“And Jeff and I did a job a while ago for a man we really shouldn’t have,” says Amy. “A money-smuggler called François Loubet.”
“Ah,” says Rosie. “Nice guy? Single?”
“Never met him,” says Amy. “All over encrypted messages, but, if he’s after me, for whatever reason, I’m in real trouble. And Jeff’s in real trouble too.”
“And he knows where we are?” says Rosie.
“If it’s him,” says Amy.
“Sounds like you shouldn’t leave me here on my own, then.”
Amy doesn’t have an answer to that.
“Good,” says Rosie. “Now, why don’t you load up on coffee and ammunition, while I go to pack my things?”
16
Jeff Nolan declines the Parmesan. “You know me and Parmesan, Bruno.”
Bruno gives a slight bow to acknowledge the fact that he does indeed know Jeff and Parmesan, and Jeff returns to his files. The recent ones, of course, but also some much older. Jeff does not intend to lose his business. He knows that such things are sent to try us, and he is nothing if not a patient man.
Jeff always eats alone if he can help it. Sometimes there are clients to be entertained, or impressed, or mollified, and Susan Knox will book him into whichever restaurant is the hardest to get into that week. But usually he is at Bruno’s. It feels like home.
Jeff started working in the City at seventeen, was making a bit of money by eighteen, and was making a lot of money by twenty-one. Bought a house in Sevenoaks when he was twenty-four, bought a bigger one two streets away at twenty-six, then, at twenty-eight, bought a town house in Mayfair for nine million. He can see it, across the street, through the windows of Bruno’s.
Jeff likes to take care of details. That’s what brought him into the close-protection business in the first place. He’d been doing a deal with a Saudi prince, and seen one of his security detail smoking and reading the paper. Jeff asked what the Saudi prince paid for his security, and whether he was happy with the job they did. The sum of money the prince mentioned, and the shrug he gave, told Jeff that this could be the business for him. He was thirty-five at this point and ready to retire, so it was perfect.
Jeff is rereading the reply he received from François Loubet after that first email. Before the killings started. Again, it might be evidence one of these days.
Mr. Nolan,
Thank you for your email, dated 14th of April.
I am sorry to hear of your clients’ plight, I don’t imagine jail is fun for anyone. However, it is the only proper punishment for smuggling money into a foreign country. We have laws for a reason.
As to your suggestion that I am somehow involved, well, I couldn’t possibly comment! I will say, however, that I am a legitimate businessman with many interests worldwide, and my bookkeeping and tax records are, while private, exemplary.
I hope nothing unfortunate should befall your company, or any more of your clients, in the months ahead, but, if it does, might I suggest it is karma for the allegations you have made against me?
Meanwhile, you might do well to speak to your colleague “Joe Blow.”
Proceed carefully, Mr. Nolan.
Warmest regards,
François Loubet
A clear and present threat from Loubet. No arguing with that. And the very first mention of “Joe Blow.”
Bruno has returned to top up Jeff’s glass. Jeff holds his hand flat to indicate enough, and hears a noise from the street. A squeal of tires. Not the sound of a car braking but the sound of a car suddenly speeding up.
And so it is that Jeff has already started sprinting before the black Jeep crashes its way through the front windows of the restaurant. By the time the two figures in balaclavas have leaped from the front seats brandishing pistols, Jeff is already through the swinging double doors that lead to the kitchen. And by the time the men follow him through the doors, firing wildly, Jeff is gone.
Through the fire door, and into the backstreets of Mayfair.
17
Well, well, well, Rosie D’Antonio is thinking, this day is certainly looking up.
Rosie hadn’t liked the death threats from Vasiliy Karpin, the chemicals billionaire, of course she hadn’t, but these things come with the territory. If you have any sort of personality, someone will eventually want to kill you. And she shouldn’t have done it, really: she should have hidden Vasiliy Karpin’s identity. But she was bored, and when you’re bored it’s important to make things happen.
Which is also why she is now in a speedboat, water lapping around her Louboutins, helping a fugitive solve a murder. Not the most extraordinary Friday of her life but not a bad one.
Things used to happen to Rosie all the time. So many things. Parties, affairs, book launches, premieres, new deals, new lovers, tiffs, spats, beefs, kisses in swimming pools, photographers in bushes. Lawsuits, rehabs, husbands, cocaine on yachts, cocaine on rooftops, cocaine at the White House. Mustique, London, Capri, Aspen. Trouble and fun, fun and trouble. But people die or, worse, get married, people slow down, the photographers hide in other people’s bushes now. They hide, Rosie guesses, in Taylor Swift’s bushes. There is still romance, there’s still booze, still the odd party here and there, people as old as she is clinking glasses and remembering who they all once were. And there’s still the writing, which people seem to be enjoying again. Back on the bestseller lists. She was never in any danger of running out of money, but she had been in danger of running out of acclaim. Of running out of fame, the sparkling tonic she has long been able to add to the neat gin of her private life.
All in all, Rosie is quite happy to be on the boat. If you’d told her at forty that she’d still be doing this sort of thing many years later, she would have been very happy. And how nice to spend a bit of quality time with this charming young bruiser Amy, who is currently squatting, bailing water out of the leaky hull. Rosie only really has one rule in life: if you see a door, walk through it.
The mainland is just a thin, misty smudge, while the water in the speedboat is halfway up Rosie’s calves. But Rosie chooses to remain confident. The boat, leaky though it might be, is so fast that, by the time it is ready to sink, they will have reached the mainland.
“Why don’t you get a speedboat that doesn’t leak?” Amy asks, above the noisy row between the engine and the ocean.
“Sentimental value,” yells Rosie. “When I got my first-ever million-dollar royalty check—for Tick-Tock, Death O’Clock, I think—I bought a house, and that burned down. Then I bought a diamond ring, and my husband gave that to a Romanian gymnast. So I bought a racehorse and I bought this speedboat.”
“What happened to the racehorse?”
“Don’t ask. Mafia.”
“It’s taking on a lot of water,” says Amy.
