Bah-
bah
-BAH! BAH! BAH!
The familiar orchestral fanfare sounded as the virtual smokestacks sprang into being amidships puffing phantom gouts of black smoke and clouds of white steam, and the paddle wheels began to churn up foam, and the halogens came on, and the band began to play “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and her lasers saluted her with virtual fireworks as
The Queen of the River
moved out into the main channel, a soul-stirring scene of son-et-lumière glory.
But the mind’s eye of the Prince of the City presiding over tonight’s fateful departure from his customary station in the wheelhouse was elsewhere. Nor was his soul being stirred by images of cakewalking sainthood.
Eric Esterhazy was remembering a scene from an old war pic from the twentieth century he had once seen. A journalist is up in a helicopter that’s strafing fleeing refugees.
“How can you shoot women and children?” he demands.
“Easy,” says the gunner. “You just lead them by about ten feet less.”
How can you pin a murder on a woman you’ve made love to and common cause with?
Easy, though Eric. All it takes is two guns.
In a shoulder holster, Eric carried a carbon-fiber spent-uranium flechette pistol, a serious professional weapon. In his left-hand jacket pocket, he had a pearl-handled piece-of-crap revolver, the sort of pistol a female amateur would secrete in her purse to do the job, its grip taped.
And Monique Calhoun herself had made it even easier. Not only had she volunteered to provide the ideal opportunity, if he tried hard enough Eric might just be able to convince himself that she had provided a moral justification.
She had, after all, called
him
. She had, after all, enlisted his collusion in conducting an interrogation of John Sri Davinda in a below-decks boudoir filled with an assortment of persuasive vapors.
And fed him an insultingly preposterous cover story.
“Why would it be in my interest to help you interrogate Davinda?”
“Because you’ll be looking over my shoulder. Because we both have the same need to know . . .”
“We do? Know what?”
“Whether Davinda is a . . . whether his . . . climate model . . . is a fake . . . like the white tornadoes . . .”
Monique might be a Bread & Circuses professional whose job it was to put spin on the truth, but she was an amateur when it came to forthright lying. Eric doubted whether she had rehearsed this cover story at all. She had almost tripped over her own tongue and let slip what Eric already knew, that her true purpose was to find out whether Davinda was a Siberian mole.
But since that was the result of disinformation
he
had fed to her, Eric had to play the naif himself. Up to a credible point.
“Your client wants you to find out whether
they themselves
are going to run another scam?”
“No, no, of course not, it’s . . . ah . . . uh . . .”
“Posner . . . ?” Eric said, gallantly giving her a helping hand with this pathetic charade.
Monique almost gave a sigh of relief. “Mossad is pissed off,” she said. “They feel they’ve been fed disinformation all along, and if the Davinda climate model is another disney, they’ll construe it as breach of contract, and pull out, maybe even change sides.”
This was a cover story that no one would even pretend to believe unless they had a need to pretend to believe it. As Eric did.
But it wouldn’t do to let it seem too easy.
“Whose side are
you
on, anyway?” he had demanded. “Big Blue? Mossad? Bread & Circuses? Or just whichever side seems to be winning?”
Monique Calhoun’s nostrils had flared at that one, but she otherwise did a good job of masking her ire, lowering her voice instead, and putting a reasonably credible fearful catch into it.
“The side of my own enlightened self-interest,” she had said. “Let’s just say that . . . Posner has made it clear that not getting this job done might be . . . worse than a bad career move.
How
much worse is something he didn’t feel he had a need to tell me and I sure don’t feel I have a need to find out. . . .”
“Well, in that case . . .”
Pretty thin, maybe, but good enough to let him pretend to swallow it like a gallant gentleman. And allow Monique Calhoun to set herself up perfectly.
All he had to do was go along, install her and Davinda in one of the boudoirs—the virtuality room might be best—observe, and wait for the opportune moment.
At which point, he could barge in and hold the flechette pistol on Monique Calhoun while he made a messy and obviously unprofessional job of dispatching John Sri Davinda with the amateur-night revolver, untape the grip, and then force her to handle the gun.
He could then literally scream bloody murder, summon Force Flic, and when they arrived, the master of
La Reine de la Seine
would be holding the murderer at gunpoint over the corpse of the deceased.
With the lady whose fingerprints were all over the murder weapon caught standing over the body by the outraged proprietor, who would
believe than anyone else had done the deed, who would believe that anyone but
her
client had commissioned the hit?
If
it came to that.
Was it perverse of him to wish that it wouldn’t?
Was it perverse of him to wish that it would?
Whether the last few days’ ominous weather had naturally sweetened or whether the Big Blue Machine had turned down its Condition Venus disney effects in preparation for cutting its possible losses, it was a golden balmy Paris evening, and here he was, riding high, wide, and handsome atop
The Queen of the River
as
La Reine
promenaded up the Seine through the heart of the tropical City of Light.
It was good to be a Prince of the City. Eric had no ambition beyond the life he had already achieved. He certainly did not want to lose it. He certainly did not want to see the dank, cold, gray skies of winter return to Paris.
And for all this to continue, it seemed he must kill John Sri Davinda. Because his contract was to remove Davinda unless he could verify the certainty of impending Condition Venus.
Meaning that if he did not eliminate Davinda, it could only be because this endless Parisian summer must die that the Earth itself might live.
Davinda or the good life.
The emotional logic
should
have been simple.
Eric
should
have been hoping that his contract on Davinda would have to be carried out, since that would mean the preservation of the clime and style of life he held dear.
But the addition of Monique Calhoun as a factor royally screwed up what should have been the self-interested simplicity of the moral equation.
Not just because he had had sex with her, Eric was not as romantic as all that. But because, despite representing different clients, despite the little lies, despite the professional fencing match, he sensed that, in some way he could not quite define, they were on the same side.
Eliminating Davinda in the service of enlightened self-interest would be an act he could perform with clean moral clarity. But pinning it on Monique Calhoun would not sit well with his conscience.
And sourly contemplating the truth of this made Eric realize, to
his unpleasant surprise, that he was indeed burdened with one.
“What’s right is what you feel good after,” had been a moral compass offered up in simpler times.
Who could argue with that?
But Eric could not imagine any outcome that was likely to make him feel good after tonight.
Monique Calhoun supposed it was standard psychological operating procedure for assassins to depersonalize their victims before the act. But in this case, the prospective victim seemed to have depersonalized himself already.
John Sri Davinda might be able to locomote by himself and utter the occasionally coherent sentence, but most of his personality seemed to have already departed his corpus, as if in morally convenient anticipation, leaving this affectless disney behind.
Five minutes as a human central processing unit would seem not only to have inflicted permanent damage at the time, but left his brain, or at least the previous entity inhabiting the meatware, in a continuing state of deterioration.
Rather than walk this unseemly golemized creature through the public hubbub of the main restaurant salon to the Marenkos’ table, where word was that Eric was currently to be found, she was taking him around the main-deck promenade toward the stern, stealing up on the aft bar from behind.
Not that Davinda cared.
John Sri Davinda didn’t seem to care about anything.
She had phoned his room with some cock-and-bull story about Prince Esterhazy personally inviting him to
La Reine de la Seine
to make amends for the other night’s unseemly events by affording him the use of a special meditative chamber access to which was granted only to his most favorite guests.
Davinda hadn’t replied to this at all.
When she strenuously suggested it would be politic to accept such an invitation, Davinda had simply said “Affirmative.”
Monique had the feeling that had she invited him for a swim in the alligator-infested waters of the Seine, his reaction would have been much the same.
When she came to collect him, he was unshaven, odorously unwashed, wearing these rumpled gray slacks and dirty blue shirt, and unshod. Under the pressure of time and circumstances, the most Monique could bother to do was get his shoes on before stuffing him into a limo.
Like leading a lamb to the slaughter, she thought somberly.
But which of us is the lamb?
And who is leading whom to what?
Monique felt that she too was running on rails like an empty disney of herself. It was all too damn easy and yet all beyond her control.
Too damn easy for one step to lead to the next once Avi Posner had trapped her with the moral necessity of committing this evil deed.
Too damn easy to convince Eric Esterhazy of the half-truth that Mossad was forcing her to interrogate Davinda. Too damn easy to get him to supply what was required.
Too damned easy to persuade the prospective victim to return to
La Reine de la Seine
.
Too damned easy to slip a loaded gun into her purse.
And now, here she was, and the notion that within the hour she might be faced with the necessary task of killing a man still had no reality.
Once Posner’s dreadful moral trap had been sprung, she had run on automatic one step after the other, hoping that something would intervene to derail this implacable train of events.
That Eric would not believe her story, and after he did, that he would have some reason for not supplying a boudoir, and when he went along with that, that Davinda would refuse to leave the hotel, and in the limo, that she would forget her purse, or maybe the riverboat would sink, or . . . or . . .
Or it would turn out at the eleventh hour that her interrogation of John Sri Davinda would prove that he was
not
a mole, that his climate model
would
prove it was a necessity to begin cooling down the planet at once to evade Condition Venus. . . .
And that was the most bitter pill of all.
For that was the only thing that Monique could now imagine
rescuing her from her own moment of terrible personal truth.
Could she have ever imagined, let alone ever sought to be, where she found herself now?
Perversely hoping that the Earth itself really
was
in mortal danger?
“
That’s
the target for tonight?” Mom muttered sotto voce to Eric as Monique Calhoun led John Sri Davinda up to the Marenkos’ table. “Looks like something that’s been sleeping under a bridge.”
And smells like it too, Eric thought, nevertheless fetching Mom a warning kick to the shin under the table as Monique brought Davinda within auditory and olfactory range.
Mom was almost as infrequent a visitor to
La Reine
as Eduardo Ramirez, but while Eduardo had prudently eschewed being present at the scene of the prospective crime, Mom, being Mom, could not resist giving in to her morbid dramatic curiosity.
“C’mon, Eric, I want to see this guy before he’s iced, and at least get to meet Ms. Mata Hari from B&C before Force Flic hauls her away to the guillotine.”
“There’s no capital punishment in this jurisdiction,” Eric had reminded her unhappily, but Mom’s gun-moll-mode whims were still beyond his powers to refuse.
The deal was that she was at least supposed to fade into the woodwork once Monique and Davinda appeared.
Fat chance.
“Eric, Ivan, Stella, Dr. Braithwaite, Dr. Larabee, Dr. Pereiro, you and Dr. Davinda all know each other . . .” Monique began as she pressed Davinda down into an empty seat beside Allison Larabee, then cocked an inquisitive eyebrow at Mom.
“My mother,” said Eric. “Mom, Monique Calhoun.”
“Ah, the one, the only, Eric’s told me all about you! But I’ll bet he hasn’t told you a damn thing about me.”