House of Spies (Gabriel Allon #17)(63)

“Did he give you gifts and money like the others?”

“Jean-Luc didn’t have to pay for his girls. He was incredibly good-looking and fabulously successful. He was . . . Jean-Luc.”

“And what do you suppose he saw in you?”

“I used to ask him the same thing.”

“What was his answer?”

“He thought we made a good team.”

“So it was a partnership from the beginning?”

“More or less.”

“Did you ever discuss marriage?”

“I did, but Jean-Luc wasn’t interested. We used to have the most terrible arguments about it. I told him that I wasn’t going to waste the best years of my life being his concubine, that I wanted to marry him and have children. In the end we reached a compromise.”

“What sort of compromise?”

“He gave me something in lieu of marriage and children.”

“What was that?”

“Galerie Olivia Watson.”





34





Ramatuelle, Provence



Olivia was used to men staring at her. Breathless men. Panting men. Men with damp, desirous eyes. Men who would do anything, pay almost any price, to have her in their beds. The three men arrayed before her now—the British spymaster, the French secret policeman, and the Israeli with no stated affiliation but a vaguely familiar face—were staring at her, too, but for a decidedly different reason. They seemed impervious to the spell of her looks. For them, she was not an object to be admired; she was a means to an end. An end they had not yet seen fit to reveal. She was not at all sure they liked her. All the same, she was relieved that such men still existed. A career in the modeling industry, and ten years in the make-believe world of Saint-Tropez, had left her with a rather low opinion of the species.

Galerie Olivia Watson . . .

The name, she told them, was Jean-Luc’s idea, not hers. She had wanted to hang the proven moniker of JLM over the gallery’s door, but Jean-Luc had insisted it bear her name rather than his. He gave her the money to purchase the fine old building on the Place de l’Ormeau and then financed the acquisition of a world-class collection of contemporary art. Olivia had wanted to acquire her inventory slowly and modestly, with a special emphasis on Mediterranean artists. But Jean-Luc wouldn’t hear of it. He didn’t do slow and modest, she explained. Only big and flashy. The gallery opened with a degree of glitz and glamour only JLM could provide. After that, he stepped aside and gave Olivia complete artistic and financial control.

“But only to a point,” she said.

“What does that mean?” asked the Israeli. “One has complete control, or one doesn’t. There’s no middle ground.”

“There is where Jean-Luc is involved.”

He invited her to elaborate.

“Jean-Luc handled the gallery’s books.”

“You didn’t find that odd?”

“Actually, I was relieved. I was a former fashion model, and he was a wildly successful businessman.”

“How long did it take you to discover that something wasn’t right?”

“Two years. Maybe a little longer.”

“What happened?”

“I started looking at the gallery’s records without Jean-Luc standing over my shoulder.”

“And what did you find?”

“That I was acquiring and selling more works than I ever imagined possible.”

“Your gallery was doing a brisk business?”

“That’s putting it mildly. In fact, in only its second year in operation, Galerie Olivia Watson earned more than three hundred million euros in profit. Most of the sales were totally private and involved paintings I’d never seen.”

“What did you do?”

“I confronted him.”

“And how did he respond?”

“He told me to mind my own business.” She paused, then added, “No pun intended.”

“Did you?”

She hesitated before nodding slowly.

“Why?”

When she offered no explanation, he provided one for her.

“Because your life was perfect and you didn’t want to do anything to upset it.”

“All of us make compromises in life.”

“But not all of us find refuge in the arms of a drug trafficker.” He paused for a moment to allow the words to wound her sufficiently. “You did know that Jean-Luc’s real business was narcotics, didn’t you?”

“I still don’t.”

The Israeli greeted her answer with justifiable contempt. “We haven’t much time, Olivia. It would be better not to waste it with pointless denials.”

There was a silence. Into it crept the Englishman who called himself Nicolas Carnot. He went to the bookshelf and, craning his neck sideways, removed a volume with a tattered cover. It was The Sheltering Sky by the American novelist Paul Bowles. He tucked the book beneath his arm and with a glance at Olivia slipped out of the room again. She looked at the Israeli, who returned her gaze without judgment.

“You were about to tell me,” he said at last, “when you became aware of the fact that your domestic and business partner was a drug trafficker.”