Greenhouse Summer Page 8

  It also had an office masquerading as a nineteenth-century Victorian English nobleman’s library—ridiculously functional fireplace with elaborate mantel, walnut bookshelves filled with leather-bound titles, overstuffed burgundy-leather chairs, heavy walnut breakfront. And while one wall of books was the real thing, the other was a flat that slid open to reveal a computer, an outsized vidphone screen, a safe, and a small armory of a dozen tools of Eric’s occasional alternate trade.

  Right now, however, he was dealing with his main enterprise and unhappily refusing a large sum of money.

  Their checkered paternal ethnic history in eastern Europe being what it had been, the Esterhazys had never been encumbered by a family religious tradition, but turning down major offers of money certainly violated it anyway.

  “Look, we are willing to negotiate, so let’s cut the fencing act and get to the bottom line . . . Prince Esterhazy,” said the woman on the screen, expressing her willingness to up the offer a lot more facilely than she seemed willing to grant him the dignity of his title.

  In fact they, whoever they were—the UNACOCS bureaucracy, the UN itself, Bread & Circuses, it was never quite clear—had been trying to rent La Reine de la Seine for the duration of their conference for over a week now.

  Having failed thus far with unalloyed greed, they had now apparently decided to try upping the ante with a more alluring representative.

  Alluring this Monique Calhoun was, or as alluring as any woman could be via vidphone without a glimpse of anything below the elegant neckline—that delicate yet somehow strong French nose and high cheekbones, that looser and easier anglophone-muscled mouth, those neat shell ears peeking out from a short bedroom tumble of black hair, those weasel-keen bright blue eyes—but there was also something annoying about her, too certain that the weight of Bread & Circuses behind her gave her a puissance no mere phony prince could resist.

  On the other hand, Eric was forced to observe, his phallic alter ego seemed to be displaying a certain independence, taking it as a challenge, and rising manfully to it.

  “You may address me as simply Prince Eric, Ms. Calhoun,” he told her magnanimously.

  “May Ah really?” she replied in an acid-tinged magnolia accent.

  “Noblesse oblige, Ms. Calhoun.”

  “I’ll bet you say that to all the girls . . . Prince Eric.”

  “Only to the ones who meet my refined and sophisticated standards of beauty, Monique.”

  “You may address me as Ms. Calhoun, Your Highness,” she said. “And you may also tell me what your real price is, because the chances are we are ready to meet it.”

  Eric hesitated. Eric grew more deeply unhappy. Eric didn’t know quite what to say. Certainly the truth did not seem a palatable option.

  Because the truth was that La Reine was not for rent to anyone at any price for any reason. And the truth was that this was Bad Boys policy set at levels to which he lacked even access, let alone the authority to overrule it. Nor was he permitted to violate the fiction that he was the lord and master of La Reine de la Seine by alluding to the syndic he fronted for. Thus the truth was something it would be both dangerous and galling to admit.

  Doubly galling, somehow, to admit it to Ms. Monique Calhoun.

  Although, perhaps, by arduous physical effort, she just might be able to extract an edited version from him. Or not. At least the poor girl should be given an opportunity to try.

  “You are serious, Ms. Calhoun? I may simply set any price?”

  “Within reason.”

  “I thought so,” Eric said dryly. “Still, I suppose, I have nothing to lose by indulging you in a discussion of the nature of reason. A philosophical discussion, of course.”

  “Right . . .”

  “Say this evening around four-thirty . . . ? At my office?”

  “Where’s that, on the boat?”

  “Ashore, actually. On the Quai de La Tournelle. Attached to . . . my little pied-à-terre.”

  MONIQUE HAD PREPPED HERSELF WITH A QUICK netsearch on Prince Eric Esterhazy, which had yielded hundreds of items, but little useful information. Most of them were gossip file stuff, and most of that seemed professionally planted to her educated eye. The name was apparently real, but the dubious title had been purchased from the Grimaldis at the usual cut-rate price, and the pedigree swiftly peetered backward and eastward into a long line of undistinguished Austro-Hungarian-Romanian con artists.

  Esterhazy had apparently traded on his title to obtain employ as glorified doorman to a series of casinos and whorehouses leading up to his current position as an upscale version on La Reine de la Seine. The famous riverboat itself appeared to be the property of a syndic whose citizen-shareholders included the crew, the chef and his team, the band, a score or so of onshore support workers, Esterhazy, and, strangely enough, his mother, who appeared to have only a token position as “booking agent.”

  Who had how many shares was not a matter of public record, but it did not appear that Esterhazy had a particularly dominant holding, or, given his previous employment record, could have been a serious financial contributor to the construction of La Reine.

  A sleazy ersatz Eurotrash nobleman from nowhere in particular fronting the latest in a string of leisure palaces who had reached the top of his dubious profession.

  But which turned out to seem to be a more lucrative one than Monique had supposed.

  His apartment building, a six-floor eighteenth-century edifice last renovated in the twentieth by the look of it, seemed modest enough from the outside, though the Left Bank quaiside address was primo. The elevator was indeed the standard twentieth century Parisian retrofit, a tiny vertical coffin in a grillework cage squeezed into the central well of an ancient spiral staircase, and it deposited her in a small unprepossessing antechamber.

  The door to Prince Eric Esterhazy’s demesne, however, looked like something taken from an old church—anciently gray carved wood bound in well-greened bronze, set in a gothic stone archway—and it seemed genuine. When she raised and let fall the gargoyle-faced knocker, it triggered a full orchestral version of the four signature notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

  The man who opened the door a perfect sixty seconds later was handsome enough to be a prince. Eric Esterhazy was tall, well built, with high dramatic Slavic cheekbones, an aquiline nose, clear green eyes, and a lovely mane of long blond hair. Only the smirky set of his full lips rescued his face from the blandness of fashion-model perfection. He wore a black velvet pajama suit just tightly enough tailored to display the goods to the maximum effect without getting obvious about it.

  “Welcome to my humble abode, Ms. Calhoun,” he said with only the slightest frisson of irony, and when he made with the Romanian hand-kissing act, he did it to four-star perfection, though Monique found herself counting her fingers afterward.

  Esterhazy then turned with a flourish, and led her directly into a living room that fully matched hers at the Ritz for rococo glitz and was maybe twice the size. Bird’s-egg-blue walls, rose wall-to-wall carpeting under four antique Oriental rugs, crystal chandelier, carved green marble fireplace, a warehouse full of eighteenth-century furniture, none of it looking particularly sittable, massive landscape paintings in ornate gilt frames, huge bouquets of flowers in porcelain Chinese vases.

  The works.

  Esterhazy gave her a carefully measured moment of goggle time.

  “It’s a bit cozier out on the balcony,” he suggested.

  The cozy “balcony” was a large fully landscaped terrace with a breathtaking view of the Seine, and Notre Dame, and the Right Bank beyond—the river traffic floating lazily through the green-encrusted stonework bayou, flocks of green and blue parakeets wheeling over the bronzed roof of the cathedral, the twin lines of tall palm trees marking the Champs-Élysées’ long march from the lush landscapes of the Tuileries to the Arc de Triomphe bridging the reflecting pond in the center of the Place de l’Etoile gardens—all the way to the ghostly white Moorish mirage of S
acré Coeur floating atop the jungled hilltop of Montmartre at the far limit of vision.

  At this afternoon hour, the sun was just coming down past the Eiffel Tower, sending lengthening shadows over the chiaroscuroed cityscape, beginning to purple the sky at the zenith, gilding the inversion layer haze over Paris to a romantic glow.

  It was heartstoppingly lovely. It was the Paris of her heart’s desire. It was so perfect that it would have been absolute kitsch had it not been real.

  The landscaping of the terrace, on the other hand, was just the sort of disney that set Monique’s True Blue teeth on edge.

  Some urban interior decorator had confected his fatuous notion of a South Seas island paradise. Potted palms and palmettos. A dozen species of waxy-flowered plants forced into riotous colorful bloom. A pond done up as a phony miniature coral reef, complete with brightly colored tropical fish extinct in the wild and worth their weight in caviar. Rattan tables and great woven peacock chairs than on second look turned out to be crafted from weatherproof synthetics. In a silver ice bucket sat some tropical punch, heavily laced, no doubt, with rum or gin and probably both. The only thing missing was the grass skirts and slaveys with palm-frond fans.

  A South Seas island.

  As reconstructed from old twentieth-century advertising videos by someone who had never been there. Never seen the sere, desiccated scrub of what little remained above the waterline. Never broiled in the actinic sun. Never swum above the dead-white corpses of the reefs overrun with starveling starfish.

  To Monique, who had seen and done these things in the grim line of duty, the landscaping of Prince Eric Esterhazy’s terrace had all the charm of that hideous virtuality re-creation of the legendary Great Barrier Reef, replete with singing tropical fish and dancing sharks, that she had once been dragged to in downtown Sydney.

  Esterhazy steered her to chairs beside the table holding the ice bucket, and poured her a tall drink that was somehow both blue and brownish. It was sickeningly sweet and unsubtly powerful. It was called a “zombie.”

  It somehow seemed perfect.

  Monique sipped at it very gingerly indeed.

  “Shall we get down to business . . . Prince Eric?” she said.

  “That would be a waste of a lovely sunset, Ms. Calhoun,” Eric Esterhazy said. “However, I will offer you one deal right now—I get to drop the Ms. Calhoun, and you get to drop the Prince.” He gave her a smile that must’ve melted a thousand panties. “Have we got a quid pro quo . . . Monique?”

  “It’s a beginning, Eric . . . But as we say on the sunken sidewalks of New York, money talks, bullshit walks.”

  Esterhazy smiled right through it.

  “Then I will not risk the latter by pretending that your last offer was a whisper in the wind,” he said. “One million eight hundred and fifty thousand wu for ten days’ rental speaks loud and clear. However . . .”

  However, Monique thought, an arms dealer or a rug merchant or a camel trader never takes an offer, no matter how foolishly magnanimous it might be, until the customer is about to stomp out the door in outraged frustration.

  And 185,000 work units a day, they both knew damn well, was more than a princely offer. La Reine de la Seine’s cash flow might not be public record, but its capacity was, and so were the prices on its menu and at the bar, nor was the little casino a serious high-roller operation, and a simple spreadsheet program easily enough revealed that 100,000 wu a day would probably be stretching it.

  Posner hadn’t told her to bargain hard or given her a limit, but this was already approaching the ridiculous and her own professional pride would not let her be taken for more than two million tops by the likes of Prince Smarming.

  “However, not being a mathematician or computer-literate, you would find a somewhat rounder number easier to calculate?” Monique suggested. “Like one million nine?”

  Esterhazy gave her a look that, like the zombie cocktail, seemed a clash of incongruous elements—one part suppressed amazement, one part greed, one part some kind of wistful regret—and hence entirely unreadable.

  “Two million would be even rounder,” he said larcenously, but sounding as if his heart wasn’t in it.

  “Ten million is a one followed by seven zeros,” Monique snapped. “It doesn’t get any rounder than that!”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Are you?”

  He flashed her a brilliant golden boy smile. “I was seriously interested in meeting you, Monique,” he said.

  “To do what? Pour me full of rum and gin and then carry me into your bedroom and make mad passionate love to me?”

  Eric Esterhazy kept the smile, lidded his eyes to half-mast as he stared into hers. “If you were persistent enough,” he said dryly, “I suppose in the end I could be persuaded. . . .”

  “Are we talking about beds or boats here?”

  Esterhazy shrugged, shoulders only, the smile fixed, the boudoir eyes inviting. “As I’ve already told you, my boat is unavailable,” he said, then paused dramatically. “However . . .” he added, and let it dangle invitingly.

  Monique was not amused. But she was confused. What was going on here? Was this character trying to use sexual repartee to up an already ridiculously overpriced 1,900,000 wu to two million? Or was he serious about La Reine de la Seine being unavailable at any price and sincerely interested only in getting her panties off? But if so, why in the world would he not snap up an offer that would double his enterprise’s gross?

  Then the only possible answer dawned on her.

  The guy’s employment record had been as a glorified maître d’. There was no evidence that he had ever really managed the business end of those whorehouses and casinos. Why assume that La Reine de la Seine was anything different?

  “Are you . . . seriously considering my offer?” Esterhazy purred.

  “Are you seriously considering mine . . . ?” Monique purred back.

  Of course you are, she thought. Who wouldn’t be? But you just don’t have the authority to take it.

  “La Reine is not for rent to outside parties,” Esterhazy said with a great and entirely unconvincing show of aristocratic snottiness. “Not for royal weddings, not for papal coronations, not for the Second Coming of Jesus or Elvis, and not even for you, ma chérie.”

  Right, thought Monique, and just maybe you have the authority to change the color of the toilet paper.

  But of course he couldn’t admit it.

  Nor would it be wise to force the issue.

  Much better to give him a graceful way out.

  “I think I can get the client to swallow two million wu, Eric, so let’s leave it on the table overnight,” she said, and then held up her hand to silence his reply, giving him her own version of the boudoir stare. “Let’s not decide until we’ve . . . slept on it.”

  Prince Esterhazy gave her the full force of his bedroom charisma right back. “Well now,” he oozed, “there’s an offer that a gentleman can hardly refuse. It would be hard to deny that this conversation might go better over a champagne breakfast.”

  Monique was tempted. It wouldn’t be the first time she had allowed herself a tactical fuck, and this one would no doubt be entirely enjoyable. For while Eric Esterhazy did not exactly have her idea of a great personality, he certainly was one beautiful male animal, and given his own obvious high opinion of himself as a seducer and the nature of his profession, it would be quite a surprise if he turned out to be less than a master cocksman.

  Monique sighed inwardly, for no, it would be a highly counterproductive tactic. The whole point of letting him “sleep on it” was to let him have a private chat with whoever made the money decisions, who would surely accept the two million, and allow him the face-saving pretense that he had simply changed his mind. Which would not be possible if she stayed the night.

  “Let’s make it lunch instead,” she said.

  Eric smiled. “You intend to keep me up that late?” he said.

  Monique found herself wondering if she c
ould. Or if he could. But this was not the time to find out.

  “Perchance in your dreams this night, sweet prince,” she said dryly, rising. “Business before . . . pleasure,” she said cockteasingly. “New York girls never do it the other way around.”

  After his tantalizing and frustrating tête-à-tête with the sweet-and-sour Monique Calhoun, Eric Esterhazy was in no mood for an alternative romantic rendezvous and had an urgent desire to kick her insanely generous offer upstairs, so he called his mother and met her for a quick drink at an anonymous little café on his way to the boat.

  “Two million, Mom!” he groaned. “Can you imagine what it felt like to say no to two million wu?”

  “Can’t say I’ve had the pleasure, Eric,” Mom drawled.

  “Some pleasure! About as pleasant as . . . as . . .”

  Mom eyed him knowingly.

  “A case of the blue balls?” she suggested.

  “The what . . . ?”

  “Nuts in a vise, kiddo, non-coitus mucho interruptus.”

  Mom had become a devotee of these obscure American gangsterisms after Dad died, many of which had probably become obsolete a century or so before she was born. Freed from any need to conceal her previous identity and forced by necessity to come out of retirement and reactivate her citizen-shareholder status in Bad Boys, she amused herself by overplaying the out-of-date “gun moll.”

  Her present costume was typical. A black leather dress suit with an antique mannish white shirt and tie, a gray felt fedora cocked jauntily off center on her rather closely cropped iron-gray curls, and swept-back mirrored sunglasses hiding the wrinkles around her hard blue eyes.

  “Foxy grandpa, your father never was,” she liked to say with a lubricious wink, “but foxy grandma, that’s me.”

  And indeed she seemed to be in the eyes of gentlemen of a certain age, and for sure in the La Fontainian sense. Eric was under no illusion that he would’ve gotten where he now was without what she called her “backdoor street smarts,” and he needed them now.