Younger

by Suzanne Munshower

  “I can’t tell you how sorry I am about the loss of your son,” she said. “I thought he was a very kind man.”

  “Kind, yes.” Madame Barton shook her head. “But foolish. Pierre was always foolish.”

  “Did you go to London for the memorial service? I wanted to, but—”

  “I wouldn’t cross a cobblestone, much less an ocean, to go to anything arranged by that woman. I rue the day Pierre met her.”

  “I didn’t realize you weren’t close,” Anna lied.

  “Get close to Marina?” She snorted. “That would be like cuddling a python, my dear. She’s strong. Perhaps even deadly. She didn’t need to physically kill Pierre; she drove him to his death from overwork and worry. But you worked for him, Anna, non?” she asked.

  “Not for very long,” she said, which was, of course, the truth. “It was just one project. I found Mrs. Barton—”

  “Très froide?”

  “Comme glace,” she managed to pull from her rusty French.

  “More so. So cold and hard that ice could take lessons from her.”

  They were silent as the waiter delivered their food. Then, before reaching for her knife and fork, Anna asked, “But the boys? She’ll let you see them?”

  To her shock, Madame Barton snorted again, more loudly this time. “The boys! They’re nothing to me and should have been nothing to Pierre. Don’t look so stunned, my dear. They weren’t his. Pierre’s precious twins are the sons of some drug dealer who died of a heroin overdose. Luckily for them, Marina’s mother is a doting grand-mère because Marina’s maternal instincts are those of a cockroach. Pierre was so besotted, he couldn’t see how common she is. You see, for all her airs, Marina’s no more than the ruthless offspring of a corrupt Communist apparatchik who plotted his way into owning a chemical factory that Marina, with Pierre’s help, stole out from under him.”

  Of course. Anna figuratively slapped her forehead: the boys weren’t his. That’s why the wedding date was so long after the birth of the children.

  “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.” Madame Barton blinked away tears. “But I did love him, and I haven’t been able to speak to anyone about it.”

  “And he loved you, I know. The whole YOUNGER venture was for you.”

  “Did he tell you that? He wanted to get rich selling the fountain of youth because of his mother?”

  “Well, he did say that after your husband, um, left, you were determined to be more youthful and, um—”

  “And turned myself into a monster? Don’t be silly, child. Pierre’s father was the one obsessed with youth.” She gestured toward her face. “He did this. Oh, not himself; he was no surgeon. But the surgeon he hired wasn’t much of one, either. Jasper told me I was too old looking for a successful man such as he’d become. I had to look younger or he’d divorce me. He hired an incompetent doctor, then he left me to live with the results.”

  “That’s dreadful!” She was as stunned by Pierre’s lies as by his father’s cruelty. “How can you be so calm?”

  “It was a long time ago.” Madame Barton shrugged. “The past is past. I put the cream on my hands because it meant so much to Pierre. He was sure he was going to be a billionaire, and he wanted so desperately to live up to what he considered his father’s genius. Then, too, Marina made him feel like a failure, spending all his money, living beyond their means, even pushing him to overpay for the company that had invented YOUNGER so no one else would get it first. Money is all she loves, that one.” She looked enormously sad and, in Anna’s eyes, no longer grotesque. “And she turned him into a liar, a man who would lie about his mother just to convince a woman to work for him.”

  They spoke little during the remainder of their lunch, for which Madame Barton insisted upon paying. “I’m an old woman with no one,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’ll stay alive as long as possible to keep that shrew from owning the whole business and in the hopes of seeing her punished.” She smiled gently. “Anna, I don’t know what brought you here. Perhaps one day you’ll tell me. But I doubt you came here by chance, and I wish you well in finding what you’re seeking.” She took an old-fashioned calling card from her Chanel handbag. “Keep this. And I hope I will hear from you or see you again.”

  “I promise you will, Madame.” She stood to go, then leaned down and gave Marie Héloise Barton an embrace with a kiss for each cheek. “I hope doing that wasn’t ‘common.’”

  “Not at all, chérie. Not at all.”

  Anna hurried back to the station and rejoiced at getting the last single sleeping couchette on the train leaving at 7:45 p.m. Then she headed for Galeries Lafayette. She’d be seeing David in a few days. She could use some chic clothes, and where better to shop than the most fashionable city in the world, where only one elderly woman knew where Anna Wallingham was today.

  Before going back to the station, she found an ATM and withdrew the daily maximum from both her Anna Wallingham account in the States and Tanya Avery’s in London. She’d been avoiding ATMs to leave no digital trail, but if her hunter or hunters found out she’d been in Paris through being able to track her withdrawals, it would get them no closer to where she would be by morning. So what if someone found out she’d met with Pierre’s mother? She wasn’t wanted by the police—at least not yet—and she was about to make her last dash toward freedom.

  She felt temporarily safe enough to eat dinner in the train’s dining car, the old-fashioned, romantic kind, with starched tablecloths, uniformed waiters, haute cuisine, and prices to match. But she refused to nibble another stale sandwich, and with the withdrawals from the ATMs in France, she would more than get by.

  She started Mother Night again, with her coffee, and kept reading afterward. It didn’t upset her tonight. Lunch with Marie Héloise had lifted her spirits, not only because the other woman was an inspiration, but because what she’d learned strengthened her conviction that Marina Barton was the key. If she could figure out the connection between Marina and Martin Kelm, she might yet discover why people had died and who had killed them.

  She jumped up when the alarm peeped at half past four and prepared herself to face once again the bleakness of Milan’s Central Station, even less salubrious surroundings before dawn, since so many of its wee-hour denizens were the drunk and the disturbed. But she could eat a pastry and drink a cappuccino as soon as the coffee bars opened and get on the first express train to Rome, arriving while it was still morning.

  She was impatient now. She had a lot of thoughts about what was going on at BarPharm and needed a sounding board, a part she was counting on David to play. After a month on the run, she wanted to make Rome her last stop. Life had turned into a bad movie; she was ready for the wrap party.

  Anna had expected the Eternal City to have changed since she’d last been there, but, looking up hotels in her guidebook, she discovered there were still sensibly priced small hostelries in the middle of what had always been the stratospherically high-rent district around the Spanish Steps. Because she was afraid to use her own passport and had no credit cards for the imaginary Maria Kelm, she hadn’t been able to prebook, but when she called the one closest to Piazza di Spagna from a station pay phone, she was told they had rooms.

  She took a taxi there, and after looking at several rooms, decided on a twin, rather than a double for single use, because it would be the most spacious and least “bedroomy” place for her and David to meet without leaving the hotel. The desk clerk—a gallant, mustachioed older man who introduced himself as Mario—was happy to recommend a place in the midst of this rich-tourist oasis where locals dined, and she went out again after unpacking and showering. This was what she thought of as the fool’s paradise part of life on the run: she always felt safest when she first hit town, sure no one was nipping at her heels yet.

  She strolled through the high-rent district. When she first caught sight of her reflection in Prada’s window
on Via Condotti, she didn’t recognize the woman in black jodhpurs and a dark coat, black curls falling around her face, with the blood-red lips and slashes of dark rouge of a 1950s B-movie siren.

  Mario’s suggestion couldn’t have been better. Refreshingly rustic and reasonably priced for being in the midst of Rome’s designer outposts, Trattoria da Giggi was undeniably charming, but what made it most appealing to Anna were its long rows of tables filled with families, shoppers, businessmen—all manner of Italians along with the odd tourist or two—sitting cheek by jowl with strangers while eating huge plates of pasta and Roman specialties like salted codfish and sausage with beans. The people next to Anna at the table spoke English and were planning to go to the States for their next vacation. She took refuge in chatting; if anyone searching for Tanya Avery or Anna Wallingham had wandered in, they might not even have noted the hard-faced brunette dining with friends.

  When she got back to the hotel, the softer pillow she’d requested from Mario was on her bed. She propped herself up and worked on adding her conversation with Madame Barton to her notes. For dinner, she ate the fresh insalata Caprese she’d picked up on the way back from lunch, washed down with a glass of overpriced vino bianco from the minibar. She fell into a deep slumber, dreaming she was on a train hurtling nonstop through the farmlands and cities of country after country, with no preordained terminus. Even asleep, she was aware that she didn’t care. She just slept on, lulled by the gently rocking motion of the car on the tracks.

  She awaited David’s arrival with anxiety and eagerness. With each passing day, she longed for human contact. Mario was off the next few days, and the woman filling in at the desk had no interest in, or pleasantries for, Anna, who scurried out briefly for lunch, her backpack loaded up for security, so the maid could tidy the room. She went out sometimes with the wig, sometimes with her hat pulled down, walking watchfully yet quickly through the streets as if she had somewhere to go.

  At the closest English-language bookstore, she picked up more books—a Charles Cumming and a Sue Grafton, it seeming like the right time for mysteries. Once she went into a restaurant on her own for dinner, but she was too jumpy, practically hurling herself under the table when a waiter dropped a plate. She was more comfortable dining in her room: cold pizza, sliced prosciutto and cheese, fruit. She’d never complain about not having enough time to read again, she vowed—eat, read, sleep was all she knew now.

  She thought a lot, too—and not about BarPharm for a change. This time it was her own life, and the shock of how little she’d examined it in the past years, that held her attention. How had she never realized how ashamed she’d remained of her working-class roots, how touched by the contagion of her parents’ sense of inferiority? It was as if she’d been living under a spell prior to April and had now awakened to realize that, other than Allie and Richard, she didn’t miss much about that old life. Yes, she’d found satisfaction in her work, but that came from the pleasure of writing and thinking creatively rather than any thrill of peddling consumer goods. And she’d thought she was empowering women! Why had it never occurred to her that so many skincare and makeup lines owed much of their success to exploiting women’s vulnerabilities and self-doubts? She supposed it was because she had never even looked at her own vulnerabilities and doubts. She was Anna the strong, the independent, the loner. She’d excelled at hiding the needy and lonely Anna from even herself.

  When Monday arrived, she dressed carefully to meet David, not wanting to stand out but hoping to look good. In her new gray merino sweater and flannel pants from Paris, with ballerina flats on her feet and her hair tucked into her black wig but without the harsh makeup, she looked like just another well-dressed woman of a certain age. A new pair of oversized sunglasses completed both the look and the disguise. It was warm enough to forego a coat, but she wore her black cardigan solely because it made her feel more secure, a pretend invisibility cape. She wrote a note for David on hotel stationery, then sealed it in an envelope and put it in her purse.

  She ate a salad and drank fizzy water at a bar on a side street. Through its windows, she saw no one likely to have been shadowing her. Her main concern now was if anyone had been trailing David.

  When she finished her lunch, she crossed Piazza di Spagna, passed the foot of the Spanish Steps, and took the elevator tucked inside the entrance to the Metropolitana up to Piazza Trinità dei Monti at the top of the most famous staircase in the world. Surely no other possessed its sensuous beauty, the wide stairs splitting into curved wings as it climbed. Standing above it provided the perfect vantage point for watching the piazza below, with its famous sunken boat fountain in the middle.

  When she saw David climbing out of a taxi that had pulled up by the cabstand beyond the fountain, she made a beeline toward someone she’d been keeping an eye on, a lone, scruffy young backpacker sprawled on the stairs. “Scusi. Parla inglese?”

  Not only did he speak English, but he was a Texan who smiled cheerfully, called her “ma’am,” and asked if she needed directions. “No directions, thanks. But if you’ll take this note to the man standing and paying the taxi down below, I’ll pay you ten euro now and ten when you’ve done it. How does that sound?”

  “No problem, ma’am.” He glanced down at David, then back at Anna and grinned. “If it’s for love, that is.”

  “It’s for love,” she assured him, blushing. “You could even say it’s life or death.”

  “You got it.”

  Keeping an eye on the square below as he clambered to his feet, she said, “First, let me tell you where to go afterward. You know how to get back up here to Via Sistina, without using the stairs?”

  “Yeah, you just go around by the American Express office and—”

  “Good. As soon as you’ve handed the note to the man I point out, I want you to hurry off, okay? Run to the left and then go to the other end of Via Sistina. I’ll be waiting with the other ten for you. Got it?”

  “You betcha, lady.”

  She pointed out David, then handed him the envelope and ten-euro bill. “As soon as I see you give him the envelope, I’ll head down the street, okay?”

  “No problem. I trust you, ma’am.” He shoved the money into a pocket of his jeans and held on to the envelope. “See you in five.”

  She hurried back up, then moved to the far left to watch as the boy walked up to David, gave him the envelope, then rushed off. She turned on her heel and headed down Via Sistina.

  The boy actually beat her there. Ah, the stamina of youth, she thought as she paid him. She flagged a taxi passing by. “Thanks for your help, dude.” She smiled.

  He opened the car door for her, like a good Texas boy. “My pleasure, ma’am. And good luck with that love thing. Oh, and the life or death thing, too, you hear me?”

  From your lips to God’s ear, she thought, then she smiled and waved until he was out of sight.

  Chapter 21

  Her note for David gave directions for walking the few blocks to Piazza del Popolo and told him to make sure his cell phone was turned on. Anna was standing in the doorway of one of the piazza’s twin churches when she saw him approaching, duffel bag over his shoulder. She turned her back and sent a text to the number he’d put in the Drafts folder. Bar Rosati. Straight ahead. Take a seat on the terrace. She saw him take out his phone, look at it, then put it back and peer around in search of Rosati, passing within fifty feet of her as he headed for it.

  She stood guard to make sure he wasn’t being followed, then crossed to the café, the terrace of which was sheltered from the square by potted bushes that provided privacy. As she entered, she spotted David at the back, pretending to study a menu. She slid into the seat across from him and pulled off her sunglasses. “Welcome to Rome.”

  He just stared at first. Then he raised his eyebrows. “Brunette?”

  “Wig.”

  “I think this is the part where I say I think
you have some explaining to do.”

  “I think you’re right.”

  They ordered Campari and sodas. “I remember drinking these with you before,” David said. “While smoking Marlboros. You quit?”

  “Smoking? God, yes, years ago. I’d noticed in London that you had.”

  “Yeah, before Nick was born. It seems so eighties now, doesn’t it?”

  “In LA, no one smokes. But I guess you know that.”

  “I go now and then for work. Is that where you’ve been?”

  “Sorry. I forgot you don’t know. Yes, I got into advertising and PR, then moved to LA years ago. I was a consultant. Beauty, mostly.”

  “Was?”

  She shrugged. “Well, now I’m—well, I guess now I’m on the lam.”

  They both laughed nervously, releasing some of the tension.

  “Here.” She handed him the hotel’s card and a small envelope. “I didn’t book a room, so they wouldn’t know I knew you, but it’s pretty quiet so I’m sure they’ll have one. Take this flash drive, too. It’s my diary covering the insane ‘experiment,’ files of Barton’s, and my reporting of the events as best I know them. You brought a laptop? Good. When you get to the hotel, open the drive and browse my report without copying it onto your computer. Then stick the drive in the envelope, put your name on it, and ask them to lock it in the safe behind the desk. Just in case.”

  “The word eager strikes me as overly enthusiastic, but I’m certainly anxious to hear your story. When I was at the company nosing around, I found the atmosphere disconcerting. More disturbed than grieving. There was an aura of deep uneasiness, I’d say. It seems the man I worked with, Clive Madden, might be returning, by the way. Becca admitted no one’s unhappy about that part. She considers Clive the real business and marketing expert. Based on my own experience, I’d say Barton micromanaged, much of it after the fact. He’d often okay something, then call the next day to say it all had to be redone. I suspected he was consulting with someone with strong if senseless opinions whom I now suppose was his wife.”