A Tangled Web (72 page)

“Stop it! This is insane. You're making this up, the two of you . . . What is it, some kind of game? Going back and forth . . . what the hell for? Making these outrageous statements . . .” He seemed to gain strength as he talked. “Absolutely outrageous. Based on nothing but some kind of fantasy. You're still trying to get back at me, Sabrina, is that it?” He looked at Stephanie, then at Sabrina, then back again, and finally settled on some neutral point between them so he would not have to decide which sister was which. “Haven't we been divorced long enough to become friends? What do you want? Money? Is that what you're here for? I don't pay blackmail. Even if I did, I haven't anything to give you, so you're wasting your time. Wasting your time! Coming in here . . . how dare you come into my home and brazenly accuse me of . . . of . . .”

“Murder,” Sabrina said. “We're not interested in money, Denton; we're interested in what you've done. You see, we also talked to Ivan Lazlo and Rory Carr.”

His face darkened. He put down his glass. “You bitch. You didn't talk to them. Even if you did, they wouldn't tell you anything.”

“You seem so sure of that. I suppose that's because you promised to take care of them when they get paroled. Even if it took another ten or fifteen years, they'd still be young enough to enjoy whatever you've promised them.”

“This isn't a game,” Stephanie said. “You and Max quarreled about Westbridge, and Rory told you I'd made a foolish remark that I knew everything there was to know
about the forged ceramics. So you had reason to want us both gone, and you told Ivan and Rory to get rid of us. Was the bomb their idea or yours? It really doesn't matter; you gave them an order and they carried it out, which makes you guilty of murder.”

“But Max wasn't killed!”

“Fourteen other people were on that yacht. They were all killed.”

“And then,” Sabrina went on, “you found out that Max was alive, in Cavaillon, and you sent another one of your henchmen to kill him. You're not very creative, Denton; you always think of killing when you feel threatened. Of course, as you've discovered, what seems to be an obvious solution doesn't always work.”

“I have no henchmen; I sent no one! How the hell many times do I have to tell you that? As far as I knew, Max was dead.”

“You were never sure of that. You weren't sure last May, when you came to Ambassadors and asked me if I'd heard from him. I thought he was dead, Denton; you weren't sure. And then, a few weeks ago, you heard that he was alive. You heard it from someone in your club. You see, we've talked to him, too. We've talked to all of them. Rory Carr, Ivan Lazlo, Alan Lethridge, and of course Nicholas. No one is lying for you, Denton; they're all quite willing to talk.”

Denton sagged. His chin was embedded in his chest and he looked at them from beneath heavy eyelids and saw them close together on the couch, arms touching, bodies touching, wearing the same clothes, their voices overlapping. They seemed to be one person, vengeful, relentless, implacable. He lowered his eyes and looked at his hands, twisted in his lap, and tried to think of a way to ask if Max was still alive.

“I saw the man you sent,” Stephanie said casually. “He followed us home once, from a church we'd visited. He hung around our house. He was still there after Max left.”

“Left,” Denton echoed. He looked up. “
Left?
”

“Yes. I woke up one morning and he was gone. He'd told me he was leaving, so I wasn't surprised; it was just more sudden than I'd expected. I left Cavaillon after that; Max had told me your man might be after me, too. The way Rory and Ivan had been when we were on the yacht.” She gazed at Denton. “Max told me,” she added dreamily, “that he would always come back.”

With a grunt, as if the breath had been knocked out of him, Denton slid all the way down on the leather couch. His heels dug into the rug, his head sank lower onto his chest. Burt, the man he had sent to Cavaillon, had called to say he had located Max, and that was the last Denton had heard. He had not called again; he had not checked out of his hotel. But he was never there when Denton called, again and again. There was no way to know what had happened: if he had tried to kill Max and failed, or if he had given up without trying because Max seemed invulnerable.

He
was
invulnerable. The son of a bitch wouldn't die.

Denton had always been in awe of Max Stuyvesant. He believed there was something mystical about him, as if he were a djin, larger than life, moving among them but not one of them, ruthless, unstoppable, untouchable, a force that Denton never could emulate or even understand. After the yacht had exploded and he had identified the body of Lady Longworth, Denton had haunted the waterfront for days, pestering the police for information about any bodies found far from the sunken ship, insisting that the search continue, that he would pay for it, that he had to know whether the one man still unaccounted for had survived or not.

In the end, he had left Monte Carlo without knowing anything, and slowly, in the following months, as nothing was heard of Max, he began to believe he had indeed been killed, blown to pieces in the explosion, or trapped somewhere at the bottom of the Mediterranean, beyond everyone's
reach. Until Alan Lethridge had told him that Max was alive.

He knew then that he had been right all along. Max was a djin: a creature of magic who either had come through that powerful explosion unscarred or else had died and then come back to life.

Max told me that he would always come back.

And either he had escaped Burt's gun in Cavaillon or Burt had killed him and once again he had come back to life, scaring the hell out of Burt, who took off, never to be seen again.

At the moment, Denton could believe either one.

He'll be after me.

His head came up as if the words had been spoken aloud.

He knows I've tried twice; he'll kill me before I can try again. And there is no place I can hide.

Sabrina and Stephanie were watching him intently, following the expressions that raced across his face. “Of course you can tell the police what happened,” Sabrina said conversationally. “You'll go to prison, of course, but I suppose you have as much chance for parole as Rory and Ivan. And you're a young man—forty-one, isn't it? When you get out, you'll still have many happy years with your friends.”

I'll never have any happy years. I'll always wonder where he is, when he'll show up. I'll always be looking over my shoulder . . .

“I think you should call the police,” Stephanie said seriously, her voice warm and encouraging. “You'll feel much better about everything.”

But not safer. Even prison isn't safe from his reach.

“Call them,” Sabrina said firmly: it was an order. “Of course we could do it, but it would be better if you did. Or would you rather call your solicitor? Yes, I'm sure you would; you always find other people to do the difficult work for you. Call him, Denton; let him take care of informing the police.”

But even prison is safer than this house or anywhere I might go: cruises, the races, country houses, ski resorts . . . Prison would be much harder for him, and it would give me time to think of some way to get to him before he can get to me. That's what I need—time—and I know I'll figure out a way to beat him.

As if in a dream, he rose from the couch and went to the desk. It was out of his hands. He saw Sabrina and Stephanie exchange a look and knew they had triumphed completely, but it was too late to care about that. He turned his back and picked up the telephone, and with a leaden linger slowly dialed his solicitor's office.

A
t last, in Paris, they talked.

They arrived on Friday evening and left their luggage in the sitting room of their suite at L'Hôtel. “Let's walk before dinner, shall we?” Sabrina asked, and they went out as they were, in the walking shoes and pants suits that they had put on for travel after coming back to Cadogan Square from Denton's house, Sabrina's a sleek gray with a thin stripe and Stephanie's a brown and black tweed. They walked a little apart from each other in the mild evening air beneath the bright lights of Paris. The closeness, the oneness they had felt in Denton's study, was gone. Sabrina tried to find a way to recapture it, remembering their pleasure in sharing London, wishing they could share the magic of Paris in the same way, but she could not do it. There were too many words waiting to be said. Say them! she cried silently to Stephanie. We only have tonight and tomorrow before Garth arrives. Tell me what you want. I don't know what I can do, what rights I have . . . Tell me what you want so we can talk about it.

But Stephanie was silent and so they walked in silence,
crossing the Seine on the Pont Neuf and turning to follow the river past the ancient Palais de Justice and the extravagantly sculptured Hotel de Ville. The apartment buildings of Paris crowded in upon each other and upon the river; Their steep roofs, punctuated by dormers, hung like heavy eyebrows over gray or buff stone facades; scrolled ironwork curved around balconies or guarded high arched windows, and at the windows lace curtains or fringed draperies framed a small sculpture, a lamp, an arrangement of flowers.

“And behind every window a private story,” Sabrina mused aloud, providing an opening to conversation. But Stephanie did not answer, and so they walked on, amid the crowds strolling on the riverbank past lighted boats tied up below, some decked out as restaurants. Then they left the river and turned down a quiet side street until they came to the Rue de Rivoli and turned once again.

“Where are we going?” It was the first Stephanie had spoken since they left the hotel.

“This was always one of my favorite walks,” Sabrina said. “From the Left Bank to the Place des Vosges. It's so old it's almost a history of Paris. I used to walk here all the time, when I was at school. There was a little cafe called Trumilou on the Right Bank; I wonder if it's still here.”

Stephanie put a little more space between them.
You were at the Sorbonne and I was at Bryn Mawr. Later, that was one of the things I envied, part of your whole life that I envied. And never stopped envying, so that when I thought of changing places, it seemed I'd wanted to do that all my life.

And now what? What do I want from you now?

The Place des Vosges lay before them, a vast square of four-story town houses, once the homes of royalty, surrounding a fenced park. “It was in ruins,” Sabrina said, “but most of the houses have been renovated and it's become very chic. Vera Stern told me that an American, Ross Hayward, did one of them: brilliantly, he said. It was unusual to have an American architect working here.”

Stephanie gazed at the elegant buildings with steep mansard roofs and shuttered windows. “Did you ever design any houses in Paris?”

“No, just in London and the countryside.”

“But you could. You know French interiors as well as English, and you have contacts here.”

“I do, but I'm not working in Europe anymore.”

They stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and the crowds parted around them, giving them quick sideways glances as if feeling the tension building between them. “Let's go back,” Stephanie said.

They walked back and crossed the Pont d'Arcole to Notre-Dame. They stopped on the broad plaza facing the great gray mass of the church, tilting their heads back to gaze at the towers and flying buttresses illuminated against low clouds that shone a pale gray from the lights of the city. No other city, Sabrina thought, had such beauty at every turn, such a wealth of evidence of the brilliance of the human imagination. So the two of us ought to be able to solve our little problem, she thought wryly. Compared to the conception and building of Paris, it should be a breeze.

“It's nine o'clock,” she said as they turned to walk again along the Seine. “I made a reservation for dinner, if you feel like it.”

Stephanie's eyebrows rose. “When did you do that?”

“Before we left London.”

“Where?”

“Laperouse.”

“I've never been there.”

“The food is good and it's very quiet.”

“You're always arranging things.” A faint note of resentment trailed through the words, and Sabrina said quickly, “We can go anywhere; what would you like?”

“I don't know. I don't know Paris.”

“Well, a bistro?”

“Yes. Something small.”

“Let's see if we can get into Benôit. Do you want to walk? We'd have to go back the way we came.”

“Yes, I love to walk.”

It's such a good way to put off talking, Sabrina thought, and in fact they did not speak again until they were seated across from each other in Benoît's tiny dining room with figured wallpaper, lace curtains stretched across the bottom half of the windows, and a few small tables, most of them along a banquette that stretched the length of the room. The maître d' led them to the only unoccupied table and Stephanie slid onto the banquette. Briefly, Sabrina debated sitting beside her, but instead took the chair the maître d' was holding for her on the other side of the table.