Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Douglas Kennedy
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Copyright
About the Book
Robin knew Paul wasn’t perfect. But he said they were so lucky to have found each other, and she believed it was true.
In the heady strangeness of Morocco, he is everything she wants him to be – passionate, talented, knowledgeable. She is convinced that it is here she will finally become pregnant.
But when Paul suddenly disappears, and Robin finds herself the prime suspect in the police inquiry, everything changes.
As her understanding of the truth starts to unravel, Robin lurches from the crumbling art deco of Casablanca to the daunting Sahara, caught in an increasingly terrifying spiral from which there is no easy escape.
With his acclaimed ability to write page-turners that also make you think, Douglas Kennedy takes the reader on a roller-coaster journey into a heart of darkness that asks the question: what would you do if your life depended on it?
About the Author
Douglas Kennedy’s previous novels include the critically acclaimed bestsellers The Big Picture, The Pursuit of Happiness, A Special Relationship and The Moment. He is also the author of three highly-praised travel books. The Big Picture was filmed with Romain Duris and Catherine Deneuve; The Woman in the Fifth with Ethan Hawke and Kristen Scott Thomas. His work has been translated into twenty-two languages. In 2007 he was awarded the French decoration of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and in 2009 the inaugural Grand Prix du Figaro. Born in Manhattan in 1955, he has two children and currently divides his time between London, Paris, Berlin, Maine and New York.
ALSO BY DOUGLAS KENNEDY
Fiction
The Dead Heart
The Big Picture
The Job
The Pursuit of Happiness
A Special Relationship
State of the Union
Temptation
The Woman in the Fifth
Leaving the World
The Moment
Five Days
Non-fiction
Beyond the Pyramids
In God’s Country
Chasing Mammon
The Heat of Betrayal
Douglas Kennedy
Again for Christine
Run up the sail, my heartsick comrades;
Let each horizon tilt and lurch—
You know the worst: your wills are fickle,
Your values blurred, your hearts impure
And your past life a ruined church—
But let your poison be your cure.
from Louis MacNeice, ‘Thalassa’
One
FIRST LIGHT. AND I didn’t know where I was any more.
The sky outside: was it a curved rotunda of emerging blue? The world was still blurred at its edges. I tried to piece together my whereabouts, the exact geographic location within which I found myself. A sliver of emerging clarity. Or maybe just a few basic facts.
Such as:
I was on a plane. A plane that had just flown all night across the Atlantic. A plane bound for a corner of North Africa, a country which, when viewed cartographically, looks like a skullcap abreast a continent. According to the Flight Progress Monitor illuminating the back-of-the-seat screen facing me, we were still seventy-three minutes and eight hundred and forty-two kilometres (I was flying into a metric world) from our destination. This journey hadn’t been my idea. Rather I’d allowed myself to be romanced into it by the man whose oversize (as in six-foot-four) frame was scrunched into the tiny seat next to mine. The middle seat in this horror movie of an aircraft. No legroom, no wiggle room, every seat taken, at least six screaming babies, a husband and wife fighting in hissed Arabic, bad ventilation, bad air conditioning, a one-hour wait for the bathroom after the plastic meal they served us, the rising aroma of collective night sweats hanging over this hellhole of a cabin. Thank God I made Paul pack his Zopiclone. Those pills really do induce sleep in even the most impossible conditions. I put aside all my concerns about pharmaceuticals and asked him for one, and it gave me three hours’ respite from this high-altitude sweat-box confinement.
Paul. My husband. It’s a new marriage – just three years old. Truth be told, we love each other. We are passionate about each other. We often tell ourselves that we are beyond fortunate to have found each other. And I do truly believe that. He is the right man for me. Just as, the day before we legalised our relationship and committed to each other for the rest of our lives, I was silently convincing myself that I could change some of Paul’s worrying inclinations; that, in time, things would tick upwards, stabilise. Especially as we are now trying to become parents.
Out of nowhere, Paul suddenly began to mumble something in his sleep, its incoherency growing in volume. When his agitation reached a level that woke our neighbour – an elderly man sleeping in grey-tinted glasses – I touched Paul’s arm, trying to rouse him out of his nightmare. It was several more unnerving moments of shouting before he snapped awake, looking at me as if he had no idea who I was.
‘What . . . where . . . I don’t . . .?’
His wide-eyed bemusement was suddenly replaced by the look of a bewildered little boy.
‘Am I lost?’ he asked.
‘Hardly,’ I said, taking his hand. ‘You just had a bad dream.’
‘Where are we?’
‘Up in the air.’
‘And where are we going?’
‘Casablanca.’
He appeared surprised at this news.
‘And why are we doing that, Robin?’
I kissed him on the lips. And posed the question:
‘Adventure?’
Two
FATE IS BOUND up in the music of chance. A random encounter, a choice impulsively made . . . and fate suddenly has its own interesting momentum.
It was fate that had brought us to Casablanca.
The ‘fasten seat belts’ sign had now been illuminated. All tray tables stored away. All seats upright. The change in cabin pressure was wreaking havoc with the eardrums of all the babies around us. Two of the mothers – their faces veiled – tried to calm their children down without success. One of the babies was staring wide-eyed at the cloaked face in front of him, his anguish growing. Imagine not being able to see your mother’s face in public. She is visible at home, but in the world beyond, all that can be seen is a slitted hint of eyes and lips: to an infant jolted awake by a change in cabin pressure, it would be even more reason to cry.
‘Little charmers,’ Paul whispered, rolling his eyes.
I entwined my hand with his, saying:
‘We’ll be down on the ground in just a few minutes.’
How I so want one of our very own ‘little
charmers’ sitting next to us.
Paul suddenly put his arm around me and said:
‘Am I still your love?’
I clutched his hand more tightly, knowing just how much reassurance he craves.
‘Of course you are.’
The moment he walked into my office three years ago I knew it was love. What do the French call it? A coup de foudre. The overwhelming, instantaneous sense that you have met the love of your life; the one person who will change your entire trajectory because you know . . .
What exactly?
Was it really love that made me swoon? I certainly thought so at the time.
Let me restate that. Honestly.
I fell in love with Paul Leuen straight away. As he told me later, much to his surprise he too felt ‘a profound change in my raison d’être’ after walking into my office.
That phrase is so Paul. He loves to ornament his language – something I still find endearing when he doesn’t overplay his hand. It serves as an intriguing counterbalance to the spare, hugely controlled line drawings that once made his name as an artist; a talent which, though he’s recently been thwarted by self-doubt, still remains astonishing to me.
So Paul also fell in love on the spot – with the woman he’d been sent to in order to sort out his messy financial affairs.
That’s right, I’m an accountant. A numbers cruncher. The person you call as a barrier between yourself and our friends at the Internal Revenue Service.
Accountants are usually grouped with dentists as purveyors of a profession that they privately loathe. But I happen to know quite a few other certified public accountants, and most of them – from the grey bookkeepers to the corporate high-flyers – tend to like their work.
I certainly like it – and that’s speaking as someone who came to the numbers-and-tax game in her thirties. No one grows up proclaiming: ‘I want to be an accountant.’ It’s a bit like driving down an open road, then veering down a lane that looks staid and humdrum. But then, much to your surprise, you find it has its own intriguing allure, its own singular sense of human narrative. Money is that fault line along which we pirouette. Show me a person’s numerical sum total and I can develop a portrait of their immense complexities: their dreams and aspirations, their demons and terrors.
‘When you look at my financial records,’ Paul asked me, ‘what do they tell you about me?’
Such directness. A flirtatious directness, even though – when the question was posed – he was still just a prospective client with wildly disorganised books. Paul’s tax problems were considerable, but not insurmountable. His salary at the state university was taxed at source. His problem was that when it came to sales of his artwork, he’d frequently been paid in cash and had never thought about paying tax on it. Though the total was reasonably modest – maybe $15,000 per annum – stretched over a ten-year period that was a not-insignificant sum of taxable income which some sharp-eyed IRS inspector now wanted declared and paid for. Paul was being audited and the little local bookkeeper who’d been handling things for him for the past decade ran scared once the IRS started knocking on the door. He told his client that he needed someone who was skilled at negotiating with the taxman. And he recommended me.
Paul’s financial problems, however, weren’t simply limited to undisclosed income. His spending habits had landed him in severe cash-flow difficulties. Wine and books were his principal vices. There was a part of me that privately admired someone with such an unfazed approach to life that, while being chased by the electricity company for his quarterly bill payment, he thought nothing of spending $185 on a bottle of Pomerol 1989. He would also only choose the finest French-made charcoals and pencil leads for his etchings and these art supplies alone accounted for another $6,000 in annual outlay. When he went to the South of France for a vacation, though he would stay in a friend’s guest cottage outside the medieval village of Eze – which cost him nothing – he would easily rack up another ten grand’s worth of gastronomical indulgences.
As such, the first impression I had of Paul Leuen was of someone who – unlike the rest of us – had somehow managed to avoid all the pitfalls of the workaday, routine life. And I always wanted to fall in love with an artist.
We are often attracted to whatever runs contrary to our nature.
Did I see in Paul – this rail-thin, six-foot-four-inch artist with long grey hair, his black leather jacket and black jeans, his black hoodie, his Converse high-top sneakers – the possibility of change; a way out of the humdrum that so much of my life had become?
During our first professional meeting Paul made a joke about his financial affairs being somewhat akin to a Jackson Pollock painting, and then said that he was the living embodiment of the French word ‘bordélique’. When I looked it up after our meeting I discovered it meant ‘like a brothel’ and ‘all over the place’. Then there was the way he was almost apologetic about his ‘financial absurdities’, and how he needed someone to take him in hand and ‘turn me into a proper functioning grown-up’.
‘The books will tell all,’ I said.
What the books did tell me was that Paul Leuen was accruing serious debt. I was direct with him:
‘You like to show yourself a good time. The fact is, your income from the state university leaves you – after state and federal taxes – with around fifty thousand a year to live on. Your house has been mortgaged twice. You could be facing a tax bill of sixty thousand plus penalties if the IRS has its way. And since you have virtually no savings . . .’
‘So what you’re saying is – I am a disaster area.’
He was all smiles as he said this; a certain bad-boy cheerfulness as he acknowledged his imprudence, his need to mess up. I knew this smile: my father was all charm and wit and an inability to get the bills paid. He was a so-called entrepreneur; a corporate guy who could never hold down a job, who always had a get-rich-quick scheme on the go, who made me and my mother move five times during my adolescence in his search for the next executive position, the next business scheme that was going to finally get us ‘on easy street’ (an expression he used so often). But that reversal of fortune, that manna-from-heaven moment, never materialised. My mother found ongoing work as a geriatric nurse everywhere we went, infirmity and ageing being two of life’s great constants. She kept threatening to leave my father whenever he had another setback, another financial loss that propelled us to yet another city, another rented house, a new school for me, a sense of ongoing uncertainty counterbalanced by the fact that my dad loved me and I just adored him. He was the sort of guy who, when he had money in his pocket, would indulge me and Mom relentlessly. God knows I preferred my father’s absurd sunny outlook on life to my mother’s bleaker perspective, even though I knew that hers had a certain credibility. When my father died of a sudden heart attack the first week I started at the University of Minnesota I was beyond crushed. Phoning me with the news, she masked her distress with steely coolness. Telling me:
‘There was a will. You’ll get his Rolex – the one thing he never hocked, along with his wedding ring. But don’t cry for him. No one – not you, not me – could have saved your father from himself.’
But cry I did, long into that night and many thereafter. After my father’s death, my mother and I began to detach from each other. Though she was the parent who got the bills paid and somehow kept the roof (or series of roofs) over our heads, I never felt much in the way of love from her. I still spent part of most major holidays with her and dutifully called her once a week. I remained the responsible daughter. And embraced, in my own way, her rigorous standards when it came to financial caution and saving for a rainy day. But when, just a few years ago, I got together with Paul – and finally brought him to meet her – my mother afterwards was bluntness itself:
‘So you’re finally marrying your father.’
‘That’s not fair,’ I said, my head reeling from the slap-across-the-face nature of her comment.
‘The truth is never fair.
If that makes you think that I am being, as usual, merciless, so be it. Don’t get me wrong – it’s not that I don’t find Paul charming. He’s charm itself. For a man eighteen years your senior he’s not in bad shape, even if he dresses like Woodstock was last week. Still, he does have a certain charm. And I know how lonely things have been for you since Donald walked out.’
Donald was my first husband – and it was me who ended our three-year marriage, as she well knew.
‘I left Donald,’ I heard myself telling my mother.
‘Because he gave you no choice but to leave him. And it destroyed you. And now you are with a man much older and as irresponsible as your father and—’
‘Paul isn’t as irresponsible as you think.’
‘Time will tell.’
Mom. She died a year ago; a stroke from out of nowhere that killed her at the age of seventy-one.
Turbulence in the cabin. I peered out the window. The plane was trying to break cloud cover, and rocking with its downward shift towards land. The man in the aisle seat shut his eyes tightly as the plane did a dangerous lurch.
‘Do you think the pilot knows what he’s doing?’ Paul whispered to me.
‘I’m sure he has a wife and children he’d like to see.’
‘Or not.’
For the next five minutes the aircraft was like a prize-fighter having a bad night, as it took ongoing body blows from the storm enveloping us. The children’s cries hit new levels of discord. Several of the masked women began to keen. Our neighbour’s eyes remained tightly shut, his lips now moving in what seemed to be silent prayer.
‘Imagine if it was all to end right now,’ Paul said. ‘What would you think?’
‘If you’re dead you’re not thinking.’
‘But say this was the moment before death hit. What would your last thought be?’
‘Is this line of questioning supposed to distract me from the fact that the plane might crash?’ I asked.
Paul laughed; a laugh instantly silenced as the plane seemed to go into momentary free fall. I gripped the armrests so tightly my knuckles felt as though they just might perforate the skin. I kept my eyes slammed shut until, out of nowhere, order and calm descended on the world. We had hit calm air. Moments later, the runway was beneath us.
The Heat of Betrayal Page 1
