Destiny (70 page)

Edouard looked at him coolly; he was thinking that the fat man probably meant what he said, and that if he did, the deficiency would show up in his films, eventually. He turned away to the door, and Thad, after a moment's pause, hastened after him.

"You want this address or not?" He brandished the slip of paper. Edouard glanced down at it, then away.

"Thank you. I don't need it."

He had reached the door, which he unlocked. Thad put the piece of paper back into his pocket.

"Let me guess—you're going to London, right?"

Edouard turned, and saw that the fat man was still smiling amiably.

"London? After all you've told me? All you've explained? No. I shall return to Paris."

Thad looked at Edouard suspiciously. "You mean you're not going to contact Helen at all?"

"I am not going to contact her, no."

"You want me to give her a message or anything?"

"Helene and I do not need messengers."

This was said with calculated hauteur, and the fat man frowned.

"Why d'you keep calling her Helene?"

"Because it's her true name," Edouard said. Then he walked out, and closed the door quietly behind him.

Thad stared at the door irritably. He disliked others to have the exit hne. He savored the prospect of going after the man, achieving the final word, and then rejected the idea. He prowled back into the room and saw that the maroon crocodile bag bore the initials H.C. He gave it a savage kick. After a while, he sat down on the couch again.

The man was probably bluffing, he thought, consoling himself. He was quite a good actor, had a lot of self-control, that was all. And that suit helped: Thad had observed the suit with interest. He himself could learn

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from that suit, he decided. Not from the man, because he was wrong, misguided, in the dark —as most men were where women were concerned.

He took off his spectacles, panted on them, and polished them on his sleeve. Without his glasses, Thad was acutely myopic: the huge room, the frescoes, the books, the bronzes, instantly blurred.

He leaned back on the cushions, aware that he was a little edgy, a little disconcerted, something he rarely felt. And for the second time that day too. First because of Helen; now because of this man. He allowed himself, briefly, to think of the scene that had taken place at the house in Tras-tevere: the memory filled him with a hot, angry mortification. It had not gone as he intended; the interview with the man had not gone entirely as he intended, either. Both the man and Helen had, in some way, eluded him: he had felt the lasso of his will start to tighten around them, and then —then they had managed to slip free. It was as if they knew something, understood something that Thad himself did not know or understand, and that knowledge gave them a quiet combative power that had thwarted him. It would not always be so, Thad decided.

His gaze flicked up at the volumes of elegantly bound pornography, which he had investigated, in a desultory fashion, some weeks before. Pornography bored him. Its increasingly obscene devices seemed to Thad desperate, pathetic, and always destined to fail. Metaphors for possession, that was all. His face took on a sneering expression. Sexual possession seemed to Thad innately trivial: it was not the possession of which he dreamed; its posturings did not make his pulse beat faster.

Art, now. Art was different. Art was the ultimate possession. He turned his mind back, with pleasure, to the film he had just made. He let it loop through his mind, sequence by sequence, frame by frame: exact, beautiful, potentially perfect; his movie, his creation, his immortal child. He felt immediately calmed, as he always did at such moments; it was an Olympian calm, the calm of potency and absolute control. It made his body stir, and harden.

He rested his hands between his thighs in recognition of that fact, and closed his eyes. The figure of Edouard receded; the figure of Helen advanced. To scan those features, which chance had made perfect for his purposes, made Thad content. He had been given a priceless gift: the perfect instrument, an instrument of flesh and blood: Thad's mind sang with the future harmonies this instrument should play. Composing them, Thad shut his eyes, and let his mind dwell in the sweet negative dark: its blackness and its blankness refreshed him. Soon, as always, it became silvery with images. Thad watched them and assembled them. He listened to them sing.

DESTINY • 433

In Paris, in his study at St. Cloud, Edouard reached across his desk and drew the telephone toward him.

He was thinking about the conversation with Thaddeus Angelini; he was thinking about Helene; he was thinking about gifts.

On the desk, next to the telephone, were three things: the photograph of Helene; the pair of gray gloves from Hermes; the square-cut diamond ring. He looked at them thoughtfully, trying to remain calm. The pain, when he had found those gloves and that ring in her room, had been intense. To have left those—of all things—when he had beUeved that they were Uke a sign between them, a tahsman of their love.

Now he could look at them more calmly, and the pain was less. It hurt him to think it, but he could see Angelini might be right: the gift of the diamond, Uke the gift of his love, had been given at the wrong time.

He thought instead now of other, less tangible gifts, gifts Helene would not even know she had received from him: the gift of time, for instance; the gift of choice; the gift, even, of his absence.

He did not find any of these easy to contemplate. All the way back from Italy he had been thinking, and planning, yet now he almost rebelled. He touched the telephone, and knew that he could go to London, and see her; knew it was more than possible that he could then bring her back.

The temptation was so very strong: he sat, his hand on the telephone, quite still. To have come so far, to have come so close—and then not to follow her to London. For a moment it was unbearable to him: he must go —he had to. Then he thought again of all the things Angelini had said, and again he heard the ring of truth in them.

Helene was the age now that he had been in London during the war; at her age, he had loved Celestine, worshipped Jean-Paul, learned of the death of his father. A time when the world had changed from second to second; a time when he had grabbed at certainties, and been filled with ambitions, as perhaps Helene was now. No, he would not go to London.

Instead, as he had planned, he placed a call to Simon Scher, who—two years before—he had transferred to Partex's Texas headquarters. Scher was now Drew Johnson's right-hand man; when he came on the line, Edouard's voice was entirely unemotional.

"Simon? We made a number of acquisitions as part of our diversification policy recently. Correct me if I am wrong. . . ."

In Dallas, Simon Scher smiled at this pleasantry: when was Edouard ever wrong in business matters?

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". . . But one of them was a distribution company, I think. A film distribution company."

"That's right. It was called Sphere. It was an asset-stripping exercise on our part. As a company, they were all washed up, but we bought for a good price, and they had some useful real estate."

"What have we done with it?"

"Nothing yet. It was only two months back. We're still investigating the development potential of the property holdings." Scher paused. "You want me to run a check?"

"No." There was a brief pause. "What would it take to relaunch the company?"

"What, as a distribution operation?" Scher's surprise was evident in his voice. "Not a great deal, I suppose. It would depend on the level of commitment we wanted. Two milhon. You could reactivate for less, but if you were envisaging expansion . . ."He paused. "I can get you some figures, but we ruled out that option. The movie industry is highly volatile at present, and without a production arm, a distribution company is weak. Sphere was in competition with the major studio distribution divisions, and it lost out. It was also weak at the executive level, of course, but that wasn't the only problem by any means. We decided Partex would—"

"I want to reactivate the company."

"What?"

Scher's jaw dropped. He could as soon imagine Edouard's being involved in movies as he could envisage his playing the slot machines at Vegas.

"I want to reactivate it as a distribution company, with a view, shortly, to investment in independent film production."

"Production?" Scher felt as if he were going crazy. He couldn't have heard correctly. "You mean you want us to make movies?"

"Not make them, back them. I'm serious about this, Simon. I'd need to go into it, obviously, but I was thinking in terms of an initial injection of funds in the region of six million. A probable three-year loss period, aiming at turnaround and profit in the fourth year. ..."

"Edouard. Hang on a minute. This is movies we're talking about. . . ."

"I would be financing the operation personally, and underwriting it, but I do not want my name associated with it in any way. I want Sphere as a fronting operation." He paused. Scher could tell from the tone of his voice that he had begun to make notes. "You'll need a headhunter, a good one, someone who knows the studios inside out. I need Sphere's trading figures for the past ten-year period, and the trading figures of its nonstudio competitors. I need—"

"You need me on a plane," Scher finished for him. He began to smile. It

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was an insane idea, and all Edouard's insane ideas had a formidable track record.

"I can't make it yesterday," he said dryly. "But I can make it tonight. You want Drew in on this?"

"Of course. He is the chairman."

Scher chuckled. They both knew that as far as Edouard was concerned, that fact need mean nothing.

"Very well then, he's my friend," Edouard corrected himself. "Tell him I need his help."

"If I tell him that, he'll fly over too."

"Then definitely tell him."

There was a brief pause, while Scher spoke to his secretary about flight times, and realized suddenly that it was the first time in ten years' association that Edouard had expressed a need for help. That fact perturbed him slightly. When he came back on the line, his voice was wary.

"You do know the kind of loss we could make on this, Edouard?" he began, feeling foolish. "I'm sure you do, of course, but it would be an entirely new departure for all of us. Distribution is bad enough, but production . . . It's a snakepit, Edouard, it's notoriously unpredictable. We—"

"We have a diversification policy, yes?" Edouard sounded amused.

"Oh, certainly. But with a view to profit. Here, we stand to make—you stand to make—a very heavy loss, and—"

"Oh, I can calculate the loss," Edouard said.

He was looking at the photograph of Helene as he spoke, and the exact nature of the loss was vivid to him. He saw it for a moment, a future that was a wasteland, a future without Helene, a future that was a terrible extension of the bleakness of his past.

He hesitated, then he turned the photograph over.

"I can calculate the loss," he said again more firmly.

PART THREE

LEWIS AND HELENE

LONDON—PARIS, 1959-1960

^ ^ I 'm having lunch at that new Itahan place I told you about, with I some terrific people. Why don't you join us?" J. "No, thank you, Lewis."

"I've got some tickets for Covent Garden tomorrow night. They're like gold dust. Callas is singing. Please come."

"No, thank you, Lewis."

"There's a party in the Albany tonight, and we've both been invited. It's one of the most amazing places in London. You must see it."

"Lewis, no. Really."

A hunt ball in Oxfordshire. The opening of a new nightclub in Mayfair. Jazz at the Chester Square home of a newly rich and fashionable Royal Court Theatre playwright. A breakfast party in Brighton. Dancing at the Dorchester . . . after months in Paris and Rome, months of uncustomary social quietude, Lewis had bounced back. He was indefatigable.

"A private viewing at the Glendinning Gallery. Champagne at noon. It's Sorenson's new exhibition. Everyone says it's incredible."

"Lewis, I can't. I'd rather stay here. And besides, I'm sitting for Anne tomorrow."

"So what? Tell her you can't. Anne Kneale is a pain in the neck. You realize she's a dyke, do you?"

"Lewis ..."

"Well, all right. Maybe she is, maybe she isn't. She certainly looks like one. I don't like her."

"Lewis, we're living in her house. ..."

"Cottage. You can't swing a cat in here. I hardly know the woman. I can't imagine why she offered to lend it. And I certainly can't imagine why I accepted. ..."

"I like it here. It's quiet. It's peaceful."

"It's bloody cold. My bed has a mattress made of iron. Last time I ran a

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bath it took three quarters of an hour to produce three inches of lukewarm water."

"There's a fire. It's pretty. My bed is extremely comfortable."

Lewis's color rose slightly. There was a silence. He was never quite sure, when Helen made remarks like this, whether they sprang from innocence or a desire to tease him. The next day, he began the campaign again.

"We could stay at the Ritz—just move in there to a couple of suites. Why not? We'd be there for Christmas."

"No, Lewis. You move if you like, but I'd rather stay here."

"No. I intend to keep an eye on you. You need looking after. You might disappear again, the way you did in Paris."

"I won't disappear, Lewis. Aren't I always here? You go to your parties, and you come back, and I'm here."

"But I want you to see London. I want London to see you. It must be so dull, staying here all the time. Lunch today—just lunch. Please—join us."

"No, Lewis. I want to be alone. I told you."

"I see. Like Greta Garbo, huh?" He pulled a wry face.

"No, Lewis. Like me."

Lewis gave in. Next day, he returned to the attack, and the day after. Lewis was persistent, and eclectic. The first night of a big new musical. A party on a boat on the Thames. Dinner with the American ambassador. A banquet in the Guildhall. The reception at de Chavigny to launch the new Wyspianski collection of jewelry.