A cluster of men in dark coats was moving rapidly down the steps. At the foot of those steps, a long black limousine had drawn up, engine running, doors open. Two operatives were already in position, one at the front of the car, one at the back, their practiced eyes raking the square.
Still the cluster of men came down the steps. Then, just by the car, as if at a hidden signal, the group parted and drew aside. One of the bodyguards raised his arm and spoke into his wrist mike. For half a second—no more—one man stood alone, poised to enter the car. Light caught his pale hair. Then he ducked and was inside the car, the door was closed, and the limousine was pulling away from the sidewalk.
Fast, discreet, one backup car, no outriders. From across the square Pascal had that half-second to glimpse the ambassador’s face.
Pure chance—but he had glimpsed his quarry. Pascal turned, and retraced his steps.
Chapter 8
“IS THAT MISS HUNTER? Miss Genevieve Hunter?” said the telephone voice.
The line was bad. The voice was interrupted by a series of clicks. Genevieve shook the receiver. She had been back in her apartment less than five minutes. Her cat was demanding food. She still had her coat on. She didn’t recognize the voice.
“What? Yes. Yes, that’s me….”
“It’s George, Miss Hunter.”
“Who? George who?”
“George from ICD. The courier service.” He sounded reproachful, “You told me to call.”
“Oh, that George. I’m sorry.” Gini struggled out of her coat. Tucking the receiver under her chin, she negotiated her living room. It was not tidy. Books and papers had spilled over onto the chairs; more piles of papers lay in wait underfoot. She made it to the tiny kitchen, Napoleon, a demanding cat, rubbing against her legs. “I’ve just gotten in. I wasn’t thinking. Can you hear that racket? It’s my cat. Demanding food. Go on talking. Ignore him. I’m listening, I’m just trying to find a can opener. And a can.”
“Well, I made my inquiries.” George sounded conspiratorial. He was, Gini thought, enjoying this. She found a can of cat food, attempted to open it one-handed, and gave a cry.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. I just cut myself on this damn can, that’s all. Go on.”
“The parcel went out from the City office, like I said. It was one of a batch of four, apparently.”
“Four?”
“That’s right. All identical, the supervisor said. Same wrapping, all used sealing wax. He remembered that.”
“There were four? That’s odd.” Gini spooned the cat food into Napoleon’s bowl and set it down by the sink. Napoleon stopped mewing and began in a fastidious but determined way to eat.
“Four.” Gini smiled. “You think they were all handcuffs?”
“Articles of clothing, that’s what the form said. The other three all went abroad. I couldn’t find out much more than that.”
“You couldn’t get addresses?”
“No. That side of things is confidential and I didn’t like to ask too much. You could, maybe. Talk to the girl upstairs, in dispatch.”
“I might just do that. In the morning. Thank you, George.”
“You get any problems, you can always give me a ring. I might be able to find out a bit more….” He paused. “It’s not nice, getting sent something like that anonymously. It’s a shock.”
“You’re right, George, it is.” Gini felt a sudden pity for the man: She could hear loneliness, and recognize it, she thought wryly, since she was often lonely herself.
She took his number, scribbled it on the back of an insurance bill she should have paid the previous week, and hung up. Napoleon had finished his supper. He looked pointedly at the meaty chunks remaining in the can. When the can was replaced in the refrigerator, he gave her one reproachful glance, then set about his toilette.
“Oh, Napoleon, Napoleon.” Gini kissed his head. “Handcuffs. And I’d almost forgotten them. Was someone trying to frighten me—or threaten me? Or just play a dumb joke? What do you think?”
Gini despised herself for this habit of talking to her cat but continued to indulge it. Napoleon took it well. When she returned to her living room, he glided behind her, leapt up into the only chair not piled with papers, and composed himself for sleep.
Gini, who was not planning on going out—why had she said that?—made a brief halfhearted attempt to straighten up her apartment. She transferred some of the papers from the floor to her desk. She lit the gas fire, which made the somewhat shabby room more welcoming. She kicked off her shoes, padded into the bedroom, surveyed encroaching chaos, shoved some of it into closets, straightened the duvet, and thus made the bed.
She found a whole heap of wash she’d forgotten for days, in which several pairs of panty hose were inextricably entwined in an octopus grip. She pushed the whole sorry mess into the machine, switched it on, and checked the fridge. It contained one orange, a piece of elderly cheese, the half can of cat food, a clove of garlic, two limp lettuce leaves, and one tuna fish sandwich wrapped in plastic which she’d forgotten, and which now smelled bad.
She tossed the sandwich into the garbage and slammed the fridge door. She briefly considered going out again and walking three blocks to Mr. Patel’s grocery store, the only one for miles that stayed open till eight o’clock. She phoned for a pizza instead.
On an impulse, waiting for the pizza to arrive, and feeling furtive and guilty, she rifled through the drawers of her desk. She despised sentimentality just as she despised pathetic people who talked to their cats, but even so, there at the back of a drawer, carefully hidden so she would be reminded as little as possible, was a shoebox. In the box were relics. Yes, relics, she said sternly to herself.
One by one, as she sat by the fire, she took them out. They were poor things, she thought: junk to most people, of significance only to herself. A card listing the hours of room service in the Hotel Ledoyen, Beirut; on the back of it, in pencil, Pascal had written his address. A yellowing paperback copy of a novel in French: L’Etrangère by Camus, bought because Pascal had once said he admired it, and because she had sworn to herself that she would read it the second she improved her French. A one-page letter from Pascal. A flower from a courtyard near his house, which he had picked for her once: It was unidentifiable now, a dry, brittle thing, scattering its few remaining petals at her touch. A bullet casing Pascal had once brought her for luck when the bullet in question had ricocheted and missed him by less than a foot. One earring, tiny, gold, of the kind made for and worn by Arab children. Pascal, a romantic, had talked the jewelry merchant into selling them by installments: this one now, for her birthday, its partner for Christmas. Christmas was then four months away. But by Christmas they had parted. Pascal was in Beirut still, but she had left.
She took the little earring out of the box and held it in the palm of her hand. Its purchase had been an extended transaction. She could see the dim interior of the merchant’s shop, the glitter of gold and silver, the scales the merchant used to determine cost by weight. She and Pascal sat on upright chairs; a boy brought them sweet mint tea. The smallest, simplest purchase, she was learning, had its rituals in Beirut. The jewelry merchant spoke to Pascal in a mixture of French and Arabic. He was explaining, Pascal said to her with a smile, that such a gift, from a young man to a young woman, was a sacred affair.
“He will be disappointed if we choose quickly,” Pascal said in English. “Sip the tea slowly. This has to last half an hour at least.”
She had sipped the tea. She could taste, now, the sugar and mint. She could hear the murmur and rasp of French and Arabic. She had stared at the floor and told herself that now, now, was the moment to confess. She must explain to Pascal now, before the purchase was made, that she had lied about her age. The sentence was simple enough: Pascal, I am not eighteen, I’m fifteen. She stared at the floor. Gold glittered. The simple sentence refused to be said. Pascal was showing her a ring, then a bracelet. She shook her head. She swallowed:
Perhaps there was a softer way of putting it? If she explained that her forthcoming birthday would be her sixteenth, would that sound better? After all, back in Britain sixteen was the official age of consent.
She averted her gaze. It made no difference: No matter how she put it, the fact remained that she had misled him, and if he discovered the truth, she knew how he would react. He would be angry, guilty—perhaps contrite. However he reacted, it would be over, she was certain of that. So she had said nothing, not one word. The heat in the shadowy room intensified. She sat there, flushed and miserable, in an agony of deceit. Later, back in his bare white room, Pascal clipped the little gold earring into place. He kissed her earlobe, then looked at her anxiously. “You like it? You’re sure you like it? It looks so tiny….”
“I like it. I love it. I love you.” She flung her arms around him and hid her hot face against his neck. Age did not really matter, the lie was not an important one, she told herself: One day she would explain to him, but not yet, not yet. Midday heat shimmered; reflections of waves moved on the white walls. Closing the shutters, she took his hand and drew him toward the bed. They lay down, and the lie no longer mattered. Time passed: hours, days, a week more together—until the break finally came, that one little truth was never expressed.
Let the past rest. She took the little earring and hooked it into place. An indulgence, perhaps, bringing with it the ghost of an old happiness. Then the ordinary present reasserted itself. The pizza arrived. She removed the earring, packed it carefully away with the other relics, pushed all of them into the box, and back into the desk drawer. She was stern with herself. No more relics, no more nostalgia, she told herself. She unpacked the newspaper clippings she had photocopied and spread them out on her desk.
John Hawthorne’s and Lise Hawthorne’s features stared back at her. She forced herself to concentrate. The Hawthornes, that perfect couple, looked famous, familiar, and unreadable. She sighed, and sank her head in her hands: Behind this public façade, was there a secret life?
When she had been working for over an hour, she took a break, made coffee, returned to her desk. She felt a sense of frustration. Here were all the staging-posts of a glittering career, here were the same anecdotes, the same quotes, endlessly repeated. Here was Hawthorne at twenty, at thirty, at forty—yet what had she actually learned? It was as if what she was reading was an authorized version, formulated years before, perhaps by an astute PR adviser, perhaps by Hawthorne’s father, or by Hawthorne himself. It was all too perfect, all too pat. Most of the interviews recycled material first given by Hawthorne long before, a phenomenon she was familiar with. It meant either that the journalists concerned had been lazy, content to write from clippings, or that Hawthorne himself refused to depart from a set script. No one here seemed to have reached below his guard: Even those journalists obviously hostile to him wrote articles that lacked sting. Unlike his notoriously right-wing father, Hawthorne had an impeccable civil rights record. Sure, he had fought in Vietnam in the late sixties and had been decorated three times for valor; but before he was drafted he had marched in Selma and Birmingham and been befriended by Martin Luther King. His political stance now was equally hard to define: pro-Israel, markedly so. In favor of massive aid to the Russians but an early advocate of intervention in Bosnia. Strong on law enforcement, a hard-liner on capital punishment, a supporter of the NRA and anti-gun-law reform, yet a liberal when it came to abortion and women’s rights.
Not a unique balancing act in American politics, perhaps, but one Hawthorne performed with exceptional skill nonetheless. Was this the result of conviction, or opportunism? It was impossible to judge. She had only her instincts to guide her, and her initial reaction was suspicion: Hawthorne looked too good and smelled too clean. He was too adroit, too careful, too perfect—a verdict that applied equally to his political and to his personal life.
The coverage of that personal life was extensive, the price Hawthorne paid for a famous name, a privileged background, and exceptional good looks. Here, before her, was Hawthorne the devoted husband, Hawthorne the proud father, and—old clippings these—Hawthorne the golden youth.
Here he was as an eighteen-year-old, flanked by his younger brother, Prescott, by all three sisters, and by the patriarch, S. S. Hawthorne himself. They stood outside the Hawthornes’ country house overlooking the Hudson. John Hawthorne smiled fixedly at the camera, his father’s arm around his shoulders; two spaniels lay panting at their feet.
The resemblance between father and son was strong. Both were tall, strong-featured, strikingly blond. Both conveyed a certain arrogance in their stance, Gini thought—or was that something she read into the photograph, a prejudice of her own, a reaction to the wide lawns, the expensive sports cars parked in the drive, and the towering façade of the house itself? She looked at the picture more closely. Thirty years old, a blurred photocopy of blurred newsprint. On closer examination, she decided John Hawthorne looked ill at ease and constrained, as if he endured with reluctance that fatherly embrace.
She pushed that picture aside and turned to others. A young Hawthorne with numerous well-connected girlfriends, but then the young Hawthorne had a reputation as a Lothario. There seemed to be a new girlfriend each month. Hawthorne at Yale with a group of friends—John sprawled in a chair while two unidentified women knelt in worshipful attitudes at his feet. Pictures of him in uniform; pictures of him as a young congressman, then as a senator. The first photograph of Hawthorne with Lise, snatched for a gossip column as they left a Washington restaurant together. They were indeed, as Pascal had suggested, related. Third cousins, Gini saw, friendly since early childhood, part of the immense tribe of interlinked Hawthornes and Courtneys who seemed to spend the endless summers of their youth in a round of parties at one another’s estates. Long Island, Nantucket, Tuscany; a stud farm on the west coast of Ireland; an English manor house in Wiltshire; a castle belonging to the Scottish branch of the family, in Perthshire—they moved around the globe, the golden members of this tribe, always to an aunt, an uncle, a cousin’s place, always to a house where there were servants, tennis courts, swimming pools, horses, abundant acres. They journeyed, Gini thought, and yet they remained cocooned in that citadel peculiar to the rich.
John Hawthorne and his distant cousin Lise had reencountered each other, she saw, some eleven years before. Lise, who had had some training in art history, had been away working for old family friends in Italy, cataloguing their art collection. It was some five or six years since she and her senator cousin had met. Their remeeting was staged by Hawthorne’s father—or so the gossip columns claimed—and it took place at the Southampton estate of another distant cousin, Lord Kilmartin, a diplomat then assigned to the U.N.
Hawthorne was then thirty-six, and known as one of Washington’s most eligible bachelors; Lise was twenty-eight, though she looked much younger; she was then in mourning for her parents, killed in an air crash some six months before. According to the newspapers, the attraction had been immediate, the courtship swift. Certainly the engagement was brief.
Within a year, the celebrated wedding. Gini scanned the photocopies in front of her. Again, she saw, Pascal had been correct. There was Lise, radiant, legendarily lovely, encased from neck to ankles in a nunlike, virginal, Yves Saint Laurent dress. Her black hair was worn loose; a white lace veil framed her beautiful face. The train, of heavy silk, was fifteen yards long, requiring four diminutive pages and six tiny bridesmaids in processional behind the bride to keep the train in place.
The wedding of the decade, the headlines screamed. And a decade later, here were all the details: the name of the Catholic bishop who officiated at the nuptial mass; the special flights and trains laid on for the thousand-plus guests. S. S. Hawthorne had piloted his own helicopter to the ceremony. In the photographs, formal and informal, he was ubiquitous, resplendent in morning dress.
Fireworks had lit the sky—a Hawthorne family tradition. The dancing began at midnight and continued to dawn. The roste
r of guests’ names was an illustrious one—statesmen, politicians, a clutch of Euro-titles; the Hollywood contingent, the authors, the diplomats, the opera diva, the English duchess.
There were many famous names here, and some infamous ones, since S. S. Hawthorne, less circumspect than his son, had contacts going back decades that might have surprised, even alarmed, some of the other wedding guests. A Middle Eastern arms dealer, for instance; a Sicilian-American rumored to own a tranche of Las Vegas clubs…. If such guests were cold-shouldered by his son, S. S. Hawthorne, Gini saw, had made up for any neglect. There he was with the arms dealer, here with the Sicilian. Robust, huge, unquenchable, indestructible, radiating purpose and energy even from faded newsprint: S. S. Hawthorne, networking, pressing the flesh.
And here, finally, were the formal photographs, the posed wedding-group pictures, taken by Lord Lichfield. They had an idyllic and yet a mysterious quality. Perfectly posed, perfectly lit, they were designed to convey perfection—and yet Gini felt they suggested something beneath and beyond: There was an inner story here, she sensed, of which Lichfield conveyed hints.
In all the official wedding pictures, John Hawthorne seemed at ease with himself. Tall, debonair, astonishingly blond, his cool blue gaze rested unerringly on the heart of the photographer’s lens. He appeared, throughout, to be slightly amused by this circus; in every photograph there was a curious, almost disdainful, half-smile on his lips.
His bride, then little used to such publicity, looked as lovely as legend claimed, but also a little nervous, a little stiff. Later, as Gini knew, Lise Hawthorne would master the art of the photo opportunity, but here, at the very beginning of her public career, her inexperience showed. She clung to her new husband’s arm as if in need of support; her eyes were either modestly lowered or fixed in anxious devotion on her new husband’s face. There was a startled, almost sacrificial quality about her, Gini decided. Her wide, dark eyes stared out of newsprint a decade old, and they seemed to carry a plea—as if Lise, encountering fame in its raw form for the first time, were silently praying to escape.
Lovers and Liars Trilogy Page 9
