Betrayals

by Carla Neggers

  “You lied to me,” he told her baldly. “Benjamin never asked you for a divorce.”

  She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke Bette Davis style. “Not that he doesn’t want one, I assure you. He’s such a coward. Oh, Thomas, don’t be mad. When will you get another chance to be seduced by a woman twenty years younger than yourself?” She grinned, totally without guilt. “You should be thanking me.”

  What could Thomas say? He’d known Annette her entire life and should have realized she put alleviating her boredom and having her way above any notion of honor or integrity. He’d known what he was getting into when he fell into bed with her, and if he didn’t, he’d been an even bigger jackass than he thought.

  “I hope,” he told her, “you don’t confess our foolishness to Benjamin. It would only hurt him.”

  She waved her cigarette. “Don’t worry—he’ll never know. But Thomas,” she chided, “what we did wasn’t foolishness. It’s called—”

  “I know what it’s called,” he said, cutting off one of her deliberately crude remarks. “You’re behaving like a naughty ten-year-old. Why are you back in Saigon?”

  “The same reason I was here before—to keep an eye on what Benjamin’s doing with my money. Don’t look so hunted, Thomas. I’ve had my fill of you.”

  “Go back to Boston.”

  She stubbed out her cigarette. “When I damn well feel like it.”

  Jean-Paul came to Thomas’s apartment at dawn that night. In his bathrobe, Thomas offered him a drink, but the young Frenchman wasn’t interested. He opened a manila envelope and spread six black-and-white photographs on Thomas’s kitchen table.

  “I didn’t just arrive in Saigon,” Jean-Paul said.

  “So I see.”

  The photographs were of Annette and Thomas during their brief, all-too-torrid affair. Having dinner together, holding hands on Nguyen Hue Boulevard, kissing at the airport, and one particularly embarrassing one of Annette peeling off her blouse as Thomas opened the door to his apartment.

  “Never saw me, did you?” Jean-Paul asked, pleased with himself.

  “No, I didn’t. Were you in disguise?”

  “Just a beard. I’ve learned to blend into the environment during the last few years.”

  “I suppose you have,” Thomas said steadily. “And the point of this exercise?”

  Jean-Paul’s expression grew serious. “I want the Jupiter Stones.”

  “You don’t think I have them?”

  “No.” He glanced at the bare-breasted photograph of Annette. “But she does.”

  That wasn’t something Thomas could argue; it was also nothing he and Annette had ever discussed. Every time he’d tried to broach the subject of Le Chat, Gisela and the Jupiter Stones, she’d turn him off. He’d been too stupidly considerate to press.

  “And if she doesn’t give them to you,” he said, “you’ll show these photographs to Benjamin.”

  “That’s right. But he’s just a start. I can think of a number of people who might be interested in just how indiscreet Thomas Blackburn can be—certain members of the Kennedy administration, embassy officials, perhaps even the president himself.”

  “You want me to pressure Annette.”

  “I don’t care how I get the stones, Monsieur Blackburn,” Jean-Paul said coolly. “I just want them.”

  Thomas pushed the photographs away. “If you’d come to me as Gisela’s son, I might have helped you. But not like this.”

  Gerard laughed derisively. “Aren’t you the courageous bastard. Look, of all people, I know what you got yourself into with Annette. All I want are the stones that belonged to my mother.”

  “Then deal with Annette.”

  He sat back in the dim light of the hot night. “I’ve tried.”

  Of course he had: Thomas wasn’t surprised. And Annette hadn’t come to him for help. “What did she say?”

  “She told me I could rot in hell.”

  Two days later Annette returned to Boston without a word about the Jupiter Stones. Barely a week later she got her wish: Jean-Paul Gerard, the only survivor of a Vietcong ambush that killed Stephen Blackburn, Benjamin Reed and Quang Tai, was taken prisoner by the communist guerrillas.

  Thomas had arranged for the information-gathering excursion into the Mekong Delta, into an area considered secure, although he knew there were risks. In a country at war, there always were. He hired Jean-Paul to drive the Jeep. He was good, he was tough, and it seemed Annette had called his bluff about the photographs. He had become friends with both Stephen and Benjamin, and regardless of how much he despised Annette for having betrayed him in 1959, he didn’t want to jeopardize those friendships. Thomas hoped Jean-Paul, however slowly and painfully, was putting his past mistakes behind him.

  Originally the trip was planned for just Thomas, Jean-Paul and Tai. At the last minute, however, Benjamin decided he wanted to go along and see for himself what was happening in the countryside, and Ambassador Nolting asked to meet with Thomas.

  Stephen went into the Mekong Delta in his father’s place.

  From the analysis of the grim scene afterward, Tai was killed instantly, and Stephen was wounded in the leg, managing to take out at least one of his attackers with the army-issue Colt before he was killed with a bullet to the head. Two other guerrillas were killed with Gerard’s assault rifle, which was never recovered.

  Wounded in the abdomen, Benjamin Reed was left to die a slow, horrible death.

  It was a fact the authorities kept from his widow. At first, Thomas had heartily agreed.

  Within days, however, he’d decided Annette shouldn’t have been spared a single heart-wrenching detail of the massacre.

  “You went to bed with a viper, my friend,” Tai had told him one night not long after Annette’s second departure.

  “You knew?”

  “Yes, but I knew, too, your common sense would prevail and you would extricate yourself from her spell.”

  Thomas smiled. Tai had worked for Annette Reed for five years and had a right to dislike her. “Next time my love life fires up, I’ll run the lady past you.”

  But Tai was deadly serious. “Thomas, she has contacts all over the city. With the crime bosses, with the police, with the Vietcong. She can find out anything she wants to find out and hurt anyone she wants to hurt. She used her time in Saigon well. She has the means to do whatever she wants.”

  “For heaven’s sake, she was so green she could barely find her way to her hotel—”

  “She worked fast, my friend. Trust me. I think she will use her contacts to keep tabs on her husband and make money for Winston & Reed. But don’t trust her, Thomas.” Tai smiled halfheartedly. “And don’t get on her bad side.”

  But it was too late for that.

  Thomas had nothing to go on but his gut feeling, Tai’s words and his own knowledge of Annette, but he believed—he knew—she had found out about his plans and had passed the word to the guerrillas.

  As he combed the city for information, he discovered enough to convince himself that Tai was right. She had the contacts, the money, the will. In one fell swoop, she would have gotten rid of two of her ex-lovers. Jean-Paul, the jewel thief and blackmailer. Thomas, the middle-aged fool.

  He couldn’t root out proof that Annette was anything more than the wealthy, bored woman from Boston who had spent lots of money in Saigon and talked lots of crazy talk no one hadn’t heard before. He turned Saigon inside out and upside down. There was nothing that would stand up in a court of law.

  And then the rumors began to circulate. “You’re hurting, Thomas,” his last friend in the state department had told him. “People around here think you were skipping out on a tête-à-tête with the VC that day.”

  Annette’s doing. Her stink was everywhere, but she was safely in Boston, mourning her lost husband and clamoring for additional military aid to the South Vietnamese government.

  Finally, Thomas accepted full responsibility for the tragedy that had claimed the lives of three
people he loved and possibly a fourth he had only just met. If he was right and Annette had tipped off the Vietcong, then pointing his finger at her—especially when he had no tangible proof—was madness. There was the rest of his family to consider—Jenny, the children. Would Annette threaten them if he attempted to expose her?

  Thomas wondered if he was being paranoid and simply looking for some way to avoid his own culpability. Common sense should have told him to stay out of her bed. Common sense should have told him to be more careful when it came to arranging excursions into the Mekong Delta.

  He looked into taking Tai’s ten-year-old daughter Tam back to Boston with him, but friends had taken her in and assured him she would be well cared for. Thomas wept for her and wondered if she still dreamed of the stone mas on the Riviera, the beautiful roses her father had cultivated, the smell of lemons and flowers and the Mediterranean Sea.

  Should he have left Tai to return to his life in southern France?

  “I would have come back,” Tai had told him. “Remember that, my friend. You’re a hard man, Thomas, but harder on yourself than on anyone else. No matter what happens to me or to my country, I don’t want you to blame yourself.”

  Dear God, how could he not?

  A month after her husband’s death, Annette became chairman and president of Winston & Reed.

  With the ambush, Thomas Blackburn lost all credibility. His company went bankrupt, and his chance at the ambassadorship to Saigon evaporated. If nothing else, he had put Vietnam on the front pages, and few in the American government wanted that. There were still those who preferred to do their work there quietly, effectively and fast.

  Thomas returned to West Cedar Street, to his house not a half mile from Annette Reed’s, and he prayed to God that with himself and Jean-Paul Gerard out of the way, she was finished.

  Twenty-Eight

  Annette poured herself a glass of brandy and wandered from room to room in her big, empty house, skipping only Kim’s quarters in the apartment she’d made for him in the basement. She moved briskly, angrily, through the house, talking to herself, wondering if this was the sort of thing crazy old women did. But she’d been doing it for years, ever since Jean-Paul Gerard had come back to haunt her first in 1963, then again in 1974, and again in 1975, and again now.

  She didn’t have his Jupiter Stones.

  But she wasn’t going to let him ruin her life over them or anything she’d done out of self-defense.

  The past was past.

  She was a different person than what she’d been thirty years ago. Couldn’t he see that? Couldn’t Thomas? People grow up, she thought. They go on with their lives. They forget the mistakes they’ve made and the wrongs that have been committed against them. They don’t hold grudges forever.

  She had lived an exemplary life. She didn’t deserve to keep suffering like this.

  And damn you, Thomas, I have suffered.

  Whenever she thought about sweet, gentle, boring Benjamin…well, she simply couldn’t. She hadn’t taken a lover since his death. Twenty-six years of celibacy: her way of honoring her husband’s memory, of punishing herself for the miscalculation that had led to his death…but that really was Thomas’s fault. He had known Benjamin hadn’t belonged on that excursion into the Mekong Delta. He should have stopped him from going.

  Thomas’s fault. Not hers.

  Benjamin’s last words to her were etched forever in her mind. “You’re a tough-minded woman, Annette. We’ll be a good balance for each other.”

  And they would have been, too. She saw that now.

  Would she have continued to have affairs? She felt no guilt about her brief liaisons with Jean-Paul and Thomas. If they’d been moral mistakes, they weren’t in the sexual sense. Both men had been incredible lovers. Benjamin hadn’t been hurt by her actions, as he’d had no idea she’d ever been “unfaithful” to him.

  Night after night for the past twenty-six years, she’d awakened aroused and sobbing, dreaming not of Benjamin and their nights together, but of Jean-Paul and Thomas.

  She refilled her brandy glass and kicked off her shoes, feeling freer and more relaxed in her bare feet.

  After her disastrous affair with Thomas and the death of her husband, she—the proud, sad widow—had plunged herself into her work at Winston & Reed. Her parents and friends had excused her unseemly ambition when she’d explained to them, tearfully, that she was working hard and determined to make one business triumph after another in order to honor her husband’s memory.

  As American military involvement in Indochina escalated, Winston & Reed made enormous profits, and Annette diversified and expanded its investments in the U. S. She never went back to Saigon on business after 1963. She had a trusted, astute American staff there and her own quiet network of Vietnamese contacts.

  With the Paris Peace Accords, she engineered the downscaling of Winston & Reed’s commitment to what she believed was a doomed South Vietnam. It just wasn’t good business to continue to invest in a country she knew wasn’t going to last. She had no desire to lose assets to the communists.

  She fought Quentin’s decision to leave for Saigon in October 1973. She could have forbidden him to go, but with the American military withdrawal and no word from Jean-Paul Gerard in ten years, she decided—moronically—she had nothing to fear. She assumed Jean-Paul must have died as a prisoner of war.

  She hadn’t even guessed Quang Tai’s lovely daughter, Tam, would become a problem.

  By the spring of 1974, Quentin had taken up with her, and Annette began to worry. When he came home for the groundbreaking ceremonies for the new Winston & Reed building, she warned her son about committing himself to a long-term relationship with a Vietnamese woman.

  “But this is Tam,” he told her.

  Yes, indeed: Tam. His childhood playmate on the Riviera whose father had died on the same day, in the same ambush as Benjamin Reed. Bad enough Annette had to tolerate Rebecca Blackburn’s return to Boston as a student and her nephew Jared’s obvious interest in her. She couldn’t control them. But Quentin was her son, and she wouldn’t tolerate his continuing a relationship with Tai’s daughter.

  By early summer, Tam and Quentin were still going strong, and Annette was running down the list of possible ultimatums she could give him to drop her.

  Enter Jean-Paul Gerard.

  He’d discovered Quentin’s idiotic involvement with a ring of drug smugglers, and finally had sent him to his mother for a way of getting the Frenchman to keep his mouth shut.

  Licking his lips, nervous and abject, Quentin explained the situation. “He asked me to tell you that you should know what he wants.”

  She did: the Jupiter Stones.

  Her only satisfaction throughout the ordeal was listening to Quentin’s description of Jean-Paul’s haggard, malnourished, parasite-ridden body. His hair had gone completely white, and he was no longer the dashing young Frenchman who’d swept her off her feet on the Riviera fifteen years earlier. He had escaped, she learned, from his jungle POW camp in 1968 after five years of imprisonment. Obviously he’d stayed in Vietnam and was unable or uninterested in getting proper medical attention for the captivity-related conditions he suffered.

  Maybe he’ll just wither away and die, Annette had thought.

  She’d never, however, been one to wait for providence to act. Indirectly and quietly, she let her more unsavory contacts know a confirmed report of Jean-Paul Gerard’s death would please her mightily. Kim himself had twice tried to kill him and failed.

  Meanwhile, Annette found her way to get her son out of Saigon and away from Tam and Gerard.

  “I’ll help you,” she told him, “under one condition.”

  He didn’t ask her what condition that was; he already knew.

  But she told him, anyway, just to be sure. “You’re not to go back to Saigon.”

  As Annette walked out into her damp, cool garden, she drank her expensive brandy, still able to see the stricken look on Quentin’s handsome face during
that dreadful luncheon in which she’d destroyed his boyish fantasies about coming home to live with Tam.

  “But what about Tam?” he’d asked.

  “She’s survived the past eleven years as an orphan in a war-torn country. She’ll be all right. Trust me, Quentin. You’ll still be thinking about her long, long after she’s forgotten you and moved on to another good-looking, rich, vulnerable man.”

  With Quentin out of the country, Jean-Paul lost his leverage. Annette half expected him to send her pictures or some other incontrovertible proof of her son’s culpability in the drug-smuggling operation, but she didn’t hear another word from him.

  Quentin moped for weeks, until she was able to call him into her office at Winston & Reed and announce not only was she promoting him to a management position, she was also going to allay his doubts about what he’d done to Tam.

  “I’ve never told you this,” she said, “but I’ve had people in Saigon looking out for Tam, because I considered her father my friend and care very deeply about her, even if I strongly object to her using my son to further her own ends. My people tell me she’s taken up with another man.”

  Her son’s shock was palpable. “Are you sure?”

  “Quite. What’s more, she’s pregnant.”

  “Mother—”

  “And I believe you know the father. They’re even living together.”

  Quentin didn’t say a word.

  Annette looked properly sympathetic. “It just goes to show you, Quentin, that you have to be very, very careful about whom you trust.”

  “Tam…”

  “Oh, not just Tam. The man she’s taken up with is your own cousin Jared.”

  Annette had no idea if all she’d told him was true or not. She did know Tam was pregnant, and she did know the young woman had gone to live with Jared after losing her penthouse apartment. The rest—well, for all Annette knew, the baby could have been Quentin’s or anyone else’s in Saigon.

  “Remember,” she had told Quentin over and over during those touchy weeks, “the one person you can trust is your mother. I always have your best interests at heart.”