Rake by Scott Phillips

in business with me, and since I was banging his lovely wife.
    “I was wondering if it was some sort of import-export business, since he travels so much.”
    She looked down at the three oysters that remained. One of them was so big it looked like the giant gray tongue of a calf.
    “Come on,” I said. “I thought you were planning to go to the States someday. You’ll have to get used to this kind of vulgar talk.”
    “It’s not that,” she said, looking very uncomfortable. I realized for the first time that her eyes were not quite identical. One of them was blue, the other a sort of bluish green. “It’s just that it’s something Bruno told me in secret.”
    “You can tell me,” I said, massaging that thigh, moving up the leg a bit toward her midsection.
    She leaned forward and said in a loud stage whisper, “He sells weapons.”
    That put a new spin on things. I tried to sound unimpressed. “Is that so? Guns and such?”
    “Guns, missiles, artillery. Bruno thinks he might be dealing nukes with North Korea.”
    No shit. I was fucking the wife of an arms dealer, the kind of guy for whom killing really meant nothing at all. Cool.
    •       •       •
    I dropped her off in a taxi on the Boulevard de Sébastopol and started walking toward the Left Bank. The occasional passerby stopped and called out to me, to which I returned a snappy salute, and at Châtelet one old lady stopped me to lecture me about my character’s love life.
    “That pretty nurse, why do you treat her that way? She should be making you babies! There’s more to life than making love to strange women, doctor.”
    I thanked her, promised to consider it, and was on my way.
    •       •       •
    I decided to walk along the river and descended to the Quai du Louvre. As I crossed beneath the Pont du Carousel I heard someone snicker from the shadows, followed by more snickering from several individuals, followed by a suggestion that some cocksucker be killed for his shit. Sensing that I was the cocksucker in question, I reached into my vest pocket and removed the tactical baton.
    “Uh, ’scuse me, sir, you dropped something,” came a voice from behind me.
    I spun and faced a guy in his twenties carrying a blade with no idea how to use it offensively. From beneath the bridge came four of his comrades, at least one of them a girl, judging from the giggling.
    “All right, faggot, let’s see the wallet. And the watch, and that way you don’t get fucked up.”
    “Goodness gracious me,” I said, the joyful adrenaline flowing through my veins and counteracting the pacifying effect of the oysters and wine in my belly. “Want my phone, too?”
    “Fuck yeah, I want your fucking phone, bitch, hand it the fuck over.”
    I flicked the baton under and over and hit his hand, and the knife went flying into the river with a satisfying, plosive splash. Before he’d fully processed its loss I cracked him across his teeth and kicked him hard in the balls, and he went down to the paving stones howling.
    His friends hesitated, and then the girl said, “Are you gonna let that faggot kick René’s ass like that, bitch?”
    At that one of them charged me, a large fellow with a stupid look on his face, at least as far as I could tell in the dim light of the quai. He was open for one of the real textbook moves in judo, so I de-telescoped the baton and, just before impact, replaced it in my jacket pocket. I bent down, stepped slightly aside and altered his trajectory over my shoulder and down thestones of the embankment and then down into the Seine to join his friend’s blade.
    (I used to hear that if you fell into the Seine they automatically hospitalized you and gave you a serious, heavy-duty course of antibiotics. Is that still true, or was it ever? Or is it just one of those things they tell young American exchange students to discourage them from diving into the river?)
    “ Au suivant ,” I yelled, and two of them turned and ran.