“Of course you would. I don’t know why Belinda hasn’t realized that. I’d have to silence you first, and that would be quite impossible without resorting to barbaric measures.”
Fleur thought of Jake with his blazing Colts and ready fists. Jake, who was so much more civilized than the old man sitting in front of her. She took a chair across from him and wished he’d turn on the desk lamp so she could see his expression more clearly. “You’ve never had any intention of locking her up.”
“From the beginning, you’ve been a worthy opponent. I expected you to discover the fire in the basement, but substituting the dresses was quite clever.”
“When you’ve been around a snake long enough, you learn how to crawl in the dirt. Tell me what you want.”
“How very American you’ve grown. Blunt and vulgar. No patience for nuance. It must be the influence of those crude friends with whom you keep company.”
A chill crept through her. Was he talking about Kissy? Michel? Or was it Jake…? Alarms shrieked inside her. She had to keep her relationship with Jake tucked safely away, well hidden from Alexi’s ruthless calculations. He surely knew Jake had lived in her attic. Maybe he even knew about her trip to his house. But he had no way of knowing she’d fallen back in love with him.
She crossed her legs and launched her counterattack. “I’m happy with my friends. Especially my brother. You made a disastrous mistake, you know. Michel is an extraordinary talent, and he has a brilliant career ahead of him. Admittedly he’s bad at business, but I’m very good at business, and I’ve made sure his money is tucked safely away.”
“A dress designer,” Alexi said contemptuously. “How can he hold up his head?”
She laughed. “Believe me, with the entire city courting him, he doesn’t have any trouble. It’s funny. He’s so much like you. The way he carries himself, his walk, his mannerisms—they all come from you. He even has your habit of looking at someone he doesn’t like with his eyes narrowed and his brow lifted. You can practically see the person shrink. It’s very intimidating. Of course, he also has the humanity that you lack, which makes him a far more powerful person.”
“Michel is a tapette!”
“And your mind is too small to see beyond that.” She heard his sharp intake of breath and concentrated on keeping her gaze even with his. “Poor Alexi. Maybe sometime I’ll be able to pity you.”
He slammed his hand down on the desk. “Do you feel any remorse for what you did? Any shame for destroying an object of such remarkable beauty?”
“The Bugatti was a work of art, and it’s sad that it no longer exists. But that’s not really what you’re asking, is it? You want to know if I’m sorry.” She pressed her fingers into the beadwork on her skirt. Alexi leaned slightly forward, and she heard the soft creak of leather as he shifted his weight. “Not ever,” she said. “Not for one moment have I ever been sorry.” The beads bit into her fingers. “You declared yourself the emperor of your own private kingdom, a man who’s above the law, just like Belinda’s movie stars. But nobody is above the laws of decency, and people who try to crush others should be punished. What you did to me was horrible, and I punished you. It’s as simple as that. You can threaten Belinda and keep on trying to ruin my business, but you’ll never make me regret what I did.”
“I’ll destroy you.”
“I think I’ve grown too strong for that, but if I’ve miscalculated—if you somehow manage to destroy my business—then so be it. I still won’t regret what I did. You don’t have any more power over me.”
The chair screeched as Alexi settled back into its depths. “I said I would destroy your dream, chérie, and that is what I intend to do. The score will finally be even between us.”
“You’re bluffing. There’s nothing you can do to hurt me.”
“I never bluff.” He slid a small envelope across the desktop. She looked at it for a moment. A chill passed through her. She reached out to take it. “A keepsake,” he said.
She slit open the envelope, and a battered piece of metal fell into her lap. The letters embossed upon it were still visible: BUGATTI. It was the red metal oval from the front of the Royale.
He pushed something else across the desk. In the dim light, it took a moment before she saw what it was. Her blood froze.
“A dream for a dream, chérie.”
It was a tabloid newspaper—an American paper with that day’s date—and the headline leaped out at her:
NEW KORANDA BIO REVEALS CRACK-UP
“No.” She shook her head, willing the ugly words to disappear, even as her eyes skimmed the sentences.
Actor/playwright Jake Koranda, best known for playing the renegade cowboy Bird Dog Caliber, suffered a nervous breakdown while serving in the United States Army in Vietnam…Fleur Savagar, the actor’s literary agent and recent companion, revealed in a press release today that Koranda was hospitalized for post-traumatic stress syndrome…
According to Savagar, details of the breakdown will be revealed in the actor’s new autobiography…“Jake has been honest about his emotional and psychological problems,” Savagar said, “and I’m certain the public will respect him for that honesty and look upon his terrible experience with compassion and pity.”
Fleur could read no further. There were photographs—one of Jake as Bird Dog, another of the two of them running in the park, a third of her alone, with a sidebar bearing the headline, GLITTER BABY SCORES BIG AS AGENT FOR THE STARS. She put the tabloid on the desk and slowly stood up. The battered Bugatti oval fell to the carpet.
“I have been patient for seven years,” Alexi whispered from across the desk. “Now the score is settled. Now you, too, have lost what you care about most. It wasn’t your business that was the real dream, was it, chérie?”
Her heart contracted into a small mass of frozen tissue that would never again pulse with life. All this time she’d thought it was the agency he was after, but Alexi had known better. He’d known from the beginning that Jake was as elemental to her as food and water. Jake was the dream.
But something inside her refused to give Alexi his victory. “Jake will never believe this,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper, but calm, as calm as the center of a storm.
“He’s a man accustomed to the betrayal of women,” Alexi replied. “He’ll believe it.”
“How did you do this? Jake and I destroyed the book together.”
“I’m told there was a man with a special camera watching the house. Such things have been possible for years.”
“You’re lying. The manuscript was never out of Jake’s—” She stopped. It had been. The morning Jake had come running after her…They’d gone for a walk on the beach. “Jake knows I’d never do anything like this.”
“Does he? He’s been betrayed before. And he knows how important your business is to you. You used his name before to gain publicity. He has no reason to believe you wouldn’t do it again.”
Every word he spoke was true, but she couldn’t let him see that. “You’ve lost,” she said. “You’ve underestimated Jake, and you’ve underestimated me.” She reached out quickly—so quickly that he couldn’t have anticipated it—and snapped on the desk lamp.
With a harsh exclamation, he jerked up his arm and sent the lamp smashing to the floor, where it rocked crazily from side to side, casting cruel, moving blades of light over him. He covered the side of his face, but he was too late. By then she’d already seen what he wanted to hide.
The slackness on the left side of his face was so subtle that someone who didn’t know him well might not have noticed. There was an extra fold of skin beneath his eye, a looseness in his cheek, the slightest dip at the corner of his mouth. Another person with the same malady might have given it little thought, but for a proud man obsessed with perfection, even so slight an imperfection was intolerable. She understood—she even felt a flash of pity—but she pushed it aside. “Now your face is as ugly as your soul.”
“Bitch! Sale garce!” H
e tried to kick at the lamp, but his left side wasn’t as responsive as his right, and he only succeeded in knocking away the shade so the rocking light flashed more brutally across his face.
“You’ve made a fatal mistake,” she said. “Jake and I love each other in a way you can never comprehend because you don’t have a heart. All you feel is the need to control. If you understood about love and trust, you’d know that all your schemes and all your plots aren’t worth anything. Jake trusts me with his life, and he’ll never believe this.”
“No!” he cried. “I’ve beaten you!” The weak side of his face began to quiver, as she saw the first flicker of doubt.
“You’ve lost,” she replied. And then she turned her back on him and left the library. She walked down the icy hallway to the front door and stepped out into the cold, clear February night.
Her limousine was gone—Alexi had planned to keep her here—but she wouldn’t reenter the house. She walked down the drive toward the gates that led to the street. Every word she’d spoken to Alexi was a lie. He’d calculated correctly. She could try to explain it to Jake. She would try. He might even believe Alexi was responsible. But he’d still blame her. Exposure was Jake’s deepest fear, and this was something he’d never forgive.
A dream for a dream. Alexi had finally beaten her.
He stood at the library window, the fingers of his right hand clutching the edge of the drapery, and watched her tall, straight figure grow smaller as she disappeared down the drive. It was a cold night, and she wasn’t wearing a coat, but she didn’t huddle into the chill, or hug her arms, or in any way acknowledge the temperature. She was magnificent.
The leafless branches of the old chestnuts formed a skeletal cathedral over her head. He remembered how the trees looked when they were in blossom and how—years before—another woman had disappeared down that same drive into those blossoms. Neither woman had been worthy of him. Both had betrayed him. Yet, even so, he had loved them.
A great sense of desolation filled him. For seven years, he’d been obsessed with Fleur, and now it was over. He no longer knew how he would fill his days. His assistants were well trained to handle his business affairs, and his hideous facial deformity kept him from ever again appearing in public.
A dull ache throbbed in his left shoulder, and he kneaded it with his hand. Her walk was so straight and proud, and tiny fires glittered on her dress as the beads caught the lamplights. The Glitter Baby. She lifted her arm, and something fell to the ground. He was too far away to see what it was, but, even so, he knew. As clearly as if she’d been standing next to him, he knew exactly what she’d thrown away. A white rose.
It was then that the pain hit him.
Belinda found him on the library floor next to the window, his body curled into a comma. “Alexi?” She knelt beside him, speaking his name softly because his henchmen weren’t far away, and she wasn’t supposed to be in here.
“B-Belinda?” His voice was thick and slurred. She picked up his head to cradle it in the lap of her saffron robe and gave a startled cry as she saw that the side of his face was grotesquely twisted.
“Oh, Alexi…” She pulled him to her. “My poor, poor Alexi. What’s happened to you?”
“Help me. Help—” His agonized whisper horrified her. She wanted to tell him to stop talking like that this very minute. She felt a damp spot on her thigh and saw that saliva had leaked from the side of his mouth through her robe. It was too much. She wanted to run away. Instead she thought of Fleur.
His mouth worked to form the words. “G-get help. I—I need help.”
“Hush…Save your strength. Don’t try to talk.”
“Please…”
“Rest, my darling.” His suit coat gaped and one of the lapels was turned under. They’d been married for twenty-seven years, and she’d never seen his suit coat untidy. She straightened the lapel.
“H-help me.”
She gazed down at him. “Don’t try to talk, my darling. Just rest. I won’t leave you. I’ll hold you until you don’t need me any longer.”
She could see the fear in his eyes then, at first the merest spark. Gradually it grew more intense until she knew he finally understood. She stroked his thin hair with the tips of her trembling fingers. “My poor darling,” she said. “My poor, poor darling. I loved you, you know. You’re the only one who ever really understood me. If only you hadn’t taken my baby away.”
“Do not—do this. I beg you—” The muscles in his right side tensed, but he was too weak to lift his arm. His lips had a blue tinge, and his breathing grew more labored. She didn’t want him to suffer, and she tried to think how to comfort him. Finally she opened her robe and cradled him to her bare breast.
Eventually he grew still. As she gazed down at the face of the man who had shaped her life, a pair of tears perfectly balanced themselves on the bottom lashes of her incomparable hyacinth-blue eyes. “Good-bye, my darling.”
Jake felt as if all the air had been knocked out of him. A basketball whizzed past his arm and bounced into the empty bleachers, but he couldn’t move. Even the noises of the game going on behind him faded away. Cold seeped through the sweat-drenched jersey into his bones, and he struggled for breath.
“Jake, I’m sorry.” His secretary stood with him at the side of the court, her face pale, her forehead knitted with concern. “I—I knew you’d want to see it right away. The phones are ringing off the wall. We’ll have to issue a statement—”
He crushed the newspaper in his fist and pushed past her. He headed for the scarred wooden door. The sound of his breathing echoed off the chipped plaster walls of the L.A. gym as he fled down the steps to the empty locker room. He shoved his legs into his jeans over his shorts, grabbed a shirt, and raced from the old brick building where he’d played basketball on and off for ten years. As the door slammed behind him, he knew he’d never be back.
The Jag’s tires squealed as he peeled out of the parking lot into the street. He’d buy up all the newspapers. Every copy. He’d send planes all over the country to every store, every newsstand in the universe. He’d buy them and burn them and—
A fire engine shrieked in the distance. He remembered the day he’d come home and found Liz. Then he’d been able to fight. He’d smashed his fist into that bastard’s face until his knuckles bled. He remembered the way Liz’s arms had felt as she fell to her knees and clutched his legs, wrapping her arms around them like a movie poster from A Hatful of Rain. She’d cried and begged him to forgive her while that poor bastard lay on the linoleum floor with his pants around his ankles and his nose pushed to the side of his face. When Liz had betrayed him, he’d had a target for his rage.
Sweat dripped into his eyes. He blinked it away. He’d written the book for Fleur, spilled out his guts…
He clutched the steering wheel and tasted gunmetal in the back of his mouth. The taste of fear. Cold metal fear.
Chapter 29
Belinda gazed at the suitcase that lay open on Fleur’s bed as if she’d never before seen one. “You can’t leave me now, baby. I need you.”
Fleur struggled to hold herself together. Only a few more hours, and she’d be away from this house forever. Only a few more hours, and she could lick her wounds in private. “The funeral was a week ago,” she said, “and you’re doing just fine.”
Belinda lit another cigarette.
The burden of dealing with Alexi’s death had fallen entirely on Fleur’s shoulders. A massive stroke, the doctor had said. One of Alexi’s assistants had found him lying on the library floor next to the front window. He’d apparently collapsed not long after she’d left him, and Fleur couldn’t help but wonder if he’d been standing there watching her when it happened. His death left her feeling neither triumph nor grief, only the knowledge that a powerful force had disappeared from her life.
Michel wouldn’t fly over for the funeral. “I can’t do it,” he’d told her during one of their daily phone calls. “I know it’s not fair to you, but I can??
?t pretend to mourn him, and I can’t handle Belinda looking at me with those calf eyes now that people know my name.”
Fleur decided it was for the best. She needed all her energy to deal with the arrangements, and the added tension of Michel and Belinda’s strained relationship would only make things more difficult.
Belinda blew a thin ribbon of smoke. “You know all this legal nonsense makes my head spin. I can’t cope.”
“You won’t have to. I told you that. David Bennis is going to work with Alexi’s staff. He’ll be able to handle everything from New York.”
Making Alexi’s assistants understand they were now taking orders from her had been one more challenge she’d faced and won. But she still had to deal with Belinda’s neediness and the way her own stomach lurched every time she received a phone call.
“I want you to handle my business affairs, not some stranger.” Fleur didn’t respond, and Belinda’s mouth formed the same pout she’d launched in her daughter’s direction a dozen times over the past week when she didn’t get her way. “I hate this house. I can’t spend the night here.”
“Then move to a hotel.”
“You’re cold, Fleur. You’ve gotten very cold with me. And I don’t like the way you’ve shut me out. All these stories about Jake in Vietnam…I had to read about it in the newspaper. I’m sure you’ve talked to him, but you won’t tell me a thing.”
Fleur hadn’t talked to him. Jake refused to take her calls. A fresh stab of pain pierced her heart as she remembered the efficient voice of his secretary on the other end of the line. “I’m sorry, Miss Savagar, but I don’t know where he is…No, he hasn’t left any messages for you.”
Fleur had tried both his house in California and his place in New York to no avail. She’d contacted his secretary again, and this time she’d met open hostility. “Haven’t you done enough harm? He’s being hounded by reporters. Why don’t you get the message? He doesn’t want to talk to you.”