Betrayals

Thirty-Five

“Sofi-Sofi, it’s Rebecca. I need your help.”

She was pacing in her grandfather’s kitchen. She still hadn’t heard word from anyone-her building, Winston & Reed, Jared. She couldn’t wait around for something to happen.

Sofi said, “Words I’ve despaired of hearing from R. J. Blackburn. What can I do?”

“I need you to come over here now.”

“Done-”

“No, wait. I won’t be here. Listen-I’m leaving the Jupiter Stones on my bed. Take them to a safe place. I imagine David Rubin can secure them. Nobody comes near them except Jean-Paul Gerard, Jared Sloan, my grandfather or me.”

Sofi inhaled sharply. “Jean-Paul Gerard. R.J., isn’t he a crook?”

Rebecca abruptly stopped pacing. “No. He’s not a crook. If something happens and none of us is able to get the stones, tell the police the gems were found in Annette Reed’s possessions in 1959 in the south of France, but not recovered until now.”

“Wait just a minute. What’s this about ‘if you’re not able to’?”

Rebecca resumed pacing and answered as clearly and as concisely as she could. “I can’t go into all the details right now. Tell the police Annette was Le Chat, and they’ve got to prove it and set the record straight. They have to admit they were wrong about Jean-Paul Gerard.”

“R.J.-”

“Sofi, will you do it?”

“I’m on my way.”

Rebecca hung up. The rain had picked up, the wind whipping it against the windows. As a little girl, she had loved to be in there while it rained. She’d color, read, play games with her brothers, just sit and watch the raindrops hit the puddles. Florida storms and the drafty O’Keefe house were different, but she’d brought her love of rainy days south with her.

It would be so easy, she thought, just to go upstairs and curl up on her bed and do nothing.

She dragged out her handbag, withdrew the red velvet bag of stones, and took the two flights of stairs two and three steps at a time and left the Jupiter Stones on her pillow.

Back downstairs, Athena was munching on an English muffin with pictures of dead bodies unfolded on her lap.

“I’m going out,” Rebecca told her. “If an Amerasian girl-fourteen years old-comes by, sit on her until Jared Sloan gets back.”

Athena glanced up with dark, intelligent eyes. “His daughter?”

“Yes.”

“And if he asks where you are?”

“Mt. Vernon Street. He’ll know-tell him it’s all Annette.”

Athena didn’t need to repeat the instructions, just said, “Okay,” and returned to her studying.

Rebecca headed out.

Jean-Paul hobbled down Mt. Vernon Street, knowing there was no longer any time…knowing he should have strangled Annette last night when he’d had the chance. He had jumped in front of the big Mercedes coming out of her driveway, trying to impede its progress out into the street. He’d pulled on the doors, but they were locked. He’d banged on the windows and screamed at Mai to run.

She’d looked nervous, but Jean-Paul had seen Annette’s reassuring smile and heard her as she rolled her window down a few inches. “Don’t worry-I won’t let him hurt you.” Then she’d turned to him. She knew she had him. “See you soon.”

The powerful car lurched, throwing Jean-Paul off. He’d landed hard and cried out at the pain slicing up from his bad leg.

Now he needed a car, a way to get to Marblehead. There was no question in his mind that Annette was using Mai to lure him to her house there. It was a private setting. She could kill him-finally. And Mai? What would Annette do with the girl? Jean-Paul felt himself go numb with shock and pain. Annette would kill Mai. She’d tried once before, in Saigon.

What have I done?

Rebecca Blackburn swung around the corner. Her expression, her mouth set hard against the rain, reminded him of her father so long ago. She was already older than he had been when he’d died. “She’s a relentless mix,” Stephen had said affectionately of his young daughter, “of her mother and her grandfather.”

No, my friend, nothing will happen to her.

But right now Jean-Paul needed her help.

Her gaze fell on him and she didn’t flee, as perhaps would have been smart. She came to him, running hard and just daring him to try and get away. Instead he moved toward her.

Before she could speak, he said, “There’s no time. Rebecca, I need a car. Annette-”

“I know about her.”

Jean-Paul could see that she did, and a surprising sense of peace came over him as Rebecca looked at him without fear, without hatred, without confusion. For the first time in thirty years he had someone who believed in him. That it was Rebecca meant everything to him.

But he said, “It makes no difference.”

“I have a truck. Come on-let’s go. You can tell me everything on the way.”

“No.”

Already starting down West Cedar, she swung back around at him, her rain-soaked hair whipping into her face. Jean-Paul grabbed her by the shoulders and held her tight. If his action created any doubts about her conclusions about him and Annette, they didn’t register in her pale, wet face.

“The keys,” he said.

“If you want them you have to take me with you. My grandfather’s in trouble, isn’t he?”

“Give me the keys, Rebecca.” He hesitated as his words had no discernible effect on her. Then, finally, he said, “Annette has Mai. She’s going to finish what she started in 1975.”

At Rebecca’s stricken look, Jean-Paul acted, taking advantage. He grabbed her wrist and twisted it behind her back, sticking one hand into the pocket of her soaked jacket, then the other. He came up with a set of keys.

“Which truck?”

“You’re hurting me-”

“You’ll survive, but I’ll break your arm if you don’t tell me. Which truck?”

“You’ll know.”

Glancing down West Cedar, he saw what she meant. Amidst the upscale cars was one battered ten-year-old truck. He started to release Rebecca, but knew she would only chase after him. Even if she didn’t have his soldier’s experience, she was younger, faster and didn’t have his bad leg. But he couldn’t bring himself to break her arm. Adding pressure, he pushed her down to her knees. She cried out in pain, but he didn’t release her.

“Let me do what I have to do,” he said.

Then, swiftly and with calculated force, he kneed her in the side, catching her in the ribs. She doubled over in pain, momentarily breathless.

Moving as quickly as he could, Jean-Paul hurried toward her truck.

Rebecca caught her breath and forced herself back upright. Her arm ached; she could see the imprint of Jean-Paul’s fingers on her wrist. The cold rain pelted down on her, but she ignored it. To get off West Cedar, Jean-Paul was going to have to drive past her.

In the next seconds, she heard the familiar rattle of her truck.

She was surprisingly steady on her feet, but to mislead Jean-Paul, she wobbled around as her truck came to the intersection of Mt. Vernon and West Cedar and slowed for a car speeding down Mt. Vernon.

Rebecca lunged and grabbed on to the back of the pickup, grabbing hold of the tailgate as Jean-Paul shifted gears and screeched sharply to the right, out onto Mt. Vernon. She could see Jean-Paul checking his rearview mirror. She hauled herself up and over the tailgate and went sprawling into the back of the truck, landing hard.

Jean-Paul slammed on the brakes at Charles Street, got out and walked around to her. “You don’t give up, do you?”

“I’m going wherever you’re going,” she said, “even if I have to steal a car and follow you-”

“All right. We’re wasting time.” He put out a hand. “Come on.”

Not trusting him, she ignored his offered hand and climbed down on the other side of the truck. Her arm ached, her side ached, she’d banged her knee leaping onto the tailgate-but Annette had Mai, and Rebecca didn’t know where her grandfather was. She jumped into the passenger seat before Jean-Paul could get back behind the wheel and speed off without her.

“Why do you care so much about me?” she asked him as he thrust the old truck into gear and clattered onto Charles Street, heading toward Storrow Drive.

He looked at her and grunted. “Don’t push your luck.”

“No, I’m serious. You could have knocked me out or run me over. There’s something going on between you and me that goes beyond a macho Frenchman’s idea of protecting a helpless woman.”

His white eyebrows arched, and for a moment she could see vestiges of the dashing race-car driver he’d been. “You’re no one’s idea of helpless.”

“So why do you care about me?”

“Because,” he said, “I’m too stupid to know any better.”

Jared did everything short of taking on a half-dozen security guards and breaking in to Quentin’s condominium in the elegantly subdued five-star hotel on the Public Garden. Chords of Mozart floated down the hall from the tearoom where a pianist in black tie was entertaining the sparse crowd gathered on love seats and wingbacked chairs, being civilized and very correct. The man at the front desk had suggested several times that Jared have a seat in there and await his cousin’s return. A pot of tea and Mozart. Just what he needed.

Where’s Mai?

“I don’t have any change,” he told the man at the front desk he’d been harassing. “I need to make a call-”

He pushed a telephone toward Jared. “Please,” he said, “go right ahead.”

His stomach burning, he dialed the Eliza Blackburn House.

“Put on a tape if you like,” Annette told the nervous girl sitting beside her. They were already winding through the familiar streets of the picturesque seaside town of Marblehead. “It’ll only be a few more minutes.”

Mai hunched over toward the passenger door. “That’s okay.”

“You’re still worried about that man, aren’t you?”

Nodding slowly, Mai decided not to mention that she was also worried about her great-aunt. Going off with her to Marblehead had suddenly not seemed such a good idea when the Frenchman had pounced on the Reed car. Why had he told her to run? Why had he looked so scared?

“Do you know who he is?” Mai asked.

“I have no idea. Mai, I don’t want to worry you needlessly, but…well, dear, I believe he’s the man who killed your mother. Any proof we could get would be in Saigon-Ho Chi Minh City now. We’ll talk to your father about him after we get to Marblehead, all right?”

Mai shut her eyes tight, trying to squeeze back the tears. She wanted to talk to her dad now. She didn’t trust Annette Reed. No wonder her dad hadn’t let her come visit Boston. His aunt was weird.

“Calm down,” Annette said. “Everything will be fine.”

The minute the car slowed down, Mai thought, she was going to jump out and run and call the police to bring her father to her.

Annette, however, gave no indication she’d be slowing down anytime soon.

Jean-Paul had Rebecca’s truck cranked up to seventy as he negotiated the intricacies of 1A and corrected his passenger on the mistakes in detail she’d made in her rendition of the events of the past thirty years. The general scope of Annette’s wrongdoing-and his own-she had exactly right.

“So in 1959,” she said, “you and Annette had an affair and she framed you for a series of jewel robberies you didn’t commit. Why didn’t you stand up for yourself?”

“The evidence was against me-Annette had planted one of her own bracelets in my house and said I’d stolen it from her. And, Rebecca, who do you think would have believed me? I was a daring Grand Prix driver. She was a proper Boston housewife-”

“Who got her kicks stealing jewels from her wealthy friends and acquaintances.” Rebecca winced. “I guess you were caught between a rock and a hard place.”

“She warned me I was about to be arrested and paid me to get out of the country-to avoid the embarrassment of our affair coming out.”

“Did she realize you knew she was Le Chat?”

“No, she still doesn’t.” Jean-Paul gripped the steering wheel, remembering her attempt last night to get him to believe Thomas was Le Chat. A clever way, he now saw, to get them both out to the relative isolation and privacy of the Winston house on Marblehead Neck. He added, “She’s convinced it’s her secret.”

“And that’s what started everything else?”

“That and my own greed, my own inability to let the past be.”

“You wanted the Jupiter Stones?”

“Yes.”

Rebecca turned and stared out her window. “I have them, you know.”

Jean-Paul stopped breathing. “What do you mean?”

And she told him…about Tam at six and herself at four in Annette’s room…about infant Mai screaming on the helicopter and Rebecca scooping out the fortune in gems…about hanging on to them for the past fourteen years thinking Tam must have been planning to smuggle the jewels into the U.S., and that the Vietnamese who’d killed her had been after them.

When she finished, Jean-Paul was unable to speak.

Rebecca looked at him. “You’ve always thought Annette had the Jupiter Stones, haven’t you?”

He nodded, the slow, dull, agonizing ache of regret working its way through him.

“That night in Saigon,” Rebecca said. “You had no idea Tam had the stones?”

“No,” he whispered. It was nearly impossible to utter a word. “She must have figured out everything and threatened Annette…” He broke off, choking back tears. “If only I’d left well enough alone.”

“You risked your own life in an attempt to save Tam’s-and you did save mine, Mai’s, Jared’s. You shot Jared to keep the Vietnamese from killing him outright, didn’t you?”

“Yes…”

Tam, he thought. Beautiful, stubborn, determined Tam. All these years she’d had the Empress Elisabeth’s gems. Had she realized their monetary value? With the Jupiter Stones, she could have bought herself a new life in any country in the world. But not Tam, Jean-Paul remembered. At twenty-two she had wanted love and happiness…a life with Quentin Reed. So she had used the valuable gems-the stones that could damn Annette as a liar, a jewel thief, and even a murderer-as a means to get what she wanted.

Help me, Madame Reed, Jean-Paul could hear her saying, and I’ll return the Jupiter Stones to you. Let me have Quentin…let me have a life.

It was all so clear to him now.

Aah, Maman, I’ve failed you again.

Beside him, Rebecca asked, “What happened to you after that night?”

Annette, he explained, had slipped into Saigon to make certain Tam and her baby didn’t get out. As South Vietnam had collapsed, her network had scattered, and, in any case, she was unwilling to delegate this particular nettling problem. Not until he had spotted her hired assassin going into Jared Sloan’s apartment had Jean-Paul realized she was even in the city. Knowing he was probably too late, he had raced after the Vietnamese, but already Tam was dead. Jean-Paul told him Annette had sent him as backup.

Afterward, Jean-Paul had gone after her.

“I didn’t know where she was,” he said, in a neutral tone that surprised him. “That gave her an advantage.”

She had shot him in the face and left him for dead in an alley.

Jean-Paul regained consciousness in a communist Saigon. All around him were bo dois, communist soldiers. His face was shattered, and his recovery, in hiding, was slow. It was eighteen months before he could escape with dozens of refugees in a fishing boat, a grueling experience for which even his years as a POW hadn’t prepared him.

He got as far as Honolulu before his body gave out again, to malnutrition, dehydration, infection. The next months he spent on the streets just trying to stay alive. How could he possibly take on Annette Reed? He saw her picture in a magazine, read about her in cast-off copies of the Wall Street Journal. She was untouchable.

You’ve survived, he’d told himself. Be glad of that.

Not until he’d seen the copy of The Score had he known Rebecca, Jared Sloan and Mai had gotten out alive. He could have found out but hadn’t. The picture was like a call to action. His final chance.

Stupidly, arrogantly, ridiculously, he had thought he could succeed this time in compelling Annette to give up the Jupiter Stones and to bring her to justice for the crimes she’d committed.

But Annette had never had the Jupiter Stones.

“I should have stayed in Honolulu,” he told Rebecca.

She smiled with tragic understanding. “Isn’t hindsight wonderful?”

As they drove on, she had her own gloomy thoughts to fight. She loved Jared. Nothing had changed after all. If anything happened to Mai…

“If you knew for certain you were doing the right thing,” her grandfather had often said, “you wouldn’t be making a difficult choice.”

No crystal ball.

He had chosen silence in 1963. Twelve years later, Jean-Paul had chosen to risk his own life to keep Annette from adding to her body count. Jared had chosen to claim Mai as his own child and raise her.

Not easy choices, maybe not even the right choices-but they’d had to make a decision. And all choices, all decisions, had ramifications.

Was that something Annette understood? She had tried to kill Mai once already…her own granddaughter.

“We’ll get Mai away from her,” Jean-Paul said, reading Rebecca’s thoughts. “Annette knows I was hesitating about going to Marblehead. She’s using Mai to lure me.”

“What do you think her strategy is?”

“To blame the last thirty years on your grandfather,” he replied calmly, “and to kill him and me.”

“But that’s crazy!”

He fastened his warm, soft eyes on her. “Think about it, Rebecca. Is it?”