Читать книгу Cut And Run - Carla Neggers, Carla Neggers - Страница 6

Len Wetherall settled back against the delicate wrought-iron rail in front of the Club Aquarian, enjoying the sunny, cold mid-December afternoon. He was a people watcher, and there was no place better to watch people than New York. Here, for a change, he could do the watching; he wasn’t always the one who was watched. He was three inches shy of seven feet tall, an ex-NBA superstar, black, rich, and a man of exquisite taste and enormous responsibilities. He knew he didn’t blend in on the streets of SoHo any more than he did anywhere else. But here no one gave a damn.

People were moving fast, even for the city. Len watched a pink-haired woman in a raccoon coat swing around the corner, covering some ground. She had on red knit gloves and red vinyl boots, and her mouth was painted bright red. Her eyes—

Len straightened up, buttoning one button of his camel wool overcoat. Her eyes were the darkest emerald green, and he’d recognize them anywhere.

“J.J. Pepper.”

When she spotted him, she grinned, her teeth sparkling white against her bright lips. Even in the harsh afternoon light, her eyes were as mysteriously alluring as everything else about her. She came right up to him, stood on her tiptoes, and he bent down and planted a kiss on her overly madeup cheek. His wife, Merrie, couldn’t understand why J.J. wanted to paint up her hair and face like that. “She must be a real light blond underneath that colored mousse she uses,” Merrie had said. “And I’ll bet her skin’s perfect. Why would she want to cover up all that?”

Why, indeed? But Len had learned not to ask J.J. Pepper too many questions. She’d just give him one of her dazed looks, as if they weren’t operating on the same planet, and avoid a straight answer. He’d asked her once how old she was, and she’d said, “Oh—around thirty.” Like she was making herself up. The colored hair, the vintage clothes, the gaudy makeup, and the rhinestones were all a part of her look. They were what she wanted other people to see. Her package. During his fifteen years with the Knicks, Len had listened to everybody’s ideas about how he should be packaged. He’d learned the hard way just to go on and be himself. J.J. would learn, too, sooner or later.

J.J. Pepper had first glided into the Club Aquarian that spring. The place had been open just one year, and already it was one of the hottest nightclubs in New York. Len had opened its doors shortly after his final season as a power forward with the Knicks. His original dream had been to start up his own down and dirty jazz joint, but if nothing else his years on the basketball court had taught him who he was and, maybe more important, who he wasn’t. Down and dirty wasn’t his style, and he wasn’t a purist about jazz. He liked to mix in some popular, some soft rock, some easy classical, turn the musicians loose, and let them do their thing. He wanted his club to have a little polish, a certain cachet. Tall ceilings. He wanted it to be the kind of place where people could have a good time, wear their best clothes, be their best selves.

Looking at J.J. the first time, he didn’t think she’d fit in. She’d had on one of her nutty outfits, a thirties dress and lots of rhinestones, and had plunked herself down at the baby grand, like, hell, baby, I belong here. Right then he’d known she had it, never mind the crazy lavender hair and the feeling she wasn’t quite on the level with him.

She’d started to play, stopped after a few seconds, and turned to him. “Did you know this piano has a muddy bass?”

“That right,” he said, noncommittal.

“I’ll compensate today, but you should have it looked at.”

“Sure, babe. I’ll get right on it.”

Before he could pull her little butt off the bench, she’d started to play. Then he didn’t want to stop her. He’d just stood there, listening. Her technique was awesome. He’d never heard such sounds come out of that piano, damned muddy bass or no damned muddy bass. But she didn’t let go; she held on tight to all the notes she had memorized. He could feel something there inside her, waiting to get out. And when it did—man, he wanted to be there. The walls’d be shaking.

She played three tunes and stopped. She turned around on the bench and looked up at him with those pink and lavender streaked eyes for his verdict. She didn’t seem winded or nervous. Len had the feeling that if he told her she wouldn’t do, she’d just shrug her nice round shoulders and walk off, ego intact.

“Not bad, J.J.” A fake name, he decided. Who the hell would call a kid with eyes like that J.J.? He didn’t believe the Pepper, either.

“Thank you,” she said, polite, but not what he’d have called relieved. She knew she was good.

“You need to let yourself go, put some heat into what you’re doing.”

She frowned, smacking her plum-colored lips together. “Improvise, you mean?”

“Yeah, improvise.” He thought, bub, what’re you getting yourself into? But then he heard himself say, “You can play the early crowds, some lunches if you want. I’m looking for somebody to do Sunday brunch, if you’re interested. We sometimes bring in a classical pianist. You know any Bach and Beethoven?”

“I’d prefer to stick to jazz and popular. When would you like me to start?”

“Tomorrow night.”

“I can’t start tomorrow night.”

“Can’t?”

“I have a previous commitment.”

“You playing another club?”

“No.”

She wasn’t going to explain. “What about Sunday?”

“You want to open me with a brunch?”

“Yeah. Earl Hines you’re not, babe.”

Those high, sweet white cheeks of hers got red. “Okay, Mr.—”

She’d forgotten his damn name. “Wetherall,” he supplied, deadpan. “Len Wetherall.”

She’d never heard of him. Took her two weeks to figure out who he was. Told him she followed hockey, not basketball. He’d dropped the name Wayne Gretzky, but she’d just said, “Who?” It had been another one of those little inconsistencies. They all added up to a big fat lie, but Len had decided if J.J. Pepper ever wanted to level with him, then he’d listen.

Until then, he’d let her be whoever she wanted to be.

“Hey, sweet cheeks,” he drawled now, giving her a slow grin. Her eyes were done up in a glittery gold. “Good to see you. How was New Zealand?”

For a second she looked as if she didn’t know what he was talking about, as if she’d forgotten she’d walked out on him four months ago to go mountain climbing in New Zealand. Then everything clicked and she laughed. “New Zealand was terrific.”

He’d have believed she’d been to Yakutsk just as well. “Bring me back a sheep?”

“Postcards.”

Where’d she pick up postcards? Not in New Zealand, for damn sure. “You ready to play?”

She gave him a wide smile, and this time there was relief in it. “Sure.”

“Then get in there. Later you can tell me about New Zealand.”

“Be glad to.”

The glint in her eyes told him she was having a grand time lying to him. But inside, the late afternoon crowd and the baby grand piano were waiting, and she seemed glad to see them both.

The Dutchman smoked a cigar as he stood alone on the park side of Central Park West at Eighty-first Street. Across from him on one corner was the sprawling Museum of Natural History, on the other, the prestigious Beresford. From his vantage point, he could review the two entrances to the Beresford on Eighty-first Street as well as the one on Central Park West. Doormen in green uniforms with gold braid were posted at each entrance. They didn’t worry Hendrik de Geer, if he needed to, he could get past them. For now, he was only observing.

He saw the woman in the raccoon coat step out of a yellow cab on Eighty-first, a wide, busy street that cut through the park. She said something to one of the doormen and was permitted to go inside. Her hair was pinkish blond. At first Hendrik had assumed it was a trick of the sunlight, but he soon realized he was mistaken and that, indeed, her hair was pink. She had left the Beresford a few hours earlier. He’d waited for her, smoking in the cold. He had to see her once more, to be sure.

He was sure now. She was Juliana Fall. He had seen her smile and her eyes. She could be no one else.

All at once the cigar tasted bitter. It was a Havana, his only extravagance. Johannes Peperkamp had given Hendrik his first cigar when he was still just a boy, and he’d choked on the smoke and vomited, embarrassing himself in front of the older friend he’d so badly wanted to impress. Hendrik had long since stopped worrying about trying to impress anyone. All that interested him was survival. His judgment of character and his ability to size up a situation were quick and accurate, and over the years those abilities had helped him stay alive. As he grew older, he found himself becoming increasingly dependent on his instincts. He could rely no longer upon the physical strength or the quickness of youth—or with his whitening blond hair and age-toughened, wrinkling skin, on its appearance. What he had was experience. Instincts.

His instincts now were telling him to run. He would need only to disappear, as he had many times in the past. It was a particular skill of his. He could do it.

He threw down the cigar and stamped it out with the heel of his boot. Then he turned around and walked through the stone gate into the park. My instincts, he thought, be damned.

Juliana Fall, aka J.J. Pepper, let the hot water of the shower rinse the last remnants of the pink mousse from her hair, and it felt as if a part of herself were being sucked down the drain. You’re not J.J.! Yes, but wasn’t J.J. real? Hadn’t Len kissed J.J. on the cheek and hadn’t the crowd at the Club Aquarian applauded J.J.?

J.J. existed. She was an aberration, perhaps, but she did exist. She had even taken over an entire bedroom in Juliana’s sprawling, elegant apartment. It was decorated twenties-style, and the closet and drawers brimmed with vintage clothes and jewelry from between the two World Wars. J.J. fare. Juliana seldom was seen in anything but the latest designs from the collections of top designers.

Stepping out of the shower, Juliana wrapped herself in a giant soft white bathsheet and towel-dried her hair. In the mirror, she looked like herself again—blond-haired, paleskinned, every bit the world-famous concert pianist. But her mind hummed with the chords of Duke Ellington, Earl Hines, and Eubie Blake. Her autumn European tour—she hadn’t stepped foot in New Zealand—was to have driven J.J. Pepper from her system, exorcised her, because J.J. was not a part of her but something that had possessed her.

At least that was what she’d told herself. But twenty-four hours back from Paris and still suffering jet lag, she was dressed in a thirties green satin dress and off to the Aquarian. She’d expected, hoped, dreaded Len would tell her to get lost. He hadn’t. He’d told her to play. And, by God, had she!

She’d had a good time.

A hell of a good time.

J.J. Pepper was back, and Juliana Fall didn’t know what to do about her. Tell Len the truth? Tell herself the truth? That she, Juliana Fall, was the pink-haired, free-spirited, jazz-playing J.J. Pepper?

She went into her own bedroom and put on a simple white Calvin Klein shirt, a straight black wool skirt, and a raspberry wool jacket. J.J.’s raspberry boots would have matched the outfit, but she chose instead her black Italian boots and passed over the raccoon coat for her black cashmere. She was having dinner tonight with Shuji, and if there was one thing Eric Shuji Shizumi would never understand, it was J.J. Pepper. Shuji was a phenomenal pianist, a wild, intense, impatient genius who exhausted audiences with his thrilling performances. He was forty-eight, and in his long career, he’d taken on only one student: Juliana Fall.

“And if he finds out about J.J.,” she said aloud as she waited for the elevator, “he’ll lop off your head with one of his authentic Japanese short swords.”

He’d threatened to do the same for transgressions far less serious than playing jazz incognito in a SoHo nightclub.

Halfway to the lobby, she remembered she was still wearing J.J.’s gaudy rhinestone ring, which she snatched off, dropped into her handbag, and tried to forget.

The Dutchman had walked across Central Park, ignoring the falling temperature and the lightly falling snow. Children on the plastic things they now used for sleds laughed as they passed him; he ignored them, too. He crossed Fifth Avenue and continued along East Seventy-ninth to Madison and up several more blocks, until he came to a little bake shop with white-trimmed windowpanes. Inside, the display of Dutch wooden shoes filled with chocolates and tiny gifts made it look as if St. Nicholas had already been there. Sint Nicolaas. Hendrik hadn’t thought of him in years.

Catharina’s Bake Shop the sign read in simple delft-blue letters. The Dutchman lingered in front of the window. Small round tables covered with delft-blue cloths were crowded with customers, laughing, happy customers indulging themselves with hot chocolate, silver pots of coffee, china pots of tea, fat cream puffs, perfect tarts and trays of scones, tiny sandwiches, assorted jams and cheeses. Glass cases were stocked with good things to take home, and smiling white-aproned waitresses bustled among the customers.

For the first time in more than forty years, Hendrik de Geer felt himself swelling with nostalgia. He had to blink away hot tears—him! A couple hurried past him, and when they opened the door, he heard the tinkle of a little bell and smelled cinnamon, nutmeg, anise, butter, and fresh coffee. It was almost more than he could bear. They were the smells of his youth, and he choked with emotion, unable to hold back the memories.

He didn’t venture inside. He shoved his cold hands into the pockets of his cheap overcoat and stared through the window, watching a couple torture themselves over which cake to choose. The chocolate or the buttercream? If only his choices were that trivial.

A woman appeared behind the glass case, and for a moment Hendrik thought her radiant smile was directed at him. Catharina… he wanted to cry out to her.

But the sight of him would only bring her pain, and he stepped back so that she wouldn’t be able to see him out on the street, alone in the dark. She spoke to the couple, and he watched, marveling at how little she’d changed. Even now, in her late fifties, there was something so captivatingly fresh and innocent about her. Her wispy white-blond hair was braided on top of her head like some long-ago Dutch queen, but without queenly arrogance, and she wore a turquoise knit dress beneath her apron. She had a strong chin and nose, almost too strong, but her dark green eyes were round and soft and exactly as Hendrik remembered.

She helped the couple choose the chocolate cake and wrapped it herself, and when the Dutchman heard the tinkle of the little doorbell as they left, he was halfway down the block.

Choices. What nonsense was this about choices? He had no choice. As always he would simply do what had to be done.

Eric Shuji Shizumi had lit a cigarette over coffee—a bad sign. He was demonically good-looking, a wiry man with sharp features, longish fine black hair touched with gray, and probing black eyes. He was notoriously single-minded. Born in San Francisco, he was sansei, third-generation Japanese-American. But his earliest memories were of a concentration camp in Wyoming, something he never discussed, never permitted to be printed in his program notes. He could have married a dozen times over, but it was the piano that possessed his soul and consumed his life—and, some said, Juliana Fall. She had heard the rumors but had always dismissed them. She knew Shuji at least as well as he knew her, and whatever had bonded them together for the past twenty years, it wasn’t sex and romance. Their relationship was volatile and incomprehensible. In their own way, they were devoted to each other, but neither had shown any inclination to marry, either each other or anyone else. Shuji was no longer formally her teacher, but she was still widely described as his sole student and continued to rely on his advice and guidance. She supposed she still needed his approval, and, too, he understood the demands of international artistic fame better than most. Yet the isolation demanded by his profession never bothered him the way it often did Juliana. He was content to sit for hours at the piano, alone with his work, day after day, month after month, year after year. He had little sympathy with his sole student’s need to be with people on occasion.

He blew out his match and dropped it in an ashtray, exhaling a noxious cloud of smoke. “Juliana,” he said, “we need to talk.”

Her heart pounded. He’s found out about J.J.! But that was impossible. Shuji would never have gotten through dinner if he’d known she’d played Mose Allison at a SoHo club that very afternoon. He’d have gone after her with a steak knife. “About what?” she asked.

“What’s happening to you.”

“Me? I’ve just returned from a grueling European tour, and Saturday night I’m doing my hundredth concert this year at Lincoln Center. That’s what’s happening to me.” Shuji held the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, not in-haling. They were at a tiny, bring-your-own wine Italian restaurant just off Broadway on the Upper West Side. It wasn’t glitzy, and if any of their fellow diners recognized the two world-famous musicians, they left them alone. Juliana was drinking decaffeinated café au lait, hoping it would counteract the wine and food and jet lag so she could go home and run through the Beethoven concerto she would be performing in two days.

“And after the concert?” Shuji asked. “Then what?”

“I go to Vermont for a week or so on a well-deserved vacation, and then I come back and spend the next few months working and recording. I don’t have another concert until spring. I’m cutting back some this year. You know all that, Shuji, so what are you trying to get at?”

“Don’t go to Vermont,” he said.

“What?”

“You heard me. Don’t go.”

“Shuji, I need rest. Dammit, I deserve a break!”

“You need work.”

“I work all the time. I’ve been on the road for four months—”

“The real excitement of being a pianist is in the practice room, not on the concert stage. Juliana, you’ve been operating at a killing pace the past few years. I know that. And you know I support your cutting back from a hundred concerts a year. But I don’t support your going to Vermont, at least not right away. You need to experience the excitement of the practice room again, and as soon as possible.”

“Jesus Christ, Shuji, I’m only going to be gone a week!”

Shuji took a deep drag on his cigarette, held the smoke a moment, then exhaled. Juliana coughed and drank some of her café au lait, but he paid no attention. As usual, he was absorbed totally in his own thoughts. If we were married, she thought, we’d last two weeks.

“A pianist doesn’t look forward to a vacation where there is no piano,” he said.

You shit, she thought, but held back. She owned a small, antique Cape Cod house overlooking the Batten Kill River in southwestern Vermont; during the winter, she liked to keep a fire going in the center chimney fireplace. She would sit in front of the flames with an old quilt spread on her lap and read books, not thinking about music. It was true she didn’t have a piano in Vermont. She didn’t even have a stereo. What she had was silence.

“Shuji,” she said carefully, controlling her impatience. “I am not you. I need this time out, and I’m going to take it.”

“It would be a mistake.”

“Why all of a sudden would going to Vermont be a mistake? It’s not as if I’ve never done it before.”

“I was in Copenhagen, Juliana.”

“Shit.”

“Yes.”

Copenhagen hadn’t been one of her more memorable performances. In fact, it had been distinctly forgettable. But Shuji didn’t comprehend things like bad nights, and Juliana knew better than to make excuses. “It was an inferior performance,” she admitted, “but skipping Vermont isn’t going to change that—and what the hell are you sneaking into my concerts for? Haven’t you got anything better to do?”

“I was in Paris also.”

“Well, then, you know Copenhagen was an aberration.” She had received a standing ovation and rave notices in Paris—and had earned them.

But Shuji was shaking his head solemnly as he crushed his cigarette in the ashtray. “I’m not interested in what went on on the surface, I’m interested in what’s going on beneath the surface.” He always talked like that; it drove her nuts. “I heard something in Copenhagen and in Paris—on a ‘bad’ night and on a ‘good’ night, if you insist. It was an uneasiness, I believe, a hint of unpredictability. No one else would notice, of course, but soon they will, if you let it get away from you. Be aware of it. Control it. Find out what it is, Juliana, and use it to your advantage. The only place you can do that is in the practice room.”

What he’d heard was J.J. Pepper creeping into her work, but that wasn’t something Juliana wanted to discuss with Eric Shuji Shizumi. “Fine. I’ll work on it after Vermont.”

“You’re in a funk, Juliana.”

“I’m not.”

His black eyes probed her face. “Are you afraid of burning out?”

“No.”

“I was, when I was thirty. You don’t remember. You were just a child and had no understanding of such things. But despite all the acclaim, the recordings, the bookings, I wondered if I’d still be around when I was thirty-five. Countless young pianists are just flash-in-the-pans, brilliant for a few years and then gone—poof. Sometimes it’s their choice; sometimes not.”

“I’m not going to go ‘poof’, I’m going to go to Vermont.”

“God knows the public’s fickle, always searching for a new star, and our competition system thrusts pianists into the public light at an incredibly young age. The pressures of being a virtuoso are enormous. You’re so exposed, so vulnerable. At thirty, the novelty’s worn off. You’ve made a great deal of money, and you must decide if you want to be in this thing for the long haul or not.”

“I’ve never considered not being a pianist.”

“Haven’t you?”

He gave her an unreadable half-smile, aware that she was lying. Of course she had. Lately, more than ever. But she couldn’t tell Shuji about the mornings she’d lain in bed wondering what her life would be like if she’d never taken up piano, if she never played again. What would she do? What could she do? She couldn’t tell him about her mounting exhaustion as the tour had worn on, about her fantasies of sticking a jazz improvisation into the middle of a Mozart sonata, about her tiresome fights with her manager, who wanted her to maintain a hundred-concert schedule and at the same time expand her repertoire and do more recordings. She couldn’t tell Shuji about her boredom with the review, the constant travel, the fancy dinners, the men she met. She couldn’t tell him about the growing monotony of it all and her fear that the monotony would follow her into the practice room, where it never had before. J.J. had counteracted some of the monotony, but she wouldn’t be around forever—and Shuji couldn’t know about J.J.

He was right. She was in a funk. But in nineteen years, she’d never once told Eric Shuji Shizumi he was right. They argued and struggled and discussed, but she never gave in to him, never permitted herself to be intimidated by his legendary status. When that happened, she would lose her independence as an artist and, she thought, as a person.

“I’m not worried about being around when I’m thirty-five, and I’m not in any funk.” She pushed aside her café au lait and sprang up, feeling tired and scared and so furious she couldn’t see clearly. Why the hell couldn’t Shuji just leave her alone! Why did he always have to push and press! “I hope to hell you’re happy, Shuji. You’ve ruined Vermont for me.”

“Good,” he said.

“Bastard. Go to hell.”

She stalked out, leaving him with the bill and a smug look on his handsome face.

From his shabby hotel room on Broadway, Hendrik de Geer put a call through to United States Senator Samuel Ryder. The Dutchman had been given the senator’s Georgetown number, and he wasn’t surprised when Ryder picked up on the first ring. It was precisely nine o’clock, when Hendrik had said he would call.

“You have your answer?” Ryder asked.

The Dutchman heard the tension in the young senator’s patrician tone, but he took no pleasure in it. “I will meet you at Lincoln Center on Saturday night.” His English was excellent, only lightly accented; he spoke Dutch only when there was no alternative. It was the language of his past. “After the concert. You’ll have a car?”

“Of course.”

“Meet me there.”

“All right. But take care the Stein woman doesn’t see you.”

Hendrik closed his eyes, just for a second, and felt the pain wash over him. The Stein woman…Rachel. But—“I need no instructions from you, Senator.” His voice was cold. “Bloch knows none of this?”

“Do you think I’m a fool?”

“Yes. You tell people what they want to hear, Senator. I know. See to it you tell Bloch nothing, do you understand? Otherwise, my friend, we have no deal.”