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“If you came for a shag, it’ll have to wait until the job is done.” His voice is a whisper, so low it does not carry beyond the banana trees. Her answering laugh could be mistaken for a bird, startled out of sleep.
“God, you have a high opinion of yourself.”
He rests next to her against the van. She is not entirely relaxed; she’s learned never to let her guard down completely, but he doesn’t make a move to touch her.
“I have a pretty good track record,” he tells her.
“I bet you do. Vance sent me to see if there were any problems.”
“Tell Vance he is not my babysitter. If there were problems, I dealt with them.”
“If you want to have a dick-swinging contest with Vance, you’ll have to start it yourself. I’m not telling him anything of the kind.”
It’s his turn to laugh. “You’re a hard woman, Billie.”
“Softness is overrated.”
“Not where I’m from.”
She pauses and they listen for a moment to the night sounds—birds, wind in the banana trees, and far away, the small, slight whine of an engine on the ocean. A fisherman, setting out for his nightly catch.
“Where are you from?”
He shrugs. “Here and there.”
She doesn’t reply and he feels the weight of her silence until he can’t stand it. “France. Burgundy, to be precise. My mother was Algerian and my father was Spanish, from the Balearics. That’s why I like islands,” he says. “It’s in my blood.”
“Was? Your parents are dead?”
“Yes. Before I joined the Museum.”
“So you grew up in Burgundy?”
He makes an impatient gesture. “You ask a lot of questions.”
“I’m curious about people.”
“Yes, I grew up in Burgundy. On a winemaking estate. Don’t get ideas—it didn’t belong to my family. My parents worked for the people who owned it. Maman scrubbed floors and did the laundry. My father worked in the vineyard, spraying the vines with some toxic shit that ended up killing him. It was slow and ugly. Maman’s cancer was fast.” He paused and gave her a close look. “You don’t seem sad for me. Usually when I tell my tragic story, a girl would already be unbuttoning her blouse by this point.”
“I have sad stories of my own,” she says.
“Tell me and maybe I’ll unbutton my blouse,” he offers.
She smiles. “I like you a little more than I want to but not nearly as much as you think I do.”
“Fair enough.” He pauses and cocks his head, studying her face in the dim starlight. “So what do you want out of this job, American girl?”
“Well, I like to travel and the money’s good.”
He nods and she lobs the question back. “What do you want out of the job, French boy?”
“Money. Girls. A really nice car. And a house—a town house in Paris. I even know the exact one.” Billie raises a brow and he goes on. “The family in Burgundy, the one my parents worked for, they owned this town house. Like three hundred years of the same assholes living there, lording it over everybody. It’s abandoned now. But someday, I’m going to have enough money to buy it.” He pauses and cocks his head. “So, how did they find you?”
She tells him, giving him the bare facts of her arrest for assault, and he grins again. “Same. Only I was eighteen and it was for arson. It is why the Museum decided I should specialize in setting fires.”
“What did you burn?”
“The vineyard where my father worked.”
