The chopper was descending into a deep, narrow bay on the ocean side of the island, well hidden from the Californian mainland and the lights of Avalon. She saw vegetation, palm trees flattening away from the chopper. As they landed, Feramo opened the door and jumped out, pulling her after him and gesturing at her to lower her head. The blades didn’t stop. She heard the engine sound rise again and turned to see the chopper taking off.
He guided her along a path towards a jetty. There was no wind. The ocean was calm, the steep line of the hills on either side and the jetty black in silhouette against it. As the noise of the helicopter faded, there was silence except for tropical sounds: cicadas, frogs, the clink of metal against metal at the jetty. Her breath was coming short and fast. Were they alone here?
They reached the jetty. She noticed surfboards leaning against a wooden hut. What did he want with surfboards? Catalina was hardly fabled for its surf. As they drew closer, she realized that the hut was a dive shack, stocked with tanks and gear.
“Wait here. I need to get something.” She gripped the wooden railing, listening to Feramo’s footsteps die away into silence. She was both terrified and confused. Was she in danger? Should she just grab a dive rig and make her escape? But then if this was, by any remaining chance, just an über-romantic date, it would seem like a pretty extreme piece of strange behavior.
She tiptoed over to the dive shack. It was well ordered: a line of tanks, twenties, in brackets; BCDs and regulator rigs on hooks; masks and fins in neat piles. There was a knife lying on a rough wooden table. She picked it up and slipped it into her clutch, starting at the sound of Feramo’s footsteps returning. She was in danger, she knew, of being overwhelmed by fear. She had to regain control.
The footsteps were getting closer. Terrified, she cried out, “Pierre?” There was no answer, just the sound of the footsteps, heavy and uneven. Was it some thug or hired hit man? “Pierre. Is that you?”
She drew the knife out of her bag and held it behind her back, tensed and ready.
“Yes,” came Pierre’s liquid, accented tones. “Of course it is me.”
She exhaled, her whole body relaxing. Feramo emerged from the gloom, carrying a clumsy bundle wrapped in black.
“What are we doing here?” she burst out. “What are you doing bringing me to some isolated place and just dumping me and not answering when I ask if it’s you when you’re making weird footsteps? What is this place? What are you doing?”
“Weird footsteps?” Feramo laughed, his eyes flashing, then suddenly whipped the black cover from the bundle. Olivia felt as though her legs were going to give way. It was an ice bucket containing a bottle of champagne and two flutes.
“Look,” she said, putting her hand to her forehead. “This is very nice, but do you have to be so melodramatic?”
“You do not strike me as the kind of woman who seeks out the predictable.”
“No, but you don’t have to scare me to death to keep me happy. What is this place?”
“It is a boat dock. Here,” he said, holding out the black cloth, “in case you are cold. I should perhaps have warned you we would be putting out to sea.”
“To sea?” she said, trying simultaneously to take the wrap, which turned out to be very soft indeed as if made from the feathers of some rare bird, and hide the knife in it.
He nodded towards the bay, where the silhouette of a yacht could be seen gliding noiselessly round the headland.
She was relieved to find that there was a crew aboard. If Feramo was going to kill her, he would, one would have thought, have done it when they were alone. And the champagne would have been a very odd touch.
She was feeling slightly more relaxed, having managed to stash the dive knife in the Louis Vuitton clutch under cover of the black, ultrafine pashmina. Feramo stood beside her at the stern, as they glided out into the blackness of the open sea.
“Olivia,” he said, handing her a glass, “shall we drink a toast to our evening? To the beginning.” He clinked his glass against hers and looked at her intently.
“Of what?” she said.
“You do not remember our conversation in Miami? On the rooftop? The beginning of our getting to know each other.” He raised his glass, then drained it. She sipped at hers, smiling weakly, wondering if this whole performance was designed to wrong-foot her, making her feel threatened and terrified one moment, and safe and pampered the next, like leg-waxing with a smooth-talking but incompetent beautician.
“So, tell me. You are a journalist. Why?”
She thought for a moment. “I like to write. I like to travel. I like to find out what’s going on.”
“And where have you visited on your travels?”
“Well, not as many places as I’d like: South America, India, Africa.”
“Where in Africa?”
“The Sudan and Kenya.”
“Really? You have been to the Sudan?”
“Yes.”
“And how did you find it?”
“It was extraordinary. It was the most foreign place I’ve ever been. It was like Lawrence of Arabia.”
“And the people?”
“I liked the people,” she said quietly.
“And Los Angeles? How do you find it here?”
“Deliciously shallow.”
He laughed. “That is all?”
“Unexpectedly rural. It’s like the south of France only with shopping.”
“And this journalism you do, this froth for magazines, it is your speciality?”
“Froth? I’ve never been so insulted in my life!”
He laughed again. He had a nice laugh, rather shy, as if it was something he didn’t quite feel allowed to do.
“I really want to be a proper foreign correspondent,” she said, suddenly serious. “I want to do something that means something.”
“The OceansApart. Did you do a piece anyway for the Sunday Times?” There was a slight change of tenor in his voice.
“Yes, kind of. But they put it under someone else’s byline.”
“Did that distress you?”
“Pretty trivial thing in that context. What about you? Do you like LA?”
“I am interested in what it produces.”
“What? Beautiful girls with giant fake breasts?”
He laughed. “Why don’t you come inside?”
“Are you trying to get fresh?”
“No, no. For dinner, I mean.”
A deckhand in a white uniform held out his hand to help her as she stepped down the stairs. The interior was breathtaking, if just a tiny bit naff. It was paneled in shiny wood with beige, deep-pile carpets and lots of brassware. It was like a proper room, not a cabin on a boat. The table was laid for two, with a white cloth, flowers and very shiny glassware and cutlery, which, disappointingly, was not gold-plated. The cabin was decorated with a Hollywood theme, and there were some interesting old photographs of stolen moments on set: Alfred Hitchcock playing chess with Grace Kelly, Ava Gardner soaking her feet in an ice bucket, Omar Sharif and Peter O’Toole playing cricket in the desert. There was a glass case with memorabilia inside: an Oscar statuette, an Egyptian headdress, a four-stranded pearl necklace with a picture of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s behind it.
“This is my passion,” he said. “The movies. I watched so many with my mother, so many of the great old movies. Some day I will make a picture which will be remembered long after I am dead. If I can fight my way through the stupidity and prejudice of Hollywood.”
“But you’ve made movies already.”
“Small movies, in France. You would not know these films.”
“I might. Try me.”
Was that a fleeting look of panic?
“Look,” he said, “this is a headdress worn by Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra.”
“Is that a real Oscar?”
“Yes, but I am afraid not the most distinguished one. My dream is to obtain one of the statuettes awarded for Lawrence of Arabia in 1962. But for the moment I am having to make do with this, which is an award for best sound editing in the late sixties that I managed to find on eBay.”
Olivia laughed. “Tell me more about your work. I might have seen something. I see quite a lot of French films in—”
“And look. These are the pearls that Audrey Hepburn wore in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”
“The real ones?”
“Of course. You would like to wear them for dinner?”
“No, no. I’d look ridiculous.”
He took them out of the case and placed them round her neck, fastening them with the dexterity of a surgeon. She bowed her head, feeling his fingers against her neck.
He stood back to appraise the effect of the necklace. “You are beautiful,” he whispered. “And what makes it all the more attractive is that you do not know it.”
She met his eyes for a second, caught herself feeling a stab of Cinderella syndrome and was furious. Dammit, she was impressed with the bloody yacht and the apartments, the pearls and the helicopter, the beauty and the charm. She knew she was one in a long line of girls who had been wooed with this lot, and she didn’t want to be. The ridiculous, delusional feelings which can afflict a girl in such situations were bubbling up. She was thinking: I’m different; I don’t like him for his money, I like him for himself. I can change him, while simultaneously imagining herself installed on the yacht, an adored creature, slipping into the water for unlimited scuba diving with no additional charge for equipment rental, then emerging from the shower and fastening Audrey Hepburn’s pearls around her neck.
Stop it, she told herself. Stop it, you total sad act. Do what you’re here to do. “Pierre bin Feramo,” she felt like yelling, “can we get this straight? Are you wooing me, or are you trying to bump me off? Are you a terrorist or a playboy? Do you think I tried to put the FBI onto you or not?” Right, she was bloody well going to tackle him.
She stood looking at the Oscar and the Egyptian headdress in the case, trying to calm herself.
“Why did you lie to me?” she said without turning round.
He didn’t reply. She turned to face him. “Why did you tell me you were French? I knew you were an Arab.”
“You did?” He looked very cool about it all, even slightly amused. “Might I enquire as to why?”
“Well, number one, your accent. Number two, I heard you say shukran.”
A second’s pause. “You speak Arabic?”
“Like I told you, I’ve been in the Sudan.”
“Was that a mosque in your apartment?”
The hooded eyes gave nothing away. “It is actually a panic room. And it seemed an ideal place for privacy and contemplation. And as for the slight, shall we say, inaccuracy about my nationality, I was trying to do away with the encumbrance of racial stereotyping. Not everyone has your positive attitude towards our culture and religion.”
“Isn’t that like politicians pretending not to be gay—the pretending in itself has the effect of suggesting there’s something wrong with being gay?”
“You are suggesting I am ashamed of being an Arab?”
His voice was terrifying: calm, pleasant, violent anger surging below.
“I’m interested in why you lied about it.”
He fixed his dark, soulful eyes on hers. “I am proud of being an Arab. Our culture is the oldest in the world and the wisest. Our laws are spiritual laws and our traditions rooted in the wisdom of our ancestors. When I am in Hollywood I am ashamed—not of my ancestry, but of the world I see around me: the arrogance, the ignorance, the vanity, the stupidity, the greed, the salivating worship of flesh and youth, the flaunting of sexuality for fame and financial gain, the lust for the new in the absence of respect for the old. This shallowness you joke of finding delicious is not sweetness but the very spores of rot within the ripe fruit.”
Olivia held herself motionless, gripping her clutch, thinking of the knife inside it. She sensed that the slightest misjudged word or move would trip the wire of his carefully controlled rage.
“Why are the richest nations on earth the unhappiest? Do you know?” he continued.
“That’s a rather odd generalization,” she said lightly, trying to shift the mood. “I mean some of the richest nations in the world are Arab nations. Saudi Arabia’s rather well off, isn’t it?”
“Saudi Arabia, pah!”
He seemed to be having some kind of private battle. He turned away, then looked back, composed now.
“I am sorry, Olivia,” he said in a gentler tone. “But spending time in America, as I do, I am often . . . hurt . . . by the ignorance and prejudice with which we are pigeonholed and insulted. Come. Enough. This is not the evening for this discussion. It is a beautiful night, and it is time to eat.”