Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen : A Novel (9781101565766) (9 page)

Ty shook Ian Santal's extended hand and, as he did so, stole a glance at Isabella, who seemed unembarrassed. He supposed she was used to her godfather's candor.

“Or about whom she knows less than she thinks,” Ty said.

“Are you a keeper of secrects, then, Mr. Hunter?” asked Ian Santal. His tone was genial, teasing.

“On the contrary, my life's an open book.”

“Called
People
magazine,” Isabella appended.

“Watch her.” Ian smiled. “She'll have you wangled into one of her adverts before you know it.”

The thought had not occurred to Ty, and he studied Isabella, evaluating her flirtatiousness in a new light. Since fame had become a salient fact of his life, he'd met most types of starstruck young women: true fans as well as those merely infatuated by image, silly ingenues, blatant starfuckers, even desirable young women intent, owing to some unobvious insecurity, on proving their desirability at ever more rarefied levels. He'd thought that Isabella might be among the last group, or simply a rich girl at play in a world of men. He had guessed that she was available, if not exactly easy to acquire or hold on to. Now he wasn't so sure. Clearly she was setting him up—but for what?

“Are you interested in masks?” Santal asked.

The question took Ty aback—until he followed the older man's line of sight. Flanking the entrance to what appeared to be Santal's quarters were two vivid theatrical masks, the one on the right primarily magenta with chalk-white lips and brows, that on the left primarily turquoise with identical features.

“They are Venetian, fifteenth century,” Ian Santal explained.

“They're lovely,” Ty replied.

“What do you collect, Mr. Hunter? May I ask?”

“So far mostly memories,” Ty answered.

Isabella smiled.

“I've just bought my first house,” he continued, “but I haven't thought much about how to fill it.”

“And why is that?”

“Time,” Ty told him.

“Always the problem,” Santal agreed. “Truth be told, I didn't take you for a collector—or, should I say, someone especially intent on seeing and appraising the collections of others.”

“Why is that?”

“In my experience most such young men are either poofters or thieves. You do not strike me as the former, and clearly you've no need to be the latter.”

Ty forced a smile, then hesitated. “I take it you collect masks.”

“He collects everything,” Isabella interjected.

“It's a disease, I fear,” Santal elaborated. “One that afflicts those of us whose talents fall short of our aspirations. I suppose one might say we are aesthetes rather than artists. What we cannot create, we purchase. Sometimes, however,
if
we manage to do it well, we bring things together in a way that produces something if not entirely then at least in some part original.”

Ty shook his head, as if to dismiss Santal's self-deprecation, but he took the older man's point. The movie business was filled with people who, having tried and failed on the creative side, had hung in—as executives or agents or even grips—simply to be near it. “Everything?” he repeated, glancing first at Isabella, then at her godfather.

“Yes, or almost,” Santal conceded, “although of course in different places. Aboard
Surpass
I have only works of art from civilizations that border the Mediterranean: Venetian, Roman, Neapolitan, Greek, Turkish, North African, French, Spanish, you name it. Here they are together, as though the Pillars of Hercules were still one mountain, as though time and nature had not separated peoples—indeed, as if they had not separated themselves.”

“Tell Mr. Hunter your theory,” Isabella said. “You might as well. You're this far along.”

Ian looked puzzled.

“About the film you plan to make one day,” she prodded.

“‘Once hoped to make' might be more accurate. No doubt now it will never happen.”

“Oh, really,” Isabella said. “When is the last time something you wanted to happen didn't happen?”

Santal demurred. “What Isabella is talking about is a story I wrote for her when she was still a young girl, just coming into her own,” he explained. “It took place among a group of cavorting, hedonistic characters in ancient Alexandria, am I right?”

Isabella nodded. “The Society of Inimitable Livers, they were called. Antony and Cleopatra were members. They were a club dedicated to debauchery and excess.”

“You came to understand that later. Back then I intentionally kept those facts hidden. Anyway, they were having a high old time when out of nowhere—literally—someone arrived from somewhere else. Not just one someone either, but an entire colony of them from another planet or universe, who knows? So this elite society and the people it disdained had to make common cause all of a sudden, because they had no other choice. People in that part of the world weren't very good at doing such a thing. They weren't then. They aren't now. The idea's mad, of course, but I love it—for that reason. I won't live to see it; I'm sad about that. But if you asked me whether there's one more thing I'd like to see before I croak, that would be it: aliens here or on the way. Entirely benign ones, mind you! Because I would like to see my fellow human beings get their act together and do it quickly. I would like to see a world in which it was not so plainly necessary for people to hold each other off.”

Isabella fixed her eyes on Ty's. “There! What do you think of that?” she asked.

“It's quite a pitch, a lot to digest.”

Santal glanced at the De Bethune DB15
Complication watch on his wrist. “Give Mr. Hunter the tour, will you, before our guests swarm in and you can't? I'll join you in a bit.”

“We'll see you later, then. Oh, and please call me Ty.”

Santal nodded. “It's Ian,” he said.

Isabella led Ty away from the owner's quarters, beyond a whirlpool, to a teak staircase that led to the bridge deck directly below. From there, past a canopied outdoor dining area whose elliptical table was set for twenty-two, they entered a Georgian dining room whose long, polished-mahogany table was set with white place mats and sterling flatware for a similar number. The center of the table was dressed with elaborate candelabra flanking a spectacular silver epergne. On the far wall were mounted a magnificent pair of George II rococo girandoles.

“It's beautiful, but it doesn't seem, if you'll pardon me, particularly Mediterranean,” Ty said.

Isabella laughed. “This room's the exception that proves the rule. I think it reminds Ian of England, particularly Cambridge. But the prints on the walls are Italian. Look: Tintoretto, Burrini, Rosa, Leonardo.”

Farther forward was a Moorish saloon whose walls were covered with Islamic art and upon whose floors lay Persian carpets. Its ceiling, leafed with gold, rose in the shallowest of Byzantine domes.

“Sometimes,” Isabella said, “when one's been aboard for a while, it's difficult to know what port you're in, to remember where you've been or where you're going.”

“Right now we're on the Riviera,” Ty said. “At least I think that's where we are.”

“Ah, the Riviera,” Isabella repeated. “Once upon a time, we wouldn't have been here in May.”

“Wouldn't we? Why?”

“It wasn't always a summer resort, you know. People used to come in winter.”

“What changed that? The weather?”

“Don't be silly. It was the fashion that changed, not the climate. Picasso came here, as did Matisse and Léger. There was an American couple called the Murphys who ran a sort of salon in their house, the Villa America, which is just over the hill in the distance. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway came to it, and they all played together. You know how it is: Where certain people go, other people follow. Eventually Grace Kelly made a film with Alfred Hitchcock here and soon thereafter married Prince Rainier of Monaco. But you're right. We
are
on the Riviera!”

Music eddied from the long deck just below. As voices quickly followed, Isabella grew quiet. “It looks as if we'll have to cut your tour short,” she said. “I'm sorry.”

“Another day,” Ty told her.

“Another day,” Isabella agreed wistfully, then settled her arm gently around him, capturing his neck in the crook of her bare elbow, drawing his face toward hers. Her kiss was immediate, deep, and long.

And then it was over. Her hand was back at her side, barely touching his.

“I apologize,” she said. “It won't happen again.”

“But what if I'd like it to?” Ty asked.

“It can't,” Isabella said.

Ty glanced at her left hand, as he had a few moments after she'd collected him from the quay and as he always did upon meeting beautiful women. There was no ring. “Then why did it happen now? Will you at least tell me that?” At once he regretted the almost adolescent plaintiveness of his tone, but, catching him unawares, Isabella had stirred something inside him, catalyzed an emotional, even physical reaction that no one else, he realized, had done since his lover's murder in that absurd theater of war that was now the Hindu Kush.

Isabella cast her glance down, then up at him once more. “Two reasons, if you must know. Because I've never kissed a movie star before. And because, as you said yourself, you collect memories.”

“And so do you?”

“And so do I,” Isabella said, then vanished among her guests.

Chapter Seven

At the foot of
the stairs, focused on Eduardo Arrigimento, the Rome-based producer who'd backed Greg Logan's film, stood the three whores Ty had avoided on the pontoon that afternoon. In the soft light of evening and their expensive clothes, they looked so innocent that, when introduced, Ty elected to treat them as he would have Eduardo's nieces.

“Do you live in Beverly Hills?” the loveliest of them asked.

“No, but nearby,” Ty replied.

“I want to go to Beverly Hills,” the same girl said. Her diction was guttural.

“So do I,” said the tallest of her friends.

“I've been there,” said the last. “It's nothing much.”

“There's Tiffany,” proclaimed the first. “So how can it be nothing much?”

Ty grinned and set off through the expanding crowd, pausing only to hug Greg and greet Sid Thrall, to a less congested spot a short distance forward on the port deck. He had never been political or socially eager. By nature he was not a party person, except when a party consisted of friends, or at least people he already knew. One of the things about fame he'd lately come to enjoy was that it relieved him of having to make an effort he'd often felt unnatural. Every actor had an inventory of smiles, and as Ty Hunter, America's leading man, he had discovered that once he'd matched one of these to an occasion, he had only to select a spot where he felt comfortable and the party would come to him.

The port-side railing, with its view of an impending sunset, had seemed as good a place as any, and he spoke a few words to all who found their way there: colleagues of Isabella's from Guardi; film financiers from Dubai and Hong Kong; dowagers from villas on the Caps or in the hills above them, usually with their mute and handsome walkers half a step behind; established and would-be producers; artistic and business-minded directors; actors and actresses both ascendant and near death, famous and merely hopeful. The pressure of others waiting for his time kept any single conversation from becoming too involved, permitting him to dispense charm in small doses and reserve his affection for the few people who really mattered to him.

He was in the middle of an interesting conversation with one of France's most famous celebrity chefs, a severe, unabashedly ambitious character of about fifty with graying temples but playful eyes, when he thought he heard a dull thunderclap, then another, louder, and one immediately after that. Above the horizon, just over the culinary entrepreneur's left shoulder, Ty quickly made out the approaching helicopter, an EC130 B4, whose rotors, though quieter than most, had forced a pause in their conversation. The chef turned, too, and with most of the other guests focused on the aircraft swooping toward them. It was an elegant piece of machinery, painted in the same deep cobalt as
Surpass
's hull.

“Sheer exhibitionism!” the chef exclaimed.

“Why don't we wait to see who gets out before we jump to conclusions?” Ty suggested.

The chef moistened his index finger, raised it to eye level, then brought it down in a single, rapid stroke in front of him, as if to say,
Score one!

When the bird had alighted on the crossbar of the encircled H that marked the helipad on
Surpass
's
aftmost deck, its rotors dipped like gulls' wings and wound down to a still hush. Then, as the party's roar began to rise gradually from the interruption, a solitary passenger emerged from the starboard door. Tall and slender, in a gray English suit, the young man did not look up to return the crowd's gaze but moved toward the shallow overhang that marked the entrance to one of the ship's many passages.

Ty wondered who the new arrival was and where he'd gone. When, after a few minutes, the newcomer had still failed to materialize at the party, Ty concluded that he must be staying aboard
Surpass,
a notion confirmed when the same man eventually reappeared wearing a tropical blazer. Even in casual clothing, however, this object of Ty's curiosity maintained a courtly bearing, just shy of military.

As discreetly as he could, Ty kept his eye on the man. Instinct told him he should. He wasn't quite sure why. Or was he? Following two brief social interactions, from both of which he nimbly extricated himself, the stylish figure ultimately made his way to where Ty's subconscious must, he thought now, have known from the beginning that it would. Isabella, in midsentence, smiled, then slowly drew him to her. Turning from the revelers, she slipped both arms around the man's neck, leaned up, and kissed him with a passion oblivious to its surroundings.

Ty moved off in the opposite direction. He was not sure what game she was playing.

A few minutes later, where the deck ended at the open doors to the ship's library, he heard her call his name and stopped.

Isabella rushed toward him, the new arrival just behind her. “Mr. Hunter, there's someone I want you to meet.”

“Of course, Miss Cavill,” Ty replied.

“Don't be silly. Call me Isabella. This is Philip Frost.”

“Hello,” Ty said, extending his hand. He couldn't help it: The whore's insight filled his memory and disgusted him. This was the man who forced women to grovel.

“How do you do?” Philip said.

“Philip,” Isabella said, “where do I begin? Philip is . . . everything to me. He's Ian's protégé and my—”

“Muse,” Philip interrupted. “I'm her muse. At least that's what Isabella tells me.”

Ty smiled. “I'd believe her if I were you.”

“I do,” Philip said, with a chill in his voice.

“Have you seen my new pieces?” Isabella asked them both. “They're on exhibit in the library. Come on, I'll show you.”

“Lead the way,” Ty said.

Philip nodded. “I can see where this is going,” he said. “In no time you'll be the new male face of Guardi.”

“I'm afraid not,” Ty said.

“And why is that?”

“I don't do ads.”

“What a luxurious position to find oneself in,” Philip said.

“Except in Asia,” Ty said.

“I'm sure the market there is different,” Philip said.

“They take a more positive view of actors advertising,” Ty said.

Isabella paused. “You mean they don't fear that commerce corrupts art?” she asked.

“No,” Ty said. “I suppose they don't.”

“Tell me,” Philip inquired. “How long are you in Europe?”

“I leave the day after tomorrow. I'm here to help a friend's film, in which I had a very unimportant part, at the festival.”

“That's too bad,” Philip continued.

“It really is,” Isabella added. “Otherwise you could have joined us for a cruise.”

“Thank you,” Ty said, “but I have a house waiting.”

“The one you just bought?” Isabella asked. Then, directing her smile to Philip, she added, “I brought Mr. Hunter out on the tender.”

“Did you? That was thoughtful.”

“No it wasn't. You know I'm a fan.”

“Just teasing,” Philip said, and laughed quickly. “I know you are.”

Ty examined Isabella's eyes. Why had she kissed him, led him on, then dropped him? Was it freedom she wanted or merely proof that she could have it? Was she trying to make Philip jealous or playing to the crowd she must have known would be watching? He said, “It's an old wreck, really, that I've bought. A great eclectic mansion in the most beautiful canyon, but it needs an awful lot of work, and now's the time.”

“Are you working on another film?” Philip asked, almost idly, but piquing Isabella's attention.

“Not at the moment,” Ty replied. “I've just finished four in a row. To be honest, I need a break before I decide what I want to do next.”

“Who you want to be, you mean,” Philip added.

“Yes, in a way,” Ty said, “exactly.”

“It makes perfect sense,” Philip said.

“Can't your house wait a week or two?” Isabella asked, with more politesse than expectation in her voice.

“I wish it could, but I have whole teams lined up: architects and builders, not to mention a decorator and landscapers. You know the drill. One thing can't be done without the other, and if you don't get the first things started . . .”

“I can only imagine,” Isabella agreed.

“Plus, I have to make a stop on the way.” No sooner had the phrase escaped his mouth than Ty caught himself. For it was an engagement he'd been asked, indeed cautioned, not to discuss. The invitation had arrived, as if out of nowhere, during his first afternoon at the Hôtel du Cap. His agent, Netty Fleiderfleiss, had called from Los Angeles in a state of high excitement.

“‘On the way,'” Isabella repeated. “That's a curious way of putting it.”

“In New York,” Ty dissembled, “which means I can't fly over the pole, so the whole trip is that much longer. But it's business. If it weren't, I wouldn't do it, not in a million years.”

“Well, it all sounds very glamorous, doesn't it, Philip?”

“
Very
glamorous,” Philip told her.

“What do you do, Mr. Frost?” Ty asked.

Philip hesitated. “A little of this, a little of that,” he ventured. “Dreary stuff in comparison to your world.”

“Philip's a diplomat,” Isabella said, “a banker-turned-diplomat, who may be about to turn banker again.”

“A strange destiny for a man who trained as a physicist, wouldn't you say?”

“I don't know,” Ty said. “Life's full of tricks.”