MORTE D’UNE LEGENDE READ the headline on the newspaper delivered to Lindsay’s room that morning. Beneath it was the famous Beaton photograph of a laughing, short-haired young woman, her hands half obscuring her face. Lindsay began to translate the long article.
Her French was serviceable, but not extensive: she could not cope with the lyricism, the orotundity here. She could gather that the facts repeated the authorized version of Cazarès’s life. Beyond that, she could see that Maria Cazarès was already being turned into a symbol, before she was twenty-four hours dead.
But a symbol of what? She struggled with the vocabulary, the syntax. Several things, it seemed: of modern womanhood, of modern women, whom she had freed, the writer claimed, redefining their images of themselves. Of France, in that she embodied the French virtues of elegance, discernment, and chic. By the final paragraph, the claims seemed to have swelled, as if the male writer were drunk on his own prose. L’éternelle feminine, Lindsay read, trying to construe a clutch of dense phrases. She had the gist, she thought. Maria Cazarès, une femme solitaire, unique, et mystérieuse… yes, yes, she understood that… was the something something and the very embodiment of the eternal feminine—whatever that was, Lindsay thought with sudden impatience. Giving up, she tossed the paper aside.
How typical, how predictable, she thought, that having decided Cazarès was an enigma, a female enigma, they should give the task of decoding her to a man. Lindsay, who had slept badly and still felt restless, moved to the window and looked out. It was still early; she could see the day would not be clear. The sky was low, the clouds scudding fast. Wind whipped the branches of the trees and rippled the Seine. The air was watery, gray, promising rain and then more rain: a day of half-light and mist.
This hotel room was beginning to feel confining. She made some time pass, first by telephoning home and speaking to Tom, and then by sending a second fax to her contact at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, who had not yet replied to her query of the previous day. Then, having hesitated some time, and finally having decided to risk it, she called Rowland’s room, since it was now nine in the morning and need not, therefore, be too embarrassing if it was Gini who picked up the phone.
She let the number ring, but there was no answer. Then, still feeling on edge, she went down to the room the Correspondent was using as their headquarters. Pixie, dressed in a garment that appeared to be made of knitted string, was already there. Lindsay picked up her pass for the Cazarès press conference that morning, checked on a few other details, was about to leave, then paused.
“You made sure there were passes for Rowland and Gini?”
Pixie gave a small smile.
“Oh, sure. I had them sent up to their room last night.” Then, after a delicate pause: “Clever of McGuire to get that room. I wept, pleaded, offered to sell the management my body—and I had no luck at all.”
“So? Rowland has more heft than you do,” Lindsay said.
Pixie’s smile broadened. Lindsay knew what that smile meant: it meant gossip, speculation, the spirals of office intrigue.
“Well,” Pixie said, “he’s that kind of man. Not easy to refuse.”
“What’s that supposed to imply?”
“—Though I thought it was pretty odd. Him sharing that room with her. I mean, he’d fired her only a few hours before.”
“What? Rowland fired Gini?” Lindsay shook her head. “No, Pixie. I saw them both last night. You’re wrong.”
“Oh, everyone saw them last night,” Pixie said in a negligent tone. “After all, this place is stuffed to the gills with reporters, what can you expect? They were seen going out late last night. They were seen when they returned. One look at her face, apparently—there was what you might call ribaldry in the bar.”
“What absolute rubbish,” Lindsay said sharply. “I was with them both later. They were working, that’s all.”
“They were? For how long?”
“Look, Pixie, I was up in the room with them a good two hours, maybe more. We were all three of us working. And you might think about doing some work right now.”
She moved to the door, hoping this lie would quell the gossip, then hesitated. “What made you think Rowland fired Gini?”
“I don’t think. I know. Tony called me from London late last night. McGuire was on the telephone, in his office, with the door closed, but Tony overheard. He said you couldn’t help overhearing, McGuire was so mad, you could have heard him in Piccadilly Circus.”
Lindsay sighed: Tony was Pixie’s latest boyfriend, and devoted. He worked in a very junior capacity in the features department, in an office across the corridor from Rowland McGuire’s.
“Well, I’m sorry, Pixie,” she said, “but for once Tony has it wrong. I told you—I was with them. Gini certainly has not been fired.”
“Oh, she got reinstated.” Pixie gave her a sidelong glance. “I mean, that was obvious to everyone in the lobby last night. But he did fire her. And he didn’t mince his words. She’d screwed up in Amsterdam, Tony says, and McGuire was going wild. Then he started in on Pascal Lamartine. Tony said he’d have died if he’d been on the receiving end. Tony said that was the worst he’d ever heard him. Then he slammed down the phone, he’d fired her by then, several times, and then he came storming out of his office with his green eyes flashing fire. Then he left, and before he left he went suddenly quiet and—” Pixie gave a sigh. “I just wish I’d been there, that’s all. I told you he was gorgeous. Can you imagine how totally gorgeous he’d be in a rage? I love tempestuous men…”
“Pixie, for God’s sake!”
“Well, I do. Show me the woman who doesn’t. I’m just honest, that’s all. Just the thought of McGuire in a rage makes my nipples go hard.”
“That’s enough, Pixie.”
“It’s his eyes, mainly…” Pixie, always irrepressible, gave a small shiver of delight. “And that black hair. And the voice. And the muscles. And the fact that he’s so tall. Also I hear he’s incredible in bed. I mean like seriously incredible, so you can hardly walk the next day. Walk? I can tell you, I wouldn’t be walking anywhere, I’d just be lying there, waiting for more…”
“Pixie, stop this right now. I’m not interested in these fantasies.”
“They’re not fantasies. All this is well documented. There’s this girl I know…”
“Pixie!”
“She scores them, all right? And her top mark is twenty-five. She gives them marks for invention, stamina, intuition, size, tendresse, output, concern—”
“Intuition? Who is this girl?”
“And you know what McGuire scored? One hundred. He went right off the charts. She was floored. Also, and this is corroborated, because she checked, and it wasn’t just her—also, he has these rules…”
“Rules?” Lindsay said faintly.
“Yes.” Pixie lowered her voice to a more confidential tone. “Like—before, right—he always makes the situation crystal clear. It’s sex, maybe friendship—and that’s all. The relationship isn’t going to have any future, there’s going to be no commitments on either side. Those are his terms. And he sticks to them too. I mean, not even any endearments, no ‘darlings,’ no personal revelations of any kind. This girl said she didn’t know one thing more about him when he ended it than she did the day it began. It drove her totally wild.”
Pixie gave Lindsay a long, significant look. Lindsay had a brief battle with her own most vulgar instincts; the instincts won.
“How long did she—”
“Two months. I gather the all-time record is two and a half. This was some years back, just after he returned from Washington. She said he went through women like a machine. She said that when it began, when he spelled out his statute of limitations, as it were—well it was fatal. She fell in love with him before he’d finished the first sentence. And then, the next morning, when she got out of bed and, like I say, she could hardly stand, she made herself this promise. She was determined, but determined, to be the one who changed his mind.”
“Well, she clearly didn’t succeed—” Lindsay said.
“She tried really hard,” Pixie continued, launched now, and speaking fast. “She thought that if she managed to hide the fact that she was totally crazy about him, she had a chance. I mean, she’s having the most incredible sex of her life, she figures there must be progress of some kind. Only there wasn’t.” Pixie sighed. “And the instant he realized how she felt—well, one night she was so overcome she just told him—that was it. Curtains. Kind but immovable. The end.”
Lindsay had begun to move toward the door.
“She tried everything,” Pixie went on, and Lindsay stopped. “She was getting so desperate, she was so madly in love, she hit on this really crazy plan. She’d get pregnant. She was sure, if she could just do that, she’d change his mind. So she stopped taking the pill and she never said a word. Only, of course, that didn’t work either. Condoms.” Pixie gave Lindsay a significant look. “Always. Because he’s careful as well as wild. And no way could she get around that—believe me, she’s inventive, and she tried.”
Lindsay had blushed crimson. She turned back from the door. “Pixie, stop this at once. We shouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“Why not?”
“Because we just shouldn’t. I don’t expect you to understand. Let’s put it down to the generation gap. This is someone’s private life, someone we both know and like.”
“I thought you didn’t like McGuire? You said he was arrogant.”
“Never mind. Like him or dislike him, it makes no difference. That kind of gossip always ends up causing trouble, and pain. I don’t want to hear any more. I don’t want you passing this kind of rumor around. If there are rumors, those rumors are untrue…”
“If you say so.” Pixie shrugged.
“I mean it, Pixie. Just keep your speculations to yourself, and don’t damned well encourage them in other people. I assume you have work to get on with—because if you haven’t, there’s something badly wrong.”
Pixie gave her a look of astonishment.
“Everything’s under control, Lindsay.”
“Just make sure I get the transparencies from the Chanel and Gaultier shows by nine tonight. Make sure Markov’s there, at his hotel, before you bike his invitations around to him, and remember, Pixie, any hitches, one fuckup, and you’re unemployed.”
Pixie had colored. “I’m good at my job,” she protested. “This is going to run like clockwork.”
“It had better,” Lindsay said, walking out, and just managing to prevent herself from slamming the door. She knew Pixie would probably be making some face at it once it was closed—and she was, of course, fully justified. Lindsay’s cheeks were still bright scarlet. She quickly left the hotel, went out into mists and soft rain, and took in deep breaths of damp air.
She was furious with herself. How could she reprimand Pixie for gossiping, when she had just been listening avidly to gossip herself? How could she then compound her own felony by picking on Pixie’s work, when that work was always excellent? She had just set Pixie an appalling example, and if she had succeeded in stemming the tide of gossip about Rowland and Gini, she would not have done so for long. She glanced back at the hotel. The lobby had been seething with journalists, with TV crews. In that kind of hothouse atmosphere, gossip bred faster than germs.
She felt dirtied by her own curiosity, sickened by the kind of details people bandied around. Beyond and behind such feelings were others.
Deeply troubled, Lindsay crossed the quay and leaned over the balustrade, looking down at the Seine. Prior to the conversation with Pixie, she had been trying to convince herself that her own instincts the previous night had been wrong. Now she felt doubly unsure. One aspect of Pixie’s report worried her, and that was the description of Rowland’s firing Gini, and the manner in which that action was performed.
Lindsay knew just how vulnerable Gini was to criticism from those she liked or admired. It was a legacy, of course, from her father, from all those years when she had tried to prove her worth, and win his affection, and failed.
Lindsay had never dared to say this to Gini, but she had always believed that this inheritance had been a strong contributing factor in her attraction to Pascal Lamartine. Lindsay might not have heard all the details of Gini’s original involvement with Pascal, for Gini was reticent, but she had heard the story of how Gini had first met him, in that press bar in Beirut, and it seemed to her there was an obvious aspect to that story to which Gini, and presumably Pascal, were totally blind.
What had ignited their affair? It was Pascal’s hostility to Gini’s father that had ignited it, and Gini’s intuition, subsequently confirmed, that Pascal Lamartine was contemptuous of Gini’s father, at whose shrine Gini had painfully worshiped for so long. At the very moment when Gini’s own doubts about her father were beginning, along came a handsome, impassioned, and very romantic man who loathed and despised Sam Hunter on sight—and said so to Gini in no uncertain terms.
As one figure of authority began to crumble before her eyes, Gini replaced him with another—what if, now, Gini was about to, or was in the process of, replacing that second mentor with a third?
Lindsay began to pace back and forth, feeling more agitated now. In order to love, she thought, Gini—like many women—had not only to admire, but also to feel she could learn. She had to look up to the man she loved, admiring his gifts, his character, his intelligence, his moral worth—and believing always that he was better endowed in these respects than she was herself.
Such a female weakness, Lindsay thought, aware that it was also her own. Gini might preach equality, and imagine she practiced it, but Lindsay believed that too much equality in love would be something Gini would loathe. Nothing appealed to Gini so much as a teacher, and nothing was so likely to attract her to a man as some reprimand from him she knew was deserved.
Would a bitter dressing-down from Rowland McGuire have a deep effect on Gini? Lindsay frowned down at the gray water, knowing that—if she herself were truthful—it would certainly have influenced her. Then she realized: in Gini’s case, that particular question had already been answered, and in front of her eyes.
It was Rowland McGuire’s sharp and angry condemnation at Max’s house, that moment when he accused Gini of behaving selfishly, that had snapped Gini out of months of illness, misery, and self-reproach. With a few sentences Rowland McGuire had been able to effect a change that in months of sympathy and argument, Lindsay had failed to achieve. Lindsay thought she could see a pattern now. She could see how, if her relationship with Pascal had been impaired, or if Pascal had, in Bosnia, failed Gini in some way, Gini might possibly end up in Rowland McGuire’s arms.
And as for Rowland’s motivation—well, that was obvious enough, Lindsay thought, turning angrily away. Gini was beautiful; for men, as Lindsay had watched over the years, she carried a powerful sexual allure. She could see Rowland McGuire’s responding to that, McGuire, who went through women “like a machine.” To him it was a matter of two months, three months, a scrupulous exercise in which his heart was not involved.
Lindsay felt indignant, then angry. In such a situation, her sympathies were always with the woman, and Gini was her closest woman friend. This anger at McGuire took root and grew as she made her way to the Cazarès headquarters for Lazare’s press conference.
By the time she reached there, Lindsay had argued herself into a position where, she told herself, she felt no attraction for McGuire anymore, not even liking. Pixie’s words ringing in her ears, she told herself that Rowland McGuire was an irresponsible, cold manipulator of women, a Casanova, a Valmont, the kind of man she most despised. Then, through the press of people, she saw him. One look at his face and she at once changed her mind.
It was a while before she saw him. When she reached the Cazarès building it was still half an hour before the start of the press conference, but the rabble had already arrived. The street outside and the courtyard within were crammed with vans, with the white sprouting mushrooms of satellite dishes, with the cables and impedimenta of TV crews. CNN was there, and the other major American network crews; she could see familiar faces from the BBC and ITN. The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish, the Japanese—they were all out in force. Lindsay pushed through a wall of people, a babel of tongues. Inside the front lobby the crush was even worse: like the melees that attended the collections, but worse. Lindsay could feel that peculiar intensity of hysteria generated by a crowd, but here, in addition to the mad desire simply to get in, there were other, stronger emotions. There was a vicarious thrill to the drama of sudden death.
Lindsay was pushed, shoved, trodden on, nearly thrown to the floor as she approached the doors to the hall where the conference would be held. Black-suited Cazarès courtiers were trying to control the crowd, but there were too few of them; they could not hold back this surge. Jostled, Lindsay let the crowd pick her up and propel her forward. She could now see into the hall beyond, which was blindingly bright from TV lights; she could glimpse, at its far end, a black dais, a table, a lectern, microphones, cameras, and—surmounting it all—a huge blow-up of that Beaton photograph of Maria Cazarès. Lindsay was caught up, thrust into the room, carried forward by a wave of people—and then she saw Rowland McGuire.
He was standing just a few feet from her, on the eddying edge of the crowd. He was using the advantage of his height to scan over the heads of those entering to watch who came through the door. He was wearing, Lindsay saw, a black overcoat, a black suit, and a black tie, a formality of dress that made him stand out from the crowd. His face was pale and set; he never once moved his eyes from the doorway, and Lindsay knew, without a second’s doubt, for whom he was searching that crowd.
He must have seen Lindsay enter, though he gave no indication of doing so, because he made one quick move, still keeping his eyes on the door. A heavy American who had pushed past Lindsay earlier now found himself thrust aside so hard, he nearly fell; Lindsay found that her arm had been gripped, and she had been drawn through the press of people to his side.
“You see that usher there?” He gestured to one of the Cazarès assistants. “He has three seats for us, center aisle, fourth row. Claim yours now. I’ll join you in a minute.”
“Three seats—and they’re keeping them? Rowland, how on earth—?”
“Ways and means.” He gave a tight smile. “Just go.”
Lindsay did so. The assistant in question could not have shown more solicitude had she been the editor of American Vogue. Lindsay looked around her, mystified, then saw that the editors of American Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and French Vogue and Paris Match and Hello! were in the same row. She was greeted with raised eyebrows and little quick air kisses. Five minutes later Rowland joined her. As he sat down, he said: “Have you seen Gini this morning? Did she come back to the hotel?”
“No. I didn’t know she’d gone out.”
“She had some research to do.” He turned, craning his neck, and looked back at the doors. “Maybe she was held up…”
Lindsay said nothing. He radiated tension. She looked at his pale, averted face; she looked down at his strong, capable hands, which were half clenched, and she could sense deep perturbation. Something had obviously happened, something well beyond the scenario she had been painting. She felt ashamed at her own triviality; the last residual influences of Pixie’s stories fell away.
If Gini was coming, she was too late now. They were closing the doors at the back of the room. At the front, in the pit below the dais, the phalanx of photographers and TV crews stirred.
Lindsay said gently, “Do you always wear black, Rowland, on occasions like this?”
“What?” He glanced toward her, then away.
“Most people don’t bother. Not anymore. Not even for funerals, these days.”
“I don’t really know. I wasn’t thinking about it particularly.” He turned back to look at the rear doors again. “Habit, maybe. Upbringing. When I was a small child—in Ireland—people dress for death. It’s a mark of respect—why?”
“No reason.” Lindsay was touched. “I like it. It’s old-fashioned. But it feels right—that’s all.”
He was not even listening. He rose and removed his overcoat, which he tossed down on the floor. As he rose, Lindsay saw women’s heads turn. She glanced up: Rowland’s dark, untamable hair fell across his forehead; the black suit, the white shirt, emphasized his height and his looks. Just along the row from her she heard a sharp American whisper: Darling, who’s that perfectly divine man? Rowland had evidently sensed none of this. “Damn,” he said, sitting down again as a group of somber-suited, impeccable Cazarès executives came onto the dais in front of them. “Damn. It’s too late now. And I need to talk to her…”
“You have a lead?” Lindsay said in a noncommittal tone: it might be a lead, she supposed, but that was not the first thing that sprang to mind.
“What? Yes. I do. And it’ll have to wait now.”
He turned back to look at the dais. Lindsay tensed. Jean Lazare had just entered, and as he did so, walking at a quick pace to the lectern, silence fell in the room.
The tribute he gave was brief, and he made it four times: first in French, then in English, then in Spanish, and finally in German. While he spoke the room was hushed, the only sound the soft whirr of cameras. When he ended, and only when he ended, came the flashing of scores of camera bulbs.
Lindsay could follow some but not all of the French; Rowland’s comprehension, she thought, was better than her own. He listened with total concentration; once or twice he frowned. As Lazare switched to English, he appeared to continue to listen, but Lindsay was unsure if he actually did so. She was straining hard to catch every phrase, so her attention was diverted, but she could sense that although Rowland kept his eyes on Lazare, he scarcely saw him. His true attention seemed elsewhere, perhaps back in the French version of Lazare’s statement.
“Yesterday afternoon,” Lazare began, “as you will know, Maria Cazarès suffered a heart attack. She was at the home of her former maid, to whom she was devoted. I take comfort from the fact that when this happened, so suddenly, she was not alone, but with a friend. I should like to take this opportunity now to thank the doctors of the St. Étienne hospital, who made every effort to revive her, and who gave her every possible care. Unfortunately, their efforts were not successful. Mademoiselle Cazarès died a short while after she arrived there. I was by her side.”
He paused. “I wish to announce that as would have been the wish of Maria Cazarès herself, her couture collection will be shown tomorrow, exactly as planned. It will include three designs, her last designs, drawn by her the day before she died. Maria Cazarès was born an artist, and was an artist to the end.
“Tomorrow morning, at Cazarès, there will be a spirit of joy, not sadness.” He paused again, on a note that was one of command. “We will be celebrating one of the most extraordinary women of our time, and certainly the most extraordinary, gifted, and visionary woman I have ever known. She was a couturière of wit, of originality, of passion. She was a woman who, as she once said, understood both the art and the science of clothes…”
As he said this, Lindsay gave Rowland a sharp glance.
“I know,” he said in a quiet voice. “Quiet. Listen to the next part.”
Lazare looked around the hushed room, that sea of upturned faces, then continued, his voice with its strange harsh accent perfectly level, unemotional, and controlled.
“It is not for me to write her obituary. But I should like to say this: I knew Maria Cazarès and worked closely with her for many, many years. In that time I never knew her to be other than vigilant, devoted to her professional task. This involved, as is always the case for any woman, many sacrifices. Maria Cazarès did not marry; she did not have a child. It has been suggested in the past, by those who did not know her, and were ill informed, that this choice was easily made. That was not so. Her dedication was not achieved without both sacrifice and struggle, and in this context, only a French term will serve: like all great artists, Maria Cazarès was, in respect of her art, a religieuse.
“She was also”—he made his first tiny hesitation—“a woman who brought joy to people’s hearts. In her private life she showed candor, understanding, grace, courage, and generosity. She had, and always retained, a childlike directness and simplicity, and she remained to the end unseduced by fame.
“In her professional life”—his voice gained strength now—“she was that rarity, a woman designing for women, while almost all the other practitioners of her art were men. She redefined the ways in which modern women chose to present themselves to the world; in changing their image, she perhaps helped to alter their conception of themselves. I leave that question to be decided by others, but I will say this: it was an education for a man to work with her, and to know her gave me insights I value greatly, into a world in which the instincts of the body and the heart are as valid and as important as the deliberations of the mind—let us use shorthand: into the female world.”
He looked down—although he was speaking without notes—then raised his head, standing formally, stiffly, almost as if to attention, Lindsay thought.
“I pay my last respects now, and I will use one last French phrase. For the world, Maria Cazarès was an artist: for me she was, and always will be—the amie de mon coeur.”
He stopped, his dark eyes resting on the body of the hall. Lindsay felt a tightening of pity and sympathy around her heart. What must it cost him, she thought, to speak in this way, to blend truth and what was surely falsehood so seamlessly? To speak in that level, deliberate, uninflected tone? Lazare, still betraying no emotion, gave the Spanish version of this tribute, and then the German, then turned, and immediately left the stage.
Rowland was on his feet before the executives on the dais had moved. He had Lindsay by the arm, and was leading her quickly down the aisle as the crowd began to move, as murmurs began and a tide of reaction began to swell. Lindsay was surprised by his haste, then understood it: Gini was standing just inside the doors at the very back of the hall.
Lindsay just caught a glimpse of her pale face; she saw Rowland give her a sharp and questioning glance, then he drew them both out into the lobby, into the courtyard, hastening them along and stopping only when they had rounded a corner. He came to a halt in a quiet, narrow side street with a row of apartment buildings opposite, and behind them a high wall.
“You heard?” Rowland said, and Lindsay realized that not only was the question addressed solely to Gini, but that as far as either of them was concerned, she herself was not there.
“Yes.” Gini was backing against the wall; she began speaking fast. “They let me in just as he was reaching the end of the French version. Such control—such extraordinary control. How could he do that? How could he speak in that way? So formally—and he wasn’t even using notes. I—” She broke off, and looked at Lindsay for the first time. “Rowland told me your New Orleans story. I was thinking about it all the way through. I could hear it, under his words, inside his words…”
Lindsay found she could say nothing. She was riveted by Gini’s face. She had recently been hit, and hit hard. Right down the left side of her face, and across the cheekbone, there was a darkening bruise.
She was trying to conceal this, Lindsay observed, by standing so that this side of her face was turned to the wall behind her. The tactic was not succeeding. Rowland was now also looking at the bruise. Lindsay watched his face change, watched him begin on some quick, involuntary movement. Gini, her eyes on his face, lifted her hand, then let it fall.
There was a silence, a silence that seemed to Lindsay to be filled with noise, with a tension that could not be dispersed. Gini began speaking again: she seemed to believe, Lindsay thought, pitying her, that if she just kept speaking, the nature of this moment could be concealed.
“The way he described her character,” she began. “Then. He said something about candor…”
“Candor, understanding, grace, courage, and generosity.” Rowland’s eyes never left Gini’s face. “Those were the words.”
“Yes. And religieuse. Something about insights that she gave him… It was right at the end. And he evaded the issue of time, of how long he’d known her.”
“Many, many years,” Rowland said. “Time was immaterial. He made that clear with his final words. Her dying made no difference. She remained the—”
“Are they issuing the text?” Gini interrupted him very fast. “I wasn’t taking notes. I meant to, but I wasn’t…”
“They’ll issue it. They’re probably issuing it now. We don’t need it. I can remember the salient parts.”
Gini gave a low sigh; her hands clenched and unclenched.
Lindsay looked from one to the other and stepped back quietly. She knew that she had no place here.
She began to detach herself as quietly, quickly, and plausibly as she could. She said that she had to meet Markov, which was true; she said she had to see him before that afternoon’s Chanel show. She could, she knew, have announced that she was to embark for Mars: neither Gini nor Rowland would have noticed. They were locked into a silent communication that was as voluble as a torrent of words.
She turned and began walking quickly away. At the corner she looked back once. Gini was now standing with her back against the wall, her head bent. Rowland was directly in front of her, his arms either side of her body, his palms pressed against the wall. He was speaking with force.
As Lindsay looked back, he stopped speaking, and Gini slowly raised her head to meet his eyes. Lindsay did not wish to be a spy, or to see any more. She turned the corner, fought her way through the crowd still spilling out from Cazarès, passed for a second time through that babel of tongues, and made her escape fast. She knew what her next task was: she had to eradicate this pain, an actual pain as discernible as a headache, that seemed to have lodged itself around her heart.
How long was it since Lindsay had left them, Gini thought, ten minutes, fifteen? It could have been longer. It could have been much less. Time was refusing to obey its ordinary rules. She turned back to look at Rowland, who was now standing beside her, his face averted, his back against the wall.
He was breathing fast, as if he had been running. She could sense his anger and his agitation in the air.
“I just want to work, Rowland,” she said, turning to him and touching his hand. “Please. I may not be capable of anything else—but I am capable of that. I just want to fix my mind on this story. I want to pull the pieces together, and I want to find Mina, above all. You agreed, Rowland, you agreed that we could do that—”
“I know.”
He hesitated, then turned to look at her. Her pale face was upturned to his; he could not bear to look at the bruise. Her lovely eyes were wide with an expression of entreaty. When she looked at him in this way, Rowland felt he could refuse her nothing; he wondered if she realized that. He felt he must be utterly transparent to her: she must know.
“Please, Rowland,” she went on. “I can’t talk to you about this. It wouldn’t be right. You don’t need to be involved. I have to deal with it, come to terms with it in my time and my way. I don’t think I even could talk about it. Too much has happened too fast. So—I just want to fix on something relatively simple, relatively clear. A series of steps: this interview, then that one. Please help me do that, Rowland. I ought to be able to do it on my own—but I can’t. Not today. Not now.”
Rowland would have said she was a woman who would never admit weakness; he was immeasurably touched by that confession of weakness now. At that moment he wanted nothing so much as to take her in his arms, but he could see that would be wrong, possibly unfair—and that she was trying to tell him this indirectly.
“Very well.” He moved a little farther away, and Gini, watching him do so, and watching a guarded expression come upon his face, thought: he’s distancing himself.
“I worked after you left.” He was staring past her, along the road. “Since you forbade me to stay with you, or come with you…”
“Rowland. Don’t.”
“I had no choice. So I worked. After a fashion. I spoke to the French police. I made some other calls. I realized something that we missed last night, which was actually very obvious—but still.” He glanced down at his watch. “So, I’d say we have a choice. We have two possible leads. We can either try to interview that maid whom Cazarès was visiting yesterday—though I’m pretty sure that Lazare will have her well protected from the press, under virtual guard. Or”—he turned back to look at her—“or we can talk to that girl Chantal. She’s with the police now, or should be, if we hurry.”
Gini stared at him. “You arranged for them to pick her up? When? This morning?”
“Yes.” He gave her one of his cool, unreadable green glances. “I can work quite well in adverse circumstances.”
“So I see. I’ll have to learn from you…” For a moment her face clouded; then she made a brisk gesture. “You’re right. It’s the next stage. Let’s talk to Chantal.”
Chantal was a small, thin, angry woman with brown urchin-cut hair and brown street-urchin eyes. Rowland and Gini first glimpsed her through the glass panels of a police interview-room door. The French plainclothes inspector who led them there was called Martigny. He was a short, dark-haired man with sharp eyes and a quiet manner. Outside the interview room, he continued to complete the rundown on Chantal which he had begun in his office a short while before. It was succinct, and in many respects, Rowland thought, predictable.
She was twenty-two years old, the daughter of a French-Canadian mother and an American father she had never known. Her mother had two other illegitimate children from whom Chantal had been separated at the age of eight, when she was first taken into foster care.
Her childhood, insofar as she ever had a childhood, had been spent in a succession of foster homes, from which she had a history of absconding. At fourteen she had served her first sentence, in a juvenile detention center in Quebec, for shoplifting. At sixteen, in Detroit, she had been arrested for car theft, and at seventeen, in New York, for prostitution and possession. She was virtually uneducated and semiliterate, and for the past three years she had been based in France. She was a registered heroin user, a dropout from a methadone program. In the past year, two charges of prostitution and drug trafficking had been brought, and subsequently dropped for lack of evidence. She was in danger of deportation, since none of her papers was in order, and she was not a woman—unsurprisingly—who was cooperative with the police.
For the past two hours, Martigny said, two of his best officers, a man and a woman, had been questioning her. Since there was no possible charge, she was about to be released. Her story, prized out of her by the use of threats, was that she knew no one by the name of Star, and never had. She couldn’t explain how her name and address came to be in the possession of some dead Dutch girl. Yes, she met lots of foreigners around Paris, and yes, she or one of her friends might hand out her address—she was generous that way: she had a room, a nice room, and sometimes people needed somewhere to crash. She couldn’t remember this Anneke, whoever she was; it was an offense now, was it, to hand another girl her address?
Martigny studied these two reporters who, according to his British colleague, had been helpful to the British police. The man looked as if he hadn’t slept in a week; the woman had a bruise down the side of her face that suggested she’d been recently hit. There was a tension between them that might have been professional, or emotional, or sexual.
Martigny shrugged such considerations aside. Chantal spoke fluent English and French, he went on; they could try questioning her in either language, and he was prepared to allow them twenty minutes. Time made no difference: if he gave them all day, they would not persuade this woman to talk.
He left them there; the woman officer remained by the door as the interview began. Rowland and Gini faced Chantal across a narrow table scarred with cigarette burns. She sat opposite them, chain-smoking, biting her nails, averting her gaze, yawning, tapping the tabletop with her thin fingers and occasionally darting in their direction small brown glances of derision and hate.
The scar on her face was one of the ugliest Gini had ever seen. It ran from the outer corner of her left eye to the corner of her mouth. It had healed badly, into a long curving cicatrix that had left the skin puckered and inflamed. It gave her a deeply disconcerting quality, as if two women, not one, faced them across the table. Once pretty, and still pretty when she turned her face aside, she seemed to accept this inflicted ugliness with defiance. Whenever she answered one of Rowland’s questions—he was speaking to her quietly, in excellent French—she turned her scarred side toward him, Gini noted. Her mounting nervousness and impatience were very apparent; Gini wondered if she needed a fix.
Gini felt very calm, curiously so, as if marooned on a flat sea, beyond the breath of any emotion at all. This had the effect of heightening her surroundings, so she saw the girl, and her reactions, with an intense precision. She felt that if she could just continue to do so, she need not remember or think about anything else.
Her silence—she had not spoken once since they entered—seemed to be irritating Chantal. At first the girl had ignored her, fixing her eyes on Rowland’s handsome face, and answering him rudely, but also boldly. Perhaps this was the way she addressed her johns, Gini thought, this odd mixture of flirtation and contempt. She seemed eager to place Rowland in the same category as the rest of the male sex—an importuner who might require only answers now, but who, given the chance, would make a more basic, and sexual request.
All of Rowland’s patient questions were being blocked. Chantal’s eyes flicked in Gini’s direction again. She yawned, lit another cigarette, then interrupted him suddenly, in English.
“So why’s she here?” She gestured at Gini. “She have a voice, or what?”
“We work together. I did explain,” Rowland replied in a level voice. The girl’s accent, speaking English, betrayed her hybrid origins: it was not Canadian, not American, or British or European, but somewhere between all four. Gini saw Rowland register this.
“What’s happened to your face?” Chantai turned to look at Gini. “You walk into a door? Someone’s fist?” She gave an insolent smile and jerked a thumb at Rowland. “His?”
“What’s happened to your face, Chantal,” Gini replied, and felt Rowland tense.
Chantal gave Gini a considering look. “Go fuck yourself.” She drew on the cigarette. “That’s my business, all right?” She pursed her lips, then turned back to Rowland. She gave him a long, blatantly sexual stare. “Why don’t you tell her to fuck off,” she said to him. “And that tight-assed bitch at the door. If you and me were alone, who knows—I might open up then…” She passed her tongue across her lips as she said this, and leaned forward, so the threadbare sweater she was wearing was drawn tight across the outline of her small breasts.
She had perhaps hoped to embarrass Rowland, certainly to disconcert him. When her moves produced no effect whatsoever, she seemed disconcerted herself. She glanced away, looked down, seemed almost to shrink back into herself. She hunched her shoulders and folded her arms across her chest. She suddenly looked much less sure of herself, even vulnerable. That body language was telling: watching it—the attempt at sexual appeal, the insecurity when it was rejected—Gini saw a possible approach. She leaned forward.
“I know how you got that scar anyway,” she said. “A man named Star did that to you with a razor, in England last year. I feel I know Star quite well by now. He’s unstable. He has a cocaine habit, and he has mood swings—rapid ones. When that happens, he’s capable of using a razor on a woman, and disfiguring her—or worse. Why is that, Chantal? Does he hate women? Does he have some sexual problem with women, perhaps?” Chantai had tensed. She bent her head and began to pick at her nails. Gini glanced at Rowland, who nodded.
“You know what I think he told you, Chantal?” Gini kept her eyes on the girl’s bent head. “I think he told you that you had—the soothing gift. That’s what he says to women, isn’t it? He told Anneke that. I expect it’s what he’s telling Mina Landis right now. And I’m sure she’ll believe him. After all, she’s only fifteen years old. She’s a great deal more gullible than you are because, unlike you, she’s led a very sheltered life. Yet even you believed him, didn’t you, Chantal? You went right on believing you could control him—until the day he cut your face.”
Chantal’s head jerked up. She gave Gini a venomous look. “Look—I don’t know him, you stupid bitch. How many fucking times do I have to say it?”
“Oh, you know him, Chantal.” Gini sighed. “And you know how he lies too. He didn’t tell you the truth about the other girls, did he? Did you know he had Mina here with him in Paris? Because he does, they were seen together yesterday. Has he admitted that to you? Or does he spin you some different line—that Mina’s like Anneke, like all the other little girls—disposable? Whereas you—you are the constant in his life? Is that what he told you, Chantal?”
It was instinct, a house of cards put together on the spur of the moment, but as soon as the words were out, Gini knew she was on the right track: Chantal’s face went white. There was just one small convulsive movement of the hand, hastily covered up. She flicked the butt into the brimming ashtray in front of her and lit the last of her cigarettes.
“Fuck you. I’m getting sick of this. I’ll say this one last time. I don’t know Star. Never did. I don’t recognize your description—nothing. So get the fuck off my back.”
“Let me show you their photographs.”
Gini reached into her bag. She took out the pictures of Mina and Anneke and handed them to Rowland, who silently passed them across. Chantal jerked her head away.
“Look at them, Chantal,” Gini said in a quiet voice. “I think you never met either of them—but you knew about them, didn’t you? You knew about them and you wondered what they looked like. Didn’t you? Wondered what made Star interested in them, when he had you?” She paused. “Look at them and you’ll see. Two different girls—yet in one respect they’re alike. They both look younger than their age. They both look like children… Is that when it started to go wrong for you, Chantal? When you started to look too much like a woman? Was that it?”
She stopped. Rowland had quietly laid his hand on her arm in warning. Chantal bent her head to the pictures. She was now chalk white, and beginning to shake.
“How old were you when you looked that innocent, Chantal? Eight? Nine? Ten?”
“You fucking cunt.” Chantal scraped back her chair and rose unsteadily to her feet. “Listen”—she swung around to the impassive policewoman—“get her out of here. Get me out. You can’t fucking keep me here. I have rights…” She was trembling violently.
Rowland said quietly, “Gini—she needs a fix.”
“I know that. I could see that when we walked in. Chantal, show me your arms. Show me what else he did to you…”
Gini rose as she said this. Neither Rowland nor the policewoman moved. There was a silence; then, to Rowland’s astonishment, Chantal allowed her hands to be taken and the thin sleeves of her pullover to be gently eased back. The needle tracks ran the length of both arms, like barbed wire, from elbow to wrist.
Without speaking, Gini drew the sleeves down again. Chantal’s hands flexed and she began to bite her lip. She was beginning to sweat, and the trembling in her limbs had increased. Gini looked at Rowland, and one look was enough of a hint.
He came around the table and said in a low voice: “If we get you home—will that help?”
Chantal shot a quick look at the policewoman, who was careful to appear deaf; she gave a nod.
Rowland put his arm around her and began to draw her toward the door. “Let us take you back. The police are finished with you. We’ll get a cab. That will be quicker, okay?”
When they were outside the station, Gini turned to the girl. All the blood had drained from her face; her forehead was clammy with sweat.
“You’re late?” Gini said. “How late?”
“Over an hour. Nearly two. Those pigs do that…”
Gini pitied her then. All the defiance and bravado had gone. She could not focus her eyes; they had that look Mitchell had described, that dead-eyed yet frantic look of animal need. She swayed. Farther up the street Rowland had succeeded in flagging down a cab. He climbed into it and the car accelerated toward them, then came to a halt. Chantal surfaced, just momentarily, from her glassy state, and gave Gini one quick, sharp street look.
“You and him?”
“He has been, yes.”
“I thought so. I can always tell.” She swayed again. “Just get me back to my room.”
She half fell, half slid into the rear seat beside Rowland. She lay back with her eyes closed. The tremblings intensified and became a series of spasmodic jerks. Gini held her hand and averted her face.
The room on rue St. Séverin was a terrible place. In a space twelve feet square was crammed a double bed, a table and chairs, boxes, piles of clothes, a huge television set. It smelled of poverty and an attempt to make a home without means; from the restaurants below, cooking smells drifted up. Two women lived here, Gini realized, Chantal and—presumably—the older woman who had answered the door to her the previous night. The remains of a breakfast lay on the table: two cups, two plates, some croissants and jam. On top of the unmade bed were two bundled nightdresses, one blue, one pink. The room was very cold, and smelled damp. An effort had been made to keep it clean. The dishes in the sink were neatly stacked. There was a cat-litter tray on the floor, and in a corner, half hidden behind a pile of cheap paperbacks, was a thin black cat. Curled up in a ball, on the bed, was a thin, timid lurcher dog. Gini bent to it and stroked its gray bristling fur. Then she turned to the windows. Through the net curtains she could just see the outline of the church. It was still raining; the thin light was already beginning to fade. She stared at the curtains and the church, because she could not bear to watch what was happening with Rowland behind her. “Help me,” Chantal was saying. “You have to help me. I’m spilling it. I can’t hold my hand steady… Christ. I burnt my hand.”
Gini glanced back, feeling sick. Chantal had made the solution; Gini could see the small plastic bag of white powder, the blue of the gas jet, the little square of aluminum foil. One moment Chantai had the syringe in her shaking hand; the next it had dropped. Gini saw it roll across the floor and come to rest by the cat tray. She averted her eyes.
She heard Rowland pick it up, then the suck as it was filled.
“The mirror…” Chantai said. “I have to stand in front of the mirror. Otherwise I fuck up.”
Gini heard Rowland move aside. There was silence. Rowland said, “Oh, Jesus Christ…”
Gini swung around. Chantal was facing the mirror, the syringe raised to her face. For an instant she couldn’t understand what was happening, then she realized. Chantai was injecting the heroin solution into her eye. She was holding her lower lid down with one hand while she inserted the needle with the other. The clear liquid in the syringe turned pink. Gini turned away, covering her face, and beginning to tremble. Rowland moved behind her; she felt his arms come around her shoulders. She twisted back to look at his grim, pale face.
“That can happen,” he said in a low voice. “They do that. When their veins are badly shot. Wait. She’ll be all right in a minute. Then she’ll probably sleep.”
“All right?” Gini stared at him. “She won’t be all right. How many hours before she needs another fix?”
“You think we’re going to cure her—here and now? Come on, Gini. If we hadn’t brought her here she’d have managed it some other way. And she’d have been in an even worse state.”
He stopped. Chantal gave a deep sigh. Gini, turning, saw that the trembling had stopped and a very faint color had returned to her face. She began speaking then, fast, in a low voice, addressing Rowland as if they were alone in the room.
“Look. I need to sleep, all right? I’ll be fine. My friend Jeanne will be back. I will kick this—in the end I will. She’s helping me. I’m careful. I’m careful what I buy. I don’t share needles. When Jeanne gets here—I’ll be all right.”
She swayed back against the sink and closed her eyes.
“You were pretty polite to me. I liked that. So—I’ll tell you. Star—I’ve known him half my life. He’s like me—a cross. Too many breeds, too many countries, too many homes, too many beatings and—so I’m fucked up, and he’s fucked up. That’s why. We’re both really fucked around in our heads…”
She dropped the syringe. Neither Rowland nor Gini spoke.
“And I don’t know where he is. I swear to you—somewhere in Paris, but I don’t know where. I saw him last night. He told me he was alone, but he—he lies a lot, and if that girl is with him, he’ll hide her. That’s what he does. You don’t need to worry too much. She’s probably okay. He’ll just give her some grass, talk to her—maybe a few pills. That’s okay—he always has good stuff. He won’t fuck her or rape her, you don’t need to worry about that…” She gave a low laugh, then stopped and opened her eyes. She was focusing now, better than before; she raised her hand to her cheek.
“Only—you’d better know this, because what she said—” She gestured at Gini. “She was right. He can get angry. He gets these bad angers, really bad, like trips. And last night—I got him a gun. He wanted a gun, he’s been wanting one for months, and he had the money and I had the contacts, so I fixed it for him. He collected it last night, just before you came knocking at the door.” She turned her face toward Gini. “It was you, right?”
“Yes, it was.” She felt Rowland tense, as she did. “What kind of gun, Chantal?”
“I don’t know. Just a gun. He told me he wanted it—I got it. He showed me some pictures, made me write down the name.”
“A handgun?” Rowland said.
“Yes. Small. Some special ammunition stuff. It’s no use looking. I wrote the name down on a piece of paper. I threw it away weeks ago. It was German—no, maybe Italian.”
“Why would he want a gun?” Rowland moved toward her. Her eyes had closed again.
“I don’t know. He likes guns. Always did. He gets off on them, just looking at pictures of them. It was expensive—I know that. Nearly four thousand francs… Serious. That’s what he said. It was a serious gun. Only then”—she swayed again—“only then—I don’t know. The TV was on in the corner while we talked—and then he suddenly got this look on his face. There’s a look he gets—in the eyes. He had it before he did this to me…” She touched the scar on her face. “So maybe, it’s not so good for that girl. I don’t know. Look—I have to lie down.”
She stumbled across the room to the bed and lay down, eyes tightly shut. Rowland looked at Gini, then bent over the bed.
“Chantal. Just try to stay awake. Can you hear me? Does he have a name, a name other than Star? What was he called when you first met him?”
He broke off and stepped back. There was the sound of footsteps running up the stairs, then the door was thrown back. The woman Gini had spoken to the previous evening came into the room, her face pale with fear. She stopped, looked at them both, then pushed past them and knelt down by the bed.
She took Chantal in her arms and began to stroke her hair, talking to her all the while in a low, crooning voice. When she swung back to look at them, there was no mistaking the love and the anger in her face. “How long did they keep her there? Those animals?”
She spoke in French, and Rowland answered her in the same language: “About an hour, maybe more,” he said.
The woman burst into a stream of angry accusations, directed at the police, them, the world.
“Jeanne, wait.” Chantal attempted to sit up, then fell back. “He’s okay. He helped me. I can’t talk. They need to know about Star. Just tell them his name, explain, all right?”
She closed her eyes again and seemed to drift off into some state close to sleep. The woman called Jeanne rose. In heavily accented English she spat out her explanation.
Star was to blame for all this. It was he who first got Chantal on to heroin, he who ruined her face. And Star was just one of his names—the latest he’d selected and the one he now liked the best. He had numerous surnames she could offer them, she said with scorn in her voice: Lamont, Lacroix, Newman, D’Amico, Rivière, Adams, Dumas—they could take their pick. When it came to first names they had a choice of two. He occasionally used the English version of his name, but he preferred the French. This past year he’d been claiming it was his true name, the name on his birth certificate—she doubted he had such a thing, but for what it was worth, the name was Christophe.