“Not intentionally, Luc. You’re as helpless as I am with all this coming down on your head.”
He unlocked my hands from behind his neck and stepped back. “But I know more than you do.”
“Then tell me about it, please.”
Luc wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “Last Sunday, when we left the beach in Cannes,” he said, choosing his words carefully.
“The men on motorcycles who were chasing you,” I said. “The two men with guns.”
“They could have killed you, Alex. They were trying to get to me, but they could have killed you.”
“You know who they were? Let’s tell Belgarde about them.”
“Jacques Belgarde’s a joke. It’s not a case for him.”
“Who were they, Luc?”
“I don’t know their names. And their names don’t matter for a minute, because when they’re gone, there’ll be two more goons to replace them.”
“But Luc-”
“It’s about drugs, Alex. Do you get that? Don’t you remember The French Connection, or was that just a piece of movie trivia to you and Mike?”
“Of course I remember it, and I’m well aware that it was real,” I said. Marseille, just down the coast from Cannes on the Mediterranean, had been the intersection where Turkish poppies were sent to French labs to be converted to heroin for sales in America-and the export of the deadly finished product.
“You know what that so-called ‘connection’ is today?”
“No, Luc. No, I don’t.”
“There’s a new source for cocaine that’s flooding the south of France. You Americans have finally made a dent in the Colombian cartels, so now there’s a different place that excels at exporting the raw material. What used to be called Africa’s Gold Coast is known as the Coke Coast.”
I thought of Papa Mo, the deposed Ivorian leader who had stolen millions of dollars from the rich cocoa crop of his war-torn republic.
“West Africa is the world’s new narco-state, Alex. It thrives in dirt poor countries like Guinea-Bissau and Mauritania,” Luc said, completely wound up in his description of the drug trade. “Two weeks ago, five women pretending to be pregnant were stopped on the Mali border. They had concealed several dozen kilos of cocaine on their bodies.”
“And the Republic of the Ivory Coast?” I asked.
“Of course, Alex. That country, too. All those isolated corners of the politically unstable African coast, with its hundreds of miles of unpatrolled shoreline. The cocaine is concealed in caravans that cross the Sahara, and in small planes that fly over the sea and land on small strips along the French border.”
I needed to slow Luc down. Why was he so on top of the drug trade in his part of the world? “And you know all this because-?”
“Because of Brigitte, of course,” he said, snapping at me. And then he lowered his voice. “Because I’m due back in court next week to lay this out before the judge who made the custody decision. My lawyer has done all the research to make his point, and I’ve spent more time studying the subject than I’ve done with my business plans. I need to get my sons out of her life. I won’t stop at anything this time.”
I turned and looked around the room for no good reason, as though an answer to my problems might be hidden behind an exposed beam or an unfinished wall unit. “But no one-neither she nor the court will let you leave the country-leave France-with your children. That will never happen, Luc. You aren’t even established over here yet. You’re staying in a hotel.”
“Don’t you think I’m aware of all this? Don’t you know it’s tearing my gut apart, Alex?” he said, the despair soaking through every word he said. “Here we are, standing inside the bricks-and-mortar foundation of what my dreams have been, professionally, for most of my life. In three or four months, the apartment on the third floor will be ready for the boys to live in-just the way I grew up, which was quite wonderful, actually.”
Luc slowed down his delivery. “On top of that, I somehow found you, and I’m having trouble making sense of how to hang on to that slice of good fortune as well.”
“Go back to the men on motorcycles, Luc,” I said. This wasn’t the moment to tell him that if that’s what he considered his good fortune, it might be about to change. “Why were they after you? The day it happened-just last Sunday-you swore to me you had no idea what it was about.”
“I didn’t put it together at the time, darling. Now it’s pretty clear they were after me, and maybe after you, too.”
“Me? That’s insane.”
“Look at what happened. Lisette came up to Mougins the night before, with a supply of cocaine. But she didn’t return. Not with the drugs, nor with money, if she was supposed to sell them for the dealer. She disappeared, at least in the minds of whoever gave her the drugs to deliver.”
“She disappeared with the coke.”
“She was dressed in white, so maybe she had told her friends-her suppliers-that Luigi had promised to get her into the party,” Luc said. “Perhaps she even bragged about getting to me directly, told them my wife used to be one of her best clients.”
“But your wife is gone.”
“So was Lisette, for three or four years. Maybe she didn’t know about Brigitte. Or maybe she just figured that there was a good chance someone at the party would be up for a little blow.”
“And when she didn’t return on Sunday morning, these guys figured that you had it, Luc. That you took it from Lisette, and they wanted it back-or they wanted to get paid for it. But me?”
“Hey, you’re just the girl hanging on to me on the back of my Ducati. Motorcycle gear and helmet on, it’s not exactly like you had ‘district attorney’ stamped on the back of your outfit.”
I could understand what Luc was thinking. “That’s why you were so anxious to leave me at the house after the chase and rush away to make sure your sons were okay.”
Luc exhaled. “That proverbial rock and a hard place. Scylla and Charybdis. It was a terrible thing I did, Alex, leaving you alone while I raced to make sure the boys were safe. Because of Brigitte’s drug habit, they’ve always been so vulnerable.”
“The guys on the motorcycle were coming after you, Luc, for the coke or the cash.”
“But it was you, Alex, it was your back that they had in their sights,” Luc said, “because I had never told you the truth about Brigitte, and that could have gotten you killed.”
THIRTY-NINE
There was no conversation in Mercer’s car on our way to my apartment. Luc and I were in the backseat, as far apart from each other as it was humanly possible to be.
The doorman came to help me out as I said good night. Mike and Mercer were going to take Luc to the Plaza Athénée and talk to him there. I had told them Luc had more information he needed to give them, both about Brigitte’s drug history and the new frontier of the West African world of narco-trafficking.
My comfortably appointed home, always my refuge, had never seemed lonelier. From my window on the twentieth floor, I could see the view south to Luc’s hotel. Any other time I would have longed to be there with him, but tonight I was knee-deep in self-doubt.
I followed my usual late night routine. First I soaked in a practically scalding bath, scented with lavender oils, to remove the day’s tension and debris. I poured a stiff nightcap of Dewar’s before slipping into my favorite silk sleep shirt. When I got into bed, I balanced my laptop on the pristine D. Porthault duvet cover, then settled in to search for the latest news stories on MGD. I entered the search words, and dozens of brand-new articles popped up instantly. The French and British papers had headlined the stories about Lille and prostitution, some with links to Baby Mo himself, and others naming businessmen who were wealthy but not so well-known abroad.