“Then you’ll go to the police?” Pépé asked.
“I … maybe not the police, but someone. Dragging up Stephen Falcone in this day and age could be like throwing gasoline onto that fire right there,” he said. “Can you imagine opening up the Pandora’s box of an off-the- radar project involving human testing gone wrong, having it show up in some newspaper next to a story on waterboarding or Guantánamo?”
Charles shook his head, without waiting for an answer. “I told you Theo swore he’d hurt someone each of us loved as deeply as he loved Maggie.”
The fiery figures rose up and became more menacing. The room grew hostile, unwelcoming. I resisted the urge to glance at the windows where a ghostly face from Charles’s past might be staring through the glass at the three of us.
Pépé’s voice was hoarse. “Juliette.”
Charles nodded. “Juliette. Who else?”
Of all the mental and moral blackmail Charles could have brought to bear on me that night—and I wouldn’t have thought there was anything—he’d found the path to my heart. He knew Pépé would suffer if something happened to his wife and I’d refused to do one small favor that might change the outcome of this situation, save her somehow.
I stole a look at my grandfather. His hands gripped the sides of his chair and he was staring into the fire, a bleak expression on his face. He wouldn’t ask me outright; it was my decision.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll do it.”
Chapter 8
Even now when I think back on that night in Charles’s lodge, the three of us sitting around an absurdly comforting fire in the middle of July during the hottest summer since they started keeping records, I have a hard time remembering what really happened and what I imagined had taken place. Charles’s tale of Theo Graf—a scientist he’d believed was dead for more than twenty years who suddenly popped up in California and decided to exact revenge for the accidental death of the young girl who’d been his lover almost half a century ago—sounded like the frayed memories of an old man with a guilt-ridden conscience. Or a narcissist who believed that a series of coincidences involving other people somehow revolved around himself.
The tenuous thread that held Charles’s logic together was a set of wineglasses with the Mandrake Society’s “logo” on them found near the bodies of Mel Racine and Paul Noble, and a fearful belief that Graf might have faked his death, flipped his name around to Fargo, and, for no obvious reason, decided to make good on a decades-old threat.
I have even hazier recollections of discussing this with Pépé when Charles finally called on a gardener who lived on the premises to drive us home that unnaturally cold night. The man’s placid, almost bovine, demeanor when he appeared at the door to the lodge, minutes after Charles phoned him, made me wonder if this were a regular occurrence, and whether it was a little secret to be kept from Juliette that one of her groundskeepers moonlighted as a chauffeur for her husband’s boozy get-togethers. I suspected he was well paid for keeping this extracurricular activity to himself.
“Do you think it’s possible that Teddy Fargo is hunting down anyone who was associated with the Mandrake Society? And that he’s really Theo Graf?” I asked Pépé as the driver pulled out of the Thiessmans’ gravel driveway onto the two-lane country road.
The moon had disappeared and, out here in the middle of farmland, no streetlights illuminated the hairpin turns and unspooling ribbon of hills that our driver navigated with the speed of someone who believed he was being chased. With the exception of two carriage lanterns at the entrance to a gated driveway that flashed by and the dimmed instruments on the dash, the night closed around us like a cocoon.
My head rested on Pépé’s shoulder. I had finally gotten him to put his suit jacket back on. It felt comfortingly scratchy against my cheek, smelling of his cigarettes and old-fashioned aftershave with a mingled hint of my light floral perfume.
“It does sound far-fetched, doesn’t it?” he said. “Who knows what tricks his mind is playing on him after so many years? He’s obsessed with Juliette not knowing a thing about this—and he’s had no one else to discuss it with until tonight.”
“I wish he’d told us the truth about those wineglasses before we started drinking,” I said. “It was sort of creepy once we knew their history.”
“Charles always did have a flair for drama,” Pépé said. “And embellishment.”
“Maybe that’s all this is,” I said.
“You are going to check out this wine for Mick anyway,
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“Then look for these so-called black roses and that will be the end of it with Charles. At least it will bring him some peace.” He patted my hand. “And Juliette, as well.”
His voice softened when he mentioned her name.
“Okay, I will.”
“And you will be with me for the trip out west,” he continued. “I’ll change the reservation at the hotel in San Francisco and you can stay with my friend Robert Sanábria when you go up to Napa. I’ll join you after my talk. He lives in Calistoga so you’ll be right where you need to be.” Another pat on the hand and he said, sounding happy, “It’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow someone some good, eh,
I showed up at Mick Dunne’s for tea on Saturday morning, Bastille Day, looking and feeling like something the cat dragged in. His housekeeper, a pretty, petite Hispanic girl with long, dark hair pulled into a loose bun, told me Mick was out by the pool and asked me to wait while she went to get him.
“It’s okay,” I said. “He’s expecting me and I know where to go. I’ll find him myself.”
She was new. He’d had another housekeeper when we were seeing each other and I slept here from time to time.
“Of course.” She bobbed her head, courteous and respectful, but something about the heavy-lidded flicker of her eyes told me she’d heard that line before, and each time it had been a woman who’d said it.
With a little twinge of jealousy, I wondered whom Mick was sleeping with now. Surely there was someone.
I had to walk through his gardens to get to the pool. When Mick bought his home a few years ago, he discovered that the previous owner, who had studied botany as an avocation, had worked with a horticulturist to identify and label the many exotic species of trees, shrubs, and flowers that bloomed on the parklike grounds of his estate. Mick tracked down the horticulturist and persuaded him to take the job of full-time groundskeeper, giving him carte blanche to purchase whatever new or unusual specimen he wanted. The current passion was succulents, or so I’d heard. Desert plants and cacti that looked like modern sculpture and could wound like weapons weren’t my thing; my favorite was the lush, luxurious sunken rose garden with its pretty two-tiered fountain. Mick told me that coming upon the rioting tumble of roses—espaliered climbers, bushes, shrubs, floribunda, tea roses, hybrids—the first time he saw the house had brought back a flood of memories of his childhood in London and the days when his route walking to and from school had been through Regent’s Park and Queen Mary’s Rose Gardens. He’d bought the house on the spot.
After that, each time I came here I couldn’t help but hear schoolboy voices and see shadows flicking in and out of the sunlight, imagining blazers heaped in a pile on the ground, dress shirts untucked, ties askew, the thud of a soccer ball being passed back and forth imitating the agile footwork of the current football idol who played for Arsenal or Man United.
Mick was on the phone by the side of the pool, still dressed in riding attire after being out with the horses for their morning exercise. He sat at a glass-topped table under an umbrella, legs splayed out in front of him, running a hand through his long, dark hair, intent on the conversation and the caller. I could tell by the way he sat, and his demeanor, that it was business.
He looked up and saw me, raising a finger to indicate that he would be only a moment as the housekeeper
