‘When you say you know him . . . have you ever met his family?’ she asked. ‘His wife . . . his children?’
‘Come and have that drink, and we’ll talk,’ he invited again, and knew that this time she would not turn him down.
They didn’t go into the bar where the rest of the press were beginning to gather again – they walked past it, across the lobby, threading through little groups of chattering hotel guests, and went into a circular bar with smoked glass windows, low-lit, panelled, with a soothing hush that made Sophie’s stretched nerves quiver with relief. She had been on edge for days, knowing what was ahead of her, and now it was over. She sat down, sighing deeply as she leaned back against yielding red-velvet cushions. She had almost forgotten the TV reporter and when he sat down next to her it made her start, her eyes jumping up to stare at his face.
Her first impression of him had been that he was a big man with a hard face, not so very different from the security men who had been interrogating her a few minutes ago, and looking at him more closely didn’t change her impression, although he was not so much big as muscular and tall. She didn’t know much about men’s clothes, at least in America, but even a casual glance told her that he looked expensively dressed: well-pressed dark grey suit, crisp white shirt and a discreet tie. If you were in front of a camera all the time obviously you had to look good, and he did, although the elegance of the suit did not disguise the formidable structure of the body under it.
‘What would you like to drink?’ he asked, watching her in his turn, and Sophie felt his curious, probing stare like a needle under her skin. It wasn’t safe to relax, she thought; she still needed to be on her guard. What was this man after? Why had he come over to her like that? Why had he hung around while the security men questioned her?
Sophie’s mouth went dry; she was stranded, high and dry, on the sands of shock and anxiety again. She wished she hadn’t come in here with this stranger; she needed to be alone, to think. She ought to be working out what to do next. She had had one plan and one only, and now she had gone through with it. She had started something without being quite sure what would happen if she did, and she was scared. She kept remembering Don Gowrie’s expression when she asked her question, the way he had swung to stare. What had gone through his mind? What was going on in his head right now?
She tried to tell herself she needn’t be scared, he wouldn’t dare do anything to her – but she couldn’t help it, couldn’t stop the jangling of her nerves. Maybe she should have gone about this some other way? Maybe she should have written to his wife? But she hadn’t quite dared do that. Far too dangerous to put anything on paper. She had tried ringing his home but neither he nor his wife or daughter were ever available and the distant, icily polite voice which answered each time had scared her too much for her to risk leaving any messages.
‘Can’t you make up your mind what to have?’ the reporter repeated and she blinked.
‘Oh . . . yes . . . a glass of white wine, please.’
A young Mexican waiter in black skin-tight pants and a close-fitting waistcoast had sauntered over; he was visibly pleased with his own lithe body, walking like a matador, a look of inner attention on his face, the look of a man listening for the roar of a crowd. Sophie couldn’t help smiling at him and his dark eyes glowed at her as if waiting for her to throw him a red rose.
‘A glass of white wine for the lady, and a whisky for me,’ the reporter said.
‘Glass white wine, whisky, certainly, sir,’ the waiter said in a warm, Spanish-accented voice, and sauntered away.
‘Sophie . . . you don’t mind if I call you Sophie? I’m Steve. Tell me about yourself,’ the TV reporter said with the practised manner of one who was a professional interviewer, and she wished to God she dared talk freely to him. If only she knew someone here in New York well enough to trust them, talk to them. This city was so huge, so crowded, yet she knew nobody well enough to talk to them, but then it was nothing new to her, that feeling of isolation. Since she was very small she had been lonely, she had been cut off from other kids her age because of her stepfather’s job; they didn’t trust her, thought she might spy on them, tell on them. Even her mother had no time for her once she had other children. Sophie had been driven to talking to the dead because the living ignored her. That was crazy, wasn’t it? Or at least not normal, talking to your dead sister because you had no one else to talk to.
When she got older she had tried to make friends, but maybe she hoped for too much, needed too much, made it all too important; her need, her air of desperation, had driven people away instead of attracting them. Even when she left the village and went to Prague to university, she had only made acquaintances; she had gone around for a couple of years in a big group, one of the crowd, but never getting very close to anyone.
The men had, it was true, wanted to date her, and didn’t waste much time or finesse in trying to get her into bed. Sex seemed all they were interested in, but Sophie needed something better than sex – she wanted to be loved, but that had always eluded her.
‘Everyone calls you the snow queen,’ one young man had said. ‘And they’re right, that’s what you are. Frozen from the neck down. Who wants a woman like that?’
She remembered the way she had felt as he spat the words at her, the misery that had swamped her. They had been in his car; he was driving her home from a concert. She could still hear the music they had just been listening to, light, lilting Strauss waltzes, mocking the way she felt afterwards, staying in her head for years after that night.
The very air in Prague was full of music; you could go to a different concert every night, many of them totally free, most of them offering cut-price tickets. As you walked around Prague you were always having cheaply printed flyers advertising concerts thrust into your hands. Peop
le put on concerts wherever they could, the more expensive ones in imposing concert halls or palaces in which nobody had lived for several lifetimes, some in the open air in summer, in the streets of the Old Town, in one of the many parks which threaded the city with green. There wasn’t just classical music, either; there was jazz or folk music in bars, or in hotels or clubs, sung masses in churches like the church of St Nicholas, the High Baroque church, glittering with gilded cherubs, where Mozart had once played the elaborately decorated organ.
They had been parked under a lime tree just outside the grey concrete block where she lived. While he tried to kiss her, his hand had slid up inside her skirt, she had felt his fingertips stroking between her legs, soft, warm, tormenting, making her burn.
She had drunk a few glasses of wine over dinner, it must have been the heat of the wine in her veins that made her want him to go on. She had ached to let the feeling build, to let him make love to her, although she knew she wasn’t even close to falling in love with him.
But he had made his move too soon. She was still sober enough to stop him, and he had lost his temper, his face red. ‘What’s wrong with you? What are you saving it for, you frigid bitch?’
She never went out with him again, but what he had said had really got under her skin. A year later she had gone to bed, quite deliberately, to prove to herself that she wasn’t frigid, with a boy from her village, a farmer’s son she had known at school. They had had a brief summer romance but it died out as suddenly as it had begun, like a passing storm over the green woods around her home. A little lightning, a little thunder, and then peace.
The TV reporter’s voice interrupted her thoughts. ‘Are you in trouble?’
Startled, she looked round at him, eyes wide. ‘What?’
‘Why don’t you tell me about it? I get the feeling you could do with a friend.’
Yes, but it wouldn’t be this man. After all, he was a reporter; he would use anything she told him. Why else had he come rushing over to her just now? Because he had smelt a story. Maybe she shouldn’t even have this drink with him, but he knew Don Gowrie and his family – he might be able to tell her things she badly wanted to know, about Mrs Gowrie, the daughter . . . what had someone said she was called? Catherine . . . yes, Catherine. She must remember that name. There was so much she did not know. But she would have to be very careful that while she was trying to get information out of this journalist she didn’t tell him anything which could be dangerous.
She had felt him staring at her while those security men were talking to her; she could see how clever he was. He had known there was something behind her question to Don Gowrie, behind the way Gowrie reacted. Her heart thumped painfully, remembering again the way Gowrie had swung round and stared at her.
She could still see his face. She wasn’t sure what she had been expecting, hoping for, what reaction she had thought she would get, but she had certainly stopped him in his tracks. He had looked quite ill for a second; she could almost be sorry for him, he had gone so pale, his eyes all black and shiny, the pupils dilating with shock.
He had got away with it all this time, he must have thought he was invulnerable, as safe as houses, and then she turned up, just as he was taking his most audacious gamble, the one all gamblers dreamt about, the jackpot, the big one. If he became president of the United States he would become at once the most important man in the world. The very prospect must make your head spin. It made her breathless to contemplate what it would mean for him, and Don Gowrie must want it very badly, any man would, and she could snatch it away from him.