Lovers and Liars Trilogy (7 page)

“Give me a
break
,” Gini moaned.

“You’re the wrong sex for this story.” One of the men from the news desk leaned over her shoulder and pressed his ear to the receiver. “Why didn’t Nicholas give it to me? Good God, who
is
this?”

“It’s number thirty-five. Swedish Au Pair.”

“She sounds as if she comes from South London, not Stockholm.”

“They all sound like that.”

“Bloody hell. What’s that?”

“Her vibrator. Again. She lets it buzz for thirty seconds. They all do. I timed them.”

“Nicky wants you. Now. In his office.” The news-desk man was already bored. “He says drop everything, something’s come up.”

“He should write these scripts. He has the perfect style.” Genevieve replaced the receiver.

“It’s lunch,” said the newsman, drifting away. “He says if you’ve made arrangements, cancel them. You have to meet some photographer, and it must be important. I overheard his secretary making the arrangements. Editors-dining-room stuff.”

Genevieve groaned. She stood up. “That’s the afternoon blown. You’re sure he said me? Since when did you become his messenger?”

The news-desk man gave her a languid salute. “Aren’t we all?” He turned and threaded his way down the room, through the ranked word processors, the ranked desks.

When God summoned, you went. Gini took the elevator to the fifteenth floor. She stepped out onto thick Wilton carpeting. From here the large windows overlooked docklands: there was a gray view of cranes, girders, the river, and Thames mud.

She made her way through the outer office, through the inner office. As she approached the sanctum itself, the door was thrown back and Nicholas Jenkins emerged looking powerful, pink, complacent, and svelte.

“Ah, there you are at last, Gini,” he said. “Come in, come in. Charlotte, get Gini a drink.”

Charlotte, his senior secretary, made one of her rude minion faces behind his back. She moved between Gini and the open doorway. Gini remained rooted to the spot. She was staring into the office beyond, where a tall, dark-haired man stood by Nicholas Jenkins’s desk. The office became silent; the air moved, flickered, became excessively bright.

“Come in, come in.” Nicholas bustled around her. He drew her through the door. He was leading her across to the man, who had turned and was regarding her equably.

“Gini, I want you to meet Pascal Lamartine. You’ll have heard of him, of course….”

Gini took the hand that was being held out to her. She could feel the blood draining from her face. She shook Lamartine’s hand and released it quickly. She had to say something—Nicholas was staring.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ve heard of him. More than that—we’ve met.”

“A long time ago,” Lamartine put in, in a polite neutral tone. His accent was unchanged. Gini could still feel Jenkins’s eyes resting curiously on her face.

“Years ago,” she said rapidly, taking her tone from Lamartine. “I was still at school. Pascal is an old friend of my father’s.”

“Oh, I see,” said Jenkins—and to Gini’s relief lost interest at once.

Years ago, in Beirut. And he had never been a friend of her father’s—quite the reverse. Her father might have won that Pulitzer for his Vietnam work, but by that time fame and bourbon had made him soft.

“An old war horse,” he would say, easing himself into the first highball of the day, holding court in the Palm Bar at Beirut’s four-star Hotel Ledoyen, surrounded by fawning cronies. There was her father, sluicing bourbon and anecdotes, and there she was, silent, ignored, and embarrassed, averting her eyes from the spectacle, watching the ceiling fans as they rotated above his head.

An old war horse, an old news hound, a forty-six-year-old boozer. Her father, a living legend, the great Sam Hunter—worshipped by the rest of the press corps. These days he relied on stringers, helpers. Once a week he took a taxi to what he called the front.

And there, on the edge of the group, was a young photographer. He was French, introduced by an Australian reporter, the man from UPI at his side. Pascal Lamartine, aged twenty-three and already on his third Beirut trip. She had seen his photographs, and admired them. Sam Hunter had also seen them and dismissed them at once.

“Pictures? Who gives a damn?” It was one of his favorite refrains. “Spare me the Leica leeches, please God. One story’s worth a thousand pictures, I’ll tell you that. This stuff—today it rates an easy tear, tomorrow it’s wrapping trash. But words—they stick. They lodge in the goddamn reader’s goddamn brain. Genevieve, remember that.”

The contempt was mutual, she had known that at once. The Frenchman was introduced; he made some polite remark. He stood on the edge of the group. Some sycophant made some sycophantic joke, and her father was launched.

The Frenchman watched him quietly. He never spoke once, but Gini could feel the eddies of Lamartine’s dislike. She was young and naive, and she loved her father very much. The ceiling fans revolved; on and on her father talked, and Gini’s heart shriveled inside her. The young Frenchman stood there, silent and stony-faced. He made no effort to disguise his contempt.

Gini could feel Beirut on her skin now, in a newspaper dining room. She could smell Beirut—honey and pastries, arak and coffee grounds, cordite and mortar dust—while the English staff served them an English lunch. Nicholas Jenkins was speaking, but over and over and through his words came a richer sound—the clamor of the Beirut streets.

Machine-gun fire and the cries of street vendors; the liquid voices of the bar girls; the creak of louvered shutters, the sudden drum of summer rain, the Western songs seeping out from the dance halls, the thunderclap of bombs and wail of Arab ululations. She could feel it now, that new foreign land, that dry, rasping heat.

Pascal Lamartine had lived in a room by the harbor. It was next door to a bar, over a cheap dance hall: twelve feet square, bare as a monk’s cell, all his pictures filed in boxes. There was a mattress on the floor, two chairs, and one table. When she went to the room, she found that the dance-hall music from below filtered up. It made the air move and the floor vibrate like the deck of a ship. Several times, in the evenings, she’d stood at his window and watched night fall. When darkness came, the fishing boats left the harbor beyond, and the dancers below began their routines. She could hear the murmurs of their male audience, soft as distant thunder, a million miles beneath.

She’d imagine then, waiting, how it would be if Pascal did not come back. She’d hear the bomb, see the sniper, live his deaths. She would count the seconds, the clink of glasses from the bar, the passersby in the streets, whispers in foreign tongues. And then the door would open, and Pascal would come back.
Quick, my darling,
he would say, or she would say,
please be quick.

Smoky twilights; neon seeping through the shutters. She could smell his skin now, recollect the detail of his gaze, feel the touch of his hand. She closed her eyes, and thought, dear God, will I never forget?

Years ago, another place, another life. She had encountered Pascal just once since.

She looked up, tried to push the past back where it belonged, in the dead zone. She sipped a glass of water. A modish newspaper dining room deconstructed, then reassembled itself. The lunch provided was elaborate, unusually so, as if Jenkins intended to impress. In front of her on a white plate was a tiny bird of some kind, its glazed skin impaled with grapes. Jenkins was talking, and she had not heard a single word he’d said. Sense was fragmenting: Pascal sat three feet away from her as polite as a stranger. There was still a pair of handcuffs in her bag; this room was a very normal and a very crazy place.

Jenkins was drinking Meursault. He drained his glass and continued speaking. Beirut receded: This was some briefing, a new assignment. For the first time, Gini began to listen to what he said.

“…total confidentiality.” He smiled. Nicholas Jenkins, thirty-five, pink-cheeked, baby-faced, growing plump. He wore rimless nuclear-physicist-style eyeglasses. His bonhomie never quite disguised the fact that Jenkins was on the make.

“No leaks,” he continued, stabbing the air with his knife. “Anything you discover, we check it once, we check it twice. Make doubly sure. We can’t afford any errors. This story will be big.”

He looked from Gini to Pascal. He pushed his quail aside, half eaten. “I’m using you, Pascal, because I want pictures. Pictures equal proof. And I’m using you, Gini, because you have certain contacts.” He paused, and gave a tight secretive smile. “You’ll understand when I give you a name. Then you keep that name to yourselves. You don’t tout it at dinner tables. You don’t leave it in a notebook in the office. You don’t stick it up on a computer screen. You don’t use it on the office phones. You don’t trot it out to wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, favorite dog—you’ve both got that? Radio silence.”

He gave them both an impressive glance. “You work together on this. You start today, and you report to me—to me and no one else, under any circumstances. Understood?”

“Understood, Nicholas,” Gini replied, thinking what a self-dramatist he was.

She caught an answering glint of mockery in Pascal’s eyes. Then Jenkins came out with the name—and the glint of amusement vanished. Pascal’s face became alert. Like Gini, he started to pay attention, and at once.

“John Hawthorne.”

Jenkins leaned back in his chair, watching them. When he was sure they were suitably surprised and intrigued, he continued. A smile played around his lips.

“John Symonds Hawthorne—and the fabled Lise Courtney Hawthorne, his wife. Or to put it another way, His Excellency the United States ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. The American ambassador, and his wife.” He lifted his glass in a mock toast.

“The perfect couple, or so we’re always told. Except as I know, and you know, my dears—there’s no such thing as the perfect couple.”

Gini registered the name, and the implication—and was shocked. She began to concentrate. She had a reporter’s memory, and so did Pascal. As the index cards in her mind started to flick, she saw his expression also become intent. Names, dates, connections, rumors, new and old hints. She saw her own mental process mirrored, checking and rechecking, in his eyes.

Nicholas Jenkins would have liked a more dramatic reaction. He liked to stage-manage his own effects. Now, as if deciding to keep his revelations in reserve, to make them wait, he leaned forward, suddenly businesslike.

“Tell me what you know,” he said. “Then I’ll tell you what I’ve heard. Pascal, you first.”

Gini watched Pascal closely. The Pascal she once knew did not care much for ambassadors and their society wives. But this Pascal apparently did.

“Very well,” Pascal began. “Politics in the blood. Three generations of public service at least. The Hawthorne money comes from steel and shipyards originally. The younger brother—Prescott—runs the companies now. They were ranked sixth in America on the last Forbes list. John Hawthorne is aged around forty-six, forty-seven—”

“Forty-seven,” Jenkins put in. “He’ll be forty-eight in a couple of weeks.”

“Educated at Groton, then Yale. Went through Yale Law School.” Pascal paused. “He served in Vietnam, which for a man of his background makes him unusual, maybe unique.”

“
Not
a draft dodger. Unlike others we could all mention…”

“Indeed.” Pascal frowned. “What else? There’s his father, of course. Stanhope Symonds Hawthorne, known to his enemies as S. S. A not inappropriate nickname either, given his political views. Stanhope’s still alive, though he must be eighty at least. The legendary wheeler-dealer, the man at the heart of the political machine. He’s semiparalyzed now, I gather, from the last stroke. In a wheelchair. But he still lords it over that vast place they have in New York State.”

“S. S. Hawthorne,” Jenkins chuckled. “Old S. S. Kind of a cross between King Lear and Martin Bormann. Not the easiest of parents. What about the mother?”

“Long dead.” Pascal shrugged and lit a cigarette. “She was killed in a car crash years back, when Hawthorne was still a child, aged about eight. The father never remarried. He ruled the dynasty single-handed from then on.”

“And the wife? John Hawthorne’s wife?” Jenkins put in silkily.

“The famous Lise? She’s very beautiful, of course. Related to Hawthorne, I think, but distantly. Second cousins, third perhaps—I’d have to check. They married a decade ago. People say S. S. Hawthorne handpicked his son’s bride, but I don’t know about that. John Hawthorne was said to be besotted with her. Anyway, it was a notorious wedding. One thousand plus guests…” A glint of amusement returned to his eyes. “As I recall, the bride wore a thirty-thousand-dollar Saint Laurent dress.”

“Did you cover the wedding?” Jenkins asked.

Gini flinched.

Pascal gave him a cold look. “No,” he replied. “I told you, it was ten years ago. I was in Mozambique at the time. I didn’t cover society weddings then.”

“Yes, yes, of course.” Jenkins sounded impatient, unconcerned at his own lack of tact Other people’s past held no interest for him unless they had direct bearing on a story. “So, anything else, Pascal? You hear rumors—it’s your job to hear rumors. Any scandal about the Hawthornes? Any ripples, hints?”

“Nothing at all,” Pascal replied evenly. “But then, it’s some time since I was last in the States. I’ve been working in Europe this past year. Something could have come up in that time. All I hear is that the Hawthornes are unfashionably happy. Two children, both boys. Marital devotion…” A hard note had entered his voice. He shrugged. “Good works and public service. Husband and wife—everywhere seen, everywhere admired. In short, the perfect couple. Just as you said.”

Nicholas Jenkins gave Pascal a sharp glance. Gini felt that he might have liked to make some jibe and then restrained himself. Pascal Lamartine’s temper was well known. Jenkins obviously decided to watch his tongue. He leaned back in his chair, looking secretive and smug. How he loved information, Gini thought. Jenkins nursing a story was like a miser hoarding gold. He turned to her.

“Your turn, Gini. There’s plenty to add.”