The Spiral Path (53 page)

A
wareness
returned in sluggish fits and starts
.
Vibration surrounded him. An
airplane, he decided.

Hazily he reconstructed what happened
after Nigel Stone had tossed his bombshell. Thinking of Charles, assuming Stone
was no longer a threat, he'd been caught completely off-guard. His brain had
splintered, leaving him as paralyzed as he'd been when starting school and a
teacher demanded answers he couldn't give. As an adult, he'd learned enough
clever, self-deprecating sound bites that he was almost always able to give a
ready reply. Not this time.

Luckily, Rainey's brain didn't crash the
way his did. She'd responded beautifully, then taken him away before his
disintegration was public. His memories of what followed were fragmentary. His
friends rallying to confuse the issue. Honest, incorruptible Rainey lying like
a trouper on the phone. Boarding the jet. Josh arriving with his luggage,
panting and unshaven, but still efficient.

Those events seemed so distant they
might have happened to someone else. The encounter with Nigel Stone was
different--the moment when the reporter smashed the fragile, blown-glass
illusion that had been Kenzie Scott was acid etched in his brain.

He rubbed his aching head. Rainey had
given him some kind of pill, which had seemed like a good idea at the time. In
retrospect he regretted it; medications always left him dazed and disoriented.

"Returning to the real world?"
Rainey's quiet voice asked.

"Only because I can't think of an
alternative." Wearily he swung his feet to the floor and buried his face
in his hands. He'd removed his jacket and tie and kicked off his shoes before
crashing, but he still wore his formal white shirt and dark suit trousers.
James Bond after a bender.

Across the cabin, Rainey was curled up
in a deep seat with a book in her lap. She'd changed from her tailored suit to
silk slacks and a tunic, but the bruised shadows below her eyes revealed how
much she was suffering.

He stood and made his way to the
well-stocked bar in the main cabin. The damned airplane looked like the same
one they'd flown home in after
The Pimpernel,
at the start of the purest
happiness of his life. The irony of being in the same plane now was too heavy
to miss.

He poured a triple shot of scotch into a
glass. Not a single malt, but he wasn't feeling picky.

Rainey followed him, trying to sound
casual when she said, "Drinking might not be a good idea after taking a
tranquilizer."

He knocked back a third of the whisky.
"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

She sighed. "Then I'll have to hope
the amount of time that's passed will save you from yourself."

He dropped into one of the wide leather
seats. Where the hell did he go from here? For that matter, where the hell were
they? Light showed outside the window, but since they were following the sun
westward, that would be true for a long time to come. "Where are we?"

"About an hour east of New
York." She took one of the facing seats. "I had the pilot change the
flight plan from Los Angeles to New Mexico. I thought Cibola would be a lot
more peaceful than California."

Rainey was a genius. The thought of the
secluded ranch was like a beacon in endless night. A place where he could hide
from the world forever.

He swallowed more scotch. Alcohol, one
of the oldest and most disreputable of crutches. He'd worry about the wisdom of
it later. "Your restraint in not asking questions is impressive."

"I figure you'll tell what you want
me to know when you're ready to talk about it. If you ever are." She
hesitated, then said slowly, "One possibility that occurred to me is that
you were a runaway teenager who turned some tricks to keep from starving. A lot
of kids do that. The lucky ones escape."

He closed his eyes, drifting in limbo,
so detached that the horrors of his childhood seemed to belong to someone else.
That made it easier to speak, since Rainey deserved to know the truth.
"Not a bad guess, but more charitable than I deserve. I was exactly what
Nigel Stone claims: a gay whore."

After a long silence, she asked,
"For how long?"

"Five years. From age seven to age
twelve."

She gasped. "Dear God, that isn't
prostitution--it's child molestation! How did it happen?"

"My mother was born somewhere in rural
Scotland. Around age seventeen, she ran off to London. She might have been
pregnant already, or maybe that came later. There's a lot I don't know about
her."

"Do you know who your father
was?"

"Haven't the foggiest."

She laughed without humor. "Something
we have in common."

"Among other disasters we both
suffered." He finished his first drink and went for another, this time
filling the glass with ice first.

As he took his seat again, she said,
"I've never seen you drink so much."

"If the plane were equipped for it,
I'd run the alcohol directly into my veins." He pressed the icy highball
glass against his forehead, remembering his mother. She'd been tall,
dark-haired, and green-eyed. Beautiful, and terribly, terribly fragile.
"My mother called herself Maggie Mackenzie, though I suspect that wasn't
her real name. Since I look quite like her, only God knows what paternal genes
might have been involved."

"So Nigel Stone's birth certificate
for James Mackenzie is legitimate?"

"Probably."

"You said there was no evidence
tying you to Stone's accusations."

"He can't prove I'm the person
listed on the certificate. There isn't a shred of documentation on me from the
time Jamie Mackenzie was seven and dropped out of a London council school, and
when Kenzie Scott started at RADA eleven years later. I didn't exist." He
didn't really now. His whole life had been smoke and mirrors.

"How did you go from being the
child of a single mother to..." Her voice faltered. "...to prostitution,
then studying at the world's most famous drama school?"

"Whoring was the family business.
My mother didn't have any other skills," he said bluntly. "She raised
me the best she knew how, even after I started school and the teachers told her
I was retarded. Of course, by then she was hooked on drugs so maybe she simply
didn't care that I was hopeless. Drugs are expensive, and there was only one
way she could afford them. She had a pimp boyfriend called Rock. He supplied
her with drugs, took her money, and beat her up. When I was seven, I think one
of the drugs he supplied must have been contaminated or more potent than
usual." He drew a ragged breath. "It killed her."

"Did ... did you find her body?"
Rainey asked, her voice trembling.

"I watched her die, and couldn't do
a damned thing about it." He drank more whisky, thinking this was easier
than he'd thought it would be, because he felt nothing. Nothing at all.
"Rock came several hours later to beat her for not working. He was quite
casual about finding her body. It probably wasn't the first time he'd lost one
of his girls to drugs. He took care of everything very efficiently. I don't
know where she was buried--there was no funeral service. She was just ...
gone." But not forgotten.

"Did the pimp take you to the
authorities so you could be put into foster care or whatever the English
equivalent is?"

"Not Rock--he was too sharp a
businessman to waste an asset. I was a nice-looking boy, and there's a market
for those. He explained that he'd take care of me, but because my mother owed
him money, I had to work to pay off her debt. And he knocked me across the room
to demonstrate what would happen if I didn't cooperate."

Jamie had been terrified of the pimp,
but the fear was less paralyzing than the knowledge that he was stupid and
worthless, and deserved whatever punishment Rock chose to inflict. He'd been
the perfect, obedient slave, never imagining his life could be any different.

The first step in creating a slave was
to break the will.

"The family business." Silent
tears ran down Rainey's face. "He forced you to be with pedophiles and
perverts and God knows what."

"It was the best training in the
world for an actor. I learned how to cower in terror from johns who liked that,
and how to be seductive. I learned how to pretend affection, and how to abuse
those who wanted to be hurt. RADA was child's play by comparison."

Rainey swallowed hard, imaginative
enough to understand all that he wasn't saying. She'd never be able to think of
him again the same way, which was perhaps best. "Did you live with
Rock?" she asked.

"He preferred to keep his private
and business lives separate, so he set me up in a flat with a rotating list of
his whores. They made sure I was fed and had clothing and took baths. Some of
them were even rather kind."

"How did you escape? Did you run
away?"

Rainey didn't--couldn't--understand how
completely hollow Jamie Mackenzie had been. No will, no soul, no hope. Hollow
people didn't run away. "As I got older, I realized that I was definitely
straight, and it became harder and harder to pretend I was a passionate little
hustler. One day when I was twelve, I snapped when I was with a German who came
to London regularly on business. He liked playing rough. Instead of going along
with it as usual, this time I provoked him. He beat me bloody. Enjoyed it so
much that he left twice the usual fee."

After the German left, young Jamie had
lain weeping on the bed in the sleazy hotel room, racked with agony, and
bitterly disappointed that he was still alive.

Face ghostly pale, Rainey asked,
"Then what?"

"I was passive to the end. Another
regular client, Trevor Scott-Wallace, was scheduled to come an hour after the
German. He was a decent old duffer who'd always treated me kindly. The German
had left the door unlocked, so Trevor came in and found me battered and bloody.
Being the responsible sort, he took me to a hospital instead of running away. I
was delirious, and started babbling about my life." Jamie had pleaded for
death, which had horrified Trevor most of all. "When he realized that I
was basically a sex slave rather than a willing whore, he took me home and kept
me, like a stray dog."

"You were adopted by a
pedophile?" Rainey's voice shook with revulsion.