Betrayals (21 page)

“Don’t. You’re a lovely woman.”

She raised her eyes to him. “Then why did you reject me?”

He smiled. “Not because I wasn’t tempted, I assure you.”

It was all she needed to hear.

The next night, she brought Frank Sinatra and Duke Ellington records, and they played them on his old record player and danced in his living room until midnight…and made love until dawn.

They were together every night for the rest of her ten-day visit to Saigon, and as much as Thomas was infatuated with her youth and optimism and smart-alecky ways, he couldn’t shake the feeling that what they were doing was wrong. Annette was still a married woman. There’d been no formal separation, much less a divorce. He felt she should extricate herself from one relationship before launching another, but remembering Jean-Paul Gerard, realized the idea of adultery wasn’t one that troubled her.

It was with both relief and sorrow that Thomas saw her off.

She promised she’d be back. “I adore you, Thomas,” she said, kissing him at the airport, opening her mouth even as he struggled to pull away.

But it wasn’t Annette who returned two weeks later; it was Benjamin Reed. He announced that his wife was now vice president of their company, and Winston & Reed had just landed a lucrative contract with the American government.

“Annette says we’ll make a fortune if there’s war in Indochina,” Benjamin remarked blithely.

Stephen warned his father not to take Benjamin’s hawkish talk too seriously. “Annette came back from her trip
filled with all kinds of ideas of how Winston & Reed can make money over here, and they’re all predicated on an escalation of direct American involvement. She’s probably writing her congressman now. Benjamin’s total mush around her. A few days back among the Blackburns, and we’ll have him talking sense again.”

But stricken by her betrayal, Thomas was no longer one to trust Annette Reed. “From something she said while she was over here, I got the impression Benjamin wanted a divorce—”

“Benjamin?” Stephen laughed. “You’ve got to be kidding. He
worships
Annette. Myself, I wouldn’t trust her to watch my kids while I poured coffee in the next room.”

Thomas nodded. What a stupid jackass he’d been.

He set out to forget Annette, and the deteriorating conditions in South Vietnam were enough to preoccupy his mind.

Then, on a warm, pleasant evening, his son brought Jean-Paul Gerard to dinner.

They’d never actually met, the Brahmin intellectual and the French race-car driver. Gisela was all they had in common, and she had spoken fondly of each to the other. Thomas was her high-minded friend whose seriousness she both admired and found amusing. They had met in Paris in 1931, when he was so hopelessly in love with Emily, and Gisela and several of her lovers—sometimes individually, often all together—showed them around their city. This was, of course, before Gisela decided to become a displaced Hungarian baroness. Then she was just Gisela Gerard, an impishly pretty young woman who loved to dance and laugh and be in love. When Emily died, Gisela didn’t send flowers or a morbidly proper card, but a note telling Thomas she’d sent money to a convent orphanage
in Provence in his wife’s memory, and the nuns there had promised to name their next orphan girl Emily. Thomas had no idea if any of this was true, for Gisela was much better at coming up with ideas and making plans than she was at executing them. But he appreciated the gesture.

Jean-Paul was her beautiful son—her “whim,” she called him, conceived in a sudden longing to have a baby. She made no demands on the father, and she herself was unconcerned about societal conventions like marriage and monogamy. World War II sobered her up some, but she retained her zest for life and was delighted when Jean-Paul set off on his own at age sixteen and became a popular and successful Grand Prix driver. It didn’t bother her at all that he never acknowledged her as his mother. She’d set herself up on the Riviera as Baroness Gisela Majlath and was enjoying this new phase in her life.

Thomas had often wondered if she’d discovered Jean-Paul had amused himself by becoming
Le Chat.
Had that disappointment precipitated her suicide, or was her grief over the Jupiter Stones?

It wasn’t the sort of question one put to a guest, however, and Thomas graciously pretended not to recognize his son’s friend as the fugitive French jewel thief. Obviously, he’d either had to leave France without his collection of stolen jewels or had squandered their “earnings” long before now. His years in the Foreign Legion had hardened him. He was just twenty-eight, but there were lines at the corners of his eyes and a leatheriness to his skin that belied his years. His muscles were stringy and tough—he had a tested soldier’s body. Thomas wondered if scores of adoring women would gather around him now, or if they’d recognize Jean-Paul Gerard as a man who’d seen too much, done too much and had very little left to lose. He had discharged from the
legion, he said, to come to Vietnam, where his skills with French and soldiering could be put to use.

Thomas wondered if the young Frenchman’s reasons for choosing Indochina didn’t also include himself and Winston & Reed.

“You want to kill people?” Thomas asked.

Gisela’s soft eyes looked back at him from the man’s weathered face. “I just want to survive.”

Stephen was embarrassed by his father’s harsh question, but Thomas behaved himself the rest of the evening. He could see the two young men liked each other. Well, what of it? Nearly four years in the
Légion étrangère
were enough punishment for any man’s crimes.

But in another week, Annette returned to Saigon, and Thomas worried about what would happen if she and Gerard bumped into each other. It was bad enough Thomas had to confront her himself.

“You lied to me,” he told her baldly. “Benjamin never asked you for a divorce.”

She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke Bette Davis style. “Not that he doesn’t want one, I assure you. He’s such a coward. Oh, Thomas, don’t be mad. When will you get another chance to be seduced by a woman twenty years younger than yourself?” She grinned, totally without guilt. “You should be thanking me.”

What could Thomas say? He’d known Annette her entire life and should have realized she put alleviating her boredom and having her way above any notion of honor or integrity. He’d known what he was getting into when he fell into bed with her, and if he didn’t, he’d been an even bigger jackass than he thought.

“I hope,” he told her, “you don’t confess our foolishness to Benjamin. It would only hurt him.”

She waved her cigarette. “Don’t worry—he’ll never know. But Thomas,” she chided, “what we did wasn’t foolishness. It’s called—”

“I know what it’s called,” he said, cutting off one of her deliberately crude remarks. “You’re behaving like a naughty ten-year-old. Why are you back in Saigon?”

“The same reason I was here before—to keep an eye on what Benjamin’s doing with my money. Don’t look so hunted, Thomas. I’ve had my fill of you.”

“Go back to Boston.”

She stubbed out her cigarette. “When I damn well feel like it.”

Jean-Paul came to Thomas’s apartment at dawn that night. In his bathrobe, Thomas offered him a drink, but the young Frenchman wasn’t interested. He opened a manila envelope and spread six black-and-white photographs on Thomas’s kitchen table.

“I didn’t just arrive in Saigon,” Jean-Paul said.

“So I see.”

The photographs were of Annette and Thomas during their brief, all-too-torrid affair. Having dinner together, holding hands on Nguyen Hue Boulevard, kissing at the airport, and one particularly embarrassing one of Annette peeling off her blouse as Thomas opened the door to his apartment.

“Never saw me, did you?” Jean-Paul asked, pleased with himself.

“No, I didn’t. Were you in disguise?”

“Just a beard. I’ve learned to blend into the environment during the last few years.”

“I suppose you have,” Thomas said steadily. “And the point of this exercise?”

Jean-Paul’s expression grew serious. “I want the Jupiter Stones.”

“You don’t think I have them?”

“No.” He glanced at the bare-breasted photograph of Annette. “But she does.”

That wasn’t something Thomas could argue; it was also nothing he and Annette had ever discussed. Every time he’d tried to broach the subject of
Le Chat,
Gisela and the Jupiter Stones, she’d turn him off. He’d been too stupidly considerate to press.

“And if she doesn’t give them to you,” he said, “you’ll show these photographs to Benjamin.”

“That’s right. But he’s just a start. I can think of a number of people who might be interested in just how indiscreet Thomas Blackburn can be—certain members of the Kennedy administration, embassy officials, perhaps even the president himself.”

“You want me to pressure Annette.”

“I don’t care how I get the stones,
Monsieur
Blackburn,” Jean-Paul said coolly. “I just want them.”

Thomas pushed the photographs away. “If you’d come to me as Gisela’s son, I might have helped you. But not like this.”

Gerard laughed derisively. “Aren’t you the courageous bastard. Look, of all people, I know what you got yourself into with Annette. All I want are the stones that belonged to my mother.”

“Then deal with Annette.”

He sat back in the dim light of the hot night. “I’ve tried.”

Of course he had: Thomas wasn’t surprised. And Annette hadn’t come to him for help. “What did she say?”

“She told me I could rot in hell.”

Two days later Annette returned to Boston without a word about the Jupiter Stones. Barely a week later she got her wish: Jean-Paul Gerard, the only survivor of a Vietcong ambush that killed Stephen Blackburn, Benjamin Reed and Quang Tai, was taken prisoner by the communist guerrillas.

Thomas had arranged for the information-gathering excursion into the Mekong Delta, into an area considered secure, although he knew there were risks. In a country at war, there always were. He hired Jean-Paul to drive the Jeep. He was good, he was tough, and it seemed Annette had called his bluff about the photographs. He had become friends with both Stephen and Benjamin, and regardless of how much he despised Annette for having betrayed him in 1959, he didn’t want to jeopardize those friendships. Thomas hoped Jean-Paul, however slowly and painfully, was putting his past mistakes behind him.

Originally the trip was planned for just Thomas, Jean-Paul and Tai. At the last minute, however, Benjamin decided he wanted to go along and see for himself what was happening in the countryside, and Ambassador Nolting asked to meet with Thomas.

Stephen went into the Mekong Delta in his father’s place.

From the analysis of the grim scene afterward, Tai was killed instantly, and Stephen was wounded in the leg, managing to take out at least one of his attackers with the army-issue Colt before he was killed with a bullet to the head. Two other guerrillas were killed with Gerard’s assault rifle, which was never recovered.

Wounded in the abdomen, Benjamin Reed was left to die a slow, horrible death.

It was a fact the authorities kept from his widow. At first, Thomas had heartily agreed.

Within days, however, he’d decided Annette shouldn’t have been spared a single heart-wrenching detail of the massacre.

“You went to bed with a viper, my friend,” Tai had told him one night not long after Annette’s second departure.

“You knew?”

“Yes, but I knew, too, your common sense would prevail and you would extricate yourself from her spell.”

Thomas smiled. Tai had worked for Annette Reed for five years and had a right to dislike her. “Next time my love life fires up, I’ll run the lady past you.”

But Tai was deadly serious. “Thomas, she has contacts all over the city. With the crime bosses, with the police, with the Vietcong. She can find out anything she wants to find out and hurt anyone she wants to hurt. She used her time in Saigon well. She has the means to do whatever she wants.”

“For heaven’s sake, she was so green she could barely find her way to her hotel—”

“She worked fast, my friend. Trust me. I think she will use her contacts to keep tabs on her husband and make money for Winston & Reed. But don’t trust her, Thomas.” Tai smiled halfheartedly. “And don’t get on her bad side.”

But it was too late for that.

Thomas had nothing to go on but his gut feeling, Tai’s words and his own knowledge of Annette, but he believed—he
knew—
she had found out about his plans and had passed the word to the guerrillas.

As he combed the city for information, he discovered enough to convince himself that Tai was right. She had the contacts, the money, the will. In one fell swoop, she would
have gotten rid of two of her ex-lovers. Jean-Paul, the jewel thief and blackmailer. Thomas, the middle-aged fool.

He couldn’t root out proof that Annette was anything more than the wealthy, bored woman from Boston who had spent lots of money in Saigon and talked lots of crazy talk no one hadn’t heard before. He turned Saigon inside out and upside down. There was nothing that would stand up in a court of law.

And then the rumors began to circulate. “You’re hurting, Thomas,” his last friend in the state department had told him. “People around here think you were skipping out on a tête-à-tête with the VC that day.”

Annette’s doing. Her stink was everywhere, but she was safely in Boston, mourning her lost husband and clamoring for additional military aid to the South Vietnamese government.

Finally, Thomas accepted full responsibility for the tragedy that had claimed the lives of three people he loved and possibly a fourth he had only just met. If he was right and Annette had tipped off the Vietcong, then pointing his finger at her—especially when he had no tangible proof—was madness. There was the rest of his family to consider—Jenny, the children. Would Annette threaten them if he attempted to expose her?

Thomas wondered if he was being paranoid and simply looking for some way to avoid his own culpability. Common sense should have told him to stay out of her bed. Common sense should have told him to be more careful when it came to arranging excursions into the Mekong Delta.