The woman looked at him, her dark violet eyes widening. “Johnny?” she said. It was a question.
She was no stranger. The absurd thing was that he had been thinking about her as he walked up Fifth Avenue, thinking of her as she had been ten or more years ago, thinking of her as she had been in Paris when he was mildly in love with her.
“Fay!”
He went over to her table and her small cool hands were in his.
“The beard,” she said. “I wasn’t sure for a moment.”
He had been a smooth-faced young man in Paris. “May I join you? Are you expecting someone?”
“Please. No,” she said.
He beckoned to the waiter to bring his wine.
“It’s wild,” she said. “I came in here because I was thinking of you and the old days.”
“ESP,” he said. “That’s exactly what happened to me.”
“Oh, Johnny!”
He ordered a stinger for her. Her taste couldn’t have changed. Nothing had changed. He said something to that effect.
“I wear a size twelve dress today,” she said. “It was an eight back in those days. That much has changed.”
She had been a model in those Paris times. She had also been a member of a young group of Revolutionaries bent on destroying the establishment in general and General de Gaulle in particular. Jericho had thought of them as crackbrained and lovable, particularly Fay. She had posed for him and they had made love and she had forgotten about the Revolution. There had been no anxieties, no guilts, no regrets when they came to the inevitable parting.
“Of course I’ve kept track of you, Johnny. You’re famous now. I’ve gone to all your exhibitions, including your one-man show at the Mullins Gallery last month.”
“You’re living in New York?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“And you never tried to get in touch with me? I’m in the phone book.”
“So am I. You’ve forgotten, Johnny, that it was you who walked out. You would have to do the getting in touch — if you wanted to.”
“I was young and stupid,” he said. “I always thought of you as still being back in that other world, taking pot shots at General de Gaulle.”
She laughed. “We were pretty crazy kids, weren’t we? No, I came back here right after we broke up. I am a respectable secretary now, for a man in the brokerage business. You may have heard of him. He’s in the news these days. Lloyd Parker.”
“He’s running for the United States Senate. That your man?”
She nodded. A tiny frown edged lines in her forehead. “A fine man,” she said. “A good warm idealistic man.”
Her man? Jericho wondered. Something in her voice—
“I don’t have very good luck with men, Johnny,” she said, reading his mind. She’d been like that in the old days. “First it was you who mattered. You walked out. Then there was — is — Lloyd Parker. I am his efficient, loyal, ever-ready office machine. He couldn’t get along without me — in the office. Out of the office he is married to a beautiful, exotic, fabulously rich gal. Crandall Steel — she was Ellen Crandall. I am the classic figure of the secretary hopelessly in love with her boss, preferring to work with him every day and not have him rather than drop him and find someone who might want me as a woman.”
“There are probably a hundred such someones,” Jericho said.
She seemed not to hear that. “I was thinking of you when I came in here, Johnny, because I need help.”
“Oh?”
“I need advice from someone who understands how complex people are, who wouldn’t make judgments by hard and fast rules. I thought that of all the people I’d ever known you never prejudged, never insisted that all people follow black-and-white formulas.” She tried a smile. “I thought that if I could only get advice from you — and presto, here you are.”
“Try me, before I make improper advances,” he said, answering her smile.
Her frown returned and stayed fixed. “Lloyd is running against a man named Molloy — Mike Molloy to his friends. Molloy is a machine politician, supported by the big-city moguls, the hardhats, the labor bosses. Perhaps not a bad man, Johnny, but not a man of Lloyd’s caliber, not a potential statesman, not in any way an idealist. Lloyd could be Presidential material in the future. Molloy belongs to other men. Lloyd belongs to himself and his country.”
“He can have my vote.”
“Lloyd is about forty-five. He has always had a little money. His family was Plymouth Rock-Mayflower stuff. I say ‘a little money’ in comparison to his wife’s fortune. He was graduated from Harvard in the late forties, having missed the War. He knew that sooner or later he would be faced with the Army, and he didn’t know what he wanted to do, really. A college friend persuaded him to put some money into a business, one of the first computer-dating services. Lloyd had nothing to do with the operation of the business; he was just a part owner. Someone blew the whistle on them. Lloyd’s partner was using information they gathered to blackmail clients. He was indicted, convicted, and sent to prison. Lloyd was cleared.”
“So?”
“After that came the Army in Korea. One day Lloyd’s top sergeant asked him to mail a package for him. On the way to the post office Lloyd was stopped by M.P.s and it was discovered that the package contained about thirty thousand dollars in cash. The sergeant, it turned out, had been stealing the P.X. blind. There was a court-martial. The sergeant went to Leavenworth. Lloyd was cleared. He had simply been an innocent messenger boy.”
“But not lucky with his friends or connections,” Jericho said.
“Neither of these things was a great scandal at the time,” Fay said. “They’ve been long forgotten. But suddenly they’ve reappeared in Wardell Lewis’ political column. Lewis is supporting Molloy. Someone has fed him these two old stories, along with some malicious gossip about a love affair which Lloyd is supposed to have broken off in order to marry the Crandall money.”
“A love affair with you, Fay?”
“No,” she said sharply. “There is some truth in it, though. He did have an affair with a girl, he did break it off, he did marry Ellen Crandall five years ago. Lewis is using all this and I’ve been trying to find out who’s been feeding Lewis this information.”
“Any luck? The partner, the sergeant, the dropped girl?”
Fay shook her head. She looked at Jericho, her eyes wide. “Ellen, Lloyd’s wife, is having an affair with Wardell Lewis.”
“Wow!” Jericho said.
“Of course Lloyd has no knowledge of it,” Fay said. “That’s what creates my problem. He loves his wife deeply. If he learns the truth, I think it will destroy him. What do I do? Do I go to Lloyd and wreck his life with the truth? Do I go to her and Lewis and threaten them with exposure? They would laugh at me. Exposure, beyond what it might do to Lloyd personally, would ruin his political future. A cuckolded candidate for the Senate becomes a national joke.” Fay brought her closed fist down on the table. “What do I do, Johnny?”
“Have another stinger,” he said, wondering just what she should do. She obviously was in love with the man.
Jericho didn’t come up with an immediate answer for Fay Martin. Parker, his wife, and Wardell Lewis were not real people to him. They were X, Y, and Z in a problem. Pay was real, very real. She had set out to help a man she loved and she could only help him, it developed, by hurting him terribly. It mattered to her whether or not Lloyd Parker won an election; but it mattered even more that he not be hurt.
The only thing that occurred to Jericho was that there might be a way to silence Wardell Lewis without using Ellen Parker’s adultery as the weapon. Lewis’ kind of muckraking journalism suggested the kind of man who might well have skeletons in his own closet. Jericho had friends. He would, he promised Fay, put something in motion.