The Decoy (15 page)

She looks at him, astonished. 'Is it?'

'Of course. Who could do a thing like that? If that man wasn't already dead, I'd want to kill him myself.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

In front of the monitor downstairs, Connie pulls one of her earpieces away from her ear so that she can speak to Frank. 'We're drifting off the script again.'

He shrugs. On the pad in front of him, his pencil has doodled an intricate shamrock of interwoven lines, looping endlessly back on themselves. Dr Leichtman decides it probably wouldn't be a good idea to tell him what that signifies.

Frank looks at the screen. Christian and Claire are kissing.

'And — cut,' Frank mutters.

But the couple on the screen seem to go on kissing for ever.

Christian's lecture is in the Maison Franchise, off Washington Mews. At noon she goes in and asks the bored desk clerk where to find him.

'Room Twelve. Upstairs and to your right.' He glances at the clock. 'He should almost be done.'

She finds the lecture hall. The door is propped open, and she can hear his voice coming through it. She looks in. In the well of a dozen or so rows of banked seats, Christian is standing at a small podium. As a concession to their trip, he's wearing a dark polo shirt and khakis.

She slips into the back row. One or two students glance at her curiously, then turn their attention back to Christian. His voice is as soft as ever, but the actress in her notes the way it carries easily to the corners of the room.

'We cannot hope to understand Baudelaire', he is saying, 'until we realize that we cannot judge his attitudes, and particularly his attitude to women, by the standards of the present.
"Moi, je dis: la volupté unique et supreme de l'amour git dans la certitude de faire le mal" —
"I say that the supreme pleasure of sex lies in the possibility of
evil."
For Baudelaire, women are not simply individuals, but idealized representatives of their sex, symbols both of perfection made flesh, and the impossibility, in this corrupt world, of perfection proving to be anything more than a brief illusion.'

Catching sight of Claire, he acknowledges her with a nod and the slightest of smiles before continuing:

'Thus, in poem seventy-one, he says of his mistress:

When she had sucked the marrow from my bone

I turned to her, languid as a stone,

to give her one last kiss… and saw her thus:

a slimy rotten wineskin full of pus.'

Several male students exchange grins. One mutters delightedly,
'Way
gross, man.'

'This conflict was apparent in Baudelaire's life, as well as in his poetry,' Christian continues, apparently oblivious to the response his quotation has provoked. 'You may remember the famous letter of rejection he sent to the Venus Blanche, in which he said'- for the first time Christian consults his notes, slipping a pair of spectacles onto his nose and removing them when he has finished the quotation — '"You see, my dear, a few days ago you were a goddess: so noble, so inviolable. And now here you are, a woman… I have a horror of passion, because I know too well the horrors into which it can tempt me."'

Claire suddenly realizes something she's never really noticed before: Christian is an extraordinarily charismatic performer. He has this audience in the palm of his hand.

'For Baudelaire, sex is not a physical itch but a metaphysical yearning. Not some mindless aerobic exercise, but a connection, however transitory, with the terrible dark mysteries of the universe. Like all mystics, he is, of course, doomed to disappointment. The achievement — the heroism — lies in the attempt.'

Even before Christian has finished speaking, a hand is in the air. A girl, seated near the front with a purple laptop open in front of her, says fiercely, 'You're saying that he treats women as sexual objects. By putting him on the syllabus, aren't you helping to dignify his views?'

Christian begins to deal with her point, courteously and methodically. The other students, rightly taking this as the end of the lecture, pack up their notebooks and laptops and begin to slide out of their seats.

Claire waits until the girl and Christian are done. Eventually the student leaves, mollified, and Christian comes over.

'Let's go,' he says. 'Do you have a bag?'

'It's downstairs.'

'We'll pick it up on our way to the parking lot, then.' He seems almost jaunty at the prospect of a weekend away.

'You've got a car?'

'Absolutely.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

The car is a pre-war Citroen, a vast and temperamental antique, which objects with a crash of its stick-shift gears to being subjected to the Friday afternoon crawl south through the Lincoln Tunnel. There's no CD player, and the radio still has the original valves in it. She's amazed that it picks up American stations — somehow REM sounds strangely profane, coming through circuits that were built for the sound of Piaf and
le Jazz.

The white van has to drive very slowly to keep from catching up.

His friends' house is about four hours due south of the city. The Citroën's suspension isn't its strong point, and by the time Christian pulls the car onto a tiny unmade track off the main road, her back is killing her.

She's already established that the people they'll be staying with, Philip and Ellen, were friends of Christian's and Stella's. She's not quite sure what it signifies for Christian to have asked her along this weekend, but she knows it isn't something he would have done lightly.

The house is a big, rambling clapboard house, overlooking a secluded rocky bay. It's full of bleached wood and pale blue furnishings, as well as many canvases of the views from the headland. Ellen is an artist; and to Claire's eye quite a good one.

Ellen and Philip greet Claire with a friendliness that doesn't quite disguise their curiosity.

'So you're the girl who's persuaded Christian out of his shell,' Ellen says with a smile when Christian's back is turned. 'It's really good to meet you. He's been refusing to tell us anything about you.'

As they bring their luggage in from the car, another couple look up from the big kitchen table, where they're shucking peas into a bowl.

'Christian, you remember Hannah and Saul, right? Hannah, Saul, this is Claire,' Ellen says. Hannah and Saul smile a welcome.

'And those are their kids in there, watching TV. The house is really full, I'm afraid.' Ellen points to a door. 'You're in there. Just dump your stuff and come grab a drink.'

The room contains a double bed and a breathtaking view of the ocean. Ellen's red setter, Morgan, comes in through the open door and jumps up onto the bed.

'I'll sleep on the floor,' Christian says quietly. 'I'm sorry, I thought I'd made it clear to her—'

'It's no problem,' she says, shooing the dog off the bed. 'Looks like I'll have Morgan to protect my honour anyway.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

Dinner is a relaxed affair — mussels from the beach, seabass that Philip caught himself, and a salad with the peas. Christian was right: it's good to get out of the city, and it's good to be here, drinking Puligny-Montrachet with these educated, intelligent, liberal people, who draw her into the conversation without prying too much or condescending to the fact that she must be nearer in age to Saul and Hannah's kids than she is to them.

After the fish, Saul excuses himself to make a phone call. Philip calls after him, 'Don't bother trying with a cellphone. It won't work around here.'

'It won't?'

'Nope. None of the networks work on this stretch of coast. There's a landline in the study.'

Claire, fingering her necklace, wonders if that means her mike isn't working, either. Excusing herself, she goes to the bathroom and opens the little window that opens on to the road at the front of the house. She turns off the light so that she can see better. Outside, the sky is almost black, the clouds cobwebbed where the moon is trying to break through.

'Frank,' she says quietly, 'if you can hear me, will you flash your lights?'

She waits. No lights interrupt the darkness. 'Frank?' she whispers. 'If you're out there in your car, flash your lights, or sound your horn, or anything. Just give me a signal that you can hear me.'

A sudden knock on the door makes her jump.

'Claire?' Christian says. 'Are you OK in there?'

'I'm fine.'

'I thought maybe you'd eaten a bad mussel.'

'I'm fine, really. I'll be out in a minute.'

Before she closes the window she scans the darkness one last time.

===OO=OOO=OO===

That night they open the windows to let in the distant respiration of the ocean. Christian wraps himself in a blanket and lies down near the window.

She lies awake, listening. After a while, she forces herself to make her breathing echo the rise and fall of the sea.

Eventually she hears him get to his feet and pad across to the bed. She feels the bed rock as he eases himself in beside her.

An arm reaches around and insinuates itself into the tight space between her arm and chest.

Her heart thudding, she feigns sleep.

They lie like that for a long time, until she realizes that Christian's asleep himself.

They get back to the city late on Sunday night. On Monday, she's woken by Frank at 9 a.m.

'Wake up, Claire. You need to see this.' He tosses a newspaper onto the bed, then goes to the window and yanks on the blinds.

For a few moments she can't even remember where she is. Groggily, she picks up the newspaper and automatically turns to the theatre section.

'Not there.' He pulls it from her hand and refolds it.
'There.'

The front page; second item.

Using the internet for banking or to purchase books may now be commonplace, but a new site demonstrates that the World Wide Web also has more macabre capabilities.
Pictureman.com
claims to show photographs taken by the killer of Pearl Matthews, a twenty-nine-year-old sex worker whose decapitated body was discovered in the Happiness Hotel off Second Avenue last month.

Initial suggestions that the pictures might be leaked from the coroner's archives seem to be disproved by the way the position of the victim's body and head vary from photograph to photograph, suggesting that the killer deliberately posed them and then recorded his gruesome activities.

The Mayor's office immediately condemned 'the unregulated Wild West that is the World Wide Web', and called for proper controls to be introduced. 'What's the use of cleaning up Times Square when the pornographers can relocate to our teenagers' bedrooms?' a source close to the Mayor demanded. 'Our office will be pushing the police to close this site and bring the killer rapidly to justice.'

'Shit,' she breathes.

'Shit is right,' Frank agrees. 'Shit in a trench, and I'm standing right in it.' He looks around. 'Where's your laptop?'

She nods at the corner.

He types in the website address and reads off the screen, '"Welcome to pictureman.com. You are visitor number 39,584." People are going crazy for this thing.'

She gets out of bed, hugging herself in the thin T-shirt she's wearing, and comes across to take a look. 'Why don't you close it down?'

'Oh, sure. We've traced the server. It's based in Senegal, where they rent disk space, bandwidth, whatever they call it, to a free e-mail service in Australia. Which gives its members a certain amount of space to build their own sites. The guys in the Senegal police department don't answer the phones, it's the middle of the night in Australia, and even if it wasn't there's no guarantee they'd agree to take it off. They make their money by selling advertising space. The more people visit the site, the more they'll make.' He clicks again. 'Over fifty thousand now.'

'Are there any links to Christian?'

'Connie's looking at it.' He gets to his feet. 'We need you over in Queens. There's a meeting in half an hour.'

She gestures at the T-shirt. 'I'll get dressed.'

To her surprise, he doesn't get out of her way.

For a few seconds he looks at her, as if unsure of himself. Then, abruptly, he says, 'You're not shy, Claire.'

'What do you mean?'

'You walk around here with no clothes on all the time. You—'

'You watch that, do you?' she says angrily.

'Hear me out. I watch you because it's my job to make sure you're safe. Christian could turn up here at any time, have you ever thought of that? My point is, you're not ashamed of what you are. You brought that boyfriend back here last week—'

'You were watching
that?'
she cries. 'What about my privacy?'

'Listen,' he says. 'Listen. Of course I didn't watch — any more than I needed to. But I saw enough to tell me that you're not inhibited. You're an actress. You've done nude scenes before, right?'

'Oh no,' she says, suddenly seeing where this is going. 'Oh no. Don't ask me to do that.'

'If you don't sleep with Christian,' he says, 'we're still going to be playing charades this time next year. And frankly, we don't have that long. If we don't get something in the next couple of weeks, Christian will be crossed off the list, and you'll have to vanish.'

'What do you mean?'

'We'll send you back to England, business class, with some money in your pocket.'

'What about my green card? You promised—'

'To get you a card if the operation came off. But if we have to
abandon
it, that's a different scenario. We can't have Claire Rodenburg, English actress, making headlines on Broadway. It would alert Christian unnecessarily.'

'If he's guilty.'

'If he's guilty. Which we'll never know unless we find some way to get under his skin.'

'That's true,' she murmurs, almost to herself. 'I'd never know.'

'If privacy is an issue,' he says, 'we could turn the cameras off and just use the mikes. I know it's not ideal, Claire, but it's all I can offer you.'