Krysalis: Krysalis (38 page)

“Robyn Melkiovicz?”

“Stay away from me!”

“I wrote you a note.”

This time the woman said nothing. David took a step forward and she at once retreated, but silently.

“I’m David Lescombe.” He spoke fast, knowing he had seconds left. “Anna’s husband. She’s in danger. I don’t know where she is. I’m trying to help her.” He stopped, awaiting a reaction, any reaction, from the woman in front of him. “You’re my last chance.”

“Oh my God,” he heard her say softly. Did her voice have an impediment …? “Oh my God,” she repeated and suddenly he knew what was wrong with her, she was crying, at the end of her rope….

“Come and have a drink,” he said gently. “Please.”

Robyn held her fists to her eyes. “Give me a minute.” At last she lowered her hands and whispered, “Let’s get off the sidewalk. I feel …” A violent shake of the head completed the sentence.

He took her inside. There were fewer customers now; it was getting late. They found a place flanked by two other empty tables, right at the back. David ordered a third scotch for himself and turned to Robyn.

“Perrier … no, Canadian Club. On the rocks.”

She sat with both hands cupped around the glass, staring at him across the table. He tried to form an
impression of her but she was such a mixture of things. Medium height, slim, with no bust to speak of. She wore a baggy black jacket over dark pants and looked as if she might be going out for an evening date, except that her auburn hair had been coiled on top of her head in braids, a tight, decorous style more appropriate to women lawyers at work than at play. Her features were small, delicate, with shadows around the deep eye sockets. Her nose had an upturned tilt, which would have given her an appealing childlike quality, were it not offset by the mouth, which was hard to start with and made harder by dark lipstick applied in a thick layer. Her face was oval-shaped, the eyes beautiful, having a misty quality of intuition.

She was the woman in the photograph. She was lovely. She was also very frightened.

“I’ve been warned not to have anything to do with you,” Robyn said. “With anybody.”

He stared, trying to make sense of what she’d said. How could they think he posed a threat? “Warned? Who by?”

“They said they were CIA.”

“So why are you meeting me now?”

“Because …” Her voice shook, as did her hands when she tried to drink, David heard the click of glass against her teeth. “Because I’m just worried to death about Anna.”

The last word was swallowed up in a marsh of unshed tears.

“That makes two of us.”

“These men who came to see me …” Robyn swallowed a couple of times and went on, “They didn’t … smell American. I have a friend who works for the
FBI. I asked him to find out if they were leveling with me.”

“When?”

“This afternoon. Not long before I got your note. He’s going to check it out and stop by for a drink later, at my apartment.”

David sat back. He mustn’t be around when the FBI man came. By now his would be the hottest name on the entire Atlantic seaboard.

“I want to come to sit next to you,” he said softly. “I’m unhappy not being able to see the door. Okay?”

She hesitated, searching his face. “All right.”

He changed seats. “Those men you described,” he said, “may be dangerous to me.” Albert lurched into his mind. “Was one of them young, with pink-tinted glasses?”

“No. Nothing like that. Middle-aged. Slav faces. Or German, maybe. Russian. Kind of rough, anyway.”

German. Russian.

“Did they mention me by name?”

“No. Just … if anyone came around asking questions about Anna Lescombe, say nothing. I’m scared.”

“Me too.”

That was the truth. If Anna had gone over to the other side, “they,” the mysterious hunters-and-watchers who lived on the borders of his imagination, could consist of more than just Albert and his cohorts. “They” could have been sent to guard and protect their latest acquisition. “They,” these new ones, intended to keep Anna. “They” did not intend to let a mere husband devalue their investment.

He remembered the man from the Audi, in that narrow Cornish lane. He, too, had seemed “kind of rough.”

“Anna’s in trouble,” Robyn said. “I just know, that’s all. David, we were that
close!
If something happens to her I feel it, here, inside, like somebody is playing a musical instrument in my chest.”

“I had no idea,” he said, sounding foolish in his own ears. “I mean … no idea.”

The bar was hot and stuffy, but David felt cold right through to the marrow of his bones. He was shivering.

“Are you okay?” Robyn was regarding him strangely.

“No. I’m not.”

He examined the other tables, one by one. Those yuppie types over by the bar, were they CIA? KGB? The two women sitting in a window alcove, talking with their hands, did they have pistols in their bags?

Robyn jumped when David brought his fists down on the tabletop. He was breathing quickly, His eyes were clenched shut.

“What’s the matter?”

He shook his head.

“Are you in some kind of trouble?”

David nodded three emphatic times.

“Is it to do with Anna? It is.”

Again the three forceful nods.

“You have to tell me! She’s my best friend.”

“This is going to sound crazy.”

“Try me.”

“Anna’s gone away. It looks as though she may have taken some papers of mine, they’re missing, anyhow. Important papers. The sort of papers that men with German or maybe Russian faces would like to read.”

“Oh God.” It was hardly even a whisper.

“I’ve been looking for her. But if I look too hard, maybe, just maybe, they’ll try to stop me from looking
any harder.” He burst into a cackle, making Robyn start. “God, I told you it was crazy!”

“It’s not. David, do you understand? I want to help.”

He told her about the last few days, the visits to Anna’s chambers, her daughter and mother, Albert, Eddy, the flight to America, the simple tricks that had allowed him to stay one step ahead of “them.”

“And now I don’t know what to believe,” he concluded. “Broadway said she was being sued for this huge amount of money, her career was in the rough; did you know she drank?”

“She could handle it.”

“Oh, yes! She could handle keeping it from me, anyway. Then Juliet told me Anna had been seeing some kind of shrink. Eddy would have me believe my wife was frigid.”

“Take it easy.”

“You say that, but I didn’t know
any
of those things! Can you imagine what it’s like, realizing you’ve been married for nine years to someone you can’t recognize, not even
from her own family’s description
of her?”

Robyn shook her head.

“Can you tell me anything at all that might help me find Anna?” David asked her.

“It’s not easy. Oh, Jesus, I don’t know. I have to go back to the start…. When I came to London, Anna was so … so damn
kind
to me. We shared an office.”

“What beats me is why she never brought you home.”

She took a deep breath and sighed it out with great force. “This is where it gets tacky. We had something in common. I’d been going through a hard time here in New York. I was in therapy. That’s the connection.”

“I don’t get it.”

“That’s how I met Gerhard. But then she told me you didn’t know about him. And … well, she thought you and I wouldn’t relate, anyway. She saw us as two very different kinds of people, and she was afraid I might blurt out something about Gerhard without thinking—I tend to do that. So we figured we had to kind of make a choice, you know? I could be part of Anna’s home scene, or part of Gerhard. And—”

David wanted to shout with frustration. “I don’t follow anything you’re saying. Who’s Gerhard?”

“Gerhard Kleist. Anna’s therapist.”

“Kleist … Eddy talked about a Kleist.”

“She’d been seeing him on and off for nearly thirteen years, when I first met her. That was 1986.”

“Thirteen. Years.”

Robyn nodded. When she put a hand over his, David scarcely noticed. “She wanted to protect you. She didn’t think she deserved you. She believed that if you knew she’d ever needed therapy, you’d abandon her, maybe. She couldn’t take that chance.”

He pulled his hand away.

“But it made life hard for her. There was no one she could discuss her treatment with. Not even you, especially not you. So when I came into her life, it was like springtime for Anna. Suddenly she could talk about experiences with someone who’d been there too.”

“I want you to tell me something straight. Why did Anna need therapy in the first place? What brought her to Kleist?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“You’ve got to.”

“No. It was her secret. She dreaded it ever coming out. She knew it could ruin her career and break up her marriage, her words, not mine.”

“You’ve told me all this, and now we get to the really important part you’re refusing to help me.”

Robyn shrugged. Her hard mouth had set in a straight line; he could detect no sign of give in her. “This man Kleist,” he said at last. “Have you any idea where—”

“Yes. I know where he might be.”

“You do! But that’s wonderful.”

“No, it’s not. David, there’s more you have to know. Anna and I had a fight. I don’t know if the fight is ended yet.”

His mouth was dry. There must be some limit to this woman’s revelations,
surely?

“I didn’t realize how … how she felt about Gerhard. So I became friends with him. We got along fine. He’s very attractive to women.”

Now David’s heart was pumping blood too fast for his system to cope with. A lot of things seemed to be going on inside his body, none of them pleasant.

“We had an affair,” Robyn said. “He took me to his villa, in the Mediterranean. On an island. Anna was … mad.”

David gazed at her, at first refusing to follow where she led. “You mean … it’s possible that she and Gerhard are …”

“Together. Yes.”

“She … felt something for this man?”

Robyn said nothing.

“She loved him? Was crazy about him?” His voice rose. “Had the hots for him?”

“David, please!”

“Well,
which?”

Robyn drew a deep breath. “Years ago, long before she met you, Anna had an affair with Kleist. And although
the affair stopped, she remained fixated with him.”

David had been expecting it, but the hard reality still knocked him cold. Long minutes passed before he spoke again.

“The affair stopped?” he managed to say at last.

“Yes. Anna told me that, so did Gerhard, and I believed them. David, she loves you very much. You’re the best thing that ever happened to her.”

“But you think she may have run to him?”

“It’s possible.”

“Why?” he said, and his voice was savage. “Why would she do that, if the affair was over?”

“Because whenever she found herself in anything deep, any bad time, she would go back to him for therapy. I think she may be having some kind of breakdown. If so, Gerhard’s the one she’ll go to.”

He was silent for a while, trying to come to terms with the knowledge that Anna could not take her problems to her husband, only to another man whom he had never met. A man who had been to bed with her. Who while in bed had taught her …

“You told me that you quarreled,” he said at last. “What was that about?”

“Gerhard and Anna managed to find a way through their affair to a kind of equilibrium. But when she found out that he and I had … she was wild. She knew she was being irrational, she admitted that. Still, if I’d foreseen the trouble it would cause, I’d never have gone with Gerhard.”

“But you did go. To the island.” Suddenly his brain completed the circuit. “That’s where the photograph was taken!”

“Yes. The photograph is what started the fight. It
was the first she knew that I’d gone away with Gerhard.”

“Have you heard from Kleist lately—is that how you know where he is?”

“I don’t
know.
A hunch, that’s all. And no, I haven’t heard from him.”

While speaking she had brought the photograph out of her handbag, David’s note still wrapped around it. Now he took it from her and said, “Would you know how to get there again?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell me?”

“I don’t know, David.” She was facing him now, her gaze coolly analytical. “I’m worried what you might do, frankly.”

His eyes could not meet hers. There was no answer to her doubts.

“David, listen to me. Please. I feel that Anna and I are … well, hewn from the same stone. She’s still my dearest friend in all the world. We quarreled, yes, but we went some way to making up, and you know something? Every day I curse myself for my mistake in angering her. If anything bad happened to her because of something I did, or said …”

“I understand. But
you
must understand this: I love Anna. I’m her husband. I’m learning things about her that shock me, and, yes, anger me as well. But I know she’s in trouble and she needs help. That’s all I want to do, help her.”

He gazed at Robyn, putting every ounce of feeling he possessed into it, until she wavered.

“You promise me you’ll be patient with her?”

“I promise you I’ll help her all I can. And if when I’ve talked to her I’m convinced she’s doing this because
she genuinely wants to, if she’d rather be with Kleist than with me, then …” he drew a deep breath “… I’ll let her go.”

He had been putting off the moment for too long; but as soon as he spoke the words aloud he knew that this decision was the right one.

“You mean that? You love her that much?”

“I do.”

For a long moment she sat motionless. Then she reached for her bag and took out a pen. “Do you have paper?”

“I don’t want anything written down, in case I’m stopped. Just tell me, I’ll remember.”

Falteringly she began to recite directions. “You start by going to Corfu. Then you have to get to the other island. There’s a man with a speedboat, it’s quicker than the ferry. His name’s Amos, I think. Yes—Konstantine Amos, with a
K….
He’ll take you to the west coast of the island, this really small place called Avlaki, just a landing pier….”