“Yeah,” the bartender said, picking up the bill and putting it under her apron. She watched Janette leave, then waddled back to the bar. “Drink up, ladies,” she said. “We’re closing for the night.”
Janette pulled the mini up on the sidewalk in front of her house, then got out and locked it. As she walked around the car to go to the steps, two men came out of the shadows of the house next door.
“Madame Janette de la Beauville?” one of them asked.
“Yes,” she answered, pausing for a moment. Then a sudden cold dread ran through her and she turned to run up the steps to the door.
But the moment’s hesitation had been enough. One of the men caught her by the arm and pulled her brutally back. She stared up at him, trying to see his face in the dark. “If it’s money you want,” she said, fear almost choking the voice in her throat, “I’ll give it to you. It’s all in my back pocket.”
“We don’t want your money,” the man said in a strangely accented, almost amused voice. “We have a message for you from an old friend.”
They were the last words she heard for a long while. Almost at the same moment, she felt a fist crash into her face. She felt her nose and her cheekbone crack. “Oh, no,” she remembered thinking, then the blood poured into her mouth and she began to fall.
It was all a haze of pain after that. She heard occasional moans without realizing they were her own; the sharp continuing blows on her face and body never seemed to come to an end. She tried to scream for help but her voice drowned in her throat. Never quite unconscious but never conscious either, all she could do was grunt in pain with each blow. Then she was lying on the concrete sidewalk feeling their heavy boots kicking into her sides. Then as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped.
She felt rather than saw the men bending over her. “That should do it,” one of them said, laughing. She remembered thinking what a strange accent he had and felt his hand searching the breast pocket of her shirt. She wanted to tell him the money wasn’t there, it was in her back pocket. But then he drew away. He laughed again. “Goodbye, Janette.”
After a few moments she tried to move. The pain knifed through her body and she screamed but there was no sound. Slowly she began to crawl up the steps. It seemed to take years of agony to reach the door. Finally she made it. It took another thousand years for her to reach up and press the doorbell. And then a million years for it to open.
She could only hear the shocked horror in the voice of the butler. “Madame!” Then she went headlong into the night.
It was six weeks later and she was sitting in the darkness of her room watching a stupid afternoon movie on the television set. There was a knock at the door and the butler came into the room.
“Yes?” she asked.
“Monsieur Jacques is here to see you, Madame.”
“Send him away,” she said sharply. “I don’t want to see anyone.”
“You can’t send him away,” Jacques said. “He’s already here.”
Quickly she pressed the remote control she had in her hand and the television set went dark. The butler left the room, closing the door behind him. Jacques came toward her. Quickly she turned the wheelchair away from him.
“Don’t turn away from me, Janette,” he said.
“I don’t want you to see me,” she said in a husky, unused voice. “I’m not very pleasant to look at.”
“I’m not concerned about that,” he said. He walked around in front of her. “Do you know what day this is?”
She turned away so that he could not look into her face. “It’s a day just like any other. What difference does it make?”
“A big difference,” he said. “It’s your birthday. I brought you flowers.”
“So now I’m forty as well as ugly,” she said in a bitter voice.
“You’ll never be ugly to me,” he said. “Besides, it’s only a matter of time. The doctors perform miracles today.”
“They’ll need all they can find to help me,” she said.
“You have the faith, Janette,” he said. “And they will find them. You have to want to be healed before they can heal you.”
She was silent.
“You’re not a coward, Janette,” he said. “You never were afraid of a fight before.”
She began to cry almost silently. “That was because I never really knew what fear was. When those two men were hitting me I was never so afraid in my life. And it wasn’t only the pain I was afraid of, I was afraid that it would stop. Because when it stopped and I would feel nothing, I would be dead.”
Gently he took her hand. “Who did this to you, Janette?” he asked softly. “I know the police haven’t been able to find out anything, but was it Maurice? If it was, you tell me and I’ll kill him”
She shook her head. “It wasn’t Maurice.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I know who did it,” she said. She remembered finding the card that had been stuffed in her shirt that night when she had thought they were looking for her money. It was on her dresser when she came home and the maid said it had fallen from her shirt when she had taken it to be washed. It was a simple white card with only a name printed on it. Nico Caramanlis.
“It doesn’t matter now,” she said. “It’s over and I just want to forget it.”
He was silent for a moment, then got to his feet and walked to the windows. Quickly he pulled back the draperies, letting the sunlight fall into the room. As quickly she raised her hands to her face, hiding it.
He came back to her and, kneeling before her, took her wrists in his hands and slowly moved them away from her face. “Let the daylight in, Janette,” he said gently, looking into her eyes. “You can’t spend the rest of your life hiding in the dark.”
Her eyes searched his questioningly.
“You still have too much to give,” he said. He paused for a moment. “See, it’s not so bad, is it?”
She began to cry again, the tears falling silently down her cheeks. Slowly he drew her down to him and held her head against his chest.
“I would have come sooner had I known,” he said. “But I was in China and I didn’t see a French newspaper until three days ago. Then I knew I had to come home. You see, Janette, I was hiding too.”
“Jacques,” she whispered. “Jacques.”
He kissed the top of her head softly. “Yes,” he said. “I’m back. And it will be the two of us again. You and me. And we’ll have fun again and laugh again and love again.”
“Yes, Jacques, yes,” she whispered. “Tell me.”
He looked down at her, the tears filling his own eyes. “I’ll never stop telling you, Janette.”
IV
The Adventurers
Contents
Epilogue as a Prologue
VII. Book One: VIOLENCE and POWER
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
VIII. Book Two: POWER and MONEY
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
IX. Book Three: MONEY and MARRIAGE
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
X. Book Four: MARRIAGE and FASHION
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
Chapter 122
Chapter 123
Chapter 124
Chapter 125
Chapter 126
Chapter 127
Chapter 128
Chapter 129
Chapter 130
Chapter 131
Chapter 132
Chapter 133
Chapter 134
Chapter 135
Chapter 136
Chapter 137
Chapter 138
Chapter 139
Chapter 140
XI. Book Five: FASHION and POLITICS
Chapter 141
Chapter 142
Chapter 143
Chapter 144
Chapter 145
Chapter 146
Chapter 147
Chapter 148
Chapter 149
Chapter 150
Chapter 151
Chapter 152
Chapter 153
Chapter 154
Chapter 155
Chapter 156
Chapter 157
Chapter 158
Chapter 159
Chapter 160
Chapter 161
Chapter 162
Chapter 163
Chapter 164
XII. Book Six: POLITICS and VIOLENCE
Chapter 165
Chapter 166
Chapter 167
Chapter 168
Chapter 169
Chapter 170
Chapter 171
Chapter 172
Chapter 173
Chapter 174
Chapter 175
Chapter 176
Chapter 177
Chapter 178
Chapter 179
Chapter 180
Chapter 181
Chapter 182
Chapter 183
Chapter 184
Chapter 185
Chapter 186
Chapter 187
Chapter 188
Chapter 189
Chapter 190
Chapter 191
Chapter 192
Chapter 193
Chapter 194
Chapter 195
Chapter 196
Chapter 197
Chapter 198
Chapter 199
Chapter 200
Postscript
Many thanks to the man who wears the hat, Bradley Yonover.
Epilogue as a Prologue
It was ten years after the violence in which he died. And his time on this earth was over. The lease he held on this last tiny cubicle of refuge had expired. Now the process would be completed. He would return to the ashes and the dust of the earth from which he had come.
The tropical sun threw waves of white-hot humidity against the black-painted crosses on the white clay cemetery walls as the American journalist got out of his taxi at the rusted iron gates. He gave the driver a five-peso note and turned away before the driver had time to say, “Gracias.”
The little flower stalls were already busy. Black-clad women were buying small bunches of flowers, their heavy dark veils seeming to shield them from the heat and the world from their grief. The beggars were also there, the little children with their large dark eyes set in hollow black circles, their bellies swollen with hunger. As he passed they held out their grubby little hands for the coins he negligently dropped into them.
Once through the gate there was silence. It was as if some master switch had turned off the world outside. There was a uniformed man sitting in an open booth. He went over to him.
“Xenos, por favor?”
He thought there was a faint expression of surprise on the man’s face as he answered, “Calle seis, apartamiento veinte.”
The American journalist turned away smiling. Even in death they clung to the routines of living. The paths were called streets and the buildings within whose walls they rested were apartments. Then he wondered about the surprise on the man’s face.
He had been in the lobby of the new hotel, leafing through the local newspapers as he always did whenever he came into a new town, when he found the notice he had been searching for. It was a tiny four lines buried amidst the back pages, almost lost in the welter of other large notices.
He was walking down a path of elaborate private mausoleums. Idly he observed the names. Ramirez. Santos. Oberon. Lopez. He sensed the chill coming from the white marble despite the heat of the sun. He felt the perspiration damp and cool on his collar.
Now the path had widened. On his left were open fields. There were small graves in them. Small, untended, forgotten. These were the graves of the poor. Thrown into the earth in flimsy wooden caskets, left to disintegrate into nature without care or memory. To his right were the apartados. The tenements of the dead.
They were big buildings with red and gray Spanish tiled roofs, twenty feet high, forty feet wide, eighty feet long, of white cement blocks, three by three, and cheating a little on each side so that more tenants could occupy the walls they filled. Each three-foot square bore the name of its tenant, a small cross above the name etched into the cement and the date of death below.
He looked up at the first building. There was a small metal plate attached to the overhanging sheaf. CALLE 3, APARTAMIENTO 1. He had a long way to walk. The heat began to pour into him. He loosened his collar and quickened his pace. It was almost the time and he didn’t want to be late.
At first he thought he had come to the wrong place. There was no one there. Not even the workmen. He checked the metal plate on the building, then the time on his wristwatch. They were both correct. He opened the newspaper to see if he had mistaken the date but that was right too. Then he let out a soft sigh of relief and lit a cigarette. This was Latin America. Time wasn’t as exact here as it was at home.
He began to walk slowly around the building, reading the names on the squares. At last he found what he was looking for. Hidden in a shaded corner under the overhang on the southwest corner of the building. An instinct made him throw down his cigarette and remove his hat. He stared up at the inscription.
He heard a creaking wagon on the cobblestones behind him. He turned toward the sound. It was an open wagon drawn by a tired burro, its ears flat against its head in protest at being forced to labor in the heat. The wagon was driven by a laborer in faded khaki work clothes. Next to him on the seat was a man dressed in a black suit, black hat, and a starched white collar already yellow from the sweat and dust of the day. Beside the wagon walked another laborer, a pickax over his shoulder.
The wagon creaked to a stop and the black-clad man clambered down from his seat. He took out a sheet of white paper from his inside coat pocket, glanced at it, then began to peer along the walls at the nameplates. It wasn’t until he came to a stop before him that the journalist realized that they had come to open the vault.
The man gestured and the laborer with the pickax came over and stared up at the cubicle. He muttered something in soft Spanish under his breath and the other laborer wearily climbed down from the wagon, pulling behind him a small ladder made of pieces of wood nailed together. He placed it against the wall and climbed up. He peered closely at the cement-block vault.
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