Betrayals

Ten

By noon the day after her picture had appeared on newsstands all over the country, Rebecca gave up all hope of getting any work done. Not that she’d tried that hard. There wasn’t a whole lot to do if she wasn’t going to get out there and take on new assignments. She’d thrown out her red nail polish, used up a dozen cotton balls and ten minutes getting it off her nails, and had done a few bad sketches of the replica of the Boston Tea Party ship just up the road at the Congress Street Bridge.

And answered the telephone.

It was ringing when she’d unlocked her door at eight-thirty and continued to ring most of the morning. She turned down interviews with two Boston newspapers and a regional magazine, but agreed to answer a few questions by a journalism student at Boston University who wanted to know about one of her school’s famous almost-alumni. There were three calls from businesses in metropolitan Boston who offered her assignments; she took their names and numbers and said she’d get back to them. Maybe. The president of a New York advertising firm called to talk to her about becoming his art director. He said he knew her work and had thought about tracking her down for several years, but when he saw The Score at the train station on his way home last night, he decided he had to call. Rebecca listened to his pitch and realized why he had gone in to advertising. She was tempted, told him so, and took his name and number.

An old boyfriend from Chicago called and said he had to be in town on business next weekend, how ’bout dinner? She told him no, but thanks. After seeing Jared Sloan’s picture the last thing she wanted to think about was men.

Half a dozen nonprofit organizations called with very polite, understated requests for money. Two she recognized as reputable and promised them checks, two she hadn’t heard of and asked them to send her more information and two she thought sounded made up and told them to forget it.

And that was enough phone calls for one morning. She put on her message machine and headed over to Museum Wharf, where she stopped for lunch at the Milk Bottle, shaped like its name and located in the middle of the brick plaza in front of the Boston Children’s Museum. She took her hummus salad to a stone bench to watch the crowd, mostly kids, tourists and young, white-collar types looking for a quick meal they could eat outside. It was a gorgeous day.

When Rebecca got up to pepper her hummus, about twenty preschoolers gathered around her bench for a carefully supervised picnic. She remembered taking her youngest brothers on picnics down by the pond at home in central Florida, teaching them about snakes and showing them how to catch frogs and lizards. In her room at night, she would describe all their activities in detailed letters to her grandfather in Boston.

She had hated Florida at first. The oppressive summer heat, the big, strange rooms of Papa O’Keefe’s twenties-style house, the pond in the backyard, the endless citrus groves, the lack of neighbors, the spiders and snakes. It was all so different from Beacon Hill. But her mother had promised her she would come to love the place, and she had, in her own way. That didn’t stop her from wondering what her life might have been like if they’d been able to stay in Boston. Would she have turned out to be another in a long series of impoverished, holier-than-thou Boston Blackburns? At least, she thought, their “wilderness exile,” as Thomas Blackburn called it, had spared her that.

After she took a few more bites of her salad, Rebecca tossed the leftovers and started back toward Congress Street. She’d return to her studio and take on all the assignments she could, maybe think about the advertising job in New York. She needed to work.

A man’s face came at her from the throng crossing the Congress Street Bridge, past the replica of the Boston Tea Party ship, and she stopped cold.

“My God,” she heard herself whisper.

The face was even more battered now and older-so old-but there was still the slight limp, and the tough, sinewy body.

Together, they became the Frenchman from Saigon.

Or his ghost. Hanging back on Museum Wharf, Rebecca waited to see if she wasn’t hallucinating from the pressures of being back in Boston and having her picture in The Score force her to relive the hell of April 1975.

She wasn’t hallucinating.

Rebecca’s heart pounded; this was no coincidence. He had to be on Congress Street because of her. He had spotted her picture in The Score, looked up her studio’s address in the Boston Yellow Pages and here he was.

The crowd thinned out once she’d passed Museum Wharf. Rebecca could easily make out the limping figure in worn, loose-fitting jeans and a faded, short-sleeved black shirt. With his scarred face and snowy hair, he’d never be able to melt into a crowd.

Concentrating on keeping her breathing normal so she wouldn’t do something stupid like faint, Rebecca walked down Congress Street after him. Seeing him was a shock; there was no question of that. Her heart deserved to pound. But she didn’t have any idea whether she should be afraid of him or not.

I suppose you’ll find out if you keep following him…

There were enough people in her building and around outside that she wasn’t too worried he’d try anything. And she wasn’t fool enough to follow him all the way up to her isolated studio. If he went up there, he could ransack the place to his heart’s content.

He wasn’t going to kill her, she told herself. He’d had the chance fourteen years ago and hadn’t.

Of course, by now he might have realized his mistake.

With a quick glance up to check the number, the Frenchman entered her building. Rebecca clenched both her hands into tight, nervous fists and made herself tiptoe up behind him in what passed for a lobby. He had already pressed the up button on the old service elevator.

Before she could say a word, he turned expectantly to her. “I thought that must be you following me.”

His accent was only vaguely French, his voice-its timbre, its intensity-exactly as Rebecca remembered from Saigon, his eyes exactly as soft and brown and strangely vulnerable. He took her in with a sweeping glance, and Rebecca knew he wasn’t seeing a terrified twenty-year-old kid who expected to have her head blown off in the next few seconds. If she hadn’t put the past behind her, she had at least gone on with her life.

She tried not to stare at his ravaged face as she searched for a response. But what was there to say? In 1975, he and his Vietnamese cohort, a tough, brutal man, had murdered Tam and left Jared Sloan dying. Rebecca hadn’t forgotten that night and, she was quite certain, neither had the Frenchman.

He seemed to sense her discomfort and smiled, a surprisingly gentle, tortured smile. “I saw your picture in the paper,” he told her quietly. “I didn’t know until then you’d gotten out of Saigon safely.”

“‘Safely’ might be exaggerating,” she said, the words not coming easily from her dry mouth and tension-choked throat. “But we got out. I’d like to know who you are.”

“I could tell you a name.” He shrugged, and she saw that he was very tanned, his muscles stringy and tough, reminding her of one of Papa O’Keefe’s invincible old roosters. “Would a name change anything?”

“If you just made one up, no. But you could tell me where you came from, why you were there that night in Saigon, why you’re here now.”

“It’s better you ask no questions, Rebecca Blackburn.” Her name rolled off his tongue, as if he’d spoken it many times. Rebecca had to stop herself from shuddering. But he noticed, and said, “Perhaps I shouldn’t have come.”

“Why did you?”

The elevator creaked and groaned as it started its descent. She would run back out into the street before she got in there with him.

If he let her.

She shook off the thought.

“The past,” he said, “sometimes must collide with the present.”

The elevator dinged and the doors opened, but the Frenchman didn’t go in; instead he started back toward the building’s entrance. Suddenly Rebecca didn’t want him to leave. She wanted him to stay and talk to her, but then she remembered the assault rifle he’d used so efficiently that night in Saigon, remembered Tam lying dead in a hot, sticky pool of her own blood. Remembered her own terror and grief and horror. And Jared. Bleeding and in shock, but not dead. Rebecca still didn’t know what she’d have done if both Jared and Tam had died.

Asking the Frenchman to stick around and chat didn’t make sense, no matter how much she wanted answers.

He looked back at her with those warm, strange eyes. “I’m sorry if I’ve frightened you,” he said. “That wasn’t my intention. I was your father’s friend,” he said, “and I believe-I know he would have been proud of you.”

Then he disappeared, Rebecca too stunned by his words to follow him and demand to know what he meant. How could one of the two-man team that had murdered Tam in 1975 have known her father in 1963?

By the time she recovered enough to run back out to the street, the Frenchman had disappeared.

Her legs felt as if they were going to collapse under her, and she stumbled into the elevator, blindly pressing the button for the fourth floor. But her knees began to shake, and then her hands, and by the time she was inside her studio, fumbling into the credenza drawer, her entire body was shaking.

She found the handcrafted silver box her father had brought back from Saigon for her seventh birthday.

Inside was a deep ruby-red velvet bag. Rebecca poured out the contents onto her drawing board.

Ten beautiful colored stones ranging in color from white to near-black glittered up at her.

Rebecca shut her eyes.

Who was she kidding?

She had never really believed the colored stones she’d unwittingly smuggled out of Saigon were an ordinary souvenir. She assumed they’d been Tam’s and that she’d been trying to get them out of the country, a nice nest egg with which to start her new life. Maybe Tam had been killed because of them; maybe not. Whatever the case, Tam was dead and her daughter was living a quiet life with Jared in San Francisco, and Rebecca had gotten used to pretending the stones didn’t exist. It was easier that way: She didn’t have to risk disturbing Jared and Mai’s life with unpleasant questions, nor they hers.

But how had Tam gotten hold of these things?

Fourteen years ago Rebecca had been a scholarship student who didn’t know a thing about gems. But she’d made some money since then, and she’d been around-she’d even bought a few gems of her own.

Tam’s red velvet bag wasn’t filled with just pretty colored stones. Rebecca suspected they were corundum: nine sapphires and one ruby.

She also suspected they were valuable.

She sighed and brushed her fingertips across their sparkling surfaces. So cool, so beautiful. Not worth dying or killing over, in her opinion.

Sliding them back into their bag, Rebecca got on the phone to Sofi. “Don’t you have a friend of a friend or something who’s a gemologist?”

“David Rubin.”

“I need to talk to him,” Rebecca said. “Your place in an hour?”

“Want me to bring the moon while I’m at it?”

“No. If I’m right, we won’t need it.”

Jean-Paul arrived on Mt. Vernon Street less than an hour after he’d left Rebecca Blackburn. He wished he was a better planner, but, as always, he’d acted on instinct and impulse-on feeling rather than cold analysis. He had seen The Score and gone to San Francisco, and then to Boston. First to Rebecca, for no other reason than to see her. Then here, to the Winston house on Beacon Hill -because he had to.

“It’s like a mausoleum,” Annette had told him many years ago. “I hate it. My husband does, too. He’d move in a minute.”

“Then why don’t you?”

She’d laughed. “Because I’m a Winston. If I’d had a brother, he’d be stuck with the place. I loathe primogeniture, but in this case it’d be a blessing.”

It was, of course, a magnificent house, not a mausoleum or anything Annette Winston Reed had ever remotely considered giving up. Jean-Paul went through the unlocked carriageway gate to the back as Annette had instructed him. He had called her office at Winston & Reed and had spoken to her secretary, who’d told him her boss wasn’t in the office today. Jean-Paul had urged her to get hold of Annette at once and left the number of his pay phone.

Annette had called him back right away. The only hint of the mind-numbing shock he’d just given her was a slight hoarseness in her voice.

So she actually thought I was dead.

The thought amused him.

She’d understood they would have to meet in person-if only to convince herself the call wasn’t a nightmare. Reluctantly, but ever the stiff-upper-lip Bostonian, she gave him directions to her house.

Jean-Paul entered the beautiful house in the back, then moved silently through the antiseptic kitchen and down a short hall, where dozens of expensively framed photographs hung on the wall. The people in them were all the same-smiling, rich, perfect. The men were without scars and the women without fear, and Jean-Paul had to make his arms go rigid to keep from knocking the photographs off the wall. The pain was there, the anger, the burning hate. Nearly four years in the Légion étrangère and five years at the mercy of the Vietcong and North Vietnamese in a prisoner-of-war camp had taught him how to control his emotions, but he could feel them exploding to the surface.

Time had resolved nothing.

He called up a self-discipline he’d forgotten he had and pulled his gaze from the private gallery, proceeding down the hall to Annette’s study.

She was seated in a bone-colored leather chair at the antique French table she used as a desk. Sun streamed in through the tall windows that looked out on the elegant urban garden, making the rich woman’s room seem far from the crush and dirtiness of the city.

For a moment Annette seemed unchanged, and Jean-Paul could almost hear her weeping for him as she had thirty years ago, begging him to love her. She was rich, American, older, married. She had fallen for him like a rock in a deep, still pool, drowning in her obsession. Stupidly-so stupidly-he had believed she loved him. Too late he’d learned Annette Winston Reed only loved herself.

Behind her stood a motionless, silent Vietnamese whom Jean-Paul recognized as Nguyen Kim. Kim was just over five feet tall, sleek, wiry and very tough. In Vietnam, Jean-Paul had known him as a consummate survivor. He’d been trained by the American Special Forces, and no doubt Annette showed him off as a former South Vietnamese army officer she’d generously given a job as her bodyguard. But Kim ingratiated himself with anyone who could help him-and was perfectly willing to kill anyone who wouldn’t. Probably, Jean-Paul thought, Annette knew that.

He had considered she might have a gun or a bodyguard, but had risked that she wouldn’t shoot him, if only not to have to explain the bloodstains on her floor.

“Well, Jean-Paul.” She sat up very straight, her tone more regal than it had ever been thirty years ago on the Riviera. She had only been a rich woman then; now she was powerful, as well. “I’m beginning to think you’re invincible.”

He’d had the same thought about her. “I want the Jupiter Stones.”

“Fine.” She swept to her feet and came around to the front of the table, sitting on its edge. Her navy suit was conservatively cut and expensive, and her hair no longer fell out of its pins and made her look more innocent than she was. “Get them. The Jupiter Stones have nothing to do with me.”

“You’re a liar, Annette.”

She laughed. “Oh, I used to love to hear you say my name. To think, I used to lie awake nights wondering if you were thinking about me. My, my, I’ve never been so absorbed with any man the way I was with you. But I’ve changed in the past thirty years. So, yes, Jean-Paul, all right-I’m a liar. But not this time.”

“You’ll do anything to get your way.” Jean-Paul walked to the edge of the Persian carpet but stopped there, as if treading on it would suck him back into her world, back under her spell. “You only care about yourself-your own pleasure and excitement. You were that way even in bed. I should have guessed long ago what you would do to me.”

“And now you hate me.” She looked at him coldly, her eyes as mesmerizingly blue as he remembered, but now distant and unsympathetic. “That’s your problem, Jean-Paul. I can’t help you.”

Looking around the study, he took in all the indications of her extraordinary wealth and thought of his own squalid room in Honolulu. Was she any happier? Any better a person?

“Do you have one of your guns handy? Or will you just wave your fingers and leave your dirty work to your bodyguard?”

He thought he saw her shiver at his reminder of just how much he knew about her-how much he’d suffered at her hands-but she recovered. “I see no reason we can’t resolve this problem in a civilized manner. Jean-Paul, I haven’t seen the Jupiter Stones in thirty years, and that’s the truth.”

“So you say.”

“Don’t believe me, then. It’s your choice.”

Jean-Paul stepped onto the thick carpet, his footfall making no sound, and his gaze riveted on the powerful woman seated before him. He asked mildly, “You love your son, don’t you? As much, of course, as a woman like you can love anyone.”

She bristled. “Who are you to talk to me about love? Get out of my house.”

Jean-Paul ignored her. “And your company,” he went on. “Winston & Reed is your triumph. It would never have amounted to anything if your husband had lived. How fortunate he died, hmm? You’re the Winston. You were always the one with the money and intelligence, but you insisted on being the perfect Boston woman and wife-until Benjamin’s death freed you. A widow can get away with so much more, can’t she? Yes. Look at Annette Reed, bravely carrying on alone.”

“Get out, Jean-Paul.” Her voice was low and deadly, but the Vietnamese guard remained impassive, not moving until she specifically instructed him to.

Jean-Paul persevered. “You always loved to take risks. It used to be you could satisfy your zest for risk by going to bed with the kind of man I once was.” He made himself smile and move toward her, until he was so close he could have taken her into his arms. Better a viper, he thought. But he lowered his voice and exaggerated his French accent, “Aah, ma belle, you were a passionate woman. Have you put all that passion into your company?”

She pushed him away. “Go to hell.”

Jean-Paul laughed. “We’ll go together, ma belle.” Then he moved in close again, daring her to touch him; he saw her wince at the foulness of his breath and the ugliness of his scars. “I can destroy your son, and I can destroy your company. Quentin and Winston & Reed. Imagine them gone. What would you have left?”

For a moment she was expressionless, saying nothing. But Jean-Paul could see beneath the composed facade, could sense how angry she was-and frightened. Could he do it? Would he? Annette might like risks, but she wanted them to be on her own terms. She hated losing control. With Jean-Paul, she had lost control thirty years ago and had tried to drive him out of her life for good.

“Don’t threaten me,” she said, but her voice cracked. She licked her lips. Without lipstick, they seemed pale and thin. Still, she had never been vain about her appearance. “No one will believe anything you say about Quentin or about me. I’ll have you locked up for the raving lunatic you are.”

Unaffected by her outburst, Jean-Paul walked to the table and fingered a chunk of rose quartz Annette used as a paperweight. “ Mai Sloan ’s a pretty child, isn’t she?” he commented, without looking at her.

“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never seen her, Jean-Paul. She’s just fourteen-”

Annette broke off, and Jean-Paul could tell she was getting nervous. The more uneasy she became, the more relaxed he felt. She was a formidable opponent, and to get what he wanted, he had to keep her off balance. Or she would win. Again.

He looked at her. “Get me the Jupiter Stones.”

“Jean-Paul,” she said in a whisper, “let the past be.”

“I can’t,” he replied and left her standing amidst her expensive antiques, her bodyguard’s eyes following him as he disappeared.

Not until she heard the back door shut and his footfall on the cobblestone carriageway outside the open window behind her did Annette move. Then, clutching her chest as her heart throbbed painfully, she flung herself into the hall, running to the front parlor, tripping and stumbling along the way, her vision blurred by tears.

She got to the window in time to see him go through the wrought-iron gate onto the brick sidewalk.

Jean-Paul Gerard.

He wasn’t even the ghost of the robust, cocky young race-car driver he’d been thirty years ago. His horrible face would give her worse nightmares than she already had about him, night after night. He seemed so shrunken and pitiful and old. Yet he was younger than she was. His yellowed, skeletal smile had stirred up her fears of dying, and she’d have given him the Jupiter Stones, just to be rid of him.

If she’d had them.

She watched him limp down the shaded brick sidewalk of Mt. Vernon toward Charles Street until he was out of sight. “Damn you to hell, Jean-Paul,” she said, turning back to her silent, empty house, “why aren’t you dead?”