by Susan Lewis
‘Anyway, she might have had a better grip on her sanity by then, but the bitterness had reached an all-time high. Her sole purpose in life now was to make me suffer for what I had put her through. She started jeering at me and trying to humiliate me in public. She was spending to the point she might bankrupt us and threatened all the time to leave me and take me for every penny that was left or I’d ever make in the future. If it weren’t for the boys I’d have got out then, but I couldn’t leave them with a mother who was as unstable as that, and to take them away . . . Well, God only knows what that would have done to her.
Then one day she just packed up and went. She did it without telling me: I just arrived home to find them all gone. I didn’t know then what had happened to make her go. It was only later that I found out Mureau had called her and told her that I was seeing Jenny again. It was a lie, of course, but when I finally tracked Gabriella down at my mother’s she wouldn’t even speak to me and neither would she allow me to speak to Tom.
‘Anyway, knowing that not seeing the boys would be what would hurt the most seemed to keep Gabriella happy for a while. But then, when I stopped calling, in the hope that my silence would provoke her into calling me, she went the other way and responded to the overtures Mureau had been making to her ever since Jenny had left him.
‘I knew nothing about the approaches he’d made, of course. Not until Gabriella told me herself that she was divorcing me to marry Mureau did I know that he’d even been in touch with her. I flew straight to Miami and forced her to see me. I knew by then that we were never going to repair things. Oh, in our own miserable and pathetic ways we still loved each other, but too much damage had been done. She just couldn’t find it in her to forgive me and I couldn’t blame her for that when I couldn’t forgive myself. Still, like I said, we saw each other. She broke down the minute she walked in the room, we both did, and for a while there it seemed like we might get it together. She broke off her affair with Mureau, I moved to Miami because that was where she wanted to be and though we lived separately we saw each other all the time. But she just couldn’t let it go. Every time she saw me talking to another woman she accused me of sleeping with her. If I was as much as five minutes late to pick up her and the boys she’d put it down to me not being able to get out of another woman’s bed in time. And every time I picked up Jack she’d remind me of what I had done while she was carrying him.
It got so that I couldn’t take it any more. We were destroying each other and I could see what an effect it was having on Tom.’ His voice had become unsteady now, strangled by unshed tears. ‘Every time I looked at his little face and saw all that confusion and the way he was struggling so hard to make things better, like he was the one to blame . . . It damned nearly broke my heart. When his mother wasn’t around he used to creep into my lap and hold on to me like he was . . . like he was trying to tell me he was sorry. He was three years old, for God’s sake. Three years old and he was blaming himself. He didn’t dare to show me any affection in front of Gabriella because he knew if he did that she would shout at him and tell him what a bastard his father was. She didn’t seem to care what she was doing to the child; all she cared about was making me suffer. So in the end I told her that the best thing she could do was file for a divorce and we would let the courts decide on custody of the boys. What a mistake that was. She thought I was threatening to take them away from her. I wanted to, it was true, but my mother had made it more than plain that if I tried she would fight in Gabriella’s corner and I wasn’t prepared to have the boys go through all that.
‘Anyway, Gabriella didn’t file for divorce, but she did take up with Mureau again. I still hadn’t met the man at this stage. All I had was a brief recollection of seeing him at the party where Jenny and I had met. Well, if I thought Gabriella was bitter, I hadn’t seen anything yet. Jenny had managed to get her divorce and was about to marry some Egyptian guy who was even more loaded than Mureau. But it wasn’t the future husband that Mureau saw as the source of all his misery, it was me. So, believing I was going to try to take her sons away from her, Gabriella went along with Mureau’s plan to break me.’
He turned to look at Penny and she saw the exhaustion and defeat lying heavily in his eyes though he tried to mask them with a smile. As she looked back at him she could feel his pain merging with all the other emotions in her heart.
‘Gabriella knew about Mureau’s involvement in the shipments of marijuana coming into the States,’ he said. ‘She went into it knowing what risks she was running, but to her they were worth it just to see what Mureau had told her it would do to me. And Mureau was right: her involvement would ruin me. I still don’t really know what kind of role she was playing at that stage; all I know is that fantastic sums of money started turning up in my bank accounts. There was no way I could explain all the surplus funds that she and Mureau between them managed to deposit into my accounts. For sure, I was a wealthy man, but I sure as hell hadn’t done anything to generate the kind of money I was making in the year or so after I told Gabriella to file for divorce. It didn’t take us – by “us” I mean me, Pierre and the accountants – long to work out what was going on, and as soon as we did we started closing everything down and moving our assets around the world to countries and accounts Gabriella knew nothing about. I took the money because Mureau, deliberately, hadn’t laundered it well enough for me to be able to explain it away and of course, if I had declared it, it would have been tantamount to sending Gabriella, or more likely both of us, to jail. Amazingly, no one asked any questions at the time. Maybe we’d got the money out before the IRS had a chance to build up any sort of case, I don’t know, but they’ve sure as hell caught up with me now. Which of course is what Gabriella and Mureau always intended. But that’s not all they intended, because when they planned my demise they made sure they looked into every possible way they could ruin me and booked their tickets.
‘The first time the DEA pulled Gabriella in for questioning she turned to me for an alibi.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘Of course I gave it. How could I not when she asked for it the way she did? Did I want to see the mother of my children go to prison? Think what it would do to the boys’ lives. Think of the stigma they would grow up with. Oh, she laid it all on and, sucker that I am, I bought it. Not because I couldn’t see through what she was doing, but because I still felt I owed her for what I’d put her through. So the charges against her were dropped; Mureau was the one they were after, but since they still couldn’t hang anything on him they were hoping that Gabriella might lead them to what they wanted.
‘Anyway, the false alibi was just for starters. What they wanted now was for me to start masterminding ways of getting Mureau’s shipments into the country. If I didn’t, Mureau and Gabriella were going to start singing about all those millions I’d managed to get out of the country. I was tempted to let them, but Gabriella really went to work on me, using my guilt in ways only she knows how until, like a fool, I went along with it. And, of course, once I was in, there was no way I could get out. I concocted ways you’d never even heard of to get those shipments into the States and I made fools out of the DEA into the bargain. On one occasion I even got them trying to arrest Customs officers who were trying to arrest them. The Keystone cops had nothing on them, they all looked such idiots, while Mureau’s shipment sailed in at another port. Robert Stirling – you know, the guy over in France? – well, he was one of the DEA officers who spent the night in jail and had to explain the fuck-up to his superiors the next day. That was just the start of it between Stirling and me. I’ve run him around the block a few times since, until I earned him the suspension from duty he’s now under. That’s why he’s there in France, freelancing. He knew I was behind it all and while the rest of them went after Mureau, Stirling came after yours truly. He’s been acting without jurisdiction – his superiors have only just found out where he is and I don’t imagine they know much about the Mafia boys in Nice who’ve been accommodating him all this time.
‘Anyway, when the FBI added Mureau’s name to the list of their most wanted, he left it to me to get him out of the country and set him up with people to look after him in Europe – your next-door neighbours being two of them. I paid them – and plenty of others – to do what they could to keep him out of jail because, if he went down, obviously he was going to take me with him, and probably Gabriella too. And where would that leave the boys? My mother’s an old woman and, besides, Gabriella is right: what kind of lives would they have once it was found out that both their parents were in jail?’
He sighed heavily. ‘I’ve made a complete mess of this and I’ve got no one to blame but myself. It’s just up to me now to see that they don’t suffer any more than they have to. I wish Gabriella had the same priority, but she doesn’t. Her priority remains the same: repaying me for what I did to her when she was pregnant with Jack. It’s a never-ending mission with her and one she never seems to tire of.
‘Still, to condense the next two years into a nutshell: Sylvia came up with the idea of starting a business which she would finance, though I would pay her back through its own legitimate profits as well as those of other companies I have – or at least I did have, until recently. She wanted to do it so that if it ever did come about that I had to go to jail there would be something there for me to come out to. Something no one could touch because, whichever way anyone looked at it, it was only her money behind it. And of course a magazine was the obvious choice, since that was what she was already into. I was loath for her to get involved, but she wouldn’t back down. She wasn’t only thinking of me, she was thinking of the boys and the fact that if they did lose their parents to the judiciary system they had in some way to be financially supported. Of course there was no question that both my mother and she could manage that without even noticing it. But I’m their father and . . . Well, without going into all the macho stuff, there we have Nuance. It’s for them as much as it’s for me and, although on paper it’s as squeaky clean as any tax man could want, the backhanders I’ve paid out to get it up and running as fast as I did have come from Mureau’s drug funds – the funds he laundered into my accounts.’
He turned again to look at Penny. He was aware that so far she hadn’t uttered a word and wondered what was really going through her mind. He guessed she’d tell him when he’d finished; he just hoped to God she could forgive him. To think of the pain he was going to cause her only heightened his own, but there was nothing he could do to spare her. Things were already happening, thousands of miles from here, over which he had no control at all.
‘Are you all right?’ he said softly.
She nodded.
‘Can I get you something? More coffee?’
‘No. I’m just . . .’ She shook her head. ‘No, nothing.’
‘Come on, tell me,’ he coaxed gently.
‘I’m just, well, almost afraid of what you’re going to say next.’
He smiled in an attempt to reassure her, but the smile was empty, for she had good reason to be afraid. God knew, he was.
‘Why did you choose the South of France for the magazine?’ she asked.
He shrugged. ‘Several reasons. It was time for me to get out of the States. Mureau wasn’t there any more, but the drugs were still coming in and the DEA were making my life pretty damned difficult. I tried to persuade Gabriella to come with me, but she wouldn’t. If I wanted her, she said, I had to stay. If I left, then she would never let me see the boys again.’
‘But you went anyway.’
‘I had to. Mureau had got involved with the Chinese by then – there wasn’t just grass coming in now, there was heroin too. For the boys’ sake as well as my own I had to get out. Their mommy and daddy going down for grass was one thing; going down for heroin was something else altogether. The strange thing was Gabriella never looked at it that way. Oh, she loves the boys, she’s a good mother in every other way, but when it comes to me she’s . . . Well, I don’t know, it’s like she gets a real kick out of seeing me hurt. I don’t blame her for wanting to pay me back, but the bitterness has got like a cancer with her. She can’t get rid of it. She’ll do anything she can to twist the knife and you can see the pleasure she gets in doing it. When I first came to Europe she flew out to spend a few days with me and what do you know? she invites Mureau to come along too. She screwed him in the hotel room I’d booked for us and made sure they were both there, in the bed, when I came in. Mureau suggested I call up Jenny and make it a real party and Gabriella laughed till she cried. She paraded about naked in front of us both and Mureau loved it – he really got off on watching me humiliated like that. So did she. I let them do it in the blind hope that they’d get something out of their systems. But when they started to screw again, needless to say I walked out.
‘Hell,’ he said, running his fingers through his hair, ‘there’s no point going back over all this now: just suffice it to say that Mureau could play her like a puppet. He only ever had to mention there might be another woman in my life and, boy, did Gabriella dance to the tune. He was having such a good time doing it he didn’t even see himself fall into his own trap until it was too late. Gabriella suddenly had us both by the balls and, wow, did she start squeezing. She doesn’t get what she wants, she goes right to the DEA and tells them everything she knows. She’s so crazy we’d have both been insane to try calling her bluff, so needless to say she’s one wealthy woman now with two sons their father can’t touch and the power to stop their father ever having another woman. “Oh, you can screw around all you like,” she told me, “but the minute it starts looking serious . . .”’ He sliced a finger across his throat. ‘As for Mureau, he’d better just keep the money rolling on in. Well, he had no problem with that. He just kept right on doing what he’d always been doing, while I financed his protection in order to keep me and my wife out of jail.’
Penny was frowning thoughtfully. ‘So as far as the Delaneys are concerned,’ she said, ‘you’re both, you and Christian, their employer?’
He pulled a face. ‘I guess you could say that, yes. I never had much to do with them, at least not at first. I got to hear about them through some contacts I had in Singapore who told me they were living in the South of France now. Apparently they were in need of money and weren’t too bothered about how they got it, so I put them together with Mureau who hired them – at my expense. Mureau was rarely in the South of France at that time so they had to travel to meet up with him. What more they did for him, other than keep him furnished with false papers and arrange decoys for him as he moved about the continent, I don’t know. What I do know is that as soon as I moved into the South of France he started coming a lot more often.’
His eyes came up to Penny’s and, smiling, he held out his hand. ‘You sure you’re OK?’ he said. ‘This isn’t getting too much for you?’
‘No, no, I’m OK,’ she assured him, taking his hand and winding her fingers through his.
‘So, where was I?’ he said. ‘Yeah, that’s right: the South of France. I chose it mainly because Sylvia had acquired Fieldstone and The Coast, much more than the other magazines in that group, needed work. It would help her out if I did what I could to revive it and it would provide me with a company that was totally legitimate. So I chose France – and Sylvia,’ he gave an ironic smile, ‘chose you.’
Though she smiled in return, a tremor of nerves coasted across Penny’s heart as his fingers tightened on hers. ‘Let’s go inside,’ she said. ‘It’s getting too hot out here.’
He waited until she was sitting cross-legged on the bed; then, sitting down on the edge, he continued. ‘So, I was getting things moving in France, Gabriella was still keeping my children from me, but, can you believe it, she was starting to make noises about some kind of reconciliation. Whether she meant it, I’ve no idea. She’s played that tune so many times now, it’s like you know all the words but you no longer hear them. Anyway, I’d have gone for it just so I could be with the boys, but my guess is that Mureau got wind of i
t and put a stop to it. He didn’t have his wife, so I sure as hell wasn’t going to have mine. Any sign of us patching things up, then he was going to take us all down. See, he could threaten her with the same things she threatened him. The ammunition we had on each other was like a ticking bomb that we kept tossing to each other, waiting to see whose face it would explode in first. The only thing they didn’t have on me was the heroin, but Gabriella had already let me know that she’d perjure herself to make sure I went down for everything she went down for. That was, until the DEA made her an offer. If she delivered the goods on Mureau and me, she’d buy herself her freedom.’
‘Oh God,’ Penny murmured.
‘Quite,’ he said.
‘How long ago was she made the offer?’
He thought a moment. ‘Six, eight, months ago. I guess, around the time you came to France. You’ll remember the way I was always disappearing, well, it was to see Gabriella. I never told anyone, other than Pierre, where I was going because I didn’t want to risk Mureau finding out. Stirling had turned up in France by then and I knew that, with him sniffing around, things were likely to erupt at any minute. But now that Gabriella had her offer it at least meant that the boys wouldn’t lose their mother to the prison system. Sure, she’d been more heavily involved than I had, but, if it came to it, I was prepared to take the rap, providing she didn’t lie about the heroin. She agreed to that, but only on the condition I went back to live with her.’
‘So why didn’t you?’ Penny asked.
‘I thought about it, believe me. I thought about it long and hard, but in the end I couldn’t do it. Apart from owing Sylvia, I knew that if I went back the boys would suffer. She was no closer to forgiving me then than she’d ever been and during the meetings I had with her I could see it. She needs help, professional help, but it would take a braver man than I to suggest it. Because, of course, I am the root of her misery. If she’d got help, then I’d have been prepared to give it a shot, but I couldn’t do it when I knew that the boys were better off not having to see the damage their parents were causing each other.’