Lovers and Liars Trilogy (6 page)

Fifteen years ago. Outwardly, Pascal was little changed since then. Tall, narrow-hipped, wide-shouldered, quick of movement, elegant yet somewhat scruffily dressed. Françoise smiled: The clothes he wore today were, as usual, good, and, as usual, unpressed. She doubted Pascal possessed an iron, or would know how to use one. He could no more sew on a button than he could make an omelette or compliment a woman on her dress. He was sublimely impractical, sublimely indifferent to such things—yet put a camera in his hands, and he was transformed at once.

With cameras, with a story in view, Pascal was unstoppable: indifferent to obstacles, privation, physical danger, or difficulties. In pursuit of a story, Pascal became a man possessed.

Except…Françoise, who had been about to speak, stopped herself. She looked down at the photographs on the table. Once Pascal Lamartine had been one of the best war photographers in the world. He had covered every major conflict, bringing back photographs that provoked passionate debate, and broke people’s hearts. What had he brought her now? Adultery: sneak shots of a man in the act of cheating on his wife.

In the pictures before her, the French cabinet minister and his American movie-star mistress were clearly identifiable. Françoise could see the shape of the swimming pool behind them, the title of the book the minister’s bodyguard was reading. She could see the minister’s wedding ring as his hand caressed the movie star’s legendary breasts. The pictures did not surprise Françoise. The minister concerned was an aggressive apostle of family values and had a reputation for absolute rectitude: So the world went.

But that Pascal should take these photographs—that did surprise her. That he should take on work of this kind once, twice perhaps, at the time of his divorce—yes, she could even understand that: Lawyers were expensive. But that he should continue to do so now, three years later, when the divorce settlement was long finalized, the alimony long agreed, the child support fixed…that she could not understand. Pascal himself never discussed his ex-wife’s demands, and this kind of work certainly paid far better than pictures of wars. But if this was the price Helen Lamartine was demanding, it was extortionate.

Françoise picked up one of the photographs, then put it down. Professional, circulation-boosting: She would publish them, of course. Yet she hated them. The photographs had a double venality: They were the evidence that a man she much admired was destroying himself.

“Okay.” She swept the pictures into a pile. “We’ll run them. Next week. Three spreads plus the cover. We’ll deny we’ve even got them, obviously, maybe prepare another dummy lead. Even so, it’s bound to leak.”

Pascal shrugged. “You think he’ll bring an injunction?”

“Maybe. And sue once we’ve published, under the privacy laws. He keeps three lawyers permanently on their toes.” She smiled. “The man’s a fool. In bed with Sonia Swan? Every red-blooded male in France will vote for him after this. He could be the next president of the Republic—maybe. I’ll be doing him a favor. But I don’t expect him to see it like that.” She paused. Pascal was paying little attention. “Provided the pictures run first in England and the States, we’re covered anyway,” she continued. “No invasion of privacy once the privacy’s invaded elsewhere. Then it becomes a legitimate news story—just about. Anyway, he’s a sanctimonious son of a bitch.
Petit Fascist.
It’s worth the risk.”

“You don’t have to worry.” Pascal turned. “Those deals are sewn up. The pictures will be on the newsstands in London and New York by the end of the week.”

“I know.” Françoise began returning the prints to their folders. “Nicky Jenkins called from London this morning. So suave. I could hear him licking his lips.”

Pascal, who disliked Nicholas Jenkins, editor of the London
Daily News,
as much as she did, betrayed no reaction. He was already moving to the door, checking his watch.

“Françoise, I’m sorry. I have to go. I’m meeting Nicky for lunch. With luck I might still make the noon flight.”

“Call me when you get back. Some friends are coming over for dinner Wednesday night. It would be nice if you could join us.”

She knew from his expression that the invitation would be refused. Most invitations were now refused, unless they assisted his work. Pascal was turning into a loner.

“I might not be back. Nicky has some new lead. Something he wants me to work on.”

“More scandals?”

“So he said.”

“Bigger than this?” She gestured at the photographs.

“Much bigger. Very hush-hush. But then, Nicky exaggerates.”

“If it’s good, tell him I want a tie-in. I don’t want it going to
Paris-Match.
”

Françoise hesitated. Pascal’s cool gray eyes had met hers.

“Just listen to us both,” he said.

He made the remark dryly, looking away. When he turned back, the irony had left his face. He looked desperately tired—or tiredly desperate, she could not have said which.

“Pascal,” she began in an awkward way. “We’re friends. We know each other. I hope we trust one another. Once upon a time your work was so…Pascal, why do you do this?”

She looked down at the photographs as she spoke. Pascal’s eyes followed her gaze. He pushed back one lock of dark hair which fell across his forehead—an irritable, careless gesture, one Françoise had seen him make a thousand times before. He was graying a little at the temples now, she saw; there were lines she did not remember, from nose to mouth. For a moment she thought she had angered him. His eyes glinted. She waited for the impetuous reply he would once have given, but none came. He turned, and Françoise thought he intended to leave her question unanswered. Yet at the door he stopped and shrugged.

“Françoise, I work for the money,” he said. “What else?”

“That wasn’t always the case.”

“No. Once I worked for—” He broke off. His expression became closed. “Circumstances change,” he said in a flat tone. It was his final remark, one that told her nothing, and he closed the door on it.

Outside, in the parking lot below, Pascal climbed into his car, switched on its engine, then switched it off. Françoise’s final question had gone unerringly to the heart of the matter, he knew that. For an instant, staring straight ahead of him, seeing no cars, no traffic beyond, no passersby, he looked down into it, this emptiness now central to his life. No optimism, no self-respect, a great deal of self-hate. He felt a sensation of vertiginous despair, then anger with himself.

There was no point in dwelling on this. Self-hate was perilously close to self-pity—and that he refused to indulge. Besides, there was a cure for despair; not drink, not drugs, not women—those exits led to dead ends.

Work,
he said to himself, and fired the engine. He slammed the car into reverse, then pulled out, accelerating fast, and made for the airport via the
périphérique.
Work, speed, haste, an accumulation of detail, these were the cures he now relied upon. They had one supreme benefit. Properly manipulated, they left no time in which to think. Racing for the plane, Pascal congratulated himself dourly: The past three years had made him an expert in this.

G
ENEVIEVE WAS WORKING ON
a new story about telephone sex. It was Nicholas Jenkins’s idea. Most of his feature proposals concerned sex in one form or another. In the year he had been editor, the
News
’s circulation had increased by a hundred thousand, so presumably—by that yardstick anyway—Jenkins’s editorial instincts were correct.

It was not, however, a policy Genevieve liked. She found it both sly and cheap. The
News
was a middle-market paper, not a tabloid, and Jenkins’s new editorial policy involved a balancing act. The saucy excesses of pinup girls were not for the
News,
so the titillation of a typical Jenkins story had to be disguised. An “exposé” was the form that disguise usually took. Thus could titillation become a crusade. Jenkins was in the process of elevating scurrility to an art form. Genevieve could have put up with the scurrility a whole lot better, she often thought, had it not come so larded with cant.

Her initial research on this new story consisted of calling a representative sample of telephone sex lines, widely and excitably advertised by one of the
News
’s most sensationalistic competitors. By noon, seated at her desk in the features department, she had been engaged in this activity for more than two hours. Her spirits felt leaden, and her head ached.

Nicholas Jenkins’s theory was that somewhere in England there was the Mister Big of telephone sex. Genevieve’s crusading task was to find this man and expose his activities. According to Jenkins, the man was—or might be—a well-known international entrepreneur whose more legitimate business interests ranged from American modeling agencies to rock-star management…or so Johnny Appleyard had suggested to Jenkins, and Jenkins placed great faith in Appleyard’s tips.

Genevieve placed less faith in them. In her book, Appleyard was an intrusive, ubiquitous busybody with an expensive nasal hobby, a man whose transatlantic tipoffs were one percent hot and ninety-nine percent myth.

With a sigh, she replaced the telephone on a breathy South London girl
(French Governess Corrects Your Mistakes).
She closed her eyes, buried her aching head in her hands, and considered for the hundredth time just how pleasant it would be to tell Nicholas Jenkins to stick this job. Before his advent at the
News,
she’d taken pride in the work she did. In the ten years she’d worked in England in journalism, she’d fought hard to establish herself. No fashion coverage, no women’s page fluff, no soft-focus human interest stories. She had wanted to cover hard news, to start out the way her journalist father had. Her ambition—never confessed to her father, whom she rarely saw, and who would have scoffed—was to move up through investigative journalism to foreign reporting. Sam Hunter had covered wars—indeed, had won a Pulitzer for his Vietnam dispatches; why should she not take a similar course? So she had served her apprenticeship but kept that goal ahead of her. One day she would be truly out in the field; she, too, would be there, at the front.

Wars drew her like a magnet, she knew this. To bring back the truth from a war zone seemed to her a tremendous thing. If she could ever do that, she felt she would prove something to herself—and perhaps also prove something to her father, although this aspect of her plan made her uneasy, and she ignored it as much as she could.

And she had come so close to her goal—so very close. All the hard work of her apprenticeship, her years first on a provincial paper, then on the
Guardian,
then on
The Times,
finally at the
News
in its previous more sober incarnation had finally paid off. Nicholas Jenkins’s predecessor, a man Genevieve had admired very much, had given her assignments with teeth. The last story she had covered for him, an investigation into police corruption in the northeast, had won the paper two awards. Her reward, so long sought, was to have been a posting to Bosnia for three months. The day before it was confirmed, that editor was fired and Nicholas Jenkins took his place.

“Bosnia?” he had said in the six and a half minutes he finally spared her. “Sarajevo? My dear Genevieve, I think not.”

“Why not?” Genevieve asked, although she knew the answer, which had nothing to do with her capabilities and everything to do with her sex.

“Because I need you here,” Jenkins replied. “I’ve got some big stories lining up. I’m not ruling out foreign stories—don’t think that. We’ll review the situation in six months….”

Six months later there had been another excuse; a third was preferred three months after that. Now a year had gone by and she was no nearer her goal. She no longer trusted Jenkins’s temporizings, and what was she now stuck with? Telephone sex: a Johnny Appleyard tip. Genevieve glared at the lurid advertisements in front of her. She punched the next number. She would give this charade, she told herself, just one more month. If the assignments did not improve by then, if she was still being fobbed off with this trivial stuff, then she would confront the slippery Jenkins. Some tougher assignments—or, Nicholas dear, you can shove this job.

Meanwhile, she was through to the next sex line—
Big Blondes
—and another girl was launched on an all too familiar spiel.

“Oooh,” moaned a bored and breathy voice. “I’m all alone tonight. I’m unhooking my bra now. I know I shouldn’t, but the weather’s sooo hot. By the way, did I mention? It’s a forty-two D….”

Genevieve groaned and looked out the office window. The sky was gray. It was beginning to sleet.

“Hot weather?” she muttered. “Lucky for you, sweetheart. Not here, it’s not.”

The recording continued. There was a rustling sound as the girl turned the pages of her script. “I think I’m going to tell you what I’m doing. Oooh yes. I’m undoing my bra now. Oooh, that’s better. I’m just
easing
it off. It’s black lace, did I mention that?”

“No, you didn’t, moron, get on with it,” Genevieve snapped.

“It’s wired underneath,” breathed the girl. She giggled mirthlessly. “Well, it has to be, you see, because I’m a
big
girl, and it carries a lot of weight….”

“Dammit,” said Genevieve. “What is this—an engineering manual? Get to the point.”

She knew she was wasting her breath. Apart from the fact that the recording could not hear her, delay was the whole purpose of these tapes. The longer the poor sucker kept listening, the greater the profits. There seemed to be hours of this anodyne buildup. The scripts were risible, their delivery amateurish. Genevieve could imagine only too well the kind of businessmen behind them: small-time wise guys making a few bucks on the side from a back room someplace. The more she listened, the less she placed any credence on Appleyard’s tip.

She yawned, hung up on
Big Blondes,
and tried
Swedish Au Pair.
Such a feast of stereotypes. Swedish Au Pair also had a South London accent. She sounded dyslexic. Two-syllable words were giving her problems. When desperate, she whirred a vibrator. She was describing her panties, at length.