Betrayals. Carla Neggers
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to talk to her about becoming his art director. He said he knew her work and had thought about tracking her down for several years, but when he saw The Score at the train station on his way home last night, he decided he had to call. Rebecca listened to his pitch and realized why he had gone in to advertising. She was tempted, told him so, and took his name and number.
An old boyfriend from Chicago called and said he had to be in town on business next weekend, how ’bout dinner? She told him no, but thanks. After seeing Jared Sloan’s picture the last thing she wanted to think about was men.
Half a dozen nonprofit organizations called with very polite, understated requests for money. Two she recognized as reputable and promised them checks, two she hadn’t heard of and asked them to send her more information and two she thought sounded made up and told them to forget it.
And that was enough phone calls for one morning. She put on her message machine and headed over to Museum Wharf, where she stopped for lunch at the Milk Bottle, shaped like its name and located in the middle of the brick plaza in front of the Boston Children’s Museum. She took her hummus salad to a stone bench to watch the crowd, mostly kids, tourists and young, white-collar types looking for a quick meal they could eat outside. It was a gorgeous day.
When Rebecca got up to pepper her hummus, about twenty preschoolers gathered around her bench for a carefully supervised picnic. She remembered taking her youngest brothers on picnics down by the pond at home in central Florida, teaching them about snakes and showing them how to catch frogs and lizards. In her room at night, she would describe all their activities in detailed letters to her grandfather in Boston.
She had hated Florida at first. The oppressive summer heat, the big, strange rooms of Papa O’Keefe’s twenties-style house, the pond in the backyard, the endless citrus groves, the lack of neighbors, the spiders and snakes. It was all so different from Beacon Hill. But her mother had promised her she would come to love the place, and she had, in her own way. That didn’t stop her from wondering what her life might have been like if they’d been able to stay in Boston. Would she have turned out to be another in a long series of impoverished, holier-than-thou Boston Blackburns? At least, she thought, their “wilderness exile,” as Thomas Blackburn called it, had spared her that.
After she took a few more bites of her salad, Rebecca tossed the leftovers and started back toward Congress Street. She’d return to her studio and take on all the assignments she could, maybe think about the advertising job in New York. She needed to work.
A man’s face came at her from the throng crossing the Congress Street Bridge, past the replica of the Boston Tea Party ship, and she stopped cold.
“My God,” she heard herself whisper.
The face was even more battered now and older—so old—but there was still the slight limp, and the tough, sinewy body.
Together, they became the Frenchman from Saigon.
Or his ghost. Hanging back on Museum Wharf, Rebecca waited to see if she wasn’t hallucinating from the pressures of being back in Boston and having her picture in The Score force her to relive the hell of April 1975.
She wasn’t hallucinating.
Rebecca’s heart pounded; this was no coincidence. He had to be on Congress Street because of her. He had spotted her picture in The Score, looked up her studio’s address in the Boston Yellow Pages and here he was.
The crowd thinned out once she’d passed Museum Wharf. Rebecca could easily make out the limping figure in worn, loose-fitting jeans and a faded, short-sleeved black shirt. With his scarred face and snowy hair, he’d never be able to melt into a crowd.
Concentrating on keeping her breathing normal so she wouldn’t do something stupid like faint, Rebecca walked down Congress Street after him. Seeing him was a shock; there was no question of that. Her heart deserved to pound. But she didn’t have any idea whether she should be afraid of him or not.
I suppose you’ll find out if you keep following him….
There were enough people in her building and around outside that she wasn’t too worried he’d try anything. And she wasn’t fool enough to follow him all the way up to her isolated studio. If he went up there, he could ransack the place to his heart’s content.
He wasn’t going to kill her, she told herself. He’d had the chance fourteen years ago and hadn’t.
Of course, by now he might have realized his mistake.
With a quick glance up to check the number, the Frenchman entered her building. Rebecca clenched both her hands into tight, nervous fists and made herself tiptoe up behind him in what passed for a lobby. He had already pressed the up button on the old service elevator.
Before she could say a word, he turned expectantly to her. “I thought that must be you following me.”
His accent was only vaguely French, his voice—its timbre, its intensity—exactly as Rebecca remembered from Saigon, his eyes exactly as soft and brown and strangely vulnerable. He took her in with a sweeping glance, and Rebecca knew he wasn’t seeing a terrified twenty-year-old kid who expected to have her head blown off in the next few seconds. If she hadn’t put the past behind her, she had at least gone on with her life.
She tried not to stare at his ravaged face as she searched for a response. But what was there to say? In 1975, he and his Vietnamese cohort, a tough, brutal man, had murdered Tam and left Jared Sloan dying. Rebecca hadn’t forgotten that night and, she was quite certain, neither had the Frenchman.
He seemed to sense her discomfort and smiled, a surprisingly gentle, tortured smile. “I saw your picture in the paper,” he told her quietly. “I didn’t know until then you’d gotten out of Saigon safely.”
“‘Safely’ might be exaggerating,” she said, the words not coming easily from her dry mouth and tension-choked throat. “But we got out. I’d like to know who you are.”
“I could tell you a name.” He shrugged, and she saw that he was very tanned, his muscles stringy and tough, reminding her of one of Papa O’Keefe’s invincible old roosters. “Would a name change anything?”
“If you just made one up, no. But you could tell me where you came from, why you were there that night in Saigon, why you’re here now.”
“It’s better you ask no questions, Rebecca Blackburn.” Her name rolled off his tongue, as if he’d spoken it many times. Rebecca had to stop herself from shuddering. But he noticed, and said, “Perhaps I shouldn’t have come.”
“Why did you?”
The elevator creaked and groaned as it started its descent. She would run back out into the street before she got in there with him.
If he let her.
She shook off the thought.
“The past,” he said, “sometimes must collide with the present.”
The elevator dinged and the doors opened, but the Frenchman didn’t go in; instead he started back toward the building’s entrance. Suddenly Rebecca didn’t want him to leave. She wanted him to stay and talk to her, but then she remembered the assault rifle he’d used so efficiently that night in Saigon, remembered Tam lying dead in a hot, sticky pool of her own blood. Remembered her own terror and grief and horror. And Jared. Bleeding and in shock, but not dead. Rebecca still didn’t know what she’d have done if both Jared and Tam had died.
Asking the Frenchman to stick around and chat didn’t make sense, no matter how much she wanted answers.
He looked back at her with those warm, strange eyes. “I’m sorry if I’ve frightened you,” he said. “That wasn’t my intention. I was your father’s friend,” he said, “and I believe—I know he would have been proud of you.”
Then he disappeared, Rebecca too stunned by his words to follow him and demand to know what he meant. How could one of the two-man team that had murdered Tam in 1975 have known her father in 1963?
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