Lovers and Liars Trilogy (20 page)

A shadow had passed across his face when he made his last remark about his sources. As he concentrated on his notes, however, that momentary darkening passed. She watched him as he jotted words and phrases, his concentration absolute. His dark hair, now graying a little at the temples, fell forward across his forehead. His eyes were lowered to the notebook in front of him. She could watch him with impunity, and with a secret pleasure too.

Pascal, who was altered and unaltered. There was, on his left cheekbone, a tiny scar, the mark of some childhood accident, some fall. Once upon a time, lying in darkness while the music from the dance hall below moved the air in his room, she had traced that scar with her fingers as he slept beside her. She had read all the details of his face with her fingers, the dear geography of eyes, nose, chin, throat, hair. She could remember with absolute precision the particular scent of his skin, the shape and grip of his hands, the ways, words, and hows of physical intimacy. She could remember little shafts of detail: ways he moved, inflections he used. It pained her that these recollections were so sharp, for there was now, of course, one component missing, the component that gave vitality to all the rest. Once, when they looked at each other, there had been such interaction of the eyes. But then, lovers did not need words, because a glance spoke a better language.

“Is something wrong?” Pascal looked up suddenly.

“No. Nothing.” She snapped back to the lesser present. “Why?”

“You looked sad, that’s all.”

“Not sad, concentrated. I was just thinking about this story….” She gestured toward the waiter. “Shall we get some coffee?”

He nodded, lit a cigarette.

“We have one other lead,” she went on, speaking rapidly. “That piece of paper I found in McMullen’s apartment, we mustn’t forget that. It might mean something—and it might mean nothing at all.”

She took out the scrap of paper as she said this and passed it across. Pascal frowned, holding it up to the candlelight. “Three sets of numbers. They’re not dates. They could be anything. A set of measurements, some combination…they could be old, or recent….”

“They’re carefully written, Pascal.”

“Even so. It could just be something someone jotted down. Then they needed a piece of paper to pad out that photograph frame, so they used this. It might not even be McMullen’s writing.”

“That’s true.” Gini took the piece of paper back from him and scanned it. “It’s just…the way McMullen disappeared. Why contact Jenkins, then disappear?”

“Something happened, obviously between the meeting when he delivered that tape and December twenty-first last year. Maybe he thought he was in danger.”

“But then surely he’d want to make contact? The story was reaching a crucial stage. He was about to provide that assignation address. If he had to disappear for any reason, surely he’d try to make contact of some kind.”

“Leave a trail, you mean? Possibly.” Pascal looked across at the paper. “But if that’s some kind of coded message, I can’t crack it, can you?”

“No. I can’t. But then, codes aren’t my strong point. Never were. We could try the obvious things, I guess, substituting letters for numbers. Try that, Pascal.”

“With the letter A as number one? Okay.” He scribbled in the notebook, then grinned. “Not too helpful. Look.” He passed the page to Gini. It now read like this:

3 C

6/2/6 F/B/F

2/1/6 B/A/F

“Gibberish. Damn.” Gini frowned. “Let’s try it with B as number one, or C. C is the third letter of the alphabet, maybe that’s what the number three at the top means…. Try that.”

They tried this and other combinations for some time. None of the combinations produced anything resembling a message, not even a clear word.

“Hopeless.” Pascal was the first to grow impatient. He pushed the paper to one side. “I think we’re wasting our time.”

“One last try. Think, Pascal. It was the only scrap of writing in that whole flat. It was inside Lise Hawthorne’s photograph. That suggests something, surely?”

“Maybe, maybe…” Pascal smiled. “I can see it’s tempting. Okay. Perhaps you missed something. Maybe you can’t make this work on its own. Maybe it has to be matched to something else. Tell me again how you found it.”

“I went through the desk twice. There was a leather blotter….”

“Clean blotting paper?”

“Pristine. Unused. I checked under it—nothing there. Then there was a pile of books, but there were books everywhere, on the shelves, on the coffee table, piled on the floor, by his bed—you saw.”

“You checked inside the books?”

“Obviously. Nothing. Oh, one of them had his name, his Oxford college, and a date written—1968. I’ll check, but I imagine it’s the date he was there.”

“Nothing underlined in the book texts, written in the margin?”

“Nothing I could see. I was looking quickly. They were well read, but clean.”

“What books were they?”

“A poetry anthology, Milton’s
Paradise Lost,
a Carson McMullers novel.”

“Eclectic.”

“Sure, but the bookshelves were the same. Novels, political works, poetry, history. Masses of history, maybe that was his subject at Oxford. Oh, and books in foreign languages, German, French, Italian…”

“A well-educated army officer. Interesting…” Pascal sighed. “It doesn’t seem to help, however. Go on.”

“That was it. The books, the blotter, the photograph of Lise—not a recent photograph by the way—and a leather container for pens and pencils. Nothing more.”

Pascal shook his head. “Then I don’t see it. It’s a blind alley.” He smiled. “You don’t know any friendly neighborhood code crackers by any chance?”

“Unfortunately, no. Not my line. Except—wait a minute. There
is
someone who might help. A friend of Mary’s, an erstwhile Cambridge don. He worked in military intelligence in the war—at least, I think he did. He compiles crosswords now, fiendish crosswords for
The Times.
”

She broke off. Pascal, she saw, was watching her closely, his expression absorbed.

“Is something wrong?”

“No, nothing,” he said. “I like it when you concentrate, that’s all. There’s a certain expression that comes onto your face then. You push your hair back, behind your ears, and you…It’s nothing. Just the way the light was falling on your skin. My photographer’s eye.”

Gini looked at him uncertainly. Pascal rose abruptly to his feet.

“I’ll get the check,” he said. “And then I’ll walk you home.”

When they were back in her apartment, Pascal showed no inclination to leave. While Gini made coffee, he prowled the room. He checked the doors, the windows, the pictures, the bookshelves, in a way that made her nervous. She sat down by the fire, stroking Napoleon, while Pascal peered at framed posters from art exhibitions. Eventually, she could stand it no longer.

“Just what are you doing, Pascal?”

“What?” He swung around and gave her an absentminded look, as if his concentration were elsewhere.

“It’s a very ordinary apartment,” Gini said patiently. “Ordinary posters, pretty obvious books. You appear to be casing it. I just wondered why.”

“I’d like to know you perhaps.” He gave a shrug.

“You do know me.”

“Maybe. You’ve changed. I’m not so sure.”

“So what does your investigation tell you?”

“Oh, a number of things. We like the same painters. We’ve even been to some of the same art exhibitions. This one, for instance—in Paris.” He gestured at the poster. “You were there. I was there.”

“Yes, and so were roughly twenty-five thousand other people, Pascal. It was a very successful exhibition.”

“Even so.” He gave her a sharp glance. “It was in Paris. I live in Paris. That exhibition was last year.” He paused. “Did you go to it on your own?”

“Yes, I did, as it happens.”

“No boyfriend?”

“I was probably between boyfriends. I quite often am.”

“I also went to this exhibition on my own….” He hesitated again. “You never thought of calling me then, when you were in Paris?”

“No, I didn’t. Pascal, it was years since we met. You had a wife, a family, I—”

“Not last year. No wife. I was divorced three years ago. You knew that.”

“Did I?”

“That’s what you said yesterday. You said you’d heard.”

Gini looked away quickly. This deception was hard. She wondered what Pascal’s reaction would be if she told him the truth: that she could never go to Paris, or anywhere else in France for that matter, without every street, every café, singing his name. She remembered the times, the many times in the past, when she had walked the Paris boulevards, sat in Paris cafés, and seen his features in the air, in the reflections on the Seine. “What about London?” She turned back to look at him. “You must have been to London hundreds of times. You never called me, Pascal. You never wrote. There was just that one accidental meeting in Paris.”

It was Pascal’s turn to look away. He wondered what Gini’s reaction would be if he told her the truth: that he
had
called her, that he
had
spoken to her—many, many times, in his own mind. Could you explain to someone that despite absence and the passing of time, it was perfectly possible to maintain an imagined dialogue with her, that those exchanges could take on vitality, a life of their own? No, you could not explain, he decided grimly, any more than you could explain how their influence remained with you, how it entered into you and stained you, and how sometimes, with a particularly painful trickery, it would surface in dreams.

He stared at the curtains of Gini’s room, and for a brief instant saw his own home in Paris, the home he had then shared with Helen, five years before. Mid-afternoon, spring sunshine; his daughter was asleep in the next room; Helen had gone shopping. He picked up the telephone, put it down; he did this three times, then finally he dialed.

He had seen Gini outside that café just a few hours before. All that time, the impulse had been mounting. Now, guiltily, he gave in to it. During that brief glacial embarrassed conversation she had mentioned the name of her hotel. Such was his perturbation, he was incapable of thinking. All he knew was that he had to speak to her, hear the sound of her voice. So he dialed, spoke to the receptionist, waited; his pulse accelerated. The room number rang three times, four, five…. Then a man’s voice answered. Pascal froze. He should have foreseen this, it was so obvious, and she had made the situation perfectly clear…. He was about to hang up, and then found he was unable to do so:

Je peux parler à Mademoiselle Hunter?

Non. Je regrette….
The Englishman’s French was good, almost unaccented. There was a slight pause.
Elle est partie.

Quand?

Cet après-midi
—
une demi-heure…Vous voulez laisser un message?

Non. Ce n’est pas important. Merci. Au revoir….

He knew, as he replaced the receiver, that Helen had returned. He could feel her presence through his shoulder blades. He swung around.

“No luck?” She gave a small, tight smile. “What a disappointment for you. I wondered when you’d call.” She gave a quick glance down at her watch. “Two and a half hours. I’m surprised you waited that long. But then, of course, you couldn’t call earlier, could you? I was here.”

She placed her shopping bag on the table and began calmly to unpack it: bread, wine, vegetables, cheese. “Never mind, Pascal. Try her next time you’re in England. She’ll be delighted to hear from you. She made that
very
clear.”

“She’s a friend,” Pascal began hopelessly. “I told you—”

“Oh, I know what you told me—and you lie terribly badly. You always did. I thought that particularly interesting. After all—why lie? Why should I care? It was years before you met me. Just another of your foreign affairs. Why pretend otherwise—unless, of course, it was a very special affair. Was it special, Pascal?”

“I won’t discuss this. You’re wrong. You wouldn’t understand….”

“Wrong?” She met his eyes coldly. “Oh, no, I don’t think so. Not at all. I find it quite remarkable that you’ve never once mentioned her name, not in all the years I’ve known you. So secretive. Her hands were shaking—did you notice?”

“No, I damn well didn’t.”

“Well, they were.”

“Look, can we just forget this?”

“Oh, I can. Probably.” Her gaze became coolly speculative.

“The question is, can you?” She folded the grocery bag very deliberately. “Unfinished business, I’d say. I can always tell. My advice would be to go to London, finish it off, and when you’ve got it out of your system, come home.”

“Helen—”

“Why not? It’s much the best way. Go to bed with her. You obviously still want to. Why else phone?”

“For Christ’s sake, that’s the only reason to phone a woman, is it? Because you want to go to bed with her?”

“No. Of course not. But it’s the reason in your case, whether you know it or not.”

“That’s not true.”

“Do you know, I really don’t care? I don’t care anymore where you go, what you do, or whom you screw.” She paused, gave him a considering look. “Have you been faithful? Are you faithful?”

“As a matter of fact, yes, I am. With difficulty.”

As always, anger and retaliation pleased her. She gave another chill smile. “Well, don’t fight it anymore on my account, Pascal. If you loved me, I might feel differently. But since you don’t, it really makes no difference. Feel free. Fuck around.”

She turned away, still quite calmly, opened the refrigerator, and began to put away the groceries. Pascal lost his temper. He smashed his hand down hard on the kitchen table.

“Why,”
he shouted. “
Why
do you say that? I married you, after all.”

“Ah, yes. You married me.” She turned around and looked at him. “And you said that you loved me. I even believed you—for a while.”

“
I
believed it, damn you.” He hit the table again, and knocked over the wine. “I wouldn’t have said it otherwise.”

Helen righted the bottle expertly. She gave him a cool glance. “Ah, but
did
you believe it, Pascal? I could see you tried—but did you really believe it in your heart?”