Younger (6 page)

As Anna approached the white neo-Edwardian façade of Seven East the next day, she tried not to feel either intimidated or excited. For all she knew, Pierre Barton was going to offer her five hundred bucks to write copy for some new jock itch cream.

The doorman’s standard dark coat and gold braid belied the calculating eyes of trained security with which he regarded arrivals. His role was undoubtedly to keep the riffraff at more than arm’s length from the biggest names in banking, business, and politics. He even had a Secret Service–style earbud and lapel mic to announce Anna, making sure she was expected before opening the heavy iron and glass door. “Take the elevator to the second floor,” he said. “Someone will be waiting.”

The elevator doors closed noiselessly.
Fancy schmancy
. Anna had been to other members-only places but never one this exclusive. She was glad she’d dressed in her black-and-white Emporio Armani suit with the short skirt that showed off her legs; they probably wouldn’t let even Hillary Clinton in here wearing one of her trademark pantsuits.

When the elevator doors opened, a handsome young Indian man in a white jacket and dark trousers was there to lead her to a cocktail table with brown leather club chairs arranged around it and take her drink order. She’d taken just a sip of her spritzer, peering around as casually as possible at the senator, the famed Internet CEO, and two national news anchors when Pierre Barton appeared.

“Lovely suit,” he said appraisingly as the waiter faded noiselessly away to fetch his drink. “I hope you don’t mind all this”—his gesture took in the mahogany-paneled room—“but it’s as private as it is stuffy, and I prefer places where I can speak comfortably.”

“No, no, this is great,” Anna assured him as he settled into the chair next to hers. “Seeing the movers and shakers here is a refreshing change from spotting movie stars in Beverly Hills.”

The waiter set down a glass of red wine and Barton raised it to her. “To the pleasure of making your acquaintance.”

“Likewise.” She toasted.

“And now, I have something for you.” Barton opened his slim black calfskin attaché case and pulled out a file. Anna half expected some kind of severance check. Instead, she was presented with a four-page document. “Confidentiality statement. It’s a serious one, so I suggest you read it carefully. Go ahead. I have some emails to catch up on.”

He pulled out a BlackBerry while Anna settled back to peruse the pages. They were boilerplate for the most part, but the “serious” parts were serious indeed. For instance, it stated that should Anna sign, she could—effective immediately—no longer discuss anything relating to her knowledge of, or even her acquaintance with, Pierre Barton and Barton Pharmaceuticals. By signing, she agreed to be legally bound, for the rest of her life, to pay a penalty of $250,000 plus legal fees of up to $200,000 should any breach in the agreement be traced to her unless released from confidentiality.

“Wow. This is pretty heavy,” she said when she’d finished.

Barton tucked his phone back into his pocket. “I assure you it’s absolutely necessary, and should you decide to hear what the project is, you’ll see why. The bottom line is, I’m prepared to offer you work. And to give you $25,000 just to listen to my offer. If you don’t want to sign that agreement, we’ll have a nice lunch, and that’s the end of it. If you decide to sign it, anything,
anything
, between us in the future, from a meeting to an email to a text message, is strictly confidential.”

“Well, I—whew.”

He smiled understandingly. “Don’t rush. Give it a think while we eat. We’ll stick to small talk over lunch. I promise.”

They moved to the top-floor dining room, where, over a lunch as fine as anything at Le Bernardin, Barton talked easily about himself.

“Nothing dramatic,” he said. “My father was a successful pharmaceutical manufacturer. He had factories, first in the British Midlands and later in Switzerland; he had a town house in Chelsea and an apartment in Paris. He was a self-made man—studied chem at uni and decided to go into business.”

Anna knew from research materials she’d leafed through when writing the acquisition press release that “uni” had been Oxford and that Jasper Barton’s own father had been a well-off land owner. She ventured, “So you were raised in London?”

“Mostly. My mother’s Parisian. My father met her on a holiday trip to Paris after he graduated. She was everything he wasn’t: a beauty and a social butterfly. He bought the Chelsea house for her, but when I was still a child, she decreed that London was too damp and too drab, deciding her perfect life required an artistic salon in Paris. So she moved back to Paris, and I divided my time between my parents. Maman is quite a character.”

“And your father?”

“My father’s been dead for years—my parents divorced and he remarried. My stepmother’s dead as well. They had no children, so I remain an only child. My mother is still in the Paris apartment. And your family?”

Anna shook her head. “Zero. No siblings, parents died when I was in my twenties.”

“No husband or kids in the picture?”

“No. Just the usual series of bad boyfriends or wrong time/place kind of things. You have children, don’t you?”

“Yes, twin boys, terrific lads. Marina and I are very proud of them.” He paused. “Now, what can I tell you that you’d like to know and that isn’t covered by the agreement you haven’t signed?” His challenging smile indicated the chitchat was done for the day.

“What’s in it for me in the long run?” she asked. “I don’t mind signing confidentiality agreements, but I usually know the reason. And this agreement has industrial-strength strings attached.”

“What’s in it for you? If, after you hear the job description, you want to give it a shot, you get a one-year contract that will pay you a quarter of a million—that’s two hundred and fifty thousand
pounds
not dollars—per quarter. If you say no, you get to keep twenty-five thousand dollars and walk away.”

Her stomach tightened at the amount. A million pounds in a year! Even the $25,000 had seemed almost too good to be true, but a
million pounds
? She managed to coolly raise her eyebrows. “Why me? Why someone you just met? I mean, the launch went very well and I shouldn’t have been laid off, all that’s true, and yet . . . Why me?”

“Tell me, Anna, if you lose other accounts and have to get out there and try to find new clients or a job, what scares you the most? What do you think could stand in your way?”

She lifted her chin. “Nothing. Sure, the economy’s bad, but it’s been bad before. Maybe—”

“Yes?”

“Maybe being older scares me a little.” He had to know she’d feel that way, so she might as well admit it. “It’s never easy to start over, and certainly not at my age—not in Los Angeles and probably not anywhere in the world. But I do have a reputation. And a track record. And I . . .” She stopped. She just couldn’t lie and say she had plenty of clients. “I guess if I were in that position, my age would scare me.”

“Even though the clients wouldn’t know and couldn’t ask exactly how old you are?”

“Even Madame X can’t make me look as young as the competition. That’s simply a fact of life.”

“And that’s why I want you on my team,” Barton said cheerfully, as though she’d just passed a test rather than made a difficult confession. “You’re talented, you’re proven, you’re a woman of a certain age, and the Madame X campaign shows you understand how other women your age think. That all works for me.”

“And if I sign this”—she tapped the folded agreement next to her espresso cup—“I get briefed on the venture and then can make up my mind, no strings attached except the confidentiality?” He nodded. “And you’ll fill me in now?”

“Now? No. In ten days.” He reached inside his attaché and pulled out an envelope. “Inside is your plane ticket, hotel information, and check for $25,000.”

“Plane ticket? To London?”

“No, to Paris.” He smiled boyishly. “I’m going to visit my mother. And now,” he added, “may I offer you the use of my pen?”

“I haven’t been to Paris in years.” She hesitated for just one more instant. “All right, I’ll sign. I’ve got my own pen, thanks. Or do I have to sign in blood?” she added jokingly. Looking up as she signed, she caught him studying her in a way that made her wonder fleetingly if she’d agreed too soon. Then she gave a little laugh and handed the agreement to him. She wasn’t Faust, he wasn’t the devil, and all she’d agreed to was an expense-paid trip to Paris and a big fat wad of money. Her future was looking up.

Chapter 4

The envelope Pierre Barton had handed her at Seven East contained a business-class ticket to Paris and a travel agent’s prepaid voucher for a week’s stay at the four-star Westin Place Vendôme near the Tuileries. She hadn’t stayed on the Right Bank since splitting up with David decades ago. Sometimes when he had to leave New York for weeks of project meetings in his native London, he would buy Anna a ticket to fly over to rendezvous in Paris. How exciting and romantic those long weekends in a quaint auberge near Les Halles had been! But then it was all over. Since then, Anna had stuck to the Rive Gauche. But this was the start of a new life, a good time to shake off the ghostly traces of that old lost love.

Tomorrow, she’d see Barton. Today, she had decided before the plane’s wheels touched down, would require only a brief nap before doing what Paris was perfect for, strolling lazily through the streets.

She’d snatched several hours’ sleep in her comfy business-class flat-bed seat, primarily because she hadn’t looked at the magazines she’d downloaded onto her iPad until an hour before landing. Articles like “Is Your Skin a Billboard for Your Age?” and “Left Behind: When Your Man Trades You In for a Younger Woman” would have unsettled her. Today, even the ads were insults, with their fourteen-year-old models pouting in garments few grown women could afford.

She hoped Paris would be a breath of fresh air—and that she’d love Barton’s offer. While $25,000 was a godsend, it wouldn’t keep her afloat for long in Los Angeles.

After checking in, she wheeled her bag to a sleek, if anonymous, chamber with a view of the Eiffel Tower. Her choice would have been something more intimate than this luxury lodge with its hundreds of rooms. Then again, she wasn’t complaining about the incredible view, was she?

A long soak in the Roman bathtub followed by a nap left her feeling groggy but fresher when the alarm went off at four p.m. Barton was calling at five, and she wanted to sound alert. She’d already had a cup of tea, put on makeup, and pulled on stretch khakis and a linen shirt before the phone rang.

Five minutes later, she was out the door, having decided the late-May weather was perfect for a stroll along the Seine, an aperitif at a café, and an early dinner at one of the small bistros on rue St. Honoré. Her conversation with Pierre had been perfunctory. After posing one rote question as to how her flight had been, he said his driver Aleksei would pick her up at eleven the next morning. “Are we going somewhere?” she’d asked.

“You are. I’ll already be there. You’re coming to meet my mother. Enjoy the evening.”

His mother? She shook her head as she walked. Was Barton a sentimentalist? Well, it was his dime, and if he wanted her to meet his mother, she would. The rich and powerful felt entitled to indulge their eccentricities, she supposed. And she felt entitled to enjoy her first evening in Paris. A languid look at the river followed by a glass of St. Emilion and a plate of duck
confit
would be an excellent start.

A dark blue Bentley limousine was parked on the street in front of her hotel when she emerged promptly at eleven the next morning. Standing next to it was a tall, well-built man with sandy-blond hair, in his late thirties, wearing a dark single-breasted suit, white shirt, narrow black tie, and dark sunglasses. He tilted his head down as formally as a bow. “Ms. Wallingham?”

“Yes. Aleksei?” She smiled.

She got the head tilt again but no returned smile as he opened the back door and stood at attention. He was no friendlier as she slid onto the smooth, cool leather seat. She noted that it was a British model with right-hand drive; how nice it must be to be driven to Paris in your own car. “We will be there in approximately fifteen minutes,” the driver said gutturally—his accent Slavic or Russian—before closing the privacy partition separating the passenger compartment from the front.
Not much for small talk,
Anna thought wryly as the big car moved silently away from the curb.

She’d worn a simple bottle-green silk shantung skirt with matching fitted cheongsam-like tunic and darker green ballet flats, formal enough for meeting Maman yet neither dull nor sexy. This day might be a turning point for her; she wanted to look good for it. Outside, the Champs Elysées slipped past, lined with stately mansions and manicured trees. Finally, Aleksei pulled to a stop in front of an imposing granite edifice—eighteenth century, she thought.

The driver jumped out and opened the door. As he offered a hand to help Anna from the car, he leaned toward her and said flatly, “Mr. Barton said please not to look shocked when you see his mother. And please to take special notice of her hands.”

“What—”

Aleksei inclined his head toward the building, where an elderly uniformed doorman was already holding open a massive wood door inlaid with what appeared to be coats of arms in varicolored marble. “Monsieur Couret is waiting.” Then, somehow managing to do it without turning his back on her except figuratively, he got back into the car, noiselessly closing the door behind him.

“Madame Wallingham?
S’il vous plaît
.” The old man escorted her across a dark stone floor to an old French cage-style elevator, gesturing her inside. He turned a lock next to a floor button with a key, then slid the metal grill closed between them. “The lift will take you to the fifth floor.”

She stepped off the elevator directly into what was clearly the antechamber of a single apartment—one of those rooms designed to keep visitors waiting three centuries ago—with several brocade sofas and chairs along with assorted Louis the Whatever cocktail tables and sideboards, which struck Anna’s admittedly unpracticed eye as the real thing.

She stood looking out the waist-to-ceiling windows onto the street just moments before a set of double doors opened to her left, and Pierre Barton motioned her to come into what clearly was Luxeland. Persian rugs gave way like marshmallow beneath her feet; the wall coverings of the rooms they passed through were flocked damask; heavy silver and Lalique crystal filled glass-fronted cabinets and tables. They traversed a smaller anteroom, then a hall with parquet floors and a large circular staircase before entering the salon where Madame Marie Héloise Beaumarchais Barton awaited.

In a room shimmering with sunlight, Madame Barton sat with her back to the door, so Anna’s first impression was of a birdlike creature perched on the bergère chair. When she stood and turned into the light, it was all Anna could do not to gasp. She realized why she’d been forewarned.

“Here’s our guest, Maman,” Pierre said softly. “Anna Wallingham. Marie Héloise Barton.”

One look at Madame Barton, and any woman would think twice, then a third time, before committing to plastic surgery. Her eyes were unnaturally wide and round; too much skin had been removed for them to close properly; she must, Anna thought, need to sleep with some kind of pads over them to keep her eyeballs moist. Whatever nose had once sat in the middle of her face had melted into a small, pug-like muzzle, while oversized cheek implants added an almost whimsical touch of chipmunk. Lips too lush for even a twenty-year-old were the finishing touch, ballooning out from her face, turning up at the ends, and making a normal chin look weak and recessive atop a tight, corded neck.
The Joker,
Anna thought. The thick curls of a platinum wig tumbled about this hodgepodge of readjusted features, undoubtedly hiding a hairline a good five inches back from the one with which she had started.

Everything else about Madame Barton was perfectly in keeping with her station in life. She was elegantly attired in a pale blue A-line, its narrow pleats indicating vintage Balenciaga, and matching pumps. Before grasping the small hand Madame held out, Anna looked at it carefully. It was dainty and expertly manicured, the nails short and natural in color, the rings simple but featuring jawbreaker-sized diamonds. The unusual thing about the hand, though, was its skin—its taut, smooth, unmarked skin. It looked almost as if Madame Barton’s hand had been transplanted from the arm of a much younger woman.

“What a pleasure to meet you, Madame Barton!” she said brightly, smiling straight into that unforgettable face.

“And a pleasure for me as well. My son has been telling me what a bright girl you are,” she said in soft, accented English. “Please, sit down.”

Anna sank gingerly onto a high-backed satin bench more comfortable than it looked while Pierre sat on the velvet sofa. She kept her smile in place as the old woman pressed a brass button set into the table next to her and said, “We’ll have some tea, shall we?” It had just begun, and already this was turning out to be one of the strangest days of Anna’s life.

They stayed less than an hour, almost long enough for Anna to get used to Madame Barton’s visage and definitely long enough for her to find the other woman
très sympathique
. She said she never went along when her son was discussing business. “Anyhow, I lunch almost every single day at Chez Jimmy. It is my tradition.”

Pierre smiled fondly. “Jimmy’s an old Manhattan expat, and Maman has known him for decades. She’s his most regular of all regulars.”

“I enjoy my own company,
mon petit
. Unlike some.”

After they said their good-byes, both Barton and Anna stood silently until the elevator came and Monsieur Couret escorted them to the sidewalk. Once in the car, Anna started to speak, but Barton had already pulled a laptop out of his attaché case. “Sorry, Anna, but I need to take care of some things. Can it wait until lunch? Just another ten minutes or so.”

“Sure,” she said, then sneaked a peek at his fingers on the keyboard. M-a-r-i-e-H-e-l-o-i-s-e, she saw. Oh, Lord, emailing Maman already? Was this rich, powerful man a mama’s boy?

Only when they were ensconced at a table on the wide, awning-covered terrace of a restaurant in the middle of what Anna supposed was the Bois de Boulogne did she manage to say, “Your mother is charming.”

Her comment was greeted with a short laugh. “Yes, she truly is. As are you, for saying that. Not the first comment most people have about Maman. Don’t look so abashed. I know she could be the poster child for plastic surgery gone wrong.”

“What happened?”

“She chose the wrong surgeon and demanded too much. He followed her wishes, then couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.” A waiter approached, poured two glasses of champagne, then took their food and drink order.

Anna was poised to hear the job offer, but instead Barton began with, “I’ll tell you a bit about my mother. Do you know the name Madeleine Castaing? No? A
raffinée
Frenchwoman who, in the 1920s, was wooed and won by an older, very wealthy art dealer. Her dream had always been to host her own salon for artists and intellectuals, and her husband was happy to buy her a big house near Chartres where she could play the
grande
dame
—it left him conveniently free to visit his mistresses.

“Madeleine loved being surrounded by artists; she and her husband had scores of paintings by the Expressionist Chaim Soutine, who painted a brilliant portrait of her—it’s in the Metropolitan in New York. She wasn’t untalented, either. She ended up in Paris as one of the most famous antique dealers and interior designers in the world, with a legendary shop on the Left Bank.”