"No."
"Have you been waiting long?"
"Long enough."
"I don't normally leave beautiful women waiting."
"Yes you do."
She knew him already: two minutes in his presence was enough to find his measure. He would come quickest to her if she was quietly insolent.
"Do you always call women you've never met before by their initials?"
"It's convenient for filing; do you mind?"
"It depends."
"On what?"
"What I get in return for giving you the privilege."
"It's a privilege, is it, to know your name?"
"Yes."
"Well… I'm flattered. Unless of course you grant that privilege widely?"
She shook her head. No, he could see she wasn't profligate with her affections.
"Why have you waited so long to see me?" he said. "Why have I had reports of your wearing my secretaries down with your constant demands to meet with me? Do you want money? Because if you do you'll go away empty handed. I became rich by being mean, and the richer I get, the meaner I become."
The remark was truth; he spoke it plainly.
"I don't want money," she said, equally plainly.
"That's refreshing."
"There's richer than you."
He raised his eyebrows in surprise. She could bite, this beauty.
"True," he said. There were at least half a dozen richer men in the hemisphere.
"I'm not an adoring little nobody. I haven't come here to screw a name. I've come here because we can be together. We have a great deal to offer each other."
"Such as?" he said.
"I have my body."
He smiled. It was the straightest offer he'd heard in years.
"And what do I offer you in return for such largesse?"
"I want to learn -”
"Learn?"
"- how to use power."
She was stranger and stranger, this one.
"What do you mean?" he replied, playing for time. He hadn't got the measure of her; she vexed him, confounded him.
"Shall I recite it for you again, in bourgeois?" she said, playing insolence with such a smile he almost felt attractive again.
"No need. You want to learn to use power. I suppose I could teach you -”
"I know you can."
"You realize I'm a married man. Virginia and I have been together eighteen years."
"You have three sons, four houses, a maid-servant called Mirabelle. You loathe New York, and you love Bangkok; your shirt collar is 161/2, your favourite colour green."
"Turquoise."
"You're getting subtler in your old age."
"I'm not old."
"Eighteen years a married man. It ages you prematurely."
"Not me."
"Prove it."
"How?"
"Take me."
"What?"
"Take me."
"Here?"
"Draw the blinds, lock the door, turn off the computer terminal, and take me. I dare you."
"Dare?"
How long was it since anyone had dared him to do anything?
"Dare?"
He was excited. He hadn't been so excited in a dozen years. He drew the blinds, locked the door, turned off the video display of his fortunes.
My God, she thought, I've got him.
It wasn't an easy passion, not like that with Vassi. For one thing, Pettifer was a clumsy, uncultured lover. For another, he was too nervous of his wife to be a wholly successful adulterer. He thought he saw Virginia everywhere: in the lobbies of the hotels they took a room in for the afternoon, in cabs cruising the street outside their rendezvous, once even (he swore the likeness was exact) dressed as a waitress, and swabbing down a table in a restaurant. All fictional fears, but they dampened the spontaneity of the romance somewhat.
Still, she was learning from him. He was as brilliant a potentate as he was inept a lover. She learned how to be powerful without exercising power, how to keep one's self uncontaminated by the foulness all charisma stirs up in the uncharismatic; how to make the plain decisions plainly; how to be merciless. Not that she needed much education in that particular quarter. Perhaps it was more truthful to say he taught her never to regret her absence of instinctive compassion, but to judge with her intellect alone who deserved extinction and who might be numbered amongst the righteous.
Not once did she show herself to him, though she used her skills in the most secret of ways to tease pleasure out of his stale nerves.
In the fourth week of their affair they were lying side by side in a lilac room, while the mid-afternoon traffic growled in the street below. It had been a bad bout of sex; he was nervous, and no tricks would coax him out of himself. It was over quickly, almost without heat.
He was going to tell her something. She knew it: it was waiting, this revelation, somewhere at the back of his throat. Turning to him she massaged his temples with her mind, and soothed him into speech.
He was about to spoil the day.
He was about to spoil his career.
He was about, God help him, to spoil his life.
"I have to stop seeing you," he said.
He wouldn't dare, she thought.
"I'm not sure what I know about you, or rather, what I think I know about you, but it makes me… cautious of you, J. Do you understand?"
"No."
"I'm afraid I suspect you of… crimes."
"Crimes?"
"You have a history."
"Who's been rooting?" she asked. "Surely not Virginia?"
"No, not Virginia, she's beyond curiosity."
"Who then?"
"It's not your business."
"Who?"
She pressed lightly on his temples. It hurt him and he winced.
"What's wrong?" she asked.
"My head's aching."
"Tension, that's all, just tension. I can take it away, Titus." She touched her fingers to his forehead, relaxing her hold on him. He sighed as relief came.
"Is that better?"
"Yes."
"Who's been snooping, Titus?"
"I have a personal secretary. Lyndon. You've heard me speak of him. He knew about our relationship from the beginning. Indeed, he books the hotels, arranges my cover stories for Virginia."
There was a sort of boyishness in this speech, that was rather touching. As though he was embarrassed to leave her, rather than heartbroken. "Lyndon's quite a miracle-worker. He's maneuvered a lot of things to make it easier between us. So he's got nothing against you. It's just that he happened to see one of the photographs I took of you. I gave them to him to shred."
"Why?"
"I shouldn't have taken them; it was a mistake. Virginia might have…" He paused, began again. "Anyhow, he recognized you, although he couldn't remember where he'd seen you before."
"But he remembered eventually."
"He used to work for one of my newspapers, as a gossip columnist. That's how he came to be my personal assistant. He remembered you from your previous incarnation, as it were. Jacqueline Ess, the wife of Benjamin Ess, deceased."
"Deceased."
"He brought me some other photographs, not as pretty as the ones of you."
"Photographs of what?"
"Your home. And the body of your husband. They said it was a body, though in God's name there was precious little human being left in it."
"There was precious little to start with," she said simply, thinking of Ben's cold eyes, and colder hands. Fit only to be shut up, and forgotten.
"What happened?"
"To Ben? He was killed."
"How?" Did his voice waver a little?
"Very easily." She had risen from the bed, and was standing by the window. Strong summer light carved its way through the slats of the blind, ridges of shadow and sunlight charting the contours of her face.
"You did it."
"Yes." He had taught her to be plain. "Yes, I did it."
>
He had taught her an economy of threat too. "Leave me, and I'll do the same again."
He shook his head. "Never. You wouldn't dare."
He was standing in front of her now.
"We must understand each other, J. I am powerful and I am pure. Do you see? My public face isn't even touched by a glimmer of scandal. I could afford a mistress, a dozen mistresses, to be revealed. But a murderess? No, that would spoil my life."
"Is he blackmailing you? This Lyndon?"
He stared at the day through the blinds, with a crippled look on his face. There was a twitch in the nerves of his cheek, under his left eye.
"Yes, if you must know," he said in a dead voice. "The bastard has me for all I'm worth."
"I see."
"And if he can guess, so can others. You understand?"
"I'm strong: you're strong. We can twist them around our little fingers."
"No."
"Yes! I have skills, Titus."
"I don't want to know."
"You will know," she said.
She looked at him, taking hold of his hands without touching him. He watched, all astonished eyes, as his unwilling hands were raised to touch her face, to stroke her hair with the fondest of gestures. She made him run his trembling fingers across her breasts, taking them with more ardour than he could summon on his own initiative. "You are always too tentative, Titus," she said, making him paw her almost to the point of bruising. "This is how I like it." Now his hands were lower, fetching out a different look from her face. Tides were moving over it, she was all alive -”Deeper -”
His finger intruded, his thumb stroked.
"I like that, Titus. Why can't you do that to me without me demanding?"
He blushed. He didn't like to talk about what they did together. She coaxed him deeper, whispering. "I won't break, you know. Virginia may be Dresden china, I'm not. I want feeling; I want something that I can remember you by when I'm not with you. Nothing is everlasting, is it? But I want something to keep me warm through the night."
He was sinking to his knees, his hands kept, by her design, on her and in her, still roving like two lustful crabs. His body was awash with sweat. It was, she thought, the first time she'd ever seen him sweat.
"Don't kill me," he whimpered.
"I could wipe you out." Wipe, she thought, then put the image out of her mind before she did him some harm. "I know. I know," he said. "You can kill me easily."
He was crying. My God, she thought, the great man is at my feet, sobbing like a baby. What can I learn of power from this puerile performance? She plucked the tears off his cheeks, using rather more strength than the task required. His skin reddened under her gaze.
"Let me be, J. I can't help you. I'm useless to you."
It was true. He was absolutely useless. Contemptuously, she let his hands go. They fell limply by his sides. "Don't ever try and find me, Titus. You understand? Don't ever send your minions after me to preserve your reputation, because I will be more merciless than you've ever been."
He said nothing; just knelt there, facing the window, while she washed her face, drank the coffee they'd ordered, and left.
Lyndon was surprised to find the door of his office ajar. It was only seven-thirty-six. None of the secretaries would be in for another hour. Clearly one of the cleaners had been remiss, leaving the door unlocked. He'd find out who: sack her.
He pushed the door open.
Jacqueline was sitting with her back to the door. He recognized the back of her head, that fall of auburn hair. A sluttish display; too teased, too wild. His office, an annex to Mr. Pettifer's, was kept meticulously ordered. He glanced over it: everything seemed to be in place.
"What are you doing here?"
She took a little breath, preparing herself.
This was the first time she had planned to do it. Before it had been a spur-of-the-moment decision. He was approaching the desk, and putting down his briefcase and his neatly-folded copy of the Financial Times. "You have no right to come in here without my permission," he said.
She turned on the lazy swivel of his chair; the way he did when he had people in to discipline. "Lyndon," she said.
"Nothing you can say or do will change the facts, Mrs Ess," he said, saving her the trouble of introducing the subject, “you are a cold-blooded killer. It was my bounden duty to inform Mr. Pettifer of the situation." "You did it for the good of Titus?"
"Of course."
"And the blackmail, that was also for the good of Titus, was it?"
"Get out of my office -”
"Was it, Lyndon?"
"You're a whore! Whores know nothing: they are ignorant, diseased animals," he spat. "Oh, you're cunning, I grant you that – but then so's any slut with a living to make."
She stood up. He expected a riposte. He got none; at least not verbally. But he felt a tautness across his face: as though someone was pressing on it.
"What… are… you… doing?" he said.
"Doing?"
His eyes were being forced into slits like a child imitating a monstrous Oriental, his mouth was hauled wide and tight, his smile brilliant. The words were difficult to say -”Stop…it…" She shook her head. "Whore…" he said again, still defying her. She just stared at him. His face was beginning to jerk and twitch under the pressure, the muscles going into spasm.
"The police…" he tried to say, “if you lay a finger on me…"
"I won't," she said, and pressed home her advantage. Beneath his clothes he felt the same tension all over his body, pulling his skin, drawing him tighter and tighter.
Something was going to give; he knew it. Some part of him would be weak, and tear under this relentless assault. And if he once began to break open, nothing would prevent her ripping him apart. He worked all this out quite coolly, while his body twitched and he swore at her through his enforced grin.
"Cunt," he said. "Syphilitic cunt."
He didn't seem to be afraid, she thought.
In extremis he just unleashed so much hatred of her, the fear was entirely eclipsed. Now he was calling her a whore again; though his face was distorted almost beyond recognition.
And then he began to split.
The tear began at the bridge of his nose and ran up, across his brow, and down, bisecting his lips and his chin, then his neck and chest. In a matter of seconds his shirt was dyed red, his dark suit darkening further, his cuffs and trouser-legs pouring blood. The skin flew off his hands like gloves off a surgeon, and two rings of scarlet tissue lolled down to either side of his flayed face like the ears of an elephant.
His name-calling had stopped.
He had been dead of shock now for ten seconds, though she was still working him over vengefully, tugging his skin off his body and flinging the scraps around the room, until at last he stood, steaming, in his red suit, and his red shirt, and his shiny red shoes, and looked, to her eyes, a little more like a sensitive man. Content with the effect, she released him. He lay down quietly in a blood puddle and slept.
My God, she thought, as she calmly took the stairs out the back way, that was murder in the first degree.
She saw no reports of the death in any of the papers, and nothing on the news bulletins. Lyndon had apparently died as he had lived, hidden from public view.
But she knew wheels, so big their hubs could not be seen by insignificant individuals like herself, would be moving. What they would do, how they would change her life, she could only guess at. But the murder of Lyndon had not simply been spite, though that had been a part of it. No, she'd also wanted to stir them up, her enemies in the world, and bring them after her. Let them show their hands: let them show their contempt, their terror. She'd gone through her life, it seemed, looking for a sign of herself, only able to define her nature by the look in others' eyes. Now she wanted an end to that. It was time to deal with her pursuers.
Surely now everyone who had seen her, Pettifer first, then Vassi, would come after her, and she would close their eyes per
manently: make them forgetful of her. Only then, the witnesses destroyed, would she be free. Pettifer didn't come, of course, not in person. It was easy for him to find agents, men without scruple or compassion, but with a nose for pursuit that would shame a bloodhound.
A trap was being laid for her, though she couldn't yet see its jaws. There were signs of it everywhere. An eruption of birds from behind a wall, a peculiar light from a distant window, footsteps, whistles, dark-suited men reading the news at the limit of her vision. As the weeks passed they didn't come any closer to her, but then neither did they go away. They waited, like cats in a tree, their tails twitching, their eyes lazy.
But the pursuit had Pettifer's mark. She'd learned enough from him to recognize his circumspection and his guile. They would come for her eventually, not in her time, but in theirs. Perhaps not even in theirs: in his. And though she never saw his face, it was as though Titus was on her heels personally.
My God, she thought, I'm in danger of my life and I don't care.
It was useless, this power over flesh, if it had no direction behind it. She had used it for her own petty reasons, for the gratification of nervous pleasure and sheer anger. But these displays hadn't brought her any closer to other people: they just made her a freak in their eyes.
Sometimes she thought of Vassi, and wondered where he was, what he was doing. He hadn't been a strong man, but he'd had a little passion in his soul. More than Ben, more than Pettifer, certainly more than Lyndon. And, she remembered, fondly, he was the only man she'd ever known who had called her Jacqueline. All the rest had manufactured unendearing corruptions of her name: Jackie, or J., or, in Ben's more irritating moods, Ju-ju. Only Vassi had called her Jacqueline, plain and simple, accepting, in his formal way, the completeness of her, the totality of her. And when she thought of him, tried to picture how he might return to her, she feared for him.
Vassi's Testimony (part two)
Of course I searched for her. It's only when you've lost someone that you realize the nonsense of that phrase 'it's a small world'. It isn't. It's a vast, devouring world, especially if you're alone. When I was a lawyer, locked in that incestuous coterie, I used to see the same faces day after day. Some I'd exchange words with, some smiles, some nods. We belonged, even if we were enemies at the Bar, to the same complacent circle. We ate at the same tables, we drank elbow to elbow. We even shared mistresses, though we didn't always know it at the time. In such circumstances, it's easy to believe the world means you no harm. Certainly you grow older, but then so does everyone else. You even believe, in your self-satisfied way, that the passage of years makes you a little wiser. Life is bearable; even the 3 a.m. sweats come more infrequently as the bank-balance swells. But to think that the world is harmless is to lie to yourself, to believe in so-called certainties that are, in fact, simply shared delusions.