Lovers and Liars Trilogy (22 page)

“We shouldn’t be paranoid,” she said, turning back to Pascal. “It’s an occupational disease. Let’s concentrate on what we do next.”

“I think I know what we’re
supposed
to do,” Pascal began. “Go chasing off to Venice, the same way we came chasing over here. I get the feeling that someone’s trying to delay us, or waste our time. Now, we could go to Venice—except it’s Friday today, and we’re supposed to be meeting the Hawthornes tomorrow at your stepmother’s house. I don’t want to miss that.”

“Neither do I. I want you to meet Hawthorne. In the flesh.”

“So, first I’ll check if this Palazzo Ossorio has a telephone. I have a friend who works for the Italian phone company.”

“And at least we do know the Palazzo Ossorio exists,” Gini put in, “unlike Mrs. Hamilton and her house here. It must be a real place, it must
be
there—that parcel was delivered, after all.”

“Exactly.” Pascal frowned. “I suppose we
could
go to Venice today. But if we did, we’d be very tight on time. I suppose it’s just possible we could go to the palazzo and find McMullen there—but I doubt it. It’s too simple by far. And if he
isn’t
there, we’d have no time to make inquiries, we’d have to get back. One problem with the flight—fog, delays—and we miss Hawthorne. No. It’s not worth it.” He paused. “Better to go the day after, Sunday morning, we could take an early flight, stay over in Venice, return Monday….”

His expression altered; a shadow passed across his face. “If we did that,” he went on, “I’d have to return via Paris. It’s my visiting day. I cannot miss that. I see Marianne then.”

There was a silence. Gini looked away up the street. She was tempted to question him; she would have liked to offer consolation, even if it was only the opportunity to talk. She had tried that the previous evening, on their way to the restaurant. It had been a mistake. All personal questions met a wall of silence. Eventually, sensing bitterness and pain, she had stayed away from the subject. Pascal’s defenses were formidable: She could see he preferred them unbreached.

“All right,” she said at last, turning back. “Let’s plan on that. Venice on Sunday, why not?” She hesitated. “Meanwhile, I think we should split up. I want to go back to the office. I want to check out Appleyard plus one or two other things….”

“What other things?”

“Nothing. Just an idea I had.”

Pascal looked reluctant to accept this. He argued against it for a while, then eventually, with an air of resignation, gave in.

“Very well. Maybe you’re right. We save time that way. I’ll go back to my hotel. Make some telephone calls. Try and fix up a meeting with McMullen’s sister. Then I’ll meet you back at your apartment. Around three?”

Gini glanced at her watch. “Better say four. If you get there before me, you can let yourself in, unless you feel like burgling me, of course—”

Pascal gave her a cool glance. “It wouldn’t be exactly difficult. I’ve looked at your windows and doors. You know how long it would take me to break in? Five seconds flat.”

“Well, you won’t need to,” Gini said sweetly. “Because there’s a spare key. I keep it there for my upstairs neighbor. Sometimes she pops down to feed Napoleon. It’s under the third flowerpot from the left.”

“And I suppose it was there all last night?”

“Yes, it was. I forgot. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. You can’t open a door with a key when the person inside has shot the bolt.”

“You are impossible,” Pascal said. He paused, about to put on his helmet. He looked into her face. He lifted his hand. With one finger, gently, he wiped the rain from her cheeks. “Impossible,” he repeated. “Headstrong. Obstinate. I thought that the very first day I met you. Twelve years later, and what do I discover? You’re unchanged, Gini. And I was right.”

He put on the helmet. Gini confronted a black glass visor, an invisible face. He lifted his hand in a half-wave, then kicked the starter pedal. The engine fired; he wheeled, and roared off down the street.

Gini waited until he was out of sight. She watched him round the corner, and for a moment his absence was intense in the street. Gini stood there for a while in the rain, waiting for the sensation of loss to abate. When she was sure she had it under control, she took the tube to Baker Street. From there, she walked north to Regent’s Park, entering it at its southwestern corner, through Hanover Gate.

The park was ringed by an outer circle road. She stood there, looking to right and left. To her right was a terrace of serene and beautiful Nash houses; to her immediate left were the buildings of the London Central Mosque. Beyond its pale stone, and the copper gleam of its dome, the road curved. On the opposite side of that road, actually within the park itself, was Winfield House, official London residence of the U.S. ambassador. It was no more than seventy yards to her left, shrouded from the road by a thick belt of shrubbery: John Hawthorne’s home.

Crossing the street, she entered the park. She wanted to take a closer look at that residence, but she approached it discreetly, by a circuitous route. She wound her way through Regent’s Park first, passing the boating lake and making for the bandstand, where, in summer, military bands sometimes played. The rain fell heavily; the park was almost deserted. Only a few stalwarts walked their dogs. The gaily painted bandstand, and the Guards’ band playing in it, had been an IRA target once, years before. Several men had died there. She walked on.

She approached the ambassador’s residence from the rear, where its large gardens bellied out into the park. From there, too, the house was almost invisible. She could glimpse only its roofs and chimneys through the trees and evergreen shrubs that had been planted inside its tall, spiked perimeter fence.

She circled the gardens, then returned to the road. She walked along the sidewalk directly in front of the house. There were two entrances, she saw, one barred off with reinforced gates, an entrance that looked unused. The other, to the north of the house itself, was flanked by a low lodge-type building. Aerials bristled from its roof; security cameras were trained on the gates and driveway; a window of greenish bulletproof glass confronted anyone seeking admission to the house.

She was beginning to feel conspicuous. There were the watching cameras, and there were also security men. She glimpsed them to the side of the entrance lodge, in the driveway. They were wearing dark suits, and dark raincoats. There were two—no, three—leaning up against a black limousine, ostentatiously ignoring her as she passed.

At her desk in the features department, walled in by word processors, and by the babble of other people’s work, she telephoned. Mary first.

Her stepmother seemed surprised to hear from her again; she was rushing out to see friends, but she did have time to confirm that, yes, The Ivy was certainly a restaurant she’d recommend.

“Oh, yes, darling,” she said. “Do take your friends there. I’m sure they’d love it. Try those little tomato tart things they do. Scrumptious.”

“I know it’s always full in the evenings….” Gini pushed a little harder. “What’s it like for lunch?”

“Oh, I love it, I often go there before matinées. It’s always full of actors, writers—lots of chums.”

There was a pause. Gini said nothing. Sometimes it was better not to prompt.

“When was I last there at lunchtime?” Mary went on. “Let me think…I know! I took Lise there, that’s right. It was just before Christmas. I remember, because she was going down to the country the following week. She’d never been there, for some reason, and she adored it—so it has her recommendation too. I knew it would be her kind of place. Not John’s perhaps, but—what, darling? Your other line? Fine. I’ll see you and your Pascal tomorrow night.”

Gini hung up. This she had expected, but it was as well to check. Appleyard next.

She flicked the cards on her Rolodex. Appleyard. There were two numbers, she remembered, two lines to his Gramercy Park apartment. She tried the first. She let it ring for a long time. Just as she was about to hang up, the receiver was lifted.

The answering voice was wary. It was male, and sounded young. “Yes?” it said. “Who is it?”

“Hi. This is Gini Hunter. I’m calling from the
News.
Is Johnny in?”

There was a pause, a scrabbling sound. Then the voice said, “Could you spell that, ma’am? The
News?
Which
News
is that? I’m just writing that down….”

Gini could hear the broad accent now. Midwest, she thought. She spelled her name, and explained she was calling from London. For the boy to take this down took an age. He sounded so pathetically eager to be efficient that Gini was patient.

“I guess Johnny’s out, then?” she said finally. “Do you work for him? Do you know when he’ll be back?”

“Oh, no. I don’t work for him. Not exactly. I mean, I get to take messages, that kind of thing. I’m Stevey. Stevey with a ‘y.’ I’m Johnny’s roommate, his friend. I guess we haven’t spoken before, but I’ve been living here a real long time.”

Of course: It came back to her then, some malicious reference Jenkins had made to Johnny Appleyard’s current toy-boy, encountered on Jenkins’s last New York visit:
A face like a young Rudi Nureyev, my dears. Semiliterate, and oh-so-eager to please. He spent an entire evening telling me about pig breeding
—
sorry, breeding hawgs. Tedious? It was fucking tedious. Johnny picked him up at Penn Station, yes, straight off the train. Couldn’t resist his bum, apparently. I said, Johnny, give me a break. He’s straight out of a Steinbeck novel. He’s still got straw in his hair.

Gini hesitated. She said: “Stevey? Of course. That’s right, I remember now. The last time I saw Johnny, on his last London trip, someone mentioned your name.”

“They did?” The boy seemed pleased by this. “That would be the trip Johnny made last fall, I guess…I nearly came along on that trip. I was real excited. I’ve never been overseas. But then Johnny changed his mind….”

Indeed, Gini thought: Given Appleyard’s rumored behavior on trips to London, a devoted farm boy might have cramped his style. She felt a shaft of pity for the boy.

“So, tell me, Stevey, when do you expect Johnny back? I need to talk to him urgently.”

“Well, that’s kind of difficult to say….” He hesitated, and his voice took a dip. “You see—I don’t know where he is right now. He just took off real suddenly, and since then, he hasn’t phoned.”

“Oh, I see.” Gini could hear unhappiness and anxiety in Stevey’s voice. Gently, she said, “He just took off, Stevey? You mean he’s been gone—what? A couple of days?”

“More than that, ma’am. He left December twenty-seventh. I was expecting him back that evening. He’s been gone now ten, eleven days….”

Gini wrote down the date; she tensed. An absence of a few nights might be understandable enough, given Appleyard’s predilections, but ten days? “That’s quite a while, Stevey,” she said, keeping her voice casual. “I guess you must be getting pretty anxious. Maybe some story came up….”

“I don’t reckon so, ma’am,” he said cautiously. “He’d have told me, he always does. And then he’d have phoned. He always phones to collect his messages. Even when he’s out of town.”

“You mean you’ve no idea where he is, Stevey? I really do need to get hold of him. You’ve no idea at all?”

There was a long silence. Eventually the boy said, in a reluctant way, “Well, he did send me a fax. But that was five days ago. And it was a weird kind of fax too.”

“Weird in what way, Stevey?”

“He didn’t tell me where he was—just said he’d be in touch. It was typed, and Johnny always writes his faxes by hand. Also, he spelled my name wrong. He put ‘ie’ on the end, not ‘ey.’ Johnny would never do that.”

Gini frowned, and made a note of these details. She said quickly, “Well, I’m sure there’s an explanation, Stevey. Maybe he was in a hurry and got some secretary to send the fax.”

“Maybe. I guess so.”

“Do you know where the fax was sent from, Stevey?”

“No. There was just a whole lot of numbers along the top. When I read it, with my name wrong and all, I figured someone else sent it. Maybe someone Johnny was with, you know….”

Gini could hear the misery in his voice clearly now. So Stevey feared he had been ditched—and that was always possible, of course. A new lover was one explanation for ten days’ absence—but it was not the only explanation. “I imagine some new story’s come up,” she said carefully. “You’ll see. Something big—some exclusive, and he had to drop everything, rush off. You know how it is.”

“I guess so. You could be right….”

The attempt at cheerfulness seemed to have worked. Stevey now sounded less miserable.

“Next thing you know, he’ll be walking in the door,” Gini went on in an encouraging voice. “Meantime, Stevey, if I can’t speak to Johnny, you might be able to help. You’ve been at home all this week?”

“I sure have.”

“Was Johnny sent a parcel? It would have arrived Wednesday morning, by courier. Sent from England. A neat-looking package, brown paper, string, sealed with red wax?”

“A package? Yes, he did. Wednesday—yes, Wednesday, that’s right.” He broke off. “How d’you know about that? Was it you who sent it? Why? That wasn’t a funny thing to do. No way! It was sick. I—”

“Hold on a second, Stevey.” His voice had risen angrily. “I didn’t send that parcel and I don’t know who did. But I was sent one too, exactly the same, special delivery. And mine wasn’t amusing either.”

“It wasn’t?” he said in an uncertain way.

Gini hesitated; sometimes, to acquire information, you had to provide some yourself. “Stevey. They sent me a pair of handcuffs, no message. I live alone. I wasn’t laughing either when I opened it up. That’s why I’m calling Johnny now, because I’ve had a big fight with the courier company, and they said he was sent a parcel too. …” She paused, but the boy made no response. “I wanted to find out what they sent Johnny. Whether he had any idea who was playing games….” She paused again. Still silence. “Stevey,” she said, gently again. “I really want to find out who did this, and why. You said it was ‘sick,’ so you must have opened it. Please, Stevey, tell me what was inside.”