Lovers and Liars Trilogy (11 page)

Work, he said to himself, and he set himself to work. He could feel the memories, just there at the edge of his consciousness, and he wanted them no closer. Work would keep them at bay. He opened his heavy address book and began to run down the names of contacts. Forget Beirut, forget that small square bare room above the harbor, forget everything that happened there. That was in another country, in another life.

He closed his eyes briefly. For an instant he saw Gini, the Gini he had known then. She was standing, quietly, near the window. It was dawn, the shutters were closed, and the pale outline of her naked body was striped with the pinkish light from the louvers. She was watching him silently, a little sadly, as he slept. Waking, seeing her, he at once ached to hold her. He lifted his hand to her.

“Darling. Don’t worry. Don’t be sad. We’ll find a solution. I love you. Come back to bed.”

He swore under his breath, closed the address book, opened it again. The memory faded, eased away, but he knew it would come back. Names, contacts, he said to himself. Somewhere in this address book there would be someone who could help with the Hawthorne story. Someone—but who? Of all these numbers—which?

Pascal’s contacts were his lifeblood. They had to be better than those of his competitors: His contacts, as much as his camera skills, kept him ahead of the pack. These connections spanned the social scale. At one end were the hostesses, the party-givers, the jet-set pleasure-seekers; at the other end were those who serviced the needs of the first—the private-plane pilots, the chauffeurs, the hotel clerks, the ski instructors, the security operatives, the maids, nannies, and gardeners—all those who quietly, efficiently, and invisibly serve the whims and caprices of the rich.

The nightclub owners, the croupiers, the swimming-pool servicers, the golf pros, the tennis coaches, the
vendeuses,
the call girls. It was a huge and useful underclass. Pascal had experienced the pulse of their resentment. Their banked hostility to their employers no longer surprised him. Like them, he had learned from proximity. He had little sympathy for the hypocrisies of the privileged and powerful, little sympathy for the sublime carelessness of the rich.

He paid well and promptly for information received. Sometimes the advantage this gave him amused him, and sometimes it disgusted him. His mother, tough, forthright, and uncompromising, had attacked him for this work, right up to and including the day of her death.

“Once your work meant something,” she said. “Now what are you? A jackal, a hyena,
un espèce de parasite.”

Pascal had not replied. He was adding bills in his head. French lawyers. English lawyers. A house in the suburbs that cost five million francs he didn’t have. A house—or so the French lawyer believed, so Helen had said—that would make his ex-wife happy and keep her in France. Keep Marianne in France, nearby, near him, at a French school, speaking French.

This had mattered to him once, passionately. Now even that achievement, that attempt to rescue some security for his child from the wreckage of the marriage, even that might be lost.

Pascal opened his address book, flicked its pages, closed it again.

“If there was no wrongdoing,
Maman,
I would have no story….” He had said that once, twenty times. “People lie,
Maman.
They cheat. They double-cross. My photographs show them doing that. They show the truth.”

His mother had not deigned to answer him, and Pascal, shamed, had turned away. Better not to try to justify this work, although it could be justified, perhaps. He needed money and this paid better than wars or deprivation. There was an inexhaustible appetite for these stories. He was in tune with his society’s values: Let that be his excuse.

He stood up and switched on the television. On the news program were reports from several Middle Eastern countries. The previous week, Israeli troops had opened up on a village in the occupied territories. Sixteen Arabs had died, two of them possible terrorists, and five of them children. The incident had occurred while the latest round of U.S.-Israeli talks was proceeding. Increased U.S. aid to Israel, and a boost in U.S. arms supplies were widely rumored to be part of the new package. The anti-U.S. demonstrations had begun in Egypt, in Syria, now in Iraq and Iran: outside the U.S. embassies, outside the premises of U.S. businesses. Pascal watched his past in his present: the processions, the placards, the slogans, the burial of the dead.

In London, the latest IRA bombing campaign was continuing. A bomb had been defused in a van outside Victoria Station. In Brussels, EEC ministers had met to…In the West Country, severe flooding had…Pascal rose and switched off the set. He spent some time on the telephone to various contacts of his, including one—formerly the madame of an exquisite brothel in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris, who might know where a powerful man would go, once a month, to hire blondes for a liaison with sadomasochistic overtones. The results of the calls might prove helpful, but for the moment were inconclusive. Pascal stood, and stared at the wall of his hotel room. He thought of Genevieve; he heard the music of that small room above a dance hall in Beirut.

At seven, needing air, feeling trapped, he left the hotel and walked the streets for a while. He passed through a silent Mayfair and skirted the brilliant empty shops of Oxford Street. He thought he walked at random, without purpose or direction, but this was not the case. His footsteps led him to Grosvenor Square, and to the U.S. embassy there.

He halted, and watched the building from across the street. Rain now fell heavily, in a thick curtain. Lights still blazed from the office windows with their protective bomb-blast curtaining. Outside the main doorway, at the head of the steps, two marines stood on guard. This was unusual; Pascal stared. He could see the startling white of their puttees, the glint of brass buttons. The front of the building was floodlit. Pascal’s eyes moved up to where the bronze eagle, wings outspread, soared along the roofline.

Protective in its attitude, yet predatory: Pascal regarded it with distrust Eagles, hammers, sickles—he disliked the icons of imperialism. He shifted his eyes higher to the flagpole, with its stars and stripes.

The marines alerted him. He heard the stamp of their feet as they came to attention. As he lowered his gaze, the doors were already swinging back.

A cluster of men in dark coats was moving rapidly down the steps. At the foot of those steps, a long black limousine had drawn up, engine running, doors open. Two operatives were already in position, one at the front of the car, one at the back, their practiced eyes raking the square.

Still the cluster of men came down the steps. Then, just by the car, as if at a hidden signal, the group parted and drew aside. One of the bodyguards raised his arm and spoke into his wrist mike. For half a second—no more—one man stood alone, poised to enter the car. Light caught his pale hair. Then he ducked and was inside the car, the door was closed, and the limousine was pulling away from the sidewalk.

Fast, discreet, one backup car, no outriders. From across the square Pascal had that half-second to glimpse the ambassador’s face.

Pure chance—but he had glimpsed his quarry. Pascal turned, and retraced his steps.

“I
S THAT MISS HUNTER?
Miss Genevieve Hunter?” said the telephone voice.

The line was bad. The voice was interrupted by a series of clicks. Genevieve shook the receiver. She had been back in her apartment less than five minutes. Her cat was demanding food. She still had her coat on. She didn’t recognize the voice.

“What? Yes. Yes, that’s me….”

“It’s George, Miss Hunter.”

“Who? George who?”

“George from ICD. The courier service.” He sounded reproachful, “You told me to call.”

“Oh,
that
George. I’m sorry.” Gini struggled out of her coat. Tucking the receiver under her chin, she negotiated her living room. It was not tidy. Books and papers had spilled over onto the chairs; more piles of papers lay in wait underfoot. She made it to the tiny kitchen, Napoleon, a demanding cat, rubbing against her legs. “I’ve just gotten in. I wasn’t thinking. Can you hear that racket? It’s my cat. Demanding food. Go on talking. Ignore him. I’m listening, I’m just trying to find a can opener. And a can.”

“Well, I made my inquiries.” George sounded conspiratorial. He was, Gini thought, enjoying this. She found a can of cat food, attempted to open it one-handed, and gave a cry.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. I just cut myself on this damn can, that’s all. Go on.”

“The parcel went out from the City office, like I said. It was one of a batch of four, apparently.”

“Four?”

“That’s right. All identical, the supervisor said. Same wrapping, all used sealing wax. He remembered that.”

“There were
four
? That’s odd.” Gini spooned the cat food into Napoleon’s bowl and set it down by the sink. Napoleon stopped mewing and began in a fastidious but determined way to eat.

“Four.” Gini smiled. “You think they were all handcuffs?”

“Articles of clothing, that’s what the form said. The other three all went abroad. I couldn’t find out much more than that.”

“You couldn’t get addresses?”

“No. That side of things is confidential and I didn’t like to ask too much. You could, maybe. Talk to the girl upstairs, in dispatch.”

“I might just do that. In the morning. Thank you, George.”

“You get any problems, you can always give me a ring. I might be able to find out a bit more….” He paused. “It’s not nice, getting sent something like that anonymously. It’s a shock.”

“You’re right, George, it is.” Gini felt a sudden pity for the man: She could hear loneliness, and recognize it, she thought wryly, since she was often lonely herself.

She took his number, scribbled it on the back of an insurance bill she should have paid the previous week, and hung up. Napoleon had finished his supper. He looked pointedly at the meaty chunks remaining in the can. When the can was replaced in the refrigerator, he gave her one reproachful glance, then set about his toilette.

“Oh, Napoleon, Napoleon.” Gini kissed his head. “Handcuffs. And I’d almost forgotten them. Was someone trying to frighten me—or threaten me? Or just play a dumb joke? What do you think?”

Gini despised herself for this habit of talking to her cat but continued to indulge it. Napoleon took it well. When she returned to her living room, he glided behind her, leapt up into the only chair not piled with papers, and composed himself for sleep.

Gini, who was not planning on going out—why had she said that?—made a brief halfhearted attempt to straighten up her apartment. She transferred some of the papers from the floor to her desk. She lit the gas fire, which made the somewhat shabby room more welcoming. She kicked off her shoes, padded into the bedroom, surveyed encroaching chaos, shoved some of it into closets, straightened the duvet, and thus made the bed.

She found a whole heap of wash she’d forgotten for days, in which several pairs of panty hose were inextricably entwined in an octopus grip. She pushed the whole sorry mess into the machine, switched it on, and checked the fridge. It contained one orange, a piece of elderly cheese, the half can of cat food, a clove of garlic, two limp lettuce leaves, and one tuna fish sandwich wrapped in plastic which she’d forgotten, and which now smelled bad.

She tossed the sandwich into the garbage and slammed the fridge door. She briefly considered going out again and walking three blocks to Mr. Patel’s grocery store, the only one for miles that stayed open till eight o’clock. She phoned for a pizza instead.

On an impulse, waiting for the pizza to arrive, and feeling furtive and guilty, she rifled through the drawers of her desk. She despised sentimentality just as she despised pathetic people who talked to their cats, but even so, there at the back of a drawer, carefully hidden so she would be reminded as little as possible, was a shoebox. In the box were relics. Yes, relics, she said sternly to herself.

One by one, as she sat by the fire, she took them out. They were poor things, she thought: junk to most people, of significance only to herself. A card listing the hours of room service in the Hotel Ledoyen, Beirut; on the back of it, in pencil, Pascal had written his address. A yellowing paperback copy of a novel in French:
L’Etrangère
by Camus, bought because Pascal had once said he admired it, and because she had sworn to herself that she would read it the second she improved her French. A one-page letter from Pascal. A flower from a courtyard near his house, which he had picked for her once: It was unidentifiable now, a dry, brittle thing, scattering its few remaining petals at her touch. A bullet casing Pascal had once brought her for luck when the bullet in question had ricocheted and missed him by less than a foot. One earring, tiny, gold, of the kind made for and worn by Arab children. Pascal, a romantic, had talked the jewelry merchant into selling them by installments: this one now, for her birthday, its partner for Christmas. Christmas was then four months away. But by Christmas they had parted. Pascal was in Beirut still, but she had left.

She took the little earring out of the box and held it in the palm of her hand. Its purchase had been an extended transaction. She could see the dim interior of the merchant’s shop, the glitter of gold and silver, the scales the merchant used to determine cost by weight. She and Pascal sat on upright chairs; a boy brought them sweet mint tea. The smallest, simplest purchase, she was learning, had its rituals in Beirut. The jewelry merchant spoke to Pascal in a mixture of French and Arabic. He was explaining, Pascal said to her with a smile, that such a gift, from a young man to a young woman, was a sacred affair.

“He will be disappointed if we choose quickly,” Pascal said in English. “Sip the tea slowly. This has to last half an hour at least.”

She had sipped the tea. She could taste, now, the sugar and mint. She could hear the murmur and rasp of French and Arabic. She had stared at the floor and told herself that now,
now,
was the moment to confess. She must explain to Pascal now, before the purchase was made, that she had lied about her age. The sentence was simple enough:
Pascal, I am not eighteen, I’m fifteen.
She stared at the floor. Gold glittered. The simple sentence refused to be said. Pascal was showing her a ring, then a bracelet. She shook her head. She swallowed: Perhaps there was a softer way of putting it? If she explained that her forthcoming birthday would be her sixteenth, would that sound better? After all, back in Britain sixteen was the official age of consent.