“Judy said he was an orphan.”
I’ll bet she did, thought Pagan. That meant that Judy would have no further questions from Lili to answer. “He charmed us all,” Pagan said. “Then he went to do his National Service as a soldier in Malaya, and the next thing we heard was that he’d been killed. We were heartbroken.”
Lili did not miss the hesitancy in Pagan’s description, or the overcarefulness of her speech, so unlike Pagan’s normal careless frankness. So there is something more to find out, Lili thought, mechanically brushing toast crumbs off her white leather trousers. “Was Judy … er … popular with boys when she was a student?”
“Judy? She worked so hard that she hardly had time for dates. Why do you ask, Lili?” Attack is the best method of defense, Pagan thought, returning Lili’s velvet-brown gaze.
She’s challenged me, Lili thought, sensing the bond between the four women, so strong it was almost tangible, an invisible wall between her and the last shreds of the mystery of her identity.
“I suppose there was no doubt that Nick was my father?”
There, I’ve said it, Lili congratulated herself.
“I should think not.” Pagan’s tone was firm with a scandalized edge. Lili realized that she would get no further, as Pagan continued, “What happened to Judy could have happened to any one of us. We were all experimenting with life, we all had our first love affairs in Switzerland and we shared everything, so it seemed natural to us to share the responsibility for you, until Judy could afford to give you a home. But she was only earning a secretary’s salary when you disappeared.”
“How did she start her business?”
“She worked in public relations, and then Maxine pushed her into starting her own business. In fact, Chazalle was
Judy’s first client. It was rough for Judy with no experience, no reputation, and no money. She keeps quiet about it now, but she was twice evicted because she couldn’t pay the rent. She was almost as broke as the Research Institute is today.” Pagan thought she might as well do what she’d come to New York to do. “My husband was so excited when I told him you were considering a donation to the Anglo-American Cancer Research Institute. He desperately needs a new electron microscope.”
Lili wriggled, feeling guilty. She had certainly lured Pagan to that meeting at the Pierre with the promise of money for cancer research. “I could ask my agent if we could open my new film with a benefit première in New York. Or a gala in London.”
“Or both?” Pagan had come a long way since, quivering with fear and shame, she had first asked for a charity donation.
“I’ll do my best,” Lili said, then added, “I wish that Maxine hadn’t had to return to France. I wanted so much to get to know you all properly.”
“You will, in time. We don’t see that much of each other these days, not that it matters.”
“Why doesn’t it matter?” asked Lili, as the waiter served their lobsters.
“A real friend is someone you don’t have to be with. These days, a friendship between two women can last longer than their marriages.” Pagan picked up her lobster crackers. “If both women accept that there will be tough times as well as good ones,” she sucked the juicy flesh from the claw, “and that sometimes you’ll want to strangle your friend and somtimes she’ll want to strangle you. A true friendship isn’t static, it comes and goes.”
“Then what pulls friends back together?” Lili wondered.
“You just feel more comfortable, more at home, with certain people than with anyone else.”
“But why?” Lili persisted.
“Oh—shared experience, understanding, tolerance and trust, that sort of thing.” Pagan gestured with a red lobster claw. “A good friendship is like a marriage is supposed to be, but very rarely is. Today, the men seem to come and go in a woman’s life, but our female friendships are often more
enduring. In fact, as marriages crash and the generation gap widens, female friendship seems to be the only growth area in relationships.”
“What do you mean?” Lili was fascinated.
“Lots of relationships are now being questioned and rethought, because it’s clear that the old relationships aren’t working as we had been led to expect, when we were young.”
“So what were you led to expect?” Lili licked a scrap of pink carcass.
“We were all taught that our purpose in life was to get a man,” said Pagan. “So we all hung around, waiting for Prince Charming to turn up.” She separated shreds of flesh from shell. “After I married, I thought that I’d live in pink bliss forever; I never imagined that my Prince Charming husband would be unkind or unfaithful. We’ve turned out to be pioneers, just as much as those women in covered wagons.” Pagan wiped her fingers on her pink napkin. “But we are pioneers of the emotions, and one of our problems is that we don’t realize this.” Lili had hardly touched her lobster, Pagan noticed as she continued. “Those pioneers knew when they were traveling through hostile territory; they could hear the war whoops, see the Indians and feel the arrows. Today, some of us are under fire, some of us are walking wounded and some of us on crutches; but our scars are invisible, and often you don’t even realize that you’ve been in battle.” Pagan paused as they ordered coffee, then continued. “The pioneers end up scalped, of course; it’s the next generation that reaps the benefit, and enjoys the promised land.”
“Where the hell is the promised land?” Lili demanded.
“A place where men and women can be honest with each other, and share their responsibilities, and base all relationships on truth, not inadequacies and fear.”
“What do you mean by fear?”
“Most relationships are based on fear to varying degrees; fear that your mother will be cross, fear that your teacher will be angry, fear that your boyfriend will leave you, fear that your boss will fire you, or fear that the Russians will kill you.”
“What do you mean by inadequacy?”
“An example of a relationship based on inadequacy is a marriage that a woman enters into because she’s frightened
that she’s unattractive, or she’s frightened that she’ll never get married, or she’s frightened that she can’t support herself.”
Slowly Lili said, “Then we are pioneers and explorers, and what we are discovering is a better way to live.”
“Hopefully, yes.”
* * *
Sand and rock spurted into the shell hole where the American war photographer and three Sydonite soldiers pressed themselves into the shuddering earth. Another shell burst at the far lip of the crater, half burying their legs. The next one will get us, thought Mark, his lean body cringing against the hot earth. I must not panic, I must not panic, I must not panic, he chanted silently to himself, like a mantra; if the next one does not get you, you will have to run, and if you panic, your legs will turn to water, and you’ll move so slowly, you’ll get hit immediately. I must not panic, I must not panic. He brushed his dirty-brown hair off his forehead and knuckled the dust from heat-sore gray eyes.
At his side, two soldiers leapt up as another shell whistled overhead; they struggled up the sliding sides of the crater, trying to run forward as the ground crumbled under their legs, and the shell ploughed into the sand behind the crater.
A burst of gunfire caught the men squarely in the neck and chest, and flung them back into the shell hole. Their blood splashed over the two remaining men crouched in the crater and Mark wiped some of the spattered drops off his camera. Mark’s wide mouth was bleeding, his big lips were suncracked and his thin face was covered with sun blisters; his small, pugnacious nose was pink and raw because he always forgot his sunblock.
Another shell howled overhead, and bullets smacked into the sand around the crater. “No way I’m going to get killed while being unprofessional,” Mark muttered as he reloaded his camera. “When they roll my carcass over, the last shot will be fit to print.”
In the few seonds the distant mortar took to reload, two Sydonite soldiers and an officer hurled themselves forward into the shell hole, falling over their dead comrades. They scrambled to their feet, pushed the bleeding bodies to one side, and started to position a missile launcher.
Mark noticed that the young officer was using an infrared tracking device to aim the missiles. For once, thought Mark, King Abdullah’s petrodollars have been well spent. The officer was calm and businesslike, they would have been proud of him back at Sandhurst. Did this quietly competent youth know that he was in charge of a suicide mission? Mark wondered. Major Khalid had tried to stop the photographer from coming out with this patrol. With hindsight, Mark realized that the major was
too
insistent that this was merely to be a routine reconnaissance mission, of no interest to the Western press. But, because so much desert warfare was carried on at night, when it was impossible to take photographs, Mark had argued with the Major. What the callous bastard had not chosen to spell out to Mark was that the platoon had been sent out as cannon fodder, to draw the guerrillas’ fire, and the Major didn’t want any half-baked heroics from an American journalist.
Again, Mark wiped the lens of his Nikon, composed the shot in his mind’s eye and carefully photographed the dead men, who were huddled together in the dirt like sleeping children; both were drenched in blood and the smaller soldier had a boot print clearly stenciled in carmine across his face. Concentration steadied Mark’s hands and wiped the panic from his body, as he cleared his mind to get the high definition which made his pictures look so vivid. A Mark Scott picture could be sent by wire around the world and not be reduced to a blur when it was printed.
Mark’s panic surged back as soon as the shutter clicked, and he watched the other three men in the shell hole work to wipe out the enemy position, grimly aware that this was their only chance of getting out alive. One soldier loaded the first slim missile down the launcher’s muzzle, and the officer watched his tracking device as it hurtled forward in a high arc.
From the hillside ahead, another shell roared over the shell hole as the angle of the missile launcher was lowered and again fired at the mortar emplacement ahead, which was tucked under a rocky overhang behind a wall of sandbags.
Mark forcused carefully on the intent faces around the launcher. These men would have no chance of leaving this crater alive unless they could get a rocket into the eighteen
inch gap between the rocky overhang and the sandbags to blow out the gun and the men manning it.
Another adjustment to the weapon, another rocket down the spout, another retort as it was fired. This time, no answering shell screamed back from the hillside ahead.
The Sydonite officer ordered another round and again there was no response.
The air was harsh with heat, smoke, and the sweetly pungent stink of war. Now Mark fought relief with the same intensity that he had earlier fought panic. Cool it, cool it, for Chrissake stay cool, stay down, stay alive. Mark had often seen men jump up in elation, believing they had been snatched from the jaws of death, only to be mown down by an enemy who understood that his last chance would be the other side’s carelessness.
The young officer ordered his two remaining men to crawl forward, one by one, taking advantage of every rock and every rise in the cracked earth, as they snaked forward, until they were below the rocky hill.
They started to scramble upwards. When they were closer to the enemy mortar emplacement, a grenade was thrown into the gap from which the gun barrel still projected. Caution saved them. With a howl of pain, a man’s body was catapulted out by the blast. Behind the billowing pall of dust and smoke, Mark saw the machine gun whipping to and fro on its tripod.
“Better use the back door,” said the officer. “Grenades may have weakened the roof of that cave.”
They crawled out of the heat into another opening in the rock, part of an interconnected labyrinth across a limestone cavern, packed with stores which looked like the usual guerrillas’ jumble of substandard or obsolete arms and explosives. Over a hundred crates, containing 1000-gram sticks of TNT were stacked by polyethylene bags, each containing 24 sticks of gelignite. Beyond was a box of safety fuses and a crate of No. 27 instantaneous aluminum detonators, half-hidden by a tangle of Cordtex detonating cords. Further back in the cave were a few primer sticks of TNT and two boxes of TNT flakes. The hot dessicated air of Sydon had preserved the arms from rust, but nitroglycerin had soaked through the
wax coating of some of the cartridges, so the pile was liable to explode at the slightest impact.
“Why did we bother?” the young officer was cheerful as he spoke to Mark in his correct, but guttural English. “One cigarette would have done our job for us.” It was a weak joke, but to the four survivors of the fourteen-man platoon which had set out that morning, it was hilarious.
Bright sunlight slid through slits in the rock and illuminated the interconnected caves as Mark wandered below the stack of old equipment. Seeing that some of the crates were marked in Cyrillic script, as well as English, Mark used his Swiss army knife, the only weapon he ever carried, to lever out the nails. The crate was full of Russian MUV igniters, for use in priming booby traps.
Further back in the cave, Mark found crates of Kalashnikov rifles, Chinese grenades, 122mm BM 21 Katyusha rockets with 20 kilo warheads and a Goryunova SG-43 machine gun. The inner cavern was a treasure trove of Soviet arms, and, unlike the elderly Western supplies near the entrance, they were clean and new.
Mark quickly moved to the devastated front of the cave, where the mortar still stood among the debris of fallen rock and torn flesh. The six bodies wore ragged U.S. army surplus battle fatigues. One man was still alive, although his chest was a gaping hole filled with blood; his lips stretched wide in agony as he tried to speak. Realizing that the man might live long enough to give them useful information, the Sydonite officer reached for his water bottle and dribbled some liquid into the cracked mouth. As the dying man mumbled a few words, Mark realized that they were not Arabic. The dying man was dark haired and olive skinned but, as Mark looked at the dirt-caked face, he realized that those features were unmistakably Latin.