Greenhouse Summer (8 page)

Upon reflection, he chose a royal blue velvet ensemble tailored to suggest a riverboat gambler’s suit pushed toward the deco, set off with a more authentic ruffled white shirt and simple black snakeskin string tie, secured with a turquoise squash-blossom clip. The color of the suit went well with his long blond hair, though he wondered if the greenish hue of the tie clip should have been pushed a bit more to the blue so as not to clash with it. On the other hand, a subtle note of discord here and there served as a statement of princely sartorial daring.

Thusly accoutered, Prince Eric Esterhazy repaired to the gangway entrance to greet his guests.

“It’s been far too long, Madeleine, working too hard as usual. . . .”

“Boys’ night out, Georges, or am I missing something?”

Admission to
La Reine
was by invitation only—though if you were on the list of invitables to begin with, you could request an invitation—and while the guest lists were compiled by other departments of Bad Boys, the pretense was that each and every patron was the personal guest of Prince Eric Esterhazy himself and Eric signed each invitation-ticket with an antique Mont Blanc fountain pen to maintain it.

“So nice to see you, Pierre. . . .”

“Lovely gown, Elvira, you look absolutely devastating in peach. . . .”

Each VIP, each mover and shaker, each whatever that Bad Boys for their own reasons wanted aboard, got a greeting by name thanks to the heads-up display on the contact lens in Eric’s left eye, and since he
was
after all a prince, each, no matter how puissant, got the first-name treatment. Every human female got the gallant old Romanian hand-kiss, practiceable with a straight face only by those bred to it in their genes.

“Ah, Alicia, how lovely you look tonight. . . .”

“Mon Dieu, Antoine, you look as if you’ve been having a rather strenuous good time. . . .”

After crowning him Prince of Charming, Bad Boys had dispatched Eric to Amsterdam to front a modest bordello, promoted him to fronting a porn-opera palace in Baden and thence to a first-class casino in Lille, as a warm-up for fronting the launch and continued operation of
La Reine de la Seine
.

The nature of which was not quite what it might seem.

“Back from Zekograd at last, Ahmad . . .”

“Is it really true that the entire poppy crop got washed away, Gunter?”

The casino, the bars, the restaurant, the sexual services, might be priced outrageously enough to make the riverboat profitable, but
La Reine
was built with state-of-the-art surveillance equipment integrated into every nook and cranny, for the real raison d’être was information and special services, the moving and shaping of movers and shapers whom Bad Boys or their paying clients might wish to move and shape.

“Are those marriage rumors really true, Ian?”

“What ever
did
happen to the Napoleon opera project, Maxine?
I
thought it was a natural part for Boris.”

Who better to front such an operation than Prince Eric Esterhazy?

Prince Eric had the name, the social connections, the rep as just one more sleazy phony prince, which Bad Boys had carefully crafted for him.

He might know nothing about boats or navigation, and could not be trusted to supervise the accounting, but he had matured within the syndic well enough to run the commercial-intelligence end of the operation too.

Who better than a comic-opera prince whom no one could take seriously as more than a glorified doorman?

Once the evening’s passengers were aboard and the gangway was up, Eric paraded through the grand salon and up the semicircular staircase to the upper-deck promenade and then forward to the wheelhouse to be seen presiding over the commencement of the voyage.

Theater it might be, but he
did
enjoy starring in it.

The captain of
La Reine
, Dominique Klein, though grandly costumed in white pantaloons and blue jacket and cap liberally festooned with gold braid, was a taciturn career Seine boatman and not much for center stage.

The “pilot,” Eddie Warburton, might be dressed in a white suit as the elder Mark Twain and had even been persuaded to affect the hair and mustachios, but he knew about as much about steering a boat or the currents of the Seine as Eric did, being a virtuality-effects engineer hired away from a midsized traveling circus.

The wheelhouse might be a perfect simulacrum of the historic article, and yes, there was even a big ship’s wheel with which one could at least in theory steer
La Reine
in the event of computer failure or an attack of lunacy, but the screens and keyboards and consoles between the wheel and the front windows were the real controls of the boat.

So Prince Eric was not entirely unjustified in strutting into the wheelhouse as if
La Reine
really
were
under his command. Not for a prince, after all, to master the grubby details, and indeed, should Captain
Klein fall overboard and be eaten by the alligators, the riverboat’s computer system was fully capable of guiding the rest of the evening’s voyage.

“Evenin’, Yer Highness,” Warburton drawled.

“Ready, Captain?”

“Bien sûr, Monsieur Esterhazy.”

“Light her up, Eddie!”

“Rock and roll!” said Warburton, and hit the appropriate function key.

Eric saw the effect live from the outside only when changes were being rehearsed, but he had seen the coverage and the pub often enough to see in his mind’s eye just what they were seeing over at Trocadéro, on the Eiffel Tower, all along this stretch of the river, and phony prince or not, he had not yet become so jaded as to not share the thrill.

Bah-
bah
-BAH!
BAH-BAH!!

A huge recorded full orchestral fanfare resounded over the Seine as the halogen tubes hidden in the woodwork lit up the great white riverboat in a blaze of glory, and two tall holographic virtual smokestacks sprouted amidships belching black clouds of virtual coal smoke and gouts of white virtual steam.

La Reine
’s lasers painted virtual fireworks across the purpling vault of the crepuscular sky as the paddle wheels began to churn. The band in the grand salon began to play “When the Saints Go Marching In” as she warped slowly away from the dock, and her speakers boomed it out over the river.

The band segued to “Rollin’ on the River” as
La Reine de la Seine
reached the center of the channel, made a majestic right turn, and headed east at her leisurely top speed beneath her own virtual aurora borealis.

Eric Esterhazy, head tilted slightly upward, gazed out the front windows of the wheelhouse, an icon of lordly vision in which in this moment he more than half believed himself.

As they promenaded grandly up the Seine, the Left Bank, the Right Bank, lights beginning to come on before darkness had really fallen as if by grace of her passage, gondolas, canoes, dragon boats,
even bateaux mouches pausing in midstream to allow their tourists to gape and cheer, the Eiffel Tower behind, the Musée d’Orsay approaching,
La Reine de la Seine
was indeed Queen of the River.

Was not her master therefore in a certain sense the real thing?

Was there a nobler domain than the City of Light?

Was not Eric Esterhazy truly Prince of the City?

IT HAD BEEN A HECTIC AND RATHER MYSTIFYING week in Paris for Monique Calhoun, and the United Nations Annual Conference On Climate Stabilization hadn’t even started yet.

She actually felt
relief
, dutifully guilty relief, but relief nonetheless, that Father was halfway around the world working on some fore-doomed project to desalinate the Hanoi marshlands and had taken Mother with him.

Dining at Bayous et Magnolias would be familial duty enough under the trying professional circumstances. The phone conversation with her parents had made it all too clear what life would have been like had they been in town and she been unable to escape living en famille in her old room in the apartment on the Avenue Émile-Zola.

Out of town or not, they had felt thoroughly snubbed even at half a world’s remove when she had thanked them for their kind offer but told them she’d be staying at the Hotel Ritz.

“The family home is no longer good enough for our woman of the world?”

“Really, Mamam—”

“How on Earth can you afford a suite at the Ritz?”

“
I
can’t, Father, no human can. Bread & Circuses is paying for it.
Do try to remember that this is
not
a vacation trip back home, I’m here on syndic business!”

“Still, Monique, wouldn’t you feel more comfortable at home? You’d have the whole place to yourself.”

“Of course I would, Mamam,” Monique had lied. “But I need the suite at the Ritz for an
office
.”

The latter was at least half true. Bread & Circuses’ Paris branch had two floors in a converted Hausmannian apartment building right behind Trocadéro, she would be using their staff when necessary, and they could’ve found her office space there.

But she was here to run VIP services, which meant sticking close to her charges, most of whom would be put up at the Ritz or hotels like it. Besides which, she was authorized to rent herself a first-class suite on the expense account. It was a sweetheart of a job, but somebody had to get to do it.

The Ritz had been, well,
ritzy
enough for a couple or so centuries for the word to have passed into several languages, and Monique’s suite, though by no means the top the hotel had to offer, had a bedroom approximately the size of her parents’ living room, a salon approximately half the size of their entire apartment, and a bathroom larger than her studio apartment in New York.

The suite was decorated in a bizarre mélange of Louis-the-Something-or-Other Rococo and Retro-Deco. The bathroom was swirling chrome and black marble reminiscent of both the Chrysler Building and classic 1950s Harley-Davidson. The bedroom ran to burgundy-flocked walls with gilded sconces, an enormous bed canopied and braided in the same color scheme, a huge antique Bokhara rug, a halogenated crystal chandelier, Tiffany incidental lamps, and a ceiling whose fruit-salad moldings and central medallion had been carefully painted in full colors. The salon mirrored this style in royal blue and gold, with antique eighteenth-century couches and tables choc-a-bloc with Bauhaus chairs and a desk-cum-media-console stunningly packaged in abstractly carved mahogany inlaid with silver Yemenite filigree.

If the suite struck Monique as more than a tad over the top, well that was the point; this was, after all, to be the headquarters of VIP
services, and therefore must make the point that the mistress thereof was herself a Very Important Personage.

It did seem to daunt Lars Bendsten when she invited the General Secretary of the United Nations Annual Conference On Climate Stabilization up to the suite for an introductory meeting.

Bendsten, as the impresario of the event, represented, and in a functional sense
was
, the client and she his subordinate, but he entered the suite as if summoned into The Presence.

He was a tall silver-haired man in a dark-blue UN diplomatic suit, the sort of Scandinavian professional that the United Nations had strategically reverted to in an attempt to counter its all-too-accurate image among the economic powers as a shrewish alms-seeking Land of the Lost debating society.

Bendsten had the standard manners and cool restraint, but Monique sensed something else beneath. Perhaps it had something to do with the way he had turned down her suave offer of champagne or sherry and requested a shot of ice-cold vodka straight up.

“Well, what can I do for you, Mr. General Secretary?” Monique said after these niceties had been concluded.

“Mr. Bendsten will do, Ms. Calhoun,” he replied primly, whacking down a slug of vodka in a manner that suggested it was not his first of the day, even though it was not yet even a civilized British teatime. “At the moment, not very much, since the displays and exhibits are still being set up in the Grand Palais, and none of the . . . invitees have actually arrived yet.”

“Displays . . . ? Exhibits . . . ? I was given to understand that UNACOCS was a scientific symposium.”