liked sailboats, lived in LA. He had a big staff and conducted investigations. He worked for wealth. Royalty. Celebrities. Governments. Big money for big problems. If he just happened by, it’s an incredible coincidence. And as I told Chellis, it’s the coincidences that kill you. I think he was hired to be there. Their rendezvous must have misfired. Perhaps she fell in on the way to meeting him in the yacht.”
Benoit lay back, looking as if she was intrigued at the notion.
“You think she hired him before she came?”
“He’s exactly the guy a big celebrity would hire.”
Once more he went to her and kissed her deeply. If it were not for the departure of his plane, he would have entered her bed a third time and asked her about the science involved-Jacques’s science.
“What is love to you?” she asked him suddenly.
“When a man says he loves, he is apologizing for his lust. It means I want to use your body but I’m sorry for it-a form of contrition.”
“And what if a woman says it?”
“She realizes that she’s being taken by a cold bastard and she begs for security. When a woman says ‘I love you’ it means: ‘Don’t leave me for someone more beautiful.’ ”
“Why do you like me?” she asked.
“Sex with you is the closest I will ever get to religion.”
“You flatter me. I think you could forget me in a day.”
He smiled despite himself. “It would take more than a day.”
He turned to the mirror to check his disguise. When he dressed he had put on a mustache and plastic, but not the beard. Traveling to America or Canada with a beard increased the likelihood that he would be detained, even though he traveled as a citizen of France.
Gaudet didn’t like leaving his island these days. The inconvenience and danger of travel kept him home more than it ever had before. Gaudet owned a portion of a small island in French Polynesia where he had constructed a burre on stilts with a thatched roof laid over copper that had turned green from the salt air. Inside it was modern, with a polished stone floor and teak and rock for the walls and Honduran mahogany for the bookcases. A German client, a corporation, had constructed the house in its own name and then quietly sold it to Gaudet’s Cayman Island corporation. The transaction was booked as an exchange of services.
He was still thinking of the place while he waited for the cab to the airport. He was not particularly fond of any city, but Paris had many beautiful women. If he didn’t consider the presence of attractive women, there were only a few places in the world he liked, and he liked his burre the best. Soon his burre might be graced with visits from Benoit, which would give his island all that he required. It troubled him that she had not agreed to visit him yet. He supposed she imagined that she would be left out of things with her sister remaining in Paris at the Grace offices. Already he had decided that if Benoit would not come to his island, he would for the most part remain in Paris and endure the company of men. But he would never sell the burre because women, like life itself, were transitory.
Gaudet had been born in Oman, the son of a merchant who had moved himself and his non-Muslim family to a suburb north of Paris shortly after his birth. On his third birthday they moved to Paris proper, and when he was twelve they shipped him to a Catholic boarding school in a village about an hour’s drive away. After that he saw little of them. Just before his thirteenth birthday they died in a taxi accident, and thereafter Gaudet largely fended for himself. It was made easier by the fact that he had never felt close to either of his parents. But then he never really felt close to anyone. He was able to remain at the boarding school and pay tuition by working during school and during the summer, with additional small contributions from an uncle in Oman.
As a young man he was ambitious and flirted briefly with drug smuggling, then went to work for a man named Jean Lacour who operated a walk-in laundry. It was a rough business, and sometimes turf wars were settled with fists. It was the violence at which he excelled, and soon he hired himself out as a collector to loan sharks as a sideline. He did so well at roughing up deadbeats that he soon left the laundry except for occasional jobs protecting territory with fists and threats.
At the age of seventeen he made his first foray into killing when a man at a neighborhood party picked a fight. He easily won the fight because he discovered in the first few seconds that he had no fear. After he beat the man with a chair and then his fists, the fight ended when some older men broke it up. Devan invited the other fellow to finish the fight down the street, but the man declined. It was then the consensus that Devan was the clear winner. It was no appeasement. When the man was on his way home in the quiet of the night, Devan jumped him with a pipe, crushed his shoulder, and then his head. He left him in the street but because of the earlier fight, was nearly arrested for murder.
It was because of this experience that Gaudet swore off direct methods of killing, which he found wanting when compared to more creative techniques. It worked much better to leave his targets dead and everyone, including the police, wondering how it came to pass.
He was only eighteen when he killed his second man, an elderly fellow named Dubroc who fed the pigeons in the park. The man had put in a laundry a block from his client’s business, and his client was willing to pay to make the new arrival disappear. Unfortunately the old man had a large family, including many sons, so picking fights and general harassment was not a solution.
By studying poisons, Gaudet learned about belladonna. The English knew it as nightshade, and although the sweet berry of the plant had resulted in the deaths of many French and English children, it was the root that yielded atropine, a deadly but medicinally useful alkaloid. While it worked well in dilution for dilating the eyes, one- hundredth of a grain of pure atropine ingested would kill a grown man in short order.
Devan was deliberate in everything, and that came to include the preparation of his poisons. What he lacked in experience he made up for in study and contemplation. After watching the old graybeard Dubroc for days, it became obvious that the man liked his pint of whiskey every afternoon, which by evening left him drunk. When Dubroc went home at night, he usually meandered down the sidewalk swaying and jolly, occasionally finding support on lampposts or in doorways. It also became apparent that the man had a sweet tooth, a love of tarts from the local bakery. It took two weeks of careful work for Gaudet to learn to bake such a tart. Even young he had been patient. It was a simple matter to grind the belladonna root fine and to fill a cherry confection with enough to kill a large dog. He doubled that amount.
To avoid any suspicion whatsoever, he baked a tart at the home of a vacationing acquaintance thirty miles distant on a day he knew that the old man would appear at his office above the Dubroc laundry. While the old man was tottering about his chores in the late afternoon, Gaudet slipped into his office and put the tart on the desk atop a piece of bakery tissue. Fascinated, Gaudet remained in the area but heard nothing. A couple of days later Gaudet read the press account. The man was out in front of his laundry unable to speak, reeling about, clutching and unclutching his hands as if kneading unseen bread. When someone grabbed him and called an ambulance, the old fellow was bending at the waist, doubled over, and turning very red at the ears.
Gaudet found the story entirely to his liking.
Since then, during a lifetime of self-development, experimentation, and wet work, Devan had become a master of the accident. He did not shoot, strangle, or stab a victim. Instead he created elaborate tragedies. It was as if he were writing screenplays, and each act of creation left him with a sense of satisfaction he had found nowhere else. Recently, though, he had noticed a yearning to watch his victims die, to kill them directly, and he had decided to make some effort toward that end.
Still, indirect killing held his primary interest, and the range of delivery methods, from gas explosions to neurotoxins, was surprisingly broad. Through Benoit and her work with Jacques in Kuching, Gaudet had even acquired monkey viruses that were almost immediately lethal to humans.
It was a wonder, he thought, that he had found a job that so nurtured his creativity.
Once in the taxi, Gaudet called Trotsky for the final time. “Do we know where they are going?”
“Seaplane to Vancouver. We’re guessing private jet out of there to the States.”
“Guessing does me no good.”
“Anna lives in Manhattan. Just to the west of Central Park. I have the address.”
“Have you got people there?”
“Soon. Chellis’s group has just found us an apartment across the street. We’ll have to lease it for a full year.”
“Do it. Surveillance?”
