by Tim Sandlin
"You of all people should want a coffee option in Paris."
That was true. I could have died for a Breakfast Blend venti right about then. French mud was growing on me, but it wasn't coffee.
"When you so rashly confronted Armand, did you see evidence of insurrection?" Pinto said.
"They had McDonald's uniforms."
Pinto glanced at me, then back at the narrow street. "Something's going on with McDonald's. Something bigger than bricks and bats."
"There was a map of Paris on the table, with a sticky star at a six-way intersection next to a river."
"That's nothing. A T.G.I. Friday's they're planning an action against today."
"You going to stop it?"
"I can't blow my cover over diarrhea dumped in a salad bar. The McDonald's attack is the battle I can use to wipe out these jackasses once and for all. Is that clear?"
"Not a bit."
"Win the war on McDonald's and we'll make Paris safe for Starbucks. I need you to find out what they're planning."
I let that I need you comment slide right on by. "And how do you know about T.G.I. Friday's?
"Not all those old drunks sitting near Armand's table at the Pléiade are deaf."
Near the top of the hill, there was a fancy church and a cluster of tourist traps on the right, what we call rubber tomahawk stores back home. Lord knows what they're called in Paris. Tinfoil Eiffel Tower ashtray traps, maybe. Pinto turned left, into a semi-posh neighborhood.
"If you're such a hotshot CIA agent, why are you desperate for cash? Why sell turquoise and drive a taxi?"
Pinto ran a stringy hand over his face. His hands with the blue tube veins made me revise my estimate of his age, upward. "I'm on loan to Starbucks, like I told you. " His right eyebrow rode his forehead like a black millipede. "In the switchover, the agency lost my paperwork. Have you ever tried to find lost secret paperwork? I can't even admit what I'm looking for exists."
The road snaked down a hill, then he hit a right and we snaked back up. The turns weren't switchbacks, but they were tighter than you would want to try in a Dodge Dakota. A full-size American pickup truck would be nothing but trouble in Paris.
"Do you keep track of all Armand's people?" I asked.
He snickered. "Down to the freckles on their behinds."
"So you knew where Odette lived yesterday, before you took me to the post office."
"Of course I knew."
"And you being in Crepes a Go Go wasn't random."
"The file clerk called me the moment you walked into the philosophy department. We are quite interested in your girlfriends' trip to Colorado."
"That means you know where Giselle lives."
"She's not home."
Pinto pulled up in front of a white house with a long front porch and Greek-looking pillars. The downstairs windows had security bars, the upstairs windows, yellow curtains.
Pinto said, "First, I must know if Mrs. Whiteside is having sex."
"She's a whore, Pinto. She's having sex."
He turned off the engine and sat, staring at his thumbs on the steering wheel. "The man I suspect her of being emotionally intimate with is in her room now. You are to go in and discover their true actions."
"Forget it."
His face flushed, angry. "How can you be so ungrateful?"
"I was raised to it. I can't believe you expect me to kick in your wife's door to make sure she's humping. That's nuts."
You could see Pinto fighting to control his voice. "Kicking in is not necessary. When a client turns violent the prostitute may need help quickly, therefore doors are never locked in a bordello. I can't believe you are so naive that you didn't know that."
I didn't say anything. I'd told him Forget it the once, there didn't seem much point to repeat myself. An urban squirrel ran between birch-looking trees in the front yard. A FedEx truck stopped next door and a woman got out. Pinto's fingers tapped a rhythm on the steering wheel. I recognized it — drum solo from "Wipe Out" by the Ventures. More his generation than mine.
"Have it your way," he said. "I'll take you to Giselle's afterward."
One of the last things I wanted to do, if not the very last, was get involved in the personal life of a turquoise-dealing cabdriver CIA agent with a whore for a wife. There were almost bound to be complications. But then, the alternative was to physically force him to give me Giselle's address, and, if he actually was CIA, he'd no doubt been combat trained.
I nodded at the big house. "This is it?"
"If you walk right in like you own the place and quickly go up the steps, no one will stop you, not this time of day anyway. At the top of the stairs, turn left. Mrs. Whiteside's suite is the last door on the right."
"In Juarez, they're called cribs."
"My wife works out of a suite."
The building looked like the place a senator might live, or maybe a private hospital for wealthy coke heads. It didn't strike me as a house of ill repute, but what did I know?
"I've never actually been inside a whorehouse before."
This struck Pinto as humorous. "A cowboy like you?"
"I've seen hookers in Vegas and Rock Springs. There's always a few strays hanging around poetry gatherings, but, as a rule, bull riders don't pay. It's the only perk we get."
"It'll be good for you to see how other people live."
I opened my door. "I don't care how other people live."
No blind piano player. No madam encased in rouge and diamonds with a breast of iron and a heart of melted Velveeta. Once again, my preconceptions went down the tubes. Maybe it was too early in the day. Maybe the piano player and madam came out after dark. The only people in sight were two women in nightgowns playing backgammon at a coffee table in the parlor. I guess you'd call it a parlor. It had chairs and couches and cabinets with glass shelves that I figured were named after Louis the some-number-or-other. At least, they are in books. But then books have blind piano players and crusty madams, so maybe the whole mythology is based on a fiction writer's imagination.
One of the women looked up at me and said something French.
I pointed to the staircase and said, "FedEx delivery for Mrs. Whiteside," then took off up the steps before they could comment on my lack of uniform or package. I don't think they knew English. I could have said anything.
The stairs were wide and marble with a marble banister on the outside drop-off. The wall had paintings, mostly of naked women and clothed men. More rape as art. Charlie Russell never painted rape as art, even in his Indian series. One painting looked like they were having a picnic, only the men were overdressed in suits and vests and the woman was underdressed in nothing. She held her hand over her snatch.
The hallway was hardwood. It had laminated siding to about hip level, then jaundice pee-colored paint on up. The lightbulb was forty-watt, at the most. The whole time I was in France. I never saw a lightbulb over forty watt. Bad lighting must be a cultural thing. I kind of felt my way to the end of the hall, located what I took to be the proper door, and walked on in.
Nobody was getting nailed. A man and woman were sitting at a little iron table like my mom has on her patio. They were drinking tea, I would assume. Steam rose from delicate cups with a matching delicate pot. An equally delicate plate held cookies. Girl Scout cookies, maybe, the shortbread kind.
The woman didn't seem fazed to see me at the door. She said, "Pardon?"
She was one of those fifty-year-old beautiful women you run into on rare occasions. Widow's peak hairline, strong forehead, posture of a ballerina, wearing a flowing dress with a turtleneck collar that seemed to be made from doily material. Heaps of dignity. Her only visible jewelry was a turquoise ring.
The man was dressed in white, in drastic contrast to everyone else in Paris. He looked like the rich uncle who leaves you seventy-five dollars in Monopoly. The fat entrepreneur. He sat forward in his chair, leaning toward Mrs. Whiteside. I got the idea I'd interrupted him in the midst of making an important point.
I said, "Oops."
Mrs. Whiteside said, "Vous désirez?"
"I'm here to pick up your FedEx shipment."
Mrs. Whiteside looked at the gentleman and said, "FedEx?"
He went off in French. After a bit, she looked back at me and said, "Non, merci."
Embarrassed no end, I got out of there.
I more or less ran down the staircase and out the door. Pinto saw me coming and turned on the engine, I suppose thinking we might need a quick getaway. When no one chased me out the door, he turned the engine back off.
He twisted in the driver's seat to face me. "Well?"
"Well, what?"
"Did you catch them unawares?"
"I caught them all right."
"What were they doing?"
"Pumping like elk in a rut."
Pinto's face broke into a smile. The tension flew from his forehead and his eyebrows stopped twitching for the first time since we met. "I knew it," he said, which was a blatant lie. "Who was on top? Alene or the client?"
"They were doing the dog."
"All the better. No eye contact."
"It was pure animal," I said. "She looked bored."
That almost got me caught. "Alene never looks bored. She is the consummate professional."
"The guy couldn't see her face."
Pinto nodded, building a mental picture of his wife and her client. "What about the mirror?"
I didn't remember a mirror. Hell, I didn't remember a bed, I'd been so caught up in the beautiful woman and the courtly gentleman. "They were facing the window."
Pinto nodded again, turning his mental picture ninety degrees. "Did Alene see you?"
"I was only in the door a few seconds. Neither one had any idea I'd been in the room."
"All the better," Pinto said.
"Now, take me to Giselle's place."
"She's not home."
"All the better."
23
Cowboys, as a rule, read more than any other profession, although what they read couldn't be considered Oprah literature. Whether it's the loneliness of the campfire or the boredom of the bunkhouse, the majority of your cowboys who actually punch cows own and have read the complete works of Louis L'Amour, including all seventeen Sackett novels, and that's where they learned how to behave. Personally, my code came from Will James, although I'm not the only one. Ian Tyson — the musician we named Tyson after — has a song where he says when you're in trouble it helps to figure out what Will James would have done.
Back in the olden days of twenty years past, many a bunkhouse had one wire-thin, bowlegged geezer with a face like a topo map of the land he'd spent his life on who knew his Ovid and Homer back to front. I dare you to find another profession where there's men can simultaneously quote Thoreau and castrate. The satellite dish and a suicide rate thirty times the national average wiped out those old cranks, but their memory hasn't quite gone the way of the Indian scout.
Which is all relevant to understanding why, as a real cowboy, I had to get my buckle back or die trying, but in the meantime I was about set to stuff Pinto's cigar down his throat. Imagine the ego it takes to put your oral gratification above the misery of others. I am floored by the mind-set of the public cigar smoker.
"Giselle lives with a roommate." He blew a column of blue smoke. "Studi. She's Belgian, works for Air France."
"Does Studi speak English?"
Pinto did one of those this-and-that waves with his cigar hand. "When she wants to. We don't think she's any more anti-American than your average flight attendant. She's not out to destroy capitalism anyway. Studi and Giselle can barely tolerate one another, so I doubt if she knows any inside information."
"Like where my buckle is."
Pinto's temper flashed. "Your buckle means nothing. You hear me?"
"It does to me."
"How can you compare a belt buckle to protecting innocent lives and property?"
"I thought you were making France safe for Starbucks."
"It's the same thing." He puffed like dry ice in a washtub. Maybe someday American smokers will all move to France and French non-smokers will move to America and we'll have world peace. "If Studi says anything about McDonald's, you let me know."
I said, "You betcha," but what I meant was "In your dreams."
The water-head hit me for thirty euros. I couldn't believe it. He practically kidnaps me, then charges for the ride. We drove back over the river and up past this temple thing into another neighborhood without grass. He pulled up in front of a building held together by graffiti.
Pinto said, "Thirty euros."
I said, "That only counts when I sit in back."
"I'm not getting you out of jail anymore."
"I'm not spying on your wife anymore."
We left it at that.
Studi herself had platinum hair and eyebrows. I found her sitting at the kitchen table, reading a glossy fashion magazine and using a cigarette to cauterize her split ends. She was very thorough, but the burnt hair smell made me queasy.
"I'm supposed to meet Giselle here," I said.
She kept her head down, toward her hair ends, so when she looked at me her eyes were way up in the whites, the way Lauren Bacall used to look at Humphrey Bogart. "Giselle hasn't been home in three days."
"She said I should wait in her bedroom until she arrived."
Any roommate who liked Giselle would have said to wait in the kitchen or living room or someplace, but I was counting on subconscious animosity. Studi's animosity wasn't all that subconscious.
She said, "I do not understand what you men see in her."
"She's cruel. Some men get off on cruelty."
She hit her cigarette and blew smoke sideways out of the corner of her mouth, the way girls do sometimes. "And you?"
"I ride bulls. It's not much of a leap from bulls to Giselle."
She chuckled in Belgian. Or Freneh, or whatever language was her usual. It didn't come off much like an American chuckle. "So, you're a masochist."
"You're not the first to call me that word."
Studi burned another split end. The magazine was open to a page showing women dressed for a costume dance, I think, walking down a raised sidewalk with photographers so close on each side they could look up the girls' skirts.
"She never brought home a cowboy before." Studi raised her face to look at me straight on. Her eyes were platinum, too. "You're American."
"Wyoming."
"Giselle hates Americans. How do I know you are a lover and not some freak out to steal her computer?"
"She has a mushroom tattoo here." I pointed out the place above Giselle's pubic Upper Peninsula.
"That is more than I care to know." Studi licked her index finger and turned the page to what looked like a douche ad. It was in French. She said, "Not that I care. If you want to steal her computer, I won't stop you."
"I'll keep that in mind."
Giselle collected dolls. Isn't that interesting? She had them lined up on shelves along one wall of her room. Must have been 150 dolls from raggedy to wooden to china faces with cloth bodies. Naked baby dolls and dolls whose eyes flipped open and shut. One doll sat on a toadstool. They were grouped by nationality and race, moving from Swedish milkmaids top left to a little Eskimo in a blue parka bottom right. The entire bottom shelf was black, Asian, or Indian. The only dolls she didn't collect were marketed series like Barbie and Cabbage Patch. Nothing there smelled of Toys "R" Us.
The rest of Giselle's room was more like Giselle. An autographed poster of Valerie Solanas slicing the tool off a cartoon redneck hung over the bed. I don't know who Valerie Solanas was or is, but she was or is pissed off. Giselle had been reading The Ballad of Dead Ladies by Dante Rossetti in English. The other books — and there were lots of them — were foreign. Hardly any had pictures on the cover. I found a dildo the size of a meat hook in her closet under a pile of spike-heeled boots, and a camouflage party dress. Even bunnies don't wear camouflage party dresses.
Between the mattress and box springs, I found a pistol, some off-brand I'm not familiar with. German, maybe. It had a bolt action and a full clip. I put it back.
One of her jewelry boxes contained a glass cylinder coated on the bottom by a powdery residue. No doubt drugs. The stuff was peach-colored, like Mica's face powder, not white or crystal like any of the drugs I'm familiar with. I opened the top and sniffed, but that's just something you do when you find a strange powder. I have no idea how dope smells.
There was a Victoria's Secret catalogue sealed in plastic in her ceiling-high toilet tank. I took that as her most embarrassing possession.
I turned on her computer and flipped through her mail while it warmed up. The mail was all French, but it seemed to be bills and offers for beauty products. Two euros off on a thin-crust pizza. Nothing came addressed to Terrorist.
Next to the gear in his war bag, a rodeo cowboy's most important tool is his computer. Without the Internet, long-distance phone bills would be horrendous. You've got to check a rodeo, enter it, pay your fees, go back later and see if the animal you drew is worth the drive. If you haven't heard of the animal, you research it. And then there's pharmaceuticals from Canada.
Giselle's computer opened right up on the 'net. I recognized the Yahoo logo even though the words were French. I went under the ALLEZ icon at the top and backtracked through her recent visits to see what she'd been looking up lately. The top page was an eBay auction of a Frozen Charlotte doll — stone bisque, unjointed, molded hair, $75 minimum bid — which proved the collection wasn't left over from her innocent childhood. She was still at it. The next page was photos of Finnish lesbians having sex on an ice floe. I scrolled through the pictures, trying to figure out what went where. I've never understood lesbianism. I mean, I understand women who prefer each other to men, I don't much like men myself. What I don't understand are the technical aspects of positioning and penetration, or lack of it. Why would a person who can't stand males purchase a dildo? Maybe it's only the bisexuals, like Giselle, who use meat hooks, and the real lesbians stick to fingers and tongues. And without a limp tool, how do they know when they're finished?
The page below was the McDonald's crew handbook in French. Cleanliness was a big deal, and uniform maintenance. Photographs showed the proper way to mop. Below that, stretching back a week and a half, all her visits had to do with McDonald's. There were sample menus and mini-biographies of Dick and Mac McDonald. She'd rooted out a database of the eight hundred and whatever franchises in France, with little MapQuest boxes so you could find one wherever you traveled.
