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  She took his hand and squeezed it. Despite the recent adventure—perhaps because his neighbor had seen him cross the road with his putative conquest—he felt a responsive stirring, an ancient longing. Inextinguishable ardor. Unstoppable urge. Infinite erectility. He still had it. To share around. And the sooner Ms. Steinem got used to the idea, the better.

  * * *

  His writer’s studio was his secret. So was the origin of his occupation of it—so duplicitous it sometimes made him wince at the audacity, or utter foolishness, of the arrangement, literally on his own doorstep, in his own backyard. Where you shit only to court extreme sanction.

  It was the opposite, the direct contradiction of the Don Juan code: never linger or overstay your welcome; never betray your coordinates. No forwarding address, cell phone number. No means of subsequent contact for the delivery of recriminations or lawyers’ letters. No accumulation of baggage that might hinder freedom of movement, frustrate the fleet of foot in quest of prey. Victims.

  But that is where Mathilde de Villeneuve, the wealthy, wayward, onetime wife of a French diplomat, had brought him. The supreme danger. The ultimate challenge. The odd thing, he sometimes thought, was that apart from his wife, Mme. de Villeneuve was the closest thing he had ever had to a steady date, a relationship, a part of life that survived all the thrills and spills as a factor that must always be taken into account. Loath though he was to admit it, lothario had met his match.

  It started like this.

  Birth had been published to enthusiastic reviews but had not yet yielded a revenue stream, or advance payments on future creations, to completely replace the twin trades Gerald Tremayne had imported from the northeast: drug dealing and plumbing. In his workman’s attire, belt on hip, toolbox in hand, he had been making a delivery of certain substances in his old white van to a well-heeled customer in Holland Park. He had been returning to his vehicle when he became aware of a voice calling out.

  “Monsieur, monsieur.”

  He turned to confront the source of this alien tongue and was taken aback by the vison of Mathilde de Villeneuve in close-fitting workout clothes, fresh from what he later discovered to be a private gym in the basement of her mansion. Although she had called out to him in French, her English was fluent enough to explain to him, in some distress, that a blockage in the drains of her restaurant-sized kitchen was causing overflows of water just as members of her staff were preparing for an important banquet.

  Could he help? Of course, he could help.

  He followed her into the villa, marveling at its opulence—the black-and-white-checkered marbling of the entrance hall, the vast gleaming chandelier below the curved staircases leading to upper floors, the glimpses of huge salons with antique furnishings and tall windows that looked out over rose gardens.

  So it really happens, he thought to himself. Like in the triple-X movies. Beauty and the Beast. The princess and the priapic plumber.

  At the time of their initial encounter, he was, it is true, getting ahead of himself. Everywhere he turned as he went about the business of identifying and clearing the blockage, there seemed to be retainers and gardeners, chefs and sous-chefs, maids and secretaries. But, unlike others of her kind, she did not abandon him to some underling as he went about his work. She chatted. She questioned. Where did he live? Was this his only line of work? She had seen his van at her neighbor’s home a few times and wondered what the problem was with next door’s pipes and faucets. Or was it a delivery of a different kind? Something that she, too, might find interesting? He found himself talking about his writing and hinting at other, illicit confection he might supply. When, finally, he lay on his back under the offending sink, his lower body protruding onto the kitchen floor and his legs akimbo, he hoped she would at least speculate on what other attributes he might display in that same position in a more intimate setting. When she asked for his bill, he said not to worry. She asked where she could reach him again in the event of blockages that needed clearing. It was one of those turning points when you know you should cut and run but you don’t. You know you should get out while the going is good and do the sensible thing. But he didn’t. Instead, he gave her one of the visiting cards he had printed out from the internet—a rash departure from tradecraft. In that precise moment, he knew he was taking a gamble he would live to regret.

  And there was another thing. No matter how posh she looked and talked and carried herself, he knew that, deep down, she was no more highborn than he was.

  It took one to know one.

  At the time, she was married to His Excellency the Ambassador of France to the Court of St. James, just as the indolence and misbehavior that marked his tenure were coming to the attention of both the Quai d’Orsay and various British law enforcement agencies. He had been awarded his diplomatic post as a reward for campaign contributions to a right-wing politician who ended up in the Élysée Palace as president. Gaston de Villeneuve had been of two minds about the job but his relatively new wife—his third—had persuaded him of the advantages, the glamour, the business contacts and the wonderful lifestyle that would accrue to them with the relatively light lifting of canapés and the trade in banter and secrets. What he did not realize was that, even with his deep pockets from a lifetime in the aeronautics industry, he could not really afford the outgoings that the beautiful Mathilde seemed to regard as her due. Even Gaston de Villeneuve’s substantial coffers would require some informal replenishment.

  When officials from Paris began to nose around a little, they discovered that his appointments diary was little more than a tabula rasa, while his official expense claims resembled a gazetteer to the better shirtmakers of Jermyn Street, the tailors of Savile Row and the bootmakers and hatters of St. James’s. Clearly, the ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary was augmenting his salary and his savings from some other source. But what could it be?

  Mathilde de Villeneuve knew nothing of all this until it was much too late. And so she played her role with conviction and artistry, the talk of the ambassadorial treadmill and of the writers of gossip and diary pieces in the newspapers that took an interest in the lifestyle of the upper crust.

  No one could quite pinpoint where she had learned her diplomatic skills—certainly not in the seamy-steamy quartier of Marseille where she had grown up. But she performed the duties of a hostess with immense aplomb, meeting, greeting, presiding over placements and menus, wine choices and the ineffable sense of social manipulation that shepherded guests from entrance to exit as the ormolu clock on the ornate fireplace of her salon chimed eleven and the carriages arrived to ferry the great and the good away, flattered by her and envious of her husband. Politicians and arms dealers, ambassadors and cultural icons from the worlds of opera and authorship, historians and editors processed through her soirees from the reception line to the fawning farewells. Like in those TV ads for gold-wrapped spherical chocolates served on silver platters. There was something icily formal in her official manner, regal, untouchable. She knew everyone but no one really knew her. Balanced between ostentation and perfect taste, they became known as one the most gilded couples on the diplomatic circuit.

  Conversationally they were just as fluent with American billionaires discussing the latest season at the Hamptons as they were talking the inside politics of Damascus or Moscow or Tehran. They were regulars at Covent Garden for the opera and the ballet. They rarely missed Bayreuth or the new season at the Garnier. Their apartment back home in the 16th arrondissement of Paris was rumored to have been acquired by her forebears from the pashas of Egypt in some complex wrangling over the Suez Canal. (A version that did not quite coincide with this account spoke of a need among some of her father’s business associates to cleanse cash flow through the real estate market in which, before her marriage to Gaston de Villeneuve, she had established a niche as a broker of bespoke residential properties.)

  But when Gerald Tremayne crossed her threshold, he discovered another person altogether, a predator whose stalking
outstripped his own by far, whose true identity swung between remarkable poles, never to settle or be truly defined. She floated like a butterfly, buzzed like a bee; flattered, cajoled, demanded, submitted. She entwined her conquests in the same obsessive needs as his class-A products. There were many Mathilde de Villeneuves. None of them, he sometimes thought, was real. But if there was a single moment when he had sensed that his tragic error had been committed, it was on a strange and distant night in Kentish Town, in a place where unknown bands held their gigs in a room above a café. His Rubicon loomed before him and he jumped in with both booted feet.

  Gerald Tremayne had been asked to give a reading of pages from Birth, streamed live over the internet. Dolores had been absent at a company off-site somewhere in Hertfordshire. The babysitter had been called upon to attend the girls, accepting the TV remote control as her badge of office along with instructions on lights out and a promise that his evening activities would not run late. If fortune favored him, he might bump into some groupie or literary hanger-on only too pleased to oblige. But Mme. de Villeneuve was not at the forefront of his considerations. Here, in Kentish Town, he was remote from her tribal hunting grounds.

  His appearance was sandwiched between two bands—one a family concern of father and sons, with brother on drums, singing idealistic Afro songs from safer times; the other a raucous remix group made up of women in pink wigs. While the musicians busied themselves switching one set of instruments for another, and people recharged bottles of beer and plates of hummus and pita bread, Gerald perched on a high stool under a single spot, clutching his personal, much-annotated copy of Birth, with Post-it stickers marking the pages he liked to think of as his best. He had dressed for the moment and the part—anguished author in tight, worn Levi’s, corduroy jacket and black roll-neck—and knew that he cut a fine figure.

  At first, in the darkened pool of faces staring at him from beyond the spotlight’s penumbra, he had not recognized the woman with her ash-blond hair piled high in a confection of scarves and beads, strutting and preening on high platform shoes, perching on a high stool at the bar, pouting. When she slid a short black Gucci leather jacket festooned with chains off her shoulders, he became aware of a revealing V-neck T-shirt garlanded with an iron crucifix that dangled above her cleavage. When she turned to order a beer—bottle, no glass, she stipulated—he saw that the rear of the T-shirt, decorated with a sequined representation of a parrot, bore a motto in the manner of Hells Angels’ biker gear: Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.

  He heard someone mutter: “See the pole dancer’s arrived.”

  And then realized who she was.

  Everything about her presence bellowed danger, with hazard lights flashing. But he was a moth to her gaudy flame. As soon as his reading was done—with thankfully few questions about where his best ideas came from, and whether he wrote by hand or on a computer, and how long it took to write a book—he was at her side. They danced briefly to the music of the bewigged women’s band. They left by hastily arranged signals to regroup at the Range Rover parked outside. They relocated to a dark corner near the graves of Highgate Cemetery. The babysitter earned generous overtime in return for a pledge of omertà.

  Only later did Gerald Tremayne realize that he had never once mentioned to Mathilde de Villeneuve that he would be at the gig in Kentish Town that night. Somehow she had known where he would be, run him to ground in his North London lair. Ambushed, captured and caged him. Jekyll in Holland Park. And Hyde in Kentish Town. Or was it the other way around?

  “Who was that woman at the reading? The one on the internet? The tarty one,” Dolores asked when she returned from the off-site, having followed the wizardry of internet live streaming of the event from her hotel room at the company off-site.

  “Beats me,” he said.

  “Wasn’t that you dancing with her?”

  “Dancing? I don’t think so.”

  He took the Range Rover for a steam-clean of the rear seat and luggage bay. He sought to reestablish the protocols of separate lives. But the madness did not just stop there. How could it? Mathilde de Villeneuve would not allow it. He was not in control. She had offered to pay the lease on a place for their trysts, where he could work during her long absences, trotting the globe with her husband, from New York to Martinique to Saint-Tropez.

  She could, of course, have chosen to rent a pied-à-terre—a foot on the ground, a bum on a bed—anywhere. Maybe somewhere closer to her residence in Holland Park. But she wanted somewhere discreet, remote, in some scruffier neighborhood where she ran no risk of running into anyone whose name figured in her Rolodex of the glitzy and the powerful. She wanted, perhaps, to slum it a little. She signed the lease under a phony name, in a building that offered rooms to lawyers and therapists. A gift for services rendered. And in return, she had first dibs. On him.

  In the plotting of duplicity and the logistics of deceit, there were no lapses. No alibi went unrehearsed or untested; no telltale quirks of personal hygiene betrayed their couplings. But, in a manner neither of them could have foreseen, their liaison became collateral damage in the much more cataclysmic unravelling of her diplomatic idyll in Holland Park. The sins that brought down the complex construct of her double life were, paradoxically, her husband’s, not her own. Her own transgressions left no trace.

  French investigators inquiring into her husband’s mysterious sources of unearned wealth discovered that their inquiries crossed paths with parallel sleuthing by private detectives scrutinizing his activities at an array of Mayfair gambling dens, where his winning streaks at the baccarat and blackjack tables had drawn the attention of the pit bosses and proprietors. In the aftermath, several croupiers were sacked and the diplomat’s accreditation was withdrawn. He disappeared and retreated to regroup in the Cayman Islands. She made no attempt to follow him or track him down, leaving that mission to her lawyers.

  There had been a brief flurry of tabloid interest that Gerald Tremayne found disconcerting, in part because it showed his lover’s potential for uncompromising reactions to misfortune, for taking matters to extremes. When her husband was exposed as a wastrel, a cardsharp and God knew what else, the papers reported, she had spilled acid on the official ambassadorial Citroën and taken a razor to the Tricolore at the entrance to the residence. She had burst into the 11 a.m. meeting—morning prayers—at the embassy and accused her husband of committing acts of infidelity with a junior cultural attaché. Her behavior amazed those who knew her only as the diplomatic hostess. But the few who were privy to her upbringing—and recalled the fiery temper displayed by her mother in some of the more notorious establishments in Marseille—were not surprised at all.

  As her public life went up in flames, Mathilde de Villeneuve cashed in her prenup and withdrew to a private bolt-hole on Fifth Avenue in New York, where she had many friends who would offer sympathy for her misfortune and, perhaps, assist in the quest for a successor spouse. Left to his own devices, Gerald Tremayne tended the shrine of their passions in the apartment she had leased near his home in more intimate times, believing that, as he put it, the game was a bogey and he would know soon enough when the lease on his love nest was canceled. Until that time came, though, why not draw some benefit and solace from the whole sorry imbroglio?

  * * *

  The studio was large and airy, located on the fifth and top floor and reached by a small, caged elevator. My artist’s garret, he liked to say, self-deprecatingly, as he escorted guests through the entrance vestibule and in to a spacious loft, with en suite facilities and galley kitchen that commanded a view through half-closed venetian blinds over trees and gardens to the acres of heathland where he would soon be training the new puppy to retrieve sticks, balls and attractive, female fellow dog walkers. Perhaps, in homage to the memory of X they would call it Y, and only he would know the answer to the question: Y did X cross the road?

  The desk was a solid board of white oak, mounted on trestles, with a large, silent computer monitor at center stage. As
a reminder, he liked to say, of his roots, he had hung his old work belt with its pliers and screwdrivers on a wall, as if it were an artwork in its own right, an installation. Or perhaps a warning of the livelihood he would have to re-embrace if things ever got unmanageable. (There had been times when, like some medieval patron exercising droit de madame, his benefactor liked him to wear it, and little else—a throwback to the days when they met.) A coffee table was stacked with recent novels by other writers, grouped in homage around a final typescript of Birth from the publisher, bound in old-fashioned, predigital string. In a corner, a flat-screen television was positioned opposite a capacious sofa that doubled as a daybed toward which he steered her. A central switch controlled lamps positioned around the studio. He sat at his swivel chair and swung toward her, legs akimbo.

  “So what do you think?”

  “It is wonderful. To think that here such great work is done. Such bursts of words. Such flows of inspiration. Such literature. Oh my God,” she said, picking up the typescript. “Is this really…?”

  He crossed the room to sit beside her, cozily, his muscular, tanned hands unknotting the simple binding on the typescript in her lap so that she could leaf through his work, his soul.

  “I wouldn’t normally show this. I’d forgotten it was here, in fact, but the way you spoke, your words, made me think: yes, she gets it! She understands! And that is so, so rare.”

  She leaned against him. The typescript slipped to the floor, its string unbound, its pages loose, but they were too focused elsewhere to discuss the finer points of its narrative structure, use of character, or composition.

  ten

  It is a test of wills that Dolores sometimes thinks she is winning and sometimes despairs of ever advancing. X, she has come to learn, is in thrall to appetites she can barely understand. From Gerald’s perspective, that is her Achilles’ heel. And now he has laid a trap to prove himself right.