The trouble, Eric knew, as he entered the office, would begin now that he had.
Eduardo did not bother rising to greet him, or shaking hands, or making with an embrasso, or any such stuff, nor had Eric expected it.
“I gather you have something urgently important to tell me, Eric?” he simply said.
“I do,” Eric replied in similar style, and he sat down and laid it out as succinctly and quickly as possible in words of one syllable, leaving nothing at all out, not even his use of the aphrogas, nor the supine posture in which he had secured most of the information he was relaying, nor even his collusion with Monique Calhoun, wanting to get it all out in one piece before he lost his courage on the one hand, and figuring that he at least owed that much to Eduardo and his syndic on the other.
When he had finished, Eduardo Ramirez just sat there silently regarding him over steepled fingers for at least a full minute, displaying no emotion, giving nothing away, making Eric sweat.
“You’ve been rather venturesome, haven’t you, Eric?” he finally said.
“It was necessary . . . under the conditions.”
“Interesting conditions,” said Eduardo, still stone-faced. “Created by you.”
“I gained a piece of valuable knowledge,” Eric told him.
“Did you?”
“We now know that a human brain—”
“A supposition,” Eduardo said coldly. “But we did learn something else.” He granted Eric a frosty smile. “Do you know what it is?”
Eric felt he was being tested in a way he did not quite understand. He thought very carefully before he spoke.
“That . . . that if Monique Calhoun swallowed my lie about Lao being the code word for an operation of ours, it isn’t one of theirs.”
“Perhaps,” said Eduardo. “Or . . . ?” He cocked an inquisitive eyebrow.
“Or . . . if it is, Calhoun didn’t know . . . any more than she knew they’re faking the white tornadoes. . . .”
Eduardo nodded. But he did not smile approvingly. Not at all.
“But she knows now,” he said. “And much more importantly, Big Blue will know that
we
know, by dispensation of a major policy decision you made without prior authorization from the syndic. Wouldn’t you say you’ve taken quite a bit on yourself, Eric?”
“I wasn’t exactly in a position to make a phone call first,” Eric said, and, despite the dire circumstances, couldn’t entirely suppress his grin.
“True,” said Eduardo, the corners of his lips merely twitching. “I would’ve done the same in your . . . position.”
“Then I did the right thing?”
“You certainly did a dangerous thing,” said Eduardo.
“Dangerous?” said Eric.
Eduardo Ramirez let him sweat for a good thirty seconds.
“Dare I suppose that, given the circumstances, you might not have been calculating the ramifications with cold logical clarity?” Eduardo finally suggested dryly. “That you might not have been fully cognizant of the bet you were, ah, laying down, or the stakes?”
“Uh . . . maybe not . . .” Eric said uneasily.
“True that nothing has been lost by letting Big Blue know we are in possession of material that could destroy them, and we do indeed have a need to know if they’re using human brains as central processing units, but . . .”
Eduardo let that “but” hang and made a palm-forward gesture inviting or daring or perhaps requiring Eric to complete his sentence.
And of course now Eric did realize what he had more or less known all along, even then.
“But if Big Blue calls my bluff—”
“No bluff, Eric!” Eduardo said sharply. “You didn’t make a
personal
threat, you made a threat on behalf of
Bad Boys
. And as a matter of both honor and practical credibility, Bad Boys can never be seen to have in retrospect bluffed. If Big Blue is so self-destructive as to believe we have, we
must
sell the recordings to the media, even if—”
“Even if it means blowing a much more lucrative sale to the Marenkos,” Eric said.
Eduardo nodded. “Now you
do
understand what you’ve done,” he said. “And the personal consequences. Because if that happens—”
“It will not have been a very good career move?” Eric said wanly, not really caring to contemplate, let alone ask, just how bad a career move it might turn out to be.
“Not at all,” Eduardo said.
And then, unexpectedly, his whole demeanor changed.
He smiled, he rose, he went to a small bar and poured two snifters of cognac, and motioned for Eric to join him before the big picture window, where a travel poster vision of Paris spread out before Eric, lush and green and fair from this air-conditioned vantage, despite the sweaty reality beyond the glass.
Disneys everywhere you looked.
He wondered uneasily if Eduardo Ramirez’s abrupt lightening of manner was more of the same, and when Eduardo handed him his glass, it took a bit of discipline for Eric to content himself with a gentlemanly sip rather than bolt down a big gulp for courage.
“On the other hand, Eric,” Eduardo said, as if continuing the same conversation, but in an entirely altered mode, “if that
doesn’t
happen, you will have earned the right to be considered a man of serious respect within Bad Boys.
Because
you took such a personal risk to do the right thing on the syndic’s behalf.”
“The right thing? But if it turns out wrong—”
“The
morally
right thing,” Eduardo said. “Which is not a matter of profit or loss. Bad Boys are neither capitalists indifferent to any values beyond the economic, nor the rough gangsters of your mother’s nostalgic fantasies. You did the right thing. I say without false modesty that I would’ve done the same thing. Or I wouldn’t be where I am today. I can’t protect you from the consequences, nor would I if I could, but win or lose, you
did
do the right thing, and I admire you for it.”
“I did the right thing, but I have to suffer the consequences if it turns out wrong?” Eric said.
“Who else would you suggest bear the consequences of your actions?”
“It doesn’t seem fair.”
“Life isn’t fair,” Eduardo said. “Perhaps you’ve noticed? And if it turns out that your misjudgment cost the syndic a large amount of money . . .”
He shrugged. “We are not capitalists, Eric. Personal decisions on the behalf of the collectivity require the acceptance of personal responsibility for the results. The buck, as the Americans never quite managed to understand, stops with each and every citizen-shareholder.”
Eric took a longer sip of cognac, but still a controlled one. He felt fear, he knew that he had put himself in this situation without being fully aware of what he had really been doing.
Yet he also felt he had unwittingly gained something thereby. Not just the warm glow of have done “the right thing” nor the adrenal rush of bravery, but the sense of having gained entry into an exclusive company, of having in some way beyond position in the syndic pecking order become the equal of Eduardo and been accepted as such.
Perhaps simply—though there was really nothing simple about it—having finally ceased to be merely his mother’s son in the eyes of Eduardo Ramirez and indeed perhaps even in his own, and become fully a man.
“Understood, Eduardo,” he said. He clinked glasses. “Understood and accepted.”
Eduardo clinked glasses back, and the two men drank to it.
As Monique Calhoun approached the café she had arranged for the rendezvous, she saw that Avi Posner and Eric Esterhazy had already arrived and were seated outside eyeing each other cautiously like two tomcats.
Checking her watch, she saw that she was a few minutes late and wondered whether this had been by unconscious instinctual design, for now, in retrospect, she thought that it wasn’t such a bad idea. For although the men were the principals in this little inspection tour and she was just a supernumerary, keeping them waiting for her for a bit altered the geometry somewhat, made the triangle more equilateral.
Avi Posner had been rather bemused when he called to tell her that the client had readily agreed to allow Esterhazy, himself, and
Monique to inspect what they now admitted was indeed the computer on which they would run John Sri Davinda’s climate model on the final day of the conference.
Too
readily by Posner’s lights.
“They came right out and admitted they were faking the white tornadoes when I confronted them with it, but they told me I wouldn’t be sorry if I reserved judgment,” he had told her. “They made a mere pro forma show of shock and dismay when I told them that Bad Boys had recordings to prove it before they caved in to the blackmail.”
“What’s the problem, Avi?”
“The problem is there’s no problem. And there should be. It’s too easy. I don’t understand it. And I don’t like what I don’t understand.”
“Professional paranoia, Avi.”
“Perhaps,” Posner had said, coming as close to cracking a joke as he ever had, which was not very, “but in my profession, it pays to never leave home without it.”
If Posner had been less enthusiastic about Big Blue’s swift capitulation to Eric’s ultimatum that he should’ve been in Monique’s opinion, Eric himself had been more relieved than the situation would have seemed to warrant when she told him.
His normally suave and supercilious persona had vanished from the nervous face on her phone screen when she called, and he had leaned forward eagerly.
“
Well?
” he had demanded without his customary niceties.
“Well what . . . ?” Monique could not refrain from teasing coyly.
“
Please
. . . .”
“Please what . . . ?”
“Please stop playing games and tell me whether it’s yes or no!”
“Oh
that
. . .” Monique had purred, letting it and him hang.
“Yes that!”
“It’s a yes,” Monique finally told him mercifully. “Five o’clock.”
It was as if a balloon had been emptied of a heavy gas and reinflated with helium. The edgy tension went whooshing out of Eric’s demeanor with a nearly audible sigh of relief and the familiar Prince Smarming came surging back.
“Excellent,” he said. “Why don’t we meet at say, three? That
should give us sufficient time to . . . relax beforehand. My apartment? Or perhaps your suite at the Ritz?”
Only then did it dawn on Monique that Eric, being an operative of Bad Boys and not Bread & Circuses, might have something a lot more personally vital riding on pulling off this blackmail scheme than she did.
And only realizing that, did it then seem to her that behind that supercilious persona there might be something admirable that had not been there before. And that made him more attractive because it was.
Nevertheless . . .
“We’ll have to meet at a café,” she had told him. “We’re going to have a third. . . .”
“Sorry I’m late,” Monique said, as she walked up to the table. “Avi, this is Prince Eric Esterhazy of, er,
La Reine de la Seine
, Eric, this is Avi Posner of, ah . . . er . . .”
“Mossad,” said Posner.
Monique cocked an eyebrow, at which of them she wasn’t sure.
“We’ve already introduced ourselves,” Eric told her with a smile.
“Up to a point,” Posner amended cautiously.
Eric Esterhazy felt more in command than ever he had from the wheelhouse of
La Reine
entering the Grand Palais with Monique Calhoun and Avi Posner.
This was no disney and he was no front man. This was
his
operation. He had taken it upon himself to conceive it, he had bet everything on it, perhaps even his life, and he had won. He was now, as Eduardo had said, a man of serious respect within Bad Boys.
And treated as such by this older and obviously hardened professional from Mossad.
That Big Blue would insist on sending its own minder along was no surprise and it was already known that they had hired Mossad. But Avi Posner’s attitude had not been what Eric had expected.
Monique had flashed him Posner’s photo at the end of her call, and Posner could not help but be familiar with the face of the famous Prince of the City, so they had recognized each other immediately when Posner approached the café table that Eric had already taken.
“Avi Posner, I presume?” Eric had ventured with the habitual superciliousness of his princely persona. Then, catching himself, and establishing his weight. “Of Mossad?”
“Eric Esterhazy?” Posner had replied, dispensing with the title, which Eric found himself taking more as a compliment than a slight. “Of Bad Boys?”
With that, Posner seated himself, and they ordered coffees.
Eric, not used to this sort of thing, broke an awkward silence. “About the, ah, methods we’ve employed—”
“A nice piece of work.”
“No hard feelings then?”
“Between Mossad and Bad Boys? We’re cousins are we not? Our menus of methods are not that different. Our syndic charters are not that dissimilar. The main difference is that you undertake certain freelance commercial activities on your own and we stick to our contract work.”