CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Annette poured herself a glass of brandy and wandered from room to room in her big, empty house, skipping only Kim’s quarters in the apartment she’d made for him in the basement. She moved briskly, angrily, through the house, talking to herself, wondering if this was the sort of thing crazy old women did. But she’d been doing it for years, ever since Jean-Paul Gerard had come back to haunt her first in 1963, then again in 1974, and again in 1975, and again now.
She didn’t have his Jupiter Stones.
But she wasn’t going to let him ruin her life over them or anything she’d done out of self-defense.
The past was past.
She was a different person than what she’d been thirty years ago. Couldn’t he see that? Couldn’t Thomas? People grow up, she thought. They go on with their lives. They forget the mistakes they’ve made and the wrongs that have been committed against them. They don’t hold grudges forever.
She had lived an exemplary life. She didn’t deserve to keep suffering like this.
And damn you, Thomas, I have suffered.
Whenever she thought about sweet, gentle, boring Benjamin…well, she simply couldn’t. She hadn’t taken a lover since his death. Twenty-six years of celibacy: her way of honoring her husband’s memory, of punishing herself for the miscalculation that had led to his death…but that really was Thomas’s fault. He had known Benjamin hadn’t belonged on that excursion into the Mekong Delta. He should have stopped him from going.
Thomas’s fault. Not hers.
Benjamin’s last words to her were etched forever in her mind. “You’re a tough-minded woman, Annette. We’ll be a good balance for each other.”
And they would have been, too. She saw that now.
Would she have continued to have affairs? She felt no guilt about her brief liaisons with Jean-Paul and Thomas. If they’d been moral mistakes, they weren’t in the sexual sense. Both men had been incredible lovers. Benjamin hadn’t been hurt by her actions, as he’d had no idea she’d ever been “unfaithful” to him.
Night after night for the past twenty-six years, she’d awakened aroused and sobbing, dreaming not of Benjamin and their nights together, but of Jean-Paul and Thomas.
She refilled her brandy glass and kicked off her shoes, feeling freer and more relaxed in her bare feet.
After her disastrous affair with Thomas and the death of her husband, she—the proud, sad widow—had plunged herself into her work at Winston & Reed. Her parents and friends had excused her unseemly ambition when she’d explained to them, tearfully, that she was working hard and determined to make one business triumph after another in order to honor her husband’s memory.
As American military involvement in Indochina escalated, Winston & Reed made enormous profits, and Annette diversified and expanded its investments in the U. S. She never went back to Saigon on business after 1963. She had a trusted, astute American staff there and her own quiet network of Vietnamese contacts.
With the Paris Peace Accords, she engineered the downscaling of Winston & Reed’s commitment to what she believed was a doomed South Vietnam. It just wasn’t good business to continue to invest in a country she knew wasn’t going to last. She had no desire to lose assets to the communists.
She fought Quentin’s decision to leave for Saigon in October 1973. She could have forbidden him to go, but with the American military withdrawal and no word from Jean-Paul Gerard in ten years, she decided—moronically—she had nothing to fear. She assumed Jean-Paul must have died as a prisoner of war.
She hadn’t even guessed Quang Tai’s lovely daughter, Tam, would become a problem.
By the spring of 1974, Quentin had taken up with her, and Annette began to worry. When he came home for the groundbreaking ceremonies for the new Winston & Reed building, she warned her son about committing himself to a long-term relationship with a Vietnamese woman.
“But this is Tam,” he told her.
Yes, indeed: Tam. His childhood playmate on the Riviera whose father had died on the same day, in the same ambush as Benjamin Reed. Bad enough Annette had to tolerate Rebecca Blackburn’s return to Boston as a student and her nephew Jared’s obvious interest in her. She couldn’t control them. But Quentin was her son, and she wouldn’t tolerate his continuing a relationship with Tai’s daughter.
By early summer, Tam and Quentin were still going strong, and Annette was running down the list of possible ultimatums she could give him to drop her.
Enter Jean-Paul Gerard.
He’d discovered Quentin’s idiotic involvement with a ring of drug smugglers, and finally had sent him to his mother for a way of getting the Frenchman to keep his mouth shut.
Licking his lips, nervous and abject, Quentin explained the situation. “He asked me to tell you that you should know what he wants.”
She did: the Jupiter Stones.
Her only satisfaction throughout the ordeal was listening to Quentin’s description of Jean-Paul’s haggard, malnourished, parasite-ridden body. His hair had gone completely white, and he was no longer the dashing young Frenchman who’d swept her off her feet on the Riviera fifteen years earlier. He had escaped, she learned, from his jungle POW camp in 1968 after five years of imprisonment. Obviously he’d stayed in Vietnam and was unable or uninterested in getting proper medical attention for the captivity-related conditions he suffered.
Maybe he’ll just wither away and die, Annette had thought.
She’d never, however, been one to wait for providence to act. Indirectly and quietly, she let her more unsavory contacts know a confirmed report of Jean-Paul Gerard’s death would please her mightily. Kim himself had twice tried to kill him and failed.
Meanwhile, Annette found her way to get her son out of Saigon and away from Tam and Gerard.
“I’ll help you,” she told him, “under one condition.”
He didn’t ask her what condition that was; he already knew.
But she told him, anyway, just to be sure. “You’re not to go back to Saigon.”
As Annette walked out into her damp, cool garden, she drank her expensive brandy, still able to see the stricken look on Quentin’s handsome face during that dreadful luncheon in which she’d destroyed his boyish fantasies about coming home to live with Tam.
“But what about Tam?” he’d asked.
“She’s survived the past eleven years as an orphan in a war-torn country. She’ll be all right. Trust me, Quentin. You’ll still be thinking about her long, long after she’s forgotten you and moved on to another good-looking, rich, vulnerable man.”
With Quentin out of the country, Jean-Paul lost his leverage. Annette half expected him to send her pictures or some other incontrovertible proof of her son’s culpability in the drug-smuggling operation, but she didn’t hear another word from him.
Quentin moped for weeks, until she was able to call him into her office at Winston & Reed and announce not only was she promoting him to a management position, she was also going to allay his doubts about what he’d done to Tam.
“I’ve never told you this,” she said, “but I’ve had people in Saigon looking out for Tam, because I considered her father my friend and care very deeply about her, even if I strongly object to her using my son to further her own ends. My people tell me she’s taken up with another man.”
Her son’s shock was palpable. “Are you sure?”
“Quite. What’s more, she’s pregnant.”
“Mother—”
“And I believe you know the father. They’re even living together.”
Quentin didn’t say a word.
Annette looked properly sympathetic. “It just goes to show you, Quentin, that you have to be very, very careful about whom you trust.”
“Tam…”
“Oh, not just Tam. The man she’s taken up with is your own cousin Jared.”
Annette had no idea if all she’d told him was true or not. She did know Tam was pregnant, and she did know the young woman had gone to live with Jared after losing her penthouse apartment. The rest—well, for all Annette knew, the baby could have been Quentin’s or anyone else’s in Saigon.
“Remember,” she had told Quentin over and over during those touchy weeks, “the one person you can trust is your mother. I always have your best interests at heart.”
Annette felt hot tears streaming down her wind-cooled cheeks. Yes, Quentin, you can trust me…. I’m your mother…I love you.
And Thomas’s voice came to her. You love only yourself, Annette.
She threw her glass onto the stone terrace. It wasn’t true!
“Bravo, my dear.”
This time Thomas’s voice wasn’t in her imagination. Whipping around, she saw him coming out of the shadows onto the terrace. He looked like a ghost—old, pale, thin. Her heart throbbed painfully, and she debated fleeing into the house and pulling all the drapes, turning out the lights, just sitting there alone, as if trapped in a huge, cavernous coffin, all alone against the big, bad, ugly world.
He went on smugly. “It’s best not to repress your emotions, but I’m too tired for arguing and swearing at each other. Annette, I have a proposition to make to you.”
She eyed him suspiciously, but said nothing.
Thomas took that as a cue to go on. “I want you to tell Jean-Paul I have the Jupiter Stones.”
“Do you?”
“Tell him Tam took them from you before she left France for Saigon. She didn’t know what they were—she only wanted them as a memento.” Thomas came into the shaft of light from the house, but it only made him look older, paler, thinner. “Tell Jean-Paul Tam sent them to me for safekeeping before her death.”
Annette couldn’t move. Her heart was racing, her eyes wouldn’t focus, and she had to will herself not to give Thomas the satisfaction of collapsing at his feet. She said, “I don’t understand….”
“I don’t want you to have control over this situation, Annette. If you’ll send Jean-Paul to me, I promise I’ll do everything I can to get him to forget about vengeance or justice and leave you alone.”
“Why should I trust you?”
He looked at her a moment. “Have I ever gone back on my word to you?”
She didn’t answer, refusing to acknowledge his honesty, but knowing he was faultlessly devoted to “his word.”
“Annette…”
Was he going to plead with her? She smiled at the prospect. But he trailed off and started back into the shadows toward the carriageway. “All right,” she said. “I’ll at least think about your idea. I’ll let you know.”
“As you wish,” he said.
“Don’t pull that sanctimonious tone on me. I never wanted any of this to happen—”
“Why not, Annette?” Thomas asked sarcastically, glancing back at her. “It’s such an adventure.”
“Goddamn you to hell, you arrogant bastard!”
He gave her a small, secret smile, satisfied, at least, that he’d gotten to her. Back out on the street, the night air was brisk and windy, the big houses aglow, and Thomas fancied them filled with laughter and people who cared about each other. It was a nice fancy. He had decided against polishing off his bottle of blueberry wine and instead had found himself on Mt. Vernon Street for the second time in twenty-six years—and in twelve hours. It hadn’t changed since morning, or, really, all that much since 1963.
Mindful of heart attacks and headlines, he nonetheless got back to West Cedar as quickly as he dared.