Lace II (13 page)

Tony ostentatiously checked the bedroom windows, enjoying
his role as temporary bodyguard to an international celebrity. Logs of juniper wood blazed in the fireplace, and a light but steady fall of December snow began to drift against the wall of glass that overlooked the roof garden; the faint sounds of the city were blotted out. Lili felt that she was in a warm white nest, thousands of feet removed from any danger.

*   *   *

Snow swirled in spirals between the high buildings, as if a giant pillow had burst outside the glass wall. Lili felt safe. Fresh from a warm bath, wearing a white lace-trimmed vest and shorts, she lay curled in front of the glowing fire, blinking into the heat like a comatose cat. For the first time in twenty-four hours, her mind was blissfully relaxed, so she was nearly asleep, and she didn’t hear the multiple soft clicks and rattles as the door locks slowly slid back.

Mark stopped abruptly in the doorway. His face was mottled with cold, and melted snow was trickling down his neck. He could see the living room reflected in the wall of bronze mirror which ran from the front to the back of his loft, linking the different rooms and levels. In front of his fire, he saw a topaz-tinted picture of some mythical creature—half woman and half cat, basking in the warmth. Then he realized that this must be Judy’s daughter, his temporary houseguest—the notorious Lili.

For a few moments, he was stunned by the force of his own appetite, as he watched her. As Lili heard him dump his camera cases on the floor, she jumped up with fear, then smiled. “I hope you’re Mark.” Mark felt as if his stomach had just dropped from the fifth floor to the basement.

“Is there anything to drink?” Abruptly, he headed for the kitchen, to get away from this exotic vision before he jumped on her. Judy’s staff had filled the refrigerator with fruit, salad, cheese, and several bottles of de Chazalle champagne.

“Here,” Mark turned to Lili, who had hastily pulled on a sweater and jeans, and offered her a tumbler of champagne.

Lili smiled as she raised her glass. “You’ve got ice on your eyelashes.”

Mark put a half-pound of Beluga and a loaf of rye bread on a tray, then carried it to the fireside.

“How did you meet my mother?” Lili wrenched off a
caviar-laden corner of bread with her pointed little teeth. She liked the possessive ring of “my mother.”

“It’s hard for me to believe that I only met her a few weeks ago. I’ve never met anyone like her. I fell for her on the spot,” said Mark. “We met when Judy came to an exhibition of my Sydon pictures. She looked like a fierce, inquisitive little terrier, dashing from one picture to the other, with her eyes shining, while all the rest of the crowd was just drinking and yakking. I loved her enthusiasm. She’s using some of my pictures for a feature on women as leaders.”

During the time it took to empty the caviar tin, Mark talked increasingly about Judy and, if the conversation turned toward some other subject, Mark firmly steered it back to Lili’s mother and the problems that might affect their relationship because of Mark’s assignments in warring foreign countries.

“But maybe it’ll be easier than if I was always around,” he said as he finished the caviar. “It’s lucky for me that Judy doesn’t want the demands of a full-time relationship any more than I do; I’m pretty impossible when I’m not working; being inactive tends to make me edgy.”

“Why are you a war photographer?”

“Because I’m not a soldier,” he grinned at her in the firelight. “I come from an army family, my father was an infantry colonel, and that’s what they wanted me to be.”

“Then why aren’t you in the army?” Lili poured herself another tumbler of champagne.

“If you’d grown up with my Dad, you would have thought twice about the army as a profession. He was in Korea from the beginning, lost two toes on one of his feet from frostbite, but he was lucky—that was his only wound—until they were pulling out. Then a junior officer went crazy in the mess and shot seven people, including my Dad. He came out of the coma with brain damage and, since then, he’s been like a five-year-old child; I hardly remember him any other way.” Mark thought of the tall, stooped figure that floated like a ghost around the airy house in San Francisco, always shadowed by his mother’s unspoken disappointment. “The army ruined my father, and I disapprove of war. That’s why I’m not in the army.”

“But surely what you’re doing makes war glamorous?”

“No. There’s nothing glamorous about killing people. I hope that my pictures show the horror of war.”

Silently, they stared into the fire. “I suppose this must be what it feels like to have a brother,” said Lili. “Let’s drink to brotherly love.”

Lili realized that, for the first time in her life, she had just enjoyed a couple of hours alone with an attractive man without feeling threatened by the man’s sexual interest. But, as the snow piled higher and higher on the roof outside, the normally silent Mark found himself talking about anything to fill the silence, which would otherwise have been flooded with his growing carnal desire for Lili.

December 1978

T
OM PUT HIS
head round the door of Judy’s office. “First letter from Kate!” He waved the airmail flimsy. “She says its like the West Bank of Jordan, it’s a forced settlement operation. It’s a way of invading without invading. Thousands of hill tribe people have been murdered, detained without trial or tortured. And Kate’s got dysentery.”

Judy looked up and said, “Just the holiday she needed,” then continued her telephone conversation. “Maxine, of course I’ll come. Invent an excuse for inviting me, let the situation cool for a few weeks and I’ll fly over for a weekend in the New Year. Through thick and thin, remember?”

“You’re crazy, Judy.” Tom looked disbelieving as she put the telephone down. “You can’t go to France now—we’re up to our eyebrows in problems.”

Judy said, “I’ll only be gone over a weekend. Now, what do we have to tell the brilliant attorney who’s going to wrestle Senator Ruskington to his knees?”

“Judy, I wish you wouldn’t joke about this.” Tom was exasperated. “The fees are piling up; you’d think those guys wrote to each other on solid gold notepaper. Financially, we’re on the limit of our contingency fund, and if this should
ever come to court—which I pray to God it won’t—and Ruskington wins, we’ll be completely ruined.”

“When that day comes, promise you’ll hold my hand as we take a dive together from the fiftieth floor.” Judy briskly opened the file.

“Okay, you’ve got a date!” Tom put his hand on her shoulder. “Look, I want you to know that if this turns out to be real trouble, we’ll be in it together. I’ll be with you right to the end.”

“Thanks, Tom. Now, what do the lawyers need?”

“We have to demonstrate that you, personally, have no malicious intentions toward the Senator. We have to show that you are not prejudiced against him in any way. It’s a tough one, Judy, because the old bird is a Bible-thumping Baptist, the biggest chauvinist pig in the pen, and your daughter claims that he tried to rape her. So he’s pretty much everything you hate in a human being.”

“If the Senator is a bigot and a rapist, surely hating him is a reasonable attitude?” Judy argued. “He’ll never take this to court, Tom. A scandal like this would finish him in Washington.”

“What’s he got to lose? The scandal’s blown up already and he wants whitewash. We’re the ones who’ll be in trouble, Judy—a mess like this won’t do our circulation figures any good.”

Judy stood up, determined to rid Tom of his doubts and boost his confidence. “What’s got into you, Tom?” she asked, “this loser talk isn’t like you at all—you know that all publicity is good publicity. We won’t lose any readers by fighting this case—they’ll all be rooting for us.”

Tom left Judy’s pastel office feeling that nothing would make her realize how serious the situation was. More anxious than when he entered, he took away the audited circulation figures for the past quarter, without showing them to Judy, because they registered a definite fall. Could Judy’s judgment—for years as deadly, fast and accurate as a Cruise missile—be faltering at last? he wondered. As Tom passed the boardroom, he noticed a few assistant editors limbering up for the daily exercise session. Judy had never been interested in sports, unwilling to walk if she could ride, and now the spectacle of her gallantly sweating through Tony’s workout,
whenever her schedule allowed, was surprising. Maybe Judy was starting to feel her age, at last.

*   *   *

An hour later, Judy put her head around Lili’s bathroom door. “I thought I’d find you here. Do you mind if I come in?”

Lili was up to her nose in pink bubbles. When Lili craved comfort and security, she always headed for a warm tub.

“The whole world has already seen me in the tub, I don’t see why my mother shouldn’t,” said Lili. “How are things with you?”

“The Senator is really putting on the pressure.” Judy wondered if she should tell Lili the full scale of the battle that threatened
VERVE!
magazine after her fatal interview.

Lili looked over the rim of the bath at her mother. “I’ve been waiting for a good moment to say this, but I don’t suppose there’ll ever be one.”

“Say what?”

“I’m sorry that his lawsuit is all my fault.”

“You told the truth, Lili. We took the risk. Your life story in
VERVE!
boosted the circulation. We miscalculated the Senator’s reaction and that’s all there is to it. We’re still hoping that the Senator will settle out of court.”

“Oh, him…” Lili sniffed. “He won’t be any problem to you, Judy. I told you I’ll stand by what I’ve said and what you printed. He won’t want to face me in court,” Lili reached for the shampoo, “because he won’t want his voters to discover that the man they sent to Washington is a dirty old goat.” She submerged her head in the carnation-scented water and came up dripping, big-eyed and sleek-headed as a seal.

Judy hesitated, then asked, “Was he really as unpleasant as you made him sound?”

Slowly Lili said, “It depends on what you mean by unpleasant.” She remembered how, a few months after Jo’s death, she had been a guest of the Duchess of Santigosta at her palatial Spanish beach house on the Malaga coast. Lili had still felt her loss after Jo Stiarkoz’ death, but Zimmer had suggested that she try to get more fun out of life and accept a few of the stream of invitations that any celebrity receives.

The first two days had been delightful. The twenty-two
other guests were mainly European business acquaintances of the Duke, who was no longer rich and supplemented his income by acting as an entrepreneur, a go-between, for his business partners, when they wanted to establish contact with, and impress, someone with whom they hoped, later, to set up a deal.

They swam, they water-skied, and everyone else in the party water-parachuted, including the Italian jeweler’s wife who was a grandmother and trying it for the first time. It was easy, she saw; so, obediently, Lili had been strapped into her parachute harness, taken a run off the end of the jetty, then found herself jerked into midair, fifty feet above the little speedboat that was towing her. Lili looked down, her stomach turned over, and she thought for one moment that she was going to be sick. She knew that she suffered from vertigo, so she never stood near the edge of balconies or bridges, but she had never felt vertiginous in an airplane, so it hadn’t occurred to her that she would do so now. The ten-minute ride was purgatorial, but eventually the speedboat stopped back near the jetty and Lili floated down toward the blue waters of the Mediterranean where her harness was quickly unstrapped by the boatman’s assistant, who then started to gather up the parachute that was drifting in the sea water. Gratefully, Lili floated on the water with her arms apart, feeling too ill to strike out for shore. It was at this moment that a nearby swimmer, a balding American Senator with whom Lili had hardly spoken, swam up to her. “Great sensation, isn’t it?” he asked, then he noticed Lili’s dazed expression. “Are you all right, my dear?”

“Yes … no … I don’t know … please,” a wave broke over Lili’s head and she accidentally swallowed a lot of sea water. “Please, could you h-h-h-help me back to the beach?”

“Put your arms around me, my dear.” Lili did so and felt her body drift against his, then the man was lying on top of her in the water as, dimly, Lili thought, surely this isn’t the way that lifesavers do it? After what seemed an eternity, the man panted, “I think we’ll make better progress if you let go, my dear, and I hold you from behind.”

A lifesaver swims backward, kicking only with his feet, as both arms are needed—the left arm holds the drowning
victim across the collarbone and the right hand cups the victim’s chin above water. But this was not Senator Ruskington’s lifesaving procedure. He had, indeed, swum backward toward shore, kicking only with his feet, but he held Lili’s body on top of his with both his hands firmly on her breasts.

Once ashore, Lili had lain in the shade and, within an hour, she had recovered, had thanked Senator Ruskington for helping her, and had decided to go to bed early. And that, Lili thought, was the end of the incident.