a good forty seconds before Osborn heard him turn back, cross to the stairs and start up, then he stopped again.
“I’m staying at an inexpensive hotel called the Vieux Paris on the rue Git le Coeur. The rooms are small but they’ve got a musty French charm. Leave word where to meet you. I won’t bring anyone. It’ll be just you and me. If you’re nervous, don’t use your own name. Just say Tommy Lasorda called. Give me a time and a place.”
McVey climbed the remaining stairs and was gone. A moment later Osborn heard the service door to the street open, then close. After that, everything was silent.
62
THEIR NAMES were Eric and Edward, and Joanna had never seen such perfect men. At age twenty-four, they were seemingly flawless specimens of the human male. Both were five foot eleven and weighed exactly the same, one hundred and sixty-seven pounds.
She’d first seen them early in the afternoon when she’d been working with Elton Lybarger in the shallow end of the indoor pool in the building that housed the gymnasium on his estate. The pool was Olympic size, fifty meters long and twenty-five yards wide. Eric and Edward were doing butterfly stroke speed laps. Joanna had seen that before but usually only over short distances because the stroke itself was so demanding. At one end of the pool was an automatic lap meter that counted the number of laps whoever was in the pool was swimming.
When Joanna and Lybarger had come in, the boys had already swum eight laps, or a half mile. By the time she and Lybarger were finished, they were still swimming butterfly, stroke for stroke, side by side. The lap meter read sixty-two, exactly two laps under four miles. Four miles of butterfly stroke nonstop? That was incredible, if not impossible. But there was no doubt, because she’d witnessed it.
An hour later, as a male attendant took Lybarger off for an exercise in diction therapy, Eric and Edward had come out of the pool house and were preparing for a run through the forest, when Von Holden introduced them to her.
“Mr. Lybarger’s nephews,” he said with a smile. “They were studying at East Germany’s College for Physical Culture until it closed after unification. So they came home.”
Both were extremely polite, had said, “Hello. Very pleased to meet you,” and then they’d run off.
Joanna had wondered if they were training for the Olympics and Von Holden had smiled. “No. Not Olympics. Politics! Mr. Lybarger has encouraged them in that since their youth when their own father died. He thought then that Germany would one day reunite. And he was correct.”
“Germany? I thought Mr. Lybarger was Swiss.”
“German. He was born in the industrial town of Essen.”
At precisely seven o’clock, family and guests sat down to dinner in the formal dining room of the Lybarger estate, which Joanna had learned was called “Anlegeplatz,” embarkation point. Meaning that from there one might leave but would always return.
Joanna had come back to her room after an extended workout with Mr. Lybarger to find a formal dinner gown, picked out and fitted flawlessly, simply from a photograph of her, by the famous designer Uta Baur, to whom she’d been introduced briefly on the lake steamer the night before and who, it turned out, was a guest at Anlegeplatz. The dress was long, tight-fitting; and instead of compromising her ample figure, it complemented it by tightening and accenting. Designed to be worn without undergarments, thereby avoiding a line or bulge caused by tight elastic, it was deliberately risque and elegantly erotic.
Black velvet, it closed several inches below the throat and had a woven, feathery pattern in gold that ran from the back of her neck across her bosom and down the other side, as if it were some kind of sleekly fitted boa. At the shoulders, a perfect nuance, hung the smallest golden tassels.
At first Joanna was reluctant. She had never expected to wear anything like it. But she had brought nothing at all dressy, and at Anlegeplatz, dinner was formal. So she had little choice but to put it on. When she did, she was transformed. It was magical. With makeup, and her hair in a French knot, she was no longer the cherubic, ordinary- looking physical therapist from New Mexico but a stylish and sexy international socialite, who carried herself with grace and panache.
The grand hall that was Anlegeplatz’s dining room might have served as the set for some medieval costume drama. The twelve guests sat in hand-carved, high-backed chairs facing each other across a long, narrow dining table that could easily seat thirty, while half-a-dozen waiters saw to their every need. The room itself was two stories high and made entirely of stone. Flags with the crests of great families hung from the ceiling like battle standards, imparting the sense that this had been a place of kings and knights.
Elton Lybarger sat at the head of the table, with Uta Baur directly to his right, conversing with him in her animated style as if the two of them were the only creatures present. She was dressed entirely in black, which Joanna later learned was her trademark. Knee-length black boots, skintight black trousers, and black, single- breasted blazer, closed only by its button at the breast plate. The skin on her hands, face and neck was taut and iridescent, as if it had never been touched by sunlight. The cleavage of her smallish breasts, pushed upward by an underwire bra, was the same milk white, lined with surface veins of light blue, like tiny cracks in fine china. Under her extraordinarily short white hair the only accent was her plucked eyebrows. She wore no makeup or jewelry of any kind. She made a statement without it.
The dinner itself was long and leisurely and, despite the other guests—Dr. Salettl, the twins, Eric and Edward, and several people Joanna had been introduced to but didn’t know—Joanna spent most of it talking with Von Holden about Switzerland, its history, its rail system and its geography. Von Holden seemed to be an expert, but he could have been talking about the dark side of the moon for all the difference it made. His cold, abrupt phone call that morning asking her to be ready to be picked up from her hotel had made her feel cheap and ugly, as if she’d been used the night before. But when he’d met her in the garden that afternoon, he’d been as warm and generous as he had been the night before and that behavior continued here at dinner. And as the evening wore on, and as much as she tried not to show it, the truth was, she was melting for his touch.
After dinner, Lybarger, Uta, Dr. Salettl and the other guests retired to the second-floor library for coffee and a dual piano recital by Eric and Edward.
Joanna and Von Holden, as employees, were not invited and excused for the evening.
“Doctor Salettl told me he expects Mr. Lybarger to be able to walk without a cane by this Friday,” Joanna said as she watched Uta take Lybarger’s arm and help him up the stairs.
“Will he?” Von Holden looked at her.
“I hope so, but it depends on Mr, Lybarger. I don’t know what’s so important about Friday. What difference would another few days make?”
“I want to show you something,” Von Holden said, ignoring her question and leading her to a side door near the far end of the dining room. Entering a paneled hallway they walked to where a small door opened to a flight of stairs. Offering his hand, Von Holden led Joanna down a few stairs to another door, which in turn opened on a narrow passageway that led under the front drive and away from the house.
“Where are we going?” she asked quietly.
Von Holden said nothing and Joanna felt a quiver of excitement as they walked on. Pascal Von Holden was a man who could attract and have nearly any woman he wanted. He lived in a world of extremely rich and beautiful people, who were nearly royalty. Joanna was nothing but ordinary, a physical therapist with a southwestern twang. She’d had her foray with him last night and she knew she couldn’t have been anything special. So why would he come back for more? If that’s what he was doing.
At the far end of the corridor, steps led up. At the top was still another door, and Von Holden opened it. Standing aside, he ushered her in, then closed the door behind them.
Joanna stood open-mouthed, looking up. They were in a room taken up entirely by an enormous waterwheel driven by the flow of a deep and fast-running stream.
“The system provides independent electric power for the estate,” Von Holden said. “Be careful, the floor is quite slippery.”
