Betrayals

Thirty-Two

The last person Annette needed drifting into her house was her son, Quentin, but there he was, looking even worse than she felt. A long, cold shower had revived her. She’d dressed in slacks, a simple cotton shirt and her tennis shoes, as if ready for an ordinary Saturday morning. Already she’d called Thomas and he’d agreed to bring the Jupiter Stones to Marblehead at one o’clock. I can’t believe he’s had them all these years-or is he just bluffing? It didn’t matter. All she required was his solitary presence on the North Shore in a little more than an hour. The solitary part had been relatively easy; she’d exacted his promise he’d come alone. She knew he wouldn’t go back on his word.

She’d already dispatched an eager Nguyen Kim to Marblehead. The years of idleness had been wearing on him, and he yearned for action. Well, now was his chance. She would leave Jean-Paul and Thomas to him.

In the meantime, she would tend to her son. She had made a late breakfast for herself and Quentin for the first time since he was a little boy and she had grudgingly slapped together peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches for him. They’d had servants, of course, but she’d considered waiting on her son part of a mother’s responsibility. Quentin would hate her if she didn’t make him the occasional sandwich. Thomas had been unimpressed with that kind of thinking. Motherhood, he’d told her, was a role, not a job. He’d sensed her deep dissatisfaction with traditional definitions of that role and had warned her to seek additional positive outlets for her energy and interests before she ruined herself and Quentin. Too late now, she supposed he’d say. What of it? She no longer cared what Thomas thought and hadn’t asked his advice in the first place.

Quentin only picked at the miniature muffins she’d scrounged out of the refrigerator and reheated, adding a pot of coffee and a pitcher of orange juice and serving the whole mess in the sunroom that jutted out into the garden. Quentin had been complaining about Jared Sloan and Jean-Paul Gerard since he’d wandered in.

“I do wish you would relax,” Annette told him impatiently.

“You should have seen Jared yesterday-”

“I did see him. Just ignore him. He’s always enjoyed making you feel small and imbecilic.” She rested back in her chair, her own breakfast barely touched, but she wouldn’t eat until she’d accomplished everything she’d set out to accomplish for the day. It was a tall order, but she was up to it. Forcing herself to focus on her son’s problems, she added, “Jared’s hardly in any position to judge you.”

Quentin sighed, shaking his head sadly. “But the way he talked about Tam. Mother, it was as if he blamed me for what happened to her.”

“That’s his own guilty conscience at work.” Noticing the snappishness of her tone, Annette admonished herself to be more patient: her son deserved that much from her. “Quentin-listen to me, all right? Tam is dead…”

He shut his eyes, wincing as if it were news to him.

Annette could have throttled the weakling. Tam had been dead for fourteen years! Gritting her teeth, she continued. “What Jared has to say about her is, frankly, no concern of yours or mine. You’ve a perfectly fine wife in Jane. I suggest you remember that and stop fretting. I’m sorry to be so brutal, but it’s obvious to me what Tam was.”

Quentin lowered his eyes. “And what was she, Mother?”

“A Vietnamese tramp who used you.” But Annette groaned, slumping down in her chair and feeling awful. “Quentin, Quentin. Why do all our conversations have to be this way? Every time we talk you maneuver me into berating you. Do you think I enjoy it?”

“No, Mother…”

“Then why do you do it? Why ask me about Tam when you know what I think? Here I am, trying to be understanding, and you won’t let me.”

He broke a muffin in half and proceeded to tear it apart, crumb by crumb. “I know-I’m sorry. Maybe I just don’t feel I deserve your understanding.”

“Oh, Quentin.”

She sighed, feeling so damned sorry for him-and furious at the same time. He reminded her so much of Benjamin. I’m not good enough for you, he’d told her a thousand times. What the hell kind of man was that? How was she supposed to respect him-to want him?

Walking behind Quentin, she put her arm around his shoulder and hugged him fiercely. “You’re my son. Quentin…don’t you understand? You’re all I’ve got. That’s what makes me so hard on you, I suppose, but never, never think you don’t deserve my sympathy. Now.” She straightened up, patted him on the shoulder, and returned to her chair across from him. “What are your plans for the weekend?”

“I don’t know-helping to sort out this business with Jared and Gerard, I guess.”

“What’s there to sort out?”

Quentin cleared his throat, looking at his mother as if she were the tough military-school teacher who always found fault with his answers. If only, Annette thought, he realized what an attractive, powerful, tough-minded man he could be. Even sitting there all worried and stricken, he was as handsome as any man she knew with his tawny hair, square chin, roguish smile and trim weekend clothes. She wished he wouldn’t be so damned tentative all the time. Stand up to me, she wanted to say-but another time. Right now she just wanted him to get moving.

“Have you heard anything more from the Frenchman?” he asked.

“Jean-Paul Gerard knows I’ll do whatever’s necessary to protect you.”

Quentin looked pained. “Mother, I’m so sorry…”

“Apologies don’t help the situation, and feeling sorry for yourself or me will only incapacitate you. You should seize upon adversity as an opportunity to make yourself a better, stronger person.”

“I suppose so,” he replied, not knowing what else to say. He had risen before dawn and walked out on the rocks at the Winston house on the North Shore, unable to get Tam out of his mind. He couldn’t think about her without the burning pain of regret in his stomach. Yet to attempt to explain his feelings to his mother would be futile. Not only would she not hear him out, even if she did, she’d never understand how, after all Tam had done to him, he still felt anguish over what he had done to her. Only after he had abandoned her had she turned to Jared Sloan. That Quentin had had little choice, that he had intended to go back for her, meant nothing. Only actions counted.

Her elbows on the table, Annette held her coffee mug in two hands and drank slowly, hoping the caffeine would revive her. She wished Quentin had the courage to meet her eye. What a hellish mess they were in. Thomas, Rebecca, Jared, Jean-Paul. Maybe she should have shot Jean-Paul while she’d had the chance-or let Kim have him. A dead man in her study wouldn’t have been the worst thing she’d ever had to explain.

“I’ve decided to leave for France this afternoon,” she said. “I hadn’t planned to leave until next weekend at the earliest, but I was up most of the night thinking about this dilemma we’re in. Frankly, I think the wisest course of action right now is for me to get out of the country. I usually don’t like to confront problems by running, but I can’t justify standing up to Jean-Paul when he might jeopardize the safety of others-you, Jared, even Rebecca. Whatever my personal opinion is of those two, I don’t want to be responsible in any way for anything Jean-Paul might do to them to twist my arm. It’s best I just leave. If Jean-Paul wants to deal with me, he’ll have to come to the Riviera.”

“Mother, are you sure? You could be leaving yourself open.”

She smiled at his boyish concern for his old mother’s safety; how sweet. What would he think of her if he knew how deliberate her actions were? “Quentin,” she said philosophically, “it’s my guess Jean-Paul Gerard won’t dare step foot in France to follow me. I’m hoping-call it a calculated risk, if you will-that he’ll just give up.” She inhaled, then sipped her coffee, debating whether she should bother to go on. Finally, she said, “There’s another side to this problem I haven’t told you.”

Quentin abandoned any pretense of eating breakfast. His mother’s seriousness-her very blue eyes riveted on him, her lined face strangely pale-further upset his stomach and made him wonder if he should have come to her. He could have explained his fears to Jane, told her everything about Tam, Saigon, the Frenchman. He could have tracked down Jared and talked to him, tried to clear the air between them. Why had he come to his mother? Not for sympathy and understanding certainly; they were in short supply with Annette Reed. For advice? For hope? For strength and courage?

No, he thought, he’d come to her simply because that’s what he’d always done.

“What’s that?” he asked in a neutral tone.

“Thirty years ago,” she said, “I brought it to the French police’s attention that Jean-Paul Gerard was their much-sought jewel thief Le Chat.”

Not wasting a word, she told Quentin about the Riviera in 1959, the jewel thief Le Chat, the popular race-car driver Jean-Paul Gerard, Gerard’s flight from the country.

“I thought I’d never hear from him again,” she explained, “but obviously I was wrong. He used you to get to me in 1974 with that blackmail scheme. Now he’s trying again.”

Quentin had listened quietly, horrified. “Mother, I had no idea. What you must be going through…to do the honorable thing and then suffer for it. And obviously I let you down. I gave him a way of getting to you-” Quentin paused and shook his head in sorrow. “I should have been more careful.”

“All water over the dam now,” Annette said briskly. “You committed a relatively minor transgression, Quentin. You were twenty-two years old, and you allowed yourself to be duped. If you’d done something I considered really wrong-really inexcusable-I would have let you take your lumps.”

“But I was just stupid.”

She made no response.

“Why did Gerard wait all these years to come after you again? There must have been something in that article in The Score-”

“No, I doubt there was anything specific. The Score simply stirred up his old feelings of resentment, and he thought he might as well have another go at me.” She pushed aside her virtually untouched plate of muffins. “The point is, Quentin, that he’s after me, not you or Jared or Rebecca or anyone else. But if I were Jean-Paul Gerard, I’d think very seriously before I stepped foot into a country I’d left thirty years ago as a fugitive from justice.”

Quentin nodded, admiring his mother’s courage. He would have complimented her again and again, except she’d had enough of him.

“Go away for the weekend,” she told him. “Let Gerard realize he’s failed again and go sulk. Everything will be fine.” And thinking of Thomas, Annette smiled and added, “I promise.”

Jean-Paul relished the taste of the hot, bitter coffee from a twenty-four-hour store on Cambridge Street as he walked back up Joy to the intersection of Mt. Vernon. He’d been debating for hours whether or not to go ahead and meet Annette in Marblehead. What was she trying to accomplish with that nonsense about Thomas Blackburn being Le Chat? With Annette, he never knew. He had considered taking the next plane west and returning to the life he had in Honolulu. It wasn’t much: odd jobs, a seedy room, too many trips to bars. He’d tried to make friends, but what was the point? He had a knack for getting good people killed.

He remembered Benjamin Reed’s screams of agony as he’d slowly died.

Remembered Stephen Blackburn’s courageous attempt to defend himself and his party.

And Quang Tai’s absolute refusal to show fear or pain to the countrymen whose tactics he so despised.

I should have died that day, not them.

Jean-Paul had fought as long as he could before being wounded and relieved of his weapon. He had assumed the guerrillas would execute him, but instead they’d marched him off as their latest trophy, a French mercenary prisoner. They’d taken his gun and used it to kill others.

Five years of hell he’d endured.

Every day, every hour of his captivity, he had thought of Annette and what she’d done.

Stephen, Benjamin, Tai. All dead because she had lacked the fortitude to kill Jean-Paul and Thomas herself.

All dead because Jean-Paul had been stupid enough to go up against her again. Would Gisela have wanted him to reduce himself to blackmail-to endangering innocent people-to get to Annette Winston Reed?

He had survived his ordeal in the subhuman conditions of the jungle POW camp and emerged into a South Vietnam in the midst of all-out war. Sick and dispirited, Jean-Paul gave up on any idea of exposing Annette or getting back Gisela’s Jupiter Stones-until Quentin Reed arrived in Saigon in the fall of 1973.

Quentin wasn’t a bad sort, just naive and frightened, but he’d gotten himself into a jam. Jean-Paul had waited to see if he’d extricate himself. He hadn’t. At first he’d okayed the drug smugglers’ use of Winston & Reed planes, not knowing exactly what they were up to. The next time, he’d done it out of fear of reprisal. So Jean-Paul had stepped in and threatened to tell the police what he’d done, using Quentin’s troubles as an opportunity to get to Annette. He doubted he’d have gone so far as to turn Quentin in to the authorities, but he was somewhat surprised when Annette’s bright, sensitive son had agreed to her demand he remain in Boston and give up any hope of a life with Tam. Why not just tell her to go to hell and return to Saigon and take his chances?

It was probably just as well, on one level at least, that he hadn’t. In going after Annette through Quentin and his misdeeds, Jean-Paul had ruined the smugglers’ neat little means of exporting their illicit product-but they didn’t blame him. They blamed Quentin. If he’d returned to Vietnam, Jean-Paul would have been compelled, no doubt, to save his life. He’d experienced a twinge of guilt at his role in Quentin’s abandonment of Tam, but Quentin could have defied his mother and gotten Tam out of Saigon without stepping into the country. Still, Annette would have never tolerated a Vietnamese-and especially Tai’s daughter-in her family.

More to the point, Tam had known too much about Annette. A survivor herself, smart, lively Tam had gotten plugged into the same network as the woman she’d have as her mother-in-law and, Jean-Paul believed, became suspicious that Annette had been responsible for her father’s death. Jean-Paul warned her not to seek vengeance.

“Vengeance?” Tam had laughed in disbelief. “I’ve seen too much suffering in my country to bother with vengeance. No, I’ll use what I know about Annette to get what I want.”

What she wanted was no less than a life with Quentin in the United States.

Jean-Paul had kept an eye on her and Jared, and had been appalled when Rebecca Blackburn turned up in Saigon. He waited for Tam to make her move, prayed she wouldn’t…and hoped Stephen Blackburn’s beautiful, crazy daughter would get out of Southeast Asia before anything happened to her.

Finally, in the predawn hours of April 29, 1975, Jean-Paul realized-too late-that Tam had gone to Annette Reed with what she knew about 1963. The Vietnamese assassin was Annette’s answer to her demands.

Over and over he had pleaded with Tam to forget Quentin and just let Jared Sloan get her out of Vietnam, but Tam had wanted everything: her baby, Quentin, a life in the U.S. “Quentin loves me,” she would say, so disarmingly.

As he started down pretty Mt. Vernon Street, Jean-Paul was reminded of the streets of Paris in his boyhood and was glad to shove aside the dark memories of Quang Tam. During his years of captivity, he had coped with his isolation and suffering by recalling every detail of his childhood with his eccentric, warm-hearted mother. Gisela had loved people and wanted them to love her, and she’d wanted to be somebody-not frantically, not jealously. Just for the fun of it.

“Why couldn’t I have been born a baroness?” she would ask him, laughing.

So she became one. Then Jean-Paul became a successful race-car driver, and it was too late for Gisela to recant and claim her famous son without jeopardizing the life she’d come to love on the Riviera. Jean-Paul hadn’t minded. He and his mother understood one another.

Had she died hating him?

He shook off the question, as he had for thirty years.

Automatically he glanced up at Annette’s magnificent house. He spotted a dark-haired girl pausing at the wrought-iron gate and squinting up at the fanlight above the front entrance.

His stomach lurched as he recognized her.

Mai Sloan.

No!

Jean-Paul threw down his foam cup and felt his insides burn as he began to run.

The Jupiter Stones and justice-vengeance-weren’t worth another life.

Not a child’s life.

With his limp, he couldn’t move fast enough. And what are you going to do when you catch up with her? She’ll only scream. Annette will come out and see she’s Quentin’s daughter-so obviously Quentin’s daughter-and that’ll be that. She’ll whisk Mai inside…

Jean-Paul slowed, wheezing.

He couldn’t risk moving too soon.

Haven’t you caused enough trouble? he asked himself. You should have followed Gisela into the Mediterranean thirty years ago.

Better than that, he should have killed Annette under the olive tree that miserable day when she’d handed him twenty thousand dollars in payment for the life she’d just destroyed.

There was no undoing the past; he could only make the present right.

Nothing would happen to Mai Sloan.

He settled into the shadows.

“Nothing,” he said aloud, waiting.

Grateful that Quentin was about to leave, Annette went to answer the front door. She’d had all she could take of her son. But she was in a relatively good mood. There’d be an end to all this soon…finally. It wasn’t the first time she’d had such a thought. When she’d gotten rid of Jean-Paul in 1959, she’d believed she was free. And then in 1963-for years she’d waited futilely for firm word that he was dead. And 1975. She’d shot Jean-Paul herself and would have made sure he was dead, but Nguyen Kim, her primary contact with the Saigon underworld, had insisted they leave at once for Tan Son Nhut. As it was, they’d only barely gotten out in the ARVN plane he’d commandeered. She shuddered at the memory of the artillery fire all around them, but they’d managed to arrive in Thailand safely. Annette had conducted some business there, quietly arranged for Kim’s emigration to the United States, earning his undying gratitude, then taken a commercial flight back to Boston. For the next fourteen years she’d thought despite the uneasy status quo among herself, Quentin and Jared, at least Jean-Paul was dead.

She took a bite of scone and checked through the side window.

She gasped, recognizing the girl on her doorstep at once as Mai Sloan.

Her hands trembling, Annette opened the door. At first she thought the girl’s Asian features were unexpected, then decided it was her Caucasian features-and then realized they blended together, inseparable, right.

Annette smiled her most gracious smile. “Hello, dear,” she said, hearing the slight catch in her voice. “You must be Mai Sloan.”

The girl smiled back, obviously relieved at her welcome, but Annette had to call on all her powers of self-restraint not to fall back into the entry and slam the door shut.

In particular when she smiled, Mai’s resemblance to Quentin-to Benjamin-was unmistakable.

Mai said, “And you’re my great-aunt Annette, right?”

No, Annette thought, no longer any question-or hope-left, I’m your grandmother.