Free Dance with the Dragon by David Hagberg Page B

Anyway, he walked up to me and handed me a pack of Marlboros and a small gold Zippo lighter. ‘From an admirer,’ he told me. I gave him a few pesos, and back in my dressing room I found out that the lighter worked, but it was also a miniature digital camera. Before I’d moved out, Louis had told me that once I was in at the house he would get the camera to me. I was supposed to take pictures of everything and everybody. The camera could hold up to one hundred pictures, but no matter how many I had taken I was to exchange it every Wednesday and Saturday with the taxi man for a fresh one.”
    “Weren’t you worried about getting caught?” Perry asked.
    “Petrified,” Shahrzad admitted. “But every time I lit a cigarette I’d use the Zippo and take a couple pictures. After the first few times right in front of the general when nothing happened, I relaxed a little.” She gave McGarvey a wistful look. “By then I don’t think he was really seeing me. We had sex only the one time, and after that I was just another one of the women he always surrounded himself with.”
    “But you were doing this for Louis, so you didn’t mind,” McGarvey suggested.
    “Exactly,” she said. “Anyway, I was afraid of the general.” She looked away. “Sooner or later everybody became afraid of him.”
    “Was Louis happy with your snapshots?”
    She smiled. “After the first week he was over the moon.”
    “How in heaven’s name could you possibly know that?” Perry asked. “You didn’t pass love notes via your taxi man, did you?”
    “One night Louis was in one of the parking places. We kissed through the open window and he told me that I was doing fabulous work. ‘Won’t be long now and we’ll be able to write our own ticket,’ he said. His own words. I was to keep taking pictures, but now he wanted me to find the general’s desk and his computer and take pictures of whatever I could. It was going to be a lot riskier, he said, but rock-solid necessary.”
    “Well, if he was getting such rock-solid product he wasn’t sharing it with me,” Perry complained bitterly. “This is the first that I’ve heard about any of this.”
    “He kept repeating that this was going to be the big score,” Shahrzad said. “But I told him that I was scared out of my skull. He looked into my eyes and promised that when it was over, not only was he going to get me up to the States, but he was going to divorce his wife and we would be together.”
    Perry started to snicker, but Shahrzad turned on him.
    “You don’t understand how it was with us. I believed him. I believed in him.”
    “We understand,” Rencke assured her. “Ya know we’re just trying to do our jobs here. We want to find out why your Louis was killed. Maybe we can figure out what went wrong, what Liu’s been up to. Maybe stop this from happening to someone else.”
    Shahrzad closed her eyes for a few moments, as if she were collecting her thoughts. “A couple weeks after I moved down to the House, the parties started in earnest. Every weekend there’d be a huge crowd out there, live music, every kind of food and booze you could imagine. Champagne, oysters, and truffles flown over from France, caviar from my country, lobsters from Maine, you name it, and of course Roaz with his stash. They were called ‘hospitality bowls,’ and they were filled with coke. Practically everywhere you looked someone was dipping into one of them.”
    “You too?” McGarvey asked.
    “It would have looked pretty odd if I hadn’t,” she said.
    “This also is news to me,” Perry said petulantly. “Did you know these people? Can you identify them for us?”
    “I knew some of them from the newspapers. Senator Trinidad Lopez showed up at least once a week, usually with Carlos Huerta, whom I was told was assistant chief of police for Mexico City.”
    “Jesus,” Perry said softly. “Were you able to take pictures of them?”
    “Sure,” Shahrzad replied. “That was easy. And so