The Little Burgundy: A Jeanne Dark Adventure

by Bill Jones Jr.

  Luc took the pad, and I looked over his shoulder. It was a passable rendition of the photo I saw on Rosie’s mantel, except that Danni had longer hair. “Yeah, that’s her,” he said. “Except wivout all the hair. She’s as diesel as any slag I ever met.”

  Dark flashed a look that made me step between her and Luc. “Where’d you get the drawing?” I whispered.

  “I drew it,” she answered, still glaring at Luc.

  “You met her?” I asked. I was sure she hadn’t seen the photo, since it was gone when I awoke.

  Her glare turned on me. “Non. Do we have to have this discussion about what I do again?” I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I knew this wasn’t the time to talk about it. It didn’t matter because Dark was all over Luc by this point. “I find it ironic that you call her a slut when it is you who has sex for money.”

  “What I do is right noble work,”

  “Noble work? Are you kidding me?” I asked.

  “Sometimes you have to do bad fings in order to do good, mate,” he said.

  “Explain,” I said.

  He clenched his jaw. “If you want to know more, I need my solicitor here,” he answered.

  Dark watched him for a time, then placed a hand on his elbow. “Tell me about Danni’s contact.”

  Luc shrugged. “All I know is he set everything up and he gets what Danni calls a franchise fee. She’s the only one who met him. We just call him the Russian.”

  “The Russian?” she asked.

  “Yeah. I walked in on her once when she was on the phone with him. He had a Russian accent. I thought he might even be speaking in Russian, but before I could hear him good, she switched the speaker off and shooed me out the room.” He exhaled and looked from Dark to me and back. “Is that it? Can I go now?”

  “One final question,” Dark asked. “How does Danni know the Russian?”

  “I don’t know. She said he’s just some geezer she met.”

  We turned Luc loose and headed back to the hotel. In the morning, we would have all points, meaning both of us, out on the lookout for Danni. Something told me this case was about to get bigger. Dark’s reaction confirmed it.

  “When he spoke of doing noble work, he was completely sincere,” she said.

  “And delusional.”

  “Non, I don’t think so. There is something behind this that is more than just prurient sex.”

  “Great, and just when I thought things were getting boring.”

  ***

  I woke up in the hotel room with the sun already low on the horizon. A groggy check of the time told me it was three-thirty, nearing sunset. The maid hadn’t been in the room, judging by the clutter, but Dark’s bed was made. I was certain she’d not slept it in. We were both exhausted when we’d hit the room, and I was torpid even before she even managed to help me get off my suit. The other pillows had faint traces of her perfume, but that was understandable since I remembered her lying next to me, watching me drift to sleep. Nonetheless, given our situation and the recent tension between us, it was inconceivable that she would have spent the night next to me.

  I got up, emptied my bladder, and decided I’d been wrong about the severity of my concussion. Forgoing room service, I grabbed some snacks we’d brought to the room and downed a half-liter of water before climbing back into bed. As I lay there on the Dark-scented pillows, I wondered if she had, in fact, slipped under the covers next to me the night before. I didn’t have to wonder long. I slipped my hand under the pillow, ready to grab a bit more sleep, and got it tangled in one of Jeanne’s bras. Not only had she joined me in my bed, apparently, she’d stripped off in the process. It probably meant nothing, I reasoned. I’d been out like a light and she was probably too tired herself to move. She knew I wouldn’t awaken and I was in no shape to do damage even if I had. Besides, the woman trusted me more than I trusted me. Sleep took me then, as I lay in bed watching the room slowly dim, all the while imagining my nude little Jeanne breathing next to me in bed. The dreams I had were wondrous things that night. Ah, to be a man with a vivid imagination and a woman worth envisioning.

  It was 9:11 the next morning when I finally awoke, more clear-headed than I’d been since Danni clocked me in her flat. Sleep turned out to be the only thing I needed. The first thing I did was turn to check the other bed. It looked the same, with the covers tucked underneath in the way the maids always prepared the room. Every time we returned to our hotel room, Dark would yank out the covers along the side and roll down the bedspread, muttering about the filth on hotel linens. It was the only part of sharing a hotel room we’d agreed upon. I was sure she’d never make it up that way herself. This time, sans the fog I’d been floating through, I jumped out of bed and began to take inventory. All my things were there, and none of Dark’s were. It’d been thirty-two hours since I’d seen her last, smiling at me and caressing my forehead as I drifted off to sleep. She had been gone when I awoke the evening before, and I’d had no idea.

  I was less concerned with her safety at that point than I was about my job security. My mission wasn’t only to help Dark solve a mystery. Hardesty wanted the two of us joined at the hip. He was worried about something, despite his assurances to the contrary. I needed to know what. Protocol said I was to call him if we ever got separated for an extended period. This certainly qualified.

  I found my phone still tucked in my pants pocket. The battery was deader than I felt. Cursing, I plugged it in and jumped into the shower to make myself presentable. By the time I’d showered, shaved, and gotten dressed, the phone was charged and was buzzing up a swarm of messages. Most were from Hardesty. A couple were from Samuels. None was from my partner. The most recent message, with a timestamp of 7:03 A.M., was from Hardesty. It read, I’m in London. Contact me via Monica. We think Dark’s gone rogue.

  10 - Gone Rogue

  Kevin Hardesty was in Monica Samuels’s office, pacing back and forth in his frenzied little steam engine way. “I need you to find Dark and bring her in. If she’s really rogue, I need to know ASAP.”

  It was the sixth time he’d said rogue and I was prepared to breach my contract by shoving the word down his throat if he said it again. I stopped myself and closed my eyes, trying to regain some semblance of professionalism. The man was two hundred and sixty pounds of jargon-spewing irritant. “Look,” I said, “I admit her going off on her own is worrisome, but it’s not out of the ordinary for her. Dark isn’t used to following anyone else’s rules, and she’s already proven herself a capable investigator. Besides, once she’s gotten the scent of a bit of evidence, she’s like a bloodhound. The best thing to do is let her keep tracking.” In truth, I was at least as worried as Hardesty, now that he’d filled me in on her background, but I wasn’t about to let him know that. He stopped his pacing, took a slurp of his coffee, and squinted a grimace at me. “Kevin, I’ll find her. I’m sure she’s okay.”

  From her desk, Samuels howled in my direction. “You don’t know she’s okay, Foster. That’s the whole point.” Her voice was sharp, but her face implacable, as if she were no more than a mobile mannequin. “All we know for certain is that she interviewed the Rao woman alone, without authorization, and then disappeared.”

  I interrupted her to remind her I’d likewise conducted an interview without official permission, and my interview had ended in minor brain scrambling. I looked to Hardesty for confirmation that he’d effectively given us the okay to work off leash, in his vernacular. Instead of vocalizing support, he plopped himself down, overwhelming a squeaky office chair, while seeming to shrink in the process. “Cain, you have to look at this from our point of view. Making sure Dark is sound is why I brought you on this in the first place.” He opened his mouth to say more, but I gave him a look that silenced him.

  “If I’m not mistaken, that’s the same line you gave her about me,” I said. “You just spent over an hour briefing me about her whole damned family history, which says you knew whom you were dealing with before you authorized us to work
independently.”

  He shot a nervous look at Samuels, who barely flinched. It was enough to tell me she’d not been told Dark and I would effectively be flying solo. “I authorized you to continue reporting to me, which is the point. Dark hasn’t reported in to anyone.”

  “I took a dump earlier that I forgot to report too. Should I file a brief?”

  “Cain, you are on thin ice,” Hardesty said. He paused and waited for me to apologize. He is probably still waiting.

  “Kevin, if you didn’t trust us, both of us, you should have let me resign.”

  “If you’re offering again, I may just reconsider,” he said.

  That got my attention. One should never play the same bluff twice. “I don’t want to quit. I want to finish this.” I pointed to the dossier spread across Samuels’s desk. “But you could’ve told me all this while I was still in D.C.”

  He pulled himself to his full five feet eight inches, his arms akimbo, fists against his waist, and his chin tilted skyward in an effort to emulate a prognathous jaw. He looked like a short George Reeves gone to pot. I doubted he could even leap over his coffee mug in a single bound. “The United States Government briefs its contractors on cleared information when the need arises, and that is determined solely by us. Had you been doing your job instead of getting your ass kicked by witnesses, perhaps we wouldn’t have needed to brief you at all.” Hardesty’s ears reddened, and I knew I was edging pretty close to his border of self-restraint.

  I decided to cross the border. “Look, Superman, you wasted six weeks of my life having me evaluate someone you’ve apparently already assessed and then had me tearing all over London on some penny-ante wild goose chase. You’ve asked my opinion on Dark and I told you she’s sound. What more do you want from me?” He stood looking puzzled, likely because he was stumped by my Superman reference. They say humor takes intelligence, and Hardesty was as humorless as they come.

  Samuels, perhaps seeing my own jaw clenched hard enough to shatter a molar, stood and walked from behind her desk, seating herself on the edge of it opposite me, her delicate ankles crossed. For ten seconds or so, she said nothing, but simply studied me. Hardesty took his cue to sit the hell back down. When I finally met her eyes, she spoke. “Foster, we both respect Jeanne and we admire you. I can assure you, this case is very real.”

  “That doesn’t change the fact that you already know more about Dark than I do. I’m not sure what I can tell you that you don’t already know. Hell, I don’t even know what I’m doing here.”

  “Protecting the United States’ interests.” She unhooked her ankles and slid her feet to the floor, leaning at an angle against the desk. “What you’re doing is vital investigative work and we brought in Dark because we’ll need her expertise to resolve this case, as her work identifying Mr. Rao’s poisons has shown.”

  “Then what’s the problem? She’s been gone, what, a day and a half? Knowing her, she’s out in the English countryside picking monkshood for some kind of chemical analysis.”

  “The problem is that we, and now you, know her background better than she does.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  She leaned forward, speaking to me as if Hardesty were no longer in the room. “You know exactly what I mean, Foster. These kinds of problems run strongly in families.”

  I bristled. Jeanne was eccentric, but I never met a genius who wasn’t. “If Dark were crazy, I’d know it.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. But your confidence is of little consequence now that she’s disappeared, isn’t it?”

  “She’s a big girl, Monica.”

  “Foster, she left you alone in a hotel room with a pretty severe concussion. You could have died.”

  I considered telling her it was my fault since I’d refused medical help, but I knew that wasn’t the point. Dark had left precisely because I was unconscious. Whether it was due to her impatience in getting on with the case, as I’d proclaimed, or because she had secrets she didn’t want to share, I couldn’t know. But I’d be damned if I’d let Samuels and Hardesty know my doubts. Dark was my partner, for better or worse. Once you’ve been in battle with someone, he’s a brother for life. This was no different as far as I was concerned. Had Jeanne not shown up and banged her hand raw on Rosie’s door to wake me, there’s no telling what might have happened. Yeah, the howling harpy and donut boy across from me had revealed a pretty sordid tale of Dark’s family, including Nazi collaborators, political betrayals, possible schizophrenia, and a contemporary branch involved in some Really Bad Shit in Eastern Europe, but as far as I was concerned, it was all an assemblage of unsubstantiated rumor. I was to believe Dark was the unstable descendant of a Nazi doctor and a possibly schizoid Vichy great-grandmother whose crazy genes were now driving Dark to infiltrate a small cell of sex worker dumbasses in London for reasons unknown. Someone call Maxwell Smart. They’re about to release the Sex Bomb and destroy America.

  A former FBI historian friend once explained to me in prodigious detail how Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy under the indirect orders of Florida crime boss Santo Trafficante and Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa for the sole purpose of shutting down brother Bobby Kennedy’s war against organized crime. Jack Ruby, who was involved with the New Orleans mob, as was Oswald, was hired to shut Lee Harvey up by paying cops to kill him. When that failed, owing to Oswald’s shoot-first demeanor and the fact that the cops who finally arrested him were the good guys, Ruby had to execute Oswald himself or be killed by the mob. My friend went on to suggest that these same parties or parties unknown hired one Sirhan Sirhan to finish the mob’s revenge against the younger Kennedy some five years later. According to him, it was the old Hire a crazy to do your dirty work in true old-school-Sicilian-style trick, straight out of Get Smart. All the pieces fit together neatly: means, motive, and opportunity. The problem with grandiose conspiracies like these, as I responded to my historian friend, is that one, some things can never be proved, and two, it no longer matters once the people involved end up dead. With regards to how this relates to Jeanne Dark, I could add a third problem: I’ve never heard a single conspiracy theory I’ve found to be plausible. People are too talkative and undisciplined to keep big secrets for long. That includes family secrets.

  As far as I was concerned, no one had proved a damned thing regarding my partner’s background, which meant Dark deserved her chance, and I was going to give it to her. The Government’s investigation wasn’t a modern-day equivalent of the Warren Commission Report; it was a witch hunt, driven by three-generation-old family skeletons. The past is good for but one thing, to my reckoning: forgetting. What frustrated me most was that I couldn’t tell Dark what info the Hardesty food chain had on her because it was TS-SCI and she wasn’t cleared to know her own background. There are three states of government reasoning: faulty logic, complete illogic, and just fucking stupid. This was the latter, and I was hamstrung to correct it. They weren’t investigating Dark in order to clear her for work or to cover up the fact they’d given a top-secret clearance to someone whom they didn’t think they could trust. Instead, they’d hired me to keep her close so that her considerable skills didn’t fall into wrong hands if she turned out to be untrustworthy or unstable. A part of me suspected this was all a ruse to keep her busy until she was needed. So, I did the only thing I could do: I went on a fifteen-minute tirade in which I tore to shreds the supposed evidence chain and reasoning of their dossier. I figure Hardesty must have forgotten who I am or what I do. He won’t make that mistake again. When I’d finished, I was confident I even had them doubting they’d spelled their names right on the report.

  After spinning in place and sweating for a few minutes, Hardesty swept his brow with a filthy handkerchief and spoke. “Cain, this all well and good, but I’m sure I can pull another analyst who’ll give us a completely different spin.” I opened my mouth to speak, and he held up a hand. “That being said, I brought you in because I trust you—not her, but you. If you say she’s
legit, that’s good enough for me. But the leash is very, very short. Find her, bring her in, and nothing else happens. If you don’t …”

  “We’re both out on the street.”

  Samuels shook her head. “Neither of you is out on the street.”

  I looked from her to Hardesty who squinted as if in pain. “Meaning?” I asked.

  “Just what you think,” she said, “possible jail time.”

  Behind her, Hardesty snickered. He had good reason to. I stood, impressing her with the full volume of my indignation. Even in her she-wolf cloak of measured indifference, I could tell the lady dug the way I was built. It was mutual, and I was hoping her alpha female ego would require her to stand in defiance against me. She did, and we stood that way, toe to toe, glaring. Were it not for Dark, I’d have asked Hardesty to step out into the hall for a few minutes while Samuels and I worked things out. Between nostril flares, I managed to say, “Lady, I’ve worked in some of the worst prisons God ever forgot. If you think you have one that scares me, by all means, send me to it. I’ll be running it in three weeks.” She panted for a few moments, her lip curled in anger. She wanted it, badly, so I gave it to her. “If I haven’t found Dark in four days, you bring me in, and you can have anything from me you want.” I leaned in. “Right now, however, what I want is time. Let me do my damned job.”

  She inhaled half the remaining air in the room and pulled herself erect, sweeping her few stray red hairs back in place. “As you say, then. But you have two days. After that, you are both mine.”

  I smiled at her. Some dim, unspeakable part of my brain began to explore what she might want to do with me. I settled on contract termination and the end of my career. “Three days will be all I need,” I said.

  “I said two,” she replied. She leaked a tight smile and said, “Three, then. You’re lucky I like you.”

  I turned to leave, and Hardesty’s grizzly voice stopped me at the door. “Cain, remember, we brought you two in because this escort thing is probably a front for a well-structured terrorist cell. I need names and locations, ASAP. We can’t afford any more glitches.”