Nimec sampled the pate and thought it was blandly decent. But he resolved that he’d have to take Begela up on his offer of guiding him toward some interesting spots to eat.
He noticed Tara Cullen passing by with one of the other Gabonese delegates and waved to catch her attention, figuring it was an ideal chance to provide an intro… as well as an opportune moment to ease himself out of the conversation and into a chair for a while. And maybe see if any of the penguins were serving coffee. He really did feel headachey and bedraggled.
“Tara,” he said, “I’d like you to meet—”
“Ms. Cullen and I have already made one another’s acquaintance.” Begela flashed his big, overpowering smile at Nimec, then beamed it onto Tara and snagged her elbow. “Indeed, though, I feel professionally obliged, and personally delighted, to take this opportunity to expand upon it.” He nodded at the tall, dark-skinned man who’d been walking along with her. “Macie Nze, this is Mr. Pete Nimec, Mr. Nimec, Macie Nze… my friend and fellow in the Ministry of Telecommunications. He can tell you of our recent trip to the capital in support of UpLink’s agenda.” The smile became even more commanding. “And we ourselves must talk later, Macie, no?” he said without elaboration.
Nze gave him a nod and agreed that they should. Nimec thought he looked sort of flustered — or surprised, anyway — wondered about it a second, and then ventured that he probably just didn’t appreciate having his blond companion rustled off by a colleague.
As Begela steered Tara toward the bar, Nimec also decided to forget about his quiet cup of coffee.
“So,” he said, and extended his hand toward Nze for a fresh round of vigorous shaking. “Tell me about that trip of yours…”
Nze did, to neither man’s particular enjoyment.
The old Detecto stand-up scale had originally belonged to a Lousiana country doctor, who had it delivered to Roland Thibodeau’s appearance-conscious godmother as a lagniappe, a little something extra offered for good measure, when she had bought some nice, new-looking furniture at his moving sale… or so Thibodeau recalled her telling him. He had vague memories of his dear Nanaine Adele Rigaud getting many small, pretty gifts from the doctor before he and his wife left the bayou, pulling stakes for New Orleans all of a sudden. These gifts, too, may have been lagniappes. But Thibodeau had been very young back then, and unclear about the ways of adults.
What he did remember clearly was that Nanaine had always kept the scale against her bedroom wall in the modest settler’s house where he was raised from the age of ten, after losing both his natural parents between June and October of 1955—his father to a bewildering freak accident, then his mother in a way that was even more inexplicable to him.
The scale’s heavy iron upright and platform base were lilac colored, Nanaine Adele having concealed its basic physician’s white under a paint job of her own lively and eccentric preference — a coat of paint that was now chipped, faded, and flecked with rust from top to bottom. Thibodeau had thought about stripping it a time or two, restoring the scale to its original condition. A lilac scale in his office surely did nothing to convey an impression of red-blooded Cajun manliness, and he sometimes felt foolish when he pictured himself on it. Lilac was a dainty color. As Nanaine Adele had been a dainty little bit of a woman. But it had been her favorite shade of purple, favorite flower, beloved fragrance of spring. She had even worn bonnets of homespun, hand-dyed lilac cotton to church on Sunday mornings.
Thibodeau had let the scale remain as it was. And if that cast doubts on his masculinity, well, he owed no explanations to anyone and was sure he’d never left any questions in the minds of vulnerable or designing ladies. On the contrary, another expression to circulate around Thibodeau in the Caillou Bay town where he had grown up (this when he was a teenager) had been
Thibodeau hadn’t argued that one either. Enough dark-haired, sultry-eyed darlings had been enthusiastic takers at the
Rollie Thibodeau’s sentimental attachments were few but strong, and he’d held onto only a handful of keep- sakes from back home. Some black-and-white family photos dulled by time’s wasting touch. Paper flowers his mother had worn on her wedding dress, their colors also diminished. A carton of gear his father had used for fishing shellfish while he threaded among the swamps and marshes in his twelve-foot dugout canoe: tall, wooden oyster tongs, rope nets, a tangle of crab line, the bucket in which he brought home his daily catch, one of the traps he would set on the muddy shore along his route to snare muskrats—“swamp rats” he’d called the nasty furballs, though their hides must have fetched a fair rate at market. There was an assortment of other boxed remembrances. And, of course, the Detecto doctor’s scale. During his tour as a Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol commander in Nam, Thibodeau had rented storage space for the items in Baton Rouge, where they were kept until his return to the States.
After he was done with the war, and the war done with him, Thibodeau moved around a lot, inside and outside the country. For almost two decades he had capitalized on his elite military background by teaching classes on self-defense and firearms use, occasionally handling personal security, hiring out his services to clients ranging from business executives and Hollywood stars to European and Arab royals. Meanwhile, his boxed up this’s and that’s had gathered dust in one warehouse or another. Since 1995 or so, right about when Megan Breen roped him into UpLink International’s developing security force with a pointed inquiry — If you’ve got the ability to do something constructive with your life, why spend the rest of it watching to see that nobody pulls the diapers off spoiled princes and princesses? — everything had been stashed away in a cheap concrete storage unit about the size of a walk-in closet at the head of a dreary, unfrequented parking lot a dozen miles outside Los Angeles.
Everything except Nanaine Adele’s rusty, peeling lilac-colored scale.
Even before UpLink, that scale had gone wherever he did. Thibodeau wasn’t sure why. In his opinion, rearview mirrors were supposed to help guide people forward on the highway of life, not inspect their balky hairs and crooked neckties at its rest stops. He hadn’t been back to Louisiana since breast cancer got Nanaine Adele in 1989, and wasn’t about to waste a minute longing for Acadia. The relics of the past that Thibodeau held close to him were the useful ones, which was probably the main reason he’d made the scale his constant traveling companion. It was a symbol more than anything else, he guessed. A reminder that the only memories worth carrying around were those that made riding out the present, and maybe the future, a little smoother.
Besides, the damn thing was just plain reliable.
Though never preoccupied with his weight, Thibodeau had kept an occasional eye on it, and always managed to stay in good shape despite the limitless pleasure he took from beer drinking and hearty eating. At six feet, four inches tall, he was the bearer of a wide-boned, chockablock physique, and had sustained a steady-as-she-goes 235 pounds for most of his adult life, packing virtually every last ounce of it in slabs of muscle hardened by regular and diligent workouts.
All that had changed about two years ago, when he’d been sucker punched by a submachine gun round while defending an UpLink facility in Brazil against a terrorist hit… a bullet that had gone deep into his stomach, hung a left through his large intestine, and then plowed into his spleen, turning it to mincemeat before finally butting up against the back of his rib cage. There was also plenty of hemorrhaging, and a partial lung collapse to stop the ER personnel who received him from getting too blase about their task.
For several months after he was shot, Thibodeau’s weakened condition had precluded strenuous exercise. Resistance training wasn’t worth a thought — in fact, he’d had days when simply raising himself out of bed, or from a chair to a standing position, was a torment. And by the time Thibodeau
While on the mend, Thibodeau had been coaxed into accepting what was intended to be seen as a major promotion at UpLink, and gotten a big pay hike consistent with its added responsibilities. He supposed he should have been grateful. That he was wrong to feel privately indignant about a legitimate career advancement. Still,
