WE MADE A GREAT SHOW OF MOVING Ginny into a small but elegant boutique hotel off the Boulevard St. Germain, where her suite was smaller than its predecessor but filled with objets d’art and so many flowers my eyes began itching the moment we walked through the door. I made certain the press knew we’d be there, and sure enough when we stepped out of the limo there’d been a line of photographers and television cameras to publicize the event.
“You sure he’ll show?” I asked her.
“Unless he smells a trap, which I don’t think he will. Not when he thinks he’s going to help me make a snuff video.”
We looked around for the best place for me to hide and decided it was the walk-in closet. Ginny figured she’d have him thoroughly engaged in the sack before he wanted a proper tour of the suite around the room, and the slats in the door gave me a reasonably good idea of what was happening in the room outside.
But first she wanted to christen that big bed. The thing about Ginny was, she really was horny just about all the time. And what the hell, she’d left word for David to join her at five in the evening, and it was only two-thirty now.
We had left word at the desk that if M. Steinke appeared, he was to be let up immediately. Members of the press would again be waiting outside the hotel and strategically placed in the corridors outside the room to record whatever transpired, and they all knew to be in place by four-thirty just to be on the safe side.
So we all got caught with our pants down, in my case and Ginny’s literally so, when the lunatic son of a bitch burst into the room at three-fifteen and found me balls-deep in his estranged wife. Ginny screamed at the sight of him, and he came at me with a butcher knife, bellowing a cuckold’s pain and an avenger’s joy as I rolled off the bed and onto the floor.
I had foreseen any number of scenarios I might have to deal with today, but fighting a knife-wielding assailant while I was naked wasn’t among them. He was an unskilled knife-fighter, but he was high on adrenaline and who knows what else and therefore unpredictable. I grabbed for his wrist, but he sliced my forearm and I retreated. I was a little bit ashamed, to tell you the truth, at allowing a civilian to slash me like that, and I vowed it was the last time.
He was laughing like an idiot, his eyes red and wide, and I had a bad feeling he’d scored some meth or, even worse, some angel dust. “This is a snuff film, baby, and you’re the star,” he said.
To my dismay I saw that Ginny was actually operating a video camera from the bed. “Damn it, give me a hand here,” I yelled.
“Fight, you fucking pussies,” she yelled back, and I had the sinking sensation that I’d been had. This was indeed a snuff film she was making, whether it was her ex or me that died, and I vowed that if I survived I’d see to it that she never worked outside of porn again.
I was backing away from him when he lunged suddenly, knocking me into a side table laden with a large pitcher full of flowers. His teeth bared, he lunged at me and I rolled to the side just in time to avoid being cut by a large sliver of broken crystal.
From my prone position I kicked him in the face and felt the cartilage in his nose crunch. He dropped the knife, and I plunged it into his throat. He made a truly horrible noise as the air from his lungs escaped through it, and his carotid artery spurted bright red onto the creamy white carpet as Ginny filmed. The blood began leaking rather than pumping from the wound in his neck, and his eyes lost focus.
“Turn off that fucking camera,” I said.
• • •
It didn’t take long for the photographers to arrive, and the police followed shortly. By that time I’d planted enough incriminating evidence on the corpse to establish definitively his identity as Krysmopompas: a page referring to Kamikaze 1989, torn from a book in Fred’s bookstore on German New Wave cinema, and a typewritten letter ostensibly from David Steinke explaining his need to kill me, Claude Guiteau, and anyone else who might facilitate Ginny’s reentry into legit show business, thereby hurting his chances of getting her back.
“It’s a good job you managed to overpower him,” Inspector Bonnot said. “Myself, I’d hate to be naked and face-to-face with a knife-wielding homicidal maniac.”
“It’s no picnic, Inspector,” I agreed, and when he’d wrapped up his duties and the body had been shipped off to the Institut Médico-Légal, we repaired to the headquarters of the Police Judiciaire, where I had the rare honor of a visit from the divisionnaire himself, who was kind enough to have sandwiches and beer sent up from the café on the Place Dauphine to thank me for the autographed picture, which had delighted his wife. After I’d made my official statement, Inspector Bonnot joined me for an apéritif at that same café.
• • •
“It’s funny,” he said, after one of the inevitable interruptions, this time by an elderly couple who wanted, as usual, to know why I sounded so different in person than on the TV. “You’re very good-natured about the whole thing. That old bitch interrupted you in midsentence.”
“How can I be mean when they’re so happy to meet me? It’s thanks to people like her that I don’t have to wait tables or drive a truck.”
“True. Nonetheless, she was out of line.”
“Maybe. People get flustered when they meet someone famous.”
“So what are your plans now? Staying in France?”
“I certainly hope so. I just gave up a good TV role to stay here and push to get this movie made.”
“Ah, that’s right, your movie. The one the late M. Guiteau was going to finance.”
“Exactly.”
“I suppose you’re out of luck there, now that he’s dead.”
“Maybe, maybe not. If the estate’s settled quickly enough, I’m sure Esmée will step in for her husband as financial backer.”
“I suppose that makes sense. Of course the whole film business is quite oblique to me.”
“It’s oblique to people who’ve spent their lives in it. Every film gets set up differently, and every television show. There’s only one rule that never changes.”
“And what’s that?”
“Every man for himself.”
We shook hands outside the café with an invitation on my part for him to visit the set once the filming was under way and walked off in opposite directions as the sun began to set. Everything had gone as planned, and it was hard to argue that the world was any the worse off without either of the men I’d killed. The movie would get made, and all involved would get what they wanted. In the distance, the lights of the Eiffel Tower sputtered on, and I felt as though Paris had been my home forever.