Folly Du Jour - Barbara Cleverly [99]
He enjoyed the clarinettist’s version of ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ and decided that when he spiralled to a climax, it would be time to move on.
He ducked into the gentlemen’s room and checked that, as Bonnefoye had said, it was no more than it appeared and waited for a moment by the door he held open a finger’s breadth. No one followed him. A second later he was walking up the carpeted stairs towards the three doors he’d been promised at the top on the landing. And there they were. The middle one, he remembered, was the one behind which the doorkeeper lurked.
The building itself was a stout-hearted stone and rather lovely example of Third Empire architecture seen from the exterior. But it had been drastically remodelled inside. The original heavy wooden features had been stripped away and replaced with lighter modern carpentry and fresh bright paint. Entirely in character with the new owner, Joe suspected.
He fished in his pocket for his ticket to the underworld, thinking it might not be wise to be observed digging about as for a concealed weapon at the moment when the doorkeeper turned up. And the mirrors? Just in case, he offered his face to the fanlight, grinned disarmingly, and waited for Bonnefoye’s promised monster.
A moment later the door opened and he was peremptorily asked his business by a very large man wearing the evening outfit of a maître d’hôtel. Bonnefoye, for once, had not exaggerated. The attempt to pass off this bull terrier as a manservant could have been comical had he not seemed so completely at ease in his role. He was not unwelcom-ing, he merely wanted to know, like any good butler, who had fetched up, uninvited, on the doorstep.
Joe held out the book he’d bought that morning.
‘This is for madame. Tell her, would you, that Mr Charles Lutwidge Dodgson . . .’ He repeated the name. ‘. . . is here and would like to speak to her.’
It’s very difficult to avoid taking a book that someone is pressing on you with utter confidence. The man took it, looked at Joe uneasily, asked him to wait, and retreated, closing the door behind him.
A minute later, the door was opened again. He saw a slim blonde woman, giggling with delight and holding out her arms in greeting.
‘Mr Dodgson, indeed!’ She kissed him on each cheek. Twice.
‘We can all make use of a pseudonym at times,’ he said, smiling affably and returning her kisses. ‘Good to see you again, Alice.’
The giant appeared behind her, a lowering presence. She turned to him and spoke in French. ‘Flavius, my guest will hand you his revolver. House rules,’ she confided. ‘I see you still carry one on your right hip, Mr Dodgson.’
Joe traded steely gazes with Flavius as he handed over his Browning. The man’s head was the size of a watermelon and covered, not in skin, but in hide. Cracked and seamed hide, stretched over a substructure of bone which had shifted slightly at some time in his forty years. Wiry grey-black hair sprouted thickly about his skull but had been discouraged from rampant growth by a scything haircut. It was parted into two sections along the side of his head by an old shrapnel wound. Or a bayonet cut. His hands resembled nothing so much as bunches of overripe bananas. Joe wondered what pistol had a large enough guard to accommodate his trigger finger.
‘Thank you, that will be all, Flavius,’ said Alice daintily. ‘I’ll call you if we need to replenish the champagne.’
‘Or adjust the doilies,’ said Joe.
‘May I just call you, as ever – Joe?’ she said, switching back to English when her guard dog had stalked off on surprisingly light feet. She held up the copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, with a peacock’s feather poking out from the pages as he remembered it on her shelf in Simla. The hat maker in the rue Mouffetard had been puzzled and amused by his request that morning and had refused payment for such a small piece of nonsense but