Lovers and Liars Trilogy (57 page)

“Decision time, darling,” he said. “What do you think?”

Gini gave him a sidelong glance. She fingered the curtain ring on her wedding finger, crossed to the rear window, and looked out.

Beyond the ruched pink silk blinds she could see a terrace with bright white rococo garden chairs. There was a large built-in barbecue, a stretch of lawn, an unlikely white statue, and a fence. Beyond the fence, fifty feet away, were the white stucco walls, the gothic porch and windows of the assignation house to which Lise Hawthorne had directed them. It was, as Pascal had quietly pointed out to her before they set foot in the agent’s office, the perfect place for him to use that coming Sunday. The perfect place for photographs. From the rear windows here, the driveway and the gothic porch were clearly visible. From here, anyone entering or leaving Hawthorne’s house was in direct view.

“Darling, I’m not sure,” she replied in a dry voice. “It’s nice, but it’s a bit overlooked at the back.”

Pascal gave her a repressive glance. He turned back to the agent, who was not looking hopeful, and who was avoiding the moment when he would have to mention the rent. “I’m afraid my wife’s a bit hard to please,” Pascal said. “We must have looked at fifty houses this last week. This might be possible, but we’d have to clear up all the formalities quickly. I’d want to be in here by Saturday morning. It’s Thursday now. If that could be arranged…”

He left the sentence unfinished, and the agent blinked. This particular house had been vacant for eighteen months. The area was overloaded with better houses than this, at a much more realistic rent. He began to talk, and talk fast.

“Well, of course, I’m sure that could be arranged. As you can see”—he waved a vague hand at oceans of pink brocade—“the house comes very comprehensively equipped. Three months’ rent in advance, naturally, and we would have to check references, of course, but that’s just a formality. I can personally arrange for all the services to be switched back on, gas, electricity, telephone—”

“Banker’s draft,” Pascal said. “This morning. And I foresee no problem with references. What is the exact rent?”

The agent swallowed. He fixed his eyes on the pink blinds, and named the figure. He waited for the expostulations, the cries of disbelief. None came. Both husband and wife were now at the window, looking out at the yard at the back.

The agent studied this young couple who had arrived at his office on foot. The woman, whom he judged attractive, was casually dressed. Her husband was wearing a black leather jacket and blue jeans. His hair was long by the agent’s standards. The agent gave a little sigh. Once upon a time he had been able to assess his clients’ income bracket from their dress. These days, as he had learned from bitter experience, it did not do to rely on such signals: The ones who looked like down-and-outs often turned out to work in movies or rock music, and to be annoyingly rich. Rock music, in this case, he decided. Too much money and no sense. They returned to his office, where a deal was swiftly struck. He ushered the couple to the door, all smiles. There, curious still, and a little envious, he asked, “Rock music, would it be? I feel I know the face….”

The Frenchman gave a modest gesture. He smiled. He said, “How did you guess?”

Half an hour later, the agent’s telephone rang. On picking it up, he heard a man’s voice, an American voice, inquire, “Is Mr. Lamartine still with you, by any chance?”

The agent explained that Mr. Lamartine had just left.

“Oh. I was hoping to reach him there. This is his assistant…. He said he’d call me if he decided to take the house so I could speed things up at the bank. I guess it slipped his mind. He has a stack of meetings all morning too….”

“Well, he has decided,” the agent replied. “I have the details here. I’m just processing the paperwork now.”

The assistant, who sounded efficient, then took all the rest of the details. “Thanks for your help,” the American said.

They were back in the safe Hampstead cottage by eleven.

“One hour to go, then we telephone,” Gini said.

Pascal nodded. Gini could see that he, too, was tense.

“I’ll make some coffee,” he said. “I need to think.”

“Can you not think without caffeine, Pascal?” She smiled.

“Sure I can. But I think a whole lot better with it. I’m going to make a list. Every actual
fact
we know about McMullen. No rumors, no suppositions, just the facts.”

He disappeared downstairs to the kitchen. Gini heard the whirr of the coffee grinder. She sat down at the table in the sitting room of the cottage, and made sure she had the telephone close. She took off her watch and put it next to the telephone; she watched the second hand sweep.

On the way back to this cottage, she had stopped off at a bookshop in Hampstead, hoping to find the same three books, if not the same editions, as she had seen in McMullen’s flat. She laid her purchases out on the table in front of her. She put her new copy of
Paradise Lost
next to the identical edition found in Venice; next to that she put Carson McCullers’s
The Ballad of the Sad Café,
and finally her last purchase.
The Oxford Book of Modern Verse
had not been in stock, but as an afterthought she had bought a large British road atlas. In the back of it was a section with street plans for thirty major cities, Oxford among them. She took out the piece of paper with those numbers, found inside the frame of Lise Hawthorne’s photograph, and the Uccello postcard from “Jacob.” There was no time now to consult Mary’s friend: She would make one last attempt at decoding this herself.

The page/word ploy did not seem to work, even with one component missing; one of the problems with this puzzle, she realized, was that there were so few numbers. The final message must be surely very short. She sat for a while with paper and pencil, making little headway. She flipped the pages of McMullen’s copy of Milton’s poem, until she found the place Pascal had said was marked. She could remember working on this poem at school. She could even remember, though vaguely, this particular passage. It came from Book One, and described the state of mind of Satan, after his fall from grace:

For now the thought

Both of lost happiness and lasting pain

Torments him

Satan, by that point in the poem, had been expelled from paradise, and she could remember the description of his great fall. But this did not help her either. Feeling defeated, she bent over the road atlas and traced the lines of Oxford’s famous streets. Here was McMullen’s college, Christ Church; here was the High Street, and the Carfax intersection and St. Giles….And then she saw it, away to the south and west, on the edge of the central area of the city dominated by the colleges: Paradise Square, and Paradise Street.

Suddenly, she understood McMullen’s message: It did not refer to pages, but to book
titles,
and the reason it was brief was that it was an
address,
a brief address. Quickly she drew a page toward her and began to write. As Pascal returned to the room with the coffee, she held up the page triumphantly.

“I’ve done it,” she said. “Look, Pascal. He did leave a message for us in his apartment He
did
refer me back to it on that postcard. It was much simpler than I thought! The number three at the top refers to the three titles; the next line down, 6/2/6, refers to the number of words in each of the three titles. And the final line, 2/1/6, gives you the order of words to
extract
from the titles.
Oxford—Paradise Café…
you see?”

Pascal looked at the paper and frowned. “If you think that’s simple, I certainly don’t We don’t know there’s any such place anyway.”

“There’s a Paradise Square. There’s a Paradise Street. I’ll bet you anything you like that in one or the other there’s a Paradise Café as well. Watch…”

She picked up the telephone and dialed directory assistance. When she put the telephone down, she had a smile on her face.

“Don’t tell me. You’re right?”

“You bet I’m right. Paradise Café, on the corner of Paradise Square…”

“He doesn’t exactly believe in making things easy, does he?”

“If he made it
easy
,” Gini retorted, “then someone else could have gotten there before us. As it is, he’d obviously decided it didn’t work—hence the meeting in Regent’s Park, and the noon telephone call. …” She broke off and looked down at her watch. “Twenty minutes to go, Pascal. Did you write your list?”

“Yes. I did. I put down all the information I obtained on McMullen from the army, where he served, and when. Then I put down all the things that don, Anthony Knowles, told you. The fact that McMullen was one of his best history students, that his studies were assisted by his gift for languages—he spoke fluent French and Italian, wasn’t that what Knowles said?”

“That’s right. The Italian as a result of the time he spent there as a child, with his family. The French, from school, I guess. Plus McMullen spent part of the nine months before going to Oxford taking courses at the Sorbonne in Paris. Knowles mentioned that. He gave it as an example of how dedicated McMullen was.”

“Fine. So McMullen was a keen student. A hard worker.” He paused. “And the dates this took place?”

Gini shrugged. “You know the dates, Pascal. We’ve looked at them before. McMullen went up to Christ Church in the Michaelmas term of 1968, that’s the fall of 1968. He’d left school at the end of the previous year, after obtaining the scholarship to Oxford. He had a nine-month gap. He moved on to those courses at the Sorbonne…does this help, Pascal?” She glanced toward the telephone.

“Maybe. The spring of 1968—that was a very significant time for a young man to be taking courses at the Sorbonne.
Les événements,
Gini—the protests and the street fighting, that whole outburst of radicalism. That took place in May 1968. I wonder if McMullen was drawn into those events, that’s all. I’m trying to understand why a young man who leaves Oxford very suddenly the following year begins writing letters to American politicians about the Vietnam War. That war was a catalyst for his generation, sure. But it still seems so
odd.
”

He turned away, frowning, and began to pace the room. Gini drew the telephone toward her. It was now six minutes to twelve.

“I don’t think we should think about that now,” she said. “It’s taking us away from the central issue here—and that’s Hawthorne and the appointments with those blondes.”

Pascal gave her a quick glance. He knew why she said that, and he could tell she would resist any aspect of this story that curved back toward that war, and her own father’s past.

“Maybe,” he said in a thoughtful tone. “Maybe, Gini. But there’s a darkness here, right at the heart of this story. And I want to understand where that darkness begins.”

“Look, let’s just get to
see
McMullen and talk to him first.”

“Very well.”

Pascal moved away and sat down. He could sense the sudden tension between them, and it alarmed him. There was an issue between them, he knew; it had always been unresolved and remained unresolved still. It concerned her father’s behavior in Beirut, and Gini’s willingness to obey him then, the excuses she continued to make for him, even now. For an instant, Pascal saw the figure of Sam Hunter as a continuing barrier between them. Even now, he thought unhappily, he and Gini would never agree about the nature of that man.

And now, just when Pascal had believed him safely distanced, back in Washington, with little day-to-day influence over Gini’s life, Sam returned to haunt them. He emerged from the shadowy recesses of this story they were working on: Hawthorne, Romero, Hunter, McMullen. All their pasts intersected at one point: Vietnam. He passed his hand wearily across his brow. It was better to say nothing, to wait. Perhaps Gini was right, and that aspect of this story would prove marginal. He looked at his watch. The hands were moving to twelve.

“Now, Gini. Make the call,” he said.

Gini did so. It was answered on the first ring by a voice she recognized. She did not identify herself, and neither did he, but it was Dr. Anthony Knowles. He came straight to the point.

“Thank you for calling,” he said. “Jacob is eager to meet you and your friend. He asks whether you know a restaurant here that would be suitable. He says he’s
entitled
to ask. Do you know of one? Don’t mention the name.”

“I do know of one.” Gini thought quickly. McMullen’s clues had been more than a trail, she saw, they had also been an aptitude test.

“I selected it from a list of three,” she continued carefully. “It’s a rather
heavenly
place.”

“Fine.” Knowles sounded amused. “Be there at six this evening. Wait outside, not inside. If there are any difficulties, call this number at nine tonight. After that, it will not be operable. You understand?”

“I understand.”

Without further words, Knowles hung up the phone.

Pascal was watching her intently. “That was McMullen himself?”

“No. That ex-tutor of his, Knowles.”

“Interesting. So he has some kind of assistance. I thought so.” He paused. “The Paradise Café? What time?”

“Six. We wait outside.”

“Good.” Pascal moved swiftly away. He began checking his camera bag. He picked up his thick address book, and Gini could see that familiar return of energy, of speed. “I need to make a few phone calls first, then we leave. On my bike we can be there in under an hour.”

“On that bike? Sixty miles? Pascal, do we have to? The meeting’s not until six. We don’t need to leave yet.”

“Yes. We do.” Pascal gave her a sharp glance. “There are three things we know about McMullen for sure. One: he’s devious. Two: he’s clever. Three: he’s commando-trained. So I intend to check out the area before we meet him. I want to see this restaurant, and this Paradise Square, before it’s dark.”

W
HEN THEY REACHED OXFORD
, it was bitterly cold, and dampness pervaded the air. A low, thin mist was rising from the river, and as darkness fell, the mist thickened. By the time they took up their position in Paradise Square, it had formed wisps and patches of a yellowish hue. It made the light from the few streetlamps a haze; it would clear momentarily, then descend again, obscuring their view.