Betrayals

Eighteen

Quentin Reed finished his run with a cool-down walk across the lawn of the Winston house on Marblehead Neck, north of Boston. He had spent the night there, alone. Built in the twenties, it was a gargantuan ocean-gray clapboard house that his mother had always hated, considering it impractical and ostentatious-like her grandfather, the spendthrift Winston who’d built it. Sixty years ago the Winstons were no longer the moneymakers they had been for two centuries, but had adopted the attitude then prevalent among wealthy Bostonians that preserving fortunes was responsible and prudent, but creating them was somewhat unseemly, unless done prior to the turn of the century. This policy of conservative money management had in part led to the stagnation of Boston ’s economy during the first half of the twentieth century, until by the late 1950s its credit rating was in the cellar. That was when Benjamin Reed had risked Winston money to launch Winston & Reed.

By his death in 1963, even Annette had come around to the notion that making money wasn’t so awful. She took her husband’s fledgling company beyond even what he’d envisioned. She had the house on Marblehead Neck redone in the early seventies, but continued to prefer the intimacy of Beacon Hill or her mas on the Riviera. Quentin held no strong opinion one way or the other about the house itself: Marblehead Neck jutted out into the ocean and that was all that mattered. Jane was staying at their own oceanside house, until they worked out their marital problems.

They’d had dinner together last night.

“You have to stand up to your mother,” she had told him. “Quentin, don’t you see? She’ll respect you more if you quit caving in all the time and start arguing with her once in a while. Damn it, I love you because you’re a decent, sensitive man, but those are qualities of strength, not weakness. It’s time you made her realize that.”

He’d had no counterargument. Maybe he was decent, maybe sensitive. People said he was, but so what? He was also weak, like his father. His mother was the strong one. At the edge of the lawn, Quentin walked out onto a flat boulder hung over a rocky cliff. Twenty yards below the tide was coming in, swirling and foaming among the rocks. The wind off the still-frigid waters of the Atlantic struck his overheated skin and rain-dampened hair, but he hardly noticed the cold. The water’s edge seemed so far away, so unreachable. If he jumped, he couldn’t even be sure he’d hit one of the small tide pools where the periwinkles liked to hide, never mind the ocean. Wherever he landed, he wouldn’t live long. Eventually, the tide would take him.

He shook off the morbid thought. What was the matter with him?

Last night he’d dreamed of Tam. He hadn’t in years. She had seemed so real to him. Every detail about her was etched clearly in his mind: her long, fine, black hair whipping over the front of her shoulders as she turned to him with her dazzling smile. Her delicate and incredibly beautiful face. Her shining dark eyes and small, sensitive mouth. She had seldom worn makeup, and even as an adult she’d resembled a pretty child, a fact that had never failed to incense her. She would call him a racist, sexist American pig, and he would agree and apologize, remarking on her intelligence and self-reliance. They would end up in bed, where she proved herself an artful, skillful lover, very much an adult.

“I can’t live without you,” he had told her so many times.

He had awakened sweating and wretched, with those same words on his lips. For a long time afterward he was positive he could smell the light, expensive perfume she favored. She would never tell him its name; it was her secret, she would say. She had always loved mysteries and secrets.

The run had only been marginally cathartic. He had already notified his secretary he would be in late, but maybe he’d skip going into town altogether. He could just stay here and walk on the rocks. They’d be slippery in the persistent drizzle; he’d have to be careful.

Or not.

He smiled bitterly in the cool wind. It would be a tragic accident, wouldn’t it? Would his mother miss him or revel in the attention her grief would elicit? First the young widow, now the childless mother.

“Jesus,” Quentin breathed, trying to shake off his depression.

He started back toward the house, his wet sneakers squishing with every step and bits of grass sticking to his legs. He remembered how he’d once fantasized about living here with Tam, filling the giant house’s cavernous rooms with their children. As he progressed across the drizzle-soaked lawn, he could almost see them running to him, crying “Daddy” as he scooped them up.

Why couldn’t Tam have continued to love him? Why couldn’t she have forgiven him?

Then he realized a figure was coming across the lawn, not a child, but a man. Quentin blinked, thinking his imagination had run wild. Yet as he drew closer, the figure remained, becoming clearer, and he saw the shock of white hair, the limping gait.

The Frenchman. Jean-Paul Gerard.

Quentin slowed, but didn’t bolt, as perhaps would have been smart. He could easily outrun the older man. Still, no matter what Quentin did, the Frenchman had always been able to find him in Saigon. He would find him in Boston, as well, if that was what he meant to do.

When they were face-to-face, Quentin cleared his throat and said, “You’ve come to kill me.”

Gerard laughed the terrible laugh of Quentin’s nightmares. “Don’t tell me-you also thought I was dead. Or did you only hope I was?”

“I haven’t thought about you in years.”

More laughter. But there was no corresponding twinkle in the Frenchman’s dead eyes. The laughter faded, and he said, “Liar.”

True enough. “What do you want?”

“Not to kill you,” Gerard replied, matter-of-factly. “No, my friend. Nothing will ever be that easy for either of us. I have no wish to harm you. Our arrangement from Saigon is finished, for both of us.”

Their “arrangement” had been nothing short of blackmail. Quentin had arrived in Saigon in October of 1973-nearly eight months after the Paris Peace Accords-despising those of his Americans who’d exploited the country they were supposed to help and protect, who’d supported an underlife of prostitution, drugs and desperation. Then, so easily, so stupidly, he had become one himself. Preying on the fears of a beautiful Vietnamese woman, he had gotten her to fall in love with him-or at least pretend she had. When he’d gone home to Boston and didn’t return fast enough to suit her, she’d assumed the worst. She never even gave him a chance. Instead, she had fallen into Jared Sloan’s arms, and Quentin had come to wonder who had used whom.

But Gerard hadn’t blackmailed him over his love affair with Tam. Through his own naiveté, Quentin had gotten involved with a network of American civilians running drugs into the United States. Jean-Paul Gerard had found out and threatened to bring his “evidence” of Quentin’s involvement to the head of Winston & Reed-unless Quentin paid. So Quentin complied. Thousands of dollars he paid, until his only escape was to admit everything to his mother and beg for her help. Her solution was to make him stay home. So he did, in August 1974, accepting his first management position at Winston & Reed, but expecting-hoping-Tam would understand that he really did love her and would return for her.

But he had never gone back to Vietnam. What would have been the point? He would have had to defy his mother and risk another encounter with Gerard. And Tam had found another man.

Quentin envied how relaxed the Frenchman looked, as if he didn’t even feel the chilly air and drizzle. “Your mother has something I want,” Gerard said calmly.

“That’s absurd.” Quentin couldn’t hide his shock. What could Annette Reed and this troll have in common? “My mother wouldn’t have anything a lowlife like you would want.”

Gerard grinned, his stained and missing teeth revealing decades of abuse. “You don’t think so? She’s a very rich woman, my friend.”

“If it’s money you want-”

“It’s not. None of this need concern you, but it can, if she refuses to cooperate.”

Quentin summoned what courage he could. “Stay away from her. If you-”

Gerard waved him silent. “Please, I don’t have time for this ‘protective son’ nonsense. Your mother needs no one’s protection, least of all yours. She has a valuable collection of sapphires. I want them. If I were you, I’d make sure she gets them to me.”

“You’re mad.”

“If not by now, then no doubt soon. But that changes nothing, my friend. The sapphires.” Gerard’s eyes were piercing, suddenly very much alive. “You tell her, all right?”

Stunned, Quentin watched the frightening man limp back across the lawn, moving with confidence and a strange dignity. He continued down the driveway and disappeared beyond the evergreens that gave the grounds privacy and an air of seclusion. If he’d wanted to, Quentin could have chased him. Demanded answers. Throttled his thin, ravaged figure. But despite his scars and limp and advancing years, Jean-Paul Gerard had proven himself a surprisingly resilient man.

Did he have proof of what Quentin had done in Saigon? Would he have to go to his mother again and beg her help to keep the one stupid mistake he’d made fifteen years ago from continuing to hang over his head?

Quentin shuddered. As usual, he simply didn’t know what to do.

Jean-Paul climbed into the nondescript sedan he’d stolen out of the Boston Common garage. He had no money for rentals. Satisfied that he’d put the fear of God into Quentin Reed, he drove out to Route 1 and headed back down to Boston, keeping within the speed limit. Annette would know he wasn’t going to give up. He’d keep turning the screws harder and harder, until she surrendered the Jupiter Stones.

“Yes, Maman,” he whispered, “we will succeed.”

He stopped along the way for coffee and candy bars, his staples the past few days. He’d dozed no more than an hour or so at a time since he’d seen The Score in Honolulu. There would be time for sleep later. He needed to stay awake. Last night he’d seen Annette’s bedroom light on well past midnight and imagined her plotting ways to kill him, and he’d seen Jared Sloan come to the Blackburn house on West Cedar Street.

They were a problem, Jared Sloan and Rebecca Blackburn.

He would deal with them next.

In Boston, he left the stolen car on Cambridge Street at the west end of Beacon Hill and felt no remorse. He’d picked a car with a near-empty tank of gas and was leaving it half-full.

Quentin showered, shaved and dressed, and feeling more in control of himself if no calmer, he dialed his mother’s Mt. Vernon Street number from the bedroom telephone.

He hung up before she could answer.

She would be coming into the office later today. He would see her there and talk to her in person. He would have to be careful. Even under pressure, his mother had extraordinary self-control, but Quentin hoped he would be able to see through any smoke screen regarding the Frenchman and these sapphires he was after.

Had his mother once done something stupid for which Jean-Paul Gerard was trying to blackmail her?

Impossible.

More likely, Gerard was using what he had on Quentin to force him to get his mother to relinquish something valuable-sapphires-that she had acquired through legitimate means. Quentin would once again be the loser: his mother would relinquish the gems to protect him and keep what he’d done fifteen years ago from coming out and embarrassing them both. She would hold his mistake over his head forever.

He couldn’t let that happen. She wasn’t a woman to understand and never one to forgive. If he intended ever to gain her admiration and respect, he couldn’t let Saigon resurface.

What if he could get the sapphires and give them to Gerard?

Mulling over that possibility, Quentin went out to his car and finally decided that whatever he chose to do, he couldn’t afford to make a mistake. If he did, the Frenchman would be waiting. And so would his mother.

“I often wonder what this company would have become if your father had lived,” she had once told her only son. “Don’t be like him, Quentin.”

Too late, Mother, he thought. I already am.