps.” She gave me another Mona Lisa smile. The woman was damned confusing. We started walking across the street to the metro, and she stopped, wincing again. She rubbed first her hip, then her thigh, and finally, her knee. “Sorry. I think it is the dampness in the air. They hurt if I sit too long.”

  “That’s okay, I have the same issue with my knees,” I said. Then, on impulse, I added, “I’m pretty good with massages, if you need some help.

  She smiled, releasing her knee. “No, merci. I will be fine.” It was worth a shot, in my estimation.

  We started across to the metro and I asked Dark where she was headed. My car was parked all the way at the end of the red line, at Shady Grove. I figured if she was going the same way, that would give me more time to understand her work style. After all, it was looking as though I’d finally found a partner—maybe even a lead partner.

  “Oh, I am just going as far as Bethesda. I’m staying at a hotel there.”

  “Why are you way out in Maryland if your meetings are in the District?” I asked.

  “I do not like to spend money unnecessarily.”

  “Isn’t the government paying your expenses?

  “Oui.”

  That was apparently the end of the discussion as far as she was concerned. However, further
interactions revealed three important bits of information. First, Dark is cheap. I mean, she’s a real tightwad. I suspected she sends the bulk of her earnings back home, but she would neither confirm nor deny it. Second, I learned that she had nowhere to live in the area, nor did she have an office space. Given we were going to spend up to a month cleaning up loose ends before the trip to London, I politely suggested she could stay with me for “a while” until she found a place. A week later, Dark showed up at my house with a moving crew and every single thing she owned. Apparently, in French, “a while” means “until the day you die.”

  Third, and most importantly, I learned that Jeanne Dark has a temper. I made the mistake of referring to her “intuition,” as “an educated guess” while on the metro to Shady Grove. For my insolence, I received a 1,500-word, ten-minute, French-profanity-laden lecture wherein I was informed, in no uncertain terms that she never guesses, is always right regarding her intuition, would put her guesses ahead of my science, and male patronizing would not be tolerated in our partnership. When she was done and I apologized, she kissed me, right there on the train. I guess that’s a French custom. In any regard, that was how I discovered that we were, in fact partners. I was fine with it, to be honest, except it was clear from the start which one of us was the brains of the outfit. So, six weeks, twenty boxes, and one fiery little brunette later, I found my old life in shambles with me the second-ranking person in my own damned house—third, if you count my cat, Dave. It was a busy month and a half, so I didn’t really have time to fret about it. Dark was helping me close out all of my open investigations so that I would be freed one hundred percent for the London trip. Whatever we were going to be doing there, Hardesty wanted us completely focused. I asked him how long I should expect to be in England, given he’d not even told me whether I would be packing for a weekend or a year.