Actor/playwright Jake Koranda, best known for playing the renegade cowboy Bird Dog Caliber, suffered a nervous breakdown while serving in the United States Army in Vietnam…Fleur Savagar, the actor’s literary agent and recent companion, revealed in a press release today that Koranda was hospitalized for post-traumatic stress syndrome…
According to Savagar, details of the breakdown will be revealed in the actor’s new autobiography…“Jake has been honest about his emotional and psychological problems,” Savagar said, “and I’m certain the public will respect him for that honesty and look upon his terrible experience with compassion and pity.”
Fleur could read no further. There were photographs—one of Jake as Bird Dog, another of the two of them running in the park, a third of her alone, with a sidebar bearing the headline, GLITTER BABY SCORES BIG AS AGENT FOR THE STARS. She put the tabloid on the desk and slowly stood up. The battered Bugatti oval fell to the carpet.
“I have been patient for seven years,” Alexi whispered from across the desk. “Now the score is settled. Now you, too, have lost what you care about most. It wasn’t your business that was the real dream, was it, chérie?”
Her heart contracted into a small mass of frozen tissue that would never again pulse with life. All this time she’d thought it was the agency he was after, but Alexi had known better. He’d known from the beginning that Jake was as elemental to her as food and water. Jake was the dream.
But something inside her refused to give Alexi his victory. “Jake will never believe this,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper, but calm, as calm as the center of a storm.
“He’s a man accustomed to the betrayal of women,” Alexi replied. “He’ll believe it.”
“How did you do this? Jake and I destroyed the book together.”
“I’m told there was a man with a special camera watching the house. Such things have been possible for years.”
“You’re lying. The manuscript was never out of Jake’s—” She stopped. It had been. The morning Jake had come running after her…They’d gone for a walk on the beach. “Jake knows I’d never do anything like this.”
“Does he? He’s been betrayed before. And he knows how important your business is to you. You used his name before to gain publicity. He has no reason to believe you wouldn’t do it again.”
Every word he spoke was true, but she couldn’t let him see that. “You’ve lost,” she said. “You’ve underestimated Jake, and you’ve underestimated me.” She reached out quickly—so quickly that he couldn’t have anticipated it—and snapped on the desk lamp.
With a harsh exclamation, he jerked up his arm and sent the lamp smashing to the floor, where it rocked crazily from side to side, casting cruel, moving blades of light over him. He covered the side of his face, but he was too late. By then she’d already seen what he wanted to hide.
The slackness on the left side of his face was so subtle that someone who didn’t know him well might not have noticed. There was an extra fold of skin beneath his eye, a looseness in his cheek, the slightest dip at the corner of his mouth. Another person with the same malady might have given it little thought, but for a proud man obsessed with perfection, even so slight an imperfection was intolerable. She understood—she even felt a flash of pity—but she pushed it aside. “Now your face is as ugly as your soul.”
“Bitch! Sale garce!” H
e tried to kick at the lamp, but his left side wasn’t as responsive as his right, and he only succeeded in knocking away the shade so the rocking light flashed more brutally across his face.
“You’ve made a fatal mistake,” she said. “Jake and I love each other in a way you can never comprehend because you don’t have a heart. All you feel is the need to control. If you understood about love and trust, you’d know that all your schemes and all your plots aren’t worth anything. Jake trusts me with his life, and he’ll never believe this.”
“No!” he cried. “I’ve beaten you!” The weak side of his face began to quiver, as she saw the first flicker of doubt.
“You’ve lost,” she replied. And then she turned her back on him and left the library. She walked down the icy hallway to the front door and stepped out into the cold, clear February night.
Her limousine was gone—Alexi had planned to keep her here—but she wouldn’t reenter the house. She walked down the drive toward the gates that led to the street. Every word she’d spoken to Alexi was a lie. He’d calculated correctly. She could try to explain it to Jake. She would try. He might even believe Alexi was responsible. But he’d still blame her. Exposure was Jake’s deepest fear, and this was something he’d never forgive.
A dream for a dream. Alexi had finally beaten her.
He stood at the library window, the fingers of his right hand clutching the edge of the drapery, and watched her tall, straight figure grow smaller as she disappeared down the drive. It was a cold night, and she wasn’t wearing a coat, but she didn’t huddle into the chill, or hug her arms, or in any way acknowledge the temperature. She was magnificent.
The leafless branches of the old chestnuts formed a skeletal cathedral over her head. He remembered how the trees looked when they were in blossom and how—years before—another woman had disappeared down that same drive into those blossoms. Neither woman had been worthy of him. Both had betrayed him. Yet, even so, he had loved them.
A great sense of desolation filled him. For seven years, he’d been obsessed with Fleur, and now it was over. He no longer knew how he would fill his days. His assistants were well trained to handle his business affairs, and his hideous facial deformity kept him from ever again appearing in public.
A dull ache throbbed in his left shoulder, and he kneaded it with his hand. Her walk was so straight and proud, and tiny fires glittered on her dress as the beads caught the lamplights. The Glitter Baby. She lifted her arm, and something fell to the ground. He was too far away to see what it was, but, even so, he knew. As clearly as if she’d been standing next to him, he knew exactly what she’d thrown away. A white rose.
It was then that the pain hit him.
Belinda found him on the library floor next to the window, his body curled into a comma. “Alexi?” She knelt beside him, speaking his name softly because his henchmen weren’t far away, and she wasn’t supposed to be in here.
“B-Belinda?” His voice was thick and slurred. She picked up his head to cradle it in the lap of her saffron robe and gave a startled cry as she saw that the side of his face was grotesquely twisted.
“Oh, Alexi…” She pulled him to her. “My poor, poor Alexi. What’s happened to you?”
“Help me. Help—” His agonized whisper horrified her. She wanted to tell him to stop talking like that this very minute. She felt a damp spot on her thigh and saw that saliva had leaked from the side of his mouth through her robe. It was too much. She wanted to run away. Instead she thought of Fleur.