FRED SHOWED UP FOR THE MEMORIAL AT THE Hanoi Hilton stag, since Annick hadn’t given Bruno the news yet; even if she had, they reasoned, it would have been poor form to rub his nose in it at his father’s memorial. Marie-Laure was there with her husband, and I was there with Ginny, who wore a form-fitting minidress through which her nipples protruded like gumdrops. The mood was festive, with a giant photograph of Claude printed on a banner hanging across one wall, the cage hanging over the dance floor minus its usual scantily clad occupant, like the riderless horse in a funeral cortege. The music was the standard horrible mélange of disco, classic rock, and techno-dance, and though Esmée was seated at a table dressed in a very sexy black outfit and playing the devastated widow very convincingly, she got up every few minutes to dance and managed never to lose her look of brooding grief, not even for the most frenetic numbers, not for a second.
I was having trouble keeping my eyes on Ginny’s face while we danced, largely because of the effect of those lovely nipples. Which is funny, since I’d spent considerable time suckling them the night before and had spent half of our limo ride over playing with them. She was in her element, being watched by most of the men in the room and not a few of the ladies. Every time a flash went off she winked at me.
“I owe you big time, if this all gets onto Gawker or E! or Entertainment Tonight,” she said.
“It’s nothing. You get a message to David?”
“Called his brother in Oklahoma. Told him I wanted to see David, said I’d cooked up some real kinky shit he wasn’t going to believe.”
“Won’t he think that’s suspicious, your calling him up like that?”
“No,” she said. “I do shit like that all the time just to torture him. He’s in love with me, the poor dumb fuck.”
“Are you sure he’ll tell David?”
“Course he will. He tells David everything. He told David he’d fucked me, for example, which was one of the reasons David and I started having problems. Big fucking deal, right? I mean, they’re brothers.”
I saw Marie-Laure dancing with her husband on the other side of the dance floor. They were dancing a little less energetically than the rest of the crowd, and I wondered what he made of his wife’s life. He looked pretty miserable, but upon consideration so did she.
Soon Ginny was dancing with Fred, who looked the very picture of masculine self-confidence. As I stood at the bar I saw Annick at a corner table by herself trying hard not to watch him, and a somewhat familiar-looking young man approached me and shook my hand.
“I just wanted to say I’m sorry about jumping you,” he said, and even with that rather obvious clue to his identity I was drawing a blank. Whoever he was, though, he was offering an apology, so I accepted it.
“The thing is, I’m kind of going crazy at the moment, and a lot of things just came crashing down around me at the same time. Like Annick cheating on me, Esmée cutting me off.”
Aha. So this was Bruno, without his dreads now, and looking rather natty. “I understand.”
“Do you? Sometimes I think if anything else goes wrong I’ll go crazy. Still, I know that attacking you was wrong. I’m planning on seeing a psychiatrist soon.”
“Your demeanor is very different than the last time we met,” I said.
“I’m heavily medicated at the moment, sir.”
I told him a truncated version of my army career and my discovery of acting as a form of therapy. He listened with interest, and then I clasped his shoulder.
“You’re a good-looking young fellow. Articulate. You have a decent voice. How’d you like to be in a movie?”
• • •
I had prepared two notes. Both of them read WISHING SHE WAS YOU. When I went over to present my official condolences to Esmée, I slipped her one, and brushing past Marie-Laure a few minutes later, I left the other clasped in her palm. But of course I was leaving with Ginny, and as we made our way past the members of the press both inside and out I said to several of them words to the effect that this Krysmopompas fellow was a chickenshit who lacked the balls to come after me, and that I didn’t expect to hear from him again.