Читать книгу The Supreme Orchestra - David Turgeon - Страница 15

Fabrice Mansaré had been walking with his brown-paperwrapped package under his arm for a few minutes when a sedan with tinted windows, grey this time, pulled unhurriedly up alongside him. Two thick men got out. One opened the back door. Fabrice Mansaré coolly took his seat next to a small phlegmatic man, different from the last one. The engine started.

‘We don’t know exactly what you’re up to,’ said the man, ‘nor do we particularly care. We just want you to lie low. For as long as it takes to.’

‘I was running some errands,’ explained Fabrice Mansaré.

‘Sure,’ conceded the phlegmatic man. ‘Errands. Far be it from us to interfere with your “errands.” You’re a free man. We’re all free men here.’

The man pondered this aperçu at length, like an oenologist according a grand cru the deep and penetrating consideration it deserved. He’d been warned about this Charles Rose. Some said he was a bit of a maverick. But then who wasn’t unorthodox, in their field? And was not this unorthodoxy the very hallmark of excellence? The phlegmatic man wondered about Charles Rose’s purchase. A work of art. A collector. But the phlegmatic man soon discarded this conclusion, as that epithet had never been applied to Fabrice Mansaré, who, though he might be smiling nervously as he thought of the work laid flat on his knees, secure in its sealed kraft-paper wrapping, was doing so for personal reasons that might well be indelicate to say out loud, but had decidedly nothing to do with his being a connoisseur of erotica, as Pierre-Luc insinuated upon watching him leave the gallery.

‘I promised to pick this up in person,’ Fabrice Mansaré continued, ‘and didn’t want to break my word.’

‘You could have sent someone,’ the phlegmatic man argued with a certain cogency. ‘We have no shortage of boots on the ground, for “errands” of this kind. Your job,’ he stressed, ‘is to lie low. And now we’d like to drop you off. Do you have other errands to run on the way?’

The car stopped in a supermarket parking lot. One of the massive men re-emerged half an hour later with a big reusable bag that proclaimed, I’m green! And you?

Fabrice Mansaré took the ‘green’ bag in his free hand.

‘How much do I owe you?’ he asked.

The phlegmatic man made, for the benefit of all and sundry, an ambivalent gesture conveying both ‘The Service will take care of it’ and ‘Could we please get a move on?’

‘Let me assure you,’ he said, ‘something’s in the works. You won’t be left twiddling your thumbs long.’

The grey sedan, after reassuming its position in the flow of traffic, took a few aberrant detours, perhaps not strictly necessary since no one was following them, but then there was never any harm in taking such precautions, if for no other reason than to entrench the habit, keep the pencils sharp. So they went for a spin around the Embassy District, wasted entire minutes at three poorly synchronized red lights, slipped under a railway bridge, and drove past a row of more or less abandoned factories before finally making their way back into a downtown draped in fog, past a slow procession of street lamps and galleries, halting in front of the forest of skyscrapers that Fabrice Mansaré was coming to know well. He’d been living there awhile. Night had fallen. Against a backdrop of darkness, hazy halos of light were visible through the car window.

‘You can leave me here,’ he suggested.

‘No,’ said the phlegmatic man, ‘I insist. We prefer door-to-door delivery.’