“PLEASE SIT DOWN.”
April Lamotte looked gracefully young in the measured way that only rich, mature women ever did. She was wearing a pale green silk pants suit and seemingly little else. She was slim, almost thin—not his type, really—and her feet were bare. She had lustrous center-parted, red hair. He already had her down as a sharp and determined piece of work as she gestured for him to sit on a long couch.
His ass sank and his legs bobbed high, but she remained standing, her fingers turning her gold wedding ring in quick circles, and he was glad to see that small sign of nervousness.
“You did as I asked? You brought the letter? No one else knows or is at all aware that you’re coming here?”
He nodded. Clients were often over-obsessed with secrecy, and that security guard who’d stopped his car really didn’t seem worth mentioning. “Discretion’s a given in the sort of work I do, Mrs Lamotte.”
“As you can see, I’ve given leave to all my servants. None of this must come out. Absolutely nothing. Ever. You understand? I’d like that letter now. May I have it please? And the envelope… ?”
He watched her flick a large silver lighter, turn the papers under its flame and lay the burning, blackening remains in a big crystal ashtray. The process made him wonder again how the letter, and the enticing fifty-C note which had come with it, had arrived at his delivery locker back in Venice with no stamp or postmark.
”Maybe,” he said, “you could tell me a little more of what all this is about. Perhaps we could begin with some basic details—”
“I’m more than aware of the sort of work you do, Mr Gable. Before you start asking questions which aren’t appropriate, I should tell you that I don’t want a divorce. Neither is my husband having any kind of affair. In a way, perhaps, that might have helped.”
“You say you know what I do, Mrs Lamotte,” he said. “But I think you should know what I don’t do as well. There’s no violence or coercion. I don’t carry a gun. Beyond parking fines, for which I bill as normal, I try to avoid breaking any kind of law. I may help evidence along but I don’t manufacture it. In fact, most of what I do is simply to find out about what people are already doing, and then make sure it’s witnessed and photographed as cleanly and clearly as such things ever can be. My hourly rate’s three dollars.”
April Lamotte made a small gesture of dismissal; even the tripling of his normal fee didn’t faze her. It was hard to tell the exact color of her eyes, although he’d have guessed at green. There was a slight pinch at the tip of her nose which, in its own way, wasn’t unattractive. The light was strange in here, dim after the brightness of those corridors, lit from a semi-circular bay of half-closed drapes which covered a wider sweep of window, but caught within the gloss of so many shining objects, this silk-clad woman included, that it sort of had a quality and substance of its own. Like fresh paint, the shine of that Delahaye’s dials, or that feelie ghost.
“You’ll have a drink?” She slung ice from a silver bucket into a cut glass jug.
Clark, who had sunk down so far by now into the couch that he was in a sort of embryonic hunch, attempted the gesture of someone who wouldn’t normally think of drinking this early in the day but was prepared to be sociable.
She poured with quick ease. He strained over his knees to take the glass, which was heavy and cold and deeply cut. The fluid inside was flecked with stuff which could have been mint, but the taste was so cold and sharp it was impossible to tell. Just the way he always did with any client, he watched the way April Lamotte drank. A short sip, and that was all. She was no lush.
“Mind if I smoke?” He tapped a roll-up against its case. She nodded and took one of her own from a lacquered Japanese cigarette box. Her cigarette was baby blue. They shared the flame of the lighter. She blew a plume of smoke. Outside, the soft sounds of morning filled this opulent valley. Birds and bees and distant lawnmowers were chirruping and buzzing and droning. Something about the way April Lamotte was standing there, sheathed in the glisten of silk, reminded him again of that feelie ghost along the corridor. He pushed the idea away.
“What I want from you, Mr Gable,” she said, “what I’ll pay you for, and pay you royally by your standards—is for you to play my husband. I want you to become Daniel Lamotte.”