Betrayals (12 page)

“To see my grandfather.”

Jared didn’t comment.

“Why Grandfather?” Rebecca persisted. “He wasn’t in Saigon in 1975. He hasn’t been there since my father was killed. Look, Jared—”

“R.J., I’m not going to start a war between you and your grandfather.”

“A polite way of saying you’re not going to tell me a thing. Well, fine—don’t.” She set her mug down hard and swept to her feet. “I’ve got enough to do without beating my head against a wall trying to make you play fair. If you’ll excuse me, I have a business to run.”

As she came around the table he caught her by the arm—not hard, not long. But she drew back as if he’d given her an electric shock. His touch called up images of hot nights of lovemaking, reminded her of how much losing him had hurt, of how damned much she’d loved him. And warned her he was as sexy as ever. She could want him again. It wouldn’t take much.

If she were going to be stupid.

“Stay out of this, R.J.,” he said quietly, his voice even deeper, raspier than she remembered. She saw that touching her had an impact on him, as well. There’d never been any doubt in her mind he’d had a grand time for himself making love to her, no matter what had happened between him and Tam.

Rebecca narrowed her eyes at him. “I’m not a kid, Jared. I won’t let you order me around anymore.”

Jared looked surprised. “I never did order you around.”

“Ha! You’ve been telling me what to do since I was two years old.”

“Not a chance. R.J., you were the bossiest kid on Beacon Hill. I never managed to get you to do one thing you didn’t want to do. And, in case you’ve forgotten, we didn’t see each other during the ten years after you moved from Boston to Florida, or the fourteen since you left me to rot in that hospital in Manila. You’ve been free of me about two-thirds of your life.” He held back a smile, his eyes giving off that pirate’s gleam that used to make her groan just with wanting him. “Hey, we’re practically strangers.”

“A stranger isn’t someone who knows—not just guesses, but
knows—
you were the one who lit the fire on Boston Common that time.”

Jared grinned at their shared childhood memory. “It wasn’t much of a fire, just a few twigs and leaves.”

“You and Quentin and Nate were playing Salem witch trial, and I was the witch. You were going to burn me at the stake. What was I, five?”

“We weren’t really going to burn you—”

“Yes, but the mounted policeman didn’t know that when he smelled smoke and you took off, leaving me tied to that tree.”

“R.J., you know you could have gotten free anytime, and anyway, the fire wasn’t that close to you.”

“The cop didn’t think so. He wanted to find you and stick your toes in it, but I kept my mouth shut.”

“Not out of any sense of virtue,” Jared countered, “but only because you’re a Blackburn and keeping your mouth shut comes naturally.”

“The point is, you’re no stranger and you never will be, no matter how little we see of each other.” She smiled wistfully, wondering if she and Jared, if never strangers, could
ever be friends again. If they hadn’t fallen in love, then it might have been possible. Now—she didn’t know. “Good luck with Grandfather. And if I don’t see you before you leave town—well, give my best to your daughter.”

Jared looked at her. “I will, R.J. Thanks.”

Maddeningly, her eyes filled with tears, and she fled, running out the front door and into the cool spring air. It was damp and drizzly, a typical New England morning, and still early.

“I have no wish to discuss with you the matter of a Frenchman who might have known your father,” her grandfather had told her yesterday afternoon.

She’d see what she could find out on her own.

First she’d have a big, fattening breakfast on Charles Street, and then she’d head over to the Boston Public Library, which supposedly had an impressive amount of information on the man John F. Kennedy didn’t choose as his ambassador to Saigon, one Thomas Ezekiel Blackburn.

It also, Rebecca felt certain, would have something on Empress Elisabeth and her Jupiter Stones, and maybe even information on a rash of robberies on the Côte d’ Azur in the late fifties.

Jared made a fresh pot of more tolerable coffee and went out into the garden, toweling off a chair. The air was cool and damp, but it wasn’t raining at the moment. His coffee was piping hot, just what he needed. He inhaled the steam and tried to settle down. It wasn’t easy to be around Rebecca again.

In a few minutes, Thomas came outside, wearing an ancient sweater over his polo shirt and chinos. He looked a hundred as he pulled out a chair and sat down, not both
ering to towel it off. “You’re not on your way back to San Francisco, I see.”

“No. I called Mai last night—she’s fine. Irritated with me for going to Boston without her, but she’ll survive.”

Thomas sighed. “I’m too old to force you to take sound advice when offered. Where’s Rebecca?”

“Gone out. She says she has a business to run, but—”

“But she’s got the bit in her teeth,” Thomas finished for him.

“She told you our man from Saigon was at her studio yesterday, didn’t she?”

Thomas fastened his incisive eyes on Jared. “She mentioned it, yes.”

“You could have told me.”

“I have no intention of repeating private conversations between myself and my granddaughter to anyone, including you, Jared.”

Jared accepted the mild lecture with equanimity, and said, in just as mild a tone, “That’s fine—until your idea of honor and discretion endangers my daughter. Thomas, R.J. knows something, and she’s holding back.”

“What do you want me to say?” Thomas asked calmly.

“I don’t know. Did she give you any indication—”

“No. I agree with you. She’s holding back.”

Jared inhaled, controlling his frustration. “R.J. should get out of Boston. If this guy’s here, she could be in danger.”

Leaning forward, Thomas looked at Jared, his expression surprisingly gentle. “Don’t be protective, Jared. Don’t hover.” He paused and picked bits of wet twigs and yellow pollen off his table. “Rebecca hates that.”

“I don’t give a damn what she hates.”

Thomas smiled. “Don’t you?”

Uncomfortable, Jared jumped up and abandoned his
coffee. The Blackburns were getting to him. “I’m going out for a while. I need some air—a chance to think.” He glanced down at the elderly man seated at the battered garden table, wishing the last quarter-century of Thomas Blackburn’s life hadn’t been so isolated and hard. Thomas would say he didn’t mind; he deserved the ostracism he’d endured since 1963. But Jared wondered. He added, “Maybe coming back here was a mistake.”

Thomas was unruffled. “There are two seats available on a nine-o’clock flight to San Francisco. I called myself. I don’t believe Rebecca’s ever been.”

A vision flashed in Jared’s mind of taking R.J. across the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time, taking her to dinner at his and Mai’s favorite Chinese restaurant.

He had to get out from under the Blackburn spell.

“I’ll talk to you later,” he told Thomas, his voice hoarse. He didn’t wait for a reply.

M
ai knew she would need cash for her plan. As much as she could lay her hands on. Her grandfather didn’t leave large sums of money lying around for someone to slip unnoticed into a pocket. All she’d managed to grab since her plan had come into her head after dinner last night was a measly five dollars she’d found on top of the refrigerator. She’d pay him back every penny she “borrowed.”

She had set her alarm for 4:00 a.m. and shoved it under her pillow so no one else would hear it go off, but it almost gave her a heart attack when it did. At least she was wideawake. She slipped noiselessly out of bed. The house was cool and filled with strange shadows. Wesley and Maureen Sloan had no pets, so there were no barking dogs to worry about, no cats to streak out of the darkness.

Her first stop was the living room, with its dramatic view of the bay and San Francisco, glittering through the predawn mist. She checked everywhere.

Nothing.

The dining room proved equally barren. She didn’t find so much as a dime at the bottom of a wineglass. It wasn’t
like at home, where her father always left the odd twenty-dollar bill and loose change around. She had never swiped a cent from him. It had never even occurred to her to steal from her own father; she’d always relied just on her allowance and own earnings.

He had called her from Boston. “Hey, there,” he’d said, “is Granddad feeding you chocolates and letting you play with all his gadgets?”

Mai had replied that he was, but she would rather be with him in Boston. “Where are you?” she’d asked.

He wouldn’t tell her where he was staying. He just wanted to make sure she was okay, that was all. “Sulk all you want,” he’d added. “It won’t kill you.”

If she had a mother, would her father be as big a pain as he was?

Shivering, Mai went into her grandfather’s study, built on a more intimate scale than the rest of the house, but still large, especially compared to her and her father’s place in San Francisco. Here the view was of the garden, a magnificent, exotic place that would burst with color in the sunlight, but now, before dawn, was dark and spooky. Mai suddenly wished her grandfather believed in drapes. She got to work, going through drawers, pencil holders, filing cabinets, credenzas, anything that could possibly hold cash.

She struck pay dirt in a smooth wooden pear, about eight inches high, that opened in the middle. Inside were five one-hundred-dollar bills.

Mai had hoped for just fifty or a hundred dollars.

Stifling a squeal of victory, she scooped up the bills with one hand.

But how would she ever pay back five hundred dollars? She was saving money for college, and she could earn a fair amount babysitting and doing yard work—but five
hundred dollars? She had trust funds set aside for her future, but she’d bet her dad and her grandfather would want the money paid back long before then.

She pushed the two ends of the pear together and retreated to her room, glad to be under her warm blankets, flush with money.

Q
uentin 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.