Hidden River (Five Star Paperback) (26 page)

“How is it?” she asked.

I noticed that she hadn’t poured one for herself.

“It’s good, it’s from the Inner Hebrides, you can tell because of the peaty aftertaste.”

She removed her pearls and put them on a sideboard. She kicked her shoes off and sat on the leather reclining chair next to the sofa. She really was extraordinary looking. Beautiful in a way that Irish girls aren’t. Healthy, sunny, fresh. She was the whole of America. Her big wide smile, her golden hair, her long legs. Even more attractive now that the thoughts of her poor mother had exposed her a little to me.

Her fingers tapped on the leather arm of the chair.

I got up, poured her a glass of whisky to see if she would drink it.

She sniffed it and took a big sip.

“Oh, Alex, that was a lovely play, Ireland sounds very romantic. Charles went there when he traveled around the world.”

“Yeah, he told me, he went to Dublin,” I said.

“Oh, yes, of course, he went everywhere. I’ve never even left America, if you don’t count Puerto Rico,” she said wistfully.

“And you don’t count Puerto Rico, because it’s still part of America,” I said with a grin.

“Yes, I suppose it is, isn’t it. What is it? It’s not a state, is it?”

“It’s a colony,” I said.

“No, I don’t think so,” she said dismissively.

“It is,” I insisted.

“No, I don’t think we have any colonies,” she said dreamily, her mind clearly on something else.

“You do, and Puerto Rico’s one of them, you got it from Spain, I think,” I said.

She bit her finger and looked at me.

“You know, Alex, when we first went out campaigning in Englewood, that night of the fire, the first time we’d talked really, apart from the interview, I was very impressed with that thing you said.”

“To the policeman?”

“No, when we talked to that dreadful woman. You said that thing about African Americans.”

“I honestly don’t remember what you’re talking about,” I said.

“You said that African Americans had invented jazz and blues and rock and done lots of things,” she said.

“Oh, I stole that from somewhere, I’m sure, it’s hardly an original thought,” I said.

“Yes, but clearly you have the sentiment, don’t you? You believe that. I mean, well, you know what I mean,” she said.

“I don’t think so,” I said, laughing, and looked at her legs crossing themselves, her hand fixing her dress.

“No, of course not, I’m not saying it very well. In fact, I don’t know what I’m saying. I just mean that you, you have real empathy. Does that make sense?”

I examined her. What was she doing? What did she mean by that? Was she complimenting me by an unspoken comparison to someone else? Was she really talking about me, or talking about herself? Maybe in a roundabout way she was trying to tell me something about Charles. Charles is not like this. He is not like you and me. Charles is cold, single-minded. Charles is a—

“Is it because you grew up in Northern Ireland, was it very hard living there with all the bombings and everything?” Amber asked softly, dripping the words out with precision, brushing the hair from her face. That accent of hers always throwing me. Not New Jersey, not the South, not Boston. A gentle echo of Charles’s patrician tones. Slightly affected. She took another drink of his whisky.

“Not that hard, you just got on with things, you got used to being searched going into stores, that kind of thing, people are very adaptable,” I said.

“Did you see any of that bad stuff?”

“Not really,” I lied.

“You didn’t see anything?” she asked, her lips closing into a pout.

“Once when I was a kid they blew up our local toy shop and we got discounted train sets and Lego. They were all fire-damaged, but it was mostly the packaging. Really, it was actually a good thing.”

“Oh, my goodness, they blew up your toy shop? Why would they blow up a toy shop?”

“I don’t know,” I said, studying the reaction on her face, which was sympathetic. Upset for me.

“I bet you saw a lot more than you’re saying,” she said, smiling.

“No, not much.”

“I bet you’re just being brave and stoic like in the play,” she said, scratching at the skin under her gold watch. Taking it off.

“Honestly, it wasn’t that bad,” I said.

“No. I know all about it. That’s why you’re here illegally. That’s why you lied to the police, because you don’t have a green card. I don’t mind. I wouldn’t tell anyone. I know how difficult it must be. I read the papers. Ireland. It’s awful over there.”

“Well, it can be hard,” I agreed.

“It’s what the play was all about. And what a story, huh? Incredible,” she said.

“Yes, I forgot that it was set in Donegal. Donegal is very beautiful. Stark, there’s still some Gaeltachts out there, villages where they still speak Gaelic,” I said.

“Do you speak any Gaelic?”

“No. Well, a little.”

“Go on.”

“An labhraíonn éinne anseo Gaelige?”

“What does that mean?”

“Is there anyone here who really speaks Gaelic?”

“Did you learn that in the Gaeltacht?”

“No, I went to a Protestant school. The Protestant schools teach Latin, the Catholic schools teach Gaelic, I just picked some of the language up from a book. I’m pretty good at languages. The one thing I am good at.”

“Tell me more about yourself,” she said.

“You know everything, you saw my résumé.”

“We both know that was closer to fiction than truth, right?” she said, again with a smile.

“Yeah, I suppose.”

“You know, despite his many travels, Charles is hopeless at languages, most Americans are, you know. I have Spanish, though,” she said.

“That’s cool, it’s always good to know a language.”

“I think I’d like to learn Irish, it sounds beautiful.”

“It can be pretty guttural. It’s not beautiful like Italian.”

“Ireland’s nice, though? Donegal, you say, is lovely.”

“It’s really nice, you’ve got the Atlantic Ocean, big, empty beaches, the Blue Stack Mountains, Saint Patrick’s Purgatory on Station Island.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a pilgrimage site, you can wipe away your sins if you go there on a pilgrimage, you walk around the island barefoot and when you’re done you’re free of sin. Seamus Heaney wrote a very famous poem about it.”

“Did you go there?”

“What makes you think I have any sins?” I asked.

She laughed at this. A big sincere laugh. And it wasn’t that funny. She took a sip of the whisky and then another and then she grabbed my glass.

I touched her hand.

She looked at me.

And, oh God, I wanted to kiss her, I wanted to hold her, I wanted to be with her. I wanted her to tell me everything. I knew it would be all right. I wanted her and I wanted to have sex with Charles’s beautiful wife while he was out of town. To punish him.

“Maybe I should go,” I thought and said.

“Oh, don’t go, I was just about to try a different whisky, another glass won’t do me any harm, and I can’t drink alone,” she said.

She poured us both some Laphroaig. The conversation failed. She crossed her legs. Her skirt hiked up a little.

“So, no, I never went to Saint Patrick’s Purgatory, it’s only for Catholics, really,” I said.

She looked at me, inspected me. She seemed to make a decision, poured herself some more whisky, added ice, knocked it back. But then said nothing, sat back down on the sofa. And asked dreamily:

“Is Belfast close to Donegal?”

“Geographically close, you know, less than a hundred miles, but the roads are quite bad, so it takes about three hours to get there.”

“And you never went to Carrickfergus, even though it’s only about five miles from Belfast, I checked that on the map.”

I studied her again. Nothing betrayed on her face. No subtlety, no fear, no repression of hidden emotion. Normal.

“No, like I said, I’ve never been to Carrickfergus,” I answered as carefully as if I were a bomb disposal expert, cutting the blue wire, not the red one.

I waited for her to bring up Victoria Patawasti. Was she about to crack? Was she suddenly going to tell me everything because I was a compatriot of the dead girl? Was all this Irish stuff getting to her, filling her with guilt about what she knew? Her lips did not quiver, her eye was steady. No, she wasn’t going to blurt out anything like that, instead she surprised me by saying something quite different:

“I suppose you know you’re very handsome, too skinny, maybe, but very handsome. Tall, dark, and handsome, in fact.”

“How do I reply to that?” I asked, embarrassed despite myself.

“You say thanks for the compliment and then you compliment me. It’s basic civility,” she said.

“Ok. But I don’t want you to think that I’m saying this because you asked me to give you a compliment, I’m saying this because it’s perfectly true. You are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met in my life. I’m not good at saying things, but you don’t just look beautiful, you have that rare thing that gets said too much, and I’m sort of regretting saying it right now, but the thing called inner beauty, too. You have it. It’s a purity of spirit, I can just tell that you are both lovely and good. Since I saw you first, I’ve felt bewitched, it’s like that stanza from Yeats, ‘It had become a glimmering girl with apple blossom in her hair, who called me by my name and ran and faded through the brightening air. Though I am old with wandering through hollow lands and hilly lands, I will find out where she has gone and kiss her lips and take her hands…. And pluck till time and times are done the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun.’”

“That’s incredible,” she gasped, genuinely touched.

I knew half a dozen Yeats poems, all memorized to impress a different girl in a different world. But it had done the trick and I knew I had to deflate the moment, so I finished off the whisky, gave her my best winning smile, and said:

“Yeah, Amber, maybe I’m cynical, but it’s true that when you’ve got an Irish accent and you’re trying to impress a woman and as long as she’s not Irish or a hard-bitten professor of literature then Yeats will generally do the trick. ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’ is by far the most popular choice, but I like ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus,’ it’s got that great last line, the chicks love it.”

She looked at me for a second, fury on her face, and then I saw that it was mock fury and then she started to laugh and laugh. Laugh so much tears were running down her face. Relief? A huge pent-up flood of emotions suddenly let loose? I was going to ask if she was ok, but before I could, she was standing up and she was reaching out her hand to mine, and I gave her my hand and she pulled me to my feet and kissed me. Hard, passionate, angry kisses. Her mouth was hungry with desire. She was drowning, she was suffocating, she was dying, she was living again through me.

I carried her to the bedroom and laid her on the bed. I pulled her dress down on one shoulder and kissed her arm and the top of her breast. There was a scar on the shoulder, a tiny imperfection in all that beauty. It made her more desirable, not less.

She wriggled out of the dress and undid her bra and ripped off my jacket and shirt. And still having my wits about me, I dimmed the lights, to hide the track marks. She looked up from the bed.

“I need you, Alexander, I need you, now, tonight,” she moaned.

I didn’t say anything. I took off my trousers and her panties. Her body pale, slender, carved in white marble, her hair like the faery gold; her red mouth open, so hungry, there was never anyone so hungry.

I kissed her neck and between her breasts and she pulled me close, her nails in my back holding on to me as if we were in danger of being torn apart. Sucked away into a vortex by terrible forces, the malignancy of Charles, by the blackness pursuing me. We were alone in this land of light. Secure. As long as we stayed together it would be good. Outside there were horrors, waiting like traps. But not here, not here. Here we were safe, safe, in this bed, in this one night.

“We’re shipwrecked,” she said, and I, agreeing, added nothing.

The bed and the silk sheets and her smooth skin and those eyes, blue like that ocean in Donegal. And her hands in my hair and on my back. And her voice in those soft harmonized American vocals.

“Oh, Alexander, you don’t know, you have no idea.”

“I want to know,” I said.

“No, no,” she said.

“Tell me,” I said.

“No.”

“Tell me,” I insisted.

“Kiss me,” she demanded.

My hands stroked her long beautiful legs and her belly and her arms. And I held her close and I kissed her and she tasted of champagne and whisky and ice.

And I kissed her and she didn’t speak and I came inside her and her body ached, hurting with pleasure and loss and she sobbed and we lay there in the dark, panting, breathing, holding each other.

And then she climbed on top of me and we made love again, and the midnight hour came and went.

“Hold me,” she said.

And I took her in my arms and I kissed her, and she smelled of booze and that perfume and her own sweat and the smell of me. She fell asleep. A drunk sleep. Exhausted.

This girl, this woman, here with me in the long, dark, lovely night. Beautiful. And I looked at her. This girl, whose husband was a hundred and fifty miles away in Aspen. This girl, whose husband maybe killed Maggie Prestwick or aided Maggie’s killer on a May morning twenty-two years ago. This man who almost certainly did kill his blackmailer and then committed another brutal slaying on the girl who found out about his slush fund. And it was neat now, tidy. Of course, we had helped, John and myself, killing the only person who could prove anything. We had wiped the traces. And now he could do anything. He could even run for Congress. And win. There would always be rumors, there would always be stories, but nothing that could be proven, nothing that would stick, and with his good works established, and his politics sensible, he would rise. And she would rise with him. From this foundation of blood and lies. Both of them bound by the black rite of this marriage. It would take place, it would happen. Unless I said something, unless I did something, unless I broke her away and let her know the truth about her husband, the truth about Victoria Patawasti. About Victoria, about Amber’s shadow, her mirror, her sister, the ghost that brought us together. Yes, and Maggie, too.