“The joint is jumpin’,” he told his translator, flummoxing the earnest young student. In fact, the blast walls, the zigzagged stairs designed to baffle the impact of an explosion, and the absence of window glass made for a relaxing atmosphere.
He told the translator to wait in the roped-off area set aside for bodyguards.
“How will you understand, sir?”
Traveling in Adam Kurzweil mode, the normally reticent Paul Janson conducted himself more openly. The Canadian security-services executive appeared sure of himself, forthcoming, brash, and even boastful. “The owner of Club Electric,” he explained, “speaks English.”
The translator was in awe. The new Club Electric was the hottest nightclub between Vienna and Mumbai. Janson might well have claimed kinship with Iraq’s prime minister, whom Janson had already spotted in a far corner of the big room eating dinner with the mayor of Baghdad. “You knowMichel Sarkis?”
“When I knew ‘Michel,’ he was ‘Mike.’ Wait over there, please. I’ll call you when I need you.”
Sarkis, a stocky Lebanese with jet-black hair, was table-hopping. Janson drifted through the big room, tracking Sarkis to a table of Iraqi businessmen and German bankers near where the mayor and prime minister were dining. The club owner stood bouncing from foot to foot, smiling and brimming with energy, bantering in French-accented English.
“From where am I?” he replied to one of the German bankers. “The answer is as complex as any international affair. Conceived1975 in Beirut the night the civil war broke out. Bornon the high seas crossing to America. What ship? The SS France, of course. The last truly elegant liner ever built. She bred in me a taste for beauty and pleasure.”
In fact, the Francemake her final westbound crossing in 1974. But Janson had no need to challenge Sarkis on the small stuff.
“ ThenGreenwich, Beverly Hills, Manhattan, and Paree. AlwaysParee.”
Janson passed close behind him and whispered so only the nightclub owner could hear, “What about Florida?”
Sarkis whirled around. “ Bonjour!” he cried, a welcoming smile and widespread arms failing to mask the panic in his eyes. Janson was not surprised that Sarkis didn’t recognize him.
“Sarasota, Florida, Mike. When you have a minute I’ll be out on the deck.”
“I’m very busy, sir; let me buy you a drink and—”
“How’s the Lamborghini running?”
Sarkis’s smile went rigid. “I’ll meet you on the deck.”
Janson followed the neon palm tree arrows that pointed the way through blast walls to the outdoor deck that overlooked the Tigris and the city lights. Few patrons braved the heat. The waiters were wilting. The river was low. Janson smelled burning plastic, oil, and sewage.
He chose a spot on the railing just beyond the glow of the red, white, and blue Pespi display coolers and stood with his back to the water. Sarkis kept him waiting ten minutes, as if sending a message that he was a fleet-footed survivor who had already recovered from the shock of Janson’s blast from the past.
“How’s the Lamborghini running?” Janson asked again.
“Sold it to a Russian,” Sarkis answered brusquely. “What’s up?” Out of earshot of his elite Iraqi customers, Sarkis sounded like an American who had grown up in Danbury, Connecticut, dropped out of state college, and used his smiling good looks to sell Florida vacation condos to well-fixed widows.
Janson answered, “What’s up is that you are rich and well connected and can help me buy a Harrier jump jet.”
Interestingly, Sarkis did not deny it. All he said was, “Why would I help you?”
“Gratitude for saving your life. Or terror that I know enough about your life to destroy it.”
“I don’t know you. I don’t know why you think that Sarasota is somehow important to me.”
“It was a while back,” said Janson. “I’ve followed your career since with admiration.”
“To blackmail me?”
“Only to call in a marker.”
“How much?”
“Not money. Information. Actually, let me amend that. I want truthful information.”
Sarkis snapped his fingers. Two bouncers hurried toward them.
Paul Janson said, “Imagine a hot night on the Florida ‘Suncoast.’ Envision a good-looking college dropout in his twenties. He’s wearing the two most valuable things he owns: a white linen suit one of his girlfriends gave him and an expensive watch from his refugee parents’ Danbury, Connecticut, jewelry store. He has a French accent he can turn on and off because at home Mom and Dad spoke French, their language back in Lebanon.
“Picture him charming old ladies into buying Sarasota condos. His commissions are small and he has to kick back a bunch to his manager. He’s living hand to mouth, money all around him, none of it his. He’s aching for a break. And here’s the thing I admire about this kid: He is ready to seize it if it comes his way. And that night it does.”
Sarkis looked at Janson. He had a look of queasy fascination on his handsome face. “Go on!”
“Call off the muscle.”
Sarkis banished the hovering bouncers with a gesture. “Go on!”
Before Janson could speak the lights went out. The entire city was suddenly dark. The reflections on the water vanished. The sky was too murky to admit the stars. Baghdad’s notoriously embattled electrical grid had died again.
“Ten seconds,” said Sarkis. “Go on.”
The deck shook. Diesel generators rumbled to life, and Club Electric was ablaze in light again, though still surrounded by the dark. “Best generators the American taxpayers’ money could buy,” said Sarkis. “Haliburton left them at the airport. Still in their crates. Go on.”
“Sarasota Film Festival. A thousand people drive inland to a party thrown by a Realtor attempting to sell million-dollar condos in a swamp too many miles from the beach. The dropout in the white linen suit is hoping for a commission, but nothing’s selling and he leaves early, just as the party is beginning to wind down, figuring he’ll drive out of the swamp ahead of the traffic jam. But when he tries to claim his car, he discovers that the valet parking system has completely broken.
“The car parkers are drunk. The boss has run for it. They stopped tagging the keys and the keys are piled in a huge heap. A thousand people are about to attempt to collect their cars. A hundred are already there shouting, ‘Where’s my keys?’ The locals are worrying about their Mercedes and Range Rovers and Aston Martins, and the tourists are trying to remember what color was the rental they got at the airport.
“The dropout thinks quick. He collars the one parking attendant not drunk but terrified, and he waves his last two hundred dollars under the kid’s nose: ‘Find the keys to my yellow Lamborghini and the dough is yours.’
“The attendant finds the keys, and the guy in the white suit with the expensive watch and the French accent drives away in a two-hundred-thousand-dollar automobile thinking he’s going to blast straight across the country—do not stop for girlfriend, do not look back—all the way to Beverly Hills, California, where rich women are kind to young Frenchmen in Lamborghinis.”
Sarkis stared at Janson. “Then what happened?”
“The kind of twist he couldn’t make up, except that’s the way life works, sometimes. The guy who owns the Lamborghini is a terrible, terrible person.”
“And chases him?”
“Was the guy who caught you the owner of the car?” Janson asked.
Sarkis’s eyes got even bigger. “Wait a minute! Was that you?”
“That was me and you never knew it until now, but I saved your life.”
Sarkis looked across the river where other generator-driven light clusters were popped up around the city like white fireworks. He said, as if describing a half-remembered dream, “Somehow you passed me in a stupid Honda and cut me off.”
“The Honda was customized. I knew how to drive fast. You didn’t.”