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The question was spoken with an Irish accent from the recesses of the bar, a smaller room off the larger one with faded red curtains that flanked the doorway.
“Christophe Marchand.” His captive was twisting in his grip and Christophe had to resist the urge to unholster his weapon and point it at the man’s head, simply to get him to stop moving. “I’d like a few moments of your time, if you don’t mind.”
A long pause descended over the bar, its patrons seeming to hold their breath as they waited for the reply from the back room.
“Get his weapon, Mick,” said the accented voice.
There was the scuffle of chair legs on linoleum and a second later a muscled man in jeans, a T-shirt, and a track jacket emerged from the shadows of the smaller room. His hair was shaved close to his scalp, his face round and flat.
He studied Christophe. “Lift your arms.”
Christophe gave the man in his arms a shove. He stumbled toward the bar.
Christophe considered declining the order. It was insulting given his station, an affront to the manners the Syndicate worked so diligently to instill in their men as they remade the organization, turning it from the thuggery of years past to a new model of honor and intelligence.
But it wasn’t worth the trouble. By all accounts, O’Brien was a prideful man. Christophe had taken great pains not to offend his ego up to this point, a strategy that had been calculated based on his research and his own instincts about O’Brien’s psychology. Throwing it away now would only be in service to Christophe’s own ego, the truest mark of an undisciplined man.
And Christophe was nothing if not disciplined.
He lifted his arms and allowed Mick to pat him down. Mick removed the gun from the holster strapped to Christophe’s side under his jacket, then took a step back. “He’s clean.”
“Come on then,” the voice said from the back room. “You’ve kicked up a bunch of shite. We may as well see it through.”
Christophe glanced at Mick, then continued through the curtained doorway.
The room was bigger than it looked from the front of the bar. Five tables were set up in the space, two of them littered with an assortment of beer bottles, half-filled drinking glasses, and ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts and ash.
Christophe forced himself not to grimace at the smell. Like many Parisians, he enjoyed a cigarette from time to time, but he disliked the smell that seeped into indoor surfaces and fabrics, and he saw the need to smoke indoors as indicative of a lack of willpower.
Seamus O’Brien stood at the very back of the room, behind the largest of the tables, his back to the wall. On the face of it, he looked very much like his photograph — an unremarkable man in his sixties with the flared nose of a lifelong drinker, a full head of silver hair, and the form of someone valiantly trying to fight the onslaught of old age.
But in person there was something menacing about Seamus O’Brien that couldn’t be conveyed by a photograph, a coiled energy that made Christophe think of a sleeping snake.
O’Brien studied him. “You came here alone?” Surprise colored his voice along with something that was either admonishment or admiration.
“I’m confident we’re capable of having a civilized conversation,” Christophe said.
He didn’t speak the other words lingering at the back of his mind:an army will come for you if I don’t walk out of here alive.
O’Brien might be a poor kid from Dublin at heart, but he wasn’t stupid.
“We’ll figure that out in short order,” Seamus said. “Sit if you want.”
“Thank you.”
There were three other men in the room — besides Mick, whose presence Christophe felt behind him — and O’Brien looked at them and waved them away. They headed for the door without a word.
Christophe watched them go before taking a seat at the table, careful to claim one that allowed him a view of the door. Mick closed the curtains in the doorway and stepped to the side of it, remaining on his feet.
O’Brien reached for a pack of cigarettes on the table and Christophe watched as the other man removed one and lit it, his eyes hooded behind the smoke as he looked at Christophe.
“You’ve got balls, I’ll give you that.”
“My visit is less courageous than it appears, as I’m sure you know,” Christophe said.
O’Brien was silent as he processed the not-so-subtle reminder that Christophe’s backup may not be visible — but that didn’t mean it wasn’t out there.
“Even so,” O’Brien said.
