Jack's Widow (25 page)

When it came to bedtime Jackie was still unsure of what she should do. Seeing Nikos continue to monitor her, she decided there could be no half measures.

On the one hand there was her pride, her pain, both private. On the other there was her fear of public ridicule, of being alone, not to mention giving up the island that the agency needed and that only a few days ago they had told her they were finally getting some benefit from.

There was something about her husband’s right-hand man tonight that seemed to make it more important to spite him, rather than her husband.

She would make love to a husband who she was sure had betrayed her. She had done it before.

When she woke on Saturday there had been an early telephone call from the agency. The message, given to her by the butler at the breakfast table, included their code, the mention of lace.

Nikos was there; he had dawdled over the meal, waiting for Jackie, agog to see how things were between the couple. He had Maria calling him at noon for an update.

As Jackie went inside to return the call, Nikos nonchalantly picked up the crumpled piece of paper she had left by her plate of fruit.

He had so little to tell Callas. There had been no visible histrionics, both Mr. and Mrs. Onassis seemed happy and at one with the world. Instead he began to moan about the frequent phone calls from the States.

“It must be the middle of the night there,” he told Callas. “Who would be calling now about curtains and whether she wants them sewn with Queen Anne’s lace?” he complained, looking at the note.

“But Niko, are you sure?” asked the diva, very disappointed with
the day’s events so far. “Queen Anne’s lace is not a fabric, it is a flower.”

“So what is she up to then?” asked Nikos. “These lace and curtain messages have come for her ever since she first arrived.”

“I have no idea. You worry about that. Meanwhile I will have to think of another way to boot out ‘the widow.’ All we do know is that obviously she has not confronted her husband.”

“And maybe she never will,” added Nikos. “After all, who else would give her this money, this freedom?”

“Perhaps someone should watch more closely what she gets up to?” suggested Callas.

“If the situation changes I will call you,” he promised.

Nikos was not up to watching Jackie as well as doing his job so he delegated observation duties to the only person in the world, other than his boss, that he trusted. His son.

Three nights later the eighteen-year-old had some news.

“I wait outside the house. Their bedroom light goes out and I think I will turn in myself when I go and get some ice cream from the kitchen. As I come back I hear a noise, it is Madame. She is coming out of the house in the dark and she is going round to her studio, but she is creeping. She goes inside for a long while and then watches the sea, just sits and looks out. After many hours she goes back to the house.”

Jackie’s nighttime activity was no great surprise to him. The whole island knew that she was a bad sleeper. As soon as she became Mrs. Onassis she ordered deep wooden shutters and extra thick blackout curtains for their bedroom suite.

Nikos knew that sometimes Ari, a bad snorer, slept on his beloved boat so as not to wake her.

The staff was under orders not to clean or work near their suite until ten in the morning. He imagined that since seeing that note addressed to Callas yesterday, she obviously had a lot on her mind.

Nikos wondered if his crafty boss had somehow managed to wriggle out of it. He had no idea what Ari’s note to Maria had said.
He had had only a moment to swap the parcels last week while waiting to go into a meeting with his boss.

But now his son had told him that Jackie was making secret visits to her studio at night. Nikos thought when it was safe he would take a much closer look.

The Queen Anne’s lace message had also alerted Jackie. So far she had received calls about Honiton lace, Valenciennes lace, guipure lace, Alençon lace, Nottingham lace. Someone, in the middle of the night, had made a mistake.

Didn’t they know at Langley that Queen Anne’s lace was not a fabric at all?

Down a crackling phone line, Harry apologized: “We were in a panic.

“A few days ago we sent Guy Steavenson to Greece because we received a photo of one of our men who worked for us over there who vanished some time ago. Guy is checking out if he’s alive.”

How well Jackie remembered the fourth red cross on the map of the Mediterranean in the dining room in New Jersey.

“Sunday night, we get this message from Guy. He has found our man. This fellow has worked for us for years. The trouble is that he’s been badly injured by some local Communists. Not only has he been loyal to us, he knows about our methods, our other undercover agents. So far he has told them very little. It would be a disaster if he were tortured and forced to reveal everything.

“We are sending a CIA officer to help him but he’ll take a while to get there. We have also sent a small naval cruiser from the Sixth Fleet that can sit in the area for as long as it takes; it just depends how soon Guy can get this fellow, Dimitri, off the mainland.

“We sent you the message because in a situation like this we always warn everyone in the vicinity in case they can give aid. I apologize, the call was automatic. Frankly you were the only one to point out that the lace thing was wrong. Thank you, it’s the sort of
stupid mistake that could be dangerous. I’ll tell our people. Anyway, you probably can’t help.

“But you ought to know that before he left I told Guy about your tiny mooring and its two exits and said that if worst came to worst he might be able to find sanctuary with you on Skorpios. But I doubt he will; when I spoke to him he was in Patras.”

Jackie was stunned.

Guy. She remembered him very fondly. Then she recalled that it was Guy who had got her into this mess. So very attractive, so very amusing, so very polished, and so very well trained.

Had she agreed to do many of the things she had done for the CIA because he had charmed her into it and she wanted to impress him?

Looking back now, she realized that she had entered into this marriage to escape, yes, but also because she had wanted to be able to do something extraordinary with the rest of her life. Being just a mother in Manhattan would not have been satisfying.

Was Guy the man who had really trapped her? And that call for aid worried her. Was he now in trouble himself?

That night, as a sexually satisfied Ari slept and snored, Jackie found sleep more elusive than ever. As she continued to debate how she should deal with her husband she tossed and turned.

She was going to make him pay but hadn’t yet worked out how to do so without damaging her own reputation. She wondered how long she could keep up the pretense.

Now that she knew Guy was possibly not that far away she had to stop herself from going to watch for him.

The next day Ari rose very early to go to Athens to prepare everything for the Swiss deal.

As soon as he left she walked to the studio. This time, her observer told his father, she had stayed inside for three hours.

As he walked with his captors toward the village Guy was reviewing every conduit where he might find aid.

The Greek civil war had done much worse damage to the country than World War II. More than one hundred thousand had died and seven hundred thousand people had been displaced.

The different factions had never truly reconciled. It had taken a mixture of the British army and millions of dollars from President Harry Truman to halt the fighting.

Like all civil wars, it had divided families and friends. Guy knew there were still bad feelings on both sides. As he listened to Dimitri’s family, he could not deny the disapproval they felt for their brother’s empathy with America. He could feel it in their attitude toward him. When the brothers took Dimitri’s body to the undertakers, Andreas had stared at him as if he were the devil incarnate. At one stage he thought Andreas would kill him, but eventually he had given him a small hunk of bread and water.

Guy’s brain was whirling with thoughts of escape. He assumed that the locals knew who the brothers supported. Surely if he could provoke them to attack him in public, the authorities, who were now very anti-Communist, would come to his defense?

While pretending to sleep he eavesdropped. After some argument he ascertained that his jailers had finally succumbed to greed. They decided that first they would take him to the bank to get his money. They hadn’t bothered to discuss what they would do to him later.

As they marched toward the square, Andreas stopped, and marched Guy into a dark alley.

He pushed his revolver hard into his ribs. In fractured English he whispered, “I am coming in bank with you. Others wait outside door. You run, you dead.”

As they arrived at the bank Guy noted the taxi stand at the front, close to tavernas full of vacationers having lunch. As planned, he and Andreas went inside.

Guy told the bank teller that he wanted to cash all of his traveler’s checks and made a great fuss of signing each one, taking his time.

Holding the gun he had hidden in his trouser pocket, Andreas stood close and watched everything he did.

The bank teller began counting. He apologized and told Guy that he had to go downstairs to the safe to get more dollars.

Guy immediately sighed loudly, drummed his fingers on the counter, and looked at him with an impatient expression.

“Do I have to wait out here for my money? Has the bank taught you nothing about looking after your customers’ security? I’ll be robbed the minute I leave.”

In an instant the bank teller moved along, opened the mahogany counter for Guy to pass through, alone.

Guy didn’t hesitate. Instead of sitting down in the chair provided, he raced into the manager’s office, opened the window, jumped out, and ran.

Fitter and faster than the others, he knew there was nowhere for him to go but the shore. Running onto the jetty, he leaped into a small dinghy moored to it. Pulling at the outboard engine, he threw himself to the floor and lay flat in case his would-be kidnappers decided to use their weapons. He concentrated on putting as much sea between himself and his captors as possible.

He was in no doubt about what they would do to him. They had already killed two men, possibly three. Raised during two wars, these men would have no scruples about finishing him off too.

Fearful, he headed out to the open sea. Soon his fuel ran out, and exhausted, thirsty, and hungry, he could not keep up his rowing and it slowed down to an ineffectual paddle. His damaged wrists ached so much he fainted. For a while he simply floated with the current. When he awoke he forced himself to push closer to the shore.

Guy blessed his obsession with Jackie. He had spent hours poring over the map during his time alone in Moscow. At first he was examining whether the island did have any worth to the agency, and then after the marriage, wondering just how the arrangement was working and what the agency had built there.

Feverish, hollow-eyed and in pain, he took nearly two days to reach Skorpios. His survival instincts made him wait out at sea until it was dark. Only then did he dare to limp into the tiny mooring.
He had just strength enough to climb onto the slipway before he collapsed on the floor.

A few feet away a scientist slept soundly in his bunk. Guy had been so quiet the man didn’t find him until morning. Immediately an urgent message was sent to Harry by radio transmitter that Guy was alive.

Not wanting to alert the Onassis house hold, the CIA official called Jackie on the dot of ten in the morning, at his time of four
A.M.

“Anything you can do to help would be gratefully received. Guy’s in a bad way. Luckily our scientist, Lenny Fleckerl, has some medicine and food down there.

“Now Mrs. Kennedy, I mean Mrs. Onassis, how can I say this without sounding forward? Your natural reaction will be to rush over there and check that all is well. Please don’t, please be careful. He is very weak right now but Guy is going to be fine. Please do nothing that will attract any attention. Behave normally and only go over to your studio in the way and at the time you usually do. We don’t want anyone to discover that there’s anything there, do we?”

Jackie seldom did any painting until the sun made long shadows in the late afternoon, so she forced herself to wait. Finally, just before five, she got ready. Making herself as small and as dark as possible for a late-night return, she slipped on nothing but a black cotton T-shirt and matching tight trousers.

She got the children off to bed and told the chef that she would prefer to eat alone in her bedroom and asked for an early dinner of bread and pâté on a tray. Once it was delivered she turned it into a sandwich and wrapped it in a scarf. Carefully hiding it under a large hat, she ambled to the studio just in case she bumped into anyone. She was completely unaware that she was being secretly observed.

The shock and then delight at seeing Guy almost overwhelmed her.

She spent three hours with him and Lenny. She and the scientist both listened as Guy whispered his story of the dead men, George and Dimitri. They tried to console him for the loss of Dimitri’s life,
which he blamed on himself. Both of them applied cool creams to help repair his cracked, burned skin and his blistered hands. Jackie, who brought medication from the States and always kept a cache for emergencies, gave him antibiotics to get his fever down.

The next day Lenny was due to leave. Once they were alone, Jackie and Guy, who was feeling much better but still not able to speak in much more than a whisper, talked over everything: her marriage to Ari, his marriage breakup, the CIA. When they stopped, Guy took her hands in his and said, “Jackie, I want you to know that I’ve loved you for a long time. I couldn’t tell you before, I didn’t dare,” he said. “Not very brave of me, was it?” Encouraged by the look in her eyes, which glistened with unshed tears, he continued. “I just couldn’t imagine you would be interested in me. I just couldn’t see how it would work.” He felt her fingers shaking.