Simon weighed all he’d heard. Something was missing. He wasn’t interested in finding out what. “Bad timing,” he said with a pained smile. “I’d like to help, but I can’t. There’s someone here I need to look after. I’m sure you can find another person better suited to the task. Someone who speaks the language, to begin with.”
“Kidding me? Everyone speaks English over there.”
“A former government official. Someone the Thais respect. I fix cars for a living. I’m sorry, Dickie.”
Shaking his head, Dickie Blackmon approached the desk, staring down at Simon with all his fury. Hammurabi standing tall to deliver his code. “You don’t get it, do you?”
“Get what, Dickie?”
“‘Sir Richard’ to you, pip-squeak. You think it’s me wants you to go? I made my opinion of you known loud and clear ten years ago. You’re a guttersnipe. A pissant. Sure, you clean up nicely, but you and I both know what you really are. A thug. One more punk from the wrong side of the tracks trying to put one over on the rest of us. A convict, no less. Did you really think I’d sit still and let you marry my daughter…after all that I’d found out about you?”
Simon remembered the day, one of his worst. The threat from Dickie, still a long way from being knighted but one of London’s wealthiest businessmen. Stop seeing his daughter or he’d go to the bank and give them everything he’d dug up: the truth about a felon named Simon Ledoux who’d done four years’ hard time in a French penitentiary for armed robbery and attempted murder. At Les Baumettes, no less, home to the worst of the worst.
Simon rocketed to his feet. “Time to go, Dickie.”
“Not quite yet.” Sir Richard Blackmon drew a fat envelope from his jacket and dropped it on the desk. “Travel documents. Flights. Hotel. Even a map of the city. I’m old school. Prefer things printed out. Don’t trust all that digital mumbo jumbo.”
Simon looked at the envelope. “I told you, no.”
“You did indeed. But, you see, I’m not the one asking. It’s your friend Rafa. He isn’t cooperating. He says no deal until he speaks with you.”
“He asked for me?”
“Hard to believe, isn’t it?” Dickie chuckled, a connoisseur of humiliation. “I thought so too.”
“Well?”
“He told me to give you a message. Something about needing the monsignor if he was going to get out of this.”
Simon kept his eyes locked on Dickie, hoping his surprise didn’t show. “‘The monsignor.’ He said that?”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake. Do I have to read it to you verbatim?” Dickie Blackmon shoved a hand into his pants pocket and, after a pained search, pulled out a rumpled paper. He made a face as he read the words aloud: “‘Tell Simon Riske that only the monsignor can get me out of this. I need his blessing.’ There, happy? Mean anything to you?”
Simon nodded. Only those closest to him knew about the monsignor: who he was, where Simon had met him, and how he’d saved Simon’s life.
It was a call for help. The only words Rafa knew that would impress upon Simon the gravity of his situation. There was more, though it remained unsaid. A debt in the Spaniard’s favor, but Rafa was too much the gentleman to bring it up even under the direst of circumstances. “The monsignor” was enough.
Dickie Blackmon tossed the paper onto Simon’s desk. “He said that you would understand. Old times, best friends. The usual horseshit. Oh, and, of course, that he was sorry about everything.”
Simon stared through Dickie, past the fleshy cheeks, the watery blue eyes, the too-white teeth. He was looking into the past, seeing himself as a newly minted banker, barely a year on the job, and seeing Rafael de Bourbon, too, his fellow trainee. It had been the beginning of an important friendship, kindred souls, latching on to each other for the difficult ride ahead. Brothers, really.
Until…
“So?” barked Dickie.
Simon slid the envelope toward himself. “When do I leave?”
Chapter 8
London
You, sir, are a liar.”
Dickie Blackmon was gone. Simon sat alone in his office, the words echoing in his ears as if Rafa had just spoken them. In fact, it had been eleven years earlier. Half past six on a Friday night. The Blackfriar pub at the foot of Blackfriars Bridge. As was their custom, they’d met after work at the bank to trade war stories of the week past and to get the weekend started on the