Glitter Baby (34 page)

The mortician hadn’t anticipated this. He hesitated and then nodded. “Very well, I’ll take you to her.”

“I’ll find my own way.” She returned the compact to her purse, swept past him into the hallway, and headed back up the grand staircase. The man she’d encountered earlier appeared at the top, but this time he made no effort to stop her, and she walked past him as if he were invisible.

Almost seven years had gone by since she’d last been in the house on the Rue de la Bienfaisance, but nothing had changed. The Persian carpets still muffled her footsteps, and the fifteenth-century Madonnas continued to roll their eyes heavenward from their gilded frames. In this house, time was measured in centuries, while decades slipped by unnoticed.

As she walked the opulent, silent hallways, she thought of the house she wanted to share with Jake—a big, rambling home, with doors that banged and floorboards that squeaked and banisters children could slide down. A house that measured time in noisy decades. Jake as the father of her children…their children. Unlike Alexi, Jake would
yell at them when he got mad. He’d also hug them and kiss them and fight the whole world if necessary to keep them safe.

Why was she hesitating? Marrying him was what she wanted more than anything. If it meant she had to accept both sides of him—well, she was wise to his tricks by now, and he wouldn’t find it so easy to shut her out when something bothered him. He also wasn’t exactly getting a bargain. She wouldn’t give up her career, and nothing would ever make her work up any real interest in housekeeping. Besides, he wasn’t the only one who’d gotten good at shutting people out.

In the cryptlike chill of the house, her doubts fell away. There was no other man on earth she’d trust to be the father of her children, and she was going to call him that night and tell him so.

She’d reached Belinda’s room, so she pulled her thoughts away from the future to deal with the present. A few moments passed after she knocked before she heard movement. The door eased open, and Belinda’s face peered through the crack. “Baby?” Her voice quivered as if she hadn’t used it for some time. “Is it really you? I—I’m a mess, baby. I didn’t think—” Her fingers fluttered like a captive bird as her hand went to her cheek.

“You didn’t think I’d come.”

Belinda pushed aside a rumpled lock of hair that had tumbled over her eye. “I—I didn’t want to count on it. I know I shouldn’t have asked you.”

“Are you going to let me in?”

“Oh…Yes. Yes.” She moved out of the way. As the door shut behind her, Fleur noticed that her mother smelled like stale cigarettes instead of Shalimar. She remembered the bright bird of paradise who used to arrive at the
couvent
carrying a fragrance so sweet it instantly dispelled the musty scent of worn habits and lost prayers.

Belinda’s makeup had faded, leaving only an oily trace of blue shadow in her eyelid creases. Her face was too
pale to hold its own against the saffron silk of her rumpled Chinese robe. Fleur noticed a stain on the bodice, and the saggy front pocket looked as if it had been forced to hold one too many cigarette lighters. Belinda’s hand once again went to her cheek. “Let me go wash my face. I always liked to be pretty for you. You always thought I was so pretty.”

Fleur caught her mother’s hand. It felt as small as a child’s. “Sit down and tell me what’s happened.”

Belinda did as she was ordered, an obedient child bowing to a stronger force. She lit a cigarette, and in her breathless, young woman’s voice, she told Fleur about Alexi’s threats to put her in a sanitarium. “I haven’t been drinking, baby. He knows that, but he uses the past like a sword over my head to threaten me whenever I upset him.” She blew a puff of smoke. “He didn’t like what happened when I went to New York. He thought I’d try harder to be with you. He expected me to embarrass you, but all I did was embarrass him.”

“You had an affair with Shawn Howell.”

She flicked her ash into a porcelain ashtray. “He left me for an older woman, did you know that? Funny, isn’t it? Alexi closed off my accounts, and the other woman was rich.”

“Shawn Howell is a cretin.”

“He’s a star, baby. It’s just a matter of time before he makes a comeback.” She looked at Fleur with her old reproach. “You could have helped him, you know. Now that you’re a big agent, you could have helped an old friend.”

Fleur saw the displeasure in her mother’s eyes and waited for the old guilt to wash over her, but it didn’t come. Instead she experienced the exasperation of a mother confronting an unreasonable child. “I’m sure I could have helped him, but I didn’t want to. He doesn’t have any talent, and I don’t like him.”

Belinda set her cigarette in the ashtray, and her lips formed a pout. “I don’t understand you at all.” She scanned Fleur’s dress. “Michel designed that, didn’t he? I never
dreamed he was so talented. Everyone in New York was talking about him.” Her eyes narrowed vindictively, and Fleur understood she was about to be punished for refusing to help Shawn. “I went to see Michel. Such a beautiful boy. He looks just like me. Everybody says so.”

Did Belinda really think she could make her jealous? Fleur felt a flash of pity for her brother. Michel hadn’t told her about the visit, but she could imagine how painful it had been.

“We had a wonderful time,” Belinda said defiantly. “He told me he’d introduce me to all his famous friends and design my wardrobe.” Fleur could hear the echo of a child’s voice in her mother’s words.
And we won’t let you play with us.

“Michel’s a special person.”

Belinda couldn’t hold it together any longer, and her face crumpled. She bent forward in her chair and shoved her fingers through her hair. “He looked at me like Alexi does. Like I’m some sort of insect. You’re the only one who’s ever understood me. Why does everybody make things so hard for me?”

Fleur didn’t waste her breath pointing out that Belinda’s own choices were what had made her life so hard. “It would probably be best if you stayed away from Michel.”

“He hates me even more than Alexi does. Why does Alexi want to lock me up?”

Fleur stubbed out her mother’s smoldering cigarette. “What’s happening with Alexi right now doesn’t have very much to do with you. He’s using you to bring me here. He wants to settle old scores.”

Belinda’s head shot up, and her petulance fell away. “Of course! I should have thought of that.” She stood abruptly. “You have to leave right away. He’s dangerous. I should have realized…I can’t let him hurt you. Let me think.”

Belinda began pacing the carpet, one hand pushing her hair back from her face, the other reaching for her cigarettes as she tried to figure out how to protect her child.
Fleur was annoyed and touched. For the first time, she understood how blurred the roles between mothers and daughters could become as they grew older.

It’s my turn to be the mommy. No, you be the baby. No, I wanna be the mommy.

As Belinda paced the floor, trying to figure out how to shelter her daughter, Fleur knew her time of being Belinda’s baby was gone forever. Belinda could no longer control the way Fleur viewed either the world or herself.

“I’m staying at the Ritz,” she said. “I’ll come back in the morning, and we’ll settle his.” She needed to take Belinda with her, but the mortician and his cohorts would make that impossible. She had to find another way.

Belinda gave her a swift, desperate hug. “Don’t come back, baby. I should have realized it was you he wanted all along. It’ll be all right. Please, don’t come back.”

Fleur looked into her mother’s eyes and saw that she was as sincere as she knew how to be. “I’ll be fine.”

She made her way back through the maze of hallways to the staircase. The mortician waited for her at the bottom. She regarded him evenly. “I’ll see Monsieur Savagar now.”

“I’m sorry, mademoiselle, but you’ll have to wait. Your father is not yet ready to see you.” He indicated the rococo chair that sat outside the library doors.

So the warfare dragged on. She waited until the mortician disappeared, then made her way to the front salon, where she plucked one full-blown white rose from the mantelpiece and pushed it into the deep V of the velvet bodice. It gleamed against her skin. She carried its heavy fragrance with her as she returned to the hallway and the library doors.

Even through the heavy paneling, she could feel Alexi’s presence on the other side—grasping for her, clinging to her as tenaciously as the scent of the rose. Alexi, malicious and confident, marking off the minutes in his war of nerves. Slowly she turned the knob.

Only one dim lamp burned in the ornate room, throw
ing the periphery in shadow. Even so, she could see that the vigorous man she remembered had shrunk. He sat behind his desk, his right hand resting on top, his left hand hidden in his lap. He was dressed as immaculately as ever—a dark suit and a starched shirt with a platinum collar pin at the neck—but everything seemed too big. She saw a small gap at the neck of the shirt, took in a looseness at the shoulders, but she didn’t let herself believe for a moment that these were signs of frailty. Even in the room’s shadows, she saw that his narrow Russian eyes missed nothing. They slid over her, taking in her face and hair, sweeping along her dress, and finally coming to rest on the white rose between her breasts.

“You should have been mine,” he said.

“I wanted to
be yours,” Fleur replied, “but you wouldn’t permit it.’

“You are a
bâtarde.
Not
pur sang.
”

“That’s right. How could I forget?” She wished she could see his features more clearly, and she stepped closer to the desk. “All my Irish Flynn blood is too uncivilized for you, isn’t it?” She had the satisfaction of seeing him stiffen. “I understand one of his ancestors was hung for stealing sheep. Definitely bad blood. Then there was all that drinking and whoring.” She paused deliberately. “His young girls…”

The hand resting on the desktop curled in upon itself. “You are foolish to play games with me that you have no hope of winning.”

“Then let’s end the game. Stop terrorizing Belinda.”

“I intend to institutionalize your mother. Lock her up in a sanitarium for incurable alcoholics.”

“That might be difficult considering that she no longer drinks.”

Alexi chuckled. “You’re still naïve. Nothing is difficult when one has money and power.”

The day had been long, and she could feel her own wea
riness catching up with her. She wanted to go back to the hotel, call Jake, and feel that life was sane again. “Do you really think I’d sit by and let you do that? I’d scream so long and so loud that the whole world would hear.”

“Of course you would. I don’t know why Belinda hasn’t realized that. I’d have to silence you first, and that would be quite impossible without resorting to barbaric measures.”

Fleur thought of Jake with his blazing Colts and ready fists. Jake, who was so much more civilized than the old man sitting in front of her. She took a chair across from him and wished he’d turn on the desk lamp so she could see his expression more clearly. “You’ve never had any intention of locking her up.”

“From the beginning, you’ve been a worthy opponent. I expected you to discover the fire in the basement, but substituting the dresses was quite clever.”

“When you’ve been around a snake long enough, you learn how to crawl in the dirt. Tell me what you want.”

“How very American you’ve grown. Blunt and vulgar. No patience for
nuance.
It must be the influence of those crude friends with whom you keep company.”

A chill crept through her. Was he talking about Kissy? Michel? Or was it Jake…? Alarms shrieked inside her. She had to keep her relationship with Jake tucked safely away, well hidden from Alexi’s ruthless calculations. He surely knew Jake had lived in her attic. Maybe he even knew about her trip to his house. But he had no way of knowing she’d fallen back in love with him.

She crossed her legs and launched her counterattack. “I’m happy with my friends. Especially my brother. You made a disastrous mistake, you know. Michel is an extraordinary talent, and he has a brilliant career ahead of him. Admittedly he’s bad at business, but I’m very good at business, and I’ve made sure his money is tucked safely away.”

“A dress designer,” Alexi said contemptuously. “How can he hold up his head?”

She laughed. “Believe me, with the entire city court
ing him, he doesn’t have any trouble. It’s funny. He’s so much like you. The way he carries himself, his walk, his mannerisms—they all come from you. He even has your habit of looking at someone he doesn’t like with his eyes narrowed and his brow lifted. You can practically see the person shrink. It’s very intimidating. Of course, he also has the humanity that you lack, which makes him a far more powerful person.”

“Michel is a
tapette
!”

“And your mind is too small to see beyond that.” She heard his sharp intake of breath and concentrated on keeping her gaze even with his. “Poor Alexi. Maybe sometime I’ll be able to pity you.”

He slammed his hand down on the desk. “Do you feel any remorse for what you did? Any shame for destroying an object of such remarkable beauty?”

“The Bugatti was a work of art, and it’s sad that it no longer exists. But that’s not really what you’re asking, is it? You want to know if I’m sorry.” She pressed her fingers into the beadwork on her skirt. Alexi leaned slightly forward, and she heard the soft creak of leather as he shifted his weight. “Not ever,” she said. “Not for one moment have I ever been sorry.” The beads bit into her fingers. “You declared yourself the emperor of your own private kingdom, a man who’s above the law, just like Belinda’s movie stars. But nobody is above the laws of decency, and people who try to crush others should be punished. What you did to me was horrible, and I punished you. It’s as simple as that. You can threaten Belinda and keep on trying to ruin my business, but you’ll
never
make me regret what I did.”

“I’ll destroy you.”

“I think I’ve grown too strong for that, but if I’ve miscalculated—if you somehow manage to destroy my business—then so be it. I still won’t regret what I did. You don’t have any more power over me.”

The chair screeched as Alexi settled back into its depths. “I said I would destroy your dream,
chérie
, and that is what
I intend to do. The score will finally be even between us.”

“You’re bluffing. There’s nothing you can do to hurt me.”

“I never bluff.” He slid a small envelope across the desktop. She looked at it for a moment. A chill passed through her. She reached out to take it. “A keepsake,” he said.

She slit open the envelope, and a battered piece of metal fell into her lap. The letters embossed upon it were still visible:
BUGATTI
. It was the red metal oval from the front of the Royale.

He pushed something else across the desk. In the dim light, it took a moment before she saw what it was. Her blood froze.

“A dream for a dream,
chérie.
”

It was a tabloid newspaper—an American paper with that day’s date—and the headline leaped out at her:

NEW KORANDA BIO REVEALS CRACK-UP

“No.” She shook her head, willing the ugly words to disappear, even as her eyes skimmed the sentences.

Fleur could read no further. There were photographs—one of Jake as Bird Dog, another of the two of them running in the park, a third of her alone, with a sidebar bearing the headline,
GLITTER BABY SCORES BIG AS AGENT FOR THE STARS
. She put the tabloid on the desk and slowly stood up. The battered Bugatti oval fell to the carpet.

“I have been patient for seven years,” Alexi whispered from across the desk. “Now the score is settled. Now you, too, have lost what you care about most. It wasn’t your business that was the real dream, was it,
chérie
?”

Her heart contracted into a small mass of frozen tissue that would never again pulse with life. All this time she’d thought it was the agency he was after, but Alexi had known better. He’d known from the beginning that Jake was as elemental to her as food and water. Jake was the dream.

But something inside her refused to give Alexi his victory. “Jake will never believe this,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper, but calm, as calm as the center of a storm.

“He’s a man accustomed to the betrayal of women,” Alexi replied. “He’ll believe it.”

“How did you do this? Jake and I destroyed the book together.”

“I’m told there was a man with a special camera watching the house. Such things have been possible for years.”

“You’re lying. The manuscript was never out of Jake’s—” She stopped. It had been. The morning Jake had come running after her…They’d gone for a walk on the beach. “Jake knows I’d never do anything like this.”

“Does he? He’s been betrayed before. And he knows how important your business is to you. You used his name before to gain publicity. He has no reason to believe you wouldn’t do it again.”

Every word he spoke was true, but she couldn’t let him see that. “You’ve lost,” she said. “You’ve underesti
mated Jake, and you’ve underestimated me.” She reached out quickly—so quickly that he couldn’t have anticipated it—and snapped on the desk lamp.

With a harsh exclamation, he jerked up his arm and sent the lamp smashing to the floor, where it rocked crazily from side to side, casting cruel, moving blades of light over him. He covered the side of his face, but he was too late. By then she’d already seen what he wanted to hide.

The slackness on the left side of his face was so subtle that someone who didn’t know him well might not have noticed. There was an extra fold of skin beneath his eye, a looseness in his cheek, the slightest dip at the corner of his mouth. Another person with the same malady might have given it little thought, but for a proud man obsessed with perfection, even so slight an imperfection was intolerable. She understood—she even felt a flash of pity—but she pushed it aside. “Now your face is as ugly as your soul.”

“
Bitch! Sale garce!
” He tried to kick at the lamp, but his left side wasn’t as responsive as his right, and he only succeeded in knocking away the shade so the rocking light flashed more brutally across his face.

“You’ve made a fatal mistake,” she said. “Jake and I love each other in a way you can never comprehend because you don’t have a heart. All you feel is the need to control. If you understood about love and trust, you’d know that all your schemes and all your plots aren’t worth anything. Jake trusts me with his life, and he’ll never believe this.”

“No!” he cried. “I’ve beaten you!” The weak side of his face began to quiver, as she saw the first flicker of doubt.

“You’ve lost,” she replied. And then she turned her back on him and left the library. She walked down the icy hallway to the front door and stepped out into the cold, clear February night.

Her limousine was gone—Alexi had planned to keep her here—but she wouldn’t reenter the house. She walked down the drive toward the gates that led to the street. Every word she’d spoken to Alexi was a lie. He’d calculated cor
rectly. She could try to explain it to Jake. She would try. He might even believe Alexi was responsible. But he’d still blame her. Exposure was Jake’s deepest fear, and this was something he’d never forgive.

A dream for a dream. Alexi had finally beaten her.

He stood at the library window, the fingers of his right hand clutching the edge of the drapery, and watched her tall, straight figure grow smaller as she disappeared down the drive. It was a cold night, and she wasn’t wearing a coat, but she didn’t huddle into the chill, or hug her arms, or in any way acknowledge the temperature. She was magnificent.

The leafless branches of the old chestnuts formed a skeletal cathedral over her head. He remembered how the trees looked when they were in blossom and how—years before—another woman had disappeared down that same drive into those blossoms. Neither woman had been worthy of him. Both had betrayed him. Yet, even so, he had loved them.

A great sense of desolation filled him. For seven years, he’d been obsessed with Fleur, and now it was over. He no longer knew how he would fill his days. His assistants were well trained to handle his business affairs, and his hideous facial deformity kept him from ever again appearing in public.

A dull ache throbbed in his left shoulder, and he kneaded it with his hand. Her walk was so straight and proud, and tiny fires glittered on her dress as the beads caught the lamplights. The Glitter Baby. She lifted her arm, and something fell to the ground. He was too far away to see what it was, but, even so, he knew. As clearly as if she’d been standing next to him, he knew exactly what she’d thrown away. A white rose.

It was then that the pain hit him.

Belinda found him on the library floor next to the window, his body curled into a comma. “Alexi?” She knelt beside him, speaking his name softly because his henchmen weren’t far away, and she wasn’t supposed to be in here.

“B-Belinda?” His voice was thick and slurred. She picked up his head to cradle it in the lap of her saffron robe and gave a startled cry as she saw that the side of his face was grotesquely twisted.

“Oh, Alexi…” She pulled him to her. “My poor, poor Alexi. What’s happened to you?”

“Help me. Help—” His agonized whisper horrified her. She wanted to tell him to
stop talking like that this very minute.
She felt a damp spot on her thigh and saw that saliva had leaked from the side of his mouth through her robe. It was too much. She wanted to run away. Instead she thought of Fleur.

His mouth worked to form the words. “G-get help. I—I need help.”

“Hush…Save your strength. Don’t try to talk.”

“Please…”

“Rest, my darling.” His suit coat gaped and one of the lapels was turned under. They’d been married for twenty-seven years, and she’d never seen his suit coat untidy. She straightened the lapel.

“H-help me.”

She gazed down at him. “Don’t try to talk, my darling. Just rest. I won’t leave you. I’ll hold you until you don’t need me any longer.”

She could see the fear in his eyes then, at first the merest spark. Gradually it grew more intense until she knew he finally understood. She stroked his thin hair with the tips of her trembling fingers. “My poor darling,” she said. “My poor, poor darling. I loved you, you know. You’re the only one who ever really understood me. If only you hadn’t taken my baby away.”

“Do not—do this. I beg you—” The muscles in his right side tensed, but he was too weak to lift his arm. His lips
had a blue tinge, and his breathing grew more labored. She didn’t want him to suffer, and she tried to think how to comfort him. Finally she opened her robe and cradled him to her bare breast.