Betrayals

by Carla Neggers

  “Yes, I believe I will,” he said airily, miffed. “Help yourself to tea.”

  He brushed the wet dirt off his hands and knees and started back into the kitchen. Rebecca swung around in her chair. “Where are you going?”

  “Up to my room.” He glanced back at her. “Do I require your permission?”

  She sighed. “Of course not.”

  “Good.”

  “Grandfather—”

  “There’s ice in the freezer,” he said, and left her fuming alone in the garden.

  Jared was in the kitchen already slamming chunks of ice into a plastic bag, sure to annoy Rebecca. He started to say something, but Thomas put up a hand. Jared took the hint and let him go on without interruption.

  Twenty-Five

  Mai had spent the day in a state of nervous anticipation and by early evening was ready to execute her plan. She wandered out to the pool where Maureen, back early from the gallery she ran, was arranging a monstrous vase of flowers and humming to herself. She was a handsome, amiable woman, maybe twenty years younger than Wesley Sloan, though it was hard to tell. She had a college-aged son from a previous marriage and said she considered Mai more of a friend than a stepgranddaughter.

  “I don’t feel very well,” Mai announced.

  “What’s wrong? Do you have a fever—”

  “Just a stomachache. I’d like to stay in my room, if it’s okay. You won’t mind if I skip dinner? I really don’t think I could eat anything.”

  “Of course I don’t mind, sweetie. Do you want some aspirin?”

  “I’ll be okay, thanks. I think I just need to rest.”

  “Well, you let me know if you need anything.”

  Promising her she would, Mai had to force herself not to skip back inside. Her dad and grandfather might blame Maureen for not seeing through her ruse, but most likely, Mai knew, they’d be too busy killing her to bother.

  But as her dad said, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do and take the consequences.

  Going to Boston was something she had to do. It was more important right now than being a nice, obedient teenager. She was afraid for her father, angry at being left out of what he was doing…and sure—so sure—that the white-haired man, her dad’s reaction to him and his sudden trip to Boston all had something to do with her. She was going to find her father and make him tell her what was going on. Make him be fair. She had rights, too. And she wasn’t a chicken. She’d explain to him that it was worse not knowing, worse wondering and being scared, worse thinking maybe she’d caused her mother’s death in Saigon and his breakup with Rebecca Blackburn in 1975.

  She could take whatever it was he hadn’t told her.

  Instead of going up to her room, Mai slipped out the front door.

  George was being dispatched in the limousine to pick up a Parisian couple at the airport who were spending the week as the Sloans’ houseguests in Tiberon. He was out at the pool, getting instructions from Maureen.

  Mai slipped into the back of the cavernous limousine and curled up on the floor, hiding underneath a tartan wool throw. It was hot and stuffy, but she’d survive. George wasn’t expecting a passenger. He’d never notice her.

  She was right.

  He climbed into the car, and in another minute Mai felt the limousine cruising out of the hills of Marin County, over the Golden Gate Bridge and through San Francisco to the airport.

  Twenty-Six

  Rebecca had given up on Jared’s bag of ice and was trying to cure her raging headache by planting the rest of her grandfather’s impatiens. They were in sorry shape, but just might make it if he left them alone. It was suppertime, and he still hadn’t come downstairs. She hoped he was all right. Maybe she’d been pushing him too hard. Even if he hated being coddled, they both had to remember he was almost eighty, no longer a young man.

  Several boarders had wandered back from assorted universities and up to their rooms to unwind or study. Athena had examined Rebecca’s face and pronounced that she hadn’t been hit that hard.

  “Not hard enough” was Jared’s unsympathetic remark.

  That remark made Athena laugh and forget she’d considered carving him up just that morning. They went inside together to rustle up some supper, Jared obviously having sensed Rebecca needed a chance to pull herself together.

  She had told Jared Sloan everything she knew about the Frenchman and what had happened that grim morning of April 29, 1975—except about the bag of colored stones she’d found in Mai’s diaper and what she’d learned about Le Chat and the Jupiter Stones from David Rubin and her library reading.

  He wasn’t just the Frenchman anymore, she reminded herself. He was Jean-Paul Gerard. She knew his name now and had to keep repeating it, not because she’d forget it, but because she wanted it to roll off her tongue the way her name did his. For fourteen years she’d hoped he hadn’t been a malevolent part of that night in Saigon. It was the Vietnamese who’d been after the jewels, she’d told herself, and who had killed Tam and would have killed her and Mai if not for the Frenchman.

  If not for Jean-Paul Gerard.

  She had fantasized that maybe he’d been an Interpol agent and had shot Jared Sloan for his own good, to keep the Vietnamese from killing him outright.

  How curiously naive.

  Jean-Paul Gerard was a crook in pursuit of ten valuable corundum gems known as the Jupiter Stones. Never mind the complications: Thomas Blackburn’s presence at Baroness Gisela Majlath’s funeral; the Frenchman’s friendship with Stephen Blackburn; his participation in the 1963 ambush; his rescue of Rebecca and Mai, and then his departure from the Tu Do Street apartment without Empress Elisabeth’s nine sapphires and ruby.

  Never mind all that. The bottom line was simple enough: Gerard hadn’t been an innocent bystander that night.

  Rebecca shuddered and stuck another impatiens in the wet dirt. Should she have turned the stones over to the authorities fourteen years ago? Should she now?

  How would Jared and Mai feel when they learned that Tam had been about to smuggle a collection of famous, extraordinary gems out of Vietnam?

  How had Tam gotten hold of them?

  A worm crawled over her hand, and Rebecca tossed it unceremoniously out of her way and pushed the dirt up around the roots of the plant. Worms had never bothered her. Tam—

  “Oh, no.”

  Rebecca froze and stared at the worm slinking back into the soft, moist soil.

  Shutting her eyes tightly, she could see herself at four digging worms with her grandfather…could see the tears in his eyes and remember wondering why he was so upset. Didn’t he like worms anymore?

  She could remember showing Jared her captured worms and could hear him telling her he was going to cook them up for her supper.

  And Tam.

  She’d told Tam about her worms.

  Tam had been crying, too, and Rebecca had tried to cheer her up and—

  And she’d found the pretty red bag in Aunt Annette’s bedroom.

  “But they were marbles,” she whispered, her knees aching on the brick terrace, the worm burrowed into the dirt. “They were marbles!”

  Not marbles: the Jupiter Stones.

  “Rebecca?”

  Jared’s voice startled her, but he caught her under the arms before she could fall backward and helped her to her feet. She knew she looked awful. She tried to smile and casually brushed her hair back, discovering dirt caked to her hands. That was right; she’d been planting flowers.

  “You okay?” Jared asked.

  Her eyes focused on the present, on him. His dark hair, his clear, teal eyes. She used to wake up at night and watch him sleep, wishing she could know what he was dreaming. She had loved to hear him laugh and see him smile and had trusted him the way only a nineteen-year-old really in love for the first time could.

  He’d taken advantage of that trust, too, but—it was a long time ago.

  The things she’d told him tonight had already rocked his balance. The man he’d hated and fe
ared for fourteen years had saved his daughter’s life. Not an easy fact to digest. Not something that slipped neatly into his own version of that night and the recent events surrounding Jean-Paul Gerard’s return.

  “I’m okay,” she told him, and found that his presence steadied her. What, she wondered, did hers do to him?

  “What’s this about marbles?” he asked.

  “Nothing. Just talking out loud.”

  He looked skeptical, but didn’t press. He’d brought a tray loaded with an eclectic array of leftovers from Thomas’s refrigerator: cold stuffed grape leaves, steamed Chinese dumplings, fresh asparagus and a stack of soft pita bread. Pulling dinner together had allowed him a chance to sort out what Rebecca had told him about the Frenchman’s role that night in Saigon. She hadn’t deliberately held back on him all these years; she simply hadn’t realized his injury had prevented him from seeing what had happened.

  “Who did you think killed that Vietnamese thug?” she’d asked.

  “You.”

  That had brought her up short. “Me?”

  “With the revolver that state department guy gave you.”

  “I thought you didn’t know about that.”

  “A .38 Smith & Wesson stuck in a college student’s knapsack is hard to miss, sweets.”

  “And I guess you also thought I chased Gerard off?”

  He had.

  She’d grinned. “With another couple of bullets, I probably would have.”

  Rebecca went inside and rinsed off her hands, returning with forks and plates. She stabbed a dumpling and sat down. “Jared, I’m sorry we didn’t talk after Saigon. I suppose it would have been the right thing to do—to clear the air and all—but you’d been shot and I was grief-stricken…and hurt and angry. Frankly, I wasn’t in the mood to do the ‘right thing.’ If someone had pitched you overboard, I’d probably have blown you a kiss good-riddance.”

  “I understand,” he said.

  She looked at him, wondering if he did. In simple, raw terms, he had betrayed her. Thinking Rebecca determined to stay in Boston while he spent his year in Southeast Asia, he had chosen a fling with Tam rather than months of celibacy. Yes, he’d been thrilled to see her in March. Tam knew the score, and it didn’t include Jared telling his Boston lover to take a hike so he could carry on with her. What had she thought those nights Rebecca and Jared had spent together on his apartment couch while she endured the last stages of her difficult pregnancy alone in his bedroom?

  Only when push had come to shove—when Tam was dead and there was no one else to claim and raise their newborn daughter—had Jared come clean and accepted responsibility for his actions.

  If Tam hadn’t died, would he ever have acknowledged Mai as his daughter?

  But Tam had died, and he did take responsibility for their daughter. And he obviously adored Mai. Even if Rebecca could still get mad thinking about herself at twenty and him at twenty-five, they’d both grown up. People made mistakes. Sometimes terrible mistakes.

  “I should have told you what happened with Mai and me and the Frenchman sooner,” she said, “but I honestly thought you saw everything.”

  “R.J., I had a hole the size of Rhode Island in my shoulder—”

  “And you’d seen your lover murdered. Yes, I understand that now.”

  Jared winced at her words. She didn’t understand a thing. But where could he begin about him and Tam and Quentin? And did he have that right, after all these years?

  But Rebecca, her hair blowing in the gusting wind, reached for a stuffed grape leaf, dropping it onto her plate, and finally looked at him. “Jared, I still haven’t told you everything.”

  He picked at the thin layers of a section of pita bread, studying her. Waiting.

  With a sigh, she whisked up her handbag, pulled out a red velvet sack, and dumped out the contents on the table.

  The ten stones sparkled in the suddenly strong early evening sun.

  Jared’s eyes darkened, going from the stunning gems to Rebecca. He dropped the pita onto his plate. “R.J., what’s this?”

  She licked her lips. “I found them in Mai’s diaper during the evacuation from Saigon.”

  Thomas Blackburn walked into the garden. With a pained expression, he went up to the table and ran his fingertips over the nine sapphires and ruby.

  “Grandfather, I can explain.”

  “You don’t have to. These,” he said, “are the Jupiter Stones.”

  Thomas had shooed Rebecca and Jared out of the garden and poured himself a glass of the blueberry wine he’d picked up from the Bartlett Maine Estate Winery during an outing down east last summer, when he’d been feeling particularly alone and miserable. Four months later Rebecca had turned up on his doorstep, to start her own studio in Boston, she’d said. But it was more than that. She’d needed, finally, to sort out her feelings about the city, him, herself, and what it meant to be a Blackburn, rich, in her thirties and unattached.

  The wine was dry and of fine quality, not at all the rotgut he normally associated with fruit wines. Perhaps he would return to Maine this summer and buy another bottle. He settled into his chair, pulling his sweater around his thin frame. The wind had picked up and there was, again, the smell of rain in the air. Thomas wouldn’t have cared if a blizzard were in progress. His living room had filled up with students enjoying a Friday evening of popcorn, Junk Mind and television, and Jared and Rebecca had gone out for a walk to digest what he’d told them—and possibly what he hadn’t.

  Thomas wanted to be alone.

  Seeing Jean-Paul again, Annette, the Jupiter Stones—it all had unsettled and confused him. Now he wondered if he’d told Rebecca and Jared too much: about Gisela’s suicide over the loss of the Jupiter Stones, about Annette Reed’s fingering of the popular Grand Prix driver as the thief Le Chat, about his reappearance in Saigon four years later.

  “He’d been there for some time,” Thomas had explained. “When he’d left France, he signed up with the Foreign Legion—no questions asked—which was headquartered in Sidi Bel Abbès until Algerian independence in 1962. That’s when he quit and came to Indochina as a mercenary. He knew I’d be there. I’m not sure he realized Annette would be.”

  “He and Father became friends?” Rebecca had asked.

  Thomas had to say yes. And to admit he hadn’t warned his son about his new friend’s background. He had assumed—hoped—the young Frenchman had owned up to his mistakes and put the past behind him.

  But how wrong he was.

  After listening quietly throughout, Jared asked, “Gerard knew it was Annette who turned him in?”

  Reluctantly, Thomas had nodded.

  “Then,” Rebecca had said, “he has a bone to pick with her for that and one with you for the ambush. How long was he a POW?”

  “Five years. He escaped in 1968.”

  “And somehow between then and 1975 he figured out that Tam had gotten hold of the Jupiter Stones and came after them. That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t explain a number of things.” Sitting forward, Rebecca had counted out each item on her fingers. “First, why didn’t Gerard turn Jared’s apartment upside down after Tam and his Vietnamese cohort were dead? The communists were shelling Tan Son Nhut, but he had time. Did he not know the Jupiter Stones were right under his nose? Second, why wait until now to come after the Jupiter Stones? Third, who does he think has them? Fourth, something about the pictures in The Score must have got his attention and made him think he had a chance to get the stones—what?”

  Thomas had told her they were all good questions, and then had refused to speculate on any answers. That annoyed Rebecca. Before she could get too steamed up, Thomas had hinted he was near eighty and might die on them any moment if they didn’t leave him alone and let him rest. Rebecca was unimpressed. Jared, however, recognized a brick wall when he saw one and spirited her away.

  Now, sipping his wine in the cool evening air, Thomas reminded himself that as much as he wanted to unburden his soul and talk about
the past, he couldn’t take that risk. He could not bear to lose anyone else he loved.

  He’d made that decision thirty years ago.

  Best, he thought, to stick to it.

  Twenty-Seven

  Gisela’s funeral had depressed Thomas, and he welcomed his four-year-old granddaughter’s company back at the Winston mas. Rebecca showed him her collection of worms and committed him to taking her for a walk. He avoided Annette. He continued to have misgivings about their talk that morning. There was something more between her and Jean-Paul Gerard than an exciting, handsome jewel thief and one of his coincidental victims. That it all might be none of his business occurred to him only fleetingly, for he had known Annette since the day she was born, and Jean-Paul was Gisela’s son, a secret she had shared only with her old friend Thomas. He was distressed that he and Rebecca would be returning to Paris in the morning and this was how their visit to the Riviera was ending, with Gisela flinging herself off a cliff, Annette retreating into uncharacteristic silence and Jean-Paul on the run as a fugitive.

  At least Quang Tai had agreed to return to Vietnam. A soft-spoken, well-educated man, Tai thought the Diem government was paranoid and wrongheaded, and he did not approve of the communists’ plans for forced collectivization of the Vietnamese peasantry or their puritanical conviction that only their way was right. Tai understood, however, that his people possessed a deep, abiding resentment of foreign domination; they would no more tolerate the Americans calling the shots for them than they had the French, the Japanese or the Chinese. Thomas didn’t need convincing, but there were those in the U.S. government who couldn’t see beyond the global communist threat to the legitimate nationalistic aspirations of the Vietnamese people. He hoped Tai, although just one person, could get the right people on all sides to listen to him.

  Thomas suddenly was anxious to get back to Saigon himself. He would return to Boston with Rebecca and see his other grandchildren, and perhaps try to convince his daughter-in-law he was perfectly sincere when he’d told her she was at liberty to do as she pleased with the house on West Cedar Street, including put a swing-set up in the garden and Porky Pig curtains in the children’s bedrooms. Why on earth should he or anyone else care? And so what if they did?