Power Games (47 page)

She half frowned and half smiled when the name fell into place.

‘Cane,’ she said. ‘Do you know, I’ve been trying to think of that for so long? There it is. Cane. His son. A castle in Europe; it was a bracelet, silver and ruby—’

‘Wait,’ said Jacob. ‘What did you say?’

‘It was a bracelet—’

‘His name.’

‘Cane,’ Celeste repeated, and when she said it this time it sounded altered, a new shape on her tongue.

Cane.

‘Jesus, Celeste, if this is what I think it is …’

Jacob grabbed her. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘we have to find the others.’

The motivation for punishing Celeste was clear. The group accepted the theft of the jewellery as the reason for their fate—if not a certainty then a possibility.

But Angela wasn’t convinced. The punishment did not fit
the crime. What Celeste had done was wrong, but it wasn’t wrong enough. Nowhere near.

There was more to Cane’s story.

As Celeste broke down, bewildered and apologising—’But why put me on a plane with all of you? I’m not famous like you, why you, why choose you?’—Angela wondered if, just if, they all had a corruption to confess. On its own nothing to warrant an ordeal on this scale, but together, a one-size-fits-all penalty …

Supposing every one of them had crossed Cane’s path?

‘Hold on,’ said Angela.

The disorder on the beach ceased. The sun was falling. Evening crawled in.

‘This isn’t it. Celeste’s right. Why would Cane choose six of the biggest names in the world if he just wanted to take down one woman? It makes no sense.’

‘He’s a fucking maniac,’ said Jacob. ‘None of it makes sense because it’s crazy and he’s crazy. You can’t apply sense to a psychopath like that.’

‘Think,’ she urged, ‘just think for a minute. Celeste’s offence was years ago; this could be something way in the past. The name. Does it mean anything?’

Eve had a creeping feeling in the pit of her stomach. She was first to speak.

‘He had a son,’ she said. ‘Do you remember? The boy died. Suicide. He was only nineteen. It was horrible. The paper covered it—it got a column, just a short one.’

‘And you wrote it?’ swiped Mitch. ‘Something nasty?’ It wouldn’t be the first occasion a victim had wished Ms Harley wiped off the face of the earth.

But Eve shook her head. No, this time she hadn’t written it. She had done something much, much worse. She, in her way, had been responsible.

Grigori Cane.

She said the name out loud. It was an ugly name, like a mouthful of grit. He had been no ordinary boy. Eve recalled an allergy to sunlight, a debilitating stammer. As an only child and sole heir, his wealthy father doted on his every move and would have tried anything to see him succeed. That promise stood in death as well as life.

She hadn’t thought of the matter in so long. Stumbling through corridors, each scene slotting with horrid clarity into their twisted puzzle, Eve recounted her tale, her companions’ expressions falling as they listened, as they, too, applied the prospect to themselves. Grigori was the shadow behind the sun, the shape in the corner, the murmur in the trees … He had been here, in some small way, for all of them.

After the suicide, Eve had read his obituary. According to the article, the Cane boy’s depression had been triggered after his young heart was crushed. She had been the one to make that happen.

Rewind.
For once, nobody else’s story but her own.

Hitting adolescence, Grigori Cane had fallen for a girl, his fourteen-year-old sweetheart Lotte. Lotte was the daughter of a high-profile German family, and Grigori believed her love might save him. He had opened his heart, possibly the first and only time, and his father had trusted it to be the start of a new phase. But Eve had sniffed a story and she had gone for it, gone for the jugular, as only she knew how.

Lotte had a criminal uncle. Even now Eve couldn’t summon with absolute certainty the felony, a minor hit-and-run that might or might not have made the uncle a bad man, it might even have been better kept buried, but Eve had been unable to leave anything buried. The exposure forced young Lotte and her family into hiding. As a result Grigori was cast aside, heartbroken and damned. He never saw Lotte again.
For the rest of his days, he would blame this outcome on Eve.

She laid it all bare, telling the tale as carefully as she could, handling it this way and that so she could feel its weight and shape; unwrapping layer by layer the heinous gift they all recognised now as the truth.

The boy who hadn’t dared speak was screaming now.

‘Voldan Cane.’ Angela was next. ‘He knew my father. They came to our house. It was my tenth birthday party. I remember Grigori—he was a creepy kid. No one wanted to play with him. He wanted to join in and we didn’t let him.’

Voldan would justify it in the same way he justified Eve, who had committed an unfortunate act but it was hardly a means to this end. Angela was the young girl at whose party Grigori had undergone his first scarring humiliation, by none less than a spoiled, dirty-rich princess. Voldan had been a consort of Donald Silvers—he would expect his child, like Angela, to have all the world. But Grigori had been different. Even aged five, he had been different. Angela had shunned him, cutting loose the rope to her tree house to stop him climbing up. He had been jeered at. Mocked.

How deep had the rejection run?

Had it set the tone for the rest of his unhappy life?

What did it say about her, that she hadn’t thought of it since? What did it say about any of them?

Selfish
, Voldan would claim. In their lives of power and privilege, these people knew no suffering on a scale with his son’s: nothing mattered except themselves.

‘It was so long ago,’ she said. ‘They must have exiled to Europe soon after.’

‘And …?’ said Eve.

‘And nothing—that was it. We were mean, but we were
kids, just messing. It didn’t mean anything. We didn’t want to cause harm. For God’s sake, we were ten.’

‘This is bullshit,’ said Jacob. ‘I’m not buying this.’

But Jacob couldn’t think of anything else, no other enlightenment that linked them in this senseless circumstance. Mitch stepped up to the stage.

‘Grigori came to a workshop of mine,’ he admitted, ‘years ago, in Dallas. Intense-looking. Dark hair, dark eyes, didn’t talk much. He had this stammer, it took him minutes to force out a sentence, the other kids didn’t know what to make of it and, for the most part, he got left alone. Crazy that he wanted to break into the movie industry but I’m guessing that’s where his father came in. Anything Grigori wanted, I’d hazard it got paid for. Connections got exploited. Favours pulled.’

‘What did you do?’

Mitch fumbled for his wrongdoing, so minor to be barely there, and thought how strange it was that no one scene in a person’s life is viewed the same from two angles.

‘After the session we ran through some break-up tasks,’ he said. ‘There was a weight-lifting competition, something informal to wrap up the day, a few kettle bells and some improvised trophies. Grigori struggled. He dropped the bells. Jesus, I don’t recall much about him but I do recall this: he was so thin he could hardly have lifted a cup of damn coffee. Anyway it was no big deal, the fact he lost. We teased him, but it was in good nature. I told him to get over it, stop being a baby, and he reacted, well, badly. Left in tears, shrieking he was a failure …’ Mitch tried to draw up more details, something truly awful he had done to the boy, something to warrant this penance.

‘It was just another day,’ he finished, baffled, ‘just what happened …’

‘Voldan blames us,’ said Angela, ‘for what happened to Grigori. He blames us totally. He thinks we pushed Grigori to it … starting with me.’

‘And ending with me.’ Celeste looked up. ‘It wasn’t just the bracelet,’ she said. ‘When I went to Szolsvár Castle, it was to value a painting—a portrait of Cane’s wife. Grigori’s mother.’

The castle sprang up in her memory: the isolated turrets, the cavernous rooms, the strange, quiet boy hidden up in the attic …

Cane Enterprises.

How could it be?

‘I visited weeks before Grigori’s suicide …’ The likeness above the Great Hall fireplace lived on as the ugliest Celeste had seen. When her superior called, she had described it over the phone. What were the words she had she used?
Gruesome. Wretched.
And heard the creak of a floorboard on the other side of the door.

Grigori must have crept down from his attic, listening in, and bled at her dismissal: the final twist in his spiral of depression, her appraisal a blasphemy to his mother.

Finally Angela asked: ‘Jacob?’

The entrepreneur was hesitant. Jacob didn’t want to engage with the theory but, even as he resisted, he was grasping at echoes. Sitting cocksure at his desk with Leith, drunk on power, dismissing dreams like switching channels on a remote.

‘He came to see Leith and me,’ said Jacob. ‘Had some notion for building a product. We turned him down. It wasn’t viable.’

‘How old was he?’

‘Eighteen, maybe.’

It wasn’t hard to fill in the blanks. Grigori’s last stake at
success, a chance to finally make something of his life. Perhaps he had watched a documentary on business thinkers and had been inspired. Perhaps he had sincerely believed in it. Perhaps Voldan had advised him against the pitch, but his son had been adamant. Perhaps Voldan had loved seeing Grigori passionate about something again, and prayed it would bolster his confidence even if the blueprint were refused …

Alas, no. On pitching to Jacob and his cronies, Grigori had wound up being guffawed out of the building.

‘Then what?’ Eve pushed. ‘What did you do?’

‘We laughed him out of town. I mean, shit, you should see the kind of things we get pitched, it was no big deal, seriously it wasn’t …’

But it was to Voldan Cane.

‘We turn away people every day, it’s part of the business. If you can’t face rejection …’

And that was it. Grigori hadn’t been able to face rejection, and they had all rejected him. So his father had avenged his rejected soul.

‘I don’t know about Tawny,’ said Eve, ‘but Kevin I can guess at. He got signed to Cut N Dry Records aged twelve. His final audition was up against another kid—I asked him about it once. Kevin described this kid, dark, small, with a stutter that made him difficult to understand. Don’t get me wrong: Grigori Cane was never going to be a pop star. He didn’t look the part, he didn’t sound the part, but I guess Voldan wanted to buy him a shot if that’s what it took to make him happy. Of course Grigori lost out. It was never going to be any other way.’

The group pictured the scene: Grigori craving love and respect, what up until then had been cruelly out of reach, then, at the last hurdle, a kid with buckteeth and a bad attitude beat him to it. Being forced to witness Kevin’s rise over the
years would have been torture. Months before his death,
Time
magazine had labelled Kevin ‘Bigger than Jesus’. It was the final nail in Grigori’s coffin.

‘There’s five of us here,’ said Angela, ‘and one more we’re certain of. It’s too much of a coincidence for it not to be connected.’

‘This is why,’ agreed Eve. ‘Oh God, this is why …’

How bold the invitation had been, how brazen, assuming the party’s ignorance and arrogance because they would not remember—and Voldan Cane had been right: they hadn’t remembered. They hadn’t given Cane’s name a second thought because whatever pain they had inflicted on his son, however it had affected the boy in his leaden years, it had meant nothing to them. Absolutely nothing.

What a price they had paid for their mistake.

‘Cane wanted us dead,’ said Jacob, ‘and he succeeded.’

‘He failed,’ Angela said. ‘We’re still here.’

‘For how much longer?’

Eve pointed over the mountain. ‘What’s that?’

Beyond the ridge was a burst of billowing grey smoke. Another appeared behind the plateau.

Two fires.

‘Kevin,’ said Celeste, but her voice was thin and afraid.

‘It can’t be,’ said Eve. ‘Those fires are a mile apart.’

‘Then what?’

Angela didn’t want to say it.
Miles apart …

Two fires. Two separate camps.

Jacob started to walk. Celeste followed. Like children to their parents’ call, they trailed across the sand and into the forest, blindly approaching the unknown.

94

I
nside the jungle, shadows closed in. Trees hulked. The forest hissed. Moans and howls they had heard from the beach moved alongside them now.

Angela led the way. She could not explain the urgency of needing to spearhead the mission, to be the first to encounter what was waiting.

Others.

The suspicion they had nursed privately for weeks.

Who were they? Where were they? What did they want? One moment she was convinced of the need to find them: people meant help, communication, even salvation. The next she questioned why they had stayed hidden.

Either way, she had to know.

They reached the foot of the mountain, a sheer grey wall, and could not go on. Moonlight trickled through the canopy, not enough to see by. They had no torches to light their way. They stopped for the night, burned a fire to keep warm.

‘They’ll see us,’ said Celeste.

‘It doesn’t matter. They already know we’re here.’ Eve did not know if she meant it as a comfort or a warning. ‘They have since the beginning.’

‘We can’t be sure there is a they,’ Jacob said. ‘It could still be Kevin.’

But they didn’t believe it. The time for excuses was over. Until today there had been no answers, no full stop; only question marks. Now they had a reason for the crash, and it made them hungry for more. The three fires were an invitation. If they accepted, they knew that in some important way they would never come back.

The shrieks of the rainforest arrived from near and far. In the firelight their faces were older, wiser, changed fundamentally, as if years had been both gained and lost.