Games of State

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Dressed in a short black skirt and jacket, with a white blouse and pearls, Nancy looked as if she were walking from a mirage. Hazy, slow, rippling.

Or maybe she looked that way because of the tears in Hood's eyes.

He winced, shook his head, made fists, felt a thousand different emotions with every step she took.

It is you. That was the first.

It was followed by, Why did you do it, damn you?

Then, You're more breathtaking than I remembered.

And, What about Sharon? I should leave, but I can't.

Finally, Go away. I don't need this.

But he did need it. And as she drifted toward him, he filled his eyes with her. He allowed his heart to fill with the old love, his loins to fill with the old lust, his mind to fill with the precious memories.

Hausen said, "Herr Hood?" Hausen's voice seemed muffled and soft, as though it were coming from a hole far, far below him.

"Are you all right?" "I'm not sure," Hood replied. His own voice seemed to be coming from that hole.

Hood didn't take his eyes off Nancy. She didn't wave, she didn't speak. She didn't look away and she didn't break her poised, sensual stride.

"It's Nancy," Hood finally told his companion.

"How did she find you here?" Hansen wondered aloud.

The woman arrived. Hood couldn't even imagine what he looked like to her. He was shocked, open-mouthed, teary, his head moving slowly from side to side. Hood was no silver knight, he was sure of that.

There was a vague look of amusement on Nancy's face- the right side of her mouth was pulled up slightly— but it changed quickly to that wide, knee-weakening smile he knew so well.

"Hello," she said quietly.

The voice had matured, along with the face. There were lines to the sides of the blue eyes, on her once-smooth forehead, along the upper lip— that beautifully curved upper lip, which rested on a slightly bee-stung lower lip. But they were not detracting, those lines. To the contrary. Hood found them almost unbearably sexy. They said that she had lived, loved, fought, survived, and was still vital and unbowed and alive.

She also looked fitter than she had ever been. Her fivefoot- six-inch body looked sculpted, and Hood could imagine her having gotten into aerobics or jogging or swimming.

Gotten into it and throttled it, made it do exactly what she wanted to her body. She had that kind of discipline, that kind of will.

Obviously, he thought with a flash of bitterness. She was able to walk out on me.

Nancy was no longer wearing the cherry-red lipstick he remembered so well. She had on a calmer watermelon color.

She was also wearing a hint of sky-blue eye shadow— that was new— and small diamond earrings. He fought a nearly losing battle to put his arms around her, to crush her to him from cheek to thighs.

He settled for: "Hello, Nancy." It seemed an inadequate thing to say after all this time, though it beat the epithets and accusations which came to mind. And as one who had been martyred by love, he found the saintly minimalism of it appealing.

Nancy's eyes shifted to Hood's right. She offered Hausen her hand.

"Nancy Jo Bosworth," she said to Hausen.

"Richard Hausen," he said.

"I know," she replied. "I recognized you." Hood didn't hear the rest of the exchange. Nancy Jo Bosworth, he repeated. Nancy was the kind of woman who would have hyphenated her name. So she isn't married.

Hood felt his soul begin to glow with joy, then burn with guilt. He told himself, But you are.

Hood jerked his head toward Hausen. He was conscious of moving it like that, of jerking it. Otherwise, it wouldn't have budged. Facing Hausen, Hood saw a look of compassion bordering on sadness in the man's eyes. Not for himself but for Hood. And he appreciated the empathy. If Hood weren't careful here, he was going to ruin a lot of lives.

Hood said to Hausen, "I wonder if you would give me just a minute." "Certainly," Hansen said. "I'll see you back in my office." Hood nodded. "What you were saying a moment ago," he said. "We'll talk more. I can help with that." "Thank you," the German said. After snapping a polite bow at the woman, he walked away.

Hood looked from Hausen to Nancy. He didn't know what she saw in his eyes, but what he saw in hers was deadly. The softness and desire were 'still there, still an electric combination, still damn near irresistible.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"It's all right," Hood said. "He and I were nearly finished." The woman smiled. "Not about this." Hood's neck and cheeks went red. He felt like an ass.

Nancy touched his face. "There was a reason I left the way I did," she said.

"I'm sure there was," Hood said, recovering slightly.

"You always had reasons for everything you did." He put his hand on hers and moved it back to her side. "How did you find me?" "I had to return papers to the hotel," she said. "The doorman told me a 'Paul' had been looking for me, and that he was with Deputy Foreign Minister Hausen. I called Hausen's office and came right over." "Why?" hood asked.

She laughed. "God, Paul, there are a dozen good reasons. To see you, to apologize, to explain— but mostly to see you. i missed you terribly. I followed your career in Los Angeles as best I could. I was very proud of what you'd done." "I was driven," he said.

"I could see that, which is funny. I never thought of you as ambitious that way." "I wasn't driven by ambition," he said, "but by despair.

I kept busy so that I wouldn't become Heathcliff, sitting up at Wuthering Heights waiting to die. That's what you did to me, Nancy. You left me sick and so confused that all I wanted to do was find you, make whatever was wrong right again. I wanted you so badly that if you'd run off with another man I would have envied him, not hated him." "It wasn't another man," she said.

"It doesn't matter. Can you begin to understand that level of frustration?" Now Nancy blushed slightly. "Yes," she said, "because I felt it too. But I was in terrible trouble. If I'd stayed, or if I told you where I'd gone…" "What?" Hood demanded. "What would have happened? How could anything have been worse than what did happen?" His voice cracked and he had to fight back sobs. He half-turned from her.

"I'm sorry," Nancy said more emphatically.

She came closer and stroked his cheek again. This time he didn't remove her hand.

"Paul, I stole the blueprints for a new chip my company was going to make and sold them to an overseas firm. In exchange for the blueprints, I got a ton of money. We would have been married, we would have been rich, and you would have been a deadly-great politician." "Is that what you think I wanted?" Hood asked. "To be successful on someone else's efforts?" Nancy shook her head. "You never would have known.

I wanted you to be able to run for office without worrying about money. I felt that you could do great things, Paul, if you didn't have to worry about special interest groups and campaign contributions. I mean, you could get away with that sort of thing then." "I can't believe you did that." "I know. That's why I didn't tell you. And after everything fell apart, that's one reason I still couldn't tell you. On top of losing you, I didn't want your scorn." She said, "You could be pretty judgmental about things illegal in those days. Even little things. Remember how upset you were when I got that parking ticket outside the Cinerama Dome when we save Rollerball? The ticket you'd warned me I'd get?" "I remember," Hood said. Of course I remember, Nancy. I remember everything we did.

She lowered her hand, turned away. "Anyway, I did get found out somehow. A friend— you remember Jessica." Hood nodded. He could still see those pearls she was always wearing, smell her Chanel, as if she were standing right beside him.

"Jess was working late," Nancy said, "and as I was getting ready to meet you at the movies she phoned to tell me two FBI agents had been there. She said the men were on their way to question me. I only had time to gather up my passport, some clothes, and my Bank-Americard, write you that short note, and get the hell out of my apartment." She looked down. "Out of the country." "Out of my life," Hood said. He pressed his lips together tightly. He wasn't sure he wanted Nancy to continue. Each word made him suffer, tortured him with the blighted hopes of a twenty-year-old man in love.

"I said there was another reason I didn't contact you," Nancy said. She looked up again. "I assumed you would be questioned or watched, or your phone would be tapped. If I had called or written, the FBI would have found me." "That's true," Hood said. "The FBI did come to my apartment. They questioned me, without telling me what you'd done, and I agreed to let them know if I heard from you." "You did?" she seemed surprised. "You'd have turned me in?" "Yes," he said. "Only I never would have abandoned you." "You'd have had no choice," she said. "There would have been a trial, I'd have gone to prison—" "That's true. But I'd have waited." "Twenty years?" "If that's how long it took," Hood said. "But it wouldn't have. Industrial espionage committed by a young woman in love— you'd have been able to plea-bargain and been free in five years." "Five years," she said. "And then you'd have married a criminal?" "No. You." "Okay, an ex-con. No one would've trusted me— or you— around any kind of a secret. Your dreams of a life in politics, would have ended." "So what?" he said. "Instead, I felt as though my life had ended." Nancy stopped speaking. She smiled again. "Poor Paul," she said. "That's all very romantic and just a little theatrical, which is one of the things I loved about you. But the truth is, your life didn't end when I left. You met someone else, someone quite lovely. You married. You had the children you wanted. You settled down." I settled, he thought before he could stop himself. He hated himself for thinking it and apologized silently to Sharon.

"What did you do after you left?" Hood asked, wanting to talk instead of think.

"I moved to Paris," Nancy said, "and I tried to get a job designing computer software. But there wasn't a lot for me to do there. There wasn't much of a market yet and there was a real protectionist thing going, keeping Americans from taking French jobs. So after burning through the blood money I'd been paid— it's expensive to live in Paris, especially when you have to bribe officials because you can't get a visa and have your name show up at the American Embassy— I moved to Toulouse and began working for the company." "The company?" "The one I sold the secrets to," she said. "I don't want to tell you the name, because I don't want you doing anything out of your famous white-knight spite. Because you know you would." Nancy was right. He'd have gone back to Washington and found a dozen different ways for the U.S. government to lean on them.

Nancy said, "The not-so-funny thing was, I always suspected that the guy I sold those plans to was the one who turned me in, to force me to come over and work for him. Not because I was so brilliant, mind you— I stole my best idea, right? — but because he felt that if I depended on him I could never turn on him. I hadn't wanted to go to him because I was ashamed of what I'd done, but I needed to work." She smiled unhappily. "To top it all off, I failed at love repeatedly because I compared everyone to you." "Gee," he said, "I can't tell you how much better that makes me feel." "Don't," Nancy said. "Don't be like that. I still loved you. I bought the Los Angeles Times at an international newsstand just to keep up on your activities. And there were times, so very many times, that I wanted to write or phone.

But I thought it was best not to." "Then why did you decide to see me now?" Hood asked. He was in pain again, rocking between that and sadness. "Did you think it would hurt any less today?" "I couldn't help myself," she admitted. "When I heard that you were in Hamburg, I had to see you. And I think that you wanted to see me." "Yes," he said, "I ran after you in the hotel lobby. I wanted to see you. I needed to see you." He shook his head.

"Jesus, Nancy. I still can't believe it's you." "It is," she said.

Hood looked into those eyes with which he had spent so many days and nights. The pull was both extraordinary and awful, a dream and a nightmare. His strength to resist them just wasn't in the same class.

The cool twilight breeze chilled the perspiration along Hood's legs and back. He wanted to hate her. Wanted to walk away from her. But what he wanted most of all was to go back in time and stop her from leaving.

Her eyes held him as she slipped her hands around his.

Her touch jolted him, then settled into an electric tingle that raced from his chest to his toes. And he knew he had to get away from her.

Hood stepped back. The electric connection broke. "I can't do this," he said.

Nancy said, "You can't do what? Be honest?" She added a little jab, the kind she had always been so good at. "What did politics do to you?" "You know what I mean, Nancy. I can't stay here with you." "Not even for an hour? For coffee, to catch up?" "No," Hood said firmly. "This is my closure." She grinned. "This is not closure, Paul. This is anything but that." She was right. Her eyes, her wit, her walk, her presence, her everything had breathed new life into something that had never quite died. Hood wanted to scream.

He stepped up beside her, looking north while she looked south. "Jesus, Nancy, I'm not going to feel guilty about this. You ran away from me. You left without an explanation and I met someone else. Someone who threw in her lot with me, who trusted me with her life and heart. I won't do anything to cheapen that." "I didn't ask you to," Nancy said. "Coffee isn't betrayal." "It is the way we used to drink it," Hood said.

Nancy smiled. She looked down. "I understand. I'm sorry— for everything— sorrier than I can say, and I'm sad. But I do understand" She faced him. "I'm staying at the Ambassador and I'll be here until this evening. If you change your mind, leave a message." "I won't change my mind," Hood said. He looked at her.

"As much as I'd like to." Nancy squeezed his hand. He felt the charge again.

"So politics didn't corrupt you," she said "I'm not surprised. Just a little disappointed." "You'll get over it," Hood said. "After all, you got over me." Nancy's expression changed. For the first time Hood saw the sadness that had been hidden beneath her smile and the longing in her eyes.

"Do you believe that?" she asked.

"Yes. Otherwise, you couldn't have stayed away." She said, "Men really don't understand love, do they?

Not on my best day, with the closest pretender to the Paul Hood throne, did I ever meet anyone as, bright or as compassionate or as gentle as you." She leaned over and kissed him on the shoulder. "I'm sorry I disturbed you by coming back into your life, but I wanted you to know that I never got over you, Paul, and I never will." Nancy didn't look at him as she walked back toward the edge of the park. But he looked at her. And once again Paul Hood was standing alone, two movie tickets in his wallet, suffering the absence of a woman he loved.