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  And . . .

  “Paris? But haven’t these things always been held in cheap locales in the Lands of the Lost?”

  “Brasília, Damascus, Nairobi, Tijuana, Colombo . . .”

  “So why Paris?”

  Giorgio’s shrug was more Gallic than Italian, though perhaps you had to be a Parisian to notice. “Why not? No doubt those in charge finally decided on a city with world-class restaurants.”

  “And they’ve hired Bread & Circuses? To do what?”

  “What we do so well, cara, give their event cachet, brio, a touch of class.”

  Monique eyed Giorgio narrowly. “They’ve never hired us before, have they. . . ?”

  Giorgio gave her the nod and the smile at the same time. “And as a consequence, UNACOCS has always had a tawdry image, lacked a certain credibility. . . .”

  The odor of Giorgio’s familial enterprise was beginning to waft off this. “Not to mention sufficient financing to put on an event like this in a city like Paris,” Monique said. “Or afford our services.”

  “For which,” said Giorgio, beaming, “they have therefore paid in advance.”

  “Why do I get the feeling there’s something you’re not telling me, Giorgio?”

  For a moment, Giorgio Kang dropped the whole act. For a moment, Giorgio actually became sincere. “Because,” he said, “I don’t know. The financial end of it makes no more sense to me than it does to you.”

  Then the mask went up again, the silky mediated mafia don this time. “This is not an offer you can’t refuse, Monique,” he said out of the side of his mouth, flicking ash off a phantom cigar. He smiled with massive fatuity. “If you don’t want to run VIP services for us in Paris, France, I can offer you an alternative assignment . . .”

  Monique did not deign to feed him the straight line.

  “The one in Texas,” Giorgio said.

  The sun was sliding down the sky, the shadows were lengthening in the Bamboo Boudoir of the Tuileries Gardens, and Prince Eric Esterhazy had more important and satisfying tasks awaiting him.

  Up ahead, in a shadowed grove beside the path, the odious M. Pierre Gauldier had struck up a conversation with a Polynesian whore in a brief crushed-silk semblance of a grass skirt and a minimal mylar halter that left barely enough to the imagination but more than enough to be completely holding his pop-eyed attention.

  Time to get it over with.

  Eric sauntered slowly up the path toward this less than romantic rendezvous, not even making a moment of eye contact with his target, indeed not even breaking stride as he reached up with his right hand to smooth back his long blond hair, an entirely natural gesture given the breeze, did so, and, passing behind Gauldier just as he dropped his arm back to his side, pointed the nozzle concealed in his palm at the back of the miscreant’s neck en passant, squeezed the trigger, and walked on by.

  C’est tout.

  Gauldier hardly even noticed the poisoned gel needle that would kill him, only started to reach up to scratch at the “insect bite,” apparently more akin to that of a gnat than to that of an angry bee or a formidable Seine mosquito, paused, then returned his full attention to the whore’s décolletage.

  Eric found the whole thing unpleasantly clinical, unmanly even, to the point that while his sympathy for the likes of a weasel like Pierre Gauldier was minimal, he briefly entertained the notion of a beau geste, of somehow providing him with an ovenighter tomorrow so that he could die, as it were, in the saddle.

  But contemplating the ire of his syndic should they learn that he had actually done such a recklessly stupid thing was enough to banish this gallant fantasy, and the whole affair left Eric in a peckish mood entirely inappropriate to such a golden afternoon. So to lighten his spirits, he decided to do something kitschily amusing, totally touristique.

  Rather than strolling north through the Tuileries up to the Rue de Rivoli and taking an ordinary taxi, he went south, to the Seine, to the Quai des Tuileries, and took a gondola instead.

  The drowning of Venice had left the gondoliers’ syndic unemployed and had rendered their boats redundant. Some had migrated to Amsterdam, where Dutch engineering had preserved a canal system of the appropriate scale, some had tried their luck in St. Petersburg or Los Angeles, but more of them than not had figured that it would be the Seine that would provide the richest tourist pickings.

  In that they were not mistaken, but the Seine was not the Grand Canal. The Seine, despite its enclosure by man-made quais throughout its passage through Paris, was in fact a real river, with a strong westward current and heavy motorized boat traffic, touristic and even commercial, and singing gondoliers in silly costumes trying to navigate it under paddle power swiftly proved helpless hazards to the river traffic, their naive tourist passengers, and themselves.

  After a short period of utter chaos, the Syndique de la Seine decreed that the gondolas must become motorized, nor were the hapless transplanted Venetians about to argue once the solution had been suggested.

  So the gondola that Eric boarded—while replete with rococo scrollwork on its recurved prow and stern and gondolier in traditional costume seemingly paddling and steering the thing with a single long oar—was actually a disney, powered by a discreet electric water jet, steered by hidden foot pedals.

  “La Reine de la Seine,” Eric told the gondolier, for he need say no more, except, that is, that musical accompaniment would not be required, and the gondola headed out into the river, westward and Left-Bank-ward, toward the Port de la Bourdonnais, where, as even the rudest Siberian tourist knew, the Queen of the River would, at this hour, be anchored.

  The Seine was bustling with river traffic, most of it touristic at this waning afternoon hour: gondolas, great faux Polynesian outrigger canoes replete with nonfunctional oarsmen in full island drag, dragon-boat disneys, and the old-model bateaux mouches, many of the great glassed-in monstrosities pathetically attempting to ape La Reine herself with paddle wheels, white-painted scrollwork, tour guides in white icecream suits, vile Louisiana cuisine straight from the microwave.

  Though truth be told—which it wasn’t, since Bad Boys did not at all subscribe to the bizarre notion that honesty was always the best policy—it was La Reine that had drawn its inspiration from this superficial tarting up of the bateaux mouches in Mississippi riverboat nostalgia during the Lost Louisianne craze which had come and gone years before her launching.

  Well, not entirely gone. These modes of the moment might become déclassé swiftly enough, but no such ersatz vogue ever seemed to quite fade away in Paris. Tourists still flocked to Montmartre, where the tacky illusion of the twentieth-century Hollywood version of nineteenth-century Paris was yet maintained, replete with sidewalk painters in berets, quaint clochards passed out in the gutters, whores in can-can outfits, can-can versions of happy hookers, and pickpockets done up as teams of apache dancers. The Rue des Rosiers still pretended to be a street in an old Eastern European ghetto, though certain unpleasantnesses with Israeli expatriates had caused Force Flic to stop providing the quartier with cops done up as Cossacks. Dressing all in black, growing scraggly beards, and hanging out in Latin Quarter cafés flocked with old newspapers, Soviet flags, and antique Che Guevara posters was still a workable strategy for picking up wide-eyed girls from Siberia looking for existentialist action.

  The Lost Louisianne vogue, however, had been, and in attenuated form still was, not yet another virtual fossil laid on by the City of Light for the seduction of tourists, but a spontaneous growth—like the Spanish moss draped from the cypress trees overhanging the quais surrounding the Ile St. Louis or the palm trees that had sprung up in the Luxembourg gardens, or the alligators of the Seine—that had ensnared the inner romantic souls of the Parisiens themselves, as had a similar syrupy version of an imaginary Vienna in a bygone century, marzipan pastry and Strauss waltzes rather than oysters bienville and Dixieland jazz.

  Paris yet nursed an atavistic sense of francophone solidarity, and so the Louisianian diaspora had
touched the heart of the city. As New Orleans slowly sank, decaying and dripping vertigris, into the marshlands whence it had arisen, the waves of refugees had been welcomed with open arms as a long-lost tribe of France, no matter that no more than a tenth of them had been true Cajuns, less than half of those had arrived speaking French, and that a patois that was incomprehensible.

  Then too, Paris had always had a taste for jazz, the more safely out-of-date the better, and however unauthentic the watered-down Cajun dishes and peppered-up Creole fare that generally passed for La Cuisine Louisianne might be, it tasted of an exoticism with a French accent, and indeed its influence added a certain something to the art of several two-star chefs, foremost among them Anton Dubrey, whom, after much pleasurable auditioning, Prince Eric had chosen to preside over the dining salon of La Reine de la Seine.

  No doubt the climate also had something to do with this attempt to re-create New Orleans on the Seine, and certainly with its visual persistence long after Lost Louisianne chic had faded into kitsch.

  Mercifully, the greenhouse warming had not inflicted upon Paris the hideous saturation humidity of a classic New Orleans summer, but no one could exactly complain about desert desiccation, and the balmy spring and fall temperature range was quite similar, the summers thoroughly tropical, and the winters nonexistent, so that the flora and fauna which had one way or another arrived with the human refugees from Lost Louisianne not only thrived but had proven virtually impossible to eradicate.

  Eric took care not to thoughtlessly dangle his hand in the water as his gondola took him past the mossy stones of the Quai Anatole-France, as absentminded tourists occasionally did to the delectation of the alligators. Ultrasonic mosquito repellers were de rigueur anywhere near the Seine at most seasons, and he had activated his long before reaching the river.

  It was hard for Eric to imagine what this languid glide down the lazy boat-filled river would’ve been like in dim days gone by. When the quais had not been overgrown with encrustations of lush green ivy and fragrant honeysuckle and morning glory perfuming the waning afternoon with an erotic tropical boudoir sweetness. How much graver the office towers and Hausmannian housing blocks of the Avenues New York and Kennedy must have been without the tall palms and even taller eucalyptus. How stark the Musée d’Orsay must have seemed when the river face of the old railway station did not rise behind its great hedge of weeping willows, branches sweeping near to water level, brightly colored African finches singing in the moss, toucans and flocks of parakeets screeching from its rooftop and parapet.

  The gondola passed under the greened stonework of the Pont d’Alma, then the Pont Debilly, as it edged closer to the Left Bank, rounding the gentle bend in the river that gave onto the sudden dramatic vista that was surely the scenic signature of Paris.

  On the Right Bank was Trocadéro, a concrete wedding cake that might have been confected by Benito Mussolini on lysergic acid, its balconies latter-day Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the plaza between it and the river a tropical garden of palmettos, palms, brightly colored hedges of South Seas exotics.

  On the Left Bank, across the Pont d’Iéna from Trocadéro, the Eiffel Tower rose out of the tangle of morning glory, honeysuckle, ivy, and bougainvillea climbing its pillars like a mighty cast-iron tree soaring up from a rain forest undergrowth. From the river, through its legs, Eric could see the awesome leafy corridor of giant live oaks marching down the Champ-de-Mars, though admittedly a white and pillared Georgian plantation house would’ve looked better as the architectural light at the end of the tunnel than the square squat profile of the École-Militaire.

  On the riverbank just east of the Eiffel Tower, a sector of the Quai Branly was done up as a levee, complete with re-created horse carriages, an elaborately detailed dockside warehouse stocked with high-end tourist junk, themed fast-food emporiums, and strolling black minstrels in straw hats playing banjos.

  At a discreet distance from this tacky spectacle and walled off from its clientele by black iron fencing and a screen of high topiary hedging was a low white embarkation pavilion tastefully and subtly reminiscent of a sort of riverside gazebo set in a copse of magnolia trees now coming into full blossom. Moored before it was La Reine de la Seine.

  La Reine was half again as long as the largest of the bateau mouche tourist boats that had plied the Seine for a century and more but not much wider, since these ungainly glassed-in flatboats had been designed to pack in the maximum number of tourists per trip, meaning that nothing much wider would fit through the smallest central arches of the many bridges spanning the river and anything approaching twice as long would have difficulty negotiating the 180-degree turn around the Ile St. Louis.

  But since the bateaux mouches drew less water than the old Seine freighters and their houseboat conversions, The Queen of the River could have a full deck below the waterline, which she needed, since the height of the lowest bridge arches pretty much limited the design to two decks above.

  As Prince Eric’s gondola approached, what he beheld was a full-sized and then some replica of a classic Mississippi steam-powered riverboat straight out of Mark Twain lore. The lower deck sported an open promenade at the bow and a roofed one at the fantail, connected by a covered porchway that encircled its cabin. The upper deck was an open pavilion with the casino cabin at its center and the wheelhouse up front. There were great paddle wheels amidships, port and starboard. The railings of the promenades and the pavilion were wooden scrollwork carved to be somehow reminiscent of both Georgian plantation-house columns and the iron railings of New Orleans French Quarter balconies. Anything that wasn’t gleaming white was polished brass.

  The only things missing to complete the image were tall twin smokestacks puffing clouds of steam and soot as the crew fired up the boilers. They would not make their appearance until La Reine de la Seine was under way.

  Passengers for the evening’s cruise were already assembling in the embarkation pavilion as he arrived at the dock, but no one was allowed on board or on the quai until Prince Eric Esterhazy stood at the top of the gangway to greet them. Nor could he perform his duties dressed like this.

  Unlike the real thing, which had carried passengers the length of the mighty Mississip, La Reine de la Seine, which never went farther than the endless round trip between the Eiffel Tower and the Ile St. Louis or on certain occasions the Port de Bercy, had no staterooms or cabins.

  Well, not exactly. Belowdecks, along with the engine room and the galley, there were a dozen fantasy boudoirs of assorted flavors, not designed to be endurable over the days between New Orleans and St. Louis, but pleasant enough for a few hours’ erotic idyll.

  Eric had appropriated one of them as a wardrobe and dressing-room hideaway, and there he repaired immediately upon boarding to don his Prince suit for the night. These outfits were not quite costumes and not quite uniforms, but one could not exactly feel at ease wearing them in the Métro either.

  Upon reflection, he chose a royal blue velvet ensemble tailored to suggest a riverboat gambler’s suit pushed toward the deco, set off with a more authentic ruffled white shirt and simple black snakeskin string tie, secured with a turquoise squash-blossom clip. The color of the suit went well with his long blond hair, though he wondered if the greenish hue of the tie clip should have been pushed a bit more to the blue so as not to clash with it. On the other hand, a subtle note of discord here and there served as a statement of princely sartorial daring.

  Thusly accoutered, Prince Eric Esterhazy repaired to the gangway entrance to greet his guests.

  “It’s been far too long, Madeleine, working too hard as usual. . . .”

  “Boys’ night out, Georges, or am I missing something?”

  Admission to La Reine was by invitation only—though if you were on the list of invitables to begin with, you could request an invitation—and while the guest lists were compiled by other departments of Bad Boys, the pretense was that each and every patron was the personal guest of Prince Eric Esterhazy himself and Eric
signed each invitation-ticket with an antique Mont Blanc fountain pen to maintain it.

  “So nice to see you, Pierre. . . .”

  “Lovely gown, Elvira, you look absolutely devastating in peach. . . .”

  Each VIP, each mover and shaker, each whatever that Bad Boys for their own reasons wanted aboard, got a greeting by name thanks to the heads-up display on the contact lens in Eric’s left eye, and since he was after all a prince, each, no matter how puissant, got the first-name treatment. Every human female got the gallant old Romanian hand-kiss, practiceable with a straight face only by those bred to it in their genes.

  “Ah, Alicia, how lovely you look tonight. . . .”

  “Mon Dieu, Antoine, you look as if you’ve been having a rather strenuous good time. . . .”

  After crowning him Prince of Charming, Bad Boys had dispatched Eric to Amsterdam to front a modest bordello, promoted him to fronting a porn-opera palace in Baden and thence to a first-class casino in Lille, as a warm-up for fronting the launch and continued operation of La Reine de la Seine.

  The nature of which was not quite what it might seem.

  “Back from Zekograd at last, Ahmad . . .”

  “Is it really true that the entire poppy crop got washed away, Gunter?”

  The casino, the bars, the restaurant, the sexual services, might be priced outrageously enough to make the riverboat profitable, but La Reine was built with state-of-the-art surveillance equipment integrated into every nook and cranny, for the real raison d’être was information and special services, the moving and shaping of movers and shapers whom Bad Boys or their paying clients might wish to move and shape.

  “Are those marriage rumors really true, Ian?”

  “What ever did happen to the Napoleon opera project, Maxine? I thought it was a natural part for Boris.”

  Who better to front such an operation than Prince Eric Esterhazy?

  Prince Eric had the name, the social connections, the rep as just one more sleazy phony prince, which Bad Boys had carefully crafted for him.