The Little Burgundy: A Jeanne Dark Adventure

by Bill Jones Jr.

  “Your girlfriend seems quite enamored with her partner,” I said.

  “We’ll see how enamored they are when I walk over and pop them both in the mouth.”

  I must confess to being irritated that he did not correct my calling her his girlfriend. Before I could react, however, he broke free of me and strode to the table with the aplomb of a male lion on the attack. I moved to the front door and had barely reached it when Danni, recognizing Foss, upended their table, pushing it toward him and onto the floor. A woman screamed indignities at having her outfit splashed with Rosie’s flying drink and spun, knocking into a waitress with a tray full of drinks. Drinks, waitress, and shrieking patron spilled onto the floor, taking five or six other customers with them in a domino effect. Two bouncers leapt over the bar and promptly slipped on the spilled drinks, going airborne and landing on their backs. Foss reached for Danni, who pushed a chubby man into him, causing both men to stumble onto the floor. Rosie used that opportunity to sprint toward the door, moving surprisingly quickly in her heels, squeezing by two men who’d stepped between me and my target in their attempt to break up what must have appeared to be an ordinary bar fight. I couldn’t use my cane within the tight confines of the club, so I allowed Rosie to bolt through the door while I intercepted Foss who was headed toward Danni.

  “I’ll take care of Danni,” I shouted, pointing to the door. “You go get Rosie.”

  Foss gave me a brief, angry glance, but then ran toward the exit. I was grateful. Not only could I not have caught Rosie, but I was afraid he’d kill Danni in his diminished state. The two bouncers moved to intercept Foss, but my partner ran through them as if he were playing American football and they were playing golf. After suppressing a smile, I turned my attention to Danni, who by now had pulled a knife and was backing toward the door.

  “You leave me fucking be,” he said, his voice barely audible over the music. Danni waved the knife slowly to and fro.

  “Calm down, now mate,” said one of the bouncers who was attempting to rise to his knees despite the glassy-eyed look on his dazed face. “Nobody has to get hurt.”

  Danni aimed the knife in his direction and the bouncer raised his hands but didn’t move further. My suspect edged again toward the door, looking from the bouncer to me, finally reaching the door. I would have lost him, but two women were entering just as Danni exited, and he bounced off of them, losing his knife in the process. That was my opportunity. I lunged through the door and pressed the hidden button on my cane, catching Danni just at the back and releasing .02 amps of electricity into his body at a screaming nineteen pulses per second. Five convulsing, painful seconds later, it was all over. Danni was unconscious, with his hat and wig having fallen away, revealing what I’d expected—a patchwork of thin hair and bald spots that gave the appearance of advanced chemotherapy. I knelt down, cradling his fragile body in my arms, and prayed to God he wasn’t already so far gone that my Taser would cause him heart failure.

  “Danni!” It was Rosie’s frantic cry. She was being escorted by Foss, who had her hands handcuffed behind her back. I was glad, as seeing her thus seemed to convince the club goers that nothing more interesting had happened than a run-of-the-mill drug bust. Within moments, they had lost interest and were back to the evening’s revelry. Rosie was crying by this time and knelt next to her fallen partner, tears dripping onto Danni’s face.

  “What did you do to him? Did you shoot him?”

  “Non, cher,” I said. “Danni is very sick. I am afraid my Taser overwhelmed his fragile body.”

  Foss looked at Danni and then me. He shook his head. Rosie was attempting to hug her partner with her whole body. Foss mouthed, “He’s too far gone.”

  He was right. If we had not found them when we did, I fear Danni would have been dead before we could ever have figured out what happened.

  12 - Rosies Are Red, Dannis Are Blue

  Watching Dark work her witnesses was like watching an Italian master paint a great work of art. For the first time since we began working together, I came to understand how her natural empathy fit in with the investigative process. Until our session with Danni, I had seen it solely as a hindrance. With my psychology background and years of interacting with both terror suspects and the mentally ill, I’d developed both a deep sensitivity toward those I interviewed and a professional distance that kept me from forming attachments I felt would only serve to undermine my needing to exploit any advantage I could develop. Dark fostered no such detachment. Quite to the contrary, her interview technique was more akin to a therapist’s than a cop’s, a point we’d argued about since forming our partnership. But with Rosie and Danni, she took it a step further; she was no longer Jeanne Dark, investigator. She was Auntie Jeanne, confidant, mentor, estate planner. Danni and Rosie never stood a chance.

  First up was convincing Danni of what was obvious to the rest of us: he was dying from acute radiation sickness caused by exposure to polonium. After working him for hours, I’d come to the conclusion he was content to go to his grave denying he’d ever even heard of the substance. By this time, Dark’s interjections into my interrogation had consisted of admonishing me when it seemed Danni had been overtaxed or when my questioning began crossing the border of human decency. By then I was in terrorist mode and didn’t give two damns about Danni’s health. What I knew was if he had polonium, then I needed to find it before more people—maybe some important people—turned up dead.

  “He’ll never tell you where he got the polonium,” Dark said. It wasn’t in private, as I’d hoped. She was sitting on Danni’s hospital bed at the Institute back in London. There was a cloud over the setting, and I couldn’t decide if it was coming from the gloomy room or from me. I felt trapped in one more of a million onerous tasks I’d carried out for my country. Danni responded by blinking drowsily and looking at Dark with something I registered as gratitude. Dark stood and escorted the objecting Rosie from the room. I heard Dark instruct one of the guards to take her to one of the “administration rooms” which was a nauseating euphemism for medium-security lockup facilities. Rosie made quite the scene, kicking and screaming all the way. The permanently skeptical part of my psyche wondered if her performance was for Danni’s benefit or mine.

  Dark reentered the room and straightened her hair. I caught sight of Danni’s eyes and for the first time understood why Dark had insisted Rosie be allowed to stay with her. She wasn’t being kind, as I thought. Rather, in Danni’s weakened state, Rosie had become his dying partner’s security blanket. Danni was strong, because he had to be, for Rosie. Now, with the real questioning starting, Dark had pulled that security blanket from the room, leaving Danni as emotionally exposed as his skinny frame was in the hospital bed. Dark again sat on Danni’s bed and began stroking her forehead. “We will give you medication to ease your suffering, but there has been too much damage to your organs. The doctors say your kidneys are failing. I’m afraid you have hours, not days.”

  Danni sniffled but otherwise showed little reaction. To his credit, it would have taken a professional to have recognized the slight glance toward the door after Dark’s pronouncement. I knew, with painful certainty, he was looking to the last spot he saw his partner. I could only imagine that he wondered if he’d ever see her again. So did I.

  Dark paused a moment, allowing her words to settle in. Then she said, “As I said, we cannot help you, but we can help Rosie.”

  “Rosie’s a tough girl. She’ll be fine.” His voice was gravel.

  “That may well be true, but as far as we can determine, she’s committed no crime.”

  “Of course she hasn’t!” Danni’s voice rose, which sent her into a fit of coughing. Dark rose, brought him a glass of water, and then tenderly helped Danni drink. I couldn’t figure out if she was Danni’s friend or worst enemy. As I said, she was a master.

  “Well, that is the problem, isn’t it?” Dark asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Does Rosie have private health car
e?” Danni’s eyes widened but she said nothing. “I didn’t think so. It was already enough that you were paying for two mortgages, a car note, furniture, perhaps trips abroad.” Danni’s eyes flashed, which I interpreted as a yes to trips abroad. Dark continued. “It would have looked suspicious if you also had very expensive private health insurance too, no? Especially given Rosie was supposed to be a waitress and you—what—a barista?”

  “I make do. So we can’t afford private doctors, so what? Most GPs are useless around these parts anyway. May as well invest your money in witch doctors.” Danni launched into another coughing spell, this time bringing up blood with it. Dark helped him as before, waving the attending nurse away as she cleaned up Danni’s bloody sputum.

  “Do you know how little polonium it takes for a fatal dose?” Dark asked. Danni held his eyes shut. “Minute amounts. I am guessing you were preparing Mr. Rao’s dosage and were being very careful, but perhaps you had an open cut somewhere and an amount you couldn’t even see got inside. That was it—and voilà, you are dead.”

  Even I winced at that one.

  Dark leaned in close for the kill. “If the amount it took to kill you was so small you never even saw it, how much do you think it would have taken to kill Rosie? Did you sneeze while handling the Po? Perhaps you forgot to dispose of the gloves you wore or the container wasn’t as airtight as the Russian had promised?”

  By now, Danni was crying and working himself up for a good bluff. “You’re lying,” he said, sniffling. “Rosie’s fine.”

  I looked at Dark and received a quick view of her eyes above her shades. I knew she was in fact lying, but no one else would have known. It was time for my Bad Cop. “You were fine too, about a week ago, Danya,” I said. At the mention of his birth name, Danni began a coughing fit that caused the nurse to push Dark aside. Danni was a man now and one who on his death bed, didn’t want to be denied the simple courtesy of an acknowledgment of that fact.

  “That’s enough now,” said the nurse.

  “He has hours to save the woman he loves,” Dark said. “He doesn’t have time to be babied.”

  Danni nodded, his face profuse with sweat. “I’m okay.” Another few coughs were followed by more fretting from the nurse. “I’ll be fine, goddammit!” He pushed at the nurse, barely moving her, but it was enough to make his point. The nurse turned and headed for the exit. “Use the call button if it gets to be too much for you,” she said, speaking to Danni as if we’d left the room. “You have the morphine switch too.” She looked at Dark and scowled. “Don’t be afraid to use it.”

  “What do you want?” Danni asked. “What will it take for you to help Rosie?”

  Dark crossed the room and sat on the chair furthest away. “I want the truth, all of it. You can start by admitting that you poisoned Arjun Rao because you knew he was sleeping with the woman you love.”

  “He raped her! Rosie ended their affair a year earlier. She was living with me. One night, she worked late and he raped her.”

  Danni didn’t start coughing this time, but I almost wish he had. Instead, he went into graphic detail on how he’d managed to poison Rao, all the while with a perverse smile on his face that made me want to puke. I’d seen that look before, in Afghanistan, while I listened to so-called jihadists brag about blowing up innocent civilians. Danni was as full of shit as they were. The term Jihad never meant holy war. It refers to the spiritual struggle within each person against sin. The only holy war proscribed in the Quran is the war against one’s own evil. Likewise, as Danni detailed his tale, it was obvious he wasn’t avenging his wronged, innocent partner. I’d interviewed Rosie myself—even she wasn’t sure whether her liaisons with Rao were rape or not. Danni had poisoned the old man with violently toxic polonium and then later with monkshood when that didn’t seem to work, for no other reason than he was mad because Rosie had sex with someone other than him. At the end of the day, it was simple jealously and greed, not righteousness that led to Danni’s destruction. He intended to kill Rao and have Rosie inherit the restaurant. A post-operative Danni would then marry Rosie for the money and set the restaurant up as a place they could use to launch Danni’s career.

  There were just two holes to clear up once Danni finished his tale: where did he get the polonium and how did he get to Rao once he was inside the Institute’s supposedly tight security?

  “I need a name, Danni, or the deal is off. You won’t see Rosie and neither Foss nor I will tell her she has been exposed.”

  “You fucking bitch.” Danni’s voice was a low snarl. Dark stood and walked to face a faded painting of downtown London that hung aslant on the wall. For fifteen seconds she stood there, her hands clasped behind her back. Danni relented, seeming to sink deeper into the bed. “It was Weasel, okay? Weasel got me the polonium, but he didn’t know what I was doing with it. It was earmarked for … I wasn’t supposed to use it.” His voice dropped to a ragged whisper that sounded as if all the wind had been sucked from his lungs. “It was just for show, just to show the marks we could touch them anytime we wanted. Weasel’s in hiding now. Even I don’t know where he is.”

  “Who the hell is Weasel?” I asked.

  “Ain’t you the detective? You figure it out.”

  “Who were your marks, Danni?” Dark asked.

  “No way I’m telling you that.”

  “Then we are through talking.” Dark moved to the door and twisted the knob.

  “No, wait.”

  Dark didn’t turn around, but I did. We were a good team—bad cop and worse cop. “Rao wasn’t the first, was he?” I asked.

  Danni’s grin looked skeletal. “With the polonium, yes. With the wolf’s bane, not so much.”

  Dark spun on her heels. “Who?”

  “Just some fat fuck banker who wouldn’t keep his hands off Rosie. She doesn’t know about it. I told her I scared him off.” She launched into a laughing and coughing spasm that made me want to calm him down with a pillow over his face. With his waning energy, Danni told us how to find his client list, which was encrypted on a laptop Samuels’s security team took from the Brighton flat. “You have to promise you’ll never say it was me who told you any of this or Rosie’s dead.”

  “Dead on account of whom?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “You’ll have to ask my brother, if you can find him. Good luck with that. He won’t exactly be cooperative.”

  “You’re telling me he was your main contact, but you don’t know where he is?” I asked.

  “That was our security plan. Weasel and I don’t trust each other. If I don’t know where he is, he figures he’s safe.”

  “Take a guess,” I said. Something about his demeanor told me he took pride in knowing more about this Weasel than he or we thought.

  Danni coughed for a spell, holding up his hand when I offered water. “Too late for that,” he said. He sucked in some hard air and wiped tears from his eyes. “I heard rumors he’s been working with some group of twats that calls themselves Seize Mai. Don’t know nothing about them except they’ve taken credit for a minor terrorist cockup in Paris that failed completely.” More coughing. “Just like Weasel to get caught up with that lot.”

  “Seize Mai,” I said. “That’s what, 16 May?”

  “Oui,” Dark answered, looking at us.

  Danni nodded in Dark’s direction. “She’s French, right?”

  “Paris born and raised,” Dark answered.

  “Then you and Weasel are practically twins.” He gave a cynical laugh that ended in bloody coughing. He gasped a few times and then struggled to catch his breath.

  “I need a real name, Danni,” I said. I’d seen enough people die to recognize the symptoms. We were running out of time.

  To my surprise, Dark answered. “Vasyl. His name is Vasyl, spelled V-A-S-Y-L but pronounced with a W, and he’s Danni’s brother. They’ve called him Weasel since he was a kid in London.”

  Danni pulled himself barely upright. “How the hell’d you know that?” she
asked. Dark said nothing and turned, resuming studying the crooked picture. Danni blinked at her several times with a look of bright despair on his face. Finally, he turned to me, calling me over to him with a curl of his index finger. “Rosie doesn’t know about the killings,” he said, “any of them. Promise me you’ll protect her.” A tear leached down his cheek. “Promise me.”

  I nodded, with the phrase any of them whistling through my head. Danni sagged back into the bed and erupted into a new coughing fit while I spun his last words in my head. Probably because I was closest, Danni grabbed my hand and squeezed, so I squeezed back, just a little, enough to let him know he was still with us. Dark turned, approached him, but instead of helping, merely pushed the call button on the bed, sending the nurse and attending physician rushing into the room to sweep me away. Without a word, a tear, or a backward glance, Jeanne Dark walked out of the room, out of the Institute, and out of the dying Danni Rudenko’s life without so much as a peep. I learned later from Samuels that Danni died in the midst of that prolonged coughing spell, spitting up blood from his hemorrhaging liver.

  I caught up with Dark across the street from the Institute, standing in the drizzling rain and smoking a cigarette. There were three butts at her feet. With the way her hand was quivering, I didn’t object to the fourth. “He died before he could tell us anything about the killings,” I said. “Samuels’s team is working on the client list. She said she’d let us know if anything turns up.” I paused, trying without success to get a read on Dark’s mood. “How did you know Weasel’s real name?”

  “You said Danni’s name was Danya, a Ukrainian name. There are only so many Ukrainian boys’ names that sound like Weasel. I took a guess it was Vasyl.”

  “Hmm. What else did you guess?”

  “Danni acted as though he didn’t like his brother much.”

  “That seemed pretty obvious, given he actually called him Weasel. I think he’d have given him up if he knew anything.”