by Allan Folsom
What happened over the next hour and a half Marten didn’t clearly remember. They ordered from the menu. The waiter poured more wine. Somewhere along the line Clementine told him again, as she had the night before, to call her Clem.
At some point, as they finished lunch and the waiter was taking away the plates and silverware, Marten clearly remembered Clem reaching up and undoing the top button of her blouse. Just the top button, nothing more, but for some reason it was the sexiest thing he had ever seen a woman do. And maybe that, and of course the Châteauneuf, was what led to the rest. In what seemed like no time their conversation turned to sex. In talking about it Clem Simpson made two pronouncements that, to him, should be ranked with history’s greatest moments of sheer erotica. The first was said with a great Cheshire Cat–like smile—“I just like to lie back and let the man do all the work.” The second, which came shortly afterward, concerned the size of her breasts—“I really am huge, you know.”
It was a dialogue that washed away any further thought of I.M. and was followed by her shamelessly propositioning him. It was done with a tilt of her head, a look in her eye, and one simple question—“What are you doing tonight?”
His reaction was even more direct, calling her hand and cutting to the chase with his own twist of her phrase—“What are you doing right now?”
It was a question whose answer led unswervingly and within minutes to his room at the Hampstead Holiday Inn.
11
3:52 P.M.
They were, for the moment at least, no longer soaked with sweat. The shower had taken care of most of it, but they had made love there, too—after having already done it three times in the span of some forty minutes on the king-sized Holiday Inn bed. Now they lay naked in the semidimness of drawn shades looking alternately at the ceiling and at each other and he gently played with this or that part of her—a nipple at the moment (Clem’s breasts were huge, as she had said—her brassiere had four snap-hooks, and he could barely hold one bosom in both hands clasped together). What he liked best, or at least second best, was the areolas around her nipples. They were not only large, but little bumps rose all over them when he touched his tongue to them. The result, of course, only served to stimulate him once more and give rise to another erection, the size and pulse of which amazed him, the thing the cops called a “blue-veiner.” But beyond all that—and it was difficult to discern what was lust and passion and genuine affection shared by them both—what he found was a human being the likes of whom he’d never before encountered. Smart and caring and feisty and funny and, at times, certifiably crude. As in the shower, where they played and laughed and lathered each other, and where she slid down on her knees to take the length of his penis in her mouth and nearly brought him to climax, then suddenly stood in the steamy downpour and turned around with her ass toward him, breathing, “Doggie me, Nicholas, oh do doggie me.”
Which, of course, he did.
Now, as he lay next to her, the sheets still damp from the wet of their bodies, he wondered if she had really believed what he had told her when they first began to undress and he had warned her about the healing wounds covering his thigh and shoulder and upper arm. It was an answer he had prepared before he left for London, knowing an eye might be raised if he went to a gym or needed to see a doctor, or in the event he somehow got lucky and ended up like this, in bed with an attractive woman.
After college, his story went, he had wanted to go to law school but because of Rebecca needed to find a steady job. He had a friend in the television business and went to work as a reader for a small production company. Later he became an associate producer and was on the set of an action show when a stunt went wrong and a gas canister exploded, hitting him with flying pieces of shrapnel and hospitalizing him for several days. The resulting, and rather substantial, insurance settlement enabled him to bring Rebecca to the Balmore, something he had long wanted to do but could not because he could not afford to walk away from his job.
“So what will you do now?” Clem rolled over and looked at him, as if she, too, were thinking about what he had said. “Finally go to law school?”
“No.” He smiled with relief. She had believed him, or at least seemed to. “It’s something I”—he chose his words carefully—“lost interest in.”
“Then what will you do?”
“I don’t know.”
Abruptly she rose on an elbow and looked at him directly.
“What were your dreams before you had to take responsibility for Rebecca? What would you like to have done with your life?”
“Dreams?”
“Yes.” There was a great sparkle in her eyes.
“What makes you think I had dreams?”
“Everybody has dreams.”
Nicholas Marten looked at her. Looked at the way she was waiting for him to answer, as if she genuinely cared what was inside him.
“What were your dreams, Nicholas?” she asked again and smiled quietly. “Tell me.”
“You mean—what to do with my life?”
“Yes.”
12
“Gardens,” he said.
Clementine Simpson, wholly naked in Nicholas Marten’s room at the Hampstead Holiday Inn at four o’clock in the afternoon, looked at him curiously.
“Gardens?”
“Since I was a kid I was fascinated by formal gardens. I have no idea why. I collected books on them. I was drawn to places like Versailles, the Paris Tuileries, gardens in Italy and Spain. The spiritual magic,” he smiled wistfully, “of Oriental designs, especially places like Ryotan-ji, the Zen temple in Hikone, Japan, or Katsura Rikyu, in Kyoto. Yesterday, I walked through Kensington Gardens here in London. Amazing.”
“Katsura Rikyu?” Clem asked, with sudden caution to her voice.
“Yes, why?”
“Tell me more.”
“Why?”
“Just tell me.”
Marten shrugged. “I started in college at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo—that’s on the California coast between L.A. and San Francisco—to study landscape architecture and—” He stopped, realizing he couldn’t tell her about the murder of his parents and why he suddenly transferred to UCLA, because that would lead to what had happened later. Quickly he picked up and went on. “Rebecca had been living with me in an apartment near the campus. When she became ill we decided the best place for her was in Los Angeles, so I transferred to UCLA to be near her. My major was English because, then, it was the easiest course to get into. But in my junior and senior years I managed to take elective courses at the School of Arts and Architecture.” He smiled, covering the transition and hoping she wouldn’t ask questions. At the same time he realized he was smiling, too, at the fond memory of his studies. “Courses with names like ‘Elements of Urban Design’ or ‘Theories of Landscape Architecture.’” He lay back and looked at the ceiling.
“You asked me what I would have done. There it is. Learn to design and build those kinds of formal gardens.”
Suddenly Clem was hunched over him, looming down, her great breasts touching his chest. “You’re fucking having me on,” she said, playfully indignant, but with an edge that said she was more than a little piqued.
“What?”
“You’re fucking having me on, you know all about me.”
Marten pulled back, as if in sharing his fondest dreams he had said the wrong thing. “I’ve barely known you a day and a half. How could I know all about you?”
“You fucking do.”
“No, I fucking don’t.”
“Then how do you know that’s what I do?”
“What’s what you do?”
“That.”
“What?”
“Gardens.”
“Huh?”
“The clinic is part of my yearly volunteer work. My full-time occupation is as a professor of town and country planning at the University of Manchester in northern England. I’m in the business of educating people to become, among other things, landscape archite
cts.”
Marten stared at her. “Now you’re having me on.”
“I am not.” Suddenly Clementine Simpson got up from the bed and went into the bathroom. When she came back she had a towel wrapped around her.
“UCLA. The University of California at Los Angeles?”
“Yes.”
“And you have a bachelor’s degree in English with elective courses in landscape architecture?”
“Yes,” Marten grinned, “why?”
“Do you want to do it?”
“Make love again?” Marten laughed and tugged at her towel, trying to make it come undone. “If you’re up for it, I am.”
Instantly she pulled back, pulling the towel tightly around her. “I am talking about the university. Do you want to go to Manchester and study landscape design?”
“You’re kidding.”
“Manchester is three hours by train from London. You could go to the university and still visit with Rebecca as often as you like.”
Marten stared at her in silence. Continuing his education, especially in an area that would follow his childhood dream, was something that had never, ever crossed his mind.
“I am returning to Manchester this Saturday.” Clem pulled open the towel, then immediately closed it again, tightening it. “Come with me. Visit the university. Meet some of the students. See what you think.”
“You’re going Saturday … .”
“Yes. Saturday.”
13
MANCHESTER, ENGLAND. SATURDAY, APRIL 6. 4:45 P.M.
Nicholas Marten and Clem Simpson arrived by train at Manchester Piccadilly Station at twelve minutes past four, exactly thirty-one minutes behind schedule and in a pouring rain.
By four-thirty he had checked into a room at the Portland Thistle Hotel on Portland Street, and fifteen minutes later they were standing under Clem’s broad umbrella walking under the stone arch of a Gothic building with the words UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER emblazoned above it.
By then—in fact, by the end of the first hour on the train—he’d received two distinctly separate pieces of information.
The first had been in a call from Clem’s maternal Russian detective Sofia reporting that not only had the Russian neighborhood surrounding Penrith’s Bar been thoroughly canvassed for a person called, initialed, or nicknamed I.M., so had the entire Russian émigré population of the eight-hundred-square-mile city of London, and, surprising to almost all, not one single person with either the initials, nickname, or description she had been given had turned up. For fun they had even suggested that Marten’s young woman might have been putting him on and that I.M. really stood for something else—a place or thing—or was an acronym for some organization. Nothing turned up. So, in other words, if there were any Russian-affiliated I.M.’s in that part of England, no one who might know them, or of them, did. That, of course, left open the possibility that whoever Raymond had been going to meet was not a local Russian but one who might have been coming from somewhere else. That, or I. M. was not Russian at all. Either way, his last-ditch hope for uncovering I. M. was gone, unless he was prepared to scour the entire planet looking for him or her or it.
The second piece of business had come, to his utter amazement, when he’d learned that Clementine Simpson was not simply Clem, or Ms. Clementine Simpson, or, for that matter, even Professor Simpson, she was Lady Clementine Simpson, the only child of Sir Robert Rhodes Simpson, Earl of Prestbury, member of the House of Lords, a Knight of the Garter, the highest order of English chivalry, and a leading member of the University of Manchester’s Court, the school’s supreme governing authority. It meant Lady Clem—Marten’s traveling companion, newly appointed career advisor, proud and dutiful member of the Balmore Foundation, and “Doggie me” lover—was something she had yet to confide in him: a titled member of British aristocracy!
The revelation had come out of the blue when the ticket taker stopped beside their seats in the first class car and said, “Welcome aboard, Lady Clementine, nice to see you again. And how is your father, Lord Prestbury?”
The two chatted briefly, and then the man moved on to continue his ticket taking. He’d barely gone when a very well dressed matronly woman, making her way down the aisle, also recognized Clem and stopped to ask very nearly the same thing. How was she? How was Lord Prestbury?
Marten had politely ignored both conversations, but when the woman had gone, he’d looked at Clem, raised an eyebrow, and said “Lady Simpson?” It was then, and reluctantly, that Clem explained the whole thing—how she was born to wealth and title, how her mother had died when she was twelve and how, from that point on, she and her father had more or less raised each other, and how, as both child and adult, she had hated both the title and the impudence of the upper class and tried to be as little a part of it as possible. Yet, it was a feat that was far from painless, considering her father was an eminent member of British nobility—as well as an exceedingly respected, powerful, headstrong force in both the government and the private sector, where he sat on the boards of any number of large corporations—who expected his only child to fully represent it when occasion called. That was far too often as far as she was concerned and made all the more difficult because “he is damnably proud of his heritage, his prominence, and his Queen and Country patriotism!” It was a bearing and attitude that drove her nuts.
“I can understand how it might.” Marten smiled lightly.
“No, Mr. Marten,” her dander fully up, her eyes flush with anger, “without having lived it, you cannot even begin to understand it!”
With that she abruptly turned and dragged a large dog-eared paperback—David Copperfield by Charles Dickens—from her purse. Opening it with a final flash of anger, she purposefully immersed herself in reading. It was the kind of emotional “end of conversation” she had used with him at Spaniards Inn when he’d asked for help in finding I.M., or his bimbo, as she’d curtly put it, and then forcefully turned to her menu.
Marten watched her for a moment and then looked out at the passing English countryside. Clem, or Lady Clem, was unlike any other woman he had ever known. Wholly open with her emotions—at least with him—she was learned, funny, brusque, vulgar, angry, and engaging, not to mention encouraging and even nurturing. Being more than a little disgusted with the whole idea of belonging to the upper class and to the manor born, had been, if nothing else, in character and amusing. The trouble was that it, like Clem, the trip to Manchester itself, and the days leading up to it, was plagued by something else—two unfinished pieces of business: the chartered jet, and April 7/Moscow.
Wednesday morning he had called Dan Ford in Washington asking if there was any further information on Aubrey Collinson, the man who had twice chartered planes for Raymond in Kingston, Jamaica, and provided the package with the false documents to be given to him upon arrival in California. Again Ford had warned him to stay out of it, but Marten pressed him, and Ford told him the CIA and the Russian Ministry of Justice had sent investigators to both Kingston and Nassau, where the flights had originated. From statements made later, both agencies reported the same dead end as before. The plane’s pilot had simply been given the document package by his supervisor and asked to deliver it to the party he was to pick up. There was nothing unusual in that. Nor was there anything particularly unusual about the man calling himself Aubrey Collinson—a man the Kingston West Charter Air manager remembered as being about fifty, speaking with a British accent, and wearing dark glasses and a well-cut suit—paying cash for the fare. That he had come back and done it a second time when his man had missed the original flight in Santa Monica, asking that the plane be sent back, this time to a different airport, might have raised eyebrows but hadn’t. Kingston and Nassau were a world all their own, peopled in part by the very rich—some of whom had made their fortunes legitimately and an equal, if not greater, number who had not, but almost all of whom preferred to keep their personal business private and used third parties to conduct their transactions, often paying fo
r their flights in U.S. dollars. It was a world where staying in business meant not asking too many questions and made uncovering anyone who didn’t want to be uncovered—especially by police, journalists, or agents of foreign governments—all but impossible.
And so, warned again by Ford to stay away from the Raymond thing completely, and as much as he hated to do so, Nicholas Marten had put Aubrey Collinson and the chartered flights into the same category with the other dying clues and did his best to forget about it.
April 7/Moscow was different and, Dan Ford or not, something he could not put aside because it had yet to happen. Thursday and Friday, Marten had been able to think of almost nothing else. This morning, when he had wakened and then met Clem and boarded the train for Manchester, had been worse because April 7/Moscow was now tomorrow! As much as he tried to keep it from his mind, every turn of the wheels over the tracks raised his level of anxiety, and with it came the throb of his own inner voice unleashed like some Elizabethan arrow that made him wish he’d never been an English major. What horrid thing lies on the morrow? It asked over and over.
What horrid thing?
What horrid thing?
Comes the morrow.
April 7.
April 7.
What horrid thing comes tomorrow?
Suddenly Nicholas Marten glanced at Clem. She was still reading. Silent. Absorbed in her book. She didn’t know. How could she know? And even if he dared reveal himself and told her who he was, how could he even begin to explain his fear when the best he could give was the tale of a vague entry in a calendar and with it a date and a place?