“Hold still,” Cinnamon-Breath scolded me. “Look up at the ceiling and don’t move. I have to do your eyes.”
“The lavender goes better with the outfit,” Nueve said to him.
Cinnamon-Breath rolled his eyes. “Do I tell you how to kill people?”
Nueve shrugged. I said to Cinnamon-Breath, “He shrugs a lot.”
“He’s Europea
n,” he said. “They’re world-weary. Close your eyes.”
“Tintagel’s board of directors voted him to the presidency after the untimely demise of our friend Monsieur Mogart,” Nueve said. “Prior to that he was a university student in Prague.”
“Why would a superrich, multinational corporation put a twenty-two-year-old college student in charge?” I asked.
“Watch him,” the makeup man said. “He’s going to shrug.”
Nueve was holding himself very still in his chair.
“He fought it back,” Cinnamon-Breath said. He reached into the valise again and removed a gray wig.
“I don’t know why I have to be so old,” I said.
“Who do you see the most in hospitals? Huh? What’s the demographic?”
He shoved the wig over my head and began tucking my own hair up into it. He gave a soft whistle and said, “Hey, love your hairstyle and I’m really digging the gray—very post-mod radical chic—but we really should shave it off.”
“You’re not cutting my hair,” I told him.
“Maybe I should just wrap some gauze around it. Like you have a head injury. We’re gonna be too lumpy this way.”
“Where is Jourdain Garmot now?” I asked Nueve.
“Pennsylvania.”
“Pennsylvania?”
“He flew into Harrisburg two nights ago, where he rented a car and drove to a tiny hamlet called Suedberg.”
Something clicked when he said the name, but I couldn’t pin down why Suedberg sounded familiar to me.
“What’s a Frenchman who runs a company in England doing in a tiny hamlet in Pennsylvania?” I wondered aloud.
“Here it comes,” Cinnamon-Breath said. Then Nueve shrugged. “Maybe it’s more a tic than a gesture.”
“More of a mannerism,” Nueve said.
“You mean affectation.”
Nueve shrugged.
Cinnamon-Breath gave the wig one last violent tug, then fluffed the tight gray curls with his fingertips. He tsk-tsked at the effect.
“Think I should have gone with a darker shade. All this hair underneath is making it bulge. And the color—you look like a human Q-tip. Oh well. All done but the lips.”
“Don’t do the lips,” I said.
“I gotta do the lips. I don’t do the lips, people are going to notice the hair. And we don’t want them noticing the hair.”