Chapter 4 – It Gets Weirder
The coffee helped. Gwen thought, at least now Roger couldn’t use the, ‘It was the middle of the night, what do you expect,’ line when he said something dumb. He had better kick his brain into gear and figure the hell out what to do with this bitch. Cute bitch, but that was beside the point. Cute haircut, sort of coifed inwards at the bottom, short but not too short. Not the sort of thing one normally associates with an assassin. Gwen figured it was a $150 haircut, easy. Roger, on the other hand, was evaluating her underwear. He really wanted to know for sure if it was silk.
Gwen knew Roger was thinking of asking the woman if she wanted a cup of coffee, and how she wanted it. Lucky for him he didn’t do that. Gwen still had her gun within reach.
Both of them knew the duct tape by this time must be getting uncomfortable. The woman hadn’t said anything for a while, wonder of wonders, hadn’t asked for the duct tape to be loosened, and hadn’t asked for a cup of coffee with eggs and potatoes, so she was playing her part to some degree at least. You know, the assassin part.
“Did you come here to kill us?” Gwen asked again. She said this off-handedly as she poured herself a second cup. The woman squirmed a little, and so did Roger. That’s quite a question to ask someone.
“Can I have a cup of coffee,” the woman asked. “That smells so darn good, and I’ve been up all night. It’s Kenyan, right? I love that smell.” Roger smiled at this, which earned him a glare from Gwen.
“You can’t have any coffee until you tell us if you came here to kill us.”
The caffeine was working on Roger and he was feeling feisty, even if it was 5:30am. He asked Gwen, “So if she says she did come here to kill us, you’re going to reward her with our $30-per-pound Kenyan coffee?” He said this with a straight face, around the corner of which peeked a smile. He loved to tease his wife once in a while.
“$30 a pound,” the woman said. “You mean per kilo, right?”
“Per pound,” Gwen said, with undue emphasis, taking out on the woman what she wanted to take out on Roger. Smart ass.
The conversation with, er, interrogation of, this person was going nowhere. Gwen knew instinctively that Roger was trying to tell if the woman was wearing perfume. The little runt actually was sniffing, which infuriated Gwen. Roger was saved from some serious abuse by the appearance of The Deneuve, who came into the kitchen, followed by the dog and an American mutt cat. Ever since a dustup with the Russian blues, the June’s cat had refused to sit on the counter with them.
Catherine looked at the woman, sitting in her underwear, duct tapped to the chair, and then at the three guns on the counter next to the sugar bowl. She said, “No solution yet, dears? I tried to get back to sleep, but first with Roger entering my room in the middle of the night, and then seeing both of you earlier, the way you were, I couldn’t.” Catherine went over to the two cats sitting on the counter and touched the top of their heads, which elicited a melodious “Caooh”. A few days earlier Gwen had told her the story of the appearance of the Russian blue cats, how they had belonged to the cook of the container ship on which four Russians criminals had been smuggled into the country, the criminals being partners of the Junes. Catherine loved the “Caooh” sound, and got it every time she touched the cats. Those cats know a quality human when they see one.
She helped herself to coffee, and sat down at the counter. Then she looked at the almost naked woman sitting in the chair. Tied to the chair. Catherine said to her, “You’re wearing OPIUM, aren’t you dear?”
The woman didn’t say anything, but sat starring at The Deneuve, mesmerized.
Roger looked smug with this confirmation of what he suspected. Gwen looked disgusted, like, what assassin worth her salt wears Yves Saint Laurent perfume out on a job. Famous perfume, expensive perfume. Gwen wondered what she wore when she was trying to seduce a man, if she wore OPIUM out on a job.
When Catherine Deneuve was in the room, everything in the room that was equal to or greater than the size of an electron paid attention to her. In this case the three cats, the dog, the Russian assassin, and the Junes all stopped thinking, and just waited for her to talk. The woman in the chair seemed very relaxed despite the fact that she now had been duct taped in one position for an hour, and Gwen realized she had some toughness to her. The tape pulling on the hairs of her arms for that length of time must be uncomfortable.
Deneuve said, “If you wear OPIUM when you’re sneaking around someone’s house with a gun in the middle of the night, what do you wear when you’re trying to get a man’s attention?”
The woman said, “I don’t need perfume to get a man’s attention.”
Catherine looked at Gwen and said, “Oh honey, I like this one, don’t you?”
Gwen decided not to make the point that the woman may be an assassin, and may be in the house to kill someone, but smiled instead. She could see The Deneuve’s point. Roger didn’t say anything because he knew Gwen wouldn’t appreciate it.
Catherine sat for a while staring at the woman. She had finished her coffee and was debating a second cup. She stared some more. The dog came over to her at the counter and put his chin on her thigh. She petted the soft head, and looked down expectantly. No “Caooh” was emitted. She smiled at the dog. When she looked up again at the woman she said, “Roger, would you make me a nice English breakfast, please, I’m hungry. Thinking always makes me hungry, and a croissant just won’t supply the joie de vivre I’m going to need this morning. The English do a lot of things wrong, like the clothes they wear, but they’re better thinkers than us French, and that’s because they know how to make breakfast.” She smiled at Roger, who automatically got up and went to the refrigerator. Eggs, potatoes, and bacon soon were in play.
While Roger was doing this, Catherine pulled her chair close to the bound woman. She looked at Gwen, who knew it meant she too should bring a chair close to the woman. They sat on either side of her, with their backs to the stove where Roger was working. The Deneuve’s left arm was next to the woman’s left arm, and Gwen’s right arm was near the woman’s right arm. They had her surrounded.
Catherine looked hard at the woman’s eyes for a minute, and then reclined, her neck supported by the top of the chair back. She closed her eyes and said, “Gwen, dear, do you know what Rudyard Kipling said about writing? It is a great precept, and it applies equally well to thinking. It applies to solving problems. He said, ‘drift, wait, obey’. That’s what we have to do with this problem.” She looked at the woman and said, “Do you Russians know Rudyard Kipling?”
The woman shook her head, No.
Catherine asked her, “Do you understand what he meant by, ‘Drift, wait, obey’?”
The woman shook her head, No.
“The three of us have a problem to solve, and we’re going to solve it together. Gwen is going to tell me her story about Russia, which is why you are here in Charleston, creeping around in middle of the night, carrying a gun and wearing one of my favorite perfumes. You have a really big problem, because you’ve threatened Gwen, and she doesn’t like that. You’re going to have to pay a price to her, and I’m not sure what that will be. But it will be something, that’s for certain. You are the one sitting tied to a chair. Gwen has stripped you of your clothes and your dignity. Why she did not strip you of your life I don’t know. If you threatened the man I love, that’s what I would have done. When I know what happened in Russia to bring you here, then we will sit and drift, and we will sit and wait, and we will sit and obey. And then we will solve our problem.”
She looked at Gwen. “Tell me about Russia.”