Swimsuit (25 page)

He thought of her now, holding the key in her hand, impatience showing on her face, but in her politeness and willingness
to help her employer she’d let him into her flat so that she could make the call for him to her boss.

Henri had thanked her, taken the one upholstered chair in Meike’s two-room flat that had been built under a staircase, and
waited for the right moment to kill her.

As the girl rinsed out two glasses, Henri had looked around at the sloping bookshelves, the fashion magazines, the mirror
over the fireplace that was almost completely covered with photos of Mieke’s handsome boyfriend.

Later, when she understood what he was going to do, she’d wailed,
no-no-no,
and begged him, please not to, she hadn’t done anything wrong, she would never tell anyone, no,
never.

“Sorry. It’s not about you, Mieke,” he’d said. “It’s about Mr. Van der Heuvel. He’s a very wicked man.”

She’d said, “So why do this to me?”

“Well. It’s Jan’s lucky day, isn’t it? He was out of town.”

Henri had bound her arms behind her back with one of her own bootlaces and was undoing his belt buckle when she said, “Not
that. Please. I’m supposed to get married.”

He hadn’t raped her. He hadn’t been in the mood after doing Gina. So he’d told her to think of something nice. It was important
in the last moments of life to have good thoughts.

He looped another bootlace around her throat and tightened it, holding her down with his knee in the small of her back until
she stopped breathing. The waxed shoelace was as strong as wire, and it cut through her thin neck and she bled as he killed
her.

Afterward, he arranged the pretty girl’s body under blankets and patted her cheek.

He was thinking now, he’d been so angry at himself for missing Jan that he hadn’t even thought to videotape the kill.

Then again — Jan would get the message.

Henri liked thinking about that.

STILL SITTING IN THE INTERMINABLE SLOG of traffic, Henri’s mind turned back to Gina Prazzi, thinking of her eyes getting huge
when he shot her, wondering if she’d really understood what he’d done. It was truly significant. She was the first person
he’d killed for his own satisfaction since strangling the girl in the horse trailer more than twenty years ago.

And now he’d killed Mieke for the same reason. It wasn’t about money at all.

Something inside him was changing.

It was like a light slipping beneath a door, and he could either open it to its full blinding brightness, or slam the door
shut and run.

The horns were blaring now, and he saw that the taxi had finally
crept
to the intersection of Pyramides and Rivoli, and then stopped again. The driver turned off the air-conditioning and opened
the windows to save gas.

Disgusted, Henri leaned forward, tapped on the glass.

The driver took a break from his cell phone to tell Henri that the street was jammed because of the French president’s motorcade,
which was just leaving the Elysée Palace on its way to the National Assembly.

“There’s nothing I can do, Monsieur. My hands are tied. Relax.”

“How long will it be?”

“Perhaps another fifteen minutes. How should I know?”

Henri was more furious at himself than before. It had been stupid to come to Paris as some kind of ironic postscript to killing
Gina. Not only stupid, but self-indulgent, or maybe self-destructive. Was that it?
Do I want to be caught now?
he wondered.

He watched the street through the open window, desperate for the absurd politician’s motorcade to come and go, when he heard
shouts of laughter coming from a brasserie at the corner.

He looked that way.

A man wearing a blue sports jacket, a pink polo shirt, and khakis, an American of course, made a comic bow to a young woman
in a blue sweater. People began clapping, and as Henri looked more closely, the man seemed familiar and then — Henri’s mind
stopped cold.

In fact, he couldn’t believe it. He wanted to ask the driver, Do you see what I see? Is that Ben Hawkins and Amanda Diaz?
Because I think I’ve lost my mind.

Then Hawkins wiggled the metal frame chair, turning it, sitting so that he faced the street, and Henri knew without a doubt.
It was Ben
. When he’d last checked, Hawkins and the girl had been in L.A.

Henri’s mind flashed back over the weekend to late on Saturday night, after he’d shot Gina. He’d e-mailed the video to Ben,
but he hadn’t checked the GPS tracker, not then. Not for a couple of days.

Had Ben discovered and discarded the chip?

For a moment, Henri felt something completely new to him. He was
afraid
. Afraid that he was getting sloppy, losing his hard-won discipline, losing his grip. He couldn’t let that happen.

Never again.

Henri barked at the driver, saying that he couldn’t wait any longer. He pushed a wad of bills into the driver’s hand, grabbed
his bag and briefcase, and got out of the cab on the street side.

He walked between cars, before doubling back to the sidewalk. Moving quickly, he ducked into an alcove between two storefronts
only ten yards or so from the brasserie.

Henri watched, his heart racing, as Ben and Amanda left the restaurant and walked arm in arm, east up Rivoli.

When they had gone far enough ahead, Henri fell in behind them, keeping them in view as they reached the Singe-Vert, a small
hotel on Place André Malraux.

Once Amanda and Ben disappeared inside, Henri went into the hotel bar, Jacques’ Américain, adjacent to the lobby. He ordered
a Scotch from the bartender, who was actively putting the moves on a horse-faced brunette.

Henri sipped his drink and viewed the lobby through the bar’s back mirror. When he saw Ben come downstairs, Henri swiveled
in the stool, watched as Ben handed his key to the concierge.

Henri made a mental note of the number under the key hook.

IT WAS ALREADY half past eight p.m. by the time I reached the Place Vendôme, an enormous square with traffic lanes on four
sides and a tall bronze memorial to Napoléon Bonaparte in the center. On the west side of the Place is Rue St.-Honoré, shopping
paradise for the wealthy, and across the square was the drop-dead-fantastic French Gothic architecture of the Hôtel Ritz,
all honey-colored stone and luminous demilune awnings over the doorways.

I stepped onto the red carpet and through a revolving door into the hotel lobby and stared at the richly colored sofas, chandeliers
throwing soft light on the oil paintings, and happy faces of the guests.

I found the house phones in an alcove and asked the operator to ring Henri Benoit. My heartbeats counted off the seconds,
and then the operator came back on and told me that Monsieur Benoit was expected but had not checked in. Would I care to leave
a message?

I said, “I’ll call back.
Merci.
”

I had been right.
Right.

Henri was in Paris. At least he would be very soon.
He was staying at the Ritz.

As I hung up the phone I had an almost violent surge of emotion as I thought about all the innocent people Henri had killed.
I thought about Levon and Barbara and about those suffocating days and nights I’d spent chained in a trailer, sitting face-to-face
with a homicidal madman.

And then I thought about Henri threatening to kill Amanda.

I took a seat in a corner where I could watch the door, ducked behind the pages of a discarded copy of the
International Herald Tribune,
thinking this was the same as a stakeout in a squad car, minus the coffee and the bullshit from my partner.

I could sit here forever, because I’d finally gotten ahead of Henri, that freaking psychopath. He didn’t know I was here,
but I knew he was coming.

Over the next interminable two hours, I imagined Henri coming into the hotel with a suit bag and checking in at the desk,
and that whatever disguise he was in, I would recognize him immediately. I would follow him into the elevator and give him
the same heart-attack surprise he’d once given me.

I was still unsure what I would do after that.

I thought I could probably restrain him, call the police, have them hold him on suspicion of killing Gina Prazzi.

Or maybe that was too chancy. Maybe I’d put a bullet in his head and turn myself in at the American embassy, deal with it
after the fact.

I reviewed option one: The cops would ask me, “Who is Gina Prazzi? How do you know she’s dead?” I imagined showing them Henri’s
film in which Gina’s dead body was never seen. If Henri had disposed of the body, he wouldn’t even be arrested.

But
I’d
be under suspicion. In fact, I would be suspect number one.

I ran through the second option, saw myself pulling the .38 on Henri, spinning him around, saying, “Hands against the wall,
don’t move!” I liked the idea a lot.

That’s how I was thinking when, among the dozens of people crossing the lobby, I saw two beautiful women and a man pass in
front of me, heading toward the front door. The women were young and stylish, English-speaking, laughing and talking over
each other, directing their attention to the man sandwiched between them.

Their arms were entwined like school buddies, breaking apart when they reached the revolving door, the man hanging back to
let the very attractive women go through first.

The rush I felt was miles ahead of my conscious thought. But I registered the man’s bland features, his build, the way he
dressed.

He was very blond now, wearing large, black-framed eyeglasses, his posture slightly stooped.

This was exactly how Henri disguised himself. He’d told me that his disguises worked because they were so simple. He adopted
a distinct way of walking or speaking, and then added a few distracting, but memorable visual cues. He
became
his new identity. Whatever identity he’d assumed, this much I knew.

The man with those two women was none other than Henri Benoit.

I DROPPED the newspaper to the floor and followed the threesome with my eyes as the revolving door dispensed them one at a
time into the street.

I headed for the main door, thinking I could see where Henri was going, buy some time to come up with a plan. But before I
reached the revolving door, a clump of tourists surged in front of me, staggering and giggling and bunching up inside the
blades of the door as I stood by wanting to scream,
“You assholes, get out of my way!”

By the time I got outside, Henri and the two women were far ahead of me, walking along the arcade that lined the west side
of the street.

They were now heading down the Rue de Castiglione and toward the Rue de Rivoli. I just caught a glimpse of them turning left
when I reached the corner.

Then I saw the two pretty women standing with their heads together in front of a designer shoe store, and I saw Henri’s white-blond
hair far up ahead.

As I tried to keep him in sight, he disappeared down into the Tuileries Métro station at the end of the street.

I ran across the stream of traffic, ran down the stairs to the platform, but the station is one of the Métro’s busiest, and
I couldn’t see Henri.

I tried to look everywhere at once, my eyes piercing the clots of travelers weaving through the station.

And there he was,
at the far end of the platform. Suddenly he turned toward me, and I froze. For one eternal minute, I felt completely vulnerable,
as if I’d been illuminated with a spotlight on a black stage.

He had to see me.

I was in his direct line of sight.

But he didn’t react, and I continued to stare at him while my feet behaved as though they were glued to the cement.

Then his image seemed to shift and clarify. Now that I was looking at him straight on, I saw the
length
of his nose, the
height
of his forehead, his
receding
chin.

Was I this crazy?

I’d been so sure — but I was just as sure now that I’d gotten it all wrong. That I was a dumb-ass, a total jerk, a failure
as a sleuth. The man I had just followed from the Ritz? He wasn’t Henri at all.

I CLIMBED UP out of the Métro, remembering that I’d told Mandy I’d be back in an hour or so but had now been gone for three.

I walked back to the Hôtel Singe-Vert empty-handed, no chocolates, no flowers, no jewelry. I had nothing to show for my Ritz-to-Métro
escapade except one scrap of information that could turn out to be critical.

Henri had booked a room at the Ritz.

The lobby of our small hotel was deserted, although a cloud of cigarette smoke and loud conversation floated out from the
bar and into the shabby main room.

The concierge desk was closed.

I went behind the desk and grabbed my key from the hook.

I took the stairs to my room, more than anything wanting to sleep.

I knocked on the door, called Mandy’s name, and when she didn’t answer, I turned the knob, ready to tell Mandy that she had
no right to be girlish and irresponsible anymore. She had to be careful for two.

I opened the door and felt instantly that something was wrong. Mandy wasn’t in bed. Was she in the bathroom? Was she okay?

I stepped into the room, calling her name, and the door slammed behind me. I swung around and tried to make sense of the impossible.

A black man was holding Mandy,
his left arm crossing her chest, his right hand with a gun to her head. He was wearing latex gloves. Blue ones. I’d seen
gloves exactly like those before.

My eyes went to Mandy’s face. She was gagged. Her eyes were wild, and she was grunting a wordless scream.

The black man grinned at me, tightened his hold on her, and pointed the gun at me.

“Amanda,” the man said. “Look who’s home? We’ve been waiting for a long time, haven’t we, sweetheart? But it’s been fun, right?”

All the fragments of information came together: the blue gloves, the familiar tone, the pale gray eyes, and the stage makeup.
I wasn’t mistaken this time. I’d heard hours of his voice piped directly into my ear. It was Henri. But how had he found us
here?