My head had barely touched the pillow, when the phone next to my ear shrilled loudly. I reached for it and pushed myself up on the pillows as I said, “Hullo?”
“It’s me, Val,” Mike Carter announced in his warm, affectionate midwestern voice. He was the head of the Paris bureau of Gemstar, one of the founders actually, and a very old, very dear friend. “How’re you feeling, honey?”
“I’m fine, Mike, thanks. A lot better. Well, coping at least. What’s happening?”
“Oh just the usual stuff . . . you know, wars, terrorist attacks, hijackings, serial murders, famine, earthquakes, floods. Disasters by the cartload, in other words.” He laughed, but it was a hollow laugh. “I guess one day the world will blow itself up, but in the meantime, what’s happening is what I call the small stuff.” He chuckled again in that macabre way of his and asked, “Know what I mean?”
“I do,” I answered, laughing with him. Mike’s black sense of humor appealed to me, as did his penchant for practical jokes. But these things aside, he had always been my strongest ally, a great supporter of mine ever since I’d joined the agency seven years ago. Over the years a close friendship had developed between us. My grandfather had been very taken with him, and Mike had been smitten in much the same way, and the two had remained good friends until the day Grandfather died.
Mike went on. “I’m not calling to lure you back into the fray, Val. Whenever you want, come on in. But take as much time as you need. It’s your call. We all understand how you feel, me most especially.”
“I know that. Maybe in a couple of weeks,” I murmured, and surprised myself with this answer. Two weeks was not so far away; I’d actually planned on taking three months off, and here I was, shortening it. I was amazed at my unexpected response to him.
“Well, that’s great!” Mike said. “You’re sorely missed around here. But listen, sweetie, the reason I called is because Qemal, the brother of Ajet, got in touch with the agency today. He asked for you, so he was put through to me. He wanted you to know that Ajet’s safe. In Macedonia.”
“I’m so glad to hear that!” I cried, genuinely relieved and pleased to have news of the young Kosovar at last. What had happened to him, what his fate had been, had troubled me and Jake for weeks. When we’d attempted to reach his brother, there was never any reply at his Paris apartment. “Jake and I thought Ajet had been killed, Mike,” I explained. “Where has he been all these weeks? Did his brother say?”
“Yes, he told me Ajet had been wounded the day he was with you outside Pe. Apparently he left the wood where he was waiting for you with the jeep once the fighting started. He actually went looking for the three of you, but he was shot before he could make contact. After he was injured, he was left for dead in the streets, but later he was rescued by some of the locals. They went out into the countryside a couple of days later and found soldiers from the K.L.A. who were able to get medical help for Ajet. The Kosovar soldiers then took him to Albania, God help him, I’ve heard the hospital conditions there are primitive. Eventually Ajet got to Macedonia, although his brother didn’t say how. You’d written the agency number on a bit of paper and given it to him, and the kid kept it. He asked Qemal to let us know he was safe. He especially wanted you to know that, Val.”
“I’m glad he’s safe, and recovered. And it was a fluke he made it.”
“I know, I know. Everything’s in the lap of the gods in the long run. That’s my belief, at any rate. As Bogie once said, it’s a cockeyed world we live in.” Mike half sighed, half coughed, and hurried on. “I gotta go, honey. Let’s talk next week, or when you feel like it. I’m here if you need me, whenever you need me, day or night. Just give me a shout and I’ll be there.”
“Thanks, Mike, for everything, and especially for caring about me, and for your friendship . . .” I found myself choking up and left the sentence unfinished.
“Feel better soon,” he murmured into the phone.
We hung up and I lay back against the pillows. Mike Carter was one of the good guys, and he’d seen it all. After knocking around the world as a photojournalist, he and several of his colleagues had founded Gemstar, an agency very similar to Magnum, which had been started years before, in the late 1940s, by Robert Capa.
When Mike’s wife Sarah had been killed in a freak automobile accident outside Paris, he had given himself a desk job at Gemstar in order to stay put so that he could bring up his two young children himself, with the help of a nanny. He was no stranger to sudden death, to unspeakable loss. And grief and sorrow were old companions of his, as I well knew. But he somehow managed to hide his pain behind the gruff heartiness and a genuine warmth. Still, I knew how much he had suffered after Sarah’s unexpected and untimely death ten years ago.
Now my thoughts turned to Ajet and that fateful day near Pe, the memory of it still terribly vivid in my mind. Almost immediately, I pushed the violent images away, smothered them. I closed my eyes, needing desperately to sleep. That was the ultimate refuge from heartache. Very simply, I wanted to blot out everything, everyone, the whole damn world.
II
I must have dozed off and slept for a very long time, because when I awakened with a start, the room was no longer filled with the bright sunlight of early afternoon.
Gray shadows lurked everywhere, curled around the bookshelves and the big Provençal armoire, slid across the ceiling and spilled down onto the walls.
The overwhelming grayness gave my normally cheerful bedroom a gloomy look, and involuntarily I shivered. Someone walked over my grave, I thought, as gooseflesh speckled my arms, and then I couldn’t help wondering why I’d thought of that particular and rather morbid analogy.
Glancing at the bedside clock, I saw that it was almost six. I couldn’t believe I’d been asleep for over four hours. Slipping off the bed, I went and looked out the big bay window.
The beautiful Paris sky of earlier was cloud-filled now and darkening rapidly, the sunny blue entirely obscured. Rain threatened. Perhaps there would be a storm. I turned on the lamp that stood on the desk, and bright light flooded across the photograph of Tony in its silver frame. It had been taken by Jake the previous year, when we had been on vacation together in southern France. I stared down at it for a moment, and then I turned away, filled with sadness.
Sometimes I couldn’t bear to look at it. He was so full of life in this particular shot, his hair blowing in the wind, his teeth very white and gleaming in his tanned face, those merry black eyes narrowed against the sunlight as he squinted back at the camera.
Tony stood on the deck of the sloop on which we were sailing that vacation, the white masts above him billowing out in the breeze. How carefree he looked, bare-chested in his white tennis shorts. A man in his prime, obviously loving that he was so virile. You could see this just by looking at the expression on his face, the wide, confident smile on his mouth.
I sighed under my breath and reached out to steady myself against the desk, and then I moved slowly across the floor, retreating from the window area.
His son Rory had taken possession of Tony’s body once it had arrived in England, and the boy had taken it on to Ireland. To County Wicklow. There Tony had been buried next to his parents.
Rory would be at the memorial service, wouldn’t he?
That question hovered around in my head for a moment. Of course he would, I eventually answered myself. And so perhaps I would finally get to meet the son Tony had had such pride in and loved so much.
I lay down on the bed again and curled up in a ball, thoughts of Tony uppermost once more. Absently, I twisted his ring on my finger, then glanced down at it. A wide gold band, Grecian in design, set with aquamarines.
“The color of your eyes,” he’d said the day he’d chosen it, not so long ago. “They’re not blue, not gray, not green, but pale, pale turquoise. You have sea eyes, Val, eyes the color of the sea.”
Pushing my face in the pillow, I forced back the tears that were welling suddenly.
“Mavou
rneen mine,” I heard him whisper against my cheek, and I sighed again as I felt his hand touching my face, my neck, and then smoothing down over my breast. . . .
Snapping my eyes wide open, I sat up with a jolt, got off the bed, hurried into the bathroom. Pressing my face against the glass wall of the shower stall, I told myself I must pull myself together, must stop thinking about him in that way . . . stop thinking about him sexually. I’ve got to get over him, he’s not coming back. He’s dead. And buried. Gone from this life. But I knew I couldn’t help myself. I knew that his memory would be always loitering in my mind, lingering in my heart.
III
I took off my dressing gown and the rest of my clothes and stepped into the shower, let the hot water sluice down over my body, and then I dumped loads of shampoo on top of my head and thoroughly washed my hair.
After stepping out of the shower and toweling myself dry, I wrapped a smaller towel in a turban around my head. And then I examined my wound. I did this every day. There was a funny puckering around it, but that would go away eventually; that’s what my doctor here in Paris had told me.
I’d been very fortunate, he’d explained when I’d first gone to see him, in that the bullet had missed muscle and bone and gone right through flesh. Where it had exited, it had left a gaping hole originally, and the main problem for the doctors in Belgrade had been picking out the bits of cloth from my clothes that had been blown into the open wound. They had apparently done an excellent job, according to Dr. Bitoun, and I had healed well.
There was no question about it in my mind, luck had been running with me that day. Just as it had with Jake. The two of us had somehow been protected.
IV
The storm broke as I finished dressing.
Thunder and lightning rampaged across the sky, and I turned on additional lights in my bedroom before going into the living room.
A master switch controlled all the lamps in there, and a second after I’d hit it with my finger, the room was bathed in a lambent glow. I glanced around, my eyes taking in everything.
Although I knew this room so well, it always gave me pleasure whenever I looked at it. My grandfather had put it together, created the decorative scheme, and his choices in furniture, all gifts from him to me, were superb. Even the lamps and paintings had been his selections, and the room had a cohesion and a quiet beauty that was very special.
Janine, the wonderfully efficient and motherly Frenchwoman who looked after the apartment—and me when I was in it—had been very visible all day yesterday. She had cleaned and polished and fussed around in general, and had even arrived bearing a lovely gift . . . the masses of pink roses that she had arranged in various bowls around the living room.
And tonight the room literally shone from her efforts. The antique wood pieces were warm and mellow in the lamplight, gleamed like dark ripe fruit; how beautifully they stood out against the dark pink walls, while the silk-shaded porcelain lamps threw pools of soft light onto their glistening surfaces.
Like the rest of the apartment, the floor in the living room was of highly polished wood and left bare, as the floors in the other rooms were. The latter were decorated more simply, since I’d done them myself; it was Grandfather’s room, as I called it, that looked the best.
After admiring it from the doorway for a moment longer, I then stepped inside, went over and straightened a few cushions on the deep-rose linen-covered sofa near the fireplace before bending over to sniff Janine’s flowers. For once they had a perfume, which was unusual these days. Most bought flowers had no scent at all.
I went into the kitchen, checked that there were bottles of white wine in the refrigerator, and returned to my bedroom. For a minute or two I studied myself in the long mirror on a side wall, thinking that I looked much better than I had for days. Healthy, in fact. But that was merely an illusion, one very cleverly created by my artifice with cosmetics; a golden-tinted foundation camouflaged my deathly pallor, hid the dark smudges under my eyes. The latter I’d enhanced with a touch of eye shadow and mascara, while a hint of pink blush and pink lipstick helped to bring a little additional life to my wan face.
The real truth was that I’d looked quite ill for the past week, haggard, white-faced, and red-eyed from crying, and I hadn’t wanted Jake to see me looking that way tonight. He worried enough about me as it was.
I wasn’t sure where we were going to dinner, so I’d chosen one of my basic outfits, composed of black gabardine pants, a white silk shirt, and a black blazer. My blond-streaked hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and, as I regarded myself objectively, I thought: plain Jane and then some.
Turning around, I went to the desk, opened the drawer, and took out a pair of small pearl earrings. I was putting them on, when the doorbell rang.
I hurried into the hall, eager to see Jake, who had been gone for the past week.
“Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes,” he drawled when I flung open the door to let him in.
“Likewise,” I answered, and we stood there, staring at each other.
Then he reached out eagerly and pulled me into his arms, enveloping me in a tight bear hug. And he held me so close to him, I was momentarily startled.
V
When Jake finally let go of me, he gave me an odd little smile that seemed a bit self-conscious to me. Then he abruptly swung around and closed the front door.
For a moment I believed that he, too, was startled by the fervor and length of his embrace, and then I changed my mind. He was my best friend and we had been close for years, so why wouldn’t he hug me excessively when he’d just returned from a trip? And especially under the circumstances.
“It’s not raining,” I murmured.
“No, it’s not,” he answered, turning to look at me. “The storm seems to have blown away before it got started.”
I nodded and headed for the kitchen to open a bottle of his favorite Pouilly-Fuissé.
Jake followed me.
“I’ll do that,” he said when I took the bottle of white wine from the refrigerator. He opened a drawer where he knew I kept the bar utensils and found a corkscrew. While he deftly pulled the cork, I took two wineglasses out of the cupboard and set them on the counter next to him, and a second later he was pouring wine for us.
He handed me a glass, and I said, “I’ve got good news, Jake. Mike heard from Ajet’s brother. Qemal told him Ajet is safe and well in Macedonia.”
“Hey, that’s great!” he exclaimed, and clinked his glass to mine. “Here’s to Ajet. Thank God he made it okay.”
I nodded. “To Ajet.”
We took our drinks into the living room, where Jake lowered himself into a chair near the fireplace and I sat down in the corner of the sofa, as I always did.
“What’s the full story?” Jake asked, peering across at me over the rim of his glass.
After I told him the whole story, I settled back, studying Jake, thinking how well he looked after a week’s rest in the South. He’d asked me to go with him to Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, but I’d declined, and I suddenly wondered if that might have been a mistake on my part. A vacation would have obviously done me good. His few days in the sun had given him a golden tan, turned his streaky hair more blond than ever, and he was in glowing health. Tonight he was wearing a blue cotton shirt with his gray sport jacket and slacks, and his eyes looked more vividly blue than ever.
“You’re staring at me,” he said. “What’s wrong?” That was Jake, who was always questioning me about everything in my life. It had been that way since we’d first met in Beirut.
“Nothing’s wrong,” I replied at last. “It’s just that you look in such great shape, I think I ought to have accepted your invitation.”
“Yes, you should have,” he quickly replied. He spoke softly enough, but I detected a certain undertone of vehemence in his voice. He took a swallow of white wine and then sat nursing his drink, staring down into the glass, his face thoughtful.
When he looked up at me, he said, “You n
eeded a holiday, and even though you think you look great, you don’t really. The makeup doesn’t deceive me. And you’ve lost weight.”
So much for my efforts with the cosmetic pots, I thought, and said, “Black makes me look thin.”
“It’s me you’re talking to,” he answered. “I know you better than everyone, even better than you know yourself.” He put the glass down on the coffee table and seemed about to get up but suddenly leaned back against the rose-colored-linen cushions and closed his eyes.
After a couple of minutes, I ventured to ask, “Are you feeling all right, Jake?”
Opening his eyes, he said, “Yep. But I worry about you, Val.”
“Oh, please don’t,” I said. “I’m fine. I haven’t lost a pound,” I lied. “Nothing. Nada. Zilch.”
He shook his head. “Has Mike said anything about your going back to work?”
“He said I was welcome back anytime I felt like coming in, but to take my time, that it was my call.”
“The sooner you get back to the agency, the better, in my opinion. You need to be busy, occupied, Val, not walking around the streets of Paris every day and sitting here alone in the apartment afterward. I know you’re suffering. I am too. Tony was my best buddy, but we’ve got to go on, that’s what he would want.”
“I’m trying hard, I really am, Jake. And the walking helps. I’m not sure why, but it does.”
“You’re less alone when you’re out there in the streets. They make you feel more alive because they’re full of life, people, traffic, noise, activity. The streets are the world. Did I ever tell you about John Steinbeck and what he did when he heard that Robert Capa had been killed in Indochina?”
I frowned. I wasn’t certain whether he’d told me or not, and yet at the back of my mind I thought that perhaps he had. Or was it Tony who had told me? Certainly we all revered Capa, the greatest war photographer who had ever lived. I said, “I’m not sure, you might have. But tell me again.”