Swimsuit (26 page)

My mind spun in a hundred directions, all at once.

I’d gone to Paris out of fear. But now that Henri had come to my door, I wasn’t afraid anymore. I was furious, and my veins
were pumping a hundred percent adrenaline, lifting-a-car-off-a-baby-carriage kind of adrenaline, the running-into-a-burning-building
kind of damn-it-to-hell rush.

I whipped the .38 out of my waistband, pulled back the hammer, yelled,
“Let her go.”

I guess he didn’t believe I would fire. Henri smirked at me, said, “Drop your gun, Ben. I just want to talk.”

I walked up to the maniac and put the gun’s muzzle against his forehead. He grinned, gold tooth winking, part of his latest
disguise. I got off one shot at the exact moment that he kneed me in the thigh. I was sent crashing backward into a desk,
the wooden legs shattering as I went down.

My first thought —
had I shot Mandy?
But I saw blood flowing from Henri’s arm and heard the clatter of his gun sliding across the wooden floor.

He shoved Mandy away from him, hard, and she fell on me. I rolled her off my chest, and as I tried to sit, Henri pinned me
— with his foot on my wrist, looking down with contempt.

“Why couldn’t you just do your job, Ben? If you’d just done your job, we wouldn’t be having this little problem, but now I
can’t trust you. I only wish I’d brought my camera.”

He leaned down, bent my fingers back, and peeled the gun from my hand. Then he aimed it — first at me, and then at Mandy.

“Now, who wants to die first?” Henri said. “
Vous
or
vous?
”

EVERYTHING WENT white in front of my eyes. This was it, wasn’t it? Amanda and I were going to die. I felt Henri’s breath on
my face as he screwed the muzzle of the .38 into my right eye. Mandy tried to scream through her gag.

Henri barked at her,
“Shut up.”

She did.

Water filled my eyes then. Maybe it was from the pain, or the fierce regret that I’d never see Amanda again. That she would
die too. That our child would never be born.

Henri fired the gun — directly into the carpet next to my ear, deafening me. Then he yanked my head and shouted into my ear.

“Write the fucking
book,
Ben. Go home and do your
job.
I’m going to call you every night in L.A., and if you don’t pick up the phone, I
will
find you. You know I’ll do it, and I promise you both,
You won’t get a second chance.
”

The gun was pulled away my face. Henri grabbed up a duffel bag and a briefcase with his good hand and arm, slammed the door
on his way out. I heard his footsteps receding down the stairs.

I turned to Mandy. The gag was a pillowcase pulled across the inside of her mouth and was knotted at the back of her head.
I plucked at the knot, my fingers trembling, and when she was free, I took her into my arms and rocked her back and forth,
back and forth.

“Are you okay, honey? Did he hurt you?”

She was crying, saying she was fine.

“You’re sure?”

“Go,” she said. “I know you want to go after him.”

I crawled around, feeling under the spindly legs and ruffled skirts of the wall-to-wall collection of antique furniture, saying,
“You know I’ve got to. He’ll still be watching us, Mandy.”

I found Henri’s Ruger under the dresser and wrapped my hand tightly around the grip. I twisted open the blood-slicked doorknob
and shouted to Mandy that I’d be back soon.

Leaning heavily on the banister, I walked off the pain in my thigh as I made my way down the stairs, trying to hurry, knowing
that I had to kill Henri somehow.

THE SKY WAS BLACK, but the streetlights and the large and perpetually booked Hôtel du Louvre next door had just about turned
night into day. The two hotels were only a few hundred yards from the Tuileries, the huge public garden outside the Louvre.

This week some kind of carnival was going on there: games, big rides, oompah music, the works. Even at this late hour, giddy
tourists and folks with kids flowed out onto the sidewalk, adding their raucous laughter to the sharp shocks of fireworks
and blaring car horns. It reminded me of a scene from a French movie, maybe one that I’d watched somewhere.

I followed a thin trail of blood out to the street, but it disappeared a few yards from the front door. Henri had done his
disappearing act again. Had he gone into the Hôtel du Louvre to hide? Had he lucked out and caught a taxi?

I was staring through the crowds when I heard police sirens coming up the Place André Malraux.

Obviously, shots had been reported. Plus, I’d been seen running around with a gun.

I stuffed Henri’s Ruger into a potted planter outside the Hôtel du Louvre. Then I gamely limped into the lobby, sat in an
overstuffed chair, and thought about how I would approach the
agents de police
.

Finally, I was going to have to explain Henri and everything else to the cops.

I wondered what the hell I was going to say.

THE SIRENS GOT louder and louder, my shoulders and neck stiffened, and then the looping wail passed the hotel and continued
on toward the Tuileries. When I was sure it was over, I reclaimed Henri’s gun, made my way back to the Singe-Verts, and climbed
the stairs like an old man. I knocked on the door to my room, said, “Mandy, it’s me. I’m alone. You can open the door.”

Seconds later, she did. Her face was tear-stained, and there were bruises at the corners of her mouth from the gag. I opened
my arms to her, and Mandy fell against me, sobbing like a child who might never be soothed again.

I held her, swayed with her for a long while. Then I undressed us both and helped her into bed. I shut off the overhead light,
leaving on only a small boudoir lamp on the night table. I slid under the covers, and took Mandy into my arms. She pressed
her face to my chest, tethered herself to my body with her arms and legs.

“Talk to me, honey,” I said. “Tell me everything.”

“He knocked on the door,” she finally said. “He said he had flowers. Is that the most simpleminded trick ever? But I believed
him, Ben.”

“He said they were from me?”

“I think so. Yeah, he did.”

“I wonder — how did he know we were here? What tipped him? I don’t get it.”

“When I unlocked the door, he kicked it open and grabbed me.”

“I wish I’d killed him, Mandy.”

“I didn’t know who he was. A black man. He wrenched my arms behind my back. I couldn’t move. He said… oh, this makes me
sick,
” she said, crying again.

“What did he say?”

“ ‘I love you, Amanda.’ ”

I was listening to Mandy and hearing echoes at the same time. Henri had told me that he’d
loved
Gina. He’d
loved
Julia. How long would Henri have waited to prove his love to Mandy by raping her and strangling her with those blue gloves
on his hands?

I whispered, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“I’m the jerk who came here, Benjy. Oh, God, how long was he here? Three hours?
I’m
sorry. I didn’t understand until now what those three days with him must have been like for you.”

She started crying again, and I hushed her, told her over and over that everything would be all right.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” she said, her voice ragged and strained. “But what makes you so sure?”

I got out of bed, opened my laptop, and booked two morning flights back to the States.

IT WAS WELL after midnight, and I was still pacing the room. I took some Tylenol, got back under the covers with Amanda, but
I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t even shut my eyes for more than a few seconds.

The TV was small and old, but I turned it on and found CNN.

I watched the headline news, bolted upright when the talking head said, “Police have no suspects in the murder of Gina Prazzi,
heiress to the Prazzi shipping fortune. She was found murdered in a room at the exclusive French resort Château de Mirambeau.”

When Gina Prazzi’s face came on the screen, I felt as though I knew her intimately. I’d watched her pass in front of the camera
in the hotel room, not knowing that her life was about to end.

I said, “Mandy, Mandy,” shook her arm. But she turned away, settled even more deeply into the feather bed and sleep.

I watched the police captain brief the press on TV, his speech translated and recapped for those just tuning in. Ms. Prazzi
had checked into the Château de Mirambeau alone. The housekeepers believed that two people stayed in the room, but no other
guest was seen. The police were not releasing any further information about the murder at this time.

That was enough for me. I knew the full story, but what I hadn’t known was that Gina Prazzi was a
real name
, not an alias.

What other lies had Henri told me? For what possible reason? Why had he lied —
in order to tell me the truth?

I stared at the TV screen as the anchor said, “In the Netherlands, a young woman was found murdered this morning in Amsterdam.
What brings this tragedy to the attention of international criminalists is that elements of this girl’s death are similar
to elements of the murders of the two young women in Barbados, and also to the famous American swimsuit models who were murdered
this spring in Hawaii.”

I dialed up the volume as the faces came on the screen: Sara Russo, Wendy Emerson, Kim McDaniels, and Julia Winkler, and now
another face, a young woman whose name was Mieke Helsloot.

The announcer said, “Ms. Helsloot, twenty years old, was the secretary to the well-known architect Jan Van der Heuvel of Amsterdam,
who was at a meeting in Copenhagen at the time of the murder. Mr. Van der Heuvel was interviewed at his hotel minutes ago.”

Jesus Christ. I knew his name.

The picture cut away to Van der Heuvel leaving his hotel in Copenhagen, suitcase in hand, journalists crowding around him
at the bottom of a rounded staircase. He was in his early forties, had gray hair and angular features. He looked genuinely
shocked and
scared
.

“I have only just now learned of this terrible tragedy,” he said into the clutch of microphones. “I am shocked and devastated.
Mieke Helsloot was a proper, decent young lady, and I have no idea why anyone would harm her. It is a terrible day. Mieke
was to be married.”

Henri had told me that Jan Van der Heuvel was an
alias
for one of the members of the Alliance, the man Henri called “the Dutchman.” Van der Heuvel was the third wheel who’d joined
up with Henri and Gina during their romp through the French Riviera.

And now, soon after Henri had killed Gina Prazzi, Van der Heuvel’s secretary had also been murdered.

If I hadn’t once been a cop, I might have dismissed these two killings as a coincidence. The women were different types. They
were killed hundreds of miles apart. But what I saw were two more flags on a grid, a part of a pattern.

Henri had loved Gina Prazzi, and he killed her. He’d hated Jan Van der Heuvel. Maybe he’d wanted to kill him, too, so, just
thinking it out… what if Henri hadn’t known that Van der Heuvel was in Denmark that day?

What if he’d decided to kill his secretary instead?

I WOKE UP to sunlight seeping in through a small window. Amanda was lying on her side, facing away from me, her long, dark
hair fanned out over the pillow. And in a flash, I was enraged as I remembered Henri in blackface, his gun pointed at Amanda’s
head, her eyes wild with fear.

Right then, I didn’t care why Henri had killed anyone, what he was planning to do next, why the book was so important to him,
or why he seemed to be spinning out of control.

Only one thing was important to me. I had to keep Mandy safe. And the baby, too.

I grabbed for my watch, saw that it was almost seven thirty. I shook Mandy’s shoulder gently, and her eyes flew open. She
gasped, then saw my face and sagged back into the bedding.

“I thought for a moment —”

“That it was a dream.”

“Yeah.”

I put my head very gently on her belly, and she stroked my hair.

“Is that the baby?” I asked.

“You dummy. I’m hungry.”

I pretended she was speaking for the baby. I made a little megaphone with my hands, called out, “Hellloooo in there, Foozle.
This is Dad,” as though the tiny clump of our combined DNA could hear me.

Mandy cracked up, and I was glad she could laugh, but I cried in the shower, where she couldn’t see me. If only I’d killed
Henri when I had him in my gun sight. If only I had done that. Then it would all be over now.

I kept Mandy close to me as I paid the bill at the front desk and then hailed a cab and told the driver to take us to Charles
de Gaulle airport.

Mandy said, “How can we go back to L.A.?”

“We can’t.”

She turned her head and stared at me. “So what are we doing?”

I told Mandy what I’d decided, gave her a short list of names and numbers on the back of my business card, and told her that
she’d be met when the plane landed. She was listening, not fighting with me, when I told her that she couldn’t phone me, or
send me e-mail, nothing. That she had to rest and eat good food. “If you get bored, think about the dress you want to wear.”

“You know I don’t wear dresses.”

“Maybe you’ll make an exception.”

I took a ballpoint pen out of my computer case and drew a ring on Mandy’s left ring finger with lines radiating out from a
big sparkly diamond in the center.

“Amanda Diaz, I love every bit of you. Will you marry me?”

“Ben.”

“You and Foozle.”

There were happy tears rolling down our cheeks now. She threw her arms around me, said, “Yes, yes, yes,” and swore she wouldn’t
wash off the ring I’d drawn until she had a real one.

I bought breakfast for us at the airport, chocolate croissants and café au lait, and when it was nearly time to board, I walked
with her as far as I could go. Then I wrapped my arms around her, and she sobbed against my chest until I was crying again,
too. Could anything be scarier than this? The thought of losing someone you love so much? I didn’t think so.