The Spiral Path

by Mary Jo Putney

  He could do without clothes, but not a passport. She found her cell phone and punched in Josh's number, waiting impatiently through the English double rings. She was about to give up when he answered, sounding half asleep even though it was almost noon. He'd left the wrap party late, and had definitely had himself a good time.

  Not bothering with small talk, she said, "Josh, it's Raine. A hellacious tabloid scandal is breaking out--utter nonsense, but Kenzie has decided to fly to the States with me to get out of the firestorm. He's not coming back to the hotel because reporters might try to intercept him there, so pack his things as fast as you can, and bring them to the airport. If you think that will take too long, just bring his passport."

  Coming awake fast, Josh said, "I can do the packing, though his clothes will be wrinkled like crazy. I'll call a car now and be on my way in twenty minutes. London City Airport?"

  "Right--the one you and Kenzie flew into. And thanks, Josh."

  She shut off the phone and closed her eyes, shaking. Stone's highly public disclosure about Clementine was upsetting, but basically old news. The claims about Kenzie were inflammatory and dangerous, though. It was the sort of sex scandal the tabloids loved most--a famous man with a good reputation accused of breathtakingly sordid behavior.

  What could be done to kill this in its cradle? If Stone had evidence of his charges, nothing could save Kenzie. If he didn't have proof, though, maybe the story could be spiked before anyone took it seriously.

  Though Kenzie's friends had started damage control, heavier guns must be brought to bear as quickly as possible. From what Pamela Lake had said, Stone was disliked even by his colleagues. If he couldn't document his claims, they'd turn on him like jackals ripping apart a wounded member of the pack.

  Time to summon the publicists. Though part of a publicist's job was getting attention for clients, equally important was scotching negative stories. Chloe, the smart, experienced unit publicist who'd worked on The Centurion set, was based in London. She must be called before the plane took off so Chloe could use her local media contacts to undercut Stone's reports.

  Next call: Barbara Rifkin, personal publicist for both Kenzie and Rainey. Barb was tops in her field, with some of the biggest stars in the business among her clients, and the protective instincts of a tigress. An entertainment reporter who ran a story that Barb didn't like risked never getting another interview with any of Barb's clients.

  Then alert Naomi and Marcus Gordon. They also had tremendous influence in Hollywood. A lot of people owed the Gordons favors, and God willing, they'd use their clout on Kenzie's behalf.

  Rainey glanced at her watch. It was the middle of the night in California, so she'd hold off calling Barb and Marcus until a more civilized hour. As she looked up the private number of the unit publicist, she mentally rehearsed what she'd say. Outrageous charges by a reporter known for his malice. Complete nonsense. Make it go away.

  If Nigel Stone could prove his story, she'd look like a gullible fool.

  The phone rang in her hand, blasting adrenaline through her system. She raised it. "Yes?"

  "Raine, Pamela Lake here. Is Kenzie Scott with you?"

  Rainey stared at the phone. "How did you get this number?"

  "You gave it to me."

  "Oh, of course." Remembering that she mustn't sound too concerned, she continued, "It's been such an exciting half hour that my wits are a bit scattered. Kenzie is here. Were you covering Charles Winfield's memorial service?"

  "Yes, but I was off to one side interviewing the man who directed Winfield's last performance. Too far away to be part of the riot." Pamela's voice was sympathetic. "Kenzie didn't respond to Nigel Stone's charges. Does he want to make a statement now?"

  Kenzie was in no shape to speak to anyone. "Of course he didn't reply--he'd just been yanked from grieving for one of his oldest friends by a journalistic ambush. Let me check if he's willing to talk to you."

  Covering the phone with one hand but not enough to completely block sounds, she dropped her voice as low as it would go and muttered a string of barely intelligible curses. Reverting to normal, she said, "If that's all you have to say, Kenzie, you'd better not say it." Speaking to Pamela again, she said lightly, "His comments on Nigel Stone's accusation aren't fit to be printed in a family newspaper."

  The reporter chuckled. "That bad?"

  Rainey lowered her voice confidentially. "Usually Kenzie lets these wild stories roll off like water from a duck's back, but this time he's completely exasperated. You know how reasonable he is. He understands that reporters need to make a living, and he'll always allow pictures and give comments when he's interviewed in public. The stories he's made up about his past have been a way to provide copy while maintaining his privacy. Don't you think he's entitled to that?"

  "I do, though not all reporters agree with me." Pamela paused, probably taking notes. "Is it fair to say that he denies Nigel Stone's story?"

  "A loose translation of his statement is that sensationalist rubbish shouldn't be dignified by an answer." Her voice lowered. "My personal, off-the-record opinion is that Nigel Stone was inspired to this lunacy by one of the plot threads of The Centurion." Any entertainment reporter who tried to read Sherbourne's original novel to figure out what that meant would be bogged down for days. Victorians wrote long and heavy.

  "Kenzie is probably wise to avoid a slanging match over this," Pamela agreed. "Can't imagine what dear Nigel is going to produce as proof."

  "Did Stone give any hints about that?"

  "He claims Kenzie was born in London and named James Mackenzie, and he has a birth certificate to prove it."

  "I'm sure he could produce the Prince of Wales's birth certificate if he wanted to, but that wouldn't put Kenzie in line for the throne," Rainey said dryly. "There are a whole lot of boy babies born in Britain every year. A birth certificate proves nothing."

  "My thoughts exactly." Pamela's tone changed. "Are you really Clementine's daughter?"

  "Yes. As I told Nigel Stone, it's not a secret. I simply decided that I didn't want to trade on either her fame, or her tragedy." Nor did she want the pain that always followed discussing her mother.

  "I grew up listening to Clementine's records," Pamela said nostalgically. "'Heart Over Heels' got me through more than one broken romance when I was single. She really conveyed the pain of loving, but also hope for the future. I cried for days when she died. I think she was the greatest female rock singer ever."

  "I agree, but I'm not exactly impartial."

  Pamela's manner turned professional again. "While we're on difficult subjects, are you still saying there's no reconciliation in the wind between you and Kenzie? The two of you looked very much together this morning."

  Rainey hesitated. She was already using the reporter, and she didn't want to lie any more than necessary to a woman who had been decent and helpful. "The honest truth is that I don't know what's happening, Pamela. If there should be any dramatic announcements in this area, I promise I'll call you first. But don't hold your breath."

  "Fair enough. Good luck at making a getaway."

  Rainey said good-bye, then called Chloe, the unit publicist. After going through her prepared spiel and securing Chloe's fervent cooperation, Rainey turned off the phone, unable to bear talking to anyone else, even Val. The rest of the drive to the airport was in silence. Kenzie stared blankly out the window, nearly catatonic.

  With nothing to distract her, questions about Kenzie's past circled compulsively through her mind. Could his intense secrecy be because he really had been a gay hustler? Every fiber of her body protested that it couldn't be true. The passion between them couldn't possibly have been faked, not for almost four years. While it was theoretically possible he was bisexual, she'd never seen him show a hint of interest in another man. He'd always behaved like a straight male who was entirely comfortable with his own sexuality.

  Yet even if Nigel Stone had lied, there had to be some connection to Kenzie's mysterious past. Kenz
ie's reaction was so violent.

  Could poverty have driven him to turning tricks to survive? She supposed it was possible. She even wanted to believe it, but the idea just didn't ring true. Kenzie would have found some other way to survive poverty.

  How would she feel if it turned out that Kenzie really was bisexual? Starkly she recognized that she didn't want it to be true. She had plenty of gay friends, had worked with gay and bi people and never thought twice about what they did on their own time. This was ... different.

  Reluctantly she acknowledged that if Kenzie was attracted to men as well as women, it would explain his conviction that he shouldn't have married her, and would never marry again. It also explained his reaction to playing Randall, a man ambivalent about his feelings for another man.

  Perhaps Kenzie had been so caught up in the white heat of their early affair that he thought he'd be straight forever, only to realize later that he'd been wrong. Maybe drifting into a meaningless affair and letting Rainey be the one to leave was his way of letting her down as gently as possible.

  It was all horribly logical.

  She wrapped her arms around herself, shaking. She didn't think that anything could stop her caring for him, but dear God, she didn't want this to be true!

  * * *

  CHAPTER 31

  Awareness returned in sluggish fits and starts. Vibration surrounded him. An airplane, he decided.

  Hazily he reconstructed what happened after Nigel Stone had tossed his bombshell. Thinking of Charles, assuming Stone was no longer a threat, he'd been caught completely off-guard. His brain had splintered, leaving him as paralyzed as he'd been when starting school and a teacher demanded answers he couldn't give. As an adult, he'd learned enough clever, self-deprecating sound bites that he was almost always able to give a ready reply. Not this time.

  Luckily, Rainey's brain didn't crash the way his did. She'd responded beautifully, then taken him away before his disintegration was public. His memories of what followed were fragmentary. His friends rallying to confuse the issue. Honest, incorruptible Rainey lying like a trouper on the phone. Boarding the jet. Josh arriving with his luggage, panting and unshaven, but still efficient.

  Those events seemed so distant they might have happened to someone else. The encounter with Nigel Stone was different--the moment when the reporter smashed the fragile, blown-glass illusion that had been Kenzie Scott was acid etched in his brain.

  He rubbed his aching head. Rainey had given him some kind of pill, which had seemed like a good idea at the time. In retrospect he regretted it; medications always left him dazed and disoriented.

  "Returning to the real world?" Rainey's quiet voice asked.

  "Only because I can't think of an alternative." Wearily he swung his feet to the floor and buried his face in his hands. He'd removed his jacket and tie and kicked off his shoes before crashing, but he still wore his formal white shirt and dark suit trousers. James Bond after a bender.

  Across the cabin, Rainey was curled up in a deep seat with a book in her lap. She'd changed from her tailored suit to silk slacks and a tunic, but the bruised shadows below her eyes revealed how much she was suffering.

  He stood and made his way to the well-stocked bar in the main cabin. The damned airplane looked like the same one they'd flown home in after The Pimpernel, at the start of the purest happiness of his life. The irony of being in the same plane now was too heavy to miss.

  He poured a triple shot of scotch into a glass. Not a single malt, but he wasn't feeling picky.

  Rainey followed him, trying to sound casual when she said, "Drinking might not be a good idea after taking a tranquilizer."

  He knocked back a third of the whisky. "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

  She sighed. "Then I'll have to hope the amount of time that's passed will save you from yourself."

  He dropped into one of the wide leather seats. Where the hell did he go from here? For that matter, where the hell were they? Light showed outside the window, but since they were following the sun westward, that would be true for a long time to come. "Where are we?"

  "About an hour east of New York." She took one of the facing seats. "I had the pilot change the flight plan from Los Angeles to New Mexico. I thought Cibola would be a lot more peaceful than California."

  Rainey was a genius. The thought of the secluded ranch was like a beacon in endless night. A place where he could hide from the world forever.

  He swallowed more scotch. Alcohol, one of the oldest and most disreputable of crutches. He'd worry about the wisdom of it later. "Your restraint in not asking questions is impressive."

  "I figure you'll tell what you want me to know when you're ready to talk about it. If you ever are." She hesitated, then said slowly, "One possibility that occurred to me is that you were a runaway teenager who turned some tricks to keep from starving. A lot of kids do that. The lucky ones escape."

  He closed his eyes, drifting in limbo, so detached that the horrors of his childhood seemed to belong to someone else. That made it easier to speak, since Rainey deserved to know the truth. "Not a bad guess, but more charitable than I deserve. I was exactly what Nigel Stone claims: a gay whore."

  After a long silence, she asked, "For how long?"

  "Five years. From age seven to age twelve."

  She gasped. "Dear God, that isn't prostitution--it's child molestation! How did it happen?"

  "My mother was born somewhere in rural Scotland. Around age seventeen, she ran off to London. She might have been pregnant already, or maybe that came later. There's a lot I don't know about her."

  "Do you know who your father was?"

  "Haven't the foggiest."

  She laughed without humor. "Something we have in common."

  "Among other disasters we both suffered." He finished his first drink and went for another, this time filling the glass with ice first.

  As he took his seat again, she said, "I've never seen you drink so much."

  "If the plane were equipped for it, I'd run the alcohol directly into my veins." He pressed the icy highball glass against his forehead, remembering his mother. She'd been tall, dark-haired, and green-eyed. Beautiful, and terribly, terribly fragile. "My mother called herself Maggie Mackenzie, though I suspect that wasn't her real name. Since I look quite like her, only God knows what paternal genes might have been involved."

  "So Nigel Stone's birth certificate for James Mackenzie is legitimate?"

  "Probably."

  "You said there was no evidence tying you to Stone's accusations."

  "He can't prove I'm the person listed on the certificate. There isn't a shred of documentation on me from the time Jamie Mackenzie was seven and dropped out of a London council school, and when Kenzie Scott started at RADA eleven years later. I didn't exist." He didn't really now. His whole life had been smoke and mirrors.

  "How did you go from being the child of a single mother to..." Her voice faltered. "...to prostitution, then studying at the world's most famous drama school?"

  "Whoring was the family business. My mother didn't have any other skills," he said bluntly. "She raised me the best she knew how, even after I started school and the teachers told her I was retarded. Of course, by then she was hooked on drugs so maybe she simply didn't care that I was hopeless. Drugs are expensive, and there was only one way she could afford them. She had a pimp boyfriend called Rock. He supplied her with drugs, took her money, and beat her up. When I was seven, I think one of the drugs he supplied must have been contaminated or more potent than usual." He drew a ragged breath. "It killed her."

  "Did ... did you find her body?" Rainey asked, her voice trembling.

  "I watched her die, and couldn't do a damned thing about it." He drank more whisky, thinking this was easier than he'd thought it would be, because he felt nothing. Nothing at all. "Rock came several hours later to beat her for not working. He was quite casual about finding her body. It probably wasn't the first time he'd lost one of his girls to drugs. He t
ook care of everything very efficiently. I don't know where she was buried--there was no funeral service. She was just ... gone." But not forgotten.

  "Did the pimp take you to the authorities so you could be put into foster care or whatever the English equivalent is?"

  "Not Rock--he was too sharp a businessman to waste an asset. I was a nice-looking boy, and there's a market for those. He explained that he'd take care of me, but because my mother owed him money, I had to work to pay off her debt. And he knocked me across the room to demonstrate what would happen if I didn't cooperate."

  Jamie had been terrified of the pimp, but the fear was less paralyzing than the knowledge that he was stupid and worthless, and deserved whatever punishment Rock chose to inflict. He'd been the perfect, obedient slave, never imagining his life could be any different.

  The first step in creating a slave was to break the will.

  "The family business." Silent tears ran down Rainey's face. "He forced you to be with pedophiles and perverts and God knows what."

  "It was the best training in the world for an actor. I learned how to cower in terror from johns who liked that, and how to be seductive. I learned how to pretend affection, and how to abuse those who wanted to be hurt. RADA was child's play by comparison."

  Rainey swallowed hard, imaginative enough to understand all that he wasn't saying. She'd never be able to think of him again the same way, which was perhaps best. "Did you live with Rock?" she asked.

  "He preferred to keep his private and business lives separate, so he set me up in a flat with a rotating list of his whores. They made sure I was fed and had clothing and took baths. Some of them were even rather kind."

  "How did you escape? Did you run away?"

  Rainey didn't--couldn't--understand how completely hollow Jamie Mackenzie had been. No will, no soul, no hope. Hollow people didn't run away. "As I got older, I realized that I was definitely straight, and it became harder and harder to pretend I was a passionate little hustler. One day when I was twelve, I snapped when I was with a German who came to London regularly on business. He liked playing rough. Instead of going along with it as usual, this time I provoked him. He beat me bloody. Enjoyed it so much that he left twice the usual fee."