Hooked

by Ruth Harris

  If he were leaving her for somebody else, she might be able to fight back. But in this situation she was helpless because she didn’t know what to do to keep him.

  “I have thought about it,” Gavin said. “The thing is that I’ve changed. I’m not interested in the material things anymore. Food doesn’t matter. All I want is enough to stay alive. Clothes and entertainment don’t matter either. I want to live another kind of life, a life that doesn’t include anybody else. It’s not just you, Cleo. It’s anyone—”

  Her sobbing had subsided but she felt emotionally drained. “Think about it for a few more days,” she said, sounding more rational. “Let’s talk about it some more this week. Maybe we can find another solution. Just don’t do anything rash—”

  “I’m not being rash, Cleo,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about it for a long time—”

  He continued packing his bag and put in a few shirts, a suit and a toilet kit. He was moving out for good and it looked as if he were packing for the weekend.

  “Is that all you’re taking?” she asked, thinking he was going to come back later for the rest of his things.

  “I don’t need anything else,” he said. “It’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Cleo. Worldly things don’t matter to me anymore. I’ve become... well, I guess you could say I’ve become a spiritual person.”

  What was wrong with him? Was he turning into some sort of monk? Didn’t he realize he needed her to take care of him?

  “Somebody’s got to take care of you while you devote yourself to your work,” she said. “Let me do it. Please—”

  He wondered why she couldn’t accept the fact that he had made his decision. If he changed his mind, she would try to take over his life again, try to run things. She would intrude on his world all over again and keep him from his work.

  He had finished packing. He closed the suitcase, picked it up, and started to leave the bedroom. Cleo stood in front of the door and blocked his way.

  “You’re not going to leave, Gavin,” she told him. “I’m not going to let you throw me away as if I were a used cotton swab—”

  He waited for her to move aside but she didn’t. He tried to get her to move, but she didn’t budge. He walked back to the bed and sat down. Cleo remained in place, determined not to let him leave.

  “You’re making it hard for me, Cleo—”

  “I want to make it impossible—”

  “You can’t keep me here,” he said. “You know that. Make it easy for both of us, Cleo, and let me go—”

  “I’ll never make it easy for you,” she said, determined to get her way.

  “I could force my way out,” he said. “I’m bigger and stronger than you are. I could push you away from that door and walk out of this room and never see you again—”

  “That’s just what I’m trying to prevent—”

  Gavin got up from the bed and walked over to the door again. “It’s over,” he said. “Why can’t you understand that? I don’t need you anymore, Cleo. My patients need me. I have to take care of them. It’s my duty, which you’ve never been able to understand. I plunge a hypodermic into their veins and I press down on the syringe. Then I watch their faces change. I inject them with life and they’re grateful to me—”

  Gavin’s eyes were unfocused and he seemed overcome by a kind of madness. It was the same expression she had observed when he was giving Gail de Córdoba her shot. Cleo realized now that it was the only time she had ever seen him give an injection. Cleo was shocked by what she understood now for the first time. She covered her mouth with her hand.

  “My God!” she gasped. “You’re addicted too. I never knew it before. You’re addicted to giving shots—”

  Her comment infuriated him and he needed to get away from her as quickly as he could. He walked to the door, grabbed her around the waist, and picked her up. As he did, she punched him as hard as she could. His lip bled and he threw her halfway across the room. She landed on her back and as she cried out in pain, she heard the door open and then close. Gavin was gone.

  She stood up, went to the door, opened it, and screamed. Her face twisted with fury and hatred.

  “Goddamn you to hell,” she shouted. “I made you and now I’m going to break you.”

  33

  The following Wednesday Adrianna went to her front door for the morning newspaper. There, on page one of The New York Times, was the news that Nicky Kiskalesi had just married Gail de Córdoba on Cilek, his private island off the coast of Turkey. James Santana, the President of the United States, the Times went on to report, now had a new relative by marriage.

  Adriana read the story with trembling hands and felt numb and sick at the same time. Numb with disappointment; sick with envy. Thanks to Nicky, she had been broken and publicly humiliated. Her art had been stolen from her, she had been left almost penniless and now she had lost Nicky for good. Her life — what she had thought of as her life until now — was over.

  As jealousy curdled within Adriana, it gradually dawned on her that suicide was no longer an option but that she had a new reason for living: vengeance. Somehow, in some way, she would find the cruelest and most vicious way to get even. She now had one and only one reason to live: to find a way to destroy Nicky Kiskalesi just as he had destroyed her.

  “She’s out to get you, Gavin,” said Elliott Stanton, executive publisher of Image. Stanton was a patient who had been in treatment for more than a year and they were in one of Gavin’s consulting rooms. “It’s a hatchet job—”

  He handed Gavin a galley proof of a forthcoming Image story about Gavin. There were details about Ames Bostwick and his breakdown. More details about Adriana Partos, her disastrous comeback tour, how she had become addicted to Gavin’s injections, what the doctor in Vienna had told her and that she had almost killed herself trying to kick the habit.

  Gavin skimmed the article and looked up at Elliott Stanton. “Where did your reporter get all this?”

  “Cleo visited her friend Arthur Congden last week,” said Elliott. “The story is slotted to be the lead article in the ‘Medicine’ department later this week—”

  “‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,’” quoted Gavin, handing the article back to Elliott. “Is there any way you can stop it?”

  Elliott shook his head. “I can’t pick up the telephone and tell Congden to kill a story. I don’t have that kind of power. Nobody at the magazine does. But I can guarantee you this story is not going to appear—”

  Gavin raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Why not?”

  “It’s been spiked,” Stanton said. “The White House had that story killed on the grounds of national security—”

  “The White House?”

  Elliott nodded. “James Santana’s name was on the list of patients your wife gave us,” he said. Then he lowered his voice. “Are you really treating the President?”

  Gavin smiled and shook his head. “Now, Elliott, you know I can’t answer that,” he replied. “Patient confidentiality—”

  A few days later, Gavin and the President were sitting in the President’s private den, just off the Oval Office.

  “I’d be in hot water without you, Mr. President,” smiled Gavin. “Thank you—”

  “I did what I could,” Santana said. “But your wife’s not going to give up. She’ll go to the television networks and the other magazines and she’s already spent an afternoon with Everett Storrick—”

  Gavin smiled. “Everett Storrick was never one of my fans—”

  “Don’t worry about Everett Storrick,” said the President. “He has his own problems—”

  “He does?”

  “Something about excessive surgical interventions, I believe,” said the President with a slight smile. “I’ve had a couple of representatives from the National Institute of Health let him know he’s being watched—”

  Gavin nodded his thanks. “I’ve been thinking about moving to Switzerland to rededicate myself to basic research,” Gavin s
aid. “Lars Mendl will help me settle in—”

  James Santana suddenly stood up. “You’re not leaving the United States. Not while I’m President,” he said angrily, holding out his arm. “I won’t let you—”

  34

  Nicky’s marriage was not a happy one. Once Gail had done her part in helping him persuade James Santana that the Western oil shale concessions should be exploited and government subsidies awarded, Nicky lost interest in her. Now in his mid-fifties, his erections became unreliable, his sex drive and even his IQ seemed diminished. His energy, once seemingly boundless, flagged. Life, which Nicky had seen in vibrant colors, was flattened and dull and, now that everything had faded, only his greed survived.

  At first he barely paid attention to what he considered Gail’s mindless gossip.

  “He told Suzanne to lose twenty pounds,” Gail said, referring to the President. “He told her she was overweight and that it was hurting his reelection chances—”

  “Ummm,” replied Nicky, sifting through some spreadsheets his accountant had prepared.

  “He ordered the White House servants not to let her have any food,” Gail went on. “Don’t you think that sounds a little crazy?”

  Nicky shrugged wordlessly, scribbled a note and didn’t even bother to look up.

  “Suzanne said he threw a chair at his Chief of Staff this morning,” Gail told Nicky after dinner a week later.

  “It wasn’t on the news tonight so I assume he missed,” joked Nicky.

  Nicky was equally uninterested in Gail’s reports of the President’s tamper tantrums and the abusive tirades he directed against anyone who crossed his path.

  “Stress,” Nicky said, dismissing Gail’s concerns. “He’s just blowing off steam—”

  “Where’s Gail,” Nicky asked several weeks later when Gail didn’t appear at lunch.

  “At the hospital,” said his secretary.

  “She’s sick?”

  His secretary shook her head. “It’s her sister—”

  According to the President’s Press Secretary, the First Lady’s broken arm and blackened eyes were the result of a fall in the shower.

  “She slipped,” said the Press Secretary. “It was just an ordinary accident—”

  Newspapers and magazines that week ran stories about the fact that most accidents happen at home. They offered tips about securing throw rugs, replacing fraying wiring and the importance of placing no-skid mats in slippery bath tubs and showers.

  “It wasn’t an accident,” Gail told Nicky. “James flew into a rage and beat her up—”

  Nicky shrugged. “She probably pissed him off—”

  He didn’t even care when Gail told him that some White House staffers were worried about the President’s stability.

  “He’s the man with his finger on the nuclear button,” Gail reminded him.

  Nicky pooh-poohed their worries and it was only when Gail told him that the president was considering rescinding Nicky’s oil shale concessions that he paid attention.

  “The major energy companies are President Santana’s biggest contributors,” Gail explained. “They don’t want competition from shale oil—”

  “Fuck me?” Nicky said, suddenly getting up. He reached for the vase on the table next to him and suddenly several thousand dollars of Ming-dynasty porcelain crashed against the wall and broke into little pieces. “Well, fuck them!”

  The gossip that bored Nicky, enthralled Cleo. She and Gail, old friends, spoke on the phone frequently and lunched when they were in the same city at the same time. It was the lunch during which Gail referred to James Santana’s rages that provided the mnemonic jolt that caused Cleo to remember the letter Gavin had written to her from the island of Cilek so many years before.

  At the time, he had instructed her to put the letter in a safe place without opening it except in the case of his death. She had taken it to her safe-deposit box, where it remained unopened and unread and, until now, forgotten. Knowing now what had happened to Adriana and to Ames Bostwick and concerned that the man with his finger on the nuclear button might be dangerously unstable, Cleo was determined not to be thwarted yet again.

  Gavin was dangerous and the world needed to be warned. She went to the bank and retrieved the letter.

  The words, written in Gavin’s meticulous handwriting — the handwriting she’d noticed the first day she’d met him — jumped out at her. Millions and millions of dollars. Conspiracy. Manipulation. A medical experiment set up at the behest of Nicky Kiskalesi, the billionaire businessman. Egyptian oil reserves. Sadun, turned from self-indulgent playboy to potential power broker and sudden, unexpected threat to Nicky’s ambitions. A threat that could only be erased by murder.

  The facts were as devastating today as on the day Gavin had written the letter. The first time Cleo read the letter, she was aware only of Nicky’s crimes, which were the point of the letter — and, she realized, Gavin’s way of guaranteeing his own safety.

  When Cleo reread the letter, this time more slowly, she became aware of the disturbing undertone. It was apparent Sadun had become dependent on Gavin — and on the drugs he administered. Sadun, who had refused to return to Egypt and the throne unless he was accompanied by Gavin, had been suffering from the same amphetamine addiction that had almost killed Adriana and destroyed Ames. Gavin’s words spelled out Nicky’s guilt — but also inadvertently made it clear that his own revolutionary treatment enslaved his patients.

  Cleo put the letter into her purse and left the bank. Then she called Bobbi for advice and, finally, she telephoned Gail to tell her what was happening to the President.

  “Bobbi’s on the board of Hillside,” she told Gail. “The doctors there specialize in treating addicts—”

  Gail gasped. “You’re telling me the President is an addict?”

  “I’m telling you the President needs treatment,” Cleo said. “You and Suzanne have to intervene with him. It’s urgent—”

  Cleo’s next call was to Adriana Partos.

  Adriana Partos was living modestly in a rustic fisherman’s village on the Southern coast of Turkey. Determined to make a full physical recovery, she devoted herself to regaining her health. She ate lightly but well, dining on native fish and local produce. She walked and swam daily, employed a masseuse, practiced yoga and slept a full eight hours nightly. She gave up alcohol and caffeine and no longer used the heavy makeup of her earlier years. She put nothing on her face and body except creams and lotions made from organically-grown plants and herbs.

  She concentrated not just on her physical health but on her spiritual well-being as well. She read philosophers, poets and psychologists and reflected on the purpose of life. She sought wisdom from a local imam and studied with a Greek Orthodox priest. She explored every part of her psyche in her quest for understanding and self-knowledge.

  She was now functioning at full capacity just as Gavin Jenkins said every human being was capable of — but she was doing it without drugs or the adulation of crowds. There was a purity about Adriana’s existence now that showed in everything that she did.

  She was at this stage of her new life — a new life devoted to vengeance — when she and Cleo sat on a terrace facing the Aegean and shared a lunch of mezze and grilled fish. The two women talked for hours about the past and the future and the urgent steps Gail and Suzanne were taking to help the President.

  “It’s Nicky,” said Adriana. “James Santana would never have heard of Gavin Jenkins without Nicky. Ames Bostwick wouldn’t be in a straightjacket in a sanitorium if it weren’t for Nicky. I lost my art, my fortune, my will to live because of Nicky—”

  35

  At first, he didn’t recognize her. The last time he’d seen her was in the photographs taken at the end of her comeback tour when she’d been ravaged by age, drugs and disappointment. Now she was radiant, her russet hair, once again thick and luxuriant, gleaming with reddish highlights, her skin fresh and taut, her posture powerful and erect. Her transformation, he tho
ught, was due to more than just the effects of a talented hair colorist or a gifted facialist or the result of plastic surgery. She glowed with inner health and new vitality.

  She was sitting in the Bemelman’s Bar of the Carlyle Hotel sipping a glass of Evian. How odd of her, he thought. He was so used to her vodka martinis.

  “Adriana?” he said tentatively.

  She nodded. “Nicky,” she said, extending her hand. “You almost didn’t recognize me, did you?”

  “No,” he admitted, ordering a vodka martini for himself. “You look lovely,” he continued, more conscious than ever of his own aged appearance and diminished abilities. “Better than I’ve ever see you. What have you done to yourself?”

  “I’ll tell you later,” she smiled, opening her purse and taking out a piece of paper. A letter, Nicky realized, as she handed it to him. “First there’s something I want to talk to you about—”

  Nicky looked more closely at the letter. Recognized it.

  “Where did you get this?” he asked.

  “That’s not the point,” she said.

  “Gavin Jenkins gave it to you?” he said, pressing the question.

  “The point is I have it now,” Adriana said. “As you well know, the release of this letter to the press will cause massive upheaval in Egypt and perhaps the entire mid-east. It will also ensure that you face execution or, at the very least, spend the rest of your life in prison. For ordering the murders of Sadun, X and the girl, Seema—”

  Nicky, who had spent his life calculating the financial value of everything, did a quick calculation.

  “Five million?” he asked.

  Adriana shook her head. “Double—”

  Her bank account was down to zero and she needed the money. She had been obliged to compensate the concert venues for lost revenue when she canceled the tour and failed to perform.

  Nicky’s tight smile told her she had won her point and she opened the briefcase on the settee next to her.

  “I’ve had my lawyers draw up the papers,” she said. “All you have to do is sign—”