It was Saturday morning and the case had gone dead. Katharine sat drinking coffee at a café on Paris's Left Bank. She had no plan. She would take it as it came, she told herself, one clue at a time. She moved to slide out of the booth, and only then did she notice that a man was blocking her exit, staring intently down at her. How long had he been standing there? She had been too lost in her reverie to notice. He was not a pleasant looking man. He wore a black tie and suit that was stretched tightly over one of the most muscular bodies she had ever seen. His hair was curly and black, he had a thick black mustache, and over his cheeks was dense, black stubble. His eyes were lit by a wildfire that could have been intelligence but looked more like plain rage.
"I got the bill," the man said in heavily accented English, without making the slightest move to let her out.
"I don't know who you are, and I'll pay my own bill," Katharine huffed, and moved to push through him to the bar. The man just snickered. He wasn't going anywhere.
"I feel I owe you," he said, continuing with the performance he'd clearly rehearsed. He's seen too many movies about the mob, Katharine thought furiously. She was accustomed to being outrageously hit upon by French men, but this guy was way out of line. "Anyway, it's already paid," the man continued, and still did not move.
"And why, exactly, do you owe me," she said loudly, hoping to signal her distress to the bartender. "Who are you?"
"A detective of sorts," he replied, reaching into his suit pocket now. Confusion clouded Katharine's face. Maybe the man had been sent by her boss. Maybe this was something she needed to know, a first clue. "And I'd lower your voice," he continued. "We don't want to draw a crowd. At least not with these on the table." With that he pulled a stack of photographs from his jacket pocket and dropped them on the table. She recognized his play immediately and slumped down in her chair.
"You see now why I owe you? I've been enjoying these all morning." Katharine hardly heard him. She was staring in horror at a black-and-white image of herself, naked, sitting on a chair, her head tossed back in the throes of frantic masturbation. With a trembling hand, she swept the photos from the table and onto the seat beside her. "What does he want now," she whispered.
"Maybe we should talk someplace less...public." She nodded quickly, gathered up the photographs and moved for the narrow opening the man had cleared, her head sunk in defeat. The "detective" followed her out onto the sidewalk, where he promptly removed the photos from her hand and slipped them back into his pocket. "Your place would be best, I think," he said, almost polite. "Assuming of course that we'll be alone."
"We'll be alone," she murmured, and they walked in silence back up the street towards the apartment, Katharine numb to the world around her, including the man. As soon as she had shut the door of the loft behind them, the man was moving off through the rooms as if searching for intruders. He did it expertly, eyes flicking left and right, body braced whenever he came to a doorway, and Katharine wondered whether he might actually be some kind of detective. He canvassed the living room, the open kitchen (ridiculous, she thought), then the bathroom, and finally the bedroom. And then he didn't appear again. Katharine swallowed hard, unstuck herself from the floor, and followed. As she came through the bedroom door, he slowly turned to look at her and said: "I think I've found a bug."
"What?" she cried, her voice strangled by terror. Then he held out his hand. In it was her vibrator, which she must have left out that morning. On the bed, she saw in the same glance, were the dozen naked photographs of her, fanned out like playing cards. He grinned: "All very exciting, n'est-ce pas? I like a woman who knows what she wants. Pick a card?"
