“I won’t, if you say not to.”
“I wasn’t always alone.”
“No surprise there, surely, but the way you say that . . .”
“She died,” Ty said, before he realized he had. His voice choked.
Isabella turned from the wheel, her eyes suddenly sympathetic. “Recently?” she asked.
“Neither yesterday nor all that long ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“She was a journalist—a photojournalist, actually, and a very fine one, too. In fact, she was just remarkable, so amazingly gifted . . . observant and brave. She’d won all kinds of awards for her pictures.”
“What was her name?”
“Carolyn.”
“That was my grandmother’s name.”
Ty smiled. “You would have loved her. And she would have admired your style, the way you pilot this boat. I mean, she had less fear and more spirit than anyone I’ve ever known. She died in the war in Afghanistan.”
Ty’s hand rested on the dashboard, and for an instant, by instinct and at a loss for other words, Isabella covered it with her palm.
“We’re almost there,” she told him at last, deliberately buoying her tone. “Watch carefully. You’re going to enjoy this.”
Surpass’s bow was pointed into the wind. A smooth, elongated plane that rose, curling into a snarl, it appeared as menacing as a warship’s. Isabella gave it a wide berth, as she had the stabilizer put out to the ship’s starboard and now the one to port. Slowing her speed until the tender’s wake ceased to disturb the sea, she circled in on the stern, where the ship’s name rose in bold steel letters from an angled escutcheon. Two seamen in dark commando dress stood at attention on the low deck. As soon as Isabella had made the final turn of her approach, with no exchange of signal the seamen stepped away from the center, toward opposite gunwales as the gates of the deck drifted open and the stern itself began to lift.
Isabella steered the tender toward the shadowy bay, which immediately brightened as they entered it. As the stern closed again behind them and Isabella killed the engines, Ty was struck by the absolute silence that all at once enveloped them. When, in search of an exit, he stirred, Isabella gestured for him to remain still. The tender was at least four feet below the deck above, with no ladder in sight.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s all been thought out. That’s how it is with Ian.”
“Ian?” Ty asked.
Isabella smiled. “Very early on, he made it clear he preferred I call him by his Christian name.”
“So he’s that kind of man?”
“Men are one way or the other in my experience. Anyhow, who knew then that he’d become so much more than a godfather? He and my father were fast friends in their days together as young Cambridge dons, and after my dad’s death he stepped in. Unlike my father, for whom the English language always remained a source of wonder and who was most at home in libraries and tutorials, Ian eventually strayed from academia.”
“That’s what the evidence would suggest.” Ty smiled.
“He was too picaresque for it. I suppose he actually pioneered the idea of cramming successive careers into the same life: scholar, merchant banker, deal maker. Exactly how it’s all added up to quite so splendid a life as the one he now lives remains something of a puzzle to me.”
“Even to you?”
“Ian never talks about money. He’s old-fashioned that way. He thinks it bad manners.” Observing Ty’s reaction, she added, “Oh, I’ve heard the stories, most of them anyway, about what a fierce, intimidating, enigmatic figure he is to so many. Knowing him, however, I discount them. The people who tell them are hardly friends or intimates. In most cases they’ve probably never so much as met him. Perhaps they’ve caught a glimpse, but, trust me, that would be all. What they are is either mischievous or jealous, or else they’re simply people who like to hear themselves sounding knowledgeable about someone so famous and famously inaccessible. Where I am—and have been—concerned, he has always shown the gentlest of souls.”
Ty smiled. He had no reason or inclination to dispute the opinion of such an attractive woman.
The tender was rising, although it was difficult for Ty to tell exactly why, impossible for anyone to hear seawater flowing into the bay, as though it were the lock of a canal. When the boat had lifted so that deck and dock were level, Isabella took the lead, and they stepped easily onto a narrow treadway floored with tightly woven steel mesh that both facilitated drainage and impeded slipping. The wall before them, in whose sheer metallic surface they could make out reflections of themselves, opened as they approached it, and they entered a compact octagonal lift that moved with the same eerie absence of noise as everything else aboard Surpass. Ty was certain that the yacht’s machinery must have been installed with the double-resilient mounting he had encountered previously only on naval vessels, but he decided not to mention the fact for fear it could direct their conversation toward areas he had sworn never to discuss.
According to the lift’s control panel, they were ascending from Level One. Apparently this particular carriage terminated at Level Two, but there was also a heat-sensitive square labeled LEVEL ONE—SUB.
“Sub?” Ty inquired. “Any lower and we’d be in the sea.”
“It stands for ‘submarine,’” Isabella explained.
“How dull of me not to have guessed,” Ty told her.
“Go ahead, push the button. It won’t work. It will only work for Ian. It has his iris stored in its memory, no one else’s.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Ty said. “Have you been in the submarine?”
Isabella shook her head. “No one has,” she replied. “It’s there for escape in an emergency, not pleasure. For that, Ian has the tender we came in and another a bit smaller that’s better for skiing, as well as a small sloop, several Windsurfers, and lots of Jet Skis.”
“A girl could have fun.”
Isabella smiled. “It’s the name of the game, isn’t it?”
“For some people,” Ty said.
Now they were in a narrow passage whose walls were covered in soft, tufted suede trimmed with a bronze handrail and whose floors were teak-and-wenge parquet. It was subtly but amply lit. They followed it forward, several times making sharp right-angle turns before arriving at another, more commodious lift that took them to Level Seven, which was known as the owner’s deck. It was smaller, more intimate than the decks below, sections of which Ty could survey from the guardrail.
“Ian?” Isabella called out.
“Only be a second, darling,” came her godfather’s reply from the recesses of his cabin.
When he appeared, he was wearing carefully cut linen trousers, a French dress shirt with its top two horn buttons left undone, a light silk jacket of robin’s-egg blue and new espadrilles. An imposing man, he had a body that was thickly set and callused, as though from years of heavy labor, but he moved with an agility and a grace that belied appearances, and the lines of his face were as lean and chiseled as his well-known arguments. “There!” he exclaimed, as though relieved to be done with whatever preparations he had undertaken. “You are obviously Mr. Hunter, about whom Isabella has told me so much.”
Ty shook Ian Santal’s extended hand and, as he did so, stole a glance at Isabella, who seemed unembarrassed. He supposed she was used to her godfather’s candor.
“Or about whom she knows less than she thinks,” Ty said.
“Are you a keeper of secrects, then, Mr. Hunter?” asked Ian Santal. His tone was genial, teasing.
“On the contrary, my life’s an open book.”
“Called People magazine,” Isabella appended.
“Watch her.” Ian smiled. “She’ll have you wangled into one of her adverts before you know it.”
The thought had not occurred to Ty, and he studie
d Isabella, evaluating her flirtatiousness in a new light. Since fame had become a salient fact of his life, he’d met most types of starstruck young women: true fans as well as those merely infatuated by image, silly ingenues, blatant starfuckers, even desirable young women intent, owing to some unobvious insecurity, on proving their desirability at ever more rarefied levels. He’d thought that Isabella might be among the last group, or simply a rich girl at play in a world of men. He had guessed that she was available, if not exactly easy to acquire or hold on to. Now he wasn’t so sure. Clearly she was setting him up—but for what?
“Are you interested in masks?” Santal asked.
The question took Ty aback—until he followed the older man’s line of sight. Flanking the entrance to what appeared to be Santal’s quarters were two vivid theatrical masks, the one on the right primarily magenta with chalk-white lips and brows, that on the left primarily turquoise with identical features.
“They are Venetian, fifteenth century,” Ian Santal explained.
“They’re lovely,” Ty replied.
“What do you collect, Mr. Hunter? May I ask?”
“So far mostly memories,” Ty answered.
Isabella smiled.
“I’ve just bought my first house,” he continued, “but I haven’t thought much about how to fill it.”
“And why is that?”
“Time,” Ty told him.
“Always the problem,” Santal agreed. “Truth be told, I didn’t take you for a collector—or, should I say, someone especially intent on seeing and appraising the collections of others.”
“Why is that?”
“In my experience most such young men are either poofters or thieves. You do not strike me as the former, and clearly you’ve no need to be the latter.”
Ty forced a smile, then hesitated. “I take it you collect masks.”
“He collects everything,” Isabella interjected.
“It’s a disease, I fear,” Santal elaborated. “One that afflicts those of us whose talents fall short of our aspirations. I suppose one might say we are aesthetes rather than artists. What we cannot create, we purchase. Sometimes, however, if we manage to do it well, we bring things together in a way that produces something if not entirely then at least in some part original.”
Ty shook his head, as if to dismiss Santal’s self-deprecation, but he took the older man’s point. The movie business was filled with people who, having tried and failed on the creative side, had hung in—as executives or agents or even grips—simply to be near it. “Everything?” he repeated, glancing first at Isabella, then at her godfather.
“Yes, or almost,” Santal conceded, “although of course in different places. Aboard Surpass I have only works of art from civilizations that border the Mediterranean: Venetian, Roman, Neapolitan, Greek, Turkish, North African, French, Spanish, you name it. Here they are together, as though the Pillars of Hercules were still one mountain, as though time and nature had not separated peoples—indeed, as if they had not separated themselves.”
“Tell Mr. Hunter your theory,” Isabella said. “You might as well. You’re this far along.”
Ian looked puzzled.
“About the film you plan to make one day,” she prodded.
“‘Once hoped to make’ might be more accurate. No doubt now it will never happen.”
“Oh, really,” Isabella said. “When is the last time something you wanted to happen didn’t happen?”
Santal demurred. “What Isabella is talking about is a story I wrote for her when she was still a young girl, just coming into her own,” he explained. “It took place among a group of cavorting, hedonistic characters in ancient Alexandria, am I right?”
Isabella nodded. “The Society of Inimitable Livers, they were called. Antony and Cleopatra were members. They were a club dedicated to debauchery and excess.”
“You came to understand that later. Back then I intentionally kept those facts hidden. Anyway, they were having a high old time when out of nowhere—literally—someone arrived from somewhere else. Not just one someone either, but an entire colony of them from another planet or universe, who knows? So this elite society and the people it disdained had to make common cause all of a sudden, because they had no other choice. People in that part of the world weren’t very good at doing such a thing. They weren’t then. They aren’t now. The idea’s mad, of course, but I love it—for that reason. I won’t live to see it; I’m sad about that. But if you asked me whether there’s one more thing I’d like to see before I croak, that would be it: aliens here or on the way. Entirely benign ones, mind you! Because I would like to see my fellow human beings get their act together and do it quickly. I would like to see a world in which it was not so plainly necessary for people to hold each other off.”
Isabella fixed her eyes on Ty’s. “There! What do you think of that?” she asked.
“It’s quite a pitch, a lot to digest.”
Santal glanced at the De Bethune DB15 Complication watch on his wrist. “Give Mr. Hunter the tour, will you, before our guests swarm in and you can’t? I’ll join you in a bit.”
“We’ll see you later, then. Oh, and please call me Ty.”
Santal nodded. “It’s Ian,” he said.
Isabella led Ty away from the owner’s quarters, beyond a whirlpool, to a teak staircase that led to the bridge deck directly below. From there, past a canopied outdoor dining area whose elliptical table was set for twenty-two, they entered a Georgian dining room whose long, polished-mahogany table was set with white place mats and sterling flatware for a similar number. The center of the table was dressed with elaborate candelabra flanking a spectacular silver epergne. On the far wall were mounted a magnificent pair of George II rococo girandoles.
“It’s beautiful, but it doesn’t seem, if you’ll pardon me, particularly Mediterranean,” Ty said.
Isabella laughed. “This room’s the exception that proves the rule. I think it reminds Ian of England, particularly Cambridge. But the prints on the walls are Italian. Look: Tintoretto, Burrini, Rosa, Leonardo.”
Farther forward was a Moorish saloon whose walls were covered with Islamic art and upon whose floors lay Persian carpets. Its ceiling, leafed with gold, rose in the shallowest of Byzantine domes.
“Sometimes,” Isabella said, “when one’s been aboard for a while, it’s difficult to know what port you’re in, to remember where you’ve been or where you’re going.”
“Right now we’re on the Riviera,” Ty said. “At least I think that’s where we are.”
“Ah, the Riviera,” Isabella repeated. “Once upon a time, we wouldn’t have been here in May.”
“Wouldn’t we? Why?”
“It wasn’t always a summer resort, you know. People used to come in winter.”
“What changed that? The weather?”
“Don’t be silly. It was the fashion that changed, not the climate. Picasso came here, as did Matisse and Léger. There was an American couple called the Murphys who ran a sort of salon in their house, the Villa America, which is just over the hill in the distance. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway came to it, and they all played together. You know how it is: Where certain people go, other people follow. Eventually Grace Kelly made a film with Alfred Hitchcock here and soon thereafter married Prince Rainier of Monaco. But you’re right. We are on the Riviera!”
Music eddied from the long deck just below. As voices quickly followed, Isabella grew quiet. “It looks as if we’ll have to cut your tour short,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“Another day,” Ty told her.
“Another day,” Isabella agreed wistfully, then settled her arm gently around him, capturing his neck in the crook of her bare elbow, drawing his face toward hers. Her kiss was immediate, deep, and long.
And then it was over. Her hand was
back at her side, barely touching his.
“I apologize,” she said. “It won’t happen again.”
“But what if I’d like it to?” Ty asked.
“It can’t,” Isabella said.
Ty glanced at her left hand, as he had a few moments after she’d collected him from the quay and as he always did upon meeting beautiful women. There was no ring. “Then why did it happen now? Will you at least tell me that?” At once he regretted the almost adolescent plaintiveness of his tone, but, catching him unawares, Isabella had stirred something inside him, catalyzed an emotional, even physical reaction that no one else, he realized, had done since his lover’s murder in that absurd theater of war that was now the Hindu Kush.
Isabella cast her glance down, then up at him once more. “Two reasons, if you must know. Because I’ve never kissed a movie star before. And because, as you said yourself, you collect memories.”
“And so do you?”
“And so do I,” Isabella said, then vanished among her guests.
Chapter Seven
At the foot of the stairs, focused on Eduardo Arrigimento, the Rome-based producer who’d backed Greg Logan’s film, stood the three whores Ty had avoided on the pontoon that afternoon. In the soft light of evening and their expensive clothes, they looked so innocent that, when introduced, Ty elected to treat them as he would have Eduardo’s nieces.
“Do you live in Beverly Hills?” the loveliest of them asked.
“No, but nearby,” Ty replied.
“I want to go to Beverly Hills,” the same girl said. Her diction was guttural.
“So do I,” said the tallest of her friends.
“I’ve been there,” said the last. “It’s nothing much.”
“There’s Tiffany,” proclaimed the first. “So how can it be nothing much?”
Ty grinned and set off through the expanding crowd, pausing only to hug Greg and greet Sid Thrall, to a less congested spot a short distance forward on the port deck. He had never been political or socially eager. By nature he was not a party person, except when a party consisted of friends, or at least people he already knew. One of the things about fame he’d lately come to enjoy was that it relieved him of having to make an effort he’d often felt unnatural. Every actor had an inventory of smiles, and as Ty Hunter, America’s leading man, he had discovered that once he’d matched one of these to an occasion, he had only to select a spot where he felt comfortable and the party would come to him.
Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen : A Novel (9781101565766) Page 8
