Before he’d stumbled upon the fast lane to material riches, when ideas still mattered more than practicalities, Ian never flew. It had been a matter of principle. Having been schooled in England and settled there as a young don, his horizon had not stretched beyond Europe. He’d captured the sweet innocence of that period of his life, especially its summer holidays, in his first book, a slim memoir entitled Train Travel, for which he had not expected even to find a publisher but which was still in print in paperback. The book’s original jacket passed across his mind as he listened to Philip on the telephone.
“The children are going to stay with their minder a little longer,” Philip said.
“Are you sure that’s wise?”
“It’s only for a short time.”
“The essential thing, at moments such as these, is to retain a Zen-like calm, to keep one’s balance and distance from events.”
“Quite,” Philip agreed.
“It’s all part of being careful. Where are you now?”
Philip looked out the window of the sedan he’d arranged through the hotel. “I don’t know,” he answered. The driver was following back roads, along which traffic flowed fitfully.
Soon, though, they were in the clear, and he could see that they were about to arrive at the Hlavní Nádraží with ten minutes to spare before his train. “The station,” he told Ian at last.
“I am surprised you’re not flying.”
“My meetings in Geneva aren’t until tomorrow. Besides, the idea of a train seemed restful.”
“Bound to be, and educational. I’ve done some of my best thinking on trains, as you know.”
“Only too well,” Philip assured him.
“Mind you, it’s always useful to bore our watchers, and few things succeed at that like a long, drawn-out journey by rail. I’m sorry I won’t be able to meet you and Isabella in Rome on Thursday evening,” Ian continued, “but I shall much look forward to having you both here at the weekend.”
“Ian?” Philip said.
“Yes.”
“No one’s watching.”
Ian stifled a laugh. “Isabella’s father,” he told Philip, “was positively brilliant at magic—as an amateur, of course. Had he not chosen to devote himself to the Romantic poets, he could have managed a very successful career on the stage. A thousand eyes could be fastened upon him and not a single one spot his sleight of hand.”
Philip hesitated. “I take your point,” he admitted.
No sooner had they hung up than Philip’s driver pulled alongside the station’s entrance off the Wilsonova.
Philip flagged a porter, and the two, ferrying his Valextra cases, made their way beneath the carved female statues that marked Prague as the Mother of Cities, then under the art nouveau station’s high glazed and stained-glass dome. In the morning light, the large, clean, crowded terminal had the air and bustle of a market. A bouquet of baking bread, brewing coffee, bacon and cinnamon still drifted from the surrounding food stalls.
At the barrier to the platform from which the Geneva train was due to depart, Philip hesitated. The porter regarded him warily until Philip shrugged. Without speaking, as though the innocent mistake had been entirely his, he withdrew the ticket from his inside jacket pocket, glanced at it, then redirected the porter with his trolley to a platform two away, from which a train to Vienna was scheduled to depart seven minutes later.
Chapter Sixteen
Even sotto voce, Oliver’s accent sounded, Ty thought, as though his old friend had ten thousand plums in his mouth.
They were on the tennis court at La Encantada, in the third game of their set, when the FedEx truck arrived just before ten-thirty on Tuesday morning. At the sight of Ty’s housekeeper hurrying along the flagstone path with the overnight letter, they suspended play.
Oliver took the letter from her.
“What the hell are you doing?” Ty asked. “I’m sure it’s addressed to me.”
“Do you know what it is,” Oliver asked, “or where it came from?”
“Not yet, obviously.”
“I do.”
Ty gave Oliver a sharp look. “You’re playing a dangerous game,” he said.
“We’re on the same team,” Oliver replied.
“We almost weren’t,” Ty said. “I almost put fourteen rounds into you the other night when you made that drama-queen entrance of yours.”
“You have that backwards, don’t you?”
“No, I don’t think I do. You wouldn’t have killed me. You knew who I was. I had no idea who you were. Added to which, you were trespassing on my property, not vice versa. You SBS guys are all the same: too daring by half.”
“Never mind,” Oliver said, “it’s served you well in the past.”
Ty’s mind flashed back to the black-ops mission they’d undertaken together in the South China Sea. He caught his old friend’s eye and smiled. Oliver smiled in return, that nomad’s smile Ty remembered only too well.
“What’s in the envelope?” Ty inquired.
Oliver withdrew an unmarked manila envelope and then, from within it, a smaller white one that bore a stiff white card of invitation. In black letters appeared the words:
The Master of the Household
Having Been Commanded by Her Majesty the Queen
Requests the Pleasure of the Company of
John Tyler Hunter
at
A Performance of Something to Look Forward To
The Odeon Leicester Square
London W1
“You need an excuse to be back in Europe. As excuses go, this one does nicely.”
“How did you pull it off? Or did the President?”
“Cheek cut by charm,” Oliver said.
“Seldom known to fail,” Ty agreed.
“Plus, both the young princes are in the military. Let’s leave it at that, shall we?”
At twelve forty-five, wearing loafers, gray slacks, an open-neck checked chukka shirt and a lightweight navy blazer, Ty approached the table for two in the front garden of the Ivy on Robertson that had been set aside for Netty Fleiderfleiss.
A waiter was pouring bottled water when Netty alighted from his Porsche and began to table-hop his way toward Ty.
“You scrub up nicely,” Netty teased upon final approach.
“Thanks,” Ty said, without returning the compliment.
Netty nodded, tightened his bow tie, then quickly smoothed the jacket of his bespoke suit. Ever since he’d arrived in Hollywood, half a generation ahead of Ty, Nethercott Fleiderfleiss had cultivated the style of a fogy with edge. Originally contrived to suggest a bridge between art and commerce, it had long ago become second nature to him, a half-truth he’d conveyed so often he now believed it himself. Understanding this, Ty had always found the shtick amusing, for he knew that it was founded on an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of American film as well as of the standard motion-picture agreement and its mutations. More important, Netty saw to the heart of things with unusual speed and resistance to distraction.
He offered his hand. “Ty,” he said as he lowered himself into his chair. “It’s nice to see you home.”
“It’s nice to be home,” Ty replied.
“Well, anyway,” Netty continued.
“Anyway,” Ty said.
“You’re in a nice place, a nice time of life.”
Ty laughed. “It’ll do.”
“But it won’t last, you know that? You’ll have to make the most of it.”
“What do you want me to say? You’re right.”
“I need you to tell me I’m right?” Netty asked. “Wait till I’m wrong, please! My only point is, you’ve got a lot on your plate: a future to think about, a house to spruce up, a personal life that . . . well, ain’
t what it should be.”
Ty sighed. “All work and no play.”
“All work and plenty of play,” Netty replied.
“Have it your way.”
“It’s not play that’s missing from your life, kid. It’s commitment. A wife and kids!”
“Ease up, will you? All in due course, I’ve told you that before. At the moment what I need is simply to rest, to take a few deep breaths and assess things, make sure I’m still the commanding officer of my own life.”
“So who’s stopping you?”
“Things come up. You know how it is.”
Netty nodded. “I know that in your career you’re batting a thousand.”
“Therefore I can afford a little downtime—”
“Take as much as you need.”
“—without committing myself to any project?”
“Absolutely, without even picking up a script until you’re ready and hungry to work again, but what you don’t want to do—and this is my whole point, kiddo—is wake up and find that your personal life just flew by while you were looking out the window.”
“Trust me,” Ty said, “I know what I’m looking for.”
“Maybe you’re looking for something that doesn’t exist,” Netty suggested.
“I found it once. I will again.”
“Not Zara?”
“Not Zara,” Ty said. “With Zara it’s fine but—”
“Such a shame,” Netty said. “It would be so good for both of you.”
“We’d kill each other.”
“You’d make news, like Brad and Angie, Tom and Katie. You’d understand each other.”
“A necessary but not sufficient condition for any marriage,” Ty smiled, “no matter how brief.”
“You don’t want people to start wondering,” Netty said.
“They can wonder all they like,” Ty said. “When I’m ready, not before, I’ll surprise them.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear that at least,” Netty said. “By the way, are you going to Sid and Mitzi’s thing tomorrow night?”
“Zara asked me the same question.”
“And what was your answer?”
Ty hesitated. “No can do,” he said.
“You should,” Netty told him. “You really should.”
“I know, but I just can’t.”
“Why is that? Don’t make me pull it out of you.”
“I’ve had a better invitation,” Ty explained. He hoped that Netty did not see he was playing a part. The point of this lunch was to initiate a drumbeat across the business, both announcing his departure, so soon after his return, and making clear the reason for it.
Incredulous, Netty shook his head. “Better than the Thralls?” he asked.
Ty removed the royal invitation from his jacket pocket and handed it to Netty, who raised the blue pince-nez reading glasses that hung around his neck. The magnets of their separate halves clicked into place over the bridge of his nose. “First the President of the United States, now the Queen of England!” he exclaimed after a moment. “What’s next? Onto the throne?”
“I’m open to the possibility,” Ty told him.
“I don’t get it. It was practically a cameo role.”
“What’s there to get? People liked Greg’s film. They liked everything about it, not just me. Fact is, I was lucky to be in it. I’ll tell you what you always tell me: Never question success.”
Netty shot Ty a severe look. “You live a charmed life. That’s all I can say. When do you leave?”
“This evening,” Ty replied.
He had one more stop to make before his departure, and knew he had to make it alone.
The Malibu Beach Colony was in high season but midweek doldrums when Ty arrived at Zara Chapin’s house, driving, instead of his F430 Spider, the hybrid Greg Logan had given him for his role in Something to Look Forward To.
More contemporary than any of its neighbors—“Bauhaus by way of China,” she called it—Zara’s house was long and relatively narrow, a sequence of single-story, double-height pavilions drifting toward the Pacific. Overwhelmingly glass but framed in bronze, jungle wood and Venetian plaster, these pavilions were set back from a garden by deep overhangs that served to protect the house from both downpours and the sun.
Zara was lying on a chaise beneath a trellis on the lanai. As Ty approached through the living room, his sense of smell became confounded.
“It’s not exactly honeysuckle,” he said.
“No, but you’re right. Honeysuckle is part of it.”
“Part of what?” Ty asked.
“Today’s aromatherapy,” Zara explained, as though there should not be a need for her to do so. “Let’s see, you also inhaled lotus and orange and lime blossom, vanilla, anise, white jasmine and . . . I don’t know, darling, I can’t remember what the last ingredient is.”
“Ginger,” Ty replied matter-of-factly. “I definitely smelled ginger. Practically tasted it, in fact.”
Zara clasped the top of her bikini in place and sat up. “Why are you here?” she asked. “It’s too late for lunch and too early for a cinq-à-sept. We’ve already said hello. So this must be good-bye. Is it?”
Ty hesitated. “Not if you’ll come with me.”
“With you where?”
Ty produced the royal invitation.
When Zara had read the card, she looked at him as though she had confused him with someone else. “Jesus Christ!” she exclaimed.
“Come on, it will be fun.”
“Fun? I guess it will be, but I can’t. I just can’t. Think about it. How much notice are you giving me?”
“Well over an hour,” Ty said, hiding his relief at her unavailability. He and Oliver had agreed that this simple, last-minute invitation to Zara would be the most efficient way to send word of his unexpected return to Europe through the community of actors and artisans who made up the creative side of the motion-picture business and the journalists and bloggers who chronicled them.
“It’s impossible, and you know it.”
“I know no such thing. Spontaneity’s always been your middle name.”
“My middle name is Gertrude, which is why I never use it.”
“What do you have on your calendar that’s better?”
“Sid and Mitzi’s—you know about that. Also, my yoga instructor is due here tomorrow morning. She was having hot flashes last week, so we’ve got lost ground to make up. And just at the moment you will be bowing your scrumptious torso to Her Majesty, I will be working with my regression analyst—who I don’t mind telling you is very hard to book, much less rebook.”
Ty looked puzzled. “What in hell is a regression analyst?”
“Someone who can tell you who you were in your past lives,” Zara explained, as if Ty were a schoolboy who ought long ago to have mastered such facts. “It takes a great deal of experience.”
“I’m certain it would.”
“Don’t laugh! We have exteriors, darling, but we also have interiors. And it’s absolutely vital we take care of both. Just the same, I’ll give you a reason you won’t think frivolous,” Zara said. “The day after that, I am guest-starring in an episode of Entourage.”
“You are?”
“Didn’t I tell you? I’m playing one of those rare actresses whose career defies the currently diminishing trajectory of stardom. In other words, myself.”
Ty laughed.
Zara reached up and kissed him, dispassionately, on the lips. “Fingers crossed,” she said, “knees bent. See you when I see you.”
Chapter Seventeen
To Campo de’ Fiori, just across the Tiber and southeast of the Vatican, dawn brought a transitory quiet. With the young at last asleep in the wake of their revelries, for a mo
ment the Renaissance returned to the quarter. Proud façades and vacant streets stood in stillness as, beyond the Capitoline, the Quirinal and the Esquiline, the sun, as yet without warmth, ascended. Along the Via Capo di Ferro, while the first stalls of the nearby piazza market were being prepared for the day’s sales, Isabella Cavill slowed from her long jog. She knew the area intimately, even the textures and irregularities of its pavements, but now, deep in thought, she was almost oblivious to her surroundings.
She loved Italy, especially Rome, and had done well by herself here, but tonight would be the night that counted. Her collection, to be unveiled at a party at Guardi’s retail palace on the Via dei Condotti, was to be her first since assuming charge of the venerable firm’s design team.
On impulse she decided to enter the Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini. The figures in Guido Reni’s altarpiece, Holy Trinity, especially the crucified Christ against the clouded cerulean sky, seemed to transcend gravity, to rise as one observed them. Isabella had long thought this one of the most beautiful and haunting paintings she had seen. For a moment she entered a pew and knelt. She was not a Catholic, nor even particularly religious. She had been baptized and, while at school, confirmed in the Church of England. But rather than denominational, she had always considered herself spiritual, a believer that God not only had been but remained in the world and could be glimpsed there at odd moments, just as He could be in great works of art.
A few minutes later, she was back in daylight, running again, relishing the sight of Rome coming to life for another day: the jacketed businessmen on their way to their offices, the young mothers tending their children toward school.
By the time she reached her apartment, she had run over five miles, feeling simultaneously exhilarated and exhausted. She slowly drank most of a bottle of Acqua Panna as she browsed a few of that morning’s English newspapers as well as her favorite fashion Web sites on her laptop, pleased that the London edition of DailyCandy.com had selected her collection’s unveiling as the event of the day.
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