‘Thank you for the drink, I must –’
His voice rode over hers. ‘So when did you move on to New York?’
‘A couple of months ago. Vlad decided that people in East Europe were fascinated by the American political process but unless they were political students they found it all too complicated. They wanted simple explanations. Vlad had started a bureau over here, which was run by an old friend of his, Theo Strahov – Theo is an American citizen now, but he was born in Prague, worked with Vlad there before he came to America. Theo retired from full-time work some years ago, but for Vlad he came out of retirement and started the new bureau. He has been running it singlehanded ever since. But he found it more and more tiring. So Vlad sent me to help out for a while, and then last week Theo collapsed in the street. He’s OK now, but the doctors say it was a stroke warning, and he must start to take it easy. So I shall be running the bureau from now on.’
She was telling him a lot, but telling him nothing, she hoped, nothing of any importance, about herself, about her life, about her world. But the cat-and-mouse game was more tiring than she had expected.
Quickly, before he could ask her any more questions, she asked him one. ‘Do you know Senator Gowrie’s wife? What is she like?’
‘Frail, sick, a lady who doesn’t always know what time of day it is.’
She already knew all that, but she pretended surprise. ‘Yes? That is sad. What’s wrong with her?’
‘God knows. She has never been strong, I gather.’
Still casual, she murmured, ‘How many children do they have?’
‘Just one. Cathy.’
She noted the intimacy of the shortened name with a pang of shock. Did he know Gowrie’s daughter well enough to call her that, or did the press all use her pet name?
‘What’s she like?’ she asked, keeping her eyes down on her linked hands on the polished bar table, struggling not to betray anything by her face, by her voice, but it wasn’t easy; emotion kept trying to break through.
‘Beautiful,’ he said with a bitter tang to his voice. She looked up then, startled, but this time it was Steve who avoided her stare, his eyes fixed on his empty glass. ‘She’s smart, too,’ he said as if talking to himself. ‘She’s clever and cool-headed, a political animal. Of course, it’s in her blood. She comes from a family who’ve been mixed up in politics for generations. She has travelled from coast to coast with her father many a time. He worships the ground she walks on, she has always been more of an asset to him than her mother, who almost never shows up. Cathy sat on platforms with him, worked on campaigns, talked to the press . . . she knew exactly how to talk to people, she could have had a career in politics any time she wanted it.’
‘But she didn’t?’ Sophie took in everything he had said, and thirsted to hear more. She needed to know everything about this other woman whose existence dominated Gowrie’s life.
He shrugged without answering. ‘She may once have done, but not any more.’
Why not? Sophie wondered. What had changed? ‘Does she have a career?’
He grimaced, his face sardonic. ‘Several, none of them very serious. She was an interior designer for a while, she’s an expert on eighteenth-century porcelain, she paints and writes articles for specialist magazines . . . she dabbles in a lot of things. I wouldn’t call any of them a career. Anyway, she’s married now.’
She nodded absently. ‘To an Englishman. I know.’
‘Why are you so interested in Gowrie?’ Steve asked abruptly, and her nerves jumped.
‘Well . . . obviously . . . if he should become president of the United States that would make him the most powerful man in the world.’ She knew she had stammered, sounded odd, but he had taken her by surprise. He kept coming far too close. She must get away from him before he guessed too much . . .
She got up unsteadily, very pale. ‘Thank you for the drink. I must go, I have copy to file,’ she said in a rush, beginning to move away just as his producer appeared in the doorway, looking agitated. He didn’t come over to them, but stared fixedly at Steve, held up his wrist, tapped his watch pointedly.
Steve nodded and began to walk towards him, in step with Sophie. ‘Looks as if I’ve got to go and do some more work, too, before Simon blows his stack. Time always flies by when you’re enjoying yourself. Look, could we have dinner together tonight?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and meant it. For once she wanted to, she really did, but she couldn’t. It would be far too dangerous. He was one of the most attractive men she’d ever met, and if he wasn’t so shrewd and perceptive she might have taken the risk, but this was not a man it was easy to fool – she knew she would find it hard to go on lying, deceiving him, for long, if they saw each other again.
‘Come on, for God’s sake,’ Simon grunted as they reached him, ‘We’re all set up outside, we’ve been waiting for you for ten minutes. If we miss the evening news you can explain it – I’m not taking the can for you.’
‘No need to panic, we have plenty of time.’
Steve Colbourne sounded so calm and unflappable – was he always like that? Sophie envied him; she wished she could stand up to pressure that well. She tried to look and sound as cool as a cucumber, but her nerves made her stomach cramp into agony at times.
As they walked towards the swing doors leading out of the hotel, the lift doors opened and out came a massed body of men who began moving at speed in their direction, cutting a swath through the hotel guests, who fell back, parting like the Red Sea in the face of that unstoppable force. Sophie’s breath caught as she saw it was Don Gowrie, flanked by security men on all sides.
Steve and his producer had already gone through the swing doors, but Sophie was too slow in following. A second later the little army of men was on her, but they didn’t march past because Don Gowrie stopped, and they all stopped with him.
‘Miss Narodni,’ Don Gowrie said, giving her that boyish smile of his. ‘Hello again. I’m sorry I didn’t have time to answer your question – another time, maybe?’
His cool nerve took her breath away. She would have loved to shout out the truth, wipe that smile off his face – but she couldn’t, not yet at least. She needed to meet Mrs Gowrie and Catherine, first. She didn’t want to destroy their lives just because Don Gowrie was a lying, cheating bastard. Why should they pay for what he had done? She felt an intense sympathy and pity for his wife; no doubt she had known the truth all along, but the poor woman had suffered. Sophie didn’t want to hurt her even more.
‘Maybe you’ll have time to talk to me while you’re in London?’ she told him, hoping she sounded as cool as he did.
She saw the flicker of shock in his eyes before he veiled them. ‘So you’ll be in London too?’ he said. ‘I’ll certainly look out for you.’
Then he was gone, his entourage hiding him from her; she followed through the swing doors a moment later and saw the long black limousines driving off at speed, while police held up the rest of the traffic until the limousines had got away.
While she stared, Don Gowrie’s face briefly showed at the back window of the second car. He looked towards her and then he was gone.
She heard Steve Colbourne’s voice from a hundred feet away; he was standing with his back to her, and the hotel behind her, recording a piece to camera, his voice confidential, smooth, accustomed.
Sophie didn’t hover to listen to what he was saying. She pulled her jacket closer, and began to walk towards the subway station nearest the hotel. She had to get back to her flat and file her story with Vlad, try to talk him into letting her fly to London.
She bought a token, walked towards the turnstile, and began to push her token into the slot, conscious of a man behind her waiting for his turn. Sophie didn’t look at him. She had learnt never to make eye-contact with men in the subway. She slid through the turnstile and walked on to the platform, staying where she could see the token booth; although it was daylight she still felt uneasy on the subway. There were other passenger
s waiting, she was not alone, but you heard such horror stories. She was relieved when another couple of women came along.
A train rattled along the tunnel and came out into the lighted station; she glanced up at the indicator board, then checked the route number, a big blue numeral, on the front of the coming train.
She was still getting used to the routes and the names of stations; she had to think for a second before she worked out that she would have to change trains at Washington Square to get to the station nearest to her flat. New York’s subway system was as complicated as the underground system in London, to which she had only just become adjusted when she was transferred here.
She was so absorbed that she didn’t hear a sound behind her or see anything.
She had no warning. A hand suddenly hit her in the middle of her back, right between the shoulder blades, propelling her violently forward to the edge of the platform.
2
Steve Colbourne was driving away from the hotel in a cab a quarter of an hour later when an ambulance passed him, siren going, and pulled up outside the entrance to a subway station already surrounded by a small crowd. A couple of uniformed policemen were barring entry to everyone but the medical team which jumped out of the ambulance and ran with their equipment down the stairs.
Steve was in a hurry but his reporter’s instincts wouldn’t let him drive on past without checking it out. He leaned forward and said to the taxi driver, ‘Hey, pull over here, would you? I just want to find out what’s going on.’
The driver looked round at him, shrugged, and put on his brakes. Steve leaned out of the window, and yelled to one of the policemen, ‘What’s happened in there?’
He got an impatient stare. ‘Accident – drive on, you’re holding up traffic.’
Steve pulled out his press card and held it up. ‘Press. What sort of accident?’
The crowd all turned to stare at him. Before the policeman could answer, a young black guy in the crowd shouted, ‘There’s a girl on the line, fell under a train.’
‘Dead?’
The guy spread his hands, his big shoulders moving. ‘Well, they don’t generally get up and walk afterwards, now do they?’
A woman hovering near the kerb complained, ‘Why do they always have to do it during rush hour, huh? I got to get home. They take so long to clear the line after one of these jumpers.’
‘Take the bus,’ the black guy told her, and got a glare.
‘Easy for you to say, you ain’t got my feet.’
He looked down at her swollen ankles. ‘Don’t want ’em neither, lady.’
Others in the crowd began to laugh, but not the policemen. Behind the cab, traffic had now built up in a noisy log jam.
‘Get going!’ the cab driver was ordered by one of the policemen, who came down to the kerb to bang on the top of the cab with his night stick.
‘Hey, don’t damage the cab!’ the driver yelled at him. The air was raucous with car horns blaring, drivers leaning out to shout insults at the cab driver, who turned to say to Steve, ‘Got to go, mister. D’you wanna pay me and get out, or can we drive on now?’
Leaning back, Steve gestured. ‘OK, let’s go.’ After all, it happened all the time, people were always throwing themselves under subway trains, although God knew why they would want so violent and painful a death, but there was nothing in it for him. It wouldn’t rate more than a para in any newspaper, and, anyway, regular news wasn’t his scene. He had always specialized; politics was all he had ever been interested in because, like Catherine Gowrie, he had been bred to it.
All his life, his parents had been active in neighbourhood politics: his mother was on a whole raft of committees, the local PT Association, Mother’s Union, raising money for charities, and his father, a New England academic, had campaigned for his local congressman most of his adult lifetime, a stalwart Republican and boyhood friend at school of Eddie Ramsey’s eldest son. Fred Colbourne had even thought of standing for Congress, himself, until a mild heart attack in his mid-fifties put paid to that idea. His doctor had warned that although he might live another twenty years if he was sensible and took care of himself, he would be asking for trouble if he didn’t slow down. He certainly wouldn’t be fit to cope with the tensions and strain of a political career.
‘Well, that’s the end of the road for me, but one day I’d like to see you in Congress, son,’ he had told Steve wistfully, on his first day back home from hospital, resting on a daybed by a window downstairs in their three-bedroomed white frame Norman Rockwell look-alike house above Chesapeake Bay, Easton, a few miles from the Ramsey family home.
Steve had laughed, grimaced, shaken his head. ‘I’m no politician, Dad. I’ve seen too much of them too close. Call me fussy, but I don’t want to get my hands that dirty.’
His father had bristled. ‘That isn’t fair, Steve. I know plenty of decent politicians. OK, there’s some corruption, there always is in government, but there are plenty of honest men in Washington.’
‘Like the wonderful guys who didn’t come to visit you in hospital?’ Steve knew none of the politicians his father had done so much to help over the years had shown up to see him after his heart attack, and that that had hurt his father, even though he had never said a word about them.
‘They’re busy men. And they probably felt it was a time for family only, and didn’t want to intrude. They’re my friends, Steve, I know them better than you do!’
Steve had heard Fred Colbourne’s voice rasp with distress and anger, and too late remembered his mother sternly warning him not to upset his father. Quickly, he said, ‘I know they’re your friends, and some of them are decent guys. And somebody has to do the job, like somebody has to take out the garbage. We have to be governed, but it isn’t ever going to be me, Dad. Sorry to disappoint you, but keeping an eye on what they get up to is more my style.’
From his teens Steve had been out on the hoof, stuffing campaign messages into letter boxes, selling party newspapers, acting as a steward at local meetings, listening in on late-night drinking sessions where his father and various other local party bigwigs talked more freely than they ever would in public. He was disillusioned before he was twenty, and nothing he had seen since had changed his view of politicians.
His father had looked at him reproachfully, rather than angrily. ‘I’ve never got my hands dirty, Steve.’
‘No, of course not,’ Steve had hurriedly agreed, his voice soothing, then went on, ‘But you’ve had to turn a blind eye to a lot of stuff you didn’t really approve of, Dad. We both know that.’ Then he had leaned over to pat his father’s shoulder. ‘Dad, don’t look that way. In the real world we all have to live with what we don’t like. I do, myself – there’s corruption and sleaze enough in TV, God knows. But at least nobody pretends to be perfect. It’s hypocrisy I can’t stand; all the sanctimonious humbug.’
From the doorway his mother had asked sharply, ‘What are you talking about? I thought I told you no politics? Your father mustn’t overdo things, he isn’t out of the wood yet. Time he took his nap now, anyway. I’ve just made some coffee and hot muffins, Steve. Come back downstairs.’
She came over and made a fuss of tucking a warm patchwork quilt around his father, as if he was a child, adjusting his pillows, pulling down the blind to shut out the noonday sun, stroking back his thinning grey hair and smiling down at him maternally.
‘Now, you get some sleep, you hear?’
‘She finally got what she wanted, son,’ his father had complained. ‘I’m at her mercy, helpless as a newborn babe. Talk about politicians wanting power! It’s women who’re power-hungry, they’re control freaks, every last one of them.’
‘You hush,’ Marcia Colbourne said indulgently, bending to kiss his forehead before she walked quietly back out of the room, taking Steve with her.
When she got him alone in the kitchen, she turned on him angrily. ‘I won’t tell you again, Steve! He may look as if he’s back to normal, but he’s still recovering, a
nd I don’t want him upset. Keep off the subject of politics. Talk to him about books, or the garden, or music, but no politics! And don’t ever let me hear you lecturing your father again.’
Steve had been taken aback, his face flushing. His mother rarely raised her voice but when she did you knew you were really in the doghouse. ‘Sorry,’ he had muttered, and meant it. ‘I didn’t think. Stupid of me.’
‘Yes, it was,’ she had said, but, relenting, had poured him strong black coffee and put out a plate of blueberry muffins, his favourites, especially when his mother had made them. She was the best cook he knew; she didn’t cook fussy food, only went for simple dishes, usually traditional New England fare, with home-grown herbs and vegetables, cooked perfectly. Her chowder was something to dream about and her fish melted in your mouth.
Marcia Colbourne still had the looks that had made Fred Colbourne fall for her thirty-six years ago. Until you got close to her you would never believe she was fifty-five; her skin had a smooth texture that made her look half her age, and her dark hair showed just a little elegant grey here and there.
She was as traditional in the way she dressed as she was in her cooking: in winter she wore soft pastel lambswool sweaters with pearls, in the English style, with tweed skirts; in summer she wore Laura Ashley dresses that gave her a cool, understated elegance. Slim, hyperactive, she was always on the move, cooking, working in the house, gardening, swimming, walking the beach in all weathers to hunt for bare, silvery driftwood for her famous flower arrangements.
Her artistic streak came out in many ways: she embroidered tablecloths and traycloths, made tapestry firescreens, painted delicate watercolours, especially of the coast around their home, and when Steve and his sister, Sally, were kids the family often took their summer vacation at the Blackwater wildlife refuge, some twenty miles away, to sail and fish and watch birds, while their mother painted the flocks of water fowl you saw there. Steve associated those holidays with a sense of freedom, a smell of the sea, of fish they caught themselves, cooking over a makeshift barbecue on the sand while his mother threw together a salad with a dressing of lemon juice and a little olive oil.
Walking in Darkness Page 5