Deceptions by Anna Porter (fox in socks read aloud TXT) 📗

your boss that her Ukrainian friend or one of his hirelings is spending time at the bow-and-arrow club in Colmar.”

On Rue Geiler, Attila found only Gizella and the dog. “Csókolom,” he said. Not that he wished to kiss her hand, even if it was a relief to be able to speak Hungarian again.

Iván had gone to the Council of Europe, and she had planned to go shopping in Place des Halles. He thought she still seemed oddly unconcerned about the murder of her lawyer. “He was the kind of guy who collected enemies,” she told him. “Most of his clients were a little shady.”

“Why, then, did you hire him?” Attila asked.

“I wanted someone who couldn’t be intimidated,” she answered. “The wife of the Czech consul recommended him. She had managed to settle for more than twice what her husband had offered the first time; it’s what I thought I wanted. You know Iván. . . .”

I don’t, Attila thought. Men like Iván would never confide in men like me. “I doubt he would ever hurt you,” he said.

Gizella was wearing a short white sheath dress, low cut, with a wide red belt that displayed her figure to its full advantage. She crossed the room in front of Attila, taking small steps on her stiletto heels and swaying a little with the motion. She picked up a white porcelain ashtray (Herendi, Attila thought) and a gold cigarette case from the sideboard and took them to the sofa. When she sat, her dress rode up her thigh. “I smoke when he is out,” she told him. “He hates the smell of cigarettes in the house, but now that we are going to be divorced, it doesn’t matter.” She gently stroked the dog’s neck, looking up at Attila.

He was still standing by the door, suddenly nervous. What he didn’t need in this assignment was an unwanted flirtation with his client’s wife. “How was your meeting with Ms. Marsh?” he asked.

Gizella lifted one shoulder, either suggestively or in an exaggerated mime of bafflement. Or both. “She didn’t say much.”

“She looked at the painting?”

“Yes, she did, but she gave no opinion.” Gizella fitted a long cigarette into a gold holder, lit it, and inhaled, making a moue with her mouth and looking up at Attila as if he were going to audition her for a starring role in a 1950s movie. “Why don’t you come in and join me?” She continued to stroke the dog.

Oh! “Did you tell her who sold you the painting?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“She didn’t ask.”

Attila considered the possibility of sitting down. He was an employee of her husband. Paid for by the Hungarian government, not that that made much difference: he was here to serve Iván Vaszary. A bodyguard. He had already overstepped his responsibilities by recommending Helena to Gizella for a second opinion, and he was only too aware that his interest in asking Helena to come to Strasbourg had underlying reasons, none of them related to either his job or his offer to help Gizella obtain a fair deal in her divorce. There was an old Hungarian poem about not lying to yourself, or being true to yourself, that he recited in his mind as he approached the spacious chair facing the sofa where Gizella had now crossed her legs in a way that displayed her long-muscled thighs to their best advantage.

“Perhaps I could look your friend up when I am in Budapest next week,” he said. He perched on one arm of the overstuffed white chair. Uncomfortable, but not yet compromised.

He was desperate for a cigarette.

“If you like,” Gizella said, taking a lingering drag. “He lives in the castle district. His name is Biro, I think. I thought you used to smoke.”

“I did,” Attila said. “Trying to give it up.”

As soon as he could, he escaped to the street and pulled the red-and-white package of Helikons out of his pocket. They were, his mother had warned, the deadliest brand of Hungarian cigarettes, certain to reduce his life expectancy by at least ten years, but they tasted great.

Chapter Nine

Marianne Lewis drove to Colmar in a rented Renault, a pleasant small car that no one would notice in this pleasant little town not far from Strasbourg, where people could enjoy the feeling of being in the countryside without actually being in the countryside. Colmar seemed to have been built or, more likely, rebuilt as a tourist attraction with half-timbered houses, cobblestone streets, a well-trained, winding little river that offered old-fashioned wooden rowboat rides, bridges with hanging flower baskets, a regular market that sold regular fare you could also buy in supermarkets, and a fancy relais with a well-reviewed restaurant, where Helena planned to dine after she signed up for the archery course just outside the town. There was a modest ad for the place in the local paper, touting itself as a historical attraction, since Strasbourg had once been a famous centre for archery. This place, the ad claimed, had been used by knights training for tournaments and for the wars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Since it was the only archery range in the area, Helena assumed it was the one Attila had alerted her to.

The plaque that marked the range (Propriété privée, défense d’entrer, with an appropriate Danger! skull-and-crossbones sign) listed a dozen knights who had been here in les temps anciens>. Malhereusement, its heyday of happy archers had ended when the local governor banned the use of bows and arrows in the town. Helena assumed that order must have followed some very bloody altercations between various lordly factions, but she doubted the directive would have been followed by the more aggressive knights.

Crossbowmen had been an essential component of the French army. Under Charles VII, the longbow was added to their arsenal. It was a somewhat late response to the nauseating rout at Agincourt.

Helena was startled by the tall, spindly man who had been strolling along the weedy path, deep in contemplation of his black-and-tan crossbow. “Too