by Jon Cleary
Tom insisted she take a sleeping tablet, something she had always prided herself on not needing; she finally dropped off, but devils walked in the darkness of her mind and Tom came into the bedroom once when she cried out. He and Sylvester kept vigil in the living-room and between long silences came to know each other well enough for respect to be firmly and permanently established. At nine in the morning the phone rang and Tom grabbed it lest it wake Cleo.
“It’s me, Mrs. Roux. Tom Border. Cleo is still asleep. She was pretty shaken up by what happened last night. Do you want to speak to her father?”
But Sylvester shook his head. He was suffering from his own shock. It had come to him during the night that, if he had not delayed Cleo at his hotel, trying to catch up on all the chances they had let go, she might now be dead.
“No,” said Claudine. “Tell Miss Spearfield I’m relieved and pleased she is safe. Who is looking after Lord Cruze’s remains?”
Remains. Jesus, Tom thought, ashes to ashes, dust to dust . . . More than that remained of a man. “I don’t know. I guess I’ll do it. I’ll call the Examiner in London. Or maybe Mr. Kibler will do it.”
“Leave it to me. I’ll have Mr. Kibler do it. Just see that Miss Spearfield doesn’t worry about it. She’s been through enough.”
Tom hung up, wondering at the sympathy and understanding one found in the most unlikely places. Claudine hung up her end of the line, thinking of Jack, his life finished, his power gone. Up till not so long ago she had never thought about her own death, but now the thought hovered in her mind, a shadow that had darkened when she had been told of Jack Cruze’s death. She would go to Mass this evening, pray for Jack and herself.
“Don’t be so surprised,” Sylvester told Tom. “Women are always better at that than us men. I think they mean it, too. They like to share suffering.”
Tom didn’t know whether Sylvester was being cynical or sincere. He was saved from asking by Cleo’s appearing from the bedroom.
“Who was that?” She had been sleeping with one ear awake, for gunshots, screams for help.
Tom told her, then said, “There are guys from the other papers and the wire services camped downstairs and enough TV cameramen to shoot Gone With The Wind. I really hate those guys, they think they own the world.”
“Go down and tell them I’ll see no one till tomorrow.”
“By tomorrow you won’t be news.”
“That’s what I’m hoping.”
But she was still news even when Sylvester left on the Sunday and she had had to grant interviews. She could have refused, but she knew how she herself would have felt if the editor of some other paper, in similar circumstances, had tried to keep his story exclusively for his own paper. Everyone tried to beat everyone else to a story skulduggery; was part of the game, but there were certain rules that had to be honoured. Two outsiders, working independently, had tried to murder an honest editor and that was everyone’s story. The freedom of the press occasionally applied amongst itself.
Sylvester went home; and so did Jack’s remains. Cleo had phoned Emma at two o’clock in the morning, three hours after the murder, and told her the news. She had explained she had not wanted Emma to hear of the tragedy on the radio and Emma had thanked her for her thoughtfulness. They talked for a few minutes, two women suddenly missing the man neither of them could live with, then they hung up, neither of them committing herself to any further meeting between them. Each felt they could be friends, but the body of Jack still lay between them.
By Monday the story was dead news. The police traced Rosa Fuchs’s New York contacts; but the two girls had fled by the time the police arrived. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind as to who had sent the hit man, but there was no evidence to warrant even asking the Kansas City Police Department to pick up Tony Rossano for questioning.
“The Mob may come after you again, Miss Spearfield,” said the captain in charge of the case, “but we don’t think so. That hit man bungled the job and for all we know he may be at the bottom of some river already. If he’d gunned down some innocent nobodies, they might have sent him after you again. But getting Lord Cruze . . . All I can say is you were lucky.”
“Yes, wasn’t I?” said Cleo and wondered if Jack would have thought the police captain was taking the mickey out of him.
Within a week after the double killing Cleo began to notice a subtle change in Alain’s attitude. He had never been more than coolly polite to her since his return to the paper; now he seemed to be going out of his way to avoid her. He had not missed an editorial conference since his first day as associate publisher; now he missed three days in a row. Cleo rang him one afternoon to tell him about a foreign policy editorial she was running next day, only to be told by his secretary that Mr. Roux would not be in today and could be contacted at his mother’s place out at Souillac.
It was Jerry Kibler who gave her the clue to what was happening. He called her, took her to lunch at Schrafft’s. “You wondering why I brought you here instead of somewhere more expensive?”
“Your bank is going broke?”
He giggled, then was instantly serious. “Don’t knock it, you may need me. I brought you here because I don’t think any of my financial friends or any newspaper friends will see us here. I saw Alain Roux having lunch with Dick Hamilton, Claudine’s banker, yesterday. I rang Dick and asked him what was going on and he told me to mind my own business. I’d have told him the same. But something is going on. I made a few underhand enquiries—I can be very underhand in the interests of a client—”
“Am I a client?”
“You’re going to be, I think. Anyhow, I found out that Alain and Claudine are trying to raise enough cash to buy back Jack Cruze’s twenty-two per cent of the stock. If they do that, guess who’s going to be shown the door.”
“Me. And you.”
“Don’t worry about me. It’s you Alain is after. You’ve put the paper back on its feet and now, with Jack gone, he wants to take over, run it his way with no interference from you. Who would Jack have left his stock to?”
“I don’t know. Possibly Emma, his wife. But I could never call her and ask, not something like that.”
“I’ll call Jack’s lawyers in London. Maybe they won’t want to tell me what’s in Jack’s will, but if I explain the circumstances they may lean a little our way. Not all British lawyers are stuffy. Now what do you want—the Special Plate?”
“I’d better eat up. I may be out of a job soon.”
Two days later he called her. “The will was read in London this morning. You’ve got nothing to worry about, at least for the moment. You’re the owner of twenty-two per cent. Jack left it to you, no strings attached. Sit tight and leave the next move up to Claudine and Alain. And congratulations. You’re a rich woman.”
She hung up the phone and looked at the very faint reflection of herself in the glass that separated her from the newsroom. People came and went through her reflection; she felt as insubstantial as she looked, her head ready to fall off her shoulders. She supposed she had always had a ticket, but she had never really thought of winning the lottery. She had never worried about money and now that she had a lot of it, or the promise of it, she had to count it. She looked up the price of Courier stock and punched buttons on her calculator. Then she sat back and her reflection faded away to nothing in the glass opposite her. She was worth slightly more than seven million dollars.
She did not ring Tom, because all at once she did not know how she was going to tell him of her—no, their—good fortune. The thought was on her mind all afternoon and she was not in command at the conference. When it was over Joe Hamlyn followed her into her office.
“Something worrying you, Cleo? You were miles away in there at the meeting. You’re not pregnant, are you?”
“Joe! Do you ask your daughters that sort of question?”
“All the time. I’m a father.”
“No, I’m not pregnant.” Pregnant with riches, maybe; but she could not tell
him that just yet. She hedged: “I think I’m suffering a reaction to last week. If I hadn’t stopped to have a nightcap with my father . . .”
He nodded sympathetically. “Why don’t you take a week off? Go away and marry Tom. Carl and I will battle Alain for you while you’re away.”
She knew she could not spare even a day away from the Courier right now. “I’ll think about it. I’ll see what Tom says.”
What Tom said, about her new-found wealth, was very little; so little that it worried her. “Is that all you’re going to say? That’s nice?”
They were in the living-room of her apartment, finishing the light supper he had prepared. At a loose end, still waiting to start work on the Times, Tom had occupied himself with housekeeping for the past week. He was no chef, but he could make a passable quiche and a good salad and he made the sort of coffee Cleo had enjoyed in Europe but never found in America. Coffee never kept her awake, but she had the feeling she would not sleep well tonight.
“What do you expect me to say? One of the things you and I had in common was we never talked about money, it didn’t worry us. But now . . . Seven million dollars! I can’t ignore that. It’s the same as if you had a wooden leg—I couldn’t ignore that. I might get used to it in time, but I sure as hell couldn’t ignore it.”
“Money doesn’t have to be as obvious as a wooden leg.”
“It is when you’re living with it.” He stared morosely into his coffee cup. “Jack Cruze would be living with us, too, even though he’s dead.”
“Are you saying that’s why he left me the stock, just to come between us?”
“I don’t know. How the hell do I know what he had in his mind?”
“We shan’t know till we see the date he made his will. Maybe he’d willed me the stock before he and I broke up, before I told him about you and me—” Suddenly she broke down and began to weep.
He looked at her suspiciously, as if she were trying some ploy. He had never seen her weep, except for joy after they had made love. Even a week ago, when she had finally got to bed after the shocking tragedy of Cruze’s death and all the intense action that had followed it, she had not broken down and wept. She had always seemed to him to be in control of her tears and it shocked him now to see her weeping as he had seen Simone weep.
He put out a cautious arm and she slid into the crook of it. He said nothing, nor did she. They settled their differences in silence, as lovers so often do; the problem was put aside for another day, to gather interest and be even more difficult to solve. Or so Tom thought, though he did not say so.
At last he said, “Let’s get married now. We’ve got the papers, we can go down to City Hall and take our place in the queue—”
She sat up, saying nothing, and he took her silence for a refusal. But then she said, “Not down at City Hall. I know a judge or two—I’ll ask one of them to come up here and marry us—”
“Okay.” He did not like public weddings, least of all his own.
“There’s one thing . . . When everything has settled down, I’d like to be married again in a church. A Catholic church.”
It had never occurred to him that she took her religion seriously. “Okay. But why?”
She could not give him a rational answer. She had never renounced her Catholicism, just drifted away from it; but now all at once she thought of her mother and the example Brigid had tried to set her children, none of whom had followed her. She had said her prayers every night, gone to Mass and Communion every Sunday, tried to be “a good Catholic.” She had never defined what she thought of as a good Catholic; she had, however, been a good woman. The goodness in her had been inherent, but she had always felt she needed the discipline of the Church. She would have wanted her only daughter to start off her marriage in what, for her, was the proper place.
“It would have pleased my mum.” She sounded young; but then she had been young when her mother had died. “She was an old-fashioned mother.”
“The best kind,” he said, unwittingly unkind. But she let it pass. She had no idea what sort of mother she would prove to be. They had not even discussed their having children.
II
They were married two days later by a District Court judge whom Cleo had met at dinner parties. The ceremony was held in Cleo’s apartment and Clem and Olive Border flew in from Missouri to meet their new daughter-in-law for the first time. Carl Fishburg was best man and Cleo was given away by Joe Hamlyn. The only other two guests were Kitty Hamlyn and Ethel Fishburg and no prior announcement was made of the wedding.
The Borders’ reaction to Cleo was a mixture of awe and scepticism. They had never met a woman as successful as she and they privately, not even confiding their thoughts to each other, wondered if she would not soon find marriage to their son boring and restricting. Being loving parents, neither of them took into consideration any shortfall in Tom’s ability to cope. The marriage if it failed, would be their daughter-in-law’s responsibility.
But they were pleasant and made a good fist, if tightly clenched, of looking happy. The judge, after kissing the bride, had to hurry back to his court to sentence a murderer to life imprisonment; life must go on, he joked, thinking he would give the son-of-a-bitch thirty years, and he took his hat and departed. Tom and Cleo took their six guests to lunch at the Four Seasons, but first she rang Jerry Kibler and told him what she and Tom had done.
“Congratulations!” He was genuinely pleased. “But you should have asked Sara and me to the wedding.”
“I know, Jerry. But then the list would have grown . . . We did it in a hurry and we’re keeping it quiet, at least for the next week. Till we find out what’s happening at the Courier.”
“I’ll keep an eye on that. Go away on your honeymoon—”
“I can’t do that—”
“I promise you, Cleo, I won’t let Claudine and Alain knife you in the back. Go away for at least a couple of days. I’ve got a cottage up in the Berkshires—go there—”
“Jerry, I don’t want to lose the paper—”
He was silent for a moment, then he said quietly, “Cleo, your marriage and Tom are more important than the Courier. You better start thinking right now about your priorities.”
More fatherly advice; but she knew her mother would have said exactly the same thing. She hung up and went out to celebrate her first priority, abruptly convinced that Jerry was right. She sat between Tom and his mother, love on one side and stiff pleasance on the other; but she tried hard with Olive Border, mincing words till she felt mealy-mouthed. By the end of the meal Olive had warmed to her and across the table Clem was smiling at her with open appreciation. But they still had their reservations. She was still a stranger, with one foot in their door and that much too well-shod for their standards. Tom had told them she was now not only editor of the Courier but part-owner. Mothers dream of rich husbands for their daughters, but sons and rich wives are another matter. A rich daughter-in-law is often harder to bear than a mortgage.
Joe Hamlyn and Carl Fishburg went off to get the Courier out and their wives went home with warmly revived memories of their own wedding days. Cleo and Tom, having driven Clem and Olive back to the Pierre, where Cleo had insisted that they stay as her and Tom’s guests, went off to the Kibler cottage in the Berkshires. They had a glorious two-day honeymoon, shutting everything out of their minds but the enjoyment of each other. They glutted themselves with sex, where they had equal riches; the disaster in the bed in Saigon was long forgotten. Being news-people they could not shut everything out of their minds: they looked at the television news each evening. On the second and last night they switched on to find that hostages had been taken at the US embassy in Teheran.
“I’ll have to go back—”
“No,” Tom said. “Joe knows where you are. If he thought you were needed, he’d have rung you.”
“Darling, I can’t sit this out—”
“You can and you will. It’s only for tonight. You’ll be back in your office tomorrow
afternoon.”
“What’s got into you? You’re a newspaperman—”
“For these two days I’m a husband on his honeymoon. I’m sticking to my priorities.”
Had Jerry spoken to him, too? But she knew that he hadn’t. “You’re not trying to tell me, in your own oblique way, that a woman’s place is in the marriage bed?”
For a moment she thought she saw the old withdrawn look, something she hadn’t noticed in a long time. “Just for tonight, that’s all.”
She argued no further. They went to bed, enjoyed their priorities and went back to New York next morning. The phone was ringing as they came in the front door of their apartment. It was Jerry Kibler.
“There’s an emergency board meeting this afternoon. You better come downtown and see me first.”
“Jerry, I have to go to the paper—”
“See me first. Otherwise you’re likely to be out on your beautiful ass.” He had never talked to her like that before. “Get down here!”
She hung up and told Tom of Jerry’s urgent command. “You better go down and see him. You want me to come with you?”
“No, you’d better go and see your parents off. Give them my love and apologies.”
They went their separate ways. Only Tom remarked that Cleo had not asked him to accompany her to the meeting with Kibler; it evidently had not occurred to her that he might want to go with her. Lines were drawn that morning that she did not see.
Jerry Kibler’s offices were on Pine Street; his New Amsterdam Commercial Bank, despite its whimsical name, had not been able to land a location on Wall Street. Cleo had never visited Jerry in his offices and she was surprised that the bank occupied only three floors of the building.
“Investment bankers don’t need that much space. All we carry is paper and what’s up here—” He tapped his forehead.
