Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen : A Novel (9781101565766)

by Caplan, Thomas

  Reputation had two sides. The advantageous one had just been demonstrated by the ease with which Wilhelm Claussen had had his story accepted and so wiggled out of a charge of driving while intoxicated. The disadvantageous side was that it made you an easy mark. Luke, who had good looks and a mind that was far better than average, if undisciplined and frequently too curious, had not seen through most of the friends, especially the girlfriends, he’d attracted. Their alloyed motives would have been plain as day to Billy, and certainly to his own father, but they remained invisible to the innocent Luke. There was no use denying it. Luke was not going to cut it in this world—not in any way that Billy understood or valued. Luke was a wanderer. He would become a hundred different people in his life, but none fully. Right now he was probably still in Palm Beach, playing with other trust-fund boys from the Midwest, striving without any prayer of success to emulate the easy, guiltlessly dissolute style of Eurotrash. There was nothing Billy could do. Luke was his mother’s son. She had always forgiven his bad habits and, by forgiving, encouraged them. She was not much better herself. She would have taken Billy’s house, the house his father gave him, but for slipping up with his friend Jack Andrews and getting caught in the act. What the hell, she’d been a prize in the sack in her day. Billy never looked back for very long, always forward. And she had bequeathed Luke those high cheekbones of hers. They might help him in some unpredictable way one of these days.

  Billy looked at the two young police officers one last time, even considered asking them inside before quickly deciding against doing so. He had made his sale. It was time to walk away. Officers Darnall and Larrabee, he thought, if only you knew how fervently I wish my son had something of you in him. Then he waved them good-bye, found his key, and turned it in the front door’s lock.

  Chapter Two

  “Riley,” he called, then quickly remembered that he had given his houseman the day off.

  He hurried toward the staircase, whose banisters, like the lintels above every door, had been festooned with swags of fragrant pine and holly, then through the shadowy reception hall, in which could be heard only the measured swing of his grandfather clock’s pendulum, and finally down the corridor to his library. There was mail on his desk, but he ignored it on his way to the bathroom tucked beyond the final of three alcoves of yew bookcases. As he relieved himself, his eye examined the photographs that lined the walls. It was a tiny cube of a room, but there must have been two dozen: Uncle Jimmy with Jubelea in the winner’s circle at Churchill Downs; the house he’d grown up in, not half a mile from here, dripping with afternoon sunlight in the spring before it burned down—his mother’s azaleas were in bloom; his frat brothers posed impishly on the eve of graduation—and Vietnam; most amusing of all, a black-and-white glossy of his father and several of his father’s friends at a finca in Cuba taken sometime in the fifties. Twelve gentlemen, members of an exclusive fishing club on their annual expedition to tropical seas, stood in white dinner jackets and black tie on an esplanade. These men, who had once looked old to his eyes, now looked half a generation younger than him. The finca’s “staff,” all of them stunning girls in their early twenties, stood behind and to each side of the fishermen. Their smiles were open to interpretation.

  One thing was for sure, he thought: It had been a better world, easier, more fun. Maybe Luke was right after all, to go where impulse and testosterone led him.

  Billy looked in the mirror as he washed his hands. By God, he was showing his age! His hair, which had begun to gray at thirty-nine, he and his barber had at once done something about. His skin was another matter. There were crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes. His brow had creased and the folds above his lip sunk, extending toward his chin. The skin itself appeared older, thinner, here and there traced with blue, almost translucent. The sharpness of his features, which had made him such a confident young man, had been all but erased beneath the deposit of years. So what? He detested complainers and had no intention of turning into one.

  Drying his hands, he glanced again at the finca—in particular into his father’s eyes. Billy missed his father. Even as he prized the freedom he had inherited along with his father’s shares and other worldly goods, he wished the old man had stayed around longer. The company he’d founded had grown thirtyfold over his son’s tenure as chief executive. The perks of such a position had also become more polished. If not the Continental Flying Spur, which Adolph Claussen would have found too flashy, Billy would like to have shown his father the fleet of company jets in their own hangar at KCI. The hangar was meticulously kept, and the planes saved thousands of hours of employee time traveling to and from Claussen sites across the world.

  Before sitting down to his desk, he looked out from the window behind it at the long, formal garden Maggie had planted. Terraced into the hillside, it was fallow now, but he had no difficulty imagining it in bloom. It was from just above the far tree line—although, seen from the other direction, the house he’d been born in—that a tornado had swept in when he was nine years old. He had never been more frightened; his heart had never beaten more rapidly. But even as he’d sprinted all those yards for shelter, a part of him had savored the idea of havoc, as if whatever was destroyed might be put back together again, improved.

  On shelves on the opposite wall, his parents’ collection of Hehe Boys, Chinese figurines, were arranged exactly as they had been in the gallery of the old house. He was not fond of them as works of art, never had been. Yet as evocations of another time—an era with its comfortable certitudes in place—they possessed for Billy a value beyond price. For a delicious moment, he looked around his library, a room none of his wives, no one but he, had ever touched. It was perfect, a chrysalis of his past.

  There was not much in the day’s mail to warrant his attention: a monthly newsletter from his New York club, a statement from one of the three personal checking accounts with which he paid for periodic indiscretions and which for that reason he always balanced himself. In the last month, sadly, there had been no such indiscretions, so he placed the red-and-white envelope in a drawer.

  As he closed the drawer, the carillon of the hall clock chimed the quarter hour, eight smoothly ascending and then descending notes to which he’d been so accustomed since childhood that they now hardly registered. But it was the sound that came next and was at once followed by an absence of sound that alarmed him: a sharp creaking of the floor above, then quick skidding that ceased as abruptly as it had begun. Billy drew his breath and stood, attuned to the silence of his house. Moving toward the library door, he kept his steps light until he had positioned his right hand over the alarm button disguised in the intricate Greek-key molding.

  “Hello,” he called out, then waited in vain for an answer. “Hello,” he called again. “Who’s there?”

  No answer came back.

  “Riley!” he shouted again, wondering if he might have mistaken his employee’s day off. He let go of the library-door alarm, fixing his sights on the wainscoting just inside the front door. On the left, beneath its uppermost molding, there was another button, and Billy moved toward it rapidly, as though it were the next base in a dangerous game of tag. At the foot of the staircase, he managed to flick both light switches with a single stroke, at once illuminating not only the clear-and-russet crystal chandelier that hung suspended on a velvet-wrapped chain in the oval stairwell but the second-floor gallery. Yet the light revealed nothing out of the ordinary, no clue as to what he’d heard, and so, as it continued, the stillness grew ever more unsettling. Again he drew a long breath but this time held it, counting as he struggled to hear inside the silence. Eight, nine, ten, he told himself. Eleven—oh, what the hell, it was no use. As he exhaled, a high-pitched wail issued from over his shoulder. He spun immediately and saw his five-year-old grandson, Stuart, mounting the mahogany banister at its summit, laughing, ready to slide.

  “Don’t do that,” Billy told him.
“You’ll wreck the garland.”

  “I’ll put it back,” Stuart pleaded.

  “No you won’t. It’s not that easy. It took them hours to install, to get it just right.”

  Stuart hesitated.

  “Come down here,” Billy said. “Let me have a look at you, young man. You’ve grown again, haven’t you?”

  “Yes,” Stuart said as he jumped from the railing, then raced noisily down the uncarpeted stairs.

  Billy hugged him, kept his hands on the boy’s shoulders as they separated as if to study him anew. It had never occurred to him that he would have a black grandchild—but then why shouldn’t it have? he mused. In her choice of a husband, as in just about every aspect of her life, his daughter, Cynthia, had broken with convention. “Where are your mother and sister?” Billy inquired. “I didn’t know you were here.”

  “We came early,” Stuart said.

  “And you didn’t hear me come in?”

  “No way! We were watching a video.”

  “What were you watching?”

  “I don’t know. One Emily wanted.”

  “I see,” Billy said.

  “She has a crush on the guy who’s in it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She told her friends. I heard her. Do you know Ty Hunter?”

  “Not personally. I know who you mean, though.”

  “He’s the one.”

  “He’s a bit old for her, don’t you think?”

  “He’s very old,” Stuart agreed.

  “I mean, he must be thirty, or even in his early thirties by now,” Billy said, intending his sarcasm for his own ears only.

  “Yeah, probably,” Stuart said. “Anyway, Emily used to have his picture on her wall.”

  “Did she? When he was just starting out?”

  “I guess.”

  “Now that you mention it, I think I do remember that.” Actors as a rule were a group of which he took little notice. But only a few years earlier, the bank on whose board he sat and for which he’d reluctantly agreed to do that ad had considered using Ty Hunter in a campaign for its Captiva credit card. While the board had dithered, Hunter’s career had taken off, and the new movie star’s agent and manager had nixed any projects other than feature films. Which was a shame, Billy had always felt, because no matter how much they reminded him of carnival people, matinee idols were one step ahead of card issuers, having captured the hearts and loyalties of their customers well before they were of age to spend money or borrow with discretion. Since he’d been on the bank’s board, Captiva had sent out millions of “preapproved” letters to college freshmen and the first-time employed. If such communications had come from a familiar performer rather than an impersonal financial institution, he suspected they might have yielded dramatically higher success rates.

  Still, now that he recalled it, he remembered that something about that poster had stopped him in his tracks, as if the young movie star, with his fetching smile, his hair the color of butter and eyes the blue of Windex, might be more than an innocent object of affection—indeed, might be likely to infect his granddaughter with unrealistic dreams.

  “Look, Stuart, do me a favor, will you?” Billy asked. “Tell Cynthia and Emily I’m home.”

  “Sure,” Stuart said, and scrambled enthusiastically for the stairs.

  “Where are we going?” Emily inquired a few minutes later, examining her fingernails as she hugged her grandfather. She had painted them chartreuse two days before, and the enamel was beginning to crack.

  “The club,” Billy said.

  “Can’t we go to Paolo’s instead?”

  “I thought you liked the club.”

  “I do, but Paolo’s has the best music—and the cutest waiters.”

  “Only in the summer,” Billy said. “Their patio’s closed this time of year. You know that. And right now the guys who work out there are either in school or in Florida perfecting their tans.” And getting laid, he thought, although he did not say so.

  “Never mind,” Cynthia said. “I’ve had a wicked week. For that matter, I’m sure your grandfather has as well. We’d like to have a drink and some decent food and conversation, in peace and quiet.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Emily said.

  “Enough,” Billy said, but quickly thought better of it and decided to relax. He did not want their holiday to dissolve into argument or sullenness. “Let me ask you a question, Emily,” he continued. “Suppose we go to Paolo’s another night.”

  “Not on Christmas.”

  “Of course not on Christmas. On Christmas we’ll be here. When does your father get in, by the way?”

  “Christmas Eve, I think,” Emily replied, searching her mother’s face for affirmation.

  Cynthia nodded.

  “How about the day after Christmas?” Billy suggested, smiling reluctantly. Only yesterday she had been a little girl, uncritical, adoring. How could he help resenting the displacement of her affection to someone else, someone younger, an object of fantasies that were not platonic? Time was passing more quickly than he’d expected, that was all. And Emily, as had her mother so many years before, was simply going through another stage. There was nothing anyone could do but grin and see her through it, as they’d seen her through her recent difficulties at school, in French and science classes. A girl’s sexual awakening was no easier to manage than a boy’s, he supposed, especially one as pretty as Emily promised to become.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” she said.

  “Then that’s settled,” Billy proclaimed, wondering, as he invariably did—as he couldn’t help but do—how genes could contrive to make siblings so different: one male, a future fullback and black, the other female, with a dancer’s delicate bones and the pinkest cheeks he’d ever seen.

  At seven o’clock, after baths, they gathered in the living room before a fire.

  “Would you like a drink?” Billy asked.

  “In fact, I think I would,” Cynthia said. “The usual.”

  He went to the bar built into a nook opposite the large bay windows, and made two Rob Roys, mixing the Johnnie Walker Black, red Lillet, and Angostura bitters with an apothecary’s precision. When he had finished and poured the liquor and crushed ice into sterling-silver Jefferson cups, he felt Cynthia beside him, her cheek fleetingly against his shoulder. Was this an apology for her mood or an expression of her exhaustion? As usual, Billy could not be sure.

  “Have you done much hunting this year, darling?” he asked finally.

  “I always do, don’t I?” Cynthia replied, taking the cocktail from him. A taste for Rob Roys was something she had inherited from him. “Tuesdays and Thursdays, all season, whenever I can. What’s the point of living where I do and not?”

  Billy nodded. Horses—the entire equestrian life—bored him, but foxhunting filled him with fear. He knew better than to say it out loud in his daughter’s presence, but he was pleased that Stuart showed signs of sharing his disinterest and hoped that Emily, suddenly faced with the distractions of adolescence, might herself be growing less keen. There was a reason they called it “breakneck” speed, and he could think of no other sport in which experience so increased the risk of injury, even paralysis. Years in the hunting field seemed to embolden people, causing them to forget that it was not only their skill at play but also the simpleton brain of a fast and heavy animal in whose custody they had placed their lives. “None, I expect,” he told her, not quite mastering a laugh and raising his glass slightly before sipping from it.

  “Always have and always will.” She took his hand, squeezed it, then let it go. Billy was still imagining his daughter on horseback. He couldn’t help it. Fear had seized him, as occasionally it was apt to. What would he do if she fell? How would her high-powered lawyer husband manage the children without her? If sh
e were to die, would his next wife, who would no doubt be younger, like them or even want them around? Why, for heaven’s sake, didn’t Cynthia sense the risk as acutely as he did? Why didn’t she concentrate her energy on one of her other loves, such as gardening or yoga or paddle tennis?

  “Well, knock on wood,” he said, striking the chair arm three times.

  “It’s just my nature, Daddy,” Cynthia said “that’s all.” Then, as she turned her face to the children, she gently patted the back of his hand.

  Studying the fiery, opinionated creature to whom he’d given life without planning to, he could still not specify with which of her qualities her husband—any man, for that matter—might have fallen in love. Youth, he supposed, but that had vanished long ago, and anyway, youth was a mask. While it survived, a man could cling to the illusion that his lover’s temperament might change, but once it fled, he was left with what had been there all along. Perhaps what Michael had responded to was the challenge of taming her, or—despite the electric tension that ran through her—he had blithely calculated that she seemed the right sort of woman to be his wife and the mother of his children. She was who she was, after all. She liked sex and would be unlikely to stray. It was too much to figure out at the moment.