Rings of Paris

Rings of Paris

Series: Softwater European Series

Genre: European Murder Mystery

Listening to Bob Dylan in his car relaxed Gannon. Stopping for a red light on France Ave. in Edina, he held up the Biograph CD. Dylan’s face and hair had a reddish color. Like a Greek Pan. Certainly plays off the ancient images in his music, Gannon thought, laying the CD down. The day had a tinge of gray but was expected to clear up by noon. He undid his sport jacket button as the car’s heater warmed him, and pushed his greying dark brown hair off of his forehead. His hazel eyes scanned the road ahead as he approached the freeway.

His car phone chirped on the passenger seat. Looking at it, he grimaced. I shouldn’t have gotten this phone, Gannon thought. A father of four, Gannon kept trim with exercise and sport activities with the kids. He also had a good gene-pool of Irish parents which gave him a positive-anything-can-be-accomplished attitude. Not recognizing the number, he picked up the phone and said, “This is Gannon.”

“Gannon! It’s so good to ‘ear your voice. ‘Ow are you? Am I calling too early?” The voice was thick, with that Parisian accent. All of the ‘H’s’ sounding like soft ‘c’s’. André Perpignan was all Parisian, full of life and charm. He had lived in the States for two years, yet refused to learn the pronunciation of American words. Tall and lanky, André looked like he never combed his disheveled, wiry hair.

“André! You’re my first European caller this morning. Must be my lucky day,” Gannon said. “Say, I’m almost at my office. I’ll call you back when I get there, okay?” Working with André for six months on software proposals for governments in Paris, and Lyon, had made little headway. Gannon was thinking there was minimal possibility for success in that country.

“Ca va. Okay. But buy your airline tickets then before you get to your office. To Paris. No reason to take extra work today? N’est pas?

“Tickets?”

“Airline, yes of course. That is what I said. Or do you prefer the sea. It is up to you, of course.” André laughed at his lame joke.

“Are you trying to say we got the business in Lyons?”

“No, that is not what I am trying to say. What I am trying to say to you, Gannon, is the following: We have the business in Paris. That is we have an official response for our services, along with a bank account number for the monies, French Francs of course. I have to talk to the gentleman in charge for disbursements. He is such a nice gentleman. Raised in Paris, went to the Sorbonne University, he, well let’s say that his wife is . . .”

“André,” Gannon cut him off, “tell me the details later. I’ll call you soon. Bye. Ciao.”

“Oui. Ciao, my friend. Ciao.”

Hanging up, Gannon started to re-think his agenda with this unexpected possibility for his company SoftWaters. André had kept this project alive, yet couldn’t close the big deal. He had brought in the existing French business. Correction, Malcolm in the UK had brought in the French business with André’s help. Malcolm was the GM for the European SoftWaters business. Even with his British lack of sensitivities, he had done a reasonable job.

André kept the SoftWaters business alive in France, adding new product offerings and training. But no new customers. This would be André’s first customer. He was finally cracking the difficult market where ‘not-invented-here’ was the general anthem.

Turning off the freeway on the Eden Prairie exit, Gannon headed east toward the SoftWaters offices. Squinting into the hazy morning sun, he maneuvered the Montero into the parking lot making a mental note to call Malcolm in London. Making a third mental note, he’d look at his family calendar to see when he could fly to Europe. The last time he went, some difficult moments with Beth and conflicts with the kids’ activities made that trip tense.

Arriving at the office, Gannon hung his jacket on the back of the chair and scanned his clutter-less desk. He had the most organized work-room considering he was the owner of a software company that was notorious for leaving piles of field reports and stacks of analysis updates laying around. No new urgent messages on his desk. Renting the entire third floor illustrated his U.S. business’ continued growth. But European expansion was his real love that was on hold.

After Ed’s murder in Italy, he realized they could have done their entrance differently, but the culture, the style of business in Europe was foreign and he was naïve and learned the most difficult lesson of death and loss. Now with hired Europeans, Gannon was taking small steps, feeling more confident, but still business-wise conservative, reflecting the initial fast pace entrance which may have led to Ed’s tragic death in Italy.

Looking at the picture on his desk of the two guys at the Grand Place in Brussels, Gannon picked it up. Six years ago, his partner Ed and he negotiated a software franchise deal for Spain and Italy, their first entrée into the European market. Brussels was picked as a neutral place for the negotiations.

Gannon wiped off the dust that accumulated on the picture and saw Ed’s smiling face, and his more pensive one. He was the worrier among them. The sights and smells of their first meetings, the late dinners, and the comedic way they succeeded in spite of their utter lack of cultural understanding, still gave Gannon a good feeling. Putting the picture down, his heart crimped, the dreadful part of the memory that Ed died on that trip. He later found out it was by the hands of Giancarlo’s thugs the Italian negotiator. It still upset him. “Those were crazy days,” he said to his lost friend, his previous co-owner of the company. “How could I have prevented your unnecessary death?” He still reconciled Europe with the good and bad elements he experienced.

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