Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen : A Novel (9781101565766) (17 page)

“Very interesting, I have to admit,” Isabella said. “When we first talked about my coming to work for you and then about launching my collection, you said stones had become commodities and that in today's world the real profit was in design. Things seem to have changed.”

“Actually, they haven't,” Lapo assured her. “What I said then is still true, but these are special circumstances. With one-of-a-kind stones like these, one is less in the jewelry business than in the upper reaches of selling fine art.”

“Or gilts,” Isabella said, and smiled. “Tell me, do I sense the hand of my godfather anywhere in this process?”

Lapo laughed. “Not directly, not that I know of—and I would know. He's your biggest booster, of course. But people do not buy such treasures as these merely to support a friend's goddaughter.”

“No,” agreed Isabella, “I'm sure they don't.”

Chapter Nineteen

Their dinner party was
on the balmy and fragrant terrace at Due Ladroni in the Piazza Nicosia. They were twenty-four in all, at three tables of eight.

“Quite a name for a restaurant,” one of Guardi's best clients, an elderly Roman count who had married an American heiress from Tulsa, remarked to Isabella over a first course of sliced raw sea bass.

“I know,” Isabella said, and beamed an ingratiating smile. “It means ‘Two Thieves,' doesn't it?”

“Literally,” the count told her. “After the war, two brothers opened it as what they called simply Tavern. Very few people had money in those days, and the place caught on by offering exceptionally good homemade food for cheap prices. Working people came first, and soon a more fashionable crowd followed. When the brothers began to raise their prices in consequence, their customers gave the restaurant the name it bears to this day.”

With the festivities
still going strong nearing midnight, Isabella commenced a circuit of the tables and ultimately found herself seated next to Sheik al-Awad, an elegantly turned-out, not-quite-rotund man of shorter-than-average height, whose soft smile and honeyed voice seemed perfectly matched.

“I am honored,” he told her.

“Queen for a day,” Isabella said. “And I'm twice lucky, as I believe we are lunching together tomorrow.”

“An event to which I very much look forward,” Sheik al-Awad replied.

“Lapo showed me the
most
amazing stones this morning,” she gushed.

“I trust him implicitly,” Sheik al-Awad said.

“Your wife is a very fortunate woman.”

“Remind her of that when you meet. I beg you.”

“She's here with you tonight?”

The sheik shook his head. “She is at our home, with the children,” he explained, his eyes then twinkling as he issued a gentle nod in the direction of a celebrated Italian cover girl at the next table.

“Well, at least someone's lucky,” Isabella came back in a determinedly neutral yet sophisticated tone.

“Oh, no, no, no,” the sheik interrupted. “These jewels are for
my
collection. Of course, one never knows when he'll meet a lady he enjoys and when that happens, it's nice to have something to offer her.”

“Take the pigeon's-blood ruby,” Isabella said. “I've never seen one like it.”

To this Sheik al-Awad replied hesitantly, “You have a lovely way with words: ‘pigeon's blood.'”

“I wish I could take the credit, but I didn't make up the phrase.” Isabella started to say that “pigeon's blood”
was a bog-standard professional phrase but quickly stopped herself, feeling suddenly uneasy. “It's difficult, isn't it,” she continued, “when one sees so many brilliant stones all together, to remember that ruby and sapphire are practically one and the same?”

Sheik al-Awad nodded. “Yes, it is,” he said.

“Both corundum,” she said.

“Both corundum,” he repeated.

“And yet, now that I think of it, I've never seen a red sapphire,” she said, baiting her trap, for there was no such thing. A red sapphire
was
a ruby.

“Haven't you?”

“Never. Have you been collecting for a long time?”

“I have been around for a long time. So I suppose my answer to that question must be yes.”

“What other gems have you collected?” Isabella inquired. “There must be so many lovely ones.”

“Yes indeed,” the sheik replied.

“That's wonderful,” Isabella said, regarding him carefully. She had no idea what sort of game he was playing or who, if not Ian, had put him up to it—nor, so long as he could fund his purchases, had she any business trying to find out. She had seen enough of collectors over the years, however, to recognize that, unlike his intended acquisitions, Sheik al-Awad was not the genuine article.

It was not until a quarter past one that Isabella and Philip were alone in her flat in the Trastevere. “It went well, didn't it?”

“How could it have gone any better?” he asked as he squeezed her hand. “Another day, another triumph.”

“Are you too tired?” she asked.

“No,” Philip said.

She was wearing a dress of a young designer friend of Balthasar's, a light jade V-neck with draped shoulder details. Once she had loosened its obi-wrap belt, it was easy to step out of. “When I was at university,” she said, “we used to pull all-nighters.”

“As did we,” Philip said, and then kissed her.

As he disrobed her, Isabella thought, not for the first time, that there was something boyish about him. His natural grace could not disguise impetuousness so fierce and selfish it was almost cruel. In bed he was like a dancer, in control of every muscle and movement of his body. So that when his left hand skimmed the flesh above her rib cage and from there across her breast, it was as soft as a current of air. She loved beauty and from the first had found Philip beautiful. Yet something about his beauty disturbed her, as if he had been sculpted rather than born. Oh, he was alive and knew how to please her, how to seduce and tease, enter and withdraw by surprise. But it was not his skill that had kept her interest, rather the part of him he withheld. She knew he was hiding something. And whatever it was had frightened her before and worried her now. She was not drawn to milquetoasts. A woman who wanted what she did from a man and from life would have to learn to look away from time to time. She understood that and, by now, how to manage the flow of potentially disturbing information from her brain to her emotions. How could she not, with Ian as her formative male role model? Men worth possessing could not be possessed, but acknowledging that truth made it no easier to resist them.

“You missed me?” she whispered with a sudden unease once he was spent.

Philip sighed. “I missed you.”

“I missed you, too.”

“It's going to be better from now on. We'll be together.”

“You'll be in Geneva.”

“I'll have a desk in Geneva. I told you: I'll be my own boss.”

“That will be good. How
was
Geneva?”

Philip touched her shoulder. He had no wish to lie but, for her benefit as much as his, could not tell her that he had been in Vienna instead. Isabella would grasp the reason in time, accept that a man either took or missed his chances. “Geneva was the same as ever: slippery,” he said.

“I know what you mean,” she said softly, sitting up a little. She was too tired to stay awake for long, yet still too excited to sleep. “God, I'm glad you're here.”

“You're not the only one,” Philip said. He knew her well enough to know she was game, but before he began again he studied her. Unlike other women whose beds he had shared, Isabella could hold her own anywhere, in any company. She could make him proud. At school he'd had classmates whose mothers, still elegant and enthralling in middle age, were more or less matriarchs of dynasties. Isabella could be such a figure. He harbored no doubt about that and for a moment wondered why he needed anyone else, anything more. The answer, he suspected, was embedded too deeply in his being to be plumbed. He was who he was.

That was the nature of things. Gatherers of power led rapacious, messy lives, but lives that were remembered and important. The dual aspects of his character had long been clear to him, and when the thought suddenly struck him that he resembled that figure of adolescent fantasy, the vampire who yearned not to be undead, he laughed silently. In the beguiling young woman who seemed to love him, he discerned a perfection and normalcy he knew he could never attain on his own.

“Buono?”
he asked, as he slipped inside her.

“Sì,”
she said, doing her best to disguise the reluctance that had gradually overtaken her mood.

Philip tightened his grip.
“Buono,”
he repeated.

In the morning she cooked their breakfast in her tiny, ocher-tiled kitchen, placing strips of bacon in fastidious tic-tac-toe patterns in a large skillet and frying fresh eggs up on top of them.

When Philip came to the table, he brought a large box wrapped in lime green paper with a purple bow.

“What's this?” Isabella inquired.

“A souvenir,” Philip said, “of Prague. I meant to give it to you before your party, but the day got away from us.”

“We were casualties of our own hospitality, as Ian would say.”

“Not quite casualties.”

When Isabella had unwrapped the package and withdrawn the musical jewel box, she lifted the lid and the mechanism within began to play Dvorˇák's
Czech Suite,
op.
39.

“It's divine,” she said. “In fact, perfect.”

“But not big enough for your collection?”

“Perhaps as it once was, not as it's becoming. That's another thing. Wait till I tell you what sorts of stones Lapo intends to set in some of my pieces.”

“Large ones, I hope.”

“So large I'll have to redo some models. They're lovely, of course, but I'm afraid they overwhelm my designs.”

“What a nice problem to have,” Philip said.

“Yes, I suppose it is,” Isabella agreed as she lowered the top of the music box. “Anyway, thank you, thank you! I love it. You always know just the right thing. You're amazing.”

“Actually, it's as much a precaution as a souvenir.”

Isabella could tell he was teasing. “A precaution?” she repeated.

“It can be dangerous to leave a pretty girl alone in Rome.”

“I wouldn't know. All I do is work.”

“That would be sad if true. Fortunately, I don't believe you.”

“The only other man in my life in Balthasar.”

“Balthasar is not a man,” Philip said.

“Now, now,” Isabella said. “I suppose the problem is that everyone who might be inclined to give it a go knows I'm taken.”

“That means nothing to Romans,” Philip said. “You know that. For a girl this city must seem to offer an abundance of riches. But if you are a man, there's so much competition. Elsewhere it's different. Take New York. Especially if you're foreign, it's not difficult to win over girls there. Half the men are gay. The other half care only about money. There is no one left for them. But in Rome even teenage boys sneak their girlfriends into the Forum after dark. In Rome if you like a girl and she's attractive, you're up against professionals.”

“There's no one more professional than you,” Isabella said as the kettle whistled.

She was tending to it when the telephone rang. “You wouldn't get that, would you?” she asked Philip as she poured the bubbling water into a
cafetière.

“Of course,” Philip said, marveling at the habit English girls had of constructing requests in the negative.
“Pronto,”
he said into the receiver.

“This is al-Awad.”

Philip hesitated. “I'm sorry. You took me by surprise. How did you know I was here?”

“I didn't. Who is this?” asked the sheik.

“Philip Frost, of course.”

“Oh, hello, Philip, and very sorry to disappoint you, but I was trying to reach Isabella Cavill.”

“She's right here.”

When her brief conversation confirmed the time and venue of their lunch, Isabella returned to press the filter of the
cafetière.

Philip said, “I didn't know you knew al-Awad.”

“Yes you did. He was there last night.”

“Many people were there. Do you know them all?”

Isabella ignored the question. “He's a client of Lapo's,” she said.

“I'm glad to hear it.”

“Honestly, Philip! He came on with us to dinner.”

“You could have fooled me, but then I don't know him by sight, only over the telephone.”

“And how, pray tell, is that? Does he collect the nuclear arms you disarm?”

Philip shook his head at the absurdity of such a thought. “He's an investor in the fund I'm going to be running.”

“Bully for him,” Isabella replied.

Chapter Twenty

To Ty, in the
fresh light of the English morning, there seemed something prematurely old about Oliver. Fatalism lurked at the corners of his eyes, the eyes of a man drawn to the edges of things, who had become addicted to shadows and danger. Such a man, Ty recognized, would not find it easy to return to London or Cambridge or Eton for very long.

At the Signature base at Heathrow, Oliver preceded his friend off the Boeing business jet that had brought them, over the North Pole, from Los Angeles. By the time Ty reached passport control, Oliver had already found his car and set off toward the M4 and London. Ty had only just identified his baggage when he was greeted by the driver from Claridge's Hotel and a pencil-thin young woman from the local public-relations office of the studio that was distributing
Something to Look Forward To.
He followed his minders to the waiting Mercedes S-Class.

“Mr. Thrall said to tell you he has forgiven you,” the publicity girl told him, “but only because it's the Queen. He also said he was confused by the letters behind your name and that I should ask you about them.”

“Did he?” Ty said. “I wrote his wife, Mitzi, a note, explaining what had happened. After my name, on impulse—really, I mean just as a joke—I put the letters CBE.”

“But you aren't, are you?” inquired the young woman with an audible gasp. “Can an American be a Commander of the British Empire?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. It's an abbreviation I came across in a script once, and I thought it would throw Mitzi and Sid. They're such Anglophiles, as maybe you know.”

“I didn't.”

“Oh, yeah. English chintz, English furniture, other people's ancestors on their walls. It's their thing. Anyway, that's not what I meant the letters to stand for. I meant them to stand for
C
an't
B
e
E
verywhere.”

The publicity girl laughed. “I'll be sure to tell him,” she said, then handed Ty a copy of his itinerary.

An hour later Ty had finished unpacking his suitcase and was standing beneath an enormous round showerhead as torrents of hot water washed the residue of his long journey from his skin.

When the telephone rang, it startled him, but he took the call on the wall unit just outside the shower door.

“On the way up,” Oliver said.

“Give me five.”

“Four fifty-nine . . .”

Ty was in one of the hotel's bathrobes when he answered the door of his suite. “You're like a bad penny the way you turn up,” he told Oliver.

“Bad news,” Oliver said.

“It's a long way to have come for that. Shoot!”

“She can't make it.”

“The Queen?”

“Hardly. Isabella Cavill. She just called in her refusal. Apparently the invitation didn't reach her until this morning. That's her excuse, in any event. We know it was delivered yesterday.”

“Signed for?”

“Don't you think that would have been a bit over the top? Let's look on the bright side. She knows you're back in Europe and have the best reason in the world to be here. She knows you were interested enough to invite her. We also know that her collection debuted last evening in Rome, so it's not entirely unlikely she's tied up there.”

“Perhaps we should have invited her boyfriend as well,” Ty suggested.

“It would have been out of character.”

“For me?”

“For Ty Hunter.”

“Where does this leave us?”

“With Plan B. Actually, still Plan A. It was always a long shot she'd appear. You go to the premiere. You have fun. We'll play tomorrow when it comes. Let me pose a question. If you had received the invitation without any involvement from me or anyone else, would you have asked her?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“And would you be tempted to pick up the phone and ring her now?”

Ty looked at his old friend with disbelief. “Not after she'd turned me down.”

“I was sure you'd say that,” Oliver said, “but I'm glad you did. As far as you are concerned, I've been seconded by the palace to see you through the hoops.”

“Fine.”

“We'd never met until today.”

“Should we be talking so openly?”

“The suite was swept for bugs five minutes before you entered it. It will be swept again every time you leave and just before you return.”

“Any other security precautions I should know about?” Ty asked.

“The couple in the suite next door—they're ours. They don't know anything about anything except that you are a guest of Her Majesty and famous in your own right. So it's only natural you might need a bit of interference run.”

“Where will you be?”

“From here I go to the palace to review plans with the household staff, make sure there are no last-minute changes. From there I'll go to my flat, then be back here to collect you at half five sharp.”

“Then it's showtime.”

“‘The roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd,'” Oliver told him, “or have I got it backwards? If you want to go out for anything, do. One of the studio's blokes can go along with you—or not, whichever you choose. The essential thing is to behave as you would if you had nothing else in the back of your mind.”

“Beyond sleeping with Isabella Cavill, you mean?”

“A fine and completely understandable desire,” Oliver replied. “In the meantime, if you're feeling frustrated, there's a very spiffy gym on the top floor.”

“I know.”

“Of course you do. For a moment I forgot. You've stayed here before.”

“A couple of pictures ago, while we were shooting at Pinewood, Claridge's was my home away from home, except that I didn't actually have a real home then.”

“Maybe people like us shouldn't.”

In the car, on the drive to the Odeon Leicester Square, Oliver said, “It's all very simple. You bow, not deeply. A graceful nod will do. On first meeting the Queen, it is ‘Your Majesty,' after that ‘ma'am.' The rest of them are ‘Your Royal Highness.' The younger they are, the more relaxed about this sort of thing. Remember, they'll be as dazzled to meet you as you are to meet them.”

“I'm full of respect but never dazzled,” Ty said. “And when the film is over?”

“There's an after party in aid of the Great Ormond Street Hospital that we've rather tagged onto at the last minute.”

“In that case I should probably stay on for a reasonable amount of time.”

“It would be a pity not to. It's at Winfield House in Regent's Park, the home of the American ambassador,” Oliver explained. “Very swell.”

“What about after the after party?”

“I'd forgot what a night owl you are.”

“I'll be on my second wind by then. We
are
starting early, remember.”

A minute or two away from the red carpet, they were now in the Haymarket. “The Queen will probably not go to Winfield House,” Oliver said. “Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge very likely will. Harry's a dead cert. Later they may go on to Boujis or Mahiki, or, who knows, now that they're all adults, to Annabel's.”

“Are we adults?” Ty asked with a wink.

“In the minds of others,” Oliver replied.

“As I recall, you're not supposed to go to certain places if you're a man over thirty or a woman over twenty-five.”

Oliver nodded. “Film stars excepted.”

“Would you have it any other way?”

“When was it ever?”

“And it's not only film stars,” Ty continued. “Billionaires also get a free ride.”

“Another perk of the undeserving, but then you can't fight nature. Women are affected by the physical attributes of men, Ty. There's no getting around that fact. From fourteen to eighteen, it's the face that counts with them. From eighteen to twenty-five, maybe thirty, it's the body. After then, except for a precious few, it's the wallet.”

Ty was surprised by how relaxed royal formality was. He was the first through the receiving line, followed by Greg Logan and his awestruck eleven-year-old daughter, Lily. He managed gracefully deferential yet far from obsequious bows and blushed with pleasure when the Queen told him she had seen and enjoyed both
The Boy Who Understood Women
and his second film,
Fortune's
Wind.
Oliver had been right about the princes and the elegant new duchess, whose welcoming smiles and enthusiastic questions about how certain scenes had been filmed Ty found flattering even though they seemed to cast the few years' difference in their ages as larger than it was.

When the Queen told him she found it “astonishing, almost magical, really, how quickly and completely certain actors, such as you, Mr. Hunter, are able to assume not only the role but the entire identity of a character, to make people believe you are someone you aren't,” she stared directly into his eyes, holding them for an extra second. This caused Ty to wonder whether—and, if so, in how much detail—she had been briefed about the operation that was under way.

“It's very kind of you to say so, ma'am,” he replied.

“Or aren't someone you are,” Her Majesty added. “It's a gift, of course.”

Later, as they arrived at Winfield House, Ty pressed Oliver on the question.

“That's difficult to say,” Oliver answered. “One can never be sure, although one suspects there's far less she doesn't know than that she does.”

“That's the feeling I had. But I could hardly ask.”

“Indeed,” Oliver agreed. “Anyway, you know what they say. There are no such things as secrets, only people who find things out a little later.”

The reception hall of the American ambassador's residence, a large bright, square room, immediately reminded Ty of La Encantada. In the center of it stood an imposing and eccentric table, a gilt-bronze-mounted burr elm with a porphyry top that Ty was almost sure had come from the same hand as one in his own house. This impression intensified when he and a few other VIPs, including the royals, were ushered into the Green Room for a pre-reception reception with the ambassador and his wife. There the avocado-and-coral palette, the Chinese wallpaper, the woven carpet with its subtle dragon design, the waxed-pine pelmet boards that contained the curtains within the windows, even the Jiaqing vases that had been adapted as lamps evinced unmistakably the Hollywood glamour of Billy Haines. Ty smiled to himself at the thought that this should be the face America had chosen to present to the mother country and, as he did so, felt a little homesick.

The ambassador, when Ty inquired, confirmed that the media tycoon Walter Annenberg and his wife, when he'd been ambassador to the Court of St. James under President Nixon, had indeed hired William Haines. “You're very knowledgeable, Mr. Hunter,” the ambassador said with a smile.

“Only accidentally in this case,” Ty told him.

As the room filled, Ty studied the faces and expressions, the stance and dress of those who surrounded him, careful to betray no more than an actor's natural curiosity in new surroundings. He wondered who if anyone knew of his assignment or even of his connection to Oliver; who might possess even one fact that, in the wrong hands, could thwart his mission. It was unlikely that the ambassador, a sixty-eight-year-old businessman bundler of campaign funds from the Upper East Side of New York, with no previous experience in foreign affairs, would have any knowledge of Oliver Molyneux's background in the Special Boat Service or MI6. The CIA station chief was another matter, of course, but which one was he? Ty searched among the guests, eliminating those connected to the film or the film business as well as those whose features, Savile Row suits, or chancy frocks gave them away as English. Then, in a far corner of the room, he noticed a man with receding, silvering hair whose tortoiseshell reading glasses dangled from a black cord around his neck. The man was of average height, with just the beginning of a paunch. Innocuous but intellectual, he seemed stranded in middle age, somewhere between forty-five and sixty. Ty recognized the man as having been cut from the same cloth as many of his father's friends, an almost perfect specimen of a type he had been familiar with since childhood. He did not wish to encounter the man more directly because he did not want to provide the probable spy an opportunity, in turn, to appraise him. The fewer people who knew or even suspected his role, the safer he and Oliver would travel, the more likely they'd be to succeed in uncovering and, if need be, foiling a transfer of missing nuclear warheads.

Outside the sprawling Georgian house, on the wide garden lawn, two geodesic domes had been inflated and were now illuminated by soft lights.

Ty left the private reception with the ambassador, his wife and Greg Logan and made his way toward the bar in the smaller tent. It was always the same, he thought, as a few fans approached and others receded, some eager to express their approval, others equally determined to respect his privacy. When someone said “Fantastic” or “Loved it” or “You were
never
better,
” he smiled and thanked the person, offered his hand, and immediately deflected the compliment to his director. He was signing an autograph when a waiter passed, offering flutes of champagne from a silver tray. He took one and the instant he did so became aware of an immovable figure just over his right shoulder. He shifted slightly, curious why it did not shift with him, if only to avoid collision, then saw that it belonged to a woman, not too tall but lithe, in a pale blue dress whose jagged hemline might have been cut for Peter Pan. Her face was a few inches from his, almost too close for him to register its subtle beauty, but she was laughing as she gazed down. When Ty's eyes followed, he saw that the toe of his slipper was pressing down on one of the points of her dress.

Embarrassed as he withdrew it, Ty said, “Sorry, I seem to have you kidnapped.”