Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen : A Novel (9781101565766)

by Caplan, Thomas

  The port-side railing, with its view of an impending sunset, had seemed as good a place as any, and he spoke a few words to all who found their way there: colleagues of Isabella’s from Guardi; film financiers from Dubai and Hong Kong; dowagers from villas on the Caps or in the hills above them, usually with their mute and handsome walkers half a step behind; established and would-be producers; artistic and business-minded directors; actors and actresses both ascendant and near death, famous and merely hopeful. The pressure of others waiting for his time kept any single conversation from becoming too involved, permitting him to dispense charm in small doses and reserve his affection for the few people who really mattered to him.

  He was in the middle of an interesting conversation with one of France’s most famous celebrity chefs, a severe, unabashedly ambitious character of about fifty with graying temples but playful eyes, when he thought he heard a dull thunderclap, then another, louder, and one immediately after that. Above the horizon, just over the culinary entrepreneur’s left shoulder, Ty quickly made out the approaching helicopter, an EC130 B4, whose rotors, though quieter than most, had forced a pause in their conversation. The chef turned, too, and with most of the other guests focused on the aircraft swooping toward them. It was an elegant piece of machinery, painted in the same deep cobalt as Surpass’s hull.

  “Sheer exhibitionism!” the chef exclaimed.

  “Why don’t we wait to see who gets out before we jump to conclusions?” Ty suggested.

  The chef moistened his index finger, raised it to eye level, then brought it down in a single, rapid stroke in front of him, as if to say, Score one!

  When the bird had alighted on the crossbar of the encircled H that marked the helipad on Surpass’s aftmost deck, its rotors dipped like gulls’ wings and wound down to a still hush. Then, as the party’s roar began to rise gradually from the interruption, a solitary passenger emerged from the starboard door. Tall and slender, in a gray English suit, the young man did not look up to return the crowd’s gaze but moved toward the shallow overhang that marked the entrance to one of the ship’s many passages.

  Ty wondered who the new arrival was and where he’d gone. When, after a few minutes, the newcomer had still failed to materialize at the party, Ty concluded that he must be staying aboard Surpass, a notion confirmed when the same man eventually reappeared wearing a tropical blazer. Even in casual clothing, however, this object of Ty’s curiosity maintained a courtly bearing, just shy of military.

  As discreetly as he could, Ty kept his eye on the man. Instinct told him he should. He wasn’t quite sure why. Or was he? Following two brief social interactions, from both of which he nimbly extricated himself, the stylish figure ultimately made his way to where Ty’s subconscious must, he thought now, have known from the beginning that it would. Isabella, in midsentence, smiled, then slowly drew him to her. Turning from the revelers, she slipped both arms around the man’s neck, leaned up, and kissed him with a passion oblivious to its surroundings.

  Ty moved off in the opposite direction. He was not sure what game she was playing.

  A few minutes later, where the deck ended at the open doors to the ship’s library, he heard her call his name and stopped.

  Isabella rushed toward him, the new arrival just behind her. “Mr. Hunter, there’s someone I want you to meet.”

  “Of course, Miss Cavill,” Ty replied.

  “Don’t be silly. Call me Isabella. This is Philip Frost.”

  “Hello,” Ty said, extending his hand. He couldn’t help it: The whore’s insight filled his memory and disgusted him. This was the man who forced women to grovel.

  “How do you do?” Philip said.

  “Philip,” Isabella said, “where do I begin? Philip is . . . everything to me. He’s Ian’s protégé and my—”

  “Muse,” Philip interrupted. “I’m her muse. At least that’s what Isabella tells me.”

  Ty smiled. “I’d believe her if I were you.”

  “I do,” Philip said, with a chill in his voice.

  “Have you seen my new pieces?” Isabella asked them both. “They’re on exhibit in the library. Come on, I’ll show you.”

  “Lead the way,” Ty said.

  Philip nodded. “I can see where this is going,” he said. “In no time you’ll be the new male face of Guardi.”

  “I’m afraid not,” Ty said.

  “And why is that?”

  “I don’t do ads.”

  “What a luxurious position to find oneself in,” Philip said.

  “Except in Asia,” Ty said.

  “I’m sure the market there is different,” Philip said.

  “They take a more positive view of actors advertising,” Ty said.

  Isabella paused. “You mean they don’t fear that commerce corrupts art?” she asked.

  “No,” Ty said. “I suppose they don’t.”

  “Tell me,” Philip inquired. “How long are you in Europe?”

  “I leave the day after tomorrow. I’m here to help a friend’s film, in which I had a very unimportant part, at the festival.”

  “That’s too bad,” Philip continued.

  “It really is,” Isabella added. “Otherwise you could have joined us for a cruise.”

  “Thank you,” Ty said, “but I have a house waiting.”

  “The one you just bought?” Isabella asked. Then, directing her smile to Philip, she added, “I brought Mr. Hunter out on the tender.”

  “Did you? That was thoughtful.”

  “No it wasn’t. You know I’m a fan.”

  “Just teasing,” Philip said, and laughed quickly. “I know you are.”

  Ty examined Isabella’s eyes. Why had she kissed him, led him on, then dropped him? Was it freedom she wanted or merely proof that she could have it? Was she trying to make Philip jealous or playing to the crowd she must have known would be watching? He said, “It’s an old wreck, really, that I’ve bought. A great eclectic mansion in the most beautiful canyon, but it needs an awful lot of work, and now’s the time.”

  “Are you working on another film?” Philip asked, almost idly, but piquing Isabella’s attention.

  “Not at the moment,” Ty replied. “I’ve just finished four in a row. To be honest, I need a break before I decide what I want to do next.”

  “Who you want to be, you mean,” Philip added.

  “Yes, in a way,” Ty said, “exactly.”

  “It makes perfect sense,” Philip said.

  “Can’t your house wait a week or two?” Isabella asked, with more politesse than expectation in her voice.

  “I wish it could, but I have whole teams lined up: architects and builders, not to mention a decorator and landscapers. You know the drill. One thing can’t be done without the other, and if you don’t get the first things started . . .”

  “I can only imagine,” Isabella agreed.

  “Plus, I have to make a stop on the way.” No sooner had the phrase escaped his mouth than Ty caught himself. For it was an engagement he’d been asked, indeed cautioned, not to discuss. The invitation had arrived, as if out of nowhere, during his first afternoon at the Hôtel du Cap. His agent, Netty Fleiderfleiss, had called from Los Angeles in a state of high excitement.

  “‘On the way,’” Isabella repeated. “That’s a curious way of putting it.”

  “In New York,” Ty dissembled, “which means I can’t fly over the pole, so the whole trip is that much longer. But it’s business. If it weren’t, I wouldn’t do it, not in a million years.”

  “Well, it all sounds very glamorous, doesn’t it, Philip?”

  “Very glamorous,” Philip told her.

  “What do you do, Mr. Frost?” Ty asked.

  Philip hesitated. “A little of this, a little of that,” he ventured. “Dreary stuff in compari
son to your world.”

  “Philip’s a diplomat,” Isabella said, “a banker-turned-diplomat, who may be about to turn banker again.”

  “A strange destiny for a man who trained as a physicist, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I don’t know,” Ty said. “Life’s full of tricks.”

  Chapter Eight

  Outside the owner’s cabin five minutes later, Philip took a seat on a curved banquette open to the sky. The human music of the party floated upward, but he did his best to put it out of his mind, to hear only the soft lap of the sea against Surpass’s hull and stabilizers. He had always preferred to concentrate in silence or, at minimum, in the absence of others’ words. He liked the Med, relished its soft, sweet, careless ways. Indeed, there had been times when he wished he had been born along its shore, heir to its beneficent maternal vision of a God who provided her children with the most temperate of climates as well as uncomplicated laughter and the ready availability of carnal love. Alas, he hadn’t! The genes he’d been selected to bear were those of hunters of wild beasts in dark forests, evaders of stags and lightning. Their God had forever dwelt in the sky, beyond ever re-forming clouds, producing thunder at twilight to rouse them from any episodes of disobedience or laxity. No man, not even one possessed of Philip’s fortitude, could by any act of will convert himself into the product of a separate, equally ancient history or set of expectations.

  When Ian finally appeared from his cabin, he said, “I am sorry to have kept you.”

  Philip stood. “Actually, it’s quite the reverse.”

  Ian nodded his acceptance of Philip’s apology and beckoned the younger man to follow, past the mounted Venetian masks into a study lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, its walls covered with green mohair velvet and its floor by a Turkish rug. Once inside, Ian closed the door, then took a seat at his enormous Chippendale desk. “Can I tempt you?” he inquired.

  Philip demurred as Ian chose a cigar, a Cohiba Robusto.

  “You don’t mind?” Ian asked.

  “You know I don’t,” Philip replied.

  When the cigar had been lit, Ian said, “Our friends in Naples, how are they?”

  “Much of a muchness,” Philip told him. “One can never be sure if they are genuinely curious or if they’ve simply come to take for granted that feigning curiosity raises their price.”

  “Go on.”

  “Not that I’m complaining, mind you. It’s a lovely port to work in, deliciously corrupt.”

  “And that corruption can cost precious time,” Ian said, “which I’m sure is what delayed you.”

  Philip sighed in agreement.

  Ian said, “I have to admit it can be amusing. The last time I was there, an American woman, who was obviously a major heiress, was staying at the same hotel. She had her very large family with her. On their way to the airport, a scooter pulled up next to the passenger side of her limousine and its driver threw a rock through the car’s window and snatched the handbag from her lap before speeding off. As it happens, she had all their passports and air tickets in that bag, which left her with no choice but to order that the car immediately turn around. By the time they’d got back to the hotel, her handbag was already in the possession of the hall porter, who discreetly asked if he might have a word with her. The money was gone, naturally, he explained, but the remaining contents, including of course those passports and tickets, could be reclaimed for a small ransom. As you say, there’s something delicious about such seamless corruption.”

  “One has to remain on guard, but it has its uses, certainly,” Philip assented. “Our cargo made its way there, disguised on the first leg as building supplies, then as level-three turbines bound in due course for the Southern Hemisphere, some for Africa, more for Latin America—in other words, machinery that’s a bit stale for Europe, past its sell-by date, not worth paying too much attention to.”

  “But you are telling me—suggesting, rather—that someone did pay attention?”

  “We’ll never know for sure. Whatever leaves Russia arouses interest. Not to worry. The fact that it bore the Claussen imprimatur or at least the imprimatur of the Claussen subsidiary that’s partnered with the Russian outfit went a long way toward allaying suspicion. You were right about that.”

  “Poor Billy,” Ian said.

  “I still can’t believe it,” Philip said.

  “There was a man who appreciated life, a man who was never afraid. He would go where angels feared to tread. As long as I’d known him, that was the case. Rather a lot of people would have instantly backed off anything having to do with Russia. Not Billy. He saw the potential in developing there from the get-go. It excited him. You could see that in his eyes. I don’t know who said or did what that caused him to change his mind so abruptly. I asked him, naturally, but he was vague about it. Sometimes cultural divides are too wide to be bridged, I suppose. Or perhaps that was simply the excuse he manufactured and his real reasons had more to do with the state of his own business than with us or any of our people.”

  “You don’t think he had become suspicious?”

  “Not for a moment. If he had, he would have alerted the authorities.”

  “He was playing one game. We were playing another. You don’t believe that a man as clever as Billy would have figured that out?”

  “Trust me, Philip. The way Billy would have seen it, this was just another in a long succession of profitable deals between us. I put him next to a juicy project, he paid me a handsome fee: business as usual. If he’d grown nervous, it was over something else.”

  “I defer to you. I never met the man.”

  “You would have enjoyed him. Anyway, it’s a pity he couldn’t have had a longer, better final act.”

  “If Claussen had lived and actually had parted ways with us—” Philip ventured.

  But Ian stopped him. “We would have found other cover without too much difficulty. There is, after all, an enticing profit to be made on that peninsula.”

  “What other cover could have been as immaculate as Claussen’s?”

  Ian regarded Philip with sudden circumspection. “We might have been forced to accept a somewhat higher level of risk. So what?”

  “Very bad timing for Billy, to say the least,” Philip said, “but it did play into our hands. That’s all I was suggesting.”

  “The world’s gone mad,” Ian said. “At least too many of the people in it have.”

  Philip nodded then resumed, “Of course, the fact that our cargo is bound where it is bound rather than, say, to Tunis or Algiers was also useful. And there were building supplies and there were turbines, lots of both scattered throughout, in case anyone looked, which they didn’t. Why would they when it could only complicate matters and they’re being paid to keep out of the picture?”

  “I’m still not sure I understand the reason for the delay.”

  “There were a few more—unanticipated—palms to grease, a few more minds to set at rest, that’s all.”

  “Where? In the Bosporus?”

  “Inevitably in the Bosporus, and also at Gallipoli and Çanakkale. All very matter-of-fact.”

  “Why do you imagine they might have been suspicious?”

  “These are people who do not think conceptually. They think practically. Contraband is their stock in trade. They wouldn’t understand any other kind of shipment, but there is contraband fashion, which is a specialty of the Camorra. Then, in addition to drugs, of course, there are contraband videos, software, arms, meaning guns or perhaps grenades; really, contraband everything. All appear on their schedule of tariffs. Their concern is that higher-tariff merchandise not move under the guise of anything less.”

  Ian drew a long puff on his Robusto, exhaled it carefully. “Therefore you paid the going price for guns?”

  “Not quite. To do so, espe
cially too readily, might have gotten them thinking: What could be more valuable than Russian guns?”

  “Very cunning.”

  “One is careful, nothing more. They wouldn’t have leaped to the right conclusion. It’s too far above their pay grade. But any conclusion might have gotten them interested in opening a crate or two, and if they happened to open the wrong one, then I would have had to depend on their not recognizing what they saw. Not a bad bet, even then. We had layers of disguise to rely on. By the time they’d left the train, our three pieces of cargo looked, as you know, like used generators. And they were so marked. As such, they were not things anyone had any use for any longer. Not at all good enough for the new Russia. Somewhere before they entered the Bosporus, they had become, to the eye if not a more practical test, run-of-the-mill turbines in need of reconditioning.”

  “How did you doctor the manifests?”

  “That wasn’t necessary,” Philip explained. “Secondhand engines, generators, and turbines fall into the same category. They’re designated by the same code.”

  “That’s fortuitous.”

  “Nothing’s fortuitous.”

  Ian laughed briefly, perched his elbow on the edge of his desk. “Do we have an estimated time of arrival?”

  “Surely that’s the last thing we want until our friends on the other end of this transaction are ready.”

  Ian nodded. “I was simply testing you. There is no margin for error in a deal of this nature.”

  “Has there ever been a deal of this nature?”

  “An interesting question, to which my answer must be an emphatic no. Neither the opportunity nor the appetite to seize it and, by doing so, shoulder such astounding risk has ever previously presented itself.”