“There is one possibility…” he said, then shook his head. “No. It’s too dangerous.”
The psychologist and Martigny exchanged glances.
“Monsieur McGuire,” said the psychologist, putting on headphones. “In this situation, everything is dangerous.”
“Open the suitcase, Pascal,” Star said. “Stay back there by the table and open the suitcase. That’s great.”
Pascal opened the suitcase, which had been, as Star said, under the pink bed in the pink room, the room filled with pictures of a woman Pascal recognized as the couturière Maria Cazarès.
He glanced up. Star was still jittery, but also careful. He was positioned fifteen feet away, still with Gini in front of him, still with the gun jabbing her neck. On a small table next to him was Gini’s tape recorder and microphone. A tape had been inserted.
It was recording now. Pascal knew, and Gini knew—he could read the knowledge in her face—that this tape was not helping them. This tape was Star’s route to notoriety, to immortality—not any interview Gini might write. Pascal, piecing these events together, could see that whatever Star might have said to Gini earlier, he had never intended her to write up this scene afterward: transcribe his words now, possibly, better still, record them so the world could later hear his voice—but not survive to give her own account any more than Pascal would survive any photographs he might take.
They were useful to him now, Pascal thought, but when the pictures had been taken and the recording had been made, he would kill them. Pascal knew that with absolute certainty; he also knew which of them he would kill first.
The suitcase was crammed with notebooks and press clippings and photographs. They were in disarray. With extreme care he began taking them out and laying them on the table in front of him.
“Don’t muddle them up, okay?” Star said sharply. “They’re in order—all right? On the top there’s all the stuff about my mother and father—and the notes I wrote, after I realized, when it all started to make sense…”
His mother and father, apparently, were Maria Cazarès and Jean Lazare. Pascal piled the notebooks in one place, the dogeared cuttings next to them.
Beneath them, he saw, were bundles of tattered miscellaneous papers and other press clippings. There was a collection on Monaco’s royal family, including his own stolen pictures of Princess Caroline to which Star had referred; there was a section on the Kennedy family, one on an English duke with a Canadian wife, one on an Australian-American press magnate, and several on various American movie stars. He laid each of these out in neat piles. Beneath them, at the bottom of the case, was a collection of pornographic pictures, much-handled and of extreme violence. Pascal closed the lid of the case on them. Star made a peculiar wiggling movement, gestured toward the secondary piles of press clippings, then smiled.
“Those were my false starts, all right? That duke—the movie star—I always knew there was something different about me, that I wasn’t just anybody, you know? I tried tracing my mother—as soon as I was old enough, and they’d let me, I tried. But, of course, Maria had covered her tracks. You know what they tried to make me believe?” His voice was filled with derision. “They tried to make me believe my mother was this hooker, this two-bit fucking hooker, now deceased. Well, I wasn’t about to buy that. In Quebec I saw this fucking social worker bitch, and she brought out all these papers, a birth certificate—there wasn’t even a father’s name on the fucking thing—and she said I couldn’t meet my mother because my mother was dead, got beaten up good by one of her johns, some shit like that… And the way she looked at me, with this kind of fucking pity on her face. I wanted to kill her right then, I just wanted to snap her fucking neck, because she was feeding me all these fucking lies. And then I saw—she was just part of the conspiracy, that’s all. So I let her live. Smug fucking dumb lying bitch…”
He shuddered, and Gini flinched.
“After that—I had to find them, my parents, right? And they’d made it really hard for me—so I followed a few false leads, and then I got lucky; just like that. I met Mathilde. I was in Paris, I’d just come here from Amsterdam and I was down on my luck, the cards weren’t good, I had no money—and this friend of mine, Chantal, we’d had a fight, so I had no place to go—and then I met Mathilde. A few blocks from here. She was in this little park, feeding pigeons—and I got talking to her. I just wanted a meal. A place to sleep. I wasn’t feeling too well—I get these pains in my head. So she brought me back here and she cooked me this food—and Mathilde was all right. I liked Mathilde. She was lonely, and she started talking—about Maria. And I knew who Maria was, of course, because I’d read about her in the magazines, and so—slowly, I began to see. A week later, maybe less, maybe a day later, I don’t remember—but Mathilde told me how Maria had lost her baby son, way back, in New Orleans—and then, light, I mean, I saw. Everything fit. The dates fit. I’d been in New Orleans one time, for a while. My hair—it’s black, like hers, like that pig Lazare’s. Yeah—my hair, and my eyes… I look like my mother. Don’t I?”
“I can certainly see a resemblance,” Pascal said.
He kept his eyes on Star. His attention seemed intermittent now, his gaze wandering like his words. He’d look at Pascal, then Gini, then the gun, then he’d stare off into space. Pascal had the sensation that this conversation was familiar, that it had been repeated many times, and that mostly it was a conversation Star was having with himself.
Cautiously, Pascal moved around the table so the distance between them was slightly reduced. Star did not react. He had begun to touch Gini again. In a clumsy and ill-coordinated way, he began to squeeze her breast.
Gini flinched. “Star—let me just check the tape…”
She kept her eyes fixed on Pascal’s face. She could see his reaction to this mauling from Star; his expression was murderous. She tried to signal him with her eyes—don’t move, don’t protest. “Star—the first tape’s about to run out. It’s okay—I have plenty more. Let me insert a new one…”
“No. We don’t need it. It’s over. That’s it…”
“No, Star—it can’t be. I—there’s so many things I want to ask you. People will want to know how Maria reacted when you told her who you were—because you must have told her, Star, surely?”
“Yeah. I told her.”
“They’ll want to know what she said. And then they’ll want to know what happened next…” She kept her eyes on Pascal and frowned. “They’ll want to know why you decided to kill Jean Lazare—and what happened when you did…”
Pascal did not move a muscle. He could see she was trying to give him information and buy time as well. Was the blood still daubed on Star’s face and hands Lazare’s?
“People will want to know the facts, Star,” she went on. “Pascal’s a good judge—you think they’d be interested, don’t you, Pascal?”
“Sure.” Pascal kept his voice even. “It’s the details that make the difference.”
“Why I killed him?” Star laughed. “How I killed him? How I would have fucking killed her if I’d had half a chance? Sure, I’ll explain that…”
He flourished the gun, then jabbed it back in Gini’s neck. His reaction delay was now lengthening, Pascal thought. It had taken him nearly fifteen seconds to answer Gini’s question, yet he was clearly unaware of the time lapse, of Pascal’s own interjection. His mind was shorting, Pascal thought.
He was now allowing Gini to bend to the recorder and change the tapes. Pascal watched for an opportunity. None came. About twenty seconds after Gini pressed record, he pulled her back in front of him and began speaking again.
“You know what? He pleaded with me…” His voice rose.
“The great Jean Lazare. The emperor himself, down on his fucking knees, begging, offering me anything I wanted, if only I wouldn’t shoot. I liked that. Let me tell you—I enjoyed that. My fucking father, crawling on his knees to me. I’ve waited so long for that.”
It had been, Pascal saw, the wrong
approach, an unwise, perhaps even fatal choice of topic. Star was excited again. There seemed to be a direct line in his head between the humiliation he was describing and sex.
He stopped speaking, pulled Gini roughly back against him, and began to ran his hands up and down her body. He rubbed himself against her back, his gaze never once leaving Pascal as he did this. He smiled, and his eyes took on a fixed, glittering look.
“Don’t try it, Pascal. The safety catch is off. The gun’s cocked. You know anything about guns? This is a fifteen-round magazine. Nasty bullets. You can really get off on these bullets. You can really spray them around… She’d be dead, and you’d be dead, before you’d moved two fucking feet…” His voice rose. “You don’t like that, Pascal? It upsets you, huh? Makes you feel a bit inadequate, a bit impotent, maybe? Well, too bad. I had years of that. Years of being pissed on and dismissed and ordered around and locked up. Years crawling to those cocksuckers, in the homes, at night, jerking those fucking bastards off—you know how fucking old I was? Five years old the first time, up the ass, in my mouth, I had ten, twelve fucking years of that, treated like I was shit, like I was some fucking nobody—”
Pascal froze. Gini gave a low moan and clamped her hand across her mouth. Pascal started to move; he knew Star was about to start shooting; he watched his face contort. The telephone rang. Star was jamming the gun at Gini’s mouth—then suddenly, five rings in, he seemed to hear the phone and stopped. A shudder ran through his body; he drew back; his face became blank and tight, then he seemed to relax. He jabbed the gun in Gini’s ribs.
“Get back over there. With him. The far side of the table, where I can see you both. Neither of you move. I have to take this call…” He shivered, then laughed. “I have to talk to my shrink.”
He watched Gini stumble across the room. He waited until they had both reached the far side of the table, twenty feet back. Keeping his eyes and the gun trained on them both, he picked up the receiver and cradled it on his shoulder. He listened, smiling. Pascal could just hear the voice of the man addressing him, a quiet, even voice.
Pascal drew Gini tightly into his arms. Whoever the man on the telephone was, he prayed to God he was good, and he prayed he would realize that they had to be quick.
He locked his arms around Gini. He kissed her tears, kissed her upturned face, tried to still the tremors of fear in her body. When Star began speaking so the sound of his own voice was drowned, he pressed his mouth against her ear and her hair and began to whisper, so she could only just hear him. He felt her body go rigid in his arms. He knew, and she knew, he thought, that this might be their last conversation. So little time, and so much to be said.
“Gini. We haven’t got very long…”
“I know. I thought he was going to fire then.”
“He was. He’s right on the edge. But he wants those photographs—and there’s something I could try…” He waited until Star began speaking again, then continued whispering. Gini listened, her eyes fixed on his. She could feel his lips against her skin and her hair. His suggestion terrified her.
“No.” She pressed her lips to his face. “No, Pascal—please, he’ll kill you. He wants to kill you first. We should wait—keep him talking.”
“We have to try. You can see how unstable he is. The police will try to tire him, wind him down. We don’t have time for that…”
He stopped as Star laughed, listened, then began speaking again. Pascal looked down at Gini’s blanched face. How long did they have? Ten minutes, fifteen?
“Pascal.” Her hand closed over his. “Why didn’t you run? Out in the street, with Marianne. You had time—you could have gotten away—oh, Christ…”
She stopped. She already knew the answer in any case, and had she doubted it, she could read it in the tenderness that flooded his face.
“The question didn’t arise,” he said simply; she heard his voice catch. “Gini—nothing is altered. I love you so much. You know that.” As he said this, he bent and kissed her mouth, turning her away so she was shielded from Star’s view. Her mouth opened under his, and her eyes closed. He could feel the love and the desperation to communicate love in her embrace.
He kissed her deeply, thinking it might be the last time he would ever do this. He listened to the language of her response. He looked down and could read the alteration, the new resolve in her face.
Star’s voice rose; he laughed again. Pascal drew back a little; he said, against her throat, his words only just audible to her: “The pink bedroom, Gini. In there. I want him in the room that upsets him the most. The room with the least light.”
In the communications van, Rowland adjusted his headphones. The police psychologist, who had introduced himself to Star by his first name only, Lucien, had been talking to him now for almost five minutes. Rowland could see exactly what the man was doing—trying to calm and extract information at the same time, trying to delay, trying, more specifically, to establish a relationship of dependency and trust. It was Rowland’s impression—and the psychologist’s, he suspected—that Star knew precisely why he was doing this.
Star was being too cooperative, Rowland thought—but his cooperative replies—they had both switched from French to English—were being made in an increasingly insolent, mocking tone of voice.
“Food?” Star said now, and laughed. “Oh, hey—yes. I mean food would be really good. There’s a larder here, and a fridge, and they’re both stuffed with food, so I guess, if I wanted, I could stay on here for days—even weeks. I mean, I wouldn’t starve, right? And neither would Gini or Pascal. We’d share. But when you say food, I guess you have something pretty special in mind, yes? You know what I really like? Langoustines. There’s a restaurant in St. Germain, L’Age d’Or, it’s called—it does langoustines this really special way. Now, if you got some of those sent in… Not immediately. Maybe in an hour. If you called me back in an hour. No—half an hour. No—twenty minutes. No, let’s take a rain check on it, okay?”
The psychologist glanced at Martigny and frowned.
“Of course. That can be arranged,” he said, still in the same calm voice.
“And the car,” Star laughed. “Don’t forget the car. I’ll be needing that. I want Jean Lazare’s 1938 Rolls to take me out to the airport. But I don’t want it yet. I’m enjoying myself too much. Then—let me just run down the list again…”
He began to enumerate the list of absurd demands already made; the psychologist switched his microphone to mute. He glanced at Martigny, then at Rowland, then shook his head.
Martigny turned and spoke to the GIGN officer next to him; Star’s voice continued. When there was silence in the van once more, the psychologist switched off the mute button. Rowland watched the tapes revolve. His sense of powerlessness and fear increased by the second.
“Meantime”—Star paused—“it’s too bad—but we’ve got the shades closed, and the drapes, so we can’t see out, and, of course, your snipers can’t see in…” He giggled. “So you’ll have to tell me—this is causing a stir, right? You’ve got the press there now? The camera crews? No—don’t bother answering. I mean, you’re a straight guy, I can tell that, but you just might lie. That’s okay. Tell them I’ll be making a personal appearance, on the balcony out front, later tonight. Meantime, I’ll get Gini to take a look—don’t shoot or anything, will you? Gini—you want to do that? The far window. What? CNN? And—all the others? That’s great. Really great. You can go back to Pascal. Slowly. That’s it. Smart girl. It’s okay. Don’t cry. Pascal—you want to kiss her again? Don’t mind me. Go right ahead. You can fuck her if you like. You first. Me next… Only kidding. It’s these little pills I take, you see. They give me this—lust for life. I might just take a top-up right now… Oh, excellent. Oh, these are seriously good… Look, Pascal—I hate to say this to a Frenchman, you know—but your technique, it’s not so good. It’s too gentle. You know what really turns women on? Rough stuff. They really really like it when you smack them around.”
&nb
sp; Rowland bowed his head. The psychologist interrupted.
“Christophe,” he said. “Christophe? Can I make a suggestion? Wouldn’t it be easier, better all around, if you could make a gesture of goodwill? In return for arranging the car, say, you release one of your hostages…”
“Gini?” Star laughed again. “You want Gini, right? I’m not so sure. She and I—we get along. I’d need to think about that.”
The psychologist made a small sign to Martigny; one finger held up.
“Then what I suggest is this. I call you back in exactly twenty minutes, okay? That gives you time to consider my proposals. You may think of some other things you need. There might be someone you’d like to talk to, and if there is, we can arrange that.”
“I don’t think so.” Star giggled again. “Not too likely. They’re all dead.”
“Fine. Twenty minutes. I’ll call you then. At precisely two o’clock.”
He cut the connection and turned back to Martigny and the GIGN officer.
“Can you be ready to go in before that? Say fifteen minutes from now?”
The other two men had a brief muttered conference.
“Half an hour would be better,” Martigny said. “Forty-five minutes would be better still.”
“I wouldn’t advise that.”
“You don’t think you can persuade him to release Genevieve Hunter?”
“He has no intention of releasing either of them. Or using the car, or the plane. You heard him. He’s excited. He’s playing games.”
Rowland watched the decision be made. He watched the GIGN officer leave; he heard movement outside the van, the shouldering of weapons, the sound of footsteps moving off.
The psychologist passed his hand across his forehead. Martigny, sitting down, lit a cigarette.