The Innocents Club Page 16

  “I noticed you and Renata had a chance to talk last night,” he said. “I debated coming over, but you seemed okay. She even kissed you when she was leaving.”

  Mariah grimaced as she filled his cup. “Air-kissed. Not exactly the embrace of long-lost soul mates.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  How to describe that strange encounter? “Not much,” she said, “and not for long. Son Nolan came and said she was neglecting her guests—the important ones, I presume he meant—and dragged her off. Just as well. He’s a smooth operator, isn’t he, for such a young man? Quite the wheeler-dealer. Yuri Belenko said he’s one of the partners in a scheme to turn the Crimea into a Russian Monte Carlo.”

  “Is that right? I heard about that Nova Krimsky thing, but I didn’t know he was in on it.”

  “Yuri said the idea started way back with Arlen Hunter. I’d heard about the project, of course, but I never knew about that connection.”

  Paul nodded. “Sounds like something old Arlen would think of. And the Russians have a long track record of cooperation with Hunter businesses, so it makes sense that Nolan has an entrée into the project now that it’s finally getting off the ground. He had quite a reputation as a party animal for a while there, but I guess he’s starting to straighten up and fly right. What do you mean, ‘just as well’ he dragged Renata off?”

  Mariah dampened the tip of her finger and lifted a crumbly flake of croissant off her saucer. “I think she’s had a private investigator snooping into my life.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “I have no idea. Nolan showed up before I could get her to explain herself. One thing is clear, though. She’s very upset at the prospect of those papers of Ben’s being released to the public.”

  “She’s probably in good company. Some people think a writer’s unpublished work should die with him. That if he didn’t see fit to release it in his lifetime, releasing it after he dies is an invasion of his privacy.”

  “You don’t, though, do you? Weren’t you the one who suggested I send them off to Chap Korman?”

  “From the little you showed me, I thought it was work your dad would have been proud of. Who knows why he never got around to submitting it himself.”

  “Sheer disorganization?”

  The journals, poems and draft novel she’d found in that soggy box had been carefully stowed away by her mother years earlier. Some looked to have been written not long before his death, but Mariah had had no idea how they’d ended up with her mother when so many other of his papers only showed up years later in the run-down Parisian flat where he’d died.

  But Mariah did remember that her mother, with her usual unwarranted optimism where Ben was concerned, always thought he was coming home. Right up until the day she found out he was dead, she had kept a watch out for him.

  Maybe this week, Mariah. I’ve got a really good feeling. I bet you’re going to walk in that door after school any day now and find your daddy at the dining-room table, working away, just like before.

  Of course, it had never happened. What Mariah did come home to find one day was her mother sitting on the seat-sprung couch in the living room, nursing Katie and crying. Someone had called that afternoon to tell her Ben was dead.

  Now all Mariah could presume was that he’d mailed the papers before he got sick. Who knew why?

  “I suspect I know what’s worrying Renata,” she said, putting her coffee cup aside. “With all this momentum building toward Ben’s sixtieth birthday, people are digging around for something new to write about him. What do you want to bet she’s worried about the journals? The woman’s been dining out for years on stories of her affaire scandaleuse with the late, great Ben Bolt. If it turns out he dissed her in his private journals, she could end up looking pretty stupid.”

  “She probably deserves to worry a little,” Paul said, “although to be fair, Mariah, it was a long time ago, and they were both pretty young.”

  “In their late twenties. Old enough to consider how their selfish behavior was affecting other people,” she said stubbornly. “You know what the funny thing is, though? If Ben did write anything about Renata, good, bad or indifferent, I’ve never run across it. Chap hasn’t mentioned it, either. Still, let her sweat, that’s what I say.”

  “Aren’t you at least a little curious?”

  “About what?”

  “What she can tell you about your father? What happened that last year? How he died?”

  “I know how he died. Of hepatitis and neglect, all alone. He was living in a grotty room on the top floor of a run-down house in Gentilly, outside Paris. I saw the place.”

  “The house itself?”

  “Uh-huh. When Lindsay and I were in Paris this past March. Her idea. We were doing the ‘Ben Bolt Memorial Tour.’ She wanted to retrace his steps, see some of the places he’d hung out. It had never really meant much to her before, being related to him, but this year, between studying Ben’s work and—”

  “And dealing with losing David,” Paul said, completing the thought.

  Mariah nodded. “I guess she’s thinking about family and heritage, and where she fits in the grand scheme of things. Anyway, as far as Ben’s last days are concerned, I don’t think Renata’s got much to tell me that I haven’t already figured out for myself. My father, it would seem, was your basic idiot savant. A brilliant wordsmith, but a complete moron when it came to personal relationships. By the way he died, I’d say he wasn’t much better at taking care of himself than of the people close to him. Renata probably had ample justification for dumping him in Paris.”

  “That sounds suspiciously like sympathy for the woman.”

  She shook her head. “I would not go that far. But after the two of them ran off, Renata and Ben stayed in an apartment near the Champs Élysées that belonged to her father. A nice arrangement, until Renata caught Ben stepping out on her—conveniently forgetting that this was, after all, his track record. Why else would he have been there with her when he had a wife and kid—make that two kids by then—back here in California?” Mariah reached for her cup again, took a sip of cold coffee, winced and put it back on the table. “Ben cheated on Renata, Renata dumped him, he got sick and died. End of story. At least, that’s the version I’ve managed to piece together.”

  Her mother’s version had a slightly different twist, Mariah recalled. In it, Ben was a martyr. None of us was good enough for him, baby. He needed us, but we let him down.

  Yeah, well, not me, Mom. I didn’t let him down.

  Mariah felt a flicker of anger, just as always when she thought of her mother and the excuses she’d made for Ben’s abysmal behavior. What did the shrinks call it? Enabling? It might sound like blaming the victim, but that was the role her mother had played. Even after his death, she’d continued to protect his memory, denying even to herself the full enormity of his selfishness.

  Paul sank back into the pillows, his long legs stretching the length of the bed. “Did you and Lindsay visit his grave over there?”

  “Yes, another regulation stop on the tour. She wanted pictures for her English class.”

  Mariah recalled the thudding shock of seeing her father’s face, never really forgotten, in the photograph embedded under glass in his marble marker. Over the years, many people had noted her resemblance to him, but until that day in Paris, she’d never given it much thought. It had been a bizarre experience, seeing her own deep-set gray eyes staring at her from the grave.

  “I always thought it odd he ended up in Père Lachaise Cemetery,” she said. “That’s got to be high-end real estate, as Parisian graveyards go. My mother could never have paid for that plot, much less the ostentatious marble marker.”

  Paul arched an eyebrow. “A pretty obvious conclusion to be drawn, wouldn’t you say?”

  “That Renata paid for it?” Mariah nodded. “She must have. There was no one else.”

  She thought again of the day she’d found her mother crying on the couch after ge
tting word Ben was dead. Somehow, through the tears, the poor woman had managed to dredge up a smile.

  They’re putting up a monument to your daddy, sweetheart. In Paris, France. Imagine! Real marble, in a nice place, like a park. He’d like that, wouldn’t he? One day, the three of us will go and see it.

  It had taken thirty years, but Mariah finally had seen it. Not her mother, though. Not her sister, Katie, either, who’d drowned accidentally at age twelve.

  “I visited his grave myself once,” Paul was saying, “years ago, when I was doing my own version of the famous writers’ tour—bookstalls on the Seine, sidewalk cafés, Les Deux Magots and all that. Père Lachaise, of course. Ben ended up in illustrious company, as I recall, about midway between Proust and Oscar Wilde.”

  Mariah took his empty cup and set it aside, nodding. “And listed right after Balzac and Sarah Bernhardt on those tour maps they hand out at the gate—Benjamin Bolt, auteur américain. Of course, my father would have deemed that only fitting. He never suffered from any doubt as to his rightful place in the cultural pantheon, as I recall.”

  “What did Lindsay think?”

  “She was thrilled, of course. It’s like having a rock star in the family. As a matter of fact, we counted as many admirers’ tributes on his grave as we saw on Jim Morrison’s.”

  The drug-addled former lead singer of The Doors was also buried in that Parisian mecca to culture junkies. Obviously, Mariah reflected, a screwed-up personal life was no barrier to the undying devotion of fans. Lindsay had spent over an hour examining not only fresh flowers on her grandfather’s grave, but also locks of hair, heartfelt letters and tear-stained poems in several languages—all for a man who’d been dead nearly three decades.

  Paul’s thoughts, meantime, had gone down another track. “Don’t you think it would be worthwhile to talk to Renata while you’re out here, anyway, Mariah? She may be a pushy old broad, but she’s probably finding this as awkward as you are. Maybe it’s kismet, your being assigned to cover an event at her father’s museum. Maybe you were fated to meet, so you can both get past that shared history of yours.”

  Mariah shot him a skeptical glance. “Kismet? Funny, you don’t look like a superstitious guy.” She unfolded her legs and got up off the bed. “I don’t think so, fella. My father’s my father, and I’m trying to come to terms with him, for Lindsay’s sake, if nothing else. But Renata’s a whole other matter. It’s not just me. It’s what she did to my mother and sister I can’t forgive. Just talking to her felt like an act of disloyalty, as if I were betraying their memories. Until last night, that woman lived only in distant memory—and a rotten place it was, too. That’s where she should have stayed.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  A knack for judging character, even of a man he’d never met—that was the Navigator’s real genius, Tucker decided. The key to the old villain’s viselike grip on secret power. Of all possible candidates in the western alliance, Deriabin had chosen him to receive the dubious gift of those secret files. It made sense. Pick a man with little to lose but a lot to protect. If push came to shove, there was no telling what such a man would be capable of.

  Tucker rounded the corner of his daughter’s street in Alexandria, just a couple of miles from his own. He’d spent the morning paying bills and arranging to have his newspaper deliveries discontinued, his mail held. Picking up laundry. Packing a small bag. Withdrawing cash from the bank and visiting his safe-deposit box. Making plane and car-rental reservations with a credit card he’d taken from the safe-deposit box along with sundry other pieces of identification—all of them bearing the name Grant M. Lewis. It was an alias he hadn’t used since his Operations days. For twenty-five years, he’d kept it current, unbeknownst to anyone. Just in case. Old habits die hard.

  The air had been dense all morning with oppressive heat and humidity, but as noon rolled around, the sun disappeared behind a high black and purple thunderhead. The temperature was dropping fast, and wind was gusting strong enough to rock the Explorer as he passed a strip-mall parking lot. The hairs on his arm, resting on the rolled-down window, prickled with the static warning of the oncoming storm.

  He was no man’s puppet, he told himself. Well, all right. The Navigator had correctly calculated that he’d react to the information dumped on him. But that didn’t mean he had to follow the script the old man had written. By destroying most of Deriabin’s files and stealing the rest, he’d already started rewriting it.

  Of course, he’d also committed a couple of indictable offenses in the process. And he wasn’t done yet.

  By the time he reached the bottom of Carol’s driveway, the rain was starting to come down in huge balloon droplets. Her house was a small postwar bungalow, its garage detached and set to the side and well back on the lot. When Tucker pulled up to it, he spotted her red minivan inside.

  “Damn,” he muttered.

  He’d phoned ahead, but had gotten the machine. Perfect, he’d thought. If Carol and Lindsay were out with the kids, he could use his key to get into her house, get what he wanted and leave without having to explain himself. Or implicate anyone else.

  As he killed the ignition on the Explorer, his peripheral vision caught a movement in the backyard. Carol, dressed in a long, cotton shirt and an old pair of shorts, was getting wet as she struggled to yank whipping sheets and towels off the clothesline. Lindsay was out there, too, a hood pulled over her head as she scrambled to pick up a fleet of brightly colored Tonka trucks scattered across the lawn.

  Tucker jumped out of his car and ran toward them. Scooping a couple of trucks Lindsay had missed, he lobbed them with satisfying accuracy into a red plastic toy bin on the back porch, then crossed the lawn to help Carol get the washing down.

  “Hi!” she called, straining to be heard above the whip of the sheets on the line. “Good timing!”

  She took down the last sheet and grabbed two corners of it, trying to wrestle it into a fold, but her light brown hair was blowing into her eyes and the sheet kept getting away on her. Tucker grabbed the flapping bottom. While he held it, she folded the sheet in half, then end over end. He jammed it on top of the laundry hamper.

  “What are you doing hanging wash when there’s a thunderstorm coming?” he bellowed.

  “Didn’t hear the forecast. No matter. Everything’s dry, anyway. We just have to get it inside. Grab the basket, Dad, and take it in quick before it gets wet. I’ll get the last few towels.”

  Hooking the hamper under one arm, Tucker ripped a couple of towels off the line and ducked under it, heading for the cedar deck by the back door. Lindsay had already gone in with the toys. The rain was starting to come down in earnest now, but at the steps, he paused for a second, raising his face to the sky. Cool rain pelted him, and he remembered another day, another storm. Long ago it was, certainly before the twins were born—a summer day that had started out hot, like today.

  He and his wife were alone at her parents’ cottage on the Susquehanna, sunning themselves. Suddenly, the wooden dock beneath them vibrated with a deep roll of thunder. Within minutes, the skies darkened, then opened.

  What happened next was the kind of stunt kids pull when there’s no one around to remind them they really aren’t immortal. Instead of running for cover as they should have, he and Joanne had lifted their faces to the sky, drinking in the rain. Tiny droplets had clung like prisms to her long lashes. She was so young, and healthy in a way she wouldn’t be for much longer, although the babies would be born before leukemia fully reared its ugly head. Had the disease been at work even then, Tucker wondered, massing deep in her bone marrow, rallying white cells for the deadly insurrection they would mount against her?

  Her lips had parted, her tongue reaching to taste rain-drops, and he hadn’t been able to resist kissing her. It had been stupid to stay out in the storm like that, but pretty damn thrilling, too, to strip out of their suits and slide off the dock, making love in the silky water as the storm whirled and crashed around them like some Wagneria
n opera.

  Not long before Joanne died, he was sitting next to her hospital bed one afternoon, watching her gaunt body struggle to breathe. She’d been only semiconscious for days, but when a crack of thunder shook the walls, a sudden smile dawned on her parched lips. She opened her eyes briefly, and her tube-laden hand reached out to touch his—sharing the moment one last time.

  The memory weighed on Tucker, sweet and heavy, as he yanked open the screen door and walked into their daughter’s kitchen. Lindsay was crouched on the floor, sorting his grandson’s toys. She’d kicked off her sandals by the door, but wet blades of grass stuck to her bare feet. Her water-spotted, hooded green shirt was short-sleeved, and when he noticed her wrists and hands, he was taken aback.

  Tattoos? A chuff of relief passed his lips. No, not tattoos. She’d just drawn on herself, doodles and curlicues in multiple colors of ink. But what the hell for?

  His tread on the linoleum made her turn her head, and she gave him a shy smile. Damp copper curls peeked out from under the hood, sticking to her small, oval face like little tongues of flame. Her eyes, huge, dark and always beautiful, looked gaunt and slightly sunken now. She was wearing makeup she didn’t need, and it had gotten smeared by the rain. It had only been a couple of months since he’d last seen her, Tucker reflected, at his grandson’s second birthday party. What had happened to that pretty young girl?

  Easy there, mister, he told himself. Kids mature in fits and starts. This hard-edged look was just some phase she was going through. It’d pass. He remembered Steven at this age, full of anger and raging hormones and senseless rebellion. Why couldn’t he have tried harder to understand what the boy was going through? Steven had lost his mother, for Christ sake. But had Frank Tucker cut him any slack? Oh, no. Knuckle down, boy! Quit whining! Be a man!

  Stupid fool. Now his son was gone, and it was too late to tell him how sorry he was. Even if Stephen’s death had been officially labeled a suicide, Tucker would go to his grave knowing that his own insensitivity to that mixed-up boy had, for all intents and purposes, pulled the trigger.