Sidney Sheldon's Mistress of the Game (16 page)

To take the photograph, Keith would have to let go of one of the ropes. He began to uncurl his fingers, and immediately felt his balance slipping.
Oh God.

“Come on, Dad! What are you waiting for?”

“I…just give me a second, buddy, okay?”

Max’s mind was racing. He estimated that Keith weighed about a hundred and sixty pounds. Roughly a hundred pounds more than he, Max, weighed. If he didn’t let go of one of those ropes, would Max have the strength to push him over the edge? What if he tried and failed?

“We’re moving faster, Dad. Soon we’ll be past it. You’re gonna miss your chance.”

Keith tried to remember when he’d last felt so frightened. The day that Eve had threatened to leave him, to run off with that actor she’d been seeing. Rory. Back then he’d screwed his courage to the sticking point. He’d done what had to be done.

Just do it! Take the damn picture and you can get down.

Keith let go of the second rope. Suddenly the wind seemed to be blowing violently, pushing them along at a frightening speed. He fumbled for the camera, but his hand was shaking so much he could barely locate the viewfinder.

Silently, Max started climbing up behind him.

Keith leaned forward. He thought the dam was in the frame but he couldn’t be sure. Everything was beginning to blur.

“Ground control to Webster balloon. Dr. Webster, do you copy?”

The crackle of the radio startled Keith so much he dropped the camera. He watched in horror as it spiraled silently into the abyss.

“Dr. Webster.” There was an urgency to Kurt’s voice. “Do you copy? Over. The wind speed is picking up. We need to get you boys down.”

Thank God,
thought Keith.

Max barely managed to scramble back down into the gondola before his father turned around.

“Answer them. Tell them we copy, I’ll bring her down now.”

That night, in their tent, Keith tried to cheer Max up.

“Don’t look so crestfallen. I’ll buy you another camera.”

I don’t want another camera, you son of a bitch. I want your head on a plate to bring home to my mother.

Katele said: “Your son is an excellent shot, Dr. Webster. Are you sure he’s had no training?”

“Quite sure.”

Eve promised Keith that Max had never used his treasured gun. Keith had no reason to disbelieve her. But he had to agree with Katele. His son’s accuracy on their first hunting trip was quite extraordinary.

“Here, Dad. You try.”

Max handed Keith the pistol. They were lying in the long grass with Katele, stalking a young gazelle.

Keith demurred.

“Me? Oh, well, I…I’m not much of a shot.”

“Go on. It’s easy.” Max’s small boy’s fingers encased his father’s adult surgeon’s hands. “Hold it steady. That’s right. Now line up that groove at the top with the white marking between the eyes. See?”

Keith nodded nervously.

“Good. Now squeeze.”

Keith pulled the trigger. There was a loud bang. The young gazelle kicked up its hind legs and darted for the safety of some nearby trees.

“Bad luck,” said Katele. “It’s harder than it looks, isn’t it?”

“Apparently so.”

Max gave his father a withering look.

“Next time, try keeping your eyes open.”

They hunted almost every day. But Katele insisted on going with them.

“Can’t we go on our own?” Max pleaded with Keith. “It’s so much more fun when it’s just the two of us.”

Keith was overjoyed. He’d been starting to feel a little jealous of Katele. Max seemed to idolize him, and it wasn’t hard to see why. To a young boy’s eyes, the native must have appeared like a god. The fact that Keith Webster was a world-renowned surgeon and highly regarded, self-made man, and that Katele was one step above a savage, living hand to mouth on an African nature reserve, meant nothing to a ten-year-old. Katele could shoot arrows, fly planes, skin rabbits and make fire with pieces of flint. He was a hero.

“I’m glad you feel that way, sport. I do, too. But this is Africa, Max. It’s not safe to go into the bush alone, without a guide.”

Keith watched his son’s face fall.

“Don’t worry.” He laughed. “When we get to Cape Town, it’ll be just the two of us.”

But Max was worried.

There would be no hunting in Cape Town. No chance to carry out his mother’s plan.

I have to do it. I promised Mommy. I have to find a way.

The hotel was pleasant. A simple, whitewashed farmhouse on the edge of Camps Bay, it was not the kind of five-star accommodation that Max was used to. But after eighteen days of camping, sleeping in a bed felt like the last word in luxury. The hot showers, in particular, were bliss.

At breakfast, Keith asked: “What would you like to do today?”

I hate you. I detest you. Why are you still alive?

“We could drive up the coast, along the wine route? Or take a picnic to the beach? Or, you know what, we could go shopping. Get you a new camera? Whaddaya think?”

Max didn’t miss a beat. “I’d like to go up Table Mountain. There’s a hiking route, the landlady told me. It’s supposed to be the best view in all South Africa.”

Keith beamed. “Sold. Table Mountain it is.”

“I mean it, Max. Get away from there.”

The wind whipped away Keith’s words, turning his shout into a
whisper. Max was dancing on one of the small boulders close to the edge of the cliff. Long tendrils of jet-black hair blew against his face, and his slender olive limbs waved rhythmically to some inner music. He was a beautiful child. Almost as beautiful as his mother.

There’s nothing of me in there. Nothing except my love.

“Max!”

Reluctantly, Keith Webster began walking toward his son. Below them was a drop of well over three thousand feet. His little stunt in the hot-air balloon had frightened Keith more than he’d realized. Every night since the incident, he’d woken with nightmares. He imagined himself falling, like the camera, spinning around and around in the emptiness, waking just seconds before his body would have slammed into the earth. He could imagine the pain, his bones shattering inside his body like broken glass, his skull caving in like a rotten grapefruit, brains oozing out into the dust.

If anything should happen to Max…

Christ. Where is he?

Max was gone. But he couldn’t be gone. He’d been right there, pirouetting on the rock, and then…Keith felt his stomach lurch and his knees start to give way.

“MAX!” It was half scream, half sob. “MAX!”

Keith was running, sprinting toward the cliff edge, propelled by something bigger than himself, some irresistible force.
Love
. Scrambling up onto the stone, all fear for himself gone, he leaned out, straining his entire body into the emptiness.

“Max! Can you hear me? MAX!”

Below him the clouds lay as thick as butter icing, obscuring everything. A child’s picture of heaven.

“I can hear you, Keith.”

Keith looked down. On the underside of the rock was a tiny tuft of grass, stuck like a limpet to the side of the mountain. It was so small it could never have borne an adult’s weight. But Max, crouched like a leprechaun, could support himself comfortably. Reaching up, he wrapped a hand around Keith’s ankle.

“Max, thank God! I thought I’d lost you.”

“Lost me?” Max laughed: an awful, maniacal strangled sound that made Keith’s blood run cold. “You never had me in the first place. Loser.”

Keith felt a tug at his feet. Instinctively, he reached out his arms, grasping for support, but there was nothing. Another tug, harder this time.
Keith looked down. Max was staring up at him, a twisted smile dancing across his face.

He smiles like Eve.

Keith looked into his son’s eyes and saw the deep well of hatred there. The last emotion Keith Webster felt was not fear or even sadness. It was surprise.

I don’t understand it. We were getting along so well…

The clouds rushed up to embrace him, soft, white, welcoming.

Then nothing.

It was the night after Keith Webster’s funeral. Max lay in his mother’s bed in their New York apartment with Eve’s arms wrapped around him. The bedroom window was open a crack, allowing the familiar noises of Manhattan to float in from outside: honking traffic, music, shouts, laughter.

Africa had been beautiful. But this was home.

“You were wonderful, darling,” Eve whispered in Max’s ear. “No one suspected a thing. I’m so proud of you, my big, grown-up boy.”

Eve had been going out of her mind with worry, waiting at home for news of an “accident.” She’d rehearsed everything with Max so thoroughly, so endlessly. She really believed he was ready. But as the days turned into weeks and still nothing happened, she began to fear that the boy had lost his nerve. Or what if it was worse than that? What if Max had tried and failed? What if Keith now knew everything and was on his way home to exact his revenge?

But Max had not lost his nerve. He had pulled it off in the eleventh hour, staging a fall so natural that there hadn’t even been an inquest. Tourists fell from Table Mountain almost every year, idiots fooling around too near the edge. Keith was just another statistic. A number. A nobody.

“You realize that
you’re
the man of the house now?” Eve cooed. “You’ll never have to share me again.”

Max closed his eyes. He felt the warm silk of Eve’s negligee caress his bare back. “Can I sleep in your bed tonight, Mommy?”

Eve sighed sleepily. “All right, darling. Just this once.”

Tomorrow morning it would be back to work, for both of them. With Keith gone, it was time to begin the second part of Eve’s plan: winning back control of Kruger-Brent. Max would be the linchpin of that strategy, too. But for tonight at least, he’d earned his reward.

Max waited till his mother was deeply asleep. Then he lay awake, smiling, remembering the look of surprise on his father’s face as he fell.

You’re the man of the house now.

You’ll never have to share me again.

F
OURTEEN

PAOLO COZMICI BARKED IRRITABLY AT HIS BOYFRIEND: “SO? Are you going to tell me what it says?”

The world-famous conductor was having breakfast at his usual table at Le Vaudeville on Rue Vivienne in Paris. An Art Deco hangout popular with locals and tourists alike, Le Vaudeville was Paolo Cozmici’s home away from home, a place he came to relax. Henri, the maître d’, knew where Paolo Cozmici liked to sit. He knew that Paolo liked the milk for his café au lait warm, not hot, that Paolo’s
pain chocolat
should always be light on the
pain
, heavy on the
chocolat
; and that Paolo did not expect to have to move to a table near the window in order to chain-smoke his beloved Gauloise cigarettes.

Everybody who knew Paolo Cozmici knew that his Sunday-morning ritual was sacrosanct and unchanging. His boyfriend knew it best of all. And yet the unfathomable boy had arrived for breakfast late, distracted, still dressed in his jogging pants (Paolo
deplored
jogging pants), and bleating on about some ridiculous letter he’d received from his kid sister back home.

I suppose it serves me right for falling in love with an American
, thought Paolo philosophically.
Barbarians, all of them, from sea to stinking sea.

“She wants me to come to her sixteenth birthday party next month. Apparently my father’s throwing her a big bash at Cedar Hill House.”

Paolo blew a disdainful smoke ring in his lover’s direction.
“Où?”

“It’s kind of like a family compound. It’s in Maine on a little island called Dark Harbor. You won’t have heard of it, but it’s a magical place. I haven’t been there since my mom was alive.”

“You’re not seriously thinking of going?” Paolo Cozmici sounded incredulous. “Robert, my sweet, you ’ave concerts booked every weekend in July. Paris, Munich, London. You can’t just pull out.”

“Come with me?”

Paolo almost choked on his croissant.

“Come
with
you? Absolutely not. Now I ’ave irrefutable evidence,
mon amour
. You have lost your mind.”

“Maybe.” Robbie Templeton smiled, and Paolo Cozmici felt his resolve melting like a bar of chocolate in the sunshine. “But you knew I was crazy when you fell for me. Didn’t you?”

Raising Paolo’s hand to his lips, Robbie kissed it softly.

“Hmm,” Paolo grumbled.
“Oui, je suppose.”

The love affair between Robbie Templeton, the American piano prodigy and classical music’s hottest male pinup, and Paolo Cozmici, the fat, bald, famously irascible Italian conductor, was a mystery to all who knew them, as well as to millions who did not.

It began six years ago. Robbie, then almost twenty, had just arrived in Paris and was living hand to mouth as a freelance piano player, moving from bar to bar and jazz club to jazz club, wherever the work took him.

“You’re being stubborn, Robert. I’ve told you, you can have an allowance.”

Peter Templeton had mixed feelings about his son’s Great European Adventure. He and Robbie had been reconciled for less than a year. Now Peter was sitting across the table from him at the Harvard Club, being told that he was about to lose him all over again.

“I don’t want your money, Dad. I need to do this by myself.”

“You’ve no idea what the real world is like, Robert.”

You’d be surprised how much I know about the real world, Dad.

“You don’t even speak French.”

“I’ll learn.”

“At least let me set up a bank account for you at Société Générale. You can look on it as emergency money. A safety net, should you need it.”

Robbie looked at his father and felt a stab of pity for him. Lexi’s kidnapping had aged him permanently. The reality of caring for a deaf child, even one as determined and independent as Lexi, had also taken its toll. Every hour Peter spent away from his daughter was an anxious, guilt-ridden purgatory: he hadn’t been there when Lexi needed him most. The least he could do was to be there now, protecting her, loving her, helping her cope with her disability.