Snowstorms in a Hot Climate (26 page)

In the spare room, I did what I had come for and stashed
away the treasure. In the top of the wardrobe, at the back of the cupboards, there was a small cubbyhole, the place where as a child I had hidden plates of food stolen from the kitchen for solitary midnight feasts. It had been a precarious business then, constructing a pile of books on top of a chair in order to reach. Now I could do it on tiptoe. The place was thick with dust. Nothing had been put there for years. I shoved the plastic bags right to the back, till they were lost in darkness. The only person in the world who knew where to find them was me. Then I showered, changed my clothes, and called London. It was midday, and she still had not checked in. This time I left my name. “Tell her Marla called. Ask her to ring me. The minute she arrives.”

It was around this time that my invincibility began to desert me, to be replaced by a creeping, corrosive fear. Lunch was traditionally served on trays in the living room, each one accompanied by its own set of engraved condiments and a small carafe of wine. The first half glass made me drowsy, and I dropped the saltcellar. Germaine watched me, hawk-eyed, her small silver knife darting in and out of the fish carcass. The conversation followed accepted lines. She asked me questions and I sidestepped them. She had been waiting for ten years now to hear me announce my marriage, and her patience was beginning to wear thin. So was mine. I sat listening for the phone. Why hadn’t she called? Something had gone wrong. The Regency clock chimed 1:00
P.M
. I used the excuse of clearing away the first course to closet myself in the study.

This time the receptionist had a different tale. Miss Cameron had booked in half an hour before. Yes, she had got my message. But she had also left strict instructions not to be disturbed. By anyone. But this was an emergency. The woman hummed and hawed. A matter of life and death. She asked for
my name and told me to hold the line. Two minutes later the answer came through. Miss Cameron did not want to speak to me. I put down the phone to find that my hand was shaking. Elly wouldn’t speak to me. My sense of triumph exploded, launching slivers of fear like shrapnel into my brain. Behind me I heard the door to the study open and Germaine’s voice crack the air.

“Marla.
Qu’est-ce que tu fais? Le repas n’est pas fini. Viens immédiatement
.” Mealtimes were sacrosanct. Even my grandfather had been pukka enough to wait until after supper to die.

I turned. She must have seen it in my face.
“Quoi! Tu es malade?”

I shook my head. “Grandmère, I have to leave. Forgive me. I have to go to London.”

“What, now?”

“Yes, now.”

We stood for a moment in the darkened room, shutters drawn to protect the brocade against the sunlight, a place of childhood memory and security. And I felt, just for that instant, an absurd desire to tell her, everything, all of it, as if her instinct for survival might somehow allow her to comprehend something that her upbringing couldn’t. But the moment passed. I went to her and put out my hand. She took it almost angrily, squeezing it hard between her bony fingers and making a small, clicking sound with her tongue. Then she said, “You always were a most peculiar child. Always too much silence. Too much”—she gestured to her head—“too much living here. It was not good. You and this Elly—” She broke off. “So, you must go. Something so important you cannot finish your
repas
. So go. But you remember. I, Germaine Lemans, am old, but not stupid.
Faites attention
, Marla. You are sometimes very careless with your life. It will bring damage.
Bien
 … go.”

She dropped my hand and made a small shooing gesture. In
the doorway I turned and spoke to her back. “Grandmère, there is one thing you could do for me.” She did not move. “If Elly calls, tell her I’m coming.”

W
here there had been triumph there was now only terror. In London it was raining. A soft summer rain, which hung so low over the city that as we finally broke cloud the runway pushed up to meet us. I was sick of airplanes, and sick of airports. Any glamour had long since seeped away. On the flight I could hardly keep my eyes open. Elly wouldn’t talk to me. The weight of my exhaustion seemed suddenly insupportable. It was only anxiety which kept me upright. We came into Terminal 2. A different customs hall from the one she would have passed through. I had to force myself not to run through it. Outside there was a queue for taxis. I stood in the rain and waited. The driver was disappointed by the closeness of the fare and left me to wait while he applied for a reentry ticket. I sat in the back with the proverbial rat gnawing at my entrails. The Heathrow Hotel took ten minutes along a rain-soaked dual carriageway. It was a ghastly affair, sitting like some Battlestar Galactica in the middle of nowhere, a large circle of boxes, Elly in one of them. At the reception desk I asked for her room number.

“Three-twelve. But …”

“She’s expecting me,” I said, and if I had been at the receiving end of my voice, I would not have argued either.

At the door I knocked. Loudly. “Elly, It’s me, Marla.”

No answer. “Elly, let me in.” Silence. An absurd scene flashed through my mind: me, shoulder to the door, splintering collarbone against wood to gain entry into an empty room with the French windows open … but my mind refused at the last fence of fantasy. I was about to start kicking when I heard a small noise from behind the door. Then a click as the lock turned. I
stood still and waited. But nothing happened. I put out my hand, turned the handle, and went in.

The room was in shadow. She was sitting in a chair by the window, looking out onto a slate gray sky. I was reminded of Gem’s daily vigil. When one has finished living, all one can do is sit and watch. I willed her to turn around, to say something, anything, but she seemed oblivious of my presence. I walked to the end of the bed and sat down, studying her profile in silhouette. We sat in silence. It seemed like forever.

“Hello, Marla,” she said at last, quietly. “How was your flight?”

The sound of a stranger. I felt my heart pound with fear. “Elly, what happened?”

“I would have thought you already knew. Wasn’t that why you took them out of my luggage?” Now she turned to face me, and now I was stung by the whiplash in her voice. “It was you, Marla, wasn’t it?”

No time for half-truths now. I took a breath. “Yes. It was me.”

“How did you find out?”

“J.T. I called him that last afternoon in New York, and he told me.”

She nodded slowly, as if the movement caused her pain. “What did you do with them?”

“They’re safe. Safe and nearby. Elly, for God’s sake tell me what happened.”

“What do you think?” she said sharply. “You want the whole story or just edited highlights? They searched me. They searched everyone. Three hundred people. X-rays, the lot.” She paused, frowning hard, back in a crowded customs hall with a suitcase full of cocaine. “And they knew just what they were looking for. Oh yes. The woman two places in front of me was carrying a
child with a bag full of toys. When they found a set of rubber balls, they had her in the back room so fast it made your eyes water. I realized then it had to be a setup. And that I had to be carrying more than sawdust.

“Funny. I’d always thought I’d be OK when it came down to it. That the adrenaline would get me through. But I was so frightened I was nearly sick. I could hardly keep my hand still to unlock the cases. And all the time I kept seeing Lenny’s face, smiling me good-bye. The end of an affair. My God … I couldn’t believe it. Not even Lenny … I stood there waiting for them to find it. Waiting for his hand to close over the plastic bag. Except, of course, it never did. He went through both cases, smiled at me, then asked me if I’d mind repacking them myself to save time and moved on to the next one. And I knew then it had to be you. I had checked the bags after Lenny left. No one else had been near them. No one else knew. You had been so strange that night. Suddenly it all made sense. Except for one thing.” She broke off with a harsh little laugh. “If you had taken them, that meant you knew what was really inside. And if you knew, then why the hell hadn’t you told me?”

I stared at her, face white and drawn, eyes lost in shadow. I imagined her last four hours, caught in a web of unknowing, with no one left to trust. And I realized then that knowing the truth and suppressing it does not make it go away but may, in some cases, make it even more terrible. We had been friends for eighteen years. She was the most important person in my life, and I had hurt her. I reached out from the bed and put my hand on her knee. My fingers rested there uselessly, the extent of my physical courage. I had one defense. And I knew it would not be enough.

“Elly, I was only trying to protect you.”

“Protect me! Christ almighty, Marla, protect me from
what?” And now came the anger. Anger and pain, a great rushing wind of it, filling the room like howl round. “What am I, some piece of porcelain too fragile to be told the truth? J.T., Lenny. Now you. How come nobody tells me what’s going on? Fuck it, for the last year I’ve been trying to reestablish control. Take back the part of me that’s mine. How can I do that when everybody around me is making my decisions for me? Treating me like a child. For better or worse, this is my life. How can I live it if I’m not in control of it? God, Marla, you of all people should have understood that. There are some things you can’t do for people. However much you love them. I asked for your help, Marla. I didn’t ask you to do it for me. No one can do that. Don’t you understand? You should have told me. I should have known.”

She broke off with a kind of moan, pulling herself out of the chair and away from me. But the room was too small for her furious energy, and after a few moments prowling she pushed herself into a corner, arms huddled around her body, eyes down. And all this time I sat paralyzed, waiting for the storm to pass. I had no memory of such ferocity in her. Or if I did, it had never been directed at me. Outside the rain blurred everything. What could I say which would bring back the love? I had done it all for her. Just as she had once done it for me. But how to tell her? It was my turn to speak. But not without sanction. I looked up at her, and across the room our eyes met. And she smiled, a weary, desperate little pucker of skin, no pleasure in it. But it was a kind of welcome.

“Elly,” I said. “There’s more that you should know.”

She closed her eyes and sighed. “So tell me.”

And so it came flooding out, all of it, from that first vision of male beauty in the Club Class of a jumbo jet to the last telephone call on a Manhattan pavement. From Lenny’s first deception to Indigo’s last. I spared her nothing. Not even a mother
and child at the bottom of a Santa Cruz canyon. Surely now she would understand why some of it had been so hard to tell. Surely now she might forgive.

And in the silence that followed she stared at me, dry-eyed and still. And when at last her voice came out of the shadows, it was quieter, in sorrow rather than in anger. “Oh, Marla. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I was afraid you’d go to Lenny,” I said, emboldened by her kindness, and because there was nothing left to lose. “And that he would lie to you and you would believe his lies. Because you needed to.”

“And is that why you believed J.T.?”

It was said so softly that I had to strain to hear the words. And even then I didn’t—or couldn’t—grasp the implication behind them.

“Elly, haven’t you heard what I said? He set you up. Don’t you understand? The cocaine was meant for him. And when he found out about it, he passed it on to you. He knew that you’d be caught.”

“No, he didn’t.” And this time her voice was loud and clear. “He knew I’d be saved.”

“Elly, listen to me. Look at the facts—”

“I said he
knew
, Marla.”

“Knew what?”

“He knew that you’d take them out.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. How could he ‘know’ that?”

In answer she smiled grimly and walked over to the bedside table. From the top drawer she drew out an envelope and handed it to me.

“When I cleared Customs, I found this on the message board at Heathrow. We had agreed that if he needed to get in touch with me, that was how he would do it. Tradition. Read it, Marla.”

I withdrew a sheet of paper. A British Airways message. On it were written the words “Don’t fret. Marla has your luggage. You have her to thank for carrying it.”

I stared down at it, and my brain whirled. Lenny trapped like a fish on a hook, wriggling to get free. I made a clumsy lunge through the water.

“Elly, how do you know this is from Lenny? If it’s a tradition, then why shouldn’t someone else have known about it? Why can’t it be from J.T.? He was the only one I told. He knew I’d saved you. It could be from him.”

The little smile was still there, sadder now than tears. “Look at the envelope, Marla.”

I picked it up from the bed. On the front the words
Pamela Richardson
. “A joke,” she explained. “Heroine and author. We always did it. A different one each time. We decided on it just before he left. No one else knew the name. It was his message. It came from him.”

“But how could …”

“I don’t know. That’s one of the things I have to find out.”

No. I refused to accept the words. “It doesn’t change anything, Elly. Think about the past, about what he’s done. The woman in California. Indigo. Think about them.”

“I don’t know anything about the woman in California,” she said harshly, as if to dismiss the subject. “But Indigo—” She gave a sharp little laugh. “Oh, Indigo I knew all about. How could I not? You’ve met her. You know what she’s like. She’s had the hots for Lenny ever since she first set eyes on him. It was no secret. They had even got it on while I was in Hawaii. He told me when I got back. But he also told me it wasn’t important. And he told me she knew nothing. I believed him. Maybe I was wrong. But she would have done anything for him. Believe me, if Lenny had told her to go to the airport and check our destinations, she would have done it, no questions asked.”

“Elly.” I couldn’t bear it. This dreadful doomed revisionism. “Listen to what you’re saying. The man lied to her. He lied to you. How can you believe a word he says?”