The two men sipped their drinks. Dimly, they could hear the distant cry from the mosque loudspeaker calling the faithful to prayer. The Scorpion glanced down again at the photo on the table. If she had been sold as a white slave in Arabia, she’d either wind up in a brothel or the desert. Either way, she probably wouldn’t live out the year. There was a tilt of independence in her chin. Slavery would be a kind of death in life for her, he thought. Harris noticed him looking at the photo and pushed it a little closer to him. There was something dirty about the way he did it, as though Harris were bribing him with the girl’s beauty.

“Pretty, isn’t she?” Harris said.

Pretty wasn’t the word, the Scorpion thought. With that exquisite face and that sexy young body, she must have started a thousand daydreams every time she walked down the street.

“What happened to her?” he said at last. Harris almost sighed with relief and he mopped his brow again with the wet handkerchief. He raised his glass in a silent toast to himself. He’d come a long way to hook this fish.

“Once upon a time there were two American girls in Paris,” Harris began.

“Jesus, Bob. Don’t give me the whole Ring cycle. Just jump to the part where they meet the traveling salesman.”

Harris straightened up, annoyed at the lack of respect for his briefing style. Then he took a long swallow of lime juice and tried the sincere smile that had taken him so far up the ladder.

“Okay,” Harris began again. “The Congressman’s Pride and Joy is Kelly Ormont. Two months ago, she and a girlfriend, Lori, packed their traveler’s checks and Kaopectate and took off for Europe. They were at a ritzy party on a private barge on the Seine when Kelly became ill after a little too much champagne. A handsome Frenchman named Gerard offered to take her back to the hotel. Lori saw her get into a white Mercedes with him. That was the last time she ever saw Kelly.

“The next day she went to Kelly’s room and found that she hadn’t come in. She stewed for a while, trying to figure out what to do and finally took it to the American embassy, who sent her to the Quai des Orfèvres. For two days, the Froggies gave her the usual bureaucratic runaround until she told them about the congressman. Then they figured it might be political and they might actually have to do something about it,” he said, pursing his lips with the bureaucrat’s distaste for someone else’s bureaucracy. “They turned it over to the Sûreté and eventually it got to Interpol, who sent out a Blue. By then the congressman was steaming and he called the Oval Office. That’s when we got involved.”