Lovers and Liars Trilogy (54 page)

“Very probably.” Pascal shrugged. “There are reasons for that.”

“I rather thought there might be. All right. Listen, Pascal, and listen carefully. I’m going to say this only once.” He paused. “First of all, there’s the question of who else knew you’d be working on this story. That question has been exercising Gini quite a lot. I’m afraid I wasn’t straight with you before. I will be now. James McMullen knew. It was agreed between us last December, when he handed over that tape. Two weeks before he disappeared. He asked specifically that you work on it—which surprised me, but apparently he’d seen your war photographs as well as your recent work. Gini was my suggestion, agreed reluctantly by him. Who else he told, I don’t know, but there’s one obvious candidate, though he claimed it was better she didn’t know.”

“Lise Hawthorne?”

“Precisely. It’s also possible”—Jenkins paused, frowning—“it’s possible our conversation was overheard. We were careful, obviously. I never went to his flat. He never set foot in this building. We met well away from other fucking journalists, and on that occasion, when your names were discussed, we met at the Army and Navy Club,” he said, then added, “There’s a few other things you should know, and they concern Johnny Appleyard. I thought his importance was tangential, and I was eager to keep it like that. That’s why I didn’t mention it at first. I realized I was wrong when I heard that he was dead….

“Then we come to the really interesting part,” he said. “We come to this last weekend, and to the dinner I attended with Gini last night.” He smiled. “A concatenation of circumstances, Pascal. It’s when I realized there had to be more to this than just a sex scandal”—his face took an expression of triumphant delight—“that’s when I realized that this story was
really
big.”

“Why?”

“Because I was
leaned
on, Pascal. Leaned on in a surprising way. Leaned on very heavily indeed. Always a good indicator, that,” he said. Then: “How much do you know about Lord Melrose?”

“He’s the proprietor of the
News,
obviously. He inherited his papers from his father. He has three others in this country, two in Australia, one in Canada, and one in the States. I gather he’s a friend of Hawthorne’s, or so Gini said.”

“Correct. But the most important thing about Melrose, from our point of view now, is that he’s an establishment man through and through. Friends in high places everywhere, including the security services, though Melrose tends to keep very quiet about that. We’ve had run-ins before, as a result. It happens like this: From time to time some nice discreet civil servant takes Melrose out to lunch at the Athenaeum, or Brooks Club, it’s usually somewhere like that. This man waits until they’ve served the coffee and the port, then he has a quiet word in Melrose’s ear. If one of his papers is on to something a bit sensitive, the man steers Melrose off. Come on, old boy, national security and all that, time to call off the bloodhounds. Now, sometimes Melrose listens, and sometimes he remembers his nice liberal conscience and tells his friend to get lost. Last Friday, Melrose went to one of those lunches.”

“Last Friday?”

“That’s right.” Jenkins gave a sly grin. “Unfortunately, I’d kind of neglected to mention the Hawthorne investigation to Melrose—shockingly remiss of me, yes? So when Melrose found out, he wasn’t pleased. In fact, he was mad as hell. What made it all rather worse was that this nice, discreet, faceless old Etonian was alarmingly well informed. Not only did he know we were working on the Hawthorne story, he knew the name of my source.”

“He mentioned McMullen by name?”

“To Melrose? Yes, he did. And he explained to Melrose that McMullen was
very
bad news. Not only had he been peddling a pack of lies to me about an eminent man, but—apparently—the old Etonian and his friends had had their eye on McMullen for some time. As had their cousins across the pond. The British files on McMullen went back a long way—a
very
long way, Pascal. They hadn’t looked at them in some time, but when they got them out and dusted them off—this was last summer—they found they were several inches thick.”

“Let me get this straight. According to Melrose, McMullen had been investigated before? By British security?”

“Yes, he had. Last summer the Americans joined in the act. For which there’s a simple explanation. They did so from last July onward, at John Hawthorne’s behest.” Jenkins tapped his fingers on the desk. “Now, Melrose’s reaction to all this was to panic,” Jenkins went on. “He went into one of his flaps. He asked for the weekend to think it over, and his Etonian friend bought that. Then, on Sunday morning, at seven-thirty Sunday morning, his friend John Hawthorne called him up personally. Then the shit
really
hit the fan.” Jenkins grinned. “I was telephoned at home, summoned to chateau Melrose, and given a straight choice. Kill the Hawthorne story or go in Monday morning and clear my desk.”

Pascal said nothing. He was thinking about the timing. Hawthorne called the morning
after
Mary’s party. These maneuvers were taking place as he and Gini had left for Venice. He looked back at Jenkins.

“So, what did you do?” he said.

“I bought myself a little time—and I’m fucking good at that. I did a lot of injured outrage, banged on about censorship. I made Melrose feel like a Fascist, and since he really fancies himself a liberal, that did the trick. He gave me forty-eight hours to decide, on the condition I published nothing in that time, obviously. And he agreed to go back to his Etonian friend and get some more information. I said I wasn’t being fobbed off with a whole lot of vague crap about McMullen being suspect. I wanted a few facts. The way Melrose was going on was ludicrous. McMullen could have been in the pay of Moscow, or he could have been late paying his taxes—it was as loose as that. So Melrose toddled back to the Athenaeum, or wherever. I came in Monday morning, heard about Appleyard’s death, and put our Italian stringer on to it that morning. I also ordered up every damn file on Hawthorne in existence. Mistake.”

“Why?”

“Because some fucking devious bastard told Melrose what I’d done.”

“Who told him?”

“I don’t know. But when I find out, he’s dead.” Jenkins paused. “Finally Hawthorne had another go at Melrose, last night. We were all at this bloody dinner. Hawthorne made this fucking sanctimonious speech about press freedom, then he took his old friend Melrose into a corner and really laid into him. Mentioned libel, criminal libel, a few things like that. Whereupon Melrose lost his nerve totally, and we were back to square one. Kill the story or else.”

“And you agreed? This was last night?”

“Of course I agreed. We bide our time, right? Gini’s off the story, that looks good. That ought to help convince them I’m playing ball, and then—”

“You’re not playing ball?”

Jenkins gave him a very sharp glance; his glasses flashed. “You don’t know me very well, Pascal. Genevieve-bloody-Hunter doesn’t know me at all. Let’s put it this way. I was a working-class boy once. A scholarship boy at a major public school. It left me a bit chippy, a bit sensitive about certain things. Like, I’m not too fucking keen on the old-boy network. I’m not too fucking keen on old Etonians who take other old Etonians out to lunch and lean on them. I’m not too fucking keen on Wasps like Hawthorne who preach one thing and do another—and when they
all
start to pressure me, I smell a rat. And I start thinking—if they’re that worried, that keen, it has to be major. Maybe even more than we realized.”

He leaned across and unlocked a drawer of his desk. He extracted a large manila envelope and passed it across the desk. “Go on working on this,” he said. “But cover your fucking tracks. I can’t be involved. I don’t even know what you’re up to, all right? When you’ve got what we need, we can always rope Gini back in, if necessary. Get the pictures Sunday and we’re halfway there. Once we have pictures, Hawthorne’s screwed. Even Melrose won’t be able to protect his old friend. Then we can
really
get to the bottom of this story. It’s more than beating up on blond call girls once a month. It’s more than a kink for expensive blow jobs when the girl’s wearing black gloves. There’s something
more,
Pascal, I can smell it, and it’s not recent either, not a taste Hawthorne developed in the last four years, the way McMullen told me. It links back to earlier events. I may not know what they are—yet. But there’s been a cover-up, and it goes back a long way. Take a look through this.”

He tapped the envelope. Pascal looked at it. It was sealed, and it was thick.

“What is that?”

“Details of John Hawthorne’s exemplary military service. I got it faxed from a friend in Washington yesterday. Plus some details on my friend McMullen. Details
I
never bloody well knew.”

“Is he a security risk?”

“Difficult to say.” Jenkins made a balancing gesture of the hand. “He was vetted for the army, obviously. Some of this stuff came via Melrose’s spooky friend, so it may or may not be reliable. It certainly doesn’t look as if McMullen spent his entire army career in the Parachute Regiment. He’s possibly more dangerous than I realized,” Jenkins continued. “Most interesting of all, his links with John Hawthorne go back further than he claimed to me.”

“Where to?” Pascal asked sharply.

“Oddly enough, to something Hawthorne touched on last night in his speech—”

“Where to, Nicholas?”

“To Vietnam,” Jenkins replied. “Now, how about that?”

Gini walked slowly along the huge marble-floored entrance hall of the British Museum. From here, she told herself, there were many places from which she could be watched. There were staircases, lobbies, pillars; innumerable places where, if he wished, James McMullen could conceal himself. Presumably, she thought as she turned and slowly retraced her steps, McMullen would wait, and approach her when it suited him. The roles of hunter and hunted were reversed.

Perhaps the best thing was simply to linger here, and wait. There were few other visitors to the museum on a wet midweek January morning. There was a party of schoolchildren being shepherded toward the museum shop; a group of dispirited Japanese with camcorders, one or two solitary figures examining the classical heads and torsos on exhibition.

One more time, she walked slowly down the gallery, then returned. Nothing. A tomblike somnolence hushed the air. Her footsteps echoed; no one approached.

After a while, she decided that this main hall was too open and too public. She mounted one of the marble staircases that led to the first floor and rapidly became lost. She lingered by large cases containing Roman coins and pottery. She turned into another room and found herself in a glass-walled cul-de-sac lined with blind Grecian heads.

Down some stairs, along a corridor, up some stairs, and she was in the Egyptian galleries. She watched her own reflection, a glacial ghost, as she passed along the cases filled with images of gods. Once, she thought she heard movement behind her, a light footfall, but when she turned, there was no one there. She bent to the cases, examined the oil and grain jars, the papyrus scrolls, the tiny pottery grave relics, and the more gorgeous ornaments with which princes were lovingly sent on their journey into the afterlife. She looked at gods in the shape of hawks, and the shape of cats. Their painted stares met hers; on the glass she traced the ochre and black of their eyes. She listened intently. Nothing. She was still alone. She confronted line upon line of mummies, some standing, some lying, some still in their gilded and painted outer casings, some protected only by the swaddling of their bandages.

So many, so lovely, so various, and so fearsome, these ways of death. She looked at a pharaoh’s son laid to rest in garments of scarlet, lapis, and indigo, painted calm on the painted likeness of his face. The air smelled dusty; in this, the older part of the galleries, the display cases made a second labyrinth within the outer one of the museum itself. She had to pass around, between, behind the dead. They cornered her, and she decided to wait elsewhere, in a more conspicuous place.

She returned to the main entrance, went outside, bought a newspaper, and returned to the museum again. In the café where the schoolchildren were making a hubbub, she sat down. No one approached.

The early edition of the
Evening Standard
led on John Hawthorne’s speech the previous night. The headline was:
U.S. Ambassador Slams “Nazi” Arab States.
An incendiary description of Hawthorne’s comments, she thought—and the comments seemed to have had an inflammatory effect. According to the Stop Press, demonstrations had begun outside the U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square, and outside the London headquarters of several American banks. There had been clashes with the police.

Gini drank some coffee, waited fifteen minutes, then left. There were telephone booths near the entrance, and from there she telephoned first the number of Pascal’s studio in Paris, then his wife’s number, on both lines, an answering machine was the only response.

Perhaps he was returning, even now, as she called. This thought made her heart lift. She was still unwilling to give up on this museum. She had now been here an hour. One more try, she decided.

This time she took the stairs that led down to the basement galleries. Here, the overall illumination was dim, and the individual sculptures, which included some of the museum’s glories, were bathed in angled light. She passed along the Elgin marbles, and a battle frieze that had once decorated the Parthenon. She looked at the great rearing marble haunches of the horses on the frieze, at the minutely observed weaponry, and at the frozen attitudes of dying men. Nothing. No one. Silence. She passed into a farther gallery, and still another, and found herself in a part of the museum she had never penetrated before, in the Assyrian rooms.

Here, bathed in an angled light, were walls of massive stone reliefs. They were somber, detailed, and magnificent: She stood, listening, before a great procession of ten-foot kings and warriors and priests. They were carrying offerings, and Gini tried to concentrate on the bundles of corn, the bowls of wine, the sacrificial animals. The phalanx of men reminded her of that security phalanx that protected John Hawthorne wherever he went, though in the modern world, of course, their offerings were automatic weapons, and modern princes like Hawthorne were rarely accompanied by priests.