Lovers and Liars Trilogy (92 page)

From the base of the stairs to the car took the first of the men about fifteen seconds. He vaulted the fence, was across the sidewalk and into the car. As he slid into it, he shouted, “Now.”

McMullen was no more than twenty yards behind him, the second man immediately on his heels. Pascal thought afterward that McMullen never once guessed that there was anything wrong. The man behind him shot him once, in the back, just as he reached the fence. McMullen slumped against it. His companions were inside the car, and the sedan had disappeared with a screech of rubber before McMullen twisted. He coughed up a long spurt of bright arterial blood, and fell to the ground.

Pascal moved fast. He wiped the rifle stock clean of his own prints. He removed his camera and wound on some fifteen frames of unused film. He moved silently and very fast down the stairs. The sirens were closer now, and very loud.

It would have been timed, he knew, so the police cars arrived about a minute and a half after it was all over. He might have about thirty seconds; he needed no more than fifteen.

The door at the bottom of the stairs was open. No one was visible in the courtyard now. Pascal walked out, his hands raised, holding the camera above his head. Five yards from the entrance he bent and carefully placed the camera on the ground. The sirens were very loud now, whooping and wailing. He could see the flash of blue lights in the corner of his vision, to his left, near the entrance to the park. Keeping his hands to his sides, he walked away from the lights, across the courtyard, and out into the main road beyond. He thought he was probably safe, because a dead French photographer would be an inconvenience, an unnecessary complication to whatever cover story had been planned, but even so, as he walked, he could feel vulnerability the length of his spine.

He reached the main road two seconds before the first of the police cars drew alongside. He could not see his camera from here, but he knew it would already have been removed. He began to walk away at a fast pace, heading for the rough open ground beyond the mosque and immediately opposite the residence lodge. There he vaulted the railings, ran fast across the rough grass, and crossed the road.

He reached the residence lodge a few seconds after the mayhem began. Men were running in all directions. The driveway was blocked by cars. The first of the ambulances had already arrived; white-coated men were running in the direction of the rear gardens. The air was flashing, alarms were ringing, and out of the havoc and confusion, Pascal saw the white-haired man appear. He was in a wheelchair which he was propelling along the path from the gardens. He burst through the group of paramedics, wheeled the chair around fast, began to follow them back toward the gardens, then seemed to change his mind. He wheeled to his left, then his right, then spun around to face the ambulance. He came to an abrupt halt at the edge of the drive.

He sat there in magnificent isolation amid the running figures and the shouts and the sirens and flashing lights. His hands gripped the arms of his chair. Then two men in black blazers ran up to him. One bent over him; the other, who was weeping, knelt by his side.

A second ambulance was arriving, and a third. The gates were jammed open with vehicles and people. Pascal was about to pass through in the confusion, when a hand touched his arm. He swung around, to find Gini and that huge security man, Malone, at her side.

“Get her out of here,” Malone said. “Get her out of here fast.”

Pascal took off his jacket and wrapped it around her. She was drenched in blood, and scarcely able to move. As he began to guide her away, he looked back one last time through the havoc.

The man in the wheelchair had arched back and lifted both his arms. His face was distorted with rage and grief. As Pascal watched, he began to scream abuse at the sky.

T
HE LONDON MEMORIAL SERVICE
for John Hawthorne was, as Pascal had expected, perfectly stage-managed: held at the Roman Catholic cathedral in Westminster, it was a somber but magnificent affair.

Mary and Gini had both insisted on attending. Pascal went less willingly—he saw it as the culmination of weeks of cover-up, weeks of misinformation and lies.

“All right,” he had said to Gini angrily in her apartment the night before. “I can see that Mary has to attend. But, darling, we don’t. They gave him a hero’s funeral. Now they’re giving him a statesman’s memorial service. I know what he truly was. You know what he truly was. Why should we participate in their lies?”

“Because I don’t see it that way,” Gini had said in the same quiet, obstinate way she adopted whenever Pascal mentioned Hawthorne’s name. “You wouldn’t either, not if you’d been there when Hawthorne died.”

Pascal could hear the rebuke at the back of her tone, and he remained silent. He gave up his protests and arguments because he could see they hurt Gini; he agreed to accompany her here.

They were seated halfway down on the left-hand side of the cathedral’s massive echoing nave. An organist was playing a Bach toccata and fugue. There must be, Pascal estimated, some seven or eight hundred people attending this ceremony, which was due to begin in ten minutes. As yet the seats in the nave were three quarters taken, groups of people still arrived. In front of him, toward the high altar, was an array of famous faces; he could recognize many distinguished men here—British politicians and diplomats, including the prime minister, and most of the cabinet. Men who might have been senior civil servants, or captains of industry, a number of army and naval officers, three newspaper proprietors including Hawthorne’s friend, Henry Melrose, several newspaper editors, familiar faces from broadcasting, and groupings of other celebrities, writers, filmmakers, a conductor, an opera singer, who were, Pascal knew, family friends.

Pascal glanced toward Gini and Mary. Both were wearing black. Gini’s face was tight and pale; Mary was close to tears. He looked down at his order of service, which he saw was to include readings from both the Bible and Shakespeare, and the “Sanctus” from Mozart’s
Requiem.
His mouth tightened as he thought:
All the best strings will be pulled.

The very front row of seats to the right of the nave were still empty: the family, Pascal knew, would sit there. He thought of the funeral Hawthorne had been given at Washington’s Arlington Cemetery, which he had watched on CNN. That had been dominated by the presence of Hawthorne’s father, in his wheelchair at the graveside, and by the frail, veiled, black-clad figure of Lise, who had stood beside her father-in-law, her black-gloved hands on the shoulders of her two blond-haired sons. She had been escorted, on that occasion, by Hawthorne’s younger brother, Prescott, and flanked by his sisters and their children. He wondered now how many of that family group would have flown over, and would be here.

He had the answer to his question shortly afterward. Beneath the magnificence of the music there was not complete silence in the cathedral but a decorous, just-audible hum as this distinguished congregation exchanged low-whispered comments: There was a feeling, despite the music, the incense, the quiet ministrations of ushers, subsidiary priests, and security men, that this was drama as well as a religious service; the atmosphere was akin to that in a theater in the split second when the audience realizes the curtain is about to rise. Abruptly, that background whispering stilled.

The Roman Catholic archbishop conducting the service began to move forward up the aisle; he was followed by attendant priests, by a boy carrying a gold crucifix, and behind this slowly moving group by Hawthorne’s immediate family. Pascal saw the younger brother, Prescott, with a pale Lise on his arm; Hawthorne’s two young sons, various sisters; then, last of all, with a faint hiss and a faint whine, by the wheelchair in which S. S. Hawthorne was seated, flanked by two black-suited security men.

When she heard that wheelchair, Gini averted her eyes. Pascal saw her stare straight ahead, into the high, dark, echoing spaces behind and above the altar. The music swelled and beat around his head. A few minutes later, the prayers and psalms began.

Pascal could see that both Gini and Mary found the procedures confusing; neither was quite sure when to kneel, when to sit or stand. It was many years since Pascal had attended Mass, and the last occasion on which he had done so had been in a tiny village church in Provence. He found that a gap of some twenty years made little difference. These rituals and responses were in his bones; he knew them from his earliest childhood onward, and to his own surprise he found they retained a deep power over him.

He found to his surprise also that he was deeply moved. He thought back to the time before he lapsed; he considered the fact that, in the eyes of his church, he had lived in a state of sin for many years. The church of his childhood recognized neither his civil marriage nor his divorce, nor the Anglican baptism upon which Helen had insisted for Marianne.

His unease intensified as each minute passed. Was he justified in judging and condemning John Hawthorne? Before entering the church he would not have hesitated to do so; now, suddenly, he felt less sure. On an impulse, he rose abruptly to his feet. He was in an aisle seat, and could leave quietly without attracting attention. Suddenly he felt he had to leave: It felt unbearable to be here.

Gini glanced toward him as he rose, then looked away. Mary had already begun to cry. Pascal turned, and walked out. He stood on the steps outside the cathedral. It was a sunny, cold March day. He began to pace back and forth in an agitated way. Traffic passed. It was a day very like the one on which Hawthorne had died. Pascal thought and thought. He stared up at the small, tight clouds that raced across the sky.

When, exactly, had he realized for the first time that none of them had seen the full extent of this story—not Gini, not himself, not John Hawthorne or his father, not even James McMullen and Lise. He had begun to understand, he thought, when he realized that McMullen, standing on that high platform with his rifle in his hand, had
expected
those black-clad figures to be below them in the courtyard. He had suspected the truth then, and he had known it for certain when he watched McMullen make his escape with men he believed to be aiding him, believed were his friends. When they shot him in the back, Pascal thought:
I knew then.

It angered him that he had not seen any indication earlier. He had enough experience after all. He had seen this kind of covert operation carried out elsewhere in the world: He had seen it in the Falklands, in Beirut; it was commonplace in Belfast. Why had he not guessed that McMullen was not simply a lone assassin, but a man who was being used, a man who would inevitably be dispensed with once that usefulness came to an end?

So who had been using McMullen, and who had determined that John Hawthorne had to die? The CIA, or British security—or some unholy alliance between the two? Pascal could see that Hawthorne, with his pro-Israeli stance, would have made powerful Middle Eastern enemies; he could also see that vested interests in America—political, nationalistic, or even military—might have viewed Hawthorne as an embarrassment best removed, for with Hawthorne, of course, died the truth about an incident in Vietnam.

There were numerous candidates, and Pascal—suspicious of conspiracy theories, that twentieth-century disease—was unwilling to select one, unwilling to enter that particular maze. Whoever had masterminded these events, was efficient, as were most of their kind. Even as he led Gini away from Regent’s Park that day, he had known what they would find when they returned to the houses they had been using: No evidence—that was what they would find.

He had warned Gini, who had not believed him, and who in any case was in a state of shock so deep she could not care. And he had been right. In St. John’s Wood, in Hampstead, in Islington: no film, no tapes, no notebooks, no disks, no handcuffs, shoes, stockings, wrapping paper. Every single fragment of evidence had been painstakingly removed.

“None of it happened,” he had said to Gini later. “None of it. That’s the effect they’re after, darling—can you not see? They’ve taken the last two weeks, and they’ve made them a fiction, a dream.”

So who were these shadows who had decided the time had come for John Hawthorne to be surgically removed? Pascal suspected that both the Americans and the British were involved, and that whoever gave the final order was highly placed. That suspicion was confirmed when, as the dream-spinners and the news-novelists got busy with the headlines, and the authorized version of John Hawthorne’s murder began to appear, the first discreet pressure was applied.

Within twenty-four hours of Hawthorne’s death, a meeting was arranged. It took place on the morning following Hawthorne’s killing, in an anonymous apartment in Whitehall. Present were Gini and Pascal, an Englishman whose name was never used, an American who said little but listened professionally, and that security man drafted in from Washington, Malone.

The Englishman wore an unlikely tweed suit, and looked as if he had just wandered in from some country estate in the shires. This was deceptive: He asked a great many questions to which Pascal was certain he already knew the answers; he had a chill manner and highly intelligent, highly alert eyes. When he paused, the quiet American took over; he concentrated on Gini, Pascal noted: The manner he affected was sympathetic and warm.

It went on for over two hours. Pascal adopted the procedure that had served him well enough in the past: He simply denied everything. He had been nowhere, seen nothing, and had nothing to report. This, he could see, did not please them. The Englishman in particular was riled by his increasingly insolent tone.

“Monsieur Lamartine,” he said, leaning forward. “Could we stop this pretense and stop it now? If you have no story, were not working on any story, and therefore have no intention of trying to publish your nonexistent story, why did you telephone two American magazines yesterday evening, and this morning why did you contact
Paris Jour
?”

“Routine.” Pascal shrugged. “I work for those editors all the time.”