“Game, set, and match,” said Esther with a smile of satisfaction.
“Told you so,” I agreed, bluffing confidence.
“Don’t jump to conclusions—just because you’re in the game doesn’t mean you’ll win it. Though I admit you’ve handled this situation masterfully.”
“You couldn’t have done it better yourself. Is there coffee?”
“A full pot.”
“I’ll have to go out to dinner with him…”
“Of course, don’t worry about me. I’ll bring work home. I want to go over the accounts thoroughly.”
“Maggie’s a good secretary, I trust her.”
“So do I, but I prefer to know all the expenses in detail. And we have a number of things that need dealing with on the New York side, so it’d be good for me to have a quiet night to work while you have dinner with Roy.”
It was great to have Esther at the helm of Global Communication. She was meticulous in her work and not even a misplaced comma could get past her. I saw that Maggie was getting impatient at Esther’s endless questions, but that she also respected her—more, in fact, than she had ever respected me.
Esther accompanied Cooper to the meeting with the rain boot manufacturers and came out with a signed contract. In the afternoon they also met with the tea importer. He was impressed by the ideas Esther sketched out. He didn’t commit to anything, but Cooper and Esther thought we had a good chance of getting the campaign. We weren’t exactly going to make a fortune, but at least it would mean that we could keep our heads above water.
I felt anxious as the evening came around. The meeting with Roy was making me nervous, but more than that I wanted to know if Yoko would be working at Madame Agnès’s.
At seven on the dot I rang the bell at Madame’s house. The old butler opened the door and seemed pleased to see me.
“Mr. Spencer! Come in, Madame will be so surprised. She was wondering when you would come to see us again.”
I was pleased to be there too. I felt the comfort of arriving at a familiar place where there are no surprises.
Madame Agnès came over to greet me. I kissed her hand, as she liked her clients to do.
“My friend, I was wondering about your absence. But I’m pleased to see you among us again.”
“Business, Madame, it’s just business that’s kept me from your house. Have you seen Mr. Parker?”
“He’s just arrived, he’s waiting for you in the small library. I’ll make sure nobody disturbs you. And I’ll send over some champagne.”
“I think Mr. Parker would prefer whiskey,” I suggested.
“Naturally, but you will drink champagne as always, no?”
Roy Parker was pacing compulsively in the room that Madame called “the small library.” It was a circular room, not very large, with floor-to-ceiling shelves on which stood, among other books, the complete Encyclopædia Britannica.
A waiter entered behind me carrying a tray with a bottle of Roy’s favorite whiskey and another bottle of champagne. Madame Agnès was going to wring a lot of money out of the moment of privacy we needed.
“You came,” said Roy, as if he’d doubted I would.
I shrugged in reply, watching as the waiter first served Roy a double whiskey, then opened the bottle of champagne and, after pouring me a glass, placed it back in the ice bucket.
When we were alone Roy seemed to relax.
“Well then?” I asked straight out.
“You’re not going to break the contract,” said Roy, looking at me with resentment.
“Aren’t I? I sent the document to your lawyers this morning. I’m waiting for them to sign it, and then both of us are free of any obligation. You’ll agree that I’m being generous by not claiming any compensation, since you’re initiating the termination of our contract. So I don’t understand what the problem is.”
“The problem is that I’m sick of you, that you’re a bloody manipulator, you’re unscrupulous, you’re a—”
“Enough, Roy! Do you think I came here to be insulted?”
“We’re not going to end it, Thomas. I won’t give Schmidt and the lawyers the pleasure.”
“I don’t understand, Roy…They want me away from you. And you know what? I don’t think they’re wrong. They have their own way of doing things, and they’re your safety net. Without them you wouldn’t survive in politics. So it’s not much they’re asking from you in return, only that you get rid of me. Well, now the time has come. Anyway, I’m going to be spending more time in New York, so I won’t be able to properly deal with London business. Not even yours.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. I demand that you continue handling my business, Thomas, that’s the trade-off.”
“You’re not hearing me, Roy. I’m not negotiating another type of contract—”
“Enough bullshit! You’re going to stay with me, Thomas, end of discussion.”
“You don’t need me anymore, Roy.”
As I said this I watched him. I knew that I couldn’t push him too far. In the end, my goal was to maintain the contract.
Roy sat down. I hadn’t realized until then that we’d both been standing, staring at each other so closely that I could smell the whiskey on his breath. I sat down too.
“I’m sick of this, Thomas. Sometimes I regret ever getting involved in this shit. I was happy before. I was running my in-laws’ business, and I had Suzi.”
“It was your decision, Roy.”
“My ambition. Yes, it was my ambition that brought me here.”
“You can’t go back now. You can’t get your life back. If you continue in politics you still have a chance to save yourself and get Suzi back, but if you let it all go, then what’s left? If you don’t have any power Suzi will end it with you.”
“My kids don’t understand anything. It hurts them to see their parents hardly talking,” lamented Roy.
“You want to become prime minister. I don’t know if it’ll happen, but if you want to try you have to pay a price.”
“I never thought it would be so high…”
We drank in silence, letting our eyes wander for a while to the fire that was crackling in the fireplace.
“All right, Roy…we won’t break the contract.” I said this with resignation, like someone being forced to make a decision he didn’t want to make.
“Evelyn is really good at her job,” muttered Roy.
“I know, that’s why I put her in charge of you. And that’s how it’ll continue,” I assured him.
“And you?” Roy’s question was loaded with worry.
“We’ll go over how things stand—I’ll meet with your people, with your electoral committee, and if possible with Suzi. We’ll draw up a new action plan, which Evelyn will be in charge of carrying out. Then I’ll have to go back to New York.”
“Have you married Esther?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“We live together. It’s good like that, and she’s my business partner too—half the company is hers.”
“Will you come to the county?”
“Yes. How long are you staying in London?”
“A few more days, till Friday. I came down for some business at the Treasury. You can spend the weekend in the county.”
“We’ll have to do that. I’ll tell Evelyn to coordinate all the meetings with your people. Esther wants to go back to New York on Monday.”
“You can’t stay longer?”
“We’ll see. In any case my visits to this country won’t be long.”
Roy seemed calmer knowing that he could still count on me. I was surprised how easy it had been to trick him and win the game. The truth was, the man I had in front of me hardly resembled the one I had once known.
“Let’s go celebrate with the girls. There are a couple of new ones,” said Roy, trying to cheer himself up.
We went back into the main room, where there were already a number of men talking to Madame Agnès’s girls. Then I saw her. Unm
istakable in her black dress, which made her look even slimmer. Yoko was talking to a couple of men.
I went up to her and grabbed her hand, bowing exaggeratedly before her. One of the men greeted me warmly. It was Tyler, the Chinese underwear importer.
“What a surprise, Mr. Spencer. They told me you’d moved to New York…”
“I have business on both sides of the Atlantic, Mr. Tyler, but here you find me.”
Yoko’s face was filled with such horror that the two men looked surprised. We watched her run to the hallway. I knew she was going to throw up.
“Hey, what’s going on with her?” one of the clients asked loudly.
“She must be unwell. She’s an old friend, so if you’ll allow me…Well, I’d like to talk to her awhile.”
The two men seemed to be weighing whether to let me go ahead. Tyler decided in my favor.
“Well, sure…”
I waited by the bathroom door until Yoko came out. When she opened the door and saw me she broke down in tears. Her face showed such desperation that any other person would have been moved.
If I’d been a decent type I would’ve told her to calm down, that I didn’t mean to do anything more than say hello to her: “You don’t need to worry. Look, I don’t want to hurt you, the past is the past. And I have no intention of getting together with you again. You have a right to your own life.”
Yoko would have looked at me, incredulous, and she might even have thanked me for giving her back her freedom.
—
But I didn’t say any of that, I grabbed her tightly by the wrists instead and forced her to look me in the face.
“We’ll have dinner together. I’ll tell Madame Agnès to send us up some champagne.”
I pulled her toward the stairs while asking the butler to give the order for us to be served dinner in one of the suites on the second floor. He looked at Yoko with concern, but he didn’t say anything. The customer is always right, and if I had chosen Yoko, the establishment could raise no objections.
Once we’d entered the room I pushed her hard. She tripped and fell to the floor. I didn’t bother to help her. She got to her feet and I watched how her expression blossomed into one of terror until her face became a mask of desperation and madness.
“Why?” she stammered.
“Why? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Why have you come back? Why do you hate me? Why do you want to destroy me?”
“You’re a whore, Yoko, just a whore. This is your job. I’m your best client. This is the way things work. Girls like you have to please their clients, you don’t get to choose.”
“We do here…We do at Madame Agnès’s…We don’t have to go with anyone we don’t want to go with…”
“But you want to be with me, Yoko, of course you do. Now we’ll have dinner and then we’ll go back to your place. We’ll spend the rest of the night there.”
“No…No…No, that’s not possible. My boyfriend…He’s at the flat, he’s waiting for me…”
“Really? Does he know where you are right now?”
“He doesn’t know anything…Please, give me my life back!” she shouted with such desperation that I was afraid someone might hear her.
“Shut up! Don’t make a scene, Yoko, or you’ll make things worse for yourself. Call your boyfriend and tell him to leave, tell him not to wait for you, that you won’t be spending tonight with him.”
“But I can’t tell Dave that!”
“Then I’ll tell him. I’ll tell him what he ought to know, that you’re a whore and you’ve been deceiving him for years. And that I pay you extra so I can go to your apartment, and so he needs to leave.”
“Don’t do this to me!” Her cry was like a wounded animal’s.
The waiter arrived with our dinner. He placed it unhurriedly on the table while looking sidelong at Yoko, who had sat down and was covering her face with her hands. When the waiter left, I went over and hit her.
“Are you trying to cause trouble? Do you want the waiter to tell Madame Agnès that you’re crying? If that’s the case, you’ll pay dearly for it.”
A few gentle knocks at the door warned me to lower my voice. I opened it. The waiter handed me a bottle, a second bottle of champagne “on the house.” I could make out the figure of Madame Agnès behind him.
“Excellent, we’ll soon finish this off. Reunions are always so emotional.”
I didn’t let him come in and I closed the door immediately. I looked at Yoko with such fury that all she could do was tremble. She knew that if she made another sound there would be very unpleasant consequences for her.
We ate in silence. When we finished I told her what I expected of her.
“Call Dave. Tell him to go, it will be best for everyone.”
“But we’re here…Why do we need to go to my flat?” she said, crying again.
I took out my cell phone and started to dial the landline for Yoko’s apartment. She looked at me with such fear that her face became the embodiment of pain. She got up and came toward me so fast that she managed to get the phone out of my hands.
I pushed her hard and threw her to the floor again.
“I don’t like this game, Yoko. You’re going to end up hurting yourself.”
She suddenly stopped crying. She got up with difficulty and looked at me with determination.
“Okay, let’s go.”
“Smart girl.”
We went down to the hall and a maid handed us our coats. We went out into the cold of the London night. Yoko was walking fast. I started to think that she had tricked me, that the reason she had suddenly agreed to go to her place was because Dave wasn’t there. She had used him to try to dissuade me, but seeing my determination, she had given in to reality. I couldn’t have been more satisfied.
I don’t know how it happened. Yoko suddenly began to run. She took me by surprise and I ran after her, but I couldn’t catch her. She reached the intersection of two roads, which several cars were crossing. She threw herself under the wheels of a car that was moving fast. The man braked, but not in time to prevent Yoko’s body from being thrown to the ground and the wheels from going over her, breaking all the bones in her skull and thorax.
I remained motionless. I didn’t approach. I watched the scene from a distance. Several cars stopped and the man who had hit her swore that the woman had thrown herself into the street, that he had been unable to avoid the collision. He was a young guy, not much more than twenty or twenty-two years old. He had been driving faster than the speed limit, but that wasn’t the cause of the accident.
An ambulance and a couple of police cars arrived a few minutes later. I continued watching without moving any closer. Nobody had seen me with her.
I walked quickly back to Madame Agnès’s. She seemed concerned to see me.
“I need to speak to you, Madame.”
I followed her into her office and she closed the door to make sure nobody bothered us.
“Something unbelievable has happened, Madame…I left your establishment a few minutes ago; I offered to go with Yoko to find a taxi. She was in a very strange mood tonight…In fact, she was walking so fast I couldn’t even keep up with her. She suddenly started running and I lost sight of her. I sped up and…well, something terrible has happened…She’s been hit by a car. I didn’t get too close, you must understand why. I’ve come to tell you what happened.”
“Oh my God! Oh my God!”
“Calm down, Madame.”
“Calm down? One of my girls has an accident and you ask me to calm down…Is she badly hurt?”
“I don’t know, Madame, but I fear the worst.”
“What are we going to do?”
“I assume you’ve considered the possibility that accidents like this might happen…”
“Accidents! No, no, I’ve never planned for the possibility that any of the young women who work here would ever end up under the wheels of a car! And so close to my establishment…Someone mig
ht have seen her leaving…It will be a scandal…”
“You have friends in high places, Madame, I’m sure that you’ll be able to deal with the problem.”
“But what about you? What happened tonight? The waiter who served your dinner told me that Yoko was crying, that she seemed very upset…”
“And so she was, Madame. She didn’t tell me why.”
“She seemed perfectly fine until you arrived…”
“That was not the case. She told me that she was fed up with this job, that she couldn’t do it anymore…It seems she has a boyfriend and he was starting to suspect something. She seemed so sad that…well, it didn’t seem appropriate to have any kind of amorous relations with a woman who was so upset.”
“That was very chivalrous of you,” replied Madame Agnès with no conviction whatsoever.
I was thinking about how not having slept with Yoko would keep me safe from any ensuing investigation. If she was dead, as I believed she was, and they performed an autopsy, they would find no trace of my semen. This would be in my favor.
“We’ll have to wait and see…I can’t publicly appear to know about what happened.”
“Sooner or later the police will come. I’m counting on you to be discreet…I came to your establishment tonight to meet with Mr. Parker. It would be terrible if he found himself negatively affected by this awful event. I hope that your staff are worthy of the trust we put in them.”
“Of course, Mr. Spencer. But…in the end…I hope we can avoid any trouble. If Yoko survives the accident, it would be best for everyone.”
“Of course. She’s a lovely young woman with a promising future.”
“Is there anything else I should know, Mr. Spencer?” As she was speaking, Madame Agnès seemed to scrutinize the most remote corners of my mind.
“Everything happened just as I’ve told you. It was all so fast…She seemed anxious to get home, and as I said, I offered to go with her to find a taxi.”
“And in doing so you broke one of our rules. You know that we don’t want our guests to have any contact with our girls outside of the establishment.”
“I was only going with her to find a taxi, Madame, and I offered to do so precisely because seeing her so upset worried me. As you may imagine, especially given the circumstances, I’m sorry for breaking that rule.”