Further Lane (26 page)

“Death to the infidel!” someone shouted.

“Marvelous!” I called back. “Right on!” I was speaking English now without actually meaning to, but it was the soothing cheer in my voice that moved them, not the words.

“Okay, fellows, I'm just going to move the lady a bit. Better camera angles, you know. Nothing fancy, matter of composition and the lighting. Step back there, you chaps, don't want shadows. Peter Arnett stuff, this. Or the Scud Stud out there on the hotel balcony, remember?”

“Death to the infidels!”

“Right on!” I responded. “Tippicanoe and Tyler, too!”

I had the woman by one hand now, gripping her bloody bicep and steering her out into the open square a few paces removed from the crowd. She was crying a bit but under control, not sobbing or threatening to collapse, and letting herself be steered. Good. She's functioning still. If I was going to get her out of this, I'd need help. Hers. Quite incredibly, considering the scene, traffic continued to roll over the cobbles of the Place, buses, private cars, vans and bicycles, even a police car, which didn't even slow. Everything you might expect of a modern city but Rollerblades.

“Here we go,” I said, still crooning comforting nonsense. The one thing I didn't want was to appear threatening. Or we might have two “infidels” being torn to pieces in the Algiers street. The naked woman, curled into my body for protection, seemed alert.

“Thank you for your assistance,” she murmured in good but accented English.

“Excellent,” I said aloud. She was functioning. I needed that.

People, who out of confusion or impressed by the “CNN” camera had briefly fallen back, now began to crowd in once more.

“Just stand still and smile,” I whispered. She nodded.

Then, trying to will authority into my voice, I called out in French, “Back there, everyone, if you please. Left to right, want to get everyone in the shot. Don't want chaps feeling left out, y'know. On the evening news tonight. Everyone. Call the neighbors, let 'em know you'll be on. Prime-time stuff…”

The mindless prattle worked once more as the mullahs, now under the spell of the cameras and wanting the shot to be a good one, exercised their authority, shoving and pushing men into a more orderly if straggling semicircle. “Good-oh!” I shouted. “Couldn't do better at St. Cyr,
mes amis.
”

“Game girl,” I murmured an aside, no longer sure when I was speaking French, when English, when amiable rubbish. We had a little space now and a pause to reflect. But I was still at a loss. How could we break away? The mob would be on us in a few meters. I might outrun them; a barefoot, battered woman, never. Not on these cobbles. Then I heard the klaxon and the shout:

“Mister Beecher!”

Toward us across the Place rolled an old Citroën, smoking badly and rattling and rasping, lurching this way and that on decrepit springs. At the wheel, Ahmet the waiter, window rolled down, one hand waving, a Gauloise stuck between his yellow teeth, very much à la Jean Gabin.

“Mister Beecher!”

The passenger-side door suddenly swung open, brushing the very skirts of the mullahs who now, affrighted and impressed, pulled back, thinking perhaps this was an Iman arriving to preside over the show. Or even an Ayatollah.

But it was only Ahmet the waiter in an antique Citroën. Into which I literally threw a naked woman I'd never met and followed myself, leaping acrobatically atop her, apologizing as I landed.

“Sorry about that.”

“Not at all,” she responded in English.

Behind us now came shouts and curses in several languages and prayers and imprecations on our heads, upon all three, the infidel woman, the
Say Enn Enn
correspondent, and the driver of the old car who might be a Muslim but was most assuredly a traitor to God and to decent, pious people, and if he were, a man to be chastised most severely.

“I'm Beecher Stowe,” I said. “Here, take my jacket. It'll have to do until we cross over into friendlier jurisdictions.”

“It'll do nicely, thank you,” she said, cheerful despite her wounds, trying to grin through split and bloodied lips, despite her proximity to death.

“A shame about your suit. Chanel, wasn't it?”

“Yes, from the January collection.”

Ahmet drove swiftly, alternately cursing at and murmuring flattery toward the Citroën, through the downtown and out into the city's suburbs where a facsimile of freeways might begin. But the chase was not ended. Behind us, automobiles had picked up the chase, and from one car or another came the single crack of a rifle. And then, swiftly following on, the
pop pop pop
of an automatic weapon. Well, I thought, I've heard gunfire before. Been in firefights. And then, in this complacent mood, and rather shockingly, I was hit.

“Oh,” I said, or rather grunted, “that hurt. That hurt like bloody hell.”

Ahmet, as he should, ignored me and kept his eyes on the road, continuing to keep us clear ahead of our trackers. “Here,” the woman said, “hold tightly to me. Let my body absorb the pain.”

I looked up into her black and rather lovely eyes.

“Sure, you do that, Ace,” I grunted through the pain and through tightly clenched teeth. Ahmet, fortunately, had friends. And that very afternoon, before there was further damage or international incident, they flew me out of the country in a small plane, my wound crudely bandaged and pillowed, to sit upon cushions flying west toward friendly Tangier, while a beautiful black-eyed woman, battered and bruised but no longer naked, bathed my brow with damp towels, as if it were fevered, which it was not, lighted cigarettes that we both smoked, and poured Black Label Scotch that I gratefully drank.

Her name was Princess Tati, a member of the Saudi royal family, who'd rashly, she now admitted, ignored rumors of danger. “I'd been told such things happened to women who wore Western clothes instead of the veil. But when one lives mainly in Paris and London, well, such nonsense is hard to credit.”

“Women have been beaten. Raped. Even killed, for ‘such nonsense.'”

That sobered her. Then, feeling damply uncomfortable, and yet aware of awkwardness, I said, “Your Highness, excuse my impertinence, but could you check to see if I'm bleeding again?”

“Avec plaisir.”

She wasn't a nurse but using my linen handkerchief and wads of tissues from the plane's tiny lavatory, she got the wound sufficiently stanched to get us to Tangier without my bleeding to death. A series of limousines, alerted by radio, waited to whisk Tati to the palace (the King of Morocco was both a distant relation and an ally) and me to the hospital.

My father, a pragmatic sort who knew about such things from personal, even painful, experience, phoned me in Tangier and, after the usual paternal expressions of love and concern, remarked that if you had to be shot, some preferred the fleshy part of the calf. Or a non–bone-breaking clean wound in the upper arm.

“But I've always felt, Beecher, if you're to take a bullet anywhere, being shot in the ass is better than most.”

I thanked him for that.

“Golly, Beecher,” Alix said when this interminable account was finally done, “having saved Tati's life, I'm bowled over that she didn't put herself out to be, y'know, accommodating to you.”

“She had both a husband and a lover, Alix. But she did send roomsful of flowers and a most cordial note of thanks.”

“Least she could do,” she said glumly, rather disappointed that Saudi princesses weren't more impulsive and demonstrative than your ordinary British royal.

“I'm sure,” I said, accepting reality and not choosing to argue the toss.

Alix tried to make it up to me for Princess Tati's failures by taking me back to bed and doing a few provocative things we'd not thought of doing before. Or with quite this urgency.

It was awfully pleasant. I almost forgot Hurricane Martha working its way toward us.

TWENTY-EIGHT

My, but you are a great beauty …

Because we were young and healthy and excited by the coming storm and needed to do something, anything! rather than just wait for a new “wind to shake the world” (and having just made love), we got in the Blazer and drove around visiting neighbors along Further Lane. Some of the houses were completely closed, the occupants gone, fled to higher ground. Miz Phoebe was in residence and her maid, who answered the door, warned us off. “Oh, don't get her started. She's a terror this morning. Ranting and raving. We didn't have this many hurricanes in the old days before television put on the
Geraldo
show.”

I thought Miz Phoebe might have a point but we went on. At Claire Cutting's house (I still thought of it as Hannah's but it was only a week or so, wasn't it?) we'd barely stopped the car when she came out onto the front porch. I'd half-expected Brass to be there, truculent and threatening, but there was no sign of him. Maybe he was securing his boat. Claire asked, cuttingly, I thought, “Still snooping, Beecher?”

“Only looking in, Claire, just looking in as neighbors do,” I shrugged and got the car turned around.

“Not terribly matey, is she?” was the extent of Alix's reaction. Being British, she understood about bad manners.

There were lights on at Warrender's and ignoring his suggestion that we phone ahead and make an appointment, I went right up to the door. What the hell, hurricane's coming. But when we rang no one came. Maybe he'd come to his senses and followed the servants. But no. When I pushed at the door it opened and we found him there in the library, looking through the picture window at the ferocious ocean.

“Sit down, sit down,” he said, but not with his usual tone of command. “Forgive me for not rising, Alix. I'm not all that well.”

He'd had a bad night, he said. Chest pain. No, he was pretty sure it wasn't cardiac. Probably he'd simply dined too well. No, he hadn't called his doctor. The damned fool was in Manhattan and what good would that do?

When we were seated he said he'd passed the restless night reading
Lear.

“The older I get and the more alone, the more I understand Lear. Or think I do. Almost three decades since Yale and English Lit.” Alix took him up on it, saying
Lear
was a favorite of hers as well, and that she hated the bad sisters and empathized with the good one, the one who truly loved her father the king. “Was that Cordelia or Regan?” she said. “I know it wasn't Goneril.”

Not that I was sure which daughter it was, but I did wonder again about that double first at Oxford.

And if Royal Warrender was acting as mad as Lear, still here riding out the storm like a dying king, just what the hell were Alix and I doing a few hundred yards from the ocean with a hurricane coming ashore? Well, I told myself, I was watching over my father's property; Alix was looking for her precious manuscript. Healthier motives those, much healthier than playing Lear on the stormy heath. Thus assured I turned to considering what, if anything, we could do for Warrender.

He apologized for not being a better host and sent Alix somewhere deeper into the house to rustle up coffee or cold Cokes. Under his East Hampton tan I thought he was paler, wasted, looking older by far than his fifty years. Whatever that nocturnal pain had been, cardiac or not, he was drained.

“Look,” I said, not knowing quite how to phrase it, considering Further Lane's strictures against being pushy, “my car's outside. Four-wheel drive. And Southampton Hospital's only twelve miles from here. We can give you a lift and have them take a look to be sure everything's okay. Couple of hours from now we may not be able to make it to Southampton the way trees are starting to come down.”

He shook his head. “I'm not going anywhere, Beecher. I'll ride it out here. If I have to die it'll come in my own house surrounded by familiar things and not in a strange room in a strange place connected to tubes and machines and people I never saw before telling me what to do. I've had it with hospitals.”

Alix came in then with a tray of soft drinks. The water for coffee, she said, was heating. “At least I think it is. I must say your stove is an impressive affair. An awful lot of buttons. I should have read engineering at Oxford. Hope I pushed the right one.”

He smiled at her, that winning Warrender smile they always mentioned in magazine articles about him, speculating on his bright future, a future that was somewhat in doubt right now. “I'm sure you did, Alix.” He paused. “My, but you are a great beauty…”

She went to him then, leaned down and kissed his forehead.

It was after he'd sipped a ginger ale that he seemed to have made up his mind, come to a decision about something. Maybe about whom he could trust. With the hurricane coming and his house emptied except for us, he didn't have many options, did he? Maybe it was simply that Alix was a beautiful girl who'd just kissed him. What-ever the reason, he needed to confide in someone, maybe anyone. So with the wind rising and the hurricane coming, he started to talk, beginning with a sort of valedictory.

“There's a tradition of service in this family. As there is in other clans of great wealth. You could be of different political orientation and yet admire the things both Roosevelts did. Or Nelson and Jay Rockefeller. Or Ave Harriman. Prescott Bush and his son. Some of the Kennedys. I was brought up in that way of thinking and I've pretty much lived my life by certain rules of conduct. Of service to the nation. Of decent behavior. Of honorable intentions. Sounds fuddy-duddy, I guess, but it was how we were trained.

“Yet twice I've broken those rules. Once nearly three decades ago. The other occasion much more recently.”

He paused. As if wondering if he were doing the right thing in trusting us with his story. Or just being foolish, playing the garrulous old man blathering on. Or thought he might be dying and wanted someone to hear him out. And then, having made up his mind, Royal Warrender told us about young Hannah Shuba.