Lovers and Liars Trilogy

by Sally Beauman

  Star took her to the café he knew, and they sat in the window. She began to feel calmer as she watched Paris go past.

  “You’ve never been here, then?” Star said, watching her. She was eating chocolate croissants and drinking café au lait. He reached across and flicked a tiny piece of pastry that was stuck to her chin.

  “No. Never. I always wanted to come. We’ve been all over—but always these really dull places. Air-base towns. Germany was worst. I hated Germany. My mother did too. We were stuck right out in the middle of nowhere, this horrible little place, all closed in with pine forests. Daddy was off working all the time. Or playing golf. He’s a golf fanatic. He has an eight handicap, so I guess he’s good at it, but Mommy and I nearly went crazy. We had cabin fever. Mommy says that’s what it’s called—”

  She stopped. She must remember not to gabble and gush, she told herself. She could see Star didn’t like it, because it made his face close. Maybe she was boring him. He looked away; he began to fidget and tapped his fingers on the table, and she could tell—something was getting to him, because normally Star was so still.

  “I’ll be back in a moment,” he said in an abrupt way, and rose. Mina watched him thread his way past the tables and disappear in the direction of the men’s room. She sat there trying to finish the croissant, trying to watch Paris, but the delight had gone from the streets outside and the croissant suddenly tasted stale.

  He was away a long time, ten minutes or more. When he came back though, she could tell at once that his good mood was restored. He sat down opposite her, fastening his shirt cuffs. His hands smelled of soap. He smiled at her with the special smile that made her feel they both had all the time in the world.

  “In Germany…” He leaned forward and touched her hand. “Was that when the quarrels started? You remember you told me in the car?”

  “Maybe.” Mina frowned. “I was only thirteen when we left there. We were there three whole years. It could have been earlier, and I didn’t notice, or I pretended it wasn’t happening. We were in Hawaii before Germany, and that was better. I’m not sure. I guess—they must have been happy sometime. When I was small. They really loved each other when they got married. Mommy told me. She said Daddy just swept her right off her feet, and—”

  She stopped, fighting sudden tears.

  Star watched her with that still, intent gaze he had. Then he took her hand in his. He said: “Mina. Love comes and goes. You have to learn that.”

  “It doesn’t stay?” She looked away. “In books it does. In movies.”

  “It might stay.” He lit a cigarette, drew on it, and exhaled. Mina watched him through the smoke’s blue coils.

  “Everyone wants it to stay, for sure. That makes people strive too hard. They get anxious and stressed out. What you should do is just wait. Let it come. Hope it lasts. Just a little bit of love is worth having. There’s a whole lot of hate in this world.”

  Mina continued to watch him closely. She thought his answer sounded wise, though it was not quite the answer she had been hoping for.

  “Star,” she asked, “if it happens, when it happens—how can you know?”

  In answer, he gripped her wrist hard, so hard it hurt her, and jerked her forward in her chair so she was leaning right across the table, and he was leaning right across the table, and his beautiful face was just inches from her own. “Look me in the eyes,” he said. “Go on. Look. Look properly, Mina. Let yourself see…”

  Mina looked into his eyes the way he told her. The iris was very dark, almost black, and flecked with blue. She could see herself in his eyes, a tiny Mina, and then she lost herself and saw only his gaze, so the room vanished and it was like looking down into the ocean. She watched waves move; she watched this slow, hypnotic, deepening sea, and she trembled a little, then sighed.

  Star’s grip became gentle. He stroked her hand. He said: “Now you know me. And I know you. I need you so bad, Mina. The first second I saw you, I knew.”

  Mina gave a gasp. Star released her hand. He rose.

  “Come on,” he said as if this were a normal moment, as if he had just said nothing special. “Come on. We have to get out to the airport. It’s time to go.”

  Mina pushed back her chair and reached for her jacket, a series of small, flurried movements. Star was already moving toward the door, and she ran after him, and caught his hand.

  “Star,” she began. “My phone call. You said I could call my parents from here.”

  “The phone’s out of order. I checked just now.” He took her arm, drew her out into the street, and hailed a taxi. “Come on. You can call from the airport. There’s a hundred phones there.”

  But when they reached the airport, he seemed to have forgotten this promise too. He walked along the concourse, up escalators and down them, his pace very fast Mina had to run to keep up with him. The place was crowded, and she was jostled on all sides. She could hear a confusing tumult of foreign voices, foreign tongues, loudspeaker announcements.

  She paused just for a second in front of one of the flight boards and watched the numbers flicker back and forth. There were flights to England, just the way he said. The ten o’clock flight had left, the eleven o’clock was being called. There was another at midday.

  “Come on. It’s this way.” Star came back for her and caught her arm again, and led her on. He was walking faster and faster, and when Mina looked up at him, she could see that he seemed angry, terribly angry for no reason at all.

  “What did I do? Star—” She plucked at his arm. “What did I say?”

  He stopped and stared at her blankly.

  “What? Nothing. I’m in a hurry, that’s all. There’s a flight coming in. I don’t want to miss it. Through here… Wait. Hold my coat. That’s better. Now, don’t say anything, and stay by my side.”

  He bundled the old tweed overcoat into her arms. Without the overcoat, she realized, he looked quite different, nothing like a traveler at all. He must have showered and changed earlier, she realized, and—how odd that she hadn’t noticed, but she always looked at his face, not his clothes—he now looked different, like a student perhaps, one of the Sorbonne students, in a black sweatshirt, a black jacket, and clean black jeans.

  “Your scarf,” she said. “Star, you’re not wearing your red scarf…”

  “Shut up,” he said. “I told you. Don’t talk. Through here.”

  He led her across to a door at the side of the concourse, and then into a corridor. Mina ran along beside him, clutching his coat. Suddenly her mind was filled with questions. What had happened to the lovely silver car? She remembered his parking it in a side street somewhere—but where was it now? Where had Star been all that time she’d been sleeping—she must have slept, she realized, for at least sixteen hours. And where was his little dog, who had sat in Mina’s lap all the way on that long trip? Dancer, who had been hidden under a blanket with Mina when they passed through customs, and who had been there—Mina was sure she had been there—when Mina fell asleep in that attic room.

  “Where’s Dancer?” she burst out, still running to keep up with him. “Star, what’s happened to Dancer? You said she went everywhere with you.”

  “She’s not with me now.” He stopped so suddenly that Mina cannoned against him. There was now no doubting the anger; his face was black with it, and Mina recoiled.

  “She’s at a friend’s. You ask one more question, and—”

  She saw him fight to regain self-control.

  “And I’ll leave you here,” he finished. “I’ll just walk away and leave you. I hate questions. I hate women who ask questions. I thought you understood that.”

  “I do. Star…”

  “Then do what I tell you. When I tell you. There’s a reason. You understand? Now. Stand there.”

  Mina did as she was bid. The corridor they were in now was quieter, at the side of the main terminal, she thought. Star moved away from her and waited. After a few minutes a man appeared, an airport employee, a janitor p
erhaps, wearing a uniform. He seemed to know Star, and Star seemed to know him. They spoke briefly in lowered voices. The man looked over his shoulder. Star made one of his conjuring movements. Mina wasn’t certain, but she thought some money changed hands.

  The man produced a key and opened a door, an unmarked door. Star beckoned to her, and the man ushered them through. The man himself did not follow them. He closed the door behind them. Mina looked around her. They were standing in a quiet airport lounge, carefully furnished in muted shades. There were groups of armchairs, a thick carpet, tables stacked with the latest magazines.

  “Where are we?” she whispered.

  “It’s a VIP lounge,” he said in a low voice. “You know what that is? When important people are flying out, or in, they come through here. No press allowed.”

  “Are we allowed?”

  “No. But we’re not doing any harm. Just quietly watching, waiting. That’s all.”

  He drew her to one side, behind a tall potted palm. Mina felt a thrill of excitement, an illicit tingling of the nerves. There were other people waiting, she saw, quite a few of them, and beyond, at some distance, there was a group of airport personnel. No one seemed to have noticed them. The airport people were fussing over papers and forms, and telephoning; the others, several men, a couple of women, all elegantly dressed, were facing the window beyond. Mina craned her neck: the window was glass, floor to ceiling. It overlooked a runway. She could just see an airplane taxiing in, a small private plane, she thought, with a logo she did not recognize on its side. Star saw it too, and as soon as he saw it, Mina felt his body go rigid.

  “Don’t move,” he said out of the corner of his mouth. “Watch. Don’t move.”

  So Mina watched. She felt a sense of gathering disappointment. After this mysterious buildup, very little occurred. The plane outside taxied to a halt. She could just see its forward door being opened, then the men and women waiting moved toward the window, obscuring her view. She caught scraps and murmurs of reaction from them, but they were all speaking French, and Mina’s French was poor.

  She could sense a certain tension, and an excitement, in the watching group, as if they were expecting the unpredictable, but nothing special happened at all. Whoever was on the plane must have descended from it and made their way up to this lounge from an entrance below, because suddenly the group by the windows began a flurry of new movement toward the far entrance doors.

  One man, drawing aside, began speaking rapidly into a mobile telephone. Another opened a black attaché case and quickly extracted some files. They assembled themselves on either side of the entrance doors in a formal greeting party. An immaculately coiffed older woman in an exquisite suit stood to the immediate right of the doors. Next to her, one step back, stood the man Mina thought seemed the most senior. He was wearing a black overcoat, tortoiseshell-framed tinted eyeglasses, and a dark suit with the finest, narrowest pinstripes. The rest of the group, deferring to these two, stood a little behind them and to the side.

  Then the doors beyond opened, and the arrival began. Mina had a clear view now: she could see that the awaited party consisted of a man and a woman. The man was about fifty, she thought, and even at this distance he radiated pace and power. His hair gleamed, black as a bird’s wing. She could see that he was relatively short, formally dressed. His skin was tanned, and Mina thought that he might be Italian, or Spanish, and that he moved like a king.

  He began speaking as he came through the doors, and it was almost funny the way the others all scurried to attention and scraped and bowed. Then the man made an imperious gesture of the hand, and the clamor of voices ceased, and the scurrying ceased, and the man stepped aside to let the woman with him go past.

  She was tiny, Mina saw, very slender and very little taller than Mina herself, and she moved with grace, like a dancer. Her hair, too, was jet black, and almost covered with an expensive silk scarf. She was wearing dark glasses so large, Mina could scarcely see her face. She could just glimpse her lips, which were pale, without makeup. She was wearing a fur coat, a most beautiful dark fur coat that reached to midcalf. Her hands were gloved. Gold gleamed at her wrists, and Mina watched it glitter as she began greeting people. She touched someone here, reached up to kiss someone there, and Mina could see that this procedure both surprised and pleased them, because as the woman and her male companion passed down the line, those behind her glanced at one another, raised their eyebrows, and nodded to each other, as if in congratulation. She could feel it suddenly, an elation as sharp as scent in the air. Then she could smell an actual perfume, a burst of spring flowers, then the woman and her solicitous guardian-companion were moving forward, moving forward, with the others closing ranks behind them. There were little eruptions of words and laughter, so the air in the room felt buoyant, then a door swung open and they were gone.

  The silence afterward was as tense as a wire; Star never once moved. He had not taken his eyes off the woman and the man from the second they entered until the second they were gone. He remained, statue-still, staring after them. His face was set, expressionless, and pale.

  Mina did not dare to speak. She could see that he might still be angry, or he might be feeling pain, but either way there was something dreadfully wrong.

  After a long while Mina plucked at his sleeve again. “Star,” she whispered. “Is that why we came here? To see them?”

  “What?” He turned to look at her, then seemed to recollect who she was and where they were.

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s why we’re here. That’s who I came to see. I have plans for them—that woman and that man.”

  “Plans?” Mina looked at him hesitantly. The glitter in his eyes frightened her. “What kind of plans? I don’t understand.”

  “You will. Three days from now. On Wednesday. You know how long I’ve waited for that day to come around? Twenty-five years, that’s how long.”

  “But why—who are they, Star?”

  “They’re my enemies.”

  “What, that man and that woman?” Mina backed away a little because his eyes were now making her very scared. “Why, Star, why? Do you know them? Who are they?”

  Star did not answer the first two of those questions for several days. He answered the third there and then.

  “They’re famous,” he said. “Very famous. World famous.” To Mina’s horror, his face suddenly convulsed; she thought for one horrible moment that he was about to hit her.

  “The woman is Maria Cazarès,” he said. “And the man with her is known as Jean Lazare.”

  Maria Cazarès cared about cars. In Paris, Lazare kept four on permanent call. Telephoning from the villa outside Fez that morning, he had instructed them to send the car he had purchased for Maria’s birthday two years before. It had been hand-built for a member of the Krupp family in 1937. They possessed later Rolls-Royces, but Maria found their detailing less stringent—she preferred a prewar Rolls.

  To travel in the back of this vehicle was to be cocooned from the world. Glass panels protected them from their driver; tinted glass screened them from the gaze of passersby. Lazare leaned back against the thick leather seats, upholstered in the finest hand-stitched Connolly hide. The only sound was the faint and reassuring whisper of the car’s wheels. The air smelled of Maria’s scent, of jonquils and narcissus, of the most delicate spring flowers. It was the first, and still the most celebrated of the Cazarès perfumes, L’Aurore. Lazare closed his eyes briefly. He had not slept the previous night. He was no longer young; recently, he had been discovering just what it did to a man to sleep only fitfully, and to wake always tired.

  He felt Maria stir beside him and opened his eyes. She was pressing her face to the window glass, staring out at the passing streets. Her small, gloved hands clenched and unclenched in her lap. She suddenly swung around.

  “Jean, tell him to turn off. I want to see Mathilde. It’s days since I saw her. I want to see her now.”

  “Darling, no.” Lazare reached across and took
her hand. “You called her four times from Morocco. It’s Sunday. It’s still early. You’ll wear her out, darling. You forget—she’s not young anymore.”

  “I miss her. I wish she lived with us still. You shouldn’t have sent her away, Jean.”

  “Darling, I didn’t.” He sighed. “She retired. I bought her that nice apartment, she has her own maid…”

  “She was my maid. She was like a mother to me. She understands me. And now you’ve banished her.”

  “Banished? Darling, you know that’s foolish.” Lazare, who had indeed never liked Mathilde Duval, a severe, hard-faced peasant woman from Provence, controlled his temper. Mathilde had looked after Maria for more than twenty years; she was possessive, secretive, a man-hater who worshiped at Maria’s shrine—but he had not banished her. Encouraged her retirement at most—but then, Mathilde had been worn out by the stress of the last five years.

  “Listen,” he went on. “You can see her tomorrow, darling. When you feel stronger. When you’ve had time to rest.” He paused, trying to think of some means of distraction. “Forget Mathilde for the moment, darling—why don’t you show me the things you bought?”

  To his relief, the distraction worked—Maria’s attention span was now short. At once, and with an eager smile, she opened the leather satchel she had brought back from Morocco, which one of the aides, as instructed, had placed beside her in the car. One by one she began to examine the small, pretty items it contained. She knew what they were, for she had purchased them herself, but even so she held up each object with a gasp of surprise and delight, as if this satchel were a party grab bag and she were a child.

  The visit to the Morocco house had been Maria’s sudden whim. It came to her at nine at night the previous Friday; they left two hours later by private jet. But Maria had been restless and tearful the entire way. They no sooner arrived in Fez than she wanted to return.