Lovers and Liars Trilogy (125 page)

Rowland made no comment.

“That child haunts me,” she continued, her face troubled. “I could see he haunted Letitia as well. What do you think became of him? Did he die, get put in some home? I think perhaps he did die. Perhaps he was handicapped in some way.”

“The child of a brother and sister? I know.”

“Think, Rowland, if he’d lived, he’d be in his twenties now. Grown up. Older than Tom. And they could never acknowledge him, never even see him. I think that would be so desperately hard… What is it, Rowland?”

“Nothing.” He had turned to look at her, suddenly intent; then he shook his head. “All of this is speculation anyway. It’s not even easy to check it out. There’s no surname. It’s too vague.”

“If you did have a surname”—Lindsay was now spooning eggs onto toast—“would you be able to run checks then?”

“Oh, you could run some even without a name. You could start with the Grants, with that convent and its school. With a name, you’d certainly get a lot farther. You could then trace the births of Marie-Thérèse and her brother. You should be able to trace the birth of her child—and discover whether or not he died. It’s conceivable you could trace them to France, through immigration records. That might provide an early address. That might give you a lead on how or where Lazare first made his money, even when they changed their names. But it would take a long time, it might lead nowhere, and besides, I told you, Lindsay. This is background and it has to stay background.”

Lindsay said nothing. It had occurred to her that there might be a quick way of discovering that surname, and an ingenious way too, but she did not intend to mention it to Rowland, in case she was wrong.

They sat down to eat their meal. It was a kind of picnic, Lindsay thought. They had toast and scrambled eggs, then toast and pâté. Then Rowland, who was still hungry—it seemed unfair that a man could imbibe so many calories and remain whiplash lean—ate cornflakes for dessert. He made coffee—and at some point during this odd meal, which began companionably enough, Lindsay could sense that just as he had done earlier, he was retreating into some private world of his own.

“I’m sorry,” he said at last, catching her eye. “I’m getting locked back into this Lazare story. That happens to me. I’m not good at switching off. And there’s one detail that’s bothering me.”

“About the story I told you?”

“Indirectly, perhaps. It’s more than that though.”

“You can’t tell me why you’re interested in Lazare?”

“Lindsay, no. I’m sorry. When it’s over, I’ll explain.”

“But Gini knows? She’s going to work on it with you?”

“That’s certainly the plan.”

“So it does relate to what happened at Max’s? And it does relate in some way to Amsterdam?”

“Lindsay, don’t ask.” He rose. “Look, it’s past ten now. I ought to call Gini—I said I would. She was going to see Susan Landis this evening, and some of Cassandra and Mina’s friends. It’s getting late. Would you mind if I just called her briefly? I won’t be five minutes.”

He was fifteen. He returned, looking thoughtful and distracted.

“So, any progress?”

“No, unfortunately. Gini saw a group of girls from that Cheltenham school. One claimed Cassandra had mentioned Star a few times. But that’s all. None of them was much help. There have been no sightings of Mina—if there had been, Gini or Max or the newsroom would have called. We’re running the story of Cassandra’s death and Mina’s disappearance tomorrow. With photographs of both of them. That might bring something in. Meantime, Gini’s going off to Amsterdam in the morning, and you’re off to Paris.”

He stopped speaking abruptly. Then: “Let me get your coat—and I’ll just quickly find those books I promised Tom.”

Five minutes later Lindsay was in her car, a book on Bergman, another on Fellini, and a tome on the French nouvelle vague on the passenger seat beside her. It was a long, slow, cold drive home, with many misturnings and doubling-backs. She had been thanked with warmth and courtesy. She still felt dismissed and dispatched.

What had the evening achieved? She had cooked perfect scrambled eggs in an impossible saucepan. She had provided Rowland with information that might be fascinating but was of little practical use. He didn’t even trust her enough to explain the exact nature of the story he was working on. The story he and Gini were working on.

“I hate the world,” she told Tom, who was still up and watching a late movie.

A small bump on the sofa, which in the dim light Lindsay had mistaken for cushions, uncurled itself and sat up. It proved to be Tom’s quiet, sweet-faced, and somewhat formidable girlfriend. Her name was Katya. Tom put his arm around her.

“Never mind,” he said in a kind way, eyes still fixed on the screen. “The world doesn’t hate
you.
Nor do I.”

“Nor me,” said Katya. “Hi.”

Lindsay felt cheered. She went to bed, tossed the fat airport novel on the floor, kicked it under the wardrobe, and read Updike for two hours. At one in the morning she got out of bed, retrieved the fat novel, and turned to the end. The hero was a veritable Lazarus, it seemed. He came back to abundant life on page 502, seduced the heroine again on page 503, quarreled with her magnificently on page 510, and after an eight-page sexual marathon, led her altarward on the penultimate page.

Like Rowland, Lindsay was a traditionalist when it came to stories: she had a weakness for triumphal love. Comforted by this rousing ending, she returned to bed and slept well.

Rowland, meanwhile, lay in his bed on the top floor of his Huguenot house with its view of Hawksmoor’s spire. Across the street, as he had first observed shortly after Lindsay’s departure, a white Mercedes convertible was parked. He had no inclination to check whether it remained there, but lay on his back, wakeful, watching the time go past.

He thought back through the story Lindsay had recounted. He thought of her, and of Gini, then Cassandra, who was dead, and Mina, who was still missing, and finally of a young man with dark hair, a young man in his twenties, a young man of undisclosed nationality, Mitchell’s candy man, Star.

At three he fell into a light sleep; he dreamed of a shadowy Esther, and a shadowy New Orleans. Although he retained a clear sense of direction, he was dazed. They walked together along Decatur, up Dumaine, along Bourbon to Canal. Esther was trying to tell him something, but he could not hear the words.

He awoke with a start and lay there, fighting the restlessness such dreams always caused. Hours inched by; he felt the peculiar turmoil of exhaustion and sleeplessness; he felt under siege from the demands of the present and the past.

At five, abandoning the possibility of sleep, he rose, went downstairs to his cold kitchen, and made coffee. Sitting there at the table, he finally submitted, and let the past back into his mind. It was not such a very long history: he had met Esther, a DEA operative, within a month of his taking that assignment in Washington, D.C. Until then, he had spent most of his free time on the fringes of Georgetown, in the company of fellow English journalists. It was a close-knit, gossipy, expatriate community, inward-looking, dependent on American contacts for work yet treating Americans, Rowland found, with a curious, faintly derisive patronage; this patronage, he noted—and it angered him—modulated in private, and after drinks, into scorn. The clannishness, the clubbiness, was already beginning to pall, and Rowland was already finding that he was gravitating more and more to the company of American journalists, when a friend at the
Post
introduced him to Esther.

On the occasion he first met her, in a fashionable downtown restaurant, she drew his eye for several reasons: she was unusually tall; she was beautiful; she was formally and exquisitely dressed—and she was the only black woman in the room. Rowland, the outsider, the displaced person, the man who never felt English, or Irish, who had never had the sensation he belonged, shook her hand. She gave him a long, cool, quantifying look: Rowland felt an immediate, and astonishing sense of recognition, the signaling of like to like; it was followed by a rare exhilaration, then some ruthlessness on his part. The friend who had introduced them was ditched, unceremoniously, within the hour. Moving on with her somewhere, anywhere, the place was immaterial, they ended up at three in the morning at a street near his house. Esther was a Smith graduate; she had a law degree from Harvard; her great-great-grandmother had been a slave. These facts mattered very much, and not at all.

“Come home with me,” Rowland said.

She gave him one long, still, grave, considering look.

“I just might do that,” she replied.

A week later they rented an apartment together near Dupont Circle. A month after that, Rowland proposed; Esther, more cautious than he, refused.

“Very well,” Rowland said. “I shall repeat the suggestion a year from now. In the meantime, I’ll just make myself indispensable.”

“You’re indispensable now,” she replied dryly. “As I suspect you know.”

A year passed; during that year Rowland’s newspaper decided to send him to France. Rowland rejected this assignment, and subsequently resigned. To his surprise, he found it was an easy decision: Esther’s work tied her to Washington; his did not, but he found that he had plenty of freelance work there from both British and American papers. His English friends doubted the wisdom of this move, and Max—visiting from London—castigated him for it. Their demurrals made Rowland impatient; he did not doubt his own abilities; he knew he could alter the course of his career; he intended, and needed, to be with Esther: the choice was effortless, and no sacrifice was involved.

“Marry me,” Rowland said to her—and being meticulous about such things, he reiterated his proposal exactly one year later, to the hour.

“I just might do that,” Esther replied.

A date was arranged; the week before, they were due to visit her brother again, in New Orleans. Her brother, host to them on several previous occasions, had promised to be Rowland’s best man. At the last minute Rowland was forced to cancel that visit to cover an urgent story. He was writing up his copy, was near to completing it, when Esther announced she was just going out to the grocery store.

He had glanced around quickly from his desk; Esther had smiled, waved a hand at him, and told him to hurry up and finish writing. Now, sitting in his kitchen, his coffee cold and undrunk, Rowland looked at that tiny, frozen frame: the last time he had seen her alive. Had he not changed the date of their visit, she would still have been alive; they would have been married, might have had—would surely have had—children. My fault, he thought as he always thought at this point. My fault, and I didn’t even say good-bye.

The boy who killed her, a crack addict just sixteen years old, stopped her on the way back from the store. Two blocks from their house. He demanded her purse—and, according to the witnesses, Esther at once gave it to him. For no known or comprehensible reason, the boy shot her anyway. He raised his gun and fired into her neck at point-blank range. Esther fell; she bled to death on the sidewalk. Mindful perhaps of AIDS statistics, the little clutch of bystanders who gathered around her did nothing; no one administered first aid.

That fact, which had made him so bitterly angry at the time, still made him so now, six years later. It would, almost certainly, have made little difference—or so Rowland was subsequently informed. Still, it remained for him an act of iniquity: even if those witnesses could not have saved her, surely one of them at least could have held her, cradled her, talked to her as she died?

He found the manner of her death unbearable, and sometimes he believed that his own inability to abandon mourning was connected not simply to her death, but to the
way
in which she died. It was as if he had to compensate for that act of omission and for his own act of omission in not saying good-bye. The futility of this task, of which he was aware, did not deter him. Max had told him once, sharply, to stop doing penance. Rowland, hearing the accuracy of the remark, turned away in silence. He felt penance had been imposed upon him: choice was not involved.

Now he never spoke of Esther to anyone, under any circumstances. He preserved his grief with this privacy, and when—with the passing of time—he sensed that this grief was less intense, it made him ashamed.

Grief, he was beginning to discover, could not be activated at will, no, not even predawn, alone in a cold house, in an empty room. Esther was beginning to slip away from him. He could still recapture the sound of her voice, and sometimes the exact quality of her gaze, but her image was more shadowy than before. He could sense her, escaping his grasp, edging away from him into that netherworld the dead occupy, while more vivid figures, living figures, moved to the fore.

Was this release, or betrayal? Could you betray the dead? Once he would have answered that last question in the affirmative; now he was unsure.

He waited another hour, and then—at seven—called Gini, who was still in the country with Charlotte, but preparing to catch an early flight to Amsterdam. There she was going to see Anneke’s parents, who might or might not have information about Star.

“Ask if he could be American,” Rowland said. “Ask if he could have American connections.”

“Why? Rowland, I’m not hopeful they’ll know anything anyway.”

“Never mind. Just ask.”

When he had hung up, he felt angry with himself. He was doing what he most despised, breaking every rule in his own book. He was seeing connections where none existed—but then, that was not surprising, he told himself. For several reasons, among them lack of sleep, his judgment was impaired.

“Is there any chance this Star could be American?” Gini asked. “Or could have American connections? Did your daughter Anneke ever mention making American friends?”

Across the room from her, Erica van der Leyden shook her head. “No. Apart from the note Anneke left, she never mentioned this man. I don’t recall her having any American friends. We lead a quiet life. Anneke was at school all day. When she came home, she had homework to do. If she was out, it was always with friends I knew. My husband and I never allowed her to wander around Amsterdam on her own, going to cafés, that sort of thing. Anneke had a strict upbringing. My husband and I are old-fashioned.”