The Aquitaine Progression (40 page)

“Of course!
Perfect
!”

“You
will
keep your
voice
down!” The cry of the cat on a frozen lake was heard.

“Again my deepest and most sincere apologies, my general. Was that all this naval officer said?”

“No, he made it clear to the commander of his base in San Diego that Halliday had come to him and told him he was meeting a man in Geneva he believed was involved with illegal exports to illegal destinations. An attorney for profiteers in armaments. He intended to confront this man, this international lawyer named Converse, and threaten to expose him. What do we have?”

“A
fraud
!”

“But on whose
side
, sabra? The volume of your voice doesn’t convince me.”

“Be convinced! I’m right. This Converse is the desert scorpion!”

“What does that mean?”

“Don’t you
see
? The Mossad sees!”

“The Mossad?”

“Yes! I talked with our specialist and he senses what I smell—he admits the possibility! I grant you, my general, my honored warrior, that he has information that led him to think this Converse might be genuine, that he wanted truly to be with us, but when I said I smelled bad meat, he granted one other, exceptional possibility. Converse may or may not be programmed, but he could be an agent for his government!”

“A provocateur?”

“Who knows, Marcus? But the pattern is so perfect. First, a prohibition is placed on his military record—it will tell us something, we know that. Then he responds in the negative about the death of an enemy—not his, but
ours
, and claims
he was his enemy too—so simple, so instructable. Finally, it is insinuated that this Converse was the killer in Geneva—so orderly, so precisely to his advantage. We are dealing with very analytical minds that watch every move in the chess game, and match every pawn with a king.”

“Yet everything you say can be reversed. He could be—”

“He
can’t
be!” cried Abrahms.

“Why, Chaim? Tell me why?”

“There is no
heat
, no
fire
in him! It is not the way of a believer! We are not clever, we are adamant!”

George Marcus Delavane said nothing for several moments, and the Israeli knew better than to speak. He waited until the quiet cold voice came back on the line. “Have your meeting tomorrow, General. Listen to him and be courteous; play the game he plays. But he must not leave that house until I give the order. He may never leave it.”

“Shalom
, my friend.”

“
Shalom
, Chaim.”

Valerie approached the glass doors of her studio—identical with the doors of her balcony upstairs—and looked out at the calm, sun-washed waters of Cape Ann. She thought briefly of the boat that had dropped anchor so frighteningly in front of her house several nights ago. It had not been back; whatever had happened was past, leaving questions but no answers. If she closed her eyes she could still see the figure of a man crawling up out of the cabin light, and the glow of the cigarette, and she still wondered what that man was doing, what he was thinking. Then she remembered the sight of the two men in the early light, framed by the dark rims of her binoculars—staring back at her with far more powerful lenses. Were they novices finding a safe harbor? Amateurs navigating the dark waters of a coastline at night? Questions, no answers.

Whatever, it was past. A brief, disturbing interlude that
gave rise to black imaginings—demons in search of logic, as Joel would say.

She tossed her long, dark hair aside and returned to her easel, picking up a brush and putting the final dabs of burnt umber beneath the shadowed sand dunes of wild grass. She stepped back, studied her work, and swore to herself for the fifth time that the oil painting was finished. It was another seascape; she never tired of them, and fortunately she was beginning to get a fair share of the market. Of course there were those painters in the Boston-Boothbay axis who claimed she had virtually cornered the market, but that was rubbish. Indeed her prices had risen satisfactorily as a result of the critical approval accorded her two showings at the Copley Galleries, but the truth was that she could hardly afford to live where she lived and the way she lived without at least a part of Joel’s check every month.

Then again, not too many artists had a house on the beach with an attached twenty-by-thirty-foot studio enclosed by full-length glass doors and with a ceiling that was literally one entire skylight. The rest of the house, the original house, on the northern border of Cape Ann was more rambling-quaint than functional. The initial architecture was early-coast-confusion, with lots of heavy bleached wood and curliques, a balustraded second-story balcony, and outsized bay windows in the front room that were charming to look at and look out but leaked fiercely when the winter winds came off the ocean. No amount of putty or sashing compound seemed to work; nature was extracting a price for observing her beauty.

Still, it was Val’s dream house, the one she had promised herself years ago she would someday be able to afford. She had come back from the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris prepared to assault New York’s art world via the Greenwich Village-Woodstock route only to have stark reality alter her plans. The family circumstances had always been sufficiently healthy for her to live comfortably, albeit not lavishly, throughout three years in college and two more in Paris. Her father was a passably good if excessively enthusiastic amateur painter who always complained that he had not taken the risks and gone totally into the fine arts rather than architecture. As a result, he supported his only child both morally and financially, in a very real sense living through her progress and devoted to her determination. And her mother—slightly mad, always loving, always supportive in anything and everything—would
take terrible photographs of Val’s crudest work and send the pictures back to her sister and cousins in Germany, writing outrageous lies that spoke of museums and galleries and insane commissions.

“The crazy Berlinerin,” her father would say fondly in his heavy Gallic accent. “You should have seen her during the war. She frightened us all to death! We half expected she would return to headquarters some night with a drunken Goebbels or a doped-up Göring in tow, then tell us if we wanted Hitler to give her the word!”

Her father had been the Free French liaison between the Allies and the German underground in Berlin. A rather stiff Parisian autocrat who happened to speak German had been assigned to the cell in the Charlottenburg, which coordinated all the activities of Berlin’s underground. He frequently said that he had more trouble with the wild Fräulein with the impetuous ideas than he had avoiding the Nazis. Nevertheless they married each other two months after the armistice. In Berlin. Where neither his family would talk to hers, nor hers to his. “We had two small orchestras,” her mother would say. “One played pure, beautiful Viennese
Schnitzel
, the other some white cream sauce with deer droppings.”

Whether family animosities had anything to do with it neither ever said, but the Parisian and the Berlinerin immigrated to St. Louis, Missouri, in the United States of America, where the Berlinerin had distant relations.

The stark reality. Nine years ago, after she had settled in New York from Paris, a frightened, tearful father had flown in to see her and had told Val a terrible truth. His beloved crazy Berlinerin had been ill for years; it was cancer and it was about to kill her. In desperation, he had spent nearly all the money he had, including unpaid second and third mortgages on the rambling house in Bellefontaine, to stem the disease. Among the profiteers were clinics in Mexico; there was nothing else he could say. He could only weep, and his losses had nothing to do with his tears. And she could only hold her father and ask him why he had not told her before.

“It was not your battle,
ma chérie
. It was ours. Since Berlin, it was always we two. We fought then together; we fight now as always—as one.”

Her mother died six days later, and six months after that her father lit a Gauloise on the screened-in porch and mercifully fell asleep, not to wake up. Valerie could not cry. It was
a shock but not a tragedy. Wherever he was he wanted to be there.

So Valerie Charpentier looked for a job, a paying job that did not rely on the sales of an unknown artist. What astonished her was not that employment was so easy to find, but that it had very little to do with the thick portfolio of sketches and line drawings she presented. The second advertising agency she applied to seemed more interested in the fact that she spoke both German and French fluently. It was the time of corporate takeovers, of multinational alliances where profits could be made on both sides of the Atlantic by the same single entities. Valerie Charpentier, artist-in-residence inside, became a company hack on the outside. Someone who could draw and sketch rapidly and make presentations and speak the languages and she hated it. Still, it was a remarkable living for a woman who had anticipated a period of years before her name on a canvas would mean something.

Then a man came into her life who made whatever affairs she had had totally forgettable. A nice man, a
decent
man—even an exciting man—who had his own problems but did not talk about them,
would
not talk about them, and that should have given her a clue. Joel, her Joel, effusive one moment, withdrawn the next, but always with that shield, that façade of quick humor which was often as biting as it was amusing. For a while they had been good for each other. Both were ambitious for entirely different reasons—she for the independence that came with recognition, he for the wasted years he could never reclaim—and each acted as a buffer when the other faced disappointment or delay. But it all began to fall apart. The reasons were painfully clear to her but not to him. He became mesmerized by his own progress, by his own determination, to the exclusion of everything else, starting with her. He never raised his voice or made demands, but the words were ice and the demands were increasingly there. If there was a specific point when she recognized the downhill slide, it was a Friday night in November. The agency had wanted her to fly to West Berlin; a Telefunken account required some fast personal service and she was elected to calm the churning waters. She had been packing when Joel came home from work. He had walked into the bedroom of their apartment and asked her what she was doing, where she was going. When she told him, he had said, “You can’t. We’re expected at Brooks’ house in Larchmont tomorrow night. Talbot
and Simon’ll be there too. I’m sure they’ll talk international. You’ve got to be there.”

She had looked at him, at the quiet desperation in his eyes. She did not go to Germany. It was the turning point; the downhill race had begun, and within a brief few months she knew it was quickening to its finish. She quit the agency, giving up authority for the dog days of free-lancing, hoping the extra time she had to devote to him might help. It did not; he seemed to resent any overt act of sacrifice, no matter how hard she tried to conceal it. His periods of withdrawal multiplied, and in a way she felt sorry for him. His furies were driving him and it was obvious that he disliked what was happening; he disliked what he was but could not help himself. He was on his way to a burnout and she could not help him, either.

If there had been another woman, she could have fought, staking out her claim and fiercely insisting on the right to compete, but there was no one else, only himself and his compulsions. Finally, she realized she could not penetrate his shield; he had nothing left for anyone else emotionally. That was what she had hurled at him: “Emotional burn-out!” He had agreed in that quiet, kind voice and the next day he was gone.

So she took him. Four years, she demanded, the exact amount of time he had taken from her. Those four years of heady generosity were about to come to an end, Val reflected, as she cleaned her brushes and scraped the palette. In January they were over, the last check, as always, posted by the fifteenth. Five weeks ago, during lunch at the Ritz in Boston, Joel had offered to continue the payments. He claimed he was used to them and was making more in salary and bonuses than he could spend soberly. The money was no hardship, and besides it gave him a certain stature among his peers and was a marvelous ploy to avoid prolonged entanglements. She had declined, borrowing words from her father or more likely her mother, saying that things were far better than they were. He had smiled that half-sad yet still infectious smile and said, “If they turn out otherwise, I’m here.”

Goddamn
him!

Poor Joel. Sad Joel. He was a good man caught in the vortex of his own conflicts. And Val had gone as far as she could go—to go further was to deny her own identity. She would not do that; she had not done it.

She placed her brushes in the tray and walked to the glass doors that looked over the dunes and the ocean. He was out there, far away, still somewhere in Europe. Valerie wondered if he had given a thought to the day. It was the anniversary of their marriage.