The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [60]
The marina is little more than three piers with sailboats tied up on either side; two larger motorboats belonging to tour companies bob at the outer edge. A couple of guys are working on one of these, so I head up the pier until I can get a better view.
“Bonjour.” One of the boatmen is watching me. “You want something?”
“Possibly.” I glance out to sea. A distinctly dead-looking seagull sits on a bollard nearby, watching me stonily. Watching me watching you . . . it suddenly occurs to me that coming out here on my own might be a bad idea if Billington is serious about his privacy and is also, as Angleton put it, a player. “Does a boat from the Mabuse call here?”
“I think you want to find somewhere else to hang out.” He smiles at me but the expression doesn’t reach his eyes. He’s holding a mallet and a big chisel.
“Why? They friends of yours?” I feel an itching in my fingertips and a distinct taste of blue—my wards are responding to something nearby. Mr. Mallet glares at me. He’s about my age, but built like a brick outhouse and tanned to the color of old oak. “Or maybe they aren’t?”
“Non.” He turns his head and spits across the side of the pier.
“Pierre—” The other guy lets loose a stream of rapid-fire, heavily accented French that I can’t hope to follow. He’s in late middle age, receding hair, salt-and-pepper beard: the picturesque Old Salt hanging out on the jetty, image only slightly spoiled by his Mickey Mouse tee shirt and blue plastic sandals. Pierre—Mr. Mallet—stares at me suspiciously. Then he turns and looks out across the sapphire sea.
I follow his gaze. There’s a warship in the distance, a kilometer offshore: long, low, and lean, with a sharply raked superstructure. It takes me a few seconds to realize that it’s the wrong color, gleaming white rather than the drab gray most navies paint their tubs.
I glance back at the pier. The goddamn seagull is staring at me, its eyes white and milky like—
Goddamn.
“Do you know a guy called Marc, from Maho Beach?” I ask.
A palpable hit: Pierre’s head whips round towards me. He raises the chisel warningly as the seagull opens its beak. I pull out my Treo. “Smile for the camera, birdie.”
The seagull stares at my smartphone accusingly, then topples off its perch and falls into the water like a dead weight. Which, in fact, is exactly what it is now that I’ve zapped it with my patent undead garbage collector.
“We’ve got about two minutes before they send another watcher,” I say conversationally. “If they’re awake, of course. So. Do you know Marc?”
“What’s it worth?” He lowers the chisel, looking at me as if I’ve sprouted a second head.
I pull out two fifty-euro notes. “This.”
“Yeah, I know Marc.”
“Describe him.”
“Oily bastard. Works out at the gym down the back of Rue de Hollande in Marigot, fills in on the door of the Casino Royale as a doorman and bouncer. He’s the one you’re asking about?”
I pull out two more notes. “Tell me everything you know.”
The old guy glares at him, mutters something, gets up, and goes aboard the boat.
“I’ll take those.” Pierre puts down the chisel and I hand him the notes. “Marc is a piece of shit. He hits on tourist women and takes them for everything they’ve got. Nearly got himself arrested a year ago but they couldn’t prove anything—or find the woman. Sometimes—” Pierre glances over his shoulder “—you see him in the early morning with some broad, going out on his boat. That one, there.” He nods at a dinghy with a mounting for an outboard engine. “Meeting up with another boat. The women don’t come back.”
I have a heavy, sick feeling. “Would this other boat happen to be from the Mabuse?” I ask.
He looks at me sidelong. “I didn’t say anything,” he says.
I nod. “Thanks for your time.”
“Thank you for taking out the trash.” He gestures at the bollard where the bird was watching. “Now get out of here and please don’t come back.”
7.
NIGHTMARE BEACH
I’M TWO KILOMETERS DOWN THE ROAD TO GRAND Case and the coastal route to Marigot when I realize I’m being tailed. I’m crap at this private eye stuff, but it’s not exactly