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“What the hell Sartre?” I decided the appearance of a dead body allowed for dropping any formalities.

“What? You’ve never seen a dead body before?” Behind the light he held in his hand Sartre was just a cutout in the darkness beyond. But I could tell he was smiling.

“Not one this ripe,” was my mostly honest answer. Wishing I had a handkerchief or something, I covered my mouth and noise with my hand.

Sartre shrugged with the dispassion of a butcher showing a customer a piece of meat that was a bit passed its prime. “He has been down here a few days.”

“Why are you showing me this?” I thought about his earlier comment regarding lessons and hoped this wasn’t going to be one.

Not for the first time that early morning Sartre surprised me by saying, “I want you to find out who killed him.”

“You didn’t?” I asked that question before I took any time to think about it. It didn’t faze Sarti, though, only producing another shrug.

“No. A local boy found him like this. His mother lives across the bridge and told one of my people.” I nodded. That made sense. She probably arrived at the same conclusion I did and called one of Sarti’s men hoping for a reward.

If that wasn’t the case though, “So get the gendarmerie on the horn.”

With his free hand Sartre handed me a passport, dry now but, like the corpse, warped and bloated with water damage. It was blue with the distorted Cyrillic letters on the front. “He’s one of Mitnick’s.”

I opened it, the documentation inside giving me an idea of what the man looked liked in life. “Yeah? Seems like all the more reason to have the police handle it.”

“If anyone else finds him they’ll make the same assumption you did.” I could feel Sartre’s eyes on me even in the dark. “If Mitnick thinks I killed him, then there surely will be a war.”

I was insulated from whatever seriousness Sarti was radiating by my own skepticism. “Going by the show at the casino the other night, I thought you wanted a war.”

“The display at the casino was calculated to exactly prevent such a thing.” Sensing my agnosticism in all things, but particularly in this, he continued, “If Mitnick continues his expansion he will leave me with no choice. Hopefully, he sees this now.”

I thumbed through the passport. Other than Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, and France, the dead man didn’t go many places. “So pull him through the grate and let the river take care of him.”

“With the currents he will most likely wash up on a beach. He will be found.” I thought about the body staining one of the city’s tourist dotted shores, how that would ruin their illusion of safety, what a scandal that would cause. The same thing must have occurred to Sartre who finished with, “Someone wanted him found.”

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