Pull Focus, page 18
“Her visa had expired,” Samantha explained. “She filed for an extension while she awaited permanent status, but there’d been a delay in it coming through. She was supposed to leave until it was granted but she didn’t. It’s an expensive flight to Bosnia and back again. The prosecution won’t proceed with charges like these if they can’t guarantee the main witness will show up.”
“This poor woman is about to get kicked out of the country because she reported a rape?” I said.
“That, in a nutshell, is the problem,” Sophia said, her tone both formal and mocking at the same time. “You believed this maid over my husband, without any facts. We will boycott this festival until you are fired. And we’ll bring our considerable resources to hurrying that along.”
I took several steps closer until I was only inches from her face. It was a pleasure to watch her eyes open slightly — as much as they were able to with all her plastic surgery — in surprise. I reached out to caress the ultra-soft leather of her purse, drawing out the tense silence. A tin whistle played itself rat-tat-tat along my veins. “The problem, in a nutshell, is that you can afford to pay eight thousand Euros for a Birkin bag and the woman has to get on a plane back to a country where that amount would be several years’ income. And you think you’ve been wronged. Get the fuck out of my office, and my city.”
“Jane —” a shocked Samantha said, but I held up my hand to stop her. Sophia Bennini took an involuntary step backward. It was the slightest signal of intimidation, but one had to take one’s small victories where they came.
“Let me ask you one question, Ms. Bennini,” I said. “Do you intend to stay with your husband in the long run?”
Her expression had not altered with my outburst. “You look down on me because I am not some quivering woman surprised at her husband’s infidelity.” Her voice dripped with scorn. “You know, yes, that all men can and will commit infidelity if given the means? They’ll make up the motive on a dime, and believe their own justification, too, if they’re the type inclined to look for absolution. Really, it’s just a primal act of fucking to them. My husband bought sex with the chambermaid because she was there and willing, and then she decided to up the ante. He’s had affairs, yes, we all know that from the papers. There is always some woman willing to believe the crumbs of attention a man throws her way means something more than it does. Some phone calls here, supportive emails there, maybe he even takes her to the theater, makes time for a luncheon near Christmas, and voilà, she creates fantasies. Really, she is less than casual sex on the side; just one more obligation to manage once the sense of trespass is gone. Who is to be despised more? The man who cannot face limitations or the woman who’s the fool?”
I walked back around my desk and sat down. “It’s strangely a relief to have my own realism dwarfed by your worldview.”
“I am not a quitter and won’t be perceived as one. I’ll leave my husband in my own good time.”
And with that, Ms. Bennini was out the door.
Chapter Fourteen
Johnnie stood before me, French cuffs of his shirt stained, the signature Valentino pants rumpled beyond recognition, a caricature of himself. I’d seen Johnnie drunk many times but, still, his air of dissolution stunned me.
“I should have known you’d be the one person who could find me,” he said, pulling me into a clumsy embrace, even before I had the chance to step over the threshold. I willed myself to stand still, one of his hands smoothing my hair, the other holding a wine bottle that bounced against my legs.
We stood for as long as I could stand it, Johnnie rocking us from side to side, me trying to keep us from tipping over. Finally, I pulled away.
“Are you going to invite me in?” I asked. “I desperately need a cup of tea.”
Johnnie waived the wine bottle unsteadily and pulled me into the penthouse suite. “I can do better than that.”
“Tea is all I want. I’m dead on my feet from the day.”
“You know how much I hate to drink alone.”
“It’s past midnight. I need some help staying awake.”
“You always were such a sanctimonious cunt about alcohol.”
A sharp left into taciturn — Johnnie’s specialty when blotto. He pushed me down onto the sofa, and went into the kitchen for another glass, settling down far too close to me upon his return. “How’s the new gig?” he asked, filling both glasses to the brim.
“Chaotic,” I said. “How are you?”
Johnnie waived his wine glass around the room. “Oh, you know. Surviving.”
I took a sip of wine. All the lines I’d practiced on the way over to dig out information without raising his ire dissipated as I wondered what opioid of hope had ever deluded me into thinking that marriage to Johnnie would end any way other than disaster. “I know about the missing money from Smythe,” I said flatly. “And about the Kazakhstan oil leases.”
Johnnie went still. There was no way of predicting which way he’d go, and I knew better than to rush into his silence. Minutes passed as I looked around the Yorkville condo where we’d lived out our short cohabitation, completely unchanged in the decade since I’d packed feverishly one morning and bundled all my suitcases into a taxi. Three years later, when Robert died, Johnnie moved back into the familial home to keep an eye on Hazel, whose drinking was getting worse — there was no happiness dividend for her in widowhood, the bitterness was too entrenched. Johnnie gloated at the time that he’d sold the condo for double the original price and wasn’t it too bad our prenuptial agreement precluded me from profiting.
With Johnnie missing, I’d asked David to check title on the condo. Johnnie continually tested people’s loyalties, but not to escape them. More than anyone I’d ever met, Johnnie craved the familiar, clung to it as a way to keep his worst tendencies in check. I thought he might well have held onto our matrimonial home as a bolt hole from Hazel when the need arose.
The ownership came back as a numbered company, and I came knocking on the door.
“The OSC leaned on me,” I continued. “I hired a private investigator to find out what was going on.”
“Why you?”
“The entire c-suite executive went vamoose. I was left holding the bag.”
“Did you tell them where I was?”
“I didn’t know for sure.”
“You wouldn’t have anyhow. Betrayal is best contained within the family, right, my darling? No outsiders need apply.”
I stayed silent. Words were hand grenades, and I didn’t yet know which one I needed to detonate.
“Bob’s gone?” Johnnie asked.
“He’s back now. I saw him yesterday morning.”
“Where was he?”
“Raising money to replenish the working capital account before we were shut down. Or charged. Or both.” I paused, considering how much it was expedient to tell him. “It’s best to talk to him directly. I don’t know very much about that side of things.”
“Sainted Bob. Dastardly Johnnie. And the Prize.” Johnnie took a long drink of his wine glass. “Some things never change.”
“We’re not quite Casablanca,” I said, giving in and drinking more of the wine myself.
“Aren’t I the hunchback of Notre Dame to you?”
“Spare me the hypocrisy of playing the victim, Johnnie,” I snapped, slipping far too easily into the rhythm of our ill-suited marriage. “We were both there, we both got the T-shirt.”
Johnnie barked a laugh, jumping up to pace. Fighting to regain an upper hand on himself.
He finally sat back down again. “Has my brother raised the money?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“You really need to discuss it with him.”
I reached to pick up my wine glass, just as Johnnie’s hand darted out to grasp my wrist, sending the contents flying. Even hammered, he had a strength that belied his thin frame.
“Please don’t,” I said, the humiliation at having to ask almost as overwhelming as the pain. Anger coursed alongside fear in my veins but the muscle memory of forced acquiescence was older, and more entrenched. Johnnie’s eyes filled with tears, but still his fingers dug into my skin. He’d spent his life failing to live up to everyone’s expectations and I was the only one there to pay the price. “You’re hurting me,” I said softly.
Slowly, the hold began to lessen. “You know I’ve never wanted to do that,” he said.
“I know.”
“You’re the only person I’ve ever loved.”
“I know.”
“I wasn’t a perfect husband, but I gave your mother a better end of life, didn’t I?” Johnnie said quietly. “The final tally shouldn’t be in the red, darling.”
I sucked in air. That wound was still open. “Thanks for that.”
We both sat slumped against the couch. At least ten minutes passed in a silence so complete that only a thousand dollars per square foot could buy it. I started to doze off, waking only as I felt Johnnie take the leaning glass from my hand. My eyes opened as I felt his lips on my fingertips.
“You lit up my life the moment you walked into that television studio,” he said softly, running my fingers along his cheek. “All day I’d think about you, barely able to wait until I could see you next. At night I’d be on fire, hearing your laugh, imagining your hair across your breasts as you climbed on top of me. Every ounce of me wanted you in a way I’d never known. Or have ever known since.” He put my hand back in my lap, patting it. “But you were never really mine. You deliberately moved left when I moved right. I’d move closer and you’d withdraw. I always knew that your ambition was too big to be contained by that town, but you lacked a way out. I was happy to be the ladder, I was happy to take care of your mother, and you. Hell, I thought it was my privilege to do so. To provide the kind of security you’d never had.” He paused to wipe away tears. My hand instinctively reached out to his misery. “It wasn’t until I finally came to understand it was unlikely a woman in her twenties would have those kind of fertility problems, that I realized just how indifferent you were to me after all.”
We sat, holding hands, defeated, until his tears subsided and he pulled away, using his shirt sleeve to dry them. He leaned back, arm slung tiredly over his eyes.
“How did Bob raise the money?”
I didn’t want to go there, but it couldn’t be avoided. “He sold forty-nine percent of the firm to a British private bank.”
Johnnie’s body curled in upon itself, like a hedgehog. I put a hand on his back, only to feel him scurry away from the touch. Dawn would break in a couple hours, and I’d be officially declared missing in action. At best, I had one ask of Johnnie and time was running short. Why he took the money and what he did with it was less pressing to me than eliminating the threat Anna Basmanova posed to us all.
“Anna Basmanova is stalking me,” I said, trying to use my calmest voice. “I’d like to talk to you about that.”
He stiffened.
“I didn’t know she was Anna Basmanova at first,” I said. “Just an unbelievably attractive woman with an accent I couldn’t place appearing out of thin air. Said you had unspecified business interests in common. That she wanted the four of us to get together for a drink. I refused to commit to that, or to give her any information, which provoked her further. I didn’t learn the wider truth until David tracked her down.”
“David?”
“My investigator and bodyguard.”
“Bodyguard?”
“I felt threatened.”
Johnnie sprang to his feet and began to pace again. He tucked his shirt in, running his hands through his hair to comb it.
“Though, to be fair, she didn’t make an explicit threat to me,” I continued, standing up myself to stretch out my back. “She just oozed threat somehow.”
Johnnie headed toward the kitchen. “Trust me, Jane, I know exactly what you mean.”
I followed, perching on a kitchen stool as he put on the kettle and set about making us a pot of tea. His mercury seemed to be dropping.
“She said you were in a business deal with her and got cold feet, and she’s looking for either you or Bob,” I ventured, once I had a cup of tea in my hands.
“Bob has nothing to do with this.”
“She’s hedging her bets on any way to reach you.”
“She’s a smart cookie,” Johnnie said, filling his own teacup. “He’d give me up before you would.”
In the starkness of the overhead kitchen lighting, in the middle of a night, some truths were difficult to sidestep. Johnnie was right, and he was wrong. I walked back to the living room and pulled an envelope from my bag, returning to perch once again on the kitchen stool.
“What is it?” Johnnie asked, eyes precisely focused for the first time since I’d arrived.
“I have not, and will not, tell Anna Basmanova, or anyone else, where you are. Ever.” I didn’t want to spook Johnnie further by mentioning the RCMP.
“But?”
I slid the envelope across the black granite of the countertop. “She wants you to sign the legal paperwork on the oil leases. The ‘or else’ wasn’t articulated, but she doesn’t mean to give up.”
Johnnie drank his tea, eyes holding my own, over the rim of the cup. His expression was inscrutable. “I’m afraid that’s not possible, Jane,” he said finally, taking his cup to the sink. “She will need to be incentivized another way.”
I nodded. “Do you have any ideas on how?”
“That’s up to others to take care of.”
“What others?”
“There are authorities, even in Kazakhstan.”
“What does that mean?”
Johnnie came around the island to sit on the stool beside me.
“You have no horse in this race,” he said. “Keep this David close for the next few days, and by then Anna will understand there’s no advantage to intimidating you.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” I said, slamming the cup down too hard on the granite counter. The noise vibrated through the narrow space between us, a sine curve measuring the pressure.
“It means,” Johnnie said very softly, “I never agreed to sell my stake. She intimated Dimitri, my original partner, into selling his shares to her at a deep discount. But not me. She’s powerful and very dangerous, have no doubt about that. But I can’t legally sign away the rights to something I no longer own.”
His face was so close, the inadvertent spittle from his mouth landed on my own. It was a minute before I pieced it all together. “You flipped your stake in the leases to a third party that’s not Dimitri and is not Anna Basmanova?”
Johnnie touched his finger from his nose to my own.
“Who?”
“I’m not telling you that,” he said.
“Do you know Alexei Panov by chance?”
“Leave it alone, Jane. Too much information will put you in danger.”
“Danger?” I said, despite the voice inside compelling me to back off. “That’s a funny thing about all this. Everyone thinks they’re protecting Jane by keeping her in the dark, when all they’re really doing is putting a fucking noose around her neck.”
“It’s not a good sign when you start talking about yourself in the third person.”
“I know that,” I snapped, spinning the other way off the stool and making a beeline for the front door. “Goodbye, Johnnie.”
My shoulders were grabbed from behind, and Johnnie turned me to face him. “Don’t walk out on me again.”
I swallowed, hard. Johnnie could go from deep emotion to intense anger to unspeakable gentleness without warning — or vice versa. A calm before a storm, or a storm before a calm.
He pulled me close into an embrace, mouth to my ear, hand on my hair. “I just need to hold you one last time.”
Tears formed in my eyes, both from the futility of our intertwined lives and from the pressure of Johnnie’s hand pulling my head back, stretching the neck muscles too far. His breath was hot against my neck. “I will always love you more than life itself,” he whispered.
“I know.”
“Come away with me.”
I watched the dark sky through the window, lit from behind with the streetlights and cityscape. I started to move my knuckles up my body, ready to go for his eyes. “You know I can’t do that.”
He pulled my hair back so suddenly, and so furiously, that the pain took a moment to catch up to what was happening. Then the tsunami overtook me. Ears roared from the sound of blood vessels popping, or maybe it was me howling, or Johnnie raging. I tried to realign my neck by falling backward but the iron vise of his other arm held me in place, like a grotesque caricature of the old-fashioned dip and kiss. All I could do was look at the tortured regret in Johnny’s red, runny eyes as everything faded to black.
When I came to, the sun was higher in the sky than I needed it to be. How many times had I lain in this bed staring at the climbing or setting sun, listening to Johnnie sleep off a foul mood, caused by alcohol or depression or both. He hated waking up alone when an “incident” had occurred, my presence the bulwark against the inevitability of facing whatever damage he’d done in his rage. I learned how to tell time exactly by every shadow the sun and moon made. But this time, I knew the bed beside me was empty.
The pain was too great to stand up. I rolled slowly off the mattress, misjudging the speed so I landed on my knees, not my feet like I had planned. The underwire of my bra dug into my chest cavity, and the elastic band of my underwear was twisted but still on my hips. Invaded in other ways, but not this.
I crawled on all fours toward the door until I reached a chaise longue, which I used to drag myself up, pausing so as to not black out a second time.
I made it to the kitchen, putting on the kettle to boil. Johnnie had carefully laid out all the accoutrements of tea-making for me on the counter, but the air of abandonment was unmistakable. He would not be back. I slowly walked the other rooms, using furniture and walls for support, thinking about the collateral damage people are capable of inflicting on those they claim to love.
