Betrayals

by Carla Neggers

  The elevator dinged and the doors opened, but the Frenchman didn’t go in; instead he started back toward the building’s entrance. Suddenly Rebecca didn’t want him to leave. She wanted him to stay and talk to her, but then she remembered the assault rifle he’d used so efficiently that night in Saigon, remembered Tam lying dead in a hot, sticky pool of her own blood. Remembered her own terror and grief and horror. And Jared. Bleeding and in shock, but not dead. Rebecca still didn’t know what she’d have done if both Jared and Tam had died.

  Asking the Frenchman to stick around and chat didn’t make sense, no matter how much she wanted answers.

  He looked back at her with those warm, strange eyes. “I’m sorry if I’ve frightened you,” he said. “That wasn’t my intention. I was your father’s friend,” he said, “and I believe—I know he would have been proud of you.”

  Then he disappeared, Rebecca too stunned by his words to follow him and demand to know what he meant. How could one of the two-man team that had murdered Tam in 1975 have known her father in 1963?

  By the time she recovered enough to run back out to the street, the Frenchman had disappeared.

  Her legs felt as if they were going to collapse under her, and she stumbled into the elevator, blindly pressing the button for the fourth floor. But her knees began to shake, and then her hands, and by the time she was inside her studio, fumbling into the credenza drawer, her entire body was shaking.

  She found the handcrafted silver box her father had brought back from Saigon for her seventh birthday.

  Inside was a deep ruby-red velvet bag. Rebecca poured out the contents onto her drawing board.

  Ten beautiful colored stones ranging in color from white to near-black glittered up at her.

  Rebecca shut her eyes.

  Who was she kidding?

  She had never really believed the colored stones she’d unwittingly smuggled out of Saigon were an ordinary souvenir. She assumed they’d been Tam’s and that she’d been trying to get them out of the country, a nice nest egg with which to start her new life. Maybe Tam had been killed because of them; maybe not. Whatever the case, Tam was dead and her daughter was living a quiet life with Jared in San Francisco, and Rebecca had gotten used to pretending the stones didn’t exist. It was easier that way: She didn’t have to risk disturbing Jared and Mai’s life with unpleasant questions, nor they hers.

  But how had Tam gotten hold of these things?

  Fourteen years ago Rebecca had been a scholarship student who didn’t know a thing about gems. But she’d made some money since then, and she’d been around—she’d even bought a few gems of her own.

  Tam’s red velvet bag wasn’t filled with just pretty colored stones. Rebecca suspected they were corundum: nine sapphires and one ruby.

  She also suspected they were valuable.

  She sighed and brushed her fingertips across their sparkling surfaces. So cool, so beautiful. Not worth dying or killing over, in her opinion.

  Sliding them back into their bag, Rebecca got on the phone to Sofi. “Don’t you have a friend of a friend or something who’s a gemologist?”

  “David Rubin.”

  “I need to talk to him,” Rebecca said. “Your place in an hour?”

  “Want me to bring the moon while I’m at it?”

  “No. If I’m right, we won’t need it.”

  Jean-Paul arrived on Mt. Vernon Street less than an hour after he’d left Rebecca Blackburn. He wished he was a better planner, but, as always, he’d acted on instinct and impulse—on feeling rather than cold analysis. He had seen The Score and gone to San Francisco, and then to Boston. First to Rebecca, for no other reason than to see her. Then here, to the Winston house on Beacon Hill—because he had to.

  “It’s like a mausoleum,” Annette had told him many years ago. “I hate it. My husband does, too. He’d move in a minute.”

  “Then why don’t you?”

  She’d laughed. “Because I’m a Winston. If I’d had a brother, he’d be stuck with the place. I loathe primogeniture, but in this case it’d be a blessing.”

  It was, of course, a magnificent house, not a mausoleum or anything Annette Winston Reed had ever remotely considered giving up. Jean-Paul went through the unlocked carriageway gate to the back as Annette had instructed him. He had called her office at Winston & Reed and had spoken to her secretary, who’d told him her boss wasn’t in the office today. Jean-Paul had urged her to get hold of Annette at once and left the number of his pay phone.

  Annette had called him back right away. The only hint of the mind-numbing shock he’d just given her was a slight hoarseness in her voice.

  So she actually thought I was dead.

  The thought amused him.

  She’d understood they would have to meet in person—if only to convince herself the call wasn’t a nightmare. Reluctantly, but ever the stiff-upper-lip Bostonian, she gave him directions to her house.

  Jean-Paul entered the beautiful house in the back, then moved silently through the antiseptic kitchen and down a short hall, where dozens of expensively framed photographs hung on the wall. The people in them were all the same—smiling, rich, perfect. The men were without scars and the women without fear, and Jean-Paul had to make his arms go rigid to keep from knocking the photographs off the wall. The pain was there, the anger, the burning hate. Nearly four years in the Légion étrangère and five years at the mercy of the Vietcong and North Vietnamese in a prisoner-of-war camp had taught him how to control his emotions, but he could feel them exploding to the surface.

  Time had resolved nothing.

  He called up a self-discipline he’d forgotten he had and pulled his gaze from the private gallery, proceeding down the hall to Annette’s study.

  She was seated in a bone-colored leather chair at the antique French table she used as a desk. Sun streamed in through the tall windows that looked out on the elegant urban garden, making the rich woman’s room seem far from the crush and dirtiness of the city.

  For a moment Annette seemed unchanged, and Jean-Paul could almost hear her weeping for him as she had thirty years ago, begging him to love her. She was rich, American, older, married. She had fallen for him like a rock in a deep, still pool, drowning in her obsession. Stupidly—so stupidly—he had believed she loved him. Too late he’d learned Annette Winston Reed only loved herself.

  Behind her stood a motionless, silent Vietnamese whom Jean-Paul recognized as Nguyen Kim. Kim was just over five feet tall, sleek, wiry and very tough. In Vietnam, Jean-Paul had known him as a consummate survivor. He’d been trained by the American Special Forces, and no doubt Annette showed him off as a former South Vietnamese army officer she’d generously given a job as her bodyguard. But Kim ingratiated himself with anyone who could help him—and was perfectly willing to kill anyone who wouldn’t. Probably, Jean-Paul thought, Annette knew that.

  He had considered she might have a gun or a bodyguard, but had risked that she wouldn’t shoot him, if only not to have to explain the bloodstains on her floor.

  “Well, Jean-Paul.” She sat up very straight, her tone more regal than it had ever been thirty years ago on the Riviera. She had only been a rich woman then; now she was powerful, as well. “I’m beginning to think you’re invincible.”

  He’d had the same thought about her. “I want the Jupiter Stones.”

  “Fine.” She swept to her feet and came around to the front of the table, sitting on its edge. Her navy suit was conservatively cut and expensive, and her hair no longer fell out of its pins and made her look more innocent than she was. “Get them. The Jupiter Stones have nothing to do with me.”

  “You’re a liar, Annette.”

  She laughed. “Oh, I used to love to hear you say my name. To think, I used to lie awake nights wondering if you were thinking about me. My, my, I’ve never been so absorbed with any man the way I was with you. But I’ve changed in the past thirty years. So, yes, Jean-Paul, all right—I’m a liar. But not this time.”

  “You�
��ll do anything to get your way.” Jean-Paul walked to the edge of the Persian carpet but stopped there, as if treading on it would suck him back into her world, back under her spell. “You only care about yourself—your own pleasure and excitement. You were that way even in bed. I should have guessed long ago what you would do to me.”

  “And now you hate me.” She looked at him coldly, her eyes as mesmerizingly blue as he remembered, but now distant and unsympathetic. “That’s your problem, Jean-Paul. I can’t help you.”

  Looking around the study, he took in all the indications of her extraordinary wealth and thought of his own squalid room in Honolulu. Was she any happier? Any better a person?

  “Do you have one of your guns handy? Or will you just wave your fingers and leave your dirty work to your bodyguard?”

  He thought he saw her shiver at his reminder of just how much he knew about her—how much he’d suffered at her hands—but she recovered. “I see no reason we can’t resolve this problem in a civilized manner. Jean-Paul, I haven’t seen the Jupiter Stones in thirty years, and that’s the truth.”

  “So you say.”

  “Don’t believe me, then. It’s your choice.”

  Jean-Paul stepped onto the thick carpet, his footfall making no sound, and his gaze riveted on the powerful woman seated before him. He asked mildly, “You love your son, don’t you? As much, of course, as a woman like you can love anyone.”

  She bristled. “Who are you to talk to me about love? Get out of my house.”

  Jean-Paul ignored her. “And your company,” he went on. “Winston & Reed is your triumph. It would never have amounted to anything if your husband had lived. How fortunate he died, hmm? You’re the Winston. You were always the one with the money and intelligence, but you insisted on being the perfect Boston woman and wife—until Benjamin’s death freed you. A widow can get away with so much more, can’t she? Yes. Look at Annette Reed, bravely carrying on alone.”

  “Get out, Jean-Paul.” Her voice was low and deadly, but the Vietnamese guard remained impassive, not moving until she specifically instructed him to.

  Jean-Paul persevered. “You always loved to take risks. It used to be you could satisfy your zest for risk by going to bed with the kind of man I once was.” He made himself smile and move toward her, until he was so close he could have taken her into his arms. Better a viper, he thought. But he lowered his voice and exaggerated his French accent, “Aah, ma belle, you were a passionate woman. Have you put all that passion into your company?”

  She pushed him away. “Go to hell.”

  Jean-Paul laughed. “We’ll go together, ma belle.” Then he moved in close again, daring her to touch him; he saw her wince at the foulness of his breath and the ugliness of his scars. “I can destroy your son, and I can destroy your company. Quentin and Winston & Reed. Imagine them gone. What would you have left?”

  For a moment she was expressionless, saying nothing. But Jean-Paul could see beneath the composed facade, could sense how angry she was—and frightened. Could he do it? Would he? Annette might like risks, but she wanted them to be on her own terms. She hated losing control. With Jean-Paul, she had lost control thirty years ago and had tried to drive him out of her life for good.

  “Don’t threaten me,” she said, but her voice cracked. She licked her lips. Without lipstick, they seemed pale and thin. Still, she had never been vain about her appearance. “No one will believe anything you say about Quentin or about me. I’ll have you locked up for the raving lunatic you are.”

  Unaffected by her outburst, Jean-Paul walked to the table and fingered a chunk of rose quartz Annette used as a paperweight. “Mai Sloan’s a pretty child, isn’t she?” he commented, without looking at her.

  “I wouldn’t know. I’ve never seen her, Jean-Paul. She’s just fourteen—”

  Annette broke off, and Jean-Paul could tell she was getting nervous. The more uneasy she became, the more relaxed he felt. She was a formidable opponent, and to get what he wanted, he had to keep her off balance. Or she would win. Again.

  He looked at her. “Get me the Jupiter Stones.”

  “Jean-Paul,” she said in a whisper, “let the past be.”

  “I can’t,” he replied and left her standing amidst her expensive antiques, her bodyguard’s eyes following him as he disappeared.

  Not until she heard the back door shut and his footfall on the cobblestone carriageway outside the open window behind her did Annette move. Then, clutching her chest as her heart throbbed painfully, she flung herself into the hall, running to the front parlor, tripping and stumbling along the way, her vision blurred by tears.

  She got to the window in time to see him go through the wrought-iron gate onto the brick sidewalk.

  Jean-Paul Gerard.

  He wasn’t even the ghost of the robust, cocky young race-car driver he’d been thirty years ago. His horrible face would give her worse nightmares than she already had about him, night after night. He seemed so shrunken and pitiful and old. Yet he was younger than she was. His yellowed, skeletal smile had stirred up her fears of dying, and she’d have given him the Jupiter Stones, just to be rid of him.

  If she’d had them.

  She watched him limp down the shaded brick sidewalk of Mt. Vernon toward Charles Street until he was out of sight. “Damn you to hell, Jean-Paul,” she said, turning back to her silent, empty house, “why aren’t you dead?”

  Eleven

  Although Sofi Mencini’s apartment in a renovated stone building on the waterfront was decorated in warm pastels and simple lines, it was as spectacular as any in Boston. Various furnishings were handcrafted, one-of-a-kind, custom-made, not because Sofi sought to be different or special, but because she knew exactly what she wanted. The effect, especially combined with the stunning harbor views, was both welcoming and awe-inspiring. A visitor knew at once that this was a successful woman with power, compassion, intelligence and humor. Rebecca wouldn’t have wanted to get rich with anyone else.

  “I had to cancel a meeting,” Sofi said when she greeted her ex-roommate at the door. “Dare I ask what this is all about?”

  “Not if you’re smart.”

  Sofi digested that remark and could tell at once Rebecca wasn’t kidding. “David’s in the kitchen.”

  David Rubin was a curly-haired redhead in his midforties. He loved to flirt with Sofi—and, thirty seconds after meeting her, with Rebecca—but he was totally committed to his wife and their five children. Together they ran a jewelry store at Copley Place. They’d sold Sofi and her fiancé, Hank—a game-creator, ace puzzle-builder and as one-of-a-kind as everything else in her life—their wedding rings. A rumpled, cheerful man, David always seemed to have baby spit-up on his tie or the odd piece of Lego in his pockets. When it came to gems, however, he was very serious and very, very careful.

  He examined Rebecca’s stones for more than an hour.

  Sofi and Rebecca drank iced herbal tea on Sofi’s balcony while they waited. David had tried to get them to go back to the store, where he had all his equipment and reference materials, but Rebecca refused. She felt uneasy enough as it was showing the stones to him and Sofi, possibly jeopardizing their safety. Accepting defeat, David did make several cryptic calls to his wife to verify information.

  “I’m not going to ask questions you’re not going to answer,” Sofi said.

  “Good.”

  Rebecca sipped her tea, feeling Sofi’s penetrating executive’s glare. Not much over five feet, Sofi had transcended the stereotype of small women as vulnerable and weak-willed with her strength of character and high expectations of herself and those around her. Reliable, creative and direct, she thrived on the challenges of corporate life, and was good at what she did.

  On the other hand, Rebecca thrived on change and taking risks with her money and her talent. She regularly drove her financial advisors in New York crazy. One had told her he’d be happy if she’d just make up her mind whether she was going to live like a rich person—she did occasio
nally—or a “Cinderella who can’t decide if she’d rather have a coach or a pumpkin to ride around in.” She had totally frustrated him by laughing. Later she’d discovered she’d been driving them all crazy and they’d decided to draw straws for who got to vent his spleen to her. He’d been the lucky winner. It wasn’t business at all, he’d explained: Rebecca was on top of every penny she had and every penny she’d ever spent. It was, he admitted, just personal. Did he want out? Oh, no, working for her gave him great material for breaking the ice at parties.

  “You get a copy of The Score?” Sofi asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Jared’s still good-looking, isn’t he?”

  Rebecca sipped her tea. Despite Jared’s failings, Sofi had always chastised Rebecca for letting Jared Sloan go. “You have unrealistic standards, R.J.,” she was fond of saying.

  “I think you should call him,” Sofi suggested bluntly. “Sharing the front page of a supermarket tabloid gives you a good excuse.”

  “I don’t need an excuse.”

  “Then how come you’ve waited fourteen years?”

  “Sofi.”

  She waved her tea glass. “Yeah, yeah, I know, but I’ve gotten used to telling people what I think.”

  Mercifully, David emerged from the kitchen managing to look both excited and grim. “Where did you get these stones?” he asked.

  Rebecca shook her head. “Can’t say.”

  “Are they one of your peculiar investments?”

  Leaving the question unanswered, Rebecca gave Sofi a look. She’d just met David, which meant Sofi must have told the jeweler something about her. Of course, David could have read about her in any number of gossip rags over the years, including The Score.

  David cleared his throat and became businesslike. “You’ll need more corroboration than just my say-so, but there’s no question in my mind that what I’ve examined are the famed Jupiter Stones.”

  Rebecca suddenly felt light-headed. “Which are?”