by Allan Folsom
“Paul,” she said and smiled, tucking her arm in his, pulling him close against the chill of the air coming across the lake, “the thing to always remember about a woman is that you only get her in bed if the decision is hers.”
“Is that a fact?” he deadpanned.
“Absolute truth.”
Reaching in his pocket he took out a key and held it up. “To my hotel room,” he said.
“I have a train. The ten o’clock TGV to Paris,” she said matter-of-factly, as if it was something he should have known.
“I don’t understand.” His heart sank. She’d never mentioned a train, or that she was leaving Geneva that night.
“Paul, this is Friday. I have things to do in Paris over the weekend, and Monday at noon I must be in Calais. It’s, my grandmother’s eighty-first birthday.”
“What do you have to do in Paris this weekend that can’t wait?”
Vera just looked at him.
“Well, what?” he said.
“What if I told you I had a boyfriend?”
“Do beautiful residents with boyfriends sneak out of town to pick up new lovers? Is that the medical world in Paris?”
“I didn’t ‘pick you up’!” Vera stood back, indignant. Trouble was, a little smile escaped from the corner of her mouth. He saw it and she knew he saw it.
“Is there an airport in Calais?” he asked.
“Why?” she pushed back.
“It’s an easy question.” He smiled. “Yes, there is an airport in Calais. No, there isn’t an airport in Calais.”
Vera’s eyes shimmered in the moonlight. A light wind off the lake lifted her hair.
“I’m not sure—”
“But there is an airport in Paris.”
“Two.”
“Then on Monday morning you can fly to Paris and take the train to Calais.” If she wanted him to do this, make him work for her, he was.
“What would I do here until Monday morning?” This time her smile was a little broader. But, yes, she was making him work for her.
“For a man to get a woman into his bed, the decision must be hers,” he said quietly, and once again held up the key to his room. Vera’s eyes came up to his and held there. And as they did, her fingers reached up and slowly encircled the key.
10
* * *
TWO DAYS would not be enough, Osborn decided the following morning. Vera had just gotten out of bed and he’d watched her walk around the foot of it and go into the bathroom. Her shoulders thrown back, unashamedly extending her small alabaster breasts before her, she’d crossed the room with the grace of a barely tamed animal unaware of its magnificence. Purposefully, he thought, she’d put nothing on—not his L.A. Kings T-shirt he’d given her to sleep in but that she’d never put on—nor wrapped around her one of several towels still on the floor, spent trophies of three extended episodes of sex in the shower. It was a way of telling him that the night before had not been a lark and this morning she was embarrassed by it.
Somewhere in the hours before daylight, between the sessions of lovemaking, they’d decided to spend the following day seeing Switzerland by train. Geneva, to Lausanne, to Zurich, to Lucerne. He’d wanted to go on to Lugano on the Italian border but there wasn’t time. Save Lugano for the next trip, he remembered musing in the moments before falling into a wholly spent and soundless sleep. That and Italy.
Now, as he heard her step into the shower, it came to him. Today was Saturday, October 1. Vera had to be in Calais on Monday, the third. That same day he was scheduled to fly out of London for L.A. What if today, instead of touring Switzerland, they flew to England? They could have tonight and all day Sunday and all of Sunday night in London or wherever in England Vera wanted to go. Monday morning he could put her on a train to Dover and from there she could take the ferry or Hoverspeed across the Channel directly to Calais.
The sense of it came in a rush, and without thinking more he reached for the telephone. It was only when he was talking to the female clerk at the front desk, and asking how to dial Air Europe, that he realized he was still naked. Not only that but he had an erection, which he seemed to have most of the time Vera was anywhere near. All at once he felt like a teenager on an illicit weekend. Except, as a teenager he’d never had an illicit weekend. Those things had happened to others, not him. Strong and handsome as he was—and had been, even then—he’d remained a virgin until he was nearly twenty-two and a student in medical school. Things other boys did, he’d never done. Though he boasted he had, just to keep from looking the fool. The villain was, as always, the same, the intense and uncontrollable fear that sex would lead to attachment, and attachment, love. And once committed to love, it was only a matter of time before he would find a way to destroy it.
At first Vera said no, England was too expensive, too impulsive. But then he’d taken her hand and pulled her to him and kissed her deeply. Nothing, he told her, was more expensive or impulsive than life. And nothing was more important to him than spending as many hours with her as possible, and they could do that best if they went to London today. He was serious. She could see it in his eyes when she pulled back to look at him, and feel it in his touch when he smiled and ran the back of his hand gently down the side of her face.
“Yes.” She smiled. “Yes, let’s go to England. But after that, no more, okay?” Her smile left, and for the first time since he’d known her, she became serious.
“You have a career, Paul. I have mine and I want it to continue the way it is.”
“Okay—” He grinned and leaned forward to kiss her, but she pulled back.
“No. First agree. After London we won’t see each other again.”
“Your work means that much to you?”
“What I have already done to get through medical college. What I have yet to do. Yes, it means that much. And I won’t apologize for saying it or meaning it.”
“Then . . .” He paused. “I agree.”
London had been a blur. Vera wanted to stay somewhere discreet, somewhere she would not run into a former classmate or professor—or “boyfriend?” Paul teased—and then be invited to dinner or tea or whatever and have to make excuses. Osborn checked them into the Connaught; one of the grandest, smallest, most guarded, and “English” of all the London hostelries.
They needn’t have bothered. Saturday evening was Ambassadors Theatre and a revival of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, followed by dinner at The Ivy across the street, a hand-in-hand stroll through the theater district, broken by several giggly champagne breaks at pubs along the Way, and finally a long, circuitous taxi ride back to the hotel during which they challenged each other, in sensuous and conspiratorial whispers, to make love without the driver’s knowledge. And did. Or thought they did. The rest of their thirty-six-hour stay in London was spent in bed. And it was neither because of sex or by choice. First Paul, and very shortly afterward, Vera, came down with either food poisoning or a violent attack of the flu. All they could hope for was that it was the twenty-four-hour kind. Which it turned out to be. And by the time Monday morning came and they took a cab to Victoria Station, both, though a little weak and shaky, were nearly one hundred percent recovered.
“Hell of a way to spend a weekend in London,” he said as he held her arm and they walked toward her train.
Looking at him, she smiled. “In sickness and in health.”
Later, she wondered why she’d said it, because she knew she’d put meaning into the words. It was an inflection in her voice that just came out. She had been trying to make it light and funny but she knew it hadn’t sounded like that. Whether she meant it or not she didn’t know, and she didn’t want to think about it. All she remembered afterward was Paul taking her into his arms and kissing her. It was a kiss she would remember all her life, rich and exciting, yet at the same time filled with a strength and self-confidence she’d never before experienced with any man.
She remembered watching him from her compartment window as her train pulled out. Standi
ng there in the massive station, surrounded by trains and tracks and people. “ Arms folded over his chest, staring after her with a sad, bewildered smile, and with every click of the wheels, growing smaller and smaller, until, at last, she was out of the station and could see him no more.
Paul Osborn had left her at 7:30 Monday morning, October 3. Two and a half hours later he was in the duty-free shop at Heathrow Airport, killing time before boarding his twelve-hour flight back to Los Angeles.
He was looking at T-shirts and coffee mugs and little towels with the London subway system printed on them when he realized he was thinking of Vera. Then his flight was announced and he waded through a sea of milling passengers to the boarding area. Through the window he could see his British Airways 747 being fueled and loaded with baggage.
Turning away from the plane, he looked at his watch. It was nearly eleven and Vera would be on board the Hover-speed, crossing the English Channel to Calais. By the time she reached her grandmother’s, the two would have little more than ninety minutes before she rushed off to catch the two o’clock train to Paris.
He smiled at the thought of her helping the eighty-one-year-old lady open birthday presents and then joke and laugh with her over cake and coffee and wondered if by chance she would mention him. And if she did, how the old woman would respond. And then, in his mind, he saw the succession of goodbye hugs and farewells and chastisements for so short a visit as Vera waited for her taxi that would take her to the railroad station. Osborn had no idea where Vera’s grandmother lived in Calais, or even her last name for that matter. Was it her maternal or paternal grandmother?
It was then he realized it didn’t make any difference. What he was really thinking about was that Vera would be on the two o’clock Calais-to-Paris train.
In less than forty minutes his bags were pulled from the 747 and he was in” the check-in line for the British Airways shuttle to Paris.
11
* * *
VERA WATCHED from the window of her first-class compartment as the train slowed and came into the station. She’d tried to relax and read for the few short hours she’d been on the train. But her mind had been elsewhere and she’d had to put her reading material aside. What impulse had caused her to introduce herself to Paul Osborn in Geneva in the first place? And why had she slept with him in Geneva and then gone with him to London? Was it simply that she had been restless and had acted on a whim at the attraction of a handsome man, or had she immediately sensed in him something else, a rare and kindred spirit who shared on many levels an understanding of what life really was and what it could be and where it might lead if they were together?
Suddenly she was aware the train had stopped. People were getting up, taking their luggage from the overhead racks and leaving the train. She was in Paris. Tomorrow she would go back to work, and London and Geneva and Paul Osborn would be a memory.
Suitcase in hand, she stepped from the train and moved along the platform in a crowd. The air felt humid and close as if it were about to rain.
“Vera!”
She looked up.
“Paul?” She was astonished.
“In sickness and in health.” He smiled, coming toward her out of the crowd, taking her suitcase, carrying it for her. He’d taken the shuttle from London and then a cab from the airport to Gare du Nord, where they were now In between he’d booked a flight from Paris to Los Angeles. He would be in Paris for five days. For five days they would do nothing but be together.
He wanted to take her home, to her apartment. He knew she had to go to work, but he wanted to make love to her all the hours between then and now. And after, when she’d finished her shift and came home, they would do the same all over again. Being with her, making love to her, was all that mattered.
“I can’t,” she told him flatly, angered that he’d even come. How dare he presume upon her like that?
It wasn’t exactly the reaction he’d counted on. Their time together had been too close, too perfect. Too loving. And it hadn’t come from him alone.
“You agreed that after London there would be no more between us.”
He grinned. “Besides a few hours at the theater and dinner, there wasn’t an awfully lot to London, was there? Unless you count the throwing up, the high fevers and alternating chills.”
For a moment Vera said nothing, then the truth came out. She told him quickly and directly. There was someone else.
It would not be prudent to reveal his name, but he was important and powerful in France and he must never know they had been together in Geneva or London. It would hurt him deeply and that was something she would not do. What she and Paul had had, what they had shared in the past few days, was done. And he knew that. Because they had agreed upon it. Painful as it was, she could not and would not see him again.
They reached the escalator and went up and out to the cabs. He gave her the name of his hotel on avenue Kléber. He would be there for five days. He wanted to see her again, if only to say goodbye.
Vera looked away. Paul Osborn was unlike any man she’d ever met. He was gentle and kind and understanding even in his hurt and disappointment. But even had she wanted to, she couldn’t give in to him. Where she was in her life, he could not be part of. There was no other way.
“I’m sorry,” she said, looking at him. Then she got into a cab, the door closed and she was gone.
“Simple as that,” he heard himself say out loud.
Less than an hour later he found himself sitting in a brasserie somewhere off rue St.-Antoine trying to piece the whole thing together. If he had followed his original plans, never taken the shuttle to Paris, in a few hours he’d be landing in L.A., taking a cab back to his house overlooking the Pacific, getting his Chesapeake retriever out of the kennel, seeing if the deer had come over his fence and eaten his roses. The day after that he would be going back to work. That would have been the natural course of things had he done it. But he hadn’t.
Vera, who she was and what she stirred in him, was all that mattered. Nothing else was worth anything. Not the present, the past or the future. At least that was what he’d been thinking when he looked up and saw the man with the jagged scar.
12
* * *
Wednesday, October 5.
IT WAS just after ten in the morning when Henri Kanarack stepped into a small grocery a half block from the bakery. He was still disturbed by the incident with the American, but nothing had happened in two days and he was beginning to agree with both his wife and Agnes Demblon that the man had either picked the wrong person or just been crazy. He was bent over collecting several bottles of mineral water to take back to work when Danton Fodor, the store’s overweight and nearly blind owner, suddenly took him by the arm and brought him into the back room.
“What is it?” Kanarack said, indignantly. “I’m current with my bill.”
“It’s not that,” Fodor said, peering out through thick glasses to make sure no customers were waiting at the cash register. Fodor was not only the owner but clerk, cashier, stock boy and custodian.
“A man was here earlier today. A private detective with an awkward drawing of you.”
“What?” Kanarack felt his heart jump.
“He was showing it around. Asking people if they knew you.”
“You didn’t say anything!”
“Of course not. I knew he was up to something right away. The tax man?”
“I don’t know.” Henri Kanarack looked away. A private detective, and he’d gotten this far. How? Suddenly he looked back. “What was his company? Did you get his name?”
Fodor nodded and opened the lone drawer of a table that served as a desk. Pulling out the card, he handed it to Kanarack. “He said we should call if we saw you.”
“We, who’s we?” Kanarack demanded.
“The other people in the store. He asked everyone. Luckily they were all strangers and no one recognized you. Where he went from here or who else he talked to, I don’t know. I’d be ca
reful when I went back to work if I were you.”
Henri Kanarack wasn’t going back to work. Not today anyway, maybe never again. Glancing at the card in his hand he dialed the bakery and got Agnes on the telephone.
“The American,” he said. “He’s got a private detective after me. If he shows up, make sure he talks to you. Make sure nobody else says anything. His name is—” Kanarack looked down at the card again—”Jean Packard. He works for a company called Kolb International.” Suddenly he got angry. “What do you mean, what should you tell him? Tell him I no longer work there and haven’t for some time. If he wants to know where I live, you don’t know. You sent some paperwork to me after I left and it came back with no forwarding address.” With that, and saying he’d call her later, Kanarack abruptly hung up.
Less than an hour later Jean Packard entered the bakery and glanced around. Conversations with two other shop owners and a young boy who happened to see his sketch by accident had pointed here, to the bakery. There was a small retail shop in the front and behind it he could see an office. Beyond that was a closed door that he assumed led to the area in the back where the baking was done.
An elderly woman paid for two loaves of bread and turned to go. Packard smiled and opened the door for her.
“Merci beaucoup,” she said in passing.
Jean Packard nodded and then turned to the young girl behind the counter. This was where the man worked. He would show the sketch to no one here. That would be a tip-off someone was after him. What he wanted was a list of employee names. This was obviously a small organization, with probably no more than ten or fifteen people on the payroll. All would be registered at the central Tax Bureau. A computer cross-check would match names with home addresses. Ten or fifteen people would not be difficult to canvass. Simple elimination would give him the one he wanted.