‘You OK, Miss Lola?’ he asked, looking concerned.
‘Yes, fine, thank you!’ Lola said, overwhelmed with relief that she didn’t have to sleep with him.
‘I still need two hundred bucks, ’ Mirko said, looking apologetic. ‘For the guys on the door. A hundred a pop so they don’t say nothing to Miss Madison when she gets back. Oh, and fifty to get you a set of keys cut.’
Lola fished in her purse. This was almost going to clean her out of cash completely.
‘Miss Madison, she always calls me when she’s coming back, so I can get Rosalka in to clean and do fresh flowers, ’ Mirko informed Lola. ‘So you’ll get a day’s notice, OK? But then you clear out and it’s gotta be like you were never here.’
Lola nodded, putting the $250 in Mirko’s hand.
‘Thanks, Mirko, ’ she said gratefully – more gratefully than Mirko would ever realise.
‘You kidding me?’ He looked at the fur wrap again. ‘Rosalka’s gonna cry for days when she sees this! How much did it cost?’
Lola blushed. ‘I don’t know, ’ she admitted.
‘Five grand at least, ’ Mirko said confidently. ‘Wow. This is going to be the best birthday of her life.’ He nodded at Lola. ‘I’ll send Luis out to get you a set of keys. They’ll be at the desk when you wanna go out.’
As he went out, folding up the fur wrap reverently, Lola walked across the room and stared out of the window. She wasn’t seeing the stunning view, the spectacular buildings, the traffic far below, the sliver of the Hudson River with the Pacific Palisades on the far bank. She might as well have had her eyes closed. All she could see was a truth about life that her father had always known, and had done his best to protect her from finding out.
But here it was, staring her in the face, blinding her to anything but how powerful it was.
It all came down to money in the end.
Chapter 11
Evie came out of the subway and stepped back, getting her bearings, figuring out which way traffic on the avenue ran – up or downtown. It was just a couple of blocks to her destination. She patted her hair down, checking it out in the window of the French restaurant next to the subway exit. A guy laying tables inside saw the movement and looked up, catching her eye, giving her a big smile once he saw how young and pretty she was.
Jesus, Evie thought, starting to walk the two blocks uptown to her destination. Men. They’ll do anything for a little attention.
And then she told herself: So work it while you’ve got it! You won’t be young forever – what have you got, five good years left? Six? She sighed. Benny always said he’d put you in his will, but that was a load of bullshit. No way he’d have done that, not with a wife like that bitch. He’d never have wanted her to find out.
Uff. Her heart sank to the soles of her grey suede shoes. This train of thought was a big, big mistake. She should never have let herself think of Benny’s wife.
Lola hadn’t considered the ramifications of visiting her father at all. She’d just walked up the stairs to the front door of his town house and rung the bell. She’d left this long enough; now she was determined to make seeing her father her top priority.
The door was opened by a young, extremely handsome man in a black two-piece uniform. Lola’s eyes widened at the sight of him, so young and sleek and groomed, so designer-looking in her father’s much more traditional house. And then she peered round his black-clad shoulder, and saw that the house wasn’t traditional any more. The gilded French furniture, the tapestry hanging, the two huge, priceless chinoiserie vases on pedestals, flanking the red-carpeted staircase, had all vanished.
Instead it looked as if some minimalist, Scandinavian-Japanese interior designer had waved a magic wand and stripped the place bare of anything it didn’t strictly need. A huge Japanese screen hung where the tapestry had been, two big white panels decorated merely with three huge swooping black brush-strokes. A glass vase on a dark-wood table held a single white lily. The black-and-white tiled floor was bare and highly polished, the staircase carpet white and new-looking.
It was very beautiful: but it wasn’t her father’s taste. Lola knew exactly whose eye was behind this makeover.
And it would never have been possible if her father wasn’t in a coma.
‘Lola Fitzgerald, ’ she said, rather curtly, to the man in the black outfit, stepping past him and into the hall. ‘I’m here to see my father.’
‘Panio? Who is it?’ called a woman’s voice impatiently.
Footsteps came quickly along the upstairs hallway and began to descend the stairs. Carin’s feet appeared first, naturally, strapped into bronze gladiator-style stilettos whose complicated buckles reached halfway up her calves. Only someone over five foot ten could wear those shoes and not look ridiculous. On Carin, nearly six foot in stockinged feet, they looked perfectly proportioned. But the height of the heels was another red flag for Lola. She’d never have worn those if Daddy were well, Lola thought. Ben Fitzgerald hadn’t liked Carin towering over him.
The rest of Carin’s legs, topped by a white miniskirt, eventually came into view; it took some time, as they were so long. Then her torso, sheathed in a black polo-neck top, long and slim. And finally, her head, the pale blue eyes like two triangular pieces of platinum, the white-blonde hair cut short and slicked back. She looked like a pop singer from the 1980s, fierce and monochromatic.
She’s done over the entire house to match her style, Lola realised. Now it’s nothing but a frame for her. Like Devon did with their London place. But Devon had made a pretty bower of golds and blues, soft and welcoming. Carin’s hostile takeover of Lola’s father’s town house was as sharp and angular as her own cheekbones. She had probably installed a torture room in the basement.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Carin demanded on sight of Lola. She stormed across the hall, her eyes flashing with rage. ‘Get out! Get out this moment!’ She flung one arm out, pointing at the door. ‘Get the fuck out of my house!’
‘It’s not your house yet!’ Lola retorted furiously. ‘But you didn’t lose any time redecorating, did you?’
‘Get out!’ Carin yelled. ‘Rico! Get up here right now!’
There was no way Lola was going to see her father, that was clear: but now her blood was up. Even after everything that had happened, she couldn’t believe how aggressively Carin was behaving. Heavy feet came running up the kitchen staircase, and a man emerged, big, dark, intimidating and much too brutish to ever have been permitted in this house before Ben Fitzgerald fell into a coma.
‘Rico!’ Carin screamed, pointing at Lola. ‘That’s my husband’s daughter, and she’s banned from this house, do you understand? Banned!’
The man called Rico started towards Lola.
‘Shall I throw her out, Mrs Fitzgerald?’ he asked, and the look in his black beady eyes was so nakedly menacing that Lola narrowed her eyes and hissed back at Carin:
‘You tell your thug that if he lays a finger on me he’ll be sorry!’
She met Carin’s eyes full-on. There was such anger in her stare that it was probably the first time Carin had ever taken her stepdaughter seriously. Carin paused for a moment and then said, ‘Don’t touch her, Rico. Just make sure she leaves.’
‘Awww . . .’ Rico whined, grinning at Lola. He stood, folding his arms across his big chest, staring at her as if he could see through her clothes, not just to her skin but to her bones. Terrified, but determined not to show it, Lola turned her back on him and grabbed the door handle. And as she was pulling it open, the doorbell rang.
Standing on the doorstep, Lola found herself looking into a mirror. It was as if a twin sister she’d never known about had suddenly appeared in front of her.
Carin burst out laughing.
And staring at the girl, Lola exclaimed, ‘Who on earth are you?’
Chapter 12
‘Me?’ the girl said right back at Lola. ‘Who the hell are you? Don’t tell me he had another one!’
Lola’s f
orehead crinkled as best it could.
‘Another one?’ she said. ‘What are you talking about? I’m the only one!’
This was so weird it felt as if she’d been suddenly plunged into a parallel dimension, like those films where you opened a door and found yourself in another world where there was already a you in existence. This girl was the same height as Lola, more or less. Her blonde hair was delicately streaked – not quite as well as Lola’s, now she looked more closely, but Lola’s hairdresser was the best in London, so what could you expect? The girl’s eyes were brown, and almond-shaped, like Lola’s, and her features were small and pretty, her nose exquisitely straight. The blonde hair was swept back in a style Lola sometimes wore when she wanted to look classic, and Lola had the disconcerting feeling that she had actually tried on that pale-pink Chanel suit last season. She couldn’t remember, actually, why she hadn’t bought it.
The girl was gaping at her.
‘You thought you were the only one too? Jeez, Benny really had us both going!’ She clicked her tongue. ‘Well, I guess that makes us both morons.’ She paused. ‘Look, I just came to see if I could visit him, ’ she said quietly. ‘I know he isn’t sitting up and talking or anything, but I’d really like to see him, just once, say my goodbyes. Did you just see him? Was that OK with his wife?’
Lola realised she had put a hand to her head, like an actress in a bad 1950s film feigning confusion.
‘There’s no way he had another daughter, ’ she said, grasping at the most basic truth of the situation. ‘Everyone would know. Wouldn’t they?’
She almost turned to Carin, to see if she knew anything about her husband having an illegitimate daughter of Lola’s age.
‘Another daughter?’ The girl stared at her in horror. ‘You’re kidding, right?’
She looked Lola up and down, her eyes widening.
‘Of course I’m not kidding!’ Lola retorted, getting angry now. ‘I’m his daughter! Who the hell are you?’
The girl was genuinely appalled. She put one hand to her mouth. The nails, Lola noticed, though French-manicured, were longer and tartier than anyone in Lola’s circle would have chosen, their tips aggressively square.
Carin started to clap, the kind of long slow hand-claps an audience makes when the act onstage is so terrible it deserves to be rewarded with sarcasm.
‘What a fantastic scene, ’ she said. ‘Do keep going, Lola. I’m really going to enjoy the part where Daddy’s little princess realises that Daddy had another princess on the side.’ She looked at the girl. ‘Though you’re not a princess any more, are you? You never really were. Just another cheap whore pretending to be better than she was.’
‘Hey, join the club!’ the girl spat back. ‘You screwed him for money just as much as I did! Where I come from, lady, that makes you a whore too!’
In a small, shadowy back of her mind, Lola was very impressed at the way the girl was standing up to Carin. But the front part of her brain was fully occupied with the horrific revelation that, according to what the girl and Carin had just said, this twin sister standing in front of her was in fact—
‘You were Daddy’s mistress?’ she said, utterly horrified.
The girl actually ducked her head for a second, refusing to meet Lola’s gaze. So it was true.
Colours spun before Lola’s eyes. The girl’s face, so like her own, split into a thousand little pieces. Lola felt suddenly weightless, dizzy, her vision blurring. Then everything went dark, and she had the sensation of being pulled down a long, twisting tunnel—
Even though she was standing still, she somehow lost her balance. She stumbled, and someone caught her by the forearms, helping her right herself. When she could open her eyes again, she saw that face, eerily close to her own, and she realised it was the girl who had saved her from falling.
Outraged, Lola pushed the girl away so violently that she stumbled in her turn.
‘How dare you touch me!’ Lola screamed.
‘Catfight!’ Rico said appreciatively, so close that Lola could feel his hot, eager breath on her neck. ‘My money’s on the little ho. The trashy ones always fight dirty. What d’you say, Panio? You wanna put some money on the princess? Hey, as long as they both strip off, I’ll be more ’an happy—’
The girl had got her balance now. She advanced on Lola furiously.
‘Hey, I was trying to help you, ’ she hissed at her. ‘Don’t you shove me away like I’m not good enough to touch you!’
‘You aren’t!’ Lola retorted furiously. ‘You’re disgusting!’
The girl’s cheeks were pink with fury, her eyes sparkling with rage.
‘This has made my day, ’ Carin announced, her voice ripe with amusement, ‘but I can’t have a scene for too long on the doorstep. So you’ll both have to take this somewhere else.’ She stared at them. ‘And don’t come back. Either of you. Panio, get the door.’
‘It isn’t much fun for me either!’ the girl said to Lola, almost defiantly, as the door slammed shut in their faces. ‘You think someone likes you because you’re pretty, and you dance really well, and then you find out it was just because you looked like—’
‘Stop!’ Lola screamed, clapping her hands to her ears so she couldn’t hear another word. She scrambled down the steps to the sidewalk and ran along it, not even sure which direction she was taking, until, mercifully, she saw a cab dropping someone off down the street and she sprinted towards it, arms flailing in a wild semaphore to catch the driver’s attention. Even by New York standards, it was a frenzied way to hail a cab. The cabbie didn’t even have the time to switch his light on and then off again: Lola was already collapsed in the back seat.
‘Where to, lady?’
Lola managed to give the address of Madison’s building. And then she wrapped her arms around herself, making as tight a little ball of her body as she could, and rocked herself, keening, trying vainly to console herself for the worst shock that had ever happened to her in her life.
Evie watched Benny’s daughter dash off down the sidewalk and fall into a cab. She couldn’t blame the girl – Lola, that was her name – for being so upset. Fuck, if she’d just found out her daddy had a mistress on the side who looked exactly like her, she wouldn’t exactly deal with it any better.
There weren’t many times Evie was glad she didn’t know who her father was. But this was definitely one of them.
She turned and looked up at the mansion where Benny had lived. Still lived, if she was being accurate. Jesus, it was some house. She hadn’t even known you could have a house like this in Manhattan, a private one, all to yourself. Massive, imposing, everything perfectly kept, with what looked like a private garden round the back. Benny had more money than God.
Though now the Ice Queen held the purse strings. Fuck, she was a piece of work, that one. Watching Evie and the daughter go at it, standing back and laughing like it was the best bit of entertainment she’d ever had in her life. It wasn’t as if that bitch had cared for Benny at all: Evie could tell that loud and clear. Like Evie said, that bitch had fucked him for money, which is just what she’d done in her turn, but the Ice Queen’d managed to get a ring on her finger and all his multi-millions in her bank account. Well, good for her: but she didn’t need to pretend she was so superior. Evie had actually cared about Benny, in her way. He’d been a gentleman. He’d looked after her, seen that she’d wanted for nothing, promised that she’d be OK, that he would always take care of her, she’d never have to go back to the Midnight Lounge again . . .
And Evie had believed him. What a sucker she was.
But she still believed that he’d meant it. Benny hadn’t realised how sick he was: Evie had seen him, checking his blood sugar levels, making sure he was OK. He hadn’t acted like someone who thought he might actually die if he fucked up his readings; he was always relaxed about it, joking with her about his insulin injections.
Still, an older guy with a 23-year old mistress didn’t exactly want to go on about how sick he was,
did he? That was why he was screwing the 23-year-old in the first place, to make himself feel young again. He wouldn’t want to go and fuck that all up by telling her he was an old fat diabetic one step away from going into a coma and dying.
Sighing, Evie started to walk back to the subway. She was angry with Benny for failing to take care of her like he’d promised, of course she was. But she missed him, too. He’d been good to her. Much, much better than any sugar daddy any girl from the Midnight Lounge had ever had. She’d owed him something for that. That was why she’d made the effort to come and visit him, even though she’d known it was very unlikely that they’d let her in, even though she’d risked humiliation at the hands of the Ice Queen for even asking.
Sorry, Benny, she thought. Bet your daughter finding out about me was the last thing you’d ever have wanted to happen. I really fucked up there, didn’t I?
Evie wasn’t looking forward to getting back to the loft. God knew what Autumn had been saying to Lawrence in her absence. She let herself into the building, taking a deep breath as she started up the stairs, hoping that both of them would be out training some client. Lawrence had been so good to her, taking her in, looking after her: she didn’t like the thought that the only reward she had for him was to bring perpetual conflict to where he lived.
Plus, she didn’t exactly like it on her own account. Fun as it was to tease Autumn by fucking Lawrence’s brains out noisily whenever she got the chance, it was beginning to get her down.
‘Hey, ’ said someone as Evie came up the rickety stairs to the second floor.
‘Hi, ’ Evie said, taking in the person, who was lighting up.
‘You OK with me smoking on the landing?’ the woman asked. ‘It’s just, everyone freaks if I do it in the apartment.’
Evie shrugged.
‘Fuck it, I’ll join you, ’ she said, pulling her pack of menthols out of her bag.
Divas Page 15
