Animosity

by David Lindsey

  “It took you longer than I thought.”

  “Longer?”

  “What’s it been, a year?”

  “Ten months.”

  “Oh. Seems longer.”

  “How did this happen?”

  At first he thought she was going to play dumb, then he saw her change her mind and give it up.

  “I’m going to have to have a drink for this,” she said, and turned to a small table with liquor bottles and glasses. She picked up a short, heavy-based tumbler. “How about you?” she asked with her back to him.

  He didn’t answer. It was as if only a day had passed. She looked the same, her tight buttocks poured into her trademark black tights, the backs of her thighs taut beneath the second skin that encased her lovely legs all the way to the ankles. She was barefoot. Her tea rose blouse, just the right shade for her complexion, was pulled snug around her waist, its tail gathered and knotted above her exposed navel. She stood with one leg cocked . . . déhanchement.

  She poured her drink.

  “You’re just going to do this straight up, huh?” she asked. “Like a man.”

  “How did you find her?”

  “Find her?” she asked, turning around, a slow, amused grin taking shape. She still wore a hint of lipstick. “What makes you think I found her?”

  “How did it happen, then?”

  “Actually, she called me. Isn’t that sweet?”

  “The newspaper articles.”

  “Magazines. To be exact, it was the Paris Match that gave her the idea of finding me. You’ll remember, that humiliating article, the one with the pictures of me throwing a fucking plate at you in the Brasserie Femme. And that other damn gossip rag that followed ‘the breakup’ in odious detail.”

  She tasted her Scotch.

  “Leda guessed that I might harbor some animosity toward you. Animosité, she said. She thought, you know, that we might share that in common, she and I.”

  Another drink.

  “She told me in our very first little conversation that she was your daughter.” She offered an expression of mock shock. “And she really wanted to have some heavy conversation about Daddy.”

  “You didn’t hold back anything, I hope.”

  “I talked my ass off. Listen, that gorgeous little hunchback—and what a weird combination she had there—had a voracious hunger for anything and everything about you. No detail was too small, no gossip too raw.”

  “You were careful to be truthful.”

  “Oh, I made damn sure she knew what Daddy was really like. Maybe I embellished a little . . . can’t remember. What the hell, sometimes misconceptions slip in . . . that happens with celebrities.”

  She spoke with a combination of smiles and edgy looks. The ten months since he had seen her had served only to darken her bitterness.

  “Just for the record,” he said, “she wasn’t my daughter. But she thought she was. I don’t care whether or not you believe it. I just want you to hear it.”

  Marian shrugged indifferently, more interested in where he was going with this than what misconceptions Leda might or might not have had about life.

  “She was a godsend to you, wasn’t she?” he asked. “The perfect dupe.”

  Marian was still standing in front of the liquor caddy, one hip cocked, her left arm across her bare stomach, her tumbler hoisted beside her Technicolor face, elbow resting on the crossed arm.

  “You know,” she mused, “she was. It was astonishing, really. I had all this bottled-up malice, just boiling over with it, and nowhere to pour it out. Then one afternoon the telephone rings . . . hello? . . . it’s her. You’ve got to appreciate that kind of symmetry.”

  “You knew there was more on her mind than simple curiosity, didn’t you?”

  She took a drink, burying a smirk in her glass. She swallowed slowly, savoring it.

  “Oh yeah, she had more on her mind, but really, she wasn’t quite sure what. We met, I don’t know, maybe eight, ten times over five or six weeks. When I saw how smart she was—and how dumb she was—I rolled up my sleeves and became her guidance counselor.”

  Chapter 48

  “That’s how she knew so many of the personal things,” Ross said. “The articles explained most of that, but it didn’t explain how she knew about the almond croissants, or how Céleste ‘intuited’ so much about Saleh. And it didn’t explain Anita Beaton.”

  “The devil’s in the minutiae.”

  “You got too carried away, Marian.”

  “Well, maybe Anita was a stretch, but Céleste had to meet her because Anita was going to be the best entrée into the San Rafael circles where she was likely to run into you. I had heard Anita talk about a friend of hers here in Paris. I called a friend of mine who called a friend of hers who called Anita’s friend and gave her the old friend-of-a-friend story. It wasn’t very slick, but it kept me out of the picture . . . and it worked, didn’t it?”

  A chilling thought ran through Ross’s mind, something that hadn’t occurred to him until this very instant.

  “And how did you meet Céleste?”

  The question caught her by surprise, and she stared at him. In that moment he realized that she didn’t know that he didn’t know that she had never met Céleste. They both understood at the same instant what had happened.

  “Shit,” Marian said with a slow, crooked grin of self-reproach for having missed a golden opportunity. “I wish I’d known that. I could have messed with your head, oh, I really could have.”

  He was enormously relieved, more grateful for this than anything he’d been grateful for in his life.

  “You didn’t talk to Leda after she returned to Paris, did you?”

  Marian thought about it but couldn’t see a downside to admitting that she hadn’t. Still, she didn’t say no, but he could see it.

  “Do you know what finally happened?”

  “I do now.”

  He wasn’t sure what she meant by that, but he didn’t want to be the one to say what had happened. Certainly not to Marian.

  “It didn’t come off exactly the way you’d planned,” he said.

  “That doesn’t surprise me. Leda was certainly capable of screwing up things. If she screwed up—whatever it was—that wasn’t part of the plan.”

  “But you do know something went wrong, don’t you? That’s why you contacted the Police Judiciaire.”

  This was getting interesting. Ross tossed his raincoat onto the chair that Marian had fallen over and walked to the liquor table and poured a drink for himself after all. He turned to her.

  “Anonymous call,” he said.

  “I wasn’t getting any news,” she said with a shrug. “When that stupid hump sliced herself up in her bathtub, that was the end of it. I hadn’t had any confirmation. I wanted to know how far she had gotten with our plans before she killed herself.”

  Ross sipped the Scotch and looked at her. “You don’t know what happened, do you?”

  He could see that this made her furious.

  “I know what was supposed to have happened,” she said, “and seeing you standing here means it hasn’t come full circle yet.”

  “You put it all into her head, didn’t you? All of it.”

  “Oh no. She had some vague plans of revenge when she came to me. I might’ve helped her refine her ideas a little.”

  She moved around to a settee in front of the windows that overlooked the street and sat down. She sat on the edge of it, her knees spread, her hands hanging down between her legs, holding the drink. He thought he sensed a growing uneasiness in her despite her bravado.

  “I’m not sure where the line is between what you planned and what went wrong,” he said. “I think we need to clear that up.”

  He could tell her curiosity was eating at her.

  “Look,” she said. “I know Lacan’s disappeared—”

  “How do you know that?”

  She grinned but didn’t answer. “I’m guessing he’s not on vacation, and I’m guessing he�
��s not ever going to come back from wherever he is.”

  It was raining hard outside now. He could hear it slapping on the leaves of the trees and splashing in the street.

  “How could you be sure he would show up in San Rafael?”

  She nodded. “Yeah. Well, he would be about due a little rough nooky after a month or so, wouldn’t he? I think that was about his schedule, wasn’t it? The odds were good.”

  She was smirking again. She knew it tortured him to hear her talk like that about Céleste. He looked at her. One of them was going to have to step out further than either of them wanted to in order to advance the conversation. But he knew that neither of them was going to admit that Lacan was supposed to have been killed. He knew now that Marian didn’t know for sure if that had happened. She knew only that he had disappeared.

  “Something went wrong for Leda,” he said, holding his drink as he walked to a picture on the wall and looked at it. Then he turned and came back toward her. “But she was young, and I guess you’d forgotten to mention to her that there’s no such thing as a perfect scheme.”

  Marian pursed her beautiful lips and watched him. She was lovely to look at, a paradox of package and content.

  “You mentioned,” he said, “that Leda was both smart and dumb. Well, she was smart last of all.”

  “Okay.”

  “She locked all her doors behind her, Marian. Even the one you walked through. She was like that, obsessive. You must’ve seen that for yourself.”

  Marian’s eyes were fixed on him now, following him as he paced back and forth in front of her.

  “Maybe you didn’t know exactly what she was going to do,” he continued, “but you put a lot of ideas into her head, and you knew that whatever she ended up doing, it wasn’t going to be good for me.”

  Marian smiled. “I did get that feeling. It made me wet, just knowing how lucky I was to be able to contribute to that . . . whatever it was.”

  He took a few steps to a cabinet, its shelves filled with Marian’s glazed pottery. He took a piece down and looked at it. Suddenly he saw the explosion of turquoise fireworks, the shower of shards falling around him like green hail.

  “Unfortunately,” he said, turning to her again, “you knew me better than you knew her.”

  Marian was blank.

  “The truth is,” he said, “Leda locked her doors from both sides—and she kept all the keys herself. She wasn’t quite as dumb as you thought. Her scheme required the help of several people, and she was smart enough to take precautions to make sure that none of them—none of them—could talk about this without incriminating themselves. Even if they didn’t know what finally did happen.” He paused. “Everyone became an accomplice.”

  “Accomplice?”

  “She taped your conversations, Marian. Not all of them, just the crucial ones.”

  She tried to smile, but it soured. “I don’t believe you.”

  He drank in one swallow the remaining bit of Scotch in his glass and walked to the liquor table, where he put it down.

  “You did all this work cultivating Leda, helping her set up this elaborate maze of lies, and then she goes off to the States . . . and that’s it. You don’t hear another word. You don’t see anything in the news. You don’t get a call. You don’t get a letter. Just silence. You get antsy, can’t stand it. The best you can do is place an anonymous call to the Police Judiciaire.”

  He stepped to the armchair and picked up his raincoat.

  “That was your first big mistake.”

  He held the coat in his arms and looked down at her.

  “But you never really knew for sure exactly what had finally happened . . . or had not happened. That was another big mistake.”

  Pause.

  “I’ve got the tapes, Marian.”

  “Bullshit!” She jumped to her feet, her face contorted. “Bullshit!”

  “Don’t believe me,” he said. “That’ll be your last mistake.”

  He saw her trembling. He saw her jaw set. He saw her eyes go blind.

  She lunged at him, and before he could raise his arm she hit him on the side of the head with her tumbler of Scotch. He absorbed the shock, felt the top of the tumbler smash and cut, and blinked his eyes against the Scotch. She swung at him again, still gripping the weighted bottom of the broken tumbler, and he deflected the blow, which glanced past him in front of his face. Instead of raising her arm again, she flailed at him, recoiling with a back stroke. He wasn’t ready. She swiped the sheared glass across his throat. He felt the clean separation of tissue, felt the release of pressure in his carotid artery as if a pressured water hose had blown a hole. He heard the rush of spewing inside his head.

  She fell back, eyes bulging, her tongue frozen in the center of her wide-gaping mouth.

  He could feel the blood spurting. With the raincoat still draped over his forearm, he reached up and felt the warm jet hit his hand. He grabbed his neck and felt it gushing through his fingers.

  He stood there, stunned by the irreparable moment but resolved not to slip into shock. He held his breath, not wanting to know that he couldn’t breathe. Gripping his throat, he felt something weighty pulling at him and he sank to one knee. Marian staggered back, dropping the glass. He heard it hit the wooden floor and looked up at her. Her expression was seized by disbelief, as if she were watching him being transformed into something unrecognizable, her beauty adorned in astonishment.

  He was surprised at the sound of it, the enormous rushing in his ears. And he was stunned by the volume of blood and by its exuberance in escaping him. Feeling a little weak, he slowly slipped down on the other knee, then leaned to one side and rested on an elbow, still holding his throat and his raincoat. Already the first of his escaping blood was cooling, and he could feel it cold on one hand while the fresh blood still gushed hot through the fingers of the other. He was very tired. He needed to rest for just a second. He slumped over on his side.

  Oddly, he didn’t feel as though he needed to breathe. Holding his breath was no trouble at all.

  But he was so tired. He rolled over, no longer having the strength to remain on his side. She stepped toward him and looked down. He stared up the length of her. Marian foreshortened, the long beautiful length of her. There was no regret in her face. No fear. But there was uncertainty. His gaze focused on her navel, a smoky spot in her white midriff. As the darkness grew from there and spread outward to encompass everything, he saw her ripping open her blouse, tearing at her tights.

  • • •

  She waited for him by the window, looking down at the rainy street. Any moment she would be surprised to see him, walking under the bare and dripping branches of the linden trees, his footsteps cushioned by the carpet of fallen, wet leaves.

  It was still early. They would go out to eat at a brasserie, and they would talk. There was so much to talk about.