Stephen warned his father not to take Benjamin’s hawkish talk too seriously. “Annette came back from her trip filled with all kinds of ideas of how Winston & Reed can make money over here, and they’re all predicated on an escalation of direct American involvement. She’s probably writing her congressman now. Benjamin’s total mush around her. A few days back among the Blackburns, and we’ll have him talking sense again.”
But stricken by her betrayal, Thomas was no longer one to trust Annette Reed. “From something she said while she was over here, I got the impression Benjamin wanted a divorce-”
“Benjamin?” Stephen laughed. “You’ve got to be kidding. He worships Annette. Myself, I wouldn’t trust her to watch my kids while I poured coffee in the next room.”
Thomas nodded. What a stupid jackass he’d been.
He set out to forget Annette, and the deteriorating conditions in South Vietnam were enough to preoccupy his mind.
Then, on a warm, pleasant evening, his son brought Jean-Paul Gerard to dinner.
They’d never actually met, the Brahmin intellectual and the French race-car driver. Gisela was all they had in common, and she had spoken fondly of each to the other. Thomas was her high-minded friend whose seriousness she both admired and found amusing. They had met in Paris in 1931, when he was so hopelessly in love with Emily, and Gisela and several of her lovers-sometimes individually, often all together-showed them around their city. This was, of course, before Gisela decided to become a displaced Hungarian baroness. Then she was just Gisela Gerard, an impishly pretty young woman who loved to dance and laugh and be in love. When Emily died, Gisela didn’t send flowers or a morbidly proper card, but a note telling Thomas she’d sent money to a convent orphanage in Provence in his wife’s memory, and the nuns there had promised to name their next orphan girl Emily. Thomas had no idea if any of this was true, for Gisela was much better at coming up with ideas and making plans than she was at executing them. But he appreciated the gesture.
Jean-Paul was her beautiful son-her “whim,” she called him, conceived in a sudden longing to have a baby. She made no demands on the father, and she herself was unconcerned about societal conventions like marriage and monogamy. World War II sobered her up some, but she retained her zest for life and was delighted when Jean-Paul set off on his own at age sixteen and became a popular and successful Grand Prix driver. It didn’t bother her at all that he never acknowledged her as his mother. She’d set herself up on the Riviera as Baroness Gisela Majlath and was enjoying this new phase in her life.
Thomas had often wondered if she’d discovered Jean-Paul had amused himself by becoming Le Chat. Had that disappointment precipitated her suicide, or was her grief over the Jupiter Stones?
It wasn’t the sort of question one put to a guest, however, and Thomas graciously pretended not to recognize his son’s friend as the fugitive French jewel thief. Obviously, he’d either had to leave France without his collection of stolen jewels or had squandered their “earnings” long before now. His years in the Foreign Legion had hardened him. He was just twenty-eight, but there were lines at the corners of his eyes and a leatheriness to his skin that belied his years. His muscles were stringy and tough-he had a tested soldier’s body. Thomas wondered if scores of adoring women would gather around him now, or if they’d recognize Jean-Paul Gerard as a man who’d seen too much, done too much and had very little left to lose. He had discharged from the legion, he said, to come to Vietnam, where his skills with French and soldiering could be put to use.
Thomas wondered if the young Frenchman’s reasons for choosing Indochina didn’t also include himself and Winston & Reed.
“You want to kill people?” Thomas asked.
Gisela’s soft eyes looked back at him from the man’s weathered face. “I just want to survive.”
Stephen was embarrassed by his father’s harsh question, but Thomas behaved himself the rest of the evening. He could see the two young men liked each other. Well, what of it? Nearly four years in the Légion étrangère were enough punishment for any man’s crimes.
But in another week, Annette returned to Saigon, and Thomas worried about what would happen if she and Gerard bumped into each other. It was bad enough Thomas had to confront her himself.
“You lied to me,” he told her baldly. “Benjamin never asked you for a divorce.”
She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke Bette Davis style. “Not that he doesn’t want one, I assure you. He’s such a coward. Oh, Thomas, don’t be mad. When will you get another chance to be seduced by a woman twenty years younger than yourself?” She grinned, totally without guilt. “You should be thanking me.”
What could Thomas say? He’d known Annette her entire life and should have realized she put alleviating her boredom and having her way above any notion of honor or integrity. He’d known what he was getting into when he fell into bed with her, and if he didn’t, he’d been an even bigger jackass than he thought.
“I hope,” he told her, “you don’t confess our foolishness to Benjamin. It would only hurt him.”
She waved her cigarette. “Don’t worry-he’ll never know. But Thomas,” she chided, “what we did wasn’t foolishness. It’s called-”
“I know what it’s called,” he said, cutting off one of her deliberately crude remarks. “You’re behaving like a naughty ten-year-old. Why are you back in Saigon?”
“The same reason I was here before-to keep an eye on what Benjamin’s doing with my money. Don’t look so hunted, Thomas. I’ve had my fill of you.”
“Go back to Boston.”
She stubbed out her cigarette. “When I damn well feel like it.”
Jean-Paul came to Thomas’s apartment at dawn that night. In his bathrobe, Thomas offered him a drink, but the young Frenchman wasn’t interested. He opened a manila envelope and spread six black-and-white photographs on Thomas’s kitchen table.
“I didn’t just arrive in Saigon,” Jean-Paul said.
“So I see.”
The photographs were of Annette and Thomas during their brief, all-too-torrid affair. Having dinner together, holding hands on Nguyen Hue Boulevard, kissing at the airport, and one particularly embarrassing one of Annette peeling off her blouse as Thomas opened the door to his apartment.
“Never saw me, did you?” Jean-Paul asked, pleased with himself.
“No, I didn’t. Were you in disguise?”
“Just a beard. I’ve learned to blend into the environment during the last few years.”
“I suppose you have,” Thomas said steadily. “And the point of this exercise?”
Jean-Paul’s expression grew serious. “I want the Jupiter Stones.”
“You don’t think I have them?”
“No.” He glanced at the bare-breasted photograph of Annette. “But she does.”
That wasn’t something Thomas could argue; it was also nothing he and Annette had ever discussed. Every time he’d tried to broach the subject of Le Chat, Gisela and the Jupiter Stones, she’d turn him off. He’d been too stupidly considerate to press.
“And if she doesn’t give them to you,” he said, “you’ll show these photographs to Benjamin.”
“That’s right. But he’s just a start. I can think of a number of people who might be interested in just how indiscreet Thomas Blackburn can be-certain members of the Kennedy administration, embassy officials, perhaps even the president himself.”
“You want me to pressure Annette.”
“I don’t care how I get the stones, Monsieur Blackburn,” Jean-Paul said coolly. “I just want them.”
Thomas pushed the photographs away. “If you’d come to me as Gisela’s son, I might have helped you. But not like this.”
Gerard laughed derisively. “Aren’t you the courageous bastard. Look, of all people, I know what you got yourself into with Annette. All I want are the stones that belonged to my mother.”