really. It was all the things I thought I wanted to become....
Sitting in the Gralyn Hotel. Watching a college boy eat a sandwich outside. Thinking that Port-Smithe is nearly perfect. Thinking about the Loner from Coastown. About Nickie Handy. Damian... Bizarre thoughts. Like whether I'll be alive one year from this exact moment.... Am I?
The Rose Diary
May 10, 1979; Washington, D.C. Thursday morning. The Tenth Day of the Season.
At 10:00 A.M. San Dominica time, 9:00 A.M. in Washington, Mrs. Susan Chaplin sat out in the charming garden cafe of the Gralyn Hotel on N Street.
Mrs. Chaplin wore a cream blouse with matching scarf; a navy skirt; blue-and-white spectators; big sunglasses pushed back on her hair.
She was toying with warm baking-powder biscuits, creamed finnan haddie, and a London prostitute who went by the stage name Betsy Port-Smithe.
Mrs. Susan Chaplin was the stage name for Carrie Rose.
'What I have in mind,' Carrie explained, watching a Washington hippie eat an impossibly stuffed Blimpie on the other side of beautifully sculpted hedges, 'is a little, uhm, unusual....'
'Unusual?' Port-Smithe shrugged. 'Well, let's see. I'm too young, and too good, to get beat up for it. That means any sum of money, Mrs. Chaplin... what is unusual?' The tall, sandy-haired woman started to laugh. 'You want me to pop out of a charlotte russe at someone's fund-raising dinner?'
Carrie Rose began to laugh, too.
When Port-Smithe began to giggle, some of the other patrons of the garden cafe began to sneak glances at the two of them. The young women were framed against a background of plain green umbrellas and the beginnings of Georgetown. Both looked very muth a part of the expensive, former embassy scene at the Gralyn. From the look of them, the two women might even be sisters. The resemblance was startling.
An attentive waiter slipped away their breakfast plates (fish, bran flakes, porridge). He placed plump grapes and shiny pears at the center of the table.
'Some time in the next week,' Carrie (Mrs. Chaplin) continued when the laughing had stopped, my husband, Damian, is due to arrive here in Washington. He's coming directly from an obnoxious, hectic, brutal series of business conferences in the Caribbean.... Damian sells clothes. Expensive women's clothes.
'At any rate, for some private reasons, I can't be here to meet him. At least I can't wait around here for the entire week....'
Port-Smithe sat with a plump grape ready to be popped into her pouty mouth. 'And?
'I'd like you to meet Damian for me.... I'd like you to meet him at the St. James, and- stay with him a night if I'm not here. That's all.
'Do you know how much I might charge?' Betsy Port-Smithe asked. 'For a week of waiting around?'
'I don't. But I'll pay you two hundred a day. Plus your room at the St. James. Plus your food.... You're free as a bird until Damian comes. You can even work, if you like. I mean, I realize you're very good, Betsy. That's the whole idea.
The London call girl smiled. She thought that she had it figured out now.... This prissy young American wife was looking for some kind of m6nage A trois. She just didn't have the nerve to ask for it.... Well, fine and dandy.
'to Damian. ' Port-Smithe raised a cup of coffee with eau-de-vie.
6 6To Damian.' Carrie Rose smiled demurely. She was beginning to get a very good feeling about the way things were breaking on her side of the partnership.
That afternoon she had to fly out of Dulles International. to Zurich. to money, power, and those wonderful little munchkins who make the world run so fast and furiously.
Carrie was well aware that -she had only one day left now. Approximately thirty hours to outwit several self- acclaimed geniuses, all of them male.
Coastown, San Dominica
they had carefully hidden Peter Macdonald in an expensive suite at the posh Coastown Golf and Racquet Condominiums.
A minimum of five CIA operatives-top men in the Caribbean account-ate, slept, and read Penthouse and Alistair Maclean novels in the sevenroom suite with him.
As many as eight agents were there the first day. Three times that many rode pink-canopied golf carts around the manicured lawns all through the night. It was an accepted fact that it would take an army to get Macdonald out of there alive. Up to his chest in steaming water in the pink marble bathtub, Peter floated quietly in one of the three condominium bathrooms. There was a strange feeling in his head.... He'd actually felt his mind go snap Wednesday afternoon.
Standing beside the Fish 'n Fool, the black policeman holding him by both shoulders, whispering loudly, 'Jane was killed this morning. I'm very sorry, mister.
Snap.
Like breaking a bone, tearing a tendon. Never knowing before that his head was so fragile.
It wasn't exactly that he wouldn't be able to exist without Janie. He would. Had for twenty-odd years before he met her.... It was more that he didn't think he could be completely sane without her....
Sane was something he'd never been particularly good at, anyway. Sane. Coping; content; not painfully lonely; not jumping into West Point because you think it will make your father love you.
Six-fifteen A.M. on his old Timex. Ten days since it all began.
