“I’ll have my office send you a check made out to the foundation and a sales contract, probably tomorrow or the next day.”
“Done, then. It’s yours from this moment on.”
“Nice doing business with you, Lance.” Stone hung up.
Holly was staring at him agape. “Did you really just do that?”
“You know, when I inherited Arrington’s fortune, I was very uncomfortable with the idea of spending any of it.”
“But you got over it,” Holly pointed out.
“The great thing about being filthy rich is that you can make snap judgments and write a check. Speaking of that, excuse me.” He called home.
“The Barrington Practice,” Joan said.
“You’re supposed to say, ‘Woodman & Weld,’” Stone pointed out.
“I forgot. You okay?”
“Never better. Listen, I just bought a little mews house in Paris.”
“Ooh! Can I come for a visit?”
“Later. Call Herbie Fisher and have him find an attorney at W&W’s Paris office and have him write a sales contract and do whatever they do in France, like a title search. The seller is the same foundation that sold me the Maine house.” He gave her the street address of the mews house. “When he’s drawn it, have him FedEx it to Lance Cabot at the CIA, and you send him a cashier’s check for a million, six hundred thousand euros, in dollars. I’d like Lance to have it all the day after tomorrow. They can e-mail the contract to you, and you can send it all together.”
“Consider it done,” Joan said.
“I miss you terribly,” he replied, and hung up before she could reply. “There,” he said to Holly.
“That was breathtaking,” she said, draining her martini glass. “Now, how are your fingers feeling?” she asked.
“Rejuvenated.”
“Then come with me,” she said, taking his hand.
48
Stone lay with his head cradled in Holly’s breasts. “That was wonderful,” he said.
“I’m impressed with the current condition of your fingers,” she said. “Maybe you don’t need to play the piano after all. How on earth could you just stop doing that?”
“I played in a jazz group in college, but I had to quit when I started law school—there just wasn’t time. Then years passed without a piano, and when I finally got one for the New York house, I was too busy to play.”
“Okay, I’ll buy that. Now it’s time for us to get out of here.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Stone said. “This house is now my home in Paris, and I’m not moving out to avoid Yevgeny Majorov. In fact, I don’t want to avoid Yevgeny Majorov, I want to kill him.”
“I’m entirely in sympathy with that desire, nevertheless, we have to think about your safety, as well as his demise. Leave that to Rick and his boys.”
“Look, we have no reason to believe that Yevgeny knows where I am.”
“You might have been spotted when you went furniture shopping today.”
“Or I might not have been spotted, or they would be here by now. Anyway, if I leave here again, that increases the chances of his people spotting me.”