Younger (24 page)

“Can I let you know in the next day or so?” Anna said.

“Not headed anywhere special?”

“I think I’m going to try to hook up with an old boyfriend, maybe in Italy.”

“Not Italian, is he? My third husband was Italian, and he was nothing but trouble.”

“If it’s not prying, can I ask how many times you’ve been married?”

“Oh, just four times, fewer than the old Hollywood stars. Gerald was the first; he’s a solicitor and the father of my grown-up twins, both of whom live in Norfolk, where I am most of the time. The second was the Czech dreamboat, exciting but easily depressed and sulky. The third was Francesco, the Italian, until his idea of fidelity turned out to be not sleeping with more than two of my friends in the same week. And the fourth is Stephen, who’s also a solicitor, but an easygoing one who’s happy to let me do my own thing.”

“You’re married now?” Anna asked, bemused.

“Oh, my, yes. Thirteen years. Stephen’s an angel, but he’s what my Italian husband would have called a ‘slipper man,’ happiest at home by the fire. This is a nice break for him—he gets to garden without someone telling him, ‘Plant that there.’ I tell him he’s my last husband, the keeper. You’ve never married?”

“Once, but it was a long time ago.”

Heather winked. “Never too late to do it again. Trust me, when you finally find the right one, it’s magic.”

“Oh, I like my life the way it is,” Anna said quickly, at the moment as big a lie as any of the whoppers she had already told.

The next day, Anna donned her wig and caught the tram at Náměstí Míru. It crossed the river, then zigzagged its way up the steep hill to Prague Castle. There, she stood gazing at the roofs below, then ambled down the tourist-clogged Old Castle Stairs, stopping to admire the views while checking for possible followers, relieved at seeing none.

Down below, she picked up a couple of secondhand novels, then lunched at a small riverbank restaurant next to the Kafka Museum before going on to be inspired by the life of someone who’d faced much greater challenges than her own. Compared to growing up a Jewish outsider, laboring joylessly in an insurance company, then dying of tuberculosis when only forty, Anna’s life had been charmed. Yet Kafka had left behind a legacy of novels and short stories universally hailed as masterpieces. If Anna didn’t write a book soon, what would she be leaving? Marketing memos and PR plans?

She felt almost serene when she left the museum, though increasingly aware that the possibility of being found grew stronger with each passing day. She found an Internet café next door to a shop, where she bought a Czech SIM card for the cheap cell phone in her purse.

Online, she found nothing in the Hotmail account Drafts folder. Checking her BarPharm account seemed risky no matter how she did it, but she had to do it. She stayed in the café but pulled out her iPhone. Surely, the VPN was safer in keeping her location untraceable? She would have given anything to call Rob to find out, but she didn’t even trust him anymore. She was afraid to stay connected for more than a minute or two, so she ignored emails from Becca and Chas. But one couldn’t be ignored: from Marina.

What she saw made her shiver.

Anna, you must call me so I can help you. I will say only that some people, people you know, are not what they have seemed to be and do not have your welfare at heart. I think they killed a woman who worked for us. And that they will kill you if they can. Call me, and I will come to you. Trust no one. Pierre came to warn you, didn’t he? And he paid the ultimate price. I don’t want that to happen to you. Marina.

Quickly, she bundled up as much as she could to hide her face. Then she all but ran out, with no thought but getting back to the sanctuary of the apartment.
Yes, I’ll go with Heather
, she decided on the Metro as she made her way back to Vinohrady. She’d be crazy not to. Free transport to Italy—and with another woman, looking like friends traveling together. Anna felt safer in transit, and she didn’t feel safe now. She didn’t know what freaked her out more: Marina’s saying someone was planning to kill her, or being called “Anna” and reminded that some people knew who she really was.

She would make her way to Rome. Even if she couldn’t get to the bottom of the
YOU
NGER conspiracy by then, she’d be in a place with a US embassy, a city she’d visited several times and knew well, a chaotic madhouse in which hiding would be easier than within the sedate environs of Prague. Yes, she could throw herself upon the mercy of the embassy in Prague, but she had things she had to do first. There was no way she’d contact Marina, nor did she feel ready yet to speak to David. She knew that reluctance stemmed from fear: he was all she had now. What if he turned her down?

She had just a few days to get through before leaving, and she left the apartment alone only when necessary, telling the others she’d been out in their absence. She checked the news online on Adam’s computer, which was set up on the living room desk and which, Adam being Adam, wasn’t password protected. Still, she didn’t dare log on to her email from there.

One day, summoning her courage, she took the Metro to a big mall in the Smíchov neighborhood, said by her guidebook to be well off the tourist path and boasting a Marks and Spencer. She wore the dark, hard-looking makeup, her blond hair tucked up under her black hat. She was going stir-crazy but also she would need more conservative clothes than what she’d bought in Berlin if she was going to pass herself off as an older, well-off tourist in Italy, and that was what she’d have to be, because, as the mirror in the brightly lit M&S changing booth told her, “Anna” was rapidly overtaking “Lisa” in the looks department.

She ended up settling on a beige twinset, a lot like the one she’d worn to lunch with Richard at The Ivy, except this was some kind of manmade “cashmerevelous” or whatever, costing a fraction of what the other had set her back and chosen mainly for its innocuousness.

Recalling that day, she sank onto the booth’s bench, shaking her head. What a fool she’d been, gliding up to the valet in a car she couldn’t afford, with her designer mocs and $400 hair color and cashmere sweaters, worrying only about how she looked. Who had that frivolous person been? Never again. She would never go back to that. What she
was
going back to—being a woman pushing sixty—scared her. Not as much as being stalked did, but it still scared her. As she was hurrying back through the mall, she heard someone calling her—actually, calling, “Lisa! Lisa!” She turned, expecting to see Heather, and came face-to-face with someone she couldn’t immediately place.

“Hey, it’s me, Fleur? Forget me already? I mean, I’m not Fleur, of course. I’m Chloe. Don’t worry. It took me a minute to place you, too. I didn’t expect to see you here, of all places! Maybe now you can tell me why I didn’t get the part?”

“The part?” She realized with a start who this girl was, but she still didn’t understand.

“The part in the film! I did everything the producer told me. I even refused to drop out of character when you pretended to pump me for information, remember? I thought I was pretty good, y’know?”

“Oh . . . Yeah, you were, Fleur. I mean, Chloe. Excellent. But I . . . I don’t know what happened. The whole project got cancelled.”

“No! Bummer! And here I thought the producer was your rich boyfriend. Not that you aren’t a good actress or anything. But what are you doing in Prague?”

“Just passing through on my way back to the States. And you?”

“I got a place with this English-language acting troupe. We’re dark right now, but in two weeks we open with a new comedy
.
Will you still be here?”

“Nope. My flight leaves tomorrow,” she lied.

“What about your chauffeur?”

“Chauffeur?”

“That guy who picked me up to take me to meet the producer in London. I thought I passed him yesterday on the Charles Bridge. He didn’t see me, though.”

“Oh—not my chauffeur. The producer’s.” She forced a careless shrug. “Look, good luck to you, but I’ve got to run!”

And run she did, making a mad dash for the doors. Could Aleksei be in Prague looking for her? Was he hunting her down for Kelm? And what about Fleur or whomever? No, that had been what it seemed, a chance encounter. If the girl had been following Anna, she never would have mentioned Aleksei. Outside, Anna hurried to the taxi stand, too scared to take the Metro.

Alone in her room that night, she gave up on one of the used books she had bought. She wasn’t in the mood for rereading
The Picture of Dorian Gray
. Oscar Wilde’s tale of eternal youth wasn’t amusing her the way she’d expected. Instead, she found Gray’s lust for youth pathetic, and she tossed the book aside when he was carrying on about being willing to give anything if his portrait, rather than he himself, would age.

Oh, no, you wouldn’t
,
Dorian,
she thought.
Trust me
. Sure, it had felt fantastic to be Tanya, to look in the mirror and see the person she considered herself to be on the inside, just like in her
YOU
NGER marketing notes. But it wasn’t real, it never had been, and it was a hard truth with which to be slapped in the face.
In the end,
she thought,
we are who we are. And stuck with it
. And the more she thought about it, the less she thought that might be such a bad thing.

At long last, it was the day before departure. Adam had insisted on returning Anna’s deposit, which was good, since she was getting low on cash. She’d now made notes of all her experiences, then copied them and everything else to do with
YOU
NGER onto yet another flash drive, which she wrapped well in paper and sealed in an envelope, on which she wrote, “To be opened only in case of my death or an emergency and given only to the proper authorities. Anna.” She stuck that in another sealed envelope, writing on the front of it: “Allie, I wanted someone to have a copy of my will and you’re It. No need to open now.” She put on her wig, then stealthily hurried around the corner to buy a padded mailer and send it to the United States.

She stayed in the rest of the day, packing and charging her equipment. Then, when it was dark and her roommates were all out, she put the wig back on and went out.

She avoided the central areas, taking a tram to student-filled Žižkov and finding an Internet café, where she checked her personal account emails. There was one from Richard telling her Clive Madden was being recalled to London. “But he’s here for another month and is trying to raise money to buy Coscom in the hopes BarPharm will want it off their hands.” A brief note from Allie said only that George, taking Jan’s death hard, had remained holed up at home since the funeral. The “studiocitygirl” Drafts folder was empty.

Outside, on her cheap cell phone with the Czech SIM card, she rang David’s home number, willing him to answer. When he did, she said nothing, overwhelmed by hearing his voice, biting back the temptation to tell him to call her back. She hung up. At least now she knew he was alive. In a grotty student hangout café, over a much-needed glass of wine, she cleared the phone’s memory and SIM card. She wouldn’t be calling David again. And she’d leave no new notice in the Drafts folder until she was sure of the plan forming in her mind.

As she got off the Metro in Vinohrady a short time later, she surreptitiously left the phone, turned on, on her empty seat. With luck, someone would find it, see there was still three hundred crowns’ worth of credit left, and carry it around Prague for the next week or so.

Chapter 20

On hearing that Anna would be going straight to Milan’s Central Station, Heather insisted on depositing her there, saying succinctly, “I drove in Naples. I’ll never be afraid of traffic again.”

Anna was sad to see the rental car drive into the setting sun and kept waving until it was out of sight. She had enjoyed both Heather’s cheery chatter and the feeling of being safely ensconced in an anonymous vehicle without having to worry about madmen speeding up behind it.

Still, she wasn’t sad enough at parting from Heather to have been honest when she’d said she was catching a train to Florence. Inside the massive train station, she bought a different ticket for the following night. Outside again, she went quickly to a large, bustling tourist hotel across the street, not to register but to copy down the number of a pay phone off the hotel lobby. Then she rolled her suitcase in the direction of a street Heather’s guidebook had assured her was lined with inexpensive hotels. Along the way she stopped at the first Internet café she came to, where she wrote a two-line email to David and put it into the Drafts folder. The vision of Kelm in Berlin, Marina’s email, and the fake Fleur’s sighting of Aleksei had spurred her to work out the rudiments of a plan as Heather drove them to Italy; she was itching to take action.

Anna had, she knew, reached the end of the avoid-the-passport-issue road. Italians were strict about documents; any hotel would demand her passport. She was running out of time and options and would soon have to get to Rome and beg for help at the embassy. But first, she had a few things to take care of.

So, promising herself it would be her final assumed identity, she walked into a down-at-heel pension just a few blocks from the station and handed the desk clerk the fake passport she’d found in Pierre’s attaché case. She checked in as Maria Kelm, her accent Benny Hill British. She looked the right age now to be the woman in the photo of Marina Barton. Not that it mattered, the desk clerk being of an age that considered anyone over thirty elderly.

The next day, she checked her big suitcase at the train station’s luggage deposit, then took the Metropolitana to the chic shopping area near the Duomo, having found the name of a good hair salon online and decided to take her chances by just showing up. When she emerged three hours later, she could have passed for Marina’s taller, more robust sister. She was lucky, the salon receptionist had said: there’d been a last-minute cancellation. A stranger implying that fortune was on her side was enough to help her ignore her own restlessness and sit patiently for the intricate balayage highlighting of layered tones. When she caught sight of her reflection in a mirror on the way out, she smirked.
Totally Russian hair
. Still, she looked more like the California Anna than she had in months. Her old look, she decided, was her best look.

She was going to be Anna again. It was impossible to go back completely; the procedures and residual effects of
YOU
NGER had left her with fewer lines and more youthful, glowing skin.
This I can live with,
she thought. She knew the time had come to reclaim her lost identity; she was more reluctant to admit that she wanted to look good for David, if he agreed to meet her. She left the salon feeling almost optimistic.

The weather had turned cool since yesterday, the sky threatening rain and a haze hanging over the crowded Piazza del Duomo. In spite of the chill, waiters at the cafés shuttled among crowded outdoor tables. Trusting that she wouldn’t be noticed in the crowd, Anna sat and ordered a late lunch of mixed antipasti and a glass of Barolo.

All around her, people were laughing, shopping, using their phones to take photos of the city’s imposing main church. Surely, she was the only person there wondering how she might tell someone that not only was she thirty years older than she’d been pretending to be but was also his former lover—and that she’d been letting him air his feelings about her all this time without setting him straight.

She didn’t dawdle. As soon as her plate and glass were empty, she settled up and backtracked to an Internet café she’d passed earlier. She logged in to the Hotmail account, which now showed a new saved draft.
David!

If anything bad has happened, I’m to blame. Early on, I thought Ur imagination was working overtime so failed to take pay phone biz seriously. The # I gave U for that 1st call was my 2nd phone line at home. Beyond stupid of me! I promise I’ve never gone to this acc’t except on public computers.

Some odd things going on. Barton’s autopsy report still not released, & some newspapers are asking why. For another, 4 days after U were supposed to ring me, I had a visit at home from that ‘private detective’ of Marina’s.

According to him, police r ‘pressuring’ Marina about Ur relationship w/ Pierre, saying they suspect U were his mistress & refusal to leave wife left U unhinged. Yes, implication was cops think U killed Pierre. Except that I didn’t want him to know I was on to him, I’d have laughed in his face.

Kelm! Had he tapped David’s home telephone? Could a slimeball like him be telling the truth? Did she have cops as well as killers coming after her? But if he was the killer, why should she believe in the cops?

The draft went on,

When I rang Bartons’ house, told Marina not in London now. Don’t believe any of them and worried about Ur safety, Tanya. I will call as U asked, every day at the same time if needed. Plus, have a new phone & new SIM cards now, all just for you. In case of emergency U can reach me any time at # below. Pls forgive me. I miss our dinners. D.

By the time she finished reading, Anna had already made two important decisions: she was going to tell David the truth, and she was going to stop being such an escapist scaredy-cat and take control, play offense rather than defense. Her life might depend on both.

She copied out the cell number David had given her, then deleted the saved draft. Before going off-line, she checked the British tabloids but found only one small item on Barton, stating that the coroner’s jury had not announced its findings pending toxicological test results and that the police had no comment. Barton’s widow, according to the ever-persistent Nelson Dwyer, released a statement saying only, “My grief is overwhelming, but for the sake of my sons, I must put this behind me.”
Bullshit,
Anna thought. The Marina she’d known wasn’t someone likely to be “overwhelmed” by anything other than being seated at a top restaurant’s worst table.

The night before, she had lain awake thinking about Marina, Martin Kelm, and Aleksei, the three people who knew her secrets. Marina seemed to have been a, if not
the
, driving force behind
YOU
NGER and the acquisition of Coscom. What had Pierre been about to tell Anna in his final minutes? How would the sentence “My wife . . .” have ended? And how did Martin Kelm fit into the picture? Pierre had looked genuinely shocked when she told him about Kelm showing up at the National Portrait Gallery that day, but why would Pierre be out of the loop—unless the real loop was elsewhere? And Aleksei? She no longer believed he was, as Pierre had put it, “what he appears to be.” But what was he? And which of them was her enemy?

Anna paid for her coffee, then, queasy with anxiety, took the subway back to the bustling hotel near the Stazione Centrale and stood by the pay phone. She picked up on the first ring.

“David? I got your message,” she said. “I think the Drafts folder is secure, even if someone manages to intercept emails.”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have doubted you.”

“That’s all right. I can’t blame you. The situation’s insane. I spent week after week in London thinking I was just paranoid. Now I know I’m not.”

“What can I do to help?”

“You can meet me in Italy.” She hurried on before he could say no. “I’ve got some important docs on a flash drive, and I need someone I trust to put it in a safe place in case anything happens to me. I mailed one to a US friend, but I want to put this one in someone’s hand so I know it can’t go astray. I don’t know from one minute to the next who’s watching or what’s being monitored.”

After a long pause, he said slowly, “I’m not sure I’m the right person to help you. I mean, don’t you have someone you’re closer to, a relative, a friend?”

“I don’t,” she said. “I can’t ask someone to fly from America.”

After another pause he asked, “So why don’t you come back to England?”

“I don’t know who’s waiting for me there or what they plan to do. When you hear the whole story, you’ll understand why. I’m sure now Pierre was murdered, David. And other people, too.”

“But why not fly back and go to the police, Tanya?”

She took a deep breath. “There is no Tanya, David. I’m Anna.”

She heard his sharp intake of breath. “But—
Anna
? Jesus, this is a hell of a time to make jokes!”

“Listen to me, please. Barton set me up so I’d accept his offer to work on a product that takes thirty years off anyone’s appearance. At least three people have already died over this.”

“You really expect me to believe—”

“Anna always loved the song
I’m a Believer
, and you used to sing it to her. You’d go to the Elgin Theater on Eighth Avenue to see movies together at the midnight show.” The words poured out. “Whenever you ate at Joe Allen’s, she had a cheeseburger and you had a plain burger with grilled onions. Your favorite sushi is sea eel; hers is yellowtail. You gave her a copy of
Lucky Jim
, and she gave you
Steppenwolf
to pretend she was an intellectual. And that flash drive I just said I mailed? I sent it to Allie—remember I used to talk about her, my old college friend?—but I have no idea if it will arrive.”

“My God—I can’t—Anna, what the hell? Is it really you?”

She didn’t speak, couldn’t speak, and after a moment, he said, sounding grimly resigned, “Okay, I’ll come.” But then his voice lightened as he said, “At least I don’t have to hire a private detective to find you . . .” She held her breath as he went on, “I can’t come for at least a day or two. Nick’s with me right now—his mother’s in France—and I won’t put my son at risk any more than I have already.”

“I understand,” she murmured shakily.

“Where? And when?”

“Can you fly to Rome next Monday? If you can’t get a seat, come the next day, or the next. There’s a daily British Airways flight out of Heathrow that gets to Fiumicino at five past two. You should have no problem arriving in Piazza di Spagna to be at the fountain at the foot of the Spanish Steps between four and five. Got that? The Boat Fountain. Just stand there when you arrive, and you’ll hear from me.”

“All right. Got it. No phone number or anything?”

“Destroy the SIM card you’re using now, put a new SIM card in your phone, and don’t turn it on until you arrive in Rome. Put the number for it in the Drafts folder along with the day of your flight. And David?”

“Yes?”

“I know I’m the one who needs to apologize. I’m sorry for everything. Everything now and everything then.”

During the drive from Prague with Heather, Anna had realized there was one thing she still had to do before going to Rome. So after speaking to David, she picked up her suitcase at the train station, where, the day before, she had booked a single sleeping compartment on the overnight train to Paris, arriving at half past ten the following morning. She’d left the return open and just had to hope she could get a compartment for the trip back to Italy. If not, it was going to be a grueling journey propped up like a sitting duck all night in a car filled with strangers, but she didn’t know how long it would take her to do what she had to do. No question—she had to make this trip to France. She was certain that at least a few answers awaited her there.

She got a panino and a pastry to eat on the train at one of the station’s coffee bars, then bought bottles of water and a liter of Coke before she boarded the train. No leaving her compartment or drinking wine tonight. She had to remain hidden and alert.

She’d planned to read the other book she’d picked up in Prague, Kurt Vonnegut’s
Mother Night
, on the way. But when she opened it in her tiny sleeping compartment on the Milan–Paris express, she was unable to get past the introduction, where Vonnegut stated the moral of the story: