The Little Burgundy: A Jeanne Dark Adventure

by Bill Jones Jr.

  We complied and she commanded us to reach out and open the door using the outside handles. Once out, we were instructed to walk backward toward the docks, which was tricky for me on the wet pavement with no cane. We were told to lie face down and I felt male hands checking me for weapons and the existence of a vagina, apparently. I had one but not the other. Foss’s weapon was taken.

  “Stand up, and keep walking backwards,” Samuels said. “That’s far enough.” She walked around us, her gun still in firing position and said, “Turn around.”

  We did so and found ourselves facing Samuels and two men, one of whom I immediately recognized.

  “I shock his balls,” I whispered, just loudly enough for him to hear.

  Foss sniggered and the man’s face tightened, his finger touching the trigger of his weapon.

  “That’s enough!” Samuels said. Foss stopped laughing and the man relaxed, just a bit. His hand did not move, however. It was what we needed to know. This was no bluff. Foss taught me that one doesn’t put one’s finger on the trigger of a weapon until he means to shoot. Mr. Ballshock fully intended on killing us. Samuels walked in front of him, ostensibly to talk to us, but I sensed by the red energy between them, it was also to let him know she was in charge and the questioning would proceed in accordance with her rules. Ironically, the only thing preventing our deaths at that moment was her. She shook her head at us and smiled. It was an empty, bitter caricature of joy. “I’m going to make this simple,” she said. “I need you two to come in.” She gestured toward Ballshock with her head. “The alternative is quite simple.”

  “By come in, you mean … ? I asked

  She stood taller. “I need you working for me, not against me.”

  “We’re not against anyone, except those who try to kill us first,” Foss said.

  “That was unfortunate, I grant you. However, I underestimated your worth then. I mistakenly saw you as a nuisance, refusing to go home after you’d been relieved of your duties. I could have had you arrested for interfering with a national security program.”

  “You could have, had your program been sanctioned,” Foss said.

  “Ah, that word again. You and Kevin are too much alike. Being sanctioned is a gradient, full of grays. You of all people should know that.”

  I said, “Your use of the drone was a dangerous mistake.”

  She smiled again, leaving the taste of dust in my mouth. “I admit, it did put me out in the open a smidge too much for an Intel operation, but given the remoteness of the locale, it seemed a viable risk. I never figured you would get out of that one.” She waggled her finger at Foss. “Naughty of you and Kevin to keep secrets from your personnel file. He told me you were purely Intel. Nowhere in your jacket did it say you were a former field operative.”

  “I was a war-decorated sniper, you crazy bitch.” She winced. I edged near my partner, hoping to calm him. The energy on that drizzly dock was electric, now almost white with tension.

  “What do you and your superiors, want?” I asked. I knew the answer, but talking kept the woman calm.

  “What makes you think I have superiors?”

  I pointed to Ballshock. “Him. You could not get access to drones without help. Nor could you have gotten him released from the French authorities. Even Monsieur Hardesty wasn’t authorized and he outranks you.”

  She sneered at me, her yellowed teeth gleaming in the light. “Every grunt in the CIA outranks Homeland Security up through the Secretary.” The two jackals behind her smiled. I closed my eyes against the sight. “But you’re right, I do have help. As far as what I want?” She took a step closer, looking into my glasses as though they were a two-way mirror. “I need to take control of these franchises, and you’re going to help me. This operation has left some loose ends that I’ve had to clean up. I need Kovac and his operation to justify the program’s having been sanctioned.”

  “Loose ends like Vasyl Rudenko?” Foss asked. I could feel his anger.

  She nodded. “And your friend, Captain Gharnati. Terrible, terrible thing. It seems he was the victim of a car bomb. I’m afraid he didn’t make it.”

  Foss lunged at her and I grabbed him. “Why would you kill your own operative?” I asked.

  She looked at me with an even worse smile—a genuine, though predatory one. “Kevin was right. You are one impressive woman. The dear Captain was instructed to secure whatever data Rudenko had and … tidy things up after. Launching missiles into an office building with witnesses in the vicinity and without obtaining any data … well, that kind of fuck up is dangerous.”

  “So you killed him to make sure nothing could be traced to you.”

  “Correct again, Dr. Dark. However, I’m not all bad.” She made a false pouting face that I wanted to slap. Nothing about the woman was sincere. “We did clean up a dangerous terrorist ring in Casablanca. You may have heard of them—Seize Mai? My official report shows they were behind Captain Gharnati’s death. The CIA was happy to try to help the Moroccan government round them up.” Her false expression faded. “They got away.”

  Foss spoke between his gnashing teeth. “So you killed your own operative, Gharnati, and then blamed it on the Seize Mai team you put in place to do his dirty work?”

  She waggled her finger at him. “You really should let Dr. Dark do the detective work. You stick to the bodyguard work. Seize Mai didn’t work for me.”

  “Gharnati was double-crossing you,” I said. “You paid him to find Rudenko’s contact, but you learned he already worked for that contact.”

  “Enough of this!” She stopped herself, exhaling melodramatically and reaffixing the false smile on her face. “Here’s my offer. We’ve already learned that millions of Euros have passed into Kovac’s accounts. I intend to share the wealth with my team.” Her face hardened. “You will both be rewarded handsomely, if you play ball.”

  Foss said nothing. I said, “I am sorry, but my hip doesn’t allow for ball playing.”

  “Very well,” she said, and raised her weapon.

  This time, Foss stepped in front. “What exactly do you want, Monica?”

  “Account numbers, names, dates, all the information you secured from that Chinese bitch.”

  I could see worry about Rosie flash across Foss’s face. I knew if I saw it, then Samuels saw it too. We couldn’t show weakness in our current situation. I spoke, hoping to distract her. “If you know all of this, I don’t understand why you haven’t just taken the data you need.”

  “Even the CIA has limits, Dr. Dark. That wild goose chase you sent us on in Cayman cost us valuable time. By the time we figured out where you were, the police had been involved. That leaves me no recourse but to secure the funds myself before the damned cops put the accounts on lockdown.”

  “You might be too late for that, lady,” Foss said, his face a glowering smile.

  “Oh, I don’t think so. You see, I know something you don’t know.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “London is just the tip of the iceberg, and there’s lots more money to be had. Once I get Kovac, we pull up stakes and relocate the entire operation. Some British bankers go to jail for fraud, a few whores get arrested for murder, and six months from now the press will be onto another story. No one will even remember this.”

  “Which leads to us, doesn’t it?” I asked. “Another loose end.”

  Samuels smiled and turned in a slow circle, holding her pistol loosely and speaking as if she were surveying the entire city before ordering in an invading army. She was mad, and madness makes people dangerous. I began to tense my body. I could feel Foss do the same.

  “See, that’s my main flaw,” she said. “I’m an optimist. I am still of the hope that you two will see the futility of your position and come work for the winning team. Even if I let you live, once I file my report, your careers will be over. You won’t be able to get work investigating dog shit in a puppy mill.” The jackals began to laugh again. “You don’t get it. You’ve always work
ed for me, every second. You think that fat fuck Hardesty is in charge? This isn’t a donut run. It’s the real deal—international espionage.”

  “This is nothing more than petty theft,” I said.

  “You think that because you think too small. True, Kovac has used his resources to extort chickenfeed while playing the great philanthropist to the public, but we see the real value here.”

  Foss said, “In other words, instead of blackmailing for money, you intend on blackmailing for information.”

  “Be still my heart,” she said. “Nothing sexier than a smart man, is there Dark?” She looked at me and curled her lip. “This is the part where you say, ‘You’ll never get it away with it, Monica.’” They all laughed.

  “Oui,” I said.

  “No one but that dumbass Arnold even knows about you. You’ve been under wraps from day one, because Kevin wasn’t authorized to have you here in the first place. Nobody but him, me, and my sponsor know you’re on this case.”

  “So that makes Hardesty a loose end?” Foss asked.

  “That’s up to you. He doesn’t have to be. The man’s not clever enough to be a real threat.” She lowered her gun. “Come in from the cold, and we’ll work all of this out. If not, I still get what I want, but you’ll all be dead.”

  “Why kill us if your report ends our careers anyway?”

  She stepped closer to him, reached out and touched his lips. “Because I hate rejection, baby.” She stepped back, aligning herself with her cohorts. They looked like a firing squad. “What’s it going to be?”

  Foss looked at me. “What do you think?” he said.

  I already knew his answer. “I think, fuck you, you stupide, orange, psycho bitch!” I showed her my middle finger and the rest happened in a flash. There was a glare of white-hot anger from her, she raised her arm and I could see her finger squeeze the trigger. I heard a shot, closed my eyes to the flash, and felt Foss shove me backwards towards the river. Another shot and I heard him groan. I was still catapulting backwards from his push. There were more shots, a furious volley of them, and I felt one breach my blouse and burn through my flesh as I fell headfirst into the Thames.

  All went cold, dark, and bitterly quiet. A second later came a huge splash and the still body of my love. I could see him above me, sinking quickly, eyes closed and stream of bright red blood rising to the surface. His purple aura dimmed, faded, stopped. Though in shock, I wasn’t hurt badly. There was fresh pain in my side where the bullet grazed me, but that probably saved my life. When I felt its impact, it spun me, sending me into the water with a jet of blood from my wound. In retrospect, I am sure they did not pursue me into the river because they were sure I was dead when I hit it.

  They say when you are dying that your life flashes before your eyes. It is also true during critical events, such as when you stand watching the building you are in beginning to collapse as a fireball consumes the room in which you’ve hidden yourself, or when you are below the surface of a foul river, with bullets whizzing past, watching the love of your life sink to his death in the unyielding current. A very specific portion of my life surfaced for me, there, that night. I remembered my mother, the hateful, yellow demon of my childhood. I recalled all the tormented days that she commanded me to stand, be stronger, push harder, walk straighter … swim one more lap. Shortly after my accident, when the winter’s chill had barely passed, she took me to out to our unheated Olympic-sized pool, pushed me in, and told me to swim to the other end. I could not, of course, having the use of only around one-half of my body at that point. Most of my hip had been replaced with borrowed bone, steel rods, and prayers, but Maman didn’t care. To her, stopping was failure. My swimming lessons had begun when I was seven and only intensified after I was injured.

  In the early days, I’d be admonished simply to swim the fifty meters to the end. I would drown there, over and over, choking on water and sputtering to an exhausted, wounded, tearful end. And she would say, simply, “Again.” And I would repeat the journey. My grand-père would attempt to intercede, always without success. By the end of my second year past the operations, I could swim my laps with ease. By the third year, she would make me drag weights tied about my waist, forcing my muscles and skeleton to make up for the damage from the drunkard’s car.

  When I was seventeen, the summer before I left and didn’t return until she was dead and buried, I swam two hundred meter races with my sister, she twenty-three at the time and quite the athlete herself. I would swim the first fifty meters underwater, without stopping, rise only to breathe during the flip-turns, push off with my feet, and continue, again, not surfacing. Maman would see me win the race, but I made certain she never once saw me swim.

  So here I floated, holding my breath as my Foss sank to me, and remembered my mother whom I hated with all the fibers of my being, and realized that she and only she had saved my life. My crazy mother, the paranoid schizophrenic, the super-bitch abuser, the woman with the gift of foresight like none other, who had seen this night in her dreams for most of my life—Maman had saved my life. I could see through the water as Samuels and the two men departed, satisfied we were both dead. I grabbed Foss by the collar, kicked with all my might, and he budged. I kicked again, and could feel my brace would hold under my slacks, Jette’s gift to my salvation, and knew I had enough strength for us both. By the middle of the river, I was satisfied we were alone and swam at the surface, still pulling Foss. He wasn’t moving, but I could see his breath, just enough.

  “Hang on, chéri,” I said. It was raining still, or I was crying. “I can’t be here alone.”

  I’d nearly reached the other side when a boat pulled up, and its light blinded me. I shut my eyes against the light, clutched my love, and called for help. Five minutes later, I was in the police boat and they were doing CPR on Foss. After that, I passed out and awoke later in the hospital. They wouldn’t tell me if he would live, only that he was critical and in a coma. They asked me if I wanted to go in to see him, but I refused. He wouldn’t believe it was me if I went to say goodbye. I checked myself out of the hotel and headed to pack.

  With or without my Foss, my mission was the same. I would go to Spain and I would end this, or be ended by it. Foss would have accepted nothing less. It was he who saved my life, and I would make it worth saving.

  22 - Sin en Albayzín

  After Maman had her debilitating stroke, her paranoia and delusions intensified in frequency and magnitude. I could not bring myself to visit her, but the institution provided her access to pen and paper, and she would dictate long, rambling tomes that would appear in my mailbox monthly until her death. I didn’t read or even open any of them until I’d turned thirty, five years after the final stroke that took her life. To this day, I am uncertain as to what moved me to read the first letter, selected at random from my perspective, but perhaps purposefully in the universe’s grand scheme.

  Most of the letter’s content was the dribbling madness of a psychotic mind, but in its midst was the story of her recurring dream, the one wherein I drowned struggling to free a giant from his constriction. Over the course of years, as her obsessions drove me to swim countless laps in our pool, the nature of the dreams changed, but only in outcome. I would marry the giant, or he would die in my arms. Which result was the truth, Maman was uncertain. Her only surety—whatever limited surety one can have while in the throes of psychosis—was that one or the other would happen. At no point in my life, up until I felt the cold, chalky water of the Thames upon my face did I believe her. She was the bane of my existence and I refused her madness, rejected her as forcefully as I embraced my own personhood. But Foss had fallen in after me, two gunshot wounds to his torso, and I had somehow pulled my giant love to at least the hope of rescue. So, was Maman mad, or simply the victim of an advanced Obsessive Compulsive Disorder that had gone undiagnosed and untreated for all her life?

  This is what I pondered as I sat on my Carnero Street balcony in Granada, listening to McCoy Tyner fr
om the player in the living room and trying to resist calling Jette for a status report for the fifth time that day. Her answer would be the same the next time I called as the previous ones, I already knew. “Foss is in an induced coma, Jeannie. He struck his head very hard on the concrete before falling in the water. Once the swelling subsides, the doctors will allow him to come out of the coma and then we will see where we stand.” She reminded me the papers claimed he and I died, and so none would come to finish him. I knew the litany by heart, but somehow, I took comfort from the words. He was not dead yet.

  Once again I wondered if my mother’s madness had begun to insinuate itself into my mind.

  It is wrong to be here. The words in my mind tormented me, clarion as they were. Whether they were carried to me from the forces of the universe, whispered remembrances from past lives, or my own imagined patronus rent from my psyche to explain how I could sometimes know the unknowable, I could hear the voices tell me I should be by the side of the man I loved. However, I had lived with those guides my whole life, and though they steered me to much professional success, I had never known true love. In such matters, they were useless. Even more, there was a single voice ringing in my head, one whom I’d never listened to—that of my mother.

  “You will marry the giant or he will die in your arms.”

  The words were clear, repeated over and over, always the same. I tried to twist them in my head to read, “Marry him and he will die in your arms,” but that choice was not given. Maman had never been right about me, but she was right about my Foss. Perhaps the next call to Jette would be the one where I heard I had lost him, and it would take all of my remaining strength to keep from leaping from the balcony to a shattered death below. But I would not take the chance Maman was right. I would not let him die in my arms.

  It was late afternoon, and the warm sun illuminated the walls of the Alhambra that rose above the hill opposite my balcony. I sat with my toes pointed towards it, peering at its ancient walls through my beer bottle and wondering what secrets it would tell me if it could. Just below the old castle, separated by a wall of verdant trees, was a series of dense buildings, many of which were holiday rentals like the one in which I sat. Most featured the familiar off-white walls and tiled roofs that were characteristic of the region, with the exception of the one across from me, with its odious saffron walls and cheery balcony of artificial grass and faux garden of tropical plants. One level below and fifty meters to the right sat the home of Alexej Kovac.