Dance with the Dragon (26 page)

“No, in fact he was almost never there. Most of the time it was the house staff that took care of me. If there was any kind of a problem, or whenever there was a party, Miguel would come up from Mexico City. Once in a while Liu would show up, but he never stayed for more than a day or two, no matter how much I pleaded with him.”

“Until the summer.”

She nodded. “By then I was a total mess. I never wanted to look in a mirror for fear that I’d have a heart attack. Near the end I was being given a lot of drugs and booze, and the parties got crazy. They were orgies. One night one of the girls drowned in the pool, but no one bothered to take her body out of the water until morning. That was the same party where they made me have sex with a dog, and I did it without fighting back.”

She got up, stumbled into her bedroom, where she looked around for several long moments, and then came back and sat down again.

“It was the end,” she said. “No matter how much I needed the drugs, I couldn’t go on like that any longer. And I told Liu that I was finished.”

“He was there at the party with the dead girl and the dog?”

“Yes,” Monique said. “I wanted to kill myself. Nothing mattered to me any longer.”

“But you still loved him?”

She laughed again. “As incredible as that may seem to you, yes, I was still in love with him. By then I’d started to think of him as my savior, and I told him that, too. The next morning he took me back to New York.”

THIRTY-NINE

THE APARTMENT

This time Monique got to stay at Liu’s apartment near the UN, though he was seldom there. The young doctor who came every day to see to her needs admitted at one point that the major had been temporarily called out of the country but phoned several times each week to see how she was doing.

“And how am I doing?” she’d asked.

“You’re making remarkable progress considering the condition you were in when you first got here,” the doctor told her.

“Do you remember his name?” McGarvey asked, but Monique shook her head.

“He had kind eyes, and even though his hands sometimes shook a little, he was always gentle.”

“Was he an addict, too?”

Yes. That’s one of the ways Liu controlled his mob. Anyway, the doctor was there to show me how intelligent people managed their addiction. The trick was to gradually switch from heroin by using methadone to control the pain of withdrawal. It wasn’t very pleasant. The two or three weeks at the beginning were nasty, but the doctor was always there for me, day or night.”

“But in all that time you never asked him what his name was?”

Monique shook her head. “Sometimes it’s best not to pry too deeply, if you know what I mean. This guy was working for Liu, which meant he had his own problems, and yet he was there to help me. His name wasn’t important.”

“Eventually you broke the heroin addiction. Then what?”

“A little morphine sometimes when it got bad in the middle of the night, but mostly some high-quality coke. And let me tell you, it doesn’t take very long to tell the good shit from the bad.”

“I don’t understand,” McGarvey said. “You’d managed to break the one addiction. Why get hooked on something else? It was a second chance. Why didn’t you just walk away when you could?”

“No, you don’t understand,” Monique said. “I wasn’t a street person, a bag lady, someone sleeping in a cardboard box. I was living in luxury. The best clothes, the best food, the finest champagne anytime I wanted it. Jewelry, the sable. I didn’t have to hustle for my fixes.”

“But you were hustling for your fixes,” McGarvey reminded her as gently as possible while keeping her on track. “You were Liu’s whore.”

“Everybody is someone’s whore,” she shot back. “And I began to like the feeling I got.”

“When you were high.”

“That too.” She was becoming agitated. “But all men think through their dicks, and I was the one in charge.”

McGarvey waited for a few moments to let her calm down. “Do you really think that?” he asked.

“You tell me.”

“Did your husband fit that mold?”

She didn’t answer, but it was clear that she’d been stung. She was on edge, and McGarvey wanted to keep her there, even though it was cruel of him.

“How long did that last?”

“I don’t know. A couple of months, I guess. Maybe a little longer, because it was fall again when Liu showed up.”

“Did he tell you where he’d been?”

Monique shook her head. “He’d come back for me, and that’s all that mattered. He had one last job for me to do, and it was important. The real score. Afterward, he promised, things would be totally different between us.”

“Did you believe him?”

She laughed. “What other choice did I have? I had nowhere to go. Not back to Pierre. Anyway, I didn’t have any money. Even the clothes on my back didn’t belong to me.”

“What about the money you’d earned in Mexico?”

“Roaz took it all for expenses. A drug habit is expensive to maintain, but he told me that if I asked nicely Liu would probably give me as much money as I wanted.” She shrugged her narrow shoulders. “I had no need for money. By then I never went anywhere unless it was with Liu or someone from the house staff, and they always paid for everything.”

For Shahrzad the big score was to have been Liu, but that had been skillfully turned around so that in the end it was Updegraf who’d been burned. The man was every bit the master that Baranov had been, and apparently just as ruthless.

“Who was this target that it took an entire year to get you ready for?” McGarvey asked.

“Said his name was Joseph Schilling. He worked in the American delegation there at the UN, but Liu had him pegged as CIA, and he wanted to find out what was going on.”

“There’s always been a CIA presence there. What was so special about Schilling?”

“That’s what I was supposed to find out,” Monique replied dreamily. She was in the past, ten years ago.

“How?” McGarvey asked. It was another stupid question, but he wanted to bring her back on track.

“Seduce the poor bastard, of course,” she said, looking up out of her daydream. “This time it wasn’t a Mexican, it was an American. But it didn’t make any difference. When Liu had his sights set on someone, the guy was as good as fried.”

“What happened?”

“Schilling had set up as one of the diplomatic aides to the U.S. ambassador, apparently to spy on some of the other delegates—Liu’s guess was the Russians. They were throwing a birthday party that Friday at the Grand Hyatt for one of the undersecretaries to the ambassador. A couple hundred guests, including some Brits, some Canadians, and a handful of others, had been invited, but Liu was sure that when it started to get late just about anybody could crash the ballroom.

“I got a room on the concierge floor Thursday afternoon, and that night the doctor came over and took me to dinner right there in the hotel. Afterward we took a stroll so that I could see the layout where the party was going to be held.”

“How were you going to know it was Schilling? Did Liu show you pictures?”

“Videos from the UN, some inside, but some as Schilling was coming out to catch a cab.” Monique smiled. “I remember that he looked sweet. He could have passed for a Frenchman, you know.” She smiled again. “I felt a little attraction. It made seducing him a lot easier.”

“How old was he?”

“That was the other thing. He was very young. Almost a
garçon,
in his early twenties.”

“How did you feel about doing it?” McGarvey asked. It was the one aspect of both Shahrzad’s and Monique’s stories that he could not quite grasp. At some point in their relationship with Liu they had come to realize that they were on a downhill ride. There’d never been a way to climb out of the deep hole he’d lured them into, yet they had hung on until something catastrophic had happened. In Shahrzad’s case it was Updegraf’s murder. He expected that Monique would tell him the same kind of story.

“Liu had promised it would be my last job, and I believed him,” Monique. “As it turned out he was telling the truth. It
was
my last job for the
salopard
.”

“What’d you do all the next day before you crashed the party?”

“I indulged myself,” she said. “For the very first time in more than a year I was alone. I had a little cash and a credit card, so I did a little shopping, had a massage and a facial, got my hair done, and had a room-service dinner in my room, including a whole bottle of Krug.”

“You were doing coke then; I’m surprised Liu trusted you.”

“He had no other choice. Anyway, I had my habit under control. In fact, I don’t even think I had a line until just before I went down to the party, around ten thirty or eleven. I was in good shape. I think I looked better that night than ever before or since. The black dress I was wearing didn’t leave a lot to the imagination. I was on the hunt to seduce a little boy, and he never had a chance. Not one chance in hell.”

McGarvey said nothing.

“I was Liu’s whore once again,” she said. “And the funny part is that I was starting to enjoy it.”

FORTY

THE APARTMENT

The transformation on Monique’s face and in her bearing was startling. At the start of their conversation she’d come across as an old, tired woman too frightened to speak much above a whisper, but now that she was back that night at the Grand Hyatt stalking a young CIA field officer she was bright, animated, even happy, and she sat up straighter.

“Did you have any trouble crashing the party?” McGarvey asked.

She shook her head. “Not a bit,” she said. “I just waltzed in, got a glass of champagne from a passing waiter, and looked around the room for Schilling. I found him over by the bar in the corner, talking with a couple of mousy women and some old man. They were all pretty drunk by then, except for Joseph. I remember telling myself to be careful with this guy. Everyone else was drunk, but he was fairly sober. Maybe there was more to him than Liu had told me. But as it turned out he was easier than I thought he’d be.”

“Were you sober?”

“I’d had too much champagne at dinner, but the line of coke I did just before I came downstairs to the party cleared my head. I felt as if I could see for a thousand kilometers, right through every man in the room. You know how it is?”

“Sure,” McGarvey said, and she didn’t catch the irony in his voice.

“He spotted me making my way to him, and just like about every other guy that night, his eyes were glued to my tits.” Monique smiled. “As you say, I’d hit a home run first time at bat.”

“How’d you handle the introductions?”

“‘Good evening, Mr. Schilling. I’m Monique Thibault, and I work as a pool translator at the UN. I’ve been wanting to meet you for the longest time.’” Monique’s eyes were sparkling. “I thought the two women he was with were going to scratch out my eyes. One of them started to say something, but Joseph brushed her aside, took my arm, and led me away. ‘I don’t know how I could have missed you over there,’ he said. ‘I must be going blind in my old age.’”

“Did he ask if you’d been invited to the party?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think he cared. From the moment he saw me he was trying to figure out how to get me to bed. It was as clear as the Frenchman’s nose on his face, almost comical, actually. He was practically falling all over himself trying to impress me with his wit and charm, and it was all I could do to keep from laughing at him.”

“I thought you said that you’d found him attractive,” McGarvey said.

“I did,” Monique admitted. “But it didn’t stop me from thinking what an ass he was making of himself. We ended up dancing by ourselves across the room from the bar, and his hands were all over me, and I let him do it, even encouraged him. It didn’t take ten seconds for him to get a hard-on, but instead of pulling away I rubbed against him, just like a cat. I think I might even have purred. ‘Keep that up and they’ll probably arrest us both,’ he told me. I looked up into his big cow eyes, wet my lips like they do in the movies, and suggested that we could go to my room. ‘Here in the hotel?’ he asked. And for a moment there I could see that he was suspicious. Maybe he was thinking that I was too easy, and that he was being set up. Which he was, of course. But I nodded, and said something stupid like ‘Perhaps you don’t find me attractive.’ And that was that. He was a puppy dog and I had him on a leash.”

“Who saw you leaving the ballroom?” McGarvey asked.

“Probably everyone, especially the two women Joseph had been with. We made quite a spectacle of ourselves on the dance floor, and I think he had his hand on my ass all the way down the hall to the elevator. That would have been hard to miss.”

“You managed to seduce the poor bastard and take him up to your room where you had sex,” McGarvey said. “And that was the end of that, right?”

“That was just the beginning for Joseph. And it wasn’t just sex. It was a lot more than that.”

“Was Liu upstairs waiting for you?”

“Not until morning,” Monique said. “We had a prearranged signal. Someone claiming to be from hotel security was going to bang on the door and tell us to quiet down or we would have to leave. It would be Liu. I was supposed to get dressed and get out of there.”

“What about Schilling?” McGarvey asked.

“At that point he’d be in Liu’s hands. I’d be gone and wouldn’t be coming back.”

“He wasn’t just going to lie there and take it. Someone bangs on the door he’ll get up to find out what’s going on.”

“Pas vrai,”
Monique said. “By that time he wasn’t in any shape to know what was going on around him, let alone object.”

“Drugs?”

Monique nodded. “Understand that I had been a serious addict for more than a year, but my habit was being managed. It made me a pro compared to Joseph.”

McGarvey couldn’t help himself. “And you were proud of what you were doing to the poor bastard?”

“Proud?” she said, turning the word over as if she’d never heard it before. “That was just as meaningless a concept then as it is to me this moment. I was giving everything to Liu. He wouldn’t take my body, so all I had left to give was my pride, my cooperation, my sex for other men. I had become nothing more than a receptacle for Liu’s plans.”